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Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 Fenomenología Hermenéutica e Inteligencia Artificial: Otra Urbanización de la 'Provincia Heideggeriana' Jethro Masís (Universidad de Costa Rica) "Los matemáticos quieren tratar los asuntos de la percepción matemáticamente y, con ello, se ridiculizan a sí mismos. [...] La mente lo hace tácita, naturalmente, y sin reglas técnicas". ― PASCAL, Pensées La Discusión Abierta: La Irrupción de Heidegger en el Laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial del MIT En primer lugar, un hecho debe ser constatado: el laboratorio de Inteligencia Artificial (IA en lo sucesivo) del MIT se ha hecho heideggeriano. Por tanto, no tratamos acá de temas inventados, sino de un ámbito de discusión que se encuentra ya abierto. Incluso según Michael Wheeler en su más reciente obra, la influencia heideggeriana no se restringe al importante laboratorio de Massachusetts, sino que "una ciencia cognitiva heideggeriana está... surgiendo en estos momentos en los laboratorios y oficinas alrededor del mundo donde el pensamiento encarnado está bajo desarrollo e investigación activa" (2007: 285). Con todo, tiene razón Winograd cuando afirma en 'Heidegger and the Design of Computer Systems' que "para quienes han seguido la historia de la IA resulta irónico que el laboratorio del MIT se haya convertido en la cuna de IA heideggeriana" (citado por Dreyfus, 1992: xxxi). ¿No comprendería Heidegger, en efecto, el proyecto de la IA como el fastigio de la metafísica, como la tecnificación más nefanda? La historia de cómo el pensamiento de Heidegger llegó a constituirse en un referente ineludible en las investigaciones del proyecto de investigación de la IA, se retrotrae a la publicación de What Computers Can't Do (1972), del profesor de la Universidad de Berkeley Hubert Dreyfus; una obra que, por cierto, estaba marcada en su subtítulo por el afán kantiano de imponer límites a una pretendida razón (en este caso, la de la simulación artificial de las competencias cognitivas humanas en una máquina digital), y que en su última edición de 1992 incluso se subtituló sin ambages 'A Critique of Artificial Reason'. No es este el lugar, por las comprensibles limitaciones que se nos imponen, de reseñar las etapas pioneras de la investigación en IA (1957-1962: simulación cognitiva y 1962-1967: procesamiento de información semántica), en que el proyecto se vio complicado en dificultades inextrincables. Ni siquiera es posible esbozar las etapas que constituyen los subsecuentes intentos correctivos de herencia heideggeriana (hasta cierto punto, los micromundos de Winograd, pero más decidicamente los proyectos de Agre 1997, Brooks 1999 y Freeman 2000; este último más merleau-pontyano que otra cosa). Para tales efectos, la gran obra de Dreyfus y sus otros textos de menor rango prestan el servicio debido. Lo que más nos interesa es el contexto problemático y filosófico: en palabras de Minsky (cf. 2003), el que la IA haya sufrido una muerte cerebral Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 desde los años setenta a partir de que descubrió el problema del conocimiento del sentido común. Esto quiere decir que nuestro texto quiere solamente servirse tangencialmente de las contribuciones críticas de Dreyfus al proyecto de investigación de la IA y a la subsecuente generación de investigadores en esa área que reclaman explícitamente un linaje heideggeriano. Pero esto sólo con el fin de visitar una derrota que, sin embargo, resulta fructífera para aclarar qué significa la transformación hermenéutica de la fenomenología llevada a cabo por Heidegger en Sein und Zeit (1927, SZ en lo sucesivo), su magnum opus.Que el laboratorio de investigación de IA del MIT (el más importante del mundo), otrora comandado por el racionalista y cientificista Minsky, se haya convertido en la cuna de un estilo de investigación de estos problemas marcado por el epíteto 'heideggeriano', no deja de ser notable. Sobre todo porque para quienes han sido educados filosóficamente en un contexto donde por años se ha forjado un actitud analítica y cientificista, aún resuenan las mofas de un Carnap (cf. 1981) contra ese lenguaje de Heidegger que había proferido aquellas infames preguntas respecto de la nada: "¿Sólo hay nada porque hay el no, es decir, la negación? ¿O es más bien al contrario? ¿Sólo hay la negación y el no porque hay la nada?" (H: 97). Y esto con la grave – para Carnap, 'insensata' – conclusión: "Pero nosotros afirmamos que la nada es más originaria que el no y la negación" (idem). Pero, ¿de qué estamos hablando? ¿Qué tiene que ver la nada con el fracaso del proyecto de investigación de la IA? Tiene que ver mucho. Y es curioso que en el mismo texto que estamos citando, la lección inaugural Was ist Metaphysik? (1929), Heidegger advierta, como en una premonición que se adelanta a las objeciones de Carnap, que a la ciencia la nada no le puede parecer más que un espanto y una fantasmagoría, a saber, "[l]a ciencia no quiere saber nada de la nada" (cf. H: 95). Y nosotros afirmamos: lo que le hubiera tenido que interesar a la IA era, precisamente, la nada; y por no haber prestado atención al problema de la nada, en efecto, es que los investigadores de la IA no podrán ni por mil años entender por qué su proyecto no funciona ni puede funcionar nunca. Pero, ¿cómo podrían haberle prestado atención a la nada? No se trata sólo de que su educación analítica se los prohibiera, sino de que vale bien pensar qué se hace con la nada si es, precisamente, nada. Pero esta nada no es nada de nada, sino una nada que pertenece al ser. La Nada y el Problema de la Programación del Sentido El proyecto de investigación de la IA se encontró con un escabroso obstáculo. En palabras de Wheeler: "Dando por supuesto un mundo dinámico y cambiante, ¿cómo puede un sistema... dar cuenta de aquellos estados cambiantes del mundo... que importan, y de aquellos estados no cambiantes del mundo que importan, siempre que ignore aquellos que no importan? Y ¿cómo puede un sistema semejante reparar y (si es necesario) revisar, a partir de todas las creencias que posee, sólo aquellas creencias que Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 son relevantes en un contexto particular de acción?" (2007: 179). Si la mente humana puede concebirse en parangón con una máquina recursiva, bastaría con añadirle a su memoria millones de enunciados, de los cuales, en su totalidad, estaría pretendidamente constituida. Pero los investigadores cayeron en la cuenta de que los enunciados necesitaban un contexto: por si sola, una sentencia apofántica no tiene sentido, tiene que referir una totalidad bajo la cual esa sentencia adquiera, por decirlo así, carne cognitiva, situacionalidad embebida e involucrada. A partir de este problema, lo que al parecer hacía falta era añadir a los enunciados un marco, es decir, un trasfondo contextual, el cual sería precisamente esa totalidad de sentido por lo pronto perdida. Respecto de este problema (el llamado frame problem) y de la definitiva degeneración del proyecto de la IA, ha afirmado Dreyfus: Pero un sistema de marcos no está en una situación, así que en aras de seleccionar los hechos posiblemente relevantes de la situación actual, uno necesitaría marcos para reconocer situaciones como las fiestas de cumpleaños, y para diferenciarlas de otras situaciones tales como ordenar en un restaurante. Empero, aún me preguntaba, ¿cómo podría la computadora seleccionar, de entre esos pretendidos millones de marcos en su memoria, el marco relevante para seleccionar el marco de la fiesta de cumpleaños en tanto marco relevante con el fin de que pudiera ver la relevancia actual de, digamos, el intercambio de regalos en vez de meramente dar dinero? Me parecía obvio que cualquier programa de IA que utilizara marcos para organizar millones de hechos sin significado para así categorizarlos dentro de los relevantes, caería en un regreso a marcos para reconocer marcos relevantes que reconocerían hechos relevantes, y que, por ende, el problema del marco no era solamente una dificultad sino un signo de que algo marchaba seriamente mal con todo el método (2007: 250). Hay aquí un supuesto de analiticidad según el cual se puede acceder al sentido a partir de lo apofántico. Las proposiciones enunciativas vendrían a ser como los átomos del sentido, de forma que la mente humana podría comprenderse como una máquina recursiva: máquina que, cuando comprende, re-flexiona, por decirlo así, sobre los propios recursos apofánticos que ya tiene 'almacenados'. Para hacer que una máquina logre adquirir afrontamiento (coping), es decir, la experiencia humana de arreglárselas, habérselas conductual, corporal, comprensiva y cognitivamente (esto es, de forma encarnada y prácticamente situada) en un contexto determinado en el que se está envuelto de manera ejecutiva y práxica, nada más habría que programarla – según esta falsa suposición – con millones y millones de datos enunciativos, de los que pretendidamente estaría conformada la mente humana. Pero no es sino Heidegger quien ha advertido que "el sentido no puede ser definido como algo que se encuentra 'en' el juicio, junto con el acto de juzgar" (SZ, § 33: 154). Y ¿dónde se encuentra el sentido? Propiamente, en ningún lugar. La suposición abstracta del análisis quiere, en efecto, servirse de la parte para dar con el todo y, en el mismo acto, ya interpreta el todo del sentido como algo total que podría descomponerse en sus partes enunciativas. Consecuentemente, hay también una concepción de la filosofía en relación con la gramática. Es la concepción que expresa el filósofo analítico Peter Strawson: "[A]sí como el gramático modélico trabaja para elaborar una explicación sistemática del sistema de reglas que Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 observamos sin ningún esfuerzo cuando hablamos gramaticalmente, el filósofo lo hace para conseguir una explicación sistemática de la estructura conceptual general de la que nuestra práctica diaria muestra que tenemos un dominio tácito e inconsciente" (1997: 50). Según Strawson, el trabajo filosófico consistiría en hacer explícita la teoría que ya dominamos cuando, verbigracia, pensamos, es decir, se trata de descubrir la teoría implícita a todo nuestro pensamiento. Es la suposición de que hay algo así como un sistema implícito de reglas (que, por supuesto, no ha dado entretanto pruebas incontestables de su existencia), lo que siempre dan por sentado los investigadores de la IA cuando se afanan por programar enunciados. Pero, ¿es cierto que hay una teoría anterior o implícita que el filósofo debe traer a explicitez? ¿En esto realmente consiste la labor de filósofo: en sonsacar la estructura apriórica del pensamiento que se halla ya interpretada como reglamentación implícita? Si se comprende bien la empresa que Heidegger se trae entre manos en la década fenomenológica (1919-1929), hay que conceder, con Figal, que se trataba principalmente de la pregunta de "cómo es posible la filosofía sin ser teoría" (1996: 35). El llamado Problem des Theoretischen o 'problema de lo teorético' surge de forma explícita en la primera lección universitaria dictada por Heidegger en la Universidad de Friburgo en Brisgovia en 1919 (cf. GA 56/57). Además, está presente como insumo instrumental y metodológico en SZ, e incluso puede entenderse que la insatisfacción de Heidegger respecto del lenguaje utilizado en aquel gran tratado – al que ha denominado, en Brief über den Humanismus (1947, cf. H: 313-364), 'fracaso' en la exposición (Versagen) – se debe asimismo al afinamiento del acervo protoconceptual que provee un sometimiento a las dificultades de un posible decir en filosofía que, a su vez, no sea teorético. El problema hermenéutico de SZ y, en correspondencia con ello, su nivel de experiencia y de meditación, sin los cuales toda recepción es inefectiva (y no toca en lo más mínimo esa supuesta 'filosofía de Heidegger', que no hay), es el que atañe a la diferencia ontológica (ontologische Differenz). Es, en efecto, porque el ser ha sido tradicionalmente interpretado como ente, que SZ no puede regodearse en las magníficas cualificaciones de un ser ontificado. Toda cualificación, es cualificación de 'algo'. Pero si es del ser de lo que tratamos, que no del ente, cabe bien cuestionarse qué puede decirse del ser sin que de inmediato caigamos en la susodicha ontificación nefanda. Aquí la valoración de lo que signifique el trabajo que está siendo llevado a cabo en SZ se bifurca: o bien Heidegger se ocupa del ser y es – como lo afirma una, a nuestro juicio, inexacta recepción contemporánea – el pensador que restauró los derechos de la vetusta ontología, o más bien Heidegger de ninguna manera se ocupa del ser (siempre que comprendamos ese 'de' del ser en el sentido objetivo del genitivo, porque precisamente fue la tradición metafísica la que se ocupó del ser en ese sentido). En esto hay que ser claros: la pregunta de SZ no es qué es el ser, sino que esa fue la pregunta de la metafísica, cuyo decurso, muy radicalmente, Heidegger traza desde Parménides hasta Nietzsche. ¿Qué pregunta, pues, la pregunta planteada en la gran obra Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 heideggeriana? Si queremos partir de ese Besinnungsebene o del mismo nivel de meditación de la obra, hay que conceder que nuestra pregunta es inexacta porque, propiamente, la pregunta no pregunta por 'algo', no es un 'qué' lo que aparece cuestionado. Y la clave para entender este asunto paradójico, aparece en la primera página del libro, el 'prólogo en el cielo' (Safranski dixit), con que se abre la gran obra. Se trata, a no dudarlo, de un extraño proemio. Pero toda la extrañeza que suscita lo tratado en SZ se debe a que, de alguna forma, es intratable: nos hallamos ante una introducción a lo atemático. Y eso atemático es lo que, justamente, merece el título de 'lo hermenéutico': no el ser a secas, ni el ente, sino el ser del ente, es decir, el sentido del ser, que, justamente, no puede aparecer como 'algo' ni puede ser tematizado en sentido estricto. De alguna forma – y aquí hacemos recurso a prestaciones gráficas – lo que hace Heidegger no es filosofía ni no-filosofía. Heidegger hace filosofía y no se ocupa el ser, sino del ser. Ha habido un giro fenomenológico-hermenéutico en los estudios cognitivos evidenciado en el grupo de investigadores en el campo de la IA que reclaman para sí un linaje heideggeriano. Pero ello coadyuva más a una crítica de los supuestos apofánticos y teoréticos que en pocos años de investigación comenzaron a testimoniar cómo el proyecto de la IA se hallaba en franca degeneración. Motivado por las investigaciones en neurodinámica de Walter Freeman, Dreyfus concluye que tal vez "se puede avizorar una suerte de IA animal inspirada por Heidegger y Merleau-Ponty, pero esto no da pie para creer, y hay muchas razones por las cuales dudarlo, que tal dispositivo fungirá como un primer paso hacia un continuum que se dirija al forjamiento de una máquina que pueda estimular el afrontamiento humano con lo que es significativo." (2007: 268). Por otra parte, lo que ha acaecido con la irrupción heideggeriana en los estudios cognitivos merece al nombre de nueva 'urbanización de la provincia heideggeriana' (pace Habermas). Puesto que el ser sea propiamente nada (no nada de nada, sino, como la expresión inglesa nothing, nada en el sentido de que no se trata de algo), es ahora empíricamente comprensible: el estar-a-la-mano (Zuhandenheit) de lo útil (Zeughaftigkeit) que mantiene al Dasein en ocupación circunmundana, no es ningún ente, y como no reside en lo apofántico, pues es pretemático y preontológico, no puede ser de ninguna forma programable o simulable. Lo que hay en todo afrontamiento es una "ejecución autónoma y expresa de la comprensión de ser que desde siempre pertenece al Dasein y que está 'viva' en todo trato con los entes" (SZ, § 15: 67). Esta Seinsverständnis es lo hermenéutico y es el "'en cuanto' [Als] originario de la interpretación circunspectivamente aprehensora" (SZ, § 33: 158). Empero, hablamos de 'lo hermeneútico' (que no de la hermenéutica como una suerte de 'teoría de la interpretación'). Abordar 'lo hermenéutico' por medio de un rodeo óntico en torno al fracaso empírico de la IA, tiene la finalidad de señalar, además de la miseria de lo apofántico en lo que más importa desde el punto de vista filosófico, los peligros de toda pavimentación de un terreno tanto agreste como lleno de trampas: el de 'lo hermenéutico'. Haríamos bien en precavernos de tematizar lo hermenéutico como si se tratase de un ámbito óntico, es decir, Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 pasible de ser tematizado. Esto quiere decir, finalmente, que una teoría de la interpretación es lo que, de hecho, no hay en Heidegger, pero solamente porque lo que no hay en absoluto, y lo que desde siempre está siendo minado, son los prestigios falsos de lo teorético en cuanto tal. o0o BIBLIOGRAFÍA Agre, Philip (1997) Computation and Human Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A. J. Ayer (comp.) (1981) El Positivismo Lógico. Trad. L. Aldama, U. Frisch, C.N. Molina, F.N. Tourner y R. Ruiz Harrel. Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Brooks, Rodney (1999) Cambrian Intelligence. The Early History of the New AI. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Carnap, Rudolf (1981) "La Superación de la Metafísica Mediante el Análisis Lógico del Lenguaje". En: A. J. Ayer (comp.) Op. Cit., 66-87. Dreyfus, Hubert (1972/1979) What Computers Can't Do. A Critique of Artificial Reason. -Revised edition. New York: Harper and Row. _____. (1992) What Computers Still Can't Do. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. _____. (2007) "Why Heideggerian AI Failed and How Fixing it would Require Making it More Heideggerian". Philosophical Psychology. 20 (2), 247-268. Figal, Günter (1996) Der Sinn des Verstehens. Beiträge zur hermeneutischen Philosophie. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam. Freeman, Walter (2000) How Brains Make Up Their Minds. New York: Columbia University Press. Habermas, Jürgen (1979) "Urbanisierung der heideggerschen Provinz. Laudatio auf HansGeorg Gadamer", 392-401. En: Philosophischpolitische Profile. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 1981. Heidegger, Martin (56/57) Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. [KNS 1919]. Gesamtausgabe Bde. 56/57. Ed. B. Heimbüchel. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. 1987. [Versión castellana de una de las tres lecciones: La Idea de la Filosofía y el Problema de la Concepción del Mundo. Trad. J. A. Escudero. Barcelona: Herder. 2005]. _____. (SZ) Sein und Zeit. [1927]. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. 1979. [Versión castellana: Ser y Tiempo. Trad. J. E. Rivera. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. 1998.] _____. (H) Hitos. Trad. H. Cortés & A. Leyte. Madrid: Alianza. Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von (1987) Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins. Eine Erläuterung von »Sein und Zeit«. Bd. I: Einleitung: Die Exposition der Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. _____. (2005) Hermeneutische Phänomenologie des Daseins. Ein Kommentar zu »Sein und Zeit«. Bd. II: Erster Abschnitt: Die vorbereitende Fundamentalanalyse des Daseins, § 9-§ 27. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Minsky, Marvin (2003) "Why IA is Brain-Dead". Wired 11 Actas de las Primeras Jornadas Internacionales de Hermenéutica. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Mayo de 2009. ISBN: 978-950-29-1177-9 (8). URL: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.08/view.html?pg=3 [Consultado 9/4/09]. Safranski, Rüdiger (1997) Un Maestro de Alemania. Martin Heidegger y su Tiempo. Trad. R. Gabás. Barcelona: Tusquets. Strawson, Peter (1997) Análisis y Metafísica. Trad. N. Guasch. Barcelona – Buenos Aires – México: Paidós. Wheeler, Michael (2007) Reconstructing the Cognitive World: The Next Step. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Part 2 Science Introduction Martin Kusch In this day and age, (cognitive) relativism is often regarded as antiscientifi c. For instance, the main "whipping boy" of the 1990s "Science Wars" was the relativistic sociologist who (allegedly) sought to downgrade natural science by treating it as on a par with myth or magic. Interestingly enough, this association between relativism and disrespect for science was not prominent in debates over relativism during the "long nineteenth century" in the Germanspeaking world- roughly, from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770– 1831) to Adolf Hitler (1889– 1945). On the contrary, in this time period and geographical region, relativism was often seen as an obvious consequence of naturalscientifi c attitudes and theorizing. Philosophers were divided on how to assess this consequence. Some saw relativism as an essential element of the modern scientifi c worldview; others attacked relativism by portraying it as the result of what we today might call "scientism" or "scientifi c imperialism." To understand this intellectual constellation, we need to remember four important features of the natural sciences in the long nineteenth century. First, the time period in question witnessed numerous scientifi c advances that were perceived as "revolutionary" by many contemporaries. Moreover, Charles Darwin (1809– 1882), Ernst Haeckel (1834– 1919), Hermann von Helmholtz (1821– 1894), Bernhard Riemann (1826– 1866), Wilhelm Wundt (1832– 1920), Ernst Mach (1838– 1916), or Albert Einstein (1879– 1955)- to mention just a few- were scientists whose names were familiar to readers of highbrow newspapers and popular weeklies. This was due, in no small measure, to these scientists' own efforts in popularizing their fi ndings. Second, in the Germanspeaking world natural scientists, philosophers, historians, linguists, and economists still belonged to the same faculties. This made for close interactions across disciplinary boundaries: thus, one fi nds historians trying to learn from biology or psychology (e.g., Karl Lamprecht (1856– 1915), Friedrich von Hellwald (1842– 1892)); philosophers engaging closely with sensephysiology (e.g., Alois Riehl (1844– 1924]); logicians and epistemologists seeking to integrate their investigations with the psychology or biology of reasoning (e.g., Benno Erdmann (1851– 1921), Mach); 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 59 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 60 Martin Kusch 60 physiologists presenting their results in a Kantian garb (e.g., von Helmholtz); or physicists highly sensitive to epistemological debates (e.g., Einstein). Third, during the long nineteenth century, the classifi cation and institutional division of the sciences and humanities underwent substantial and often confl ictual reorganization. The fi rst chairs for physiology were introduced in the 1850s, and psychology began its long and painful separation from philosophy in the 1890s. Sometimes such reorganizations created "split identities," that is, authors who could claim to have substantive expertise in more than one fi eld. Thus, Wundt was both a psychologist and a logician; von Helmholtz a physiologist, physicist and philosopher; or Mach a physicist, epistemologist, and psychologist. New institutional boundaries frequently led to fi erce competition over academic chairs; for instance, universities and ministries of education tended to create chairs in experimental psychology by cutting positions in traditional fi elds of philosophy. The traditional philosophers ultimately responded with a petition. Fourth, for much of the long nineteenth century, philosophy struggled to recapture the cultural capital it had lost when the systems of Friedrich Wilhelm Josef Schelling (1775– 1854) and Hegel fell into disrepute. The struggle was diffi cult not least because some scientists (e.g., Haeckel) published widely circulating books in which they declared much of traditional idealistic philosophy obsolete. The last four paragraphs can help us appreciate why in the long nineteenth century, relativism and natural science were seen as closely intertwined. To begin with, many important naturalscientifi c results were presented by their proponents as undermining traditional philosophical beliefs in absolutes: mathematicians showed that Euclidean geometry was not without alternatives; physicists rejected Newtonian conceptions of absolute space and time; biologists replaced eternal and immutable species with contingently evolving species; statisticians supplanted human essence with the fi ction of l'homme moyen ; sensephysiologists argued that perceptions are structured in good part by needs of the organism; and cognitive, developmental and social psychologists endlessly displayed different forms of "apperception," that is, the infl uence of background information on belief formation. The scientifi c challenging of absolutes was sometimes infl uenced by earlier or contemporaneous work in philosophy or politics. John Stewart Mill (1806– 1873) and Herbert Spencer (1820– 1903) were particularly important here. But the scientifi c rejection of absolutes in turn also had a substantive impact on philosophy and stimulated forms of philosophical cognitive relativism. Clear cases in point were some of the logicians and epistemologists whom Gottlob Frege (1848– 1925) and Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) would later attack as "psychologistic." One particularly striking selfproclaimed relativist was the philosopher Georg Simmel, who assembled his "relativistic worldview" out of scientifi c insights from Darwin to von Helmholtz, Riemann to Einstein. Simmel was a student of Berlin philosophers, early social psychologists (e.g., Moritz Lazarus), and von Helmholtz. 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 60 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Introduction 61 61 Of course, many infl uential philosophers- from Wilhelm Windelband (1848– 1915) to Heinrich Rickert (1863– 1936), from Paul Natorp (1854– 1924) to Ernst Cassirer (1874– 1945), Frege to Husserl, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833– 1911) to Vladimir Lenin (1870– 1924)- soon disagreed with these relativistic uses of naturalscientifi c results and attitudes. These philosophers sought to refute "biologism," "naturalism," "materialism," or "psychologism"- all taken as so many species of relativism or even skepticism. At the same time, the critics were careful not to appear antiscientifi c; they were objecting to what they regarded as a mistaken overextending of natural science into the domains of the humanities in general and philosophy in particular. The attacks were often combined with the lament that too many philosophical chairs had already been taken over by scientists posing as philosophers. Frege's and Husserl's arguments against psychologism are today the bestknown contributions to this genre. For both men, logical laws were ideal and outside of space and time. Thus, these laws could not be studied with the methods of empirical science. Indeed, all scientifi c work always already presupposed logical laws. The argument did not end there. In response to Husserl and other critics of relativistic naturalism, a number of authors proposed nonrelativistic ways of overcoming a strict separation of the empirical and ideal domains. Such proposals fl ourished fi rst and foremost in and around psychology and especially in the Weimar period. The four papers published in this section selectively highlight four key junctures of the development sketched above in broad outline. Lydia Patton focuses on how the pioneers of psychophysics, Ernst Weber (1795– 1878) and Gustav Fechner (1801– 1887), as well as their most important interpreter, von Helmholtz, developed the idea that perception is physiologically, psychologically, and perspectivally relative to the human observer. Patton also shows that this idea had important consequences for how these authors thought of scientifi c knowledge. Richard Staley studies the relationship between "physical relativity" and philosophical relativism in Mach and Einstein. He argues that both men's uses of the term "relativism" was infl uenced not only by debates in physics but also by their refl ections on science and politics and views of absolute and relative across disciplines from history to physics. Dermot Moran discusses Husserl's lifelong engagement with relativism from the Logical Investigations to the late Crisis writings. Relativistic naturalism and historicism were the central targets throughout Husserl's oeuvre . Moran's paper is also signifi cant for other sections of this book: e.g., Husserl's attack on Dilthey and historicism is important for the "history" section, and his attack on Lucien L é vyBruhl (1857– 1939) for the "society" section. Finally, Paul Ziche discusses various attempts in the period around 1900 of steering a middle path between absolutist idealism and psychological empiricism. The central theme was that philosophy and the natural sciences could live in harmony as long as the latter (and their philosophical interpreters) gave up on naturalistic reductionism. 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 61 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 62 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 62 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 63 4 Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observerrelativity 1 Lydia Patton Enlightenment perception The history of early modern empiricism and idealism in philosophy is entwined with normative accounts of rationality and perception. 2 When Ren é Descartes, John Locke, and David Hume are faced with the objection to their theories of perception that not all human beings experience things in the same way, they appeal to the "healthy" adult human, free of "disease," "sane" of mind, and without any perceptual differences such as colorblindness. "Normal" human beings are able to engage in acts of perceiving and reasoning that follow, or become, normative standards. Those whose perceptions do not meet these normative standards are considered to have an overactive imagination, which is associated with mental illness in the writings of Locke, Descartes, and Malebranche. 3 The "Enlightenment ideal of rationality" may be a myth of the scholars. But it has a basis in the texts, and, as Hatfi eld ( 1990 ) has emphasized, it has a counterpart in normative standards for human perception. To reason competently about the world, it is not suffi cient to be able to make correct inferences: one must also be able to perceive the phenomena "correctly." In many authors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the standard of correct perception is relative to the perceptual capacities of human beings. There is an important limitation to this claim, in both the Cartesian and Lockean traditions. A competent perceiver of Lockean ideas is able to perceive not only the primary qualities of things that are features of the mindindependent world but also those qualities that are secondary: qualities of our perceptions that arise in an interaction between the perceiver's sensory capacities and her environment and that depend constitutively on both. But arguably, for Locke, the perception of primary qualities does not depend on the perception of secondary qualities, and so we do not need to give an account of observerrelative qualities when giving an account of how knowledge is obtained through perceptual experience. 4 The Cartesian knower shuts her eyes to all unclear and indistinct physical perceptions in order to see the true ideas by the natural light of reason- and these ideas are not relative to the perceiver. 5 In this sense, Descartes and 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 63 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 64 Lydia Patton 64 Locke agree: True ideas do not depend on properties of the perceiver or of her sensory capacities. They disagree about whether sensation can reveal real qualities of things. Descartes denies that veridical perception of sensible qualities, whether primary or secondary, reveals the true qualities of the world as it is. As Ott ( 2017 ) reads the text, in The World, or Treatise on Light , Descartes argues against the Scholastic view that "the sensible qualities that we experience either just are or resemble the sensible qualities that exist in the world" (1664, §2.3.1). Instead, as Descartes remarks: Words, as you well know, bear no resemblance to the things they signify, and yet they make us think of these things, frequently without our even paying attention to the sound of the words or to their syllables ... Now if words, which signify nothing except by human convention, suffi ce to make us think of things to which they bear no resemblance, then why could nature not also have established some sign which would make us have the sensation of light, even if the sign contained nothing in itself which is similar to this sensation? Is it not thus that nature has established laughter and tears, to make us read joy and sadness on the faces of men? (1664, 79) Cartesian sensible qualities do not directly refl ect the qualities of mindindependent objects. Instead, they stimulate us to think of other things, as when we think about the taste of pie when we see an advertisement for pie. A fl at, odorless picture of a pie does not have any resemblance to the taste of lemon meringue, but it is "natural" to make a mental association between one and the other. Similarly, in Descartes' and Locke's accounts, the particles streaming from the pie and impinging on the subject's senses do not resemble the pie. But they stimulate the mind to form an idea of the pie. In Malebranche's elaboration of the Cartesian philosophy, there is divine guidance of the mental process of inference from sensation to idea. Psychophysics: Qu'estce que c'est? To a physiologist of perception, that is, to someone interested in the experimental and physical basis of the act of perception, Descartes' and Locke's accounts leave parallel questions unanswered. Descartes argues that there is a "natural" relationship between sign and thing signifi ed, but he does not explain- in The World , at any rate- how that relationship can be investigated experimentally. Locke argues that the sensible, primary qualities of objects are real qualities of those objects, but he does not provide a physiological explanation of this claim. Physiologists of perception seek an experimentally verifi able, or at least an empirically wellfounded, explanation for any relationship between sensed and objective qualities. From the perspective of the physiology of perception, both Locke and Descartes appeal to a natural 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 64 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 65 65 or preestablished harmony between sensation and idea. The difference is in the ground they postulate for the inference from one to the other: Cartesian "natural geometry" or Malebranchian divine natural judgments, or Lockean habitual inference from experience. From this perspective, the Critical philosophy introduces a twist on the explanation of visual experience, by emphasizing the role of sensibility, perception, and representation in epistemology. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/ 1787), Immanuel Kant asks how knowledge can be relative to human sensibility, how our acquisition of knowledge may depend constitutively on purely subjective features of our experience, and yet how knowledge can be universal, necessary, and objective. What Descartes saw as a "natural" harmony between subjective signs and ideas is a problem for Kant: the problem of how to interpret subjective sensations as evidence for inferences that support objective knowledge. 6 These two ideas are not inconsistent. In fact, one could see Kant as responding to the Cartesian problem. 7 How are we to fi nd a logic of perception: a formal account of how nature and reason lead us from sensation to knowledge? Hatfi eld ( 1997 ) proposes that we understand the "the development of philosophy from Descartes to Kant ... as a series of claims about the power of the intellect to know the essences of things, with resulting consequences for ontology and for the role of sensory cognition in natural philosophy." On Hatfi eld's reading, Kant entered his critical period when he realized that human cognizers do not have available the 'real use' of the intellect or understanding to know an intelligible world of substances; at the center of his critical (theoretical) philosophy was his new theory of the human understanding as a faculty limited to synthesizing the materials of sensory representation but unable to penetrate to things in themselves. (1997, 22) One can note as well that, in the move from Descartes to Kant, the idea is no longer a standard derived from our knowledge of essences. The standard for knowledge in Kant comes via proofs of the validity and objective reality of a set of rules of synthesis of representations, which ground knowledge from experience. Locating the ground of objective knowledge in a relation between the subject and the object, rather than in the subject's knowledge of ideal essences, has a wellknown and profound effect on natural philosophy. The epistemic relation between sensation, perception, inference, and knowledge came to the forefront in physiological neoKantianism, and in the closely entwined tradition of empirical psychology, from the beginning to the end of the nineteenth century. 8 Kant's focus on the conditions for objective judgments put an emphasis on how to determine the relationship between subjective and objective in perception and in knowledge. 9 Much of the research in German psychology done at the time, including that of Johann Friedrich Herbart and Wilhelm Wundt, focused increasingly 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 65 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 66 Lydia Patton 66 on what could be investigated empirically. In which circumstances, if any, can we consider a subjective perception to be evidence of the properties of thingsin themselves? If it is not possible to have knowledge of thingsinthemselves, as Kant and many neoKantians argue, we may decide instead to delineate the contributions of the subjective and the objective, and to show how each operates in phenomenal experience. An explanation of phenomenal experience along these lines will allow us to identify those aspects of experience that are objective, stable, and manipulable, which is suffi cient for a scientifi c account. But it is not necessarily the case that identifying what is "objective" requires disentangling the objective part of experience from the part that is relative to the observer. To the postKantians , knowledge can be "objective," "scientifi c," and "relative to the observer" simultaneously. The tradition of "psychophysics" established by Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner set the stage for midnineteenth century work in this area. 10 Psychophysics establishes quantitative relationships between qualitative sensations and their stimuli, and investigates the dynamics of these sensations, including how they arise and recede, and how they are heightened or dulled in response to stimulus. Researchers in psychophysics must rely on results from physiology of perception to establish standards of measurement for sensation, and on results from physics to establish differential equations describing the variation of sensation with respect to stimuli. The contributions of the tradition of psychophysics go beyond the quantitative analysis described above, however. Infl uenced by the questions described above, which developed in the tradition of natural philosophy including the work of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and Kant, the founders of German physiology of perception and psychophysics explicitly set up their research to answer epistemological questions. 11 In The Sense of Touch and the Common Sense , Ernst Weber was concerned to establish which elements of sensation were objective and which subjective. Gustav Fechner ( 1859 ) and Weber established the wellknown WeberFechner law, which is a quantitative stimulusresponse relation. But the epistemological investigations of psychophysicists went well beyond the mathematical establishment of a stimulusresponse curve. Fechner's On a Fundamental Law of Psychophysics and its Relationship to the Estimation of Stellar Size analyzes the difference between the apparent and the real diameter of stars. 12 According to optical theories, that is, theories of light itself and of our perception of it, we should see the stars as they are. Light emanating from the stars has a certain wavelength. The light strikes our retinas, and the optic nerve transmits the resulting impulses to the brain. As far as this physical system is concerned, there should be no difference between the "phenomenal" and the real diameter of stars. But that is not the case: there are real, measurable differences between the apparent and the real diameter of stars. Nonetheless, these differences are not random. They are stable among the 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 66 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 67 67 population of human perceivers. Weber begins The Sense of Touch with a variant of Fechner's astronomical example: We must distinguish, in all sensations, between pure sensation and our interpretation of [sensations]: the sensations of darkness, light, and of colors are pure sensations; that something dark, light, and colored either is in us, or is in space before us, and has a form, is resting, or is moving, is an interpretation of [sensations]. This interpretation is so closely associated with sensation that it is inseparable from it and we take it for a part of sensation, whereas, in fact, it is a representation that we make for ourselves from sensation . Not only veridical, but also false interpretations of sensations are mixed in with [sensations], in some cases so closely that one cannot separate [false interpretations] from [sensations], even when one is aware of the error and of the cause of the error. To everyone, even astronomers, the rising and setting sun and the rising and setting moon seem to have a larger diameter than when either of them are high in the sky... the visual angle under which we see these celestial bodies in the two cases is, as measurement proves, exactly the same, but it [the illusion] rests on a false interpretation that anyone in these circumstances would be forced to make , so possibly no one yet has been able to be free of it. (Weber 1905 , 4– 5, emphasis added) Mathematical perspective and judgments of distance infl uence perception, as much earlier theorists including AlHaytham and Plato recognized. Weber and Fechner take an inferentialist perspective on this phenomenon, arguing that sensations are interpreted to yield perception, and that this perceptual interpretation may be in confl ict with independent measurements. Helmholtz's epistemology The physiologist of perception and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz was among the fi rst, if not the fi rst, to recognize the novelty and potential of Weber and Fechner's approaches. Helmholtz spent much of his early career investigating perceptual phenomena including stereoscopic vision and the horopter effect. Stereoscopic vision is the phenomenon that humans with two eyes see a single visual image, which is made up of two independent retinal images combined into one. Of course, the retinal images are also upside down, and the brain interprets them as right side up. For Helmholtz, the vast majority of our perceptual experience is an effect , caused by the interaction between external objects and our sensory and nervous system. But this conclusion raises a striking question for epistemology: what is the epistemic status of propositions about perceptual experience? Fechner and Weber had argued that many inferences made from sensation are inescapable, even to those who know that they are illusions. In that case, Helmholtz asked, 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 67 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 68 Lydia Patton 68 are there regularities in our inferences- even in the incorrect ones- that can be the source of knowledge about perceptual experience itself ? There might be three sources of such knowledge, at least: (1) A description of the physiological facts about perceptions, explaining how sensations arise and interact. (2) A psychological account of how concepts and inferences may contribute to perceptual experience. (3) A perspectival theory of how the subject's situation in space, time, and history infl uences her experience. For instance, being born on a planet with no gravity might infl uence the inferences from sensation that a subject would make. Helmholtz provides detailed accounts of the fi rst two of these sources. In the case of the perspectival theory, he does defend the view but does not give a detailed account of how it will work. The elements (1), (2), and (3) above are combined in Helmholtz's epistemological account of knowledge via perception. For Helmholtz, the spatial and temporal order of sensations is the ground of a "remarkable effect," namely, that objects appear to have sensible qualities- even though we do not perceive those qualities directly. In his lecture "The Facts in Perception," Helmholtz writes: Thus, that this intuited spatial order of things originally arises from the sequence in which the qualities of the sensations of the moved sense organ are presented ultimately remains a remarkable effect, even in the accomplished representations of the experienced observer. That is to say, the objects present in space appear to us clothed with the qualities of our sensations. They appear to us red or green, cold or warm, smell or taste etc., while in fact these sensory qualities belong only to our nervous system and certainly do not reach out to external space. Even if we know this, the appearance 13 does not cease, for this appearance in fact is the original truth; it is the sensations themselves, which primarily present themselves to us in spatial order. (1878, 21) All qualities are qualities of bodies that are constituted by the properties of our sensory nerves and nervous system. 14 The qualities of perceived objects are the qualities of our sensations, and yet they "clothe" the objects present to us in observation. Helmholtz refers to the fact that we experience perceptual qualities, and not just mechanical sensations, as a Folge (effect or consequence). But this "appearance" is the "original truth." Our perceptual experience is caused by physical and physiological regularities, which includes the stable 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 68 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 69 69 features of our interaction with our environment. 15 If I perceive an object as red, that quality does not "reach out to external space." We do not have defi nitive reason to believe that redness is a mindindependent property of the object that caused the sensation. But that does not mean that my perception of redness is an error. It is possible to know what Helmholtz calls Thatsachen (facts) about our experience of redness, without ascribing those facts to an object that is independent of the sensing body or mind (Helmholtz 1879 ). That is the sense of Helmholtz's title Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung: the facts in perception. Facts can include the claim that "Vermilion is red:" for Helmholtz, this claim can be factual as perceived, but not an "objective" truth in Kant's sense of valid for all perceivers. This will be discussed in more detail below. Helmholtz defends a second thesis infl uenced by psychophysics: features of our perceptual experience are constituted by unconscious inferences, which in turn are based on prior experience. Perceptual experience thus is situated : perceptual experience can be captured fully only by giving a historical account of previous perceptions, inferences from those perceptions, and their logical and occurrent impingement on present perceptions and representations. Recall the passage from Weber that analyzes the illusion of the setting sun and moon: "not only correct, but also false interpretations of sensations are mixed, in some cases so closely that one cannot separate [the false interpretations] from [the sensations] at all." Even experienced observers- and even astronomers!- experience the setting sun as larger than the sun at high noon, even though they know it is not. This is a result of an inference, but an inference that takes place very swiftly and without our noticing it. To use another example that Helmholtz gives, I perceive objects that are farther away as smaller than identical objects that are closer to me. This is a mere appearance. If I measure the objects, I will discover they are identical. But it is also an appearance that is forced on me, not just by the nature of my sensory processing system, but by unconscious inferences I am constrained to draw by the nature of my previous experience. The passage from the Handbook of Physiological Optics in which Helmholtz describes these inferences is signifi cant to anyone who has been reading Weber and Fechner: The mental operations through which we come to the judgment that a particular object in a particular state in a particular place outside us is present, are in general not conscious operations, but unconscious. In their results, they are similar to an inference , insofar as we achieve from the observed effect ( Wirkung ) on our senses the representation of a cause of this effect, whereas, in fact, we can only perceive directly the nerve stimulations, that is, the effects, never the external objects. However, they appear to be distinguished from an inference- this word taken in its usual sense- because [an inference] is an act of conscious thought. Such actual conscious inferences are, for instance, when an astronomer calculates the position in outer space, its distance from the Earth, and so on from the 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 69 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 70 Lydia Patton 70 perspectival images that are given to him of the stars at different times and in different positions of the Earth's orbit. The astronomer supports his inferences with a conscious knowledge of the theorems of optics. Such a knowledge of optics is missing in the usual acts of sight. However, it is permissible to describe the mental acts of usual perception as unconscious inferences .... (1867, 430) A human being moving among the objects she experiences is an earthly astronomer. She eyeballs the measurements of objects in her visual fi eld, and makes comparisons between them, in order not to step into a busy street or to fall off a cliff. This requires complex calculations about spatial relationships, relationships that, according to Helmholtz, are inferred. Those inferences are inferences on the basis of sensations, which are just the stimulations of nerves in a certain sequence, to the size, confi guration, and position of external objects. 16 Weber's astronomer still sees the setting sun as bigger than the sun at noon, like the rest of us. Helmholtz's earthly astronomer, the human observer, cannot stop making unconscious inferences in perceptual experience. Even if you know that two ships are exactly the same size, you will still perceive one that is much farther away as smaller. The inference that grounds this element of our perceptual experience is not a free act, it is an effect of a cause. In his essay "The Facts in Perception," Helmholtz raises the question: "What is truth in our representations?" This question relates truth or epistemic justifi cation, not to bare sensation but to our representation of external objects on the basis of that sensation. Helmholtz argues that it is possible to explain how we construct representations of objects and processes on the basis of sensations that are experienced in a time order. In the Handbook of Physiological Optics and in On the Sensations of Tone , Helmholtz develops theories of sound and color. There, Helmholtz gave signifi cant attention to the problem of distinguishing subjective from objective, 17 and to the problem of giving a "physiological" and "psychological" account of the phenomena encountered in conscious experience. Helmholtz argues that complex qualitative and quantitative features of phenomenal experience, including separation in space, shades of color, and gradations of sound, are not sensed but inferred from sensation. We must make inferences from our sensations, and from the sequence in which they present themselves to us, to have access to a set of qualitative and quantitative features of perceptual experience (Helmholtz 1868 , 175– 176). We do not perceive the external objects that cause our sensations directly. Rather, we infer from the assumption of a causal interaction between the subject and the object, and from the sensations via our nerve endings, that external objects are present: The mental operations through which we come to the judgment that a particular object in a particular state in a particular place outside us is present, are in general not conscious operations, but unconscious. In their 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 70 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 71 71 results, they are similar to an inference , insofar as we achieve from the observed effect on our senses the representation of a cause of this effect, whereas, in fact, we can only perceive directly the nerve stimulations, that is, the effects, never the external objects. (Helmholtz 1867 , 430) Helmholtz's account blocks the appeal to direct "confi rmation" or "verifi cation" of beliefs about objects via observation. Perception of external objects is always mediated by inference. 18 Thus, as Hatfi eld notes, Helmholtz rejects the direct scholastic and Lockean inference from perceived qualities to real qualities of objects. Helmholtz argues that we must discover the relationship between sign and object by investigating the stable relationships between sequences of perceptions and changes in the stimuli that produce them, whether these changes are artifi cially manipulated for experiment's sake, or natural. Those relationships must be discovered and analyzed within experience itself. Helmholtz does not allow for a standpoint outside experience that serves as a standard. The subject's experience is experience of objects, and also refl ects the subject's physiology, psychology, and perspective. It is not the case that we must restrict ourselves to introspection when studying experience: all the scientifi c tools of investigation can be brought to bear, including experiments on how subjects perceive and stimuli to which they respond. By analyzing experience in this way, we can come to have increasingly better knowledge of what is subjective, and what is objective, relative to a particular subject's perceptual experience. "Subjective" and "objective," in this case, are not absolute categories as they are in Kant's sense: there is no "pure" subjectivity in Helmholtz. Rather, Helmholtz's "subjective" and "objective" are explanatory categories, used to construct explanations of processes and elements in perceptual experience that can be ascribed to the subject or to the object. When constructing these explanations, one a priori assumption is necessary: that objects outside us exist and that they cause our sensations of them. 19 A scientifi c analysis of perceptual experience as observerrelative There are three senses in which perceptual experience, as described by German empirical physiology and psychophysics, is relative to an observer. One is physiological: human perceptual experience depends on human sensory capacities. Another is psychological: since habitual judgment impinges on experience, human perceptual experience depends on, and must be analyzed relative to, human psychological and inferential capacities. Yet another is perspectival : Again, since habitual judgment impinges on experience, the historical, environmental, and physical conditions for the formation of a subject's habitual inferences have a constitutive infl uence on perceptual experience. The traditions of psychophysics and of the physiology of perception were entangled over the nineteenth century with longstanding problems from 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 71 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 72 Lydia Patton 72 Cartesian and Lockean natural philosophy, and from the physiological and epistemological strands of neoKantianism. The history of psychophysics illuminates possible approaches to these questions. According to the methods used by this tradition, observation is a natural interaction with, and adaptation to, the environment, which should be analyzed as a process. Knowledge gained from experience is always relative to the human observer. For Helmholtz, that knowledge gained through experience is relative to the observer is precisely why the observerknowledge relation can be analyzed scientifi cally. The natural process by which humans obtain knowledge is itself subject to a rigorous, experimental analysis, the scientifi c basis for which grew stronger over the nineteenth century. 20 The availability of facts about the physiology, psychology, and perspectival basis of perceptual experience is the ground for claims of knowledge from perception that is not independent of the context in which it arises. Such claims are the basis of what is now known as "contextualist knowledge," according to which "A sentence is true for X if and only if it is true as uttered by X, true relative to a context in which X is the speaker" (Williamson 2005 , 92). Propositions about sensory and perceptual experience are contextually true for Helmholtz. For instance, the proposition "The mountains look far away" is true for someone who is far away from the mountains, and false for someone close to them. But Helmholtz's position goes deeper than this. He even argues that the statement "Vermilion looks red" is not true in an absolute sense, but only relative to our sensory faculties- even to the faculties of a particular observer: To ask whether vermilion is actually red, as we see it, or whether this is a sensory illusion, is ... senseless. The sensation of red is the normal reaction of normally formed eyes to the light refl ected by vermilion. A colorblind person would see vermilion as black or dark greyyellow; this too is the correct reaction for a different eye ... In itself the one sensation is not more correct or more false than the other. (Helmholtz 1867 , 445) This is a classically contextualist position. "This vermilion looks red" is true for observer A, who is not colorblind, but not for observer B, who is colorblind. The contextualist reading of Helmholtz, strongly supported by the passage above and by many of Helmholtz's remarks, raises the question: If Helmholtz is a contextualist, what does this mean for Helmholtz's epistemological account of knowledge from perception? We might try to situate Helmholtz's view within contemporary positions on color realism, for instance. Here, I would advise caution. Among the positions taken in the contemporary context are realism (Byrne and Hilbert 2017 ), relationalism (Cohen 2009 ), and relativism. Relationalism is the view that, for certain properties like being poisonous or having a certain color, "There is no such thing as [having 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 72 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 73 73 that property] simpliciter. Rather, there is a family of relational properties," defi ned in relation to a subject: something can be poisonous to humans but not to snakes, and something can appear green to me but not to you (Byrne and Hilbert 2017 , 173). Relationalism, as Byrne and Hilbert observe, "multiplies perceptible properties" ( 2017 , 175). There are a number of perceptible properties in the world: greentoLydia is a distinct property from greentoHermann , for instance. We might, then, try to locate Helmholtz within the spectrum of "relationalist" theories of color, as against realist theories, according to which there is a property, "redness," that exists independently of human observers. Tracz ( 2018 ) is a cogent defense of such a reading. While the relationalist reading of Helmholtz is certainly defensible, it is not the end of the story: restricting ourselves to an argument according to which Helmholtz only is defending contemporary relationalism would risk losing some of the force and complexity of Helmholtz's view. Tracz ( 2018 ) makes a convincing case that Helmholtz defends a view close to Cohen's relationalism about perceptual properties. The relationalist view is intended to answer questions about "the metaphysical status of the properties that we perceive" (Tracz 2018 , 66). Relationalism is the view that there are families of relational properties, as Byrne and Hilbert put it, in terms of which we can explain the metaphysical status of perceptual properties. Contemporary relationalism seeks to defi ne a set of stable relational properties. While it is true that one can become blind, or one's sense of smell and thus taste can change, it is also the case that, for Helmholtz, habit and inference - and even deliberate interference- can change the relational properties involved, and thus change my perceptual experience. For Helmholtz, humans are detectors of a certain kind: human ears can perform Fourier analysis, and human eyes detect radiation at specifi c wavelengths. 21 But for Helmholtz, Fechner, and Weber, perceptual experience of complex phenomena like music and colored objects is not reducible to the groundlevel sensory response to physical stimuli. Inference is inextricably involved in human perceptual experience. Helmholtz took from psychophysics the idea that my previous experience impinges on my perceptual experience, and Helmholtz argues that the impingement happens through a series of inferences that can be manipulated experimentally. Certain judgments and perceptions are stable features of our perceptual experience. We perceive objects that are farther away as smaller than identical objects closer to us. We perceive the setting sun as larger than the sun at noon, but it is the same sun. We reliably can produce stable perceptual illusions by manipulating sensory and motor responses to stimuli (Helmholtz 1867 , 429, 436– 437). More recent research supports the idea from Helmholtz, Weber, and Fechner that some sources of the processing that results in perceptual experience arise from changing experience, not just from stable- or even relatively stable- properties of a perceiving subject. The psychologist Diana Deutsch 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 73 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 74 Lydia Patton 74 details the activity of tonal processing (1999), including illusions that arise in the recognition of music (1969) and auditory illusions in general (1974, 1975). Auditory illusions arise that can be associated with rightand lefthandedness : righthanded persons perceive certain pitch combinations differently from lefthanded persons. Deutsch's research supports the view from Helmholtz, Weber, and Fechner that experience, in conjunction with physiological and psychological factors, can infl uence perceptual processing. As I have argued throughout this essay, Helmholtz allows for not only physiological facts and psychological inferences but also perspectival reasoning, to infl uence perceptual experience and knowledge gained from perception. But Helmholtz also defends a version of the view according to which there can be a kind of "perspectival truth" revealed in scientifi c research and investigation. Helmholtz argues that the relationships between subjective and objective, real and actual, actual and illusory, must be analyzed scientifi cally, within experience. There is no standpoint outside experience from which we can reason, no extrasensory knowledge of the constitution of the "ideal subject" or of the properties of "real objects." Instead, we reason using the "sign system" of our sense impressions, which allow us to form representations of objects. Those representations are always physiologically, psychologically, and perspectivally relative to the observer. However, precisely for that reason, they can be used as scientifi c evidence, provided that relativity to the observer itself can be analyzed scientifi cally. In the tradition of psychophysics inherited by Helmholtz, we can arrive at a kind of perspectival analysis of perceptual experience, which embeds an account of that experience within the context of the history and situation of the perceiving subject. 22 That analysis is relative to the perceiving subject, but the perspectival explanations Helmholtz constructs are not thereby relativist : in fact, for Helmholtz, the more squarely the perceiving subject is placed in a scientifi c, perspectival context, the more facts we are able to learn about her experience and the objects with which she interacts. Notes 1 I would like to thank Martin Kusch, Katherina Kinzel, Johannes Steizinger, and Niels Wildschut for the opportunity to contribute to this volume, and for substantive comments on an earlier draft, which have infl uenced the project of the chapter much for the better. Walter Ott has provided valuable contributions to the chapter's account of Locke, although, of course, he is not responsible for the details of the interpretation that I have given here. 2 Hatfi eld ( 1990 ) is a classic reference in this context. 3 These remarks are familiar to those who study this period. They occur in Descartes' Meditations 4 and 6, in Malebranche's The Search after Truth (for instance, 2.3.1.4, 3.1, and 3.2), and in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (for instance, 2.11.13). See Hume ( 1739 ), especially the editorial material from the Nortons on p. 751 and p. 771. 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 74 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 75 75 4 As Walter Ott conveyed in personal communication, Locke's "simple" account of the perception of primary qualities can be found in the Essay (Locke 1689 ) , especially II.v and II.ii.1. The fi rst eight chapters of Book II of that work present Locke's theory of visual experience. As Ott notes, chapter nine complicates the picture by adding judgment: "Because Sight, the most comprehensive of all our Senses, conveying to our minds the Ideas of Light and Colours, which are peculiar only to that Sense; and also the far different Ideas of Space, Figure, and Motion, the several varieties whereof change the appearances of its proper Object, viz. Light and Colours, we bring ourselves by use, to judge of the one by the other. This in many cases, by a settled habit, in things whereof we have frequent experience, is performed so constantly, and so quick, that we take that for the Perception of our Sensation, which is an Idea formed by our Judgment; so that one, viz. that of Sensation, serves only to excite the other, and is scarce taken notice of it self; as a Man who reads or hears with attention and understanding, takes little notice of the Characters or Sounds, but of the Ideas, that are excited in him by them" (Locke 1689 , II.ix.9, 146– 147). It may seem prima facie as if this passage supports a reading of Locke that is closer to Descartes: that our perceptions are a language we must read, not direct evidence of the properties of bodies. However, on Ott's reading, Locke introduces judgment into his account of visual experience to correct for mistakes in the original experience that cloud our understanding of that experience. And the passage above bears this out: the rhetorical force of the passage is to argue that when we begin to habitually associate ideas of light and color with ideas of space, fi gure, and motion, ideas from one place (judgment) are being wrongly used to judge ideas from another (sensation). Unlike Descartes, Locke believes that an analysis of sensation can clear up any confusion between judgment and sensation and can reveal the evidence of primary qualities that is given in perceptual experience. On a different subject, several ideas resembling those in this passage are discussed by Helmholtz in §26 of his Handbook . 5 In Madness and Civilization , Foucault writes memorably: "the Cartesian formula of doubt is certainly the great exorcism of madness. Descartes closes his eyes and plugs up his ears the better to see the true brightness of essential daylight; thus he is secured against the dazzlement of the madman who, opening his eyes, sees only night, and not seeing at all, believes he sees when he imagines. In the uniform lucidity of his closed senses, Descartes has broken with all possible fascination, and if he sees, he is certain of seeing that which he sees" (1961, 102). 6 The reading of Kant here owes much to Hermann Cohen and the Marburg School. For an early version of my reading of the Marburg School, see Patton ( 2004 ). 7 To be sure, Descartes was far from the fi rst to pose this problem. Plato's Timaeus contains a beautiful statement of a similar question. In classical Indian philosophy, we fi nd a fascinating debate between Buddhist and Hindu thinkers of the Vasubandhu and Ny ā ya traditions, on the question of how perception can become veridical cognition, and on the status of perception and sensation themselves (see Chadha, 2016 ). 8 For more on the tradition of "physiological neoKantianism," see Patton ( 2004 ) and Beiser ( 2014 ), including references there to others' work. As Hatfi eld details (2018, §4.1), the question of the relation between the subjective and the objective in perception arose even for empirical physiologists of perception, like Johann Georg Steinbuch and Caspar Theobald Tourtual. 9 See Edgar ( 2013 , 2015 ). 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 75 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 76 Lydia Patton 76 10 Fechner's psychophysics owes a debt to the earlier work of Johann Friedrich Herbart. Michael Heidelberger has written the defi nitive work on Fechner with Die innere Seite der Natur ( The inner side of nature ). In 1863, Ernst Mach delivered lectures on psychophysics, which are published in German; an appreciation of the lectures in English is in Titchener ( 1922 ). 11 While recent interpreters of Helmholtz's work disagree on the infl uence of Fichte on Helmholtz, they appear to agree on this point: that Helmholtz was concerned to use the methods of empirical physiology to answer epistemological questions, and even to dissolve metaphysical questions that turn out to be empirical questions in disguise. Compare, for instance, de Kock ( 2015 ) and Heidelberger ( 2015 ) to Hatfi eld ( 2018 ). 12 Original title: Ü ber ein psychophysisches Grundgesetz und dessen Beziehung zur Sch ä tzung der Sterngr ö ssen (1859) . 13 The word Schein has been translated as "illusion" in the past, but I now believe this translation to be misleading. 14 Helmholtz discusses the example of the setting moon in §30. 15 This includes features of our voluntary motions with respect to objects, as de Kock emphasizes (2014, 2015). 16 "Now, the described unconscious inferences from sensation to their causes are congruent in their results to the socalled inferences from analogy . Because in a millionfold majority of cases, stimulation of places on the retina on the outer corner of the eye originates from external light that falls on the eye from the area of the bridge of the nose, we judge that it will be so as well in each newly encountered case in which the stated places on the retina are stimulated, just as we assert that each single human now living will die, since experience has revealed that all humans living in the past are dead. Further, these unconscious inferences from analogy arise with compulsory necessity, since they are not acts of free conscious thought, and their effect cannot be reversed through better insight into the connection of things" (Helmholtz 1867 , 430). 17 Emphasized by Ernst Weber in The Sense of Touch (1834) and in The Sense of Touch and the Common Sense (1846). 18 "We use the sensations that light stimulates in our apparatus of sensory nerves, to form for ourselves representations from them [the sensations] concerning the existence, the form, and the location of external objects. We call such representations visual perceptions . ... Since perceptions of external objects thus belong to the representations, and representations always are acts of our mental operation, perceptions can come about only in virtue of mental operation, and thus the doctrine of perceptions in fact already belongs to the domain of psychology" (Helmholtz, 1867 , 427). 19 See Patton ( 2009 ) for a discussion of Helmholtz's reasoning on this score. 20 For accounts of the development of research in nineteenthcentury physiology of perception in the labs, see Finkelstein ( 2013 ), Otis ( 2007 ), and Sulloway ( 1992 ). 21 Lenoir ( 2006 ) illuminates Helmholtz's experimental practices in testing these views, building material objects like Helmholtz resonators to stand in for human sensory apparatus. 22 The most recent and compelling argument for "perspectival truth" is presented by Michela Massimi ( 2018 ). Massimi argues for perspectival realism as a version of scientifi c realism. It is possible that the work of Grete Hermann provides an early version of this (see Banks 2017). See also Brogaard ( 2010 ) for an argument in the case of color. 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 76 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM Perspectivalism in the development of scientifi c observer-relativity 77 77 References Banks , E. ( 2018 ), " Grete Hermann as NeoKantian Philosopher of Space and Time Representation ," Journal of the History of Analytical Philosophy 6 ( 3 ): 244– 263. Beiser , F. ( 2014 ), The Genesis of NeoKantianism, 1796 – 1880 , Oxford : Oxford University Press . Brogaard , B. ( 2010 ), " Perspectival truth and color primitivism ," in New Waves in Truth , edited by C. Wright and N. Pedersen , Basingstoke : PalgraveMacmillan , 1 – 34 . Byrne , A. and Hilbert , D. ( 2017 ), " Color Relationalism and Relativism ," Topics in Cognitive Science 9 : 172 – 192 . Chadha , M. ( 2016 ), "Perceptual Experience and Concepts in Classical Indian Philosophy," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by E. N. Zalta, URL = < https:// plato.stanford.edu/ archives/ spr2016/ entries/ perceptionindia/ >. Cohen , J. ( 2009 ), The Red and the Real , Oxford : Oxford University Press . De Kock , L. ( 2014 ), " Voluntarism in early psychology: the case of Hermann von Helmholtz ," History of Psychology 17 ( 2 ): 105 – 1 28 . - - ( 2015 ), " Hermann von Helmholtz's empiricotranscendentalism reconsidered ," Science in Context 27 ( 4 ): 709 – 7 44 . - - ( 2018 ), " Historicizing Hermann von Helmholtz's Psychology of Differentiation ," Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 6 ( 3 ): 42 – 62 . Descartes , R. ( 1664 ), " The World, or Treatise on Light ," in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. I , translated and edited by J. Cottingham , R. Stoothoff , and D. Murdoch , Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 1985 , 79 – 98 . Deutsch , D. ( 1969 ), " Music Recognition ," Psychological Review 76 ( 3 ): 300 . - - ( 1974 ), " An Auditory Illusion ," The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 55 ( S1 ): 18 – 19 . - - ( 1975 ), " Musical Illusions ," Scientifi c American 233 ( 4 ): 92 – 104 . - - ( 1999 ), " The Processing of Pitch Combinations ," The Psychology of Music 2 : 349 – 412 . Edgar , S. ( 2013 ), " The Limits of Experience and Explanation ," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 ( 1 ): 100 – 121 . - - ( 2015 ), " The Physiology of the Sense Organs and Early NeoKantian Conceptions of Objectivity ," in Objectivity in Science: Approaches to Historical Epistemology , edited by F. Padovani , A. Richardson and J. Tsou , Dordrecht : Springer , 101 – 122 . Fechner , G. ( 1859 ), Ü ber ein psychophysisches Grundgesetz und dessen Beziehung zur Sch ä tzung der Sterngr ö ssen , Leipzig : S. Hirzel . Finkelstein , G. ( 2013 ), Emil du BoisReymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in NineteenthCentury Germany , Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press . Foucault , M. ( 1961 ), Madness and Civilization , abridged translation by R. Howard , London : Routledge , 2001 . Hatfi eld , G. ( 1990 ), The Natural and the Normative , Cambridge, MA : MIT . - - ( 1997 ), " The Workings of the Intellect ," in Logic and the Workings of the Mind , edited by P. Easton , Atascadero, CA : Ridgeview Publishing Co ., 21 – 45 . - - ( 2018 ), " Helmholtz and Philosophy ," Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 6 ( 3 ): 10 – 41 . Heidelberger , M. ( 2015 ), " Naturalisierung des Transzendentalen in der Sinnesphysiologie von Hermann von Helmholtz ," Scientia Poetica 19 ( 1 ): 205 – 233 . Helmholtz , H. ( 1855 ), Ü ber das Sehen des Menschen , Leipzig : Leopold Voss . - - ( 1867 ), Handbuch der physiologischen Optik , Leipzig : Leopold Voss . 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 77 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM 78 Lydia Patton 78 - - ( 1868 ), " The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision ," in Science and Culture , edited by D. Cahan , Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 1995 , 127 – 203 . - - ( 1879 ), Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung , Berlin : Hirschwald . Hume , D. ( 1739 ), A Treatise of Human Nature. Volume 2 , edited by D. F. Norton and M. Norton (eds.), Oxford : Oxford University Press , 2007 . Lenoir , T. ( 2006 ), " Operationalizing Kant ," in The Kantian Legacy in NineteenthCentury Science , edited by M. Friedman and A. Nordmann , Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press , 141 – 210 . Locke , J. ( 1689 ), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding , edited by P. H. Nidditch , Oxford : Clarendon , 1975 . Massimi , M. ( 2018 ), " Four Kinds of Perspectival Truth ," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 96 ( 2 ): 342 – 359 . Otis , L. ( 2007 ), M ü ller's Lab , Oxford : Oxford University Press . Ott , W. ( 2017 ), Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception , Oxford : Oxford University Press . Patton , L. ( 2004 ), Hermann Cohen's History and Philosophy of Science , Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University. - - ( 2009 ) " Signs, Toy Models, and the A Priori: from Helmholtz to Wittgenstein ," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 40 ( 3 ): 281 – 28 9 . - - ( 2014 ), "Hermann von Helmholtz," The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , edited by E. N. Zalta, URL = < http:// plato.stanford.edu/ archives/ fall2014/ entries/ hermannhelmholtz/ >. - - (2018), " Helmholtz's Physiological Psychology ," in Philosophy of Mind in the Nineteenth Century , edited by S. Lapointe , New York : Routledge . Sulloway , F. ( 1992 ), Freud, Biologist of the Mind , Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press . Titchener , E. B. ( 1922 ), " Mach's 'Lectures on Psychophysics '," The American Journal of Psychology 33 ( 2 ): 213 – 222 . Tracz , R. ( 2018 ), " Helmholtz on Perceptual Properties ," Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 6 ( 3 ): 63 – 78 . Turner , R. S. ( 1994 ), In the Eye's Mind , Princeton : Princeton University Press . Weber , E. ( 1905 ), Der Tastsinn und das Gemeingef ü hl , second edition, edited by E. Hering , Leipzig : Wilhelm Engelmann . Williamson , T. ( 2005 ), " Knowledge, Context, and the Agent's Point of View ," in Contextualism in Philosophy , edited by G. Preyer and P. Peter , Oxford : Oxford University Press , 91 – 114 . 9781138571877_pi-251.indd 78 03-Jan-19 4:24:22 PM

Euthanasia, Or Death Assisted to (Its) Dignity István KIRÁLY V. Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Department of Philosophy Motto: "The person who really loves me will be the one who helps me die". Dialogue from Alejandro Amenábar's motion picture entitled The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro). Keywords: euthanasia, dying, death, existential analitics; fundamental ontology, ontology of death, metaphysics of death Abstract: The paper attempts to conceptualize the "ancient" issues of human death and human mortality in connection to the timely and vital subject of euthanasia. This subject forces the meditation to actually consider those ideological, ethical, deontological, legal, and metaphysical frameworks which guide from the very beginning any kind of approach to this question. This conception – in dialogue with Heideggerian fundamental ontology and existential analytics – reveals that, on the one hand, the concepts and ethics of death are originally determined by the ontology of death, and, on the other hand, that, on this account, the question of euthanasia can only be authentically discussed in the horizon of this ontology. It is only this that may reveal to whom dying – our dying – pertains, while it also reveals our relationship to euthanasia as a determined human potentiality or final possibility. Thus euthanasia is outlined in the analysis as the possibility of becoming a mortal on the one hand, while on the other hand it appears in relation to the particularities of its existential structure, which essentially differ from the existential and ontological structure of any other possibility of dying. This is why it should not be mixed up with, or mistaken for, any of these. E-mail: [email protected] * I. Obstacles of thinking about euthanasia Already in its original meaning the Greek term of "euthanasia" meant "good death". However, the way in which people conceived death, or what they regarded at all as death, or especially "good" death, has changed continuously throughout the ages, cultures, and civilizations. To begin with, in Greek culture and philosophy, for instance, one of the basic and almost constant meanings of philosophy or philosophizing was the meléte thanátou, the actual practice of preparing oneself for a dignified death. This also renders the meaning of "good death" as it was understood by the Greeks. In spite of this the Hippocratic Oath forbade even at that time the active participation of the physician in ending one's life. In opposition to this, Christianity seems to refrain from its very beginnings from conceiving of any kind of "good death". The primary reason for this is probably not even the fact that it would reject the attachment of any kind of positive attribute – the attribute of goodness – to something as utterly negative as death. Much rather, the reason is that in Christian mentality death is implicitly and sui generis connected to the original sin, and therefore it is indeed impossible to relate it to any qualities of "good-ness". According to Old Testament Judaism and later Christianity, the "certain" death springs from sin, and it is nothing else than the payment, the punishment for sin. Thus it cannot possibly be anything that should be made better or easier. Consequently, it is not so much the inner negativity of the act of dying, but rather its state of punishment which induces Christianity to essentially and a priori reject euthanasia. At any rate, this induces it more directly than, say, its convictions related to the sacred, divine origin of life or its reverence, as Christianity itself has eliminated quite some "lives" in the course of time, or even today any civilized Western army hardly ever marches into a war – that is killing – without the reassuring assistance of the camp ministers. * It has become a bibliographical commonplace by now that the Greek word euthanasia was first used in early modernity in a medical-healing context by a philosopher, the Englishman Sir Francis Bacon in his study The Knowledge of Man's Body, where he formulated his personal opinion that a physician's task is not merely to restore health, but also to ease one's passage from life when the time has come. This is stated also in the title of a subchapter of this book: De euthanasia exteriore, which is distinguished, within brackets, from the spiritual preparation (preparation of the Soul) for death, for dying. 1 But why did Bacon use the Greek 1 See: Lord Bacon's Essay Continued in Twenty Seven Chapters Translated from this Lordship's Treatise De Augmentis Scientiarum. By William Willmott, Volume the Second, London, 1720. p. 209-210 (http://books.google.ro/books?id=ry8CAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=Francia+Bacon+Euth anasia&hl=ro&sa=X&ei=VzVzT8QPMfVsgbryrnrDQ&ved=0CFoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q&f=false) (Downloaded 30 March 2012) and even more precisely: De euthanasia exteriore : "Nay further, I esteem it the office of a physician not only to restore health, but to mitigate pain and dolors; and not only when such mitigation may conduce to recovery, but when it may serve to make a fair and easy passage: for it is no small felicity which Augustu Caesar was wont to wish to himself, that same Euthanasia; and which was specially noted in the death of Antoninus Pius, whose death was after the fashion and semblance of a kindly and pleasant sleep. So it is written of Epicurus, that after his disease was judged desperate, he drowned his stomach and senses with a large draught and ingurgitation of wine; whereupon the epigram was made, Hinc Stygias ebrius hausit aquas; he was not sober enough to taste any bitterness of the Stygian water. But the physicians contrariwise do make a kind of scruple and religion to stay with the patient after the disease is deplored; whereas, in my judgment, they ought both to enquire the word euthanasia in a text originally written in Latin when there had already been several books written in Latin, and also translated into other languages, about the Christian meanings and "practices" of "good death" (mors bona) and the art of dying (Ars moriendi)? Most importantly, Bacon must have tried to emphasize the human-bodily as well as the medical aspects of things and thoughts connected to this issue, focussing meanwhile not so much on the questions of a Christian's preparation for death, but on the actual problems, pains, sufferings of dying. Also, possibly with regard to the fact that in matters of dying and agony the ruling Christian mentality of the age was not so much interested in the sufferings of the dying person but much rather by the fact that, as a result of "constitutive" human weaknesses, these pains and sufferings can be a doorway for the workings of the devil. Who, of course, is lurking, ready for action, especially in real moments of crisis, such as dying. These must be fended off by appropriate, step-by-step practices, in order to reach salvation, which is highly dependable on the events of the last moments before one's death. 1 skill and to give the attendances for the facilitating and assuaging of the pains and agonies of death." In Francis Bacon, Selected Writings, with an introduction and notes by Hugh G. Dick (New York, The Modern Library & Randon House, 1955), Book 2, 277–278. and: "... etiam plane censeo ad officium medici pertinere, non tantim ut sanitatem restituat: verum etiam ut dolores et cruciatus moborum mitiget: neque id ipsum solummodo, cum illamitigatio doloris, veluti symptomatis periculosi, ad convalescentiam faciat et conducat; imo vero cum abjecta prorsus omni sanitatis ipse, excessum tantum praebeat e vita magis lenem et placidum. Siquidem non parva est felicitas pars (quam sibi tantopere precari solebat Augustus Cesar) illa euthanasia; quae etiam observata est in excessum Antonius Pius, quando non tam mori videretur, quam dulci et alto sopore excipi. Scribitur etiam de Epicuro, quod hoc ipsum sibi procuraverit: cum enim morbus ejus haberetur pro desperato, ventriculum et sensus, meri largiore hausto et ingurgatione obruit; une illud in Epigrammate:Hinc Stygias ebrius haustit aquas (vino felicitet stygii laticis amaritudinem sustulit). At nostris temporibus, medicis quasi religio est, aegrotis, postquam deplorati sint, affidere; ubi meo judicio, si officio suo atque adeo humanitati ipsi deesse nolint, et artem edificere etintelligentiam praestare deberunt, quam animam agentes, facilius et mitius e vita demigrent. Hanc autem partem, inquisitionem de euthanasie exteriori (ad differentiam ejus euthanasia quae animae preparationem respicit) appelamus, eamque inter desiderata reponimus." Source: Francisci Baconi, Baronis de Verulamio, De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum dans Novum Organum (1623), Wirceburgi, Jo. Jac. Stahel, (1779), 292–294, http://books.google.ca/ (source: http://agora.qc.ca/thematiques/mort.nsf/Dossiers/Euthanasie_Terminologie:_Francis_Bacon, (downloaded 30 March 2012), and Ian Dowbiggin, A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Maryland, 2007), 23–24. http://books.google.ro/books?id=CNigO7gMGkUC&pg=PA23&lpg=PA23&dq=euthanasia+ and+Francis+Bacon&source=bl&ots=Q2vOF69Ei5&sig=wqOR8gNiWYVZPZz5PWQv5 (downloaded 30 March 2012) 1 It may suffice to mention: Ars Moriendi ex variis scripturarum sententiis collecta cum figuris ad resistendum in mortis agone diabolicae sugestioni, ed.. Johan WEISSENBURGER, (Landshut, 1514). http://www.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00011658/images/ FIDES Digital Library http://digital.fides.org.pl/Content/525/page1.html (downloaded 5 April 2012), or a Hungarian edition, Frances M. M. Comper, ed., Ars Moriendi: A meghalás művészete, trans. László Virág (Budapest: Arcticus, 2004). Both of these clearly prove that * It is also true however, that "euthanasia" was used in the Nazi Germany as an excuse for unimaginable genocides. That is, in this country the mentally or physically disabled people or those suffering from degenerative illnesses were simply gassed in the name of "euthanasia" and in reference to "racial hygiene", 1 as "lives without life-value". This is why Germans are still reluctant today to call the subject of this paper "euthanasia" in their own language, choosing to use the term Sterbehilfe, or more precisely aktives Sterbehilfe instead. Presumably it is because of similar reasons that the Hungarian language also bewares of the term "euthanasia" and in its stead uses the term "gracious death", much more condescendingly than the German Sterbehilfe. An expression, that is, the meaning of which, instead of validating certain ontological situations or contingent "rights", explains such a death – such dying – as a benign and condescending practice of some kind of "grace"... However, the situation is quite similar in English as well, as shown by the term mercy killing, which also denotes something merciful, gracious, or an act of benefaction – and what is more, it also means "killing"... These terminological inconsistencies, groping hesitations and ambiguities are in fact very telling in their own ways. They betray the fact that, despite the ancient, original, and universal nature of the phenomenon of death, we people have failed to face from the very beginning the serious and manifold possible complexity of death's particular potentiality and its also particular pertinence to us, people. This situation is probably the explanation of the fact that we hardly have any words even today to express and conceive of that what the ancient Greek name of euthanasia tried to paraphrase. This happened even then in multiple directions, because of which the term still stands in the wide and contradictory polyvalence of its history, so much so that it is almost impossible to attribute some kind of deep and particularly outlined meaning to it. The major problem apparently is that in our languages any kind of "privation" from "life" mostly, directly, and simply qualifies as "killing". And the term "killing" primarily means "the act of killing" in reference to a generally understood human or even animal "life"... 2 With no regard whatsoever to any kinds of circumstances – for instance, the quality of life, etc. Clearly, under such conditions, euthanasia, despite all its endeavors to goodness, inevitably remains only a kind of "killing", that is, a kind of negativity and negation which is related to the indissoluble negativity which dying is to us. In this way euthanasia – inevitably and necessarily – seems something which hurries to present itself in a deceitful and definitely suspicious way as a kind of "good killing"! Nonetheless, the penury of language always hides the penuries of existence and, naturally, of thinking! That is, it hides existential and historical insufficiencies, the primary stake of the Christian care for dying – or, more precisely, the dying person – is to fend off the "suggestions", temptations of the devil, and nothing else! 1 Cf. Philippa Foot, "Euthanasia," Philosophy and Public Affairs 2 (1977): 85–112. 2 Cf. A magyar nyelv történeti-etimológiai szótára (Hungarian Language Dictionary of Historical Etymology), ed. Benkő Loránd (Budapest, 1967). more precisely, the insufficiencies which occur in a man's history of existence as he faces his own mortality and death. In fact, it grasps and formulates in a most radical and serious way precisely the Heideggerian statement that the man is still not a mortal even now and even today, although his life is finite, so he always dies. Actually, what is primarily implied here is the fact that in the course of millennia the man has mostly thought of (his) mortality or (his) death without considering his own dying. Therefore, the reason why we have no words in our languages by which we can conceive of "euthanasia" in a serious, open, and indeed consistent way is that we are still lacking the essential conception of the act of dying – the factual finiteness of human life! It is by this that we humans – that is, "conscious" beings with a finite life – could actually enable for ourselves our (doubtless) mortality, (our) death, and especially (our) dying. In spite of this people generally still think of death as a kind of usually confusing termination of life. That is, as the end of life. It is only in this aspect that there is any sense in speaking about a "good death", of something, that is, which is supposed to end a "good life" in a "good" way, or which, by its peculiar kind of pertinence to life (by the very ending of it) deserves some kind of special attention. And which, therefore, can or must be "good" in itself, in its own nature. However, as far as the recent actuality of the problematic theme of euthanasia is concerned, it is multiple even today. The most ostentatious is in this case too the fashionand journalism actuality of the subject. We see almost daily that the yellow press and all kinds of "media" strenuously pick up, as if in a campaign, all the cases of and references to euthanasia, about which, certainly, all mentalities and the representatives of all the institutions and organizations "embodying" them express their irrevocable and unfailing standpoints and declarations. However, the mediocre voices of all these standpoints also intrude into the theory of the question, to such an extent that they usually define and outline it. 1 Still, this is not why we are interested here and now in the problem of euthanasia. But, simply and concisely, re-emphasizing the problem in a first person singular form: I am interested in the subject of euthanasia because I know and fear myself to be mortal, and naturally those too, who stand close to, or on the contrary, quite far from me! Primarily this is why, as far as possible, I wish to understand the problem and subject of euthanasia, which, I repeat, is not one "outside" me, but one which belongs into my world as a heavy and oppressing potentiality. Then, because of this, the expression "as far as possible" used above should be understood literally, as it supposed to mean that I will try to grasp my death or death in general as a particular, yet at the same time effective possibility, pertinent to myself and my world, by the possibility and challenges of euthanasia. 1 One of the most telling examples in this respect is Raphael Cohen-Almagor's book: Euthanasia in the Netherlands: The Policy and Practice of Mercy Killing (Boston, Dordrecht, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), 195. II. Thinking and inquiring euthanasia... In fact, euthanasia itself is, above all, a possibility. As such, and as all possibilities: it is questionable. That is, euthanasia should not only be accounted for as only a "potentiality" or "virtuality", an accidental, yet actual "possibility"... but it is essentially questionable, as a consequence of its particularly outlined potential nature; or rather: it actually is a question, what is more: an existential question! But, in the end, whose question is the question of euthanasia? Who else's could it possibly be than the mortal man's? That is: whose question could the question of euthanasia possibly be than that of the being who, while existing, questions himself, his own existence – and thus necessarily his own death as well – by this question? And who, because of this, by the peculiar problematic nature of death, discloses, outlines, weighs and sketches for himself the questionable possibility of euthanasia. I repeat: expressedly as a question. There are several reasons why the case of euthanasia has only recently – mainly after the Second World War – become an unavoidable center of interest. It was exactly this period when the circumstances of the ending of people's lives – recte: their dying – have considerably changed. Primarily, due to the development and spreading of medical care and public sanitation, in parallel with the increase of general living standards, the people's average life expectancy has considerably increased. Additionally, there have been important changes in the reasons of dying as well as the structure and ways of dying. While in the 1940s most people died as victims of acute illnesses or accidents, today the major reason of the death of most people in the civilized countries is chronic, that is, long-lasting and evolvingdegenerative illnesses, 1 which, naturally, also influence the quality and dignity of aged people's lives. Thus, for instance, the reason for half of the suicides of people in their 50's, and 70% of the suicides of people in their 70's has been identified to be the suffering caused by chronic diseases, and the loss of any kind of perspectives and dignity connected to it. 2 As a consequence to all this, recently dying itself has increasingly become the focus of thinking, mentality and care about death. More precisely, the focus is on how and when we/people die? These questions are entangled into more and more emphatic and unavoidable challenges for all the traditional modes of dealing with death, 3 including their dominance defined mainly by mentality. This shows in fact 1 See: Rommel W Meckelprang and Rommel D. Meckelprang, "Historical and Contemporary Issues in End-of-Life Decisions: Implication for Social Work," Social Work 50 (Oct. 2005): 315–325. 2 Ibid. 3 The discussions connected to euthanasia and "medically assisted" suicide became harsher following the legalization in 1997 of the "medically assisted suicide" in the state of Oregon, and in 2002 the acceptance of euthanasia in the Netherlands and Belgium. The analysis of the application and effects of these laws is going on today, in parallel with possibilities of extending it to, e.g., incurable diseases which cause unbearable suffering and certain death, to infants born with serious handicaps, and to underage children. Moreover, the jurisdiction of the European Union prioritizes the harmonization of national laws on euthanasia with the European laws in formation. See also: Sissel Johansen, Jacob Chr. Holen, Stein Kaasa, Jon Havard Loge, and Lars Johan Matersvedt, "Attitudes toward, and wishes for, euthanasia in the extent to which traditions in their actual novelty are able and willing to accept the "bio-ethical", medical, deontological, and especially "thanatological" problems occurring in this way, and again, to radically rethink the problem of death urged or compelled by these traditions. Euthanasia – as mentioned above – is primarily, still, a possibility. A possibility, which is particularly articulated within the particularly human and present – at the same time ontological and existential – possibility and potentiality of death. Meaning, in the late Heideggerian terminology, that euthanasia is exactly one of the particular, determined, and factual possibilities of "becoming a mortal". As such, obviously euthanasia is primarily a possibility connected directly to dying itself. And "within" this, to how and – indirectly – to when do we die? Thus not even the mere name of euthanasia can be conceived without the conception of a thematic anticipation of (one's own) death – or, more precisely, dying. Actually, euthanasia articulates nothing else than death pertaining to the dying person as his own, usually together with its whole, seriously and effectively oppressive and problematic nature. Hence euthanasia is a disputed possibility. The most common debates primarily concern various ethical (including also deontological) and ideological, and in strong connection to these, legal and political issues, 1 often in a philosophical approach. However, the exclusively ontological-existential approaches are almost completely missing. Nevertheless, it is quite problematic to see from the very beginning the extent to which these ethical, deontological, ideological and political approaches are aware of their own original and ontological determination by death. Even more problematic it is, however, to see in what degree they acquire, interiorize and validate their original, radical, and once again, ontological determination by death. advanced cancer patients at a palliative medicine unit," Palliative Medicine 19 (2005): 454– 460. 1 The politicians of the legislative bodies are in fact always dependent not only on the automatic constraints of their own ideological convictions, but also on the prejudices of public opinion – manipulated by all kinds of influences and continuously determining the results of elections – which they mostly have to take into consideration. However, it is important to be aware of the fact that this public opinion is actually completely prone to change and formation. The opinions of public opinion do not spring from themselves, but they are cultivated and bred! It is this kind of breeding of opinion in which the public ideas are formed and thrive according to which the possibility of euthanasia is a kind of – naturally "unnatural", "superficial", and "intolerable" – liberty in relation to the ways of dying similar to the naturalness of the liberty with which people choose, say, the street-car that they take... "Naturally", no word is spoken about the fact that – as opposed to street-cars – death cannot be chosen or changed, nor transferred... The only thing which could be chosen to some extent is the way it should happen... But even so the well-bred public opinion usually pictures euthanasia as if it meant that, let's say, on gloomy Sunday afternoons the people more depressed than usual are assisted in a nearby euthanatological bistro to pass over all the difficulties of life for a reasonable price or directly as a social insurance service... However, despite all this, the surveys frequently show that the decisive majority of people support some modality of euthanasia. However, beyond its direct existential – that is, directly vital – importance, the actual philosophical distinction of the question of euthanasia primarily stands in the fact that it can return ethics, law, ideologies, philosophies and naturally the people dealing with these to the roots of the effective and essential ontological origins lying in their own deaths, in human mortality! And, obviously, to the explicit historical unfolding and acceptance of this origin. At the same time, this recognition may lead to the admission of the fact that this origin can never become completely surmountable or manageable for any kind of ethics, deontology, legal system, ideology, etc. On the contrary, it is only the exclusively philosophical examination of this origin which can provide that historically changing, appearing, and always re-questioning disclosure on the basis of which all these existential regions, again continuously questioning, can now truly re-connect to their actual historical (ontological) roots and origins. Also, with the additional possibility or perhaps necessity of the recognition that in the course of the analysis of the ontological roots of euthanasia it is not "life in general" that one should initially start from, but death, respectively its pertinence to life as specifically – one's own – dying. 1 Euthanasia is connected to nothing else than precisely the life just dying, and to the peculiar "experience" of dying; more precisely: this is exactly what euthanasia means! Because it is not life, but the living what dies, and only thus does the perspective of the death of life have its gravity and articulated meaning. Therefore the ontological-hermeneutic specificity and basic situation of euthanasia is the ontological specificity of the life and the living being just dying or reflecting upon – usually his own – dying. That is, we are not speaking about the "conceptual" – and mostly contrary – specificities of a general (conceptual) "life" or an also general (conceptual) "death", the various definitions of which (ethical, deontological, legal, ideological, etc.) we would then try to sort out. Instead, we are speaking about the recognition that it is only mortal beings for whom the rules, the "imperatives", or any kinds of duties or problems of relationships have a meaning or a real weight in advance! Referring of course to both the observance and the violation, and accordingly the rewarding or punishment of these. In opposition to this, at a closer look one might see that the term "immortal", which for some reason always comes up in connection to "death", necessarily has in mind something which – at least according to definition – is untouchable in reference to the existence of the living. So a more thorough analysis of "immortality", also because of more traditional metaphysical reasons, would do no harm. A "lifeless" dead can only be someone who had previously lived. Stones, though lifeless, are not dead. Consequently death and the lifelessness of death also pertain to life, naturally, as the loss of life. Well, the case with immortality is somewhat similar. This is so because the so-called metaphysical "eternal beings" (aei ontá, as Aristotle calls them) are not necessarily "immortal" as well. It could well be that they had never been alive – that is, they never live. Immortal can only be something which has been alive and which is consequently still alive continuously and/or 1 And not from some kind of framework-like "right" for "self-determination". eternally. Such a thing is called "immortal" because we think of it as something which is – while alive! – deprived of death. That is, as something which, eternallyliving – is. It is therefore the being-alive – more precisely the "sheer life" – of such a thing which does not "depend" on, and cannot be touched by, anything. Its beingalive is thus in no way connected to Nothing. This way the undestroyable and unbreakable How-being of everything which is "immortal" can necessarily, primarily and completely be nothing else at all than indifferent! That is: it could be "this way" or "that way", or it could also be "like this" or "like that", but all these can only be incidental and actually only indifferent possibilities. But these could never be real and thus serious (alive- )existential possibilities connected to its being-alive within its existence, such that would deeply and hazardously influence its being-alive in an existential way... Nothing can ever present any risk for the life, the being-alive of something immortal. Its eternal, deathless, being-alive life cannot be put to risk even by itself. Everything – how it is, how it is like – is utterly, existentially and necessarily weightless or indifferent to it – everything that we, people would refer to as "immortal" in a quite thoughtless way. Because everything immortal exists in such a way from its very beginning that it always is (alive). Actually, it is always impossible for it not to be alive, or to be not alive. Regardless also of How? it is alive... always ... or rather ... just... In a serious way of thinking: no other definite quality can be conceived as related to the immortal than a kind of constant – that is, in fact eternal – living quality. In opposition to this, any kind of (other) qualities can be related to it at any time on a constant – that is, eternal – basis... That is, only incidentally and only weightlessly... and in the end with a tracelessness and weightlessness of existence that disappears into eternity, into the eternal being-alive. Therefore any kind of "striving" of such a thing to justness or rightfulness – and especially the "constancy" or "regularity" of such strivings – is completely incomprehensible and meaningless, too – if not an absurdity! At any rate, the immortal is completely and eternally "on this side" of any "good" or "evil", "fair" or "unfair", "right" or "wrong", etc. And it cannot ever possibly reach them – it can never reach beyond "good" and "evil". That is, not only is it impossible for it to stand at the basis of ethics, legal systems, ideologies, etc., but it cannot even judge those. Because, in a nutshell: it has no possibility to become mortal! Not even as an accidental eventuality! Therefore things like "ethics", "deontology", "law", or rightfulness only have meaning, weight, significance and accessibility for entities which, as a consequence of their existence, are also somehow forced to have a meaning, a weight and some significance to the quality of their lives. Those entities which are mortal and can die! Meaning is also created of course by interpretation, and all interpretations are actually projections upon the possibilities. The horizon of the possibilities is most deeply disclosed – in a questionable and factual way – by the possibility of impossibility. And it is also factually and questionably articulated by the same thing: namely, by death itself. Death and dying deeply articulate thus, in and from the depth of existence, all kinds of ethics, ideologies, deontology, law, politics and, what is more, also philosophy and metaphysics with an ontological reference to their origin and meaning, although in a non-thematic way. And it does not harm ethics, legal systems, ideologies, politics, deontology, and of course metaphysics to be aware of this. Especially at a time when they judge death from above – that is, their very basis, source and roots! Naturally, the meditation on euthanasia could be a distinguished occasion of applied philosophy to acknowledge these aspects. And these recognitions ought also to guide the commentaries on euthanasia. Our approach to euthanasia depends in fact on the ontology of death, that is, the factual metaphysics of death, and only indirectly and secondarily on how it can be fitted into the a priori, ready-made and hardly questionable frameworks of certain ideologies, metaphysics, ethics, deontology, or legal systems, or their current "developments" and "updates". 1 III. The ontological metaphysics of death and euthanasia The ontological, existential and hermeneutical placement of euthanasia is thus primarily defined by the "parameters" of the approaches discussed above. It also belongs to this same placement that – as previously mentioned – euthanasia is also a directly thematizing advancement to the also thematized death, understood directly as (one's own) dying. Which is thus revealed and reveals itself in its existential closeness and definite pertinence to that what advances, as directly and clearly its own death. The How? and – derivatively – When? of which is not indifferent, as this very "thing" forms the problematic subject of a decision connected to these questions! There is thus no kind of "negation" of, and no "turning away" or fleeing from death, as here we are clearly speaking about a mortal human being, who is usually dying. That is, it is not merely – or generally – someone for whom, although aware of the finiteness of his life, the name of the end of his life remains a "concept", the concept of death which does not – or may not – necessarily mean his own dying as well... In this way euthanasia is an advancement or projection not "generally" to death or the particular potentiality of death, but much rather to one's own imminent dying! So, actually, euthanasia is an articulated advancement and protruding projection of one's own dying, which at the same time "brings forth" (one's own) dying, while it stands face to face with it (its own dying), grasped by it. In this respect euthanasia seems to only achieve that which – also seemingly – is about to happen anyway (and also soon). A dying man's state of dying, of being in the final stage means in fact: to be in dying, to be just dying... Since euthanasia, technically as well, means the medical or medically assisted intervention by which an incurable and physically and/or psychologically and/or existentially seriously 1 So it must be noted here that euthanasia pertains to the ontology and metaphysics of death and dying without the ontological and theological sketches of, say, the ideas of natural law. suffering human being is quickly and painlessly put to death on account of piety or the interest of the dying person. 1 This definition refers of course to the real, willingly intended, so-called "active" euthanasia, that is, that form of euthanasia which – incorrectly – is called "medically assisted suicide". Beside this form, there is an indirect, passive kind of euthanasia 2 – also technically speaking – which primarily consists in the ignoring or interruption of certain otherwise possible medical procedures. 3 However, euthanasia is in the first place that active or passive medical procedure which is initiated or "failed" on the specific request or decision of the diseased. The definition must be completed by the fact that such a request or decision implicitly reveals the overwhelming and unbearable physical, psychological, or cognitive-existential sufferings of the (incurable) diseased, as well. It frequently happens however that this request or decision is not made by the diseased, but by one of his or her relatives or an authorized person, as the diseased is unable to make decisions or – as in case of underage children – is legally not "competent". This may indeed imply several ethical, legal, and deontological problems, but the ontological and existential significance of the subject is still the fact that it bears witness to the mortality of the "environment" as well. It is in this respect that the connection is made between the existential decision and the personal death of a dying person unable to make a decision. From this point of view the second philosophical-existential distinction of the thematization of euthanasia lies in the fact that the question of euthanasia always implies and asks the question of the "mortality of the environment". This is so precisely because in order for euthanasia to happen, the person who needs it will always require the assistance of other people. These people can only consider and undertake authentically the unique meaning of the actual request if they project and anticipate it to mortality in general, and indirectly to their own mortality and the similar possibilities of their own death. Thus, if euthanasia is an explicit possibility and way of becoming a mortal, then it does not only mean and imply the mortality of an isolated "individual" or an "Ego" closed within itself, but also the mortality of a world structured in a definite way and latitude! 4 In any case: it is now merely death and dying itself which can be grasped as unavoidable and imminent in euthanasia, but also its previsioned modality, as well as the anticipated time of dying! Precisely of this death, this dying 1 See: Enikő Školka, Aspecte ale asistenţei bolnavului aflat în stadiul terminal – Posibilităţi, limite şi dileme fundamentale (Aspects of terminally ill patients assistance – Possibilities, limits, and fundamental dilemmas) (Cluj-Napoca, 2004), 23. 2 Anita Hocquard rightfully notes that such kinds of "classifications" usually initially correspond to ethical and legal criteria, therefore it is doubtful whether it is possible at all to clarify the ethical and legal state of things on the basis of these. Even more so because these criteria can be understood differently in different cultures or countries. See: Anita Hocquard, L'euthanasie volontaire (Paris, 1999), 11. 3 See: Školka, Aspecte ale asistenţei..., 109–110. 4 In this sense the "theoretical" or some initially decided legal, deontological or ethical restraints of euthanasia always reveal the problematic nature of the mortality of this legal, deontological, or ethical world! of this particular person and of his or her human life, and the possible human dignity pertaining to his or her (present) being, or more exactly the well-defined universality – that is, the reflective reference to the world – of this pertinence. This means a human dignity which receives a special emphasis by the human universality of death in the very act of dying. Because here we are never speaking of a temporary loss of dignity, but of a kind which involves the termination of life and as such it existentially reflects back– meanwhile! – on the entirety of life. These are the issues raised – though rather externally – when discussing the problems connected to the insurance of the right to death beside the right to life. If we seriously grasp death as a special something connected to life – that is, life's actually experienced end –, then the dignified ending of human life pertains indeed to the humane dignities of human life. Or at least should pertain! Euthanasia is thus first of all a possibility. This also means that it has no "unconditioned validity". It is not and indeed cannot be the exclusive and "universal" way of dying. Nevertheless, euthanasia is essentially such a possibility which is articulated within the particular ontological-existential potentiality of death. Again specifically, of course. Death's particular potentiality has probably been revealed and analyzed in the philosophically most serious and clear way by Martin Heidegger. According to him, the first existential and ontological particularity of the potentiality of death is the fact that the possibility of death is a certain possibility. It is impossible that it might not be, that it might not happen... Thus death is also an intransgressable potentiality. 1 In the knowledge of all these it is clear however, that by euthanasia one actually grasps or reveals both the certainty and the unavoidability of death, while there is a quite well articulated effort to diminish or even eliminate the indefinedness 2 of death. Actually, even according to Heidegger the indefinedness of death's potential nature directly refers to the fact that it is exactly the time of death which is undefined and usually also indefinable, too. In relation to this Heidegger primarily suggests that in everyday reality – exactly because of this actual indefinability – the Dasein tends to escape death and the definition of the time of death... But if euthanasia really and exactly means expressed decision over, and action towards, the modality of death, then it necessarily touches upon the anticipated time of dying as well, in a rather articulated or "predictable", and indeed "calculated" way. That is, the potentiality of death articulated through euthanasia in the possibility of dying retains and strengthens its certain and unavoidable nature on the one hand, while on the other hand it eliminates its indefinedness, with reference to both the time, and primarily the modality of death! This way euthanasia can never be regarded as a kind of inauthentic or "escaping" relation to death, which should not be "regulated" but only prohibited comfortably and punished... 1 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Translated by John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1973), 294. 2 Idem, 295. On the contrary, euthanasia is precisely the explicit acceptance of the unreferentiality 1 of the particular potentiality of death. Because the person or persons who make the decision stand indeed at the termination of life 2 as a defined and factually final potentiality – and as an explicit "ability of being". Which, above this, must be "taken onto himself alone" as exactly dying! with a clearly outlined unambiguousness. 3 At this point "death does not only "belong" to its own Dasein, but lays claim to it as to a singularity." 4 Here one's own death is also revealed and accepted as the most particular potentiality, 5 which pertains explicitly to the dying person (to myself) in general. The unreferentiality of death and dying, as well as the related circumstance that death lays claim to the Dasein as a "singularity" does not mean at all – and neither does it for Heidegger – that it might not have any kind of interpersonal meaning or significance... On the contrary! But these interpersonal meanings cannot influence or eliminate that basic and essential reference to myself that it is only I who can and must take my own death and dying upon myself, and I cannot under any circumstances transfer it to anything or anybody else. That is: I have to take my death upon myself as exactly dying. Such thing happens of course in those existential modalities of self-anticipation which directly thematize and validate it, such as, for instance, the testaments and decisions connected to a possible euthanasia or "more innocent" burial ceremonies and modalities. 6 But on what basis can such testaments or testament-like decisions be actually applicable for others, involving and even compelling them? Is it not so that even the legal validity of testaments originates from, and prevails only and solely on the basis of the above discussed ontological foundations? On what basis would the others, the caretakers accept as valid my last wishes related to my own dying – or euthanasia – or simply the "organization" of my own funeral if not on the basis of their acceptance and recognition (though "interpersonally") of the fact that this issue – my death, my dying, and the related problems – essentially, although not exclusively, pertain on(to) me?! And also on this account would they feel – probably painfully, overwhelmingly, yet essentially – compelled to utmostly fulfill and comply with my dispositions and decisions! 1 Ibid. 2 Idem, 295–296. The Heideggerian analyses presented here also show that even Heidegger did not confer an adequate and specific existential analytical potentiality to the particular problem of dying itself. This can be explained mainly by the fact that Heidegger primarily – and rightfully – tried to prove that the Dasein should not actually "become mortal" only in this final and "incurably ill" stage of its life, but with regard to its own possible complete existence. 3 Idem. 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 That is, to be buried where, how, in what state (e.g., burnt, cremated, or not), with what kind of – "secular" or "religious" ceremonies or with no ceremonies, etc. Hence derives, primarily and precisely, the most significant conclusion, that after all also the so-called interpersonal references related to death, to dying, can only be determined in fact based on, and in terms of, the otherwise universal ontological nonreferentiality of death, of dying! Exactly "interpersonally"! So, in essence, this is what determines the imperative character – for others: the doctor, the thanatological caretaker, the notary, the lawyer, the close relative etc. – and also the essential validity of the – nonreferential! – choices and decisions of the dying person, related to (his or her own) death. This, rather than a "valid" moral customary system or juridical system of regulations. And this is reacted to and "epiphenomenalized" e.g. by the general respect for the "unconditioned" validity of the wishes expressed on the deathbed! Thus, dying itself is, on its own, nonreferential... hence, the decision related to it of the mortal or dying person bears a special and real interpersonal significance, validity and structure, also for the other(s), – mainly for the close people, for those around him or her (e.g. caretakers, doctors, family members etc.). Otherwise, such a thing would rather be some kind of "negociation" – remaining "external", at least partially, anyway. Instead, the matter is that it is not possible to pay regard to such – disposing – decisions and to remain in a mere relation of noninvolvement with them! And this is the same reason why, in the case of incapability of decisionmaking, it is the interpersonality of close relatives that is put in charge of making such a decision, as it always and concretely manifests and represents a phronesislike form of biographical interpersonality. A form of interpersonality which, based on, and in the sense of, the nonreferentiality of the dying person, and, on the other hand, stemming from the biographical relatedness, thematically gains existential – thus not necessarily "legal" – right and ground for him/her or them to assume and to make the decision, as well as to achieve – depending on the possibilities – that the respective decision should then be really and actually performed as such. IV. Euthanasia and interpersonality However, the interpersonality that is necessarily constituted under the circumstances of euthanasia is certainly not restricted to the above mentioned references. Moreover, it is mostly factually related to the person who "carries it out" or assists it. In relation with this, it is important to repeatedly emphasize the fact that also this interpersonality is completely, expressedly reflective! As the authenticity condition of such factual interpersonality is that these people – also personally! – should be in a relationship, endeavoring to authenticity, with their own mortal nature, with their own death, expressedly and factually foreshadowed as dying – though not "current" for the time being! It is only in this context that they can actually meet and understand the other, dying person's claim of euthanasia! In this respect euthanasia means – in this basic sense – nothing else than a determined meeting of existences in their own – and each other's – mortal nature, which is certain, unavoidable and never controllable in advance – and, because of this, nonreferential! Euthanasia is a meeting, in which all of them, all of us must expressedly and actually become "mortal". This is why the "decision itself" – especially the final decision – never derives from the framework of the external, already existing – or nonexisting – legal, deontological etc. dispositions, but only from those ontological-existential sources from which, in a concealed, invisible, not openly assumed manner, any kind of regulation stems, and from which these acquire their actual validity and authenticity. Certainly, this does not mean at all that the people taking part in the decision-making and in its community-meeting, which always proves to be interpersonal, with respect to its final condition – because of the radical differences of situations and "roles" –, should be present with equal importance! After all, always, only the death of "one of them" is in question at that moment! It does not mean either that merely externally codified "deontological" obligations of other people (e.g. the doctor, the close family members etc.) could be assigned to the externally outlined personal rights – let us say, to the right of the frequently debated "dignified death". On the contrary, we should rather speak here about an essential, substantial, qualitative meeting of personal rights and obligations, as, when the right to dignified death is in question, then we do not only – and never! – refer to the right of the dying person claiming his or her right to euthanasia, but also to the personal involvement of the doctor or the codifier as well. On the other hand, as we have already mentioned, it should also be discussed that euthanasia – occurring as an interpersonal question – also implies unavoidably the outlined possibility of everyone's attitude, whether authentic or not, to their own mortal nature and their own dying. And this personally involves the other person, the doctor or the close relative. This is why it is basically wrong to place the medical deontological question and, together with it, the doctor's person in the centre of the so-called "problem of euthanasia". 1 As noone else should be in the focus of the question of euthanasia but the dying person claiming his or her dignified death through euthanasia! 2 The one who is helped by euthanasia to die under circumstances of supposed dignity. 1 Not to mention that in this way the person of the "doctor" also remains totally abstract. As the possible "executor" of euthanasia is mostly not "any kind" of doctor – e.g. not a dentist, not a dissector, not a plastic surgeon etc. –, but primarily one who is specialized – by the way, based on his or her own decisions – in the treatment of those diseases, in the case of which the occurrence of incurable cases is very likely, or which, according to the present state of medicine, are considered as incurable. And the treatment of which is not curing, but only the treatment of symptoms or experimental research. On the other hand, it is also problematical whether the deontological considerations are themselves automatically moral. As the codifications of the deontological considerations formulate their regulations in an abstract, impersonal way, in this way their agent is a general executor rather than a particular medical expert who pursues his or her profession in a personal concrete manner. 2 It was Cecília Lippai's Master's degree dissertation entitled Eutanázia, jelenvalólét és necro-philia (Euthanasia, Dasein and Necrophilia) that most convincingly drew my attention to the fact that it is mistaken to place the person of the doctor and the deontological questions in the focus of the matter of euthanasia (manuscript). In any case, the debates and considerations related to euthanasia must/should in fact be only and exclusively oriented by the considerations related to the specific ontology, existentiality and metaphysical facticity of death, of dying. As this – and only this! – can reflect on the questions of who death belongs to, how one belongs to his or her own death, and how one's own death belongs to one's own self. Certainly, such an approach also determines the areas and possessors of competence of the "decisions" related to death, to one's own dying! In short: actually and primarily everyone, anyone can make ontologically and existentially "grounded", and in this way interpersonally meaningful and valid decisions, exclusively related to their own death, to their own dying. The interpersonal validity of these decisions can only mean that in fact, in connection with the decision of the only competent decision-maker, the other people do not have and cannot have any other "ethical", "deontological", "legal" etc. responsibilities or pondered obligations, than putting it forward – also taking into account and weighing their own mortal nature. Even in the form of not interfering into the – momentary, as we cannot speak of any other form – impeding of the person's death. This is what the actual competence of any "death-ethics", "thanatological deontology" and legal codification endeavoring to authenticity is – essentially – confined to, and beyond this, only restricted to prevention from the possible abuses of euthanasia. However, the possibility of abuses of the euthanasia is not a reason for refusing it. But of course neither for accepting it. Especially as such a thing – in other words, "the abuse of euthanasia" – is not at all euthanasia, but mostly real murder. With respect to this euthanasia must also be regulated and controlled as well. It is also here that we should include the so-called "pedagogical" functions of death. Regarding its "usefulness", we people – also listening to the exhortations of philosophers – could at last accept death as our "master". In other words, in these "functions" the regulators and the supervisors could assist also pedagogically, so that the human beings with a limited mortal span should anyway become really mortal. Including the present and future generations. 1 And us as well. But the ethical worriers, the metaphysical thinkers, the deontologists, the legal experts as well as the fulminating propagators of ideologies – still – are mortal themselves. Sooner or later, by facing their own dying, they also have to account for their ethical, ideological, legal etc. "systems" – ontologically! – grounded by, and – again ontologically! – stemming from, death and dying. 1 As far as thanatological education is concerned, it equally refers to the work to be carried out in any kinds of educational institutions, schools, universities ... Including the training of "professionals" as well, as "taking care" of people being in the last stage of their lives requires special skills and competences, both on the part of professionals and close relatives. It is considered an educational task to inform, to provide counselling etc. for the latter ones. However, it also includes information and education by means of the media. In this respect, the endeavours existing for years, initiated by the BBC and the Discovery Channel, namely the broadcast of so-called "thanatological" films, are very interesting. These films have a scientific and documentary value, they are not just "popularizing" creations. Especially as there is no immediate "sociological" relationship between the spreading of such a pedagogy – supported by more and more people – and the prospective statistical increase of the claims for euthanasia. As this "depends" more directly on several other factors, for example, on how many people get into the final stage of their lives, whose diseases cause sufferings that prove to be unbearable and unworthy of them etc.... 1 Or on when, where and to what extent are the suffering, ill people informed on the nature of their diseases, on its actual "stage", on the possible outcome of their diseases, and in connection with these, on the prospective consequences – again and essentially worthy of the patient's "informed" knowledge –, which affect human dignity. 2 1 Although it is not advisable and not proper to get involved in "statistics" and "percentages", still, we can mention that the research in this matter, carried out in the Netherlands, clearly proves that the change of the requests for euthanasia mainly depends on the efficiency of palliative care, that is, the efficient care of unbearable symptoms. (Of course, it is possible to carry out such "real" research in the Netherlands, as there euthanasia is permitted in a legally codified way. Of course in places where there are no such regulations or permissions, it is not even possible to study the matter of euthanasia. This also means that every ban on euthanasia actually results in the lack of its concrete study. As under such circumstances there is not what and how to study. What is more, beyond the "opinion inventories" such a thing perpetuates these situations.) See: Jean-Jacques Georges, Bregje D. OnwuteakaPhilipsen, Gerrit van der Wal, Agnes van der Heide, and Paul J. van der Maas, "Differences between terminally ill cancer patients who died after euthanasia had been performed and terminally ill cancer patients did not request euthanasia," Palliative Medicine 19 (2005): 578–586. Other research led to similar results. See also: Johansen, Sissel, Jacob Chr. Holen, Stein Kaasa, Jon Havard Loge, and Lars Johan Matersvedt. "Attitudes toward, and wishes for, euthanasia," 454-460. 2 In several countries – e.g. in Romania, but not only here –, of course among widespread deontological worries, it is not considered as one of the medical obligations to directly and honestly inform the patient on his or her health condition. Of course, this is the case of incurable, degenerative diseases causing immediate death. "Information" is mostly restricted to informing the family members and close relatives, putting them, their insight and "competence" in charge of the possible information of the patient. Under such circumstances, of course, the "question" and "possibility" of euthanasia can emerge in a "specific" way. See also: Dominique Thouvenin, Le secret médical et l'information du malade (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1982), 167–198. On the contrary, in the United States of America, in Canada, in Japan etc. it is a medical obligation to immediately and personally inform the patients, and one consequence of this deontological mentality has been the establishment and continuous development of the so-called hospice-system. However, this is not at all an "alternative" to euthanasia! Moreover, in this system not even the suicide of the patients was directly impeded. There it is previously made clear, who is the person empowered by the patient to make decisions related to the patient's life and condition, in case the outcome of the disease should undermine the patient's decision-making capacity. However, until then, the hospice-patients can record in writing their will regarding the circumstances under which no more treatments prolonging their lives should be started, or the existing "treatments" should be stopped. See: Školka, Aspecte ale asistenţei...,103–104. "By choosing the hospice-system, the patient accepts the unavoidability of his or her death, and accepts that there will be no more trials to stop the disease." In: Ibid., 103. At any rate, what essentially distinguishes euthanasia from murder is that it is carried out on the basis of the decision of the actually dying person – on death's doorstep, existentially advancing to his or her own imminent mortality 1 –, or on his or the empowered person's expressed request – not only with his agreement, but actually on his determined initiative. As opposed to murder, euthanasia suspends by no means the possibilities of a nonreferential facing of one's own death. 2 What essentially distinguishes euthanasia from suicide is that euthanasia does not eliminate the concept of the metaphysical fact of death, of dying, and does not change it – as suicide does – into a brutum factum. 3 Even if one way of euthanasia is named – figuratively and erroneously in fact – "medically assisted suicide". As in these cases the matter is, on one hand, only that the medicine itself which induces death, and its effective "doses" are established with the professional expertise of a doctor; on the other hand, that the respective patient administers it by himself/herself. In this case we cannot speak about an isolating-isolated suicide, but rather about an explicitly determined, special interpersonal euthanatological communication and assistance. Independently of this, the presence of euthanasia – as self-preceding and as immediate presence – is mostly the presence of the already – incurably – ill person being in the "last stage" of the illness and of life. The person is not – "specifically" – "death-ill" in the Kierkegaardian sense, but most of the time actually ill, a dying person, at death's doorstep. The "patient" by all means. Not anyone else. But not Anyone! As the presence of euthanasia involves assuming one's own mortal nature and dying: one existentially decides upon this! In this respect euthanasia – as we said – is a possibility. As such, it does not have any "unconditioned validity". However, it is a real, factual possibility. It may already be obvious that the real-factual possibility of euthanasia is in essence similar to what Aristotle – and after him also Hans-Georg Gadamer – interpreted as phronesis. But phronesis is exactly that basic, essential moral-practical discretion which always aims at the concrete situation in fact, and as such, it cannot dispose of the previousness of acquirable knowledge. 4 The matter itself always requires "negotiation with ourselves". 5 In this respect, understanding stands at the basis of, 1 There is and there can be nothing extraordinary about the fact that if a person, still in "good health", thinking of the possibility that he or she will suffer from an incurable disease which will threaten and undermine his or her capacity of making a decision, should dispose "in advance" in connection with the circumstances of his or her future euthanasia. 2 In what follows, we will analyze in detail the differences between euthanasia and murder. 3 This is the essential "difference" between euthanasia and suicide, rather than the fact that in the "case" of the self-murderer, the existence of the illness cannot be established, as some doctors doing research in the question think. See for example: Kyriaki Mystakidou, "The evolution of euthanasia and its perception in Greek culture and civilization," Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 1 (2005): 95–105. Certainly, in what follows, we must return to these aspects of the question as well. 4 See: Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 18 5 Ibid., 309 and Martin Heidegger, Being and time. and inside, phronesis. We have seen that understanding is essentially a projection. A projection and an opening towards the possibilities, which are always directed by the "possibility of the impossibility". In the present context, these considerations primarily mean, of course, that in fact we can never acquire in advance the knowledge related to how it is "ethical", how it is "correct", "advisable" to die, how one must die etc. Dying has no acquirable, transmittable, teachable know how, it is impossible for it to have one. Not even the name of "euthanasia " – meaning "good death" – interprets death as being "good" in the sense of acquisition or technical "transmission", "practice" or "pursue" in some kind of a learning process. Instead, it problematically refers to dying, exactly to the particular case of the particular dying person. In connection with this matter, it is in fact not possible to oppose "one opinion to another". As the opinions, the "standpoints" in essence do not refer – cannot refer – to the same "thing". For the same reason the sentences of the present paper certainly do not take a stand, either for, or against euthanasia. But they stand for one's possibility to take a stand for his or her own death – or his or her own dying –, to make a decision – for or against – in this matter. Certainly, the same considerations should in fact orientate the medical, deontological or juridical approaches to this matter as well. However, the original medical oath, the Hippocratic Oath, which, to everyone's knowledge, forbids euthanasia and "medically assisted suicide", simplifies rather than takes on the actual moral – and not only "deontological", but in essence really phronesis-like – question, concealing the ontological references and aspects. In this respect euthanasia is – repeatedly and essentially – a possibility. It is a possibility which directly, explicitly alludes to the sui generis potentiality of death, of human death itself. Certainly, this allusion is factually essential, as it refers back, it makes us reflect on the fact that man is mortal "all the time"... One does not become mortal merely when getting closer to death, reaching the last stage of one's life, or at the point of dying! Eventually, "being mortal" means dying "in some way" at the existential end of life – as actually, existentially ending it. However, the advancement to death, to one's death, to which Heidegger also attaches such a great importance, remains a mere mirage until – in spite of the really existing possibility or danger of everydayness or non-actuality – it does not refer "at all" to the nature of some kind of death interpreted as dying! As a consequence of this, dying – my own dying! – can be "like this" or "like that", or even "different"! 1 And it can be something that – as a consequence of the fact that death, our own death existentially belongs to us, and in spite of its undetermined nature – is probably never indifferent for existence. In this way, the possibility of reaching and advancing to death, in terms of becoming mortal, "naturally" and organically also means – or may mean – the selfpreceding, forward-pointing advancement, as far as the expressed "How?" of our 1 And because of this the "immortal" and "immortality" – which we had to touch upon at the beginning of the present discourse – has "nothing to do with" or no "competence" regarding the questions of death and dying! death is concerned. 1 As the ontological and existential meaning of the previous and horizon-like, but still well determined decision is that this is actually the selfpreceding, the advancing to death, to dying itself, or, to be more precise, the always expressed and thematic – not only implied or merely generally "presupposed" – advancement. In which there are totally different "dispositions", such as the ones related to possessions in connection with which the "right" of making a will is usually not questioned. In other words, the possible euthanasia can (also) be decided upon or disposed of. So clearly, that it is possible that, depending on the actual situation, the decision itself will prove to be useless and void. As the actual "circumstances", which are previously always uncontrollable, may or will be also different. 2 In any case, it may have become obvious from what has been said that actually it is necessary first to think over the ontological investigations related to death, if we want then to really understand and "appreciate" the ethical and moral – generally called "ethical", but mostly only ideologically determined –, and legal, deontological, and thanatological considerations, references (also) related to euthanasia, as well as the actual – that is, really "legitimate"! – "competences" related to it! It is only based on these that we will be able then to reflect upon "ideologies" in a legitimate way! In other words, not only on what these "ideologies" aim to see, but also on what they actually have in view. As there is a difference – an essential difference – between "killing" regarded as, generally speaking, the extermination of the "living being" in general or in particular, 3 or its deprivation of its life, and its meaning in terms of the expectations of the dying person, becoming mortal, and hopelessly suffering, through his or her biographical interpersonality, also openly expressed as its consequence, to help him or her die in dignity. Certainly, even in a way that, ignoring the medical deontological and other moralizing considerations, we do not 1 Although ending human life as a consequence of a decision – similar to the death of victims of accidents, murders or suicides – can indeed hardly be considered as "natural" death. Whereas any kind of death resulting from some kind of "civilization disease" is mostly unproblematically regarded as "natural" ... However, we rarely ask whether life, full of chemicals, plastic, medicines, environmental pollution and all kinds of stress ... can still be accounted for as "natural". In other words, even nowadays we rarely ask why a more and more unnatural – but not necessarily more "inhuman" – life should by all means be ended in a way considered – of course, artificially – as "natural". Obviously, this fact betrays much about the real profoundness of "natural law" approaches. About what these approaches regard in connection with the fact that, only because man is by nature mortal, he can build up and end his life also in any kind of unnatural way. 2 For example I can make a will in advance regarding the circumstances and questions related to my euthanasia ... then it may happen that actually I will die as a victim of a sudden heart attack. However, I can also avoid the worries of such a will that looks ahead, without avoiding the possibly totally "inhuman" and unworthy miseries of torturing death, and the actual challenging-trying experience of these... As it also happened to Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich. 3 Language – at least the Hungarian language – uses the same word for killing a man and killing... a pig! artificially prolong the dying process of the suffering, dying person, who wants to die, on behalf of prolonging "life" or expecting a miracle. As in these cases in fact it is not the person's "life", but the process of dying that is "prolonged". Based on these, and summing up what has been said so far, we can go further with reflections, as we can now more precisely determine the ontologicalhermeneutical specificity of euthanasia – treated at the beginning of the study –, taking into account its existential ontological structure. As a result of our investigation so far, it has been made clear that euthanasia is in fact one specifically structured (regarding its expressed and existential structure) – certainly also existential ontological – possibility of becoming mortal, on the one hand, and on the other hand that of dying itself. Obviously, as any possibility, the possibility of euthanasia is constituted and structured by certain well determined conditions. In the sense of, and depending on, these conditions, it may be obvious now that euthanasia is in fact nothing else but a possibility of one's becoming mortal and of one's dying, outlined and structured by decision, communication, dialogue and cooperation! 1 Based on all these results, and with the help of all these possibilities, we can now undertake to outline the specific ontological-existential structure of euthanasia. At the same time the merely formal and doubtful-obscure level of "treating" and reflecting on this subject can be surpassed. According to these: although the euthanasia turns the fact of the process and events of death, of dying, into an act, still its ontological-existential structure basically differs from any other factual or possible type of dying! Primarily it differs from the existential-ontological structures of murder (killing a man) and suicide, which euthanasia, in spite of this, is so frequently and thoughtlessly mistaken for. As for example suicide, though it "contains" the decision of the person to die, he or she is short of dialogue and communication with others, of cooperating with others while carrying out, committing the act. As far as the murder, the expressed act of killing the other person is concerned, in it the victim never takes part in his or her own dying, in the sense of a decision made by himself or herself in this respect; and certainly the dialogue-communication, as well as the cooperation with the murderer is missing from the ontological-existential structure of murder. What is more, it is to be remarked that it is the decision itself that is always missing from the existential-ontological structure of the so-called "natural" death. Consequently, as compared to all the other possibilities and ways of dying, the existential-ontological structure of euthanasia indicates basic differences and specificities, which means that it is not possible to mistake it for these forms with such superficiality and carelessness. Based on all these considerations, it has hopefully been made clear enough that euthanasia – though it is an act that directly brings forth death in most cases – is by no means murder. As, though it is one's own decision regarding his or her own 1 In order to avoid misunderstanding, it must be made clear that here the matter is not the impossibility of constitutive communication of dying itself, but rather the communication related to becoming mortal and related to making the decision. death – or the decision of another, expressedly or biographically implicitly empowered person –, the dying person, whose death is the consequence of dialogue, communication and cooperation – in a dialogical sense –, is indeed a victim, however, not the victim of the other person carrying out the euthanasia, assisting his or her death, but exclusively the victim of his or her own disease and state. Thus what happens to one, brought forth by himself or herself, during the act of euthanasia, is by no means murder, it is in fact an assistance to dignified dying and death, which not only makes possible, but also presupposes the dying person's facing his or her own mortality, what is more, his or her own constitutive death, and expressedly assuming one's death. As such, it is not only a well-determined way of making explicit the expressed reasons for life and death, but also their interpretation in form of application! It is such an interpretation and such an expressed way of grasping meanings, with regard to the ontological-existential structure of the phenomenon, which – due to its specific situation – even "deontologically"! – results in the constituting and opening up of the – certainly also essentially ontological-existential – obligations of the very determinations and horizons of the meanings! Thus it essentially differs from the exercise of some patronizing or merciful "graces". The fact that criminal law systems as well as the deontological constructions have hardly any knowledge of all this, reveals those existential insufficiencies and inadequacies, which were mentioned at the beginning of the study. Indeed – in the stream of tradition deriving from Roman law – each and every way of depriving people from their life, of causing human death, is juridically regarded – most of the time, but not in every case 1 – as some kind of murder, which has to be reacted to and treated – punished – according to criminal law. To such an extent that the deprivation of life with one's own hands – even suicide itself – is considered, at least linguistically, as "murder". 2 In the meantime criminal law claims that it defends not only people's lives, physical safety and health, but beyond this, it protects their freedom, dignity and honesty – as moral personalities – as well. 3 Obviously, not in what concerns their relationships to themselves, but especially in their interpersonal, social relations. However, neither the juridical – e.g. criminal – nor the medical deontological status quo obliges the philosophical analysis of things to anything! As this latter one always focuses on the "things themselves", and, certainly, mainly not from the perspective of the prevailing status quo, but from that of the authenticity horizons of the possibilities. In this respect, the supposed matter and tendency is that – as it used to be in the case of suicide – the various legal systems and legal practices – as well as the medical deontologies – are prone to admit and to assume the essential ontological-existential position of dying and of becoming mortal, as 1 For example euthanasia is no longer considered murder in the Netherlands. 2 If there is anybody left to be punished ... Those who tried to commit suicide were held responsible by criminal law in many places for a long time. Not to mention the punishments of the church – also affecting the dead –, which are still existent. 3 See: George Antoniu, "Ocrotirea penală a vieţii persoanei," (The criminal defence of personal life), Revista de Drept Penal 1 ( 2002): 9. well as the aura and weight of the possibilities of these. In other words, what can be analyzed and pointed out only by philosophy. As – among other aspects – philosophy can make exactly such things clear, and, also among other things, this is what the assigned and applied dignity of philosophy lies in. It is often said about philosophy that it does not result in any real and factual knowledge. It is also said that the insights of philosophy cannot be applied, "used" in fact in anything. However, a possible result of the above reflections would be to refute this belief, by the analysis of a really "current" (euthanasia), and always "vital" question, that is, the question of death. By such an approach it becomes "possible", and utterly factual for us to actually face, on the one hand, the challenge of the matter of euthanasia, on the other hand, to actually become aware of our own mortal nature and death, and in the third place, to encounter the questions and reinterpretations of philosophy by means of philosophical thought, and – why not – of the power of philosophizing. These reflections point out the fact that the problems related to euthanasia essentially and factually derive from man's mortal nature, an existentially problematic issue from the very beginning, and they allude back and forth to these questions. Also from this perspective, reflecting on the problem of euthanasia is a true philosophical and existential – historical existential – chance. It is such a challenge and such an opportunity which has to be faced with a proper attitude as it is not all the same either from the perspective of our own death or of the further development of the history of existence! And eventually, as this is the very stake of the matter!

Aesthetic Adjectives Lack Uniform Behavior* Shen-yi Liao, Louise McNally, Aaron Meskin Inquiry (forthcoming)† The goal of this short paper is to show that aesthetic adjectives-exemplified by "beautiful" and "elegant"-do not pattern stably on a range of linguistic diagnostics that have been used to taxonomize the gradability properties of adjectives. We argue that a plausible explanation for this puzzling data involves distinguishing two properties of gradable adjectives that have been frequently conflated: whether an adjective's applicability is sensitive to a comparison class, and whether an adjective's applicability is context-dependent. §1 introduces the distinction now commonly made in the linguistics literature between relative and absolute gradable adjectives (Kennedy and McNally 2005): very roughly, relative gradable adjectives have varying standards of application, but absolute gradable adjectives do not. §2 uses an experiment to introduce a new diagnostic, the question felicity test, which shows that aesthetic adjectives do not behave like relative gradable adjectives. §3 presents corpus data involving "for" phrases consistent with the experimental results. But then §4 discusses three other existing diagnostics, two on which aesthetic adjectives do behave like relative gradable adjectives and another on which, again, they do not. §5 presents an explanation of the collectively puzzling data. The key insight of this explanation is that we must distinguish two senses in which a gradable adjective might be called "relative". Aesthetic adjectives are like relative gradable adjectives in one sense-their standards of application derive from comparison classes-but they are unlike relative gradable adjectives in another sense-the relevant comparison classes are not contingent on the immediate situational context. 1. Relative and Absolute Gradable Adjectives Gradable adjectives can be operationally defined as adjectives that can be modified by comparative constructions (e.g. "more [adj.] than..."). A core parameter in the typology of gradable adjectives concerns their context-sensitivity. Some gradable adjectives, such as "long" and "tall", are typically interpreted relative to a contextually-determined comparison class. Other gradable adjectives, such as * The authors' names are ordered according to their contributions. Shen-yi Liao's work was supported by a European Community FP7 Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship, grant PIIF-GA-2012-328977. Louise McNally's work was supported by Spanish MINECO grant FFI2013-41301-P, AGAUR grant 2014SGR698, and an ICREA Academia award. We thank Stacie Friend and the London Aesthetics Forum for giving us the initial opportunity to discuss the issues covered in this piece, and Carla Umbach and two anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version. † PENULTIMATE VERSION. For citation and reference, please see the final version forthcoming in Inquiry. 2 "spotted" and "flat", typically are not. Following Kennedy and McNally (2005), we will call the former kind relative gradable adjectives (or "relative" for short) and the latter kind absolute gradable adjectives (or "absolute" for short).1 The majority, if not all, of evaluative aesthetic adjectives-exemplified by "beautiful" and "elegant"-are gradable adjectives, as seen in the fact that they appear in comparative constructions (e.g. "Lionel Messi's style of play is more beautiful than Cristiano Ronaldo's").2 In assessing aesthetic adjectives' place within the gradable adjective taxonomy, we will focus on diagnostics that have been used to distinguish between relative and all varieties of absolute gradable adjectives.3 We will show that aesthetic adjectives pattern unstably-sometimes like relative adjectives and other times not-with respect to a range of diagnostics.4 2. Question Felicity Recall that while relative adjectives are typically interpreted relative to a contextually-determined comparison class, absolute adjectives typically are not. The question felicity test makes use of the following premise: because the standard for an absolute adjective does not depend on a contextually-determined comparison class, it should as a rule make sense to ask whether an absolute adjective can be predicated of an object without further qualification. In contrast, if relative adjectives cannot be ascribed without taking into account a comparison class, it should typically makes less sense to ask whether an object can be truthfully described with a relative adjective unless a unique relevant comparison class is salient in the context. The reason is that, with relative adjectives, different comparison classes might deliver conflicting verdicts. Whenever there is this indeterminacy of comparison classes, the 1 Dichotomizing gradable adjectives thusly is, of course, a simplification. First, it ignores distinctions between three kinds of absolute adjectives: lower-closed (minimal-standard), upper-closed (maximal standard), and closed (minimaland maximal-standard) (cf. Cruse 1986; Kamp and Rossdeutscher 1994; Yoon 1996; Rotstein and Winter 2004; Kennedy and McNally 2005). Second, it ignores a kind of context sensitivity exhibited in so-called "loose talk", such as calling France "hexagonal" (cf., e.g., Unger 1975; Lewis 1979; Lasersohn 1999; Kennedy 2007). 2 Sibley (1959) famously characterizes aesthetic terms as those expressions which require "taste or perceptiveness" for their application in ordinary or critical discourse. Sibley's examples of terms that predominantly function this way include "graceful", "delicate", "dainty", "handsome", "comely", "elegant", and "garish". There has been a longstanding debate among aestheticians about Sibley's characterization of aesthetic terms (cf., Kivy 1973; Cohen 1973). In particular, as Sibley himself noted and is commonly acknowledged, there can be non-aesthetic uses of characteristically aesthetic terms, as well as aesthetic uses of characteristically non-aesthetic terms. However there is general agreement that there is an important category of adjectives or associated concepts that are central to the criticism and evaluation of art. We have chosen two relatively uncontroversial characteristically aesthetic terms: "beautiful" and "elegant". 3 Toledo and Sassoon (2011) and Burnett (2012) provide helpful summaries of the diagnostics that have been proposed in the literature. As Burnett notes, some diagnostics only distinguish between, say, relative and one species of absolute adjectives. For example, while the accentuation test (Kennedy 2007; cf. Unger 1975) distinguishes relative adjectives from upper-closed absolute adjectives, it fails to distinguish relative adjectives from lower-closed absolute adjectives. 4 One diagnostic that we will not discuss in this paper is Kristen Syrett and colleagues' presupposition assessment task (Syrett et al. 2006, 2010). Using multiple experimental studies, Liao and Meskin (in press) show that aesthetic adjectives exhibit a pattern of behavior on the presupposition assessment task that is in between relative and absolute adjectives' patterns of behavior. In other words, on this diagnostic it behaves neither like relative nor like absolute adjectives. This puzzling behavior is, in fact, the original motivation for our current investigation into aesthetic adjectives' behavior on other diagnostics. 3 question of whether an adjective can be predicated of an object should generate some hesitancy or puzzlement-that is, it will be somewhat difficult for addressee to make sense of the question without further qualification.5 For example, when presented with a round disc with thirty-seven spots on it and a 10-cm diameter, the question (1) Is this spotted? [absolute] is entirely felicitous insofar as it can be answered without reference to any additional information from the context. However, the question (2) Is this big? [relative] is expected to be somewhat puzzling-that is, to be harder to make sense of than (1)-because in order to answer it, the addressee will need to know the answer to a second question: "Compared to what?". Our intuition is that aesthetic adjectives pattern as absolute on this diagnostic: it makes every bit as much sense to ask (3) Is this beautiful? [aesthetic] as it does to ask (1). To test whether ordinary English speakers share our intuition, we conducted an experimental study online to show that aesthetic adjectives pattern as absolute on the question felicity test.6 For this study, we used the following object / adjective combinations: Relative Absolute Aesthetic "long" "spotted" "beautiful" (verdictive) "elegant" (substantive) Figure 1: Stimuli for the Question Felicity Test Study Participants were shown, in random order, each object and the corresponding question "Is this [long / spotted / beautiful / elegant]?" shown in Figure 1. 5 There is another possible cause of the question not making sense: the presence of a category mistake. For example, it does not make sense to ask whether the number 42 is spotted. Hence, a background assumption of the question felicity test is that there is no category mistake involved in the question. 6 50 US-based paid participants were recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk. After excluding participants who failed an instructional manipulation check (cf. Oppenheimer et al. 2009), 45 participants remained (median age = 38; 66.7% women). 4 Participants were then asked to make a question felicity judgment, concerning whether it makes sense to ask the question shown. Participants responded to the statement "It makes sense to ask this question" on a 7-point scale that is anchored from strongly disagree (= 1) to strongly agree (= 7). Figure 2: Results for the Question Felicity Study The means for the adjectives tested are shown in Figure 2 and as follows: relative ("long") M = 4.00, SD = 1.784; absolute ("spotted") M = 5.16, SD = 1.999; aestheticverdictive ("beautiful") M = 5.38, SD = 1.696; and aestheticsubstantive ("elegant") M = 5.47, SD = 1.471. We first observed a difference across all adjectives tested. Repeatedmeasures one-way ANOVA revealed a statistically significant main effect of adjective on question felicity judgments: F(3, 132) = 9.148, p < 0.001. We then looked for differences between specific pairs of adjectives. As expected, a planned contrast revealed a difference between "long" and "spotted": F(1, 44) = 9.652, p = 0.003, effect size r = 0.424. More importantly, additional planned contrasts revealed differences of a similar magnitude between "long" and "beautiful", and between "long" and "elegant": F(1, 44) = 27.123, p < 0.001, effect size r = 0.617; and F(1, 44) = 32.464, p < 0.001, effect size r = 0.652. Simply put, on the question felicity test, aesthetic adjectives behave unlike relative adjectives. 5 3. Corpus Data on Compatibility with "for" Phrases Still further evidence of a difference between aesthetic adjectives and relative adjectives comes from the fact that aesthetic adjectives, while felicitous with explicit mention of a comparison class via a "for a(n) N" phrase, as in the following examples, in fact virtually never appear with such phrases.7 (4) (a) Anyone who calls someone "beautiful for an older woman" does not get my love. (b) Elegant for a Best Western There are no such examples of "for" phrases with "beautiful" in the 450-millionword Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; Davies 2008), and only 4 in the 1.9-billion-word Corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE; Davies 2013). There are none in either corpus for "elegant". Interestingly, both of the examples in (4) suggest that the adjective would not apply under ordinary expectations. In other words, someone who is described as beautiful for an older woman is so called presumably because the unqualified adjective would not apply; and in the case of (4b) one naturally infers that the author of the post would not consider the Best Western in question to count as elegant by some more commonly used standard. Note that relative adjectives do not behave the same in these aspects. For example, occurrences of e.g. "tall," "short," "big," and "long" with such "for" phrases are easily findable in COCA and GloWbE. This contrast indicates that even if we might have some general idea of what counts as "tall" or "long" for a particular kind of individual (for example, we might be inclined to accept that 2 meters is tall for a person) when we look at subkinds of those individuals (e.g. 15 year old males, or people who grew up during the Spanish Civil War), those standards are highly susceptible to variation because height distribution varies considerably between subclasses, and therefore explicit mention of the comparison class of interest is necessary. Moreover, the form with the "for" phrase does not consistently yield the implication that the unmodified adjective does not apply to the individual in question: (5a), from COCA, does not suggest that (5b) holds (5) (a) It rides on a 104-inch wheelbase – long for a small car... (b) The wheelbase is not long. To sum up, the corpus data on aesthetic adjectives in combination with "for" phrases suggest that they behave unlike relative adjectives. 7 (4a) is from http://web.archive.org/save/https://twitter.com/charabbott/status/309378554217521152 and (4b) is from http://web.archive.org/save/http://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/ShowUserReviews-g31393-d226761-r118515504BEST_WESTERN_PREMIER_Grand_Canyon_Squire_Inn-Tusayan_Arizona.html. 6 4. Additional Diagnostics for the Relative/Absolute Distinction 4.1. Compatibility with "Very" Kennedy and McNally (2005) claim that "very" is restricted to combining with relative adjectives (6a). If it modifies an absolute adjective, the result is either infelicitous (6b) or the adjective is reinterpreted as relative, with a standard based on a comparison class. (6c), for example, describes the baby as generally alert, rather than in a state of a high degree of wakefulness, for which the phrase "wide awake" would be used. (6) (a) a very long movie (b) # a very closed door (c) a very awake baby Kennedy and McNally argue that this selectiveness is due to the fact that "very" influences the comparison class that the adjective uses to determine its standard, restricting that class to individuals to which the adjective truthfully applies in the context, following proposals in Wheeler (1972) and Klein (1980). If an adjective does not use a contextually-determined comparison class to determine its standard, as is the case, by hypothesis, with absolute gradable adjectives, "very" will not be able to exert its intended semantic effect and will thus not combine felicitously with the adjective. Now consider the following examples of aesthetic adjectives in combination with "very". (7) (a) a very beautiful performance (b) a very elegant sculpture The examples in (7) seem as natural as (6a). On this diagnostic, aesthetic adjectives behave like relative adjectives. 4.2. Comparative Form to Positive Form Entailment Kennedy and McNally (2005) also observe that absolute and relative adjectives differ in their entailment patterns. Absolute adjectives whose standard is a lower endpoint on the relevant scale typically license entailments from the comparative form to the positive form for their subject argument, because to have any degree of the property in question entails that the property will truthfully apply, and to have more of a property than some other individual entails having a non-zero degree of that property. For example, (8a) entails (8b). (8) (a) This disc is more spotted than that disc. (b) This disc is spotted. 7 Absolute adjectives whose standard is the upper endpoint on the relevant scale license entailments from the comparative form to the negation of the positive form for the entity in the than clause. This is so because to have a non-maximal amount of the property entails that the adjective will not truthfully apply, and thus if X manifests the property to a higher degree than Y, the degree to which Y manifests the property cannot be maximal. For example, (9a) entails (9b). (9) (a) This door is more closed than that door. (b) That door is not closed. In contrast, relative adjectives typically do not license entailments of either sort. For example, (10a) entails neither (10b) nor (10c). (10) (a) This man is taller than that man. (b) This man is tall. (c) That man is not tall. This shows that the standard for relative adjectives falls somewhere between the minimum and maximum degrees to which the property they describe can be manifest: in such a situation, we have no way of knowing a priori for two individuals that manifest a non-zero degree of such a property whether one, both, or neither falls above the standard. Aesthetic adjectives, like relative adjectives, typically do not license such entailments.8 There is no entailment from the (a) examples to the (b) or (c) examples in either (11) or (12). (11) (a) This disc is more beautiful than that disc. (b) This disc is beautiful. (c) That disc is not beautiful. (12) (a) This man is more elegant than that man. (b) This man is elegant. (c) That man is not elegant. This shows that the standard for aesthetic adjectives cannot be simply the manifestation of a non-zero degree of the aesthetic property, nor does an aesthetic adjective truthfully apply only if a maximal degree of the property in question is held (if, indeed, it even makes sense to say that one can be maximally beautiful or elegant). On this diagnostic, aesthetic adjectives behave like relative adjectives. 8 This test is less reliable when it comes to negatively-valenced adjectives, possibly due to pragmatic factors. In general, negatively-valenced adjectives license the entailment from the comparative form to the positive form, irrespective of their context-sensitivity (Bogal-Allbritten 2011, though see Bierwisch 1989 for an earlier discussion that underscores the complexity of the data). For this reason, we focus on positively-valenced aesthetic adjectives here. 8 4.3. Compatibility with "Almost" The general consensus in the literature is that relative adjectives generally sound odd when modified by "almost", whereas absolute adjectives generally do not (cf. Rotstein and Winter 2004 and references cited there). (13) (a) The room is almost empty. (b) # The room is almost big. For example, in the absence of context, (13a) sounds relatively natural but (13b) sounds less so. However, it is also generally agreed that there are exceptions to this generalization. Rotstein and Winter (2004: 280) propose the following two conditions on the acceptability of "almost" with adjectives. First, the interval almost A is located on the scale below the standard value of A. Second, the standard value of A is its default value (if there is any) or else is recoverable from the context. When Rotstein and Winter say "default value", they are referring to adjectives with minimum or maximum standards; by "recoverable from context" they mean that a precise value for the standard is contextually available. In the latter such cases, "almost" can combine with a relative adjective. For example, in a context where it is known and accepted that 2 meters counts as tall, if we know that Sam's height is 1.9 meters, then we can assert that he is almost tall.9 Aesthetic adjectives, such as those in (14) sound markedly more natural with "almost" out of context than do examples such as (13b): (14) (a) The cemetery was almost beautiful. (b) The rooms were clean and almost elegant. On this diagnostic, aesthetic adjectives behave unlike relative adjectives. 5. Discussion Although there might be a range of alternative explanations for the results of each diagnostic described above, we can have a unified and elegant account of the puzzling data presented therein by distinguishing two features that have been associated with relative adjectives. As we noted in §1, relative adjectives are typically defined as those gradable adjectives that are interpreted relative to a contextuallydetermined comparison class. Note that there are two components to this definition of relative adjectives: (a) the standard for these gradable adjectives is relativized to a comparison class, and (b) that comparison class is contextually-determined. We think 9 Sometimes this phenomenon is characterized as "coercion" of the adjective (e.g. Burnett 2012). Whether this is an appropriate characterization or not, we note that the co-occurrence of relative adjectives with "almost" is not infrequent. A brief inspection of COCA reveals more than two dozen examples of "almost" with adjectives such as "giddy", "angry", "obsessive", "sweet", "quaint", "happy" and various others that are not obvious candidates for absolute adjectives. "Beautiful" occurs 21 times with "almost", and "elegant" occurs 14 times with "almost". 9 that the puzzling behavior of aesthetic adjectives shows that these two features should be teased apart. Aesthetic adjectives behave more like relative adjectives than like absolute adjectives on diagnostics that signal interpretation with respect to a comparison class. Aesthetic adjectives are compatible with "very" (§4.1) because it is possible to use "very" to restrict the comparison class to those individuals to which an adjective truthfully applies in a specific context. Aesthetic adjectives lack entailments from the comparative to positive form (§4.2) because their standards of application are not minimum or maximum values on a scale. However, aesthetic adjectives behave less like relative adjectives on diagnostics that signal appeal to not just any comparison class, but rather to a comparison class that is not contingent on the immediate situational context. First, recall the question felicity test (§2): it makes sense to simply ask "Is this beautiful?" with little or no prior context because the comparison classes for aesthetic adjectives are not as a rule contextually-determined. Second, this fact also explains why aesthetic adjectives typically do not occur with "for" phrases (§3): typically such phrases are used to explicitly give a comparison class where the context offers none, but typically aesthetic adjectives already come with comparison classes that do not vary from situation to situation; rather, they seem to vary primarily according to the types of entities they apply to. Third, aesthetic adjectives' compatibility with "almost" (§4.3) indicates that, even out of context, aesthetic adjectives have recoverable standards of application; this can only be if those standards are specified by comparison classes that are not determined by the situational context. To conclude, while a comparison class is essential for the evaluation of aesthetic adjectives, the default salience of the choice of class and the uniformity with which arbitrary subsets of the class members manifest a range of degrees of the property in question together effectively render aesthetic adjectives less context dependent, all else being equal.10 Aesthetic adjectives can therefore be said to be "relative" in a broad sense of the term-they have standards that are established in relation to a comparison class-but not so in a narrow sense of the term-they do not have standards that are obviously context-dependent. In this short paper, we have focused on "beautiful" and "elegant" for the diagnostics we have discussed. Note that these adjectives contain an evaluative component. We have set aside here adjectives that are commonly used in critical discourse but appear to be purely descriptive, such as style terms (e.g. "cubist" and "brutalist"). It remains to be explored whether other evaluative aesthetic adjectives exhibit the same linguistic properties as "beautiful" and "elegant"; the reader is invited to test other aesthetic adjectives using the diagnostics we have presented. We also hope that the more nuanced characterization of gradable adjectives we have developed can shed light on the puzzling behavior that has been observed in other classes of gradable adjectives, such as predicates of personal taste, moral 10 We stress the all-else-being-equal clause here because we do not want to exclude the possibility that there can be other sources of context-dependence that do not involve a comparison class. 10 adjectives, and color terms.11 For example, Hansen and Chemla (manuscript) have found that color terms behave similarly to aesthetic adjectives on another diagnostic, the presupposition assessment task (Syrett et al. 2006, 2010; cf. Liao and Meskin in press). It remains to be explored whether color terms and these other classes of gradable adjectives pattern in a similarly unstable fashion across a full range of diagnostics. 11 McNally and Stojanovic (in press) argue that aesthetic adjectives are distinct from predicates of personal taste (e.g. "fun" and "tasty"), which have been much more widely discussed. 11 References Bierwisch, Manfred (1989). "The Semantics of Gradation." In Dimensional Adjectives, edited by Manfred Bierwisch and Ewald Lang. Berlin: SpringerVerlag. Beavers, John (2008). "Scalar complexity and the structure of events." In Event Structures in Linguistic Form and Interpretation, ed. Johannes Dölling and Tatjana Heyde-Zybatow. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Burnett, Heather (2012). "The Puzzle(s) of Absolute Adjectives." UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, Papers in Semantics 16: 1–50. Cohen, Ted (1973). "Aesthetic/Non-Aesthetic and the Concept of Taste," Theoria 39: 113-152. Cruse, D. A. (1986). Lexical Semantics. 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Kennedy, Christopher, and Louise McNally (2005). "Scale structure and the semantic typology of gradable predicates". Language 81: 345–381. Kivy, Peter (1973). Speaking About Art. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Klein, Ewan (1980). "A semantics for positive and comparative adjectives." Linguistics and Philosophy 4 (1): 1–45. Lasersohn, Peter (1999). "Pragmatic Halos." Language 75(3): 522–551. Lewis, David (1979). "Scorekeeping in a Language Game." Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 339–359. Liao, Shen-yi, and Aaron Meskin (in press). "Aesthetic Adjectives: Experimental Semantics and Context-Sensitivity." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. DOI: 10.1111/phpr.12217 McNally, Louise (2011). "The relative role of property type and scale structure in explaining the behavior of gradable adjectives." In Vagueness in Communication, ed. R. Nouwen, R. van Rooij, & U. Sauerland (pp. 151– 168). New York: Springer. McNally, Louise, and Isidora Stojanovic (in press). "Aesthetic Adjectives." In J. 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REFLEXE 52/2017 „VNÍMÁNÍ JE JIŽ VYJADŘOVÁNÍ" Merleau-Pontyho první přednášky na Collège de France Jan Halák 1. Merleau-Pontyho filosofický projekt po roce 1945: proměna a překročení vnímání V roce 1953 Merleau-Ponty nastupuje na Collège de France, což mu po osmi letech ne příliš stabilního akademického působení přináší kvalitní badatelské zázemí a mimořádnou svobodu při volbě dalšího filosofického směřování. Způsob, jímž Merleau-Ponty tuto příznivou situaci využívá, stojí sám o sobě za povšimnutí: zatímco několik předchozích let se věnoval přednáškám z dějin filosofie a výuce dětské psychologie a pedagogiky, své působení na Collège začíná revizí své disertační práce z r. 1945, kterou se pokouší prohloubit.1 Své první práce, díky nimž se stal „fenomenologem vnímání", nyní chápe nejen jako určitý výdobytek, ale také jako otevření obecnějšího filosofického problému.2 Originální modalita zkušenosti, kterou jsme odhalili při popisu vnímání jako náš „prvotní kontakt s bytím", není pouhým souborem „empirických zajímavostí"3 týkajících se jen vnímání, nýbrž nám „předepisuje itinerář a metodu" pro další zkoumání,4 jež budou mít dokonce ontologické důsledky. Vnímající lidský subjekt se nespokojuje s tím, co je mu ve vnímání dáno, nýbrž se k tomu zpětně obrací a pokouší se to fixovat, shrnout, učinit disponibilním. Jinak řečeno, 1 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris 1945; česky: Fenomenologie vnímání, přel. J. Čapek, Praha 2013. 2 Srv. dva texty ke kandidatuře na Collège de France z přelomu let 1951 a 1952: M. Merleau-Ponty, Titres et travaux – Projet d'enseignement, in: týž, Parcours deux, Paris 2000, str. 9–35; týž, Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in: tamt., str. 36–48. 3 M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 277. Merleau-Ponty se v několika dalších textech ohrazuje proti námitkám, podle nichž by jeho fenomenologie vnímání byla jen popisem „psychologických kuriozit". 4 M. Merleau-Ponty, Titres et travaux – Projet d'enseignement, str. 22. https://doi.org/10.14712/25337637.2017.19 © 2017 The Author. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). 112 Jan Halák usiluje o to překročit svou situaci, dospět k pravdě jako takové, jedním slovem myslet. Metodu Fenomenologie vnímání proto „musíme aplikovat v širším kontextu", píše Merleau-Ponty, a na základě toho vypracovat „konkrétní teorii ducha".5 Zcela zásadní je, jak Merleau-Ponty dále vysvětluje, že v prvních pracích „jsme na základě metodické abstrakce předstírali", že se nacházíme ve světě bez řeči.6 Důležitým úkolem dalších zkoumání proto je studovat a popisovat konkrétní kulturní materiály, zejména řečové nástroje, díky nimž si mluvící subjekt osvojuje universálně platné, „veřejné" významy. Musíme odhalit, jak za pomoci „řečového užití těla",7 tj. stále ještě pomocí naší tělesnosti, překračujeme hranice naší vlastní perspektivy a našeho „přírodního" postavení. Myšlení a komunikace, již myšlení předpokládá, jsou tak podle Merleau-Pontyho vůči vnímání „originálními útvary", avšak zároveň pouze „přebírají" (reprennent) vnímání, „zachovávají a překračují", tj. „sublimují" naši tělesnou existenci, spíše než že by ji rušily či se k ní připojovaly jako autonomní řád.8 Původ a zrod procesu „sublimace" neboli fundace a překročení, jejž chce Merleau-Ponty sledovat na ose mezi vnímáním, vyjadřováním, řečí a myšlením, je podle něj nutno hledat v aktivním, „mimickém užití těla" – v gestu.9 Právě gesto je sice stále ještě vnímatelný fenomén, ale již se obrací zpět ke vnímanému, aby v něm ukázalo něco z jeho smyslu, co ve vnímání orientovaném k předmětům bylo sice obsaženo, ale zůstávalo pouze implicitní. Gesto do perceptivního světa přináší „nadbytek smyslu",10 protože činí tématem něco, co by bez něj zůstávalo pouze na pozadí vnímaných témat. Jakožto vyjadřovací akt nás gesto tedy ještě zcela neodpoutává od naší tělesně-perceptivní situace, ale začíná ji reorganizovat, provádí v ní operace, které ji proměňují, a tím podle Merleau-Pontyho začíná tradici, ve které tuto situaci nakonec překročí5 M. Merleau-Ponty, Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, str. 43. 6 M. Merleau-Ponty, Titres et travaux – Projet d'enseignement, str. 22. Merleau-Ponty se otázce řeči věnuje i v jiném textu napsaném ve stejné době jako citované podklady ke kandidatuře: Sur la phénoménologie du langage, in: Signes, Paris 1960, str. 105–122. 7 M. Merleau-Ponty, Titres et travaux – Projet d'enseignement, str. 24. 8 M. Merleau-Ponty, Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, str. 37 a 42; srv. týž, La prose du monde, Paris 1969, str. 173. Myšlenku „sublimace" v tomto smyslu nacházíme již ve Fenomenologii vnímání, např. str. 168. 9 M. Merleau-Ponty, Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, str. 43. Srv. již Fenomenologii vnímání, str. 223–252, kap. „Tělo jako výraz a fenomén mluvy". 10 M. Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde, str. 92. Viz níže, sekce 4. 113REFLEXE 52/2017 me v řeči a myšlení.11 Řeč je podle Merleau-Pontyho „pokračováním" před-řečových forem vyjadřování (a každá promluva přinášející doposud nedisponibilní význam má gestický charakter), avšak zároveň tyto formy „proměňuje".12 Podle Merleau-Pontyho tedy gesto míří na něco z vnímaného světa, o čem bude řeč mluvit nebo co bude např. matematika vyjadřovat algoritmem, tj. na něco, co bude myšlení nakonec myslet. Myšlenka „těla jakožto přirozeného symbolismu", kterou Merleau-Ponty představuje již ve Fenomenologii vnímání, však „není posledním slovem, nýbrž naopak ohlašuje pokračování".13 Ve svém prvním přednáškovém cyklu na Collège de France, „Smyslový svět a svět vyjadřování", Merleau-Ponty provádí první kroky, jež by měly vést k vyjasnění takto načrtnuté struktury „překročení" vnímání a „přirozeného symbolismu" těla ve vyjadřovacích aktivitách. Paradoxně si to vynutí retraktovat výsledky samotné fenomenologie vnímání a pokusit se je očistit od zbytků ontologických předsudků spojených s kartesiánskou tradicí. Přesněji, bude nutno zásadně revidovat naše pojetí vnímajícího subjektu a vnímaného, nakolik se vzájemně podmiňují a nakolik je toto podmiňování podrobeno různým druhům dynamiky. Cílem následujícího textu je představit a komentovat tyto dvě hlavní myšlenky v kontextu Merleau-Pontyho kursu, resp. vyjasnit to, co z nich lze rekonstruovat na základě vydání Merleau-Pontyho přípravných poznámek k přednáškám.14 2. Nová analýza vnímání bez pojmu vědomí Naznačili jsme, že Merleau-Ponty je přesvědčen, že jeho interpretace vnímání má ontologické důsledky a že umožňuje, ba dokonce vyžaduje 11 Srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, Un inédit de Maurice Merleau-Ponty, str. 42: Přechod mezi vnímáním a poznáním spočívá v tom, že „tělo má dvojí funkci. Svými ,smyslovými poli', celou svou organizací, je jakoby předurčeno k tomu, aby se přetvářelo podle přirozených aspektů světa. Ale jakožto aktivní, schopné gest, výrazů a nakonec i řeči se obrací zpět ke světu, aby jej označilo". 12 M. Merleau-Ponty, Titres et travaux – Projet d'enseignement, str. 27. 13 M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, Paris 1968, str. 179–180. Srv. výše, pozn. 10. 14 Znění přednášek samých se nedochovalo, k dispozici máme pouze Merleau- -Pontyho přípravné poznámky k přednáškám a jejich stručné shrnutí: M. Merleau- -Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression. Cours au Collège de France. Notes, 1953, Genève 2011; týž, Résumés de cours, str. 11–21. 114 Jan Halák vypracování „nové analýzy rozumu".15 V roce 1953 má však ještě pocit, že se mu relevanci analýzy vnímání v tomto ohledu nepodařilo uspokojivě ukázat. Soudí tak již z ne příliš chápavých reakcí filosofických autorit své doby, jak je lze sledovat zejména v diskusi k přednášce z roku 1946, která vyšla pod titulem Primát vnímání a jeho filosofické důsledky .16 Mnohem závažnější jsou ovšem Merleau-Pontyho vlastní kritické postřehy vůči způsobu, jakým dříve analýzu vedl: nyní se již domnívá, že ve Fenomenologii vnímání používal předmětu zkoumání neodpovídající tradiční pojmový aparát (45–46),17 což mělo vést k tomu, že analýzy „byly často negativní" (46) a „nedostatečně vypracované" (47). Zásadní obtíž v tomto bodě působí zejména pojem vědomí. V titulu přednášky uvedený pojem vyjadřování má nyní Merleau-Pontymu pomoci již provedené analýzy vnímání „nově vyložit", „prohloubit" (51, 45), a tak „opustit", „zpochybnit", „nahradit" právě pojem vědomí (51, 58, 53). Představa vědomí v kartesiánsko-kantovské tradici definuje vztah subjektu k předmětu způsobem, který se podle Merleau-Pontyho zásadně liší od tělesně-perceptivní existence ve světě. Vědomí má co činit pouze s významy (48), a to jakožto s něčím, co existuje „o sobě" a samostatně (50). Jakožto vědomí proto dosahuji věci bez jakékoli distance, jsou pro mne buď „zcela jasnými" významy (49), nebo je nemohu mít. Tím jsem však od nich zároveň nekonečně vzdálen, protože věci mohou s vědomím „mít kontakt", pouze nakolik je ono samo konstituuje, „nemohou se obrátit proti němu" (48), nemohou je „zachytit" a vtáhnout mezi sebe (55) .18 Pojem vědomí podle Merleau-Pontyho současně implikuje pojetí smyslu jako podstaty: Smysl se stává odpovědí na otázku „Co je mi dáno?", definicí: „každé vědomí je uchopením takovéto podstaty či její aplikací na nějaký jednotlivý případ" (48). V tomto smyslu je také 15 M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, str. 11. 16 M. Merleau-Ponty, Primát vnímání a jeho filosofické důsledky, přel. J. Halák, Praha 2011; srv. zejména reakce É. Bréhiera, J. Hyppolita a J. Beaufreta; srv. také M. Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, str. 46; a týž, Résumés de cours, str. 11. Tato kritika má pro Merleau-Pontyho zásadní význam a bude se k ní vracet i později, srv. E. de Saint-Aubert, Vers une ontologie indirecte, Paris 2006, str. 21–35. 17 Všechna čísla stran, jež uvádím přímo v textu, odkazují na vydání Merleau-Pontyho přípravných poznámek k přednáškám: M. Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression . 18 Tento motiv Merleau-Ponty později prohloubí v přednáškách o pasivitě, srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, L'institution – La passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955), Paris 2003, str. 157 nn. 115REFLEXE 52/2017 vědomí nachystáno k tomu, aby se stalo řečí, tzn. „je již kladením určité výpovědi, mluvícím vědomím" (49). V protikladu k tomu je nutno konstatovat, že jakožto vnímající jsem vnímaným věcem blíže než vědomí, protože věc „se zmocňuje mého těla, aby se od něj nechala vnímat (barva mi ukládá určitý životní rytmus...)" (49). Jsoucna „přesahují" do vnímajícího, „obkličují" (55) a „pronásledují" jej (56), zachycují jej do svých struktur. Zároveň si však věc výrazněji zachovává svou dálku, jelikož se ukazuje pouze prostřednictvím toho, co ve mně vyvolává, aniž by tím proto ještě opouštěla své místo: Věc vždy překračuje onu vibraci, kterou vyvolává v mém těle (56), zůstává „nepřístupná", je horizontem (181). Má-li vědomí své předměty jedině jako něco určeného, jakožto případ nějaké podstaty, na rovině perceptivního vztahu je i ta sebeurčenější danost figurou, která předpokládá nikoli tematicky daný horizont, tj. „něco neartikulovaného a pouze skrytě předpokládaného" (51). Jakožto vždy podmíněné netematickou přítomností pozadí je perceptivní vědomí jakéhokoli tématu vždy „nepřímé" a „převrácené" (60), na rozdíl od vědomí v tradičním smyslu, které je z principu předmětně orientované, tematické a přímé. Významy vnímaného světa tak jsou zcela jiného druhu než významy myšlené (a v řeči vyjadřované) proto, že jsou principiálně neoddělitelné od uspořádání, ve kterém se objevují, a nelze je tak chápat jako subjektem intencionálně držená významová jádra, rozumu principiálně přístupné podstaty. Zkušenost s perceptivními významy nelze chápat jako „udílení smyslu" či konstituci (Sinngebung, Auffassung als, 55). Perceptivní smysl není vnímajícím „vlastněn" jako v případě inteligibilního významu (66), nýbrž je jím spíše „vykonáván" (pratiqué, 50). Smyslově pociťovatelný význam je dán jako určitá „koherentní deformace našeho universa zkušenosti" a našeho styku se světem, aniž bychom mohli vyslovit její princip.19 Je „modulací určité dimenze", „odchylkou" od určité normy, která stejně jako odchylka sama není dána, nýbrž je skrytě předpokládána na pozadí (56). Stručně shrnuto, vlastnosti vnímaného předmětu podle Merleau-Pontyho analýzy „souvisejí" s jeho místem, mají na něj „vazbu", jsou to „vázané" významy, „nevýslovné" struktury – na rozdíl od významů myšlených vědomím a vyjadřovaných v řeči, které jsou (alespoň globálně vzato, v prvním přiblížení) „nezávislé" na svém kontextu, „bez vazeb", a z toho důvodu takříkajíc připravené k tomu, aby byly tematicky vysloveny a uchopovány vědomím jako jsoucí o sobě. 19 M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, str. 12. 116 Jan Halák 3. Vyjadřování mezi vnímajícím a vnímaným Tento způsob danosti perceptivního významu a jeho vztah k vnímajícím nyní Merleau-Ponty nově shrnuje za pomoci pojmu vyjadřování. Platí- -li, že smyslová „danost poukazuje na tělo, které je třeba mít" (indique le corps qu'il faut avoir), k tomu, aby mohla být vnímána, a zároveň že „tělo završuje danost" (80), tedy že smysl danosti krystalizuje pouze v kontextu těla, jeho patřičného postavení a jeho exploračních pohybů, pak je podle Merleau-Pontyho „mezi smyslově pociťovatelnými [jsoucny] a vnímajícím orgánem vztah vyjadřování" (rapport expressif, 49). Lidské tělo „má charakter výrazu" (est expressif) v tom smyslu, že každé jeho gesto vykresluje a rozvíjí určitý svět (58), takže lze zároveň říci, že „identita věci je ekvivalentní škále gest, které k ní vedou" (58). Vnímat význam, tj. figuru na pozadí, odchylku od určité normy, může pouze tělo „projikující" se do světa, „zabydlující" se ve světě tím, že při svém fungování privileguje některé jeho oblasti, které tak získávají „systematickou platnost" (58), „nabývají hodnoty dimenzí" (50) (např. zdi jako meze mého pohybu). Význam těchto prvků pak na druhé straně nemůže existovat o sobě, je svázán s tělem a tím, co a jak ono privileguje. Proto platí, že když svým tělesným postojem a pohybem adoptuji určitou perceptivní normu, „vyjadřuji svět či on vyjadřuje mne" (58). Jestliže na jedné straně „na věcech vidíme něco, co je zjevně výrazem subjektu" (176), a na druhé naše tělesné postavení odpovídá určité konfiguraci světa, a tedy na ni odkazuje, pak „mezi vnímaným a námi je vztah vyjadřování" (50). Odtud Merleau-Ponty činí silný závěr, že „vnímání je tedy již vyjadřování",20 že „vyjadřování je podstatou perceptivního vědomí" (176). Myšlenka, že určitému postoji těla odpovídá určitá konfigurace světa, hraje důležitou roli již ve Fenomenologii vnímání a níže uvidíme, které konkrétní popisy odtud nyní Merleau-Ponty přebírá a prohlubuje. Pomocí pojmu vyjadřování ji však Merleau-Ponty systematicky formuluje až v přednáškách z r. 1953.21 Změna pojmosloví, jíž jsme svědky ve vztahu 20 Tamt., str. 14. 21 Ve Fenomenologii vnímání Merleau-Ponty sice již také mluví o vyjadřování, resp. výrazu (expression), ale až na několik náznaků ne ve smyslu vzájemné reference vnímajícího a vnímaného. V souladu s konvenčním užitím slova tím míní projev, díky němuž si osvojujeme nový význam, který však zároveň tento význam vytváří, nikoli pouze aktualizuje či prezentuje navenek (srv. tamt., str. 233). E. de Saint- -Aubert ve své knize Être et chair. Du corps au désir: L'habilitation ontologique de la chair (Paris 2013, str. 57) uvádí, že v tomto novém, výrazně originálním smyslu Merleau-Ponty pojem poprvé používá v tzv. Mexických přednáškách z r. 1949 (ne117REFLEXE 52/2017 k Fenomenologii vnímání, není samoúčelná a má nám právě pomoci zbavit se zbytku intelektualistických předsudků („opustit pojem vědomí").22 Zbavíme-li se důsledně intelektualistického slovníku a pojmů zděděných z této tradice a budeme-li místo toho chápat vnímání jako vzájemné vyjadřování vnímajícího a vnímaného, měla by nám právě tato homologie v obou kontextech umožnit navázat analýzu vnímání na analýzu kulturní symbolické produkce. 4. Přehodnocení vztahu vnímání a myšlení, přírody a kultury Merleau-Ponty konkrétně píše, že cílem zavedení pojmu vyjadřování je „na základě redefinování vnímání a smyslu obnovit jednotu a současně odlišnost světa vnímaného a světa inteligibilního" (45). To přesněji znamená, že je v první řadě třeba vyhnout se dvěma podobám reduktivního přístupu k těmto rovinám zkušenosti, tj. tomu redukovat myšlení na vnímání (senzualismus) nebo vnímání na myšlení (intelektualismus). Výše jsme viděli, že vnímání má zásadně jinou strukturu než myšlení ve smyslu držení určených významů, že je tedy nelze vykládat jako jeho rudimentární formu. Na druhé straně redukce na senzorický „pozitivismus vnímání" (46) je podle Merleau-Pontyho sama absurdní, protože patřičně prozkoumané vnímání právě ukazuje, že vnímaný předmět vnímání samému uniká, že si vyžaduje vlastní překročení, a že tedy není žádná pozitivní matérie, na kterou by bylo možno ho redukovat. „Vnímání v úzkém (senzorickém) smyslu si žádá své vlastní vyjádření" (45), což znamená překročení, a universum významů je tak na druhé straně ve vnímání již „anticipováno".23 Merleau-Ponty opětovně tvrdí, že myšlení je „sublimací" vnímání (45), tzn. že mezi „světem vnímání" a „světem publikovaný rukopis). Ve vydaném díle se tomuto způsobu užití poprvé přibližuje zřejmě v Próze světa, která vznikala z největší části v průběhu r. 1951. Srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde, např. str. 110: „každé vnímání ... je již prvotním vyjadřováním" (expression primordiale). 22 Je třeba si povšimnout, že v přednáškách z r. 1953 Merleau-Ponty přebírá z Fenomenologie vnímání řadu konkrétních popisů (prostor, hloubka, pohyb), které dále prohlubuje, přitom však zcela nechává stranou její třetí část, jejímž cílem bylo právě podat filosofickou interpretaci subjektivity jako takové. 23 M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, str. 12. 118 Jan Halák významů"24 podle něj lze sledovat zároveň „přechod" i „obrat" (55), „povznesení" a „překročení na místě" (65). Fenomén vyjadřování a jemu odpovídající pojem pro Merleau-Pontyho představuje takříkajíc neutrální půdu, jež je společná vnímání i myšlení, a proto umožňuje nereduktivním způsobem uchopit jejich rozdíl. Přesněji řečeno, vyjadřování na rovině řeči, tj. formulování významů, bez kterého není možné myšlení, je podle Merleau-Pontyho převzetím (assomption, reprendre) něčeho, co bylo přítomno ve vnímání, nakolik je již ono samo vyjadřováním. Vztah „vyjadřování" mezi vnímáním a vnímaným, píše Merleau-Ponty, „pro nás slouží pouze jako úvod ke světu vyjadřování [ve ,vlastním smyslu'],25 tzn. je prvním příkladem vyjadřovací aktivity, jíž posléze bude duch", tj. myšlení (52). Ještě jinými slovy formulováno, „vyjadřování ve vlastním smyslu, to, kterého dosahujeme pomocí řeči, přebírá a zesiluje jiné vyjadřování, které odkrývá ,archeologie' vnímaného světa".26 „Vše je vnímáním" (tout est perception), tvrdí tak opakovaně Merleau-Ponty (např. 45, 54, 55). Přesněji, „způsob přístupu k bytí, který existuje ve vnímání, je přítomen všude", na všech rovinách zkušenosti (45). Vnímání Merleau-Ponty nechápe jako pouze faktickou, senzorickou danost, nýbrž šíře jako určitý „modus přístupu k bytí, přístup k leibhaftig gegeben" (46), tj. jako zkušenost dávající svůj předmět v originále, „ztělesněný". Je proto třeba nyní ještě přesněji zjistit, jakým způsobem chápat toto vnímání v širokém smyslu, jež by mělo dávat předmět v originále na všech rovinách zkušenosti. Na jedné straně je nutné, aby byla „naše představa vnímání ... rozšířena takovým způsobem, aby umožnila analýzu rozumu" (55). Současně s tím je třeba provést analýzu struktur vlastních rozumu, jež by byla „stejného typu" jako ta, která již byla provedena u vnímání a která ukáže „stejný typ organizace" (54). Jakým způsobem je tedy vnímání, tj. tělesně-perceptivní vyjadřování, „převzato" kulturním vyjadřováním, a tak nakonec mluvením a myšlením? Vzájemné vyjadřování vnímajícího a vnímaného podle Merleau-Pontyho již umožňuje „otevřenost virtuálnu" či „možnému" (65). Existuje-li „synchronicita" či „synonymie určitých gest a určité krajiny, 24 Tamt., str. 11. 25 Pro jasnost doplňuji podle Résumés de cours, str. 12. 26 Tamt., str. 12–13. Tomu odpovídá i Merleau-Pontyho obecná definice pojmu vyjadřování, viz Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, str. 48: „Vyjadřování (expression) nebo výrazovost (expressivité) zde budeme chápat jako takovou vlastnost určitého fenoménu, díky níž se již z jeho vnitřního uspořádání dozvídáme o nějakém fenoménu jiném, aniž by tento byl zároveň či vůbec někdy dán." 119REFLEXE 52/2017 ... vztah vyjadřování mezi zkoumajícím tělem a tím, co prozkoumává, např. [smyslovou] kvalitou" (58), platí, že „jsem v případě její nepřítomnosti schopný vytvořit její kvazi-přítomnost", že mohu „za pomoci mého těla a jeho zasazení do pole [vnímatelného] realizovat kvazi-smyslové struktury" (56).27 Tělo tak vytváří „virtuální prostor" ve smyslu „systému korespondencí mezi vlastnostmi mého aktuálního pole a tím, čím by tyto vlastnosti byly pro mne v jiném postavení nebo pro někoho jiného" (52; srv. 64 n.). Tělo je pro nás, jak Merleau-Ponty píše např. již v podkladech ke kandidatuře na Collège de France, „mnohem více než nástroj či prostředek – je naším výrazem ve světě, viditelným tvarem našich intencí".28 Tělo díky gestu přestává být pouze „danou strukturou" (64), je nyní také „orgánem mimiky" (64), aktivně se pohybuje a „obrací se zpět ke světu, aby jej označilo a ukázalo" (52, srv. 64). Tělesná praxis proto není pouze řešením zvnějšku přicházejících problémů, reagováním, nýbrž také „propracováváním samotných podmínek" existence (66). „Vyjadřování pomocí gesta", píše Merleau-Ponty, „není překročením mé situace, nýbrž převzetím celého jejího smyslu" (assomption de tout son sens, 65). Gesto, jež je stále určitou tělesně- -perceptivní praxí, a nikoli intelektuálním vědomím významu, nás tak nepřenáší přímo do roviny mimočasového světa podstat, avšak vyznačuje se jistou „všudypřítomností" (53). Jakožto výraz určité konfigurace světa, na níž může každé tělo participovat, překračuje horizont věcí vnímatelných pomocí těla jako pouhého prostředku vnímání, a proměňuje tak naši situaci. 5. Vnímání prostoru a pohybu není možné bez vyjadřování Více než dvě třetiny přednášek Merleau-Ponty věnuje rozboru konkrétních tělesně perceptivních fenoménů, které mají tyto obecné filosofické pozice osvětlit na konkrétních situacích. Za tímto účelem interpretuje řadu popisů a experimentů zejména z oblasti gestaltpsychologie a neurologie, s přesahy také k psychoanalýze, psychopatologii apod. Řada empirických zkoumání má pro Merleau-Pontyho pozitivní význam, často se ovšem také distancuje od jejich interpretací u původních autorů, protože podle něj mají redukcionistické tendence. První skupina 27 Podobné formulace lze nalézt již ve Fenomenologii vnímání, např. str. 265. 28 M. Merleau-Ponty, Un inédit de Merleau-Ponty, str. 39. 120 Jan Halák fenoménů, které podle všeho nelze uchopit tak, že zvolíme empirickoobjektivistické nebo intelektualisticko-subjektivistické hledisko, je spojena s naším vnímáním prostoru. Naše zkušenost s orientací (nahoře- -dole, vlevo-vpravo), viděním hloubky, blízkostí a dálkou či zdánlivou velikostí předmětů podle Merleau-Pontyho pokaždé poukazuje na to, že žádný z těchto fenoménů „není absolutní vlastností obsahů [vnímání], avšak ani pouze myšlenou organizací", protože stále zůstává bezprostřední smyslovou daností (77).29 Jde tak spíše o to, že vnímající tělo a vnímaný předmět spolu tvoří „systém" (78), tj. celek, v jehož rámci se vzájemně „vyjadřují". Konkrétně tak např. vertikální, vzpřímená orientace podle Merleau- -Pontyho není „výhradně vázána ani na vlastnosti světa ani na postavení těla" (78), protože i když jsou podmínky v tomto ohledu stejné, orientace může být různá (srv. 57). Orientace spíše závisí na součinnosti systému těla a systému světa a bez jejich společného „optimálního fungování" (78) dochází k deformaci vnímaného prostoru: Neodpovídá-li postavení našeho těla tomu, co si žádá „vzpřímený" svět, máme vjem „šikmé" orientace, stejně jako v případě, kdy struktura světa neodpovídá tomu, co pro nás doposud bylo normou „vzpřímeného" postavení těla. Jelikož má tato součinnost dynamický charakter, tzn. že to, co vnímáme jako „vzpřímené" nebo „šikmé", se může měnit, není vnímání orientace otázkou určitých vlastností těla nebo světa, ani otázkou interpretace vjemů (např. vizuálních ve světle taktilních). Závisí spíše na tom, jak si tělo osvojuje prostor a jak prostor odpovídá fungování těla, což podle Merleau-Pontyho ilustruje způsob, jímž je jedno vyjadřováno v druhém jako v pozadí stojící prvek, na nějž každý z nich implicitně odkazuje svým vlastním uspořádáním. Merleau-Ponty však pro svůj výklad vnímání jako vyjadřování považuje za nejvýznamnější jiný fenomén – totiž pohyb. Pohyb, tvrdí Merleau-Ponty, „ještě lépe než problém [smyslové] kvality nebo prostoru ospravedlňuje přepracování problému vnímání a pojmu subjektu" (181), protože na rozdíl od věci, která „na první pohled existuje o sobě", odhaluje naznačenou „koexistenci" těla a toho, co prožívá (181). Merleau-Ponty nejdříve věnuje široký prostor výkladům, jež by nám měly umožnit vrátit se k pohybu jako fenoménu, tj. přestat jej chápat objektivizovaně, jako změnu místa se sebou identického předmětu v o sobě jsoucím prostoru. Myslíme-li pohyb takto, je vůči pohybovanému vnější, 29 Při rozborech hloubky, orientace a pohybu (viz níže) Merleau-Ponty navazuje na analýzy z Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 307–345. 121REFLEXE 52/2017 což vede k tomu, že myšlenkově ztrácíme to, co je nám perceptivně dáno – právě pohybující se samo a pohyb jako jeho integrální součást. Na druhé straně nestačí ani vrátit se k pohybu „žitému zevnitř", našemu vlastnímu pohybu (Bergson), protože jde právě o to pochopit, jak je možná nedílnost pohybu v předmětném, tedy vůči nám vnějším světě. Proti těmto objektivistickým a subjektivistickým přístupům proto Merleau-Ponty staví popisy gestaltpsychologie, které podle něj umožňují suspendovat naše kladení objektivního světa a pohybu jako události v něm a navrátit se k pohybu „ve stavu zrodu" (93), tj. k samé fenomenální struktuře pohybu. Gestaltpsychologické studie stroboskopického pohybu v tomto smyslu ukazují, že pohyb je „výsledkem vnitřního uspořádání" perceptivního pole (102), figurou na pozadí, tedy že není nutné, ba ani přesné vykládat jej na základě předpokladu nějakého pohybovaného jsoucna. Ani prvky pole samotného ovšem nelze chápat ve smyslu objektivně existujících příčin, které by na psychické úrovni deterministickým způsobem působily vjem pohybu (jak se domnívá sama gestaltpsychologie). Jelikož smysl jevu jako celku je částečně závislý také na smyslu prvků pole, gestaltpsychologie je nucena svůj objektivistický determinismus doplnit zásahem intelektuálně chápaného vědomí, které na základě identifikace a posouzení předmětu dodává to, co nelze odvodit z objektivisticky chápaného pole. Podle Merleau-Pontyho ovšem organizace pole neexistuje „ani ve třetí osobě, ani v první" (104), opět se vymyká kombinaci objektivních a subjektivních determinant. Experimenty realizované Albertem Michottem30 již podle Merleau- -Pontyho ukazují, že pohyb sám o sobě „odkrývá bytí" (102), aniž bychom vůbec kladli objektivní jsoucno a aniž bychom měli intelektuální vědomí o předmětu. Michottovy stroboskopické projekce totiž např. ukazují, že série tří obrazů abstraktních čar může být vnímána jako pohyb živého tvora (např. plazení, plavání), aniž by vnímající subjekt měl nějaké znalosti z oblasti biologie či vůbec jakoukoli představu o konkrétním zvířeti. Jakmile se objeví „uzavřený tvar, moje tělo se s ním identifikuje a dochází k Einfühlung (vcítění) do jeho vztahů s okolím" (197); pohyby plazení či plavání nám nepřipomínají červa nebo žábu (107), jsou jednoduše „výsledkem variace vnitřního členění figury" (105). Mezi glo30 A. Michotte, Perception de la causalité, Louvain 1954. Srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, zejm. str. 101 a 181. Michottovy experimenty Merleau-Ponty shrnuje rovněž ve svých pozdějších přednáškách o přírodě, srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes. Cours du Collège de France, Paris 1995, str. 205–206. 122 Jan Halák bálním smyslem uspořádání pole a jeho prvky určitým způsobem vztaženými k sobě tak podle Merleau-Pontyho panuje vztah reverzibility či „ekvivalence", která nepředpokládá, nýbrž naopak sama o sobě teprve přináší vědomí určitého předmětu. Tuto myšlenku chce Merleau-Ponty dále potvrdit pomocí rozboru příkladů zpomaleného a zrychleného pohybu.31 Ta samá konfigurace perceptivního pole, která v nás vyvolává dojem určitého typu předmětu, např. živočicha, působí dojmem rostlinného, či dokonce anorganického jsoucna, je-li zpomalena. Zpomalené pohyby lidí zase působí nesrozumitelným, neskutečným dojmem, a zrychlené rostliny naopak jako by začínaly dělat gesta jako živočichové. Smysl daného jevu obdobným způsobem mění rovněž variace dynamiky zvukového doprovodu. Platí-li, že při změně kadence vnímaného pohybu dochází ke změně způsobu, jímž chápeme bytí předmětu, tj. zakoušíme jiný předmět, pak je podle Merleau-Pontyho pohyb perceptivní fenomén, který podobně jako orientace nebo hloubka nemůže existovat „o sobě", nýbrž jej lze vnímat jedině na základě „určité antropologické projekce do věcí" (182). Vnímající subjekt uchopuje vnější pohyb, resp. momenty perceptivního uspořádání, z nichž vyvstává, jako určitou událostní jednotu proto, že se vztahuje k prostoru a pohybuje se v něm (avoir prise sur l'espace, 112). To, co umožňuje podržet jednotlivé prvky pohybu u sebe a uchopit je jako určitý celkový smysl, tedy jako určitý předmět, je tak neoddělitelné od subjektu, který je sám pohyblivý a který je schopný určitého pohybového „projektu". Ve vnějšku vnímaný pohyb se na straně vnímajícího dotýká určité „klaviatury" možností či „ozvučné desky" (117), jež mu na základě svého předchůdného uspořádání zpětně propůjčuje jeho celkový způsob organizace. O něco radikálněji řečeno, „naši schopnost pohybu" je třeba chápat jako „základ pohybu předmětů" (120); „smysl [vnějšího] pohybu je motorický projekt", vnější „pohyb, jeho smysl, jeho charakteristický chod chápeme na základě hybných možností vlastního těla" (119). Podle Merleau-Pontyho lze nakonec mluvit i obecněji o tom, že vnímaný předmět mobilizuje nejen naše potenciality motorické, ale i životní, jak lze ukázat např. na tom, jak na nás působí různé druhy prostoru (čas, tj. také pohyb, např. plyne jinou rychlostí v závislosti na světelnosti prostoru).32 31 Opírá se přitom zejména o popisy Jeana Epsteina (L'intelligence d'une machine, Paris 1946) a o film Jeana Viga Trojka z mravů (Zéro de conduite, 1933), kde se vyskytuje známá scéna se zpomaleným pohybem postav. 32 Kromě gestaltpsychologie se Merleau-Ponty inspiruje např. esejistickým textem J. Paulhana, La peinture moderne ou l'espace sensible au coeur, in: La Table Ronde, 2, 1948, str. 267–280. 123REFLEXE 52/2017 Merleau-Ponty shrnuje svou myšlenku následujícím způsobem: „Uspořádání tvaru se na mne obrací a dotazuje se mých vztahů s prostorovým okolím, Sinngebung (udílení smyslu), ke které dochází, je odpovědí mé prostorovosti na to, co v uspořádání výjevu vybízí k Einfühlung (vcítění)" (189). Něco jako vnímání pohybu je tedy možné proto, že „mezi mnou (mým tělem, mými [smyslovými] poli) a výjevem je vztah vyjadřování" (rapport expressif), že „zaujmout nějaký postoj pokaždé znamená schopnost být v určité situaci a každý výjev je stopou nějakého postoje" (125). Vnější pohyb a motorický subjekt jsou tedy výrazem jeden druhého, protože vnější pohyb vyvolává variaci motorické dimenze subjektu a bez existence motorického subjektu by nebyl vnější pohyb. 6. Subjektem vnímání je tělo jakožto „tělesné schéma" Má-li se má vlastní časoprostorová nedílnost a pohyblivost odrážet ve věcech tak, jak se to podle všeho ukazuje např. na fenoménu pohybu, musí tělo být schopné tuto vazbu nést a náležitým způsobem ji adaptovat ve vztahu ke světu. Proto je klíčovým bodem druhé části přednášek původně neurologický pojem „tělesného schématu",33 tj. těla, které stojí v pozadí všech našich perceptivních aktů jako jejich referenční norma, a je v nich proto v tomto smyslu vždy „vyjadřováno". Merleau-Ponty klade pojem „schéma" výslovně do protikladu k představě „obrazu", aby tak zdůraznil, že schéma není reprezentace ve vědomí.34 Tělesné schéma podle něj jednak není předmětem myšlení či 33 Zásadní roli pro Merleau-Pontyho hraje kniha P. Schildera The Image and Appearance of the Human Body: Studies in the Constructive Energies of the Psyche, London 1935. K tělesnému schématu srv. rovněž Fenomenologii vnímání, zejména str. 134–137 a 290–294. Zde se již Merleau-Ponty distancuje od původní asocianistické i pozdější formalistické definice tělesného schématu, avšak v r. 1953 se již mnohem více věnuje tomu, jak lze tělesné schéma určit pozitivně a dynamicky. Ve Fenomenologii vnímání vychází pouze z raných prací neurologů Heada, Lhermitta a Schildera, nyní studuje novou literaturu, zejména výše citovanou Schilderovu knihu. 34 Sami neurologové, zejm. P. Schilder, ne vždy dokáží jasně formulovat, zda, resp. nakolik se schéma liší od obrazu. Tento stav v současné literatuře kritizuje zejm. S. Gallagher (např. How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford 2005, str. 17–40), který se sice v tomto smyslu shoduje s Merleau-Pontym, avšak pojetí subjektivity a těla obou autorů je podle všeho značně odlišné. Pro kritické srovnání pojetí tělesného schématu u obou autorů srv. např. E. de Saint-Aubert, Être et chair. Du corps au désir: L'habilitation ontologique de la chair, str. 43–59; J. Halák, Merleau-Ponty 124 Jan Halák poznání (140), je vnímatelné a názorné jako nákres či plánek; zároveň však má v jistém smyslu obecnou hodnotu, protože „vyznačuje, co je podstatné" (133). Tělesné schéma tedy není faktem či předmětem, který bychom pouze konstatovali, protože z něj vychází určitý smysl, jemuž se podřazují všechny jednotlivosti, avšak tento smysl zároveň není dán formou intelektuálního, pojmového vědomí. Tato „předlogická", „laterální" jednota těla (126) vyplývá z toho, že části těla se „vzájemně implikují", tj. že funkčně, prostorově a smyslově „koexistují" (133). To se podle Merleau-Pontyho ukazuje např. na tom, že je možné ztratit schopnost pojmově si zpřítomnit a jmenovat prostorové umístění částí svého těla, aniž by subjekt zároveň přišel o praktický přístup k nim (tzv. autotopoagnozie). To však neznamená, že jednota těla je jednotou fyzické věci „tělo", nýbrž že je jednotou orgánů či údů (zejm. aktivních částí těla jako ruce a nohy). Potvrzuje to fenomén fantomové končetiny, kdy je zachována jednota jednání a kdy „pokračuje celková aktivita" subjektu (137), i když „část těla, o kterou se má toto jednání opřít, objektivně neexistuje" (140).35 Jednotu tělesného schématu tak lze pozitivně popsat v první řadě jako jednotu určité praxis (138), „jednotu činnosti" (150). Tělo je „postoj k", „otevřenost vůči cílům" (133), kterou máme k dispozici, nakolik jsme schopni čelit nějaké situaci nebo něco dělat. Přesněji řečeno, tělo je „výchozím bodem pro určitou činnost ve světě", „rejstříkem", do kterého jsme vepsáni v našem vědomém životě a do kterého se „zapisujeme" veškerou svou další činností.36 Tělesné schéma „je vždy orientováno vůči privilegovaným pozicím, normám" pro realizaci určitých činností, a „vědomí, které o něm máme, je zejména vědomím odchylky od těchto norem" (139).37 Nejedná se zároveň o jednotlivé činnosti působící na jednotlivé předměty, nýbrž spíše o „typy činností či gest", jako je např. „uchopit" něco (150). Mít tělo proto za normálních okolností znamená bezprostředně disponovat tělem jakožto místem, odkud vychází naše iniciativa vůči věcem, a mít věci znamená nacházet své tělo jako potenci na ně působit, tzn. zažívat „soulad (Deckung) určitého stylu aspektů svěon Embodied Subjectivity from the Perspective of Subject-Object Circularity, in: Acta Universitatis Carolinae Kinanthropologica, 52, 2016, str. 33–39. 35 Srv. již M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 110 nn.; zde obsažené rozbory nicméně Merleau-Ponty v přednáškách značně prohlubuje. 36 M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, str. 16. 37 Merleau-Ponty se zde opírá o formulace H. Heada, srv. Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, str. 138–139. 125REFLEXE 52/2017 ta (něčeho, co chceme udělat) a pozadí, odkud tato iniciativa vychází" (150) . Z hlediska prostoru je pak tělo „absolutním zde" (129), „před-objektivní prostorovostí" (138), „lokalitou" samou (150), nikoli pouze jedním z možných obsahů prostoru, jak by platilo, pokud by bylo předmětem. Je samo „zprostředkovatelem vztahu zde-tam" (142), pozadím, vůči němuž vystupují předměty jako odchylky nadané smyslem „tam". Lokalita mého těla a prostorové odchylky předmětů se vzájemně „ukazují" (152). Jakožto toto pozadí činnosti a prostorových vztahů tělesné schéma „není vnímané", je „před explicitním vnímáním" (143) a u normálního člověka je jeho tematická danost nadbytečná. Tělesné schéma je naopak vůbec „normou nebo privilegovanou pozicí, v protikladu ke které lze definovat vnímané tělo" (143). Implicitní přítomnost těla na pozadí a jím nesenou přítomnost světa negativně ukazuje např. tzv. „japonská iluze", specifická poloha těla, při které vizuální vjem našeho těla narušuje naši schopnost efektivně disponovat taktilním tělem. Při této iluzi vizuální tělesné schéma neodpovídá našim možnostem na rovině praxis, takže se naše vizuální tělo stává cizím předmětem v prostoru, který je od nás odpojený a který můžeme pouze postupně bod po bodu nalézat pomocí pokusů a omylů. Podobně případy autotopoagnozie38 ukazují, že nutnost pomocí pátracích pohybů „hledat" své tělo či „usuzovat" na jeho polohu z určitých vnímaných aspektů (např. tlak židle) je patologickým projevem a kompenzací ztráty samozřejmé přítomnosti těla na pozadí. Normální subjekt nemá tělo dáno předmětně, např. neví, která část těla bude působit na kterou část předmětu, avšak toto pozadí je pro něj zde, k dispozici, což umožňuje nevěnovat se jemu, nýbrž právě činnosti ve světě. Nejenže původní přítomnost těla jakožto základny činnosti pro nás nemá předmětný charakter, je naopak dokonce třeba tvrdit, že „je projektem" (142), jelikož struktura tělesného schématu se proměňuje korelativně s naším úsilím. Variace vnímané lokalizace těla ukazují, že se tato lokalizace nekryje s objektivní polohou těla, nýbrž se při činnosti posouvá ve směru tonusu (143). Tělo ve smyslu tělesného schématu se tak nachází nikoli tam, kde lze tělo objektivně konstatovat, nýbrž „tam, kam jsme připraveni je umístit", kde jsme s to zaujmout patřičný postoj 38 Srv. např. známý případ veterána Schneidera, tamt. str. 139 nn., a M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 139 nn. V současné filosofické literatuře patologie tohoto typu popisuje a interpretuje rovněž Gallagher, srv. např. S. Gallagher – J. Cole, Body Schema and Body Image in a Deafferented Subject, in: Journal of Mind and Behavior, 16, 1995, str. 369–390. 126 Jan Halák ve vztahu k nějaké činnosti či k něčemu, co chceme vnímat (139). Tělesné schéma na rovině svalového tonusu tak definuje „klidovou normální pozici, ve které bychom nic nevnímali jako figuru a vůči které je každá odchylka vnímána právě jako výslovné vnímání" (143). Variace napětí tělesného schématu korelativně vzbuzují variace vnímaného světa, „tedy tělesné schéma je také určitá struktura vnímaného světa a ten v něm má své kořeny" (143). 7. Transfigurace tělesného schématu Z cirkulární vazby mezi tělesným schématem a činností, pro niž je pozadím, tj. výchozím bodem, prostorovou referencí a vytyčením roviny nulového úsilí, vyplývá také to, že jednota tělesného schématu je dynamická. Tělesné schéma je „mobilizovatelné" (142), „zůstává otevřené" (139), je „dourčováno činností" (139) a „v klidu je nečleněné" (142). Merleau-Ponty se v návaznosti na neurologické rozbory věnuje řadě patologických podob tělesného schématu, zejména apraxiím, které dynamický charakter tělesného schématu potvrzují nejprve negativním způsobem. Ukazuje se to na případu známém již z Fenomenologie vnímání,39 válečném invalidovi Schneiderovi, který „nenalézá části svého těla", je-li v klidu (139), avšak pomocí „přípravných" „automatických" pohybů celého těla je schopen „postupně upřesnit" (141) jeho umístění v prostoru, „reaktivovat tělesné schéma" (142) a nakonec zjistit polohu částí svého těla. Takto odhalenou transfiguraci těla v činnosti a jí odpovídající „stupně artikulace tělesného schématu" (151) lze podle Merleau-Pontyho obdobně sledovat na jednotlivých fázích spánku, resp. probouzení, které po vzoru několika neurologických autorů interpretuje jako apraxii (hluboký spánek jako totální apraxie). Při apraxii je vazba tělesného schématu jako pozadí a výchozího bodu činnosti a této činnosti samé „rozpojena" (dissociation) (144), tělesné schéma a svět již nejsou „zapřažené" (engrenage) do sebe navzájem (155). Apraxie je tedy stav, kdy subjekt ví, co by měl udělat (gnósis), je schopen úkol slovně formulovat (fasis), ale toto vědomí, „intelektuálně definovaný úkol" (144), v něm nevyvolává realizaci činnosti (praxis) . Že je vůbec něco takového možné, podle Merleau-Pontyho souvisí s tím, že tělesná praxis sedimentuje, tj. že naše praktické tělesné schéma se obohacuje např. vizuálním schématem, na jehož úrovni se tělo již stává 39 Srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 58 a zejm. 139 nn. Merleau-Ponty čerpá zejm. z prací A. Gelba a K. Goldsteina. 127REFLEXE 52/2017 předmětem, ke kterému se vztahujeme jinak než čistě na rovině praxis (148). Subjektu trpícímu apraxií pak chybí vazba mezi tímto zpředmětněným, sedimentovaným tělem, kterého se týká gnósis či fasis, a tělem jako tělesným schématem, které je výchozím bodem určité praxis (podobný stav navozuje např. výše zmíněná japonská iluze, která odpojuje naše vizuální schéma od praktického). Patologické fenomény tohoto typu podle Merleau-Pontyho vyžadují, abychom nově promysleli obecnou (nepatologickou) podobu vztahu „praxis k poznání, gnósis, pojmovému vědění" (152) a nakonec i řeči (fasis). Je možné uvažovat jednoduše o tom, že problém na jedné rovině je příčinou problémů na rovinách ostatních, jak by tvrdila např. jejich „intelektualistická" interpretace? Merleau-Ponty se problém pokouší vyřešit zejména pomocí rozboru různých typů vazeb, resp. relativní nezávislosti mezi různými typy apraxií a agnozií. Na základě poznatků neurologie nakonec konstatuje „originalitu praxis", tj. „relativní autonomii způsobu, jímž je nám svět přítomen pomocí pohyblivosti" (154). Obtíže na rovině praxis mají totiž v některých případech za následek obtíže na rovině gnósis, můžeme se ale setkat jak s apraxií bez agnozie, tak s agnozií bez apraxie. Neplatí tedy ani, že by všechny apraxie byly agnozie, ani že by byly oba typy obtíží naprosto nezávislé. Merleau-Pontyho prvním nejsilnějším závěrem tak je na první pohled neuspokojivé konstatování, že mezi agnozií a apraxií existuje jak „spojitost" (connexion), tak „oddělenost" (disjonction, 157), tedy že je spojení a relativní nezávislost i mezi praxis a gnósis . Přesný vztah praxis a gnósis zůstává pro Merleau-Pontyho otázkou až do konce kursu a na základě jeho hutných shrnutí různých patologií lze mnohdy jen s obtížemi dovodit, jaký filosofický závěr mají vlastně podporovat (resp. jestli vůbec nějaký). Výše vykázaný vztah mezi rovinami praxis a gnósis však alespoň vyřazuje možnost, že mezi problémy na obou rovinách je vztah přímé determinace. Merleau-Ponty tak nachází argument proti redukcionistickým pokusům objektivismu a intelektualismu a problém se dostává na novou rovinu, kde je třeba praxis i gnósis vyložit jako dvě k sobě vztažené modality našeho originárního vztahu ke světu, jejž Merleau-Ponty nazval vnímáním. Dvojznačný vztah mezi praxis a gnósis lze ilustrovat na konkrétním příkladu vztahu k prostoru: Na jedné straně je poznávací vztah k prostoru fundován tělesnou praxí, protože základní pojmy jako bod, plocha, kontura mají vůbec nějaký smysl pouze pro subjekt prakticky existující v prostoru a zasazený do nějakého místa v něm; na straně druhé je superstruktura „poznání" relativně nezávislá, protože operace s pojmově 128 Jan Halák přístupnými prostorovými symboly jsou v určitých patologický případech možné i přesto, že na rovině praxe subjekt trpí těžkými poruchami. Superstruktury na rovině gnósis tedy mají význam zisku či výdobytku praxis (acquis, acquisition) (141, 161), který zůstává, i když je praktická infrastruktura, ze které vzešly, poškozena. Merleau-Ponty tak konstatuje, že „superstruktury se vyznačují vlastní stabilitou" (solidité propre des superstructures, 157), která vzniká „sedimentací" praxis (např. 148, 151, 157, 201). Zároveň ovšem platí, že vyšší rovina, kterou vnímáme jako takovou sedimentaci infrastruktury praxis, si zachovává svou plnohodnotnou podobu a takříkajíc zůstává živá, pouze pokud se opírá o nějakou část tělesného schématu, která je schopná v aktivitě praxis pokračovat. Platí sice, že pokud je infrastruktura praxis poškozena, superstruktura gnósis může „maskovat" její zhroucení (148, 157–158, 199), tj. subjekt je např. schopný i nadále provádět operace s pojmy vyjadřujícími prostor, i když nemá přístup ke konkrétním praktickým aktivitám, díky nimž mohly vzniknout a které jsou s to vyjadřovat.40 Avšak sama superstruktura v takovém případě podle Merleau-Pontyho zásadně mění svůj charakter, protože pokud integrita gnósis nepředpokládá rázem integritu infrastruktury praxis, předpokládá alespoň schopnost přistupovat k rovině gnósis konstruktivním, produktivním způsobem (148). Ztrácí-li subjekt tento aktivní život na rovině gnósis, tj. určitou praxis druhého řádu,41 stává se superstruktura skutečně už jen pouhou maskou, zdáním gnósis. Merleau-Ponty opět používá popisy chování zraněného Schneidera, z nichž je zřejmé, že si sice uchoval základní schopnost práce s pojmy a může užívat řeč, avšak ztratil schopnost k těmto aktivitám přistupovat produktivně, spontánně, s iniciativou, není schopný improvizovat apod. (157).42 Ještě konkrétněji např. analýza Gerstmannova syndromu, při kterém postižený trpí zároveň sníženou schopností provádět matematické opera40 Obdobný příklad týkající se rozlišování, resp. jmenování barev Merleau- -Ponty rozebírá na základě prací Gelba a Goldsteina, Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 244. 41 Srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, str. 149: „vyšší formy vyjadřování (rozpoznávání symbolů a zacházení s nimi) jsou stále fakta praxis"; tamt., str. 127: „V principu jsou praxis a gnósis synonymní. Ale gnósis není praxis na stejné rovině." 42 Schneider vždy postupuje podle předem daného plánu, což se týká i jeho způsobu užívání řeči: srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologie vnímání, zejm. str. 177 a 248. Srv. také Merleau-Pontyho popis afázie, tamt., str. 224. 129REFLEXE 52/2017 ce a rozlišovat prsty rukou a strany,43 podle Merleau-Pontyho odhaluje, že sice zajisté nemyslíme rukama, ale že nemyslíme ani bez „transfigurovaného" těla (162), těla jakožto „nositele" významů, infrastruktury praxis, jak jsme ji výše popsali na vlastnostech tělesného schématu. Gesto vykonané rukou „neobsahuje myšlení", ale „ruka je nutná k myšlení" přinejmenším proto, že je frázuje, člení a zasazuje do světa (162) právě tím způsobem, jakým určité postavení těla při vnímání odpovídá krajině, kterou se pokoušíme vnímat. Tuto oporu tělesného schématu je tak možno zredukovat či ochudit, ale nikoli zcela zrušit, pokud má být myšlení v plném slova smyslu možné (201). Jinými slovy, netrpí-li lidé, kteří přišli o ruku, jež hraje důležitou roli při orientaci v prostoru, nutně prstovou agnozií (201), musel u nich roli, kterou hrála ruka v tělesném schématu, přejmout jiný orgán. Ruka v tomto smyslu tedy „není ruka-část, empirická ruka, kus z masa a kostí", nýbrž „ruka, nakolik je součástí aktivního těla a tělesného schématu" (201). Ruka v tomto smyslu je „nositelem lidského významu" (est chargée de signification humaine, 201). Merleau- -Ponty tuto svou pozici shrnuje následovně: „tělo je nositelem (porteur) neomezeného počtu symbolických systémů ..., jejichž vnitřní rozvíjení bezpochyby přesahuje význam ,přirozených' gest, avšak tyto systémy se hroutí, pokud tělo přestane členit jejich vykonávání a zasazovat je do světa a do našeho života."44 Mezi rovinami praxis a gnósis je tedy podle Merleau-Pontyho „fundamentální vztah" (157), protože poškození na jakékoli z rovin se nakonec vždy nějak odráží na všech ostatních (158). Tyto postoje či poznávací modality bychom proto měli chápat jako „póly" jednotného lidského vztahu ke světu, jako projevy jedné funkce či síly uskutečňující se na různých úrovních (147, 158).45 Jakkoli jsme tedy výše viděli, že Merleau-Ponty chce tvrdit, že „vše je vnímáním", a později i to, že vnímání má původně charakter praxis neboli pohyblivosti (mobilité, motilité), nelze podle něj zastávat názor, že by „teorie byla bezprostředně totožná s praxis" (199). Intelektuální funkce podle něj není nadřazená praktické, ale ani obráceně „neplatí, že by theórii bylo možno redukovat na praxis" (199). Nelze vůbec pomýšlet na to, že redukujeme jedním nebo druhým 43 M. Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, str. 149, pozn. 1: „Gerstmannův syndrom je soubor symptomů vyznačující se spojením prstové agnozie, nerozlišování pravé a levé strany, agrafie a akalkulie." 44 M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, str. 18; v podobném smyslu M. Merleau-Ponty, Le monde sensible et le monde de l'expression, str. 158. 45 Srv. již M. Merleau-Ponty, Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 242. 130 Jan Halák směrem a Merleau-Ponty se explicitně vyjadřuje v tom smyslu, že „takovou redukci nem[á] v úmyslu provádět" (199). Místo toho, že by jedna rovina pohlcovala druhou, platí, že „praxis do sebe začleňuje i theória, zahrnuje určitou theória nebo gnósis, jíž je základem (fond), již modifikuje a jíž je zpětně sama modifikována" (141). Takto definovaný vztah mezi oběma rovinami odráží proces fundace, vyjadřování a sedimentace, který zároveň zůstává cirkulární. Merleau-Pontyho původním záměrem bylo výsledky analýz patologií tělesného schématu potvrdit na základě studia způsobu, jímž se tělesné schéma specificky modifikuje za pomoci před-řečových výrazových aktivit, konkrétně výtvarného umění. Nakonec však toto téma zpracovává pouze velmi stručně při poslední přednášce a nemáme bohužel prostor se mu blíže věnovat. Obecně řečeno výtvarné umění a např. i film nás dovádějí k významu, který se v prostě vnímatelném světě nevyskytuje, tím, že specifickým způsobem mobilizují naše tělesné schéma (podobně jako vnímaný pohyb mobilizuje naše motorické potenciality).46 Na začátku jsem již naznačil, že na stejném principu podle Merleau- -Pontyho funguje i řeč, tj. že je formulací a tematizací původně „neartikulovaného významu" (201). Řeč však již má ambici plně realizovat to, co na rovině výtvarného umění zůstává ne plně vyslovené (tacite): chce se „zmocnit významů", fixovat je (170). S nástupem řeči se podle Merleau-Pontyho „objevuje něco nového, co si zasluhuje zvláštní zkoumání" (162, srv. 165), a proto se jí chce (a bude) věnovat v následujícím roce.47 Cílem přednášek o vyjadřování však nebylo analyzovat řeč (66), nýbrž pouze ukázat, že tělesné schéma je oporou myšlení (srv. např. 162, 126), jak jsme vysvětlili např. na Gerstmannově syndromu. Tomu na úrovni řeči odpovídá, že „systém mluvy", o niž se opírá pojmové myšlení, je podle Merleau-Pontyho „zvlášť křehkou superstrukturou tělesného schématu" (164). Tak křehkou, že se fonematická struktura rozvolňuje či rozpadá paralelně s dezartikulací na rovině praxis, což lze sledovat na jednotlivých fázích spánku, resp. probouzení jakožto stupňů apraxie. Fasis a praxis jsou tak podle Merleau-Pontyho „paralelní jakožto funkce 46 Interpretaci přednášek o vyjadřování ve vztahu k filmu bylo věnováno několik studií v Chiasmi International 12, Philosophie et mouvement des images, Milano – Udine 2010. 47 Fixování významu za pomoci řeči, což de facto znamená jeho oddělení od jednotlivého projevu, je podle Merleau-Pontyho možné na základě toho, že v minulosti vydobyté významy v řeči „sedimentují" (na rozdíl od významů formulovaných před-řečovými výrazovými prostředky). Srv. např. M. Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde, str. 142 a 151. 131REFLEXE 52/2017 artikulující svět, který je vědomím ve smyslu bdění" (163), jsou figurami „stejné existenciální modality" (162). Tento relativně krátký exkurs k paralelnímu charakteru praxis a fasis odhalitelnému za pomoci analýzy probouzení (160–165, 208–209) je jediným Merleau-Pontyho pokusem v přednáškách o vyjadřování tematicky uchopit přechod k řeči. Je ovšem na místě připomenout, že Merleau-Ponty v r. 1953 vede ještě druhý, paralelní kurs, jehož tématem je „literární užití řeči".48 Obecně řečeno zde zkoumá, jak literatura pomocí systematické transformace řeči vydobývá nové způsoby lidské existence, čili jak myšlení na rovině literární řeči „transfiguruje" náš před-literární život. Záměrem kursu „Problém mluvy"49 z roku následujícího (1953–1954) ve stejné linii bylo rozšířit saussureovský pojem mluvy a chápat ji jako obecnou „pozitivní a dobyvatelskou funkci"50 v protikladu k představě řeči jako pouhé hmotné opory či záznamu „kategoriálního postoje" ducha. Merleau-Pontyho úvahy o řeči však vycházejí již z prací na Próze světa (kolem 1951) a po zbytek života je bude upřesňovat, např. v přednáškách o Husserlově Ursprung der Geometrie a Heideggerově Unterwegs zur Sprache (1959–1960) .51 Závěr: vyjadřování čili reversibilita – principiální motiv Merleau-Pontyho filosofie V úvodu jsem citoval z materiálů, z nichž je zřejmé, že již v době Fenomenologie vnímání chce Merleau-Ponty chápat vztah mezi vnímáním a myšlením jako fundaci a překročení čili „sublimaci". Při rekapitulaci přednášek jsme pak mohli vidět, jak Merleau-Ponty zpřesňuje a konkretizuje tuto ideu. Vysvětluje, jak „infrastruktury" praxis sedimentují do podoby relativně nezávislých „superstruktur" gnósis, které je zpětně modifikují, tj. detailněji člení, avšak zároveň jimi nepřestávají být nese48 Ke kursu byly vydány přípravné poznámky a shrnutí: M. Merleau-Ponty, L'usage littéraire du langage. Cours au Collège de France . Notes, 1953, Genève 2013; týž, Résumés de cours, str. 22–30. 49 K tomuto přednáškovému cyklu nebyly vydány žádné materiály kromě shrnutí, M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de cours, str. 32–42. 50 Tamt., str. 34. 51 M. Merleau-Ponty, La prose du monde, Paris 1969; týž, Notes de cours sur L'orgine de la géometrie de Husserl, Paris 1998 (přípravné poznámky k přednáškám). 132 Jan Halák ny a jsou na ně odkázány ve své dynamice. Zároveň se tím dostáváme od „vzájemného" vyjadřování těla a světa k vyjadřování „ve vlastním smyslu", jež je formulací doposud nedisponibilního významu, překročením naší tělesné situace. Viděli jsme, že v první polovině přednášek se Merleau-Ponty zabýval takříkajíc horizontálním, zrcadlovým vztahem mezi tělem a světem, jejich cirkulárním podmiňováním; v polovině druhé bylo již otázkou, jak tato rovina významu může být „vertikálně" dediferencována v patologii či převzata a dále strukturována na rovině různých typů kulturních významů, čímž dochází buď k jejímu rozpadu (např. apraxie, spánek), nebo právě překročení (gnósis, theória, mluvení, myšlení). Merleau-Pontyho výklady v přednáškách z r. 1953 tak podle mého názoru přesvědčivě ukazují, že prohloubená analýza vnímání, nakolik je vyjadřováním, nás přibližuje k chápání toho, jak můžeme vnímaný svět reorganizovat pomocí symbolických prostředků, aniž bychom předpokládali inteligibilní universum o sobě, které by pouze shora udílelo svůj hotový rozumný řád „mnohoznačnému" světu tělesné existence. Viděli jsme také, že „transfiguraci", ke které by mělo docházet při přechodu mezi vnímáním a myšlením, můžeme podle Merleau-Pontyho chápat jedině na základě radikálně nového pojetí těla. Jakožto tělesné schéma není tělo ani předmětem, ani souborem vjemů, je v silném smyslu naším hlediskem vůči světu. Člení se korelativně k činnosti a v jejím průběhu, tj. nemá nějakou předem fixovanou strukturu, která by a priori determinovala význam, ani však není z hlediska existence významu ve zkušenosti něčím nepodstatným či pouze omezujícím. Tělo je tak instancí, která nejenom otevírá a průběžně nese, ale zejména také umožňuje vést dál proces diferenciace systému vzájemného odkazování mého postoje vůči světu a jevení ve světě. To, co je ve vyjadřování ve vlastním smyslu novým způsobem „převzato" a sublimováno, je právě tělo ve smyslu implicitní výchozí normy každé dílčí zkušenosti, tj. perspektiva vyjadřovaná v každém jevu, vůči němuž je perspektivou. Tělo nám otevírá svět, je perspektivou každého vnímání a výchozí pozicí každé tělesné činnosti, avšak na úrovni vnímání světa jako „přírodní" krajiny, tj. ne-symbolických daností a reaktivního postoje, tělo nevyčerpává možnosti zaujímat perspektivy a konat. Vyjadřovací akt užívá tělo novým způsobem, čímž „posouvá normy"52 etablované na rovině těla jakožto vnímajícího. Gesto již není pouze interakcí s vnímatelným světem, nýbrž právě aktivitou, tj. používá něco z vnímaného světa k účelům, které 52 M. Merleau-Ponty, Husserl et la notion de Nature, in: týž, Parcours deux, str. 223. 133REFLEXE 52/2017 překračují prosté vnímání v určité situaci. Vyjadřovací symbolické akty tedy stále fungují na principu perspektiva–jev (tj. tělo na pozadí – figura jevu), avšak detailněji člení, dourčují tento vztah pomocí gestických či na symbolech založených výkonů, kulturních diferenciačních systémů. Udávají tak novou normu, vůči níž vystupují jevy, otevírají zkušenostní perspektivu, která překračuje možnosti těla a jeho norem, postojů, perspektiv a činností. Když tak bude nakonec Merleau-Ponty tvrdit, že „duch čili myšlení" je „sublimací tělesnosti",53 je zřejmé, že nejde jen o metaforický způsob vyjadřování, ani o dogmatickou tezi. Promluva, řečový akt formuje celek vyslovitelného, tak jako postoj a pohyb mého těla formuje krajinu vnímatelného – je zaujetím perspektivy, vymezením postavení. Tak jako je mé tělo „opěrným bodem" mého tělesně-perceptivního života,54 „mé myšlení by nemohlo ani o krok postoupit, pokud by se jím otevřený horizont smyslu neproměňoval pomocí řeči v něco, čemu se na divadle říká praktikábl".55 Tělesnost, jež zde má být myšlením sublimována, tak samozřejmě není tělo jakožto předmět, „kus z masa a kostí", nýbrž tělo jako sídlo a „zprostředkovatel" vzájemného vyjadřování vnímatelného a vnímání, jejich „reversibility", jak později řekne Merleau-Ponty.56 Dostáváme tak jasnou fenomenologickou odpověď na otázku, v jakém smyslu je tělo „nutné k myšlení". Myšlení není sublimací těla jako předmětu, je sublimací této reversibility57 či cirkularity perspektiva-jev, jejímž „prototypem" je vnímající tělo a již diferenciační kulturní systémy dourčují, tj. také předpokládají. Merleau-Pontyho pojmové uchopení problému „překročení" vnímání tak nevystihuje pouze „analogii" mezi vztahy tělo-vjem a promluva-myšlenka, nýbrž také jejich asymetrii, což znamená relativní samostatnost či odlišnost řeči a myšlení a zároveň fakt, že jsou fundovány tělesně perceptivním životem. Tělo je „nositelem" diakritického systému vnímání–vnímané, jejž je možno hlouběji kulturně strukturovat („sublimace"), 53 M. Merleau-Ponty, Viditelné a neviditelné, přel. M. Petříček, Praha 1998, str. 150; upravuji český překlad, Merleau-Ponty zde mluví o chair, což má zásadní význam, viz pozn. 56. 54 M. Merleau-Ponty, L'homme et l'adversité, in: týž, Signes, str. 373. 55 M. Merleau-Ponty, Předmluva ke Znakům, in: týž, Smysl filosofického tázání. Dva texty k Viditelnému a neviditelnému, přel. J. Halák, Praha 2016, str. 18. 56 Pojem tělesnosti (chair) je u Merleau-Pontyho definován právě jako reversibilita vnímání a vnímaného, srv. M. Merleau-Ponty, Viditelné a neviditelné, např. str. 143. 57 Tamt., str. 150: „fenomén reversibility... nese mluvu", stejně jako vnímání. 134 Jan Halák a překročit tak horizont vnímatelného, přičemž jedna ze struktur tohoto dourčení (řeč) je s to „sedimentovat", tj. získávat „relativní samostatnost" vůči svému původnímu nositeli. Sedimentace řeči, resp. gnósis, jež řeč předpokládá, je však Merleau-Pontym v přednáškách o vyjadřování pouze oznámena, nikoli vyložena, čímž také zůstává otevřená otázka „oddělitelnosti" významů od diakritických systémů, díky nimž si je osvojujeme (otázka idealit). Výklad tohoto problému by si vyžádal věnovat se Merleau-Pontyho tematickým úvahám o řeči. Ve světle těchto úvah stojí za povšimnutí konečně i to, že pojem vyjadřování systematizuje vybrané aspekty popisů z Fenomenologie vnímání a vede již naši pozornost určitým směrem, jenž se ukáže jako rozhodující pro další fázi Merleau-Pontyho vývoje. V r. 1953 již nejde pouze o to myslet vnímání jinak než jako intelektuální uchopování předmětu, nýbrž zcela zbavit pojem vědomí jeho role svého druhu garanta struktury zkušenosti. Perspektiva vzájemného vyjadřování tělo–jev již realizuje určitou „decentraci" našeho pohledu na zkušenost, čímž shrnuje celou řadu zjištění, podle nichž se svět nerozkládá pouze před pohledem subjektu, jako korelát jeho intencionálního zaměření, nýbrž jej obklopuje, prostupuje, mobilizuje či zatěžuje. Jestliže tento princip nefunguje pouze na rovině vnímání, ale i dále v „myšlení", představuje pozitivní alternativu vůči objektivistickým a subjektivistickým teoriím zkušenosti a má podle všeho skutečně ontologické důsledky, protože neponechává místo pro žádný subjekt, jehož podstatou by bylo myšlení. Zcela „decentrované" formulace z pozdního období Merleau-Pontyho filosofie, jež vyjadřují tuto změnu ontologie, by nyní měly být o něco pochopitelnější: jakožto „sídlo" vzájemného vyjadřování perspektivy a jevu je „subjekt" zkušenosti „překřížení", „záhyb", „chiasma", „zavíjení do sebe" viditelnosti58 – ono „X, kde Bytí přichází k sobě, žije samo pro sebe nebo opět pro sebe ožívá".59 Jedním z přínosů přednášek o vyjadřování tedy také je, že ukazují, jak o řád obecnější formulace z období Viditelného a neviditelného vyrůstají z velmi konkrétních a mnohdy až technických znalostí z celé řady oblastí empirického zkoumání, že tedy nemají tak spekulativní charakter, jak by se mohlo zdát bez znalosti souvislostí.60 58 Tyto formulace se opakovaně vyskytují ve Viditelném a neviditelném . 59 M. Merleau-Ponty, Koncept k Viditelnému a neviditelnému, in: týž, Smysl filosofického tázání . Dva texty k Viditelnému a neviditelnému, str. 38. Srv. již Fenomenologie vnímání, str. 268. 60 Tato studie je výsledkem badatelské činnosti podporované Grantovou agenturou České republiky v rámci grantu GA ČR 16-17984Y „Kořeny Merleau-Ponty135REFLEXE 52/2017 RÉSUMÉ Au moment où il entre au Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty considère comme la tâche la plus importante une nouvelle analyse de la rationalité qui éclaircirait son attache à la vie perceptive-corporelle. Les activités expressives humaines, dont la forme la plus élaborée est la formulation de la pensée en langage, sont une reprise explicite de ce qu'on trouve déjà au niveau de la perception comme la référence implicite et mutuelle entre le sujet percevant et la réalité perçue. Dans notre article, nous tentons de reconstituer l'argumentation de Merleau-Ponty à partir des notes qu'il a rédigées en vue de son cours, et nous présentons une interprétation des concept-clés « expression » et « schéma corporel ». SUMMARY In his initial lecture course at the Collège de France, Merleau-Ponty attempted to develop a new analysis of rational thought in order to clarify its link with corporeal-perceptive life. The formulation of thought in language as the most elaborate human activity of expression explicitly takes over what we already observe in perception as the implicit and mutual reference between the perceiving subject and that which is perceived. The article reconstructs Merleau-Ponty's argumentat, based on his preparatory notes for the lectures, and provides an interpretation of the key concepts of "expression" and "body schema". ho převrácení objektivistického paradigmatu v přednáškách z Collège de France" řešeného na Univerzitě Palackého v Olomouci.

Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 3, No. 1, April 2006 MUSICAL THOUGHT AND COMPOSITIONALITY CHRISTOPHER BARTEL KING'S COLLEGE LONDON Many philosophers and music theorists have claimed that music is a language, though whether this is meant metaphorically or literally is often unclear. If the claim is meant literally, then it faces serious difficulty-many find it compelling to think that music cannot be a language because it lacks any semantic value. On the other hand, if it is meant metaphorically, then it is not clear what is gained by the metaphor-it is not clear what the metaphor is meant to illuminate. Considering the claim as a metaphor, I take it that what a theorist who speaks in this way is trying to draw our attention to is that there are interesting and illuminating parallels between music and language that might be philosophically significant. If this is their point, then the question is: what interesting parallel is it that could be so philosophically significant? In this essay, I will attempt to make explicit just what philosophical significance there might be to the claim that music is a language (or is languagelike). Jumping straight in, I want to suggest that the connection between music and language that these theorists are trying to elucidate is that musical thought has a languagelike structure. By "musical thought" I mean that species of thought that underwrites a musician's creative activity. When a musician composes a piece of music, or improvises a performance, they go through a particular decision-making process-that is, they think musically. In saying this, I am making one assumption, which is controversial but I believe warranted. I am assuming that the decision-making process that a musician goes through when they compose or improvise a piece of music is not linguistic. Whatever a musician does when they create a piece of music, they do not do something involving language. This seems CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 26 warranted by the simple empirical observation that it is not required of us when thinking of music to translate what we think into some language. So how is this related to the claim that music is a language? The thought I wish to examine is that, whatever mental process a musician goes through when creating a piece of music, that process follows a syntactic structure similar to that found in linguistic production. In this, I agree with Harold Fiske who says that the musiclanguage question is interesting (partly) as a question about 'whether music is processed cognitively either in a parallel or identical way to language.'1 An examination of this thought would be of interest for two reasons. First, understanding the process of thought that a musician goes throught when creating a piece of music would be informative to general issues of creativity. Second, it would be of interest to any theorists in the philosophy of mind who is concerned with the structure or contents of thought. For instance, the claim that musical thought has a linguistic structure would be of great interest to someone who sought to defend the Language of Thought Hypothesis. The Language of Thought Hypothesis states that thought has a languagelike structure where mental representations are the semantically evaluable constituents of thought, and that the vehicle of thought is a syntactic ordering of these representations. If musical thought has a linguistic structure, then this might be another feature in the cap for theorists defending the language of thought. If true, then one could say that the mind's "mental language" is evidenced in the languagelike structure of music.2 What evidence would serve to prove that the musical thought has a linguistic structure? In this paper, I will focus on what I claim could serve as one piece of evidence, namely I will claim that musical thought exhibits compositionality to a sufficient degree to warrant the description of music as a language (though still metaphorically). Of course, I am not thinking of the sort of semantic compositionality that Fodor endorses, where 'the semantic value of a thought is inherited from the semantic values of its constituents, together with their arrangement'.3 I am not claiming that music, or musical thought, has any semantic value. Rather, what I mean by 1 Fiske (1990): 1. 2 Admittedly, the Language of Thought Hypothesis is a hotly contested topic. I will not here undertake a defence of the LOTH, however if my claim here sounds plausible, then this might be a further reason to support that hypothesis. 3 Fodor (2001): 6. CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 27 compositionality is that the constitutive elements of thought exhibit generality and recombinability in such a way that a subject might be able to produce an unlimited number of larger complex phrases out of a limited number of elemental phrases. Admittedly, I have no argument to prove the compositionality of musical thought, rather what I will present here are what I take to be compelling reasons from an examination of musical creativity that seem to demand consideration for my claim. But there are a few methodological concerns I will need to address. First, I will briefly examine an account offered by Diana Raffman of what it is about music that leads us to wonder whether it is a language in the first place. Relating this to my discussion, it seems to me that many people find the claim that music is a language to be intuitively compelling because they are able to respond to the compositional aspects of musical creativity. Next, I will try to show what is meant by "musical thought" and offer reasons for thinking that examining the structure of music would be an adequate vehicle for examining the structure of musical thought. Finally, I will then be in a position to consider my central claim, that musical thought is compositional in a languagelike way. Three caveats: discussions of similarities between music and language are usually discussed by theorists who are engaged with the question of what it is to "understand the meaning" of a musical work. Such theories are mainly interested in explaining what it is to understand what we hear, or what it is to grasp the meaning of a musical work. In this paper, I am not concerned with questions of "musical meaning" or "understanding".4 My only concern with the musiclanguage question here is to examine whether there might be any sense in which describing music as a language might be philosophically interesting. Second, most theorists who examine "musical understanding" are mainly interested in its reception, not in its production. Their question is, what does it mean for a listener to understand music. I am mainly concerned with what is involved in the performer's creativity, specifically, I am concerned with the cognitive process that enables a musician to manipulate musical phrases or motives in a seemingly language-like way. Finally, I will take jazz improvisation as the paradigm of such activity. In jazz improvisation, musicians find themselves in the difficult position of having to improvise an interesting 4 For more on theories of musical understanding, see DeBellis (1995) and (1999); Fiske (1990); Raffman (1993); and Zbikowski (2002). CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 28 and entertaining performance with no more guidance than their knowledge of the harmonic structure of a piece and its melody, and with no more preparation than the musical skills that they must perfect in advance in the practice room. My question is, what cognitive skills must a musician possess in order to have the ability to seemingly compose on the spot. The answer to this question will reveal much about the compositionality of musical thought. 5 I. What is it about music that leads us to question its relation to language in the first place? Raffman's (1993) argues that we often expect to find meaning in music even though there really is none because music seems to have a syntactic structure. Let me briefly review her argument. For Raffman, to "understand" a piece of music is (partly) to gain some knowledge or understand ing of the emotional qualities that some piece of music might express. Musical works make use of certain musical structures (such as cadences, dynamic devices, rhythmic patterns, etc.) that contribute in their way to the music's sounding resolved, or relaxed, or tense, or whatever. Certain musical structures almost always contribute in a specific and predictable way to the emotional content of a musical piece. For instance, a melodic line that descends in a downward step-wise motion from the mediant to the tonic typically sounds like a relaxation-the melodic sequence E-D-C sounds resolved when it appears in the key of C-major. That these musical structures seem to make predictable contributions to one's emotional understanding of a musical work makes it seem as though there are certain specifiable rules for the expression of emotion through music, and it is these rules that composers exploit in their compositions. This seems to lead to an error theory about musical meaning. A listener expects to be able to recover the emotional content of a musical passage by their application of certain "musical rules", and this seems to require that the subject possess some '(domainspecific) psychological rules for apprehending that structure' very much like one would 5 Kraut (2004) takes a different though related view of the value of jazz. Kraut argues that jazz mu sic serves as a paradigmatic test case for examining the music-language question. On his view, jazz improvisation has a distinct value in aesthetic theory from all other musical styles in that it is the most compelling case by which one could consider the music-language question. To this extent, he and I are in agreement. CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 29 expect from a Chomskian model of generative grammar.6 If there are such psychological rules for the apprehension of the emotional content of a musical work, then it looks as though music has some grammar-like structure. Of course, most listeners would be unable to say just what these psychological rules are. And yet, as Raffman says, 'a plausible thought, then, is that the presence of grammatical structure in music, likewise recovered by rule-governed operations from acoustic stimuli, (mis)leads us to expect something similarly effable',7 that is, similar to the effable rules of linguistic grammar. The knowledge one seems to possess about the emotional significance of some music is ineffable. This ineffable knowledge, which Raffman calls "feeling ineffability", results in a feeling of something's-being-said, and this is part of what it is about music that misleads us into expecting that it possesses some meaning.8 While I am not here concerned with Raffman's issues of musical meaning or understanding, nor am I concerned with the issue of how music might express emotion, I find Raffman's suggestion to be quite a compelling nudge in the direction my claim, that musical thought does have a linguistic structure. On Raffman's account, one is mislead into believing that there are grammarlike rules for the understanding of musical works because certain recurring musical devices seem to be responsible for the emotional quality of the music. And our belief in the music's having a grammatical structure leads us to expect that the music has some meaning. No wonder, then, that many jump to the conclusion that music is a language. This paper is meant to backup Raffman's suggestion that music only appears to be a language. Music appears this way, she says, because it seems to have a syntactic structure. This point would be made stronger by showing that it is musical thought, rather than music itself, that has some similarity to language. II. Many music theorists and aestheticians find comparisons between mus ic and language to be quite helpful in enlightening something about the nature of music. I am suggesting that this claim should be understood as a claim about the structure of music, in which 6 Raffman (1993): 41. 7 Ibid. 8 Her book is a very interesting and rewarding read. For more on ineffable musical knowledge, I can only refer the reader to Raffman's (1993). CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 30 case the comparison becomes something of philosophical significance. What would be gained by entertaining this comparison? There is one very easy way of misunderstanding the intent of these theorists, therefore some care needs to be shown. The comparison these theorists address, I claim, should primarily be concerned with understanding the nature of musical thought. Or at least I take it that the question of whether music is a language has less to do with music itself than it has to do with the structure of musical thought. It is meaningless to ask whether music, in abstraction, could be a language; or, if not meaningless, then at least trivially true that music itself is not. Musical works themselves, independent of their performances, composers, and socio-historical contexts, are just particular sequences of sounds. And one would be right to argue against any theorists that took the comparison too literally. On the other hand, the claim that musical thought has a linguistic structure has quite a different focus from the claim that music is a language. The question then is whether thought of this nature is similar in any salient way to linguistic thought. First, we should notice that, when musicians think of music, they do so in music, not in language. Clearly people are able to think about music-some musicians claim to be able to compose musical works 'in their head'-and what is equally clear is that there exists no way to translate music into any natural language,9 so musical thought must be its own species of thought, independent of linguistic thought. If musical thoughts have content, then its content is nothing more than sounds and their organisation into particular sequences. How are we to examine the structure of musical thought? I would suggest that by examining scores and performances and the organisation of musical events, we might come to understand something about the structure of musical thought. We could think of a musical work (whatever that is) as the record of a very complex thought, specifically a thought about sound. If one can make discoveries about the structure of linguistic thought by examining the structure of language-as the Language of Thought Hypothesis 9 One reason to think that music cannot be translated into any natural language is simply that music has no content-it has no semantic value. Thus music is untranslatable because it does not refer to anything beyond itself. Some theorists take the view that this lack of semantic value is fatal to the thought that music is a language, in both its literal and metaphorical form. While I think that that position is questionable in that it overstates the point, I cannot discuss this point further here. CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 31 suggests-then similarly to understand the structure of musical thought we should examine the structure of music.10 III. So, what would it be for musical thought to be compositional? To say that some symbolic system is compositional is just to say that the atomic elements of that system can be recombined in numerous different settings where it would be significant to think that something salient to the character of an atomic element is retained in each new setting. To apply this to the case of music, the use of musical quotes would be one such example. Ella Fitzgerald would often use quotes such as the melody to 'A-Tisket ATasket' during her improvised vocal solos; Charles Mingus uses a small quote from 'God Bless America' in measures 104-105 of his bass solo on 'Haitian Fight Song'.11 While the use of musical quotes forms one kind of example, another more interesting kind where composers use a theme from one song in a new setting. Such an example occurs when Charles Mingus uses the central theme of 'Haitian Fight Song' in 'Hog Callin' Blues'.12 These examples are interesting only insofar as they show that musicians will often appropriate small, recognisable melodic themes presumably so that their listeners will appreciate the musical reference. But this doesn't tell us much about the structure of musical thought. All it shows is that sometimes musicians like to use recognisable phrases from other works in their own. The claim I want to make is more significant: that the structure of musical thought actually takes the form of these small, abstracted melodic themes as the atomic elements of thought, and that it is through the musician's mental manipulation of these atomic melodic elements that thought exhibits compositionality. Musical thought has content, which can be specified by something like a graph of musical 10 Levinson (2003) makes a similar claim. In fact, much of the present essay has been strongly influenced by Levinson's essay, though Levinson does not explore the possibility that musical thought might be compositional. 11 For a complete transcription of Mingus' solo, see Priestly (1982): Appendix IV. 12 'Haitian Fight Song' appears on the album The Clown (1957), while 'Hog Callin' Blues' appears on Oh, Yeah (1962). CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 32 analysis.13 At least part of what specifies the content of this graph will be musical phrases-repeatable single units of musical notes that are the basic building blocks of larger musical events. These are the claims that I will now argue for. What are the atomic elements of musical thought? An answer is suggested by Schoenberg's writings on music theory: they are motives (or motifs). Schoenberg describes motives as the smallest grouping of notes that a listener could recognise and reidentify: 'Motive is at any one time the smallest part of a piece or section of a piece that, despite changes and variation, is recognizable as present throughout.'14 The composer's use of these small, recognisable musical units is required for a listener to make sense of the music. Without these, he claims, listeners would have little else to grasp hold of. For an example of what a motive would be, take Thelonious Monk's tune 'Straight, No Chaser'. The central melodic motive is a five-note ascending line that is repeated eleven times within the central theme of the tune : {" {( È { R{ r' !{ U uwç ç{ çV v{wç çÇ Wç {wç *ç Wç w{ { € { ! Figure 1 My claim-that musical thought exhibits compositionality-will be elucidated alongside this second claim-that the atomic elements of musical thoughts are motives like the one in Figure 1. Jazz performance students are taught to develop their improvisatory skills by starting with simple repeated phrases (as in Figure 1) that can be altered slightly to allow for harmonic variation. Often these fragments are found in the melodies of existing tunes, or are stock phrases of the student's invention, or consist of quotes lifted out of well-known recordings of other musicians. These phrases are treated as single units that can be recombined in a variety of ways. The student's task is to discover which 13 This is an idea that is central to Mark DeBellis' work on the contents of musical perception. It is an idea that I am strongly in agreement with. His idea, briefly, is that musical perception involves a mental state with content; this content represents music as being a certain way in perceptual experience; and that the content of these mental states can be captured by graph of musical analysis, like a Schenkerian graph or a graph of the Generative Theory of Tonal Music. For more on this, see DeBellis (1995), (1999) and (2005). 14 Schoenberg (1995): 169. See also Zbikowski (2002), Ch. 1. CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 33 combinations will work and in which harmonic settings. Over time, the student is meant to build up a larger "vocabulary" of these phrases, which will allow them to achieve greater complexity and variety. Whole solos are then constructed out of these stockintrade phrases that the student will have learned to incorporate into a wide variety of harmonic settings.15 What is interesting and important for jazz improvisation is that phrases like Figure 1 can be recombined with other phrases. I said above that to say that some symbolic system is compositional is just to say that the atomic elements of that system can be recombined in numerous different settings where something salient to the character of an atomic element is retained in each new setting. I have claimed that the atomic elements of musical thought are motives, but what is salient to the character of Figure 1 that can be retained in new settings? The phrase in Figure 1 could be repeated just as it is, but this would quickly become boring. Very often musicians use variations on these basic phrases. Two ways of varying the phrase would be changing the pitch relation or the rhythmic structure. Consider Figures 2 and 3: {" {( È { W w{– !{ Zs { [t { { u\ { Í v] { { ! Figure 2 {" {( È { U{ u• !{ T tuwç ç{ çU uv{wç ç Vç v{wç Çç Wç w{ { € { ! Figure 3 Figure 2 retains the same pitch relations as Figure 1-that is, the distance between the notes is the same in each figure. The pitch relations between the notes of Figure 1 are Perfect Fourth Major Second Minor Second Minor Second. This series of pitch relations is retained in Figure 2, though the rhythm is not. Figure 3, on the other hand, retains the rhythmic organisation of Figure 1 but not the pitch relations. The possibility 15 At Berklee College of Music, first-year performance students are literally given a book of such phrases that they are expected to work through to help them begin building up their "vocabulary". CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 34 of varying the phrases aids the performing musician in that it enables her to recombine phrases in novel ways without requiring her to employ a new motive each time. Improvisation would simply be too difficult if one needed to memorise a unique motive for every possible variation. Armed with a relatively small number of motives, and knowledge of the rules for such variation, an improvising musician can begin to generate a large variety of novel lines.16 Finally, one might question whether this implies that there might be rules for "musical grammar". As previously mentioned, Raffman suggests that there might be psychological rules for the understanding of the emotional content of a piece of music. The question here is different from her concern: does musical compositionality allow us to judge whether a musical phrase is wellformed. In language, the rules of grammar allow a language-user to judge whether a sentence is wellformed. So, how do we judge whether a performer's attempts are successful? I cannot address this fully here, but I can make a short attempt. As I mentioned above, the sort of compositionality I am describing is concerned with the production of music, not its reception. While we might look at some piece of musical analysis in order to judge why a particular melody does not work, I do not imagine that dissecting a melody into its atomic phrases could tell us much about why a particular melody does work. I would suggest the basis of such judgment must be aesthetic-we know when a particular melody works simply when it is pleasing. The rules of recombination and variation for these phrases-their "grammar"-is given simply by the demands of harmony. Phrases must be recombined, and if necessary altered, in ways that do not threaten the harmonic setting or musical style. Of course, the task of such compositionality is not to generate strings of wellformed sentences, rather it is to enable the performer to generate an unlimited number of extended melodic lines out of a limited number of musical phrases that can be applied over a wide variety of harmonic settings. When some melody does not work, we might find by examining it closely that the melody clashes with the harmony, so we can discover why some melody fails, but what 16 A note on terminology: we could think of a "line" as being roughly the musical equivalent to a "string" of language. CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 35 we cannot do is decide in advance that some particular melody will be pleasing. 17 This is simply because there is more to the appreciation of music than whether it is harmonically constructed or not. A melody might be harmonically correct, but we might find it boring, or repetitive, or predictable, or derivative. Jazz musicians have a quite daunting task: to construct interesting, exciting and memorable melodies out of a limited musical vocabulary. IV. In section one, I add to Raffman's thought that we are lead to erroneously believe that music expresses some meaning or behaves like a language because it seems to possess some syntactic structure by suggesting that the production of musical performance seems to exhibit compositionality in a languagelike way. The difference between Raffman's project and mine is that she is concerned with what the listener hears and I am concerned with what the performer does-hers is a concern with receptivity, mine is a concern with productivity. In section two, I argue that the music-is-a-language issue is more than an interesting analogy in that it suggests something significant about the nature of musical thought, namely that it might have a languagelike structure, and in section three I defend this view by illustrating my claims about the seeming compositionality of improvisational musical performance. While there are many problems circling around this topic that I have not been able to address, the thought that this paper recommends is that there is some sense in comparing music to language in that the comparison may reveal something interesting about the nature of musical thought. It would be of great philosophical interest not only to aestheticians and music theorists but also to the areas of philosophy of mind and language to discover that there might be a species of thought that behaves in a language like way and yet is composed entirely of mental representations of musically structured sound-event types. When a musician thinks of a particular musical phrase, they mentally represent a particular type of sound-event and also represent it as standing in certain relations (namely, harmonic or melodic relations) to other sound-event types. A theory of mental representation of musical phrases must underwrite a musician's 17 I am here appealing to Sibley's notion that aesthetic judgments are negative-condition governed. See Sibley (2001). CHRISTOPHER BARTEL 36 ability to improvise. These improvisational abilities would be wholly mysterious unless musical thought is compositional in the way described. REFERENCES DEBELLIS, Mark (1995). Music and Conceptualization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DEBELLIS, Mark (1999). 'What is Musical Intuition? Tonal Theory as Cognitive Science'. Philosophical Psychology, 12 (4): 471-501. DEBELLIS, Mark (2005). 'Conceptual and Nonconceptual Modes of Music Perception'. Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 2 (2): 45-61. FISKE, Harold (1990). Music and Mind: Philosophical Essays on the Cognition and Meaning of Music. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen. FODOR, Jerry (2001). 'Language, Thought and Compositionality'. Mind and Language, 16 (1): 1-15. KRAUT, Robert (2005). 'Why does Jazz Matter to Aesthetic Theory?'. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63(1): 3-16. LEVINSON, Jerrold (2003). 'Musical Thinking'. Midwest Studies, 27: 59-68. PRIESTLY, Brian (1982). Mingus: A Critical Biography. London: Quartet Books. RAFFMAN, Diana (1993). Language, Music and Mind. London: M. I. T. Press. SCHOENBERG, Arnold (1995). The Musical Idea and the Logic, Technique, and Art of Its Presentation. Ed. and trans. Patricia Carpenter and Severine Neff. New York: Columbia University Press. SIBLEY, Frank (2001). 'Aesthetic Concepts', in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics. John Benson, Betty Redfern and Jeremy Roxbee Cox, eds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ZBIKOWSKI, Lawrence (2002). Conceptualizing Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

For Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation, (eds.) P. Bondy & J.A. Carter, (Routledge). Well-Founded Belief: An Introduction Patrick Bondy (Wichita State) and J. Adam Carter (Glasgow) I. The Basing Relation: A Brief Overview Well-founded belief is belief that is properly held on the basis of good, justifying reasons.1 Just as it often happens that people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, or fail to act when they have good reason for acting, it also often happens that people have good reasons for holding a belief but don't hold it, or they do hold it but on the basis of some other bad reasons instead. Of course holding a belief on the basis of bad reasons does not make the belief false, just as performing an action on the basis of bad reasons does not make the action itself wrong. But in order to be fully justified, the beliefs that we hold for reasons must be held on the basis of good reasons. Epistemologists standardly distinguish between propositional justification and doxastic justification. Propositional justification is the justification a person can have for 1 Feldman and Conee's influential evidentialist definition of well-foundedness, for example, goes as follows: WF: S's doxastic attitude D toward p is well-founded for S at t if and only if (i) having D toward p is justified for S at t; (ii) S has D toward p on the basis of some body of evidence e such that: (a) S has e as evidence for p at t; (b) having D toward p fits e; (c) there is no more inclusive body of evidence e' had by S at t such that having D toward p does not fit e'. (1985, p. 24, italics added) 2 holding a belief, even if she does not hold it, or even if she holds the belief on the basis of some other bad reasons instead. Doxastic justification is full justification, the justification a belief has when it is held in the right kind of way. "Well-founded belief" and "doxastically justified belief" are not quite synonymous, but in many contexts they are interchangeable. The former is often the more natural expression to use, though it is more theoretically loaded, as it suggests a foundationalist account of the structure of justification.2 In any case, the latter is the more widely used expression in contemporary epistemology. Getting clear on doxastic justification is important in its own right, but because doxastic justification is plausibly also necessary for other epistemic statuses such as knowledge and understanding, getting clear on doxastic justification is of paramount importance for epistemology. A key ingredient in doxastic justification is the epistemic basing relation, the relation between beliefs and the reasons on the basis of which they are held. In order to understand doxastic justification, then, we need to understand the basing 2 "Well-founded belief" is also theoretically loaded in that it suggests an account of justification in terms of beliefs that are based on reasons, ruling out an externalist account of justification like Goldman's (1979; 1986) reliabilism, according to which, roughly, beliefs are fully justified iff they are produced by reliable processes, including processes that do not take reasons for belief as inputs. Goldman calls fully justified beliefs produced by reliable processes "ex post" justified, but we can view his account as an account of doxastically justified belief. Still, because many accounts of doxastic justification do make essential use of epistemic reasons for belief, and all accounts of doxastic justification allow that at least some beliefs are justified in virtue of being held on the basis of good reasons, and this volume is about beliefs held on the basis of reasons, we don't need to worry about this sense in which "well-founded belief" is theoretically loaded. Beliefs that are doxastically justified in virtue of being held on the basis of good reasons are well-founded beliefs. 3 relation. And, with a satisfactory account of the basing relation in hand, we can go on and use that account to shed light on a variety of other epistemological issues. The basing relation is an explanatory relation: it provides an explanation of why a subject holds a belief. But it's not just any kind of explanatory relation. It explains why a person has a belief specifically by reference to what are often called "motivating" or "operative" reasons. To illustrate: suppose we want to explain why Jane brews herself a cup of coffee every morning. Because the caffeine in coffee is mildly addictive, in some contexts we can explain why Jane brews coffee every morning by citing the addictive nature of the drink. But the addictive nature of coffee is not normally a reason on the basis of which Jane acts when she pours her coffee. It is an explanatory reason but not a motivating reason. Jane's (motivating) reasons would be more like, "coffee helps me wake up," or "I like it," or "it makes me feel ready for the day," or something along these lines. These are the reasons which prompt Jane's action, and which Jane sees as making the action of brewing coffee worthwhile. Of course, Jane will often not explicitly think of these reasons before she brews her coffee. We often perform actions on the basis of reasons even without explicitly calling our reasons to mind. Still, Jane has her reasons, and without those reasons she would likely not brew coffee every morning. So the basing relation is an explanatory relation which holds between beliefs and the reasons for which the beliefs are held. The task for us lies in specifying the content of that relation. Two broad distinctions will help to orient the approaches to, and the arguments about, the basing relation. The first distinction is between the activity of justifying-that is, of providing or at least being able to provide the reasons on the basis of which one's belief is held, and which justify one's belief-and the state of having beliefs that are based on, and are justified by, the reasons one possesses. Some epistemologists have held that having 4 doxastically justified beliefs is a matter of being able to provide reasons which justify those beliefs. For example, Stephen Toulmin has written that We "know" something (in the full and strict sense of the term) if-and-only-if we have a well-founded belief in it; our belief in it is well-founded if-and-only-if we can produce good reasons in its support..." (1976, p. 89, italics in original) Toulmin thought that well-founded belief is sufficient for knowledge, that it requires conclusive reasons, and that it requires that one be able to produce those reasons. Similarly, Keith Lehrer has written that if a person has evidence adequate to completely justify his belief, he may still fail to be completely justified in believing what he does because his belief is not based on that evidence. What I mean by saying that a person's belief is not based on certain evidence is that he would not appeal to that evidence to justify his belief. (1965, p. 169, italics in original) It is now widely accepted, however, that the state of having beliefs which are based on, and justified by, one's reasons, is entirely distinct from the activity of providing or of being able to provide the reasons on which one's beliefs are based, and which justify one's beliefs. Keith Korcz identifies several important, widely-accepted aspects of this distinction:3 First, and most apparently, being justified in believing p is a state whereas showing that one is justified in believing p is an action. Second, it seems clear, for instance, that one may be justified in holding a belief even if one lacks the epistemic concepts needed to show that it is justified. Thus, one need not be able to justify one's belief in order to be justified in holding it. Third, I could attempt to show that my belief that p is justified even if I am not justified in believing p. ... Similarly, I might not be 3 See also Harman (1970) and Alston (1985) for similar arguments against the view that the activity of justifying is part of what constitutes the state of being justified. 5 justified in believing p but nonetheless believe p. Under pressure to justify my belief, I could discover that I do have good reasons to believe p and perhaps become justified in believing p on the basis of those reasons. (2000, p. 533 italics in original) Two of Korcz's points are particularly important for us here. The first is that one can have fully justified beliefs, which one holds on the basis of good reasons, even if one is unable to provide those reasons in defense of one's beliefs. (Maybe one lacks the necessary concepts to formulate the reasons as reasons, or maybe one is simply too nervous and one tends to forget one's reasons when asked for them, or maybe some other mechanism intervenes and prevents a person from providing her reasons.) The second point is that one might hold a belief on the basis of bad reasons at a time t1, and not even realize that there are good reasons for holding it-but then, once one is pressed to provide reasons, one immediately comes to realize at t2 that there are other good reasons available for the belief. So, at t2 one comes to base one's belief on the good reasons, and one's belief thereby becomes justified. The point is that at t1 one has this ability to provide good reasons for the belief, but at t1 one's belief is not held on the basis of the good available reasons. So, Korcz argues, being justified is entirely distinct from being able to provide a justification. That is the current orthodoxy in epistemology,4 and that is the first broad distinction to help orient the debates about the epistemic basing relation. The second important distinction to draw is between causal and doxastic accounts of basing. We've noted above that the basing relation is an explanatory relation. Causal accounts of basing provide a causal interpretation of that relation. The basic idea of a causal account is that a belief is based on a reason when the reason causes the belief. But that basic idea needs, at minimum, to be bolstered with a way to rule out deviant causal chains, because 4 But see Leite (2004), Bondy and Carter (2018) and Hetherington (this volume) for some pushback against this orthodoxy. 6 beliefs can be caused by reasons in so-called "deviant" ways, where the belief is clearly not held on the basis of the reason. For example: Suddenly seeing Silvia, I form the belief that I see her; as a result, I become rattled and drop my cup of tea, scalding my leg. I then form the belief that my leg hurts; but though the former belief is a (part) cause of the latter, it is not the case that I accept the latter on the evidential basis of the former. (Plantinga 1993, p. 69n8) Ruling out causal deviance is a challenge, and it is key to giving a satisfactory account of basing in causal terms. Causal accounts of one sort or another have been widely defended or assumed.5 An alternative to the causal approach is to give an account of basing in doxastic terms. Doxastic accounts hold that having an appropriate "meta-belief," to the effect that a reason R is a good reason for holding a belief B, is the key to holding B on the basis of R. Believing, of some reason that you possess, that it is a good reason for a belief that you hold, seems like it's at least sufficient-and possibly even necessary-for you to count as holding your belief on the basis of that reason.6 One worry for doxastic accounts is that they overintellectualize the basing relation, with the result that conceptually unsophisticated agents cannot count as basing beliefs on reasons. Another worry for some epistemologists is that our beliefs can be based on reasons of which we are unaware, or which we have forgotten. If that is correct, it's a problem for doxastic accounts of basing, because we clearly cannot have 5 See Winters (1980), Swain (1981), Audi (1983), Turri (2011), McCain (2012), and Bondy (2016) for various causal accounts of the basing relation. 6 See Tolliver (1982) for a defense of a doxastic account of basing. Lehrer (1971) argues against causal accounts of knowledge, and his central counterexample to the causal account of knowledge (the case of the superstitious lawyer) is also naturally interpreted as an attempt to counterexample causal accounts of the basing relation, in favour of a doxastic account of basing. Setiya (2013) proposes a doxastic account of inferential basing. 7 appropriate meta-beliefs regarding the quality of our reasons if we are unaware of those reasons. So we have purely causal accounts of basing, as well as purely doxastic accounts. Hybrid accounts containing both causal and doxastic conditions have also been proposed, as have other alternative approaches.7 The essays in this volume propose novel analyses of the basing relation, new lines of argument for and objections against various analyses of the basing relation, arguments regarding what sorts of things can stand in basing relations, and interesting and important connections between the basing relation and various other issues in epistemology. II. Overview of Chapters We turn now to an overview of the volume's chapters – sixteen in total – which we've organised into two broad categories: (i) the nature of the basing relation; and (ii) basing and its applications. The former papers are concerned, principally, with positively characterising the epistemic basing relation and criticising extant accounts of it, including extant accounts of the relationship between epistemic basing and propositional and doxastic justification. The latter papers are unified in that they connect epistemic basing with other topics of interest in epistemology as well as ethics, including: epistemic disjunctivism, epistemic injustice, agency, epistemic conservativism, epistemic grounding, epistemic genealogy, practical reasoning, and practical knowledge. This division between the nature of the basing relation and its applications is of course an imperfect one (as there will be some overlap in places), though we hope it will be helpful nonetheless as a way to navigate the volume. 7 For example, Audi (1986) holds that causal and doxastic conditions are both necessary for basing; Korcz (2000) holds that appropriate causal and doxastic conditions are each sufficient for basing; Evans (2013) argues against both causal and doxastic approaches, and in favour of an alternative disposition-based account. 8 II.1. PART ONE: The nature of the basing relation The book begins with a brand-new account of basing defended by Ru Ye in her paper 'A Doxastic-Causal Theory of Epistemic Basing'. The key idea of Ye's account is that a belief is based on a reason just when two conditions hold: first, the reason must cause the belief; in this respect, the view lines up with causal accounts. But, secondly, and here is Ye's theoretical novelty, that the reason causes the belief must itself be because the subject believes that the reason supports the belief. In a bit more detail, the idea is that epistemic basing is a matter of 'causation caused by taking' and the taking must be a belief about evidential support. This proposal, which she calls 'Causation Caused by Believing (CCB), is then argued to both avoid deviant causation and also fit snugly with a plausible view of proper basing. In 'All Evidential Basing is Phenomenal Basing', Andrew Moon's objective is to defend a novel necessary condition on evidential basing, i.e., on what it is for beliefs to be based on evidence. On Moon's proposal, the evidential basing relation obtains between someone's belief and the evidence she has only if the mental state associated with that evidence has phenomenal character, where the phenomenal character of a mental state is the experiential 'what it is like' to be in that mental state. Moon's argument for this thesis – the phenomenal basing thesis – is inductive: across a wide range of cases considered, either the beliefs are not based on evidence or the mental state associated with the relevant evidence has phenomenal character. So, the phenomenal basing thesis is probably true. Hamid Vahid, in 'Dispositions and the Basing Relation', aims to carve out an alternative to causal and doxastic accounts of the basing relation, what he calls the dispositional account of the basing relation. A motivating idea in the paper is that an adequate account of basing must avoid the kind of causal deviance objections that notoriously plague standard 9 causal accounts. Vahid's key move for getting around the problem is to defend a dispositional analysis of how propositional and doxastic justification are related to one another; in particular, the suggestion is that propositional justification is an (epistemic) dispositional property that a subject can have with doxastic justification as its manifestation. Vahid then argues that this account provides the basis of an account of the basing relation that avoids deviant causal chain objections. Luca Moretti and Tommaso Piazza, in 'The Many Ways of the Basing Relation', set out to expand traditional thinking about how well-grounded beliefs must be based on reasons that give the subject propositional justification for those beliefs. They note, as a starting point, that what the basing process involves can be different depending on the kind of reason one has. For example, non-doxastic reasons (e.g., experiences) require a basing process that is immediate in a way that doxastic reasons, which require inference, do not. Moretti and Piazza's novelty is to show that these ways of basing in cases of well-grounded beliefs are not exhaustive, and to accommodate outlier cases, they introduce what they call enthymematic inference, which corresponds with a way of basing that stands apart from the more traditional varieties. John Turri, in his chapter 'Reasons and Basing in Commonsense Epistemology: Evidence from Two Experiments', combines traditional thinking about the nature of the basing relation with non-traditional methodology. Turri begins by arguing for the importance of experimental evidence in our theorising about the closely related notions of basing and epistemic reasons. He then reports the results of two new experiments about our concepts of both: the first experiment lends support to the causal theory of the basing relation, and the second suggests that reasons include both psychological and non-psychological items. In 'Inference and the Basing Relation', Keith Allen Korcz's main objective is to resolve some mistaken ideas about the relationship between epistemic basing and inference, 10 and in particular as regards the latter, whether inferences can occur only among beliefs, and whether an inference must be stated as a premise within an argument. Once these confusions about the nature of inference and its relation to basing are sharpened, Korcz argues, it will help us to appreciate among other things how basing works in cases of analytic truths, and also how to better understand the relationship between propositional and doxastic justification. We (that is, Pat Bondy and Adam Carter) in 'The Superstitious Lawyer's Inference', offer a new diagnosis of what is the most well-known-as well as perhaps the most divisive-case in the basing relation literature: Keith Lehrer's (1971) case of the superstitious lawyer, which Lehrer poses as a counterexample to the causal theory of the basing relation. On our view, and contra Lehrer, the superstitious lawyer case plausibly features both doxastic justification and well-founded basing, even though there are independent reasons (though not those Lehrer or others have adverted to) to think that the target belief falls short of knowledge. We round out Part One of the volume with Errol Lord and Kurt Sylvan's chapter 'Prime Time (for the Basing Relation)', which challenges received thinking about what it takes to believe something for sufficient normative reasons. Their target is what they call the 'Composite View', according to which believing something for a sufficient normative reason involves nothing more than (i) believing on the basis of a motivating reason, and (ii) that motivating reason's corresponding to a sufficient normative reason for that belief, where (i) and (ii) are conditions that could obtain independently of each other. Seeing why the composite view is false and a prime view true, they argue, has important ramifications for our theorising about propositional and doxastic justification, the place of reasons in epistemology and of competence in theories of doxastic justification that appeal to reasons. 11 II.1. PART TWO: Basing and its applications Part Two of the book, which connects basing with other topics of interest in epistemology and ethics, begins with Mona Simion's 'Hermeneutical Injustice as Basing Failure'. Hermeneutical injustice, a key species of epistemic injustice, occurs, according to Fricker's (2007) influential account, when the interpretive resources available to a community render a person's experiences unintelligible to her. Moreover, as Fricker maintains, this unintelligibility must itself be due to the epistemic marginalization of that person or members of her social group. Simion's chapter has two main aims, one negative and the other positive. The negative aim is to show that Fricker's account is too restrictive; it rules out genuine cases of hermeneutical epistemic injustice. Building from this criticism of Fricker, Simion then advances and defends the positive thesis that hermeneutical injustice is unjustly brought about basing failure. An important implication of unpacking hermeneutical injustice in terms of epistemic basing, Simion maintains, is that hermeneutical epistemic injustice can be appreciated as a form of distributive injustice, a point that is elided on Fricker's more restrictive characterization. In 'Agency and the Basing Relation', Ram Neta connects epistemic basing with agency, by criticizing a particular way of thinking about the relationship between epistemic and practical agency defended by Kieran Setiya (2013). Setiya's account of epistemic agency and its relationship to practical agency is predicated on his acceptance of a particular view of basing, according to which to believe that p on the ground that q is to believe that p and that the fact that q is evidence that p. Setiya maintains that if this is right, then, epistemic agency is unlike practical agency in that it does not involve our exercise of a capacity to cause anything – it involves nothing over and above our having certain kinds of belief. Neta argues that even if Setiya's preferred way of thinking of basing were true, this difference between practical and epistemic agency wouldn't follow, though he also argues that basing is in fact 12 not what Setiya assumes it is. An upshot, Neta maintains, is that the very same kind of agency that we find in intentional action can also be found in beliefs and other attitudes. Kevin McCain's chapter 'Epistemic Conservatism and the Basing Relation' attempts to resolve an apparent tension between the causal theory of the basing relation and epistemic conservatism, the view that having a belief confers some positive epistemic status on the content of that belief. The prima facie tension between the two views is this: it looks as though, if the causal theory of basing relation were true, then epistemic conservativism could be true only if a belief could cause itself, which it can't. As McCain argues, this apparent incompatibility between the causal theory of the basing relation and epistemic conservativism boils down to a misunderstanding of epistemic conservatism which, once suitably clarified, suffices to dissipate the puzzle. Miriam McCormick's contribution 'Can Beliefs be Based on Practical Reasons?' answers her title's question in the affirmative. It's uncontroversial that practical reasons can contribute to what one believes in the sense that they can make a different to what one believes. Much more controversial, though, is whether beliefs can be based on practical reasons. Some philosophers, such as Nomy Arpaly (2019; see also Thomas Kelly 2002), have gone so far as to suggest that the very idea of practical reasons for belief is a 'category mistake'. After arguing that beliefs can be, and commonly are, based on practical reasons, McCormick then proceeds to defend the further thesis that in at least some cases, practical reasons can justify the beliefs that are based on them. Duncan Pritchard, in his chapter 'Epistemological Disjunctivism and Factive Bases for Belief', shows how epistemic basing interfaces with a particular way of thinking about rational support in cases of perceptual knowledge. According to epistemological disjunctivism, one's perceptually formed belief can enjoy rational support that is both factive and reflectively accessible (see, e.g., Pritchard 2012). An important commitment of epistemic 13 disjunctivism, Pritchard shows, is that basing is itself distinctively factive. A benefit of the kind of factive basing that epistemological disjunctivism involves is that it can be used in the service of responding to traditional problems for epistemological disjunctivism, including what Pritchard has described elsewhere (e.g., 2012) as the basis problem and the access problem. In his chapter 'From Epistemic Basing to Epistemic Grounding', Jesper Kallestrup shows how epistemic basing differs, despite some similarities, from epistemic grounding, and gives a novel account of the later. The key difference, according to Kallestrup, comes at the level of explanation: an epistemic basis, as a result of which you know, backs causal explanation of knowledge, while an epistemic ground, in virtue of which you know, backs metaphysical (rather than causal) explanation of knowledge. On the account of epistemic grounding Kallestrup proposes and defends, epistemic grounding is a non-primitive relation of asymmetric metaphysical dependence between knowledge and its epistemic ground. Guy Axtell, in 'Well-Founded Belief and the Contingencies of Epistemic Location', takes as a starting point that many of our beliefs in controversial areas (e.g., politics, religion, etc.) are culturally nurtured-viz., historical, temporal, geographical, cultural contingencies often play a significant role in determining how our opinions in these areas take shape. Suppose we reflect on this fact and then conclude that we would be very likely to see our own nurtured belief as both false and tainted by unrecognized bias, were we have been nurtured in a different culture or epistemic community. Should this undermine the wellfoundedness the nurtured beliefs we hold? Axtell's answer is 'no', but this negative answer comes with a range of important qualifications, including some that are in tension with how epistemic conservativists and dogmatists will be inclined to think about the epistemic status of these beliefs. 14 Finally, in 'The Epistemic Basing Relation and Knowledge-That as KnowledgeHow', Stephen Hetherington shows how the platitude that knowledge requires basing can be unpacked on Hetherington's own practicalist conception of propositional knowledge, according to which knowledge-that is a species of knowledge-how (see, e.g., Hetherington 2011a; 2011b). Drawing inspiration from Plato's Statues of Daedalus analogy in the Meno, Hetherington defends the view that proper basing – a kind of 'tethering' relation – is best understood as a kind of knowledge-how, nestled within knowledge-that. References Alston, William. 1985. "Concepts of Epistemic Justification." The Monist 68 (1): 57–89. Arpaly, Nomy. 2019. "Epistemology and the Baffled Action Theorist (ms.) Audi, Robert. 1983. "The Causal Structure of Indirect Justification." Journal of Philosophy 80 (7): 398–415. Audi, Robert. 1986. "Belief, Reason, and Inference." Philosophical Topics 14 (1): 27–65. Bondy, Patrick. 2016. "Counterfactuals and Epistemic Basing Relations." Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 97 (4): 542–569. Bondy, Patrick and J. Adam Carter. 2018. "The Basing Relation and the Impossibility of the Debasing Demon." American Philosophical Quarterly 55 (3): 203–215. Evans, Ian. 2013. "The Problem of the Basing Relation." Synthese 190: 2943–2957. Feldman, Richard, and Earl Conee. 1985. "Evidentialism." Philosophical Studies 48 (1): 15– 34. Goldman, Alvin. 1979. "What is Justified Belief?" In G. Pappas (ed.), Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 1–23. 15 Goldman, Alvin. 1986. Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Harman, Gilbert. 1970. "Knowledge, Reasons, and Causes." Journal of Philosophy 67 (21): 841–855. Hetherington, S. 2011a. How To Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Hetherington, S. 2011b. "Knowledge and Knowing: Ability and Manifestation." In Conceptions of Knowledge, (ed.) S. Tolksdorf. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 73–100. Kelly, Thomas. 2002. "The Rationality of Belief and some other Propositional Attitudes." Philosophical Studies 110: 163-196. Korcz, Keith. 2000. "The Causal-Doxastic Theory of the Basing Relation." Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (4): 525–550. Lehrer, Keith. 1971. "How Reasons Give Us Knowledge, or the Case of the Gypsy Lawyer." Journal of Philosophy 68 (10): 311–13. Leite, Adam. 2004. "On Justifying and Being Justified." Philosophical Issues 14 (1): 219– 253. McCain, Kevin. 2012. "The Interventionist Account of Causation and the Basing Relation." Philosophical Studies 159: 357-382. Plantinga, Alvin. 1993. Warrant and Proper Function. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pritchard, Duncan. 2012. Epistemological Disjunctivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Setiya, Kieran. 2013. "Epistemic Agency: Some Doubts." Philosophical Issues 23: 179–98. Swain, Marshall. 1981. Reasons and Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Tolliver, Joseph. 1982. "Basing Beliefs on Reasons." Grazer Philosophische Studien 15: 149–161. 16 Toulmin, Stephen. 1976. Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to Philosophy. MacMillan, New York/Collier MacMillan, London. Turri, John. 2011. "Believing for a Reason." Erkenntnis 74: 383–397. Winters, Barbara. 1980. "Reasonable Believing." Dialectica 34 (1): 3–15.

Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality Giovanni Rolla Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul Departamento de Filosofia Porto Alegre Brasil [email protected] _________________________________________________________________ Article info CDD: 120 Received: 09.04.2016; Revised: 21.06.2016; Accepted: 23.06.2016 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/0100-6045.2016.V39N3.GR ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ Keywords: Disjunctivism Dream Skepticism Rationality Actionism ____________________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT Based on Pritchard's distinction (2012, 2016) between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds, and on how those grounds bear on the elimination of skeptical possibilities, I present the dream argument as a moderate skeptical possibility that can be reasonably motivated. In order to block the dream argument skeptical conclusion, I present a version of phenomenological disjunctivism based on Noë's actionist account of perceptual consciousness (2012). This suggests that perceptual knowledge is rationally grounded because it is a form of embodied achievement – what I call embodied rationality –, which offers a way of dissolving the pseudo-problem of epistemic immodesty, namely, the seemingly counterintuitive thesis that one can acquire rationally grounded knowledge that one is not in a radical skeptical scenario. ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. Favoring and Discriminating Epistemic Grounds Disjunctivism about perceptual knowledge is not an orthodoxical view: contrary to modern philosophical tradition, one of its main tenets is that perception is sometimes factive and that non-factive states do not have the 6 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. same epistemic status as perception. Alternatively, a disjunctivist might say that there is no epistemic common-level between perception in paradigmatic cases and non-perceptive states, like dreams, hallucinations and illusions. The view is especially relevant against a variation of skeptical argument that hinges on the idea that our experience does not give us a rational basis for believing mundane proposition instead of skeptical hypotheses1. When dealing with skepticism, therefore, factivity is not enough: an interesting version of epistemological disjunctivism has to claim that perception is a factive rational basis for holding beliefs about the external world (at least in paradigmatic cases)2. Henceforth, I will assume the correctness of epistemological disjunctivism. In order to advance the view without committing it with the seemingly absurd consequence that we have rational grounds to discriminate between actual possibilities – say, that there is a goldfinch yonder – and the relevant skeptical hypotheses – e.g., that I am an envatted brain hallucinating a goldfinch – Pritchard (2012, 2016) introduces an independently motivated distinction between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds. Imagine I hold an apple and form the belief that it is a pacific rose apple (p). An interlocutor could ask me how I know it. With this she could mean how I know that p obtains instead of its being a red delicious apple (q). This possibility is a close one, and it seems that I must be able to discriminate a pacific rose apple from a red delicious apple in order to know that p perceptually. Things start to get interesting if we consider local skeptical possibilities. Imagine my interlocutor asks me how I know that it is a pacific rose apple instead of a perfectly manufactured counterfeit apple (r). If this possibility is reasonably well-motivated3 – if we are both well aware that 1 Brueckner (1994) is responsible for bringing this argument, which is now known as the underdetermination skeptical argument, to the contemporary epistemological debate. 2 I am using Pritchard's (2012) formulation, but other philosophers such as Hinton (1967) and McDowell (1982, 2011) express disjunctivist ideas differently. See Haddock and Macpherson (2008) for the differences between the varieties of disjunctivism. 3 'Reasonably' here means 'to be appropriately supported by reasons'. Moreover, as it will become clear in §4, I am not using 'reasonably' and 'rationally' interchangeably. Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 7 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. counterfeit apples are abundant in this area, for instance – then my initial belief that p was temerarious and does not amount to knowledge, for I would be unable to discriminate p from r just from looking. In order to know that p obtains, then, maybe I would need to smell the putative apple, feel its texture more attentively, weight it and so on, which means I would need to appeal to accessible discriminating evidence. It is entirely another matter if r is not reasonably well-motivated. If there is no particular reason to suppose that r could be the case – if my interlocutor asks me out of the blue how do I know that p because r just could be the case – then there is no need to discriminate between p and r from obtaining. Favoring epistemic grounds (such as my current perception and my background knowledge) are enough to support the belief that p over r if r lacks a reasonable motivation4. The crux of the matter, argues Pritchard, is that radical skeptical possibilities, such as being a brain in vat, are necessarily reasonably unmotivated, for there is no particular reason that could be adduced in its support (Pritchard, 2016, p. 141). A skeptic would not (indeed, could not) claim that there is some evidence that supports the possibility that we are envatted brains, for this would be self-defeating. Neither there are accessible discriminating evidences one could discover to rule out radical skeptical possibilities like this one, for such possibilities supposedly undermine all of our putative knowledge at once – that is precisely what makes them radical. However, the epistemological disjunctivist is in a position to say that the propositions we come to believe everyday do enjoy favoring (nondiscriminating) epistemic support over radical skeptical possibilities, since our perception is a factive rational basis for believing. Now, the putative problem of epistemic immodesty arises if we join this view with the closure principle for rationally grounded knowledge – namely: 4 This is analogous to the famous zebra case originally found in Dretske (1970): one sees a zebra in the zoo, but if there are available reasons to suppose that it might be a cleverly disguised mule, then one's epistemic position is surely undermined. In this case, one needs discriminative evidence to dismiss the possibility that it might be a cleverly disguised mule. However, if this possibility is not properly motivated, then one's epistemic position qualifies at least prima facie to knowledge. 8 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. If S rationally knows that p and S competently deduces q from p, forming a belief in q and retaining the rationally grounded knowledge that p, then S rationally knows that q.5 This principle enjoys some intuitive plausibility; it does not look like we could reject it with impunity. Moreover, epistemological disjunctivism per se offers no ground for the rejection of the principle, which is indeed an advantage of the view. If we combine epistemological disjunctivism with this closure principle, it follows that we can acquire rationally grounded knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses. That we know in a rationally grounded way (even if not discriminatively) that we are not brains in vats, for instance, is what Pritchard takes to be a case of epistemic immodesty. He writes: [...] If the epistemological disjunctivist extends her anti-skeptical line to this form of radical skepticism [closure-based radical skepticism] by contending that we can have rationally grounded knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, then it can look like an unduly strong response to the problem of radical skepticism [...] Epistemological disjunctivism, so construed, seems committed to embracing a kind of epistemic immodesty, in that intuitively we are unable to have rationally grounded knowledge of these propositions [denials of radical skeptical hypotheses]. (Pritchard, 2016, p. 179-180) Epistemic immodesty consists in the possibility of acquiring rationally grounded knowledge – as opposed to mere externalist knowledge – of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, which seems to be a case of dogmatism. On a conception of rationality according to which to be epistemically rational implies to possess available reasons to believe (a conception we will challenge bellow), it is unintuitive to say that we have conclusive factive reasons to believe that radical skeptical hypotheses are 5 Pritchard (2016, p. 13) calls this formulation diachronic because it differs from the classical formulation namely: if one knows that p and knows that p entails q, one knows that q. Moreover, and importantly, the diachronic version of the principle avoids uninteresting counterexamples that affect the classical formulation. Without the restriction of rationally grounded knowledge, Williamson (2000, p. 117) originally expressed this principle diachronically under the name of intuitive closure. Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 9 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. false. This unappealing consequence would compel us to reject the disjunctivist thesis or the closure principle. Since this version of the closure principle is at least as plausible as epistemological disjunctivism, and that there is no independent ground to suppose both should be abandoned together, epistemic immodesty would motivate a reductio of disjunctivism itself. Alternatively, one might argue, the fact that epistemological disjunctivism entails epistemic immodesty turns out to weaken epistemological disjunctivism in comparison with other anti-skeptical positions, such as epistemological contextualism, which would concede to the skeptic that in certain contexts we do not know that radical skeptical hypotheses are false (thus being "epistemically modest"). We will inquire in §§4 and 5 whether epistemic immodesty really is as problematic as it might seem. I resist the temptation to reject disjunctivism based on this consequence, for I contend that a more inclusive notion of epistemic rationality dissolves the apparent problem of epistemic immodesty. For now, we must take a closer look at moderate skeptical possibilities and see how they fit the schema of discriminating and favoring epistemic support (§§2 and 3). 2. Dream Skepticism and Phenomenological Conjunctivism If radical skeptical possibilities are reasonably unmotivated by their very nature because they could not be supported by particular reasons, then a moderate skeptical possibility could, at least in principle, be reasonably motivated at the expense of having a narrower scope. The dream possibility fits the bill because it is possible to offer reasons in its favor, although it is traditionally taken to be less effective than the Evil Genius and similar hypotheses6. As a motivation, one could say most people often dream and, when they are dreaming, they falsely take those dreams to be veridical 6 Since at least Descartes' Meditations, dream possibilities are taken to be ineffective against a priori knowledge. Even if this kind of knowledge does not exist, some general facts about our constitution – such as that we are sometimes awake and that most people dream, etc. – are presupposed by the dream argument and could not be threatened by it. 10 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. representations of their surroundings. If we can reasonably motivate this moderate skeptical possibility, then mere favoring epistemic support in favor of p is not enough to rule out the possibility of dreaming that p (and, obviously, p not being the case), for one must be able to discriminate between perceiving that p and dreaming that p. This is a consequence of the thesis that a reasonably well-motivated alternative can only be discarded if a subject has discriminating epistemic support against it. Put in another way, the idea is that, for a large class of believed propositions about the external world, there is the nearby possibility of entertaining these propositions in a dreaming state, and this modal proximity is what makes the dream possibility so acute. One could argue, then, in the following fashion: (I) If S has rationally grounded knowledge that p then S is able to achieve rationally grounded discriminative knowledge that she is not dreaming. (II) S is unable to achieve rationally grounded discriminative knowledge that she is not dreaming. :. (III) S does not have rationally grounded knowledge that p. (I) is based on the closure principle for rationally grounded knowledge, which seems to be beyond dispute. Therefore, if we want to reject the skeptical conclusion in (III), we must take a closer look at (II) and the motivation that lies behind it. The philosophical platitude that one is unable to achieve rationally grounded knowledge, in particular of a discriminative sort, that one is not dreaming is anchored in a phenomenological thesis – call it phenomenological conjunctivism: The content C of S's waking experience is phenomenologically indistinguishable, from S's point of view at any given time, from a content D of S's possible dreaming experience. The justification for phenomenological conjunctivism is the fact that, when we are dreaming, we misleadingly take oneiric experiences as veridical representations of our surroundings, in a way that we are unable to distinguish between dreaming and perceiving. Therefore, in order to avoid the skeptical conclusion in (III), we need to undermine the phenomenological conjunctivist thesis, and this in turn depends on examining whether this fact supports phenomenological conjunctivism. One way to do so is to dispute the fact itself (or the way this fact is usually construed). This can be done by claiming that we do not believe in the contents of our dreams, for dreaming that p and believing that p are Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 11 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. different mental events. Sosa (2007) explores this view based on the distinction between events that happen in dream and events that happen while one dreams7. Events in dream may encompass belief-like states, but that is different from the beliefs one has while awake and that survive in the background of one's conscience while dreaming. One could reinforce this distinction by arguing that believing is in principle open to rational evaluation, while dreaming is not. One should, after all, review one's beliefs given the accessible evidences, but it seems entirely out of place to rationally evaluate a belief-like state that happens in a dream. One problem with this line of response is that it ignores what happens when one entertains a lucid dream, for lucid dreams do not seem to be completely devoid of doxastic states – indeed, it is reported that lucid dreamers are able to perform certain tasks, like counting time in the dream (LaBerge, 2000). Moreover, contrary to what Sosa claims, it is quite possible to believe in what happens in a dream during a waking experience: several times I seem to suddenly remember something during the day – say, that there were some fruits in the fridge – only to find out later that I had dreamt it. In this case, it seems that fragments of the dream played a doxastic role and could be rationally assessed in a waking experience. I can open the fridge in the morning and become genuinely surprised to find out there were no fruits there. Nightmares can serve as counterexamples as well: often when a dream takes a bad turn, one wakes up believing that so-and-so happened and it takes a while, and maybe a good deal of ambientation, to realize it had not. This suggests that a belief (or a belief-like state, if you will) formed in dream can transcend the dreaming state and become open to rational evaluation in a waking experience. If this is so, the idea of distinguishing beliefs from oneiric belief-like states does not seem appealing and the fact that we often take dreams to be veridical representations remains unscathed. There is indeed an available alternative: to question whether the fact about our inability to distinguish in-dreams states from veridical states lends 7 Wittgenstein (1969) proposes a similar strategy: 'The argument "I may be dreaming" is senseless for this reason: if I am dreaming, this remark is being dreamed as well and indeed it is also being dreaming that these words have any meaning' (§383). See also §676. 12 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. the necessary support for phenomenological conjunctivism. Remember that phenomenological conjunctivism is a general thesis about the indistinguishability of a waking content C, from S's point of view at any given time, from a content D of a possible dreaming experience. The fact that's under scrutiny, however, is that we cannot discriminate dream from reality in dream. I submit it is a non-sequitur to arrive at the general thesis from this fact, for it is plainly possible to discriminate waking experience from dreaming experience while awake. There is a grain of truth on asking for someone to pinch you to see whether you are dreaming (anecdotal as it may be), for waking experience is different from dreaming experience in a substantial way8. This point has been made in a slightly different tune by a few philosophers. Austin's enlightening thoughts on the matter deserve to be quoted at some length: [...] We have the phrase 'a dream-like quality'. Some waking experiences are said to have this dream-like quality, and some artists and writers occasionally try to impart it, usually with scant success, to their works. But of course, if the fact [that 'delusive and veridical experiences' are not 'qualitatively different'] here alleged were a fact, the phrase would be perfectly meaningless, because applicable to everything. If dreams were not 'qualitatively' different from waking experience, then every waking experience would be like a dream; the dream-like quality would be, not difficult to capture, but impossible to avoid. (Austin, 1962, pp. 48-49). Similarly, and more to the point, here is Rödl: From the fact that, when I am fooled, I do not know that I am, it does not follow that, when I am not fooled, I do not know that I am not. When I know that p as I perceive it to be the case, then I know 8 Sosa intends to defend this conclusion by the distinction we mentioned above. Therefore, Sosa and I share the same conclusion, but I offer a different rationale. Here is his view on the matter: 'What enables us to distinguish the two contentidentical states is just the fact that in the dream state we do not affirm anything- not that we are veridically perceiving an external world, nor that we are not- whereas in waking life we do knowingly perceive our surroundings. This by our lights suffices to make the two states distinguishable.' (Sosa, 2007, pp. 18-19). Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 13 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. that I perceive that p. Thus I am in a position to distinguish my situation from any possible situation in which I would be fooled, for, in any such situation, I would not perceive that p, while in the given situation I do. (Rödl, 2007, p. 158) If we hold on to the idea that waking experience is fundamentally different from dreaming experience, then we are straightforwardly committed to the rejection of phenomenological conjunctivism: it is not the case that waking and dreaming experiences share the same phenomenology and are, therefore, indistinguishable. So it seems that, in order to deal with dream skepticism, we have to think of experience in terms of phenomenological disjunctivism. However, this result is dialectically insufficient to reject the premise on the skeptical argument that says it is humanly impossible to achieve rationally grounded discriminative knowledge that one is not dreaming, because we still need a reasonable explanation of how can we distinguish reality from dreaming. What exactly is present in a case and absent in the other? 3. Actionism and Phenomenological Disjunctivism 3.1. Motivations and Relevance Recently Alva Noë proposed an independently motivated account of perceptual consciousness – what he called enactive approach (2004) and actionism (2012) – which offers a plausible rationale for phenomenological disjunctivism9. The basic tenet of this view is that conscious perception is an activity performed by the exercise of sensorimotor abilities. This means that the content of one's conscious perception is constituted by the practical way one can engage with the world. Actionism is a phenomenological account that aims to do justice to our perceptual experience. Its main motivation is to explain two related facts 9 For a classical work on the subject of embodied mind, see Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991). As a critique of the philosophical consequences Noë draws from the experiments we mention bellow, see Prinz (2009). It is beyond the scope of this paper to present an extensive defense of this view. 14 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. about our encounter with objects without appealing to representations as internal models of the world: first, the fact that perception is a perspectival event but is also about the objects themselves, in a sense regardless of the perceiver's point of view. For instance, as I look at a plate on the table, it seems to be oval or oblong from my current perspective, but I also perceive it as being round. In the second place, actionism explains the fact that objects present themselves as facets but also as wholes: as I look at the bookshelf in front of me, I see aspects of books, mostly their covers, but it is also plausible to say I am perceiving the books, not just slices of books. Both facts of our phenomenology are explained by the appeal to sensorimotor knowledge: I perceive the plate as round because I dispose of the practical knowledge to move and engage with the different aspects of it that unfold in my experience, and this practical knowledge allows me to grasp what stays constant when I perceive the plate, its roundness, and what shifts when I move around, its look or appearance. That I perceive objects in their entirety despite seeing only facets of them is explained by the virtual accessibility provided by my sensorimotor abilities to navigate in the environment: I perceive books and not only slices of their covers because I have the know-how to assume different perspectives and integrate them in a dynamic experience10. Actionism is also in tune with empirical findings: cases of what Noë calls experiential blindness count as direct support in its favor (2004, pp. 8-11). Those cases are exemplified by experiments where a subject wears glasses with inverted lenses, which cause left and right (or up and down) to be switched in her visual field. The subjects in these experiments at first fail to integrate their perceptual stimuli and experience a period of confusion (Stratton 1897, Kohler 1951 and Taylor 1962). In a second stage, they slowly relearn how to operate with these stimuli and come to entertain episodes of conscious perception as if they were not wearing inverted lenses. Finally, when the lenses are removed, they undergo a period of confusion similar to 10 Noë also aims to explain our perception of colors through actionism (Cf. Noë, 2004, chapter 4): although surfaces hardly are uniformly colored, we are perfectly able to distinguish the actual shade of a surface from the variations caused by the way light reflects on it on different angles. Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 15 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. the one at the first stage and have to relearn once again how to operate with their perceptual stimuli. The best explication of what happens in these cases is that the subject is partially blind due to the 'inability to integrate sensory stimulation with patterns of movement and thought' (Noë 2004, p. 4), which is exactly what actionism predicts. As for indirect support, competing views fail to explain cases of change blindness, where an individual does not consciously perceive changes that happen in her perceptual field (see Noë 2004, pp. 51-54, idem 2012, p. 93). This argument depends on the uncontentious premise that the environment we inhabit is heavily detailed. If our perception were pictorial, in the sense that it would capture all the details available in a single 'mental scene', then changes in the details of the environment would cause changes in perception. But this is not what happens. Experiments show we are prone to fail to perceive significant changes within our perceptual field if our attention is focused elsewhere (O'Reagan et al. 2000). Therefore, the phenomenon of change blindness shows that 'we don't make use of detailed internal models of the scene.' (Noë 2004, p. 52). In order to entertain states of conscious perception, then, we have to navigate through the environment, and this can only be done by the exercise of our sensorimotor abilities: from saccades to movements of the whole body. According to Noë's actionism, perceptual consciousness is an embodied achievement – it necessarily involves an interaction with the environment, as the epistemological disjunctivist claims (see Noë 2012, pp. 63-67 for this same point) – and, more importantly, it requires the effective exercise of certain abilities that are not strictly intellectual, such as the ability to move one's own body in order to access what is available11. Here is Noë on the matter: 11 As Noë himself notices (2012, p. 69), the view bears some resemblance to conceptualism about perceptual experience, because experience is not given, instead it is mediated by one's understanding in this case, practical understanding. Practical understanding or sensorimotor abilities would play a role analogous to the one played by concepts in the conceptualist view. Unless we are willing to stretch the very idea of conceptual capacities in order encompass sensorimotor abilities (which indeed was Noë's (2004) view on the matter), actionism does not amount to conceptualism. Note that an actionist approach to conceptual content seems to imply the rejection of Evans' Generality Constraint (Evans 1984, p. 75), according 16 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. [...] Conscious reference is, in general, an achievement of the understanding. To see something – that is, for something to show up for one in conscious visual experience – or to refer in thought to something – that is, for it to show up in one's conscious thoughts – is a matter of skillful access to the thing. [...] Conscious reference is a relation between a skillful person and a really existing thing. Where there is no really existing thing there can be no access or genuine availability; at most there can be the illusion of such. But the mere existence of the intentional object is not sufficient to guarantee that our thought or experience can involve it; for thought or experience to involve the object, the perceiver must be comprehending. (Noë, 2012, p. 27) The view that our experience is constituted by our sensorimotor abilities to access the world is directly relevant to our present puzzle, because it offers a plausible explanation of the difference in kind between waking and dreaming experiences – thus justifying phenomenological disjunctivism. The idea here is that our dreaming experiences are not the result of a successful exercise of our sensorimotor abilities (nevertheless it is quite plausible that a different set of abilities is necessary for dreaming, which would explain the possibility of lucid dreaming and the fact that some people do not dream). This in turn explains why our experience is richer and significantly more consistent in actual perception: because we can navigate through our environment and access its details, while in dreaming there is no movement and practical understanding involved12. So (II) on the to which an individual possessing conceptual capacities would be capable of generating an infinite number of thoughts. The reason for the rejection of the Generality Constraint is that, on the actionist view, the exercise of an individual's abilities are constrained by the environment she inhabits and could not be reproducible infinitely. 12 Noë, 2004, p. 214 draws a similar conclusion. He is not worried with dream skepticism in particular (indeed, he explicitly sets aside the question), but rather with answering the internalist objection that, if sensorimotor abilities were necessary for perception, how could we explain dream states? The common ground here is of course the fact that there is no sensorimotor abilities involved in dreaming experiences and Noë's reply consists in explaining that waking and dreaming Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 17 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. skeptical argument above is false, and the argument from (I)-(III) is not solid. Moreover, if epistemological disjunctivism is a stronger anti-skeptical thesis when understood also in terms of a variation of phenomenological disjunctivism, in this case, the one supported by actionism; and if both actionism and disjunctivism consistently explain the differences between perceptual states and defective states – actionism through a phenomenological route and disjunctivism through an epistemological one – then the explanation of these differences offered by the combination of the two accounts is more robust than the one offered by epistemological disjunctivism or by actionism separately In the next two sections, I intend to show that if one is willing to accept actionism as the motivation for phenomenological disjunctivism in order to solve the skeptical puzzle based on the dream possibility, then epistemic immodesty – the apparently problematic consequence of epistemological disjunctivism and closure – is not really problematic at all, given a more inclusive notion of rationality suggested by an actionist view. But first we will take a closer look on what means to take actionism as an anti-skeptical thesis. 3.2. Actionism as an Anti-Skeptical Thesis One could object that actionism is unable to properly motivate a response to the dream skeptical argument because it is an empirical thesis. This is a controversial claim, for actionism is intended to be an account of our perceptual experience – and, although it does enjoy empirical support (both direct and indirect), it is unclear whether describing our perceptual experience by appealing to our bodily skills is question-begging. After all, actionism seems to be an accurate account because we are embodied creatures, and supposing from the beginning that the only fitting kind of answer to the skeptic has to dispense our bodies and to depend exclusively on internal representations is to gratuitously shift the burden of the proof. However, in order to answer this objection, we can concede that actionism is empirically motivated, but this does not undermine our overall experiences are radically different precisely because sensorimotor skills are absent in dreaming states. 18 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. strategy. As said in §1, we are assuming the correctness of epistemological disjunctivism and trying to avoid construing the consequence that we can have rationally grounded knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses as a case of epistemic immodesty. The core disjunctivist idea is that perception yields a factive rational basis for believing and that nonperceptual states do not have the same epistemic status as perception. This allows us to block the skeptical argument according to which we are not entitled to rely on our perceptual states, because they would have the same epistemic status as deceptive states, and thus would not yield knowledge. So if epistemological disjunctivism is correct, we are entitled to take our perceptual states as sources of knowledge if we find ourselves in good epistemic circumstances. Among those perceptual states are the ones that support actionism, such as observations of our own experience and the relation it holds with our sensorimotor abilities and the empirical evidence in support of actionism. There is a condition, however, that must be satisfied for epistemological disjunctivism to allow us to rely on an empirically based claim, viz.: that there are no reasonably well-motivated possibilities of mistake. If any such possibility is available, we do not find ourselves in good epistemic circumstances and should withhold our judgements concerning our perceptual states. Here one might take the skeptic's point as fundamental and argue that, given the dream possibility, we have to prove beforehand that we can acquire rationally grounded knowledge that we are not dreaming. This strategy could be properly said to be a refutation of the skeptical argument, and it does not seem like it can be done with anything less than a transcendental argument. I suggest a more cautious stance: there is no prior reason to suppose that the skeptic's point is more fundamental than common sense. Therefore, instead of refuting the skeptic, we aim to explain what is wrong with the skeptical argument by appealing to a commonsensical view according to which we have plenty of knowledge. On this strategy, skeptical arguments are taken to be pseudo-paradoxes, for they are constituted by prima facie plausible premises which entail unacceptable consequences. The strategy deployed here consists in explaining why a premise of the skeptical argument is merely apparently plausible, but is Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 19 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. actually misleading and should be rejected13. This process is epistemologically relevant not only because it shows where exactly the skeptical argument goes astray, but also because it exposes features of our cognition that, if ignored, lead to unappealing consequences. Specifically in the case of the dream skeptical argument, we saw in §§2 and 3.1 that the premise (II), according to which one cannot acquire rationally grounded discriminative knowledge that one is not dreaming, is not only unjustified but also arguably false. 4. Embodied Rationality Recall that epistemological disjunctivism is the thesis that perception is a rational factive basis for holding beliefs about the external world. If I know perceptually that p, and if the rational basis for my perceptual belief does transfer across the known entailment that I am not a brain in a vat, then I am able to acquire the rationally grounded knowledge that I am not a brain in a vat. This result is what Pritchard calls epistemic immodesty, and it does seem to be too strong of a consequence. This is so because usually when talking about rationality – hence about rationally grounded knowledge – philosophers have in mind something as the possession of reasons that entail or non-deductively support the target belief. Ideally, those reasons can be articulated and brought about by a rational individual with the relevant conceptual skills when he or she is questioned. Call this the narrow conception of rationality, because it demands that the individual whose rationality we are assessing possesses a set of sophisticated cognitive skills. It follows that small children and non–human animals are a-rational for they do not fit this view normative framework. It is something along these lines that Pritchard has in mind when he says that disjunctivism, as a philosophical position, enables us to have rationally grounded knowledge of mundane propositions (although he is not explicit about it). And this would be, indeed, one of the biggest gains of assuming a 13 This is why the specific strategy I endorse is close to the one Pritchard calls 'undercutting' anti-skeptical strategy (Pritchard, 2012), for it aims not to respond to the skeptic, but to diagnose what is wrong with her argument. 20 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. disjunctivist position: the fact that one perceives that p is the rational source of one's belief that p, which entails p in appropriate conditions. There is nothing mysterious in citing this fact as the rational source of belief formation: 'I know because I see it'. However, on this view of rationality, it certainly sounds odd to say that any perceived fact is a rational basis for denying a radical skeptical hypothesis, given that individuals in skeptical scenarios and in non-skeptical cases (like the real world) would seem to share the same phenomenological states. However, actionism enables us to reject this premise, for individuals in skeptical scenarios – as these are traditionally conceived – trivially do not enact their perceptual content. A brain in a vat has no body to exercise its sensorimotor abilities and thus lacks perceptual experiences altogether – as a radical disjunctivist would certainly predict. But what does this tell us about rationality? The view I am proposing here is that to perceive that p is a rational basis of belief formation not because we can cite the fact that p as the source and justification of the relevant belief, but because to perceive that p is a form of achievement, particularly, an embodied achievement. It is with this account of rational cognition as achievement in mind that I suggest the following general definition of rationality, call it embodied rationality thesis: S is a rational agent iff S is able to achieve a specific goal through the exercise of the relevant abilities in suitable conditions. A perceptually conscious agent is rational, according to this view, because she achieves perceptual content (and forms beliefs correspondingly) by exercising her sensorimotor abilities in her interaction with the environment. Note that the ability to achieve a specific goal is dispositional and it implies some sort of stability, so it has to cover a large class of cases, for rational procedures are not compatible with lucky achievements. One can cash out this notion in modal terms: an agent is rational in achieving a specific goal if she achieves the same goal in most or all nearby possible worlds wherein she exercises the same abilities with the same end. Secondly, and relatedly, the notion of 'relevant ability' is intentionally vague, for the capacity to overcome shortcomings in which the specific abilities are not Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 21 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. available (or could not be properly exercised) is quite intuitively a distinctive aspect of rational individuals14. The embodied rationality thesis is broader than the narrow notion mentioned above for two reasons. Firstly, it covers paradigmatic cases both of epistemic and of practical rationality. Note that if perception fundamentally depends on practical understanding, then the distinction between practical and epistemic rationality becomes somewhat blurred when it comes to perception as a source of rationally grounded knowledge15. Therefore, it is an advantage of the embodied view of rationality that it does not offer a clear cut between epistemic and practical rationality. Secondly, it is consistent with the idea, which is central to the narrow notion, that if a belief has some sort of appropriate propositional support, it is rationally held. For deductive and non-deductive justification certainly are cases of achievement of specific goals (deductively demonstrated belief or inductively justified belief16) through the exercise of the relevant abilities (inferential abilities, recognition of inferential patterns, sensitivity to reason and to new evidences) in suitable conditions (Gettier-style cases and skeptical scenarios aside). What the embodied rationality thesis explicitly rejects is the conditional that, if a belief is rationally held, then it enjoys some sort of appropriate propositional support. The reason for that is that now we can appreciate other forms of rationality in a more inclusive normative view, for non-human animals and small children are also able to successfully engage with their environment, in different levels and with different abilities (something that is corroborated by an evolutionary view) and form beliefs correspondingly17. 14 Variety and creativity in problem-solving strategies is fundamental for most conceptions of intelligence as well see Cianciolo & Sternberg (2004), mainly Sternberg's notion of successful intelligence (1995) -, plausible because intelligence and rationality are closely related. 15 Note that the appeal to an actionist theory of perceptual knowledge is not sufficient to entail that all knowledge-that is a kind of knowledge-how (or depends on practical understanding) such as the view defended by Hetherington (2011). 16 For simplicity, I am supposing here that abductive inferences are a subclass of inductive inferences. 17 Of course, that is not to say that humans and non-human animals share the same basic form of access to the world. On the contrary, the view we are advocating here 22 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. Now, we distinguished two conditionals, both of which are central to the narrow notion of rationality. One is that if a belief has some sort of appropriate propositional support, it is rationally held – call this the inclusivist conditional – and the other one is if a belief is rationally held, then it enjoys some sort of appropriate propositional support – call this the exclusivist conditional. What could be the rationales behind both conditionals? Certainly the idea behind the inclusivist conditional is that of truthconduciveness, for deductively valid inferences are truth preserving and inductively good inferences enhance the chances of its target belief being true. But note that being true is not the main aspect of the rationale for the inclusivist conditional, for a belief can be accidentally true and thus fail to qualify as rationally held belief. What is important here is the idea of achieving true beliefs through certain methods (specifically, in this case, deductive and non-deductive reasoning), and this is why the inclusivist conditional is contemplated by the embodied notion of rationality. As for the exclusivist conditional, its rationale seems to rest in a confusion between, on the one hand, the act of making explicit the rational support a belief might have and, on the other, the rational status an agent might have independently of this act. This confusion arises in a similar manner when the topic is epistemic justification, as noticed by Alston (1988) – for focusing on our practices of giving reasons and responding to challenges inevitably leads us to the idea that only beliefs justify other beliefs. This is so because, if we partake in the dialogical game of giving and demanding justifications, we have to explicitly articulate them as propositions which we endorse. Similarly, we can focus on whether a propositional attitude is rational, given an available procedure to arrive at that attitude or we can focus on whether an individual is rational in having that attitude, given certain behavior that is explanatory of her attitude. The former forces a constraint of propositionality upon our view of rationality – ensures that individuals possessing different abilities engage with the world differently, and thus instantiate different forms of rationality. How complex an individual's abilities are and how rich is her conceptual scheme are elements that transform the rationality she instantiates on her engagement with the world this is why this view represents a transformative conception of rationality, as presented by Boyle (forthcoming). Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 23 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. hence the narrow notion – while the later allows us to say that an individual is rational by achieving certain goals through specific abilities. I find no independent reason to choose the first view, which entails the exclusivist conditional, instead of the second – unless one is supposing from the start that any broad notion of rationality is false. 5. Epistemic Immodesty Recall that epistemic immodesty – the idea that one can acquire rationally grounded knowledge that one is not in a skeptical scenario – is a seemingly unappealing consequence of epistemological disjunctivism conjoined with the closure principle for rationally grounded knowledge. The distinction between favoring and discriminating epistemic grounds does not ease the discomfort, for even the possibility of acquiring non-discriminative rationally grounded knowledge that one is not in a skeptical scenario seems to be too strong. Pritchard's attempt to solve this puzzle is inspired by some of Wittgenstein's (1969) remarks on our epistemic practices, according to which all rational evaluations are local, viz., some propositions cannot be assessed in a rational inquiry. More to the point, according to Pritchard we cannot rationally evaluate the denials of skeptical hypotheses, because propositions, like 'I am not a brain in a vat', codify or express our hinge commitments, which are 'visceral commitments on our part, commitments that must be in place in order to create the rational arena in which rational evaluations function' (Pritchard, 2016, p. 175). If this is the case, then hinge commitments cannot constitute (or be translated to, or be codified by) beliefs, for beliefs are essentially open to rational evaluation. A fortiori, they cannot qualify as knowledgeable propositions18. On this view, one cannot even form the belief (let alone the knowledge-apt belief) that one is not a brain in a vat on the ground that one perceives something to be the case, even if one's perception is factive and rationally grounded. The closure 18 Pritchard is careful to distinguish the view that hinge commitments cannot constitute (or be translated to, or be codified by) beliefs from the stronger thesis that hinge commitments are not propositional. One contender of the later view is Moyal-Sharrock (2004). 24 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. principle for rationally grounded knowledge, then, would not apply to this sort of case. Aside of creating an exception to the relevant closure principle, what may sound puzzling about Pritchard's strategy is that it seems entirely possible to believe that one is not a victim in a skeptical scenario. In order to accommodate this appearance, Pritchard has to deny that the phenomenology of our mental states is a privileged way of determining their nature. He writes: This [hinge] commitment may feel like belief to the person concerned, in that its phenomenology may be identical to other, more mundane, beliefs that the subject holds. But the import of this point is moot once we remember that the phenomenology of a propositional attitude does not suffice to determine what propositional attitude is in play (Pritchard, 2016, p. 102). Pritchard then offers the example of wishful thinking as a justification for the claim that the phenomenology of our mental states is not a reliable indicator of their nature. Note, however, that wishful thinking is not a standard case, unlike believing, which would explain why an individual who thinks wishfully has a propensity to fail to identify the nature of her mental state. Moreover, Pritchard is here advocating some sort of phenomenological conjunctivism, which would bring us back to dream skepticism (in particular, our solution to the dream skeptical argument, which consists in rejecting II, would not be available). The advantage of the embodied notion of rationality on this matter is that it offers a less onerous solution to the apparent problem of epistemic immodesty – and it is also Wittgensteinian in spirit (although I am not interested in presenting a faithful exegesis here). The idea is that the attitudes concerning the propositions that codify our hinge commitments – such as 'here is a hand' – do not come for free. They are not the goal of a rational evaluation, in the sense that they could not enjoy rational support narrowly conceived (at least in most normal circumstances). But they are achieved by the way we engage with the world, which is explained by our sensorimotor abilities. Our attitudes concerning these propositions then, on the light of the embodied rationality thesis, are rational. The same applies to the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses: we Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 25 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. form the beliefs in the denials of radical skeptical possibilities based on the successful exercise of our sensorimotor abilities: it is because we are successfully interacting with the world that we believe we are not brains in vats for instance. Since beliefs like these are achieved through the exercise of our relevant abilities in suitable conditions, we are rational in believing that we are not victims in skeptical scenarios. Furthermore, given epistemological disjunctivism, our perception in good circumstances is factive – it follows that the beliefs in the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses constitute rationally grounded knowledge.19 This point is on a par with some of Wittgenstein's (1969) passages that show a struggle with the finding that rational evaluations are dependent upon something that is not open to rational evaluation itself, namely our most fundamental practices: Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end;but the end is not certain propositions' striking us immediately as true, i.e. it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game. (§204, my emphasis) [...] As if giving grounds did not come to an end sometime. But the end is not an ungrounded presupposition: it is an ungrounded way of acting. (§110, my emphasis).20 That our epistemic practices of 'giving grounds' are based on 'an ungrounded way of acting' is a way of expressing the locality of our rational evaluations, for we cannot adduce reasons in support of our most fundamental presuppositions, our hinge commitments. But it does not follow from this fact that 'our acting' is irrational, not as long as one conceives of rationality as something embodied. Epistemic immodesty, then, is not a problem on this view because we cannot but act the way we do, viz., by engaging with the world through the cognitive apparatus we are endowed with. This consequence is best understood not as a matter of 19 Note that the claim I am advancing here is bolder than the idea that we are pragmatically justified in accepting that we are not victims in skeptical scenarios. For this view, see Wright (2004). 20 See also §§148, 232 and 342. 26 Giovanni Rolla Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. immodesty, but as a depiction of our constitution as cognitive agents. This is also obliquely contemplated by Wittgenstein for, although it is a contingent matter which hinge commitments we hold fast to in order for our rational evaluations to be possible, that some need to stay put is not contingent21: But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest with the assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put (§343)22. 6. Concluding Remarks The suggestion that rationality is not something purely intellectual and unconstrained by our worldly actions arises naturally from the sort of actionist account of perception I proposed as a solution to the dream argument. This view then allows us to say that epistemic immodesty is not a problematic consequence of epistemological disjunctivism and closure for rationally grounded knowledge, because it is not problematic at all. But it also has a consequence that seems to be counterintuitive or straightforwardly unacceptable: individuals in skeptical scenarios do not engage with the world – by the most intuitive way to construe such scenarios – and could not, therefore, be said to be rational if we accept the embodied view of rationality. They achieve nothing, they fail systematically. Nonetheless, it seems that we can imagine the victims in skeptical scenarios as being epistemically responsible and avoiding inferential pitfalls – which is something cardinal to any intuitive notion of rationality. How can the view defended here deal with this objection? This is a problem to be addressed in the future. 21 Wittgenstein addresses the fact that there is not sharp and definitive distinction between our hinge commitments and the rest of our rational evaluations with the riverbed metaphor (§§96-99). 22 See also §§152 and 235. Epistemic Immodesty and Embodied Rationality 27 Manuscrito – Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 39, n. 3, pp. 528, jul.-set. 2016. Bibliography ALSTON, W. "An Internalist Externalism." Synthese 74, PP. 265–83, 1988. AUSTIN, J. L. Sense and Sensibilia. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. BOYLE, M. "Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique." European Journal of Philosophy. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:8641840. Forthcoming. BRUECKNER, A. "The Structure of the Skeptical Argument." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (4), pp. 143–59, 1994. CIANCIOLO, A, T., STERNBERG, R. J. Intelligence a Brief History. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. DRETSKE, F. "Epistemic Operators." 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Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? forthcoming in Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy (penultimate draft; please cite published version) Graham Clay, University of Notre Dame Michael Rauschenbach, Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine Abstract We argue that prevailing definitions of Berkeley's idealism fail to rule out a nearby Spinozist rival view that we call 'mind-body identity panpsychism.' Since Berkeley certainly does not agree with Spinoza on this issue, we call for more care in defining Berkeley's view. After we propose our own definition of Berkeley's idealism, we survey two Berkeleyan strategies to block the mind-body identity panpsychist and establish his idealism. We argue that Berkeley should follow Leibniz and further develop his account of the mind's unity. Unity-not activity-is the best way for Berkeley to establish his view at the expense of his panpsychist competitors. 1. Introduction In teaching, when we need a paradigmatic idealist, we point to Berkeley. Whether Leibniz and Kant are idealists is complicated-or so we tell our students-but Berkeley, he is an idealist. This confidence flows from a broad consensus that Berkeley is an idealist.1 Given the breadth of this consensus, one might naturally assume that there is a definition of his idealism that enjoys the status of a standard and also distinguishes his position from nearby competitors. In this paper, we argue that the prevailing definitions of Berkeley's idealism fail to explicitly rule out a nearby rival view endorsed by Spinoza that we call 'mind-body identity panpsychism.' Since Berkeley certainly does not agree with Spinoza about mind-body identity panpsychism, we call for more care in defining Berkeley's view. Next, we argue that this problem is a symptom of broader definitional issues surrounding idealism and panpsychism. We then propose a more discriminating definition of Berkeley's idealism. Finally, we survey two Berkeleyan lines of thought which might help Berkeley block the mind-body identity panpsychist and establish his idealism. We argue, with reference both to challenges presented by Spinoza and to problems with contemporary formulations of the view, that Berkeley should follow Leibniz and further develop his account of the unity of the mind. Berkeley must differentiate between minds and bodies to separate himself from his panpsychist competitors. The alternative differentiator, the mind's activity, is important to Berkeley but it is not up to the task. 1 An anonymous reviewer points out that despite Berkeley's status as the idealist par excellence in philosophy today, Berkeley himself never uses the term 'idealism,' which is most likely an invention by later German philosophers and historians of philosophy in the mid to late 1700s. Indeed, Wolff may be its inventor (see Guyer & Horstmann 2018). Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach 2. Incomplete Definitions Since the definitions of Berkeley's idealism one finds in the literature converge significantly, there seems to be something of a standard or, at least, several nearby standards. However, these definitions all fail to distinguish Berkeley's position from a nearby rival view. Consider the following definitions: A. Ordinary objects are only collections of ideas, which are mind-dependent. (Flage 2018, Sec. 4) B. Reality consists exclusively of minds and their ideas. (Downing 2013, Introduction) C. Sensible objects and their sensible properties are nothing more than mind-dependent entities. (Rickless 2013, 1) D. The only kinds of things there are in the world are minds and ideas. (Rickless 2013, 9) E. All that exists is either mind or is dependent on mind. (Hausman & Hausman 1995, 64) The first and third of these definitions reflect Berkeley's own strategy of expressing his view negatively as the rejection of all positions, from physicalism to dualism, that affirm the existence of bodies (or their constituent qualities) independent of minds. Yet, both definitions are compatible with mind-body identity panpsychism. This is the rival view that every body is identical to some mind and every mind is identical to some body. As versions of Berkeley's famous slogan-esse est percipi (aut percipere), to be is to be perceived (or to perceive)-the other three definitions do no better. As stated, they all are compatible with mind-body identity panpsychism. We treat the kind of dependence referenced by these definitions as dependence with respect to existence: necessarily, for all x and all y, x depends on y if, and only if, necessarily, if x exists, then y exists. Necessarily, for all x and some mind y, x is mind-dependent if, and only if, necessarily, if x exists, then y exists. Clearly, this definition of dependence does not entail asymmetry between the dependent thing and what it depends on, a feature that must be kept in mind in what follows despite its perhaps counterintuitive ring in English. It is thus a more general definition of dependence than the asymmetrical one that Berkeley often seems to have in mind. On our definition, for instance, for all minds x, if x exists, then x is mind-dependent, because necessarily, for all minds x, if x exists, then some mind (that very x) exists. If Berkeley's idealism is to be distinguished from mind-body identity panpsychism, asymmetry must be explicitly stated as part of its definition, not assumed as part of what it means for one thing to depend on another, a point we return to at length later in the paper. This definition of dependence (what we call "dependence with respect to existence") also differs from Spinoza's definition of dependence. Given his importance as Berkeley's interlocutor in this paper, it is crucial to clarify how our definition interacts with Spinoza's. Two features of Spinoza's views deserve comment. First, Spinoza's notion of dependence is attribute-specific, meaning that Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? Spinozist dependence relations hold only between, for example, extended things, either Substance or modes, and other extended things, and they never hold between modes of different attributes, such as between thinking and extended modes.2 Spinoza makes this clear in EIIp6, writing that "The modes of each attribute have God as their cause insofar as he is considered under the attribute of which they are modes, and not insofar as he is considered under any other attribute," although his argument there ultimately appeals to EIp10, which asserts the independence of each attribute from every other. Second, there is substantial overlap between the various types of dependence Spinoza discusses, including being caused by, being conceived through, inhering in, and others, although Spinoza's interpreters disagree about the extent of overlap.3 Under our definition of dependence, mind-body identity panpsychism, whose defenders include Spinoza, entails that every body depends on some mind and every mind depends on some body. If ordinary objects are only collections of ideas, which are mind-dependent (A), then mind-body identity panpsychism could be true as well, given that ordinary objects would be dependent on minds if they were identical to minds, which are just collections of ideas of varying complexity for Spinoza (EIIp15). If sensible objects and their sensible properties are nothing more than mind-dependent entities (C), then mind-body identity panpsychism could be true as well, given that sensible objects would be dependent on minds if they were identical to minds and their properties would be dependent on minds if they were identical to properties of minds. If all that exists is either mind or is dependent on mind (E), then mind-body identity panpsychism could be true as well, given that all that exists could be a mind or dependent on one if all bodies were identical to minds. And so it goes for the rest of the definitions. None of the definitions of Berkeley's idealism is inconsistent with mindbody identity panpsychism.4 2 And while modes of a given attribute depend on Substance, considered under the attribute of which they are modes, Substance never depends on its modes. 3 See Newlands 2018, 57-59, for a partial catalog of the myriad terms Spinoza uses to discuss types of metaphysical dependence. Samuel Newlands (2018, 57-89) offers an extended argument for identifying all relations of metaphysical dependence in Spinoza's ontology, such that every dependence relation is identical to every other, and for the claim that all dependence relations are ultimately conceptual, a view he calls 'Conceptual Dependence Monism.' Michael Della Rocca (2008 and 2012) appears to endorse something like Newlands' view, whereas Mogens Laerke (2011, 449) and Francesca Di Poppa (2013, 306, 317) both appear to endorse the fundamentality of causal over conceptual or inherence relations. Finally, Yitzhak Melamed (in 2013a and elsewhere) has raised issues for identifying inherence relations with causal and conceptual relations. However, virtually all interpreters read Spinoza as committed to attribute-specific dependence relations, at least some of which are either co-extensive or identical with some others. Since we are primarily interested in the single broad claim about existential dependence defined in the body of the paper, we do not take a stand on these more sophisticated debates in the literature on Spinoza, though for ease of exposition we will often talk as if Newlands' and Della Rocca's views are correct. 4 Stefan Storrie (2018, esp. 161-165) discusses a list of four possible interpretations of Berkeley's idealism that is in many ways close to our (A-E) list. We are almost wholly sympathetic to Storrie's arguments, which show in various ways the gaps remaining in Berkeley's arguments for idealism if it is interpreted in one of the four ways Storrie discusses. However, since Storrie is focused on different Berkeleyan interlocutors than Spinoza, there are fewer points of contact between Storrie's discussion and ours than it may seem, despite the similar lists that serve as starting points for our respective discussions. Specifically, Storrie imagines Berkeley's interlocutor as defending a broadly Cartesian view of extended substance, as something radically different from mental substance, which underlies or supports sensible things or ideas. But Spinoza, the Berkeleyan interlocutor we engage most here, thinks that mental Substance is Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach However, the two aforementioned features of Spinoza's views on dependence must be kept in mind when assessing our claim that Berkeley's definitions (A-E), as stated, are compatible with mindbody identity panpsychism as exemplified by Spinoza. Consider the case of definition C. Spinoza would reject the claim that sensible objects and their sensible properties are nothing more than minddependent entities (C) since he would understand 'mind-dependent' as misapplied unless it were used to refer to his own definition of dependence, according to which all dependence relations are attribute-specific.5 For Spinoza, sensible objects and properties likely belong to the attribute of Extension, and so depend only on other extended things, per EIIp6 and EIp10.6 Nonetheless, he cannot deny that sensible things, taken as extended, and minds, as specified in definition C, depend on one another by our definition, whether or not he would deny that this constitutes dependence by his definition.7 Spinoza cannot reject this because, according to EIIp7s, "A mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways." If sensible objects and sensible properties are extended modes, then they are identical to, or one and the same thing as, thinking modes, per EIIp7s. Thus, necessarily, for all sensible things and their corresponding thinking modes (or ideas), if the sensible thing exists, its corresponding idea exists. But this just is dependence by our definition, so Spinoza must accept the content of definition C.8 In this paper, we employ our definition of dependence, whose existential entailment claims Spinoza accepts, despite the underlying disagreements just outlined, and focus our attention on the asymmetrical dependence claims between the minds and ideas that are crucial to Berkeley's idealist project. Our concern is with how these claims are formulated and how Berkeley can best justify them. identical to extended Substance (as opposed to radically different), and he precludes any dependence relations between his Substance, taken as extended, and mental modes such as ideas, in virtue of EIIp6 and EIp10 (which assert the independence of each attribute from all the others). Storrie's arguments, while persuasive, are aimed at different targets than the one we focus on here. 5 We focus on definition C here, but similar remarks could be made about the others. We thus intend our discussion here to account for the discrepancy across the board between our notion of dependence and Spinoza's. 6 This is somewhat unclear, since the terminology of "sensible things" is far less important to Spinoza than it is to Berkeley. But since Berkeley argues that sensible things are ideas that depend on minds (and some such ideas are bodies or parts of bodies), we think it is fair to treat sensible things as if at least some of them were extended, since the point of contention between Berkeley and Spinoza concerns bodies. 7 The subtleties involved in comparing Spinoza's views on dependence to the definition of dependence we have given here parallel in important ways the discussion of so-called "attribute neutrality" in Spinoza's Ethics, as discussed, for example, in Bennett 1984, 144-145, Newlands 2018, 245-249, and Melamed 2013, 645-646. As Melamed puts it (646), we need some way of speaking of trans-attribute units of modes-of modes of a specific attribute ("Modes of an Attribute")-and modes under all attributes ("Modes of God"). Translating our discussion of dependence into Melamed's terminology, we can say that bodies or sensible objects (as "Modes of Extension") cannot depend on minds (as "Modes of Thought"). However, since body b and mind m are the same Mode of God, necessarily, if m exists, b exists, and vice versa. It is the attribute-neutral claim (or claim about the Modes of God) that secures the identity of b and m and licenses our claim that b depends on m with respect to existence. So although we acknowledge that Spinoza restricts dependence claims to within modes of a single attribute, we also think it important to note that, given that b and m are the same Mode of God, one cannot exist without the other. 8 With the same caveat as before that while modes depend on Substance, considered under the attribute of which they are modes, Substance itself never depends on its modes in any way. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? The foregoing discussion shows that mind-body panpsychism is a rival of Berkeley's idealism, as is clear from consideration of Spinoza's version of this more general view. As stated above, Spinoza holds that "a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways" (EIIp7s). Moreover, for Spinoza divine and human minds just are more or less complex ideas (EIIp15). Every composite body is identical to a complex idea and constitutes the Extended object of that complex mind in Thought. To hold mind-body identity panpsychism is to deny Berkeley's idealism since, among other reasons, Berkeley's ontology contains a wholly immaterial God and finite, wholly immaterial spirits. Spinoza denies both. Likewise, Berkeley's view that minds are not ideas cannot be simply assumed and ought to be explicitly stated by any definition of his idealism, given the arguments-Spinoza's or otherwise-for the contrary claim that minds just are ideas. Berkeley's arguments for the non-identity of mind and body that rely on this view (and the claim that bodies are collections of ideas) ought to be treated as contested.9 Of course, as noted, Berkeley's idealism has other rivals since some physicalists think that all minds are identical to bodies, but that some bodies are not minds or dependent on them, and dualists hold that mind-independent bodies and minds both exist. Both these alternative rival views are explicitly excluded by the preceding definitions. Although Spinoza's position is a rival to Berkeley's, Berkeley shares more with Spinoza than with some of his other rivals. Notably, Spinoza argues that his mind-body identity panpsychism is a direct consequence of his views on God, which he establishes with the help of ontological and cosmological arguments similar in ways to those employed by the Christian tradition of which Berkeley is a part. So, while the historical context Berkeley found himself in demanded engagement with physicalists and dualists, he potentially faces a graver threat from Spinoza. 3. Incomplete Arguments Before offering our own definition of Berkeley's idealism that explicitly excludes mind-body identity panpsychism, we must address a natural objection. Given that mind-body identity panpsychism is neither one of Berkeley's targets nor a prevalent view, one could argue that those who give definitions of Berkeley's idealism-whether they are his commentators or Berkeley himself-are not obligated to formulate it in such a way that it explicitly precludes mind-body identity panpsychism. One might think that how philosophers define views is largely stipulative and depends on the dialectical contexts they find themselves in. So, while the definitions of Berkeley's idealism found in the literature fail to explicitly preclude mind-body identity panpsychism, this is not a problem. After all, Berkeley's arguments for his idealism clearly rule out mind-body panpsychism. This objection amounts to the claim that the premises of some of Berkeley's arguments for his idealism 9 To be clear, our concern is not with Berkeley's claim that all bodies are ideas, since Spinoza's mind-body identity panpsychism commits him to accepting that all bodies are ideas as well (and vice versa, of course). Rather, we focus instead on Berkeley's claim that minds are not ideas, given Spinoza's defense of the contrary position that minds are just complex ideas, as EIIp15 indicates explicitly and as Spinoza's general ontology commits him. Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach entail the negation of mind-body identity panpsychism, so if their conclusions are formulated to express all of their entailments, mind-body panpsychism is ruled out. In this section, we will argue that this claim is false. Choosing which argument to examine is no easy matter. There is little dispute that Berkeley is, in fact, an idealist, but it is not settled how his arguments for idealism should be understood. It is often argued that his main strategy is to grant or argue for the mind-dependence of certain "sensible qualities" and then attempt to undermine various distinctions between these qualities and others in order to establish his idealism. In discussing this strategy, some commentators focus on Berkeley's perceptual relativity arguments, while others focus on his inseparability argument.10 Recently, it has been proposed that this latter argument is unique in bringing together several seemingly independent lines of reasoning that Berkeley develops elsewhere to support his idealism.11 Given our goals, it is not feasible for us to present and discuss all of the arguments in Berkeley's texts that have been proposed as arguments for his idealism. Since the inseparability argument is, as of late, taken to be either Berkeley's strongest argument for idealism or one of them, it is as good of a choice as any. What makes the inseparability argument unique is that Berkeley uses it, fittingly, to argue for the inseparability of the primary and secondary qualities. There are different ways of understanding how the argument proceeds. The argument is found in both the Principles (PHK 10) and the Dialogues (3D 194), but what follows is our formulation of it as Berkeley expresses it in the Principles. Here is Berkeley: They who assert that figure, motion, and the rest of the primary or original qualities do exist without the mind, in unthinking substances, do at the same time acknowledge that colours, sounds, heat, cold, and such like secondary qualities, do not, which they tell us are sensations existing in the mind alone, that depend on and are occasioned by the different size, texture and motion of the minute particles of matter. This they take for an undoubted truth, which they can demonstrate beyond all exception. Now if it be certain, that those original qualities are inseparably united with the other sensible qualities, and not, even in thought, capable of being abstracted from them, it plainly follows that they exist only in the mind. But I desire any one to reflect and try, whether he can by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body, without all other sensible qualities. For my own part, I see evidently that it is not in my power to frame an idea of a body extended and moved, but I must withal give it some colour or other sensible quality which is 10 Those who defend the traditional "inherence account" are focused on the former. For classic statements of the inherence account, see Allaire 1963 and Watson 1963. Others who have a similar, but distinct, focus include David Hausman and Alan Hausman (1995). 11 Samuel Rickless has recently argued forcefully for a version of this interpretation. For a summary of Rickless' interpretation and the role the inseparability argument plays for Berkeley, see Rickless 2013, 185-187. Lisa Downing (2018) argues that the inseparability argument blocks a path that Berkeley's non-idealist interlocutors could have used to escape his attacks, if Berkeley only had the perceptual relativity arguments and his arguments from the immediacy of perceived things at his disposal. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? acknowledged to exist only in the mind. In short, extension, figure, and motion, abstracted from all other qualities, are inconceivable. Where therefore the other sensible qualities are, there must these be also, to wit, in the mind and no where else. (PHK 10) Berkeley's argument for the first premise (P1), which we have not included, relies on the received view about the mind-dependence of phenomenal secondary qualities that is held by Descartes, Locke, and many other non-idealists. Here, following Locke but using contemporary terminology, we contrast phenomenal secondary qualities (e.g. a particular shade of red that you see when viewing a tomato) with dispositional secondary qualities (e.g. the disposition of a tomato to cause you to see a particular shade of red when viewing it). The crucial point is that Locke holds that the former are represented by us as belonging to mind-independent bodies but they are in fact mind-dependent. P1. It is not possible that there is a mind-independent being that has phenomenal secondary qualities. [granted by many opponents, perceptual relativity arguments, identification argument] P2. For all p, if it is inconceivable that p because it is a contradiction that p, then it is not possible that p. [Berkeley's inconceivability principle, according to Thomas Holden] P3. If it is inconceivable that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways because it is a contradiction that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways, then it is not possible that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways. [P2] P4. If it is not possible that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways, then it is not possible that there is a mind-independent body. [P1] P5. For all x, x is a body if, and only if, x has all of the primary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways. [Locke's definition of 'body,' Berkeley's nominalism] P6. For all x, if x is a quality and a fully determinate and non-contradictory way of being extended, figured, or mobile, then x is a primary quality. [Locke's definition of 'primary quality,' Berkeley's nominalism] Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach P7. For all x, x is a body if, and only if, x has extension, figure, and mobility in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways. [P5, P6] P8. For all x, if x has extension, figure, and mobility in fully determinate and noncontradictory ways, then x has phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways. [Berkeley's inseparability principle, Berkeley's nominalism] P9. It is a contradiction that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways. [P7, P8] P10. It is inconceivable that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways because it is a contradiction that there is a body that exists without having phenomenal secondary qualities in fully determinate and non-contradictory ways. [P9, Berkeley's view on the inconceivability of contradictions] C. So, it is not possible that there is a mind-independent body. [P3, P4, P10] The traditional view is that the inseparability argument relies centrally on a principle that moves from inconceivability to impossibility: for all p, if it is inconceivable that p, then it is not possible that p. This principle would take the place of P2 above; call it P2*. A virtue of the traditional view is that it does not require the attribution of a strong metaphysical inseparability premise like P8 to Berkeley. P8 is needed to generate the requisite contradiction. Instead, the traditional view can simply attribute a premise that asserts that the primary and phenomenal secondary qualities cannot be conceived apart. A cost of the traditional view is that P2* does not seem to be endorsed by Berkeley. Thomas Holden (2019) convincingly argues that Berkeley holds that there are cases where we cannot conceive something but nonetheless it is possible. However, for those cases where we cannot conceive something because it is contradictory, then it is in fact impossible. After all, everything that is contradictory is impossible, on Berkeley's view (and that of many of his contemporaries). Or so Holden's argument goes. Thus P2 and P8. There is much to be said about the argument itself, but we will limit ourselves to three points. First, no subset of the premises entails the negation of mind-body identity panpsychism; the mindbody identity panpsychist could endorse all of the premises of the inseparability argument. Second, none of the premises provide anything like non-question-begging reasons for the negation of mindbody identity panpsychism. Berkeley might simply add the negation of mind-body identity panpsychism as an assumption, but this would beg the question. None of the premises to which he is entitled, and for which he has provided some compelling independent motivation in making his inseparability argument, entail the negation of mind-body identity panpsychism. Third, in analyzing Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? this argument, we can see why commentators end up with definitions like those listed in the prior section (especially A and C). Berkeley's own argumentation is not sensitive to the challenge presented by the mind-body identity panpsychist. 4. A Definitional Digression In noting that both common definitions of Berkeley's idealism and his most prominent arguments fail to distinguish his ontological position from mind-body identity panpsychism, we do not mean to criticize Berkeley. We grant that the dialectical context Berkeley found himself in as he presented his views about the mind did not demand direct engagement with mind-body identity panpsychism. Our goal is simply to show that more care must be taken to get clear on the precise nature of Berkeley's idealism, given the early modern option space as well as burgeoning recent interest in nearby panpsychist views. Since we seek to offer an improved-even if still incomplete-definition of Berkeley's idealism, contemporary attempts to define idealism and panpsychism are natural starting points, although these discussions are themselves fraught with disagreement. Nevertheless, we turn there first, before considering whether Berkeley can justify his preference for idealism over a mindbody identity panpsychist alternative. In introducing Idealism: New Essays in Metaphysics, Tyron Goldschmidt and Kenneth Pearce register the difficulties associated with defining idealism, before glossing both idealism in general and Berkeley's idealism in particular. They write: Roughly speaking, we may say that idealists endorse the priority of the mental [...]. George Berkeley's view that minds and their ideas are all the beings there are is the most famous version of idealism. According to Berkeley, minds enjoy ontological priority: minds alone are fundamental and everything else depends on them. (Goldschmidt & Pearce 2017, ix) Other contributors to the same volume gather related theses under the banner of idealism, including Robert Adams' claim that "all intrinsic non-formal qualities must be qualities of consciousness or strongly analogous to qualities of consciousness" (2017, 2), Robert Smithson's assertion that "truths about ordinary objects and their manifest properties supervene on truths about actual and possible counterfactual experiences" (2017, 18), and Segal and Goldschmidt's characterization of idealism as "the view that all concrete things are purely mental" (2017, 35). These definitions all have their problems. Smithson's supervenience formulation of idealism, like pure supervenience formulations of physicalism, fails to capture the notion of asymmetric dependence that Jaegwon Kim and others have argued is central to any non-trivial supervenience definition.12 Aaron Segal and Goldschmidt admit that their definition is consistent with "the world being thoroughly physical, wholly physical, physical through and through [...]. That would be the case 12 Kim (2005, 34) argues that supervenience needs ontological dependence too. See also Wilson 2005 for a catalog of the problems with supervenience-based formulations. Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach if every mental aspect of the universe were itself physical, and vice versa" (2017, 34). Adams' view faces the same problem, since intrinsic non-formal qualities of consciousness might be wholly physical qualities in addition. These latter views thus appear to countenance something like Spinoza's monistic view that "the thinking substance and the extended substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that" (EIIp7s). But, as Samuel Newlands and Yitzhak Melamed have argued at length, Spinoza cannot be an idealist, for idealism introduces incoherence into his philosophical system, in violating EIp10.13 Definitions of panpsychism do not fare much better. David Chalmers, for instance, defines panpsychism as "the thesis that some microphysical entities are conscious" (2016a, 24). As stated, this view is consistent with Segal and Goldschmidt's definition of idealism, since if all concrete things are purely mental (per their definition of idealism) and all microphysical things are concrete, then all microphysical things are purely mental. If all purely mental things are conscious, then trivially some microphysical things are conscious, but this is Chalmers' definition of panpsychism. Yet, the views are clearly intended to be distinct. As Godehard Brüntrup and Ludwig Jaskolla discuss in their introduction to Panpsychism: Contemporary Perspectives, "Panpsychists in contrast claim that mental being is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe but is not the only fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the universe [...]. It is thus distinguished from absolute idealism, according to which the world consists solely of minds and their activities" (2016, 1). Other panpsychists, however, appear to disagree. Galen Strawson, for instance, describes his view as "a form of pure panpsychism, which I here take to be the view that experientiality is all there is to the intrinsic nature of concrete reality" (2016, 81). This, of course, sounds like Segal and Goldschmidt's claim that idealism is the view that all concrete things are purely mental, but Strawson apparently denies that there are other non-mental fundamental features of the universe (so the purely mental is not also purely physical).14 If this latter part of Strawson's view is indeed a commitment, then his panpsychism runs afoul of the definition from Brüntrup and Jaskolla. Finally, there is what Chalmers labels 'constitutive Russellian panpsychism,' according to which [...] microphenomenal properties serve as quiddities, playing the roles associated with microphysical properties, and also serve as the grounds for macrophenomenal properties [...]. One could think of the world as fundamentally consisting in fundamental entities bearing fundamental microphenomenal properties, where the microphenomenal properties are connected to each other (and perhaps to other quiddities) by fundamental laws with the structure that the laws of physics describe. (Chalmers 2016, 254-255) On this view, microexperience is fundamental, grounding macroexperience while serving as the quiddity occupying all microphysical roles. So, pace Brüntrup and Jaskolla, Chalmers holds that the 13 Newlands 2012 and 2018, esp. chapter 9, and Melamed, 2013. Ethics Ip10 is central not only to Spinoza's views on the mind-body problem, but also to all his central arguments concerning God in Ethics Part I. 14 See Strawson 2006, 238-242. There Strawson considers the possibility that the purely mental is also purely physical. Since he gives some reasons to be skeptical, we interpret him as tentatively denying this identification. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? questions of fundamentality and ubiquity come apart: being mental is alone fundamental but being mental and being physical are both ubiquitous features of the world. To exit this definitional morass, reconnect with prevailing definitions of Berkeley's idealism, and emphasize the crucial differences between Berkeley's project and contemporary ones, we propose the following theses for consideration: Strong Asymmetry: (1) Necessarily, for all x, if x is a mind, then x does not depend on a body, and (2) necessarily, for all x, if x is a body, then x depends on a mind. Mental Substances: Necessarily, for all x, if x is a mind, then x is a substance. Existence: There are minds, there are bodies, there are mind-dependent beings that are not bodies, and there is nothing else. Berkeley's Idealism: Strong Asymmetry, Mental Substances, and Existence. Our definition has the following virtues. First, it is consistent with all of the definitions given at the outset of this paper. Like others in the literature, many of these definitions highlight Berkeley's view that all bodies depend on minds, as well as his view that minds and bodies exist (he is not an eliminativist about bodies). The second conjunct of Strong Asymmetry and Existence capture these features of Berkeley's idealism. Second, the first conjunct of Strong Asymmetry expresses Berkeley's denial that it is possible that a mind depends on bodies.15 It is this component which rules out mindbody identity panpsychism and thus makes explicit what has been presupposed by Berkeley's commentators. The distinct advantage of our definition, relatedly, is that it clarifies where Berkeley would require further argument against a mind-body identity panpsychist rival. Third, note that it is not enough for Berkeley, as it is for many contemporary panpsychists, that the property of being mental or phenomenal properties exist ubiquitously and fundamentally. Strawson hints at this divide in his own definition of pure panpsychism, arguing "[that] the existence of subjects of experience can't be supposed to be anything ontologically over and above the existence of experiencing" (2016, 81). Rather, independent mental substances are a key part of Berkeley's ontology.16 15 God depends on nothing (other than Himself), and thus not on any body. Finite minds are more complicated, yet we think Berkeley holds that while there could be no finite minds independent of all ideas whatsoever, minds do not depend on the ideas that constitute bodies. Thus no minds depend on bodies. 16 We do not deny that Berkeley scholars debate his commitment to mental substance. For instance, Robert Muehlmann argues that "Berkeley's nominalism (and, consequently, his anti-abstractionism) is fatal to substances, whether material or mental" (1995, 90; see also Muehlmann 1992). Others, like Marc Hight and Walter Ott (2004), argue that Berkeley's conception of mental substance is relatively traditional and that for Berkeley mental substances are objects of inner awareness, or agents (on this latter point, see Bettcher 2008). Still others argue for a Stoic conception of substance not amenable to being spoken of or theorized abstractly, like Stephen Daniel (2001 and 2008). Despite this disagreement, we think on balance the texts strongly suggest Berkeley includes mental substances in his ontology. Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach Some forms of panpsychism, including Strawson's pure panpsychism and perhaps Chalmers' constitutive Russellian panpsychism, might count as forms of idealism in the sense defined, depending on the stance taken on whether microexperience requires micro-minds. But we agree with Segal and Goldschmidt (2017, 47) in counting this consequence among our view's advantages: the fundamentally idealist implications of some forms of contemporary panpsychism bear noting and should be accounted for by an adequate definition. At best, arguments like the inseparability argument support the second conjunct of Strong Asymmetry, while other arguments are needed for the other components of Berkeley's idealism. In the rest of the paper, we conclude with some thoughts about Berkeley's prospects for success with these tasks. 5. The Virtues of Unity Here, we conclude by surveying two Berkeleyan strategies, one more prominent in Berkeley's published writings than the other, for establishing the following claim: Non-Identity: Necessarily, for all x, if x is a body, then x is not a mind. Establishing this claim is a necessary first step if Berkeley is to secure the first conjunct of Strong Asymmetry. Non-Identity will be established if Berkeley establishes that, necessarily, for all x, if x is a mind, then x is F, where F is some quality, and, necessarily, for all x, if x is a body, then x is not F.17 All dialectically defensible methods for Berkeley to establish Non-Identity in the face of opposition from the mind-body identity panpsychist reduce to this schema. The mere stipulation or presumption of Non-Identity would be question-begging, and both direct and topical reductio arguments for NonIdentity would be instances of this schema. The first option to consider is that 'active' is F. After considering this possibility, we will suggest reasons for Berkeley to shift his emphasis to his less common proposal-namely, that minds are fundamentally unified in a way no bodies are or could be. We will conclude by briefly discussing Berkeley's prospects for establishing the rest of the claims he needs in order to secure the first conjunct of Strong Asymmetry and Mental Substances.18 Berkeley's focus on the activity of minds and the passivity of bodies is ubiquitous. When Philonous is first challenged by Hylas to explain how his "passive and inert" idea of a "purely active" being like God or himself could represent such a being, he has this to say: 17 Spinoza's views on identity and non-identity are highly idiosyncratic, but Spinoza can accept our method of establishing Non-Identity (though of course he rejects Non-Identity, since he thinks minds just are bodies), as long as the relevant F in our schema is what some commentators have called an "attribute-neutral property." And activity and unity, insofar as they are discussed explicitly at all by Spinoza, are clearly attribute-neutral. See Della Rocca 1999, Newlands 2018, and Melamed 2013 for more on Spinoza's use of attribute-neutrality. 18 We thus set aside the question of establishing Existence. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? PHILONOUS. [...] I do nevertheless know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I mean by the terms 'I' and 'myself'; and I know this immediately, or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a color, or a sound. [...] (3D 231) PHILONOUS. How often must I repeat, that I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas. [...] (3D 233) Assuming that Philonous' position can be identified with Berkeley's own, Berkeley's argument in this passage is an appeal to his intuitive or reflective awareness of himself-he knows that he exists as an active mental being "by a certain internal consciousness" (DM 21).19 Yet, it seems that Berkeley's awareness of himself could at most show that he is a mind and is active at the time that he introspects, but not that it is necessary that he is. How could experience teach Berkeley that it is not possible that he is passive? Cartesian memories loom large here. One solution is to interpret Berkeley as holding that 'active' refers to a capacity, such that if Berkeley is aware of himself as active, then he is aware of himself as capable of acting at all possible times that he exists.20 This syncs better with Philonous' claim that minds are passive when they perceive via the senses and also with Berkeley's remark to Samuel Johnson that "the soul of man is passive as well as active, I make no doubt" (Works 2:293). If there could be some duration when minds perceive only via the senses, then it seems Berkeley must deny that, necessarily, minds are acting, but he need not deny that necessarily, minds are capable of acting.21 To be clear, though, Berkeley does not maintain that minds are nothing over and above their activity (or capacity for activity). Berkeley locates the activity of the mind in the will, which is one of its two constituent faculties. Here is one of Berkeley's arguments which relies on this bipartite concept of the mind: PHILONOUS. [...] From the effects I see produced, I conclude there are actions; and because actions, volitions; and because there are volitions, there must be a will. Again, the things I perceive must have an existence, they or their archetypes, out of my mind: but being ideas, neither they nor their archetypes can exist otherwise than in an understanding: there is therefore an understanding. But will and understanding constitute in the strictest sense a mind or spirit. The powerful cause therefore of my ideas, is in strict propriety of speech a spirit. (3D 240) 19 For Berkeley, this "internal consciousness" is not mediated by ideas, which he makes clear in saying: "Our souls are not to be known in the same manner as senseless inactive objects, or by way of idea" (PHK 142) 20 For cases where Berkeley uses 'active' in this sense, see PHK 53 and PHK 61. 21 Note, however, that some interpreters argue that Berkeleyan sense perception is not passive, and that Berkeley conceives of sense perception in an adverbial manner as a series of mental acts. For a classic defense of this interpretation, see Pitcher 1969. For a recent defense of a similar view, see Frankel 2013. For an extended criticism of views of this kind, see Marušić 2018. Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach In a similar fashion, Berkeley occasionally argues for the passivity of bodies via conceptual analysis. For instance, in De Motu 22, Berkeley argues that the qualities distinctive of bodies exclude power when he proposes that [...] impenetrability, extension, or shape include or connote no power to produce motion. On the contrary, when we review one by one not only those qualities but whatever other qualities that bodies possess, we see that they are all genuinely passive, and that there is nothing active in them [...]. But Berkeley's more common strategy is to identify bodies with ideas in order to argue for bodies' passivity via the passivity of ideas. If ideas are "visibly inactive," as Berkeley argues at Principles 25, then Berkeley can rightfully conclude that they are in fact inactive, given his view that "there is nothing in them but what is perceived." There is some disagreement about the next step. Some commentators argue that Berkeley identifies bodies one-to-one with the ideas of one sensory modality, others argue that Berkeley identifies bodies with collections of ideas perceived via multiple sensory modalities across time (including, perhaps, some that will be or would be observed), and still others fall somewhere in between these extremes. It is granted on all hands, though, that Berkeley identifies bodies with ideas or collections of ideas. Berkeley argues for this identification at various points in his corpus by arguing for the identification of bodies with whatever it is we "immediately perceive by our Senses" (3D 180) since ideas are what we immediately perceive. If Berkeley is correct that bodies are necessarily inactive, perhaps because they are ideas and ideas are "visibly" so, or because the concept of body excludes power, then he is well on his way to Non-Identity. In four interconnected ways, Spinoza challenges Berkeley's reliance on 'active' as the quality F that differentiates minds from bodies. First, whereas Berkeley thinks that there is nothing in ideas but what is perceived, Spinoza argues that our ideas of bodies-and what they are capable of-are fundamentally inadequate: "For indeed no one has yet determined what the body can do, that is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the bodies can do from the laws of Nature alone" (EIIIp2s).22 Second, granting for the moment that Berkeley is right that there is nothing in ideas but what is perceived, and that bodies are ideas, Berkeley would still need to establish that our mind is not an idea or collection of ideas to establish Non-Identity. Berkeley must do so without simply presupposing that ideas, or bodies, are perceived as "visibly inactive." Spinoza is not alone in failing to share that perception and, as noted before, he has arguments to establish that our minds are ideas. 22 An anonymous reviewer points out that Spinoza argues that those aspects of bodies which meet two criteria, namely that they are "common to all, and which are equally in the part and the whole" (EIIp38dem) must necessarily be adequately conceived. This might seem to complicate our claim that, for Spinoza, our ideas of bodies are fundamentally inadequate. But we do not think this obviates Berkeley and Spinoza's disagreement. EIIp38dem entails that some aspect of every body, that which is common to all and equally in the part and the whole, must be adequately conceived, but it does not imply that any finite minds have adequate conceptions of finite bodies in total. And since Berkeley thinks that there is nothing in bodies, which are ideas or collections of ideas, but what is perceived, there are deep and wide-ranging disagreements about the adequacy of our conceptions of bodies between Spinoza and Berkeley, which is all our claim here requires. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? Third, Spinoza argues that minds are only active when their associated bodies are: "Does not experience also teach that, if the body is inactive, the mind is at the same time incapable of thinking?" (EIIIp2s).23 Berkeley denies that a mind is, at any time, completely incapable of thinking, both for the reasons already discussed and because he maintains that the passage of time is relativized to a thinker's thoughts.24 But bodies, for Berkeley, are always wholly passive. Fourth, Spinoza argues that the essence of a finite thing, whether thinking or extended, is its degree of power, and thus bodies, like minds, are inherently powerful and active.25 For all that we have said so far, one might think that Berkeley and Spinoza simply come to opposing conclusions on the basis of similarly compelling arguments. The mere existence of Spinoza's alternatives and their accompanying arguments, one might think, is not enough to put pressure on Berkeley's use of 'active' as the F needed to establish his idealism at the expense of mind-body identity panpsychism. Yet, another feature of Spinoza's defense of his mind-body identity panpsychism puts special pressure on Berkeley in particular and reveals a strategy Berkeley might use to try to avoid Spinoza's challenge to his view. Spinoza argues for his substance monism on fairly traditional grounds, using versions of the ontological and cosmological arguments for God's existence.26 Berkeley, as an Anglican Christian bishop, faces significant theological pressure to accept these traditional arguments.27 Michael Della Rocca, for example, interprets Spinoza's argument as containing four key steps: 23 Note that Spinoza also rejects the view that either the mind or body could ever be completely inactive. Spinoza's point here must thus be read as suggesting that the activity levels of the body and the mind are, in our experience, precisely correlated, contrary to Berkeley's suggestion that the mind is often quite active while its ideas, bodies, are wholly passive. Berkeley cannot challenge Spinoza's claim here by appealing, for example, to cases where people who are paralyzed still think. This is not a true mismatch in the activity levels of mind and body, of course, since "bodies" for Spinoza include any physical extended thing of whatever size. What would be needed for a Berkeleyan counterexample like this to succeed would be mental activity in the complete absence of neural (that is, bodily) activity, and such cases do not exist in our experience. 24 For instance, in his letters to Samuel Johnson, Berkeley states that "A succession of ideas I take to constitute Time, and not to be only the sensible measure thereof, as Mr. Locke and others think" (Works 2:293). There, Berkeley also rules out one mind's succession of ideas being a measure of the time of another, and he argues that "all things, past and to come, arc actually present to the mind of God, and that there is in Him no change, variation, or succession" (Works 2: 293). 25 See, for example, EIp36, EIIIp7, EIVdef8, and elsewhere. Della Rocca (2003, 225) discusses these and related passages. 26 Of course, we do not mean to imply either that Spinoza's God just is the Christian God or that his versions of the ontological and cosmological argument are identical to traditional Christian ones. Indeed, it is clear that Spinoza's God is not the Christian God, for reasons we have already identified, first and foremost among which is that the Christian God is in no way material or extended. For commentators who argue that, nonetheless, Spinoza's arguments mirror ontological or cosmological arguments in many particulars, see Garrett 1979, Earle 1951, Jarrett 1976, and Laerke 2011. 27 This is a sociological claim quite independent of Berkeley's other disagreements with Spinoza, which one might reject depending on how closely one associates Berkeley's philosophical and religious commitments. Regardless, it is obviously better from a strategic point of view if Berkeley could press his objections to Spinozism without being forced to reject orthodox Christian theology, even if Berkeley's preferred arguments for the existence of God are rather different, or at least presented as such. Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach Spinoza argues first that no two substances can share an attribute (1p5). Second Spinoza argues that "it pertains to the nature of a substance to exist" (1p7). On the basis of 1p7, Spinoza argues that God-defined as the substance with all the attributes-exists. Finally, since God exists and has all the attributes and since there can, by 1p5, be no sharing of attributes, no other substance besides God can exist. Any such substance would have to share attributes with God and such sharing is ruled out. (Della Rocca 2008, 46) On this reconstruction, and given some sociological pressure to accept the traditional theological arguments, Berkeley's ideal strategy would be to combat EIp5, which is the view that no two substances (i.e. finite minds and God, for Berkeley) share an attribute. But as far as we can tell, Berkeley never sees, and therefore never addresses, the problem of whether there can be multiple substances of the same attribute. Other interpreters, like Don Garrett, disagree with Della Rocca about how exactly to formulate the strongest version of Spinoza's reasoning, but they agree that it shares some features with the traditional ontological argument while ultimately relying on a very strong Principle of Sufficient Reason more at home in standard versions of the cosmological argument.28 There is a consensus, however, that Spinoza's mind-body identity panpsychism follows quite directly from his theology. Spinoza's arguments for his so-called "parallelism doctrine" (EIIp7) that "the order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things," and for his mind-body identity panpsychism (EIIp7s), that "a mode of extension and an idea of that mode are one and the same thing," cite only EIA4, which states that "knowledge of effects depends on, and involves, knowledge of causes." Immediately prior to introducing his mind-body identity claim, Spinoza says, "[b]efore we proceed further, we must recall here what we showed in the First Part." Yitzhak Melamed relies on this language to argue that Spinoza's mind-body identity panpsychism follows from the nature of God alone, as already proved in EIp16: "From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes." That is, for Melamed, Spinoza's doubling of infinity (infinite things or modes of God...in infinitely many ways or modes) is already sufficient to establish mind-body identity panpsychism, since each "mind and body are just two out of the infinite aspects of a mode of God which follows from God's nature" (2013, 648-649; see also our footnote 7 above). Della Rocca (2008, 89-136) draws a linear connection between Spinoza's substance monism, the constraints of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and mind-body identity panpsychism. In broad strokes at least, Garrett seems to agree, noting that [Spinoza] will reply that the perfection of the necessarily existing divine substance, as established by the ontological argument and the principle of sufficient reason, actually requires that one substance have all possible principal attributes, necessarily mirroring one another...this means that the one substance and each of the singular things that are its finite 28 Garrett 1979 marks the beginning of this fruitful debate, which Della Rocca continues (2002 and 2008) and Garrett returns to a decade later (2018b). Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? modes must exist in multiple fundamentally different yet complementary dimensions of being-including as thinking and as extended. This is nothing less than panpsychism. (Garrett 2018a, 237-238) So, Spinoza sees mind-body identity panpsychism as following rather directly from his conception of the divine nature-a conception that leaves little room for the appeals to the will that form one prong of Berkeley's conception of spirits as active. In fact, Spinoza would challenge every step of Philonous' aforementioned argument in Dialogues 240 that "From the effects I see produced, I conclude there are actions; and because actions, volitions; and because there are volitions, there must be a will." Spinoza agrees that every effect implies some activity, but he would argue that the inferences from activity to actions and from actions to volitions are not warranted. And Spinoza argues in EIIp48-49 that since each mind is a determinate mode of God (EIIp11), and since all God's determinate modes are necessarily caused by preceding ones (EIp28), there are no free acts of will, but only effects produced by necessity, such that "in the mind there is no other volition, or affirmation or negation, except that which the idea involves insofar as it is an idea" (EIIp49).29 In this way, Spinoza argues from God's nature to a mind-body identity panpsychism in which volitions just are ideas, the complex joining of which is all there is to being a mind. Space does not permit us to fully evaluate each step of Spinoza's reasoning. We can grant that it is unclear whether Berkeley would accept the Principle of Sufficient Reason. And Berkeley would certainly continue to deny that Extension is a possible attribute of substance. Nonetheless, the more or less traditional theological arguments whose conclusions Spinoza interprets in heterodox ways to ground his mind-body panpsychism pressure Berkeley to justify his rejection of that position (and its entailment that minds and bodies are active to precisely the same extent). The burden is on Berkeley to explain how his arguments for the passivity of bodies remain compatible with these traditional theological arguments. Berkeley could go this route and address Spinoza's arguments directly, showing in detail how Spinoza goes wrong in the above-noted ways. Perhaps Berkeley has some fairly direct way of challenging Spinoza's claim, in EIp5, that no two substances can share a single attribute, which we have simply overlooked. But it is our position that a simpler and more dialectically effective solution would be for Berkeley to switch his emphasis from the mind's activity to the mind's unity, following Leibniz's example.30 Like Berkeley, Leibniz focuses at times on the activity of substances, which for 29 See Garrett 2000, Curley and Walski 1999, and Newlands 2018, Ch. 4, for more discussion of Spinoza's commitment to necessitarianism. Della Rocca 2003 gives much more of the argument for Spinoza's rejection of the distinction between will and intellect, or willing and the having of an idea. 30 An anonymous reviewer suggests that Berkeley's commitment to the semiotic structure of ideas in An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision and Alciphron, Dialogue 4 might serve as an alternative route to establish an asymmetry between minds and ideas. Perhaps we can infer such an asymmetry from asymmetries between signs and language creators. John Roberts (2007, 90n14) seems to hint at something similar in connecting Berkeley's views on the difference between minds and ideas to his overall philosophy of language, and Kenneth Pearce's Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World (2017) is a powerful new discussion of Berkeley's thought that serves in many ways as a general development of this line of argument. Although space does not permit us to discuss it with the detail it deserves here, Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach him include only minds, and at other times on their unity. For instance, in the Monadology, Leibniz is clearly focused on the unity of mental substances. This is evident both from his opening definition- "the monad, which we shall discuss here, is nothing but a simple substance that enters into composites"-and from his famous "mill argument" in Monadology 17, which seeks to show that "perception, and what depends on it, is inexplicable in terms of mechanical reasons," such that "we should seek perception in the simple substance and not in the composite or in the machine." Why would this shift in emphasis help Berkeley? For one, it would block many of Spinoza's objections to the use of 'active' as F that we started with. Second, accounting for certain aspects of the unity of minds is widely regarded as one of panpsychism's most important challenges. One popular formulation of the combination problem for panpsychism holds that subjects, or subjective perspectives, cannot unite. If we as subjects and our thoughts as constituting a particular perspective have the unity that Berkeley argues they do and that we commonly take them to have, they cannot be constituted as the mind-body identity panpsychist says they are.31 Third, Spinoza accepts the mutual dependence of minds and bodies, in our weak sense, in virtue of their identity. But he explicitly denies the finite mind's unity, in part because he holds that the finite mind is identical to a finite body that is composite.32 If either our concepts, the data of experience, reasoning along the lines of Leibniz's mill argument, Kant's argument for the transcendental unity of apperception, or some other arguments favor Berkeley here, then Berkeley will have an advantage over Spinoza. This is not to claim that there are no complications facing Berkeley were he to change his approach. One issue is that Berkeley never gives us a full account of the relevant sort of unity-it may be that this part of his system was lost when the rest of the Principles were lost.33 Another is that Berkeley seems to maintain that the unity of the mind follows from its activity. Berkeley often mentions activity and unity simultaneously as features of minds (though he almost invariably focuses on activity at the expense of unity).34 Some commentators interpret Berkeley (or, at least, the "mature Berkeley") as understanding perception as requiring an active mind to gather together the objects of we have some preliminary comments on this strategy. On one hand, it seems that the property F that this line of reasoning attributes to language creators would be activity or unity (i.e. language creators are active with respect to signs that constitute language or language creators unify signs into words or sentences, while the signs and the ideas they signify are passive or require unification), or a property that entails the former or the latter. Insofar as F is the former, the concerns we discuss would still apply, while insofar as it is the latter, there may be significant promise to this strategy given the relative scarcity of texts where Berkeley discusses unity explicitly (as we note below). On the other hand, an argument to the mind's unity that does not require the adoption of significant parts of Berkeley's philosophy of language would be preferable. 31 See, among others, Chalmers 2016b, 182-183, as well as Montero 2016, and others in the same volume, for discussion of this aspect of the combination problem. 32 "The idea that constitutes the formal being of the human mind is not simple, but is composed of a great many ideas" (EIIp15). Here, as always, we mean only minimal dependence with respect to existence in describing Spinoza's view. 33 As A.A. Luce and T.E. Jessop surmise in their Editor's Introduction to Berkeley's letters to Samuel Johnson. See Works 2:269. But see footnote 30 for one suggestion of how an account of unity may be present in Berkeley's texts in the form of his philosophy of language. 34 See, for example, Principles 141 or Dialogues 234 and 249. For a discussion of unity's importance to Berkeley's view of substances (and its origins in his philosophical antecedents), see Wilson 1995, 81-88. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? perception into a single unified perspective à la Kant.35 Others suggest that the distinctive activity of minds is to imitate God, such that "to fully and properly achieve participation in the divine nature, it is not enough to grasp clearly and distinctly what I ought to do-I must act on that knowledge [...] to be engaged in the activity of virtue [is our] proper, natural state" (Roberts 2018, 150).36 If either view is right, then even though one of the mind's specific activities explains and is thus more fundamental than its unity, Berkeley could simply argue that bodies lack this type of activity-the ability to unify perceptions in a single perspective, on the former reading, or to act as a unified virtuous agent, on the latter. Berkeley need not necessarily commit himself to showing that bodies are wholly passive, just that they are passive with respect to a certain type of activity, even if the latter is something he in fact continues to believe. A third complication is that Berkeley also mentions unity as a feature of collections or "congeries" of ideas but also as a feature of individual ideas like sensations. Below is an example of the latter: HYLAS. Hold, Philonous, I fear I was out in yielding intense heat to be a pain. It should seem rather, that pain is something distinct from heat, and the consequence or effect of it. PHILONOUS. Upon putting your hand near the fire, do you perceive one simple uniform sensation, or two distinct sensations? HYLAS. But one simple sensation. PHILONOUS. Is not the heat immediately perceived? HYLAS. It is. PHILONOUS. And the pain? HYLAS. True. PHILONOUS. Seeing therefore they are both immediately perceived at the same time, and the fire affects you only with one simple, or uncompounded idea, it follows that this same simple idea is both the intense heat immediately perceived, and the pain; and consequently, 35 This activity does not, however, require precedent volitions, so it is not the same sort of agency as is involved with the will (and so it can be, and is, blind). See Hill 2018. If, for Berkeley, activity and unity are in fact linked in this way, such that the relevant sort of unity is entailed by activity, then activity would be an appropriate F, as it would be sufficient to establish Non-Identity. However, displaying this fact would require an argument for the link between activity and unity, as well as an expanded version of the argument we have given for the efficacy of unity against the mind-body identity panpsychist. 36 Later in Roberts' discussion of Cudworth's Neo-Platonism and its connection to Berkeley's view, he draws, implicitly and without much commentary, as Berkeley often does, the same connection between activity and unity or simplicity, saying: "His is a view of agents as simple, active, immaterial substances where activity is conceived of exactly the way it should be if we are made in the image of God and God's nature is conceived of axiarchically. In other words, where activity is conceived of as volition. It is through volition that our moral natures are self-determined" (2018, 152; italics ours). Graham Clay & Michael Rauschenbach that the intense heat immediately perceived, is nothing distinct from a particular sort of pain. (3D 176) If Berkeley is to establish per our proposed definition that, necessarily, for all x, if x is unified, then x is a substance, then he must distinguish between different kinds of unity. As for collections or congeries of ideas, Berkeley holds that "in each instance it is plain, the unit relates to some particular combination of ideas arbitrarily put together by the mind" (PHK 12).37 Since the unity of minds explains the unity of collections and congeries in this way, its unity must be distinct from and more fundamental than theirs.38 Even if the sort of unity possessed by a mind which enables it to unify collections and congeries is its unity of perspective, more needs to be said about what this amounts to.39 Supposing Berkeley were to have a well-developed account of what this unity of perspective amounts to, he would be in a much improved position relative to panpsychists more generally and mind-body identity panpsychists like Spinoza in particular. Although Berkeley's texts provide little immediate assistance in further explicating his account of the mind's unity, Berkeley could rely on plausible arguments defended by others to improve his position. The benefits are significant not only because they provide additional grist for Berkeley's idealist mill, but also because the claim that the mind is unified-while the body is not-has substantially greater intuitive plausibility than the claim that since bodies are ideas and ideas are passive, bodies are wholly passive. This advantage in intuitive plausibility remains so even if Berkeley's ultimate explanation for the mind's unity is its having a specific sort of activity, as unifier of perceptions into a single perspective or as unified virtuous agent, that bodies lack. 37 See also 3D 245-246 and 3D 249. 38 There is robust discussion in the literature of "Berkeley's dualism," which is roughly the view that minds and ideas have "natures perfectly disagreeing" (PHK 139), beginning with Berman 1994, 21-22, Roberts 2007, 90, 90n14, Bettcher 2007, 51-53, and Hill 2018, 127. For our purposes, though, these discussions bring together many questions we prefer to discuss separately. For instance, Roberts (2007, 90n14) discusses Berkeley's dualism in connection with his philosophy of language, which we do not consider here, except briefly in footnote 30. By contrast, Hill (2018, 127) connects Berkeley's dualism to the passivity of ideas, as we discuss here and in what follows, and Bettcher's fascinating discussion (2007, 51-53) touches on ideas' passivity, but also on Berkeley's rejection of ideas as "modifications of the mind" (52) and on self-knowledge generally. We respond to the passivity points in the main text, but Bettcher's point about ideas as modifications deserves special comment. Notably, however effective Berkeley's arguments are against this Cartesian view, Spinoza's view is different. Ideas are not modifications but constituents of the mind; said differently, the mind is a complex idea. Of course, Berkeley also rejects the notion that minds are complex, and indeed, as we discuss in our section on unity, we think this is his most promising strategy. But we do not think the most promising version of Berkeley's argument runs through the passivity of ideas (and thus their non-identity with minds), but rather through the unity of spirits (and thus their non-identity with Spinoza's complex ideas). 39 Especially since Berkeley claims that the unity of minds entails that they are "incorruptible," "indissoluble by the Force of Nature," and "immortal" (PHK 141). A simple pain is, by contrast, corruptible, dissoluble, and mortal, and undeniably so. Berkeley does not give a clear explanation of what explains the difference. Can the Berkeleyan Idealist Resist Spinozist Panpsychism? 6. Conclusion The foregoing suggests that, even if Berkeley fails to identify mind-body identity panpsychism as an important rival to his idealism, he may in the end have the resources to argue for Non-Identity. We are optimistic about Berkeley's chances, although pessimism looms. If neither 'unified' nor 'active' are viable replacements of F in our schema, and so neither enable Berkeley to defend his idealism, then what follows is that his idealism is simply ill-suited to respond to the challenge posed by mind-body identity panpsychism, given the significant limitations of Berkeley's arguments for his position we have identified here. Supposing, though, that Berkeley can establish Non-Identity, he then must turn to the other components of his idealism. Mental Substances can be secured if Berkeley can establish that, necessarily, for all x, if x is unified, then x is a substance. It follows from this claim and the claim that, necessarily, for all x, if x is a mind, then x is unified that, necessarily, for all x, if x is a mind, then x is a substance. Since, again, it is not clear what sort of unity all minds possess on Berkeley's view, we cannot address whether Berkeley could plausibly argue that only substances have this sort of unity. There is reason, however, to be hopeful about this possibility, given that whatever sort of unity it is, it is not possessed by ideas, which are, on Berkeley's picture, the only non-substances. With NonIdentity and Mental Substances in hand, Berkeley can establish the first conjunct of Strong Asymmetry with the addition of only one further claim: necessarily, x is a substance if, and only if, x is independent. This is an eminently plausible claim since substances are generally defined as independent beings, both in the early modern context and otherwise. Supposing Berkeley is successful at these tasks, he would have his idealism, or something near enough.40 Primary Texts PHK Berkeley, G. 1710. Of the Principles of Human Knowledge: Part 1. Luce/Jessop (eds.) 1948-1957. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. 3D Berkeley, G. 1713. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. Luce/Jessop (eds.) 1948-1957. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons. DM Berkeley, G. 1721. 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What Is the Question to which Anti-Natalism Is the Answer? Nicholas Smyth, Fordham University Often, we can best understand the nature and significance of a philosophical theory by getting clear on the question it is meant to answer.1 Here, for example, are some questions that moral philosophers might help us to answer: 1. Which actions should I take? 2. Which actions of mine will best promote valuable outcomes? 3. Which types of actions will best promote valuable outcomes? 4. What are the most valuable outcomes? These questions are prima facie distinct, and it would require substantive argument to show that two of them are, contrary to appearances, identical. They lie on a familiar continuum that begins with practical inquiry conducted from within a first-personal, situated perspective and ends with a detached, theoretical inquiry into which possible world is the best one. In this paper, I will argue that a wide range of positions in procreative ethics may well be of no practical relevance to people who are deliberating about whether to procreate. This is because these positions are primarily answers to the third and fourth types of question, and because their authors have not even tried to connect those answers to the first-personal, deliberative question of how an agent should think about her decision to have children. I will not argue that this gap cannot be bridged, but I will stress that this is a serious collective failing, one that needs remedying if procreative ethics is to be anything more than a mere philosopher's game. Along the way, I will develop an account of what has been rather unfortunately termed "the right to procreate" (Cutas, 2009; Quigley, 2010; Robertson, 1996). On my account, there is in fact no such right or permission, as these deontic concepts do not capture the normative significance of procreation in an individual human life. Rather, I will argue, a person's reasons to procreate are often profoundly subjective and existential, located in a normative space that is distinct from the domain of objective morality. 1 I owe this more general idea to R.G. Collingwood, who believed that propositions are not fully understood unless seen in light of the questions they are meant to answer. See (Collingwood, 1939, pp. 25-43). 2 1. Practicality and Authority in Moral Philosophy One of the controlling ideas of late-20th century philosophical ethics was that there is certain tension between two competing practical perspectives. Thomas Nagel, Susan Wolf, Bernard Williams, and Christine Korsgaard each offered subtle and powerful discussions of this idea. Nagel said that we are torn between the "objective" and "subjective" perspectives on values and action, Williams argued that moral philosophy tends to distort the affect-laden "inside" perspective on action, Wolf argued that life's meaningfulness is contingent on our balancing something like these "inside" and "outside" perspectives, and Christine Korsgaard argued that ethical truth is only accessible from the standpoint of actual decision-making, and not from a detached, theoretical standpoint2. Each of these thinkers grappled with the evident fact that our ethical lives are stretched on a wire, running between a reflective, impersonal and broadly impartial viewpoint and an engaged, partial, subjectively rich, largely unreflective viewpoint. Each took a different stance on the ultimate nature and significance of this fact, but each believed that it was of great importance. And importantly, each drew the conclusion that the first question listed above-which I will call the practical question-cannot not be answered simply by listing some set of impartially generated truths about valuable outcomes or possible worlds. The idea that morality (so conceived) can accomplish this feat is, they argued, akin to a kind of metaphysical fantasy. Since agents must form intentions if they are to decide what to do, we must have some account of how a series of facts is related to an agent's practical perspective, such that an encounter with those facts could produce intentions to act. This, in a nutshell, is the practicality problem for ethics: what is the relation between moral considerations and the actual intentions of rational human agents? How can we act on those considerations?3 Moreover, as Williams and Korsgaard stressed, even if we solve this perennial problem, there is a second question, that of rational authority. An agent may care about being a morally good person, and certain moral considerations may connect up in the right way with their practical perspectives. But this does not entail that they always ought to prioritize those considerations over other ones, nor does it even entail that they ought to give those considerations very much 2 See (Korsgaard, 1996; Nagel, 1989; B. A. O. Williams, 1985; Wolf, 1997). For a canonical discussion of this general issue, see (Scheffler, 1994) 3 The question of how reflection on ethical propositions can issue in intentions was most influentially articulated by Aristotle. In recent meta-ethics, it has come to be known as "the normative question". (Aristotle, 2009, p. 1147a; Dreier, 2015; Korsgaard, 1996) I add the qualifier "rational" in my description because it is not clear that a moral philosopher has to explain how moral considerations can motivate any agent; most philosophers in this area will concede that this explanatory burden only exists for agents who meet certain minimal standards. Even the fairly skeptical Williams granted that an agent may be totally unmoved by their own overriding reasons if they lack certain cognitive or imaginative capacities. (Williams 1981) I am grateful to Mona Simion for discussion of this point. 3 weight at all. This is what I will call the authority problem: why do the dictates of an impartial moral perspective trump reasons arising from other viewpoints?4 In what follows, I will assume that any moral philosopher who supplies us with moral verdicts must provide a substantive solution to the practicality and authority problems. Unfortunately, I lack the space to defend this general meta-ethical orientation. The position is hostile to certain forms of externalist moral realism which hold that practical reasons might simply be facts simpliciter, and that such facts might fail to motivate any agents and still retain their normative status (Parfit, 2011; Scanlon, 2014). Proponents of this view tend to relegate the practicality problem to the domain of psychology; the question of how reasons motivate actual agents is simply not part of the program. Realists of this sort might remain justifiably unmoved by the arguments I provide in this paper, though I will suggest that this position comes at a cost. A moral realist who wants to reject my arguments must think of applied ethics as a very strange field, one which supplies verdicts to real persons but which does not think that any persons are meant to act on those verdicts. This is a coherent position, but as I will suggest, it requires us to radically re-conceptualize applied ethics. Thus, I will mostly follow Korsgaard, Williams, Nagel and Wolf in assuming that any philosopher who produces substantive moral verdicts-an applied ethicist, for example-must address the practicality and authority problems. Moreover, it seems clear enough that our ability to solve the practicality and authority problems depends on the way we generate our moral verdicts: if the procedure is not one that an actual decision-maker can recognize and incorporate into their lives, then the verdict simply cannot gain the right sort of traction. 2. The Impersonality of Procreative Ethics Consider, then, contemporary procreative ethics, where (as I will shortly show) a great many philosophers write as though the questions of practicality and authority are virtually settled by the mere declaration that biological procreation is morally suspect in some impersonal, objective sense.5 In doing so, they follow the contemporary enfant terrible of procreative ethics, David Benatar, whose anti-natalist work is in many ways responsible for the revival of this topic. 2.1. Benatar's Anti-Natalism Benatar has argued that it is always wrong to bring somebody into existence. He has three principal arguments for this conclusion. I will label these the asymmetry argument, the misanthropic argument and the badness of life argument, and I will take each in turn. I will not attack the logic of each argument, rather, I will focus on the type of considerations it brings to bear on the 4 For various discussions of what has been called the "overridingness" question, see (Archer, 2014; Black & Tiffany, 2011; Portmore, 2008; Stroud, 1998; Tanyi, 2012; B. Williams, 1981). See also Sam Scheffler's Human Morality, ch.3 (Scheffler, 1992). 5 A principal exception is Christine Overall. The final chapter in her Why Have Children? has the virtue of not automatically treating the moral and the practical questions as though they were identical, and openly discusses meaningfulness, authenticity and identity. (Overall, 2012) 4 practical question at hand. In each case, I will suggest, such considerations can only seem relevant to procreative decision-making if we blur the lines between distinct practical questions. To begin, Benatar has argued that "coming into existence, far from ever constituting a net benefit, always constitutes a net harm" (Benatar 2006, 1). In order to establish this, he outlines what he calls the "basic asymmetry": (1) The presence of pain is bad, and (2) the presence of pleasure is good...However... (3) The absence of pain is good even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone; but (4) the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation. (Benatar 2006, 30) This asymmetry, he claims, shows that it is better never to come into existence. Roughly, this is because the absence of pain always counts in favor of not existing, whereas the absence of pleasure never counts against not existing. Now, Benatar immediately notices that the argument has an undesirably abstract or impersonal flavor. This is because we are meant to place a great deal of weight on an asymmetry in valuation that is said to apply to a person who, by definition, does not exist. As soon as we start to speak of a real, flesh-and-blood person, the proposition (2) will justify their existence, and the asymmetry will no longer hold. Yet, can mere intuitions about badness with respect to nonexistent persons really suffice to show that reproduction is necessarily a moral evil? How can the absence of pain count in favor of a decision if there is no-one for whom that absence is good? As several critics have pointed out, the argument has a deeply impersonal flavor.6 This is why, in later work, Benatar is at pains to deny that his comparisons between the absence of pain and the absence of pleasure are impersonal or purely metaphysical. He insists that his conclusion is that "it is better for a person that he never exist, on condition that we understand that locution as a shorthand for a more complex idea."(Benatar, 2013, p. 124) Presumably, since prospective parents care about the welfare of their (possible) children, this idea-that it is better for their children to never come into existence-would immediately secure practical relevance for the argument and for Benatar's overall position. But what is this "more complex idea"? That more complex idea is this: We are comparing two possible worlds-one in which a person exists and one in which he does not. One way in which we can judge which of these possible worlds is better, is with reference to the interests of the person who exists in one (and only one) of these two possible worlds. Obviously those interests only exist in the possible world in which the person exists, but this does not preclude our making judgments about the value of an alternative possible world, and doing so with reference to the interests of the person in the possible world in which he does exist. (Benatar, 2013, p. 125) 6 See (McMahan, 2009). 5 It is revealing that Benatar cannot elucidate his allegedly 'personal' claim without saying that we are in fact comparing the values of two possible worlds. Since he cannot say that one possible life is better than another, he must say that one world is better than another. But the question of what is better for a person is not identical (or, we might add, even remotely similar) to the question of which of two worlds is best. Moreover, when asking what would be best for their future children, prospective parents are not asking about the comparative value of two possible worlds. Benatar, despite what he says, is answering the fourth and most abstract of the questions listed at the beginning of this paper.7 But this is not the question that any prospective parent is asking, nor has anyone shown that it is the question they ought to be asking. Let's now consider Benatar's second argument, which he appropriately labels the misanthropic argument. Benatar claims that human beings cause so much suffering that we should not make any more of them. He thinks that "we have a (presumptive) duty to desist from bringing into existence new members of species that cause (and will likely continue to cause) vast amounts of pain, suffering and death." (Benatar & Wasserman, 2015, p. 35) What kind of pain and suffering matters, here? When confronted with the fact that human-on-human infliction of suffering has been declining rapidly for centuries, Benatar cites the population explosion in order to insist that it is the total amount of suffering caused by humans, and not our individual contributions to the amount, that really matters (Benatar and Wasserman 2015, 51). Humanity is generally despicable because of the aggregative total suffering it causes, and not because of the suffering that each human being causes. Many are instinctively repelled by such arguments, perhaps because humanity is cast as some kind of disease or blight, such that intentional procreation becomes morally analogous to the release of malarial mosquitos or smallpox germs into an ecosystem. I want to try to dig beneath this sort of response and ask a prior question about why the perspective Benatar takes is automatically taken to have practical relevance. He is plainly working under rule-consequentialist assumptions; it is supposed to be wrong to produce children because producing children, in general, results in a great deal of suffering. Yet, as I have already indicated, much of late-20th century ethics was devoted to showing that this sort of abstract, aggregative, ruleconsequentialist approach faces a barrage of serious objections, mostly centered precisely around the problems of authority and practicality (Hurley, 2009). It is entirely unclear why impartially delivered facts about overall global suffering must outweigh other practical considerations for any rational agent, or how we are supposed to relate these facts to the actual decision-making processes of situated human beings. Prospective parents are asking: should I have children? And Benatar's answer, at this stage, is: no, because procreation in general produces a great deal of aggregate suffering. But is this an answer to the question? Only if the aggregate suffering produced by a type of action is a consideration that ought to weigh decisively the first personal 7 In saying this, I am not asserting that the badness of a possible-future person's life should never weigh in our deliberations. My argument here merely concerns the form of the comparative question that is being asked: if we are to include such possible-future persons in our deliberation about whether to make them actual, we necessarily compare worlds and not lives. 6 performance of a token of that type. But this is, to put it mildly, a highly contentious thesis, one which Benatar never defends. Here, again, it is only by blurring the lines between distinct questions that his desired conclusion can appear plausible. Finally, Benatar offers the badness of life argument. This argument alleges that any future child is likely to have a life that is on-balance disvaluable for the child. This is because, according to Benatar, there are many kinds of pain and suffering that we suppress, forget, or try to ignore when we try to convince ourselves that life is in fact worth living. Once those negative elements are added to the balance sheet, he thinks it becomes clear that the average life, or possibly all human life, is not worth living (Benatar 2006, 85). Now, admittedly, this is the sort of consideration which can easily count as practical and authoritative for prospective parents, since virtually no-one wants to create children whose lives contain on-balance suffering or personal disvalue. One can easily imagine saying to an ordinary person: "You're going to create someone that you will love, but that someone is going to have a life full of undeserved pain and suffering." Surely this admonition makes plain sense, so at first glance it can appear as though Benatar is appropriately concerned to relate his position to the practical perspectives of deciding agents. Unfortunately, this appearance is deceptive. As the argument develops, it immediately relies on an abstraction away from those very practical perspectives, away from the ways in which ordinary reflective agents see their lives. After all, as Benatar well knows, the first question any of us will ask upon being presented with this argument is: "Does my life really seem that bad?" Moreover, unless we are in rather permanent and dire circumstances, we are very likely to say: "no", even after deep, thoughtful reflection. In order to pre-empt this thought-which will severely weaken the badness of life argument-Benatar lists several "biased" tendencies in human self-assessment, for example, the well-known fact that people's assessments of subjective well-being are not particularly affected, in the long-term, by such things as poverty and ill health (Benatar, 2006, pp. 65-66). We are, he says, not reliable assessors of our own well-being. I do not wish to completely adjudicate the bias question here; my focus is on the perspective from which these arguments are being launched, and not on their merits or demerits. However, there is a thorny philosophical problem hiding in all-too-easy declarations of bias. Suppose it is true that after falling into serious long-term illness, most people will take about a year to report the same level of well-being they reported before becoming ill. What, exactly, does this show? One hypothesis is that the illness has permanently reduced their well-being, and if this is so, we can indeed conclude that such people are hopelessly biased in favor of the value of their own lives. This is Benatar's view. But another hypothesis is that the value of a life is not entirely given by the data that we can cite about it from a third-personal perspective. Perhaps well-being is more holistic, depending at least partly on the perspective of the person involved and on the way in which that perspective interacts with and evaluates their own experiences. 7 Consider a subjectivist, desire-fulfillment view of well-being (Heathwood, 2014). Benatar argues that even if this view is true, we tend to ignore or forget about the large number of our desires that go unsatisfied. But desire-satisfaction is not a matter of mere counting. Rather, some desires are more central to our lives and identities, and any plausible desire-satisfaction theory will accord such desires far more weight. Yet, is it not the case that (for example) the desire to be happy with one's life is powerful, controlling, and central to the lives of pretty much everyone? When the person with a long-term illness adjusts to their circumstances and regains their sense of contentment, is this powerful desire not thereby being satisfied? This would entail that their life is improving, perhaps dramatically. And if this is so, in what sense is such a person biased against the truth about their lives? This dialectic is familiar in meta-ethics: subjective accounts of reasons or values partly immunize us against bias by defining the facts in terms of our attitudes (Street, 2016). Any broadly subjective account of well-being will have the same feature. But this possibility does not, to my knowledge, receive any treatment in Benatar's work. The idea that coming to feel a certain way about one's life partly constitutes the goodness of that life is alien to his more third-personal mode, which looks instead to such measurable, quantifiable elements as physical or financial health as determinants of well-being. And this argumentative lacuna is exactly what you would expect from a philosopher who is so unconcerned to answer questions about practicality and authority. Now, in support of the claim that we are biased against the truth about our lives, Benatar sometimes runs a different, even more abstract argument. He has claimed that our inclination to see life as generally good is the product of evolutionary influence, and that this has biased us against the cold reality: Anti-natalist views, whatever their source, run up against an extremely powerful pronatalist bias. This bias has its roots in the evolutionary origins of human (and more primitive animal) psychology and biology. Those with pro-natal views are more likely to pass on their genes (Benatar, 2006, p. 8). Unfortunately for Benatar, it is now well-understood by those working on evolutionary debunking that the mere fact that we were in some sense bound to arrive at some evaluative orientation, given Darwinian influence, says nothing about the normative status of that orientation. Rather, it is only when the evolutionary influence is shown to positively distort our evaluative outlook that its justification is called into question (Copp, 2008; Vavova, 2014). But this, of course, requires just the sort of argument that is missing from Benatar's texts: a nonquestion-begging way of establishing that life actually is bad overall, such that we can positively establish that evolutionary influences have pushed us off-track. Let's review. The decision to procreate is often made by someone who is intensely engrossed in a series of intimate questions: am I ready for this challenge? Is this the kind of love I can accept into my life? Will I be able to provide care and support for my child? Will this decision alter my relationship with my partner in undesirable ways? Is this the sort of world into which I 8 wish to bring a child? I find it instructive to imagine such a person picking up a book on procreative ethics and reading that this collection of difficult and deeply personal questions can be tossed aside, because: (1) The absence of pain is good even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone; and the absence of pleasure is not bad unless there is somebody for whom this absence is a deprivation, (2) Human procreation is causally related to the production of large amounts of suffering, and (3) Life is bad, but you don't notice that because evolution has made you biased. It should be clear that there is at least a problem here: how could such abstract, impersonal thoughts have practical authority over the decisions of real agents who are confronted with this important decision? Strikingly, many contemporary procreative ethicists, pro-natalists included, have not even acknowledged that this sort of problem exists. Instead, they have mainly followed Benatar in continuing to write in highly impersonal terms about sufferings, harms and duties, usually in impartial and quantitative terms. 2.2 Other Procreative Ethicists In articulating a contrary, pro-natalist position, Elizabeth Brake attempts to outline what is morally significant about procreation. "What can be said in favor of procreation," she asks, "other than preference, instinct, or a desire to continue the family line? Such relatively trivial reasons look unlikely to justify it in the face of its costs...A procreative justification needs to extend beyond the personal project of parenting."(Brake, 2015, pp. 140, emphasis mine) Having summarily dismissed the practical perspectives of deciding agents, she goes on to tell us what is most significant about procreation: "Procreation shapes the future by populating it. It is a direct contribution to the gene pool and to the future agents who will make decisions changing the world." Her thought is that in some cases, this contribution will be on-balance valuable. Yet, why should any deciding agent take this consideration-that they might make an extremely miniscule contribution to the impersonal value of future populations-to have practical relevance? No answer is forthcoming, nor does an answer appear in a great deal of related literature. In articulating a similar position, Anca Gheaus argues that we might have individual pro tanto duties to procreate in order to avoid the scenario in which humanity's final generation "suffer[s] great harm due to depopulation"(Gheaus, 2015, p. 87). She follows several writers in arguing that, contra Benatar's misanthropic argument, procreation produces significant public goods. For example, pregnancies ensure that society will contain have a tax base which can fund old-age pensions. Moreover, future children will provide future generations with a working economy which will prevent the human race from suffering a deeply unpalatable death (Gheaus, 2015, p. 94). These considerations, she thinks, might be sufficient to generate a defeasible duty to 9 procreate. Yet, the fundamental first-personal question remains: why should any prospective parent see their decision as regulated by these considerations? No answer is forthcoming.8 Corey MacIver, in arguing that procreation is as morally criticisable as anything else that affects our ecological footprint, writes that procreation is "a fundamentally material practice, reliant upon the appropriation of significant quantities of natural goods." Roughly, procreation is said to be fundamentally material solely because it requires those natural goods, and MacIver doesn't dwell on the fact that, according to his definition, weddings, churches, blood banks, funeral homes, graveyards and large monuments dedicated to victims of genocide are "fundamentally material". In any case, once the decision to have a child is equated with the decision to appropriate resources from other people without their direct consent, it is easy to conclude, as MacIver does, that "procreative decisions are subject to moral censure and even to intervention." (MacIver, 2015, p. 118) Thomas Young goes even further, equating childrearing with what he calls "ecogluttony" solely because he cannot find a way to draw a distinction between having a child and purchasing, for example, "a dozen jet-skies, six jacuzzies, three bars, and an indoor tennis court." (Young, 2001, p. 186) As I will suggest in section four, this is a significant failure of imagination. Many more examples could be produced. Each of these philosophers names a state of affairs- the relative size of an ecological footprint, the production of valuable genetic material, the overall badness of the average person's life, tax bases, pension plans-and rather startlingly moves from certain possible-future states of affairs to an entirely distinct deontic judgment (that procreation is forbidden, required, or what have you). Once the values of prospective states of affairs have been weighed, and the probabilistic calculations are in, the deontic status of procreation is established, and that is that. But what is this work for? What is its purpose? Who is supposed to read it, and who is supposed to accept its conclusions about procreation? These questions lead us to a more general problem: what, exactly, is applied ethics supposed to be? 3. What Is Applied Ethics? Consider a slightly unfamiliar model of applied ethics, one which nonetheless harmonizes nicely with the externalist moral-realist position mentioned earlier. We might call this a juridical model, inasmuch as its fundamental goal is to issue verdicts in the form of moral propositions. Moral propositions are facts about reasons. These facts will concern the rightness, wrongness, permissibility or impermissibility of such things as abortion, euthanasia, social inequality, factory farming and stem cell research. And it is perfectly possible that these facts will be abhorrent, incoherent or otherwise mysterious to human beings who must make real-world decisions. 8 Of course, many parents have children to ensure their own well-being as they enter old age. But this is not the kind of consideration that Gheaus cites. Rather, she focuses solely on the well-being of humanity in general. 10 Unsurprisingly, some realist philosophers simply deny that moral philosophy is practical in the sense I have been discussing, and this view commits them, fairly inexorably, to the juridical model of applied ethics. "If moral philosophy had the aim of answering such [practical] questions," writes arch-externalist Derek Parfit, "it could not possibly succeed. Moral philosophy cannot make our decisions" (Parfit, 2011, pp. Vol II, 415). For these philosophers, moral philosophy simply aims at theoretical discovery, an activity which may quell various metaphysical worries but which is not actually meant to help us decide anything. Indeed, if the task of procreative ethics is simply to register these facts, to note their existence on some cosmic ledger, then perhaps that task has been accomplished by the procreative ethicists I am discussing. However, this is not at all what applied ethics appears to be, and most work on the function of applied ethics has concluded that it is in fact meant to help us make decisions.9 It's not hard to see why. Consider what is widely considered to be the most important and influential work in applied ethics, Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (Singer, 1975). While sometimes pitched as an application of utilitarianism to the question of animal rights, the book's social importance is plainly not due to its adherence to any moral theory. Rather, its arguments resonated deeply with the practical perspectives of millions of readers. The frank discussions of animal suffering and anguish, the charges of 'speciesism', and the final, passionate call to action-this was applied ethics that was meant to move us in the right direction. In a retrospective interview, Singer himself says as much: When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change the world. I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time the sixties still existed for us. It looked as if real changes were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one of them (Specter, 1999). He was right, of course. His book did change the world, because it provided considerations that helped millions of actual people to make firm decisions regarding their own consumption of meat. Now, if the task of reproductive ethics is what it appears to be-to help actual people make the best reproductive decisions available-then questions about the authority and practicality of global, impersonal value-balancing cannot be avoided. Because they do not directly say what their work is meant to accomplish, I cannot say what Benatar and his fellow procreative ethicists would say here. But at this point I can register a conclusion: if the question to which various natalisms are an answer is merely that of the content of that cosmic ledger, then these natalisms are a distinctly odd, juridical form of applied ethics which is not actually meant to be applied by 9 For example, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy published an entire issue on methodology in applied ethics in 2000. While the authors differed in many respects, the editor noted that every contributor to the issue shared the assumptions that "bioethics is about resolving cases, not about moral theory, and that the best method of bioethical decision-making is that which produces useful answers." (Smith Iltis, 2000) 11 anyone. They are territory staked out in a chess match that moral philosophers are playing with each other, and they do not tell anyone how to think about their own decisions (Dennett, 2006).10 Perhaps, however, something more interesting and ambitious is intended. Perhaps it is that thoughtful people, in reading these discussions, are meant to be supplied with authoritative practical reasons for accepting some conclusion or another. These are supposed to be reasons that resonate with readers, just as profound animal suffering resonated with Singer's readers. Now, my main critique returns with a vengeance. For, as was the case with Benatar's arguments, there is a striking gap between the considerations provided by Brake, Gheaus and MacIver and the practical perspectives of actual agents. Consider the most familiar way to illustrate the gap, which begins with the well-known fact that we, as individual persons, are powerless to affect the large-scale social and environmental ills listed by authors like Brake. These are the "costs" she worries about which, she suggests, dramatically outweigh my personal desires or projects. It is supposed to be wrong for me to have children because I am increasing my ecological footprint, but the smallness of that footprint relative to the scope of the ecological problems facing humanity is so extreme that it is hard to analogize. To call it even a 'drop in the bucket' is to give my offspring's expected ecological footprint far too much significance, whether I have one child or ten. This is a particularly stark way in which these natalisms fail to relate their evaluative conclusions to the practical perspectives of real agents. Individual decision-making is illicitly absorbed into the collective, such that each decision-maker is somehow made responsible for outcomes they have virtually no hand in producing. If my remaining childfree will not in any way deter ecological disaster, then ecological disaster is not immediately relevant to my remaining childfree. I do not wish to argue that it couldn't be shown to be relevant; after all, there is always recourse to rule-utilitarianism, should any of these philosophers with to adopt that view (and show how it is practical and authoritative). I merely want to note the strange fact that many procreative ethicists do not, as a rule, acknowledge the existence of this famous gap between global disvalue and individual decision-making. One way to summarize what has been said is to say that there are more and less personal ways to do ethics. It will be said, rightly, that moral philosophy cannot be wholly personal. The activity of philosophy requires a certain abstraction and reflective distance from situational particulars.11 Be that as it may, each successive step toward abstraction leaves something behind, and my 10 Perhaps more charitably, these philosophers may be offering arguments in favor of certain state policies, such as China's well-known one-child policy. If this is so, then they should be far more explicit about this, and drop any references to moral censure and blame, to rightness, wrongness, permissibility or impermissibility. If, for example, MacIver's point is simply that governments have strong reasons to discourage reproduction, reasons grounded in resource-scarcity, then he should simply say so, and not insist that procreators are subject to "moral censure". 11 This is roughly the tension to which Williams was referring when he said: "We can dream of a philosophy that would be thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful. This, of course, implies an impossible combination of characteristics." (Williams 2000, 212). 12 diagnosis is that each step leaves us successively less able to answer questions about practicality and authority. What kind of compromise between the general and the particular can a moral philosopher strike, here? Consider the position adopted by Martha Nussbaum on this question. She argues that literature can play a powerful role in moral philosophy, and as if she is right, a moral philosophy which drew heavily on literary examples would almost certainly count as personal philosophy in my sense, and would thus be well positioned to solve the practicality problem (Nussbaum, 1990). If the deliverances of such a moral philosophy can be made to resonate with the reader via their sympathetic identification with a character's perspective, then it may be able to effect a transformation in the reader themselves. If such a philosophy has done well, then the reader may now care about the claims being endorsed and may be more inclined to see those claims as authoritative. Now, my own view is that non-fiction is an equally powerful and under-appreciated resource for moral philosophers. Autobiographical writing, for example, can illuminate the contours of lived human experience, offering a window into practical considerations which are actually salient to real agents. One such consideration is worth dwelling on here, as it is deeply relevant to the question of procreation and is often ignored by writers whose gaze is so firmly fixed on the abstract, impersonal realm of deontic verdicts.12 I call it existential grounding. In order to see what existential grounding is, it will be necessary to move away from pure theory and engage directly with lived experience. 4. Existential Grounding Consider a simple, everyday scenario. A woman arrives home with her groceries, unpacking them and putting them away, and leaving out the ingredients for a vinegar-chicken recipe she wishes to try. After turning on some of her favourite music, she quickly enters the flow of the kitchen, dicing, frying and spicing as the recipe directs. The meal is cooked, and she sits down with a glass of white wine and a plate of food, breathing it all in, unreflectively savouring the particular atmosphere that is this moment with this dish and this music in this life. Memories of such particular experiences are what leap unbidden into our minds when we encounter certain sounds or smells, when a sensory modality triggers a cascading tide of recollection, transporting us back to a unique time in our lives which was not necessarily good or bad but which was simply us. Such memories supply many of us with narratival continuity, 12 Once again, I wish to explicitly exempt Christine Overall from this criticism. 13 they remind us of our temporally extended existence, and their passing subtly reminds us that ultimately our time on this earth will someday come to an end.13 Such experiences are not readily describable in the hedonistic categories to which Benatar so often reduces human experience. Rather than directly deploy predicates like "pleasurable", we might approach the problem by following those existentialist philosophers who claim that only our consciousness of death can illuminate the meaning of our life.14 We might, in other words, ask the following question: Suppose I am on my deathbed in a number of years, reflecting back on the point or purpose of my life. Suppose further that I decide that it has all been worth it. Is this the sort of experience which I would cite as part of a justification for that judgment? If the answer is a resonant and wholehearted 'yes', then the experience is, for a person, existentially grounding.15 While its significance is potentially shareable, its function is not primarily to justify one's actions to others. Rather, its function is to justify one's life to oneself, to the person who must actually live it. I have deliberately chosen an example that may seem trivial, one that may induce some to wonder why I would ever include something so mundane as an evening's cooking in a paper about moral philosophy. But that is precisely the point: to the person having the experience it may be quite serious indeed, and its triviality to you, the analytically disengaged reader, is neither here nor there. It is not meant for you, because it is not an answer to any question that you are currently asking.16 Now, to the point: I think it is eminently clear that procreation-the project of conceiving, birthing and raising a child-is existentially grounding for many or even for most people who decide to undertake it.17 In defense of this claim, I can only say that it is what shines out of autobiographical language like this: 13 According to Galen Strawson, narratival continuity is not a universally shared human experience, and I am perfectly willing to grant that these descriptions won't resonate with everyone (Strawson 2003). However, this is dialectically irrelevant here. Procreative ethicists argue over whether procreation is right or wrong as such, and these positions are rendered problematic even by the existence of some people whose lives are such that they have strong practical reasons to procreate. 14 Most notable here is Heidegger; see (Edwards, Freeman, & Sugden, 1979; Heidegger, 1996). . 15 I use the terms "resonant" and "wholehearted" in roughly the sense given to them by Harry Frankfurt in his important work on identity and autonomy. See (Frankfurt, 1987). 16 I am thus in agreement with Nomy Arpaly's critique of Susan Wolf's account of life's meaningfulness. Wolf includes an "objective" component in her account, which is meant to rule out the meaningfulness of lives which, for example, entirely revolve around the love for a goldfish. Arpaly simply asks: why isn't such a life meaningful for the person who is living it? Here, we may simply distinguish two questions. Is this a life we would wish to lead, or that we would wish for our loved ones to lead? The answer is probably 'no'. But is this a life that is existentially grounding for the goldfish-lover? The answer is 'yes' (Wolf et al., 2010). 17 Curiously, in his most recent work, Benatar recognizes that something like this is true. He writes: "Many people have meaningful lives from this perspective. They are loved and cherished by their family, and in turn they play important, meaningful roles in the lives of those family members. They provide love, support, company, and deep personal connections."(Benatar, 2017, p. 28) He does not seem to recognize that this complicates his antinatalist position. 14 It's a bittersweet process, the changing of the seasons. The switch itself is beautiful-the fire in the trees, the long shadows on the ground, the harvest sunsets, the cool air on sunburned skin... That spark, that first orange leaf, always makes me feel sad. I tend to start missing things before they're gone. At least, I think to myself as I watch the burnt leaves fall, summer will come around again. Life is, after all, a very cyclical kind of thing. It's 7:00 PM and I'm snuggled up in a rocking chair with my son under a green and yellow knitted baby blanket that used to belong to his dad. The fire...fills the room with a warm amber light that shifts on the walls and plays on the pages of the book open in front of us... Someday these leaves will burn up and he'll be a kid who goes to school, and I'll miss him-but he'll be ok. It will be another new beginning, another spring. Someday he won't live in my house anymore, but maybe he'll meet someone special and start a family. And then maybe, the moment he lays eyes on his own baby, he'll catch a glimpse into how I feel about him. That will be another spring. (Krause, 2017) Krause uses plain language to express something with which many of us are familiar: that sense of change, decay and inevitable loss we can feel as the seasons change. Moreover, for her, the decision to procreate represents her redemptive participation in an ancient and apparently sacred cycle. Her life has presented her with an unavoidable question: how can I make sense of loss and change? And her son is, in many ways, an answer to that question. And this, by the way, is a question which has plainly been of enormous practical urgency for people throughout human history.18 In any case, this is the narrative into which she places her son's existence. He is how she makes peace with change, decay and loss. Her words may resonate with some readers; if so, this passage can help to illuminate existential reasons they share with Krause. Others will find her perspective maudlin, sentimental or even silly. But this is perfectly compatible with my main claim, since her experience is existentially grounding for her and no one else. Moreover, there is something odd, perhaps even downright absurd, in expecting first-personal reflections on a life's meaning to be anything other than sentimental. In any case, these are the sorts of reflections I find when I, in blatant defiance of the conventions of so much procreative ethics, consult what has actually been written by parents about their children. The more one reads this literature, which is full of struggle, joy and heartbreak, the more astonishing it seems that philosophers like MacIver and Young cannot see their way to a meaningful distinction between procreation and producing carbon emissions while driving to work. Indeed, the idea that childbearing might be fundamentally about the construction of 18 It appears, for example, in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, which is often read as the story of Gilgamesh coming to terms with human mortality. And of course, a great deal of religious belief is very often motivated by consciousness of earthly mortality. One famous hymn, written during the Irish Famine, reads "Change and decay in all around I see; O Thou who changest not: abide with me." 15 narratival meaning or existential purpose doesn't even feature in any of the multiple works cited above. This is only possible because theorists have dogmatically chosen to occupy a disengaged, bureaucratic standpoint on human decision-making, the very perspective that sees all practical questions as collapsible into the question of which possible worlds are best. Importantly, Krause's intimately personal thoughts do not serve to justify a right or permission to procreate, since they are not answers to questions about rights or permissions. They are not meant to stand as a reason for anyone else to procreate, nor are they meant to rebut the claim that significant future sufferings may occur if one has a child.19 They are an answer to the existential question, and thus have automatic practical relevance for anyone who finds them compelling. This is why procreative ethicists face an uphill battle. These philosophers wish to bring certain moral-theoretical considerations to bear on the perspective of prospective biological parents, but not only are those considerations of dubious relevance to that perspective, there is almost certainly a different kind of consideration which is immediately practical and authoritative-existential grounding. 5. Self-Indulgence At this point, many committed anti-natalists and pro-natalists will have lost patience. After all, if these ruminations are meant to be decisive, then I am arguing that self-focused existential grounding somehow trumps what we have been calling 'moral' considerations-considerations that arise from an impersonal, value-maximizing perspective. Isn't this insufferably selfindulgent? The first thing to say is that this is not actually my claim, since I am not staking out a positive position in procreative ethics. I am not arguing that The choice to have a child is existentially grounding, therefore It is permissible to have a child. Existential grounding, as I have said, is not best described as a source of permissions, rights or similar moral claims. Rather, it is simply a weighty practical consideration, one which can be shared with others, but which need not, in every case, be shared with all others. Nor do I claim that the existential question is the only practical question that faces deciding agents; after all, almost all of us care about our moral integrity and about the state of the world more generally. It is not impossible that such considerations might weigh in the decision to procreate, though, as I have suggested, philosophers have not yet shown why they should. The point is that the existential question is quite obviously the sort of question which is of immediate practical significance for a deciding agent. 19 For a systematic treatment of the distinction between reasons for me and reasons for all, see (Hodder, 2014). 16 By contrast, we should remember that if my previous arguments are correct, then the procreative ethicists I have discussed have no solution to the practicality problem, and have therefore not provided anyone with any practical reasons. If their impersonal perspective does not actually speak to the perspective of any deciding agent, it cannot provide reasons which stand in any need of being 'trumped' by existential ones. However, perhaps the proor anti-natalist is not convinced by those previous arguments, and still holds that there is some genuine subjective reason-providing force which arises from their preferred moral perspective. Well, if they can solve this practicality problem, we also need a story about why those reasons are authoritative for agents, why they are sufficiently strong to outweigh other practical considerations. Here, I think, the charge of self-indulgence could have real practical force. Brake, for example, alleges that it would be "narcissistic" to allow personal desires to justify a decision to have children. Few of us wish to be narcissistic, and if childbearing is indeed narcissistic in the thick evaluative sense, then that would be a powerful reason for most of us to avoid it. However, the existential question is in a way essentially narcissistic. I am unavoidably thrown into a distinct, individual life, a life on which I and only I can 'look back' in the relevant sense, barring bizarre science-fiction scenarios. Put another way, if someone on their deathbed is openly asking whether it has all been worth it, there is an absolute, categorical distinction between a person standing beside the bed and the person in the bed. We face the existential question in this unavoidably lonely way. So how can it possibly be narcissistic in any evaluative sense to decide partly on that basis? What is the force of this charge supposed to be? But surely, it will be insisted, we care about the harm that we do to other persons, and the choice to have a child is the choice to produce such harm and suffering. In choosing to have a child anyway, we are thereby deciding that our own existential predicament is more important than those harms. This, it seems, is unbearably self-indulgent, in a way that might tarnish the existential grounding itself. But do we make this comparison, between existential grounding and causing harm? Once again, the abstract, bloodless nature of natalist arguments comes back to haunt their advocates. Let us remember, these are exclusively harms which accrue to either (a) persons who do not yet exist and who can only be harmed if we create them, and (b) future persons who will be affected by large-scale social or environmental catastrophe. On the first point, we should recall that the oft-cited "non-identity problem" is a problem precisely because there is a huge difference between my harming some existing person and acting so as to create the very person whose sufferings can be traced to me. The fact that the person's very existence depends on my 'harming' them produces an extraordinary puzzle, and it is not at all clear that common-sense terms like "self-indulgent" apply at all to someone who fails to avoid this metaphysically bizarre form of "harming" (Heyd, 2009). 17 On the second point, as I have already indicated, it is virtually impossible for me to make a decision that will prevent large-scale social or environmental ills. It is disingenuous in the least to say that this is at all like an ordinary case of self-indulgence, where existing persons whose welfare I can actually affect are disregarded in favour of self-interested considerations. This is, I fear, yet another case in which language has gone 'on holiday', where a perfectly ordinary term like 'self-indulgent' is being used in a context which is wildly different from the norm. 6. Conclusion Moral philosophy is a tricky business. On the one hand, unless it displays a certain generality, a certain abstraction away from particulars, it isn't philosophy. On the other hand, it often seeks to legislate to particular, situated human agents, informing them that they ought to avoid or pursue various courses of action, that they have various duties and rights, and, increasingly, that certain personal projects they might have are objectively problematic. One of the important lessons of late-20th century ethics was that this must be a balancing-act, that questions about practicality and authority cannot be avoided if one is addressing actual agents. Unfortunately, in satisfying what Wittgenstein called the philosopher's "craving for generality", many procreative ethicists appear to have nearly abandoned the particular, and this has led them to provide answers to questions that (almost) no-one is asking.20 Works Cited Archer, A. (2014). Moral Rationalism without Overridingness. Ratio, 27(1), 100-114. Aristotle. (2009). 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Filmul Solaris, regia Andrei Tarkovsky – Aspecte psihologice și filosofice Nicolae Sfetcu 02.02.2018 Sfetcu, Nicolae, "Filmul Solaris, regia Andrei Tarkovsky – Aspecte psihologice și filosofice", SetThings (2 iunie 2018), MultiMedia (ed.), URL = https://www.setthings.com/ro/ebooks/filmul-solaris-regia-andrei-tarkovsky-aspecte-psihologice-si-filosofice/ DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.24928.17922 Email: [email protected] This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/. 2 Abstract În acest eseu evidențiez principalele aspecte psihologice și filosofice desprinse din filmul Solaris regizat de Andrei Tarkovski, precum și tehnicile cinematografice utilizate de regizor pentru a-și transmite mesajele spectatorului. În expunerea mea, mă bazez pe lucrările lui Andrei Tarkovsky (Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema) (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996), Simonetta Salvestroni and R. M. P. (The Science-Fiction Films of Andrei Tarkovsky) (Salvestroni 1987), Thomas P. Weissert (Stanislaw Lem and a Topology of Mind) (Weissert 1992), Vladimir Tumanov (Philosophy of Mind and Body in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris) (Tumanov 2016), David George Menard (A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky's Theory of Time-Pressure) (Menard 2003), Elyce Rae Helford ("We are only seeking Man": Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris) (Helford 1992), Manfred Geier (Stanislaw Lem's Fantastic Ocean: Toward a Semantic Interpretation of Solaris) (Geier 1992), Daniel McFadden (Memory and Being: The Uncanny in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky) (McFadden 2012) și Richard Duffy (Sculpted in time: Heterotopic space in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris) (Duffy 2003). În "Introducere" prezint pe scurt elementele relevante din biografia lui Tarkovski și o prezentare generală a romanului Solaris a lui Stanislav Lem și filmul Solaris în regia lui Andrei Tarkovsky. În "Tehnica cinematografică" vorbesc despre ritmul specific al scenelor, mișcarea radicală declanșată de Tarkovsky în cinematografia modernă, rolul elementelor simbolice și iconice, , și afinitățile cu zona fantastică a literaturii ruse. În "Aspecte psihologice" analizez problema comunicării într-o societate umană a viitorului considerată de Tarkovsky ca rigidă, obsesia casei, și evoluția personală a lui Kris, Hari, și a relațiilor dintre ei. În "Aspecte filosofice" se analizează filmul prin prisma filosofiei minții (dualismul cartezian, reducționismul și funcționalismul), a problemei identității personale, a teoriei spațiilor heterotopice dezvoltată de Michel Foucault, și interpretările semantice care se 3 pot deduce din film. De asemenea, se analizează problema identității personale prin prisma filosofiei lui Locke. "Concluziile" expun ideile generale rezultate din acest eseu, respectiv că Tentativele omului de a clasifica și de a păstra forme de interacțiune cu entități necunoscute vor fi întotdeauna condamnate la eșec și vor reflecta o greșeală majoră în lumea panoptică în care trăim. În acest cadru de analiză a filosofiei minții, funcționalismul pare a fi cel mai intuitiv. Solaris este, totuși, un film care începe ca o căutare a răspunsurilor și ajunge să ofere aceste răspunsuri împreună cu o serie de întrebări cu totul diferite. Toate traducerile citatelor din articol sunt făcute de autorul articolului. Cuvinte cheie: Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky, film, tehnica cinematografică, psihologie, filozofie, dualism minte-corp, identitate personală, heterotopia 4 Introducere Andrei Tarkovski (1932 1986) s-a născut în Rusia. Tarkovsky a regizat primele cinci din cele șapte filme ale sale (Copilăria lui Ivan (1962), Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris (1972), Oglinda (1975) și Călăuza (1979)) în Uniunea Sovietică; ultimele sale filme, Nostalgia (1983) și Sacrificiul (1986), au fost produse în Italia și Suedia. Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Oglinda și Călăuza sunt listate în mod regulat printre cele mai mari filme ale tuturor timpurilor. Ingmar Bergman a fost citat spunând: "Tarkovsky pentru mine este cel mai mare [dintre noi toți], cel care a inventat o nouă limbă, care este adevărat față a naturii filmului, deoarece captează viața ca o reflecție, viața ca pe un vis." (Bielawski 2018) Istoricul de filme, Steven Dillon, spune că o mare parte a filmului ulterior a fost profund influențată de filmele lui Tarkovsky. (Dillon 2006) Tarkovsky a dezvoltat o teorie a cinematografiei pe care a numit-o "sculptarea în timp". Prin aceasta el a vrut să evidențieze caracteristica unică a cinematografiei ca mediu, aceea de aborda experiența noastră despre timp și de a o modifica. Filmul neregulat transcrie timpul în timp real. Folosind filmări lungi și câteva tăieturi în filmele sale, el a urmărit să ofere spectatorilor un sentiment de trecere a timpului, timpul pierdut și relația dintre un moment de timp și altul. Solaris (Lem 2012) este un roman filosofic de ficțiune din 1961 al scriitorului polonez Stanisław Lem. Cartea se axează pe temele naturii memoriei umane, experienței și inadvertenței comunicării între speciile umane și non-umane. Romanul a fost transpus cinematografic de trei ori: în 1968, regizat de Boris Nirenburg, respectând îndeaproape cartea și menținând accentul pe planetă, mai degrabă decât relațiile umane; în1972, în regia lui Andrei Tarkovski, respectând vag cartea și accentuând pe relațiile umane; și în 2002, regizat de Steven Soderbergh, cu George 5 Clooney și produs de James Cameron, mergând de asemenea pe relațiile umane și neglijând temele sugerate de Lem. De altfel, Lem însuși a remarcat că niciuna dintre versiunile filmului nu se axează pe oceanul Solaris: „... din ce cunosc eu, cartea nu este dedicată problemelor erotice ale oamenilor din spațiul cosmic ... În calitate de autor al lui Solaris îmi voi permite să repet că am vrut numai să creez o viziune a unei întâlniri umane cu ceva care cu siguranță există într-o manieră puternică, dar nu poate fi redus la concepte, idei sau imagini umane. De aceea, cartea a fost intitulată 'Solaris' și nu 'Iubirea în spațiul cosmic'." (traducere proprie) Stanislaw Lem, Stația Solaris (8 decembrie 2002) (Lem 2006) Tarkovsky recunoaște aceste diferende, afirmând: "în contradicție cu ideea inițială a lui Lem, pentru că eu eram interesat de problemele vieții interioare, de probleme spirituale, ca să spun așa, și el era interesat de coliziunea dintre om și Cosmos, Necunoscutul cu literă mare "N". Aceasta este ceea ce îl interesează. Într-un sens ontologic al cuvântului, în sensul problemei cunoașterii și al limitelor acestei cunoașteri este vorba despre asta. El a spus chiar că omenirea a fost în pericol, că a existat o criză de cunoaștere atunci când omul nu mai simte ... Această criză este în creștere, un bulgăre de zăpadă, ia forma diverselor tragedii umane, inclusiv ale oamenilor de știință." (Jerzy and Neuger 1985, 21) Diferența este evidentă și din explicația lui Tarkovski despre procesul de transpunere cinematografică a lui Solaris. Tarkovski a comentat romanul lui Lem: "M-a atras doar pentru că pentru prima dată am întâlnit o lucrare despre care aș putea spune: ispășire, aceasta este o poveste a ispășirii. Ce este ispășirea? Remușcare. Într-un sens clasic simplu al cuvântului când rememorăm păcatele din trecut, păcatele, se 6 transformă în realitate. Pentru mine acesta a fost motivul pentru care am realizat un astfel de film." (Jerzy and Neuger 1985, 21) În 1972, Tarkovsky a finalizat filmul Solaris. A lucrat la scenariu împreună cu Fridrikh Gorenshtein. Solari are ca personaje pe Natalya Bondarchuk (Hari), Donatas Banionis (Kris Kelvin), Juri Järvet (Dr. Snaut), Vladislav Dvorzhetsky (Henri Berton), Nikolai Grinko (tatăl lui Kris Kelvin), Olga Barnet (mama lui Kris Kelvin) Solonitsyn (Dr. Sartorius) și Sos Sargsyan (Dr. Gibarian). Filmul este o dramă psihologică derulându-se la bordul unei stații spațiale care orbitează planeta Solaris. Cei trei membri ai echipajului au probleme psihologice, astfel încât psihologul Kris Kelvin este trimis acolo pentru a evalua situația, dar se confruntă cu aceleași fenomene misterioase ca și ceilalți. Tarkovsky și Lem au colaborat la adaptarea cinematografică a romanului Tarkovsky se concentrează asupra sentimentelor lui Kelvin pentru soția sa, Hari, și asupra impactului explorării spațiului cosmic asupra condiției umane. Coloana sonora a filmului este preludiul coralei lui Johann Sebastian Bach pentru orgă, Ier ruf 'zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, interpretat de Leonid Roizman (tema centrală a filmului), și o compoziție electronică de Eduard Artemiev. Hari are propria sa subtemă muzicală, un cantus firmus de Artemiev inspirat de muzica lui J. S. Bach, care se aude la moartea lui Hari și la sfârșitul filmului. (Artemyev 1991) Solaris a avut premiera la Festivalul de Film de la Cannes din 1972 și a câștigat Marele Premiu Special al Juriului și a fost nominalizat la Palme d'Or. O listă a celor mai bune 100 de 7 filme ale lumii cinematografice compilate de revista Empire în 2010 a clasat Solaris-ul lui Tarkovsky pe locul 68. (Empire.com 2017) Stanisław Lem a susținut că "nu mi-a plăcut niciodată versiunea lui Tarkovski." (Lem 2012) Tarkovski ar fi mers atât de departe încât a produs mai degrabă Crimă și pedeapsă decât Solaris, omițând aspecte epistemologice și cognitive ale cărții sale. [a20] Pentru Tarkovsky, conflictul existențial expus de Lem a fost doar punctul de plecare pentru dezvoltarea vieții interioare a personajelor. (Jerzy and Neuger 1987, 137–160) 1 Tehnica cinematografică Tarkovski s-a opus montajului și a considerat că baza artei cinematografice (arta filmului) este ritmul intern al imaginilor. El consideră cinematografia ca o reprezentare a curenților distinctivi sau undelor de timp, transmise în film prin ritmul său intern. Ritmul este în centrul "filmului poetic". Un ritm ca o mișcare în interiorul cadrului ("sculptarea în timp"), și nu ca o succesiune de imagini în timp. (Menard 2003) După cum afirmă Donato Totaro, editarea reunește secvențe care sunt deja umplute cu timp (Totaro 1992, 24). Timpul din cadru exprimă ceva semnificativ și adevărat care depășește evenimentele în sine, receptat în mod diferit de fiecare spectator în parte. Ritmul nu este determinat de lungimea secvențelor, ci de presiunea timpului care trece prin ele. (Menard 2003) Într-o declarație care articulează asemănările dintre modelul Deleuze, Tarkovski și modelul heterotopic 1 al lui Foucault (Foucault 1971), Deleuze afirmă "Imaginea timpului are puterea de a afecta modul în care gândim prin tăierea fluxului ordonat al timpului cronologic, continuitatea pe care se întemeiază unitatea și 1 Heterotopia este o schimbare evolutivă a aranjamentului spațial al dezvoltării embrionare a unui animal, complementară heterocroniei, o modificare a ratei sau calendarului unui proces de dezvoltare. 8 integritatea subiectului. Imaginea timpului alimentează gândirea și o împinge la limită unde se formează noile concepte și apar noi forme de subiectivitate și moduri de a fi în lume." (Deleuze 1985). Pentru Ian Christie, care discută problemele formalismului în cinematografie, filmul lui Tarkovsky produce o mișcare radicală în cinematografia modernă pentru că eliberează filmul din constrângerile regizorului, permițând filmului să trăiască în timpul propriu : "Formalismul ... spre deosebire de metodologiile structurale și psihanalitice, implică în mod crucial un spectator activ ... Bordwell propune o teorie "constructivistă" care leagă percepția [Tarkovsky] și cunoașterea [Deleuze] ... Conceptul cel mai influent al lui Bakhtin este, probabil, "dialogismul", care a apărut în special din studiul său al romanelor lui Dostoievski ... implică distincția dintre discursul direct al unui autor și cel al personajelor sale... Bakhtin a arătat modul în care aceste genuri interacționează cu genurile literare pentru a defini o "memorie de gen" [Tarkovsky] care stabilește limite pentru fiecare gen ... Maya Turovskaya (1989) a folosit conceptul cronotopului pentru a evidenția ideea lui Andrei Tarkovsky despre cinema ca "timp imprimat." (Ian, Hill, and Gibson 1998) Deleuze scrie despre textul lui Tarkovsky, despre "figura cinematografică", după cum urmează: "... Tarkovsky spune că ceea ce este esențial este modul în care timpul curge în secvențe, tensiunea sa [adică timp-presiune] sau rarefacția, "presiunea timpului în secvență". El pare să subscrie la alternativa clasică, secvență sau montaj, și să opteze net pentru secvență ("figura cinematografică" există doar în interiorul secvenței)." (Ian, Hill, and Gibson 1998) 9 Interiorul stației spațiale este decorat cu reproduceri complete ale ciclului de pictare Lunile (Vânătorii în zăpadă, Ziua însorită, Recolta de fân, Culegătorii și Revenirea turmei) din 1565, de către Pieter Brueghel cel Bătrân , și detalii din Peisaj cu căderea lui Icarus și Vânătorii în zăpadă (1565). Filmul face, de asemenea, referire la filmul anterior al lui Tarkovski din 1966, Andrei Rublev, prin plasarea icoanei lui Andrei Rublev în camera lui Kelvin. Referințele și aluziile lui Tarkovsky din film sunt încercări ale regizorului de a oferi în arta cinematografică o perspectivă istorică, pentru a evoca spectatorului sentimentul că cinematografia este o artă matură. (Jerzy and Neuger 1987, 137–160) Tarkovski contrastează, în film, Pământul ca sursă a vieții și stația spațială învechită și inertă, împreună cu imagini dinamice ale plantelor subacvatice, focului, zăpezii, ploii. Contrastul apare evident și între scenele inițială (vizita la casa tatălui lui, cu un iaz plin de viață și pomi înfloriți) și cea finală în același loc, dar unde de data aceasta afară este frig, iazul este înghețat, iar copacii sunt goi. Tarkovsky a inclus scene de levitație pentru valoarea lor fotogenică și pentru inexplicabilitatea magică. (de Brantes 2008) Apa, norii și reflecțiile au fost folosite de el pentru frumusețea lor suprareală, pentru valoarea fotogenică, și pentru simbolismul lor. (Bellis 2008) Solaris prezintă afinități precise și creative cu zona fantastică a literaturii ruse. Interacțiunile metaforice, bipolaritățile, miracolele ambigue pe care le întâlnim și la Bulgakov, Dostoievski, Gogol și Strugatsky, Tarkovsky le transferă imaginii. În film, dialogul dintre omenire și planetă se manifestă exclusiv prin imagini, exemplificând, într-un mod original și complex, modul în care imaginea comunică și contribuie la dezvoltarea cunoașterii. (Salvestroni 1987) 10 Tarkovsky apelează la o întreagă galerie de picturi faimoase, atârnate pe pereții stației și în mod repetat focalizate, și trei inserții de film: ancheta lui Berton; mesajul lui Gibarian înainte de sinucidere, și o secvență din copilărie filmat de tatăl său. Aceste secvențe, la fel ca produsele Inconștientului materializate de ocean, acționează ca o teleportare în timp, sfidând cauzalitatea și permițând revenirea trecutul și chiar a celor morți (Gibarian, mama lui Kris, câinele lui Kris din copilărie). Deși există printre unii oameni de știință și filosofi ideea că se poate imagina oricând o realitate care să sfideze cauzalitatea, argument care poate aduce ficțiunea pe picior de egalitate cu "realitatea". (Sfetcu 2018) Criticul de film Maya Turovskaya susține că trecutul are o semnificație specială pentru Tarkovsky, el există întotdeauna pe picior de egalitate cu prezentul; lumea imaginației coexistă cu lumea reală. Ceea ce Tarkovski prezintă ca vise, imaginări, amintiri este "fluxul individual al timpului" personajului. În această schemă de lucruri, toate momentele în timp sunt co-egale, existente alături de intriga aparentă. (Turovskaia 1989) 2 Aspecte psihologice Filmul lui Tarkovski este o "dramă a durerii și a redresării parțiale" concentrată asupra psihologiei echipajului stației de pe Solaris. Tarkovski a dorit astfel să abordeze mai profund emoțional și intelectual genul științifico-fantastic, considerat de el ca fiind superficial. Filmul tratează un fenomen central al analizei critice-psihologice a lui Klaus Holzkamp asupra percepției umane: condițiile de percepție a lumii umane sunt semnificative pentru ființele umane. (Geier 1992) În percepție, ființele umane se orientează către un sens obiectiv, pe care obiectele îl posedă în legătură cu activitatea vitală a oamenilor. În virtutea acestei calități, localizarea sensurilor în obiecte este exclusiv o caracteristică a lumii umane." (Holzkamp 1989, 119). "Lumea umană" este semnificativă prin aceea că este o obiectivizare a evaluării utilității și, 11 prin urmare, a puterii umane. În aceste condiții, Solaris nu poate avea nici un sens, dezorientând societatea umană. Solaris este o specie complexă noetică o specie cu proprietatea gândirii (Griffin 1998), care a evoluat în condiții complet diferite de ale noastre. În sistemul nostru metafizic, deși două specii ating nivelul integrativ noetic, sub-nivelele lor particulare pot fi diferite și niciodată nu vor putea să comunice dacă decalajul dintre ele se situează în afara ferestrei de contact a celuilalt. (Weissert 1992) Filmul se axează pe problema comunicării, într-o societate umană a viitorului considerată de Tarkovsky ca rigidă. Această societate refuză să accepte diversitatea, atât un refuz dogmatic de a verifica mărturiile astronautului Berton cât și intenția de a distruge ceea ce nu reușește să înțeleagă. (Salvestroni 1987) Spectatorul deduce caracteristicile acestei societăți viitoare, dar care se aseamănă foarte mult cu realitatea sovietică a lui Tarkovski, doar indirect, din modul de desfășurare a anchetei lui Berton, metafora lumii mecanice indusă de caracterul impersonal și aparent haotic al automobilelor pe autostradă, afirmațiile lui Sartorius, etc. Tarkovski este obsedat de casă. Imaginile de vis ale casei sunt prezente în Solaris, la fel ca în Oglinda și Nostalgia. Un "acasă" construit ca un loc atât pentru memorie, cât și pentru dorință. Subconștientul lui Kelvin este constituit din amintiri despre casă. Idealizarea casei în memorie îi permite să evadeze mental din realitatea conflictuală. Multe dintre amintiri au trăsături ireale (plouă în interior, levitație, discontinuitate spațială) afectând orice idee că ontologia trecutului este simplă și obiectivă. (McFadden 2012) Pentru scenei casei tatălui lui Kris, o simetrie la începutul și finalul filmului, în contradicție cu evoluțiile tehnologice, regizorul recurge la o serie de imagini metaforice: lac plin de viață, ploaia, calul care amintește de cadrele finale din Andrei Rublev. 12 Criticul Mark Le Fanu consideră că amintirile de acasă din film se combină "să demonstreze că memoria nu trebuie să fie dispariția; și dimpotrivă, noi trăim în semnificație în măsura în care suntem pregătiți să îmbrățișăm umbrele pierderii noastre." (Fanu 1987) Criticul de film Sean Martin observă paralelismul dintre psihic și acasă ", ca și când ar reflecta logica visului ... interioarele acestor vase sunt întotdeauna aranjate ambiguu, cu camere aparent în mișcare în raport unul cu celălalt". (Martin 2011) Instabilitatea structurii casei reflectă dizarmonia dintre conștient și subconștient în filme. Structura casei este mutabilă și confuză, deoarece personajele în sine sunt confuze și nu au o cunoaștere totală despre sine. Când personajele se confruntă cu sinele lor ciudat, iluzia de auto-cunoaștere este zdruncinată și sunt forțate într-o stare de anxietate. (McFadden 2012) Kelvin este prezentat în cadrul de început ca profund incapabil să înțeleagă corect esența societății în care trăiește. Regizorul remarcă faptul că este important să recunoaștem că Kelvin "Este un locuitor obișnuit al orașului, un filistin; el arată așa, de obicei. Pentru mine era important ca el să fie așa. Ar trebui să fie un om cu o dimensiune spirituală destul de limitată, în medie doar pentru a putea experimenta această luptă spirituală, frică, nu ca un animal care este în durere și nu înțelege ce se întâmplă cu el. Ceea ce era important pentru mine era tocmai faptul că ființa umană se forțează inconștient să fie umană, inconștient și, în măsura în care abilitățile sale spirituale i-ar permite să se opună brutalității, se opune tot ceea ce este inuman, în timp ce rămâne uman. Și se pare că, în ciuda faptului că a fost așa pare un tip cu totul mediu, el se află la un nivel înalt spiritual. Este ca și cum ar fi condamnat el, a intrat direct în această problemă și sa văzut într-o oglindă." (Jerzy and Neuger 1985, 22) 13 Solaris deranjează profund această societate deoarece invalidează legile și regulile fixe cu care este obișnuită. Oceanul are un comportamentul noetic permițând viselor să creeze, din propriul material biologic, structuri geometrice temporare pe suprafața sa, precum și unele versiuni disproporționate independente ale formei umane a oamenilor care s-au apropiat de ea, din amprenta amintirilor oamenilor de știință. (Weissert 1992) Oceanul este înzestrat astfel cu o logică "simetrică", care îl ajută să depășească barierele formale în comunicare. Conform teoremei lui Godel 2 , este nevoie aici de o abordare a limbajului la meta-nivel. Dar astronauții nu sunt pregătiți pentru această conștientizare a inconștientului. Dialogul lor cu necunoscutul devine dificil și tensionat, respingând instinctiv și dogmatic acest mod de comunicare. Kris este singurul personaj din film capabil de o evoluție. În Solaris, "cheia interpretării este acel principiu al "simetriei" care guvernează inconștientul, inclusiv visele și emoțiile. Hari, Kris și Solaris sunt ființe autonome, distincte unul de celălalt, și în același timp elemente în care partea este identică cu întregul." (Salvestroni 1987) Hari este inițial doar un mesaj materializat în comunicarea dintre Kelvin și Solaris. Ea reunește trăsăturile umane derivate din amintirea lui Kris despre femeia pe care a iubit-o, dar și o alteritate pe care o partajează cu Solaris prin modul în care a fost creată și evoluează. Astfel, unul dintre momentele cele mai importante ale Solaris, în care potențialitățile și ductilitatea limbajului imaginilor ajung la vârf, este când Hari, la rândul ei, dezvoltă un proces interactiv, folosind imagini pe care le percepe vizual. 2 Teorema de completitudine a lui Gödel este o teoremă fundamentală în logica matematică care stabilește o corespondență între adevărul semantic și probabilitatea sintactică în logica de ordinul întâi. 14 (Vânători în zăpadă (1565), de Pieter Bruegel cel Bătrân) După ce Hari vede într-o înregistrare flăcările calde și roșii ale unui foc în jurul căruia familia lui Kris este adunată într-un peisaj de iarnă acoperit de zăpadă, ea privește reproducerea vânătorilor lui Pieter Bruegel în zăpadă cu o concentrare intensă. Hari, o persoană extraterestră care posedă limbajul natural și capacitățile cognitive ale unui adult, dar lipsită de experiențe lumești, se încadrează în comentariile Ludwig Wittgenstein despre percepțiile vizuale: "Mă gândesc la o față și văd brusc asemănarea cu altul. Văd că nu sa schimbat; și totuși o văd diferit. Eu numesc această experiență "observând un aspect." (Wittgenstein 1953, 193). Hari observă elementul pe care pictura îl are în comun cu secvența pe care a vizionat-o zăpada și acest lucru declanșează un proces asociativ care îi permite să vadă pictura într-un alt mod. Izolează 15 anumite proprietăți, le asociază cu alte imagini și în același timp sintetizează detaliile lor comune, astfel încât să se clarifice și să se ilumineze reciproc. În același timp, Bruegel, cu tonurile sale cenușii și verdele și albul său de gheață, transmite un sentiment de frig, de singurătate, de incomunicabilitate. Vânătorii lugubri și întunecați, care se presupune că ucid în mod inutil, pare să aibă o legătură cu apropiata dizolvare iminentă a lui Hari în anihilatorul lui Sartorius, ca victimă a unei ferocități reci pe care o simte dar nu o înțelege. Pictura îi oferă lui Hari o modalitate de a se apropia de o lume necunoscută, și în același timp să conecteze mesajul picturii cu situația ei ca victimă și pradă. (Salvestroni 1987) Hari este mesajul pe care planeta îl transmite lui Kelvin, făcându-l conștient de cruzimea obtuză și mecanică dominantă în lumea de unde provine: "în timp ce voi îi considerați pe vizitatorii voștri... se pare că așa îi numiți... ca pe niște inamici exteriori... niște piedici. Dar musafirii voștri sunt o parte din voi. Sunt conștiința voastră." (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972, 02:02:13,333-02:02:29,808) Acest al doilea și din nou imperfect model pe care planeta îl trimite și pe care Kris îl poate descifra imediat readuce spectatorul la scena inițială a filmului. Pe măsură ce privim la ceea ce pare a fi apa lacului ramelor de deschidere (care prezintă aceeași mișcare concentrică), aparatul foto se retrage încet la distanță, astfel încât să percepem că ceea ce vedem acum este o insulă acvatică, învelită la rândul său prin apele Solaris și pe insulă, casa vechiului Kelvin înăbușită înăuntru și afară. Îmbrățișarea ulterioară între bărbații din două generații este un eveniment care se produce departe de Pământ, pe stația spațială, ca materializare a imaginii mentale a lui Kris; și acest lucru semnalează acceptarea unei alterități mai puțin fantastice decât Hari sau planeta, deși una care ar fi fost de neînțeles lui Kris înainte de experiența lui dublă extraordinară. (Salvestroni 1987) 16 Când Kris se îmbolnăvește și intră într-o stare de vis cu febră, se prezintă o ultimă secvență a memoriei. Figurile lui Hari și a mamei lui sunt aproape de nedistins, fotografiile ascunzând fețele acestora, și amândouă poartă aceeași îmbrăcăminte. Soția și mama se îmbină într-o singură figură, o temă recurentă la Tarkovski, care sugerează o dorință oedipală în Kris, actualizată de gestul final al lui Kris către tatăl său în scena finală. (McFadden 2012) 3 Aspecte filosofice Jonathon Rosenbaum notează că Solaris al lui Tarkovski, spre deosebire de romanul lui Lem, se califică mai mult ca antifizică decât science fiction. (Rosenbaum 1990, 60) Rosenbaum sugerează că filmul, în timp ce ne neagă voiajul arhetipal prin spațiu, se preocupă de investigarea psihologică a personajului său central Kris Kelvin, în timp ce încearcă să redescopere o umanitate pierdută în vidul tehnologiei și al științei. Tarkovski a notat că "mă interesează mai presus de toate caracterul care este capabil să își sacrifice și modul său de viață indiferent dacă sacrificiul este făcut în numele valorilor spirituale sau de dragul altcuiva sau al lui mântuirii proprii, sau toate acestea la un loc." (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996, 217) Filmul Solaris (1972) al lui Andrei Tarkovski poate fi abordat și prin prisma filosofiei minții, a întrebărilor esențiale în acest domeniu. Aceste întrebări se referă la personalitate și suferință, care acoperă cel puțin perioada de la Rene Descartes la filosofii moderni, precum Derek Parfit și Hilary Putnam. Solaris apare ca un vehicul adecvat pentru a explora provocările filosofice. Derek Parfit a imaginat un astfel de scenariu de science fiction sub numele de Experimentul Thinking Teletransporter, cerințele filosofice pentru personalitate, care seamănă perfect cu filmul lui Tarkovsky, deoarece implică replicarea individului. (Parfit 1984, 200) 17 De altfel, filmul Solaris al lui Tarkovsky permite multiple interpretări semantice. Astfel, Manfred Geier (Geier 1992) vede oceanul prin prisma a trei lexeme metasemice dominante: o imagine a sexualității feminine, și o mașină de miracol schizofrenic (derivată din Anti-Oedip-ul lui Deleuze-Guattari). Având în vedere originea ontologică extraterestră a oceanului în raport cu ființele umane, "înțelesul" său poate fi determinat doar negativ: constă în a ține în fața ființelor umane o oglindă a propriei lor limitări antropomorfe și geocentrice. Dacă există vreun scop / înțeles pentru oameni, acesta constă în încercarea de a cuceri Solaris, nu în Solaris însuși. În același timp, Solari prezintă un exemplu excelent despre modul în care spațiile heterotopice pot exista în termeni cinematografici. 3 Filmul lui Tarkovsky explorează modul în care experiențele câștigate în spațiul heterotopic oferă individului capacitatea de a inversa viziunea panoramică și cum aceste experiențe ne pot arăta în cele din urmă cum putem recupera sau restabili existența noastră ca subiecți individuali. Prin experiențele personajelor din film suntem invitați să observăm multe dintre forțele și discursurile care au contribuit la crearea acestui spațiu, dintr-un punct de vedere exterior. (Duffy 2003) Conștiința umană se poate referi la lucruri pe care nu le percepe în mod direct. Obiectele imaginate sau concepute pot fi distanțate față de realitatea imediat percepută. Conceptele se referă la lucruri care au fost odată capabile să fie experimentate ca fiind prezente și sunt acum absente; sau la o realitate care există în altă parte și de a cărei existență nu mă îndoiesc, deși nu am experimentat-o niciodată; la o lume inexistentă creată de o imaginație poetică, lumea unui film, de exemplu, ale căror personaje și evenimente fictive le pot trăi în timp ce văd filmul ca și cum ar fi acestea reale; sau, în cele din urmă, la o realitate fantastică. (Geier 1992) În toate aceste 3 Foucault descrie drept "spațiu heterotopic" un decalaj unic în planul discursiv în care individului i se oferă posibilitatea de a observa elementele care sunt active în discursurile care îi modelează viața ca subiect individual. 18 cazuri, obiectul conștiinței este o realitate conceptualizată, imaginară, care este reprezentată sau exprimată în limbaj. Desigur, conștiința este intenționată în orice caz; sunt conștient de ceva. În toate aceste cazuri limba joacă un rol preeminent. Este limbajul care permite conștiinței să rămână concentrată asupra ceva. Textul literar sau fantezist, totuși, se poate referi la o realitate care nu există. Avem de-a face aici cu expresii fictive care posedă aceeași formă lingvistică ca și declarațiile care pot fi adevărate (Roman Ingarden vorbește despre "cvasideclarații" (Ingarden 1997)), dar care nu se referă la obiectele reale. Declarațiile nu ridică problema adevărului, ci doar a corectitudinii sau coerenței semantice. În Solaris, în limitele experienței heterotopice, se explorează mai multe întrebări teoretice și ontologice printr-o examinare a cerințelor psihologice, emoționale și spirituale asupra indivizilor din acest spațiu. În Sculptarea în timp Tarkovski a comentat că "Solaris a fost despre oamenii pierduți în cosmos și au fost obligați, indiferent dacă le place sau nu, să dobândească și să stăpânească încă o cunoaștere". (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996, 198) Berton declară una dintre principalele teme filosofice din film când îi spune lui Kelvin: "Iar tu vrei să distrugi ceea ce suntem incapabili să înțelegem deocamdată? Iartă-mă, dar eu nu pledez pentru cunoaștere cu orice preț. Cunoașterea e justificată doar atunci când e fondată pe moralitate." (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972, 00:29:26,099-00:29:42,115) Tatăl lui Kelvin crede că fiul său este un pericol pentru el și pentru societate, și este de acord cu sugestia lui Berton că viziunea utilitară a fiului său asupra vieții nu are nici moralitate, nici o abordare umanistă esențială. Oceanul "nu înseamnă nimic ca obiect", pur și simplu există. Oceanul nu se regăsește în nici una din abordările experimentale umane. Niciun experiment nu este repetabil, nicio generalizare determinabilă. Este ceva singular, care contrazice în esență limbajul uman, un "obiect pur" fără un scop inteligibil sau experimental delimitat, provocând un fel de optimism 19 epistemologic. Oceanul este pentru oameni o existenta extraterestră si, prin urmare, incomprehensibilă. Este desemnat ca fiind un ocean, un creier, o mașină protoplasmică, o gelatină, deși toată lumea știe că "ea" nu este nici una dintre acestea. (Geier 1992) Astfel, oceanul Solaris poate fi interpretat ca plasmă (structură fizică organizată, cu propriul său metabolism și mecanism, capabilă de activitate orientată spre scopuri, generând noi forme eruptive, (Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary 1907, 10:356) cu variante precum oceanul valuri care se mișcă ritmic, fumul și ceața se ridică de pe suprafața sa, cu adâncimi și insule -, o formațiune prebiotică organică o structură biologică primitivă, gelatinoasă, o singură celulă monstruoasă, supraaglomerată -, și creier protoplasmic, cantități uriașe de informații, o sursă de impulsuri electrice, sub forma unui monobloc gigantic, incomprehensibil, eventual înzestrată cu conștiință), ca simbol al sexualității feminine (necunoscutul este transpus în experiență parțial similară; experiența lui Berton cu copilul nu este nimic altceva decât apariția nașterii, chiar dacă pare a fi o creație plasmatică fără sens, iar apariția mimoizilor se poate interpreta ca o naștere), sau ca un mecanism schizofrenic (o mașină a dorințelor, o sinteză a inconștientului schizofrenic, ne-oedipalizat Hari, produsul oceanului, devine obiectul analizei, al examinărilor experimentale și al reflecțiilor (Deleuze and Guattari 2004, 10–11) Tarkovsky schimbă subiectul principal al romanului reducând focalizarea pe Solaris și concentrându-se pe evoluția lui Hari. O întrebare cheie din punct de vedere filosofic este, poate fi considerată Hari umană? Hari poate fi analizată în contextul dualismului cartezian. Opiniei reducționiste a lui Descartes cu privire la suferința animalelor și mașina-animal i se opune experiența evolutivă a lui Hari în Solaris. Poate fi considerată Hari doar o structură amorfă extraterestră, sau ar trebui să se țină cont de comportamentul ei? Dezvoltarea emoțională și suferința ei, călătoria ei epistemologică spre cunoașterea de sine și în special relația ei intensă cu 20 Kelvin face din film o operă de artă autonomă și profund filosofică. "Abordarea majoră pe care Tarkovsky o întreprinde în filmul său constă într-o schimbare principală a intenției generale a narațiunii, determinată de convingerea fermă că dragostea și emoția umană au un înțeles primar în univers." (Deltcheva and Vlasov 1997, 533) Stația spațială servește drept spațiu heterotopic din care Tarkovsky poate proiecta explorarea incisivă a vieții, a morții și a umanității în acest cadru îndepărtat. Stația va deveni elementul facilitator pe care narațiunea devine dependentă. În plus, stația formează un pământ ontologic al nimănui în care elementele, în cadrul narațiunii și dincolo de acestea, intră în opera în ansamblu și oferă audienței posibilitatea de a vedea o varietate de discursuri foarte diferite. John Locke și-a imaginat ce s-ar întâmpla dacă mintea unui prinț ar fi transportată într-un corp de cizmar înlocuind mintea cizmarului. Deși în exterior ar părea cizmar, sentimentul din "interior" ar fi princiar, "Căci sufletul unui prinț, purtând cu el conștiința vieții trecute a prințului, intră și informează corpul unui cizmar; de îndată ce a părăsit sufletul său, fiecare vede că va fi aceeași persoană cu prințul, răspunzător numai pentru acțiunile prințului. (Locke and Winkler 1996, 142) Pentru Locke, cizmarul ar fi prințul numai cu condiția ca toate experiențele trecutului, adică memoria sa autobiografică, să fie păstrate în timpul transferului minții. Astfel, Locke vede memoria autobiografică ca cel mai important aspect al personalității, care este foarte relevant pentru evaluarea statutului lui Hari în Solaris. La început, Hari nu pare să posede o memorie autobiografică ("Știi, am senzația că am uitat ceva."), deci nu reușește testul de personalitate al lui Locke. Kelvin ajunge la concluzia că nu poate fi o persoană umană și o elimină. Acțiunea sa este reprezentativă pentru o cultură a represiunii personale, și conforme avertismentului lui Berton de la începutul filmului, că Kelvin este arătat mai mult decât dispus să distrugă ceea ce nu înțelege. 21 Dar Kelvin are șansa de a reevalua pe Hari la a doua iterare a acesteia. Noua Hari începe să acumuleze memoria autobiografică impusă de Locke, fuzionând într-un fel cu Kelvin deoarece este o emanație a minții sale. Această paradigmă de "externalizare a memoriei" poate fi dezvoltată pe baza încercării lui Derek Parfit de a extinde conceptul de personificare Lockean: "Există mai multe modalități de a extinde criteriul memoriei de experiență pentru a acoperi astfel de cazuri. Voi face apel la conceptul de lanț de experiențe-amintiri care se suprapun. Să spunem că, între X de astăzi și Y de acum douăzeci de ani, există conexiuni de memorie directă dacă X își poate aminti acum că are câteva din experiențele pe care Y le-a avut acum douăzeci de ani. În viziunea lui Locke, numai aceasta face ca X și Y să fie una și aceeași persoană. Dar chiar dacă nu există astfel de conexiuni directe de memorie, poate exista continuitate de memorie între X de acum și Y de acum douăzeci de ani, dacă între X și Y în acel moment a existat un lanț suprapus de amintiri directe.... Pe versiunea revizuită a ideii lui Locke, o persoană prezentă X este aceeași cu o persoană din trecut Y, dacă între ele există o continuitate a memoriei." (Parfit 1984, 205) În Solaris avem un astfel de lanț de memorie care se suprapune în cazul lui Hari, pentru că își amintește de Kelvin. Hari reușește chiar să își amintească de un conflict cu mama lui Kelvin, un fragment preluat din memoria lui Kelvin: "Îmi amintesc cum beam ceai și apoi m-a aruncat afară. M-am trezit și am plecat. Și apoi ce s-a întâmplat?" Ultima întrebare indică faptul că memoria autobiografică împrumutată este încă incompletă, dar ea există. Într-un studiu realizat de Nina Strohminger și Shaun Nichols, aceștia au ajuns la concluzia că modificarea bazei morale a unei persoane mai degrabă pierderea memoriei este cea mai importantă trăsătură a pierderii identității. (Strohminger and Nichols 2014, 161) Autorii numesc această "ipoteză auto-morală" și o propun ca un model al modului în care oamenii percep 22 nucleul autonomiei în ceilalți. În cazul lui Hari, putem argumenta că "baza sa morală", identică cu cea a fostei soții a lui Kelvin, este foarte clar definită. Parfit sintetizează identitatea personală ca un fenomen complex: "identitatea personală în timp constă în [...] tipuri de continuitate psihologică, de memorie, caracter, intenție și altele asemenea." (Parfit 1984, 227) Astfel, Kelvin descoperă că Hari nu este o replică goală, ci o persoană cu calități morale și emoționale ca orice ființă umană. În timp, replica lui Hari devine o persoană cu totul nouă: "Nu sunt Hari. Hari este moartă." Dar continuitatea psihologică a noii Hari îl captivează și îl convinge pe Kelvin de personalitatea ei. Când încearcă să se sinucidă cu oxigen lichid și apoi revine la viață cu dureri oribile, Kelvin declară: "Ai fost asemănătoare cu Hari. Dar acum tu și nu ea ești adevărata Hari." Episodul sinuciderii cu oxigen ilustrează rolul capital al suferinței în procesul de stabilire a personalității lui Hari. Pentru Sartorius însă, structura nebiologică, non-umană a lui Hari o descalifică. El își exprimă punctul de vedere că este liber să experimenteze pe "invitații" stației în căutarea cunoștințelor. justificarea acestor acțiuni provine din convingerea că el nu experimentează pe oameni adevărați sau pe animale, însă apariția figurii copilului care încearcă să scape din laborator evocă afirmația lui Berton cu privire la valoarea sau moralitatea în căutarea cunoașterii. Avertizarea lui Kelvin, "ar fi bine să plecați, sunteți prea impresionați" sugerează că astfel de considerente nu sunt respectate în această stație. Tarkovski a remarcat că "Căutarea neîncetată a omului pentru cunoaștere, oferită lui în mod gratuit, este o sursă de mare tensiune, pentru că aduce cu sine o anxietate constantă, o greutate, o durere și o dezamăgire." (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996, 198) Snaut adaugă că sistemele de neutrini din care este compus corpul acesteia sunt instabile, afirmație cu o semnificație simbolică, echivalentă cu negarea personalității lui Hari. 23 Stabilitatea caracterului este importantă pentru identitatea personală. Fără stabilitate, cei doi colegi ai lui Kelvin sugerează că Hari poate fi distrusă ca un obiect. Corectitudinea intuiției lui Kelvin este demonstrată și de faimosul test al raței 4 de raționament inductiv: "Dacă arată ca o rață, înoată ca o rață și măcăie ca o rață atunci probabil că este o rață." Spre deosebire de piticul lui Sartorius care nu reușește să treacă testul de rață al umanității. Ca și în cazul lui Snaut. Reducționismul face parte dintr-o mișcare în filosofia minții care contravine dualismului cartezian. René Descartes susține că ființele umane posedă un suflet (sau mintea în termeni moderni) destul de separat și calitativ diferit de corp: "Din însăși faptul că concepem în mod viu și clar natura corpului și a sufletului ca fiind diferite, știm că în realitate ele sunt diferite și, în consecință, sufletul poate gândi fără corp." (Descartes 1984, 99) Spre deosebire de dualismului cartezian care susține că ființele umane posedă un suflet (sau minte) separat și calitativ diferit de corp, reducționismul se bazează pe ipoteza că sufletul/mintea poate fi redusă la trup, respectiv creierul produce mintea, și deci sufletul nu poate "gândi fără corp". Funcționaliștii printre care și Hilary Putnam încearcă să salveze elementele dualismului cartezian în contextul materialismului modern, (Putnam 1975, 436), încercând să mențină baza materialistă a reducționismului, fără a accepta pretenția acestuia din urmă de a avea o corespondență între fizic și mental, contestând prin problema durerii ideea că stările mentale pot fi reduse la stările creierului 4 Testul raței implică faptul că o persoană poate identifica un subiect necunoscut prin observarea caracteristicilor obișnuite ale subiectului. Este uneori folosit pentru a contracara argumentele brutale sau chiar valide, că ceva nu este ceea ce pare a fi. 24 Din acest punct de vedere, Sartorius este un reducționist, luând în considerare doar structura neutrinică a lui Hari. Poziția lui Putnam însă, cunoscută sub denumirea de realizabilitate multiplă ideea că indiferent de modul în care durerea este realizată, indiferent de structurile sau procesele fizice în care persoana suferă, experiența durerii arată existența unei constituții mentale. (Putnam 1975, 436) Practic, în confruntarea dintre Kelvin și Sartorius în legătură cu durerea lui Hari, avem o dezbatere dramatică dintre reducționism și funcționalism cu fundamente etice. Descartes a considerat animalele lipsite de suflete și, prin urmare, de capacitatea de a experimenta cu adevărat durerea sau suferința. El le-a văzut ca niște automate și chiar a făcut vivisecții de tipul pe care Sartorius îl sugerează lui Kelvin să o interpreteze pe Hari : "Nu explic sentimentul de durere fără referire la suflet. Din punctul meu de vedere, durerea există doar în înțelegere. Ceea ce vă explic sunt toate mișcările externe care însoțesc acest sentiment în noi; la animale, aceste mișcări se produc, și nu durerea în sens strict." (Descartes 1984, 148) Descartes a fost un dualist numai în ceea ce privește oamenii. Pentru animale, a fost un reducționist deplin. În scena bibliotecii, după ce a asistat la tensiunea și ostilitatea dintre cei trei bărbați din bibliotecă, și a auzit pe Sartorius acuzându-l pe Kelvin de neglijarea științei în favoarea ei, Hari oferă ceea ce poate discursul central al filmului: "Hari: Eu cred că Kris Kelvin este mai profund decât voi amândoi la un loc. În aceste condiții inumane, el e singurul care se poartă omenește, în timp ce voi îi considerați pe vizitatorii voștri... se pare că așa îi numiți... ca pe niște inamici exteriori... niște piedici. Dar musafirii voștri sunt o parte din voi. Sunt conștiința voastră. Kris mă iubește... Poate 25 că nu eu sunt aceea pe care o iubește, poate că pentru el e doar o formă de autoapărare. El își dorește ca eu să trăiesc... Dar nu asta-i problema. Nu contează de ce iubește un om. Pentru fiecare e altfel. Dar nu pe Kris, ci pe voi... Pe voi amândoi vă urăsc! Sartorius: Te-as întreba... Hari: Nu mă întrerupe! La urma urmei, sunt femeie! Sartorius: Nu ești femeie! Nu ești nici măcar o ființă umană. Încearcă să înțelegi asta, dacă ești capabilă să înțelegi ceva! Hari nu există! A murit! Iar tu... Tu ești doar o reproducere. O reproducere mecanică! O copie. O matriță! Hari [își mișcă mâna peste fața ei inundată de lacrimi, respirând cu putere]: Da... Așa o fi. Dar eu... eu... devin o ființă umană! Simt la fel de profund ca fiecare dintre voi. Credeți-mă... Deja nu mai pot trăi fără Kris. Eu... îl iubesc. Sunt o ființă umană! Voi... voi sunteți foarte cruzi." (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972, 2:02:02,489-02:04:35,893) Hari trece testul raței în bibliotecă, convingând spectatorii. Aici, Sartorius pare mai degrabă o mașină carteziană. Snaut oscilează între respingerea științifică și acceptarea emoțională a lui Hari, demonstrând dilema inerentă condiției umane, între emoția pură și teoriile pe care le construim. Monologul lui Snaut este punctul culminant al scenei finale a bibliotecii: "Noi n-avem niciun interes să cucerim vreun cosmos. Noi vrem doar să extindem granițele Pământului până la marginile cosmosului. Nu avem nevoie de alte lumi. Noi avem nevoie de o oglindă. Doar de o oglindă în care să ne vedem propriul interior. Ne luptăm să stabilim un contact, dar n-o să-l găsim niciodată. Suntem în situația ingrată de oameni care luptăm pentru un tel de care ne temem, si de care nici măcar nu avem nevoie. Omul are nevoie de oameni!" (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972, 01:59:22,329-02:00:00,701) 26 Noțiunea de oglindă este elementul semnificativ în utilizarea lui Tarkovski a modelului heterotopic. Ca parte a stației, biblioteca nu numai că îi permite lui Tarkovski să prezinte audienței un cadru care evită exotica, dar afirmă, de asemenea, utilizarea modelului heterotopic în film. Biblioteca reprezintă alternativa la discursul raționamentului științific reductiv care guvernează restul discursului. (Duffy 2003) Ca un sit care deschide tărâmul discursiv al imaginației și al modelelor alternative ale "realității", biblioteca este în același timp punctul focal al concursului între reprezentările "adevărului". Așa cum a subliniat mai mulți critici, scena bibliotecii din film este în mare parte creația lui Tarkovsky. (Vida and Graham 1994) Lefanu afirmă că "Tarkovski, desigur, intenționează să ne arate oglinda ca interdependența pământului și a spațiului în ultimă instanță, una și aceeași locație, filtrată prin imaginația umană." (Fanu 1987, 61) Posibilitatea de a exista în spațiul heterotopic ne oferă capacitatea de a privi înapoi de la distanță, adevărata inversiune a vederii panoptice. Green spune că oceanul planetar este cel care ne oferă dispozitivul care ne va permite să privim direct la propriile noastre credințe în umanitate. Mandatul dispozitivului heterotopic este acela de a furniza această sticlă "sau" oglinda ", care ne permite să vedem ceea ce este adesea ascuns de ochii noștri prin incapacitatea noastră de a recunoaște evidentul. (Duffy 2003) Concluzii Vorbind direct viziunii omenirii pe care ne-o oferă Tarkovsky în Solaris, Gilles Deleuze pune întrebarea "trebuie sa credem că planeta Solaris dă un răspuns și că va reconcilia oceanul și gândurile, mediul înconjurător și vom vedea imediat ce desemnează fața transparentă a 27 cristalului (femeia redescoperită) și forma cristalizabilă a universului (locuința redescoperită)? "(Deleuze 1985, 75) Problema e că umanitatea și-a pierdut legătura cu ea însăși, cu propria sa spiritualitate și cu multe elemente care o leagă. Concluzia sa este că Solaris, deși ne expune multe dintre aceste elemente, este în cele din urmă incapabil să reconcilieze redescoperirea umanității individuale a lui Kris Kelvin în film, sugerând că Solaris nu răspunde la acest optimism. Solaris este un film care începe ca o căutare a răspunsurilor și ajunge să ofere aceste răspunsuri împreună cu o serie de întrebări cu totul diferite. Filmul sugerează că ficțiunea este la fel de puternică ca și "realitatea" și că imaginația este singura temelie pe care se bazează "realitatea". Viața încearcă să se conecteze la altă viață. Tentativele omului de a clasifica și de a păstra această formă de interacțiune vor fi întotdeauna condamnate la eșec și vor reflecta o greșeală majoră în lumea panoptică în care trăim. Heterotopia este un spațiu în care astfel de categorii, clasificări și restricții nu se aplică. În astfel de spații putem identifica faptul că existența este cel mai bine înțeleasă ca un câmp de imaginație nesubstanțiat, unde posibilitățile sunt nesfârșite, iar limitele restrictive sunt reduse ineficiente. (Duffy 2003) Prin exploatările sale în spațiul heterotopic, Kelvin a avut șansa de a reveni asupra unora dintre greșelile din trecut ale vieții sale și, în acest fel, își re-descoperă propria umanitate și își confirmă locul ca un subiect individual liber să-și facă propriile alegeri. Cu siguranță această experiență trebuie privită cu cel puțin un optimism. Faptul că Hari trece prin testul de rață al umanității în ochii lui Kelvin este reflectat de reacția inevitabilă a spectatorului la actrița Natalia Bondarchuk o femeie adevărată, capabilă să afișeze convingător suferința, dragostea, înțelegerea și comportamentul nobil. Nici o cantitate de 28 bâlbâială științifică nu ne-ar putea convinge că Bondarchuk este doar o grămadă de "neutrini instabili" sau de "specimen". (Tumanov 2016) Creierele noastre nu ne vor lăsa. Pentru a reduce umanitatea lui Hari, sunt necesare teorii fundamentele științifice și filosofice ale poziției lui Sartorius. Numai astfel de teorii pot suprima răspunsul emoțional natural la umanitate. O astfel de teorie este reducționismul. Tentația de a renunța la orice spontaneitate în lumina puterii conceptuale a filosofiei și dovezile copleșitoare ale științei cântăresc foarte mult asupra socialității umane. Deși funcționalismul și reducționismul, în mod strict vorbind, sunt teorii din filosofia minții, funcționalismul pare a fi intuitiv o trăsătură construită sau implicită a minții umane. Am evoluat mecanismele mentale pentru viața socială compasiunea, reciprocitatea, capacitatea de a simți vinovăția, de a lega emoțiile etc. Nu putem să nu luăm în considerare comportamentul nostru emoțional. Cu toate acestea, aceste adaptări pot fi respinse sau suprimate prin anumite forme de raționament. Negarea demagogică a omenirii și a genocidelor care au apărut din nou și din nou în istoria noastră ne conduc înapoi la caracatița lui Putnam. 5 Și aici pot ajuta contra-teoriile. Implicațiile raționamentului funcționalist. (Tumanov 2016) Imaginea finală sintetică și polisemă, cu insula, casa tatălui lui Kelvin, și îmbrățișarea celor doi, este interpretată în moduri foarte diverse, și de multe ori contradictorii, ca "o supunere față de autoritate și instituțiile sociale tradiționale", "arhetipul puterii, figura tatălui", "o entitate dură înfășurată în logica sa conservatorism ", sau un sens "oscilând între necesitatea de a se încredința unor entități superioare capabile să facă miracole și deschiderea unei noi viziuni a 5 "teoreticianul identității trebuie să specifice o stare fizico-chimică astfel încât orice organism (nu doar un mamifer) să simtă durerea dacă și numai dacă (a) posedă un creier cu o structură fizico-chimică adecvată; și (b) creierul său este în acea stare fizico-chimică. Aceasta înseamnă că starea fizico-chimică în cauză trebuie să fie o stare posibilă a unui creier de mamifer, a unui creier reptilian, a unui creier de moluscă (caracatițele sunt moluște și, cu siguranță, simt durerea), etc. În același timp, ea nu trebuie să fie o stare posibilă (din punct de vedere fizic) pentru creierul oricărei creaturi fizic posibile care nu poate simți durerea." (Putnam 1967, 77) 29 lumii, o viziune care descoperă bogăția unei realități pline de posibilități", prin care Kelvin "se proiectează spre un viitor dinamic în care nu există realități statice și absolute". (Salvestroni 1987) În altă interpretare, Kris își dă seama că poate găsi consolare în a se înțelege cu persoanele din amintirile sale, în loc să le reprime și să le țină la distanță, la fel ca și Hari la început. O altă interpretare a concluziei ar putea fi că suprafața planetei reaprinde dorințele lui Kris fără prezența sa fizică, și că Kris pe care îl vedem este pur și simplu o altă manifestare solariană. În ambele scenarii, îndeplinirea vizuală a dorinței lui Kris este importantă. Ambele ar fi constituite din aceleași amintiri și psihicuri. (McFadden 2012) Furtuna filosofică dezlănțuită de încercările de a se lupta cu dualismul cartezian trebuie, în cele din urmă, să se întoarcă în corp indiferent cât de mult Descartes a redus forma noastră muritoare. Oricare ar fi structura ei de bază și în ciuda faptului că este o emanație a memoriei lui Kelvin, Hari este întruchipată pentru Kelvin și pentru audiența filmului. Această întruchipare cinematică (și testul asociat rață) ne conduc dincolo de dezbaterea dintre funcționalism și reducționism sau problema personală a lui Locke. Iar corpul ei îl sacrifică pe Hari pentru Kelvin pe măsură ce ea se supune în mod voit unei anihilare de la Snaut și Sartorius. (Tumanov 2016) Același act asemănător cu Hristos, în mod paradoxal, îl sigilează pe Hari ca pe un om neechivoc de om și rezolvă problema personalității sale. Răspunsul final al lui Tarkovski la întrebarea centrală a filmului este înălțător tragic. 30 Bibliografie Artemyev, Eduard. 1991. "Eduard Artemyev Talks to Maya Turovskaya ]." 1991. https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Stalker/artemyev.html. Bellis, Aina. 2008. "English Programme Booklet for The Sacrifice." 2008. http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/AT_For_Dummies.html. Bielawski, Trond Trondsen and Jan. 2018. "Nostalghia.Com An Andrei Tarkovsky Information Site." 2018. http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/. Brantes, Charles de. 2008. "La Foi Est La Seule Chose Qui Puisse Sauver l'homme." 2008. https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/AT_On.html. Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary. 1907. "ЭСБЕ/Дубасовы - Викитека." 1907. https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%AD%D0%A1%D0%91%D0%95/%D0%94%D1%8 3%D0%B1%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B. Deleuze, Gilles. 1985. "L'Image-Temps. Cinéma 2." 1985. http://www.leseditionsdeminuit.fr/livreL%E2%80%99Image_temps._Cin%C3%A9ma_2-2018-1-1-0-1.html. Deleuze, Gilles, and FeÌl?ix Guattari. 2004. Anti-Oedipus. A&C Black. Deltcheva, Roumiana, and Eduard Vlasov. 1997. "Back to the House II: On the Chronotopic and Ideological Reinterpretation of Lem's Solaris in Tarkovsky's Film." The Russian Review 56 (4): 532–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/131564. Descartes, René. 1984. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 3, The Correspondence. Cambridge University Press. Dillon, Steven. 2006. The Solaris Effect: Art and Artifice in Contemporary American Film. University of Texas Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/book/211. Duffy, Richard Nathan. 2003. Sculpted in Time: Heterotopic Space in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris. UMI. Empire.com. 2017. "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema." Empire. 2017. https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/100-greatest-world-cinema-films/. Fanu, Mark Le. 1987. The Cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky. BFI. Foucault, Michel. 1971. "The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences." 1971. https://www.amazon.com/Order-Things-Archaeology-Human-Sciences/dp/0679753354. Geier, Manfred. 1992. "Manfred GeierStanislaw Lem's Fantastic Ocean: Toward a Semantic Interpretation of Solaris." 1992. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/geier57art.htm. Griffin, David Ray. 1998. "Pantemporalism and Panexperientialism." In The Textures of Time, edited by P. Harris. University of Michigan Press. Helford, Elyce Rae. 1992. "Elyce Rae Helford- 'We Are Only Seeking Man': Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Stanislaw Lem's Solaris." 1992. https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/helford57art.htm. Holzkamp, Klaus. 1989. Sinnliche Erkenntnis. Historischer Ursprung und gesellschaftliche Funktion der Wahrnehmung. Königstein/Ts: Athenaeum Vlg., Bodenheim. Ian, Christie, W. John Hill, and Pamela Church Gibson. 1998. The Oxford Guide to Film Studies Formalism and Neo-Formalism. Vol. Formalism and Neo-Formalism. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press. https://trove.nla.gov.au/version/39966020. Ingarden, Roman. 1997. Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks. M. Niemeyer. 31 Jerzy, Illg, and Leonard Neuger. 1985. "'Tm Interested in the Problem of Inner Freedom..." Interview w/Andrei Tarkovsky." 1985. https://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/interview.html. ---. 1987. "The Illg/Neuger Tarkovsky Interview (1985) ]." 1987. http://people.ucalgary.ca/~tstronds/nostalghia.com/TheTopics/interview.html#On_Solaris . Lem, Stanislaw. 2006. "The Solaris Station." Stanislaw Lem The Official Site. 2006. http://english.lem.pl/index.php/arround-lem/adaptations/soderbergh/147-the-solarisstation. ---. 2012. Solaris. Premier Digital Publishing. Locke, John, and Kenneth Winkler. 1996. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Hackett Publishing Company. Martin, Sean. 2011. Andrei Tarkovsky. Oldcastle Books. McFadden, Daniel. 2012. "Memory and Being: The Uncanny in the Films of Andrei Tarkovsky." Verges: Germanic & Slavic Studies in Review 1 (1). https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/verges/article/view/10846. Menard, David George. 2003. "A Deleuzian Analysis of Tarkovsky's Theory of Time-Pressure." 2003. http://offscreen.com/view/tarkovsky1. Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. OUP Oxford. Putnam, Hilary. 1967. "The Nature of Mental States." In Art, Mind, and Religion, edited by W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill, 1–223. Pittsburgh University Press. ---. 1975. Mind, Language, and Reality. Cambridge University Press. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. 1990. "Inner Space [SOLARIS]." 1990. https://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/2017/07/inner-space/. Salvestroni, Simonetta. 1987. "The Science-Fiction Films of Andrei Tarkovsky (Les Films de Science-Fiction d'AndreiTarkovsky)." Science Fiction Studies 14 (3). Sfetcu, Nicolae. 2018. "Buclele Cauzale În Călătoria În Timp." ResearchGate. 2018. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324601633_Buclele_cauzale_in_calatoria_in_ti mp. Strohminger, Nina, and Shaun Nichols. 2014. "The Essential Moral Self." Cognition 131 (1): 159–171. Tarkovsky, Andrei. 1972. Solaris. Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/. Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1996. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. University of Texas Press. Totaro, Donato. 1992. "Time and the Film Aesthetics of Andrei Tarkovsky." Revue Canadienne d'Études Cinématographiques / Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2 (1): 21–30. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24402079. Tumanov, Vladimir. 2016. "Philosophy of Mind and Body in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris." FilmPhilosophy 20 (2–3): 357–75. https://doi.org/10.3366/film.2016.0020. Turovskaia, Maya. 1989. Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry. Faber & Faber. Vida, Johnson, and Petrie Graham. 1994. "The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky." Indiana University Press. 1994. http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/isbn/9780253208873. Weissert, Thomas P. 1992. "Stanislaw Lem and a Topology of Mind (Stanislaw Lem et Une Topologie de l'esprit)." Science Fiction Studies 19 (2): 161–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4240148. 32 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. 4 edition. Cambridge, Mass: WileyBlackwell.

Ars Disputandi Volume 5 (2005) ISSN: 1566–5399 Lloyd Strickland LANCASTER UNIVERSITY, UK On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World Abstract Many have argued that if God exists then he must necessarily create the best possible world (hereafter: bpw), which entails that the bpw necessarily exists, and is therefore the only possible world. But without any scope for comparison, the superlative term 'best' is clearly inappropriate and so the bpw cannot be the bpw at all! As such, it must be impossible for God to create it. Hence if God exists then he must of necessity make something that is impossible to create! Because of its conclusion, I call this the repugnant argument. I consider a number of possible responses to this argument. 1 The Problem Stated [1] A few dissenters aside, the majority of philosophers who have expressed a view on the matter are firmly of the opinion that, if God exists, then he must make the best of all possible worlds.1 This is generally held to be true since God's omniscience leads him to know what is most perfect, his omnipotence enables him to bring it about, and his perfect goodness ensures that he would not even countenance acting in a less than perfect way. From this it follows that a most perfect being cannot operate in a less than perfect way. That is to say, God's nature is such that only the most perfect way of acting is consistent with it. This can be summed up in the following proposition: [2] (P) The operation of the most perfect being is always most perfect [3] And it follows from (P) that God, if he exists, necessarily creates the best possible world. Or at least it does if we make the assumption that the so-called 1. Cf. Lawrence Resnick, 'God and the best possible world,' American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1973), 313; Jerome A. Weinstock, 'Must God create the best world?,' Sophia 14 (1975), 37–38; R. W. K. Patterson, 'Evil, omniscience and omnipotence,' Religious Studies 15 (1979), 2; David Basinger, 'Must God create the best possible world? A response,' International Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1980), 341; C.MasonMyers, 'Freewill and the problemof evil,'Religious Studies 23 (1987), 291; Michael J. Coughlan, 'Must God create only the best possible world?,' Sophia 26 (1987), 15; David Schrader, 'Evil and the best of possible worlds,' Sophia 27 (1988), 27; Stephen Grover, 'Why only the best is good enough,' Analysis 48 (1988), 224; Charles B. Daniels, 'God vs. less than the very best,' Sophia 35 (1996), 21; Erik J. Wielenberg, 'A morally unsurpassable God must create the best,'Religious Studies 40 (2004), 57. For contrary views see Charles Journet, The Meaning of Evil (London 1963), 104; Robert Merrihew Adams, 'Must God create the best?,' Philosophical Review 81 (1972), 317; Bruce Reichenbach, 'Must God create the best possible world?,' International Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1979), 208; Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (revised edition, Oxford 1991), 114. It should be noted that those who deny that God must make the best are also those who argue that the notion of the best possible world is incoherent. c© February 2, 2005, Ars Disputandi. If you would like to cite this article, please do so as follows: Lloyd Strickland, 'On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World,' Ars Disputandi [http://www.ArsDisputandi. org] 5 (2005), paragraph number. Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World 'no best world' objection is false. The 'no best world' objection simply states that for any possible world that might be termed the best, there is always another that is better. Despite the popularity of this argument, I believe it to be mistaken. As I have stated the grounds for my belief elsewhere,2 I shall not rehearse them again here. I can therefore only ask the reader to assumewithme that the 'no best world' objection is false. [4] Now having the conclusion that God necessarily produces the best possible world might seem to be a boon to the optimist, for it provides him with a cast-iron guarantee that if a perfectly good God exists then the world such a God would create would be the best. But it is in fact a problematic conclusion, for if God necessarily creates the best possible world then technically the best possible world is in fact the only possible world, since all other 'possibles' are not really possible at all. As Mark Heller puts it, 'God, being necessarily all good, cannot do less than best. Any description of a world that includes God's doing something less than the best does not describe a possible world at all.'3 And herein lies a further problem – if there is only one logically possible world then that world can hardly be described as the best possible world. For as Lawrence Resnick observes, '[t]echnically, if no lesser worlds are possible, our world cannot be the best. There cannot be a superlative where comparatives are impossible.'4 We can distil these points into the following deductively valid argument: [5] P1: If God decides to create then he will of necessity create the best possible world. [6] P2: If God will of necessity create the best possible world, then only the best possible world is possible. [7] P3: If only the best possible world is possible, then it is not the best possible world (as there are no other possible worlds to compare it to). [8] P4: If thebestpossibleworld isnot thebestpossibleworld, then it is impossible for God to create it. [9] Therefore if God decides to create it is impossible for him to create the best possible world. [10] A little explanation is required here. First, by 'possible world' I understand a completely determinate and contingent set of (spatio-temporally connected) things that is free from internal contradiction (so on this definition God 2. See my 'Determining the best of all possible worlds', forthcoming. 3. Mark Heller, 'The worst of all worlds,' Philosophia 28 (2001), 263. See also J. F. Ross, 'Did God create the only possible world?,' Review of Metaphysics 16 (1962), 14, and Coughlan 'Must God create only the best possible world?,' 15. 4. Lawrence Resnick, 'God and the best possible world,' American Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1973), 315. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World is not part of any possible world).5 Second, I have added an antecedent to P1 to recognise the common theistic claim that it is open to God whether to create or not; P1's consequent, along with P2 and P3, will be familiar from what we have discussed in this paper thus far, while P4 derives from the generally accepted view that God cannot bring about contradictory states of affairs. It should be clear enough that not only is the conclusion anathema to the optimist, but to theism generally. For we know from P1 that if God decides to create he will of necessity create the best possibleworld, and from the conclusion that it is impossible for him to create the best possible world. So in order to avoid the unfortunate situation that would arise from his positively deciding to create something impossible, he would obviously have to decide not to create at all. Thus the existence of a world is incompatible with that of a perfect God. Yet we know that there is a world! For obvious reasons I will therefore call the above argument the repugnant argument. How to escape its conclusion shall be the focus of the remainder of this paper. 2 Possible solutions I: God and omnipotence [11] It might appear that P1 can be undermined simply by appealing to God's omnipotence, which is typically taken to be the power or ability to do or bring about anything that it is logically possible to do or bring about.6 This is ordinarily supposed to cover a great many things, so to insist that the only logically possible action for God is to create one particular world will entail that his omnipotence will be circumscribed in a way not normally considered acceptable. [12] On the surface, then, the traditional account of omnipotence appears to entail that other worlds beside the best are possible. From which, we might suppose that we can force through the conclusion that the best possible world is not the only possible world on the grounds that to say otherwise would destroy the concept of God. The principal problem with this reasoning, however, is that we are only able to argue that God's omnipotence allows him to create worlds other than the best by considering omnipotence in isolation from all the other divine attributes. Once it is properly considered in conjunction with omniscience and perfect goodness, we see that no world other than the best is possible because 5. This definition is similar to those givenby, amongst others, JohnD.McHarry, 'A theodicy', Analysis 38 (1978), 132, Patterson 'Evil, omniscience and omnipotence', 1–2, and Peter Forrest, 'The problem of evil: two neglected defences', Sophia 20 (1981), 50. I think it is reasonable not to count God as part of any possible world because presumably he himself would not do so. For when deciding what to create, God is surely concerned only with the goodness ofwhat he is creating (or what he is going to create), rather than the goodness of himself plus his creation. 6. Although omnipotence is popularly understood this way, this is by no means the only sense in which it is understood. There are in fact great disagreements about what an omnipotent being can and cannot do, and consequently about what omnipotence essentially is. To enter into this debate here would involve a long and unnecessary digression to plot all themoves and counter moves, so I shall simply point the reader in the direction of some recent works that contribute to this debate. See Nelson Pike, 'Omnipotence and God's ability to sin,' American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1969), 208–216; Peter Geach, 'Omnipotence,' Philosophy 48 (1973), 7–20, Thomas V. Morris, Our Idea of God (Notre Dame 1991) Ch. 4, and Wes Morriston, 'Omnipotence and necessary moral perfection,' Religious Studies 37 (2001), 143–160. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World God's power is directed by his perfect goodness, which in turn is directed by his perfect wisdom, with the result that he can only consistently will the best possible world. It is thus worthwhile stressing why exactly there is only one logically possible action open to God: his perfect nature. [13] Is there perhaps a little room for manoeuvre here though? That is, although we have no choice but to accept that God's omnipotencemust in practice be directed by his knowledge and goodness, is it not still open to us to suppose that in theory it might not be so directed? Or to put it another way, can we not reintroduce the Scholastic distinction between God's potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata, i.e. his absolute power (considered in isolation from his other attributes which would otherwise regulate it) and his regulated power? If this distinction is made then it can be argued that although God necessarily creates the best, other worlds are nevertheless possible because it is within God's power to create them even if he lacks the imperfect will that would allow him to do so. Or to put it another way, a distinction can be drawn between what God literally cannot do, and what he cannot bring himself to do. This distinction seems to hold good in everyday life, for it is one thing to say that I literally cannot harm someone (because, say, I am paralysed and so lack the means to inflict harm on anyone) and quite another to say that I cannot bring myself to harm someone (which implies that I have the power to do so, but not the will). It seems no less legitimate to transfer this analysis to God to say that while God's power extends to performing actions less than the best, it is only his will that does not. And if this is the case, then as it is affirmed that God has the power to create worlds other than the best, these worlds must therefore be possible. [14] As promising as this seems, however, it overlooks one very important point, namely that in God's case the fact that he cannot bring himself to do certain things (i.e. anything less than the best) is a logical truth, whereaswith humans it is not. As such, there is simply no distinction between what God cannot do and what he cannot bring himself to do. To illustrate, let us return to the above example where a distinction was drawn between my being unable to harm someone and my not being able to bring myself to harm someone. Now the fact that I cannot bring myself to harm someone today does not necessarily mean that I won't be able to bringmyself to harm someone tomorrow. I could, overnight, be corrupted, brainwashed, undergo a personality change, or even just happen upon a reason that makes me believe that harming people is acceptable in certain circumstances. In short, the attributes I have, which determinewhat I can and cannot bringmyself to do, are fluid, they can change over time. With God this is not so. And if an agent necessarily cannot bring itself to do a certain action, then it can reasonably be said that the agent simply cannot perform that action. The Scholastic distinction thus does not help us one jot. 3 Possible solutions II: God's freedomand indifferent choice [15] Although the appeal to omnipotence does not help us reject P1, perhaps having recourse to another of God's attributes might, namely his freedom. On the Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World surface it certainly doesn't look like a particularly promising approach; after all, we know that if God decides to create he is bound by his own nature to choose the best possible world, so any appeal to God's freedom would seem to be of no avail because he does not have the freedom to create just anything. Kant saw this only too clearly (during his optimistic phase at any rate), and he rejected all suggestion that God has the 'fictitious notion of freedom' that would allow him to choose the worst over the best.7 He thus preferred instead to praise 'the benevolent necessity, which is so favourable to us, and from which there can be nothing but the best.'8 If he had said 'from which there can be nothing or the best' he might have got it right. In any case, invoking God's freedom does nothing to neutralise the repugnant argument. Or so it seems. [16] Joshua Hoffman and Gary Rosenkrantz appear to agree with P1 – they accept that God is obliged to obey his own nature and make a world of unsurpassable goodness if he is to create at all – but nevertheless feel that it is still possible to appeal to God's freedom in order to render false P2, that the best possible world is the only possible world.9 Their argument hinges on there being 'indefinitely many maximally good possible worlds.' With this supposed, they move on to claim that creating any one of these maximally possible good worlds is 'equally rational for God' and that only one of them can obtain. Now, Since there can be no reason forGod to prefer creating any one of theseworlds, and since it seems possible for him to create any one of themwithout his being compelled or determined to do so . . . We conclude that in creating one of these worlds, God has it within his power (in the libertarian sense) to create any of the alternative possible worlds. In other words, God has it within his power to do otherwise in the requisite sense.10 [17] Now we might wonder whether there are indeed indefinitely many maximally good worlds, as Hoffman and Rosenkrantz suppose. They argue that this is indeed the case, since 'different goods combined in different possible ways may constitute different, logically independent, possible total goods of the same value.'11 They illustrate this claim with a character called Smith, who in one possible world has spaghetti for dinner, while in another, ceteris paribus, has linguini. The enjoyment from Smith's eating spaghetti is assumed to be equal to his enjoyment gained from eating linguini, making it the case that there are at least two possible worlds exemplifying the same degree of goodness. What 7. Immanuel Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770 (trans. & ed. David Walford, & Ralf Meerbote, Cambridge 1992), 75. 8. Kant, Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770, 76. 9. It should be noted that their argument is in fact intended to defend the idea of divine freedom rather than invalidate the repugnant argument as such. However, as they claim that God can only be free if he is able to do otherwise than he does, i.e. if he is not restricted to creating one particular world, their argument is as much against P2 as it is in favour of divine freedom. 10. Joshua Hoffman & Gary S. Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes (Oxford 2002), 175–6. The same argument, albeit in a slightly less elegant form, can also be found in Resnick, 'God and the best possible world,' 316. 11. Hoffman & Rosenkrantz, The Divine Attributes, 159. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World Hoffman and Rosenkrantz fail to ask, however, is how plausible it is that possible worlds might differ only in the tiny detail of what one person has for dinner on one particular night. While others have agreed with them that some possible worldsmight differ only in such a detail,12 it is also a commonly held view that any difference between worlds that share a common history up to a particular point of time will ultimately lead to significantly different histories. Even something as apparently trivial as the deviation in the direction of an atom is often considered an event sufficient to ultimately produce two radically different worlds. If we are being asked to accept that worlds can differ only in tiny details that do not affect their overall value, we are entirely justified, I think, to ask for a reason why these differences do not multiply over time. For if they do, it is plausible to suppose that they will ultimately lead to worlds of differing value – precisely the opposite of what Hoffman and Rosenkrantz suppose. Until further analysis on this matter has been carried out, I am inclined to consider it an open question as to whether there would be many worlds of unsurpassable goodness. [18] This is not to suggest that theHoffman-Rosenkrantz argument is wholly without merit. In fact, if we modify the repugnant argument to allow for their suggestion that there are multiple possible worlds of equal goodness, we will find that we have overcome the problem of there being only one possible world. As great an achievement as this is, however, it does not enable a suitably modified repugnant argument to reach a conclusion more palatable than the one we have already met. For a suitably modified repugnant argument would go as follows: [19] P1: If God decides to create then he will of necessity create a possible world of unsurpassable goodness. [20] P2: IfGodwill of necessity create a possibleworld of unsurpassable goodness, then only possible worlds of unsurpassable goodness are possible. [21] P3: If only possible worlds of unsurpassable goodness are possible, then they are not possible worlds of unsurpassable goodness (as there are no possible worlds of an inferior degree of goodness to which they could be compared). [22] P4: If possible worlds of unsurpassable goodness are not possible worlds of unsurpassable goodness, then it is impossible for God to create any of them. [23] Therefore if God decides to create it is impossible for him to create a possible world of unsurpassable goodness. [24] We thus need to look elsewhere for ammunition in our fight against the repugnant argument. 12. E.g. Stephen Grover, 'Incommensurability and the best of all possible worlds,' The Monist 81 (1998), 655. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World 4 Possible solutions III:weknow that thingsmight havebeen otherwise [25] Perhaps it could come from J. F. Ross, who argues that P2 is absurd, conflicting as it does with our knowing that things could have been otherwise than they are: [W]e know that things other than what is actual are possible, and we will allow no argument to convince us of the contrary. We would more readily reject the proposition that God exists or that God is absolutely perfect or that every possible world contains God as an element, than we would the obvious consistency of some false proposition.13 [26] But this appeal to our certainty that things could have been different is a puzzling one. Are we really certain that things could have been different? Ross obviously thinks so, and damns the denial of his position as 'an obvious falsehood,' but unfortunately neglects to share his reasons for thinking this.14 I suspect, however, that he had in mind something akin to an argument first formulated (so far as I know) by Leibniz. [27] Leibniz did not deny that God's perfect nature was such as to make it inevitable that he would create the best possible world, but argued that although 'God does not fail to choose the best,' nevertheless he could not have been necessitated to do so.15 This could be shown, he thought, in the following way: [28] If God acts out of necessity, then the best possible world is necessary. [29] If the best possible world is necessary, then it is the only possible world. [30] The best possible world is not the only possible world. [31] Therefore God does not act out of necessity. [32] Or in his own words: although it is certain and inevitable that God always chooses the most perfect, whether in fact the best, or most expedient to his own glory . . . nevertheless it is not for that reason necessary, otherwise it would follow that nothing is possible except that which is actually created, whereas there are infinite possibles (certainly whatever does not imply contradiction) which are not chosen by God. Although God must always choose the best . . . nevertheless he chooses freely because that which he does not choose remains possible by its own nature, and so its opposite is not necessary.16 13. Ross, 'Did God create the only possible world?,' 23. 14. Ross, 'Did God create the only possible world?,' 25. 15. G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy (trans: E. M. Huggard, Chicago 1990), 148. 16. G. W. Leibniz, Textes Inédits (ed. Gaston Grua, Paris 1948), 299–300. Translations from this volume are my own. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World [33] Leibniz' rejoinder to the repugnant argument thus hinges, as does Ross', on claiming that worlds other than the best are possible. Let us see if this argument fares better than the others. [34] Leibniz' favoured test to determine logical or absolute necessity was to consider a state of affairs and ask if its opposite implied a contradiction. If it did (and only if it did), the state of affairs was logically necessary. With worlds other than the best, Leibniz thus holds that they should properly be treated as possible worlds since, in and of themselves, they do not imply contradiction. As he explained to Gabriel Wagner, 'There are as many series of things that can be imagined not implying contradiction as there are possible worlds . . . [F]or I call possible that which does not imply contradiction.'17 Or in the Theodicy: since there aremany thingswhichhavenever happenedandneverwill happen, and which nevertheless are clearly conceivable, and imply no contradiction, how can one say they are absolutely impossible?'18 [35] So Leibniz deems a world possible if it is internally coherent, i.e. if it is in itself free from inconsistency. Leibniz thus attempts to finesse the problem we have been addressing by accepting that only one world could have been made by God, but denying that this entails the impossibility of any other worlds: Speaking in absolute terms, it must be said that another state [of things] can certainly exist, but nevertheless the present one does exist, because from the nature of God it follows that he prefers the most perfect.19 [36] To the best of my knowledge Leibniz nowhere comes closer to explicitly employing the old Thomistic distinction between absolute and relative possibility than he does here. In Aquinas' philosophy, a thing or state of affairs can be said to be absolutely possible if it is internally consistent, i.e. involves no contradiction, and relatively possible if some agent or other being could actually bring it about, i.e. supply themeans of generation for it.20 If Leibniz accepts this distinction then wewould expect to find him affirming that (a) lots of things and series of things are possible in the absolute sense, and (b) the best world and its contents are the only things possible in the relative sense, i.e. with respect toGod (becauseGod can only create the best possible world). And this is precisely what we do find. We have already seen that Leibniz considers many non-existing things to be possible in the absolute sense because in and of themselves they are free from contradiction.21 But just as readily as he affirms the absolute possibility of non-existing things, he also affirms that the best world is the only one possible in relation to God. This 17. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 390. 18. Leibniz, Theodicy, 272. Cf. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 289 and 324; Leibniz, Theodicy, 234–5. 19. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 393. 20. Cf. Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings (trans. & ed. Timothy McDermott, Oxford 1993), 244–5 (originally from Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia). Aquinas appears to have developed the distinction from Aristotle'sMetaphysics 1019b21–1020a6. 21. Cf. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 287–88. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World occurs in the passage cited above, where Leibniz accepts that worlds other than the best are possible in an absolute sense, but not in a relative sense 'because from the nature of God it follows that he prefers the most perfect.'22 And in a short text entitled De Libertate (On Liberty) from the early 1680s, in which Leibniz plays out an imaginary discussion on necessity and possibility, he considers a question posed by his imaginary interlocutor that God cannot will a thing to exist unless it is part of the best series, and replies: 'I accept this, nevertheless it remains possible in its own nature, even if it is not possible with respect to the divine will.'23 [37] Before we assess the merits of Leibniz' solution, it is worth making the following observation: although Leibniz is happy to grant that a thing or state of affairs is possible if its concept harbours no contradiction, this does not mean that he is prepared to accept that it could actually exist. Strictly speaking, things or states of affairs not belonging to the best world are incompatible with God's existence, as he concedes in a series of notes from the early 1680s: The eternal damnation of an innocent man seems to be from that number of things of which the essence does not in fact imply contradiction because it can be completely understood, but nevertheless its existing implies contradiction.24 [38] 'That number of things' is in fact very large, and encompasses anything that is (a) not part of the best series, and (b) involves no contradiction in and of itself. Hence such things are possible, in Leibniz' accepted sense, but can nevertheless never exist, for if God were to produce them it would generate a contradiction. The concepts of uncreated possible things therefore contain no contradictions so long as they remain uncreated, which is to say that they must necessarily remain uncreated. We must be wary, then, of assuming that when he spoke of 'possible things' he meant things that could actually exist, as evidently this is not what he meant at all.25 [39] The question before us now is whether Leibniz' analysis is sufficient to assuage our concern that the best possible world is the only possible world, and as such not actually the best possible world at all. We might be tempted to suppose that it is, as his notion of 'possible' has been very warmly received by philosophers. Indeed, if we were to say 'a unicorn is possible and a round square is not' we would 22. Cf. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 390. 23. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 289. If Leibniz did indeed accept the distinction between absolute and relative possibility, as I maintain he did, why is it that he fails to use the term 'relative possibility'? The answer is to be found inDe Libertate, where Leibniz explains that he reserves the term 'possible' for things 'possible in their own nature,' i.e. the absolutely possible, so as to avoid giving the word 'every kind of absurd locution.' (Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 289) With the notion of relative possibility stripped of the right to determine what is and is not 'possible' in Leibniz' favoured sense, we see precisely how he feels he can get away with claiming that worlds other than our own are possible even though God could never make them. 24. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 300. 25. The point is important, for as Leibniz notes 'possible things have no existence at all and therefore have no power to make themselves exist, and consequently it is necessary to look for the choice and cause of their existence in a being whose existence is already established and therefore necessary in itself.' Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 286. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World ordinarily be understood to be talking about concepts, and whether the terms of those concepts were compatible with each other. We would be quite surprised, I think, if someone interpreted our statement as suggesting a unicorn is part of the best world which God must produce whereas a round square is not. Likewise, when it is asked whether God is possible or not, as it often is by philosophers of religion, the question is understood to be asking whether the attributes normally ascribed to God are consistent with each other, not whether there is some agent able to promote God from the nothingness of non-being to actuality. We might feel entitled to say on the strength of this that worlds other than the best are still possible in their own nature even though God could never make them, and therefore that it is acceptable to speak of the best possible world. [40] However Lawrence Resnick notes that this kind of solution 'is patently ad hoc, for, except to escape a paradox, no one would ever suppose that a world which could not possibly exist is a possibleworld.'26 Heaccepts that the traditional idea of possibility turns on internal logical consistency alone, but argues that this test for possibility is no longer valid when a 'necessarily existing Perfect Creator' is supposed.27 What he is getting at here, I think, is that if we are to suppose a perfect God then we must revise our notion of possibility. For a thing to be possible it would no longer be enough that it is absolutely possible in the sense described above, it would have to be relatively possible too, i.e. it must be free from logical inconsistencies and Godmust be able to make it. If neither condition is met, then the thing is not truly possible in the important sense that it could actually exist. It seems to me that this must be right. To insist that a thing which could never exist is nevertheless possible seems an unforgivable abuse of language. Indeed, it leaves no clear water between what is possible and what is impossible.28 It seems, then, that Leibniz' efforts to establish that worlds other than the best are genuinely possible cannot be considered successful. 5 The best world [41] Wehave thus far found no chinks in the repugnant argument, and given its tightly logical nature it would seem that there are none for us to find. However there is a solution that can pull the fangs from the repugnant argument, though it extracts a price from the optimist too. It emerges when we recognise that the repugnant argument is predicated on one huge historical mistake, one for which 26. Resnick, 'God and the best possible world,' 315. 27. Resnick, 'God and the best possible world,' 314. 28. The argument here, developed from Resnick, clearly undermines the distinction drawn by Alvin Plantinga between possible worlds and actualizable worlds. In Plantinga's thought, a possible world is 'any possible state of affairs that is complete,' whereas an actualizable world is a possible world that God is able to bring about. For reasons I shall not go into here, Plantinga argues that not all possible worlds are actualizable worlds, and as a result he thinks it may well be the case that the possible world featuring moral good but no moral evil is not actualizable despite being possible. But what he overlooks is the curious abuse of language involved in reaching this conclusion, as it is unclear how unactualizable possible worlds can be called possible at all given that they could never exist. The quotation is from Alvin C. Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids, 1977), 36. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World we have Leibniz to thank. The mistake to which I allude is the notion of the best possible world, bequeathed to us by Leibniz. We shall be able to appreciate the scale of his blunder by returning to the point I made in the previous section, that different criteria for determining possibility apply in theistic and non-theistic contexts. In the latter it is sufficient that the concept of a thing is free from contradiction for it to be deemed possible. In the former, because a perfect God is being supposed, and because in this context God alone determines what can and cannot exist, it is necessary but not sufficient for the concept of a thing to be free from contradiction for it to be deemed possible. In addition to that, Godmust also be able to make the thing. Leibniz' mistake was to employ the former conception of 'possible' when he should have employed the latter (because he was supposing the existence of a perfect God). Had he notmade this error, hewould have realised that the notion of 'the best possibleworld' was onlymeaningful (ironically enough) in a non-theistic context, for only there is itmeaningful to talk of possibleworlds in the plural, and thus only there can possible worlds be compared and superlatives applied. Once wemove to a theistic context and suppose the existence of a perfect God, the notion of the best possibleworld becomes nonsensical because a different formula for determining possibility applies. Under this formula, only what is free from contradiction and consistent with God's existence is possible. And we know from proposition (P), which we encountered near the start of this paper, that God, as a perfect being, will necessarily act in the most perfect way – something Leibniz knew only too well.29 So we know that only what is best or most perfect is consistent with God's existence. Now in first premise of the repugnant argument we construed this to mean the following: [42] P1: If God decides to create then he will of necessity create the best possible world. [43] Now givenwhat was said above, it should be clear that the idea of God (a necessary being) creating necessarily is in conflict with the idea of the best possible world (which of course is just a shorthand way of saying 'the best of all possible worlds'). The conflict comes to a head later in the repugnant argument, where it is affirmed that the best possible world is not really the best possible world at all – a clear breach of the law of identity. This contradiction could have been avoided by recognising that the criterion of possibility employed in the notion of 'the best possible world' is the wrong one for the context. What we now know is that, for that notion to make any sense at all, there must be at least two possible worlds with different degrees of merit. And what we have also learned is that when a perfect God is posited, this requirement is not, indeed cannot be fulfilled, because a perfect God necessarily acts in the most perfect way, thus condemning all but one world to be eternally impossible. [44] There are two questions that now deserve our attention. First, what should P1 have said in place of 'the best possible world'? And second, why did we use the notion of the best possible world in the first place? The easy answer 29. Cf. Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 286 and 393. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World to the second question is of course that it is a popular concept and expression, not one generally considered to be problematic. We shall return to this shortly. Turning, then, to the question of what P1 ought to have said, one answer is: that God will of necessity create the only possible world. But a second – and better – answer emerges when we remind ourselves why there is only one possible world: firstly, because God is perfectly good, and secondly, because the world he favours is unsurpassed by any other. 'Unsurpassed by any other what?' we may ask, for we know that there are no other possible worlds. The response is disarmingly simple: unsurpassed by any other worlds. Not possible worlds. Worlds. While the only possible world cannot be the best of all possible worlds, it is still the best world, or best of worlds, and we thus have our answer: the world God necessarily creates will not be the best of all possible worlds, but it will be the bestworld. [45] Therefore God necessarily selects for creation the best world and only thatworldmeets theapplicable criteria forbeingpossible. All theworlds inferior to thebest are impossible by the same criteria, forwhile they are internally consistent, they have no chance of ever being granted existence. Had Leibniz recognised this he would not have spoken of the best possible world at all; he would instead have talked of the best world, as indeed would the writers that followed him (since they all borrowed the concept and phrase 'the best possible world' from him).30 [46] It is thus something of an historical accident that the phrase 'the best possible world' (or 'the best of all possible worlds') came to be preferred over 'the best world' (or 'the best of worlds'). Had Leibniz not tried to wriggle out of accepting the necessity of God's creation by insisting on a definition of 'possible' that was only half right given the context in which he was writing, the chances are the phrase 'the best possible world' would not have been popularised in the way that it has. But as untold numbers of philosophers right up to the present day have followed Leibniz and committed his mistake again and again, the meaningless notion of 'the best possible world' has earned itself an unwarranted place in the philosopher's vocabulary. And an appearance in the soon-to-be-discredited repugnant argument. [47] But before we see how amending Leibniz' mistake can tame the repugnant argument, we ought to be certain that the amendment I have suggested – ditching the concept of 'the best possible world' in favour of 'the best world,' at least in theistic contexts – is a valid step. For it is surely not enough that we 30. Howmuch of the blame should be directed Leibniz' way for this is debatable. As Radner and Radner have observed, Leibniz does not use the expression 'the best of all possible worlds' in his work. Nevertheless his writings are littered with alternative renderings of the same idea, such as 'the best of all possible universes' (Leibniz, Theodicy, 249) 'the best possible plan' (Leibniz, Theodicy, 188 and 190) and 'the best possible series.' (G. W. Leibniz, Monadology and other Philosophical Essays (trans. Paul Schrecker & Anne Martin Schrecker, Indianapolis 1965), 131) Moreover, Leibniz says ofGod that hematches 'all things together in the bestwaypossible' (Leibniz, Textes Inédits, 287) and 'always chooses the best possible.' (G. W. Leibniz, Die Philosophiscen Schriften III (ed. C. I. Gerhardt, Berlin 1875–90), 587, cf. Leibniz, Theodicy, 187) Given these remarks it is hardly surprising that the concept and expression 'the best of all possible worlds' have been associated with him. See Daise Radner & Michael Radner, 'Optimality in biology: Pangloss or Leibniz?,' The Monist 81 (1998), 684 n8. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World need to take it in order to lay low the repugnant argument; it also needs to be reasonable in itself. And I think that it is, for in a theistic context a 'world' need simply be considered analogous to what in a non-theistic context is commonly termed a 'possible world'. That is, it is a completely determinate and contingent set of things that is free from internal contradiction. Now I submit that there is no absurdity in the idea that such things can be compared with each other and even arranged in order of merit. For even though the vast majority of these worlds are not possible (because God cannotmake them) they are stillworlds, i.e. alternative determinate histories harbouring no contradiction, no less than is the best of their number. [48] This is challengeable of course. Forhowcan it bemeaningful to compare a possible thing with other things that aren't possible at all? Is it not just as absurd as saying that a square can be compared in size with a square triangle? Both cases turn on comparing the possible with the impossible, and if the latter case is absurd then why not also the former? [49] This objection is interesting, but not particularly telling, because it confuses two distinct types of impossibility. In the case of the square and the square triangle, wemust recognise why exactly there is no scope for comparison: because a square triangle does not describe a coherent concept. By its very definition, then, it is not the sort of thing that can have a size or any other properties. Comparing a square triangle with anything is thus out of the question. In the case of worlds, there are two ways in which they could be impossible. The first way is when a world is like the square triangle in nature, that is, it involves contradiction. Such worlds may include and exclude the same thing, or involve some other breach of the laws of logic. It is clearly no more acceptable to compare these sorts of impossible worlds with a possible world than it is to compare a square triangle with a square, for the same reason that we have ruled out the latter (i.e. these impossible 'worlds' do not actually describe anything and can therefore be said to not really be worlds at all). But there is of course another way in which a world can be impossible: not because of some violation of a logical rule within the concept of the world itself, but rather because these worlds are inferior to the best, and thus not attractive enough to a perfect being to make him want to create them. Thus it is the very fact that these impossible worlds can be compared to the only possible world that makes them impossible in the first place! If we deny that these impossible worlds can be compared to the one possible world then there is absolutely no reason at all why these worlds should be impossible, as in themselves they contain no contradiction. And if it is acceptable to compare the only possible world with all the other worlds that it renders impossible by its very superiority, then it is quite acceptable to refer to it as the best world. [50] Hence the repugnant argument needs to be recast as the following hypothetical syllogism: Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org Lloyd Strickland: On The Necessity Of The Best (Possible) World [51] P1: If God decides to create then he will of necessity create the best world. [52] P2: If God will of necessity create the best world, then only the best world is possible. [53] Conclusion: Therefore if God decides to create he will of necessity create the only possible world (i.e. the best world). [54] By stripping out the reference to 'possible world' in P1 and replacing it with 'world' the argument takes a very different course, and arrives at a conclusion that an optimist would find wholly unrepugnant. [55] I mentioned that this solution came with a price for the optimist. What this is shouldbeobvious– theoptimist cannot call thisworld thebest of all possible worlds, he must instead call it the best world. The latter is not as impressive a moniker as the former, and betrays the fact that there are no other possible worlds that couldbe inferior to theoneGodcreates. But once it ismade clearwhy there are no other possible worlds, i.e. the supremacy of the best and the perfect goodness of he who chooses it, then the price cannot be considered to be an especially high one to pay. The optimist gets most of what he wants and actually has to give up very little. But best of all, he saves himself from the conclusion of the repugnant argument and gets to part company with ameaningless concept that has persisted for more than 300 years.31 31. My thanks to Vernon Pratt, Patrick Sherry and an anonymous Ars Disputandi reviewer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Ars Disputandi 5 (2005), http://www.ArsDisputandi.org

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=bfsn20 Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition ISSN: 1040-8398 (Print) 1549-7852 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/bfsn20 Edible insects – defining knowledge gaps in biological and ethical considerations of entomophagy Isabella Pali-Schöll, Regina Binder, Yves Moens, Friedrich Polesny & Susana Monsó To cite this article: Isabella Pali-Schöll, Regina Binder, Yves Moens, Friedrich Polesny & Susana Monsó (2018): Edible insects – defining knowledge gaps in biological and ethical considerations of entomophagy, Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, DOI: 10.1080/10408398.2018.1468731 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2018.1468731 © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Accepted author version posted online: 25 Apr 2018. Published online: 17 May 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 103 View related articles View Crossmark data Edible insects – defining knowledge gaps in biological and ethical considerations of entomophagy Isabella Pali-Sch€olla, Regina Binderb, Yves Moensc, Friedrich Polesnyd, and Susana Monsoe,f aComparative Medicine, Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University Vienna and University Vienna, Vienna, Austria; bInstitute of Animal Husbandry and Animal Welfare, Department of Farm Animals and Veterinary Public Health, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Vienna, Austria; cAnaesthesiology and Perioperative Intensive Care, University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna, Austria; dAGES Academy, Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), Vienna, Austria; eEthics and Human-Animal Studies, Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University Vienna and University Vienna, Vienna, Austria; fSection of Moral and Political Philosophy, Institute of Philosophy, Karl-Franzens-Universit€at Graz, Graz, Austria ABSTRACT While seeking novel food sources to feed the increasing population of the globe, several alternatives have been discussed, including algae, fungi or in vitro meat. The increasingly propagated usage of farmed insects for human nutrition raises issues regarding food safety, consumer information and animal protection. In line with law, insects like any other animals must not be reared or manipulated in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, distress or harm on them. Currently, there is a great need for research in the area of insect welfare, especially regarding species-specific needs, health, farming systems and humane methods of killing. Recent results from neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and behavioral sciences prompt caution when denying consciousness and therefore the likelihood of presence of pain and suffering or something closely related to it to insects. From an animal protection point of view, these issues should be satisfyingly solved before propagating and establishing intensive husbandry systems for insects as a new type of mini-livestock factory farming. Abbreviations: APA: Austrian Animal Protection Act; EC: European Community; EFSA: European Food Safety Agency; EU: European Union; FDA: Food and Drug Administration; OJ: Official Journal of the European Union; PAP: processed animal protein KEYWORDS Edible insects; ethical aspects; legal situation; novel food; nociception; rearing; allergenicity; sentience; entomophagy 1. Introduction Anthropo-entomophagy, the consumption of insects as food by humans, is no novel phenomenon, because obviously it has been practiced since the very early development of human beings (Sponheimer et al. 2005). Humans initially had an insectivorous diet, and only with subsequent evolution came fruits, vegetables and meat, when humans began hunting and eating other mammals (reviewed in Ramos-Elorduy 2009). Today, entomophagy is still a form of nutrition in over 100 countries, mainly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, with over 2300 insect species used for consumption by about 3000 ethnic groups (van Huis et al. 2013). When seeking novel food sources to feed the increasing population of the globe, several alternatives have been discussed, including algae, fungi or in vitro meat. In addition, there are several arguments on the table for promoting insects as novel food and novel feed worldwide, including in industrialized Western countries. First, there is the nutritional value of insects, namely their high content of biologically valuable protein, optimal fatty acids and several favorable micronutrients like copper, iron, magnesium, riboflavin, biotin and others (Rumpold and Schluter 2013). Further reasons for consuming insects are environmental. De Goede et al. summarize the presumed environmental advantages of insect farming (De Goede, Kapsomenou, and Peters 2013), although one has to admit that -to the best of the authors' knowledge- there is no reliable calculation of the overall ecologicalor water-footprint or the risks of large-scale mono-cultured insect farms in Western climate conditions. However, another advantage seems to be their capacity for bioconversion, as insects can be reared on residual waste, such as manure of poultry, swine and cow, as well as fish waste (Ramos-Elorduy 2009; Rumpold and Schluter 2013; Ocio, Vinaras, and Rey 1979). This feed can be converted very efficiently into biomass with a relatively low energy input, due to the poikilothermic metabolism of insects (van Huis et al. 2013). The rearing per se could be realized with much less land use than other livestock (Oonincx et al. 2010), and with only low space requirement, by piling multiple stories on top of each other. Furthermore, it seems that emissions of greenhouse gases and ammonia of commercially-reared insects are lower than in the case of conventional livestock (Oonincx et al. 2010). As there is a large phylogenetic distance between insects and humans and other mammals, the risks of transmission of CONTACT Isabella Pali-Sch€oll [email protected] Comparative Medicine, Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Medical University Vienna and University Vienna, Veterin€arplatz 1, 1210, Vienna, Austria. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/bfsn © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC CRITICAL REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND NUTRITION https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2018.1468731 diseases from insects to humans are most probably very low (van Huis et al. 2013). Finally, the introduction of insects as feed, e.g. as substitute for fishmeal, protects other species and thereby biodiversity (Rumpold and Schluter 2013). All in all, these arguments suggest many advantages of including edible insects as novel food on our plates and novel feed in the bowls. However, in addition, a number of controversial aspects have to be considered, such as food and feed safety, consumer information, and animal protection issues brought about by the large scale breeding, rearing and killing of insects. 2. Legal situation – the European perspective The usage of insects for human purposes (e.g. production of silk and honey) has a long tradition in different parts of the world. The same is true for entomophagy, i.e. the use of insects for human consumption. In Western societies, however, the use of insects as food is a very small niche market so far (EFSA Scientific Committee 2015), although over the last years interest in using insects as food and feed has been increasing and propagated for various reasons (van Huis et al. 2013; EFSA Scientific Committee 2015). From the legal perspective, large-scale farming of insects for the production of food and feed (for other farm animals) raises primarily two issues: (i) the question of food safety, and (ii) the issue of animal protection. 2.1. Food safety With respect to the food safety issues involved in the use of insects as food and feed, legislators have to pay special attention to the general guidelines that apply to novel food, as well as to any potential allergenicity risks. 2.1.1. Regulation of novel food According to Regulation (EC) No 1069/20091, insects are regarded as "farmed animals". Insects, either whole or processed, are food as defined by Art. 2 of Regulation (EC) No 178/ 20022 and, like any other animals intended for human ingestion, are subject to the supranational and national legislation on food safety3. Generally speaking, the processing and storage of insects and products of insect origin have to follow the same health and sanitation regulations as conventional foodstuff. Additionally, the regulatory framework for novel food is applicable. According to EU-legislation, novel food is defined as foods and food ingredients that have not been consumed to a significant degree by humans in the EU prior to May 15th, 1997, when the first supranational regulation on novel food came into force4. Novel food in general and insects in particular may be connected with a series of potential risks for human health (e.g. biological and chemical hazards, allergenicity) and the environment, which have to be assessed and minimized by regulatory requirements. Because there is little experience with the production and consumption of these foods, they have to undergo a standardized safety assessment process before being allowed to be marketed in the EU, in order to make sure that they do not represent a risk to the consumer. The first EU regulation on novel food, dating back to 1997, was superseded by a new European Novel Food Regulation, which came into force on December 31st, 2015 and has been legally binding for the member states since January 1st, 20185. This new regulatory framework is primarily concerned with centralizing, simplifying and expediting evaluation and authorization procedures. Whereas applications for authorization of a novel food item were previously assessed in the individual member states, they now are evaluated centrally by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). Basically, individual authorizations are replaced by general (generic) authorizations, applying not only to the applicant, but to all distributors of the relevant foodstuff. With regard to foods that have been traditionally consumed in third-party countries, safety evaluation will be more efficient in order to make access to the EU market easier. In this way, according to Art. 14 of the new Novel Food Regulation, a simplified authorization procedure (notification) is sufficient if the safe use of the relevant food outside the EU can be demonstrated for a period of at least 25 years and no appeal is lodged by the member states or the EFSA; in the latter case, the relevant food item is subject to the standard authorization process. The use of insects as feed currently is limited to pets (such as birds, reptiles and amphibians), because of the feed ban provisions of Regulation (EC) No 999/20016 (TSE Regulation), which do not allow insect Processed Animal Protein (PAP) to be fed to farmed animals due to lack of a safety profile (EFSA Scientific Committee 2015). 2.1.2. Allergenicity One of the safety points that have to be considered according to the Novel Food directive is the allergenicity of edible insects. For many insect species, it is already well-established that longterm, high-antigen environmental exposure, e.g. of professional insect farmers, leads to respiratory sensitization in a percentage1Regulation (EC) No 1069/2009 of the European Parliment and of the Council of 21 October 2009 laying down health rules as regards animal by-products and derived products not intended for human consumption and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1774/2002 (Animal by-products Regulation). OJ L 300/1, 14/11/2009. 2Regulation (EC) No 178/2002 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 28 January 2002 laying down the general principles and requirements of food law, establishing the European Food Safety Authority and laying down procedures in matters of food safety, OJ L 031, 01/02/2002. 3Cf. esp. Regulation (EC) No 852/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the hygiene of foodstuffs, OJ L 139/1, 30/4/2004; €Osterr. Bundesgesetz €uber Sicherheitsanforderungen und weitere Anforderungen an Lebensmittel, Gebrauchsgegenst€ande und kosmetische Mittel zum Schutz der Verbraucherinnen und Verbraucher (Lebensmittelsicherheitsund Verbraucherschutzgesetz – LMSVG), BGBl. I Nr. 13/2006 in its current version. 4Regulation (EC) No 258/97 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 27 January 1997 concerning novel foods and novel food ingredients, OJ L 043, 14/ 02/1997. 5Regulation (EU) 2015/2283 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 November 2015 on novel foods, amending Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council and repealing Regulation (EC) No 258/ 97 of the European Parliament and of the Council and Commission Regulation (EC) No 1852/2001, OJ L 327/1, 11/12/2015. 6Regulation (EC) No 999/2001 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 laying down rules for the prevention, control and eradication of certain transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, OJ L 147, 31/05/2001. 2 I. PALI-SCH€OLL ET AL. of up to 50–60% of individuals rearing grasshoppers (Pener 2014; Lopata et al. 2005) or silkworm (Uragoda and Wijekoon 1991). Allergenicity also has to be considered in the domestic context. A rather new development is the acquisition of reptiles as pets in homes, which are fed live grasshoppers, and here the owner has to consider the sensitization potential via the lung or skin (Jensen-Jarolim et al. 2015). Regarding the consumption of insects, there has been some anecdotal data from China, which report 54 cases of anaphylaxis due to consumption of shortor long-horned grasshoppers between 1980 and 2007 (Ji et al. 2009). Furthermore, around 1000 anaphylaxis cases per year occur due to consumption of silkworm in China (Ji et al. 2008). In recent studies from the Western countries, the potential for cross-reactivity of crustaceanor house dust mite-allergic patients to mealworm or grasshopper consumption has been shown (Verhoeckx et al. 2016; Broekman et al. 2016; Broekman et al. 2017; Broekman et al. 2017; Broekman et al. 2015; Verhoeckx et al. 2014; van Broekhoven et al. 2016). Accordingly, the guidelines of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Health and Women's Affairs for insects strongly recommend the labeling of edible insects and products thereof with the potential risk of allergic reactions in people who are allergic to crustaceans or house dust mites7. Importantly, also primary sensitization can take place when mealworms are eaten by humans (Broekman et al. 2017). These studies furthermore point towards individual sensitization, meaning that having an allergic reaction to one insect species does not necessarily mean that an allergic reaction to all insects will take place (Broekman et al. 2017). Therefore, as there are a number of different insect species around and they might contain different proteins, the allergenic potential probably needs to be evaluated individually. Taken together, neither the knowledge about cross-reactivity nor about primary sensitization regarding edible insects is so far complete. Furthermore, as insects are unlikely to be consumed in a raw or whole state in our countries and therefore presumably will arrive at the market in a processed form, it would be ideal to reveal and legislate the most efficient treatment and technological processes to reduce the primary sensitization capacity as well as cross-reactivity, which could be successfully performed for migratory locust by protein hydrolysis (own unpublished data). Apart from labeling potential allergenic reactions or crossreactivities, novel food must not be misleadingly labeled, which is especially important with regard to products made of or containing ingredients of insect origin that are not recognizable as insects (e.g. powder, granules, paste). 2.2. Animal Protection Large-scale farming of insects (mini-livestock) may cause a variety of animal protection issues, especially in the areas of rearing, husbandry and killing, which seem to have been widely neglected by regulatory frameworks and recommendations so far. Collecting insects in the field would make for a rather uncertain source of food. If insects shall play an important role in human nutrition, efficient mass-rearing with minimized input of materials, energy and labor is needed. Beekeeping for producing honey and breeding silk moths on mulberry for silk production have a history of some thousands of years. For decades there has been a lot of experience in mass-rearing of different insect plant pests to use either directly in plant protection (sterile insect technique) or as feed for mass rearing of beneficials. There is a lot of practical experience in breeding insects as feed for animals in zoos (Figure 1) or private terrariums. Most of these species are of interest for human nutrition, too. The insect species eligible for mass-rearing for human nutrition (De Goede, Kapsomenou, and Peters 2013; Schneider 2009; Erens et al. 2012) will be those that allow for fast growth under easy-to-maintain climatic conditions, as well as cheap and disposable feed. In order to ensure minimumwelfare standards, the species in question should also have a social behavior that allows the individuals to be kept in relatively high densities without cannibalism. These demands are met by several insect species:
Species with provenience in tropic or subtropic regions with rather stable climatic conditions (e.g. many locusts)
Synanthropic species (e.g. cockroaches)
Stored-food pests (e.g. mealworm, Tenebrio molitor L.)
Saprophagous or carrion feeding species (e.g. Black soldier fly, Hermetia illucens L.) Predatory insets will most probably not be suitable for massbreeding for human nutrition, because this would require a Figure 1. Crickets Acheta domesticus (A) and Yellow mealworm Tenebrio molitor (B) reared as feed for reptiles and birds in the zoo. 7Leitlinie f€ur gez€uchtete Insekten als Lebensmittel. https://www.verbraucherge sundheit.gv.at/lebensmittel/buch/codex/beschluesse/Insekten_LL.pdf?5th0ev CRITICAL REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND NUTRITION 3 mass-breeding of living insect feed in an upstream mode and raise costs and necessary input. For a stable mass-rearing of insects, a high level of hygiene is a basic requirement. Otherwise the breeding will collapse because of viral, bacterial or fungal pollution (Maciel-Vergara and Ros 2017). Hygiene requirements for human food have specialized standards, and the same will apply to the rearing of insects from egg to adult. The collection of the growth stage that is envisaged for usage or processing for consumption, e.g. larvae or adult insects, and the way to kill the specimen are both especially challenging. There is a need for a fast and non-poisonous as well as nonhurting killing of the target growth stage of the specimen before it is prepared for food or feed use, as one method for killing might not be optimal for every growth stage of a species. Fast freezing and/or treating with boiling hot water are the two preferred ways, where the most "humane" way needs to be assessed individually for every species and growth stage, e.g. fast freezing seemed to be better for mealworm than boiling (Adamkova et al. 2017). Although according to the Scientific Opinion rendered by the ESFA in 2015, the "general animal (vertebrate) health and welfare regulations should also apply for insects", the Art. 1 no. 2 d) of Council Directive 98/58/EC concerning the protection of animals kept for farming purposes8 explicitly excludes "any invertebrate animal" from its scope. Furthermore, the EFSA itself defined health and welfare of insects as an issue outside the terms of reference of the above mentioned document. Similarly, a guideline on farmed insects used as food, published by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Health and Women's Affairs, which is competent for food safety as well as for animal welfare, does not even touch upon the issue of animal protection,9 although the Austrian Animal Protection Act10 (APA) partly covers all invertebrate animals and thus also applies to insects. Although so far there is no conclusive evidence of sentience in insects, some entomologists proposed to apply humane killing techniques as early as in the first third of the 19th century (Cooper 2011). In 1980, entomologist V.B. Wigglesworth recommended anesthetizing insects prior to traumatizing manipulations in laboratory settings, although he himself was convinced that insects by and large do not feel pain (Eisemann et al. 1984). This precaution, according to Wigglesworth, "not only facilitates handling, but also guards against the remaining possibility of pain infliction and, equally important, helps to preserve in the experimenter an appropriately respectful attitude towards living organisms whose physiology, though different, and perhaps simpler than our own, is as yet far from being completely understood" (Wigglesworth 1980). Thus, in laboratory settings it is increasingly regarded as unacceptable to conduct invasive procedures on invertebrates without "some form of chemical restraint, preferable through the use of an agent with known anesthetic properties" (Cooper 2011; Cooper 2001). Interestingly, despite this progressive attitude towards insects' possible sentience, invertebrates (except cephalopods) are not subject to contemporary animal experimentation legislation of the EU11. From the legislative point of view it is not necessary that the sentience (i.e. whether they are capable of experiencing pain or suffering) of animals that fall within the scope of animal protection legislation be proven. With regard to its ethical foundation, animal protection law may be divided into two types of clauses: (1) pathocentrically-oriented pieces of legislation, which consider only sentient animals, and (2) biocentric clauses, which pertain to all animals. Although contemporary animal protection legislation is characterized predominately by pathocentrism, being mainly concerned with prohibiting the infliction of unjustified pain and suffering on sentient animals and with safeguarding their well-being, it also includes biocentric elements, which typically are independent of an animal's (actual or proven) sentience (Binder, Grimm, and Schmid 2009). Thus, the Austrian APA partially includes insects within its scope (x 3/1 and 2 APA): while those parts of the APA relating to husbandry conditions (xx 13ff. APA) and the obligation of animals' keepers (x 12 APA) apply to vertebrates, cephalopods and decapodes only, two important groups of provisions, namely the ban of animal cruelty (x 5 APA) and the prohibition of killing animals without a justifying reason (x 6 APA), apply to all invertebrates; the same is true for the general requirements relating to the methods of killing (x 32 APA), which stipulate that unnecessary pain and suffering must be avoided when killing an animal. In line with x 5 APA (animal cruelty), insects, like any other animals, must not be reared or manipulated in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, distress or harm on them. Regarding animals whose sentience has not been proven, "harm" is the most important type of interdicted impairment, because it is commonly agreed upon that the concept of "harm" ("Schaden") covers any human-induced worsening of an animal's condition (Binder 2014; Kluge 2002; Lorz and Metzger 2007; Hirt, Maisack, and Moritz 2015), irrespective of the animal's subjective perception. Thus, a fly is harmed if one of its legs or wings is torn off, because, despite possible efforts to compensate for the loss, the animal, as perceived from the outer perspective, definitely is worse off than before, even if it is assumed that it neither feels any sort of pain nor is suffering from distress. The question of whether insects are able to feel pain remains controversial (Elwood 2011) and although it is – as mentioned above – ultimately irrelevant from the legal point of view whether there is any evidence for sentience in insects, it is interesting from the scientific as well as from the ethical point of view that there are indications supporting the possibility of some sort of pain experience in some taxa of insects. These indications, namely, the well-established fact of nociception, the evidence of endogenous opioids in insects and their (at least) rudimentary ability to learn to avoid noxious stimuli (Eisemann et al. 1984; Elwood 2011) are discussed in detail under "Physiological considerations" in the 8Directive 98/58/EC of 20 July 1998 concerning the protection of animals kept for farming purposes, OJ L 221, 08/08/1998. 9Ministry of Health and Women's Affairs (now Ministry of Health) (2017): Guideline for insects bred as food. Published with reference no: BMGF-75210/0003-II/ B/13/2017, 15/02/2017. 10Federal Act on the Protection of Animals (Animal Protection Act – APA; Tierschutzgesetz TSchG), Federal Law Gazette I no 118/2004, Art. 2, in its current version. 11Cf. Art. 1 no 3 of Directive 2010/63/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, OJ L 276/33, 20/10/2010; x 1/1 Austrian Federal Act on Animal Experiments (Tierversuchsgesetz 2012 – TVG 2012), Federal Law Gazette I no 114/2012, 28/12/2012, Art. 1. 4 I. PALI-SCH€OLL ET AL. present paper. These indications should be regarded as sufficient to strongly support the precautionary principle, which is inherent in biocentric animal protection legislation, granting the benefit of the doubt to entities that are profoundly different from us and whose potential "inner lives" cannot be conclusively accessed because of epistemological12 boundaries. As mentioned above, the APA's regulatory framework includes insects only partially, for x 3/2 APA stipulates that the requirements laid down for animal husbandry do not apply to invertebrates (other than cephalopods and decapods). The large-scale farming of insects may, however, raise a range of welfare issues, if their specific, species-related needs are not considered appropriately. Among other problems, disease and high mortality caused by inappropriate environmental conditions (e.g. temperature, humidity, light), cannibalism due to lack of space or malnutrition, and inhibition of natural behavior, e.g. in migratory species like locusts, are mentioned in the literature (Schneider 2009; Erens et al. 2012; Eisemann et al. 1984). Despite this fact, in Austrian animal protection legislation there are currently no provisions on the rearing and husbandry of insects, neither in the general framework of the APA (which establishes an obligation to consider physiological and ethological needs of animals and to prevent husbandry-related diseases as well as overstraining animals' adaptability), nor with regard to taxa-specific minimum requirements on statutory level. Another path is taken by the Dutch Animal Act13, which came into effect in 2013 and comprises European Animal Health Law as well as provisions in the area of animal protection. The latter part of the Dutch Animal Act, which is based on the Five Freedoms defined by F.W.R. Brambell in 1965 (Brambell 1965), lists a number of insect species as "production animals", whose well-being needs to be respected. Thus, according to Dutch legislation, also insects should be free from thirst, hunger and inappropriate feed, physical and physiological inconvenience, pain, injury, and disease, fear and chronic stress, and finally from limitations on natural behavior (De Goede, Kapsomenou, and Peters 2013; Erens et al. 2012). Commenting on the Dutch legislation, De Goede et al. (De Goede, Kapsomenou, and Peters 2013) make the following suggestions with respect to Brambell's five freedoms (Brambell 1965): 1. Freedom from thirst, hunger and inappropriate feed: Insects can be fed multiple plant and animal sources, including waste (which is an environmental advantage). They tend to get enough water from their feed, but some species are prone to dehydration if there is not enough water provisioning, and low humidity may negatively influence food conversion efficiency (which may mean that it also implies a negative subjective state for the insects). 2. Freedom from physical and psychological inconvenience: Many species are nocturnal, so a place to shelter during the day may be necessary, in addition to the provision of a day/night rhythm. 3. Freedom from pain, injury and disease: With regard to the freedom from pain, this requirement is problematic within the given context because of the lack of consensus on insect pain. It should, however, be kept in mind, that injury as well as disease are also relevant for animals that are actually or presumably insentient, because they invariably harm animals from an objective (external) perspective. When it comes to humane killing methods, very little is known, although freezing is usually considered humane and is currently the main killing technique. And lastly, with respect to the freedom from disease, there is such little scientific knowledge that this freedom cannot currently be provided. When facilities are infected by a virus, there tend to be high mortality rates. 4. Freedom from fear and chronic stress: There is a need to investigate whether current rearing methods cause stress, and whether it can be avoided. However, again, it is unknown whether insects can experience these states subjectively. 5. Freedom from limitations in natural behavior: Insect farms tend to have a higher population density than natural populations, which can lead to overheating. Different stages within the lifecycle may require different rearing conditions. With regard to certain specific insect species, it is quite obvious that husbandry systems would prevent normal behavior. Thus, locusts, for example, are not allowed to perform their extensive migratory and flying behavior in captivity, which could be detrimental for welfare. Despite this precautionary principle, it could still be preferable to rear insects over traditional livestock as a food source, because even if (some taxa of) insects do experience (some kind of) pain, it does not seem far-fetched to suppose that they are less sentient than vertebrate species, especially mammals. Here it is interesting to note that laboratory animal legislation establishes as mandatory to choose those experimental designs which "involve animals with the lowest capacity to experience pain, suffering, distress or lasting harm."14 This approach, enshrined in laboratory animal legislation since its very beginning in the last third of the 19th century (Binder 2014), might lead to the far-reaching consequence that the usage of insects as food source should have priority over the consumption of traditional livestock for reasons of animal welfare (Principle of Refinement). 3. Physiological considerations The intentional mass killing of insects for reasons of pest control, their incidental killing during daily activities as well as the use of insects for biological research inevitably raise the question of pain perception in these animals (Eisemann et al. 1984). Today, the increasing importance of insects as a commercial source of protein for human consumption further boosts the interest in the topic. 12Epistemology is the study of knowledge. An epistemological problem is one related to the methods we use to acquire knowledge. 13Animal Act 31 389 Een integraal kader voor regels over gehouden dieren en daaraan gerelateerde onderwerpen (Wet dieren). 14Art. 13/2/b) Directive 2010/63/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 September 2010 on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes, OJ L 276/33, 20/10/2010; x 6/1/9 Austrian Federal Act on Animal Experiments. CRITICAL REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND NUTRITION 5 During the last decades, important progress has been made in understanding the mechanisms of pain perception in mammals and key findings are reported in current editions of major textbooks (Tranquilli, Thurmon, and Grimm 2013; Grimm et al. 2015). In summary, there exists a general agreement that two key components must be present for pain to be experienced: The first component is the ability of an animal to detect and react to noxious stimuli by moving itself or the affected part of its body rapidly away from the stimulus. This phenomenon - "nociception" - may be a pure reflex response, which not necessarily involves pain sensation. For the latter, a second component is necessary, which represents the individual emotional and subjective interpretation of the nociceptive experience - and this requires a component of consciousness. It has been shown that in vertebrates pain is experienced as a result of central processing of input from free endings of nociceptive nerves, so called nociceptors. Nociceptors detect stimuli that are potentially harmful, like extreme temperatures, irritant chemicals, electrical shocks or pronounced mechanical interference. Most receptor endings are responsive to several types of stimuli. The signals generated from nociceptors travel via nerve fibers to the spinal cord. At the spinal level, nociceptive input may trigger immediate somatic and sympathetic protective reflexes (nociceptive reflex). At the same time, the signal output is locally processed and transmitted to the brain via ventro-lateral fiber tracts in the spinal cord, resulting in pain sensation. Considerable modulation of the nociceptive input occurs at the spinal level via ascending and descending inhibitory and excitatory pathways, involving various neurotransmitters, substance P and endogenous opioid peptides. At the level of the brain, the thalamus redirects information to different areas in the cerebral cortex for interpretation, whereas the limbic system is responsible for the emotional response. Eventually this can result in non-reflexive responses, like for instance aggression or learned avoidance. In the early eighties, Eisemann stated on the basis of different arguments that insects are unlikely to experience pain (Eisemann et al. 1984). First, the nervous system of insects differs greatly from that of vertebrate animals, as it has a relatively simple organization and much fewer neurons. They lack the higher neurological structures that translate an aversive stimulus into an emotional experience. In the absence of nociceptors and spinal reflex mechanisms, the aversive responses by insects - which may resemble the nociceptive reflex - are thought to occur following activation of particular nervous system programs activated by excessive or abnormally-patterned non-nociceptive sensory input. In contrast, the discovery of endogenous opioid peptides and their receptor sites in some insects (El-Salhy et al. 1983; Stefano and Scharrer 1981) and the modulation by opiate agonists and antagonists of nociceptive-type responses (Zabala et al. 1984) may indicate - in analogy with their role in mammals - a capacity for pain perception. Opioid peptides are known to also play a role in several other physiological processes and thus their presence per se is not a proof of the existence of mechanisms leading to pain perception (Dyakonova 2001). These aforementioned facts, coupled with behavioral observations of injured insects, which e.g. continue normal feeding whilst heavily injured, showed, according to Eisemann, that insects do not have a "pain subprogram" (Eisemann et al. 1984). Since then, important progress has been made in trying to answer the question of whether insects can experience pain and thus have a form of consciousness. Research from the last decades as reviewed by Elwood (Elwood 2011) allows a more differentiated view on the issue. More is known about the possible neurophysiological pathways in insects confronted with aversive conditions. Several neurotransmitters typically involved in vertebrate pain pathways, such as serotonin and substance P, have been identified in insects (El-Salhy et al. 1983; Wurden and Homberg 1995). In line with what happens in mammals, hormone-mediated responses to stressful environmental conditions have been identified in some insects. Various kinds of nociceptive neurons responding e.g. to mechanical and thermal stimuli using molecular mechanisms similar to nociceptive signal generation have been identified in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (Hwang et al. 2007). In fruit flies, multi-dendrite nociceptive neurons have been identified with ascending projections that cross the midline to innervate contralateral postsynaptic targets (Guo et al. 2014). This bears some similarity with pain processing in vertebrates, but whether the brain of the larvae is involved in perception of the noxious stimulus or whether lower-level processing in the abdominal or thoracic ganglion plays a role remains to be determined. Nowadays, while mammalian animal models are still the most frequently used for the study of acute and chronic pain, the role of the fruit fly as a model for the study of nociception and the screening of potential analgesic substances has gained a lot of interest (Leung et al. 2013; Manev and Dimitrijevic 2005), not in the last place because of restrictive regulatory legislation associated with the use of vertebrate animals in research. The use of the fruit fly has also facilitated research into the genetics of nociception with yields of evidence of evolutionary continuities across vertebrates and invertebrates, e.g. in the role of opioids in protection and survival of organisms. While the complexity of insect behavior and the apparent involvement of complex processing of neural information is now well recognized, it is still thought that they lack the brain capacity to experience emotion and evaluate injury, which are inseparable from the experience of pain (Gullan and Cranston 2014). Recently, Barron and Klein reviewed and compared the structure and functions of the vertebrate midbrain with the brain of insects (Barron and Klein 2016). They write that "insect behavior involves multiple layers of filtering of sensory information to support selective attention to stimuli that are salient and suppression of representation of irrelevant stimuli". The authors therefore presume that structures in the insect brain function similarly to the human midbrain, an area that is essential for subjective experience in humans and where also consciousness is thought to emerge. They claim that consciousness may be very ancient in evolution rather than something that evolved only in "higher" vertebrates. In conclusion, recent results from neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and behavioral sciences prompt caution when denying consciousness, and therefore the likelihood of presence of pain and suffering or something closely related to it, to insects (Tiffin 2016). This strongly underlines earlier 6 I. PALI-SCH€OLL ET AL. statements (Cooper 2011; Wigglesworth 1980; Elwood 2011; Smith 1991) that while awaiting results of further research one should consider the possibility that at least some insect species might suffer pain and, as a precaution, always ensure humane handling of these animals, including the application of anesthesia and analgesia for painful procedures and humane killing techniques. 4. Ethical considerations 4.1. The moral importance of sentience One of the first questions that needs to be asked when discussing insect ethics, and arguably the most important one, is whether the species we are dealing with is sentient. Indeed, the answer to this question determines whether or not it makes sense to speak about insect ethics altogether. Asking whether insects are sentient is not the same as asking whether they possess nociception. Nociception, as discussed above, can be defined as the "capacity to respond to potentially damaging stimuli" (Adamo 2016). In contrast, sentience is the capacity to feel, to undergo subjective, conscious experiences. These two capacities are in principle independent of each other. In the case of humans, for instance, "it is possible to have nociception without pain, and pain without any activity in nociceptive fibres" (Adamo 2016; Hardcastle 1997).While it is well established that insects possess a capacity to respond to noxious stimuli (Eisemann et al. 1984; Adamo 2016), theoretically it is possible for these responses to occur without the presence or mediation of any conscious mental states, that is, without sentience. Asking whether insects are sentient may not be enough, since not all forms of sentience may be relevant for morality. For instance, Birch distinguishes two senses of the term 'sentient,' only one of which is considered important for ethics (Birch 2017). In a broad sense, sentience is equal to what is often called 'phenomenal consciousness.' If an individual possesses sentience in this sense, it can be said that there is "something that it is like to be that organism-something it is like for the organism" (Nagel 1974). Ascribing sentience, in this broad sense, to an organism means that the experiences it undergoes will have a certain subjective character, but this is not enough to specify how this subjective character might actually feel. In a narrow sense, sentience refers to the capacity to undergo experiences that are felt, specifically, as attractive or aversive. While narrow sentience requires broad sentience (because experiencing something as attractive or aversive already implies experiencing it), it is however possible for an organism to possess phenomenal consciousness (or broad sentience) without having the specific capacity to experience anything as aversive or attractive. It has been suggested by Godfrey-Smith (Godfrey-Smith 2017) that instead of speaking about narrow and broad sentience, it might be more appropriate to consider different kinds of basic subjectivity. Amongst these, he distinguishes sensory subjectivity and evaluative subjectivity. Possessing sensory subjectivity implies having the capacity to experience perceptual states, while evaluative subjectivity is equal to what Birch terms 'narrow sentience' (Birch 2017), that is, the capacity to experience things as aversive or attractive. According to Godfrey-Smith, sensory subjectivity and evaluative subjectivity can exist independently from one another and each may have played its own role in evolution. In fact, he lists terrestrial arthropods as a potential example of perceptually complex animals that lack evaluative subjectivity, and gastropods as a possible example of creatures with an evaluative subjectivity and no complex perception (Godfrey-Smith 2017). What can confidently be said when it comes to the treatment of insects is that it neither matters whether they possess broad sentience, nor whether they possess sensory subjectivity, but whether or not members of these species can feel pain or suffer, that is, whether they possess narrow sentience or evaluative sentience. A being that lacks the capacity to experience anything as aversive cannot feel pain and it cannot suffer. Therefore, whatever happens to that being does not matter to that being, and what is done to that being simply does not matter from an ethical perspective. In this respect, we are focusing on aversive experiences because these are the most obviously relevant for ethics, but having the capacity to experience things as attractive, that is, having the capacity to feel pleasure or find certain things enjoyable, also makes a difference to whether or not the way an organism is treated matters to that organism. A handful of ethicists would disagree here, since some ethical theories allow for duties or entitlements to emerge even in the absence of narrow/evaluative sentience (hereafter 'sentience'). Amongst these we can find, most notably, biocentrists (a position that is reflected in some legislation, see above). For biocentrists, insects would be entitled to moral consideration due the simple fact that they are alive. However, there needs to be a justification as to why being alive entitles one to moral consideration. In the case of sentience, the justification is clear: if an individual does not possess it, then nothing that happens to that being can matter to it. In the case of life, this justification has proven to be very elusive. Biocentrists often appeal to the notions of teleology (Holm 2017) or welfare (Nolt 2017) in order to justify the moral relevance of life. They argue that all things that are alive are entitled to moral consideration because they have a good of their own, which is due to the fact that they have characteristics that are directed towards an end (teleology) or to the fact that things can go better or worse for them (welfare). However, biocentrists are still haunted by the problem of scope. This problem refers to the fact that the definitions of teleology and welfare cannot easily leave out entities such as machines, bacteria, or meteorological phenomena, which also appear to have a good of their own, but whose moral status is dubious at least. Aside from these problems, the fact remains that the moral relevance of life is disputed by many, while the moral relevance of sentience is very rarely brought into question, with some exceptions (Hsiao 2015). The question of whether insects possess sentience thus seems like a good place to start when determining whether or not they should be granted moral status. Indeed, while sentience is not the only thing that matters when determining the kind of moral consideration that a being is owed, it can plausibly be considered "a threshold condition for membership in the community of beings who have entitlements based on justice" (Nussbaum 2007), i.e. the community of beings who are owed some sort of moral consideration. CRITICAL REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND NUTRITION 7 4.2. Sentience in insects As opposed to European animal protection law, which (1) at least partly applies to all invertebrates and (2) protects animals not only from the unjustified infliction of negative experiences (like pain and suffering), but also from being harmed, i.e. from negative impacts which are not necessarily accompanied by subjective experiences, in ethics it is a widely accepted claim that sentience is a precondition for moral standing. The problem is that determining whether a certain nonhuman species possesses sentience is very difficult. At the root of this difficulty, we find two classical philosophical problems. The first one is the problem of other minds. This problem emerges because minds are necessarily private. One cannot directly observe another's subjective experiences. One can only observe the behavioral or physiological correlates of these subjective experiences. Thus, we can always doubt whether those around us (even our fellow humans) have minds. Even more important is the existence of another problem: the so-called 'hard' problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995). This boils down to the fact that it is simply not yet known how consciousness emerges from physical structures. Therefore, we cannot yet establish with certainty which neuro-anatomical structures must be present for an individual to be conscious. Thus, we can study the physiology and the behavior of a species in order to attempt to overcome the problem of other minds, but due to the 'hard' problem of consciousness, we cannot, as of yet, use the results to conclusively establish whether a certain animal is sentient. Due to the problem of other minds and the 'hard' problem of consciousness, determining whether any nonhuman species is sentient is always a difficult endeavor. But while we can never be absolutely certain that we have found consciousness in another species, we can come pretty close in those cases in which the animals are very similar to humans in neurophysiological and behavioral terms (since, despite the philosophical conundrum involved, no one seriously doubts that other humans have minds). The more a species differs from us, the more difficulties we will encounter when determining whether its members are sentient. In the case of insects, these difficulties are almost insurmountable. We cannot rely on verbal reports, as in the case of humans, since obviously insects cannot speak. We also cannot rely on arguments from analogy as in the case of vertebrates, since insect physiology differs so much from our own. So, we have to rely on ethological, neurological or neuro-ethological approaches, but these are not as reliable as one would hope. Both the neurological and the neuro-ethological approaches inevitably encounter the 'hard' problem of consciousness. Until the latter is solved, we cannot know for sure what the neural correlates of consciousness are. As for ethological approaches, these are also riddled with uncertainty, since the presence of a certain behavior can never guarantee the presence of consciousness. For instance, Adamo argues: "Robots are capable of demonstrating pain-like behavior more similar to our own than any insect ... In fact, using behavioral criteria (Sneddon et al. 2014), an argument could be made that some present-day robots are more deserving of ethical treatment and protection (Levy 2009) than are insects" (Adamo 2017). Barron and Klein (Barron and Klein 2016) have also argued that ethological approaches tend to introduce a bias towards animals that do clever or interesting things, even though this may not necessarily be related to consciousness. There is thus a fundamental epistemological problem: we are, most likely, never going to conclusively determine whether or not insects are sentient. However, it should be noted that there is a very big difference between the size of insect and mammalian brains. The brain of the honeybee, which is very large for an insect, possesses less than one million neurons. In comparison, the brains of mice (6.8 million neurons), rhesus monkeys (6.4 billion neurons) and humans (86 billion neurons) are enormous (Klein and Barron 2016). Some authors have used this difference to argue that insect brains may not be big enough to support sentience (Feinberg and Mallat 2016), while others are confident that the number of neurons is not so important, since the structures relevant for sentience may be implemented on vastly different scales (Merker 2016). It may be the case, however, that insect brains do support sentience but that their experiences are less fine-grained, less complex, than those of animals with much bigger brains, like mammals. This idea is supported by the fact that insects have been shown to continue to use their limbs when they are damaged, eat their own innards and feed while being consumed by another insect (Eisemann et al. 1984). If they do feel pain, these considerations suggest that it may somehow 'feel less painful' than it does in other animals. This may be a relevant consideration to take into account when their interests conflict with those of more complex animals. 4.3. Appealing to a precautionary principle As discussed before, it is virtually impossible for us to obtain conclusive evidence of insect sentience. However, as is often remarked in comparative cognition, absence of evidence is not equal to evidence of absence. So, the fact that there are severe epistemological obstacles to the study of insect sentience does not, in and of itself, mean that insects are not sentient. In fact, it may very well be that insects can feel pain and suffer and we simply lack the tools to establish it scientifically. If insects were indeed sentient, we might inadvertently be causing them serious suffering with our actions. Waiting until we have strong evidence of their capacity to undergo conscious experiences might take too long, and thus a better strategy might be to treat them as if we already knew that they are sentient. Several ethicists have defended this strategy by suggesting that we follow some form of precautionary principle. It would be absurd to include within the protection of a precautionary principle every single being for whom we don't have conclusive evidence of their lack of sentience, since this would even require taking measures to protect inanimate objects from pain, in case panpsychism were to be true. Therefore, any precautionary principle needs to be narrowed down. Along these lines, Birch (Birch 2017) has formulated a precautionary principle that commits us to include within animal protection legislation all animals for which there is statistically significant evidence of the presence of at least one credible indicator of sentience in at least one species of the order that those animals belong to. The sorts of behaviors that he considers to be credible indicators of sentience are things like self-delivering 8 I. PALI-SCH€OLL ET AL. analgesics, weighing the preference to avoid a noxious stimulus against other preferences, and demonstrating an avoidance of locations where noxious stimuli have been found before. Other authors believe we should be less cautious towards animals whose moral status is as uncertain as insects and reserve greater protection for those species whose sentience has been well established scientifically. Fischer, for instance, defends a precautionary principle that establishes that we should treat animals that are probably conscious as though they were definitely conscious only in those cases where it wouldn't prevent us from fulfilling any obligation towards a being that is definitely conscious (Fischer 2016). As for beings who are perhaps conscious (a group where Fischer locates insects), we should treat them as definitely conscious only when their interests don't conflict with beings that are definitely or probably conscious. Because prescribing a specific course of action can be very problematic, due to the high number of intervening factors, potential consequences and other relevant considerations that must be taken into account, some ethicists consider that we should be even less restrictive in our prescriptions. Knutsson & Munthe (Knutsson and Munthe 2017), for example, take a virtue ethics approach and defend the need to cultivate "...a character trait of being disposed to consider the possible moral importance of these beings". This way, rather than establishing that we should always treat these beings as though they were sentient, we should be open to taking these precautions or not, depending on the situation, the potential consequences, the price to pay, and so on. While this sort of precautionary approach allows us to easily maneuver in the case of a conflict of interests or a situation with high uncertainty regarding the causal implications of our actions, one could also argue that it is excessively vague and permissive, and that it could give too much room for a mistreatment of possibly sentient beings. 4.4. Treatment of insects if they are sentient If we were to establish that a certain species of insect that is currently raised for food is sentient (something that, as we have seen, is not at all easy to determine), the immediate question arises: what should we do about it? One possibility would be to conclude that members of this species should be granted full moral status, which implies a moral right to freedom and to life, such as is defended by many animal rights activists and theorists with respect to other species that are traditionally raised for food. This would imply that we are no longer morally allowed to use this species of insect in our food production. This conclusion, however, immediately leads to several problems. Firstly, it seems that other farmed species, such as pigs, have a more urgent and justified claim to being liberated, due to their much more complex ethological needs, which arguably cannot be catered for in modern husbandry systems. As Fischer has argued (Fischer 2016), we may have underestimated the minds of insects, but it is highly unlikely that they will rival the minds of highly complex animals like pigs. As Nussbaum notes (Nussbaum 2004), the ways in which a being can be harmed depend on the complexity of that being. More complex beings will be capable of suffering more types of harm than less complex beings. If being raised for food means suffering more types of harm for pigs than it does for insects, then arguably the former have a stronger case for being liberated. Moreover, a plausible case can be made to argue that those who defend farm animal liberation in fact have a moral obligation to eat insects. This idea has been defended by Fischer (Fischer 2016a) and it is based on the fact that the techniques used for planting and harvesting fruits and vegetables routinely harm or kill animals that happen to be in the field and that arguably have a higher claim to moral consideration than insects, such as mice or rabbits. Combining a vegan diet with the occasional consumption of insects might actually result in less harm being delivered to animals with complex subjective experiences than a strictly vegan diet. This argument might not work, though, if the idea that raising insects for food implies an instrumentalisation or a commodification that is not present when animals are killed as side-effects of the use of agricultural machinery is factored in. However, it is unclear whether this notion of instrumentalisation or commodification can be easily applied to the case of insects, and whether it would be enough to trump the interest of mice and rabbits in continuing to live. Fischer further notes that ascribing full moral status to insects may also have many undesirable consequences (Fischer 2016): a huge number of them are killed by cars-would we then have a moral obligation not to engage in non-essential driving? Or should we let fleas take over our dog's body? And what should we do about insecticides? Ascribing full moral status to insects would imply a radical change in our lifestyles. This is not enough to conclude that insects have no moral status (slave-owners also had to face a radical change in their lifestyles when slavery was abolished), but together with the other considerations it suggests that, with respect to insects, their possession of sentience would likely point us in the direction of welfare measures, rather than outright liberation. A study by Adamkova et al. suggests that taking the welfare of edible insects into account may actually have positive consequences that go beyond insect welfare (Adamkova et al. 2017). In the case of mealworms, the species studied, they established that subjecting the mealworms to nutritional deprivation affected their welfare, but also had a negative effect on their nutritional value and the economic aspects of their breeding. They also found that the moment of death as well as the way of killing influenced the nutritional value and the quality of the meat obtained. Death by freezing, as opposed to boiling, was found to be better from both a welfare and a nutritional perspective. Thus, in addition to the ethical advantages, there may also be pragmatic reasons to ensure the welfare of insects raised for food. 5. Knowledge gaps and future steps Following Knutsson & Munthe (Knutsson and Munthe 2017) we can identify six challenges that need to be overcome in the field of insect ethics. The first challenge is to determine whether or not insects are sentient. It is clear from what was discussed above how difficult answering this question is going to be. The second challenge is to determine to what degree they are sentient, meaning whether their sentience is of the morally relevant sort and whether their experiences are as fine-grained as those of other animals. CRITICAL REVIEWS IN FOOD SCIENCE AND NUTRITION 9 The third challenge is to establish how many beings are involved in insect rearing and whether these numbers count morally. While we have already seen that there are both environmental and ethical advantages to consuming insects, the fact is that many more individuals will have to die if we want to obtain the same nutritional yield that we get from consuming traditional sources of meat. We have to reach a consensus on whether we consider these numbers to count morally. While from the perspective of most consequentialist ethics these numbers would count, there have been some ethicists who have argued that numbers are irrelevant for morality, i.e. that it is just as bad to kill one individual as it is to kill a thousand (Taurek 1977). The three final challenges that Knutsson & Munthe identify relate to the costs that may come from ascribing moral status to insects (Knutsson and Munthe 2017). The first one is the problem of how to assess the complex causal effects of our actions. For instance, if we were to assign moral status to insects and stop using pesticides, this might have long-term effects on the population of insects and other animals, which could lead to more suffering on the whole than using pesticides. The second of these final challenges is how to balance different interests and values. It is clearly inevitable that the interests of different species will conflict, so there needs to be a way of establishing whose interests and which values will be favored. And, lastly, it needs to be acknowledged that precaution does not come for free, so the final challenge is to determine what price we are willing to pay in exchange for behaving cautiously towards beings with uncertain sentience. Aside from these challenges, we should obviously attempt to provide welfare measures for the insects reared for food, not only because of the ethical advantages, but also for pragmatic reasons, as discussed above. The biggest knowledge gap that we have to overcome is the topic of insect welfare, which is so understudied that searching for "insect welfare" on Google Scholar delivers: "Did you mean insect warfare?". In addition, an important point to bear in mind is that "...insect biodiversity is too large to generalize upon welfare standards" (De Goede, Kapsomenou, and Peters 2013). So it is not enough to study a couple of species and then develop welfare standards just based on these results. A good deal of research effort should therefore go to studying the welfare of the insects currently reared for food and feed, and determining what the costs of implementing welfare standards would be. 6. Conclusion The increasingly propagated usage of farmed insects for human nutrition raises issues regarding food safety, consumer information and animal protection. While humanrelated challenges have been addressed by supranational law since the late 1990s, animal-related problems brought about by large-scale farming of insects have been neglected so far. National legislation differs with regard to the protection of insects, but generally fails to address farming and killing of insects comprehensively. To eliminate this deficiency it would be necessary to fully include insects into the scope of animal protection legislation and to define standard requirements for the rearing of the most commonly farmed insects but also for insect taxa bred as feed and kept as pets. On the other hand there is a great need for research in the area of insect welfare, especially regarding species-specific needs, health, farming systems and humane methods of killing. From an animal protection point of view these issues should be investigated and satisfyingly solved before propagating and establishing intensive husbandry systems for insects as a new type of mini-livestock factory farming. 7. Summary While seeking novel food sources to feed the increasing population of the globe, several alternatives have been discussed, including algae, fungi or in vitro meat. The increasingly propagated usage of farmed insects for human nutrition raises issues regarding food safety, consumer information and animal protection. In line with law, insects like any other animals must not be reared or manipulated in a way that inflicts unnecessary pain, distress or harm on them. Currently, there is a great need for research in the area of insect welfare, especially regarding species-specific needs, health, farming systems and humane methods of killing. Recent results from neurophysiological, neuroanatomical and behavioral sciences prompt caution when denying consciousness and therefore the likelihood of presence of pain and suffering or something closely related to it to insects. From an animal protection point of view, these issues should be satisfyingly solved before propagating and establishing intensive husbandry systems for insects as a new type of minilivestock factory farming. Conflict of interest The authors declare no conflict of interest. Authors' contribution IPS was responsible for conception of the review, IPS and SM contributed the introductory part; RB wrote the part of legislation/regulation, FP about biological considerations, IPS the allergenicity sub-section, YM about nociception and analgesia, and SM about the ethical considerations. All authors edited the article and approved the final version. 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International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 Comparative Assessment of the Implementation of Quality Assurance Mechanisms in Educational Management Programme of Universities in South-East Nigeria. 1Dr. Asiegbu, Emmanuel Chidubem and 2Dr. Ezeugbor, Carol Obiageli Department of Educational Management & Policy Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. Anambra State, Nigeria. E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected], [email protected] Abstract: This study focused on comparative assessment of the implementation of quality assurance mechanisms in educational management programme of federal and state universities in south-east, Nigeria. Four research questions and four null hypotheses guided the study. The study was carried out in the eight government-owned (3 federal and 5 state) universities in south-east that run educational management programme. The study adopted a survey research design on a population of eight heads of department. A 44-item researcher constructed questionnaire was used to rate the implementation of quality assurance mechanisms as it relates to; moderation of examination, in-service professional development programmes, mock accreditation exercise, and infrastructural facilities. The instrument was validated by three experts, while a grand reliability index of 0.84 was obtained using crombach alpha reliability coefficient. Mean scores were used to answer the four research questions while t-test was used to test the four null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. The major findings of the study indicated that both federal and state universities in south-east implement the four mechanisms for quality assurance in educational management programme to a little extent. Though they both have implemented it to a little extent, the federal universities seem to record better implementation of these mechanisms compared to the state universities. This is supported by the outcome of research questions 3 & 4 as well as hypotheses 3 & 4. It was recommended among others that the National Universities Commission (NUC) should lay more emphasis on the state universities during the usual general/main accreditation exercise of institutions. This will reduce the differences that may exist in standard. Conclusions, implications and limitations of the study were made as well as suggestions for further studies. Keywords: Assessment, Quality Assurance Mechanisms, Educational Management Programme 1. INTRODUCTION The university is a complex learning organization occupying a strategic position and the highest level in the education ladder. The university is made up of people with different backgrounds in terms of needs, skills, talents, status, competencies, knowledge, behavioral styles, interest and perceptions (Nakpodia, 2003). In fact, the skills and high level manpower needed for the growth and development of any nation are produced by the universities. Universities as learning organizations are centers of excellence, teaching, research and store houses of knowledge. According to the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN, 2004:36), University Education shall make optimum contribution to national development by: 1. Intensifying and diversifying its programme for the development of higher level manpower within the context of the needs of the nation; 2. Making professional course contents to reflect the national requirements; 3. Making all students, as part of a general programme of all-round improvement in university education, to offer general study courses such as history of ideas, philosophy of knowledge and nationalism; 4. University research shall be relevant to the nation's developmental goals. In this regard, universities shall be encouraged to disseminate their research to both government and industries; 5. University teaching shall seek to inculcate community spirit in the students through project and action research. The university runs so many programmes at various levels. Educational management programme which is a subset of the university education and like other programmes of the university is specifically for the training of education managers, teachers, administrators, supervisors and policy makers in education. It encompasses the training of individuals for the management of all levels of educational system in the nation. Thus, educational management is that aspect of educational training which an individual receives with the primary motive of enabling him/her to acquire adequate attitudes, concepts, knowledge, understanding and skills in school management activities for usage in careers as an administrator, manager or teacher wherever he/she may find himself/herself in the society. The objectives of educational management programme include the following: www.ijeais.org/ijamr 7 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 a) Provide highly motivated, conscientious and efficient education mangers for all levels of the education system b) Encourage further the spirit of enquiry and creativity in teachers c) Help Educational managers to fit into the social life of the Community and society at large and enhance commitment to National objectives d) Provide educational managers with the intellectual and professional background adequate for their assignment and to make them adaptable to any changing situation, not only in the life of their country but also in the wider world. e) Enhance teachers' commitment to the teaching profession to make them adequate for their assignments and to make them adaptable to any changing situation. f) Produce highly efficient and conscientious classroom teachers who would manage classrooms in a way that will motivate and enhance learning. g) Develop skills and knowledge of those who will manage the educational system and h) Prepare various categories of workers in the education industry for further studies in management. (Unizik Edu. Mgt. & Policy Handbook, 2014:24) For the aforementioned objectives of educational management programme and other inherent benefits of education to be realized, there is need therefore, to ensure quality and sustainable standards in the education system. Hence, it becomes imperative to check and assess the mechanisms for quality assurance in educational management programme. Quality assurance in the education system implies the ability of the institution to meet the expectations of the user of manpower in relation to quality of skills acquired by their output (Ajayi & Akindutire, 2007). Oladipo, Adeosun and Oni (2009) posited that quality of educational programme could be measured in terms of quality of input, quality of process, quality of content and quality of output. Therefore, ensuring quality in educational management requires the right quantity and quality in everything that goes into the teaching/learning process or system as input and process. For education and educational management programme in particular to be accorded its respect in our society, Okebukola (2011) noted that it must provide graduates with minimum skills that will enable them to be self-reliant and useful to the society. It is on record that Nigerian universities have been producing high quality graduates in far past. As evidenced by Daisi in Oladipo et al (2009), many graduates from Nigerian universities have distinguished themselves in their areas of specialization so much that some of them are now professors in the best universities across the globe. One cannot doubt the fact that the university education system has enhanced social, cultural, economic, political, scientific and technological progress in Nigeria. The country is more blessed now with specialists at various fields of endeavor: medicine, law, engineering, philosophy, education, etc. Due to this development, the nation is becoming more and more dynamic and self-reliant as the days go by. With the establishment of at least a federal university in every state, in recent time, without proper care and monitoring, a lot of failures have been witnessed. Okebukola (2011) decried the quality of graduates produced in Nigerian tertiary institutions especially in the last four years and thumbed down the quality of those that would graduate in three years time. Similarly, Ekumayo (2012) submitted that the non-inclusion of any of the nation's universities in the world best 1500 universities is unsavory and worse still, Nigeria ranked number 22 after South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, and Kenya in the ranking of African universities. The NUC (2014) assessment study on the labour market expectations of graduates from Nigerian universities revealed that there were scores of unemployed graduates roaming the streets and more embarrassing, those who were lucky to secure employment had to undergo remedial training in order to bridge the huge knowledge and skill gaps leftover from university training. The researcher had also observed, during the recent accreditation exercise (2014) of the department of Educational Management and Policy, Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, where he belongs, that only 16 reports, after all enquiries were documented in the self-study form, as employers rating of graduates of the department, for the past 4 years. The fact that only 16 reports were obtained does not necessarily mean that only 16 out of about 160 past graduates of the department for the past 4 years are employed, it shows that only few are known to be working, even-though about 8% of them usually enroll for Masters programme each year, with the intention of acquiring higher certificate for better chance of employment. This tends to negate the tenets of university education which is essentially an institution established to produce quality workforce for national development. The recent developments in the Nigerian university system and its poor rankings in Africa and the world in general shows that all is not well as expected with ensuring quality in the Nigeria university system. Educational Management programme is not left out of this deplorable state. The major objective of educational management is to produce education managers for all levels of education. Most managers at the top levels of various educational systems are not experts in educational management, as some of them climb the ladder of leadership either by promotion on the basis of years of experience or by appointment (Adegbesan, 2011). According to Anioke (2010) until expertise positions are reserved for only qualified personnel, the system will continue to suffer degradation. Due to the declining quality in recent years, the accolade attached to Nigerian universities seems to be fading away fast. This is informed by the flood of criticisms that www.ijeais.org/ijamr 8 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 beclouded the quality of graduates produced. Parents now seek alternative for their children's education in South African and Ghanaian universities and even beyond. This ugly situation in Nigeria tends to negate the tenet of quality university education which is essentially an industry established to produce high quality workforce for national development. It is against this background that National University Commission (2012) identified the following mechanisms for quality assurance in Nigeria educational system to salvage the deplorable situation. They are: moderation of examination, in-service professional development given to career academics, proper funding of education, supervision and inspection, infrastructural evaluation, mentoring and monitoring, mock accreditation exercise, regular evaluation of the system among others. However, this study will evaluate four of these mechanisms which include; moderation of examinations, in-service professional development programme, mock accreditation exercise, and adequate infrastructural facilities. These mechanisms, already existing in schools, are contained under the criteria for accrediting a degree programme, as a policy, in relevant areas of section 8.0 of the National University Commission (NUC, 2012)'s manual of accreditation procedures for academic programmes in Nigerian. It is believed that when these mechanisms are properly implemented in the institutions, it will bring about quality and thereby lead to high standard of university education in the country. Although, all universities in Nigeria are regulated by National Universities commission (NUC), implementation procedure of these mechanisms seems to differ with respect to public and private universities as well as federal and state owned universities; which the study seeks to identify. It is based on these that this study seeks to access the extent of the implementation of quality assurance mechanisms in educational management programme of Federal and State Universities in south-east Nigeria. 2. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1. To what extent is moderation of examinations as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme being implemented in federal and state universities in south-east? 2. To what extent is in-service professional development programme as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme being implemented in federal and state universities in south-east? 3. To what extent is mock accreditation exercise as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme being implemented in federal and state universities in south-east? 4. To what level of adequacy is infrastructural facilities as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme being provided in federal and state universities in southeast? 3. NULL HYPOTHESES 1. There is no significant difference in the mean ratings of federal and state universities on the extent of implementation of moderation of examinations as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of universities. 2. Federal universities and State universities do not differ significantly in their mean ratings on the extent of implementation of in-service professional development programme as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of universities. 3. There is no significant difference in the mean ratings of federal and state universities on the extent of implementation of mock accreditation exercise as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of universities. 4. Federal universities and State universities do not differ significantly in their mean ratings on the level of adequacy of infrastructural facilities provided as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of universities. 4. METHOD This study utilized ex-post factor research design which focused on comparative assessment of the implementation of quality assurance mechanisms in educational management programme of federal and state universities in south-east, Nigeria. Four research questions and four null hypotheses guided the study. The study was carried out in the eight government-owned (3 federal and 5 state) universities in south-east that run educational management programme. The population of the study stood at eight heads of department who responded to the questionnaire, while other documents of the department were presented and observed by the researcher. A 44-item researcher constructed questionnaire was used to rate the implementation of quality assurance mechanisms as it relates to; moderation of examination, inservice professional development programmes, mock accreditation exercise, and adequacy of infrastructural facilities provided. The instrument was validated by three experts, while a grand reliability index of 0.84 was obtained using crombach alpha reliability coefficient. Mean scores were used to answer the four research questions while t-test was used to test the four null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. www.ijeais.org/ijamr 9 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 5. RESULTS The result of the study is presentation sequentially in a table starting from answering the research questions to testing the null hypotheses. Table 1: Mean scores of HODs' responses on extent of implementation of moderation of examinations as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of federal and state universities in South East. Table 2:Mean scores of HODs' responses on extent of implementation of in-service professional development programme as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of federal and state universities in south-east. Table 3: Mean scores of HODs' responses on extent of implementation of mock accreditation exercise as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of federal and state universities in south-east. Federal Universities State Universities S/N Moderation of Examinations Mean Decision Mean Decision 1 Moderation of examination questions 4.3 VHE 4.0 HE 2 Moderation of marking scheme 2.3 LE 1.8 LE 3 Moderation of answer scripts 2.7 M 1.6 LE 4 Moderation of continuous assessment scores 3.7 HE 2.8 M 5 Moderation of examination results 4.7 VHE 3.8 HE 6 Moderation of students' research project 4.3 VHE 2.0 LE 7 Moderation of course content/scheme of work 1.3 VLE 1.4 VLE 8 Moderation of lesson notes in-line with course content 1.0 VLE 1.0 VLE Grand Mean 3.0 M 2.3 LE Federal Universities State Universities S/N In-service Professional Development Programme Mean Decision Mean Decision 9 Mentoring of newly recruited staff by old staff 3.3 M 2.0 LE 10 Attendance to conferences 3.6 HE 3.0 M 11 Organizing coaching classes 1.3 VLE 2.4 LE 12 Promoting consultation for staff 1.7 LE 1.4 VLE 13 Technical assistance given to new/young staff 1.3 VLE 1.8 LE 14 Organizing and attending seminars 2.0 LE 2.4 LE 15 Participating in workshops 3.0 M 3.0 M 16 Organizing summit for staff 1.7 LE 1.6 LE 17 Attendance to train-the-trainer programme 1.3 VLE 1.6 LE 18 Organizing demonstration lessons 2.3 LE 2.0 LE 19 Teaching of part-Time/Sandwich courses 5.0 VHE 3.0 M 20 Engaging in intellectual debates 1.0 VLE 1.2 VLE 21 Attending academic events (Inaugural lecture) 3.0 M 1.6 LE Grand Mean 2.3 LE 2.1 LE Federal Universities State Universities S/N Mock Accreditation Exercise Mean Decision Mean Decision 22 Specification of admission requirement 5.0 VHE 4.0 HE 23 Philosophy and Objectives clearly stated 4.7 VHE 4.2 HE 24 Supervision of guidelines for mounting the programme 3.6 HE 3.0 M 25 Compulsory exposure of students to teaching practice 5.0 VHE 4.2 HE 26 Compulsory exposure of students to practicum 4.7 VHE 2.0 LE 27 Establishing and maintaining minimum academic staff requirement 3.6 HE 2.0 LE 28 Collaborative efforts in curriculum review 3.3 M 1.6 LE Grand Mean 4.3 VHE 3.0 M www.ijeais.org/ijamr 10 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 Table 4: Mean scores of HODs' responses on level of adequacy of infrastructural facilities provided as a mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of federal and state universities in south-east. Table 5: t-test comparison of mean ratings of federal and state universities Table 6: t-test comparison of mean ratings of federal and state universities Table 7: t-test comparison of mean ratings of federal and state universities University Type N X SD Df t-cal. t-crit ᾀ Decision Federal Universities 3 4.3 0.63 6 2.5929 2.179 0.05 Reject Ho State Universities 5 3.1 1.05 Federal Universities State Universities S/N Infrastructural Facilities Mean Decision Mean Decision 29 Conducive classroom 2.7 A 2.6 A 30 Well equipped computer laboratory 3.7 HA 3.0 A 31 State of the art model office 2.3 LA 2.6 A 32 Well equipped library 5.0 VHA 3.0 A 33 Well furnished staff office 3.0 A 1.8 LA 34 Research laboratory 2.3 LA 2.4 LA 35 Auditorium 3.7 HA 3.2 A 36 Multimedia support gadget 3.3 A 1.2 VLA 37 Lecture/examination halls 3.3 A 1.8 LA 38 Students' hostel 3.7 HA 3.2 A 39 Canteen/cafeteria 4.0 HA 3.2 A 40 Free online communication 3.7 HA 2.2 LA 41 Air conditioning in classrooms/lecture halls 1.3 VLA 1.2 VLA 42 Sport complex 2.3 LA 1.4 VLA 43 Recreational facilities 1.7 LA 1.2 VLA 44 Toilet facilities for students 2.7 A 1.8 LA Grand Mean 3.0 A 2.2 LA University Type N X SD Df t-cal. t-crit ᾀ Decision Federal Universities 3 3.1 1.32 6 1.3445 2.145 0.05 Ho Not Rejected State Universities 5 2.3 1.04 University Type N X SD Df t-cal. t-crit ᾀ Decision Federal Universities 3 2.3 1.13 6 0.5643 2.064 0.05 Ho Not Rejected State Universities 5 2.1 0.61 www.ijeais.org/ijamr 11 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 Table 8: t-test comparison of mean ratings of federal and state universities 6. SUMMARY OF MAJOR FINDINGS The major findings that emerged from this study are presented as follows: 1. Both federal and state universities had little extent implementation in; moderation of marking scheme, moderation of course content/scheme of work and moderation of lesson notes in-line with the course content. Meanwhile, only state universities implement the moderation of answer scripts and moderation of students' research project to a low extent. 2. Both federal and state universities recorded weakness in; organizing coaching classes, promoting consultation for staff, technical assistance given to new/young staff, organizing and attending seminars, organizing summit for staff, attending train the trainer programmes, organizing demonstration lesson and engaging in intellectual debate. On the other hand, only state universities had difficulty on mentoring of newly recruited staff and attending academic event (inaugural lectures). 3. Federal universities portrayed high extent implementation in mock accreditation exercise as they recorded very high scores on all the items on this section. Meanwhile, state universities had low extent implementation on some items which include; compulsory exposure of students to practicum, establishment and maintaining minimum academic staff requirement, as well as collaborative effort in curriculum review. 4. Both federal and state universities had little adequacy in; research laboratory, air conditioning of classroom/lecturer room, sports complex and recreational facilities. Meanwhile state universities failed in adequate provision of well fashioned staff offices, multiply-media support gadget, lecture/examination halls, free online communication & toilet facilities for students. Although federal universities recorded little adequacy on state of art model, the state universities recorded adequacy on it (state of art model). 5. Even though both federal and state universities recorded adequacy in the implementation of some items, there seems to be some variations on the extent of implementation of these mechanisms, although these variations are minimal. 6. Two null hypotheses (1 & 2) on; moderation of examination and in-service professional development programme were not rejected (accepted), showing the existence of no significant difference in the mean ratings of federal and state universities on the subject matter, while hypothesis 3 & 4 on mock accreditation exercise as well as adequate infrastructural facilities were rejected (not accepted) which indicates that there is significant difference in the mean ratings of federal and state, universities on the subject matter. 7. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The result of the study shows that both federal and state universities in south east have negative attitude towards; moderation of marking scheme, moderation of course content/scheme of work and moderation of lesson note in-line with course content, by rating them to a low extent. This is in conformity with the idea of Ezeani and Eze (2013) that even-though the school management sees these measures as veritable in ensuring quality of the school system, in most cases, they tend to continue with those they find easy and abandon others. This means that both federal and state universities in south east do not implement; moderation of marking scheme, moderation of course content/scheme of work and moderation of lesson note inline with course contents, even where they do, they do it to a low extent. The result also indicates that state universities implement in-service professional development programme to a low extent. In support of this Akamobi (2005) in his study, observed that most university programmes during the period of accreditation exercise, engage in various measures like; moderation of examinations, provision of infrastructure, adequate fund for expenditure, and so on. Immediately after accreditation exercise, some abandon these mechanisms which in turn lead to fallen standard of the entire system. It is glaring that both federal and state universities in south east are found wanting with respect to implementation of inservice professional development programmes as a University Type N X SD Df t-cal. t-crit ᾀ Decision Federal Universities 3 2.9 0.91 6 2.3997 2.042 0.05 Reject Ho State Universities 5 2.2 0.73 www.ijeais.org/ijamr 12 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 mechanism for quality assurance in educational management programme of universities. Qiang and Shiyan, (2007) lamented that it is a well known fact that most of the higher institutions that offers educational management programme suffer from shortage of teachers. Also the excessive workload of teaching and supervision of students' projects that rest on the few teachers available reduce their effectiveness in teaching. Qiang and Shiyan (2007) observed that teachers in educational management are always too busy because they have many students to evaluate and supervise; more than ten students. This inevitably affects the quality of teaching in educational management (Amoor 2010). Findings from the study comparatively shows that in federal universities, infrastructures are adequate while in state universities, infrastructures are little adequate. This agrees with the view of Omeje (2008) who noted that, the facilities and resources in our colleges of education and universities are in poor state, grossly inadequate to meet and sustain the required standard. He maintained that among such facilities are laboratories, sports complex and recreational facilities. The result of the hypotheses shows that implementation of mock accreditation exercise and infrastructural facilities are better in the federal universities compared to the state universities. This may be as a result of better financed policy the federal universities enjoy compared by the state universities, just as Akamobi (2005) points out that implementation of accreditation procedures are often successful in federal universities compared to the state universities due to the huge fund allocation from the general government. Knowing that accreditation exercise has a very high financial consequence on the institution, only institutions with financial stability will succeed from it. Finally, on the general findings, the research concludes that even though both federal and state universities had moderate implementation of the identified mechanisms, the federal universities seem to record better implementation of these mechanisms compared to the state universities in south-east. This is supported by the outcome of hypotheses 3 and 4. 8. RECOMMENDATIONS Based on the findings of the study, the following recommendations were made; 1. University management in south-east universities especially state universities should embark on monitoring scheme to ensure that departments implement moderation of examination to a very high extent, especially moderation of marking scheme, moderation of course content/scheme of work, and moderation of lesson note in-line with course content which were rated very low extent. 2. The annual appraisal of lecturers should dwell not just on few but all the items of in-service professional development programme. This will improve lecturers' performance and in-turn improves the standard of the school, knowing that no education system can grow beyond the skills and knowledge of the teachers. 3. University management especially for state universities should ensure that; the required academic staff are employed, students are exposed to practicum, and that collaborative curriculum review be promoted. This will go a long way in improving the academic content of the programme. 4. Government should ensure that the process of accessing Tetfund be made easy for universities especially state universities, so as to acquire infrastructural facilities. Due to high cost of these infrastructures, the institutions should also improve on their Internal Generated Revenue (IGR) in order to complement the effort of the government. 5. Just as it was observed that quality assurance mechanisms seems to have been implemented more in federal universities than in state universities, the National University Commission (NUC) should as a matter of urgency pay more emphasis on the state universities during the institutional accreditation exercise. This will improve the performance of state universities to meet up with the federal universities, so as to reduce the differences that seem to exist in standard. REFERENCES 1. Adegbesan, S. O. (2011). Establishing quality assurance in Nigerian educational system: Implication for educational managers. Education Research and Reviews, 6(2),147151 2. Ajayi, 1. A. & Akindurite, I. O. (2007). The unresolved issues of quality assurance in Nigeria universities. Journal of Sociology and Education in Africa 6(1),17-22 3. Akamobi, D. (2005). Assessment, for learning: beyond the black box. Cambridge: School of Education. 4. Akindutire, E and Ajayi, P. O. (2007). "Evaluation of the Implementation of Physics Curriculum in South West Secondary Schools in Nigeria" Unpublished Research Monograph of the University of Ado-Ekiti. 5. Amoor, S. S. (2010). The Need to improve teacher quality in business education programme in Nigerian universities. International Journal of Education Research, 11(1), 1-10 6. Anioke, B. O. (2010). Adequate infrastructural provisions and quality attainment in business education. School of Vocational Education Journal 5(1), 234 -241 7. Ekumayo, Z. A. (2012, April 6), Universities ranking: Nigeria keeps sliding. The Sun Pp.27-28. 8. Ezeani, A. N. & Eze, L. O. (2013). Improving quality assurance in business education for actualization of the millennium development goals. Book of Readings 3(1), 146150. 9. Federal Republic of Nigeria (2004). National Policy on Education. Abuja: NERDC. www.ijeais.org/ijamr 13 International Journal of Academic Multidisciplinary Research (IJAMR) ISSN: 2000-006X Vol. 2 Issue 5, May – 2018, Pages: 7-14 10. Nakpodia, A. R. (2003). Career opportunities in education in Nigeria, Business Education Journal 2(3), 150 155. 11. National University Commisssion (2012). Manual of Accreditation procedure in Nigerian Universities: Criteria for accrediting a degree programme. 12. Okebukola, P. A. (2011). Intensive retraining programme for graduates of universities for better quality and standard. A keynote Address at the first Oyo State Education Summit, Ibadan, July 10. 13. Omeje, G. O. (2008). Improving and sustaining standards in Agricultural Education in colleges of education: The provision of facilities. In Enyi D., Meeting and Sustaining Standards in Colleges of Education. Ankpa: Cuca Publication. 14. Qiang, A. & Shiyan, W. (2007). Factors affecting the quality of post-internship of higher vocational education. National Bureau of Economic Research (Working Paper)680 ~ 683 www.ijeais.org/ijamr

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO CENTRO DE FILOSOFIA E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFIA GRADUAÇÃO EM FILOSOFIA RODRIGO JOSÉ DE LIMA SOBRE O USO DA MATEMÁTICA NA FÍSICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO: possibilidades e limites de uma descrição matemática do mundo RECIFE 2015 RODRIGO JOSÉ DE LIMA SOBRE O USO DA MATEMÁTICA NA FÍSICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO: possibilidades e limites de uma descrição matemática do mundo Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial à obtenção do título de Mestre em Filosofia, pela Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Área do conhecimento: Ciências humanas Orientador: Prof. Dr. Marcos Roberto Nunes Costa RECIFE 2015 Catalogação na fonte Bibliotecária Maria do Carmo de Paiva, CRB4-1291 RODRIGO JOSÉ DE LIMA SOBRE O USO DA MATEMÁTICA NA FÍSICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO: possibilidades e limites de uma descrição matemática do mundo Dissertação de Mestrado em Filosofia aprovado, pela Comissão Examinadora formada pelos professores a seguir relacionados para obtenção do título de Mestre em Filosofia, pela Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Aprovada em: 28/04/2015 BANCA EXAMINADORA __________________________________ Prof. Dr. Marcos Roberto Nunes Costa (ORIENTADOR) UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO ___________________________________ Prof. Dr. Alfredo de Oliveira Moraes (1o EXAMINADOR) UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO ___________________________________ Prof. Dr. José Francisco Preto Meirinhos (2o EXAMINADOR) UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO (PORTUGAL) RECIFE/2015 RESUMO Uma das grandes conquistas da ciência moderna consistiu em investigar o mundo por seu aspecto quantitativo, ou seja, ela reduziu o mundo a expressões matemáticas. Porém, esta conquista apenas foi possível depois de várias tentativas ao longo da história, as quais foram marcadas por uma tensão existente entre uma investigação qualitativa ou quantitativa do mundo. Dentre os vários filósofos que investigaram o problema e deram consideráveis propostas de solução, destaca-se Tomás de Aquino, pelos desenvolvimentos pessoais que realizou. São várias as passagens onde menciona a relação entre a física e a matemática na investigação do mundo, porém nesses textos nos quais ele reconhece a possibilidade de se utilizar dos princípios da última sobre a primeira, isto não é desenvolvido. Sendo assim, parece-nos que, mesmo reconhecendo essa possibilidade, Tomás de Aquino não se preocupou em extrair dela maiores consequências. Pois, o tema apenas foi abordado na medida em que contribuía para esclarecer outros assuntos em questão. Palavraschave: Aristóteles. Ciência. Física, Matemática, Tomás de Aquino. ABSTRACT One of the great achievements of modern science is to investigate the world for its quantitative aspect, i.e., it reduced the world to mathematical expressions. However, this achievement was only possible after several attempts throughout history, which were marked by tension between a qualitative or quantitative research of the world. Among the many philosophers who investigated the problem and gave considerable proposed solutions, stands out Aquinas by personal developments he held. There are several passages where he mentions the relationship between physics and mathematics research in the world, but these texts where he recognizes the possibility of using the principles of the latter on the former, it is not developed. Thus, it seems that even he recognizes this possibility, did not bother to extract her major consequences. So the issue was addressed only to the extent that contributed to clarify other matters in question. Keywords: Aristotle. Mathematics. Physics. Science. Thomas Aquinas. AGRADECIMENTOS Dentre as inúmeras pessoas às quais gostaria de agradecer pela participação direta ou indireta neste trabalho, cito primeiramente a minha mãe, que acompanhou meus estudos desde a graduação até esta dissertação. Compreendeu meus esforços desde as primeiras horas do dia até altas horas da noite, buscando sempre possibilitar-me tempo livre para seguir nas leituras dos textos. Expresso meus sinceros agradecimentos ao Prof. Dr. Marcos Roberto Nunes Costa que, além de disponibilizar o ambiente de seu gabinete para que fossem realizados os estudos, também acompanhou a elaboração do texto e indicou as leituras a serem feitas, assim como as devidas correções que deveriam ser realizadas. Ao longo desta trajetória ele sempre ajudou e compreendeu as diversas dificuldades advindas da elaboração desta dissertação. Não possuo palavras para agradecer as contribuições do Dr. Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento, pois sem a sua inestimável ajuda este trabalho não teria sido realizado. Sua contribuição se estende em todos os âmbitos; desde a gentileza em orientar o modelo do trabalho a ser seguido, até gentilmente fornecer diversos de seus trabalhos, os quais foram fundamentais na estruturação do texto final. Por fim, foi notável sua prontidão em retirar várias dúvidas. Possuo ainda dívidas eternas com a Irmã Adélia Miranda, pois fui testemunha de sua imensa dedicação na minuciosa correção da gramática portuguesa, concedendo ao texto adequação às normas vigentes. Expresso ainda a gratidão a todos os meus amigos de curso e, particularmente, a Gardênia Viana e Roberta Nazário, as quais foram companheiras de vários debates e trabalhos realizados. Por fim, e não menos importante, a minha namorada Aline Oliveira e os meus amigos Emerson Silva, Rodrigues Pontes, Derwin Mandú Galdino, Hélio Olímpio Barreto, Graça Gouveia, os quais sempre me incentivaram nos momentos cansativos e difíceis deste trabalho. SUMÁRIO INTRODUÇÃO ................................................................................................................ 08 1. A RECEPÇÃO MEDIEVAL DA CONCEPÇÃO ARISTOTÉLICA DE CIÊNCIA .................................................................................................................... 13 2. DISTINÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO ....................................................... 37 2.1. O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AO LIVRO II DA FÍSICA DE ARISTÓTELES .................................................................................................... 51 3. A PROIBIÇÃO DA METÁBASE SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO ........................................................... 69 3.1. O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AOS SEGUNDOS ANALÍTICOS ............................................................................................................................... 82 4. A RELAÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES.. ...................................................................................................................................... 94 4.1. A RELAÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO..............................................................................................................102 CONCLUSÃO ................................................................................................................114 REFERÊNCIAS .............................................................................................................121 8 INTRODUÇÃO A história da ciência Ocidental é complexa, é o resultado de um itinerário de múltiplas tentativas que visavam solucionar determinados problemas, dentre os quais a questão referente ao instrumental metodológico capaz de expressar o mundo. O impasse polarizou-se em duas metodologias distintas, a saber: uma física, de natureza propriamente qualitativa, e uma investigação matemática, de caráter quantitativo. Pode-se verificar que esse impasse remonta à Grécia Antiga e foi objeto de análises tanto por parte de filósofos quanto de cientistas, quer de modo implícito ou explícito. Dada essa diversidade de autores e análises, faz-se necessário restringir nossa análise tanto a um momento histórico preciso quanto a autores específicos a serem estudados. Em nossa pesquisa investigaremos o problema da relação entre a física e a matemática segundo Tomás de Aquino, tendo por contexto a proposta de Aristóteles para esta questão. Esta estrutura foi escolhida por acreditarmos que ela possibilita compreendermos tanto a solução proposta pelo Estagirita como a percepção de que existe uma continuidade de crença entre Aristóteles e Tomás sobre a questão acima mencionada. Por meio desse primeiro aspecto conseguimos contextualizar a influência filosófica de Aristóteles sobre Tomás de Aquino, enquanto por meio do segundo, percebemos que esse problema emergiu no pensamento medieval como consequência do alargamento das fontes que lhe nutriram a vida intelectual, particularmente a redescoberta dos escritos de Filosofia natural e os Segundos Analíticos de Aristóteles; e justamente várias concepções dessa fonte original permaneceram na investigação empreendida por Tomás. Na estrutura desta dissertação iniciaremos com uma análise da recepção da noção aristotélica de ciência e conhecimento científico; assim, privilegiaremos o processo de transmissão e recepção tanto da Física quanto dos Segundos Analíticos, visto que é nessas obras que encontramos esta caracterização de forma mais notável, assim como uma reflexão em torno da física e da matemática. Nesse percurso iniciaremos pelo trabalho desenvolvido por Boécio, o qual tanto traduziu quanto escreveu alguns comentários sobre determinadas obras de Aristóteles. Esta atividade, apesar de não ter sido completada, foi determinante para a vida intelectual da Idade Média. Podemos, assim, falar de um projeto boeciano, que, mesmo incompleto, transmitiu textos e noções fundamentais que se constituíram em pontos fundamentais para os filósofos e teólogos posteriores. 9 Em seguida, acompanharemos o renascimento cultural do século XII e o seu aspecto mais marcante, ou seja, a onda de traduções que possibilitou o contato com obras médicas, científicas e filosóficas que eram anteriormente desconhecidas. No interior desse movimento será destacada a recepção das obras de filosofia natural, juntamente com os tratados de lógica, em especial a Física e os Segundos Analíticos. Buscaremos, assim, mostrar que foi por meio de novas fontes, particularmente as supracitadas, que novos problemas surgiram para os pensadores latinos medievais. Além do mais, foi a partir do contato com essas obras que eles se tornaram capazes de estruturar suas próprias reflexões em torno daqueles temas discutidos nesse período. Constataremos, ainda, como foi complexo e difícil o processo de recepção de alguns livros de Aristóteles. Apesar de várias dessas obras terem sido inicialmente proibidas, elas por fim se constituíram parte obrigatória do currículo da Faculdade de Artes, a qual era preparatória para os cursos superiores. Resumindo, a recepção de tais obras possibilitou a explicitação de diversas questões, tais como: a caracterização do conhecimento científico, a subalternação entre as ciências, a impossibilidade da transferência de demonstrações entre gêneros-sujeito distintos, a questão do conhecimento demonstrativo, a relação existente entre as ciências teóricas da matemática e da física, etc., Ora, uma vez que Aristóteles propôs respostas para estes problemas e seus livros se tornaram obrigatórios no currículo universitário, suas soluções, consequentemente, se constituíram passagem obrigatória no ensino acadêmico, cabendo aos filósofos concordar com as respostas do Estagirita e esforçarse por explicitá-las, ou afastar-se delas e propor soluções alternativas. Assim, este era o contexto acadêmico no qual um estudante de uma típica universidade medieval estava inserido. Delimitando o âmbito da recepção do corpus aristotelicum, o qual foi determinante para a vida intelectual da Idade Média, pretendemos apresentar, na primeira parte da dissertação, como o mundo medieval latino cristão recebeu a produção aristotélica e reestruturou a herança intelectual grega a partir do seu modo específico de civilização. No capítulo 2 abordaremos de início a crença aristotélica a respeito da diferença entre os entes físicos e os entes matemáticos. Para isso nos basearemos principalmente no livro II da Física e em algumas passagens da Metafísica. Perceberemos então que este tema sempre é debatido em função de outro assunto principal, em particular, do debate em torno da classificação das ciências teóricas. Daremos ênfase no texto aos princípios empregados pelo Estagirita para defender a crença na distinção entre os sujeitos da física e da matemática, a saber, os diferentes modos de considerarem e definirem os seus respectivos objetos de 10 investigação. Em seguida, analisaremos qual a crença de Tomás sobre os argumentos utilizados por Aristóteles. Recorreremos principalmente ao seu Comentário à Física e também a passagens do De Trinitate. Estes textos nos mostrarão que, mesmo tendo o Aquinate concordado com a resposta do Filósofo, não foi por isto impossibilitado de desenvolver a mesma ideia do texto comentado, levando em conta os mesmos argumentos já fornecidos. Além disto, ele também enveredou sua argumentação por um tópico que não estava presente no texto comentado, a saber, a relação epistêmica de prioridade e posteridade na intelecção humana. Reservamos o capítulo 3 para acompanhar, primeiramente, a doutrina aristotélica da ciência. Este ponto inclui tanto a concepção de conhecimento dedutivo como a sua teoria da demonstração científica e a doutrina da metábase. Analisaremos a concepção de ciência e seu procedimento demonstrativo como relacionado à sua forma estrutural. Veremos ainda que Aristóteles realizou uma distinção epistêmica notável entre o conhecimento de um fato e o conhecimento da razão deste fato, além de ter argumentado em favor de condições que caracterizariam o conhecimento demonstrativo nos Segundos Analíticos. Por fim, notaremos que existe uma tensão entre dois polos na obra de Aristóteles: de um lado, temos a sua proibição de que ocorra a transferência de demonstrações de um gênero a outro em um silogismo científico; por outro lado, é reconhecido que algumas ciências se comportam de modo a tornar este seu requerimento mais flexível, visto que elas aparentemente transgridem sua doutrina da metábase. Em seguida investigaremos em que medida Tomás concorda com as respostas fornecidas por Aristóteles aos tópicos anteriormente mencionados. Nesta parte do texto nos basearemos principalmente em seu Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos e nos trabalhos de alguns comentadores. Perceberemos que a tensão entre teoria e experiência existente no interior da doutrina aristotélica subsiste no sistema de Tomás, mas este se esforça por explicá-la especialmente a partir de sua doutrina da subalternação entre as ciências. Por fim, reservamos o capítulo 4 para investigar em que medida existe concordância entre Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino sobre o modo de conceber a relação entre a física e a matemática. Esta questão deve ser abordada no contexto em que ela está inserida, especialmente no âmbito da demonstração científica. Ora, na medida em que o Estagirita reconheceu a existência de um grupo formado por algumas ciências, dentre as quais se destacam a ótica, a mecânica, a astronomia e a harmônica, e que elas se apresentavam como exceção ao procedimento demonstrativo do conhecimento científico teorizado por ele, pois se utilizavam de princípios estranhos aos seus gêneros-sujeito, constata que, embora elas tratem 11 de aspectos físicos do mundo, utilizam-se de demonstrações matemáticas. Assim, nesse âmbito é reconhecido que a física e a matemática, apesar de possuírem sujeitos de investigação distintos, possuem um vínculo entre si. Ora, esse impasse, ao invés de modificar a teoria aristotélica reafirma-a, e na análise que empreende das referidas ciências o Estagirita não demonstra interesse unicamente em função delas mesmas, mas o seu tratamento que lhes dispensa decorre da necessidade de justamente reafirmar sua doutrina e resolver outros problemas em questão. Essa dificuldade no sistema aristotélico foi percebida pelos filósofos medievais e se constituiu tema de análise que, pouco a pouco, tornou-se objeto central de reflexão filosófica. Ao analisarmos a exposição de Tomás de Aquino sobre esse assunto, tomaremos em consideração principalmente textos gerais que abordem a questão, buscando em seguida sistematizá-los e retirar as devidas conclusões. Dentre os textos que remetem ao vínculo entre a física e a matemática, nos basearemos principalmente naqueles que mencionam a astronomia, e a perceptível hesitação de Tomás em aceitar um modelo astronômico definitivo. Perceber-se-á, ao longo do trabalho, que é possível encontrar em Tomás de Aquino uma reflexão mais extensa sobre essas questões, em comparação com sua fonte primária. Resumindo o esquema desta dissertação no que concerne a Tomás de Aquino, podemos afirmar que, embora ele aceite a resposta de Aristóteles para o modo de distinção entre o físico e o matemático, esforça-se por explicá-la por uma ordem distinta, a saber, a ordem de intelecção das coisas. No que diz respeito ao procedimento demonstrativo das ciências, podemos notar uma adesão às respostas fornecidas pelo Estagirita, mesmo que em caráter geral. Mas, não deixa de ser constatada uma formulação mais clara e sistemática destes tópicos por parte de Tomás, o que se deve em parte ao fato de ele ter ser herdeiro das diversas contribuições feitas por outros filósofos em torno desse problema, especialmente por Grosseteste, Alberto Magno, Temístio e Averróis. Pode-se ainda perceber que aquele grupo de ciências que ocupavam um lugar muito modesto no sistema aristotélico, recebe na obra de Tomás um lugar bem definido, no clássico modelo de divisão das ciências além de considerável clareza e uma maior quantidade de material do que a sua fonte original. Talvez isso decorra do seu interesse pela singularidade metodológica daquelas ciências denominadas por ele de "ciências intermediárias". É possível acompanhar o interesse epistemológico de Tomás pelo procedimento específico destas ciências, ao longo de sua obra. De fato, encontramo-lo desde o seu opúsculo juvenil De Trinitate até as obras da maturidade. O fato de Tomás nunca ter sido professor na Faculdade 12 de Artes e ainda assim ter produzido 12 comentários a obras aristotélicas e estar intensamente ocupado com elas durante os dez últimos anos de sua vida, ao que se acresce o fato de esses escritos se ocuparem especialmente de filosofia natural e lógica, corrobora em favor da tese da importância do aspecto metodológico do conhecimento científico para o Aquinate. Essa abordagem mais sistemática e completa que encontramos em torno dessas ciências que "aplicam os princípios matemáticos às coisas naturais", não deve ser vista como decorrendo apenas da genialidade de Tomás. Como mencionamos, ele é herdeiro de várias contribuições feitas por outros filósofos, o que não invalida a percepção de que ele contribuiu também decisivamente para a discussão a respeito do assunto. Tanto a caracterização do procedimento próprio das referidas ciências, quanto sua posição intermediária entre a física e a matemática e sua designação de Scientiae Mediae, provêm da obra de Santo Tomás. Encontramos, assim, investigando o seu pensamento, a caracterização do tipo de sujeito e o procedimento demonstrativo dessas ciências e, embora isto não tenha sido feito primariamente em função delas mesmas (tal como em Aristóteles), mas pelo fato de tais ciências se apresentarem como modelo epistêmico que lhe possibilitava atribuir o status de ciência à doutrina sagrada, suas reflexões se tornaram ponto de passagem obrigatório na história das ciências e se estabeleceram como ponto alto da tradição filosófica medieval em torno das supracitadas ciências. Por fim, reservamos um espaço para a conclusão advinda dos dados discutidos ao longo do trabalho. Buscaremos, nessa parte, esclarecer como devemos entender a relação entre Aristóteles e Tomás sobre a relação entre a física e a matemática. Tentaremos, assim, identificar uma relação de ruptura ou de continuidade de pensamento entre os referidos autores. 13 1 A RECEPÇÃO MEDIEVAL DA CONCEPÇÃO ARISTOTÉLICA DE CIÊNCIA O aristotelismo realizou no Ocidente Latino cristão durante a Idade Média um complexo itinerário, que implica a recepção e posterior formalização do corpus aristotelicum latinum. Segundo Alain De Libera, os componentes deste processo constituem um jogo complicado de fatores perturbadores, os quais incluem períodos de sucessivas traduções, incorporação de numerosos apócrifos e pseudoepígrafos e princípios de leitura que tendiam a neutralizar os efeitos de tais fatores 1 . Acompanhar minuciosamente este percurso escapa aos objetivos do presente trabalho 2 ; no entanto, acreditamos que, para melhor compreendermos a relação entre Tomás de Aquino e Aristóteles em torno do tema deste trabalho, é necessário que tenhamos uma compreensão, ainda que de forma geral, deste processo de recepção das obras do Estagirita no Ocidente Latino Cristão durante o medievo. Visto que o problema da relação entre a ciência natural e a matemática se encontra teorizado e discutido principalmente na obra Física, e também nos Segundos Analíticos, acreditamos que compreender o processo de recepção da noção de ciência presente nestas obras possibilita uma melhor contextualização do problema para Tomás de Aquino e o seu ambiente universitário 3 . Julgamos que o motivo pelo qual Tomás de Aquino recebeu e aceitou em grande medida a obra aristotélica não está suspenso em um vazio especulativo. Ainda que isto encontre justificação em questões de caráter histórico-social próprias daquele tipo de civilização, não se reduz a elas. Porquanto é justamente pelas traduções e o posterior estudo dessas obras, que a proposta aristotélica de conhecimento científico se tornará 1 LIBERA, Alain de. A filosofia medieval. Trad. de Nicolás Nymi Campanário e Yvone Maria de Campos Teixeira da Silva. São Paulo: Loyola, 1998. p. 359. 2 De fato, tentar acompanhar minuciosamente este processo além de escapar aos objetivos do presente trabalho, e desconfigurar o seu objetivo, terminaria por ofuscá-lo. Na verdade, devemos lembrar que este empreendimento ainda está por ser concluído pelos especialistas no assunto. No que diz respeito aos textos de Tomás de Aquino, a edição Leonina, que busca estabelecer o texto original a partir dos critérios modernos de crítica textual, ainda não se encontra terminada; e, ainda que os minuciosos dados advindos dos notáveis trabalhos de Lorenzo Minio-Paluello e da International Union of Academies que estão provendo o mercado com edições críticas de todas as traduções do grego para o latim, buscando justamente esclarecer toda a problemática que se encontra por trás das recepções e traduções das obras antigas, e, particularmente, das aristotélicas utilizadas durante o medievo, representam um esforço em constante construção. Os resultados destas pesquisas nos possibilitarão compreender até que ponto as diferentes interpretações e soluções que os filósofos medievais propuseram para vários problemas eram decorrentes do tipo de texto que eles tinham em mão que, implicavam em alguma leitura diferente daquela que o texto originalmente propunha. Essa situação possui como caso típico o comentário de Tomás ao livro II da Física, assunto que comentaremos no próximo capítulo. 3 Para uma descrição do processo de transmissão das obras gregas na Idade Média ver: DOD, Bernard G.Aristotle in the middle ages. In: KENNY, Anthony; PINBORG, Jan; KRETZMANN, Norman. The cambridge history of later medieval philosophy: from the rediscovery of aristotle to the disintegration of scholasticism I100-1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. p. 43-79 (obra doravante abreviada por CHLMP). 14 conhecida entre os filósofos da Idade Média. Com a posterior inclusão de seus escritos como componentes obrigatórios do currículo da Faculdade de Artes de Paris, os comentários àquelas passagens eram inevitáveis. São justamente esses comentários que nos possibilitam compreender as distintas atitudes que os estudiosos do medievo tiveram frente ao problema da relação existente entre a possibilidade de uma investigação física e/ou matemática do mundo. Visto terem sido diversas as compreensões em torno da questão supracitada, não pretendemos fazer uma enumeração delas, ao contrário, restringiremos nosso estudo apenas à obra de Tomás de Aquino e, mais especificamente, ao seu comentário às obras Física e Segundos Analíticos. C. H. Lohr propõe um modo de compreender a influência das obras e, consequentemente, das diversas ideias de Aristóteles sobre o Ocidente, em três sucessivos estágios 4 : o primeiro momento se encontra centralizado na figura de Boécio e o seu trabalho 4 DOD In: KENNY ; PINBORG ; KRETZMANN, 1982, p. 81-98. Estamos cientes de que qualquer modelo que busque apresentar a produção intelectual medieval e todos os seus componentes é um tanto arbitrário, porquanto prioriza alguns elementos em detrimento de outros. Além do mais, um modelo que busque representar um período tão extenso e complexo quanto à produção intelectual, qual seja o medievo, corre o sério risco de simplificação. Sendo assim, é necessário que tenhamos em mente a função desempenhada por um modelo, o qual deve ser visto como um recurso que facilita a compreensão de algum aspecto em questão, em nosso caso, a recepção das obras de Aristóteles, em especial os tratados da Física e os Segundos Analíticos. Tendo destacado este ponto, percebemos que poderíamos, da mesma forma utilizar-nos outra proposta de compreensão distinta da oferecida por C. H. Lohr. Sendo assim, poderíamos legitimamente servir-nos da proposta sugerida pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro. Segundo ele, a produção intelectual do período pode ser entendida através do instrumental disponibilizado em função do qual a teologia se estruturou, a saber: gramática (século IX), dialética (século XII), filosofia (século XIII) (cf. NASCIMENTO, Carlos Arthur R. O que é filosofia Medieval. Brasiliense, 1992, p. 18). De maneira semelhante, pode-se recorrer a outro modelo de expressar a produção intelectual, como aquele apresentado pelo prof. Ricardo da Costa, que se utiliza primariamente do conceito de ciência buscando, a partir dele, identificar a sua posterior mudança de significado ao longo da Idade Média, ou seja, procurando acompanhar historicamente as diversas acepções que o termo veio a possuir historicamente. No caso, Ricardo Costa termina por constatar uma progressiva dependência do significado daquela definição dada por Aristóteles, através deste procedimento que acompanha a mudança de um conceito de ciência, em que ele julga identificar 3 períodos, a saber: 1) época tardo-romana (séc. VI-IX), época em que o termo possuía uma orientação pedagógica; 2) apogeu do monacato ( X-XII), período que conheceu a proeminência da teologia sapiencial; 3) período escolástico ( XIII-XIV), no qual a definição corrente é subsidiária daquela dada por Aristóteles (cf. COSTA, Ricardo da. A ciência no pensamento especulativo medieval. SINAIS – Revista Eletrônica de Ciências Sociais. Vitória, v. 1, n. 5, 2009, p. 132-144). Devemos observar que este modelo, de fato, é proposto por Celina A. Lértora Mendonza, no entanto ele é utilizado como um recurso para compreender o problema da classificação das ciências ao longo da Idade Média (cf. LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. El concepto y la classificación de la ciencia en el medioevo. In: BONI, Luiz Alberto de. (org.) A ciência e a organização dos saberes na Idade Média. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2000. p. 57-83). Embora o professor Ricardo tenha retomado este modelo proposto inicialmente por Celina para investigar outro assunto, isto não impede que ele seja utilizado como instrumento para analisar o conceito de ciência. Outro modelo que poderia legitimamente ser utilizado ao longo de nossa exposição, é aquele oferecido por Joseph Ratzinger no qual a produção intelectual do período medieval é compreendida a partir de dois ambientes distintos onde elas ocorreram, ou seja, os mosteiros e as scholae. Pois, é a partir destes dois ambientes que teremos dois modelos diferentes de teologia, a teologia monástica e a teologia escolástica (cf. BENTO XVI. Os mestres medievais: de Hugo de São Vítor a João Duns Escoto. Trad. e notas L'Osservatore Romano. Campinas: São Paulo,Ecclesiae. 2013. p. 9-10. O que devemos ressaltar dessa discussão anterior é o fato de que, independentemente do modelo adotado, é possível relacioná-lo com outros temas em questão; no presente caso, com a entrada de Aristóteles na Idade Média 15 de traduzir para o latim diversas obras do Estagirita, em particular aquelas relacionadas à lógica e que formavam o Órganon; dessa forma, Boécio transmitiu ao Ocidente as bases da investigação lógica aristotélica. O segundo momento da entrada de Aristóteles no Ocidente tem por contexto geral o movimento de traduções do século XII, que abarcava inicialmente diversas áreas do conhecimento científico antigo, em especial aquelas diretamente relacionadas com ampla utilidade, tais como a astronomia, a medicina, etc. Embora não fosse um movimento de tradução primariamente filosófico, foi por meio dele que o corpus das obras de Aristóteles se tornou disponível. Por fim, o terceiro estágio da periodização oferecida por C. H. Lohr compreenderia o período referente ao século XV. Podemos generalizar aquilo que comentamos até o presente momento e afirmar que nos dois primeiros estágios a preocupação era primordialmente de cunho filosófico, enquanto no terceiro estágio a preocupação era mais em torno do texto, na medida em que novas edições do texto grego foram disponibilizadas. Para os objetivos deste trabalho nos ocuparemos apenas destes dois primeiros períodos, porquanto apenas eles se referem mais diretamente à recepção medieval da concepção aristotélica de ciência. A importância de Boécio para a formação do contexto intelectual da Idade Média é imensa. Sua influência está presente em diversas áreas e isto tanto pelas análises por ele realizadas de diversos problemas filosóficos quanto por seu trabalho de tradutor. De fato, ele foi o intermediário entre o mundo grego e a cultura latina. Além de ter cunhado diversas expressões latinas para várias palavras filosóficas gregas, também estabeleceu termos que predominariam no debate teológico dos séculos seguintes, e assim forneceu definições fundamentais para categorias que constituíam o debate presente em sua época tais como: eternidade, pessoa, etc. No entanto, foi no campo da lógica que sua influência se fez sentir mais fortemente 5 . Boécio teve contato com quatro das principais correntes de pensamento do seu tempo, a saber: o neoplatonismo grego, os escritos filosóficos latinos, a literatura cristã grega Latina. Sendo assim, no primeiro modelo acima discutido, poderíamos destacar que o instrumental filosófico em geral, e aristotélico em particular, disponibilizado para a teologia a partir do século XII em diante, incluiria a recepção das obras de Aristóteles. E, de maneira semelhante, tomando por base o segundo modelo, também se pode relacioná-lo com a recepção das obras do Filósofo, pois foi a partir do contato com elas que o conceito de ciência foi fortemente influenciado a ser entendido como conhecimento necessário. Sendo assim, esclarecemos que a escolha que fizemos neste trabalho por tomar a proposta de C.H. Lohr é apenas pelo fato de acreditarmos que ela seja de mais fácil compreensão. Esta mesma idéia é difundida no Brasil por meio do trabalho do Professor Luiz Alberto De Boni, (Cf. DE BONI, Carlos Alberto Luiz. A entrada de Aristóteles no Ocidente Medieval. Revista de Filosofia Dissertatio. UFPel, n. 19-20, p. 131-173). 5 GILSON, Etienne. A filosofia na Idade Média. Trad. de Eduardo Brandão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1995. p. 160. 16 e os escritos dos pais da Igreja latina. Desta maneira, sua formação na cultura latina clássica, em filosofia e literatura gregas, são identificáveis ao longo de sua obra, pontos que indicam que ele por certo conheceu as obras de Proclo, Porfírio e Amônio Sacas 6 , de forma que, embora muitos dos desenvolvimentos neoplatônicos gregos de seu próprio tempo com os quais ele teve contato, agora se encontrem perdidos 7 , pode-se destacar que, dentre os segmentos de escritos dos quais ele teve conhecimento, o neoplatonismo foi o mais importante na formação de seu pensamento 8 . John Marenbon divide a obra de Boécio em quatro grupos: livros-textos sobre assuntos matemáticos, chamados por ele de "quadrivium"; escritos relacionados à lógica, grupo que inclui as suas exposições, traduções e comentários; tratados teológicos; e a Consolação da Filosofia 9 . Devemos notar nessa classificação proposta que, desde muito cedo, as disciplinas astronomia e música estavam associadas à matemática, particularmente à aritmética e à geometria 10 , e esse aspecto continua a ser mantido na obra de Boécio. A partir de seu trabalho, constata-se a presença de uma divisão que aplica a cada uma das disciplinas do quadrivium um objeto próprio de consideração. Segundo ele, a aritmética estuda unidades discretas de quantidade; a música estuda as razões aritméticas da harmônica; a geometria investiga as quantidades contínuas e a astronomia estuda a magnitude em movimento 11 . Embora algumas dessas obras não tenham sobrevivido, servem para indicar-nos a inclinação de seus estudos para o âmbito das "matemáticas aplicadas", como se depreende do relato de Cassiodorus 12 . Nosso maior interesse neste momento reside nos escritos de Boécio de 6 MARENBON, John (org.). Routledge history of philosophy: medieval philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2004. vol. III, p. 11. 7 Boethius. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, (Col.) Great Medieval thinkers, p. 13. 8 Ibid., p. 11. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 De fato a relação entre estas disciplinas e a matemática remonta à Antiguidade. Mais tarde comentaremos um pouco dessa compreensão. Por ora basta mencionar que pode ser encontrada uma útil descrição do caso em HEATH, Thomas. A history of greek mathematics: from Tales to Euclid. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. vol. I, p. 1-25; 440-446. Para uma apresentação do problema, especificamente o que inclui o problema da subalternação das ciências para Aristóteles, ver: MC KIRAHAN JR, R. D. Aristotle subordinate sciences. British Journal for the History of Science, v. 1, 1978, 197-220. 11 MARENBON, 2003, p. 14. 12 É um equívoco julgar que a obra de Boécio se reduz à atividade de comentar determinadas obras. De fato, esta era sua atividade primária, porém de forma alguma exclusiva. Julgamos correta a opinião de Henry Chadwick de que a ênfase de Boécio sobre tópicos lógicos e o quarteto matemático composto pela aritmética, música, geometria e astronomia deve-se ao fato de que ele percebeu a fraqueza de material intelectual disponibilizado aos latinos nestas áreas, enquanto no campo retórico e gramatical eles possuíam bons representantes. Isto pode ser compreendido a partir de uma nota de sua "A Consolação da Filosofia": que Quintiliano ainda era lido em seu tempo, e o quarto século assistiu ao aparecimento do influente orador Mário Vitorino. Chadwick menciona ainda que um dos motivos pelos quais Boécio tinha os objetos matemáticos do Quadrivium em alta consideração era por considerá-los como quatro caminhos que conduziam à sublime sabedoria. Sua obra a respeito deles não foi legada à posteridade e desde cedo caiu no esquecimento. No período entre Boécio e Alcuíno, pouco da obra boeciana sobre o Quadrivium interessou a alguém; apenas a aritmética, da qual João 17 natureza lógica, em particular nas suas traduções e comentários às obras de Aristóteles que formavam o Órganon. Se, por um lado, a obra de Boécio não se reduz simplesmente ao trabalho produzido por um comentador, também é verdade que a originalidade não estava entre as suas preocupações. Daí que a natureza predominantemente expositiva de seus trabalhos se deve primariamente aos objetivos que tinha em mente, bem como ao seu compartilhamento da prática comum na Antiguidade, que consistia em comentar obras consideradas padrões ou referências em determinados assuntos. Sem dúvida, ele foi um filósofo de grande capacidade e ambição intelectual. Segundo Sten Ebbesen, o projeto de Boécio no que diz respeito à lógica era constituído pelos seguintes objetivos: a) Um conjunto completo de textos básicos, a saber, a Isagoge de Porfírio, a totalidade de Aristóteles, os Tópicos de Cícero (que naturalmente não necessitavam ser traduzidos), a totalidade de Platão; b) comentários elementares sobre cada um dos textos básicos; c) em alguns casos, no mínimo um comentário mais compreensivo; d) em ao menos um caso, também uma paráfrase; e) monografias suplementares, incluindo uma demonstrando a compatibilidade da filosofia aristotélica com a platônica 13 . Dentre esses vários pontos listados por Sten Ebbesen, destaca-se o último, pois o objetivo de mostrar a compatibilidade entre a filosofia de Platão e o aristotelismo pode ser visto como um empreendimento geral que orientou o seu trabalho de traduções e comentários. Embora sua tarefa tenha sido interrompida por sua morte prematura, ele não deixou de legar contribuições determinantes para a filosofia em geral e particularmente para o âmbito da lógica; além de ter traduzido 14 os Primeiros Analíticos, os Argumentos Sofísticos e os Escoto fez abundante uso, sobreviveu completamente. Ainda que essa situação possa ser um reflexo da simplificação da cultura que se seguiu à sua morte, ela permanece em forte contraste para o notável sucesso que alcançou seu trabalho com lógica (cf. CHADWICK, Henry. Boethius: the consolations of music, logic, theology, and philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. p. 70, 107). 13 "A complete set of basic texts, viz. Porphyry's Isagoge, the whole of Aristotle, Cicero's Topics (which, of course, need not be translated), the whole of Plato; (b) elementary commentaries on each of the basic texts; (c) in some cases, at least, also a more comprehensive commentary; (d) in at least one case, also a paraphrase; (e) supplementary monographs, including one demonstrating the compatibility of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy" (EBBESEN, Sten. Boethius as an aristotelian commentator. In: SORABJI, Richard. Aristotle Transformed: the ancient commentators and their influence. New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. p. 374). 14 Existe uma considerável divergência entre os pesquisadores em atribuir a tradução completa do corpus lógico de Aristóteles a Boécio. Em geral encontramos três possíveis posições entre os pesquisadores: em primeiro lugar, temos aqueles que acreditam de fato em uma tradução completa do Órganon: em segundo lugar, temos aqueles que acreditam que Boécio não chegou a realizar a tradução dos Segundos Analíticos; a terceira posição é de fato intermediária entre as duas anteriores: segundo aqueles que defendem esta opinião, Boécio de fato chegou a realizar a tradução dos Segundos Analíticos, porém essa tradução não foi transmitida à posteridade e desde cedo ela teria sido perdida. Representando o primeiro grupo, temos os trabalhos dos pioneiros no campo 18 Tópicos, e também as Categorias, o De Interpretatione e o Isagoge de Porfírio, para os três últimos ele ainda fez comentários 15 . Além disso, compôs tratados sobre música, aritmética, silogismos hipotéticos e categóricos. Foi por meio de suas traduções, comentários e escritos que Boécio proveu a base para a lógica medieval 16 , sendo por isso denominado de "o professor de lógica da Idade Média" 17 . Ainda que eruditos tais como William Kneale e Marta Kneale vejam na obra de Boécio a consumação de um processo de confusão gradual da lógica estóica e aristotélica no fim da Antiguidade Tardia 18 , transmitindo assim para a posteridade uma herança impura, isto não invalida sua importância na transmissão do legado de Aristóteles ao Ocidente, pois, mesmo a pesquisa de caráter mais antigo já havia constatado que a lógica de Boécio é um comentário à de Aristóteles, com o desejo de interpretá-la segundo a filosofia de Platão 19 . Acreditamos que se compreende melhor a situação quando lembramos que, dentre as correntes de pensamento com as quais Boécio teve contato, sem dúvida alguma foi o neoplatonismo aquela que exerceu maior influência sobre seu pensamento. Desse modo, é compreensível que ele compartilhasse alguns pontos da exegese vigente na tradição dos filósofos neoplatônicos, em cujas características destaca-se a crença de que a filosofia de da filosofia medieval, em particular os de Etienne Gilson (cf. GILSON, 1995, p.160). Como representante do terceiro grupo podemos citar Ellen Ashworth, pois, ainda que, segundo a autora, Boécio tenha realizado a tradução, esta não foi legada à posteridade (cf. ASHWORTH, E. J. Linguagem e lógica. In: MCGRADE, A. S. (Org.). Filosofia medieval. Trad. de André Oídes. São Paulo: Ideias e Letras: 2008. p. 99). A posição de John Marenbon pode, por sua vez, ser incluída no segundo grupo, porquanto, ainda que ele concorde com a opinião de Ellen e julgue que a tradução de Boécio se perdeu, isso é feito com ressalvas que possibilitam questionar se de fato ele pertenceria a esse grupo. É manifesta a sua dúvida quanto à possibilidade de tal tradução (cf. MARENBON, 2004, p. 12, 25). Talvez a sua indecisão seja decorrente de ele ter seguido a proposta de Barnes, que toma por base esta informação de um manuscrito do século XIII que menciona um comentário de Boécio aos Analíticos Posteriores. No entanto, Sten Ebbesen destaca que isto é um erro, pois o manuscrito que se encontra em Munique (MS, clm I 4246) é na verdade a tradução do comentário de Filopono (cf. EBBESEN, Sten. The aristotelian commentator. In: MARENBON. John. The Cambridge companion Boethius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. p. 52). Além do mais, Lorenzo MinioPaluello, baseando-se em análises estilísticas, opõe-se a tal fato, pois a partir de seu trabalho ele chegou à conclusão de que as versões comuns dos Primeiros Analíticos, Tópicos, Elencos Sofísticos são reciprocamente consistentes em estilo e com as traduções de Boécio da 'Logica vetus', no entanto os Segundos Analíticos estão em estilo diferente (cf. apud CHLPM, 1982, p. 55). É provável que esta discussão seja totalmente esclarecida no futuro com o avanço das pesquisas e descobertas na área da manuscritologia, mas de toda ela, o que se deve impor à nossa mente é a grande importância que Boécio desempenhou na configuração e recepção da obra aristotélica no ocidente latino cristão durante a Idade Média. 15 John Marenbon acredita que, embora o projeto inicial de Boécio tenha sido o de traduzir tanto Aristóteles quanto Platão com o objetivo de mostrar a concordância entre eles, a prioridade que ele deu à lógica e o fato de que em vários casos realizou não apenas tradução, mas também monografias a respeito do assunto, e, em alguns casos, duas traduções de uma mesma obra, são pontos que indicam que ele foi além de seu projeto inicial (cf. MARENBON, 2003, p. 18). 16 MARENBON, 2004, p. 11. 17 GILSON, 1995, p. 160. 18 KNEALE, William; KNEALE, Marta. O desenvolvimento da lógica. Trad. de M. S. Lourenço. Lisboa: CalousteGulbekian, 1962. p. 181. 19 GILSON, 1995, p. 163. 19 Platão e Aristóteles não são contrárias entre si 20 , ou seja, que os comentários realizados por eles tinham por base uma perspectiva platônica de caráter conciliatório, e isto legou à posteridade uma imagem "deturpada" do aristotelismo. Percebemos, assim, a forte influência do neoplatonismo sobre o pensamento de Boécio. Alain De Libera chega a dizer que Boécio "importou a filosofia neoplatônica do Oriente ao Ocidente e aclimatou tanto suas doutrinas quanto a visão da filosofia sob o céu latino, particularmente sua exegese "platônica" de Aristóteles" 21 . Portanto, acreditamos que o veredicto de William Kneale e Marta Kneale é anacrônico e impreciso, por isso nos colocamos em favor da posição defendida por Sten Ebbesen, que ressalta a importância de Boécio como lógico, porquanto, até mesmo aquilo que ele não passou à posteridade determinou em grande parte a possibilidade dos trabalhos de seus sucessores, pois, "uma vez que ele não legou um comentário pitagoreano sobre as categorias, salvou os primeiros lógicos medievais de serem absorvidos em um esquema que os conduziria a âmbitos especulativos em geral improdutivos" 22 . Outro ponto a ser destacado é a opção de Boécio pela interpretação de Porfírio à lógica aristotélica, oposta àquela realizada pelos últimos platonistas gregos, o que revela que ele não tentava encontrar doutrinas platônicas nos textos lógicos, porque, ao seu ver, tratavam de assuntos distintos. Estes dois aspectos deixam transparecer as suas preferências intelectuais e nos fazem recusar a imagem que o apresenta como um simples compilador de ideias anteriores 23 . O valor de seu trabalho não deve ser julgado a partir da genialidade de criar um sistema filosófico que explicasse a realidade: "traduzir, comentar, conciliar e transmitir, era essa, em sua primeira intenção, a obra de Boécio" 24 . Esse trabalho determinou três características sobre o Aristóteles que a Idade Média conheceu: em primeiro lugar, temos um Aristóteles que possui aspecto neoplatônico, porquanto, como vimos, uma vez que Boécio compartilhou vários pontos comuns da exegese vigente nas escolas neoplatônicas, algumas ideias estranhas ao aristotelismo foram admitidas como derivadas dele; em segundo lugar, destaca-se a natureza 20 Edward Grant destaca que o neoplatônico Porfírio, além de ter sido o responsável pela introdução dos estudos das obras aristotélicas nas escolas Platônicas da Antiguidade como parte integrante do estudo de Platão, também argumentou em favor da harmonia entre Platão e Aristóteles nas doutrinas essenciais. E esta crença se tornou aceita, em maior ou menor grau, por todos os comentadores antigos, incluindo os cristãos (cf. GRANT, Edward. História da filosofia natural: do mundo antigo ao século XIX. Trad. de Tiago Attore. São Paulo: MADRAS, 2009. p.7585). No entanto, Marenbon percebeu claramente que, embora o projeto Boeciano de comentar tanto Aristóteles quanto Platão e mostrar que não há discordância entre eles, fosse uma prática das escolas neoplatônicas gregas, evidenciando assim a influência delas sobre Boécio, todavia, no resultado, o projeto de Boécio diferiu nitidamente das escolas neoplatônicas, dado o seu interesse desproporcional pela lógica. 21 DE LIBERA, 1998, p. 250. 22 EBBESEN, 1990, p. 391. 23 MARENBON, 2003, p. 19; p. 41-42. 24 Ibid., p. 175. 20 parcial do Aristóteles que é transmitida ao Ocidente, pois, como bem sabemos, as traduções não se estenderam a todas as obras do Estagirita. De fato, com a onda de traduções posteriores, percebemos que as ideias de Aristóteles alcançaram o Ocidente antes de suas obras; por fim, o terceiro aspecto que decorre diretamente do trabalho de Boécio é a natureza predominantemente lógica do Aristóteles que será legado à posteridade, e isto na medida em que apenas as obras do Órganon foram traduzidas. Devemos ressaltar, no entanto, que mesmo este "Aristóteles parcial" teve de ser redescoberto ao longo do período medieval 25 , ou seja, o contato com a obra de Aristóteles foi um lento e complexo processo, no qual mesmo diversas imprecisões no estabelecimento de ideias legitimamente aristotélicas foram necessárias para tal possibilidade. Boécio se encontrava em um ambiente que expressava dois aspectos: o de mudança e o de continuidade. E dessa maneira seu projeto ficou à mercê das condições socio-históricas vigentes em sua época, pois a filosofia latina em geral, e a de Boécio em particular, não sobreviveram ao desaparecimento do mundo político que as abrigou 26 . Steven P. Marrone descreve claramente a situação da filosofia no Ocidente no início da Idade Média: A partir do final do século VI, a metade ocidental do mundo mediterrâneo sofreu uma série de profundos choques econômicos e demográficos, os quais a apartaram cada vez mais, comercialmente, politicamente e, por fim, culturalmente, dos ainda vitais centros do Império Romano e da economia localizados no Oriente falante do grego. O que se seguiu não foi a extinção do aprendizado latino clássico, que havia nutrido a primeira fase da filosofia medieval, mas um estreitamento de foco e redirecionamento de interesse 27 . 25 O contato com este Aristóteles parcial foi antecedido ou condicionado pela redescoberta do trabalho de Boécio, pois durante grande parte do período medieval as únicas obras de Aristóteles conhecidas resumiam-se às Categorias e ao tratado De Interpretatione. De fato, a redescoberta da obra de Boécio foi uma condição determinante para as traduções do século XII. Este ponto é de suma importância para que possamos reconhecer a devida importância de Boécio, e, ainda que Kneale não lhe conceda maiores méritos, mesmo assim o menciona (cf. (KNEALE, 1962, p. 193); Bernard G. Dod nos fornece uma descrição mais coerente do fato (cf. CHLPM, 1982, p. 46). 26 De Libera acredita que o futuro da filosofia ocidental pós-Boécio não foi determinado em primeiro lugar pelas guerras em si, mas pela reconquista de Justiniano, o qual impôs ao Ocidente a política antifilosófica que ele estava implantando no Oriente; o caso clássico de tal política foi o fechamento da escola de Atenas em 529 d.C. (cf. LIBERA, 1998. p. 259260). Steven P. Marrone mostra dúvida em aceitar a posição de De Libera. Segundo ele, o fechamento da escola de Atenas além de poder nunca ter ocorrido, "não deve ser pensado como o golpe de misericórdia desferido sobre o pensamento filosófico greco-romano". Ele leva em conta o argumento de que "os filósofos pagãos continuaram a atrair estudantes a Atenas depois de Justiniano". Marrone aparentemente se baseia nos trabalhos de BLUMENTHAL, H. J. 529 and after: what happened to the academy? Byzantion, v. 48, 1978, 369-385 e CAMERON, A. The last days of the academy at Athens. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, v. 195, 1969, p. 7-29. 27 MARRONE, Steven P. A filosofia medieval em seu contexto. In: MCGRADE, A. S. (org.). Filosofia medieval. Trad. de André Oídes. São Paulo: Ideias e Letras, 2008, p. 34. 21 Peter Brown, por sua vez, descreve a situação como uma rápida simplificação da cultura, tornando-se tênue a distinção entre a cultura aristocrática e a popular que marcou a Antiguidade Tardia 28 , emergindo, assim, um ideal mais utilitário em substituição aos antigos padrões 29 ; desta forma, a educação clássica torna-se apanágio de uma oligarquia limitada 30 . Pierre Riché, após analisar a fusão social, as estruturas econômicas e o destino da cultura que se seguiu posteriormente às grandes invasões bárbaras no Ocidente, afirma que os Bárbaros não viram o interesse da cultura antiga a não ser nas suas manifestações utilitárias (agrimensura, arquitetura, medicina, direito). Deixaram desaparecer o sistema escolar romano – na Gália, no fim do século V; em Itália e em África, ao longo do século VI. Só a igreja salvou, adaptando-o a fins espirituais, uma parte do patrimônio grecolatino 31 . No período posterior à morte de Boécio, em especial nos séculos VII e VIII, percebe-se uma diminuta atividade educacional e literária, salvo em poucos monastérios, onde a educação elementar desenvolvida era quase que inteiramente pessoal 32 . Esta condição de instabilidade e fragilidade da cultura foi intensificada por meio da invasão muçulmana, que significou a quebra de contato com o reservatório de erudição grega e, mais especificamente falando, platônica. Assim, diante de uma total situação de isolamento intelectual a única tarefa que caberia seria a de preservar a coleção de fatos e interpretações já feitas pelos enciclopedistas 33 . O período que compreende a decadência do Império romano no Ocidente também conhece o surgimento de estruturas sociorreligiosas, em particular os monastérios, que vão desempenhar o papel fundamental de preservação e transmissão do saber disponível. Eles serviram como transmissores da alfabetização e contribuíram para a versão da tradição clássica. Em um período em que a alfabetização e a erudição estavam severamente ameaçadas, ainda era possível encontrar no interior e de alguns monastérios uma pequena versão da tradição clássica, sendo que esta era cultivada apenas na medida em que contribuía para fins religiosos 34 . Embora, a investigação tivesse caído em quantidade e qualidade, é um erro supor que ela se extinguira. David C. Lindberg sinalizou corretamente que a investigação continuou, porém adotando novas formas e com uma mudança de enfoque. A ênfase foi dada 28 BROWN, Peter. O fim do mundo clássico: de Marco Aurélio a Maomé. Trad. de Antônio Gonçalves Mattoso. Lisboa: Verbo, 1972, p. 185. 29 Ibid., p.186. 30 Cf. Ibid., p. 138. 31 RICHÉ, Pierre. As Invasões Bárbaras. Lisboa: Europa-América, 1979. p, 87. 32 KNOWLES, David. The evolution of medieval thought. 2. ed. Edinburgh: Longman publishing,1988, p. 68. 33 CROMBIE, Alistair Cameron. Augustine to Galileo: the history of science A.D. 400-1650. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953. p. 4. 34 LINDBERG, David C. Los inícios de la ciencia occidental: la tradición científica europea en el contexto filosófico, religioso e institucional (desde el 600 a. C. hasta 1450). Barcelona: Paidós, 2002, p. 207-208. 22 então ao âmbito religioso e eclesiástico. As mentes mais frutíferas lançaram-se ao campo da interpretação bíblica, à história religiosa, ao governo da Igreja e ao desenvolvimento da doutrina cristã 35 . Assim, o que se seguiu não foi a extinção do saber, mas a sua reorientação em função da vida religiosa. Será necessário esperar até fins do século XI, seguindo o século XII, para encontrarmos um retorno à investigação de caráter filosófico das obras de Aristóteles no Ocidente, tal como havia sido feito anteriormente por Boécio. Um impulso maior à atividade de investigação é dado durante o período Carolíngio e está associado à corte de Carlos Magno. Por meio de suas reformas educativas, ele importou eruditos do exterior, tais como Alcuíno, para organizar uma escola no Palácio, e ordenou o estabelecimento de Escolas monásticas e episcopais em todo o reino, as quais contribuíram para uma maior difusão da educação. A importância da reforma educacional empreendida por Carlos Magno pode ser mais bem compreendida quando lembramos quais foram os organismos através dos quais a educação medieval fluiu, a saber: o monastério, a escola catedral, os mestres individuais e as Universidades. Esses vários tipos de educação aconteciam e repercutiam nas classes sociais que as frequentavam 36 . Embora os frutos da reforma Carolíngia sejam colhidos apenas posteriormente à época de Carlos Magno, durante o reinado de seus sucessores imediatos foi a partir das escolas carolíngias que a vida intelectual da Idade Média se desenvolveu. Nesse florescimento intelectual a questão intrigante consistia 35 Percebemos esta mudança de ênfase ao constatarmos que os escritos de praticamente a totalidade dos autores de maior envergadura intelectual deste período se relacionam, de forma geral, com o âmbito eclesiástico. Lembremos que Isidoro de Sevilha (560-636), além de suas obras enciclopedistas tais como Etimologias e Acerca da Natureza das Coisas, também escreveu manuais para instruir o clero sobre materiais de história, teologia, interpretação bíblica e liturgia. Gregório de Tours escreveu uma História dos Francos na qual documenta a expansão do cristianismo em território Franco. Gregório o Grande (550-604) compôs um influente conjunto de sermões, dissertações, diálogos e comentários bíblicos. Beda, juntamente com seus livros sobre cronometria e calendário, escreveu livros sobre comentários bíblicos, sermões e hagiografias (vidas de santos). (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 237). Para uma defesa das obras e interesses filosóficos ainda predominantes no período que se seguiu à simplificação da cultura e sua conexão com a corte de Carlos Magno, recomendamos fortemente a leitura de MCKITTERICK, Rosamond; MARENBON, John. Philosophy and its background in the early medieval West. In: MARENBON, John. Routledge history of philosophy: medieval philosophy. London: Routledge, 2004, vol. III, p. 96-120. 36 Dentro da cronologia oferecida por David Knowles referente a cada uma dessas "instituições", temos que o monastério se mostrou como força educacional importante no período de 1000 a 1150. O caráter da instrução realizada no monastério era quase que inteiramente doméstico e de proveito particular dos monges; a escola catedral se distinguiu por assistir ao aumento do número de clérigos seculares em suas funções no período compreendido entre 1000 e 1200; os mestres individuais desenvolveram suas atividades principalmente entre os anos de 1050 e 1150; e, por fim, Universidades, de 1050 em diante na Itália e, a partir de 1200, na França (cf. KNOWLES, 1988, p. 74-75). Algo que percebemos nesta proposta de Knowles é que esses organismos não se seguiram cronologicamente. De fato, uma vez que essas instituições se desenvolveram e conviveram simultaneamente, os conflitos entre elas eram inevitáveis. C. H. Lohr percebeu corretamente que as diversas polêmicas que encontramos, tais como aquelas entre Pedro Damião e os dialéticos, a de Lanfranco contra Berengário, a de Bernardo de Claraval contra Abelardo, representam a reação de uma tradição mais antiga frente às mudanças que estavam ocorrendo, em outras palavras, a mais velha ideia monástica em oposição à nova concepção urbana do papel do professor (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 83). 23 em saber "por que a filosofia e a lógica se tornaram um foco de interesse erudito no início da Europa ocidental, especialmente à luz das preocupações acadêmicas vigentes com a teologia cristã e a exposição da Bíblia?" 37 Pois, embora saibamos pouco do currículo existente nas escolas carolíngias, está claro que as sete artes liberais estavam incluídas e que até mesmo a astronomia era ensinada em certo nível. Esse maior nível de ensino pode ser constatado na obra de Gerberto de Aurillac 38 . A retomada dos estudos filosóficos no Ocidente latino cristão foi também impulsionada e precedida pelo contato com aquele trabalho realizado anteriormente por Boécio e a consequente apropriação do seu conteúdo. Percebemos este ponto de maneira mais marcante na constituição do syllabus básico em lógica, porquanto este programa básico de estudos, constituído pelas Categorias e o De Interpretatione 39 , juntamente com a tradução da Isagoge de Porfírio, os Tópicos de Cícero e outros escritos seus (especialmente o De divisione e o De topicis differentiis), era ensinado por Gerberto de Aurillac na escola-catedral de Rheims, próximo ao fim do século X, como integrante de um currículo escolar. É bem verdade que tal currículo não possuía um caráter absoluto de rigidez, pois no século XII ocorrerá a adição do Liber sex principiorum, o qual foi chamado de "lógica velha", logica vetus 40 . Foi apenas por volta de 1120 que as traduções dos Primeiros Analíticos, dos Argumentos Sofísticos e dos Tópicos foram redescobertas, as quais, juntamente com uma tradução dos Segundos Analíticos, realizada por Tiago de Veneza a partir de uma fonte grega, 37 "Why should philosophy and logic have become a focus of scholarly interest within early medieval Western Europe, especially in light of the prevailing scholarly preoccupations with Christian theology and exposition of the Bible?" (MARENBON, 2004, p. 99). 38 De fato, percebe-se na obra de Gerberto de Aurillac um nível de erudição possibilitado pela Reforma Carolíngia. Além de ter contribuído para a recuperação e a difusão das artes liberais clássicas, especialmente daquela lógica associada a Boécio, ele também alcançou considerável nível nas ciências matemáticas. Depreende-se de sua obra este maior nível de erudição, instruções sobre a construção de um modelo astronômico e sobre o uso do Ábaco para multiplicar e dividir (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 241-243). 39 As Categorias foram conhecidas em primeiro lugar por meio de uma paráfrase latina, Categoriae decem. Essa obra, que erroneamente foi atribuída a Agostinho, gozou de tamanha popularidade que se tornou o texto de lógica mais lido desde a época de Alcuíno até o século X. A Categoriae decem é uma obra provavelmente do fim do século IV. Aparentemente é uma tradução adaptada de algum compendium grego das categorias de Aristóteles que provem do ambiente de Themístio (317-388). Porém, gradualmente ela foi substituída pela tradução de Boécio a tal ponto que, por volta do século XII, ela havia quase que desaparecido das escolas. De fato, a Idade Média teve de progressivamente redescobrir o trabalho de Boécio, porquanto a sua tradução da Isagoge é conhecida por volta do século IX e aquela referente ao De Interpretatione apenas um século mais tarde. Os dados anteriormente apresentados se apoiam fortemente naqueles fornecidos por MARENBON, 2003, p. 164-182. 40 O Liber sex principiorum foi erroneamente atribuído a Boécio, mas é na verdade uma obra do século XII. Os estudiosos do assunto estão propensos a atribuí-lo a Gilberto de Poitiers (cf. ASHWORT, 2008, p. 100). 24 receberam a denominação de "nova lógica" 41 . Embora posteriormente a ênfase sobre a obra de Boécio tenha diminuído, são inegáveis os desenvolvimentos estimulados por sua obra. A disponibilização do "corpus aristotélico" no Ocidente latino cristão nos leva à segunda etapa proposta por C. H. Lohr, que tem por contexto a onda de traduções do século XII. A retomada do estudo das obras de Aristóteles estava em consonância com mudanças determinantes no âmbito da sociedade, da economia, da política e da educação, que encontramos desde o final do século IX e que possibilitaram a emergência de uma "civilização complexa" 42 . O resultado desses desenvolvimentos foi o surgimento de uma nova Europa. Muito se debate entre os historiadores sobre a força motriz responsável pelas mudanças no interior daquele modo de civilização. Neste ponto encontramos opiniões muito divergentes, pois, enquanto alguns, como Knowles, julgam ser impossível identificar com precisão a causa responsável pelo florescimento ou o despertar do século XII 43 , outros, como Lindberg, recorrem a várias causas. De forma geral podemos dizer que ocorreu uma combinação de fatores, ou utilizando-nos da expressão de Joseph Ratzinger, ocorreu uma "série providencial de coincidências". Ele resume o contexto destas transformações: Nos países da Europa ocidental reinava, então, uma paz relativa, que garantia à sociedade o desenvolvimento econômico e a consolidação das estruturas políticas, e favorecia uma vivaz atividade cultural graças também aos contatos com o Oriente. No interior da Igreja sentiam-se os benefícios da vasta ação conhecida como 'reforma gregoriana', a qual, promovida vigorosamente no século precedente, tinha contribuído com uma maior pureza evangélica para a vida da comunidade eclesial, sobretudo no clero, e tinha instituído à Igreja e ao Papado uma autêntica liberdade de ação. Além disso, difundia-se uma vasta renovação espiritual, apoiada pelo vigoroso desenvolvimento da vida consagrada: nasciam e expandiam-se novas Ordens religiosas, enquanto que as que já existiam conheciam uma retomada prometedora. Refloresceu também a teologia, adquirindo maior consciência da própria natureza: apurou o método, enfrentou problemas novos, progrediu na contemplação dos Mistérios de Deus, 41 CHLPM, 1982, p. 46; Ver também: KNEALE; KENEALE, 1962, p. 193. Um típico manuscrito de lógica medieval era constituído pelas seguintes obras: Isagoge, Categorias, De Interpretatione, Refutações Sofísticas, os Primeiros Analíticos, os Tópicos, os Segundos Analíticos, o De divisione liber, o De topicis differentiis, e o Líber sex principiorum. Para uma exposição histórica da evolução sofrida pela lógica vetus durante a Idade Média recomendamos a leitura de TORRES, Moisés Romanazzi (org.). A evolução história da logica vetus. Mirabilia, v. 1, n. 16, 2013, p. 201-220. 42 Utilizo aqui esta expressão de Lynn White Jr., que a usou para se referir à emergência de uma sociedade totalmente distinta das antecedentes. Outras denominações como "período de renascimento" também são correntes. Essa última foi popularizada por Charles Haskins. Para uma breve e útil descrição das mudanças ocorridas na Europa que foram responsáveis por sua reestruturação (cf. GRANT, Edward. God and reason in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 17-30). 43 KNOWLES, 1988, p. 75. 25 produziu obras fundamentais, inspirou iniciativas importantes da cultura, da arte e da literatura, e preparou as obras-primas do século seguinte [...] 44 A proposta de Lindberg é interessante, pois, embora ele acredite em uma conjunção de causas, tais como: estabilidade política, inovações tecnológicas, reconfiguração da estrutura social, mudança de uma agricultura primariamente de subsistência, crescimento populacional, aparecimento de vilas e de algumas cidades, atividades de comércio e mercado, argumenta em favor de uma íntima relação entre educação e urbanização como fatores determinantes para o surgimento desta nova Europa posterior ao século X. Tomando por base essa relação, Lindberg analisa a escola prototípica da Idade Média, ou seja, a escola monástica, em oposição às escolas urbanas surgidas posteriormente. Enquanto a primeira era rural, afastada, isolada do mundo secular e dedicada a reduzidos objetivos educativos, as últimas, tendo por contexto o aumento e deslocamento populacional nos séculos XI e XII, saíram da sombra das escolas monásticas e se transformaram na principal força educativa. Talvez seja equívoco pensar em termos de ruptura entre essas duas instituições medievais, porém não devemos esquecer que os objetivos educacionais das novas escolas urbanas eram mais amplos e, ainda que a ênfase do programa docente variasse de uma escola para outra, de fato elas ampliaram e reorientaram o currículo para satisfazer as necessidades de uma variada clientela. Desta forma, os estudos em torno da lógica, as artes do quadrivium, bem como a teologia, o direito e a medicina foram levados a termos que não se coadunavam com a tradição monástica 45 . Independentemente dos fatores que foram responsáveis pelo florescimento da Europa, o que deve ser destacado antes de tudo é a relação existente entre o aparecimento dessa nova mentalidade e as fontes que a nutriram. Rémi Brague enfatiza a necessidade de modificar aquilo que ele chama de "representação hidráulica", ou seja, pensar que foi a disponibilização do "corpus aristotélico" que possibilitou seu estudo. A relação deve ser vista de modo inverso, em outras palavras, só se traduziu porque se sentiu que havia uma necessidade. É esta necessidade que deve ser explicada. Assim, a demanda precede a oferta 46 . 44 BENTO XVI, 2013, p. 9-10. 45 LINDBERG, 2002, p. 244-245. 46 BRAGUE, Rémi. Mediante a Idade Média: filosofias medievais na cristandade, no Judaísmo e no Islã. Trad. de Edson Bini. São Paulo: Loyola, 2010. p. 26. Bernard G. Dod concorda com De Rijk e acredita que não foi pelo fato de haverem sido traduzidos que os tratados aristotélicos foram utilizados, foi, sim, pelo fato de que se precisava usá-los que eles foram traduzidos (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p.83). 26 Esta necessidade se deve ao fato de que ocorreu um renascimento intelectual europeu, o qual é anterior às fontes que a inspiraram em seu empreendimento. A onda de traduções abrange aproximadamente o período que vai da metade do século XII (1150) até fins do século XIII (1295). De fato, o renascimento do século XII nutriu-se de duas instâncias particulares: em parte, do conhecimento e das ideias já existentes no Ocidente latino; por outro lado, do influxo de novo aprendizado e da literatura do Oriente 47 . No que diz respeito ao primeiro caso, já abordamos que o conhecimento de forma geral não foi extinto durante o período que antecedeu o Renascimento do século XII: o que ocorreu foi apenas o seu redirecionamento a outros aspectos da vida cultural. Por isso percebe-se que aquele modo de ciência, tal como conheceram os romanos, o qual tendia em geral a ser uma versão limitada e divulgativa daquilo que fora alcançado pelos gregos 48 , nunca foi por completo extirpado da cultura ocidental, e foi este tipo de conhecimento que os autores medievais herdaram inicialmente. Por isso é correto apontar que a ciência medieval foi um desenvolvimento da aprendizagem enciclopédica de Beda e seus continuadores. Quanto ao segundo caso, podemos perceber que mesmo este aspecto enciclopédico da ciência medieval, será mais tarde acrescido por tratados árabes e aristotélicos 49 , e será justamente esse material, somado àquele conhecimento enciclopédico presente ao longo do período, que estimulará o empreendimento investigativo do século XII. Edward Grant faz menção ao conteúdo desse grande espólio cultural que foi o movimento de traduções do século XII. Segundo ele, esse empreendimento possuía um conteúdo primariamente científico: O novo conhecimento foi quase exclusivamente dos domínios da ciência e da filosofia natural. As humanidades e a literatura não tiveram quase nenhum papel. Dentro dos domínios da ciência e filosofia natural, tornaram-se disponíveis tratados sobre lógica, matemática, astronomia, óptica, mecânica, filosofia natural e medicina assim como obras sobre astrologia, mágica e alquimia 50 . A partir do conteúdo predominante desse movimento de traduções pode-se distinguir esse renascimento do século XII, dos demais que ocorreram ao longo do período medieval e, particularmente, daquele do século XV. Levando em conta esse aspecto, a 47 HASKINS, Charles Homer. The renaissance of the twelfth century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927. p. 278. 48 LINDBERG, 2002, p. 183. 49 KNOWLES, 1988, p. 68. 50 "The new knowledge was almost exclusively from the domains of science and natural philosophy. The humanities and literature played almost no role. Within the domains of science and natural philosophy, treatises became available on logic, mathematics, astronomy, optics, mechanics, natural philosophy, and medicine, as well as works on astrology, magic, and alchemy"(GRANT, 2001, p. 86). 27 diferença consiste em que, enquanto este último preocupava-se antes de tudo com literatura e questões diretamente relacionadas com os textos, aquele, por sua vez, focou sua atenção na ciência e na filosofia. Knowles nos oferece uma proposta muito interessante para a compreensão da recepção de Aristóteles pelo Ocidente latino cristão no interior do movimento de traduções do século XII. Segundo ele, podem-se caracterizar três momentos distintos, os quais compreendem diferentes conjuntos de obras que, por sua vez, podem ser agrupadas por sua natureza interna, tendo cada uma delas um modo de aceitação distinto por conta das implicações decorrentes de sua aceitação, contrariamente às teses por elas postuladas. Segundo esse modelo, o primeiro momento envolveu as obras de lógica, as quais foram absorvidas fácil e avidamente, não ocorrendo assim oposição deliberada contra tais livros; pelo contrário, perceberam-se os aspectos promissores da utilização dos princípios lógicos em outros campos do saber. O segundo momento incluiu as obras propriamente filosóficas, em particular a ciência natural. Essas obras carregavam consigo problemas e foram menos rapidamente absorvidas. De fato, a discussão em torno da eternidade do mundo, da unidade do intelecto, da subsistência da alma etc., são apenas alguns dos temas que as referidas obras carregavam, e estavam em oposição à crença cristã. Por fim, temos a recepção das obras éticas e políticas. Apesar desta análise ser interessante, devemos perceber que ela é uma forma de olharmos a recepção de Aristóteles em suas unidades constitutivas. Se, porventura, analisarmos a recepção de Aristóteles a partir de seu resultado, perguntaremos em que consiste a importância desse período para a posteridade. Embora sejam possíveis diversas respostas relativas à interpretação do século XII, notamos uma polarização entre duas tendências, as quais se distinguem na medida em que enfatizam aspectos diferentes dos componentes desse processo. Assim, por um lado, temos o caráter da pesquisa mais antiga expressa por Haskins, que tende a compreender o trabalho do período como aspecto da mediação. Segundo ele, a tarefa do século XII era colocar o Ocidente uma vez mais em posse dos escritos científicos dos gregos, abrir o conhecimento de seus comentadores e expositores árabes e estimular a atividade científica em todo o campo 51 , o que possibilitou os filósofos do século seguinte desenvolverem o seu vigoroso empreendimento filosófico. Por outro lado, temos a pesquisa mais recente expressa por Marenbon, que tende a destacar as capacidades e conquistas do período que, no seu entender, teve o mérito de desenvolver um método 51 HASKINS, 1927, p. 308. 28 sistemático e argumentativo tanto em teologia quanto na elaboração de sofisticadas técnicas lógicas para análise semântica e estudo dos argumentos 52 . Seria esta estrutura que, juntamente com o novo material aristotélico e árabe disponibilizado, proveram a estrutura na qual se nutriu a filosofia do século seguinte. Independentemente da diferença entre as duas ênfases da pesquisa, acreditamos que o ponto central da discussão são as implicações ou consequências advindas ao pensamento filosófico, porquanto, se levarmos em conta o impacto resultante das traduções do século XII, foi através do contato com novas fontes que se presenciou à ascensão de novos problemas existentes nelas; ou seja, foi por meio do contato com obras desconhecidas, comentários explicativos e trabalhos individuais sobre diversos assuntos, que as fontes de referências do pensamento ocidental foram alargadas e, consequentemente, novas perspectivas foram exigidas. Grant destaca a possibilidade da construção de um sistema filosófico que fosse capaz de explicar a realidade: Tomadas como um todo as traduções de Aristóteles deram aos pensadores Ocidentais, pela primeira vez, assunto sobre o qual construir um sistema completo e maduro, porém a atmosfera, as pressuposições deste grande corpo de pensamento não eram nem medievais nem cristãs, mas do grego antigo e não religiosas, para não dizer racionalistas em caráter 53 . Uma das maiores consequências decorrentes do trabalho dos tradutores do século XII foi a progressiva percepção da insuficiência da estrutura das sete artes liberais clássicas como proposta suficiente para manter em equilíbrio todos os assuntos que podiam ser estudados em algum detalhe, naquele momento, diferentemente do período anterior 54 . Esse processo disponibilizou um corpo de literatura que formaria o currículo das emergentes 52 MARENBON, 1998, p. 179-180. 53 "Taken as a whole the translations of Aristotle gave Western thinkers, for the first time, matter on which to construct a full and mature system, but the atmosphere, the presuppositions of this great body of thought were not medieval and Christian, but ancient Greek and non-religious, not to say rationalistic in character" (KNOWLES, 1988, p. 174). Talvez possa parecer que existe uma exaltação indevida à realização do século XII, porém tal crítica se funda antes de tudo em aspectos que ressaltam ou pressupõem o modo de pensamento especificamente pautado em critérios posteriores estritamente racionalistas. Julgamos esta crítica indevida, pois acreditamos que a relevância de um sistema filosófico não deve ser medida pela sua capacidade em antecipar o pensamento moderno: pelo contrário, sua importância deve levar em conta a sua capacidade explicativa em oferecer respostas satisfatórias ou ao menos plausíveis para os problemas que são enfrentados pelas estruturas de pensamento vigentes em seu tempo. Não estamos defendendo que emergiu na Europa uma época de racionalismo exagerado capaz de ingenuamente confundir-se com o positivismo. Isto sempre esteve longe dos pesquisadores nesse campo. Ressaltamos apenas o grande vigor que surgiu nas mentes, despertando, direcionando e confiando mais em suas capacidades investigativas, fato para o qual mesmo a pesquisa pioneira de Haskins constatou e fez as devidas ressalvas: "nem mesmo em seu mais alto ponto o espírito da Europa cristã na Idade média se emancipou ele mesmo do respeito pela autoridade a qual foi característica da época. O sentido critico tem estado apenas parcialmente despertado, e não penetrou mais distante ou em todas as direções" (HASKINS, 1927, p. 336). 54 LUSCOMBE, David. A history of western philosophy: medieval thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, vol. II, p. 66-67. 29 Universidades e incorreu diretamente na adoção dos escritos de Aristóteles no currículo universitário medieval, fato de consequências muito vastas para a vida intelectual do período e para a civilização ocidental como um todo. Foi o renascimento cultural que possibilitou a existência do século XIII, como a época de ouro do pensamento escolástico. Seu legado esteve presente nos mais importantes desenvolvimentos intelectuais do período que, segundo Jan A. Aertesen, compreendem o aparecimento das Universidades, a recepção de Aristóteles e o conflito entre as Faculdades 55 . Quanto às traduções especificamente de Aristóteles, é necessário distinguir nesse processo as provenientes do árabe e as traduzidas diretamente do grego. Existem divergências entre os estudiosos sobre diversos pontos das traduções. Exemplo disto é a questão em torno do momento específico no qual as obras de Aristóteles sobre filosofia natural ocorreram: enquanto Brague expressa certa dúvida em especificar o momento específico no qual teve início o movimento de traduções, Grant afirma que as primeiras traduções de Aristóteles do árabe para o latim sobre filosofia natural parecem ter ocorrido na Espanha na última metade do século XII 56 . No entanto, nem tudo está envolto em obscuridade e os estudiosos concordam em vários pontos. Sabemos hoje que as primeiras traduções foram feitas por volta do fim do século X na Espanha e o conteúdo material desse empreendimento envolveu primeiramente textos científicos e não filosóficos: os objetivos eram, antes de tudo, textos de caráter prático, a saber: manuais de medicina, aritmética ou astronomia 57 . Duas figuras devem ser destacadas nesse processo de tradução: Gerardo de Cremona (1114-1187) e Miguel Escoto (1175-1232). O primeiro, de fato, foi o mais importante tradutor do árabe no século XII, pois é espantosa a quantidade de material que lhe 55 "The most important intellectual developments in this period – "the rise of the university, the reception of Aristotle, and the conflict between the faculties" (KRETZMANN, Norman; STUMP, Eleonore. The Cambridge companion to Aquinas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. p. 14). 56 Devemos notar que as obras propriamente científicas foram traduzidas do árabe para o latim antes das obras de filosofia natural de Aristóteles. Conhecemos vários desses tradutores: Platão de Tívoli, Adelardo de Bath, Roberto de Chester, Guilherme de Caríntia, Domingo Gundisalvo, Pedro Alfonso, João de Sevilha, entre outros. Essas primeiras traduções realizadas na Espanha são justificadas em função de diversos fatores: a existência de uma notável cultura árabe que possuía ao seu dispor uma grande quantidade de livros escritos em árabe, a presença de comunidades dos moçarabes (árabes cristãos cuja língua nativa era o árabe, sendo-lhes permitido praticar sua religião); outros fatores foram reforçados com a retomada de Toledo pelos cristãos em 1085, durante as Guerras de Reconquista, que implicou na posse cristã dos centros culturais árabes e de suas bibliotecas. Os dados aqui expressos se apoiam fortemente naqueles encontrados em LINDBERG, 2002, p. 260. Ainda que não possamos ter certeza sobre a constituição de uma escola formal de tradução em Toledo, visto que as fontes contam pouco para nós, Haskins parece supor sua existência a partir da constatação de uma sucessão ininterrupta de tradutores por mais de um século (cf. HASKINS, Charles Homer. Studies in the history of mediaeval science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. p. 12-13). 57 BRAGUE, 2010, p. 234. 30 é comumente atribuído, o que deu margem a suposições de que ele teria sido ajudado nessa tarefa por um grupo de estudantes. Independentemente disto ser ou não verdadeiro, sabemos que ele passou aproximadamente três ou quatro décadas em um constante trabalho de tradução que incluiu obras de astronomia, matemática, medicina e quatorze obras de lógica e filosofia natural, dentre as quais o De caelo, Meteorológicos (livro I-III), Sobre a Geração e a Corrupção, Física, os Segundos Analíticos e também uma paráfrase de Temístio sobre esta última obra 58 . As traduções do árabe para o latim foram continuadas no século XIII pelo trabalho de Miguel Escoto. A especificidade dessa série de traduções consiste em que ela envolveu tanto as obras aristotélicas sobre filosofia natural quanto os comentários de Averróis a Aristóteles 59 . Ele traduziu os grandes comentários sobre o De caelo, De anima, Física, os comentários médios sobre Geração e Corrupção, Parva naturalia, e outros mais. O trabalho empreendido pelos tradutores permitiu que "praticamente toda a filosofia natural de Aristóteles se tornasse disponível no Ocidente latino em torno de meados do século XIII" 60 . Por ter sido constatado um viés árabe da entrada de Aristóteles no Ocidente, alguns defendem que o Ocidente tenha aprendido Aristóteles por meio das traduções árabes. Bernard G. Dod acredita que isso não passa de uma lenda, porquanto essas traduções apenas ocorreram na medida em que faltavam traduções inteligíveis diretamente do grego. Além do mais, com exceção das obras De Caelo, Meteorologica I-III, De animalibus, Metaphysics, foram poucas as traduções provindas do árabe que obtiveram ampla circulação, e, mesmo nesse caso, elas foram em seguida rapidamente substituídas pelas versões de Guilherme de Moerbeke 61 . Portanto, não se deve exagerar a importância das traduções árabe-latinas de 58 Ao todo lhe são creditadas 71 traduções as quais cobrem um vasto campo científico (cf. GRANT, 2009, p. 177178). Lindberg nos oferece a seguinte listagem: uma dezena de textos astronômicos, dezessete obras de matemática e ótica, quatorze sobre lógica e filosofia natural, vinte quatro obras médicas (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 261). 59 Existe uma considerável discussão a respeito da tradução por Miguel Escoto de alguns dos longos comentários de Averróis a Aristóteles. Sem sombra de dúvida ele foi o mais prolífico nesta atividade, porém não foi o único estudioso a traduzir os comentários de Averróis para o latim. Sendo assim, reconhecemos apenas o caráter de plausibilidade da atribuição acima realizada. 60 GRANT, 2009, p. 181. 61 Não é de todo verdadeira a declaração de que Aristóteles alcançou os latinos por meio dos árabes. Tomada literalmente, ela é falsa, pois na maior parte ele chegou aos eruditos latinos por meio de traduções diretas do grego. Lembremos que a tradução do grego nunca cessou totalmente. Exemplos típicos de tradutores são Boécio, no século VI, e Erígena, no século IX. Além do mais, algumas regiões eram favorecidas pela presença de comunidades que falavam o grego, caso particularmente encontrado no sul da Itália, na Sicília, havendo também nessa região bibliotecas que continham livros em grego. É bem verdade que os benefícios advindos do contato entre a Itália e o Império Bizantino não são constatados da mesma forma em outros lugares, porém o que deve ser destacado é apenas a rapidez e a ênfase com as quais as traduções diretamente do grego são feitas a partir do século XII (CF. MARENBON, John. Bonaventure, the German Dominicans and the new translations. In: MARENBON, John (org.). Routledge history of philosophy: medieval philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2004. vol. III, p. 226). É compreensível o motivo pelo qual os estudiosos davam preferência às versões do grego para o latim, pois, embora os tradutores do árabe adotassem o mesmo método literal que os 31 Aristóteles 62 ; elas não são a causa do renascimento cultural, mas seu efeito 63 . Sendo assim, as traduções feitas diretamente do grego possuem uma importância que não pode ser relegada ou substituída por aquelas feitas a partir do árabe. O empreendimento cultural de tradução das obras de Aristóteles do grego para o latim não consistiu na constituição de escolas; foi, sim, fruto do trabalho de diversos personagens que, infelizmente, passaram como anônimos nessa atividade. Os únicos nomes de tradutores conhecidos do século XII são Tiago de Veneza, João e Henrique 64 . Levando em conta o movimento de tradução como um todo, destacam-se os nomes de Tiago de Veneza e Guilherme de Moerbeke (1215-1286). Tiago de Veneza foi o mais importante tradutor de Aristóteles diretamente do grego, no século XII, uma vez que lhe é creditado o mérito de ter traduzido a Física, o De anima, os Segundos Analíticos e alguns fragmentos de comentadores gregos sobre esta obra, a Parva naturalia, etc 65 . Guilherme de Moerbeke, por sua vez, além de ter revisado diversas traduções existentes, tanto pela primeira tradução latina da Política, Ética, De motu animalium e De progressu animalium; de ter feito novas traduções das Categorias, do De caelo, dos Meteorológicos, Retórica e De interpretatione, além do restante do De animalibus, realizou também revisões de diversas obras, dentre as quais destacamos os Segundos Analíticos, Física, De anima, Parva naturalia, Metafísica, Sobre a geração e corrupção, entre outras. Quanto à recepção de Aristóteles pelo Ocidente, podemos dizer que, "enquanto os seus tratados lógicos foram de interesse imediato e vital tanto para cada mestre quanto para toda escola, as suas obras filosóficas e científicas não foram de interesse direto nem para os lógicos nem para os teólogos" 66 . Bernard G. Dod afirma que, da evidência material do século seus conterrâneos, o resultado, era muito diferente, porquanto as traduções árabes elas mesmas não eram feitas diretamente do grego, mas através de versões siríacas intermediárias, e assim os tradutores para o latim estavam trabalhando em remover o original que se encontrava por trás da linguagem semítica que não os conduzia prontamente a traduções literais, seja do grego, seja do latim. Disto resultava que as traduções de Aristóteles do árabe para o latim são muito mais difíceis de ser lidas e entendidas do que as versões latinas traduzidas diretamente do grego, fato que explica por que elas mais tarde foram preferidas quando estavam disponíveis (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 68). 62 BRAGUE, 2010, p. 237. 63 Ibid., p. 247. 64 A Física e os Segundos Analíticos foram revisados a partir da versão de Tiago de Veneza (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 57-58). 65 Parva naturalia são os pequenos tratados físicos, dentre os quais: Da sensação e o Sensível; Da memória; Do Sono; Dos Sonhos; Da Adivinhação pelo Sono; Da Longevidade e Brevidade da Vida; Da Juventude, Senilidade, Vida e Morte, e Respiração. Estas obras encontram-se impressas na coleção publicada pela Cambridge: BARNES, Jonathan.The complete works of Aristotle: the revised Oxford translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, vol. I-II. 66 "but whereas the logical treatises of Aristotle were of immediate and vital interest to each and every master and school, the philosophical and scientific works were of no direct interest either to logicians or to theologians" (KNOWLES, 1988, p. 172). 32 XII, percebe-se que, embora a maioria das obras de Aristóteles tivessem sido traduzidas nesse século, seu estudo e circulação só ocorreu de forma significativa no século XIII e, ainda que a "lógica antiga" tivesse sido bastante estudada e os Segundos Analíticos fossem conhecidos por alguns escolásticos, esta obra foi pouco analisada 67 . Ao que tudo indica, o estudo de Aristóteles na Europa antes do século XIII era do interesse apenas de um punhado de mestres e estudantes, o que significa que ele não se tornou realmente importante no mundo acadêmico senão em meados do século XIII 68 , limitando-se no início o seu conhecimento apenas a poucos lugares. Assim, a emergência do Estagirita como uma figura proeminente no mundo acadêmico foi algo gradual e o processo de recepção e assimilação de Aristóteles no Ocidente Latino durante a Idade Média foi, na verdade, um processo lento, e isto vale inclusive para as obras que não foram alvo de proibições eclesiásticas. A partir dos dados fornecidos no século XII, podemos perceber que a ênfase dos estudos se concentrou sobre o âmbito da logica vetus, com predominância para os Elencos Sofísticos. Isto talvez se deva à novidade da obra, visto que ela não tinha sido conhecida anteriormente. Os Primeiros e Segundos Analíticos, juntamente com os Tópicos, apesar de serem conhecidos por alguns eruditos, não foram amplamente estudados 69 . O contato com o corpus aristotelicum, em especial com os tratados de filosofia natural e os Segundos Analíticos, suscitou ao pensamento medieval diversas questões presentes nestas obras, dentre as quais destacamos: a caracterização do conhecimento científico; a classificação das ciências e os seus respectivos objetos de investigação; o modo específico de proceder de cada uma das ciências, etc. Levando em conta que, após as traduções, um típico manuscrito do Órganon de Aristóteles incluiria diversas obras, dentre as quais destacamos os Segundos Analíticos, e, levando em conta que a Física fazia parte do "corpus vetustius 70 ", fica estabelecido que, tanto 67 "Although the majority of Aristotle's works had been translated in the twelfth century, the evidence of the manuscripts and other sources indicates that they were not much studied and circulated until the thirteenth century" (CHLMP, 1982, p. 50). 68 Ibid., p. 53. 69 No que diz respeito aos Segundos Analíticos a situação é um pouco mais complicada, e isto talvez se tenha dado pela própria dificuldade do texto, pois John de Salisbury queixa-se, em seu Metalogicon, de que os Segundos Analíticos possuem tantos obstáculos quantos capítulos, indicando assim que esta obra era de seu conhecimento, ao menos no que diz respeito à constatação de sua dificuldade por meio de algum contato com ela. Além do mais, no prólogo da versão que é comumente atribuída à misteriosa figura de Ioannes, é dito que o conhecimento dessa obra não é difundido entre os falantes latinos de sua geração. Menciona ainda o estado de incompletude do que seria uma possível tradução de Boécio que se encontraria obscurecida pela corrupção. Por fim, registra que, embora a versão de Tiago de Veneza fosse conhecida pelos mestres da França, o silêncio destes testemunha que ela estava envolta em obscuridade, resultando daí proveito quase nulo (CHLMP, 1982, p. 56). 70 As obras que formavam a coleção de obras lógicas são as seguintes: a Isagoge de Porfírio, Categorias, De Interpretatione, De divisione e De topicis differentiis de Boécio, o Liber sex principiorum, e os Primeiros Analíticos, Segundos Analíticos, Tópicos, Elencos Sofísticos de Aristóteles. 33 a coleção padrão lógica quanto aquela sobre filosofia natural que circularam, continham as duas obras (Física e Segundos Analíticos), nas quais a compreensão do Estagirita sobre a relação entre física e matemática são mais explícitas. É justamente este problema que será cada vez mais objeto de investigação dos filósofos e culminará na revolução científica durante a modernidade. Esse processo, porém, apenas foi possível pela inclusão dos escritos aristotélicos como base para a formação intelectual. Para apreciarmos corretamente a grande importância que as traduções de Aristóteles desempenharam no âmbito intelectual do Ocidente, devemos observar o lugar de destaque que foi reservado aos seus escritos, e, particularmente, àqueles sobre filosofia natural. O predomínio do aristotelismo é, de fato, um fenômeno tardio que a Idade Média conheceu depois de decorridos vários séculos. Esta primazia é evidenciada na inclusão de seus escritos como componentes curriculares das Universidades. A recepção das obras de Aristóteles foi um fato de imensa repercussão para o pensamento filosófico ocidental, que David Knowles designou como a "revolução filosófica" do século XIII. Talvez a maior implicação decorrente da adoção dos escritos de filosofia natural no currículo da Faculdade de Artes tenha sido a substituição e/ou o notável declínio no estudo das sete artes liberais, as quais foram relegadas ao status de estudo introdutório, enquanto a filosofia natural de Aristóteles passou a ocupar a posição de assunto primário na educação em artes. E, uma vez que o título de bacharel em artes era pré-requisito para a admissão nos cursos superiores de medicina, direito ou teologia, praticamente todos os estudantes na Universidade medieval tiveram contato com os escritos de Aristóteles sobre filosofia natural, segundo nos informa Edward Grant: Praticamente todos os estudantes em uma Universidade medieval recebiam o currículo em filosofia natural, a qual era primariamente a filosofia natural de Aristóteles. Era o currículo que todos eles compartilhavam. Uma vez que, a filosofia natural de Aristóteles era o currículo básico para todos os estudantes durante cinco séculos, é óbvio que a filosofia natural, com suas características racionalistas, foi institucionalizada nas Universidades. Indivíduos educados na sociedade medieval eram assim expostos a um currículo que Os editores do Aristoteles latinus reservaram a expressão "corpus vetustius" para se referirem à coleção padrão dos escritos de Aristóteles sobre filosofia natural, realizada por volta da metade no século XIII. Em geral o corpus vestustius continha as seguintes obras: Física (Tiago de Veneza); De caelo (Gerardo de Cremona); De generatione et corruptione (anônimo); De anima (Tiago de Veneza); De memoria (Tiago de Veneza); De sensu (anônimo ); De somno (anônimo); De longitudine (Tiago de Veneza); De differentia spiritus et animae (João de Sevilha ou anônimo); De plantis (Alfredo de Sareshel); Meteorologica (Gerardo de Cremona e Henrique); Metaphysics (Tiago revisou apenas o Livro I); Metaphysics (Miguel Escoto); De causis (Gerardo de Cremona); Nicolas de Amiens, De articulis fidei. A relação destes livros baseia-se na informação fornecida por Bernard G. Dod (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 50). 34 enfatizava uma abordagem racional de problemas sobre o mundo físico 71 . As obras de Aristóteles que constituíram o núcleo da filosofia natural eram usualmente referidas coletivamente como "livros naturais", os quais eram: Física, De caelo, De anima, Geração e corrupção e Meteorológicos 72 . A Faculdade de Artes na Universidade medieval possuía uma orientação de ensino bem específica, tal como afirma Grant. A natureza desse ensino era primariamente uma educação em lógica, filosofia natural e ciências exatas, onde a razão funcionou como a mais importante ferramenta de interpretação e análise. Na ausência de cursos em literatura e história e outros temas de humanidades, a Universidade medieval ofereceu uma educação que era esmagadoramente orientada em direção e temas analíticos: lógica, ciência, matemática e filosofia natural 73 . É bem verdade que, embora o currículo tivesse essa orientação específica, a distribuição entre as áreas era diferente: ainda que as matemáticas estivessem presentes por meio do quadrivium, nunca, porém, foram proeminentes. A aritmética e a geometria ocupavam talvez de oito a dez semanas no currículo de um típico estudante medieval. A astronomia chegou a ser cultivada em um nível mais alto, mas isto não se dava de forma unânime no tempo nem, simultaneamente, nos lugares. Enfim, as ciências matemáticas ocuparam um lugar discreto no currículo. Ainda que seja difícil mencionar o momento específico em que Tomás de Aquino teve seu contato inicial com a obra de Aristóteles, sabemos, que foi nos primeiros anos da formação desse contexto acadêmico que a influência do Estagirita se fez sentir de forma mais marcante sobre Tomás de Aquino 74 . 71"virtually all students at a medieval university took the natural philosophy curriculum, which was primarily Aristotle's natural philosophy. It was the curriculum they all shared. [..]Since Aristotelian natural philosophy was the basic curriculum for all students for some five centuries, it is obvious that natural philosophy, with its rationalistic characteristics, was institutionalized in the universities. Educated individuals in medieval society were thus exposed to a curriculum that emphasized a reasoned approach to problems about the physical world" (GRANT, 2001, p. 101). 72 GRANT, 2001, p. 152. 73 "A medieval university education in arts was primarily an education in logic, natural philosophy, and the exact sciences, where reason functioned as the most important tool of interpretation and analysis. In the absence of courses in literature and history and other humanities subjects, the medieval university offered an education that was overwhelmingly oriented toward analytical subjects: logic, science, mathematics, and natural philosophy" (Ibid., p. 102). 74 LINDBERG, 2002, p. 269. Dizer, de fato, quando Tomás de Aquino teve contato com a obra de Aristóteles é difícil. Tomás de Aquino nasceu em Roccaseca, na Itália meridional, por volta de 1224. Por ser o filho caçula, foi oferecido como oblato no mosteiro vizinho. Por conta da proximidade com Monte Cassino, ele, com aproximadamente 5 ou 6 anos foi enviado para lá. Em Monte Cassino deve ter recebido uma boa instrução básica, a qual incluía alguns rudimentos em letras, e foi iniciado na vida religiosa beneditina, fato que se tornou marcante em sua personalidade, visto que vários destes pontos são identificados em suas obras nos períodos posteriores de sua vida. As coisas se complicam mais um pouco quando se busca saber até que ponto se 35 Daquilo que temos discutido até o presente momento algumas implicações são determinantes para as análises subsequentes. Em primeiro lugar, pudemos perceber que o contato e a posterior assimilação de Aristóteles foi um processo complexo no qual os homens do medievo viveram "a perturbação, a resistência, o escândalo dos tradicionalistas, as hesitações da Igreja, primeiro condenando, depois tolerando e filtrando Aristóteles, antes de deixar, enfim, passar a torrente [Aristóteles] domada por seus doutores 75 ". Em segundo lugar, destacamos que o processo de recepção foi determinado a partir de aspectos subjacentes ao modo específico da civilização medieval. Em outras palavras, a obra de Aristóteles suscitou aos filósofos medievais problemas específicos que decorriam de várias instâncias sociais próprias ao mundo medieval, e.g., a ascensão da teologia ao nível acadêmico. Nesta mesma estendia essa educação elementar que ele recebeu em Monte Cassino. Quando Tomás foi enviado para Nápoles, provavelmente por instabilidade política, aos 14 ou 15 anos (1239-1244), afim de ali desenvolver estudos mais aprofundados, ele pôde se inscrever no studium generale que havia sido fundado por Frederico II. Dentre os vários intuitos com que isto foi feito, estava o de se contrapor à Universidade de Bolonha. Aí Tomás de Aquino devia começar seus estudos pelas artes e filosofia antes de poder se dedicar à teologia. O contexto no qual se encontrava Nápoles foi determinante em sua formação, pois, embora a Universidade aí fundada em 1220 fosse pequena "desde os seus primórdios ela expressava uma atitude não rígida e aberta aos novos ventos, ao direito romano e já a Aristóteles" (cf. AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma teológica. São Paulo: Loyola, 2001, vol. I, p. 23). Torrell também nos informa que nessa época havia intensa vida cultural no sul da Itália (Palermo, Salerno e Nápoles), onde eram florescentes a ciência aristotélica, a astronomia árabe e a medicina grega (TORRELL, Jean-Pierre. Iniciação a Santo Tomás de Aquino: sua pessoa e obra. Trad. de Luiz Paulo Rouanet. 3. ed. São Paulo: Loyola, 1999, p. 7.). Podemos assim destacar que a estada de Tomás de Aquino em Nápoles foi determinante em dois aspectos: em primeiro lugar, pela provável mediação do contato inicial com a obra de Aristóteles que estava em ascensão como figura proeminente no mundo intelectual de então algo para o qual ele mais tarde contribuiria decididamente. Sendo assim, é quase certo que ele conheceu em Nápoles aquele que se tornaria para ele o filósofo por excelência; em segundo lugar, temos o seu contato com a Ordem dos Frades Pregadores, a qual seria sempre para ele "o modelo da vida evangélica e apostólica, contemplativa e ativa, teologal e dedicada aos outros". Santo Tomás esteve sob a influência de Alberto Magno por um considerável período (1245-1252). Da época em que ficou em Paris podemos levar em conta aquilo que Torrell nos informa, a saber, dos três anos escolares em Paris, "Não se exclui que a primeira parte deles tenha sido o ano de noviciado, que Tomás ainda não pudera ter desde que assumira o hábito, em abril de 1244. Quanto aos dois anos seguintes, pôde estudar as artes, tanto na Faculdade como no convento, mas nada impede que tenha seguido em Saint-jacques, simultaneamente, certos cursos de teologia com Alberto Magno, do qual recopia o De caelesti hierarchia, num manuscrito que dá mostras de conhecimento do sistema parisiense de "peças". Em 1248, parte para Colônia em companhia de Alberto, com quem irá continuar seus estudos de teologia e seu trabalho assistente". Gauthier informa que neste período parisiense ele pode ter completado a formação recebida em Nápoles. Sendo assim, Tomás teria frequentado a faculdade de artes, isto talvez pelo fato de que os 4 ou 5 anos que ele passou em Nápoles não fossem suficientes para terminar o ciclo de estudos de artes (visto que geralmente eles consumiam 6 ou 7 anos de estudos). Durante sua estada em Paris, no convento de Saint-Jacques, ele teve contato com Alberto Magno, do qual "recebeu formação filosófica e conseqüentemente aristotélica. Desta forma Tomás pôde familiarizar-se desde cedo com a filosofia natural de Aristóteles e sua metafísica numa época em seu estudo ainda era oficialmente proibido em Paris" (TORRELL, 1999, p. 8). Quanto à sua posterior estada em Colônia (1248-1252), sabemos que ela se deveu ao fato de Alberto Magno ter sido incumbido de organizar um Studium generale em Colônia (1248-1252). Foi durante esses anos que a influência de Alberto Magno sobre Tomás se mostrou de maneira mais determinante. Depois de Colônia ele seguiu para os primeiros anos de ensino em Paris (1252-1256). Esses anos sob a influência de Alberto Magno devem ter sido notáveis, pois foi durante esse tempo que Tomás teve de fato um contato íntimo com a obra do Estagirita e com os seus comentadores árabes. Ratinzger também acredita que a decisão de Santo Tomás seguir Alberto Magnio indo para Colônia, onde este último tinha sido convidado por seus Superiores para fundar uma Casa de estudos teológicos, foi determinante, pois, era aí que Alberto ilustrava e explicava tanto Aristóteles quanto os seus comentadores árabes (cf. BENTO XVI, 2013, p. 120). 75 AQUINO, 2001, p. 24. 36 categoria devemos ainda incluir os problemas provenientes de leituras alternativas que foram obtidas como resultado do processo de traduções. Isto ficará mais claro no próximo capítulo quando mostraremos repercussões desse tipo na análise que Tomás de Aquino fez de uma passagem no livro II da Física. Em terceiro lugar, percebemos que o contato com os escritos aristotélicos implicaram na possibilidade de construir uma filosofia da natureza. Pois, anteriormente à redescoberta da ciência aristotélica e à metodologia científica do século XII, não havia uma forte tentativa em elaborar uma teoria física da natureza. Os teólogos, ao comentarem o Hexaemeron, se baseavam na cosmologia platônica utilizada por Agostinho 76 . Isso mudou drasticamente após o contato com as obras de filosofia natural, as quais implicaram uma explicação da realidade por princípios inerentes a ela mesma. Assim, dentre os vários problemas dos quais os teólogos e filósofos medievais tomaram conhecimento a partir do contato com a Física e os Segundos Analíticos, temos a distinção entre a física e a matemática. Dessa forma, devemos em seguida investigar em que medida foi possível a Tomás de Aquino, apoiando-se em Aristóteles, defender uma teoria física da natureza que explicava os múltiplos dados advindos da experiência. E isto paralelamente ao reconhecimento da autonomia da ciência matemática com os seus respectivos objetos e métodos de investigação. 76 WEISHEILP, James A. The development of physical theory in the middle ages. New York: [s.n.], 1959, p. 19. 37 2 A DISTINÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO A questão referente à catalogação dos saberes humanos é algo que se constituiu como tema de investigação de boa parte da tradição filosófica. A divergência, por sua vez, mostrou-se tanto no critério a ser utilizado na realização desta tarefa, como nos grupos propostos e, respectivamente, em relação às ciências que deveriam compor esses grupos. Dentre as clássicas propostas que foram feitas merece destaque aquela realizada por Aristóteles, que dividiu as ciências em produtivas, práticas e teóricas. As primeiras englobavam tudo aquilo relativo a fabricação de objetos úteis; as ciências práticas, por sua vez, tinham por objeto a conduta humana; por fim, as ciências teóricas ou especulativas tinham como fim apenas a verdade. Este último grupo era composto pela física 77 , a matemática e a metafísica. Na presente análise é justamente este grupo que será objeto de nossa investigação, em especial a distinção entre física e matemática. Esta classificação de Aristóteles não pareceu adequada a todos os filósofos que se dedicaram a investigar este assunto. Lembremos que foram propostas diferentes classificações daquela oferecida pelo Estagirita, dentre as quais merece destaque tanto a classificação da filosofia realizada pelos estóicos quanto a posterior distinção das sete artes liberais clássicas. Para os estóicos, a filosofia era dividida em lógica, física e ética; as sete artes liberais, por sua vez eram sistematizadas ou compreendidas em dois segmentos, formados, respectivamente, pelo trivium, que englobava a gramática, a retórica e a dialética, e pelo quadrivium, que era constituído pela música, astronomia, aritmética e geometria. Esta proposta teve grande destaque ao longo da história educacional no Ocidente Latino, a qual foi marcada por uma forte dependência filosófica deste modelo. Apesar disso, a proposta do Estagirita sempre foi tida em alta estima, apesar de ter alcançado o Ocidente apenas de forma indireta, porquanto foi somente por meio da exposição de Boécio, que de maneira geral seguia a mesma estrutura defendida por Aristóteles, que o Ocidente conheceu a referida classificação, inicialmente. Podemos, de fato, acompanhar o grande itinerário realizado pelo problema da classificação das ciências ao longo da história intelectual do Ocidente de forma geral e, mais especificamente, durante o período medieval. Pode-se perceber que, ao longo do percurso, o 77 Uma vez que durante o medievo as expressões ciência natural, e filosofia natural além de serem várias vezes utilizadas como sinônimas e incluírem aquele mesmo campo de estudos abarcados pela física aristotélica, no presente trabalho nos utilizaremos destas expressões de modo intercambiável. Sendo assim, usaremos ao longo deste trabalho as três expressões de forma indiscriminada. 38 referido problema mostrou feições de caráter aristotélico, as quais, somadas ao trabalho de diversos comentadores neoplatônicos da Antiguidade Tardia, em particular ao de Boécio 78 , alcançaram o mundo Medieval Latino e foram objeto de diversas abordagens. Devemos lembrar que o motivo pelo qual a questão da classificação das ciências se tornou um assunto muito debatido durante o Medievo está inicialmente diretamente relacionado com a ascensão da teologia ao nível de ensino. A tentativa de conceder a esta um lugar entre as disciplinas seculares é um empreendimento surgido posteriormente. O problema se tornará mais explícito com a recepção dos Segundos Analíticos, pois se discutirá em que medida a Teologia pode ser ciência, visto que ela não satisfaz às condições que Aristóteles estabelece para que alguma investigação receba legitimamente tal designação. Daí este tema ter sido objeto de diversas abordagens 79 . Constatemos inicialmente como Aristóteles procedeu na classificação das ciências. Embora sejam diversas as passagens às quais o Filósofo remete a sua crença na distinção entre física e matemática, este assunto é abordado de forma mais detalhada na Física e na Metafísica. A discussão em ambas as obras possui ênfases distintas, pois, enquanto na Metafísica a exposição inclui as três ciências teóricas, na Física a discussão é mais restrita e se concentra na oposição entre física e matemática. Devemos notar que, ao longo da argumentação do Estagirita, no livro VI da Metafísica o que está em foco são duas preocupações principais: em primeiro lugar ele busca restringir o número de ciências especulativas unicamente a três, porquanto tudo aquilo que pode ser objeto de investigação, tendo como fim unicamente a verdade, recai no âmbito de investigação da física, da matemática ou da ciência primeira. Sua segunda preocupação consiste em mostrar o que as distingue entre si, pois, havendo três ciências especulativas, é necessário saber aquilo que as diferencia enquanto tais. A resposta de Aristóteles na Metafísica busca encontrar um princípio responsável pela divisão entre as ciências. Desta forma, ele divide as ciências em função de seus objetos materiais e formais. Sua discussão se move no âmbito de demonstrar que de fato a ciência natural, a matemática e a filosofia primeira são verdadeiramente especulativas, tendo como fim unicamente a verdade 80 . Justifica isto entendendo-as como investigando propriamente as causas e os princípios das coisas. Em suas palavras "todas essas ciências distinguem e isolam 78 GRANT, 2009, p. 10. 79 Para uma exposição de diversas propostas de classificação das ciências no Ocidente ver: LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. El concepto y la classificación de la ciencia en el medioevo. In: BONI, Luiz Alberto de. (org.) A ciência e a organização dos saberes na Idade Média. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2000, p. 57-83. 80 ARISTÓTELES. Metafísica, 2006, II, 1. 993b20. Quando houver ao longo do trabalho menção a outra versão, isto será indicado. 39 algum ser em particular ou gênero e dele se ocupam como objeto de investigação" 81 . O argumento aqui estabelecido remonta à ideia de que esta distinção estabelece-se a partir da própria estrutura ontológica das coisas, pois as ciências fazem justamente a delimitação daquilo que está dado no mundo com suas próprias determinações. Embora a exposição de Aristóteles nessa passagem não mencione explicitamente a física e a matemática, Enrico Berti infere que ambas as disciplinas estão em sua mente nestes textos. Seu argumento leva em conta que "a ciência que torna clara a essência de seu objeto por meio da sensação é a física, enquanto aquela que a põe como hipótese é a matemática 82 ". Outro ponto que aparentemente reforça a sugestão de Enrico Berti é o fato de que, logo em seguida, o Filósofo menciona explicitamente o campo de investigação da física, dando assim a ideia de continuidade argumentativa com a parte anterior. O estabelecimento da física como uma disciplina teorética se dá inicialmente não por afirmação, mas por consequência pois é pela compreensão de que ela não satisfaz às condições de ser nem uma ciência prática nem uma ciência produtiva que ela é compreendida como especulativa dentro do sistema aristotélico. Tendo estabelecido a ciência natural como uma disciplina teorética, uma questão que surge naturalmente nesse contexto é saber em que medida as disciplinas especulativas se distinguem entre si. É nesse âmbito que Aristóteles ressalta a importância de investigar a essência e sua forma, visto que, se isto não for levado em consideração, sua investigação será inútil 83 . Aristóteles, então, recorre a uma distinção no modo de definição das coisas; algumas são definidas como chato enquanto outras o são como côncavo. De fato, a distinção referida pelo Estagirita leva em conta o modo pelo qual as coisas definidas estão ligadas à matéria sensível, pois, chato é um nariz curvo. Dizemos assim que não se pode pronunciar e nem inteligir curvo sem que esteja compreendida a noção de algo material que possui a propriedade de ser curvo; percebemos assim uma relação de indissociabilidade da matéria sensível. Por sua vez, "a concavidade é independente da matéria sensível", sendo assim, não é necessário que pensemos a concavidade como ligada necessariamente à matéria, porquanto ela é justamente a propriedade que entidades materiais podem possuir. Resumindo, podemos dizer que o curvo sempre é definido como um sínolon, ou uma combinação de matéria e forma, e deste modo a matéria sensível é levada na sua definição, enquanto que a concavidade é vista simplesmente como uma forma, e deste modo independe da matéria em sua definição. 81 ARISTÓTELES. Metafísica, 2006, VI, 1, 1025b 1. 82 BERTI, Enrico. As razões de Aristóteles. Trad. de Dion Davi Macedo. São Paulo: Loyola, 1998, p. 48. 83 ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica, 2006, VI, 1. 1025b 25. 40 Aristóteles julga que a distinção entre o chato e o côncavo serve como modelo para explicitar a diferença entre os entes físicos e os matemáticos: enquanto todos os entes naturais são análogos ao chato em sua natureza, ou seja, incluem matéria e forma em sua definição e, consequentemente, não podem ser nomeados e inteligidos sem relação ao movimento, os matemáticos, por sua vez, se assemelham ao exemplo da concavidade, por isso eles podem ser referidos e inteligidos independentemente da matéria sensível. Ainda que não encontremos um questionamento direto de Aristóteles sobre o estatuto epistêmico da matemática, o mesmo não se pode dizer de seu estatuto ontológico. Podemos perceber logo no início da exposição do Filósofo sobre as entidades matemáticas que ele expressa certa dúvida sobre o estatuto ontológico delas, e isto é feito em oposição ao modo de compreensão, daí afirmar ele que [...] a matemática é também teorética, porém, se seus objetos são imóveis e separados da matéria não está claro no presente momento, está claro, contudo, que ela considera alguns objetos matemáticos enquanto imóveis e enquanto separáveis da matéria 84 . A dúvida repousa, pois, na oposição existente entre a existência e o modo de considerar os objetos matemáticos, pois ainda que não se saiba ao certo o estatuto ontológico que eles possuem, ou seja, se eles independem ou não da matéria para subsistir, o que se sabe ao certo é que a matemática, ao tomá-los em seu âmbito de estudo, os considera enquanto imóveis e separáveis da matéria. Percebemos nesta passagem uma renúncia em conceder aos números certa independência ontológica, tal como no platonismo; antes, é a maneira como são concebidos que lhes permite serem objeto de investigação. Poderíamos pensar assim que a matemática lida com as formas presentes na matéria, mas deixa de lado a concretude das coisas no seu modo de proceder. A dificuldade em extrair dados conclusivos da postura aristotélica quanto aos objetos matemáticos consiste em que o Estagirita nunca dedicou uma obra exclusivamente ao seu tratamento, mas sua postura encontra-se dispersa, e até mesmo quando temos um tratamento mais demorado sobre o assunto, isto é feito em consonância com outras questões existentes. Em outras palavras, o tratamento das entidades matemáticas é 84 "Mathematics also is theoretical; but whether its objects are immovable and separable from matter, is not at present clear; it is clear, however, that it considers some mathematical objects qua immovable and qua separable from matter" (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica,1025b 19 1026a 33. In: BARNES, Jonathan. The complete works of Aristotle: the revised oxford translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, v. 2. p. 85). 41 feito em primeiro lugar submetido a outros assuntos em questão fato para o qual vários comentadores têm chamado a atenção 85 . Por fim, o Filósofo insere a metafísica na discussão, destacando a sua natureza especulativa e o seu objeto de investigação, o qual consiste nas "coisas que são tanto dissociáveis da matéria quanto não submetidas ao movimento". Destas substâncias se ocupa a filosofia primeira, cujos objetos são imutáveis: é a ciência do ser enquanto ser. A classificação das ciências especulativas propostas por Aristóteles na Metafísica compreende, portanto, três disciplinas com seus respectivos objetos de investigação. Como ele mesmo afirma: A ciência natural lida com coisas que são inseparáveis da matéria, porém não são imóveis, e algumas partes da matemática lidam com coisas que são imóveis, porém provavelmente não são separáveis, mas presentes na matéria; enquanto a ciência primeira lida com coisas que são ao mesmo tempo separáveis e imóveis 86 . O poder de enquadramento das entidades nesta proposta de classificação é notório, pois as entidades que não estão compreendidas nas disciplinas práticas ou produtivas recaem por fim em uma das ciências especulativas. É bem verdade que em outras passagens Aristóteles retoma a distinção entre as disciplinas teóricas. Um lugar privilegiado para acompanharmos essa distinção é uma passagem do segundo livro da Física. Nos tópicos seguintes analisaremos em que medida a argumentação ali efetuada está em consonância com aquela do livro sexto da Metafísica. A relação existente entre a Física e os demais escritos de Aristóteles é um assunto muito debatido pelos estudiosos, porquanto estabelecer qual é a função ocupada pelos princípios e conclusões obtidos no âmbito da física aristotélica dentro de seu sistema filosófico é algo determinante para compreendermos melhor a estrutura de seu sistema de pensamento. Dentre as inúmeras vias pelas quais esta discussão pode ser encaminhada, destacaremos apenas três, a saber: a metodológica, a sistemática e a estrutural. Sendo assim, podemos em primeiro lugar comparar a metodologia presente na Física com aquela teorizada para a ciência nos Segundos Analíticos e discutirmos até que ponto ela satisfaz àquelas 85 OLIVEIRA, Érico Andrade Marques. O papel da abstração na instanciação da álgebra nas Regulae ad Directionem Ingennii. Revista de Filosofia Analytica. Rio de Janeiro, v. 15, p. 145-172. 2012. p. 149. 86 "For natural science deals with things which are inseparable from matter but not immovable, and some parts of mathematics deal with things which are immovable, but probably not separable, but embodied in matter; while the first science deals with things which are both separable and immovable" (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica, 1025b 191026a 33. In: BARNES, 1991, p.85). 42 exigências que o Estagirita faz para que uma determinada investigação possa ser considerada conhecimento científico. Em segundo lugar, podem-se levar em conta os demais escritos de filosofia natural e perguntar-se em que medida certos conceitos e concepções da estrutura constituinte do mundo sensível são transmitidos e determinantes para os livros que tratam dos fenômenos naturais em sua especificidade, visto que, tomado como um todo, a maior parte do corpus aristotelicum é dedicado ao estudo da natureza em geral e de vários fenômenos naturais específicos. E, por fim, pode-se também investigar a relação existente entre a física e a metafísica aristotélica, analisando assim a estrutura existente entre elas. Quanto ao primeiro ponto, os estudiosos da obra do Estagirita estão cientes da emergência do debate em torno da multiplicidade metodológica de Aristóteles 87 , debate que se deve em boa parte à constatação de que a teorização para o conhecimento científico encontrada nos Segundos Analíticos não é satisfeita em seus pormenores em diversas de suas obras, para não dizer em sua totalidade, tal como acredita John Cooper, o qual julga que nenhum dos escritos aristotélicos sobre filosofia natural e ciências em geral está em conformidade com o "ambicioso relato dos Segundos Analíticos, segundo o qual todas as ciências consistem de demonstrações em 'teoremas' partindo de concepções primitivas " 88 . Quanto ao segundo ponto, alguns estudiosos têm chamado atenção para o fato de que a Física tem por função explicar e defender certas análises específicas das concepções aristotélicas, as quais julga serem fundamentais para o estudo da natureza em absoluto e em seus diferentes ramos. A física, nesta perspectiva, tem por meta estabelecer versões claras e coerentes dos conceitos básicos aplicáveis aos objetos naturais, e são justamente esses conceitos que serão utilizados em uma série de estudos especializados sobre aspectos particulares do mundo físico 89 . Em outras palavras, os propósitos da física aristotélica são 87 Não entraremos no debate em torno deste ponto o qual possui um aspecto multifacetado. Empreender esta atividade neste trabalho encontraria duas dificuldades principais: em primeiro lugar ele escapa à nossa capacidade de acompanhá-lo pormenorizadamente, e, além do mais, esboçá-lo, ainda que de forma simples, escaparia aos objetivos do presente trabalho e terminaria por descaracterizá-lo. Uma breve e simples exposição do problema pode ser encontrada em (BERTI, 1998). Nesta obra há indicações de materiais para pesquisas de caráter mais aprofundado. Aqueles que se sentirem mais familiarizados com a questão obterão um ótimo guia do assunto em: MESQUITA, António Pedro. Aristóteles: introdução geral. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2005. Vol. 1. 88 "[...] Aristotle's ambitious account in the Posterior Analytics of all sciences as consisting of demonstrations of 'theorems' starting from primitive conceptions" (COOPER, John M. Aristotle. In: SEDLEY, David. The Cambridge companion to greek and roman philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. p. 137). 89 Ibid., p. 139. O sistema físico de Aristóteles mostrou-se muito eficaz, porquanto o autor, munido de uma artilharia conceitual espaço, tempo, movimento, a teoria das quatro causas, natureza, etc., conseguiu explicar o mundo físico em seus múltiplos aspectos, e conseguia também solucionar diversas aporias decorrentes de outras investigações, e.g. o eleatismo. Não por mero acaso sua influência foi sentida fortemente em três 43 delimitar as causas e os princípios pelos quais os entes naturais podem ser cientificamente conhecidos. Em último lugar, no que se refere ao terceiro ponto, pode-se tomar a Física e investigar qual a sua relação com a Metafísica. É bem verdade que, em geral, sempre houve opiniões que defendiam que aquela se encontrava em uma relação de subordinação a esta última. No entanto, devemos lembrar que a precedência da Física sobre a Metafísica é algo que remonta não apenas à organização das obras de Aristóteles realizada por Andrônico de Rodes no século I a. C., mas à própria estrutura do conhecimento que, se inicia com as coisas concretas e eleva-se até os princípios abstratos. Visto que nesta catalogação dos escritos aristotélicos as obras científicas estavam dispostas posteriormente às obras de lógica, as primeiras sendo encabeçadas pela Física, seguida pelos demais escritos científicos em diversos ramos, e somente depois dessa ordem vinha a Metafísica, alguns acreditaram que a precedência da Física sobre a Metafísica era apenas estrutural, na medida em que era levada em conta a organização realizada por Andrônico de Rodes. Concordamos com a resposta dada por Enrico Berti para esta questão e acreditamos ser um equívoco pensar a relação desta maneira, ou seja, que a Física possui primazia sobre a Metafísica apenas no âmbito estrutural. O contrário é que parece ser verdadeiro, pois, a própria ordem na qual as obras foram dispostas reconhecia um encadeamento interno entre os escritos. Sendo assim, a física é o que fundamenta ou legitima a ascensão de uma nova ciência, ou seja, a metafísica. Além do mais, é somente a partir da física que se reconhece a existência de uma realidade distinta daquela que se apresenta de início à nossa investigação. Por isso é correta a afirmação de que "a metafísica é justamente o êxito extremo da física 90 ". Levando em conta unicamente a Física, podemos perceber que o método adotado por Aristóteles nessa obra consiste tanto em partir das sensações, isto é, dos dados da experiência ou da observação, como da opinião de outros filósofos. Prossegue-se então de modo tipicamente dialético propondo aporias e resolvendo as suas consequências, isto é, excluindo as soluções que se deixam refutar, ou seja, reduzir a contradição 91 . A partir deste procedimento ele então analisa os seguintes temas: matéria e forma (livro I), o conceito de natureza e causalidade (livro II), movimento (livro III), lugar e tempo (livro IV), a multiplicidade dos movimentos (livros V-VI), e o motor imóvel (livros VII-VIII) 92 . Ao iniciar grandes civilizações, a saber, o mundo bizantino, o árabe e o ocidente latino. Lindberg, muito acertadamente, constatou que a supremacia de Aristóteles no Ocidente se deu por meio da força persuasiva de seu sistema e não por força coercitiva. Foi a capacidade explicativa que levou os eruditos a aceitarem o sistema aristotélico em várias instâncias (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 101). 90 BERTI, 1998, p. 46. 91 Ibid., p. 56-58. 92 WEISHPEILP, 1959, p. 31. 44 o estudo da natureza, Aristóteles começa com a busca pelos princípios do ser da natureza. É notória sua preocupação em estabelecer o número de princípios responsáveis pelo dinamismo observado na natureza, manifestos no movimento e na multiplicidade. Assim, prevalece ao longo de sua investigação um esforço em refutar o eleatismo. Esta crítica transparece de modo perceptível nos princípios que ele postula para as mudanças na natureza: 1) o sujeito que muda, a matéria; 2) a caracterização que ele recebe, a forma; 3) a ausência prévia dessa caracterização, a privação 93 . Embora haja uma unidade argumentativa e íntima ligação entre os livros I e II da Física, este último possui um aspecto de considerável dificuldade. William D. Ross propõe que o segundo livro da Física seja constituído por três partes principais: o capítulo I, que tem por objetivo discutir e estabelecer a significação da palavra natureza; o capítulo II, que investiga a distinção entre a física e as matemáticas; e os capítulos III-IX, que estudam as causas que a física deve reconhecer 94 . Aristóteles inicia a sua análise levando em consideração aquilo que foi alcançado pela discussão do capítulo anterior. No referido capítulo ele havia estabelecido critérios para delimitar o domínio dos entes naturais. A partir disto, dois pontos principais são defendidos: em primeiro lugar, o estabelecimento de que a natureza deve ser entendida como princípio de movimento e/ou repouso. O outro aspecto destacado consiste em que a natureza se diz de dois modos, ou seja, matéria e forma, mas a primazia pertence à forma. Ambos são princípios internos de movimento dos entes naturais. De posse desta conclusão, são formulados dois problemas: primeiro investigar qual a diferença existente entre o estudioso da natureza, ou seja, o físico; e segundo, saber se a astronomia pode ser considerada como parte da ciência da natureza. A primeira questão que Aristóteles analisa encontra justificativa no fato de que aparentemente existe uma indeterminação dos objetos de investigação entre estas ciências, visto que "também os corpos naturais têm superfícies e sólidos, bem como comprimentos e pontos, a respeito dos quais o matemático faz seu estudo 95 ". A distinção é requerida para que não se tome por natural aquilo que é da esfera do matemático e vice-versa 96 . O problema desta indeterminação se daria no 93 GARDEIL. Iniciação à filosofia de Santo Tomás de Aquino. Trad. de Wanda de Figueiredo. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1967. Tomo II, p. 20. 94 ROSS, W. D. Aristóteles. 2. ed. Trad. de Diego F. Pró. Buenos Aires: Libera os Libros, [s.d.], p. 81-82. 95 ARISTÓTELES. Física, I-II, 193b 22. Prefácio, introd., trad. e comentários de Lucas Angioni. Campinas: Unicamp, 2009. p. 46. Remeter-nos-emos a esta versão ao longo do trabalho, salvo em algumas situações em que mencionaremos outras; neste caso, a versão utilizada será indicada ao longo da passagem. 96 Ingemar Düring acredita que o motivo pelo qual Aristóteles descreve nesta passagem da Física o objeto da filosofia natural indica que se trata de uma apologia. Esta distinção estabelecida devia ser considerada uma introdução ao assunto. Sendo assim, estaríamos diante de uma passagem que possui um aspecto polêmico que provavelmente teria os platônicos em foco (cf. DÜRING, Ingemar. Aristóteles: exposición e interpretación de su pensamiento. 2. ed. Trad.y edición de Bernabé Navarro. México: Universidad Nacional Autônoma de Mexico, 1990. p. 373). Este entendimento de Düring não é incompatível com a opinião de Ross, pois, segundo 45 âmbito demonstrativo do conhecimento científico, embora já tenhamos comentado anteriormente que a física não se encaixa naquele modelo de conhecimento científico teorizado nos Segundos Analíticos, estando muito mais próxima da argumentação dos Tópicos; somente assim, se alguém tomar os objetos físicos por matemáticos, incorrerá em erro, pois o objeto e o método de cada uma destas ciências não estarão em harmonia com as conclusões advindas da investigação. Quanto a saber se a astronomia pode ser considerada como parte da ciência da natureza, a legitimidade desta segunda questão provém da aparente contradição existente no fato da astronomia, apesar de tratar de entidades de natureza física, utilizar-se de meios matemáticos ou demonstrar através deles. Sendo assim, a questão consiste em saber se a astronomia pertence ao âmbito da ciência natural ou da matemática 97 . Ingemar Düring acredita que o que distingue os entes naturais dos entes matemáticos segundo Aristóteles são apenas três propriedades, todas elas peculiares aos primeiros: 1) possuem a faculdade de se mover; 2) possuem existência independente; 3) são forma na matéria. Percebemos uma coerência na argumentação do Estagirita com aquilo que já havia sido exposto anteriormente, pois possuir a faculdade de se mover é de fato apenas outra maneira de expor que o domínio dos entes naturais compreende justamente as entidades que possuem em si o princípio de movimento e/ou repouso. A segunda propriedade está em consonância com aquilo que ele já havia dito anteriormente, ou seja, "seria ridículo tentar provar que a natureza existe 98 ". Sendo assim, afirmar que eles existem independentemente da mente implica que não são instituídos a uma posição de objeto por meio de uma atividade do intelecto; pelo contrário, eles simplesmente existem e, pelo fato de possuírem um determinado estatuto ontológico, estão dados diretamente à percepção sensível. A terceira propriedade, por sua vez, destaca que eles são um sínolon, o composto de matéria e forma, e justamente por conta disso é que são estudados enquanto tais, por isso cabe ao filósofo natural estudar a este, Aristóteles define a física através de dois recursos: de início ele compara o objeto da ciência natural com o das matemáticas e em seguida considera se a física, distintamente da matemática, estuda a natureza como matéria, forma ou como o composto de ambos (cf. ROSS, [s.d.], p. 84). Dizemos que a opinião de Düring não é incompatível com a de D. Ross porquanto é possível perceber que as três propriedades destacadas por Düring são idênticas àquelas que D. Ross menciona, pois, na comparação entre os entes matemáticos e os naturais, percebe-se que de fato uns possuem o princípio de movimento em si, enquanto outros não o possuem; além do mais, enquanto os últimos são investigados enquanto sínolon, os primeiros são estudados apenas como forma. 97 Lucas Angioni é da opinião que Aristóteles busca legitimar a relevância da investigação em torno destas questões pelo fato de que as soluções propostas pelos platônicos lhe pareceriam inaceitáveis. Desta maneira, o foco da passagem seria uma crítica à separação platônica e, tal como ele afirma, "Aristóteles teria introduzido as questões concernentes à matemática e à astronomia no interesse de determinar o método adequado ao cientista da natureza – certamente por haver adversários, os platônicos, que negavam à ciência da natureza qualquer especificidade própria, propondo sua redução a certo tipo de conhecimento matemático" (ANGIONI, 2009, p. 221). 98 ARISTÓTELES, Física, II, 1, 139a 1. 46 natureza nos dois sentidos especificados pelo Estagirita, ou seja, matéria e forma. Reforçando estas características apontadas por Düring, devemos notar que elas pertencem apenas aos entes naturais, dessa forma acreditamos ser plausível tomá-las apenas enquanto propriedades dos entes naturais e não como aspectos primários de distinção entre o procedimento do filósofo natural e o do matemático, ainda que isso possa ser feito de modo secundário. Levando em conta os aspectos propriamente ditos da distinção entre o matemático e o estudioso da natureza, a resposta de Aristóteles, no livro II da Física, está estruturada segundo alguns pontos. Em primeiro lugar ele busca mostrar que a distinção entre ambos se funda no âmbito da consideração de seus objetos, ou seja, eles consideram de modo diferente o sujeito de sua investigação. Pois, tanto na ciência natural quanto na matemática as figuras dos corpos constituem parte da investigação, porém na ciência natural a figura e ou outros concomitantes que pertencem aos corpos sensíveis são estudados apenas na medida em que são responsáveis por diversos fenômenos físicos, no entanto tal estudo não é feito em função destes concomitantes que acompanham os corpos físicos, de forma que eles não podem ser deixados de lado na investigação do filósofo natural. De fato, ele inclusive destaca a incoerência que se seguiria se o estudioso da natureza tivesse por tarefa apenas investigar os objetos da realidade física e deixasse de lado os seus concomitantes 99 . Além do mais, o Estagirita ainda reivindica a efetividade da investigação natural. É justamente levando em consideração os concomitantes dos corpos naturais que "os que estudam a natureza manifestamente se pronunciam também sobre a figura da lua e do sol, e buscam saber se a Terra e o mundo são esféricos ou não" 100 . Distintamente do filósofo natural, o matemático toma aqueles concomitantes como objeto de investigação em função deles mesmos, ou seja, como objetos separados das coisas naturais às quais eles pertencem. Destaca-se, assim, que as propriedades essenciais de um determinado objeto são passíveis de investigação tanto na física quanto na matemática; a diferença consiste nas diferentes perspectivas em que elas são consideradas. Porém, isto apenas é possível porque esses concomitantes que ocorrem aos corpos físicos, na medida em que são físicos, são separáveis pelo pensamento. Assim, a argumentação inicial do Estagirita 99 A expressão que Lucas Angioni traduziu por "os concomitantes que se lhes atribuem em si mesmos", a versão espanhola traduziu por "sus atributos esenciales" (ARISTÓTELES, Física. Trad. y notas de Guillermo R. de Echandía. [S.l.]: Libera los Livros, 1995. p. 45). Enquanto a versão da complete works da Cambridge traz a expressão "to know any their essential attributes" (ARISTÓTELES, Física, 193b 26193b 31In:BARNES, Jonathan.The complete works of Aristotle: the revised oxford translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, v. 1, p. 21). O que está em questão na passagem são as determinações próprias dos objetos enquanto eles são tomados como objeto de investigação, ou seja, aquilo que pertence a eles própria e primeiramente. 100 ARISTÓTELES, Física, II, 1, 193b 22. 47 no livro da Física tinha por base distinguir aquilo que advém ao sujeito da ciência em função dele próprio e aquilo que não ocupa primariamente esta posição, mas é nela instituído pelo intelecto. Ainda que aquilo que o matemático considera sejam sempre propriedades de uma realidade física, que não existem independentemente deste receptáculo material, essas propriedades são tomadas e estudadas "em função de si" pelo matemático através da atividade de separação do intelecto. Assim, os diferentes modos de consideração são apenas possíveis porque remetem a uma capacidade do intelecto humano, a qual seria responsável por possibilitar que as entidades possam ser consideradas de modos diferentes pelo indivíduo. Ele acredita que o intelecto é capaz de isolar dos corpos físicos as suas propriedades e estudá-las por si, e isto justamente sem o corpo ao qual elas pertencem primeiramente. Devemos notar que o apelo que Aristóteles faz à separação deve ser encarado de forma mais profunda, e não unicamente como decorrente apenas de uma capacidade do intelecto de representar para si um objeto de maneira abstrata, ainda que ele seja concreto. A separação, aparentemente, se enraíza de forma profunda e remete à natureza do objeto mesmo. Em outras palavras, podemos dizer que, para o Estagirita, os entes matemáticos são separáveis pelo pensamento, porquanto a matéria sensível e, consequentemente, o movimento, não fazem parte de sua essência, são apenas formas consideradas enquanto tais. Por seu turno, os entes naturais não são separáveis porque sua essência inclui tanto a forma como a matéria 101 . Esta interpretação recebe apoio da passagem seguinte, na qual Aristóteles defende que este modo de consideração próprio ao matemático não implica em erro; na verdade, os próprios platonistas fazem o mesmo. Assim, o procedimento de separação que distingue os objetos físicos dos matemáticos não é uma exclusividade sua; o erro deles consiste em agir separando as coisas naturais, as quais são menos separáveis do que as matemáticas. Ao fato de que os objetos são separáveis acrescenta-se o segundo ponto que distingue o filósofo natural e o matemático, a saber, os respectivos modos de definirem seus sujeitos e seus concomitantes 102 : 101 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Uma fonte aristotélica das reflexões medievais sobre a aplicação da matemática à física: física e matemática de acordo com uma passagem da Física de Aristóteles. In: SOUZA, José A. C. R. (Org.). Idade Média: tempo do mundo, tempo dos homens, tempo de Deus. Porto Alegre: Edições EST, 2006. p. 15 102 Enrico Berti julga também encontrarmos nos Analíticos Posteriores II 10 a crença de que Aristóteles admitia uma diferença entre os princípios próprios das matemáticas e os da física no que diz respeito ao modo de definirem os respectivos objetos. Ele acredita que, para Aristóteles, as matemáticas recorrem à causa formal na definição de seus objetos, ou seja, à essência, enquanto a física leva em conta os outros três tipos de causas e inclui todas elas em suas definições. Isto estaria teorizado em Analíticos Posteriores II 11. Outro ponto a ser destacado a respeito desse assunto leva em consideração não apenas o modo de definição de seus objetos, mas também a rigorosidade com que isto é feito e alcançado, porquanto Aristóteles fala na Metafísica 1025b 6-13 em "causas e princípios ou mais rigorosos ou mais simples" e, prosseguindo, afirma também que algumas 48 De fato, o par e o ímpar, o reto e o curvo, bem como o número, linha e figura, hão de ser definidos sem movimento, mas carne, osso e homem não mais poderiam ser definidos sem movimento – pelo contrário estes últimos se definem como o nariz adunco, mas não como o curvo 103 . Desta passagem podemos depreender que, ao definir alguma entidade, dever-se-á remeter a algumas determinações específicas a respeito da matéria e, consequentemente, do movimento. Essas determinações são próprias das entidades naturais e mostram de fato que elas são distintas e separáveis. Os objetos naturais, ao serem definidos, não podem deixar de lado a noção de matéria sensível, que lhes pertence propriamente na medida em que se encontram no gênero das entidades físicas; assim, as determinações decorrentes da matéria sensível que implicam na necessidade do movimento estão presentes em sua definição. Por outro lado, há entidades que podem ser definidas sem a noção de matéria sensível, não incorrendo assim na determinação de movimento que o conceito implica, por isso elas possuem um caráter de imobilidade e universalidade, e.g., os objetos matemáticos. Devemos perceber que a solução de Aristóteles não se funda apenas no âmbito da análise linguística, ou seja, a diferença entre o filósofo natural e o matemático não leva em conta simplesmente o uso diferente da linguagem no processo de definirem seus objetos, mas considera também as diferenças nas definições pois, em última instância os próprios objetos são distintos ontologicamente. A argumentação busca assim salvaguardar este aspecto, na medida em que, por meio da definição, esta distinção ontológica é levada em conta. O Estagirita julga ter esclarecido que as propriedades matemáticas não existem em si e por si, mas são sempre propriedades de entes naturais. Compreende-se assim que suas definições deixam de lado justamente o aspecto material que lhes é próprio, mantendo desta forma o aspecto da imutabilidade. Sendo assim, são levados em conta esses diferentes modos de definirem seus objetos de investigação, tornando possível estabelecer distinções entre o filósofo natural e o matemático. Depreende-se que "os entes matemáticos são definidos como formas, ao passo que os entes naturais o são como formas presentes numa matéria 104 ". Aristóteles nega a concessão de autonomia ontológica às entidades matemáticas, prevalecendo ciências "demonstram de modo mais necessário ou maleável" (BERTI, 1998, p.47). Este aspecto da rigorosidade também está expresso na versão portuguesa, a qual traz a expressão "aproximativamente exatos ou indeterminados" (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica. 2006, 1025b 10, p. 169) e na versão inglesa que traz a expressão "they then demonstrate, more or less cogently," (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica, 1991, 1025b31025b 18, p. 84). Podemos resumir a discussão dizendo que, enquanto a física define a essência de seus objetos por meio da sensação, a matemática, por sua vez, os define como hipóteses. 103 ARISTÓTELES, Física, 2009, 193b 35. 104 NASCIMENTO, 2006, p.14. 49 assim o princípio da economia aristotélica; por outro lado, buscam-se critérios objetivos para fundamentar a distinção de procedimento entre ambos os estudiosos, o filósofo natural e o matemático. A passagem da Física 194a 7 busca corroborar a argumentação anterior 105 . Aristóteles recorre então às "mais naturais entre as disciplinas matemáticas, como a ótica, a harmônica e a astronomia". O que percebemos de início é a aparente crença em uma certa diversidade no âmbito das matemáticas. Poderíamos, assim, falar em matemáticas mais naturais e matemáticas menos naturais 106 . Percebe-se que esses grupos de disciplinas não são teorizados exclusivamente a partir deles próprios, ou seja, a menção a essas disciplinas na passagem não indica que isto tenha sido feito pelo fato dele ter percebido nelas um modelo 105 O fato de o texto buscar reforçar a argumentação anterior é destacada pela expressão mediante a qual começa a passagem: "Mostram isso também [o destaque é nosso] as mais naturais entre as disciplinas matemáticas [...]" (ANGIONI, 2009, p. 46). No entanto, uma pequena dúvida aparece no texto, pois, tomando por base a versão de Lucas Angioni, aparentemente existe a questão de saber se o exemplo reivindicado pelo Estagirita se relaciona com a distinção entre o filósofo natural e o matemático, e desta forma levaria em conta as passagens anteriores, e particularmente 193b 22-193b 35; ou se, de modo distinto, o texto tem em mente aquilo que foi discutido apenas em 193b 35, e se relacionaria desta maneira com os diferentes modos do físico e do matemático definirem seus sujeitos. Esta possibilidade de interpretação encontramos também na versão espanhola, a qual menciona: "Isto também é claro nas partes das matemáticas mais próximas a física, como a ótica, a harmônica e a astronomia" – Esto es también claro [o destaque em negrito é de nossa autoria]en las partes de las matemáticas más próximas a la física, como la óptica, la armónica y la astronomia" (ARISTÓTELES, Física, [s.d.] 194a 5, p. 45). De igual maneira, a versão inglesa da complete works conduz a semelhante possibilidade, porquanto ela que "Similar evidência é sustentada pelos ramos mais naturais das matemáticas, tais como a ótica, a harmônica e a astronomia" Similar evidence is supplied [o destaque em negrito é de nossa autoria] by the more natural of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy" (ARISTÓTELES, Física, 2001, 194a7-194a11). O professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro acredita que a passagem em questão se relaciona com o texto inteiro e seria uma ênfase da distinção entre o físico e o matemático, pois, segundo ele, este problema encarado por Aristóteles recebe uma tríplice resposta, a qual se funda em primeiro lugar na diferença no modo de proceder, em segundo lugar, na diferença existente no modo de definir e, por fim, na sua situação ou estado de "matemáticas mais naturais" (NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 14). Concordamos com esta última interpretação, pois devemos ter em mente que, embora a passagem em 193b 35 discuta a respeito dos diferentes modos de se definirem os seus sujeitos, o texto se funda antes de tudo em exemplos tirados do âmbito da aritmética e da geometria; ele menciona o par e o ímpar, o número, a linha e a figura, e isto em oposição aos objetos naturais carne, osso e homem, deixando transparecer assim um antagonismo entre os objetos naturais e os matemáticos. Alguém poderia então perguntar qual a relevância em determinar o âmbito do alcance da passagem em questão. Ora, se a passagem que estamos discutindo se relaciona apenas com o texto próximo, teríamos que conceber a distinção Aristotélica entre a física e a matemática fundamentada em apenas dois pontos, ou seja, a diferença no modo de proceder e na definição de seus objetos, sendo esta definição exemplificada pelas "mais naturais entre as disciplinas matemáticas", por outro lado, se ela se aplica à passagem como um todo, teríamos no caso três critérios para estabelecer a referida distinção. Desta forma, somando-se aos dois critérios anteriores, teríamos este grupo de ciências que mostram que tanto a física quanto a matemática são distintas. 106 Tomo as expressões "matemáticas mais naturais" e "matemáticas menos naturais" do trabalho do professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro. No entanto, acreditamos que a nomeação utilizada aqui independe, pois, tomando por base a referida passagem do texto aristotélico, acreditamos que se pode legitimamente falar em matemáticas mais altas e mais baixas, hierarquização matemática, etc., embora o autor das expressões citadas faça ressalvas ao uso delas, talvez devido ao fato de que elas implicariam um desenvolvimento ou teorização que não encontramos na obra do Estagirita. De fato, isso será fruto de desenvolvimentos posteriores. Ainda assim, julgamos que o ponto principal da passagem está em que a linguagem usada deixa transparecer que existem disciplinas ou ramos da matemática que mantêm uma íntima relação com o mundo sensível, enquanto outros não possuem esse mesmo vínculo (cf. NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 15). 50 epistêmico; elas são mencionadas apenas em oposição à geometria, mais especificamente, em relação aos diferentes modos de proceder entre a geometria e a ótica. Daí afirmar Aristóteles que "de certo modo elas se comportam de maneira inversa à geometria, pois a geometria estuda a linha natural, mas não enquanto natural, ao passo que a ótica estuda a linha matemática, não enquanto linha matemática, mas enquanto linha natural" 107 . Nota-se, na passagem, que Aristóteles não se preocupa em teorizar a respeito dessas disciplinas: a menção a elas parece ter sido feita apenas por julgar que ajudariam a esclarecer a diferença entre o físico e o matemático. Sem dúvida, Aristóteles tinha em mente a aritmética e a geometria como "matemáticas mais puras". A aritmética compreende, por seu objeto, a quantidade sem extensão, enquanto a geometria trata da quantidade contínua ou extensa. De fato, os objetos da matemática em geral, e particularmente no caso da geometria os objetos considerados enquanto tais, são detentores de matéria, no entanto esta não deve ser pensada como a matéria natural, sujeita às determinações físicas do movimento, mas sim como matéria inteligível, sendo desta forma uma primeira determinação que é condição de possibilidade da intelecção desses mesmos objetos, e é essa matéria que torna possível a pluralidade dos inteligíveis, enquanto a matéria natural torna possível a pluralidade dos sensíveis. Diante do que temos dissertado até o presente momento, podemos apresentar o seguinte esboço: embora Aristóteles não tenha dedicado um livro exclusivamente ao tratamento da matemática, tal como fez com a física e outras ciências, é possível encontrar, em diversos de seus textos, análises concernentes aos objetos matemáticos. Porém, deve-se ressaltar que isto não parece ser feito em função do tema em si mesmo, mas em consonância com diversas outras questões existentes. Em outras palavras, a emergência da investigação em torno de temas matemáticos no pensamento do Estagirita é compreendida como passo necessário para explicar diversos outros pontos, em especial a classificação das ciências especulativas 108 . 107 Um ponto de extrema importância que tem sido destacado pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro consiste no uso do vocabulário usado por Aristóteles nessa passagem. Não encontramos aqui nem o uso do substantivo aphaíresis (abstração) e nem do verbo aphairéo (abstrair). Isso se torna mais estranho na medida em que, levando-se em conta o livro III do De Anima, a expressão "separar pelo pensamento" poderia ser tomada como uma espécie de definição de abstração (cf. NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 15). 108 Aparentemente esta é também a opinião do Lucas Angioni, pois ele afirma que "no capítulo 2, Aristóteles dedica-se, de início, à distinção entre as ciências matemáticas e as ciências da natureza. O seu interesse é delimitar o método apropriado às explicações na ciência da natureza e, em suma, caracterizar o hilemorfismo. Por isso, Aristóteles retoma a distinção das duas naturezas e formula como problema central saber se a ciência da natureza deve considerar os dois princípios de movimento reconhecidos sob o título de "natureza" (a forma e a matéria)" (ANGIONI, 2009, p. 14). Sendo assim, o objetivo principal do texto que discutimos seria mostrar que as ciências, ainda que tenham por investigação objetos semelhantes, não se confundem e nem tão pouco se 51 Aristóteles discute em algumas passagens de suas obras, principalmente na Metafísica e na Física, a distinção entre a física e a matemática. O foco da discussão nas duas obras que discutimos possui aspectos um pouco diferentes, pois, enquanto na Metafísica o debate tem por centro a delimitação de três ciências especulativas, na Física a discussão não inclui a metafísica, e se preocupa também em destacar o aspecto metodológico. Esta distinção leva em conta tanto a diferença entre os objetos quanto os procedimentos utilizados pelo filósofo natural e o matemático nas suas respectivas investigações. Dessa forma, o Estagirita acredita que o modo de definir, de considerar, de demonstrar e a posição ocupada pelas "mais naturais dentre as ciências matemáticas", são aspectos que nos mostram que a física e a matemática são de fato ciências distintas com seus respectivos objetos e modos de investigação. Assim, ele pretende salvaguardar a autonomia das ciências, opondo-se assim a uma tendência a reduzir o conhecimento físico ao matemático. Devemos em seguida analisar se Tomás de Aquino, em seu Comentário à Física, segue esta mesma compreensão de Aristóteles, ou se porventura ele propõe uma compreensão distinta, enveredando sua argumentação por caminhos diferentes. 2.1 O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AO LIVRO II DA FÍSICA DE ARISTÓTELES A Antiguidade Tardia herdou essa tríplice divisão das ciências especulativas e a transmitiu ao mundo medieval por meio da obra de Boécio, especialmente através de seu opúsculo teológico sobre a Trindade 109 . Nesta obra reaparece a questão da classificação das ciências, porém sob outro ponto de vista, pois Boécio se encontra circunscrito num contexto teológico e viu a necessidade de esclarecer sobre a posição desse conteúdo na classificação do conhecimento. Para Boécio, há uma correspondência entre o número de entidades e o número de ciências. E, existindo três grupos de entes, ou seja, os naturais, os matemáticos e os inteligíveis, é necessário que lhes correspondam três ciências teóricas. É esclarecedor, neste ponto, o comentário de Celina Lertora Mendonza: Os entes naturais são os entes físicos e materiais de nossa experiência, e a eles corresponde o primeiro escalão da ciência, que é a ciência física, cujo objeto são os entes que existem na matéria. Os entes inteligíveis são os entes que, embora existam na matéria, seu conceito incluem. Busca-se desta forma esclarecer quais são os aspectos que permeiam a investigação científica e que mantêm a distinção entre os objetos de estudo de cada uma delas. 109 Esses opúsculos, cuja autenticidade foi questionada, tiveram solução com a descoberta por Holder, em 1877, de um fragmento de Cassiodoro que atribuía um desses opúsculos a Boécio. 52 não depende dela. Finalmente, os inteligíveis ou espirituais são os seres positivamente imateriais, como Deus e os anjos 110 . Enfim, o modelo de Boécio é de que a física "considera as formas dos corpos com a matéria", "a matemática considera as formas dos corpos sem a matéria" e a metafísica ou teologia trata do que é separado da matéria, não a imagem, mas sim a forma 111 . Boécio tem também a preocupação de ressaltar a especificidade metodológica de cada uma das ciências. Justamente por isso, após mencionar as disciplinas e seus respectivos objetos, logo em seguida define quais os três respectivos modos de procedimento delas em relação aos seus objetos. Na física deve-se proceder naturalmente (por via da experiência), disciplinativamente na matemática 112 , e, por fim, intelectualmente na teologia. Algo que nos chama a atenção na análise de Boécio sobre a divisão das ciências presente no De Trinitate é o perceptível tom aristotélico que ela possui. E, ainda que sua exposição guarde notável semelhança e, podemos de fato dizer, dependência daquela oferecida por Aristóteles ainda assim, ela é mais simples em seu aspecto geral. Isso é mais notável quando observamos que, da evidência material existente, as obras que abordam o assunto de forma mais direta, a Física e Metafísica, não foram objeto de seus comentários. Independentemente da maneira pela qual Boécio tomou conhecimento da divisão aristotélica, o que devemos perceber é o mérito e a verdadeira distinção em ambas as divisões. Sua contribuição consiste no fato de, ao tentar estabelecer um lugar para o pensamento teológico na antiga estrutura da classificação aristotélica, ele transmitiu à posteridade o problema da relação entre a Teologia filosófica e a Teologia da Sagrada Escritura. Foi justamente esse modelo proposto por Boécio que Tomás de Aquino buscou esclarecer em seu comentário ao De Trinitate, o qual levaremos em consideração juntamente com seu Comentário à Física. Embora não esteja de todo descartada a possibilidade de um comentário de Boécio à Física, da evidência material disponível até o presente momento não se tem notícia de uma tradução anterior ao século XII. Haskins, em seu trabalho pioneiro, já havia chamado a atenção para a problemática de estudos referentes à recepção dessa obra durante o medievo, porquanto, além de ser necessário determinar o período no qual a versão árabe foi convertida 110 LERTORA MENDOZA, 2000, p. 59. 111 A versão do texto aqui utilizada é aquela traduzida pelo professor Luiz Jean Lauand e disponível no site: www.ricardocosta.com 112 Celina Mendonza entende esta expressão como significando um processo axiomático (cf. LÉRTORA MENDONZA, 2000, p. 59). 53 ao latim, deve-se, além do mais, investigar a possibilidade de uma tradução feita bastante cedo, a partir do grego 113 . É em geral admitido que Tomás de Aquino produziu um dos melhores comentários à Física de Aristóteles, em seu gênero. De maneira geral, havia três modelos de comentários de Aristóteles utilizados pelos comentadores latinos medievais: 1) paráfrases; 2) questões; 3) comentários literais. No primeiro caso temos análises de caráter mais pessoal do conteúdo da obra. Desta forma, pouca atenção é concedida aos detalhes verbais do texto, caso bem exemplificado na obra de Avicena. No segundo caso temos uma série de problemas sugeridos pelo próprio texto. Percebe-se este gênero nos comentários de Roger Bacon. E, por fim, temos exposições do texto original, comentado frase por frase. O comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino se enquadra neste terceiro tipo. Tomás de Aquino segue a divisão em livros, e, usando o princípio analítico, divide o texto de forma bimembre 114 . Enquanto o comentário de Averróis é de caráter histórico-crítico, o de Tomás de Aquino é um comentário a serviço de um projeto filosófico próprio. Algo que nos chama a atenção é o fato de Tomás de Aquino não ter escrito um proêmio metodológico a esta obra, o que surpreende ainda mais, na medida em que ele fez isto para outros comentários. Iniciando diretamente o texto, o aspecto metodológico é comentado paralelamente à exposição do livro I 115 . Daí ser compreensível que, logo no início de sua exposição, seja anunciado que busca descobrir qual é a matéria e o sujeito da ciência da natureza. Segundo os filósofos medievais de maneira geral, e particularmente na interpretação de Tomás de Aquino, encontramos na Física uma análise sistemática do fenômeno mais comum observado na natureza: o movimento dos corpos físicos. E por movimento era compreendida a mudança física e natural de todos os tipos: vir a ser, perecer, aumento, diminuição, alteração e movimento local 116 . Sendo assim, o objeto de estudo da ciência natural consistiria, portanto, no ens mobile, o "corpo físico capaz de movimento" 113 HASKINS, 1924, p. 224. 114 LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. Averroes y Tomás de Aquino sobre el concepto de ciencia natural. Revista Veritas. Porto Alegre, v. 52, n. 3, set. 2007 p. 156. Uma ótima análise do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino do ponto de vista textual pode ser encontrada em: LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. El comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino a la Física: la división del texto aristotélico. Buenos Aires/Argentina: Edigraf, 2003. v. 62, p.393-440. 115 Celina Lértora Mendoza chama atenção para o fato de Santo Tomás de Aquino, no início de seu comentário, ter omitido qualquer referência inicial à intentio authoris. Isso não é não é casual, mas trata-se de uma opção, por não usar este critério (presente no comentário de Averróis ao livro da Física) de forma exclusiva, e talvez mesmo nem sequer prevalente. Essa separação, segundo ela, tem um efeito paradoxal, porquanto, embora conserve autoridade a Aristóteles, concede ao conteúdo do texto um maior valor objetivo, pois, a partir daí, a ciência natural é o que é, não porque teria sido essa a intenção do Estagirita, mas porque ela simplesmente é assim (cf. LÉRTORA MENDONZA, 2000, p. 155). 116 WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 31. 54 (movimento entendido nesse amplo sentido). Uma vez que os filósofos medievais viam os oito livros da Física expressando uma teoria geral e unificada de todas as ciências naturais, era então natural a delimitação de temas em cada um dos respectivos livros. Assim, para Tomás de Aquino, enquanto o livro I era visto como discutindo a possibilidade de alguma mudança tomar lugar no mundo, o livro II buscaria limitar a natureza como tema da ciência natural 117 . Visto que natureza é princípio de movimento ou descanso nas coisas às quais ela pertence por si, diz-se que natureza pode ser compreendida em dois sentidos: no primeiro caso, é entendida enquanto princípio formal ou simplesmente forma, daí dizer-se sentido ativo; no segundo caso, é entendida como princípio material ou apenas matéria, fala-se; portanto, em sentido passivo. Tomás de Aquino dedica a Lectio III à explicação do livro II da Física 118 . Ao longo de seu comentário, a principal preocupação é esclarecer a posição de Aristóteles a 117 CHLMP, 1982, p. 524. 118 Uma vez que Santo Tomás de Aquino não lia diretamente do grego, o seu comentário foi feito tendo por base uma versão latina. O problema consiste na identificação desta versão. De fato, esse texto ainda não tem sido identificado, e a versão da Física, que em geral está impressa juntamente com o comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino, é uma tradução tardia, da época do renascimento. Algo a ser notado é que, quando os primeiros editores renascentistas publicaram os comentários de Santo Tomás de Aquino sobre Aristóteles, estava ausente um texto padrão latino medieval de Aristóteles. O costume então era copiar as primeiras palavras de cada seção de Aristóteles como uma identificação do texto inteiro em discussão. Como consequência disto, esses editores obtiveram uma versão latina de Aristóteles; as impressões modernas do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino sobre a Física simplesmente reproduzem o texto renascentista de Aristóteles. Isto implica que nossos textos latinos de Aristóteles, tais como os temos agora impressos e acompanhados dos comentários de Santo Tomás de Aquino, não são nem a versão de Moerbeke nem a versão específica lida por Santo Tomás de Aquino. Os editores da versão inglesa do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino à Física identificam 5 versões e revisões delas anteriores à exposição de Santo Tomás de Aquino. Seriam as seguintes: 1) uma tradução do árabe para o latim, atribuída a Gerardo de Cremona, feita em Toledo antes de 1150; 2) uma tradução do grego para o latim, porém incompleta, possuindo apenas os dois primeiros livros, datando de aproximadamente o mesmo período da obra mencionada anteriormente; 3) uma versão completa do árabe para o latim, mencionada por volta de 1170 por alguns doutores médicos; 4) uma versão do árabe para o latim acompanhada do comentário de Averróis, que é atribuída a Miguel Escotto, datado do início do século XIII, provavelmente antes de 1235; 5) por fim, temos uma versão do grego para o latim produzida por William de Moerbeke. Essa obra foi produzida durante o tempo de vida de Santo Tomás de Aquino (o prefácio ao aristotelis latinus conclui que a revisão de Moerbeke não é inteiramente independente da versão greco-latina mais recente, embora ela contenha correções significativas). Ainda segundo os editores da referida versão inglesa, Santo Tomás de Aquino começou a usar a versão moerbekiana a partir da lectio2 do livro II. Anteriormente ele aparentemente se utilizou de uma versão pré-moerbekana semelhante. Provavelmente o texto usado era o resultado dos esforços dos copistas medievais para produzir um texto agradável de ler das várias versões disponíveis para eles. Daí por que, possivelmente, o texto do qual Santo Tomás de Aquino se utilizou contivesse uma mistura de várias traduções, sendo, portanto, um texto contaminado, como se diria hoje, segundo a crítica textual. O que importa disso tudo é o fato de que o texto que Santo Tomás de Aquino tinha em mão não era muito diferente de nossas atuais edições gregas. De fato, os eruditos medievais não tomavam as obras de Aristóteles tal como o faz hoje a investigação crítica textual hodierna, que leva em conta questões em torno da autenticidade das obras, pseudo-epígrafos, inserções póstumas ao texto, etc. Eles tomaram os 8 livros da Física como receberam tanto dos gregos quanto dos árabes: dos primeiros, a estrutura em capítulos, e dos segundos, a divisão do texto. A preocupação deles, no entanto, se voltou primariamente para o âmbito da disposição e conteúdo dos seus livros (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 523-524). Embora não haja uma data precisa do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino à Física, ele foi provavelmente escrito durante a década de 1260. Gauthier propõe preferencialmente os anos de 1268-1269, ou seja, o início 55 respeito do modo pelo qual a física e a matemática diferem na consideração do mesmo objeto. O texto está dividido em unidades que possuem como núcleo a questão principal de mostrar o que a ciência natural investiga. O texto compreende duas partes: em primeiro lugar, ele mostra como a ciência natural difere da matemática; em segundo lugar, ressalta aquilo para o qual a investigação da ciência natural se estende. A respeito do primeiro ponto, Tomás de Aquino identifica três etapas realizadas pelo Estagirita, a saber: primeiramente há o estabelecimento da questão; em seguida, temos as razões que mostram tratar-se de um problema; e, por fim, temos a resposta à questão formulada. Quanto ao primeiro ponto (a distinção entre a física e a matemática), Tomás de Aquino identifica ainda três etapas na argumentação de Aristóteles: primeiro ele formula a questão; em seguida, justifica o motivo pelo qual se trata de um problema; e, por fim, responde ao problema formulado. Quanto ao primeiro ponto, o problema consiste em saber qual a diferença entre a física e a matemática na consideração das mesmas coisas. A formulação do problema é a seguinte: quando ciências distintas consideram o mesmo sujeito, elas são a mesma ciência, ou uma é parte da outra. Cabe, assim, saber apenas qual é a relação que elas mantêm entre si. Visto que tanto o matemático quanto o filósofo natural consideram superfícies, volumes, linhas, etc., segue-se que elas ou são a mesma ciência ou uma é parte da outra. Na parte dedicada à solução do problema, Tomás de Aquino identifica novamente três etapas realizadas por Aristóteles: em primeiro lugar temos a solução em si; em seguida ele retira uma conclusão do exposto anteriormente; por fim, ele exclui um erro dos platônicos concernente ao assunto. É associada à questão da distinção entre esses dois campos de investigação que Tomás de Aquino insere a pergunta sobre a posição ocupada pela astronomia entre eles. Uma vez que a astronomia é considerada uma disciplina de caráter matemático, se porventura ela também for parte da filosofia natural segue-se que a matemática e a filosofia natural concordam ao menos neste segmento, ou seja, elas não estariam totalmente desvinculadas entre si. Poderíamos dizer então que haveria mediação entre elas ou um ponto de contato. Algo que nos chama a atenção no comentário de Tomás de Aquino é que em sua leitura da Física ele atribui ao Estagirita a crença de que a astronomia é "mais natural do que matemática", ao invés de uma das "matemáticas mais naturais". Comentaremos este problema do segundo período de ensino parisiense. A exposição dos dados apresentados anteriormente apoia-se fortemente naqueles fornecidos por Bourke na introdução da obra: AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Translated by Richard J. Blackwell; Richard J. Spath and W. Edmund Thirkel. New Haven: Yale University, 1963. Para uma breve discussão em torno de alguns problemas referentes ao texto latino da Física utilizado por Santo Tomás de Aquino, ver p.7-20, desta mesma obra. Utilizar-nos-emos dessa versão ao longo do trabalho; as traduções que dela forem feitas são de nossa responsabilidade e autoria. Servirnos-emos da numeração presente nessa versão inglesa, a qual remete a de Bekker, para facilitar o manuseio ou a consulta. 56 no final do presente capítulo. Por enquanto, é suficiente perceber que isto é reivindicado do seguinte modo: a quem pertence investigar as substâncias também compete considerar os seus acidentes por si, e.g., o filósofo natural, o qual investiga a substância do sol e da lua e também considera seus acidentes per se. Ele defende então que a astronomia e a ciência natural concordam em dois pontos: ambos consideram os mesmos acidentes e demonstram as mesmas conclusões, no entanto por meios diferentes. Assim, aparentemente a astronomia é uma parte da física e, como tal, a física não difere totalmente da matemática 119 . Levando em conta toda a exposição de Tomás de Aquino presente na Lectio 3, podemos perceber que ele adere à resposta de Aristóteles no que diz respeito à distinção entre o físico e o matemático; notamos também que ele dedica páginas significativas à explicação de diversos pontos que não foram abordados tão extensamente pelo Estagirita. Essa quantidade maior de material disponível deve-se, de fato, a dois motivos: 1) à própria natureza do comentário, que tem a função de explicar o texto para os leitores; 2) ao encaminhamento da questão em pontos que não foram primariamente apresentados por Aristóteles. Não nos ocuparemos do primeiro ponto. Sendo assim nossa atenção está voltada justamente para o encaminhamento da argumentação de Tomás de Aquino. Tomás de Aquino concorda com o Estagirita em que o matemático se distingue do filósofo natural por meio da consideração de seus objetos, abstraindo seu objeto da matéria sensível, mas, logo em seguida, segue-se uma justificação da legitimidade desse procedimento. Existem dois pontos dentro do aristotelismo concernentes aos objetos matemáticos que, podemos dizer, constituem o núcleo de seu entendimento sobre eles: 1) o seu estatuto epistêmico, ou seja, eles são obtidos por meio da capacidade de abstração do intelecto; 2) a dependência ontológica, isto é, eles não são concebidos como existindo independentemente dos entes materiais. Não resta dúvida de que Tomás de Aquino adere aos dois pontos. Podemos encontrar várias passagens nas quais este entendimento é defendido: em seu comentário à Física, ele menciona que, "enquanto a matemática trata daquelas coisas que dependem da matéria sensível para a sua existência, mas não para as suas definições, a ciência natural, por sua vez, a qual é chamada de física, trata daquelas coisas que dependem da matéria não só apenas para a sua existência, mas também para as suas definições120". 119 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 158 p 78. 120 "[...] Whereas mathematics deals with those things which depend upon sensible matter for their existence but not for their definitions. And natural science, which is called physics, deals with those things which depend upon matter not only for their existence, but also for their definition" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 1 Lec 1 Sct 3 p 3). Segundo Santo Tomás de Aquino, o caráter abstrato de consideração não pertence exclusivamente ao matemático, pois ele assemelha este modo com aquela abordagem realizada pelo lógico. Daí afirmar ele que "[...] muitas coisas não são equívocas segundo a 57 Esta crença é algo firmemente estabelecido no pensamento de Tomás de Aquino. De fato, são várias as passagens nas quais o caráter abstrato da matemática é mencionado em oposição ao modo de procedimento da física, isso é expresso com clareza no comentário ao De Caelo, onde se diz que "as coisas matemáticas são obtidas por abstração das coisas naturais, mas as coisas naturais são por oposição às coisas matemáticas – pois elas acrescentam aos objetos matemáticos uma natureza sensível e movimento, dos quais a matemática abstrai" 121 . Encontramos outras passagens onde ele contrapõe ou distingue ambas as ciências a partir de seu objeto, daí sua afirmação de que "a matemática lida com um abstrato e a física com um objeto mais concreto" 122 . Por fim, existem ainda textos que levam em conta a natureza dos entes matemáticos de modo isolado, pois, segundo Tomás de Aquino, "a ciência da matemática trata seu objeto como se fosse algo abstraído mentalmente, que não é abstrato na realidade 123 ". Retornando à discussão a partir do texto da Física, percebemos em Aristóteles a preocupação em salvaguardar o procedimento metodológico do matemático, no entanto, ele se limita a dizer "que não há erros para os que abstraem", e afirma ainda que de igual modo é o que "também fazem os platônicos, sem no entanto se darem conta de que abstraem aquilo que é menos separável". É bem verdade que a idéia da legitimidade desse procedimento de abstração realizado pelo matemático pode ser também pensada, ou melhor, entendida a partir de uma passagem da Suma Contra os Gentios, na qual Tomás de Aquino ressalta dois aspectos constituintes do processo cognitivo, neste caso, o objeto e o sujeito. Ora, se "o objeto da intelecção não recebe coisa alguma por ser apreendido, mas o sujeito inteligente que é consideração abstrata da lógica ou matemática" (cf. AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 7 Lec 7 Sct 937 p. 453). Encontramos também na Suma contra os gentios uma passagem em que Tomás enumera a lógica, a aritmética e a geometria como ciências que se igualam por tomarem as coisas a partir de seus princípios formais (cf. AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma contra os gentios. Trad. de Odilão Moura. Porto Alegre: EST/Edipucrs, 1996. vol. II. p. 201). 121 "[...] mathematical things are obtained by abstraction from natural things, but natural things are by apposition to mathematical things-for they add to mathematical objects a sensible nature and motion, from which mathematics abstracts" (AQUINAS, Saint Thomas. Exposition of Aristotle's treatise On the heavens. Translated by LARCHER, R. F.; CONWAY, Pierre H. College of St. Mary of the Springs Columbus 19, Ohio 1963-1964. Bk 3 Lec 3 Sct 560 p 3-7 /. p. 235). 122 "for mathematics deals with an abstract and physics with a more concrete object" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Exposition of Aristotle's treatise on the heavens. Lecture 3 (Aristotle's Text) Ari. De caelo 3 Ch 1 299a2299b14 / [412] p. 233). 123 cf. AQUINAS, Saint Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Folio VIP Eletronic Publishing,1993. First part. FP Q 44 A 1Rp 3 / Reply OBJ 3. É justamente por esse modo de considerar o seu objeto que "na matemática não há potência, nem movimento" (AQUINO, 1996, vol. II, p. 143). 58 aperfeiçoado" 124 , então o matemático não incorre em erro ao inteligir os seus objetos como sendo entes independente dos entes naturais aos quais eles pertencem propriamente. Embora esse entendimento não seja incompatível com a exposição da Física, Tomás de Aquino em seu comentário, envereda a argumentação por outros rumos, segundo ele afirma: Como prova desta razão nós precisamos perceber que muitas coisas estão reunidas em uma coisa, mas o entendimento de uma delas não é derivado do entendimento da outra. Dessa maneira branco e musical estão reunidos no mesmo objeto, todavia o entendimento de um deles não é derivado do entendimento do outro. E assim, um pode ser compreendido separadamente sem o outro. E este é compreendido como abstraído de outro. Está claro, contudo, que o posterior não é derivado do entendimento do anterior, mas inversamente. Portanto, o anterior pode ser compreendido sem o posterior, mas não inversamente. Assim está claro que animal é anterior a homem, e homem é anterior a este homem (homem é obtido por adição a animal, e este homem por adição a homem). E por causa disto nosso entendimento do homem não é derivado de nosso entendimento de animal, nem tão pouco nosso conhecimento de Sócrates, de nosso entendimento de homem. Portanto, animal pode ser compreendido sem homem, e homem sem Sócrates e outros indivíduos. E isto é abstrair o universal do particular 125 . Tomás de Aquino, semelhantemente a Aristóteles, ressalta que a abstração é um processo legítimo, não provindo daí erro algum. E destaca que isto não é uma exclusividade dele, porquanto os platônicos também se utilizam dela, no entanto ele se esforça ou sente uma 124 AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma contra os gentios Trad. de Odilão Moura. Porto Alegre: EST/SULINA/UCS, 1990. vol. I. p. 92. 125 "As evidence for this reason we must note that many things are joined in the thing, but the understanding of one of them is not derived from the understanding of another. Thus white and musical are joined in the same subject, nevertheless the understanding of one of these is not derived from an understanding of the other. And so one can be separately understood without the other. And this one is understood as abstracted from the other. It is clear, however, that the posterior is not derived from the understanding of the prior, but conversely. Hence the prior can be understood without the posterior, but not conversely. Thus it is clear that animal is prior to man, and man is prior to this man (for man is had by addition to animal, and this man by addition to man). And because of this our understanding of man is not derived from our understanding of animal, nor our understanding of Socrates from our understanding of man. Hence animal can be understood without man, and man without Socrates and other individuals. And this is to abstract the universal from the particular" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 161 p 78). Tomás também destaca a relação entre os acidentes reunidos em um objeto numa passagem da Suma contra os Gentios, porém a ênfase no texto recai sobre o âmbito da independência ontológica entre os qualificativos de um determinado objeto. Ele nos diz que "se duas coisas estão unidas por acidente em uma terceira, e uma pode ser encontrada sem a outra, é também provável que esta outra possa ser encontrada sem a primeira. Por exemplo: se os qualificativos branco e músico encontrarem-se em Sócrates, e se em Platão encontra-se o de músico sem o de branco, é possível que em uma terceira pessoa possa ser encontrado o de branco sem o de músico" (cf. AQUINO, 1990, vol. I, p. 40). Assim, enquanto no comentário a Física, Tomás destaca a relação entre os acidentes, e.g., o branco e o musical presentes em um ente, a partir de uma perspectiva epistêmica, buscando legitimar o processo de abstração. Por sua vez, na Suma contra gentios essa relação é pensada sob o âmbito da independência que essas qualificações possuem nos diversos entes, pois, ainda que em alguns seres elas se encontrem reunidos, isso não implica que em algum outro ente nenhum desses qualificativos possa ocorrer isolado, pois eles estão reunidos de forma acidental nos entes. 59 necessidade maior de mostrar como o procedimento matemático deve ser compreendido. Ao longo dessa passagem ele argumenta em prol da capacidade do intelecto de separar e compreender as diversas coisas que se encontram reunidas nas entidades. Sua argumentação segue, em primeiro lugar, a tentativa de mostrar que as coisas que reúnem em si diversas propriedades podem ser compreendidas sem que seja necessário a compreensão de todos os seus componentes. Ele destaca então que existe uma ordem de dependência na estrutura do conhecimento entre o anterior e o posterior. Devemos notar que esta relação à qual ele remete não se encontra no texto aristotélico da Física, embora não seja incompatível com a versão aristotélica do problema; ela consiste em um desenvolvimento pessoal. Ele então afirma que o posterior não é derivado do entendimento do anterior, mas inversamente, ou seja, o entendimento do anterior pode se dar sem o do posterior. Segundo a sua exposição, ainda que o branco e o musical estejam reunidos no mesmo objeto, a intelecção de um deles independe da compreensão do outro, e.g., levemos em conta um piano branco: não necessitamos entender a propriedade musical para entender a cor branca. De fato, a compreensão de um deles independe do outro. Tomás de Aquino chama esta capacidade de isolar determinada propriedade de um objeto e estudá-la enquanto tal de abstração. Pode-se, portanto, abstrair um do outro no entendimento, apesar de que eles estejam reunidos na mesma coisa concreta. Daí que a intelecção desta propriedade ou deste objeto abstraído pelo entendimento pode ocorrer independentemente dos concomitantes que o seguem, pois eles são capazes de ser abstraídos. Interessante é o fato de que Tomás de Aquino relaciona esta relação entre o anterior e o posterior na intelecção de algum objeto com a ordem dos acidentes que advêm às substâncias. Alguns podem ser compreendidos independentemente dos outros, tal como ele afirma: De igual maneira, dentre todos os acidentes os quais vêm à substância, a quantidade vem em primeiro lugar, e em seguida as qualidades sensíveis, e as ações e paixões, e os movimentos decorrentes de qualidades sensíveis. Portanto, a quantidade não abarca em sua inteligibilidade as qualidades sensíveis ou as paixões ou movimentos. No entanto, inclui substância em sua inteligibilidade. Portanto, quantidade pode ser compreendida sem matéria, a qual é sujeita a movimento, e sem qualidades sensíveis, porém não sem substância. E, assim, quantidades e essas coisas que pertencem a elas são compreendidas como abstraídas do movimento e matéria sensível, porém não da matéria inteligível, como é dito na metafísica 126 . 126 "In like manner, among all the accidents which come to substance, quantity comes first, and then the sensible qualities, and actions and passions, and the motions consequent upon sensible qualities. Therefore quantity does not embrace in its intelligibility the sensible qualities or the passions or the motions. Yet it does include 60 Ele defende assim que a quantidade possui uma ordem de anterioridade sobre os demais acidentes, sendo seguida, respectivamente, pelas qualidades sensíveis, as ações e as paixões e, por fim, pelos movimentos das qualidades sensíveis. Assim, "o primeiro acidente, efetivamente, que segue a matéria é a quantidade" 127 . Para Tomás de Aquino, a quantidade é uma propriedade comum às entidades naturais e, uma vez que a quantidade é uma determinação que antecede as demais, ela pode ser compreendida sem matéria, movimento, qualidades sensíveis etc., assim, não é necessário que a intelecção de um determinado objeto se reduza à sua efetividade concreta no mundo. Como ele mesmo afirma na Suma Teológica, "não é necessário que as coisas tenham na realidade o mesmo modo de existir que o intelecto tem em seu ato de conhecimento 128 ". Uma vez que a quantidade é anterior aos demais acidentes, ou seja, é o primeiro que ocorre à substância, ela não depende dos demais acidentes, em especial das qualidades sensíveis, para obter sua inteligibilidade. E é isto justamente o que o matemático faz, por isso o seu modo de consideração não implica em erro, pois ele não declara que os entes matemáticos, enquanto são pensados como destituídos de movimento, existem enquanto tais, o que implicaria em erro: ele apenas os estuda enquanto tais, e isto é legítimo, a partir da ordem de conhecimento entre o anterior e o posterior. Esta concepção, que compreende existir uma ordem na qual as determinações advêm à matéria em sua determinação, está presente ao longo do pensamento de Santo Tomás. De fato, podemos encontrá-la exposta já no seu opúsculo juvenil, De Trinitate, no qual Santo Tomás de Aquino explicava a ordem como constando dos seguintes acidentes: a substance in its intelligibility. Therefore quantity can be understood without matter, which is subject to motion, and without sensible qualities, but not without substance. And thus quantities and those things which belong to them are understood as abstracted from motion and sensible matter, but not from intelligible matter, as is said in Metaphysics, VII" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. (Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 161 p 79). 127 (cf. AQUINO, Tomás de. A natureza da matéria. In: AQUINO, Tomás de. Opúsculos filósoficos. Trad. de Paulo Faitanin. São Paulo: SitaBrasil, 2009, vol. I. cap. 9, nota, 3. Sempre que citarmos alguns dos opúsculos de Tomás de Aquino presentes nesse livro, está pressuposto por nós a autenticidade da obra mencionada. Daí, para deixamos de lado a questão em torno da autenticidade Tomista deste opúsculo, para os nossos objetivos basta constatar à ideia de que o primeiro acidente ou determinação que qualifica a matéria consiste na quantidade, é algo condizente com aquilo que conhecemos do sistema filosófico de Tomás, pois encontramos essa idéia repetida em vários lugares. Gardeil, nos informa que o peripatetismo retomou uma dupla distinção sobre a quantidade presente na antiga geometria e aritmética, a saber, a quantidade de extensão ou de grandeza dimensível e a quantidade discreta. Porém, esta diferença foi acentuada no peripatetismo pela diferença característica da continuidade. Enquanto a quantidade concreta é aquela na qual as partes são contínuas, a quantidade discreta é aquela que pode ser dividida em partes não contínuas (cf. GARDEIL, 1967, tomo II, p. 30-31). O padre Édouard Hugon, nos diz que o papel da quantidade é precisamente o de dar à substância, que é em si mesma indivisível, essas partes integrais, esta extensão e estas dimensões. Esta noção nos esclarece todas as propriedades da quantidade: a extensão das partes no lugar, a impenetrabilidade, a divisibilidade e a ordem das dimensões submetidas à medida (cf. HUGON, Édouard. Os princípios da filosofia de Santo Tomás de Aquino: as vinte e quatro teses fundamentais. Trad. de Odilão Moura. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 1998. p. 101). 128 AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma teológica. Questão 44. Art.3, p. 43. 61 quantidade, a qualidade, as afecções e o movimento 129 . Desta maneira, a quantidade pode ser compreendida sem a matéria sensível, mas conserva a inteligibilidade da substância, uma vez que a quantidade é sempre quantidade de algo. Daí a matemática considerar essas quantidades abstraídas da matéria sensível e do movimento, e aquilo que as acompanha enquanto tais, como outras determinações, e.g., as figuras. Assim, a oposição entre a física e a matemática é pensada como gêneros diferentes, pois enquanto a física considera o corpo no gênero da substância, a matemática o considera enquanto constituído por três dimensões, encontrando-se no gênero da quantidade 130 . Na argumentação que encontramos em sua lectio 3, a Física pode ainda ser explicada de outra forma. Consideremos um determinado objeto tomado em sua simplicidade conceitual X. Se tomarmos este X e acrescentarmos alguma determinação ou propriedade, constituir-se-á aquilo que podemos chamar de X 1. . Este objeto é a síntese de algo primário acrescido de alguma propriedade. Mas, se tomarmos este novo elemento X 1 e acrescentarmos outra determinação, obteremos aquilo que se pode chamar de X 2 ; este, por sua vez, é a síntese não apenas de X, mais também de X 1 . Dizemos, portanto, que X 2 é um objeto que é obtido ou resultante do acréscimo sucessivo de determinações ou propriedades. De fato, este processo pode seguir sucessivamente, e não se depreende que o conhecimento de X 1 independa do entendimento de X, porquanto X 1 é obtido justamente pelo acréscimo de determinadas propriedades a X; no entanto o conhecimento de X não implica o entendimento de X 1 , pois X não decorre de X 1 . É esta relação entre o anterior e o posterior no campo epistêmico que Tomás de Aquino busca legitimar. De fato, o intelecto é capaz de abstrair o universal do particular 131 . Embora o comentário à Física seja uma obra da fase madura de seu pensamento, os pontos nela expressos a respeito da referida distinção não são antagônicos àqueles expostos no De Trinitate. De fato, podemos apontar apenas uma preocupação distinta, pois, enquanto no comentário à Física o cerne da questão é a distinção entre a física e a matemática, no De 129 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário ao tratado da Trindade de Boécio: Questões 5 e 6.Trad. e introd. de Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento. São Paulo: UNESP, 1999. q. 5, a. 3.. 130 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3, ad 2m. 131 Percebemos ao longo da argumentação de Santo Tomás de Aquino que a tentativa em legitimar o processo de abstração realizado pelo matemático, tal como em Aristóteles, está em polêmica com o platonismo. Segundo a sua interpretação, a defesa pelos platônicos da teoria das ideias lhes adveio como hipótese necessária para responder ao problema da possibilidade do conhecimento científico da realidade. Visto que o conhecimento natural não se refere ao particular, mas ao universal, é necessário, que o universal esteja separado do singular; outro ponto que teria servido de apoio aos platônicos foi o errôneo raciocínio de que aquilo que é separável no entendimento é separável no ser. 62 Trinitate a questão primordial é a tríplice classificação das ciências especulativas, levando por isso em conta também a metafísica. Nesse opúsculo, Tomás de Aquino busca estabelecer a legitimidade da divisão em dois âmbitos: por um lado, na estrutura ontológica das coisas, e, por outro, no modo como concebemos distintamente cada uma delas. "É porque as coisas têm uma certa estrutura ontológica que elas fundamentam um tríplice saber – físico, matemático e metafísico" 132 . Quanto ao primeiro ponto, percebemos a discussão de Aquino movendo-se ao longo de todo o artigo 1 da questão 5 para mostrar que só pode haver três ciências teóricas, pelo simples fato de que é justamente em um desses modos que se encontra todo o objeto de estudo das ciências especulativas. Ele não estabelece a distinção a partir de qualquer diferença, mas unicamente a partir daquelas que competem por si aos objetos, ou seja, é pela "diferença dos especuláveis na medida em que são especuláveis" que a diferença é estabelecida e busca encontrar legitimidade, isto na medida em que não transgride o modo de ser do objeto. Desta forma, "as ciências especulativas se distinguem segundo a ordem de afastamento da matéria e do movimento 133 ". Da análise tomista, depreende-se que há coisas que dependem da matéria sensível quanto ao modo de ser e as incluem em sua consideração. Dessas entidades trata a ciência natural. Há, por outro lado, objetos que dependem da matéria quanto ao modo de ser, mas independem dela em sua consideração: destes tratam as matemáticas. E, por fim, existem entidades que são separadas da matéria segundo o ser, porém não pela consideração (pois isto exigiria que estivessem juntas); nesse sentido compete à filosofia primeira a tarefa investigativa. A divisão se encerra com estas distinções, pois não há no mundo um quarto gênero de entidades as quais dependem da matéria para serem inteligidas, porém independem dela quanto ao modo de ser. Por isso entende Tomás de Aquino que a divisão das ciências especulativas corresponde ao modo como as coisas são. No que diz respeito ao modo como são apreendidas as coisas, a divisão é estabelecida reivindicando o modo de apreensão destes objetos pelo intelecto. No modo de apreensão deve-se distinguir o que é por si do que é de acordo com o acidente. Tal como ele diz, "o que quer que seja pode ser considerado sem tudo o que não se refere a ele por si 134 ". E é justamente no modo de considerar principalmente, e não exclusivamente, que Tomás de Aquino distingue as diferentes maneiras pelas quais o intelecto trata seu objeto, tal como ele diz: 132 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Divisão e classificação das ciências segundo Santo Tomás de Aquino. Ágora Filosófica. Recife, ano 5, n.1, p. 23-29, jan./jun. 2005. p. 24. 133 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1. 134 Ibid., q. 5, a. 2. 63 Encontra-se, portanto, uma tríplice distinção na operação do intelecto: uma, de acordo com a operação do intelecto que compõe e divide, que é chamada propriamente de separação; esta compete à ciência divina ou metafísica; outra, de acordo com a operação pela qual são formadas as quididades das coisas, que é a abstração da forma da matéria sensível; esta compete à matemática; a terceira, de acordo com esta mesma operação, [que é a abstração] do universal do particular; esta compete à física e é comum a todas as ciências [...] 135 . Tomás de Aquino entendia, assim, que na ciência natural as formas são consideradas em si, e desta forma sem movimento, o intelecto abstrai o universal em relação ao particular. Na matemática ocorre a abstração da forma em relação à matéria sensível ou signata, pois, ainda que os entes matemáticos só existam na matéria quanto ao ser, não dependem dela para sua intelecção. Por isso no estudo empreendido pelos matemáticos são consideradas apenas as quantidades e o que as acompanha, tais como as figuras. De tal modo que a matéria sensível não é posta em suas definições. E, por fim, na ciência primeira não ocorre processo abstrativo, mas sim um processo de separação, na medida em que ao divino não é dado ser na matéria. Vemos, assim, que a argumentação se move no âmbito de uma ontologia das coisas existentes no mundo, bem como em uma epistemologia que busca reconhecer a atividade intelectiva das entidades. Para Tomás de Aquino, em última instância, a distinção entre as ciências especulativas em geral, e particularmente entre a física e a matemática, remonta ao próprio caráter ontológico de seus objetos. Assim, para cada ciência especulativa existe um determinado objeto próprio que lhe corresponde. Tomás de Aquino nos diz que o objeto próprio "é aquele por meio de cuja informação a potência exerce o seu ato" 136 . A atividade do intelecto na apreensão dos objetos próprios das ciências a partir de seu estatuto ontológico e epistêmico é ressaltado por ele anos mais tarde em seu comentário ao De Anima, no qual alude às distinções feitas por Aristóteles: E, para que não seja dito que a mente trabalha do mesmo modo na matemática e na ciência natural, ele [acrescenta] que a relação das coisas ao intelecto corresponde à sua separabilidade da matéria. O que é separado no ser da matéria sensível pode ser diferenciado apenas pelo intelecto. O que não é separado da matéria sensível no ser, mas apenas em pensamento, pode ser percebido em abstração da matéria sensível, mas não da matéria inteligível. Os objetos físicos, no entanto, embora sejam intelectualmente discernidos em abstração da matéria individual, não podem ser completamente abstraídos da material sensível. Pois, "homem" é compreendido como incluindo carne e ossos, porém em abstração desta carne e destes ossos. Mas o indivíduo 135 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3. 136 AQUINO, Tomás de. O princípio de individuação. In: AQUINO, Tomás de. Opúsculos filósoficos. Trad. de Paulo Faitanin. São Paulo: Sita-Brasil, 2009, vol. I. p. 245, nota 7. 64 singular não é diretamente conhecido pelo intelecto, mas pelos sentidos ou pela imaginação 137 . Levando em consideração a exposição de Tomás de Aquino à Física notamos que ele adere à resposta de Aristóteles de que um dos pontos que diferencia o filósofo natural do matemático consiste nos diferentes modos utilizados por ambos para definirem os seus respectivos sujeitos. Desde a Lectio 1 de seu comentário já encontramos sua afirmação de que "é necessário que as ciências se diversifiquem de acordo com o diferente modo de definição" 138 . Ao longo da Lectio 3, por sua vez, não há qualquer inserção de algum outro exemplo diferente daqueles propostos por Aristóteles para explicitar os referidos modos de definição. Tomás de Aquino apenas enumera alguns elementos do âmbito da aritmética e geometria em oposição aos elementos físicossangue, corpo e homeme menciona que tais casos se comportam semelhantemente ao já conhecido exemplo do curvo e do arrebitado. O fato de Tomás de Aquino não ter sentido a necessidade de desenvolver esse ponto em seus pormenores, tal como fez anteriormente, indica que ele julgava esse assunto esclarecido. É possível encontrarmos sua compreensão desse assunto desde o seu opúsculo juvenil De ente et essentia, onde menciona que "[...] a definição das substâncias naturais contém, não apenas a forma, mas também a matéria; pois, de outro modo, as definições naturais e matemáticas não difeririam" 139 . Uma exposição mais detalhada da diferença entre ambas as ciências a partir do modo de definição aparece no De Trinitate. Nesse comentário Tomás de Aquino mostra a relação entre o inteligir e a definição. Afirma o Aquinate: 137 "And lest it be said that the mind works in the same way in mathematics and in natural science, he adds that the relation of things to the intellect corresponds to their separability from matter. What is separate in being from sensible matter can be discerned only by the intellect. What is not separate from sensible matter in being, but only in thought, can be perceived in abstraction from sensible matter, but not from intelligible matter. Physical objects, however, though they are intellectually discerned in abstraction from individual matter, cannot be completely abstracted from sensible matter; for 'man' is understood as including flesh and bones; though in abstraction from this flesh and these bones. But the singular individual is not directly known by the intellect, but by the senses or imagination" (AQUINAS, Saint Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima. Translated by KenelmFoester and Silvester Humphries. London: Yale University Press, 1965. Bk 3 Lec 8 Sct 716 p 418, § 716. 138 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário à Física de Aristóteles. Lectio 1, 1. Trad. de Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento (obra inédita) Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 02.07.2014. 139 AQUINO, Tomás de Aquino de. O ente e a essência. Trad. Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento. 6. Ed. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 2010, capítulo II, 12. A passagem não menciona que a única diferença entre as duas ciências reside na forma de definirem seus sujeitos, diz apenas que, quanto aos modos de definirem seus sujeitos, a Física leva em conta o composto tomado como um todo, ou seja, o sínolon; a matemática, por seu turno, define os seus objetos a partir da forma, ou seja, a partir daquilo que eles são. A diferença entre as duas ciências repousa em outras instâncias, e.g., as causas utilizadas em suas demonstrações. Sobre este ponto Santo Tomás de Aquino possui um comentário muito esclarecedor a respeito das causas através das quais cada uma das ciências especulativas demonstram as suas conclusões; a matemática demonstra unicamente a partir da causa formal, e a Metafísica demonstra principalmente através das causas final e formal, mas também por meio da agente; a Física, por seu turno, demonstra através de todas as causas, cf. AQUINAS, Thomas.Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 1 Lec 1 Sct 5 p 5. 65 [...] alguns dependem da matéria no que se refere ao ser e ao inteligido como aquilo em cuja definição é posta a matéria sensível; donde não poder ser inteligido sem a matéria sensível, como na definição do ente humano é preciso incluir a carne e os ossos. Destes se ocupa a física ou ciência natural. Há, ainda, alguns que, apesar de dependerem da matéria no que se refere ao ser, não dependem no que se refere ao inteligido porque a matéria sensível não é posta em suas definições, como a linha e o número 140 . O inteligir leva em conta aquilo que está posto na definição do ente, e como o físico e o matemático definem seus sujeitos de forma distintas, ou melhor, não a partir dos mesmos elementos, então eles são distintos, pois o modo de definir não é compartilhado. Não devemos pensar que as definições sejam totalmente arbitrárias, algo delas remete à própria constituição da coisa, daí Tomás de Aquino afirmar que "o termo não pertence à natureza da coisa da qual é termo, mas tem alguma relação para com esta coisa, assim como o termo da linha não é a linha, mas tem para com ela alguma relação" 141 . Dessa forma, a distinção no modo de definir os respectivos objetos remete a uma distinção inerente ao próprio objeto. Tomás de Aquino também reconhece que as ciências se distinguem a partir do modo de demonstrar suas conclusões, pois, enquanto "a matemática não demonstra senão pela causa formal; a metafísica principalmente pela causa formal e final e também pela causa agente. A da natureza [ciência], no entanto, por todas as causas" 142 . Algo que percebemos no comentário é que esta adesão de Tomás de Aquino à proposta de Aristóteles sobre os diferentes modos das ciências definirem seus objetos não é seguida estritamente em seu comentário às ciências intermediárias. No início de sua exposição Tomás de Aquino enuncia uma definição destas ciências, que levam em conta seu procedimento metodológico: Aquelas ciências são chamadas intermediárias, as quais tomam os princípios abstraídos das ciências puramente matemáticas e os aplicam à matéria sensível. Por exemplo, a perspectiva aplica à linha visual aquelas coisas as quais são demonstradas pela geometria sobre a linha abstrata; e a harmônica, isto é, a música, aplica ao som aquelas coisas as quais a aritmética considera sobre as proporções dos números; e a 140 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1. 141 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 2. 142 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário à Física de Aristóteles. Lectio 1, 1, nota 12. Trad. de Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento (obra inédita). Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 02.07.2014. Esta concepção está clara em Tomás, e não se deve reivindicar o texto em De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1., onde apenas é dito que 'as demonstrações naturais partem dos efeitos sensíveis". Pois essa passagem não se propõe a diferenciar as ciências em função das diferentes causas tomadas no processo demonstrativo, mas sim apenas comparando a Metafísica e a Física a partir do alcance epistêmico, daí ele mencionar o âmbito da demonstração do quê e do porquê. 66 astronomia aplica à consideração da geometria e a aritmética aos céus e suas partes 143 . É notório que esta definição oferecida por ele leva em conta principalmente dois aspectos: de um lado, a posição ontológica ocupada por estas ciências que se encontram entre a ciência natural e a matemática; e, de outro lado, o seu modo específico de proceder, ou seja, elas tomam os princípios matemáticos e os aplicam à matéria. Após a definição, seguem-se imediatamente exemplos que buscam esclarecer justamente a metodologia utilizada por essas ciências. Destaca-se no texto a ênfase sobre a forma como elas procedem em oposição à aritmética e à geometria. A perspectiva leva em conta as demonstrações decorrentes da geometria sobre a linha abstrata e as utiliza na consideração da linha visual; já a harmônica se utiliza das proporções numéricas que pertencem ao campo de estudo da aritmética e as utiliza no escalonamento e proporção dos sons; por sua vez, a astronomia se utiliza tanto da aritmética quanto da geometria na descrição dos céus, astros, posições planetárias, etc. O que transparece ao longo da passagem é que estas ciências se utilizam de princípios que legitimamente pertencem a outro ramo de investigação; no caso em questão, especificamente à aritmética e à geometria. A passagem seguinte destaca que, embora essas ciências ocupem a posição de intermediárias entre a física e a matemática, Aristóteles lhes teria atribuído a pertença mais propriamente à ciência natural; causa-nos no mínimo espanto ler tal afirmação feita por Tomás de Aquino, porquanto, como já temos visto, o Estagirita fala dessas ciências como "as mais naturais dentre as matemáticas", indicando, assim, que elas pertencem primariamente ao campo das matemáticas. Esta contradição pode ser explicada caso Tomás de Aquino esteja comentando a Física com base na tradução realizada por Tiago de Veneza. De fato, essa tradução foi um quebra-cabeça para os doutores do século XIII, pois atribuía às ciências intermediárias o caráter de serem mais naturais do que matemáticas. De fato, Tomás de Aquino considera as ciências intermediárias como fazendo parte das matemáticas, matemáticas aplicadas, mais especificamente falando. Podemos perceber isto a partir de seu 143 "Those sciences are called intermediate sciences which take principles abstracted by the purely mathematical sciences and apply them to sensible matter. For example, perspective applies to the visual line those things which are demonstrated by geometry about the abstracted line; and harmony, that is music, applies to sound those things which arithmetic considers about the proportions of numbers; and astronomy applies the consideration of geometry and arithmetic to the heavens and its parts" (AQUINAS, Thomas.Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 164 p 80). Analisaremos mais detalhadamente o lugar ocupado pelas ciências intermediárias em um capítulo posterior; por ora, basta notarmos que a definição dessas ciências permaneceu constante ao longo de seu pensamento e que existe uma considerável desproporcionalidade de material referente a essas ciências tanto com o restante da passagem em discussão, quanto com o texto comentado. Isto indica, ao menos em princípio, que uma maior atenção foi dispensada a esse grupo de ciências. 67 comentário ao De Trinitate de Boécio (anterior ao comentário da Física) e na Ia IIae da Suma de Teologia (possivelmente posterior ao comentário da Física). Estamos provavelmente diante de um caso em que Tomás de Aquino, ao comentar a Física, procura salvar a afirmação de Aristóteles tal como ele lia na tradução de Tiago de Veneza 144 . Sendo assim, é compreensível o motivo pelo qual o Aquinate, após mencionar a pertença daquelas ciências à física, busca explicar isso argumentando que cada coisa é nomeada e toma sua espécie a partir de seu término 145 , ou seja, elas pertenceriam à física porquanto em última instância suas investigações se encerram em realidades de caráter natural ou físico. Isto parece ser feito com certa renúncia, porquanto, ainda que na mesma passagem seja mencionado que as referidas disciplinas sejam mais naturais do que matemáticas, contrariamente a isto é também destacado que elas se utilizam de princípios matemáticos para suas demonstrações. O estabelecimento dessas ciências é feito não exclusivamente a partir delas, mas sim levando-se em conta o seu relacionamento com as ciências puramente matemáticas, a aritmética e a geometria; pois, enquanto as ciências intermediárias tomam a linha abstrata que constitui objeto de estudo da geometria e a aplica à matéria sensível, a geometria, inversamente, toma a linha natural existente na matéria sensível e separa as propriedades naturais que acompanham a linha natural 146 . Tomás de Aquino relaciona a questão em torno da posição ocupada pela astronomia com a percepção de que o referido grupo de ciências não se encontra destituído de relações com as matemáticas puras; assim, embora a astronomia seja mais natural do que a matemática (apenas segundo o comentário à física), ela não está destituída de relações com esta, pois demonstra o mesmo que a física, a saber: a esfericidade da terra, no entanto, a partir da figura do eclipse lunar. De toda a nossa discussão ao longo do presente capítulo, nos parece seguro concluir, mesmo de forma geral, que Tomás de Aquino concorda com a resposta de Aristóteles, que a Física e a matemática são ciências distintas e possuem os seus respectivos objetos de investigação. Ainda assim, é possível apontar algumas particularidades entre ambos os filósofos. Enquanto Aristóteles tanto privilegia a distinção entre os objetos de investigação da física e da matemática a partir da maneira diferente delas definirem os sujeitos e os seus respectivos modos de considerá-los, quanto recorre ao estatuto ontológico 144 A resposta aqui adotada segue em sua totalidade aquela oferecida pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro. Para analisar sua resposta de forma completa, cf. NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. De Tomás de Aquino a Galileu. 2. ed. Campinas: UNICAMP/ IFCH, 1998. p. 66-71. 145 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 164 p 80. 146 "Therefore from this difference between intermediate sciences and the purely mathematical sciences, what was said above is clear. For if intermediate sciences of this sort apply the abstract to sensible matter, it is clear that mathematics conversely separates those things which are in sensible matter" (QUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 164 p 81). 68 dos entes, embora sobre este último ponto não se mostre tão exaustivo como nos anteriores, Tomás de Aquino, retoma essas distinções feitas por Aristóteles e lhes dá tanto uma ênfase quanto encaminha à solução da questão por vias um pouco distintas. Pois os pontos destacados por Tomás de Aquino, a saber: a relação cognoscitiva entre o posterior e o anterior, a fundamentação das ciências especulativas na estrutura ontológica das coisas e no modo de compreensão delas, as diferentes causas tomadas na demonstração e a posição das scientiae mediae, são pontos que, apesar de não estarem explicitamente formalizados em Aristóteles, não são incompatíveis com ele 147 . A diferença entre os referidos autores, expoentes do pensamento filosófico, seria mais perceptível no caso das scientiae mediae, principalmente no tocante à importância reservada a elas no interior dos respectivos sistemas. Notemos que Tomás de Aquino, utilizando-se de uma nomenclatura mais desenvolvida, julga que os aspectos mensuráveis daquelas realidades físicas constituem o objeto de investigação de ciências distintas da ciência natural, as quais, embora intermediárias entre a filosofia natural e as ciências matemáticas puras, são formalmente matemáticas e não naturais 148 . Por fim, cabe-nos concluir que dois pontos foram obtidos de nossa análise: a física e a matemática são distintas, uma não se reduz à outra, mas elas não estão destituídas de vínculos entre si, caso bem exemplificado nas scientiae mediae. De posse destas conclusões, devemos em seguida investigar em que medida esta distinção e o vínculo entre a física e a matemática são mantidos ou reelaborados, e isto na perspectiva dos requerimentos do conhecimento científico teorizado nos Segundos Analíticos, e particularmente à luz da doutrina aristotélica da metábase. 147 Assim, o comentário de Tomás leva em conta uma quantidade maior de reflexões em torno do problema que não se encontra na obra comentada, porém essas explanações não podem ser consideradas como rupturas entre os dois filósofos, até certo ponto elas podem ser vistas como decorrentes da própria natureza do comentário. 148 CHLMP, 1982, p. 525. No entanto, pode-se questionar isto porquanto, como vimos anteriormente, a argumentação de Santo Tomás de Aquino parece estar neste ponto muito mais preocupada em salvaguardar a leitura do texto que ele tinha em mãos a partir da versão de Tiago de Veneza. Não devemos, porém, deixar de notar que, ainda assim, sua exposição sobre as ciências médias é mais extensa no corpo do texto, e evidencia uma maior atenção dedicada ao grupo formado por essas ciências. 69 3 A PROIBIÇÃO DE METÁBASE SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO Tornar-se nota de rodapé da história intelectual do Ocidente significa, de fato, ocupar um lugar de privilégio e poucos possuíram os méritos intelectuais para alcançar tal condição. No entanto, ser responsável pelo próprio desenvolvimento deste pensamento é algo que exige não apenas genialidade, mas também criatividade. São justamente essas duas características que encontramos presentes na obra de Aristóteles. Sua genialidade é expressa tanto na capacidade que possuía de sistematizar dados advindos das investigações de filósofos que o antecederam em diversos campos quanto de oferecer teorias com maior poder explicativo em diversos aspectos. Sua genialidade é também expressa no âmbito da lógica. Isto não quer dizer, de forma alguma, que antes de seus estudos neste campo as pessoas não se utilizassem da lógica; no entanto, o trabalho de formular e explicitar as leis lógicas não foi empreendido por ninguém anteriormente a ele, por isso podemos afirmar ter sido ele o idealizador da lógica. Não é de relevância alguma para o presente estudo discutir se a lógica associada diretamente a Aristóteles é correta ou possui deficiências. O que está no cerne da questão é mostrar que foi seu espírito agudo e sistemático que forneceu, durante centenas de séculos, o instrumental de investigação que guiou diversos filósofos e cientistas. Se para o bem ou para o mal, não está em nossas mãos determiná-lo. Contudo, faríamos bem em não confundir validade e verdade das teorias científicas, lógicas, etc., e entender que a relação entre essas duas categorias é algo que em geral escapa à visão do homem que as vivencia em sua experiência diária. Remetemos, aqui, à opinião anteriormente expressa por Lindberg de que o sucesso de uma explicação científica (e, por implicação, também lógica) não deve ser sua concordância com a nossa crença vigente, mas sua capacidade epistêmica de oferecer respostas mais coerentes e adequadas do que as fornecidas pelas teorias rivais sobre os mesmos aspectos que elas tentam explicar. O Estagirita pode legitimamente ser apontado como o pai da lógica. Isto não implica em dizer que antes dele as pessoas não se utilizavam dos princípios lógicos em seus raciocínios. Ressaltamos apenas que foi ele o responsável por sistematizar os princípios do raciocínio de tal forma que, durante muitos séculos, tanto fazia falar de lógica quanto de lógica aristotélica, não havendo distinção entre ambas. Seu maior sucesso neste âmbito reside em sua teoria silogística, ou seja, na forma da correta inferência. Ainda hoje, muitas vezes 70 falamos simplesmente de lógica aristotélica, sem nos preocuparmos com uma especificação de suas partes. Segundo Ross, os tratados aristotélicos relacionados à lógica compreendem as seguintes partes: 1) os Primeiros Analíticos, que se debruçam sobre as diferentes formas de silogismo; 2) os Segundos Analíticos, que investigam particularmente o silogismo demonstrativo ou científico; 3) e, por fim, os Tópicos e os Elencos Sofísticos 149 . O que percebemos nesta proposta oferecida por Ross é que essas partes centrais são antecedidas pelas Categorias e pelo De interpretatione, que são considerados objetos de investigação preliminar, desempenhando assim uma função propedêutica ao estudo no âmbito da lógica. Independentemente da classificação de Ross ser aceita ou não, devemos perceber que ela reconhece diferentes preocupações ao longo dos escritos aristotélicos sobre lógica. Se levarmos em conta que o estudo da lógica era pensado enquanto preparatório, ou seja, que a lógica era investigada pelo fato de ser pensada como sendo o instrumento do qual o conhecimento científico deveria utilizar-se, se torna-se mais compreensível a diversidade de temas presentes nos escritos aristotélicos. A designação de Órganon para os diversos escritos do Estagirita sobre lógica é tanto o reconhecimento da diversidade de temas abordados nesse âmbito de estudo quanto a tentativa de conceder uma unidade aos escritos lógicos. Daí o nome dessa coleção indicar a crença de que a lógica se apresenta como um instrumento da filosofia. De modo geral, o conteúdo das obras que compõem o Órganon é o seguinte: as Categorias, que lidam com termos simples (sujeitos e predicados), os quais, quando combinados, passam a constituir declarações simples e caracterizam as substâncias primárias, como o sujeito último de predicação; em seguida, o De Interpretatione, no qual se discutem tanto as declarações que resultam da combinação de nomes e verbos, quanto um tratamento de várias relações modais entre as declarações; posteriormente, os Primeiros Analíticos, que analisam a teoria formal do raciocínio silogístico e mostram como as declarações se combinam para formar argumentos; depois, os Segundos Analíticos, cujas demonstrações são analisadas como silogismos explanatórios a partir dos primeiros princípios e do seu relacionamento com o conhecimento científico; seguem-se os Tópicos, que têm como principal característica a discussão do debate dialético; por fim, as Refutações Sofísticas, que tratam dos vários tipos de falácias em um 149 ROSS, W. D. Aristóteles. 2. ed. Trad. de Diego F. Pró. Buenos Aires: Libera os libros, [s.d.], p.30. 71 argumento dialético 150 . Para os interesses do presente trabalho, deter-nos-emos apenas nos Segundos Analíticos 151 e, particularmente, em duas das três seções deste livro, conforme proposta de Ross 152 . Segundo Aristóteles, a ciência é o hábito demonstrativo; nesta perspectiva, o conhecimento científico é passível de demonstração. No entanto, esta expressão poderia causar ao leitor moderno certo equívoco, podendo inclusive levá-lo a pensar a ciência como relacionada com as características quantitativas de controle experimental e laboratorial próprias da ciência contemporânea. Isto, porém, seria afastar-se grandemente da concepção aristotélica de ciência demonstrativa. Para evitar esse possível erro, é necessário compreendermos tanto a concepção aristotélica de ciência como o seu procedimento demonstrativo. De fato, aquilo que é comumente chamado de "o ideal aristotélico de ciência demonstrativa" encontra-se teorizado nos Segundos Analíticos. Nesta obra, encontramos a seguinte definição de ciência dada pelo Estagirita: julgamos dispor de conhecimento puro e simples e sem qualificação de tudo [...] quando acreditamos que sabemos [1] que a causa da qual o fato é originado é a causa do fato e [2] que o fato não pode ser de outra maneira 153 . Esta definição do conhecimento científico nos permite destacar duas características 154 : de um lado é necessário possuir o conhecimento das causas e, de outro, o 150 Sabe-se que o conteúdo de alguns livros do Órganon é tema de forte debate entre os estudiosos, e particularmente as Categorias, porém a exposição anterior sobre as obras e seus respectivos conteúdos apoiou-se fortemente nas informações oferecidas por CODE, Alan. Aristotle's logic and Metaphysics. In: FURLEY, David (Ed.). Routledge history of philosophy: from Aristotle to Augustine. New York: Routledge, 1999, vol. II, p. 40-41. Marenbon julga que as Categorias são uma tentativa de explorar o modo como a realidade, representada precisamente pela linguagem, pode ser dividida e categorizada, não estando assim preocupadas em estudar os argumentos e nem mesmo indiretamente os termos usados para expressar argumentos. Cf. MARENBON, John. Early medieval philosophy: 480-1150. 2. ed. London: Taylor & Francis e-library, 2002, p. 20. 151 Obra doravante abreviada por S.A. 152 Ross propõe que os Segundos Analíticos possam ser divididos em 5 partes principais: 1) (I, 1-6), que trata das condições que as proposições que vão formar as premissas devem satisfazer; 2) (I, 7-34) que mostra por que as propriedades pertencem a seus sujeitos; 3) (II, 1-10) onde ele estabelece os caracteres distintivos da demonstração; 4) esta seção compreenderia a retomada de diversos assuntos que já haviam sido tratados anteriormente, porém de forma breve; e, por fim, a seção ( II, 11-18), que explica o processo pelo qual chegamos a conhecer as proposições imediatas que têm servido como ponto de partida (II, 19). (ROSS, p. 54). 153 ARISTÓTELES, I 2, 71b 10. (cf. ARISTÓTELES. Analíticos Posteriores. In: Órganon. Trad., textos e notas adicionais de Edson Bini. 2.ed. Edipro, São Paulo, 2010). Ao longo do trabalho serão utilizadas outras versões desta obra. Quando isto ocorrer, haverá a devida referência. 154 A partir desta versão que utilizamos podemos perceber claramente duas propriedades do conhecimento científico. Berti defende também a mesma opinião (BERTI, 2002), no entanto Lucas Angioni (ANGIONI, 2007) entende que a definição aristotélica destaca três propriedades. Como devemos, então, entender esta questão? Acreditamos que, de fato, o que está em jogo são apenas duas propriedades, pois a terceira propriedade, que Angioni reivindica, a saber, a oposição entre o modo de conhecer sofístico e o modo de conhecer científico, não parece ser uma propriedade específica pertencente ao conhecimento científico 72 caráter de necessidade das conclusões 155 . Ter ciência significa conhecer tanto o "quê" como o "porquê" de certo estado de coisas. Em suma, conhecimento científico, tal como compreendido nos Segundos Analíticos, significa conhecer algo e saber que tal conhecimento decorre de uma verdadeira necessidade 156 . O conhecimento das causas toma por base o aspecto de explicação, que pode ser de um fato, de um comportamento ou mesmo de uma propriedade tomada como explicação de um determinado estado de coisas. Para entendermos melhor esta compreensão aristotélica, é necessário analisarmos a maior contribuição de Aristóteles no âmbito da lógica, a saber, a doutrina do silogismo. Um silogismo é um caso de argumento válido no qual a conclusão se segue da necessidade das premissas, e isso decorre do modo como os termos sujeito e predicado estão combinados. Sendo assim, um silogismo científico ou demonstrativo é um tipo de silogismo que demonstra sua conclusão por mostrar que ela se segue necessariamente de seus princípios explanatórios. Portanto, o conhecimento das causas e a necessidade da conclusão são ambas asseguradas por este tipo de silogismo, que é um raciocínio de caráter dedutivo, para ser mais específico. No silogismo científico, postas pelo menos duas premissas, a conclusão, ou seja, a relação entre o sujeito e o predicado, é deduzida necessariamente apenas do fato delas terem sido postas ou apreendidas. enquanto tal; esta menção apenas indica um modo de oposição direta entre os tipos de conhecimento, o científico e o sofistico. Por outro lado, não nos parece também de todo certo o modo como Angioni entende Porchat (2001, p 35-36), ou seja, compreendendo a terceira característica assumida por este como o corolário das duas anteriores; antes, a causalidade e a necessidade são as duas propriedades fundamentais que caracterizam a ciência enquanto tal. Porchat afirma que "o procedimento que se denuncia como sofístico seria, tão-somente, a pretensão de ser ou de fazer-se passar por ciência, por parte de conhecimento que não possua aquelas qualidades que a definem". Além disso, a crítica de Barnes no sentido de Aristóteles ter sido muito vago ao comentar a terceira característica talvez tenha se dado unicamente pelo fato de que não há terceira característica. A interpretação proposta por Angioni está aparentemente baseada em algo que não foi dito, ao invés de levar em conta aquilo que foi afirmado. De fato, Angioni afirma que o conhecimento será sofístico se não for satisfeito qualquer um dos requisitos para o conhecimento científico, mas não é claro se, entre tais requisitos, ele compreende apenas as duas características mencionadas em 71b 9-12, ou algo mais (como as seis propriedades das proposições demonstrativas, expostas em 71b 20-33). Por fim, ele acredita que Barnes se inclina para a terceira opção. Não é claro para nós o motivo pelo qual Angioni continua insistindo em três propriedades e, mesmo fazendo menção ao fato de haver divergência entre alguns intérpretes quanto ao número de características que estariam presentes a partir da definição de Aristóteles, menciona que o sentido de cada uma delas não é claro. Ver: ANGIONI, Lucas. O conhecimento científico no livro I dos Segundos Analíticos de Aristóteles. Revista de Filosofia Antiga. v.1, n. 2, p. 1-26, maio/out. 2007. ISNN 1981-9471p. 2. Entendemos que as propriedades que definem o conhecimento científico são a causalidade e a necessidade, características claramente expressas na versão inglesa da obra do Estagirita. "We think we understand a thing simpliciter (and not in the sophistic fashion accidentally) whenever we think we are aware both that the explanation because of which the object is its explanation, and that it is not possible for this to be otherwise". [Ver: ARISTÓTELES. Posterior Analytics. In: BARNES, Jonathan (ed.). The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, vol, II. 70b9-70b16]. 155 BERTI, 2002, p. 4. 156 Cf. Ibid., p. 4. 73 Na estrutura do silogismo, há pelo menos duas premissas e uma conclusão. As premissas distinguem-se entre si em função da presença dos termos maior e menor, por isto elas se dividem em premissa maior e premissa menor. Esta designação leva em conta a presença do sujeito e do predicado da conclusão em cada uma delas, ou seja, a premissa maior é aquela que contém o predicado da conclusão (termo maior), e a premissa menor, aquela que possui o sujeito da conclusão (termo menor). Existe ainda outro elemento presente na estrutura do silogismo, o termo médio, o qual ocorre em ambas as premissas, porém não na conclusão; ele é entendido como sendo aquilo que é comum às premissas, em suma, é a causa explicativa 157 . A compreensão do termo médio é fundamental na teoria silogística aristotélica, pois, ainda que o termo médio ocorra em ambas as premissas, ele pode ocupar posições diferentes em relação aos extremos, a partir das quais as possíveis figuras de um silogismo são determinadas. Sendo assim, a noção de figura é caracterizada por especificar as relações entre os termos que ocorrem nas premissas e na conclusão. Daí o motivo pelo qual, segundo Aristóteles, existem três figuras do silogismo, pois o termo médio pode ocupar a posição de sujeito em uma premissa e de predicado em outra, constituindo assim a primeira figura. Ele pode formar a segunda figura ao ser posto como predicado em ambas as premissas; e, por fim, sendo colocado como sujeito em ambas as premissas, temos a constituição da terceira figura 158 . Podemos representar este esquema segundo o modelo abaixo: 157 O raciocínio pode ser estudado sob dois pontos de vistas, material e formal; enquanto o primeiro ponto está relacionado ao seu conteúdo, o segundo ponto se relaciona com sua disposição ou ordenamento lógico (aqui está compreendido o estudo do silogismo). "O silogismo é essencialmente a identificação dos dois extremos em virtude ou em razão de um têrmo médio. Quando eu declaro que 'Pedro é contemplativo porque ele é filósofo', eu estou afirmando que o predicado 'contemplativo' pertence ao sujeito 'Pedro' em razão do médio [termo] 'filósofo'. O termo médio constitui o elemento dinâmico efetivo do raciocínio; é ele que traz a luz: concluir é assentir sob a pressão do termo médio. O silogismo é antes de tudo uma operação de mediação causal pelo termo médio" (GARDEIL, 1967, tomo I, p. 124). Os significados dos termos maior e menor mudam ao longo do pensamento de Aristóteles. Além do mais, as expressões "termo maior" e "termo menor" são tomadas para expressar a relação de extensão entre os termos na primeira figura (cf. KNEALE, 1962, p. 71-73). De fato, as expressões termo maior e termo menor são apropriadas apenas no modo universal afirmativo da primeira figura (ROSS, [s.d.], p. 45). O termo médio pode também, de igual forma, ser chamado termo mediador. Ross assinala que a noção de termo médio se aplica mais facilmente à questão de saber (o porquê) se A é B (ROSS, [s.d.], p. 63). Smith também chama atenção para o fato de que na primeira figura os termos maiores e menores têm diferentes funções nas premissas que não podem ser aplicadas à segunda e terceira figura. Cf. (SMITH, 1995, p. 69). Ele destaca ainda que, para esta questão ser resolvida, devemos buscar na essência de A um elemento que mostre por que A possui a propriedade B. Um argumento está na primeira figura, se o termo maior é o predicado da premissa maior e o termo menor é o sujeito da premissa menor. Em tais casos o termo médio é o sujeito da premissa maior e o predicado da premissa menor (CODE, 2005, p.48). A partir de agora utilizaremos 'M' para referir-nos ao termo médio. 158 O silogismo se estrutura segundo o modo abaixo apresentado: O que é espiritual (M) é imortal (T) Ora, a alma humana (t) é espiritual(M) Logo, a alma humana (t) é imortal (T) 74 Primeira figura Segunda figura Terceira figura Sujeito-predicado Predicado-predicado Sujeito-sujeito M-T T-M M-T t-M t-M M-t t-T t-T t-T Os argumentos válidos dentro das três figuras podem ser especificados em função de seu modo. O modo de um silogismo é qualquer uma das formas válidas em que cada uma das figuras de um silogismo categórico pode ocorrer. Segundo Aristóteles, há 14 modos válidos de deduções válidas nas três figuras 159 . No presente trabalho, nosso interesse reside, T-termo maior, o predicado da conclusão t-termo menor, o sujeito da conclusão M-termo médio, o termo comum das premissas, é a causa explicativa enquanto tal (cf. GARDEIL, 1967, tomo I, p. 122). Ora, sendo o silogismo composto por termos e proposições, os diferentes ordenamentos dos termos serão responsáveis por determinar as diversas figuras de um silogismo. Por sua vez, os diferentes modos de um silogismo provêm das diferentes maneiras como as proposições podem ser dispostas. De fato, haverá quatro maneiras de dispor dois a dois os termos do silogismo, e assim quatro figuras possíveis do silogismo, caracterizadas pelo lugar do M em cada premissa. A quarta figura, chamada galênica, não se encontra em Aristóteles que não reconhece senão três figuras distintas do silogismo. Deve-se considerá-la como uma forma indireta da primeira figura, pois nesta figura o M estaria posto como sujeito e predicado. Esta figura é melhor designada pela denominação de primeira figura indireta. Verificando dois silogismos que reproduzem a primeira e a quarta figuras, notamos isso de maneira mais clara. Ex: 1o figura direta 1o figura indireta Todo homem é mortal Pedro é homem Ora, Pedro é homem Ora, todo homem é mortal Logo, Pedro é mortal Logo, algum mortal é Pedro Cf. (GARDEIL,1967, tomo I, p. 127-128). 159 Como dissemos anteriormente, os diferentes modos são decorrentes das diferentes disposições das proposições, e como para cada uma delas existem quatro possibilidadesuniversal afirmativa, universal negativa, particular afirmativa ou particular negativa-, cada uma das duas proposições terá quatro possibilidades distintas e, se multiplicarmos o número de possibilidades entre elas, obteremos 16 possiveis combinações, pois 4x4= 16. E, se multiplicarmos o número do total de possibilidades pelas 4 figuras, 16x4= 64. Porém, desse total apenas 14 são válidos, pois estão em acordo com os princípios e as leis do silogismo. Buscando facilitar o processo de aprendizagem dos modos de silogismos válidos, os lógicos posteriores se utilizaram de palavras para eles, as quais eram verdadeiramente recursos mnemônicos. As três primeiras vogais de cada palavra indicam a natureza das premissas e da conclusão, na seguinte ordem; maior-menor-conclusão. (Cf. GARDEIL, 1967, tomo I, p. 129). Em seguida colocamos as expressões mnemônicas para cada um dos modos válidos nas três figuras silogísticas abaixo delas colocamos uma estrutura simplificada a elas correspondente, onde a sequência de três letras correspondem ao esquema predicado-tipo de sentença-sujeito. Primeira figura: Barbara ( se todo M é L e todo S é M, então todo S é L) AaB, BaC; portanto AaC Celarent ( se nenhum M é L e todo o S é M, então nenhum S é L) AeB, BaC; portanto AeC Darii ( Se todo M é L, e algum S é M, então algum S é L) 75 primariamente, no silogismo científico, o qual é estritamente dedutivo, ou seja, tomando por base premissas universais, procede deduzindo conclusões particulares. Tendo uma forma fixa de concatenação lógica dos objetos e suas propriedades, ele expressa o caráter de necessidade da conclusão. Uma vez que Aristóteles vinculou o conhecimento científico a esta forma de AaB, BiC; portanto AiC Ferio (se nenhum M é L, e algum S é M, então algum S não é L) AeB, BiC; portanto AoC Quando se argumenta seguindo os moldes da primeira figura, demonstra-se a sua conclusão, mostrando que uma condição suficiente foi obtida. É a única figura na qual frases declarativas gerais de todos os quatro gêneros podem ser demonstradas. Aristóteles pensa que só silogismos da primeira figura são perfeitos ou completos. As regras especiais desta figura são: 1) a premissa maior tem que ser universal; 2) a premissa menor tem que ser afirmativa. "Apenas na primeira figura, quando os termos estão dispostos em ordem usual, é que a transitividade da conexão entre os termos é óbvia logo à primeira vista". Enfim, o silogismo em Barbara é o modo demonstrativo par excellence (cf. (KNEALE,1962, p. 75). Segunda figura: Cesare (se nenhum L é M, e todo o S é M, então nenhum S é L) MeN, MaX; portanto NeX Camestres ( se todo o L é M, e nenhum S é M, então nenhum S é L) MaN, MeX; portanto NeX Festino (se nenhum L é M, e algum S é M, então algum S não é L) MeN, MiX; portanto NoX Baroco (Se todo o L é M, e algum S não é M, então algum S não é L) MaN, MoX; portanto NoX Quem argumenta levando em conta a estrutura da segunda figura prova a sua conclusão, que tem que ser negativa, mostrando que uma condição necessária para a aplicação do predicado ao sujeito não foi obtida. As regras especiais para esta figura são: 1) a premissa maior tem que ser universal e 2) uma premissa tem que ser negativa. Neste caso (figura) todos os silogismos possuem como conclusão uma proposição negativa. Terceira figura Darapti (se todo o M é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S é L.) PaS, RaS; portanto PiR Felapton (se nenhum M é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S não é L) PeS, RaS; portanto PoR Disamis (Se algum M é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S é L) PiS, RaS; portanto PiR Datisi (se todo o M é L, e algum M é S, então algum S é L) PaS, RiS; portanto PiR Bocardo (Se algum M não é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S não é L) PoS, RaS; portanto PoR Ferison (se nenhum M é L, e algum M é S, então algum S não é L) PeS, RiS; portanto PoR Nesta figura, além da conclusão ter que ser particular, a única regra especial é a premissa menor ser afirmativa. Kneale nos diz que aquele que argumenta na terceira figura prova a sua conclusão, aduzindo casos. Isto é essencial, porque uma frase declarativa particular é uma afirmação de existência, e a existência não pode ser estabelecida sem referência a casos. Darapti e Felapton só são válidos se se admitir a implicação existencial para frases declarativas universais usadas como premissas. Deve-se notar que estes são os dois únicos modos na silogística de Aristóteles que dependem da suposição da implicação existencial. Se não for considerada a implicação existencial, há apenas quatro modos válidos em cada figura. Neste caso, todos os silogismos possuem como conclusão uma proposição particular (cf. (KNEALE, 1962, p. 76-77). 76 silogismo, sentiu a necessidade de caracterizar e, deste modo, de restringir as premissas que poderiam ser legitimamente utilizadas neste raciocínio. Para ocupar legitimamente o lugar em um silogismo científico Aristóteles supõe que as premissas devem satisfazer a algumas exigências: é preciso que elas sejam "verdadeiras, primárias, imediatas, mais bem conhecidas e anteriores à conclusão e que sejam causa desta 160 ". O sentido próprio dessas expressões explicita a natureza das premissas. Vejamos, portanto, o significado delas 161 . Quando é exigido que as premissas sejam verdadeiras, isso implica que elas têm de corresponder ao que as coisas são de fato, porquanto a ciência é um conhecimento de um certo estado de coisas que existe, não sendo possível haver conhecimento científico do não-existente. Logo, é requerido que as premissas sejam verdadeiras, ou seja, expressem realmente a situação à qual elas se referem. Segundo Enrico Berti, por premissas primárias e não-mediadas, devemos compreender o caráter de indemonstrabilidade ou sua derivação a partir de premissas indemonstráveis. Lucas Angioni, por sua vez, acredita que a imediaticidade das premissas consiste no fato delas "não poderem ser explicadas adequadamente por nenhuma causa anterior, e não no sentido meramente formal de não poderem ser deduzidas por nenhum argumento correto 162 ". Aristóteles aplica-se, igualmente, a refutar a crença de que todo conhecimento deve ser demonstrativo. Isto para ele é impossível. É bastante conhecida a sua crítica a respeito da possibilidade de uma demonstração retornar ad infinitum; porquanto, se as premissas devessem ser sempre demonstradas, nada seria demonstrável e, consequentemente, a ciência não seria possível. Por isto é necessário que o conhecimento das premissas imediatas não seja demonstrativo 163 . Aristóteles observa ainda que as premissas devem ser mais conhecidas do que a conclusão, e isso é óbvio, pois o conhecimento delas deve ser independente da conclusão. Deve-se destacar que a expressão "mais conhecidas" comporta dois sentidos, podendo-se levar em conta o sujeito cognoscente ou a própria coisa a ser conhecida. No primeiro caso, temos aquelas realidades próximas à sensação, que se 160 ARISTÓTELES, Segundos Analíticos I 2, 71b 20. 161 Existe certa discordância em torno do sentido exato das características que Aristóteles lista para as premissas de um silogismo científico. Este ponto é algo consciente nos estudiosos do assunto. O debate em torno das qualidades ou da natureza das premissas a serem usadas na constituição de um silogismo científico está diretamente relacionado à questão de saber se essas exigências implicam em uma compreensão axiomática do conhecimento científico ou não. Embora a descrição que seguiremos se apoie fortemente na análise realizada por Enrico Berti (cf. 2002, p. 5-6), não deixamos de consultar as exposições realizadas tanto pelo professor Lucas Angioni, (2012) como pelo professor Oswaldo (PORCHAT, 2000). 162 ANGIONI, 2012, p. 22. 163 ARISTÓTELES, I 2, 72b 20. 77 relacionam, assim, ao particular. No segundo caso, as coisas "mais conhecidas" por natureza são realidades distantes da sensação, ressaltando-se o aspecto de universalidade. Temos, pois, a clássica distinção aristotélica sobre o conhecimento das coisas quanto a nós e a partir delas próprias 164 . Por fim, é exigido que as premissas sejam anteriores e causas da conclusão. Enrico Berti acredita que estas duas características podem ser pensadas como decorrentes da estrutura formal do silogismo científico, uma vez que a anterioridade deve existir para que seja respeitada a ordem da dedução. Quanto à causa da conclusão, relaciona-se também com a estrutura formal do silogismo, porquanto a conclusão deve advir das premissas, sendo estas, por sua vez, causas da conclusão. Para Lucas Angioni, dizer que as premissas são causas da conclusão em um silogismo a partir de sua forma lógica é algo trivial. Daí ter proposto uma interpretação diferente daquela em que até o presentemente nos detivemos. É a seguinte: O requisito da causalidade deve ser tomado de modo mais específico: em uma demonstração científica, as premissas devem apresentar, como termo mediador, a causa apropriada que faz o sujeito C ter a propriedade A e, portanto, explica adequadamente o fato relatado na conclusão. A mera verdade das premissas, somada à forma lógica de um argumento válido, não é suficiente para explicar adequadamente a conclusão 165 . Segundo Robin Smith, a concepção de Aristóteles sobre a necessidade de as premissas serem anteriores à conclusão abrange os seguintes sentidos: o epistêmico (quando A é mais óbvio que B), o causalmente anterior (se A causou B) e, por fim, o sentido lógico (quando A é de maneira apropriada para servir de premissa da qual decorre B). Acreditamos que esta noção fornecida por Smith parece ser a mais adequada, pois, embora não se encontre em oposição nem com a explicação de Enrico Berti nem com a de Lucas Angioni, possui maior poder explicativo, na medida em que podemos entender que Enrico Berti e Lucas Angioni apenas focaram a atenção em algum dos sentidos presentes na noção aristotélica, deixando, porém, de perceber que, de fato, ela possui outros aspectos. Voltando ao nosso foco, se as premissas satisfizerem todas as exigências de que falamos, então elas podem legitimamente compor o silogismo científico. Podemos assim entender que as premissas que satisfazem todas aquelas exigências teorizadas por Aristóteles 164 Lucas Angioni se opõe ao fato de que a caracterização das premissas como mais conhecidas do que a conclusão implique em uma compreensão axiomática do conhecimento científico. Por entender que o contexto paradigmático para o conhecimento científico consiste em explicar pelas causas apropriadas por que é verdadeira uma conclusão que já era conhecida como tal, e não em estabelecer a verdade de uma conclusão antes desconhecida, Angioni entende esse requisito em termos de causalidade. Sendo assim, é por serem causas que as premissas devem ser descritas como mais conhecidas (cf. ANGIONI, 2012, p. 42). 165 ANGIONI, 2012, p. 24-25. 78 podem também ser chamadas de princípios próprios, porquanto é necessária a aquisição dos princípios para se obter o conhecimento científico. Devemos notar que a ênfase com a qual Aristóteles destaca a necessidade dos princípios próprios implica necessariamente no aspecto restritivo da demonstração, porquanto eles não podem ser inferidos de outras ciências, ou seja, a demonstração é sempre e exclusiva no âmbito de uma determinada ciência 166 . Embora no tocante às exigências que as premissas devem possuir para poderem ser legitimamente utilizadas em um silogismo científico Lucas Angioni tenha argumentado em prol de uma independência da noção de demonstração com sua forma silogística, porquanto, segundo ele, o traço mais importante do conhecimento científico não reside nessa estrutura, 167 julgamos existir uma íntima relação entre ambos os aspectos, porém nos eximimos de discutir, neste momento, os pontos que fundamentam nossa opinião. A imagem que emerge desta concepção aristotélica da ciência é expressa claramente nas seguintes palavras de Smith: Uma vez que o conhecimento científico é, por definição, um conhecimento de causas, e uma vez que esses primeiros princípios não têm causas, a fundação última do conhecimento científico tem de ser algo distinto do conhecimento científico. Para usar um termo moderno, a imagem aristotélica da ciência é fundacionista no sentido de que ele pensa que a demonstração só é possível se existem verdades primeiras conhecidas sem fazer apelo a demonstrações 168 . Se, porém, são tomadas como "princípios próprios" as premissas que satisfazem as exigências teorizadas pelo Estagirita, segue-se que tais princípios são aquilo a partir do qual se demonstra em um silogismo científico. Então poderá o leitor perguntar-se: O que, afinal, é demonstrado? Ora, o que é demonstrado são as propriedades universais e necessárias 166 Enrico Berti percebeu corretamente as implicações decorrentes desse fato: "isso implica na impossibilidade de uma ciência universal, a partir da qual se possam demonstrar os princípios próprios de todas as outras ciências, como também a impossibilidade de uma ciência capaz de demonstrar os princípios comuns a todas as outras. Nem os princípios próprios, com efeito, nem os comuns, enquanto princípios são demonstráveis".[BERTI, 1998, p. 8-9]. 167 Lucas Angioni deixa claro que não compreende a proposta de demonstração como uma axiomatização do conhecimento. De fato, ele manifesta que está propondo uma interpretação diferente, segundo a qual a "demonstração científica se define pela tarefa essencial de explicar adequadamente, pelas causas primeiras, por que são verdadeiras certas proposições que já sabemos que são verdadeiras (cf. ANGIONI, 2012 p. 4). 168 "Since scientific knowledge is by definition knowledge of causes, and since these first principles have no causes, the ultimate foundation of scientific knowledge must be something other than scientific knowledge. To use a modern term, Aristotle's picture of science is foundationalist in the sense that thinks demonstration is possible only if there are first truths known without demonstration". SMITH, Robin. Logic. In: BARNES, Jonathan (org.). The Cambridge companion to Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 49. 79 dos objetos às quais os princípios próprios se referem 169 . Lucas Angioni entende que não cabe principalmente à demonstração estabelecer, por meio de premissas verdadeiras, a veracidade de uma conclusão cujo valor de verdade era antes dubitável, mas cabe-lhe principalmente, enquanto demonstração, explicar, por meio das causas apropriadas, por que é verdade uma conclusão que já era reconhecida como verdadeira 170 . Daí acreditar Lucas Angioni que a imposição de Aristóteles à demonstração segundo a estrutura silogística não pretendia, de forma alguma, um ideal de axiomatização; a escolha ter-se-ia dado, antes de tudo, por conta da capacidade inerente ao silogismo e, mais particularmente àquele da primeira figura, de captar as relações de causalidade 171 . Uma vez que o conhecimento científico é necessário, as premissas que o compõem devem também ser necessárias; em outras palavras, a relação estabelecida entre o sujeito e o predicado nas premissas de um silogismo científico deve ser necessária; assim, os predicados devem ser essenciais aos seus sujeitos. Para caracterizar esta necessidade Aristóteles afirma que o predicado deve convir ao sujeito de três maneiras: 1) de todo; 2) por si; 3) e universal. Segundo Aristóteles, a atribuição "de todo" é a inclusão ou exclusão de todo elemento a determinado grupo, não sendo, pois, permitido que essa atribuição seja ocasional. Essa ocasionalidade não pode se dar nem no âmbito do indivíduo, nem no da temporalidade. A atribuição, para ser legitimamente "de todo", além de incluir todos os membros da classe à qual se refere, deve fazer isto atemporalmente. Pois, na relação entre sujeito e predicado o que está em questão é que tanto a afirmação quanto a negação de propriedades que estão sendo expressas em relação ao objeto em questão, seja uma atribuição constante. Quanto à exigência de que a atribuição do predicado ao sujeito seja "por si", expressa o caráter de que daquilo que é atribuído deve constituir um elemento essencial na natureza do objeto da predicação 172 . Sendo assim, os predicados já devem estar compreendidos na definição do sujeito. Tanto a afirmação quanto a negação de um predicado a um determinado sujeito deve ser feita a partir da própria natureza do sujeito. Segundo Ross, é possível encontrarmos 4 sentidos contidos na expressão "por si": 1) O primeiro se dá quando um termo está implicado na essência de outro e em sua definição. Um exemplo típico é a noção de linha, que está implicada na essência e na definição do triângulo. Assim, quando dizemos que um predicado condiz "por si" com relação ao sujeito, 169 Cf. BERTI, 2002, p.7. 170 Cf. ANGIONI, 2012, p. 41. 171 Ibid., p. 56. 172 ARISTÓTELES, Segundos Analíticos, I 4, 73 a 35. 80 temos a definição, o gênero ou a diferença específica do sujeito. 2) Um segundo sentido ocorre quando um termo é atributo de outro e o inclui em sua definição. Entendemos melhor este caso quando lembramos que toda linha é reta ou curva, e os termos reto e curvo não podem ser definidos sem referência à linha. Neste segundo sentido, um predicado por si é uma propriedade ou uma disjunção que estabelece propriedades alternativas do sujeito. 3) O terceiro sentido pertence ao campo das proposições existenciais. Neste caso, algo é por si quando não é afirmado de outro sujeito, mas de si mesmo. Podemos constatar isto quando percebemos que os termos "branco" e "caminhando" implicam um sujeito distinto de si mesmo alguma coisa que seja branca ou caminhe. 4) Por fim, o quarto significado da expressão leva em conta a conexão entre uma causa e seu efeito, expressando a concomitância dos acontecimentos. Do exposto, pode-se afirmar que, enquanto os sentidos 1 e 2 estão compreendidos na formulação aristotélica do modo de conveniência entre o sujeito e o predicado, os sentidos 3 e 4 são utilizados apenas para dar uma explicação completa do significado de "por si" 173 . Por fim, quanto à exigência de que o predicado se relacione ao sujeito de forma universal, isto é necessário para demonstrar que "ele pertence a qualquer caso fortuito desse sujeito e que pertence a ele primariamente" 174 . Lucas Angioni explica que o universal é um atributo que se mostra verdadeiro a respeito de qualquer caso particular contido no sujeito de que se predica predicado 175 . Uma vez que no processo demonstrativo não basta que apenas o predicado seja necessariamente pertinente ao sujeito, mas que o seja também o termo médio, do qual depende a demonstração, torna-se claro que o termo médio também deverá ser necessário, devendo assim pertencer ao mesmo gênero dos termos extremos. Daí que, para haver demonstração, a relação estabelecida entre o gênero-sujeito e o predicado deve ser a mesma, ou seja, não se pode proceder demonstrativamente passando de um gênero-sujeito a outro. Esta transferência é, segundo Aristóteles, proibida e configura-se como a conhecida doutrina aristotélica da metábase. Percebemos, assim, que uma ciência demonstrativa universal é impossível segundo os moldes aristotélicos, pois cada ciência possui dois aspectos em comum: um 173 A exposição anterior sobre os significados compreendidos na expressão "por si" apoia-se fortemente nos dados oferecidos por Ross. Uma vez que a passagem é extensa, escolhemos apresentar apenas uma paráfrase. [Cf. ROSS, [s.d.], p. 57-58]. 174 Ibid., I 4, 73b 35. 175 ANGIONI, Lucas. O conhecimento científico no livro I dos Segundos Analíticos de Aristóteles. Revista de Filosofia Antiga. v.1, n. 2, p. 1-26, maio/out. 2007. p. 9. 81 termo-espécie que demarca o seu assunto e um conjunto de atributos que ela estuda 176 . A teoria do conhecimento científico em Aristóteles é um assunto em torno do qual diversos problemas estão relacionados. Alguns destacam a existência de uma assimetria entre o método científico proposto e a sua real utilização 177 . Jonathan Barnes chega a afirmar que não há em Aristóteles um único exemplo de demonstração; os exemplos reivindicados por ele são, antes, argumentos que chegam muito próximos à forma demonstrativa, porém não há exemplo perfeito 178 . Poderíamos ainda destacar o problema das ciências que constituem exceções à teoria aristotélica da demonstração científica, como é o caso das ciências subordinadas. Outro problema concerne ao modo preferível de entender a teoria aristotélica: devemos entendê-la como um sistema dedutivo axiomático compreendendo um conjunto finito de demonstrações, ou apenas como um modo de transmitir o conhecimento obtido? Independentemente do posicionamento a ser tomado, o que está muito explicito é a íntima relação existente entre a teoria do conhecimento científico e as matemáticas, particularmente a geometria 179 . Esta associação é expressa em quatro aspectos distintos: 1) grande parte dos números dos exemplos utilizados por Aristóteles são retirados do âmbito das matemáticas; 2) considerável parte de sua terminologia lógica pode ser derivada do vocabulário matemático em voga no seu tempo; 3) a matemática foi a única ciência na antiguidade que alcançou o status de procedimento rígido, o qual pode ter despertado em Aristóteles o interesse em axiomatizar a geometria; 4) desde Platão, no mínimo sempre houve uma íntima relação entre filosofia e matemática, sendo, pois, natural que um estudante nutrisse interesse por esta relação. Não seria, pois, de esperar que Aristóteles ignorasse essa tendência de havia muito existente 180 . 176 CODE, 2012, p. 51. 177 BARNES, Jonathan. Aristotle's theory of demonstration. Phronesis, v. 14, 1969. Extracted from PCI Full Text, published by Pro Quest Information and Learning Company. 178 BARNES, 1969, p. 124 Essa percepção foi algo marcante em sua interpretação, que constitui justamente uma tentativa de solucionar aquilo que ele julgou ser um impasse entre uma teoria altamente formalizada, de um lado, e uma prática muito inocente, de outro. 179 Esta relação entre a teoria da demonstração e a matemática torna-se mais perceptível ao levarmos em conta a tabela fornecida por Barnes a respeito dos exemplos utilizados por Aristóteles ao longo dos Segundos Analíticos. Temos os exemplos: Matemáticos Não-matemáticos Livro A 50 36 Livro B 19 46 Total 69 82. Apesar de ser ressaltada a proximidade entre a ciência demonstrativa e as matemáticas, Barnes adverte que essa relação não deve ser entendida de um modo tão radical que se configure como um isomorfismo (BARNES, 1969, p. 129). 180 BARNES, 1969, p. 128-129. Percebe-se claramente a extrema dependência de exemplos do âmbito da geometria nos Segundos Analíticos. Angioni, de fato, chega a dizer que Aristóteles "abusa das elipses", o que Ross já havia de antemão percebido. De fato, Ross argumenta em prol dessa relação através de uma 82 Retornando ao texto: Aristóteles deve ter-se apercebido das sérias exigências que fazia em relação ao conhecimento científico, pois, em seguida, comenta a respeito da dificuldade que encontrava em proceder demonstrativamente a partir de um sujeito, e isto de forma primária, por si mesma e universal. Mesmo tendo formalizado sua doutrina, Aristóteles faz menção a algumas ciências que procedem precisamente transferindo demonstrações de um gênero-sujeito a outro. A astronomia utiliza-se de demonstrações geométricas, a ótica demonstra por meio de teoremas geométricos; além disso, teoremas de proporção aritmética são aplicados aos sons. Mesmo frente a tais casos, ele não nega sua doutrina, mas reafirma-a, indicando que é precisamente pelo fato de serem mantidas relações entre os gêneros-sujeito destas ciências, que a transferência é possível. Ao expor a concepção aristotélica desta doutrina, Carlos Arthur Ribeiro Nascimento conclui que essas disciplinas constituíam um tipo de obstáculo para Aristóteles 181 e a menção a elas não era em função de si, ou seja, a passagem por elas era necessária a fim de esclarecer outro tema em questão, a saber, a ciência demonstrativa. Este grupo de ciências será mais adiante objeto de nosso estudo de forma mais detalhada, porém, no momento, limitamo-nos a investigar em que medida Tomás de Aquino adere à doutrina aristotélica. 3.1 O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AOS SEGUNDOS ANALÍTICOS Uma vez que já abordamos algumas questões em torno da recepção dos Segundos Analíticos na Idade Média, devemos ter presente que a obra foi comentada e que, tanto a concepção de ciência como aqueles "casos inconvenientes de metábase" ali mencionados, foram objeto de análise por parte dos filósofos medievais e, especificamente, por Tomás de Aquino. O comentário de Tomás de Aquino aos Segundos Analíticos é uma exposição literal, portanto, "um comentário linha por linha, exaustivo, mas que não se afasta muito do texto original, já que o objetivo é mais didático do que filosófico, procura-se mais dar uma compreensão literal do texto do que discutir suas teses com alguma profundidade. comparação linguística e funcional entre os Elementos de Euclides e o modelo teorizado por Aristóteles. Julga que o verdadeiro mérito de Euclides não consiste em haver criado um sistema geométrico de dedução, mas em tê-lo sistematizado. A palavra axioma foi tomada do âmbito das matemáticas. Os axiomas de Aristóteles correspondem às noções comuns de Euclides e as hipóteses de Aristóteles assemelham-se aos postulados dos elementos (ROSS, [s.d.], p. 57-58). Opinião semelhante é defendida por Smith, segundo a qual a íntima relação existente entre o conhecimento demonstrativo e as matemáticas se dá pelo fato de que, tanto a aritmética quanto a geometria, no tempo de Aristóteles, já estarem sendo apresentadas como séries de deduções partindo de primeiros princípios básicos (cf. SMITH, 1995, p.81). 181 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Aristóteles e a metábase. Scintilla. Curitiba, v. 3, n. 2, p. 379-390, jul./dez. 2006. p. 389. 83 Diferentemente do seu comentário ao livro da Física, a obra possui um prefácio no qual encontramos uma reflexão em torno de alguns assuntos, dentre os quais se destacam os seguintes: 1) uma reflexão em torno da natureza da lógica 182 ; 2) uma proposta de divisão da lógica em várias partes; 3) a associação dos atos da razão com as operações naturais. Quanto à natureza da lógica, Tomás de Aquino destaca dois pontos: primeiro, que é uma arte racional, no sentido de ser orientada segundo a razão. No entanto este aspecto não é algo exclusivo da lógica, pois diz respeito a todas as artes humanas, ou seja, o ser orientada pela razão é uma propriedade comum e primária, e não exclusiva, de todas as artes. Mas, ao fato de a lógica ser orientada pela razão, tal como todas as artes humanas, deve-se acrescentar que ela tem o ato da razão como sua matéria própria, daí poder ser legitimamente chamada de "arte das artes". Tendo estabelecido esse primeiro ponto – que a lógica diz respeito aos atos da razão Tomás de Aquino infere um segundo, ou seja, que ela se divide segundo esses mesmos atos, os quais são, respectivamente: 1) a inteligência dos indivisíveis, ato responsável por inteligir o que a coisa é ; 2) a composição ou a divisão do intelecto, ato em que já ocorre o verdadeiro e o falso, distintamente do aspecto anterior, onde estava apenas em questão a essência da coisa; 3) o discorrer de um a outro / "raciocínio". Além disso, Tomás de Aquino interpreta que cada um desses atos é compreendido pela análise de Aristóteles nos seus escritos lógicos. Assim, na interpretação de Tomás de Aquino as Categorias se ordenam à inteligência dos indivisíveis, o De interpretatione referese à composição ou divisão do intelecto, e os demais escritos de lógica, ao ato de "discorrer de um a outro" 183 . Tomás de Aquino afirma também existir uma semelhança entre os atos da razão e os atos da natureza, porquanto a arte imita a natureza. E, reconhecendo três ações no 182 Embora o prólogo tome as expressões arte e ciência como sinônimas, a prioridade da lógica frente às demais ciências é ressaltada no mesmo prólogo, onde Tomás afirma ser ela "a arte das artes". 183 Apresentamos o texto de Tomás onde ele expõe sua tese: "Portanto, é preciso considerar as partes da lógica segundo a diversidade dos atos da razão. Ora, os atos da razão são três. Dos quais, os dois primeiros são atos da razão segundo esta é certo intelecto: uma ação do intelecto é, de fato, a inteligência dos indivisíveis ou incomplexos, segundo a qual se concebe o que é a coisa, e esta operação é chamada, por alguns, de informação do intelecto ou imaginação pelo intelecto; e a esta operação da razão se ordena a doutrina que Aristóteles trata no livro das Categorias. A segunda operação do intelecto é a composição ou divisão do inteligido, na qual já há verdadeiro e falso; e a este ato da razão se destina a doutrina que Aristóteles trata no livro Sobre a Interpretação (Pery Hermeneias). Ora, o terceiro ato da razão é segundo o que é próprio da razão, isto é discorrer de um a outro, tal que por aquilo que é conhecido se chegue ao conhecimento do que é ignorado; e a este ato se destinam os outros livros da lógica". A tradução aqui utilizada foi realizada pelo professor Anselmo Tadeu Ferreira, disponível em: FERREIRA, Anselmo Tadeu. A estrutura da Lógica segundo Tomás de Aquino. Educação e Filosofia Uberlândia, v. 25, n. 50, p. 445-474, jul./dez. 2011. p. 471-472. A proposta de que a lógica seja compreendida em lógica dos termos, das proposições e do raciocínio pretende relacionar cada uma destas partes com uma das operações do entendimento. Por meio da inteligência dos indivisíveis alcançamos um conceito ou termo; na composição e divisão, alcançamos uma proposição e no raciocínio alcançamos um argumento. 84 âmbito da natureza, que são, respectivamente, o necessário, o frequente e o erro ou a falha, identifica sua ocorrência também nos atos da razão. Daí afirmar que, com efeito, algum processo da razão conduz ao necessário, no qual não é possível haver falha quanto à verdade, e por esse tipo de processo da razão se adquire a certeza da ciência; mas há outro processo da razão no qual, no mais das vezes, se conclui o verdadeiro, contudo não há necessidade nisso; e há um terceiro processo da razão no qual a razão falha quanto ao verdadeiro, por causa de algum defeito do princípio que devia ser observado ao raciocinar 184 . Após essas identificações, Tomás de Aquino esclarece que seu comentário se deterá particularmente na parte judicativa da lógica, a qual se preocupa antes de tudo com o juízo propriamente dito. Em seguida, reconhece uma dupla divisão no livro: a primeira, trata da necessidade do silogismo demonstrativo, e a segunda, compreende um veredicto sobre o silogismo. A necessidade do silogismo científico aparece como uma resposta àqueles que defendem que o conhecimento se baseia sempre em conhecimento prévio. A posição de Aristóteles é oposta, pois defende que apenas parte de nosso conhecimento é obtido de outro já existente. A análise tomasiana começa reconhecendo um aspecto polêmico do posicionamento de Aristóteles em relação ao defendido na antiguidade por Platão. De fato, embora diversos postulados aristotélicos a respeito do conhecimento científico tenham provindo de Platão, alguns foram rejeitados pelo Estagirita, a exemplo da teoria das ideias 185 . Na discussão posterior Tomás de Aquino se aplica a explicar em que medida deve ser entendida a extensão do conhecimento prévio e, uma vez que o conhecimento científico é constituído por três componentes os princípios, o sujeito e o atributo próprio-, é a eles que se estende o conhecimento prévio. Porém, o conhecimento desses três componentes do conhecimento científico está diretamente relacionado com outras duas questões, a saber: se cada um é e o que cada um é. A partir disso, temos que de um princípio não conhecemos o que ele é, mas apenas se o fato é verdadeiro; quanto ao atributo próprio, é possível conhecermos o que é, sem, no entanto, conhecermos se ele existe; por fim, o sujeito pode ser conhecido tanto no que é, quanto em relação ao se ele é. A partir da lecture 4, Tomás de Aquino passa a comentar a natureza do silogismo demonstrativo, o qual pode ser entendido a partir do seu fim, o de produzir conhecimento científico, pois a demonstração é silogismo que produz ciência. Conhecer alguma coisa cientificamente é conhecê-la perfeitamente, o que implica tanto a ideia de completude, como 184 FERREIRA, 2011, p. 28. 185 DÜRING, Ingemar. Aristóteles: exposición e interpretación de su pensamiento. 2. ed. Coyoacán/ México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990. p. 156-157. 85 ressalta Tomás de Aquino, quanto o conhecimento da relação existente entre a causa e o efeito 186 . Assim, conhecer cientificamente é tanto o fim do silogismo demonstrativo quanto o seu resultado. O objeto procurado pelo conhecimento científico através da demonstração é uma conclusão na qual, um atributo próprio ao mesmo tempo, seja predicado de algum sujeito e a conclusão inferida a partir dos princípios 187 . Temos que as proposições de uma demonstração são a causa da conclusão, devendo por isso ser elas primeiro e mais bem conhecidas. Após destacar que podemos considerar as noções de "primeiro" e "mais bem conhecidas" de dois modos, a saber, tanto em referência a nós quanto à natureza, Tomás de Aquino procura explicar uma aparente contradição entre os Segundos Analíticos e os dados presentes na Física I: enquanto os Segundos Analíticos afirmam que os princípios dos quais a demonstração procede são primeiros em relação à natureza e posteriores quanto a nós, a Física deixa transparecer a ideia de que os universais são primeiros em relação a nós e posteriores em relação à natureza. Portanto, enquanto segundo os Segundos Analíticos universal é o que está mais distante dos sentidos, segundo a Física, universal é o que está mais próximo e se conhece primeiro. Tomás de Aquino chama a atenção para a necessidade de distinguir as diferentes perspectivas numa e noutra obra. Enquanto na primeira (os Segundos Analíticos) privilegia-se a ordem do singular para o universal pois esta é a ordem do próprio conhecimento sensível e intelectivo em nós (o conhecimento sensível é anterior ao intelectivo, mas guarda estreita relação com ele), na segunda perspectiva (a da Física), privilegia-se a ordem do universal, do mais universal para o menos universal, mas não de modo absoluto. Na Física, portanto, o mais universal é primeiro e mais bem conhecido em relação a nós, a exemplo de animal e homem. Ainda que ambos os textos estejam sob perspectivas distintas, eles podem ser compreendidos a partir de uma passagem da Suma Contra os Gentios, que leva em conta a necessidade "de se fazer a distinção entre o que é simplesmente evidente por si mesmo e o que é evidente quanto a nós. Com efeito, acontece ao nosso intelecto estar em relação às verdades evidentíssimas como a coruja, em relação ao sol" 188 . Em seguida, Tomás de Aquino reserva espaço para esclarecer que o princípio de uma demonstração é precisamente uma proposição imediata, aquela que não possui nenhuma anterior a ela. A proposição imediata 186 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Translated by Fabian. R. Larcher. With a Preface by James A. Weisheipl. Albany: MAGI BOOKS, 1970, Bk 1 Lec 4 p 15. 187 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle.Bk 1 Lec 2 p 7. 188 AQUINO, Tomás de. 1996. vol. II. p. 34-35. 86 não possui anterioridade, por estar o predicado incluído na noção do sujeito e por ser ela conhecida em função de si mesma. Distinguem-se dois tipos de proposições imediatas: o primeiro é a position [thesis] da qual se diz ser imediata por não poder ser demonstrada, devendo apenas ser aceita; o segundo tipo é a máxima, que deve ser compreendida como verdadeira por serem seus termos entendidos. Tomás de Aquino remete então à Metafísica, tomando como exemplo o princípio de não-contradição 189 . Quanto à position, distingue nela duas subdivisões: ela pode ser uma suposição ou uma definição. Enquanto a primeira (a suposição) simplesmente supõe uma certa condição para que algo seja ou não de determinado modo, a segunda não supõe, mas afirma que algo é. Temos em seguida a exclusão de dois erros, o problema do retorno ad infinitum e o da demonstração circular. Após haver discutido sobre o que é um silogismo demonstrativo, a partir da lecture 9, Tomás de Aquino dá uma explicação a respeito da natureza dos componentes que o constituem 190 . Ter ciência demonstrativa é orientar-se em função de uma demonstração; em outras palavras, nós a temos através de uma demonstração. Assim, a conclusão de uma demonstração não é apenas necessária, ela se faz conhecida em função de uma demonstração. A conclusão segue, pois, de coisas necessárias, mais especificamente, da relação entre os componentes do silogismo. Tomás de Aquino acredita que os requerimentos no modo de predicação de per se, de omni e universale entre o sujeito e o predicado são, de fato, cumulativos. É objetiva e esclarecedora a explicação da seguinte passagem por Anselmo Ferreira, o qual nos diz que tudo que se predica de algo per se também se predica de omni, mas não o inverso, e tudo o que se predica primo universale de algo também se predica per se, mas não o inverso. A diferença entre esses três modos é que o predicado de omni é o mais genérico, cabe a tudo o que esteja contido sob a denominação do sujeito; já o predicado per se se diz por comparação ao próprio sujeito ao qual inere e deve fazer parte de sua definição ou o sujeito fazer parte da sua. Já o predicado se atribui primo universaliter a um sujeito em comparação ao que é anterior ao sujeito e o contém. Nem todo predicado que se atribui universalmente, portanto, preenche todos os requisitos necessários de universalidade que será a característica das proposições do silogismo demonstrativo; tal universalidade liga-se ao fato de que o conhecimento científico deve ser necessário 191 . 189 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lec 5 p 21. 190 A lecture 9-25 do comentário está analisando os capítulos 4-13 dos Segundos Analíticos, e constitui uma unidade, tendo como objeto o silogismo demonstrativo. Anselmo Ferreira identifica nela três etapas; 1) uma breve retomada da definição do silogismo científico; 2) uma explicação sobre o sentido das palavras que expressam a forma de relação a ser mantida entre o sujeito e o predicado (per se, de omni e universale); 3) a natureza dos princípios a partir dos quais se dá o silogismo científico (Cf. FERREIRA, 2011, p. 107). 191 Cf. FERREIRA, 2008, p. 108-109. 87 Percebemos que a questão primordial na explicação dada por Tomás de Aquino é ressaltar tanto o caráter de necessidade quanto o de universalidade requerida na relação entre os termos que compõem um silogismo demonstrativo, para que se tenha legitimamente a demonstração. Pois, se a relação entre os termos for acidental, o conhecimento das causas também o será, invalidando desta forma o processo demonstrativo. Uma vez que se julga estabelecido como se devem compreender as três exigências do caráter predicacional realizadas por Aristóteles, Tomás de Aquino reserva, a partir da lecture 13, uma organização do texto que versará sobre os princípios do silogismo científico, ou seja, os itens a partir dos quais a demonstração procede. Essa divisão compreende um duplo aspecto, que remete à clássica distinção entre o conhecer, quia (o quê) e o propter quid (o por quê) do fato. De início, enfatiza-se que aquilo que é predicado per se de uma coisa, está nela de modo necessário. Isto é comprovado ao tomarmos em consideração um dos modos da predicação per se, aquele segundo o qual aquilo que é predicado está compreendido ou incluído na definição do sujeito; por isso, tudo que é predicado de alguma coisa e se encontra em sua definição, é predicado dela necessariamente 192 . Isto é evidente, pois, se tudo quanto é predicado de uma coisa, o é de modo necessário ou contingente, e a demonstração não se dá acidentalmente, pois neste caso não teríamos conhecimento da causa. Impõe-se então que a conclusão provenha de uma predicação necessária. De fato, na demonstração um atributo próprio é provado de um sujeito através de um meio (causa pela qual algo é o que é), que é justamente a sua definição. A definição desempenha um papel primordial, visto que ela tem por função manifestar-nos a essência ou a natureza de uma coisa, o que ela é. Sendo assim, o meio através do qual a demonstração ocorre deve ser necessário, porquanto ele é a causa explicativa da predicação que ocorre; por isso "não se pode demonstrar uma conclusão necessária a partir de um mediador contingente, pois, uma vez removida a causa pela qual (propter quid) algo é, deve cessar o efeito", e desta forma não estaremos mais em posse de uma demonstração 193 . A parte seguinte do texto está diretamente relacionada à proibição de metábase por Aristóteles. É a oportunidade de verificar em que medida a análise realizada por Tomás de Aquino realiza está em consonância com a posição expressa no texto por ele comentado. Eileen Serene tem destacado que, embora seja possível afirmar de maneira geral que o "ideal aristotélico de ciência demonstrativa" tem recebido veredicto favorável das maiores figuras da 192 AQUINAS, Thomas.Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lec 13 p. 43. 193 Cf. FERREIRA, 2008, p. 123. 88 filosofia medieval 194 , essa aceitação obscurece em grande parte os diversos relatos realizados a respeito desse assunto, tanto no que diz respeito aos fundamentos da ciência demonstrativa quanto ao seu alcance. Segundo Eileen, isso se deve a que, [...] na exposição da teoria de Aristóteles, os autores medievais tipicamente a interpretavam e criticavam à luz de suas próprias concepções e doutrinas; por exemplo, suas análises das exigências de que as premissas de um silogismo demonstrativo fossem verdadeiras, necessárias e certas, invocam várias concepções de verdade, necessidade e certeza 195 . A autora destaca ainda que a fidelidade de um filósofo medieval à doutrina aristotélica da ciência demonstrativa se dá nos seguintes tópicos: 1) a interpretação das exigências para um silogismo demonstrativo; 2) a relação entre ciência demonstrativa e outros tipos de conhecimento; 3) a possibilidade de alcançar uma ciência demonstrativa da natureza 196 . Foi precisamente o segundo tópico que levantou grandes questões, pois, embora a doutrina aristotélica gozasse de aceitação geral, ela requeria uma análise detalhada, visto que ocasionava um certo impasse na forma de se entender a teologia. Ora, se apenas o conhecimento estritamente dedutivo pode ser caracterizado como científico, a teologia, na medida em que tem por base a fé na revelação divina, não poderia ser entendida como ciência. Esse dilema, que foi objeto de investigação por parte de muitos filósofos medievais, mereceu também lugar especial na análise de Tomás de Aquino, tornando-se uma preocupação constante ao longo de seu pensamento, estando presente desde o seu opúsculo juvenil o De Trinitate, até as obras da maturidade e, particularmente, no seu Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos. O professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro descobre um avanço na teoria da metábase exposta por Tomás de Aquino, quando comparada à apresentada por Aristóteles. O avanço está em que, enquanto Aristóteles apenas constata os casos, Tomás de Aquino esforça-se por explicar como é possível a passagem de um gênero a outro. Desde o início, Tomás de Aquino 194 Diz-se que a expressão "ciência demonstrativa" é ambígua, designando, por um lado, o efeito que ocorre em um indivíduo que compreende os silogismos demonstrativos, estando assim relacionada a um aspecto psicológico em um indivíduo: por outro lado designa um sistema de silogismos que se encontram concatenados segundo uma determinada relação lógica, tal como expõe Aristóteles nos Segundos Analíticos. Para a exposição acima comentada (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 496-517). 195 CHLMP, 982, p. 496. "In expounding Aristotle's theory, medieval authors typically interpret and criticise it in the light of their own conceptions and doctrines; for example, their treatments of the requirements that premisses of demonstrative syllogisms be true, necessary, and certain invoke various views of truth, necessity and certainty". 196 Ibid., p. 497. "Thus the import of a philosopher's allegiance to the ideal of demonstrative science varies according to his position on at least three topics: (1) the interpretation of the requirements for a demonstrative syllogism; (2) the relationship between demonstrative science and other sorts of knowledge; and (3) the possibility of attaining a demonstrative science of nature". 89 mostra um interesse especial pela singularidade metodológica daquelas ciências que praticavam a metábase, as assim chamadas "ciências intermediárias" 197 . No seu opúsculo Sobre a Trindade, a resposta de Tomás de Aquino está diretamente relacionada à doutrina da subalternação das ciências. O Aquinate distingue duas formas pelas quais uma ciência está compreendida sob outra. A primeira se dá quando o sujeito de uma ciência específica é também parte de outra. Isso acontece porque a determinação pela qual o objeto é sujeito de determinada ciência pode não ser tomado em outra ciência, sendo ele, desta forma, compreendido por outra ciência. Para explicar isso, Tomás de Aquino recorre à relação entre a ciência natural e a botânica. Num segundo caso, uma ciência está sob uma outra numa relação de subalternação, quando "na ciência superior se determina o porquê daquilo de que na ciência inferior só se conhece o quê" 198 . Portanto, Tomás de Aquino propõe que uma ciência compreende uma outra mediante duas vias distintas: primeiro, recorrendo ao âmbito do sujeito, na medida em que a determinação própria do objeto a partir da qual este é classificado em certa ciência, pode ser tomada de diferentes maneiras; segundo, apelando para o âmbito da ciência em si, na medida em que o alcance epistêmico da ciência subalternada restringe-se ao âmbito do quê, enquanto o da subalternante concerne à determinação do porquê. Este modelo reaparece com uma pequena modificação no Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos 199 , onde é afirmado que 197 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Boletim do CPA. Campinas, n.1, jan./jun. 1996. p. 31. 198 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1, ad 5m 199 Quando Tomás de Aquino escreveu o seu comentário aos Segundos Analíticos, por volta de 1270, havia 6 traduções da obra, sendo 4 a partir do grego e 2 a partir do árabe. O texto comum na Idade Média foi a versão de Tiago de Veneza, feita antes de 1259. Esta esteve em uso durante a segunda metade do século XII e início do século XIII. Outra versão muito influente deve-se a Michael Scott, juntamente com o comentário de Averróis. Essa obra foi escrita aproximadamente entre 1220 e 1240. Essas duas traduções eram familiares a Tomás, mas provavelmente este depende da versão de Moerbeke, da segunda metade do século XIII. Tomás se utiliza de comentários já existentes para a confecção de seu comentário dos Segundos Analíticos (no caso, os de Temístio, Averróis, Roberto Grosseteste e Alberto Magno). Gauthier afirma que Tomás comentou a tradução de Tiago de Veneza até o capítulo 26 do livro I e, daí em diante, utilizou a tradução de Guilherme de Moerbeke (cf. FERREIRA, Anselmo Tadeu. O conceito de ciência em Tomás de Aquino: uma apresentação da Expositio Libri Posteriorum (Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos). Campinas: UNICAMP, 2008. 286 f. Tese (doutorado em filosofia) Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, 2008. p. 38). Gerardo de Cremona traduziu tanto os Segundos Analíticos quanto uma paráfrase de Temístio sobre a referida obra. Outro comentário disponível na época em que Tomás escreve e que poderia ter sido conhecido e lido por ele é o comentário médio de Averróis, na tradução de Guilherme de Luna, de 1230. Segundo Anselmo, não era possível que Tomás tivesse conhecido e lido o comentário de Averróis e, embora ele não cite expressamente o bispo de Lincoln (Roberto Grosseteste), não se pode afirmar que ele não tenha utilizado o comentário deste, embora seja provável, uma vez que Grosseteste segue bem de perto o Temístio, que é retomado por Alberto Magno. A paráfrase de Alberto Magno aos Segundos Analíticos parece ter sido a grande fonte de Tomás de Aquino. Como fonte secundária, possivelmente tenham sido utilizados os Elementos de Euclides, segundo indicação de Gauthier. Embora os Elementos de Euclides sejam posteriores a Aristóteles, os inúmeros exemplos da teoria geométrica de que Tomás se utiliza nos Segundos Analíticos são naturalmente interpretados por Gauthier como tirados da geometria euclidiana. Trata-se, porém, de uma versão latina de Euclides, cuja 90 [...] uma ciência está sob uma outra de duas maneiras. De um primeiro modo, quando o sujeito de uma ciência é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, assim como o animal é uma espécie do corpo natural, e por isso a ciência dos animais está sob a ciência natural. De outro modo, quando o sujeito da ciência inferior não é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, mas o sujeito da ciência inferior se compara ao sujeito da superior como o material em relação ao formal 200 . A ideia que permeia este texto é a de estabelecer o tipo de relação existente entre as ciências no âmbito da subalternação porquanto o texto do De Trinitate não falava em termos de espécie, mas apenas em partes da ciência. No primeiro caso, tem-se uma relação de inclusão pela espécie; no segundo, uma relação de semelhança, na medida em que a ciência superior determina princípios sobre a inferior. Observa-se que há, no primeiro caso, uma relação de gênero-espécie e que se continua no mesmo gênero da ciência superior, enquanto, no segundo caso, se evidencia uma relação material-formal entre as ciências, e o gênero é o mesmo apenas "de uma certa maneira", pois ocorre uma descida a outro gênero. Tomás de Aquino dedica a lecture 15 do seu comentário aos Segundos Analíticos à explicação da proposta aristotélica de que não é possível, no processo de demonstração, proceder por meio da passagem de um gênero-sujeito a outro. Destaca, assim, que a demonstração não parte de princípios comuns ou estranhos ao gênero-sujeito, mas de princípios próprios, por si. Notemos que tanto Aristóteles quanto Tomás de Aquino compreendem a geometria como modelo de procedimento demonstrativo, razão pela qual, logo em seguida, observa o Aquinate: [...] visto que uma demonstração é a partir daquelas coisas que são por si, está claro que a demonstração não consiste na descida ou passagem de um gênero a outro, como a geometria, demonstrando a partir de seus próprios princípios, não desce a algo na aritmética 201 . Mesmo sendo a geometria e a aritmética ramos abstratos da matemática, é interditada a alternância de princípios de demonstração. A geometria demonstra a partir de seus próprios princípios, permanecendo desta forma no mesmo gênero-sujeito. Uma vez estabelecida a necessidade de permanecer no mesmo gênero para que ocorra a demonstração, história ainda não pôde ser rigorosamente contada. A redação da obra situa-se provavelmente entre 1272 e 1274. Para uma exposição geral sobre diversos aspectos textuais da obra (cf. FERREIRA, 2008, p.23-46). 200 A tradução acima foi realizada pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro Nascimento e encontra-se em NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 32. 201 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lect 15 p. 50. "He says therefore first (75a38) that "inasmuch as demonstration is from things that are per se, it is plain that demonstration does not consist in descending or skipping from one genus to another, as geometry, demonstrating from its own principles, does not descend to something in arithmetic". 91 segue-se um comentário a respeito dos elementos presentes em uma demonstração, a saber: a conclusão, o axioma do qual a demonstração procede e, por fim, o gênero-sujeito cujos atributos próprios e acidentes a demonstração por si revela 202 . Tomás de Aquino realiza então uma distinção com respeito aos três elementos citados anteriormente. Destaca que pode acontecer que o axioma do qual a demonstração procede seja o mesmo em demonstrações diversas ou até em ciências diversas. Isso, no entanto, parece ser afirmado das ciências que estão no mesmo gênero, porquanto, em seguida, temos uma menção às ciências cujos gêneros-sujeito são distintos. Mais uma vez é negada a passagem de gêneros. O exemplo utilizado é novamente a relação entre a aritmética e a geometria. Faz-se, porém, uma observação sobre uma possível passagem entre gêneros: "a menos que por acaso o sujeito de uma ciência estivesse contido sob o sujeito de outra 203 ". Como isto é possível, não se diz de imediato, mas afirma-se que será dito depois. Em seguida, em relação aos gêneros, diz-se apenas que é preciso que eles sejam os mesmos de alguma maneira. É necessário esclarecer quando de fato permanecemos no mesmo gênero. É justamente a esta questão que a lição 15 pretende responder: Ora, é preciso saber que se admite que um mesmo gênero é pura e simplesmente o mesmo quando, da parte do sujeito, não é tomada alguma diferença determinante que seja estranha à natureza desse gênero; [...]. Mas, trata-se de um gênero sob um certo aspecto quando é tomada alguma diferença estranha à natureza desse gênero; assim como o visual é estranho ao gênero da linha e o som é estranho ao gênero do número. [...]. Donde ser patente que, quando se aplica à linha visual o que pertence à linha pura e simples, dá-se de certo modo uma descida a um outro gênero; não, porém, quando se aplica ao triângulo isósceles o que pertence ao triângulo 204 . Dessa argumentação temos que, quando uma ciência não é uma espécie de outra ciência, mas estão ambas em gêneros diferentes, é possível tomar alguma diferença extrínseca à natureza do gênero da ciência superior e aplicar sobre ele determinações, tornando-se possível "uma descida a outro gênero". Vemos assim que Tomás de Aquino tem uma caracterização mais positiva da metábase do que Aristóteles. Esta modificação do sistema era 202 Cf. Ibid., Bk 1 Lect. 15 p. 50. 203 Cf. AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lect 15 p.57.[...] unless perchance the subject of one science should be contained under the subject of the other [...]. "a menos que por acaso o sujeito de uma ciência estivesse contido sob o sujeito de outra" 204 A tradução da passagem foi retirada de NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 33. 92 fundamental para Tomás de Aquino poder atribuir à teologia o caráter de ciência, o que já foi bem indicado por diversos autores 205 . Tomás de Aquino também reconhece que as ciências se distinguem a partir do modo de demonstrar suas conclusões, pois enquanto "a matemática não demonstra senão pela causa formal, a metafísica principalmente pela causa formal, final e também pela causa agente. A da natureza [ciência], no entanto, por todas as causas" 206 . Ora, a matemática lida com necessidade absoluta, enquanto que a Física lida com uma necessidade suposicional. A necessidade em ambas as disciplinas é compreendida distintamente: enquanto a primeira leva em consideração apenas as causas internas (matéria e forma), a última considera tanto as causas internas quanto as externas (agente e finalidade). Em outras palavras, enquanto a matemática demonstra propriamente a partir da essência ou causa formal do objeto, a ciência natural demonstra a partir das causas material, formal, eficiente e final. Willian Wallace julga que existe na matemática uma dupla necessidade; a necessidade de inferência ou consequência (necessitas consequentiae), e a necessidade de conclusão ou consequente (necessitas consequentis). Na física, por sua vez, não há uma necessidade consequente, pois o fim resultante de um processo natural nunca é automaticamente seguro. Lembremos que na natureza o fim é regularmente (não necessariamente) alcançado 207 . Enquanto Aristóteles 205 Este avanço percebido na teoria de Santo Tomás provém tanto de sua grande capacidade intelectual quanto de sua habilidade em sistematizar e se beneficiar das análises de outros filósofos. Exemplo típico disto é que, no Comentário de Grosseteste aos Segundos Analíticos, ele "introduz três elementos não constantes do texto de Aristóteles, que serão presentes na discussões posteriores. 1) a designação das ciências em questão por subalternante (superior) e subalternada (inferior). 2) A distinção e relacionamento entre o sujeito da ciência superior e inferior por meio da condição acrescentada; Grosseteste não se contenta, como Aristóteles, em dizer que as duas ciências têm o mesmo sujeito de um certo modo – o sujeito da subalternada é o mesmo da subalternante, com uma condição acrescentada. 3) Grosseteste precisa e esclarece por que a demonstração da ciência subalternada não é do por quê mas do quê: ela não fornece a causa (física) do que se passa na reflexão". Tomás se beneficiou destes e outros pontos presentes na obra de Grosseteste (cf. NASCIMENTO. Carlos A. R. Roberto Grosseteste: Física e matemática. Educação e filosofia. Uberlândia, v. 23, n. 45, p. 201-228, Jan./Jun. 2009. p. 211-212). O professor Dr. Carlos Arthur tem destacado este ponto em diversos trabalhos seus. É possível encontrar neles a indicação de que outros estudiosos também perceberam esta manobra de Tomás. Uma pequena lista com alguns desses trabalhos encontra-se na parte final da presente dissertação reservada às referências. 206 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário à Física de Aristóteles. Lectio I, 1, nota 12. Trad. de Carlos Arthur (obra inédita). Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 02.07.2014. Esta concepção está clara em Tomás de Aquino, e não se deve reivindicar o texto em De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1., onde apenas é dito que 'as demonstração naturais partem dos efeitos sensíveis". Pois essa passagem não se propõe a diferenciar as ciências em função das diferentes causas tomadas no processo demonstrativo, mas apenas em comparar a Metafísica e a Física a partir do alcance epistêmico; daí mencionar ele o âmbito da demonstração do quê e do porquê. Tomás reconhece uma gradação no rigor com o qual a demonstração é realizada pelas diversas ciências. Elas possuem uma maneira de demonstrar específica (não exclusiva), pois "alguma maneira de demonstrar [destaque nosso] é encontrada em todas as artes, caso contrário elas não seriam ciências" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle.Bk 1 Lect 1 p. 6 | Then (71a3). Porém, a matemática sempre foi concebida como exemplo desse rigor inerente ao conhecimento científico. 207 WALLACE, Willian A. St Thomas's conception of natural philosophy and its method. Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 12.08.2013, p. 13. Wallace, nesse artigo, se opõe à 93 defendia que a demonstração no âmbito da ciência natural fosse feita ex hupotheseos, Tomás de Aquino apoiando-se em Alberto Magno, refina essa ideia e defende que nessa ciência a demonstração deve ser geralmente feita ex suppositione finis. Assim, deve ser aceito que o fim da natureza será, para a maior parte dos casos, regularmente alcançado, ainda que isso não ocorra com necessidade matemática que garanta a sua realização. Podemos resumir os dados advindos de nossa discussão ao longo do presente capítulo. A física e a matemática foram compreendidas por Tomás de Aquino como ciências distintas e cada uma delas privilegia causas distintas a partir das quais demonstram suas conclusões. Embora o Aquinate tenha mantido um tom geral de concordância com a doutrina aristotélica da proibição de transgressão da unidade entre o gênero-sujeito no procedimento demonstrativo (metábase), percebe-se um desenvolvimento desta doutrina em Tomás de Aquino. Pois ele não apenas reconheceu casos em que existe esta passagem de um gênero a outro, tal como fez o Estagirita, mas também argumentou em função de mostrar como isso era de fato possível. Além do mais, o vínculo ou ponto de intersecção entre a física e a matemática também é reconhecido no âmbito da doutrina do conhecimento demonstrativo, tal como o fora na classificação das ciências. De fato, o contato entre as duas ciências mencionadas anteriormente está marcado pelo alcance epistêmico de suas demonstrações. Assim, devemos em seguida investigar em que medida Tomás de Aquino teorizou e se era de fato compatível ou não com seu pensamento o uso da matemática na descrição do mundo físico. Isto será investigado levando em conta dois pontos alcançados até agora ao longo de nosso trabalho, a saber: por um lado, a crença tomista de que a física e a matemática são distintas, e, por outro, que elas possuem um ponto de intersecção, não estando assim totalmente destituídas de relações, particularmente no contexto das ciências intermediárias. idéia de que, não havendo uma necessidade absoluta no âmbito da física ela seja ciência apenas de modo hipotético. Assim, o fato de que as demonstrações da física estejam sob a perspectiva ex hupotheseos, não implica que ela não seja ciência, mas sim que um modo distinto de demonstrar lhe é próprio. 94 4 A RELAÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES Não há dúvida de que se deve atribuir à Aristóteles um lugar na história da ciência ocidental, e, mais particularmente falando, no longo processo de matematização da realidade física. Porém, existe uma considerável discussão em saber qual a forma correta de entendermos esse lugar ocupado por ele. De forma geral, existem duas possíveis interpretações; em primeiro lugar, encontramos alguns estudiosos que julgam ter sido a teoria aristotélica da metábase um grande obstáculo ao progresso das ciências físico-matemáticas; em segundo lugar, temos alguns estudiosos do assunto que não constatam um antagonismo entre a rígida noção de conhecimento científico defendida por Aristóteles e o incentivo do uso da matemática na ciência natural, o aparente tom de oposição seria apenas decorrente de uma compreensão errônea dos textos do Estagirita que abordam o assunto. A partir dessas duas opiniões, buscaremos de início determinar qual é, segundo o nosso entendimento, a melhor forma de interpretar a postura de Aristóteles quanto ao uso da matemática na realidade sensível. E, para alcançarmos tal objetivo, buscaremos entender a exposição do Estagirita sobre as ciências que já possuíam em seu tempo o caráter de ciências "físico-matemáticas" e tendo-as sempre no contexto da doutrina aristotélica do conhecimento científico e da metábase, expostas anteriormente. Nos Segundos Analíticos são três os principais capítulos em que Aristóteles menciona a relação entre as ciências físicas e o uso que elas fazem dos princípios matemáticos. O tema está presente nos capítulos VII, IX, XIII. Entre esses capítulos, o mais importante, onde se encontra a discussão aristotélica sobre o uso da matemática na física, é o capítulo VII dos Segundos Analíticos. Nele existe uma análise da demonstração científica. É justamente em uma passagem deste capítulo que encontramos a famosa proibição de Aristóteles. Ele afirma que "não é possível demonstrar uma coisa passando de um gênero a outro, digamos demonstrar uma proposição geométrica por meio da aritmética" 208 . Se, por um lado, ocorre essa forte negação de que sejam transpostos os princípios de uma ciência para outra no processo demonstrativo, também é verdade que Aristóteles reconhece que isto de fato acontece. Levando em conta todo o capítulo VII, alguns pontos se destacam ao longo de sua argumentação: 1) a proibição de transposição dos princípios de um gênero-sujeito para outro 208 ARISTÓTELES. Analíticos Posteriores. In: Aristóteles. Órganon. VII, 75a 40. 95 no processo demonstrativo; 2) o reconhecimento de que algumas disciplinas realizam esta transposição; 3) as condições específicas que possibilitam a algumas ciências essa passagem entre gênero-sujeito distintos (quando são subordinadas); 4) nem todas as ciências podem fazer essa passagem, apenas um grupo bem seleto 209 . Conhecemos a exigência de Aristóteles de que o gênero-sujeito entre as ciências seja o mesmo, isso também determina a unidade da ciência. De fato, este requerimento era muito importante, pois, mesmo no contexto da doutrina da metábase, se ocorre a transferência, está suposto que o gênero é o mesmo, de "algum modo". Interessante é o fato de que Aristóteles não se esforçou em explicitar as condições pelas quais deveria considerar que eles são um mesmo gênero de algum modo, isso apenas é suposto como certo. Assim, a ideia que permeia o texto consiste em que, se é possível transgredir, isso só ocorre porque o gênero é o mesmo de algum modo e, consequentemente, não estamos mais falando em uma transgressão de modo absoluto. Esse esquema geral encontrado pode ser complementado, ou melhor, compreendido levando em consideração o capítulo XIII da mesma obra, pois lá encontramos uma análise mais pormenorizada de como é possível ocorrer aquela "exceção à regra" do mesmo gênero-sujeito, por parte de algumas ciências. Nesse capítulo a exigência do Filósofo de que os gênero-sujeitos estejam associados um sob o outro será relacionado com o alcance epistêmico das ciências, ou seja, com o conhecimento do quê e do porquê. Logo no início do capítulo, Aristóteles faz uma distinção concernente ao conhecimento: de um lado, deve-se considerar o conhecimento de um fato e, de outro, deve-se considerar o conhecimento da razão desse fato. Assim, está explícita a famosa distinção entre conhecer o quê e conhecer o porquê de um determinado fato, evento, propriedade, relação, etc. Mais tarde os medievais fizeram essa distinção a partir dos seus termos latinos, quia e propter quid. Essas noções apresentadas por Aristóteles recebem ainda um acréscimo em dois contextos diferentes, pois ele nos diz que é necessário distinguir o conhecimento do quê e do conhecimento do porquê tanto na mesma ciência quanto em ciências diferentes. 209 Estes quatro aspectos que mencionamos encontram-se dispersos no texto, no entanto eles são estritamente próximos. De fato, Aristóteles menciona ao longo deste capítulo cada um desses dados. Quanto ao primeiro ponto, ele noz diz que "não é possível demonstrar uma coisa passando de um gênero a outro" (75a 35); o segundo aspecto encontra justificativa em sua afirmação de que, como esta transferência é possível, será explicado posteriormente no que toca a alguns casos" (75b 5). Encontramos o terceiro ponto na parte do texto onde é reconhecido que "As únicas exceções são as proposições da harmonia que são demonstradas pela aritmética" (76a 10); e, por fim, o quarto ponto está no reconhecimento de que apenas um número reduzido de ciências escapa à regra geral de sua teoria da demonstração científica, "Entretanto, a demonstração não é aplicável a um gênero distinto, exceto na condição que explicamos das demonstrações que se aplicam às proposições da mecânica ou da ótica e as demonstrações aritméticas às proposições da harmonia" (76a 20-25). 96 Em sua exposição Aristóteles começa por analisar esta distinção epistêmica no caso das mesmas ciências. São enumeradas duas situações: 1) quando a conclusão não é tirada de premissas imediatas; 2) quando a conclusão não é tirada da causa [própria]. Para exemplificar melhor estas condições ele mostra como isso ocorre em uma demonstração. No caso em questão, ele toma a demonstração de que os planetas estão próximos porque não cintilam. Tomando letras representativas de objetos e predicados, ele mostra como se poderia estabelecer uma relação de predicação entre eles. Em seu exemplo, adota o seguinte esquema representativo: Ccorresponde a planetas Bequivale a não cintilar Aindica estar próximos Tomando esse esquema representativo, Aristóteles nos diz que é correto predicar B de C, ou seja, os planetas não cintilam. Mas, também é correto predicar A de B: temos assim que aquilo que não cintila está próximo. Ora, independentemente disso ser suposto ou assumido quer por indução, quer por percepção sensorial, é possível construir um silogismo com a seguinte estrutura: Os planetas não cintilam O que não cintila está próximo Logo, os planetas estão próximos Devemos notar que esse silogismo, no entanto, possui a estrutura apenas do quê, pois ele nos diz apenas o fato que 'os planetas estão próximos', ele não demonstra a razão do fato enquanto tal. Daí, afirmar o Filósofo que não é porque os planetas não cintilam que estão próximos, mas porque estão próximos é que não cintilam. Se levarmos em conta a diferenciação por ele estabelecida no início do capítulo, também podemos construir um silogismo do porquê deste silogismo. Levemos em consideração o seguinte esquema representativo: Ccorresponde a planetas Bequivale a estar próximo Aindica não cintilar Podemos, então, relacionar B e C, o que nos dá a proposição "os planetas estão próximos". Por sua vez, A se aplica a B, o que está próximo não cintila. E, por fim, A se aplica a C, ou seja, os planetas não cintilam. Temos assim o seguinte silogismo: 97 Os planetas estão próximos Ora, o que está próximo não cintila Logo, os planetas não cintilam. A partir desta estrutura silogística podemos perceber que a razão do fato enquanto tal é demonstrada, e isto deve-se ao termo médio ter sido invertido com o termo maior, pois eles são recíprocos. Esse mesmo modelo pode ser tomado para mostrar a esfericidade da lua. Em seguida o Estagirita passa a analisar o segundo caso em que ocorre a distinção entre conhecer o quê e o porquê na mesma ciência. Esse caso ocorre quando aquilo que não é causa é mais conhecido do que a própria causa, e nesses casos, uma vez que a causa não é enunciada, a demonstração estabelece apenas o fato, e não a razão deste. Para deixar isso claro, Aristóteles toma o exemplo da demonstração de que a parede não respira. Semelhantemente ao exemplo anterior, podemos utilizar as seguintes letras representativas: Acorresponde a animal Bequivale a respiração Crepresenta parede. Se é verdadeiro que A se aplica a todo B (pois tudo que respira é animal), isso implica que A não se aplica a nenhum C ( a parede não é animal) e tampouco B se aplica a algum C (a parede não respira). O argumento fica exposto da seguinte maneira: Tudo que respira é animal Ora, a parede não é animal Logo, a parede não respira 210 . Estes dois exemplos mencionados pelo Filósofo ocorrem na mesma ciência e em função da posição ocupada pelo termo médio. Enquanto, no primeiro caso, este pode não ser tomado como a causa própria, sendo possível, no entanto, intercambiá-lo com o termo maior, no segundo caso, ele é enunciado de forma muito remota, longínqua. Em seguida Aristóteles mostrará como se distinguem o conhecimento de um fato e o conhecimento da razão deste fato em ciências distintas, onde uma está sob a outra. Essa parte possui para nós particular importância, pois é onde encontraremos uma discussão mais 210 Apesar de sua zoologia ser complicada, isso não obscurece a percepção de que as causas tomadas na explicação do exemplo por ele adotado são longínquas. O exemplo da parede que não respira porque não é animal é compreendido adequadamente apenas dentro da zoologia de Aristóteles onde somente os animais de sangue quente possuem sistemas respiratórios. Desta maneira, esta não é a causa de não respirar porque há, segundo Aristóteles, animais que não respiram (cf. NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Aristóteles e a metábase. SCINTILLA. Curitiba, v. 3, n. 2, p. 378-390, jul./dez. 2006. p. 386). 98 pormenorizada daquelas ciências que transgridem a proibição de metábase. No final do capítulo, sua análise se voltará para as ciências que não estão uma sob a outra. De início, Aristóteles busca mostrar que aquela distinção por ele realizada entre conhecer o quê e o porquê, ocorre em ciências distintas pelo fato dos sujeitos dessas ciências manterem entre si uma determinada relação. Segundo o Filósofo, essa relação é de subordinação entre os seus sujeitos. Desta maneira, a diferença entre conhecer um fato e a razão desse fato em ciências distintas se fundamenta no princípio de que os sujeitos de algumas ciências estão subordinados aos sujeitos de outras ciências. Algo interessante que devemos perceber na formulação do Estagirita consiste em que não diz que os sujeitos são subordinados e por isso se relacionam, mas sim que eles estão a tal ponto relacionados que, em função disto se subordinam. Em seguida, ele lista os casos particulares das ciências nas quais ocorre subordinação entre os seus sujeitos. Afirma Aristóteles que Isso é exato no que concerne a todos os sujeitos que estão de tal modo relacionados que um se subordina a outro, como é a relação dos problemas óticos com a geometria plana, dos problemas mecânicos com a geometria dos sólidos, dos problemas harmônicos com a aritmética e do estudo dos fenômenos celestes com a astronomia 211 . Menciona-se que a íntima relação que os sujeitos dessas ciências mantêm entre si é destacada até mesmo pela designação que elas recebem, pois são praticamente sinônimos os seus respectivos nomes. Em seguida ele atribui o alcance epistêmico da distinção feita por ele anteriormente: "compete aos que reúnem dados sensoriais conhecer o fato e aos matemáticos determinar a razão" 212 . Levando em conta essa sua afirmação podemos perceber que as ciências que possuem os seus sujeitos subordinados aos de outras ciências ficam restritas ao conhecimento do quê, ao passo que as outras ciências, no caso em questão, a matemática, conhece o porquê do fato. Dois pontos se destacam; 1) o conhecimento do matemático pertence ao âmbito do porquê, em função dele ser capaz de demonstrar as causas; 2) não existe inclusão no âmbito do conhecimento, ou seja, ainda que o matemático conheça o porquê, isto não implica que ele também saiba o quê. Esta teorização de Aristóteles na qual os sujeitos de uma ciência estão subordinados aos de outras ciências levou em conta o objeto da matemática como subordinando os demais sujeitos daquelas ciências mencionadas por ele. Esta subordinação implica que a demonstração utilizada por estas ciências recorrem aos princípios matemáticos. Temos nesse momento uma singularidade, pois, ainda que as demonstrações matemáticas 211 ARISTÓTELES. Analíticos Posteriores. In: Aristóteles. Órganon. VII, 79a 1. 212 Ibid., VII, 79a 5. 99 independam de um ente concreto, pois elas lidam com as formas, as ciências que por sua vez possuem seus sujeitos subordinados aos sujeitos matemáticos levam em conta as formas matemáticas enquanto concretizadas na matéria sensível e, por conta de sua subordinação, tomam os princípios matemáticos para as suas demonstrações em questão, ou seja, elas circunscrevem suas demonstrações a um substrato particular. Esta mesma ideia é expressa pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro nos seguintes termos: "nas disciplinas que se colocam sob as disciplinas matemáticas e que, portanto, são as disciplinas matemáticas as que estão aptas a demonstrar as propriedades em questão" 213 . Por fim, Aristóteles comenta no texto casos em que as ciências são diferentes, não estando assim uma sob a outra. Toma como exemplo o conhecimento entre o médico e o geômetra. Ora, as feridas circulares cicatrizam mais lentamente do que as demais, o médico sabe disto por meio da experiência, ou seja, ele sabe apenas o quê, ao passo que a razão deste fato é dada pelo matemático, apenas ele sabe o porquê disto acontecer. O geômetra sabe que o círculo é uma figura geométrica que possui segmentos que não se aproximam, e, visto que a ferida circular é uma circunferência, logo neste tipo de ferida os segmentos não estão próximos, dificultando assim o processo de cicatrização. Podemos perceber que, dentre as quatro diferentes maneiras mencionadas pelo Estagirita entre conhecer o quê e o porquê apenas a terceira se relaciona diretamente com a questão das ciências físico-matemáticas. Daquilo que estudamos ao longo do capítulo XIII dos Segundos Analíticos, concluímos que Aristóteles reconhece que determinadas disciplinas guardam uma relação entre si, digamos, uma relação de subordinação entre os seus sujeitos, para sermos mais específicos. É justamente esse vínculo de subordinação entre elas que possibilita a distinção epistêmica realizada por ele. Sua argumentação tomou um caminho bem específico, pois ele argumenta que não é em função de sua subordinação que elas se relacionam, mas ao contrário, é em função de estarem relacionados que se subordinam. Ora, se a primeira opção estivesse presente no texto isto daria margem a pensar que a distinção entre eles ocorre em função apenas de uma perspectiva epistêmica. Porém, como encontramos a segunda opção, isto nos possibilita pensar a questão em aspectos propriamente ontológicos. Sendo assim, a divisão entre o quê e o porquê, em ciências distintas que estão uma sob a outra, particularmente aquelas que transgridem a metábase, decorreria da própria constituição ontológica desses entes, pois os seus princípios contêm um elemento comum 214 . 213 NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 388. 214 É bem verdade que esta relação já havia sido anunciada no capítulo IX, porém ela não foi desenvolvida em seus pormenores; ali apenas é dito que "as proposições da harmonia que são demonstradas da mesma forma, 100 Reconhecemos que o tema que nos dedicamos a investigar nessa breve discussão possui dificuldades inerentes. Daí, ser compreensível a divergência entre vários estudiosos do pensamento aristotélico. Ora, enquanto de um lado temos eruditos como Aubenque e Solmsen defendendo que o predomínio da concepção aristotélica da demonstração científica pelos filósofos medievais se constituiu em um entrave à possibilidade de desenvolvimento do uso da matemática em solucionar problemas físicos, estudiosos como Oswaldo Porchat e Lucas Angioni acreditam que de forma alguma a postura de Aristóteles era incompatível com a utilização da física no âmbito da ciência natural. Essa falsa impressão decorreria apenas de uma compreensão errônea dos textos do Filósofo. Desta maneira, levando em consideração tanto alguns estudos dos autores acima mencionados como as nossas próprias leituras, acreditamos ser possível extrair as seguintes conclusões: Em primeiro lugar, está fora de questão que o Filósofo reconheceu a existência de disciplinas que possuíam uma posição específica dentro da estrutura geral das ciências. Elas mostravam que o âmbito físico e o natural não estavam totalmente desvinculados 215 . Em segundo lugar, temos a tentativa de Aristóteles em explicar o fato de que algumas ciências parecem contradizer sua teoria da demonstração e, consequentemente a proibição da metábase 216 . Em terceiro lugar, o modo pelo qual Aristóteles buscou explicar aqueles casos mas com esta diferença, a saber, que enquanto o fato demonstrado pertence a uma ciência distinta (uma vez que o gênero subjacente é diferente), os fundamentos do fato pertencem à ciência superior à qual os predicados pertencem per se" (76a 10). 215 É bem verdade que o próprio caráter destas ciências é matéria controversa entre os estudiosos. Alguns julgam que, apesar de serem elas físicas e tomarem princípios matemáticos em suas demonstrações, isso não invalida o caráter primariamente físico delas (cf. PEREIRA, Oswaldo Porchat. Ciência e dialética em Aristóteles. São Paulo: UNESP, 2001. p. 222). No entanto, preferimos complementar os dados com a exposição de Aristóteles na Física, onde elas são mencionadas pela designação "as mais naturais dentre as matemáticas", indicando assim a natureza primariamente matemática delas, ainda que se aproximem do âmbito natural. 216 Neste ponto as coisas se complicam um pouco mais quando levamos em conta a argumentação tanto de Porchat quando de Angioni. Ora, Porchat se esforça em mostrar que as ciências físico-matemáticas não se constituem em casos específicos de exceção à proibição feita pelo Filósofo. Além disso, ele busca reduzir o âmbito de aplicação da doutrina da metábase, tornando a passagem feita por aquelas determinadas ciências menos radical, pois em última instância o gênero seria o mesmo. Outro procedimento realizado por ele em seu texto consiste em extrair conclusões implícitas na obra comentada, os Segundos Analíticos. Por fim, propõe que é o caráter ontológico dos entes matemáticos que os permite serem usados em fenômenos naturais. Assim, a matemática poderia ser usada ao menos para explicar as propriedades quantitativas dos corpos naturais. Em uma bela passagem de sua obra ele afirma que "E se, desse modo, uma vez mais se delineia, com grande clareza, o estatuto das ciências físicas matemáticas dentro do sistema aristotélico das ciências, também se apontam os fundamentos da matematização do mundo físico: é a própria natureza dos mesmos seres matemáticos – tal como o filósofo os concebe – que explica a possibilidade de um estudo matemático dos fenômenos físicos. Com efeito, o mesmo fato de não terem os seres matemáticos uma realidade "separada", mas de, tão-somente, constituírem propriedades das coisas físicas que a "separação" matemática faz passar ao ato, permitindo, destarte, a constituição de uma ciência que, em si mesmos, os considera, torna também possível uma "extensão da aplicação matemática aos objetos físicos ou naturais na medida em que a quantidade os afeta". As partes matemáticas da física permitem-nos, então, reintegrar no mundo físico sua "verdade" matemática, que as matemáticas puras, isoladamente, conheceram" (PEREIRA, 2001, p. 222). De fato, não acreditamos que esta interpretação de Pereira contradiga o modo pelo qual entendemos todo o 101 específicos dá margens a interpretações opostas, daí encontrarmos entre os estudiosos leituras divergentes deste tópico. Em quarto lugar, devemos salientar que, mesmo sendo possível mostrar em Aristóteles uma posição favorável ao uso da matemática no âmbito natural, isso é feito por meio de um esforço exegético, ou seja, a leitura mais simples dos textos indica que ele proibiu a passagem para um gênero-sujeito diferente, mas reconheceu que algumas disciplinas fazem justamente isso. Suas breves referências àquelas ciências, portanto, consistiram em justificar aqueles casos por ele comentados em que uma ciência está sob outra, mostrando que elas não transgridem a sua regra absolutamente falando. Se existe passagem, é porque o gênero é o mesmo, de alguma maneira. Mas o modo como isso é formulado deixa transparecer uma incompletude na análise e não faz menção direta da possibilidade de passagem para outros casos além daqueles mencionados por ele. Sendo verdade que, tomando alguns pontos presentes na obra do Filósofo, é possível defender o uso da matemática na ciência natural (acreditamos que isso apenas é possível por meio de vários malabarismos hermenêuticos que forçam em demasiado a obra do autor), também não deixa de ser verdade que ele de forma alguma incentivou esta perspectiva. Não há sombra de dúvida de que Aristóteles nutriu um grande respeito à matemática; de fato, ele nunca negou a validade nem tão pouco a utilidade dela no estudo da natureza. Ele mesmo estava notoriamente consciente das discussões e desenvolvimentos que ela estava sofrendo em seus dias. Ele percebeu e notou que o uso da matemática, particularmente nos segmentos da astronomia, óptica, harmônica e mecânica, mostravam-se muito eficientes e proveitosos na compreensão de vários fenômenos naturais. Mas, investigar exaustivamente o motivo pelo qual isso acontecia nunca foi sua pretensão, o que nos exime de maiores explanações sobre o tópico. Sendo assim, concluímos que Aristóteles reconhece uma ligação entre as ciências físicas e as matemáticas, particularmente no âmbito da astronomia, harmônica, óptica e, no problema em questão. Mas, também é verdade que esta sutil interpretação não se encontra teorizada ou proposta de forma clara pelo próprio Aristóteles como uma forma de resolução da dificuldade que ele analisou. Lucas Angioni, por sua vez, ainda que concorde com a conclusão de Oswaldo Porchat, busca complementá-la por meio de outros argumentos. Ele propõe dividir o problema central do texto em unidades menores para que, em função disto, as respostas a serem extraídas da obra do Estagirita sejam direcionadas para cada um destes problemas em questão. Ele formula as três questões seguintes; 1) Se Aristóteles admitia a possibilidade de matematizar certos fenômenos naturais; 2) se porventura ele julgava possível o uso dos princípios matemáticos como causas auxiliares e condições necessárias nas explicações de certos fenômenos físicos; 3) se ele admitia a possibilidade de reduzir todo fenômeno natural a princípios matemáticos. A conclusão de Lucas Angioni é que apenas para o terceiro caso a resposta do Filósofo foi negativa. Não reconstruiremos toda a sua argumentação em seus detalhes, basta notarmos que seu procedimento para chegar a essa conclusão consistiu em conceder ênfase à noção de acréscimo e subtração dos objetos na consideração das ciências (cf. ANGIONI, Lucas. Aristóteles e o uso da Matemática nas Ciências da Natureza. In: WRIGLEY, M.; SMITH, P. (org.). O filósofo e sua história: uma homenagem a Oswaldo Porchat. Campinas: CLE/UNI CAMP, 2003, vol. 36, p. 207-237, p. 218). 102 mínimo,em alguns segmentos da mecânica, mas esta relação não se encontra totalmente desenvolvida 217 . Ele deixa margens a algumas interpretações divergentes, e percebe-se no texto uma tensão entre dois pólos: reconhecer aquelas ciências que procedem de forma singular ou reafirmar as condições que especificam o conhecimento científico enquanto tal, mais precisamente, sua doutrina do conhecimento e demonstração científica. 4.1 A RELAÇÃO ENTRE A FÍSICA E A MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO Os contextos intelectuais nos quais o pensamento do Estagirita e do Aquinate se desenvolveram não são os mesmos. Este último, vivendo vários séculos depois do primeiro, beneficiou-se dos diversos avanços das discussões científicas e filosóficas que ocorreram ao longo do tempo. Podemos tomar dois caminhos diferentes para investigar qual a compreensão de Tomás de Aquino sobre a relação entre a física e a matemática. Em primeiro lugar, poderíamos isolar os textos nos quais esta relação é mencionada. Neste particular, seria necessário distinguir os casos em que a relação é mencionada em função de si, daqueles casos em que o tema possui caráter secundário, pois o assunto em questão é outro, mas alguma menção sobre aquelas ciências está presente. Em segundo lugar, poderíamos tomar a obra de Tomás de Aquino em seu aspecto mais amplo e inserir a compreensão da relação entre as ciências nesse contexto. Acreditamos que nenhum desses dois modos se mostram exaustivos se tomados isoladamente. Portanto, entendemos que a melhor forma de investigar o tema seria tomá-los mutuamente complementares. Buscamos isto em função de responder às 3 seguintes perguntas formuladas por Weisheilp sobre o Aristotelismo de Alberto Magno e Tomás de Aquino: 1) Que lugar a matemática ocupou nos ramos do pensamento?; 2) Que tipo de assistência poderia a matemática dar para a solução de problemas físicos?; 3) Que tipo de explicação científica pensavam esses filósofos que a matemática poderia oferecer para os fenômenos naturais? 218 217 Mesmo na época de Aristóteles já eram notáveis os avanços que a matemática conseguiu realizar. De fato, ela se constituiu como um sistema organizado no qual a certeza era obtida tomando em consideração apenas alguns princípios não demonstráveis. Exemplo típico disto é a sistematização da geometria por Euclides. Além do mais, não parece coerente supor que o sucesso explicativo alcançado pela descoberta de várias leis hidrostáticas por Arquimedes e o desenvolvimento da óptica por Ptolomeu foram fatos que simplesmente não chamaram a atenção de vários filósofos. Esses eram fatos conhecidos do Estagirita, mas, ao que tudo indica, parece que esses avanços não extasiaram a ponto de dedicar-se inteiramente a teorizar sobre eles. 218 WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 58. 103 Em uma passagem do De Trinitate, Tomás de Aquino argumenta em prol de dois aspectos que permitem que as ciências guardem relação entre si. No primeiro caso, as ciências guardam relações entre si na medida em que o sujeito de uma delas é também parte de outra ciência. No segundo caso, as ciências guardam uma relação entre si no âmbito da teoria da subalternação. Devemos estar atentos e perceber que a subalternação envolve a ideia de dependência, subordinação e aplicação de uma ciência a outra. Assim, se levarmos em conta apenas um desses aspectos, ele não exprime a subalternação em sua totalidade, ou seja, nem todo caso de subordinação entre as ciências implica que elas sejam subordinadas. Cabe ainda mencionar que a subalternação das ciências pode ocorrer em função de dois modos: em função de seus princípios ou em função de seus objetos 219 . É possível argumentar em favor de um vínculo entre a física e a matemática se levarmos em consideração os dois modos mencionados por Tomás de Aquino pelos quais as ciências guardam vínculo entre si? De fato, ao afirmar que as ciências possuem uma relação entre si na medida em que o sujeito de uma delas é também parte do sujeito de uma outra, transparece a crença de que as ciências gerais, que tomam o seu sujeito com poucas determinações, incluem as particulares (ao menos em alguns casos, pois o Aquinate reivindica o exemplo entre a planta e a física). O modo desta inclusão parece ser pela maneira como seus sujeitos são tomados, pois, no exemplo acima mencionado, o que distingue a ciência da planta da ciência da natureza é o modo de consideração: enquanto na primeira ciência o objeto é considerado de modo mais restrito, na segunda ciência prevalece uma análise geral sobre os princípios determinantes do mesmo sujeito. Sendo assim, poderíamos pensar que a física e a matemática guardam um vínculo a partir dessa compreensão Tomista? Interpretando o texto, acreditamos que a resposta é negativa, pois, antes de tudo, devemos perceber que a relação reivindicada por Tomás de Aquino nessa primeira parte, ou seja, que o sujeito de uma ciência, sendo parte também de uma outra, remete ao mesmo tipo de ciência teórica, ou seja, a física, ele não reivindica em prol dessa relação a totalidade das ciências especulativas da física, matemática e metafísica, pelo contrário, ele se restringe em específico a apenas um dos âmbitos desse grupo, o natural, e destaca essa relação de inclusão no interior desse âmbito. Além do mais, a expressão da qual ele se utiliza está no singular: "quando seu sujeito é uma 219 MULLAHY, Bernard I. Thomism and Mathematical Physics. Dissertation presented to the faculty of philosophy of Laval university to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.1946, p.133. Weisheilp diz que, para o homem medieval, uma ciência subalternada é aquela que tem um campo especial de investigação, porém precisa dos dados de uma ciência mais alta para solucionar seus problemas básicos. (Cf.WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 25). 104 parte do sujeito desta 220 ". Isso indica que as relações de inclusão não são pensadas aqui como sendo amplas o suficiente a ponto de incluírem ou transporem os limites de divisão entre as ciências teóricas. Sendo assim, ao menos no que diz respeito ao âmbito de inclusão das ciências como sendo parte de outra, a relação não permite pensar no uso da matemática na física segundo os moldes expostos nessa passagem do De Trinitate. Alguém não satisfeito com essa constatação poderia levar a discussão para outro ponto, a saber, a unidade entre os sujeitos da física e da matemática. Ora, é bem conhecida a postura de Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino em negar autonomia ontológica aos entes matemáticos. Estes são obtidos por meio do modo de consideração do intelecto que separa as propriedades que pertencem a eles. A partir disso, pode-se argumentar que, em última instância, temos apenas um objeto, o natural, e os objetos matemáticos surgem pelo modo de consideração específico com o qual o intelecto institui o seu objeto, a saber, por meio da abstração. Argumentar segundo esses moldes, nos parece razoável e até mesmo interessante, porém, tomando por base a nossa leitura, parece ser infundado atribuir semelhante interpretação a Tomás. O máximo que se pode dizer é que ela não se encontra em oposição à postura dele quanto aos objetos matemáticos 221 . Retornemos ao segundo modo de inclusão das ciências, mencionado por Tomás de Aquino, ou seja, a doutrina de subalternação, Tomás de Aquino afirma: Uma ciência está compreendida sob uma outra como subalternada a ela, isto é, quando na ciência superior determina-se o porquê daquilo que na ciência inferior só se conhece o quê, assim como a música está colocada sob a aritmética. Podemos perceber que Tomás de Aquino se valeu do nível ou alcance epistêmico de uma ciência para teorizar sobre o modo de relação entre elas. Da passagem acima, depreende-se dois pontos: 1) nem todas as ciências possuem o mesmo conhecimento das propriedades e relações causais, pois, enquanto algumas ciências conhecem o quê, outras, por sua vez, conhecem o porquê do fato a ser explicado; 2) algumas ciências são subordinadas, daí a recorrência da relação entre a música e a aritmética. Podemos perceber que Tomás de Aquino não retira maiores conclusões disso ao longo da passagem, nem tão pouco dedica partes significativas do texto para explicar o fato em questão, e nem ainda explana em maiores detalhes o exemplo por ele utilizado. 220 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, p. 107 221 Esta foi a interpretação exegética da doutrina da metábase proposta por Porchat. Ele buscava com isso mostrar que a passagem para outro gênero-sujeito, no caso, da física e da matemática, consistia em última instância em um modo de considerar distintamente os mesmos objetos (Cf. PEREIRA, 2000, p.221-222). Deixando de lado os pormenores de sua análise, parece-nos ser possível defender este ponto, mas com a ressalva de que não o encontramos explicitamente em Aristóteles. Sendo assim, ele é muito mais uma reflexão nossa do que propriamente alguma sugestão do Filósofo presente no texto. 105 Dentre os vários âmbitos nos quais a matemática poderia ser aplicada a questões físicas temos o do movimento. De fato, Tomás de Aquino apenas teorizou, ou melhor, se mostrou favorável à possibilidade do uso da matemática para a descrição do movimento, porém não retirou daí maiores implicações. Isso, segundo ele, seria possível pelo de 'o movimento participar de algo da natureza da quantidade'. Essa participação do movimento no gênero da quantidade ocorre no sentido de que a divisão do movimento pode ser tomada tanto do meio onde ele ocorre, ou seja, o espaço, quanto do objeto que o realiza, ou seja, o móvel. Independentemente de qual desses modo seja tomado, observamos que a análise do movimento dentro desse esquema se familiariza com os seus aspectos físicos. Daí, afirmar Tomás que, "não cabe ao matemático considerar o movimento, mas os princípios matemáticos podem ser aplicados ao movimento 222 ". Percebemos assim, que embora ele tenha se mostrado favorável nesse ponto, não retirou dele maiores conclusões, não encontramos nenhuma teorização mais demorada sobre esta possibilidade. Talvez isto lhe parecesse uma tarefa intelectual não viável, pois ele compartilhava de uma física que priorizava os aspectos qualitativos dos entes, ao invés dos quantitativos. No texto seguinte, Tomás de Aquino mais uma vez se mostra favorável ao uso da matemática na ciência natural. O ponto que fundamenta sua crença nesta possibilidade leva em consideração um princípio por ele aceito: "o que é mais geral engloba o mais simples". Afirma o Aquinate: [...] o que é simples e suas propriedades se salva nos compostos, embora de outro modo, assim como as qualidades próprias dos elementos e os movimentos próprios deles se encontrem no misto; mas o que é próprio dos compostos não se encontra no que é simples. Daí procede que, quanto mais alguma ciência é abstrata e considera algo mais simples, tanto mais seus princípios são aplicáveis às outras ciências. Donde, os princípios da matemática serem aplicáveis às coisas naturais, não porém o inverso; pelo que a física pressupõe a matemática, mas não o inverso [...] 223 . Prevalece assim a argumentação guiada por este postulado inicial de Tomás de Aquino que ele não se preocupou em deduzi-lo e nem tão pouco justificá-lo. O caráter metafísico dele está patente, talvez este princípio pressuposto por ele possibilite pensar a relação entre as duas ciências no seguinte modo; uma vez que a matemática é mais simples que a física, as propriedades inerentes À matemática, a saber, as relações numéricas e dimensionais, se salvam, ou, em outras palavras, se conserva nos entes concretos. Esse modo 222 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, Ad. 5. p. 125. 223 Ibid., Ad. p. 126 106 faz sentido, pois se a matemática trata como vimos anteriormente, de qualidades dos entes físicos que são isoladas pelo intelecto por meio da abstração, indicando assim que ela lida com formas (simples), podemos então pensar que os objetos físicos, na medida em que são compostos, decorrem do resultado da combinação de matéria e forma. Assim, os entes naturais são formas acrescidas de matéria, mas a forma mesma é simples; daí a forma (simples) é acrescida de matéria e constitui o sínolon, o qual é composto. Portanto, aquilo que é simples (a forma) se salva no composto (os entes concretos); em outras palavras, as propriedades matemáticas de relações numéricas e dimensionais se salva, ou são conservadas nos entes físicos. Por isso é possível utilizar esses princípios matemáticos nos entes naturais; é possível porquanto eles já estão lá, porém acrescidos de matéria, mas ainda assim conservando aquelas mesmas propriedades. De fato, na mesma passagem após reconhecer a legitimidade da tríplice divisão das ciências especulativas Tomás menciona a característica das ciências intermediárias, elas 'aplicam os princípios matemáticos às coisas naturais'. Devemos notar algo interessante ainda no contexto da tríplice divisão da ciência especulativa: ele parece restringir os entes concretos que são capazes de serem descritos matematicamente. Afirma Tomás de Aquino que, "os entes móveis e incorruptíveis, por causa de sua uniformidade e regularidade, podem ser determinados no que se refere a seus movimentos, pelos princípios matemáticos, o que não se pode dizer dos móveis e corruptíveis 224 ". Ora, sendo levado em consideração este texto, isso implicaria que a descrição matemática alcançaria ao menos os entes da região supralunar, segundo a clássica cosmologia aristotélica. É notório, na passagem exposta acima, que Tomás de Aquino está ressalvando a legitimidade da descrição matemática no âmbito das ciências intermediárias, pois o que está em foco é a discussão no âmbito da astronomia. A possibilidade de uso é aqui pensada em função da uniformidade com que os corpos celestes realizam seus movimentos e, embora não esteja expresso no texto alguma ideia referente à lei de regularidade do movimento dos astros, esta não é incompatível com ele. Porquanto o movimento desses corpos implica no fato de que eles se dão segundo uma determinada periodicidade capaz de ser expressa em termos matemáticos. Poderíamos então perguntar: e os entes físicos e corruptíveis não são capazes de serem expressos em relações matemáticas ou segundo leis regulares de movimento? Levando em conta apenas a passagem do texto em questão, aparentemente ele nega isso por alguns motivos, dentre os quais mencionamos: 1) o que está em questão é o caráter próprio da 224 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, p. 127, nota 8. 107 astronomia, daí o texto focar sobre o seu objeto específico de estudo, os corpos celestes; 2) o texto tem como foco a regularidade, e o fato de negar uma descrição matemática aos entes corruptíveis parece se dar porque eles não possuem aquela regularidades dos corpos celestes; enfim, não é dito que eles não podem ser descritos matematicamente, o que se diz é que o movimento deles (não regular) não pode ser descrito segundo tais parâmetros; 3) ele não se expressa em termos de quaisquer movimentos tais como; lançamento de projéteis ou velocidades de corpos em determinados espaços de tempo; ele se refere apenas aos movimentos regulares. Desta forma, os entes físicos de nossa experiência cotidiana que estão sujeitos aos processos de geração e corrupção não seriam capazes de ser descritos matematicamente. Devemos lembrar que isso não invalida a percepção de que as ciências intermediárias fazem uso da matemática e, de fato, o seu uso se expressa em aspectos rígidos de leis, e.g., a lei da proporção dos sons. Mas, não encontramos menção ao uso indiscriminado dos princípios matemáticos por outras ciências além daquelas em que já estamos familiarizados ao longo dos textos de Tomás de Aquino. Assim, está fora de questão discutir se Tomás de Aquino compreendia que a física e a matemática possuíam um ponto de contato entre si, pois "algo de matemático é assumido nas [ciências] naturais 225 ". A partir dos textos apresentados anteriormente está claro que ele reconhece tanto no âmbito sublunar quanto no supralunar o emprego da matemática nessas duas esferas de entes distintos. Apenas não está exposto o motivo pelo qual esta simultaneidade no uso dos princípios existe em ambas as regiões. Em geral esta relação é pensada segundo o modo matéria e forma, "o que é físico é como que material e o que é matemático é como que formal". Essas considerações anteriores nos permitem contextualizar melhor aquelas questões anteriormente formuladas por Weisheilp. Para responder ao questionamento inicial que consistia em saber que lugar a matemática ocupou nos ramos do pensamento filosófico de Tomás de Aquino, seria bom retomarmos um pouco aquilo que discutimos no capítulo 2 deste trabalho. Embora nunca tenha sido dedicado um livro ao tratamento exclusivo das entidades matemáticas, ela ocupa um lugar de destaque ao longo de suas discussões sobre outros temas. Nos textos em que a menção à matemática ocorre, predomina uma consideração a seu respeito enquanto modelo de rigorosidade demonstrativa; ela é vista enquanto ciência de rigor. Além do mais, ela também é pensada como uma ciência superior a partir de sua dignidade, pois, sendo uma das ciências 225 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, p. 134. 108 especulativas, é uma ciência nobre que não se subordina a algum fim externo a ela. Sua dignidade não remete a determinada funcionalidade. Por fim, é reservada para ela certa autonomia no interior do sistema do Aquinate, isto na medida em que lhe é atribuída tanto uma metodologia específica quanto determinados objetos de investigação, ainda que estes últimos não sejam compreendidos como autônomos no aspecto ontológico. A partir disto podemos então buscar uma resposta ao segundo problema levantado por Weisheilp: que tipo de assistência poderia a matemática dar para a solução de problemas físicos? Responder a este tópico é difícil, pois, como vimos, o pensamento do Aquinate expressa certo antagonismo; se, por um lado, acredita-se que as entidades matemáticas guardam autonomia entre si, por outro lado, também se reconhece que elas possuem um ponto de conexão expresso nas ciências intermediárias. Lembramos que esse impasse, que é perceptível ao longo das obras de Tomás de Aquino, provém de sua principal fonte filosófica, pois os próprios textos de Aristóteles carregam essa tensão. Weisheilp identifica que parte desse impasse derivou do fato de os Segundos Analíticos serem tomados como uma base lógica para uma teoria física geral da natureza durante a Idade Média 226 . De forma geral, podemos dizer que as passagens que encontramos mencionando essa relação não expressam uma reflexão de Tomás de Aquino sobre uma complementaridade da matemática, e mais particularmente a astronomia à física, mas sim formas distintas de demonstrar as suas conclusões. Para tentar responder a essa questão poderíamos nos apoiar nas citações de Tomás de Aquino quanto à astronomia (considerada enquanto disciplina matemática) e à física. Ora, a astronomia ao tomar em consideração o céu e suas partes, reconhece na matemática o instrumental capaz de investigá-lo. Mas esta investigação, por sua vez, possui dois pontos característicos; o modo diferente pelo qual o físico e o astrônomo demonstram as mesmas conclusões; e a natureza hipotética dos sistemas astronômicos conhecidos até então. Afirma Tomás de Aquino: O físico prova a Terra ser redonda por um meio, o astrônomo por outro: o último prova isto por meio da matemática, e.g., pela forma dos eclipses ou alguma coisa do tipo, enquanto o primeiro o prova por meio da física, e.g., pelo movimento dos corpos pesados em direção ao centro, e assim por diante 227 . 226 WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 26. 227 "The physicist proves the earth to be round by one means, the astronomer by another: for the latter proves this by means of mathematics, e.g. by the shapes of eclipses, or something of the sort; while the former proves it by means of physics, e.g, by the movement of heavy bodies towards the center, and so forth". (AQUINO, Tomás de. Summa theologica. Q 54 A 2 Rp 2 / Reply OBJ 2: Ia-IIae). Esta mesma ideia já havia sido exposta na mesma obra, de forma mais simples. "Pois, o astrônomo e o físico ambos podem provar a mesma conclusão: 109 Dentre as inúmeras vezes que encontramos este exemplo, em nenhuma delas está expressa alguma ideia de complementaridade entre as ciências; o que recebe ênfase é apenas a diversidade dos meios através dos quais elas demonstram o mesmo fato. O segundo aspecto marcante na relação entre a física e a astronomia, segundo a crença de Tomás de Aquino, é expresso no caráter hipotético desta última. O professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro assim resume a questão: São Tomás encontrava-se diante de dois sistemas: o de EudóxioCalipo-Aristóteles e o de Hiparco-Ptolomeu. Que se faça a tentativa de explicar as irregularidades dos movimentos planetários por meio das esferas concêntricas à Terra (primeiro sistema) ou recorrendo aos excêntricos (segundo sistema), isto de modo algum quer dizer que os movimentos reais dos planetas se produzem conforme essas suposições. Com efeito, estas são apenas um artifício que nos permite reencontrar a regularidade e fazer os cálculos astronômicos 228 . que a Terra, por exemplo, é redonda, o astrônomo por meio da matemática (i.e., abstraindo da matéria), porém o físico por meio da própria matéria". "For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself" (AQUINO, Tomás de. Summa theologica Ia, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2m. (FP Q 1, A 1, Rp 2/ reply obj 2). De fato, este entendimento de Santo Tomás perpassa todas as suas obras. É possível encontrar já em seu comentário às Sentenças a defesa de que "o astrônomo e o estudioso da natureza mostram a redondeza da terra através de termos médios diversos" (AQUINO, Tomás de. In II sententiarum, dist. Q. 2, a. 2., ad 5m). A mesma argumentação é encontrada em um escrito do período maduro do seu pensamento. Diz-nos Tomás no Comentário à Física: "Pois os filósofos naturais tratavam da forma do sol e da lua e da terra e de todo o mundo. E estes são tópicos que chamaram a atenção dos astrônomos. Portanto, a astronomia e a ciência natural concordam não apenas em ter os mesmos sujeitos, mas também na consideração dos mesmos acidentes, e em demonstrar as mesmas conclusões" "For natural philosophers are found to have treated the shape of the sun and of the moon and of the earth and of the whole world. And these are topics which claim the attention of the astronomers. Therefore astronomy and natural science agree not only in [having] the same subjects but also in the consideration of the same accidents, and in demonstrating the same conclusions" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics.Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 158 p 78). 228 NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 77. Estes dois diferentes sistemas astronômicos mencionados pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro foram constituídos por trabalhos individuais que foram somados aos modelos originais propostos. Vejamos rapidamente cada uma das contribuições desses indivíduos na estruturação dos respectivos sistemas astronômicos. Eudóxio de Cnido (408-305 a.C.) foi um astrônomo e matemático grego. Ele tentou explicar o movimento dos planetas em termos de esferas concêntricas girando em torno de seus eixos. Para a questão sobre o movimento dos astros no céu ele propôs aquilo que ficou conhecido como "esferas homocêntricas". De acordo com Eudóxio, Sol e Lua estariam presos cada um a três esferas concêntricas interligadas, de forma que o movimento combinado dessas estruturas ao redor de eixos com diferentes inclinações teria como resultado o movimento observado no céu. Os cinco planetas estariam ligados a quatro esferas cada um, a fim de explicar seus trajetos errantes, como a retrogradação. A esfera onde as estrelas estavam dispostas seria uma só, ela se moveria de oeste para leste. O sistema de Eudoxo compreendeu um total de 27 esferas, uma dentro da outra. Calipo de Cízico foi um discípulo de Eudóxio, ele criou o chamado ciclo calíptico (ciclo de setenta e seis anos) buscando harmonizar o ano trópico com o mês sinódico. Assim, ele foi responsável por tornar o sistema de Eudóxio mais sofisticado e aumentar o número de esferas. Aristóteles adotou aquele modelo inicial de esferas proposto por Eudóxio, mas percebemos cada vez mais um aumento considerável no número de esferas propostas para fazer com que os dados se coadunassem à experiência. Na constituição do segundo modelo astronômico temos Hiparco (190-120 a.C.). Ele foi um considerável astrônomo grego que definiu uma rede de paralelos e meridianos do globo terrestre. Destacou-se pelo rigor de suas observações e segurança das conclusões a que chegou. Ele conseguiu prever vários eclipses, elaborou o primeiro catálogo estelar baseado no brilho das estrelas. Ptolomeu (90-168 a.C.) apresentou um 110 O impasse se mostra da seguinte forma: dados dois sistemas alternativos que possuem estruturas, elementos, conceitos distintos na explicação de uma mesma realidade, e ambos conseguindo "explicar os fatos satisfatoriamente", qual o critério de escolha entre eles? De fato, quem propuser oferecer critérios de escolha entre sistemas antagônicos deve reconhecer que será necessário se debruçar sobre outras questões, tais como: os elementos postulados nos diferentes sistemas explicativos possuem existência de fato? Os sistemas explicativos para possuírem validade devem obrigatoriamente remeter a entidades reais? Enfim, o processo é extremamente exaustivo e isto pode ser constatado na obra de Tomás de Aquino, pois sua hesitação na escolha de um daqueles sistemas astronômicos decorre da complexidade da questão. Esta indecisão por parte de Tomás de Aquino é expressa em uma passagem onde ele afirma: Aduz-se uma razão para alguma coisa de dois modos. De um modo, para provar suficientemente algum fundamento, assim como na ciência da natureza aduz-se uma razão suficiente para provar que o movimento do céu é sempre de velocidade uniforme. De outro modo, aduz-se uma razão, não que prove suficientemente o fundamento, mas que mostre que os efeitos consequentes concordam com o fundamento já estabelecido, assim como na astronomia estabelece-se a razão dos excêntricos e dos epiciclos pelo fato de que, estabelecido isto, podem ser salvas as aparências sensíveis acerca dos movimentos celestes. No entanto, esta razão não é suficientemente probante, porque talvez estabelecido também algo diferente, poderiam ser salvas 229 . Ora, a passagem acima destaca os dois modos pelos quais a ciência pode aduzir uma razão para explicar algo. É possível que a razão aduzida seja suficiente no âmbito de sua explicação. Sendo assim, ela é capaz de explicar o fenômeno em questão em função de sua concordância com um fundamento já firmemente estabelecido. Mas também é possível que uma ciência aduza uma razão não de forma suficiente, mas sim probante, visto que ela levará em conta a compatibilidade com os efeitos resultantes, mas isso poderia ser também modelo geométrico do sistema solar; era um sistema geocêntrico que, tendo a terra como centro, colocava os demais planetas e estrelas realizando órbitas ao seu redor. Essas trajetórias são esquemas complicados, pois são na verdade resultantes de um sistema de ciclos e epiciclos, ou seja, círculos com centros em outros círculos. O objetivo de Ptolomeu era produzir um modelo que permitisse prever a posição dos planetas de forma correta e, nesse ponto, ele foi razoavelmente bem sucedido. Por essa razão, esse modelo continuou sendo usado sem mudança substancial por cerca de 1300 anos. 229 O texto de Tomás citado acima encontra-se traduzido em (NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 75). De fato, o texto original encontra-se na Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 32, a. 1, ad 2m. O recurso ao uso do epiciclo foi proposto inicialmente por Apolônio de Pérgamo e usado amplamente em astronomia por Hiparco. Mais tarde Ptolomeu se serviu do mesmo esquema para construir seu sistema geométrico do sistema solar. No modelo de epiciclos se considerava que um planeta P se move uniformemente ao longo de um pequeno círculo (epiciclo) cujo centro C se move uniformemente ao longo de um circulo maior (deferente com centro na Terra. No modelo excêntrico considerava-se que o Planeta P se movia ao longo de um círculo grande, cujo centro C se movia uniformemente num círculo pequeno de Centro específico. 111 alcançado pelo estabelecimento de um outro fundamento. Ele então mostra como este segundo caso é bem exemplificado na astronomia, pois a aceitação dos excêntricos e epiciclos não concluem de modo suficientemente probante. Tomás de Aquino está ciente das disputas astronômicas ao longo da história e do fato delas divergirem em postular modelos astronômicos distintos para os astros e ainda assim conseguirem considerável grau de sucesso em suas descrições. Daí afirmar Tomás que Não é, porém, necessário que as suposições que eles descobriram sejam verdadeiras; com efeito, embora sendo feitas estas suposições, salvem-se as aparências, não é preciso dizer que estas suposições são verdadeiras, pois talvez de acordo com algum modo, ainda não percebido pelos homens, salvem-se as aparências a respeito dos astros 230 . A passagem deixa transparecer dois pontos de considerável importância: 1) a hesitação de Tomás de Aquino em escolher um sistema astronômico em definitivo; 2) reconhece a possibilidade do progresso científico no âmbito científico em geral, e particularmente no caso da astronomia. Assim, a tensão metodológica existente consistia não apenas em conceder a prioridade da investigação do mundo em termos de uma física que remetia à própria natureza das coisas em contraposição a uma análise matemática do cosmos; essa tensão se diversificava no interior do próprio sistema matemático adotado pelos astrônomos, permanecendo assim em aberto o problema da escolha entre sistemas que se mostravam satisfatórios em explicar os fenômenos propostos. Levando em conta a passagem acima, podemos perceber que a indecisão de Tomás de Aquino quanto ao modelo astronômico a ser adotado implica na possibilidade de progresso científico nessa ciência 231 . Ele menciona que os desenvolvimentos que ocorreram nas teorias astronômicas determinaram cada vez mais a sofisticação delas, e de forma alguma deve ser julgado que elas se desenvolveram ao limite. Mas, é provável que no futuro elas se desenvolvam a tal ponto que 230 A tradução do texto citado acima é da autoria do professor Dr. Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento e encontra-se em (NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 78). 231 Embora tenha sido objeto de acalorados debates entre os historiadores da ciência se existiu uma noção de progresso científico anterior a ciência moderna, acreditamos por razões não completamente expressas neste trabalho que, tanto na Antiguidade quanto na Idade Média encontramos em vários autores a noção de progresso científico. Na Grécia Antiga havia uma noção de progresso, ao menos no campo da matemática e da matemática aplicada. Arquimedes (287-212 a.C.) mencionou que alguns de seus contemporâneos ou sucessores seriam capazes de descobrir outros teoremas além daqueles que ele havia proposto (cf. PRIORESCHI, Plínio. The idea of scientific progress in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, Vesalius, VIII, 1, 34-45, 2002. p. 35). Acreditamos que, não devemos buscar encontrar nos textos antigos a expressão que julgamos ser correta de progresso científico; ela existia em forma rudimentar. Essa noção presente entre alguns dos antigos matemáticos, astrônomos e filósofos continuou ao longo da Idade Média, mas ela não foi compartilhada por todos os eruditos. Apenas uns poucos aceitavam essa crença, tais como: Roger Bacon, Alberto Magno, e Bernardo de Chatres (implicitamente). 112 proponham um modelo astronômico distinto dos anteriores e que consigam do mesmo modo explicar o cosmos. Do que temos comentado até agora, é possível afirmar que Tomás de Aquino não julgava que a matemática poderia solucionar problemas no âmbito físico. Encontramos, sim, sua hesitação diante de ciências que já haviam feito notáveis progressos, particularmente no caso da astronomia, mas não encontramos passagens onde ele mencione que elas venham a contribuir na explicação de fenômenos naturais. O que é encontrado nos textos é referente à autonomia que elas possuem. E aquelas passagens onde encontramos menções claras da possibilidade de princípios matemáticos serem usados nas ciências naturais estão em geral fundamentadas em postulados de caráter metafísico que remetem ao platonismo. Estes princípios podem ser resumidos nas palavras do professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento, o qual afirma: tal aplicação [dos princípios matemáticos à ciência natural] é tornada possível pelo próprio fato de que a matemática é mais abstrata que as ciências físicas e por considerar objetos mais simples que estas últimas. Dessa maneira ainda mais geral, pode-se vincular esta concepção das relações entre a matemática e física a uma visão hierarquizada da realidade, segundo a qual aquilo que é simples se reencontra com suas propriedades, embora sob outra modalidade, naquilo que é composto, enquanto aquilo que pertence propriamente ao composto não se encontra naquilo que é simples 232 . Podemos perceber que um dos aspectos que é reivindicado como fundamento da relação entre a física e a matemática consiste no modo de consideração delas, ou seja, enquanto a matemática possui uma consideração mais universal, na medida em que não recorre à matéria sensível e nem às determinações que a seguem enquanto tal, a física, por sua vez, retoma esses aspectos e consequentemente possui uma abordagem que não se encontra nos mesmos moldes de simplicidade. E, como o que é mais simples está salvo no composto, mas não o inverso, então elas asseguram esta possibilidade de aplicação no âmbito de suas respectivas considerações. Porém, a consideração do objeto enquanto tal deve remeter à própria estrutura da coisa. Sendo assim, é necessário que ambas as ciências guardem uma relação no âmbito ontológico. Neste ponto transparece o platonismo na obra de Tomás de Aquino, pois ele compreende a realidade estruturada segundo uma hierarquia, e também por esta via ele busca salvaguardar a relação de vínculo entre as ciências. Assim, a obra de Tomás de Aquino oscila entre investigar o mundo por seu caráter quantitativo ou por seu aspecto qualitativo, e se é verdade que em vários lugares ele acena e 232 NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 28. 113 reconhece que o primeiro aspecto é possível, de fato, é ao segundo aspecto que ele dedica mais atenção. Isto nunca chegou a ser suplantado e nem mesmo há alguma indicação dessa possibilidade no conjunto da obra do Aquinate. As passagens onde encontramos uma reflexão em torno da relação entre a física e a matemática são esporádicas e apenas indicam percepções sem qualquer comprometimento de desenvolver tal projeto. Mas devemos estar cientes de que, mesmo essas passagens, não se mostram contrárias ao projeto futuro que mais tarde seria um dos pontos de glória da ciência Ocidental, a saber, a matematização da natureza. Assim, mesmo que Tomás de Aquino não tenha incentivado esse projeto conscientemente e sua obra não apresente indícios de que ele estivesse preocupado com ele, isso talvez decorra da tensão existente entre o próprio instrumental físico do qual ele fazia uso e a sua compreensão do caráter ontológico dos objetos matemáticos. Cabe, assim, salientar que é possível, a partir de seus escritos, defender tal possibilidade, porém isso quer apenas mostrar a compatibilidade de sua compreensão com os desenvolvimentos posteriores. Atribuir a Tomás de Aquino este projeto é enveredar pelos caminhos do anacronismo. 114 CONCLUSÃO Diante de tudo quanto tivemos oportunidade de estudar ao longo do presente trabalho parece-nos seguro extrair algumas conclusões. Em primeiro lugar, devemos destacar que o problema da relação entre a física e a matemática, em outras palavras, o uso delas na investigação do mundo, é um problema tipicamente grego. De fato, a matemática foi utilizada para descrições naturais em diversas culturas antigas, tais como entre os: Caldeus, Assírios, Egípcios, etc., porém somente com os gregos podemos dizer que o assunto foi pensado em termos rigorosamente epistêmicos. É apenas com o pensamento especulativo grego que vemos a matemática ser pensada como fundamento último de compreensão da realidade 233 . Isto deve ser visto como uma conquista intelectual, pois, mesmo entre os gregos, só paulatinamente a relação entre a física e a matemática foi pensada em modos antagônicos de explicação. Algo a ser destacado consiste em que aparentemente, tanto para Aristóteles quanto para Tomás, o problema surge no sistema filosófico de ambos pelo caráter de herança. Porém, existe uma diferença entre eles, pois, enquanto a abordagem que o Aquinate realiza deste problema provém diretamente de sua maior fonte de influência no campo filosófico, no caso, a obra de Aristóteles, no que diz respeito ao Estagirita depreende-se de sua argumentação que ele toma como exemplo conhecido das pessoas o fato de que existem determinadas ciências que tomam os princípios matemáticos e os aplicam à realidade física. Neste caso, a tradição filosófica apenas constatou esses casos e se esforçou por explicá-los por meio de diferentes teorias. No entanto, o problema não pode ser pensado em termos unicamente de herança, mas decorre também da própria estrutura interna do sistema filosófico de Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino. Ora, uma vez que no sistema aristotélico as ciências são classificadas a partir de seu sujeito e modo de procederem, ocorre um impasse, na medida em que é reconhecida a existência de algumas ciências que não pertencem propriamente a algum dos grupos específicos, estando assim em uma posição intermediária entre eles. Desta maneira, o problema da relação entre a física e a matemática no sistema filosófico de ambos os pensadores provém por um lado da recepção ou constatação do fato em outros segmentos do saber e, de outro lado, da própria estrutura interna de pensamento. 233 WEISHEIPL, 1959, p.17. 115 Tendo compreendido este esquema, podemos visualizar o esboço geral desta dissertação. Havendo uma multiplicidade de ciências, é necessário esclarecer em que consiste a diferença entre elas. Ora, no esquema geral elas foram divididas em ciências práticas, produtivas e teóricas, e, justamente nesse último grupo, encontramos, além da metafísica, a física e a matemática. Mas esta divisão deve se basear ou remeter a aspectos que a legitimem enquanto tal e, no que diz respeito à diferença entre a física e a matemática, os princípios requeridos foram: o diferente modo delas definirem os seus sujeitos, o modo distinto delas considerarem os seus objetos, além de demonstrarem por termos médios diferentes. Quando levamos em conta a compreensão de Tomás de Aquino sobre a diferença entre as duas ciências podemos notar que ele concorda com os mesmos pontos ressaltados pelo Estagirita para diferenciá-las. Mas, enquanto Aristóteles reforça seu argumento por meio de um quarto argumento que recorre ao estatuto ontológico daquele ramo das "mais naturais dentre as matemáticas", Tomás, por sua vez, além de destacar a relação epistêmica de anterioridade e posteridade na intelecção de alguma coisa, aplica esta relação no campo metafísico, pois destaca que ela ocorre também entre os acidentes que advêm à substância. Devemos ainda ressaltar que a fundamentação das ciências especulativas segundo a estrutura ontológica das coisas não é incompatível com o sistema aristotélico, todavia não é enfatizada por ele. Por sua vez, em Tomás de Aquino encontramos este tópico fortemente acentuado, particularmente em seu comentário ao De Trinitate. Assim, o esquema geral da relação entre Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino é que a física e a matemática são distintas. E, como temos visto, um desses pontos está baseado no modo diferente de elas demonstrarem, ou seja, os termos médios que elas utilizam são distintos. Enquanto a matemática recorre a causas explicativas de natureza matemática, a física, por sua vez, leva em consideração princípios naturais para suas demonstrações. Aristóteles relaciona o conhecimento científico com a forma silogística dedutiva, onde o procedimento demonstrativo parte de princípios próprios a este sujeito. Todavia, isto não impossibilitou que ele mencionasse ou reconhecesse que algumas ciências procedem precisamente transferindo demonstrações de um gênero-sujeito a outro, e.g., a astronomia utiliza de demonstrações geométricas. Assim, também no âmbito da teoria da demonstração científica mais uma vez está presente o impasse; a física e a matemática são distintas (pois possuem modos diferentes de demonstrar), mas elas possuem um ponto de contato (visto que algumas ciências se utilizam de princípios matemáticos e os utilizam em suas demonstrações). No que diz respeito à posição de Tomás de Aquino nesta questão podemos afirmar que, mesmo ele aceitando o esquema proposto pelo Filósofo, ainda assim podemos notar uma 116 ênfase diferente em alguns aspectos. O Aquinate não apenas constata que aquelas ciências que aplicam os princípios matemáticos aos objetos físicos não se enquadram com facilidade na teoria do conhecimento e demonstração científica (como fez Aristóteles), mas também se esforça em explicar como isso era possível, particularmente no âmbito das ciências intermediárias. Assim, ele buscou salvaguardar a unidade da ciência esclarecendo o vínculo que os diferentes sujeitos guardam entre si. Primeiramente, os sujeitos expressam esse vínculo quando o sujeito de uma ciência é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, assim como o animal é uma espécie do corpo natural, e por isso a ciência dos animais está sob a ciência natural. De outro modo, quando o sujeito da ciência inferior não é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, mas o sujeito da ciência inferior se compara ao sujeito da superior como o material em relação ao formal. Neste segundo caso, Tomás julga a relação existente como sendo do tipo material-formal. O que ele pretende é estabelecer o tipo de relação entre as ciências no âmbito da subalternação. No primeiro caso tem-se uma relação de inclusão pela espécie; no segundo, uma relação de semelhança, na medida em que na ciência superior ocorre determinação dos princípios sobre a inferior. Assim, no primeiro caso há uma relação de gênero-espécie e continua-se no mesmo gênero da ciência superior, enquanto no segundo caso, tem-se uma relação material-formal entre as ciências e o gênero é o mesmo apenas "de uma certa maneira", pois ocorre uma descida a outro gênero. Desta argumentação temos que, quando uma ciência não é uma espécie da outra, estando desta forma em gêneros diferentes, é possível tomar alguma diferença extrínseca à natureza do gênero da ciência superior e aplicar sobre ele. Isto torna possível "uma descida a outro gênero". Desta maneira, Tomás argumenta em favor da subalternação das ciências intermediárias à matemática e desta relação é constituído um gênero secundum quid (de certo modo). Assim, os sujeitos das duas ciências possuem vínculos entre si. Com isto Tomás pretende salvaguardar a unidade de gênero-sujeito no interior das ciências, flexibilizando assim ao mesmo tempo a doutrina da metábase. Vimos, portanto, que Tomás tem uma caracterização mais positiva da metábase do que Aristóteles. Esta modificação do sistema era fundamental para Tomás poder atribuir à teologia o caráter de ciência, a qual será pensada como ciência subalternada, pois aceita os teoremas de uma ciência superior. Pode-se perceber um amadurecimento da formulação deste assunto por Tomás, pois, apesar de seu Comentário à obra de Boécio mostrar um grande interesse na questão metodológica das ciências, ele encontra dificuldades para explicitá-la segundo a estrutura interna de qualquer uma delas nos moldes do aristotelismo. Diante disto, 117 ele recorre a uma concepção de natureza metafísica da realidade, na qual transparece o tom do neoplatonismo da antiguidade tardia com uma visão hierarquizada da realidade. É possível encontrarmos na obra de Tomás desenvolvimentos que se mostraram mais elaborados do que aqueles fornecidos primeiramente pelo Filósofo. Contudo, a relação entre a física e a matemática continuou encontrando dificuldades para ser teorizada, mas Tomás ao menos teve a vantagem de ter mostrado maior consciência da questão. Podemos então concluir que a física e a matemática não estão desprovidas de relações segundo o sistema filosófico de Aristóteles. Mas o modo de formalizar esta relação não é totalmente claro, pois seus textos dão margem a interpretações diferentes, algo bem perceptível ao estudarmos as opiniões divergentes entre os estudiosos. De fato, a primeira percepção que encontramos nos textos de Aristóteles é que ele, mesmo proibindo a passagem para um gênero-sujeito diferente, reconheceu que algumas ciências fazem isto. Assim, se não podemos falar em posição desfavorável ao uso da matemática no mundo da experiência sensível; também não é verdade dizer que este ponto recebeu por parte do Estagirita algum incentivo. De fato, a matemática sempre ocupou um lugar de considerável importância, e ele nunca negou a sua validade no estudo da natureza, particularmente nas disciplinas que conheceram um notável desenvolvimento e.g., a astronomia e a harmônica. Mas, ela permaneceu restrita ao âmbito epistêmico, sendo considerada como modelo de conhecimento científico e não foi teorizada como fundamento ao qual a realidade sensível pudesse ser reduzida. Quanto a Tomás de Aquino, mesmo sendo verdade que encontramos passagens onde ele tanto justifica quanto reconhece a possibilidade de uma investigação do mundo a partir de sua natureza quantitativa, este ponto nunca chegou a suplantar a sua crença de que a prioridade pertencia ao aspecto qualitativo. As passagens que encontramos apenas mencionam casos em que a matemática é utilizada por algumas ciências no campo dos entes naturais, mas de forma alguma é encontrado algum texto que nos informe que isto é possível na totalidade do mundo natural. Ainda que ele afirme que "os princípios matemáticos podem ser aplicados ao movimento", isto deve ser compreendido de forma restrita, pois estão em foco apenas as ciências intermediárias. Deste modo, é negada uma simples transposição de gêneros essencialmente diferentes e distantes entre si, tais como entre a matemática e a ciência natural. Além do mais, a teorização da relação entre as duas ciências é muito abstrata. Ora, o princípio de que "o que é simples e suas propriedades se salva nos compostos" não é um princípio que seja deduzido, mas é algo apenas pressuposto; da mesma forma a crença de que, "quanto mais alguma ciência é abstrata e considera algo mais simples, tanto mais seus 118 princípios são aplicáveis a outras ciências. Donde os princípios da matemática serem aplicáveis às coisas naturais, porém não o inverso" ser também é um princípio pressuposto, que se baseia apenas em que a matemática é mais abstrata do que a física e de certa forma a inclui. Embora a preocupação primordial do Aquinate não estivesse relacionada com um projeto de matematização do mundo, independentemente do modo como ele teoriza essa possibilidade podemos perceber certo progresso no assunto, visto que ele busca explicar como as ciências intermediárias procedem. Mas, esta teorização se encontra dentro de determinados limites, o que talvez se dê por sua aderência ao sistema aristotélico de conhecimento científico. O interesse de Tomás nessas questões decorria de sua pretensão de atribuir à teologia o caráter de ciência. Daí, ter ele retomado o sistema aristotélico e tê-lo reestruturado segundo outros moldes. Encontramos em Tomás o exemplo de como a Idade Média deu sua contribuição ao uso da matemática na ciência natural, oscilando entre uma metodologia qualitativa e outra quantitativa. "Este problema do uso da matemática para explicar o mundo físico manteve-se, na verdade, um dos problemas metodológicos centrais, e foi, em muitos aspectos, o problema central das ciências naturais até o século 17 234 ". A história da ciência ocidental a partir do século 12 até a revolução científica moderna pode ser considerada como uma penetração gradual da matemática (combinada com o método experimental) em campos previamente considerados da competência exclusiva da "física" 235 . Devemos ter sempre cautela para não cairmos em um anacronismo. Não podemos por isso procurar nos textos medievais a questão da possibilidade de uma descrição matemática do mundo tal como no projeto científico moderno. Se por acaso intentarmos isso, por certo não encontraremos a explicitação do problema, pois devemos acompanhar o problema na medida em que ele se encontra teorizado em seus determinados moldes. E a configuração que o problema possuía nesta época consistia de certo modo no caráter secundário, ou seja, ele nunca foi posto em função de si, nem por Aristóteles nem por Tomás. 234 "This problem of the use of mathematics in explaining the physical world remained, in fact, one of the central methodological problems, and was in many ways the central problem, of natural science down to the 17th century". CROMBIE, Alistair Cameron. Science, Art and Nature: in medieval and modern thought. London: Hambledon Press, 1996, p. 51. 235 Ibid., p.52. 119 Temos, portanto, que a recorrência ao tema era decorrente de outras discussões que ocupavam lugares primordiais. Ele se encontrava desta forma subordinado a outros problemas. Assim, não havia interesse em desenvolver a matemática em função de si mesma. Medições precisas foram feitas quando elas eram requeridas por necessidade prática, como na astronomia 236 . Os aspectos que constituíram a ciência moderna, a saber, a observação metódica e cuidadosa, os experimentos controlados e a aplicação sistemática da matemática aos problemas físicos estiveram ausentes na ciência medieval. Mesmo os significativos exemplos desta atividade que podem ser encontrados no final da Idade Média eram esporádicos e episódicos, nunca rotineiros e sistemáticos 237 . A Idade Média nunca esteve destituída de textos que mencionavam a relação entre a física e a matemática. De fato, as doutrinas pitagóricas, platônicas e alguns textos de Aristóteles mencionam a crença na teoria da harmonia celeste. Caso típico é o famoso Sonho de Cipião, onde encontramos a bela passagem que nos diz que Cipião ainda observava atônito a estrutura do universo quando sua atenção se voltou para um doce e agradável som que ele ouvia. Ao questionar seu avô, Públio Cornélio Cipião, chamado de Africano ao longo do texto, sobre a origem daquele som, recebe como resposta que aquele som era ocasionado pelo movimento das esferas celestes, o qual ocorre segundo uma certa proporção que fora determinada por uma razão 238 . Transparece, assim, a crença de que o escalonamento musical de fundamenta em princípios matemáticos de proporção, os quais, por sua vez, apenas reproduzem ou buscam se aproximar de uma musicalidade própria do universo que é produzida pelo movimento das esferas celestes. Daí dizer ele que "o número é o laço do universo" 239 . Mesmo sendo verdade que o texto que foi muito difundido no período medieval não foi o Sonho de Cipião (livro VI da República), mas sim o comentário escrito por Macróbio, no século V, ao referido texto, ainda assim, a filosofia presente nesse comentário é de inspiração platônica e inclui partes substanciais sobre aritmética, astronomia e cosmologia. Além do mais, podemos perceber na obra "O casamento de Filologia e Mercúrio", de Marciano Capella, onde são abordados vários temas referentes às matemáticas aplicadas, em 236 CROMBIE, 1996, P 472. 237 GRANT, 2001, p. 97. 238 De fato, percebe-se na passagem uma forte influência pitagórica por meio de sua doutrina dos intervalos. Esta, por sua vez, é fruto da junção entre geometria, física e música. 239 CÍCERO, Marco Túlio. O Sonho de Cipião. Apresentação, tradução e notas Prof. Dr. Ricardo da Costa. Notandum. Porto, v. 22, 2010, p. 37-50. 120 especial à astronomia 240 , uma exposição sobre mais alto nível de ensino que as artes matemáticas possuíram nas escolas do império romano tardio. Lembramos ainda que tanto a "Aritmética" quanto "Os princípios de música", ambos textos de Boécio, foram amplamente lidos desde o século IX até o renascimento, e neles também encontramos o uso de razões e proporções no escalonamento musical. Na primeira metade do século XII, as matemáticas se empregavam não para quantificar as leis naturais ou para proporcionar uma representação geométrica dos fenômenos naturais, mas para responder a perguntas que nós consideraríamos metafísicas ou teológicas. Neste mesmo século as matemáticas também serviam como um modelo do método axiomático de demonstração. 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The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation Nikolay Milkov University of Paderborn, Germany Abstract: This paper introduces a novel interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a work widely held to be one of the most intricate in the philosophical canon. It maintains that the Tractatus does not develop a theory but rather advances an original logical symbolism, a new instrument that enables one to "recognize the formal properties of propositions by mere inspection of propositions themselves" (6.122). Moreover, the Tractarian sign-language offers to instruct us on how better to follow the logic of language, and by that token stands to enhance our ability to think. Upon acquiring the thinking skills that one can develop by working with the new symbolism, one may move on and discard the notation-"throw away the ladder" (6.54), as Wittgenstein put it. 1. The New Wittgensteinians This paper introduces a novel interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In the process, it takes issue with the New Wittgensteinians, in particular Cora Diamond and James Conant,1 who some twenty-fi ve years ago fi elded a comprehensive, essentially skeptical interpretation of the entire body of the Tractatus. Diamond and Conant argued that the core propositions of the Tractatus are literally nonsense, gibberish equivalent to phrases like "piggly wiggle tiggle" (Diamond, 2000, p. 151). To be more explicit, Diamond and Conant defended their view that the book's core content is philosophically vacuous by arguing (i) that the Tractatus is divided into a body and a frame; (ii) that the Preface, 3.32–3.326, 4–4.003, 4.111–2 and 6.53–6.54 compose the frame (Conant, 2001, p. 457), which Wittgenstein constructed as a substantive philosophical position; and (iii) that the rest of the Tractarian propositions constitute the body of the work, which Wittgenstein intended to be read "tongue in cheek." Further, Diamond and Conant asserted that the core propositions of the Tractatus function as elucidations2 that rely "on the reader's provisionally taking himself to be participating in the traditional philosophical activity of establishing theses through a procedure of reasoned argument" (Conant, 2001, p. 422). According to this New Wittgensteinian account, similar to what occurs in successful psychoanalytic therapy, the Tractarian reader is 198 Nikolay Milkov progressively "elucidated" as he undergoes the "therapeutic" experience of understanding that the philosophical positions he entertained as he worked his way up to his ultimate frame of reference are nonsense. The fi nal proposition of the Tractatus's postulated frame putatively substantiates their reading: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them-as steps-to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) (6.54) This, according to Diamond, Conant, et al., is the genuine purport of the Tractatus. 2. Initial Problems with the New Reading of 6.54 Decades prior to Diamond and Conant, around 1930, Otto Neurath repudiated Wittgenstein's work (which put him at odds with the other members of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick in particular) because it struck him that in 6.54 Wittgenstein essentially declared the philosophy of the Tractatus itself nonsensical. Of course, the reading of the Tractatus by Conant and Diamond differed from that of Neurath. The New Wittgensteinians do not repudiate Wittgenstein's work but instead insist that we are to interpret it in a most literal key: we are to construe 6.54 as referring to the architectonic of the Tractatus. This, they were convinced, points the way to the most persuasive interpretation of the book. However, by thereby discarding what they call the "body" of the Tractatus, the New Wittgensteinians sweep much Tractarian material under the carpet and hence unwarrantably multiply the challenges the text poses to the serious reader. Moreover, it is telling in this connection that in his frequent references to the Tractatus and in written commentaries on it, the so-called "later Wittgenstein" never said anything about having written the bulk of the work tongue in cheek (cf. §9). What's more, while he would refer to written and unwritten parts of the book, Wittgenstein never alluded to any frame-and-body architectonic as a structural principle of the Tractatus. It is thus evident that the New Wittgensteinians introduced a division of the Tractarian propositions that stands at odds with the work's authentic architectonic. Besides, while Diamond and Conant saw section 6.54 as the key to genuinely understanding the Tractatus, one can read this section without 199 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation subscribing to their frame-and-body thesis. To be sure, while Wittgenstein indicated, on one hand, that the propositions of the book are ultimately "nonsensical," on the other hand, he makes it clear that the point is for the reader to "climb up beyond them." The imperative that the reader "must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it" (italics added) makes plain that the treatise provides its content as a useful expedient, an instrumentality, and hence is not "nonsense"-not Diamond's "gibberish" or "piggly wiggle tiggle." The New Wittgensteinians direct their criticism both against the interpretation of the Tractatus by the neo-positivists (pace Otto Neurath), and against the so-called "ineffability" interpretation of 6.54. Wittgenstein's distinguished student and companion Georg Henrik von Wright originated the latter approach. Von Wright called attention to the fact that for the Tractatus the only propositions that possess sense are pictures of the states of affairs, or their truth-functions. By contrast, logical and mathematical propositions are tautologies and hence senseless (sinnlos). The propositions of the Tractatus itself, however, are neither propositions of science nor propositions of logic or mathematics: they are elucidations of the propositions of science and logic. It is in this respect that they are nonsense (Unsinn), which is different both from being senseless and from being nonsensical in the way in which the propositions of metaphysics are nonsensical (von Wright, 2006).3 More precisely, the propositions of the Tractatus are what, early on, Ramsey termed "important nonsense" (1931, p. 263), and what Peter Hacker more recently referred to as "illuminating nonsense." As such, the Tractarian propositions illuminate by showing points about language that cannot be otherwise articulated (said). The sections that follow demonstrate with concrete specifi city how the propositions of the Tractatus are elucidations in the sense of 6.54. Besides discrediting the interpretation of Diamond and Conant, we shall see that this approach moves beyond the so-called "ineffability interpretation" that von Wright and Peter Hacker champion. 3. What Are Elucidations? The fi rst step in answering this question is clearing up what Wittgenstein understood as "elucidations."4 To this purpose, it will be helpful to consider commonplace situations that fi nd us referring in daily life to such elucidations. We know this approach from the Oxford ordinary language philosophers, upon whose thinking Wittgenstein exerted a shaping infl uence. We commonly require and employ as "elucidations" sets of instructions when we operate a new appliance or unfamiliar work tool. 200 Nikolay Milkov These elucidations inform us how it functions. Generally, once familiar with how an appliance works or with how to operate and maintain a new tool, one dispenses with the elucidations. It's worth noting that we do not necessarily need to know how the new appliance or tool is constructed. As a rule we wish an instruction manual simply to elucidate how most effectively to utilize it and to keep it performing optimally, which is by and large all the elucidation that instruction manuals supply. A familiar "elucidation manual" that applies to a culturally specifi c symbolic form rather than a physical object is the foreign-language handbook. If one wishes to acquire speaking facility in Italian, for example, one obtains a text of instructions on how to speak the language that exists in literature and on the streets of Pisa, Bologna and Milan-one does not need fi rst to invent or construct it. It goes without saying that as one grows fl uent in Italian the once-indispensable handbook, stocked with "elucidations," will become superfl uous. In a like manner, Wittgenstein's Tractatus teaches its readers to understand how the propositions of everyday discourse as well as of science logically relate to one another. Moreover, the book also aims to cultivate (train) the reader's thinking skills since its propositions, while empty of content in themselves, putatively sponsor "the logical clarifi cation of thoughts" (4.112). Just as with an instructional handbook, Wittgenstein fi nds no need to describe how the language and thinking he clarifi es are constructed since they are already available to the reader (cf. §7). Further, the Tractatus propounds no theory, nor does it posit truths. Wittgenstein's elucidations of thinking constitute an instruction set that simply suggests how to make better use of our thought. This interpretation of the Tractatus fi ts perfectly well its description as a ladder that we are to throw away once we have reached by its aid a level beyond its use as a means of ascent. To be sure: (i) The instrument of training is precisely what we discard upon achieving a skill level that renders supererogatory any further training by means of that instrument. (ii) What is important about such instruments is not their content but their form. Someone might well construct a different type of instrument, alternative training set, for help in mastering the same skill. In this respect, the propositions of the Tractatus do not express necessary truths; rather, they are contingent, a point that Diamond underscored (see Diamond, 1991, p. 196). 4. The New Sign-language and Its Role A fi rst head upon which to question the New Wittgensteinian interpretation of the Tractatus is that Wittgenstein clearly stated the express task of 201 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation his treatise, namely to draw a limit to thought by drawing a limit to the expression of thought (P., pp. 3-4). The work undertakes to achieve this end by advancing a new logical symbolism, a new sign-language for elucidating our language and thinking. In this particular, the Tractatus marks a development, clearly a radical one, of Frege's work. Indeed, the program for a new "sign-language" (a term Wittgenstein employs throughout the Tractatus),5 which correctly presents the logical operations of our thinking, was something that Frege intensively promulgated. Importantly enough, he insisted that we can "compare" its role for thinking "to that which the microscope has to the eye" (Frege, 1879, p. xi). Ultimately, how Wittgenstein incorporates his transformation of Frege's project is manifest in the claim that "in a suitable notation [i.e., in the Tractarian sign-language] we can in fact recognize the formal properties [the logic] of the propositions by mere inspection of the propositions themselves" (6.122). In other words, the correct sign-language makes apparent the logic of the propositions, but it does not spell it out (4.022). One of the consequences of this position is that the logically correct sign-language eschews all superfl uous entities, such as "logical objects." It also shows that "the 'logical constants' are not representatives" (4.0312). Another consequence of adopting "the suitable" sign-language is that we "can do without logical propositions" (6.112), which from the standpoint of this "redundancy theory of logic" are merely tautologies. It follows form all this that there are no theoretical ground for anything like an academic discipline of logic. These points show that the Tractarian sign-language is something more than a Fregean optical instrument. As already indicated and as will be detailed in what follows, Wittgenstein's sign-language can also train our thinking. In sum, the basic idea is simple: once the Tractarian notation has fulfi lled its purpose as an aid in training one to advance to a higher plane of thought, it becomes an irrelevancy and one can simply proceed without it. In light of the foregoing it should be clear that to embrace the ideas of the Tractatus is to adopt a position on the task of philosophy that is, to say the least, quite different from that of a Christian Wolff or a Hegel. Being exclusively instrumental, no more than a training aid, philosophy on the Tractarian view has no message of its own, no story to tell about the world, and hence no independent meaning. 5. Tractarian Scaffoldings But what about the numerous "ontological" propositions of the Tractatus articulated, for example, in 1-2.063, which allegedly give an account of the 202 Nikolay Milkov structure of reality? These propositions exemplify those that Conant and Diamond declare to have been written "tongue in cheek" as therapeutic targets of thought that free us from the inclination to get involved in traditional philosophical doctrine. Can such propositions be part of a theory? Are they philosophical? In order to effectively address this issue in defi nitive terms, we need fi rst to get clear about that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein thinks of logic in two senses: (i) the logic of the world-relative to which he could declare that "logic pervades the world" (5.61), and (ii) logic as a discipline. Importantly enough, logic in the fi rst sense informs not only states of affairs and facts, but also objects. Indeed, the Tractarian objects feature an inner logic, which manifests itself in their forms.6 An object's form, on this account, determines the possibility of that object occurring in a state of affairs (2.0141).7 This helps us see how, on Wittgenstein's view, "we can talk about formal properties of [both] objects and states of affairs" (4.122). Both objects and states of affairs possess a logical structure. Wittgenstein refers to the logical structure of objects and states of affairs as the "scaffolding of the world" (6.124). Since the propositions (tautologies) of logic are abstracted (extricated, distilled) from the logic of objects and states of affairs, logical propositions are what we can call "formally identical" with the logic of the actual world, which means that both have the same logical form. This formal identity of logic and ontology is manifest in Wittgenstein's "logical scaffolding" trope, which is not to be confused with his reference to the "scaffolding of the world."8 In short, the difference between them can be put into words this way: the discipline of logic constructs logical scaffolding in order to help to grasp the scaffolding of the world (see §6). To understand the scaffolding metaphor, it is essential to bear in mind that Wittgenstein conceives both language and thinking as "constructions," as experimental arrangements that depict (model) the possible forms that objects exhibit. He framed his view this way: "In a proposition a situation is, as it were, constructed by way of experiment" (4.031). In other words, a proposition constructs a situation, a fact of language, that models another situation, namely a state of affairs of reality. To be more explicit, propositional models show the precise structure of states of affairs. In Frege's terminology, both have the same sense. It is a shared "pictorial form," one that is "identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all" (2.161). This is the hinge upon which rides the relation of the language and thinking, on the one hand, and the world, on the other hand. Worth remarking in this connection is that the elements in a 203 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation proposition-symbols, names-cohere in its (in proposition's) "nexus, concatenation" (4.22) on their own, and this thanks to their logical confi guration (shape, topology)-and not on account of any logical constants (which do not represent) or any quasi-logical objects external to symbols and names. Wittgenstein held, moreover, that the logical scaffolding can surround and support every newly constructed picture or proposition, every new model of fact (of state of affairs). That scaffolding, however, serves no constitutive role. It can support the propositional signs that compose a proposition (picture), and in that way can contribute to the mutual coherence of the signs ingredient in propositions. Without such scaffolding, a propositional construct is subject to collapse, with the result that we may fail to grasp the objects in the structures we intend to build with the aid of the Tractarian logical notation (see Milkov, 2001). However, the well-trained language user (picture-maker) does not need logical scaffolding, which is no more than a dispensable aid means. Signifi cantly, an austere quasi-ontology correlates with the austere Tractarian sign-language.9 Just as the propositions are concatenations of names without logical objects to connect them, no mortar (no tertium quid) connects the Tractarian objects (Wittgenstein, 1973, p. 23). The objects composing the state of affairs cohere in virtue of their formal profi le alone. 6. Tractarian Sign-language as Logical Scaffolding Merely an expedient for cultivating our ability to produce and understand language and thought, the Tractarian logical scaffolding is, we've seen, disposable: it does not play a constitutive role in them. Our next remark is that the Tractarian sign-language is itself a kind of logical scaffolding. That is why, whereas the declared task of the old logic, including that of Frege and Russell, was to extract or distill in theoretical form the logical structure of the world, the task of the Tractarian sign-language-operative, again, as a kind of logical scaffolding-is more modest. Its purpose is merely to enable one to recognize the logical structure of the propositions of one's own language. Hence, while the propositions of the old logic (inclusive of Frege and Russell) are tautological and thus superfl uous, the Tractarian sign-language sponsors elucidations that may meet our real needs, even if they are optional and ultimately to be abandoned. One may employ them so far as necessary, although one must not confuse them with the constitutive elements of what they help us to achieve. The Tractarian sign-language thus assists us in fi nding our way in the logic of our language, and it is in this respect that the notation "elucidates" it. Upon mastering the instructions, however, we can jettison the logical scaffolding that the sign-language supplies, as what has in effect become 204 Nikolay Milkov so much superfl uous. More explicitly put, the sign-language of the Tractatus indicates how to apprehend the logic of language in the manner that one apprehends how the elements of a picture connect with each other in "logical space." To achieve knowledge of this sort is to acquire insight into "how [the] things stand" (4.5) in the logic of the world. In other words, the notation makes it possible to acquire a grasp of the logic of facts (states of affairs) and objects. We can compare the Tractarian sign-language to a system of "road signs" that help us fi nd our way in the logic of language. But Wittgenstein also invokes another metaphor: "signs for logical operations are punctuation-marks" (5.4611). Without having any independent semantic content, they indicate how to read the logic of language. The logical signs thus have meaning only as instructions or-recurring to the more functionally precise term-as elucidations. Importantly enough, the elements of the sign-language of the Tractatus themselves tend to disappear. In the end, what the reader has in hand are only correctly indicated relations among the propositional signs in the logical space of propositions. These relations are formulated in the truism of the general propositional form, Wittgenstein's single logical constant: "this is how things stand" (4.5). In light of the correctly grasped logic of propositions, those with mastery of a language and thinking fi nd their way in the world; without it they would be unable to discern the relations articulating the logical space that language shares with objects and states of affairs. Wittgenstein thus posits the Tractarian sign-language as having a transient character.10 Prima facie, it is the logical form that constructively organizes the content of all propositions (as pictures, or models) with sense.11 Then the reader realizes that this purely instrumental form does not actually organize anything: an organizing logical frame is not ingredient in the content of propositions. The logical scaffolding is, once again, just an expedient-an optional means that is in any case ultimately dispensable- by means of which we can acquire the ability to better recognize on our own the indispensable form of a language. More fully to spell out this pivotal feature of the Tractarian signlanguage, we can recur to the analogy of language learning. The textbook for advanced students of Italian is more literary in character and concerned with fi ner points of stylistics than one written for beginners and which concentrates principally on elementary grammar, syntax, and semantics. Moreover, students who achieve a perfect facility in the language will dispense with any language instructions. To take a step further and apply Wittgenstein's own example, one can also imagine a highly profi cient 205 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation reader of Italian, or of any other language, who is able correctly to decipher the logic of a text that lack punctuation marks. The interpretation of the Tractatus introduced in the foregoing sections stands as a corrective to the New Wittgensteinian reading on still another ground. Conant alludes to a putative "experience" of seeing that the Tractarian "metaphysical" theories fall apart, an experience that he postulates Wittgenstein expressly sought to foster in the reader for its "therapeutic" effect. What is actually at issue here, however, is no therapeutic "experience" as such, but rather a rational pedagogical process in which the reader engages with the sign-language advanced in the Tractatus as a disposable mechanism for elucidating our language and thinking.12 7. Fatal Neglect Scholars of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the New Wittgensteinians in particular, too often overlook or underestimate the relevance of two pivotal aspects of his thought: His position (i) on everyday language and (ii) on "the correct method in philosophy." (i) Commentators commonly fail to note Wittgenstein's claim that in daily life, we have the capacity to use language that is far from being scientifi c and yet is hardly senseless. "In fact," he declares, "all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect order" (5.5563). We are able to speak quite sensibly even without knowing how we do so (4.002). Among other things, this view reveals a solid link between the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations; for in both works Wittgenstein maintains that the language we use in daily life: (a) is not senseless, (b) is already available: we are not the fi rst to invent it or to construct it. But whereas in his later text Wittgenstein concentrates on developing this point, in the Tractatus he merely takes it to be obvious and consequently does not discuss it, with the result that students of his philosophy often have unwittingly overlooked it. In fact, that language and thinking are something given is the fundamental postulate of the Tractatus. They are available together as an expedient, or an "appliance," that helps us to fi nd our place in the world and to act in it. The objective of the Tractarian propositions themselves is nothing else than to elucidate the functioning of language and thinking. The assertion that "philosophy aims at logical elucidations of thoughts" (4.112) is consequently the kernel of the Tractatus and, pace the New Wittgensteinians, not a part of its "frame" that remains discrete from its "body." 206 Nikolay Milkov This core point of the Tractatus implies the priority of language over being (hence for Wittgenstein "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" (5.6)) as well as their intrinsic interconnectedness. That we think and speak about elements of the world (states of affairs and objects) led Wittgenstein to develop a quasi-ontology. The prefi x "quasi" applies since the Tractarian ontology is but only the fl ip side of its sign-language, which has but an elucidatory function and nothing more. It is in effect a kind of doppelganger of the perfect logical symbolism. It is not a theory. As we noted in §2, then, the Tractarian elucidations lack independent sense (Sinn) since they do not picture elementary states of affairs, nor are they truth-functions of such pictures. Rather, they show, without discursively articulating it, the logic of language and so of the world. One can see in this connection the shortcomings of Peter Hacker's "ineffability reading" of the Tractatus. According to Hacker, one can mean something that cannot be said, but rather expresses itself in a different way viz. is shown by features of our language. Moreover, [Wittgenstein] insisted, we can apprehend, indeed, can see some things which are thus meant but cannot be said. (2000, p. 368) This characterization points in the right direction but is incomplete and ultimately inaccurate. Hacker fails to notice that the propositions that show something but say nothing are propositions of the new sign-language. They are, once again, elucidations that instruct us in how to understand the functionality, the "logic," of the "appliance" that is our language. Thus, when we learn to follow the logic of the language on our own, we can dispense with the notation. That is why one more properly refers to the notation as "elucidating nonsense" rather than "illuminating nonsense," as Hacker has it. Among other things, this alternative description directly ties this kind of Tractarian "nonsense" to the ultimate objective of Wittgenstein's book: elucidation of the work of our language and thinking. (ii) The second point that the New Wittgensteinians unwarrantably neglected, which, by the way, is connected with the fi rst one, is the precise meaning of 6.53. What this culminating subsection of the Tractatus proposes is that "the correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science-i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy" [emphasis added]. Clearly, what Wittgenstein means here is that the bulk of the propositions in the Tractatus are nonsensical only if we construe them as philosophical propositions. In fact, however, they are not propositions 207 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation pertaining to philosophy (to metaphysics) the purpose of which is to say something about the world as such. Rather, the Tractarian propositions simply elucidate the logic of human language and thought-as well as that of the minimal and ultimately disposable sign-language. And being such, they are simply "propositions of our everyday language... [and thus] are in perfect order" (5.5563). In fact, all of the propositions that Conant and Diamond refer to collectively as the "body" of Wittgenstein's Tractatus are of this nature. They are not propositions of fact and science, nor are they philosophical propositions by means of which to "see [to picture] the world" (6.54 [emphasis added]). They just show how our language and thought work. That is why they are also not nonsensical in the way that metaphysical sentences might be considered nonsensical. That said, as elucidations, the Tractarian propositions do not make sense in the way that sentences of fact and science do. 8. Five Cases of Tractarian Elucidation We are now in a position to consider how the propositions of the Tractatus serve as elucidations in the sense established in 6.54. To be more exact, we can discern fi ve forms of Tractarian elucidations. First, the propositions that elaborate Wittgenstein's sign-language are neither philosophical propositions nor propositions of science. Instead, they are propositions that elucidate our language as an instrument that helps us to fi nd our way in the world. Oskari Kuusela implicitly makes something like this point in characterizing the Tractarian notation as engendering a "non-theoretic linguistic capacity that allows [the reader] to recognize something as philosophically or logically problematic" (2011, p. 137). To put this more accurately, however, we should say that the Tractarian sign-language enables one to recognize how language and thinking function-to recognize, that is, their logic. In other words, the case in point is not a non-theoretical linguistic capacity but non-theoretical notational capacity.13 Second, besides featuring propositions that articulate the notation, the main body of the Tractatus introduces propositions that are themselves elucidations of this notation, hence in effect they are elucidations of elucidations. The Tractatus thus elucidates the sign-language and ipso facto teaches how better to grasp the logic of sentences, and in the process to think with greater logical cogency. Third, Wittgenstein's logical notation elucidates the work of the received logical "gear," the "old" new logic of Frege and Russell, in ways that correct it for its patent shortcomings. 208 Nikolay Milkov Fourth, in view of the intrinsic connection between language and thought (cf. 7, (i)), the Tractarian sign-language elucidates our thinking. Indeed, Wittgenstein devised his notation as an instrument for recognizing the logical properties of the propositions of the science and the daily life in which we express our thoughts. Lastly, the Tractatus also elucidates primitive signs (3.263).14 But the provisional, disposable character of its sign-language eventually led Wittgenstein to identify it with the general propositional form which in turn is only a primitive sign (5.472). In this way the fi fth form of Tractarian elucidation overlaps with the fi rst one. 9. Therapy, Irony, or Training? A telling argument against the interpretation of the New Wittgensteinians is that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein entertained no such idea as "analytic therapy." Indeed, while he may have fi rst read Freud prior to the publication of the Tractatus in 1922,15 he fi rst adopted the idea that philosophy has a therapeutic objective only in 1933 (see Milkov, 2012, pp. 73-4). Contrary to the thesis fi elded by Conant and Diamond, the Tractatus advances no program for therapy but rather argues for an activity designed to teach readers better to understand their language, and by that means trains them to think with greater cogency. (In this way Wittgenstein subscribes to the classic Cartesian view that the vocation of philosophy is to cultivate clear and distinct thought (4.112).) It is true that both sorts of activity, therapeutic and pedagogic, are alike processes that occur in stages; moreover they both serve to improve our thinking and to eliminate epistemological error (cf. §6). Still, therapy and pedagogy have two clearly different objectives, the former to cure an intellectual disorder and the latter educationally to develop our mastery of language and our understanding. This difference is crucial since the two leading schools of interpretation argue for mutually incompatible views of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a circumstance that sparked the so-called "Tractatus wars." To be sure, whereas intellectual illness is something patently irrational, to have problems with the orientation in the logic of languages and the world is not. Moreover, the interpretation of the New Wittgensteinians suggests that Wittgenstein's Tractatus is close to continental philosophy. In this sense, Peter Hacker correctly sees this line of interpretation as "postmodernist" (in that Wittgenstein allegedly employed pervasive irony, writing the bulk of the propositions of the Tractatus "tongue in cheek") and "deconstructivist" (it held that almost all propositions of the Tractatus are sheer nonsense). 209 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation This side of the New Wittgensteinians' interpretation is patent in their insistence that to achieve his putative therapeutic goal, Wittgenstein forged a clever plan. With the aim of subverting the human inclination to get taken in by philosophical theories, he propounded instead philosophical quasi-theories, which in fact are no more than successive rungs of the therapeutic ladder that the reader ascends step by step through the course of the Tractatus. In other words, as the New Wittgensteinians would have it, Wittgenstein purposed to deceive his readers in order to cure them. This story cannot be right, however, since Wittgenstein's method and style throughout the Tractatus are genuinely consequential and demonstrably mark a radical development of early analytic philosophy as pioneered by Frege, Russell and G.E. Moore. First of all, despite the fact that he didn't offer a new philosophical theory, Wittgenstein laid out his views in formally discursive terms. That he repeatedly identifi es the Tractatus as a "treatise" (Abhandlung), and not as a dialectical dialogue, testifi es to as much. A second factor corroborating this judgment is that Wittgenstein composed this most intricate work on a nerve-shatteringly tight time budget, while serving as a soldier at the Eastern Front in World War I. As a result, the book has a highly compressed character which sets about addressing with utmost economy and formal rigor a constellation of the most intricate problems of philosophical logic. The very notion, espoused by the New Wittgensteinians, that under such circumstances as the author of the Tractatus labored he would seek to communicate his highly technical ideas in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek manner stretches credulity. 10. Epilogue The foregoing sections make the case that the New Wittgensteinian interpretation of the Tractatus is inconsistent, and that on a variety of counts it is out of touch with what Wittgenstein demonstrably gives us in his treatise. That said, however, the challenge to traditional readings of the Tractatus mounted by the New Wittgensteinians had also one unquestionably positive effect. For it impelled the crowded community of Tractatus scholars to revisit and in many cases revise their interpretations with an eye to more faithfully revealing the true sense of Wittgenstein's early masterwork. The present paper counts itself as one such attempt.16 210 Nikolay Milkov Notes 1 Other defenders of this reading are Oskari Kuusela, Denis McManus, and Rupert Read in Great Britain, and Juliet Floyd, Warren Goldfarb, Michael Kremer and Thomas Ricketts in North America. For recent discussion on this standpoint, see Read and Lavery (2011). 2 The declared purpose of Conant (2001, p. 378) is to discuss just this term, plus the term 'nonsense.' 3 They are nonsense if we see them as philosophical propositions (cf. §7, (ii)). Incidentally, that there are different kinds of nonsense was also demonstrated by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (cf. Husserl, 1900-1, vol. 2, Part One: Fourth Investigation). 4 Wittgenstein did not originate the concept of elucidation in philosophy. Hacker (1975) and Geach (1976) identify its earlier appearance in Frege. Long before Frege, however, Kant (1800, §§104 ff.) made extensive use of it opposing elucidations to synthetic judgments. The philosophical history of this concept is not, however, a concern here. 5 This point was also mentioned in Glock (2008, pp. 35ff.): "For Wittgenstein, the logical calculus developed by Frege and Russell is not an ideal language, one that avoids the alleged defects of natural languages [cf. §7], but an ideal notation which displays the logical structure that all natural languages must have in common under their misleading structure." 6 That objects have logical structure is evidenced by the fact that it is impossible "for two colors... to be at one place in the visual fi eld. ... It is excluded by the logical structure of color" (6.3751). 7 To be more exact, the object's forms are space, time and color (2.0251). Incidentally, Wittgenstein failed to notice that sound, too, can be considered as an object's form. 8 On the difference between the Tractarian concepts "logical scaffolding" and "scaffolding of the world" see Milkov (2001). 9 There is more to say below, in §7 (i), about why this ontology is "quasi," as well as why it corresponds to the Tractarian sign-language. 10 The transient character of the Tractarian sign-language explains why some of its interpreters (cf. Goldfarb, 1997) maintain that Wittgenstein failed to suggest a sign-language at all. 11 Cf. 4.023: "A proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding." 12 There will be more to say about this difference in §9. 13 What is inaccurate in Kuusela's interpretation is also the claim that we may need such a notation when there is something problematic, in the sense of metaphysical, to be eliminated. In fact, we need it all the time, whenever we think and speak. 14 In fact, this form of elucidation has genealogical priority over the other four forms. That primitive signs are to be elucidated was already underscored by Kant and Frege (cf. n.4), and later by Russell. 211 The Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus: Toward a New Interpretation 15 There are no pieces of evidence for this assumption, though. For example, Brian McGuinness' standard biography of the early Wittgenstein (1988) never even mentions Freud. 16 The initial version of this paper was delivered at the 26th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Austria, in August 2003; a second, revised draft was read at an Open Section of the Mind Association and the Aristotelian Society Joint Session in Brighton (Sussex) in July 2011. Finally, the paper was presented at the 6th annual conference for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy in Calgary, Alberta, in May, 2016. The author is indebted to stimulating remarks offered by Guy Stock, Chon Tejedor, Carolyn Wilde and David G. Stern. The paper also benefi tted from the numerous remarks of the anonymous reader for the Southwest Philosophy Review. Thanks go also to all those who supported my work with criticism and encouragement, in particular to Phillip Stambovsky, who helped me by improving the English of the paper. Works Cited Conant, James. (2001) The Method of the Tractatus. In E. Reck: (ed.), From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy (pp. 374462). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Diamond, Cora. (1991) Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus. As reprinted in The Realist Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (pp. 179-204). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ---. (2000) Ethics, Imagination and the Method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In Crary and Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein (pp. 149-173). London: Routledge. Frege, Gottlob. 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In Read and Lavery (eds.), Beyond the Tractatus Wars: the New Wittgenstein Debate (pp. 121-48). London: Routledge. 212 Nikolay Milkov McGuinness, B.F. (1988) Young Ludwig: Wittgenstein's Life 1889-1921. London: Penguin. Milkov, N. (2001) Tractarian Scaffoldings. Prima Philosophia 14: 399-414. ---. (2012) Wittgenstein's Method: The Third Phase of Its Development (1933-36). In A. Marques and N. Venturinha (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Mind: Wittgenstein's Early Investigations (pp. 65-79). Berlin: de Gruyter. Ramsey, F.P. (1931) Philosophy. In R.B. Braithwaite (ed.), The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays (pp. 263-9). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Read, R. and M.A. Lavery (eds.). (2011) Beyond the Tractatus Wars: the New Wittgenstein Debate. London: Routledge. von Wright, Georg Henrik. (2006) Remarks on Wittgenstein's Use of the Term 'Sinn', 'Sinnlos', 'Unsinnig', 'Wahr', and 'Gedanke' in the Tractatus. In Alois Pichler and Simo Säätelä (eds.), Wittgenstein: the Philosopher and his Works (pp. 98-106). Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1921 [1961]) Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. David Pears and B.F. McGuinness (trans.). London: Routledge. ---. (1933 [2005]) Big Typescript: TS 213. Oxford: Blackwell. ---. (1973) Letters to C.K. Ogden. G.H. von Wright (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. ---. (1979) Notebooks 1914-1916, 2nd ed. G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe (eds.), G.E.M. Anscombe (trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. ---. (1979) Geheime Tagebücher. Wilhelm Baum (ed.). Vienna: Turia & Kant. ---. (1995) Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa. B.F. McGuinness and G.H. von Wright (eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Explicitism about Truth in Fiction William D'Alessandro Abstract The problem of truth in fiction concerns how to tell whether a given proposition is true in a given fiction. Thus far, the nearly universal consensus has been that some propositions are 'implicitly true' in some fictions: such propositions aren't expressed by any explicit statements in the relevant work (or works), but are nevertheless held to be true in those works on the basis of some other set of criteria. I call this family of views 'implicitism'. I argue that implicitism faces serious problems, whereas the opposite view ('explicitism') is much more plausible than has previously been thought. After mounting a limited defense of explicitism, I explore a difficult problem for the view and discuss some possible responses. 1. Truth in Fiction An old problem in the philosophy of fiction is how to tell which propositions are true in, or true according to, a given fiction. A solution to this problem is a theory of 'truth in fiction'. Questions about truth in fiction impinge on major issues in ontology (e.g., the existence and properties of fictional characters), metaphysics (e.g., fictionalist approaches to domains of discourse such as modality and mathematics), and philosophy of language (e.g., the semantics and logic of claims about 'truth according to a source'), among other subjects. So the problem is one that many philosopers ought to care about. This paper attempts to shed some light on the problem of truth in fiction, in two ways. First, I distinguish between two kinds of theories of truth in fiction, which I'll call explicitism and implicitism. According to explicitism, the set of propositions that are true in a given fiction is a subset of the set of propositions that are expressed by explicit statements in the corresponding works. Implicitism, meanwhile, is the denial of explicitism. According to implicitism, there are some works, and some propositions which aren't expressed by any explicit statements in those works, such that the propositions in question are nevertheless true in the corresponding fiction. (What exactly is meant by these definitions will be clarified shortly.) Although some version of the explicitism/implicitism distinction has been observed by other authors, the present paper offers some clarifications about the two views and surrounding issues that haven't been made elsewhere. It's safe to say that implicitism is the dominant way of thinking about truth in fiction (although there's been lively debate over exactly which version of the theory is correct).1 In fact, no philosopher that I know of has seriously questioned implicitism or attempted to defend any version of explicitism. My second and primary goal here is to challenge this orthodoxy. I hope to show that implicitism is much less obviously true, and that explicitism is much less obviously false, than the standard wisdom suggests. 1 See, for example, David Lewis, 'Truth in Fiction', American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978), 37-46; Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction (New York: Cambridge, 1990); Alex Byrne, 'Truth in Fiction: The Story Continued', Australasian Journal of Philosophy 71 (1993), 24-35; Derek Matravers, 'Beliefs and Fictional Narrators', Analysis 55 (1995), 121-122; Christopher New, 'A Note on Truth in Fiction', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (1997), 421423; John F. Phillips, 'Truth and Inference in Fiction', Philosophical Studies 94 (1999), 273-293; Richard Hanley, 'As Good as It Gets: Lewis on Truth in Fiction', Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (2004), 112-128. I begin by raising a problem for implicitism about truth in fiction. Roughly, the issue is that the purported existence of implicit truths conflicts with the possibility of sequels (or other appropriately related works) in which pretty much anything can turn out to be true, provided only that what's established in the later works is consistent with what's explicitly true in the earlier works. If the argument against implicitism is decisive, as I think it may be, then it's time to take a closer look at alternative approaches. To this end, I consider whether explicitism is really as indefensible as many authors have claimed. I show that it isn't. On the contrary, explicitism is preferable to implicitism in important respects, and the most common and seemingly plausible attempts to refute it are unsuccessful. There remains one problem with the view, however, that's more difficult to resolve. The problem arises from much the same sort of reasoning that figures in the argument against implicitism, with much the same upshot. One possible response to the problem is to accept a nihilistic version of explicitism according to which there are no (nontrivial) truths in fictions. I leave it open whether this is the correct response, or whether some more robust form of explicitism might yet be salvaged. Let me fix some terminology before going further. Throughout the paper I use the term 'work' to mean a literary artifact, such as a novel, short story or play. (I limit myself to literary fiction for convenience and simplicitiy, though I think that almost everything I say can probably be adapted to fiction in other media. The main challenge will be to work out a notion of explicitness that's appropriate for the medium in question.) If you like, a work can be identified with an ordered set of sentence-types. By contrast, I use the term 'fiction' (or sometimes 'story') to mean the (nonactual) state of affairs described by some work or family of works. A fiction, then, can be identified with a set of propositions. According to this picture, to say that a proposition p is true in a fiction F is to make the set-membership claim p ∈ F. Here's a bit more terminology. An 'explicit statement' in a work W is a declarative sentence-type appearing somewhere in W. An 'explicit proposition' in W is a proposition expressed by an explicit statement in W.2 Finally, when I speak of the set of explicit propositions associated with a given work, I really mean the closure of this set under logical consequence, and probably under the consequence relation of the relevant natural language too. (Thus, properly but more cumbersomely speaking, explicitism is the view that all the truths in a given fiction are either expressed by explicit statements in the relevant works, or else are implied by such propositions.) 2. Implicitism about Truth in Fiction 'Does Sherlock Holmes have a third nostril?' (That is, 'Is the proposition expressed by "Holmes has a third nostril" true in the Holmes stories?') This is the sort of question to which implicitism and explicitism might give contrary answers, since the claim that Holmes lacks a third nostril is arguably true in the stories though it's nowhere made explicitly. For example, David Lewis writes: 2 This is a slight abuse of language, since propositions aren't 'in' works, in the sense of set membership. But there seems to be no way to express this important idea that's both suitably compact and non-misleading, and so I've chosen to err on the side of compactness. I doubt that any serious confusion will result. I claim it's true, though not explicit, in the [Sherlock Holmes] stories that Holmes doesn't have a third nostril; that he never had a case in which the murderer turned out to be a purple gnome; that he solved his cases without the aid of divine revelation; that he never visited the moons of Saturn; and that he wears underpants.3 The main dispute among implicitist philosophers like Lewis is about what conditions, exactly, are necessary and sufficient for a (non-explicit) proposition to be true in a work of fiction. Some implicitists are relatively liberal about these conditions, others relatively conservative. Lewis's account, for example, is on the liberal side, as it allows for many non-explicit 'background' truths to be supplied by the beliefs of the author's community. Other authors have proposed other criteria for identifying implicit truths in fiction: see, for example, the works by Walton, Currie, Byrne, Matravers, New, and Phillips cited above. I lack the space to discuss the details of any of these proposals here, unfortunately. But the argument I'll soon give against implicitism applies equally to any version of the view. Before going further, it's worth asking what sorts of considerations have been offered in favor of implicitism. David Lewis, whom one might justly call the founding father of the view in its modern form, seems in fact to offer no argument at all. He simply asserts that there are implicit truths in fiction, such as that Holmes wore underpants and lacked a third nostril. Lewis apparently takes these claims to be so obviously true as to require no comment or justification. Lewis's successors have often been less dogmatic, although they haven't been as thorough as they might be. At least, however, some recent authors have distinguished implicitism 3 Lewis, 'Truth in Fiction', 41. from some form of explicitism, and they've recognized the bare possibility that explicitism might be true. For example, Phillips considers the view that what is true in a story is what is explicitly mentioned in the text; nothing more and nothing less. I shall label this view the Literal View. The Literal View, as we have already seen, appears to be an inadequate theory. The Literal View fails to account for the truth of statements such as 'Iago is duplicitous', 'Tom Sawyer is a human being', 'King Lear had a consort', 'Holmes has a blood type', and countless others like them. Intuitively, there are many propositions that are part of a story which aren't expressed by any sentences in the text. A better theory, then, would be one which could account for the truth of statements of this kind.4 And Byrne asks: Why not identify what is true in a fiction with what is explicitly stated in the fiction (or follows deductively from what is explicitly stated)? Well, in some fictions there are deluded narrators, and so they speak falsely. Therefore the proposal doesn't give a sufficient condition. But it doesn't give a necessary condition either. There are many truths in fiction which aren't explicitly stated, and aren't entailed by what is explicitly stated. It's true in the Holmes stories-as Lewis pointed out-that 4 Phillips, 'Truth and Inference in Fiction', 275. Holmes doesn't have a third nostril, and that he never visited the moons of Saturn. However, neither of these propositions is explicitly stated in the stories, or entailed by what is explicitly stated.5 Although Phillips and Byrne go further than Lewis, their arguments are unsatisfying in a couple respects. For one, the version of explicitism attacked by Phillips and Byrne is a simplistic and implausible one. What Phillips calls the Literal View (and what Byrne identifies without naming) is the thesis that the set of truths in a given fiction is coextensive with the set of propositions expressed by explicit statements in the relevant works. As Byrne points out, this view is easily refuted, for instance by the existence of unreliable narrators. But explicitism comes in other and more credible forms. A sophisticated explicitist will hold that the set of truths in a given fiction is a subset-in general, a proper subset-of the set of explicit propositions in the relevant works. This view is entirely compatible with the existence of untruthful narrators, misinformed characters, and the like. Moreover, Phillips' and Byrne's arguments (as well as Lewis's) lean heavily on unsupported appeals to implicitist intuitions. While I don't deny that many people have such intuitions, this fact alone isn't likely to move someone who has principled reasons for doubting the truth of implicitism. In the next section I offer just such a reason. (Later, in section 5, I argue that explicitism is in fact compatible with implicitist-style intuitions. So the worry here is even less pressing than it might have seemed.) 5 Byrne, 'Truth in Fiction', 24. 3. Against Implicitism The central premise of my argument against implicitism involves the notion of works canonically related to a given work, or canonical relatives of a given work for short. The defining feature of canonical relatives is that they have the power to settle the truth values of certain propositions in the fictions to which they're related.6 Given a work W, the most familiar example of a canonical relative of W is a sequel (or 'prequel') to W, though some works might have canonical relatives of other sorts. Do canonical relatives, as I've defined them, actually exist? It seems they do.7 Here's an example. In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins acquires a strange ring with the power to turn him invisible. Although Bilbo's ring plays an important role in the story of The Hobbit, we aren't told very much about it in that novel; we know that it previously belonged to a creature called Gollum, but much else about its nature and origin remains mysterious. In the Lord of the 6 What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for some work to count as a canonical relative of a given work? In general, I don't know. But for an enlightening recent discussion of a special case of the problem, see Roy T. Cook, 'Canonicity and Normativity in Massive, Serialized, Collaborative Fiction', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (2013), 271-276. 7 Incidentally, David Lewis agrees: 'I've spoken of Conan Doyle's Holmes stories; but many other authors also have written Holmes stories. These would have little point without inter-fictional carry-over' ('Truth in Fiction', 45). Rings stories and other writings, however, Tolkien went on to describe the career of Bilbo's ring in great detail. In those writings, we learn that Bilbo's ring is in fact the 'One Ring', an ancient artifact created by a powerful supernatural being. We learn how Gollum came to possess the ring, why it provoked such unusual behavior in its owners, and so on. What I want to emphasize in this example is the following: once Tolkien had written The Lord of the Rings, it was thereafter true that, in the story of The Hobbit, Bilbo finds the One Ring. More generally, all the assertions made by Tolkien about the One Ring in his other writings came to be true of the object found by Bilbo in the original story. And this example is in no way unusual. Indeed, it's arguably part of what it is for a work W2 to be a sequel (say) to a work W1 that W2 settles the truth values of some propositions in the fiction F1 associated with W1. At the very least, if some event e of F2 takes place after the events of F1 (as is typical of sequels), then W2 makes it true in F1 that e will occur in the future. It therefore hardly seems possible to understand the relationship between a fiction and its sequels without grasping that what's true in the latter partially determines what's true in the former. In general, there's practically no telling which propositions may be made true in a given story by its canonical relatives. There's certainly no reason why surprising revelations might not be made in a sequel, for example, that couldn't have been predicted on the basis of the original story. We might learn that a setting that was made to seem alien or fantastical is in fact Earth in a distant (or not-so-distant) future. Or we could discover that 'it was all a dream'. As a rule, there's no reason to think that writers of fiction won't withhold important information in an earlier story, only to reveal it in a subsequent work. That is, there's no reason to think that writers will or should always obey Gricean maxims in the course of their storytelling. This should be no surprise, since it's often necessary to violate such maxims in order to achieve common dramatic and aesthetic effects. While it's perhaps unusual for canonical relatives to surprise us in truly bizarre or radical ways, it's certainly not inconceivable that this should happen, and we'd have no difficulty understanding it if it did. For example, it's logically possible that Tolstoy, in a sequel to War and Peace, revealed that the marriage of Pierre and Natasha was orchestrated by conspirators from the Andromeda galaxy. If Tolstoy had actually done this, it would thereafter have been true in War and Peace that the principal romance was brought about by an intergalactic plot. While we might be dubious about the literary merits of Tolstoy's decision, we surely wouldn't find it objectionable on purely logical grounds. War and Peace and its hypothetical sequel would, I take it, comprise a perfectly consistent and intelligible story. I believe the point holds with generality: any proposition not explicitly false in a given fiction is made true by some possible canonical relative of the fiction. Having established this, the conclusion I promised is only a short step away. If it could be, or could have been, made true in the Holmes stories that Holmes has a third nostril, then it can't (now, actually) be true in the stories that Holmes lacks a third nostril, on pain of contradiction. To see this, suppose on the contrary that 'Holmes lacks a third nostril' is true in the stories. Then, if Conan Doyle had given Holmes an extra nostril in a further story, we would apparently have to judge the result inconsistent or unintelligible, since it would then be both (implicitly) true in the stories that Holmes lacked a third nostril and also (explicitly) false that he did. But this supposition is wrong.We surely wouldn't, in fact, find such a development inconsistent or unintelligible. (We might well find it silly, incongruous, or in bad taste, but that's another question.) Therefore, 'Holmes lacks a third nostril' can't have been true in the stories in the first place. Similarly, if it could have been made true in War and Peace that an alien intelligence was at work behind the scenes, then this proposition couldn't (now, actually) be false in War and Peace. And so on. The main observations I've been making may be condensed into the following thesis. Let W1 be a work and F the associated fiction. Let p be any proposition that's neither explicitly true nor explicitly false in W1. Then: (1) There exists a possible canonical relative W2 of W1 such that W2 makes p false in F, and the resulting story (in particular, the set {~p} ∪ F) is logically consistent.8 I hope that (1) is uncontroversial, or as uncontroversial as a premise in a philosophical argument can be; as I've said already, some such principle seems to me indispensible for understanding the relationship between a work of fiction and its sequels. Moreover, it's trivially true that (2) If the set {~p} ∪ F is logically consistent, then p ∉ F. 8 Here I'm making use of the identification of a fiction with the set of propositions that are true in the fiction. So, by (1) and (2), (3) p is not true in F. In particular, p is not implicitly true in F. Since the argument concerns an arbitrary work and an arbitrary proposition, this last statement amounts to the claim that there are no implicit truths in fictions. Hence implicitism is false. If I'm right about this, then we need to start considering alternative accounts of truth in fiction-that is, the various possible versions of explicitism. The prevailing wisdom has it that explicitism is a hopelessly bad theory, so this might seem like an ill-fated undertaking. But I think this is wrong. As I hope to show in the next section, explicitism survives a variety of common and initially plausible objections, and in fact it comes out looking rather attractive in many ways. 4. Prospects for an Explicitist Theory of Truth in Fiction Explicitism, as I've defined it, is the thesis that the set of true propositions in a given fiction is a subset of the set of explicit propositions in that fiction. Even if the above arguments establish the truth of explicitism, they don't by themselves point the way toward a fully satisfying theory of truth in fiction. For explicitism in this general form doesn't give a criterion for deciding whether an arbitrary proposition is true or not in an arbitrary fiction. We may be convinced that the truths in a certain fiction are some subset of the explicit propositions, but how this subset is to be identified remains to be seen. Alas, I don't have a proper theory of this sort to offer. A few observations, however, can readily be made about the prospects for such a theory. First, we won't want to say that every explicit proposition in each work is true in the associated fiction. For characters' thoughts and speech often take the form of explicit statements, and characters often lie or get things wrong. Second, we won't even want to say that every explicit statement made "in the narrator's voice" expresses a true proposition in the relevant fiction. For narrators are sometimes unreliable, even when they don't appear as characters in the usual sense. It may well be that, in the great majority of works of fiction, the narrator may appropriately be viewed as omniscient and sincere, so that everything said 'in the narrator's voice' can be taken as true in the story. Even in the relatively few works where this agreeable situation breaks down, it may be that it's often easy to tell which of the narrator's assertions we should take as true and which we should reject. Unfortunately, however, even this level of convenience is not always available to the reader. There's a small but significant body of literature involving narrators who are known (or reasonably suspected) to be unreliable, but whose assertions can't easily be sorted into the true and the false or dubious. (Consider Nabokov's Pale Fire, for example, a key feature of which is the massive uncertainty surrounding the narrator's version of events.) In view of works such as these, it's doubtful that there exists any simple algorithm for determining whether a given explicit proposition is true in a given fiction. Although I'm stopping short of offering a 'decision procedure' for truth in fiction, the conclusion I've argued for is nevertheless quite strong. If I'm right, then the theory of truth in fiction needs to be largely rebuilt upon new foundations. But we haven't yet reached the end of the story. In the next couple sections, I anticipate and try to respond to some concerns about the plausibility of explicitism and the arguments I've relied on. 5. Is Explicitism Perverse? Implicitism, as its defenders have pointed out, has considerable intuitive appeal. Surely, one wants to say, there's something natural and appropriate about thinking that Holmes wears underpants, or that he doesn't have a third nostril. To remain agnostic about such things is to be badly confused about how to understand works of fiction. If explicitism invites us to engage in such bizarre imaginative behavior, then that just shows there's something wrong with the theory: the proper inferential move here is not a modus ponens yielding the nonexistence of implicit truths in fiction, but rather a modus tollens yielding the denial of explicitism. In my view, this line of thought is largely correct, although the falsity of explicitism isn't the proper moral to draw from it. There is indeed something appropriate about the implicitist's mode of imaginative engagement with fiction; someone really is making an important kind of mistake if she earnestly refuses to imagine Holmes having two nostrils, or if she claims to have no idea whether Ophelia is a human being. The explanation for this, in my view, is not that implicitism is actually correct. On the contrary, I stand by the claim that 'Holmes has two nostrils' is not true in the Holmes stories, in the proper and strict sense of 'true'. (Of course it's not false in the stories either; it simply lacks a truth value.) The correct explanation is rather that it's reasonable for the reader to imagine, or to tentatively suppose, that Holmes has two nostrils. The reader is entitled to imagine this because, for instance, that's the picture of Holmes that Conan Doyle presumably had in mind, and it's the one that Conan Doyle presumably wished for his readers to have in mind. There's a familiar kind of 'cooperative principle' at work here, imposed by the limitations of the medium and of human beings. The authors of fictions want their readers to take for granted various propositions that it would be impractical to make explicit in the story. The readers are aware of this, so they cooperatively supply whichever details they think the author probably intended. This system is elegant and effective. Without some such coordination between author and audience, fiction as we know it could hardly exist. But the system is no foolproof guide to truth in fiction, properly so called. For a reader might have every reason to believe that the author of a given work intends for her to think that p is true in the story, and yet p might later turn out to be false in the story. It doesn't take a sophisticated argument to see this. It suffices just to note that, if 'The reader is permitted (or obliged) to imagine that p is true in the story' entailed 'p is actually true in the story', it would follow that authors could never surprise readers by temporarily encouraging them to make some innocuous-seeming assumption, only to reveal the wrongness of the assumption at some suitably unexpected juncture. But of course authors can do this, and they do it routinely. So it would be a mistake to confuse what is true in a story with what we might or ought to cooperatively imagine to be true. I conclude that explicitism can safely accommodate implicitist-style intuitions, or something near enough: it can accommodate the thought, at least, that it's in some sense appropriate for readers to act as though there are implicit truths of fiction. Moreover, accepting explicitism doesn't mean adopting a bizarre or tendentious attitude toward fiction. An explicitst can agree that one ought to imagine Holmes having two nostrils (until one has good reason to do otherwise). To deny that such propositions are true in the pertinent stories is not to hold that it's necessarily inappropriate to act in certain respects as if they were true. 6. Genre and Canonical Relatives Let me now move on to another issue. Perhaps the most attractive direct response to my argument involves the rejection of (1), which essentially claims that any work could have any sort of canonical relative whatsoever. Many people will be skeptical of this claim. In particular, it's natural to think that the genre of a work places some (often rather strong) constraints on what kinds of sequels it could have. Consider the bizarre sequel to War and Peace described in section 3, in which Pierre and Natasha's marriage is revealed to have been planned by alien conspirators. Presumably nobody would deny that Tolstoy might have written such a work, as a matter of bare logical possibility. But if he had written it, could it really have been a genuine sequel-i.e., a genuine canonical relative-to War and Peace? Some will be inclined to say no, on the grounds that War and Peace is a work of realistic historical fiction, and that the norms of that genre forbid such strange flights of fancy. On this view, Tolstoy might have written some genuine sequel to War and Peace-a realist novel about the role of Pierre and Nikolenka Volkonsky in the Decemberist uprising, maybe-but not a sequel involving outlandish intergalactic plots. The general thrust of this line of thought, then, is to deny that any work could have just any type of canonical relative. The set of possibilities is circumscribed by the genre to which the original work belongs. Hence (1) is false. I don't think this argument succeeds, however. First and most obviously, it simply isn't the case that canonical relatives have to be works of the same genre as the original. On the contrary, one frequently sees relatively mild genre shifts within a set of canonically related works, and even more drastic shifts are fairly common. For example, the first two books of Jeff Lindsay's popular Dexter series are naturalistic crime thrillers. But the third book, Dexter in the Dark, introduces the pagan god Moloch as a major character and plot element. Despite the sudden and radical shift from naturalism to supernaturalism, there's no temptation to rule Dexter in the Dark noncanonical (let alone knowable a priori to be noncanonical). So it would be wrong to suppose that the genre of a given work determines the genre of the work's possible canonical relatives in any straightforward way. In any case, there's a second problem with the genre objection. For it assumes falsely that genre is an intrinsic property of a work. In general, however, membership in a genre depends not only on the features of the work itself, but also on contingent facts about the work's actual canonical relatives, if it has any. For one can certainly imagine a genre of multistylistic serial works, which includes only series with two or more canonically related sub-works, and whose distinguishing feature is the occurrence of profound shifts in content and manner from one subwork to another. Perhaps such a genre has been recognized already; at any rate, it seems obviously possible that works in such a genre could exist. Moreover, one clearly couldn't tell by examining a single work in isolation whether it belonged (as a sub-work in a larger collection) to the genre of multistylistic serials. What's the point of introducing this notion? I want to suggest that, given any work W, whatever W's actual genre may be, W could (as a matter of logical possibility) have been part of a multistylistic serial. If W had been such a work, it would have had canonical relatives of arbitrarily strange and incongruous kinds. I've thus made a 'softer' and a 'harder' argument against the key premise of the genre objection. The softer argument points out that the genre of a work doesn't, as a matter of observable fact, place substantive constraints on the genres of its canonical relatives. The harder argument suggests that a work's actual genre couldn't possibly entail anything about the contents of its possible canonical relatives, since any work could have belonged to a genre in which it had canonical relatives of any sort. 7. A Harder Problem for Explicitism I've gone to some trouble in the last couple sections to show that explicitism is a credible view, not to be dismissed out of hand as obviously false. I think these arguments are important ones to get on the table, and I hope to have opened up some space for explicitism in future debates. Unfortunately, though, my discussion has to end on a less positive note. There remains a serious worry about explicitism that I don't know how to answer, and I think the best response may in fact be to give up on (any reasonably conservative version of) the view. As it turns out, this doesn't mean a return to implicitism, but something more like a rejection of the very notion of truth in fiction. Let me start with some setup. I previously acknowledged the implausibility of 'naïve' explicitism: that is, the view that every explicit proposition in a given work is true in the associated fiction. Since narrators can be unreliable and characters deceitful or misinformed, it won't do to simply believe everything we read. Hence we need a more sophisticated version of explicitism. Such a view must hold that, in general, only some of the relevant explicit propositions are true in the associated fiction. I left it open how this subset was to be identified, noting only the correct procedure is unlikely to be simple. Here's an argument that seems to show that the task is not only difficult, but impossible in principle. Choose any explicit proposition p in any work W. Let p be as innocuous, or as harmoniously integrated with the larger story, or as crucially important to that story as you want. For any such explicit p, isn't there a possible canonical relative of W that makes p false in the story (such that the resulting fiction isn't unintelligible or inconsistent)? An argument very much like the one offered in section 3 seems to show that there must be. For instance, a sequel might have revealed that the narrator of the earlier work was deluded, so that even among the previous narrator's most unremarkable or seemingly trustworthy reports, some were entirely mistaken. We might even discover that large portions of the original narrative were hallucinated or fabricated. I know of no way to establish the impossibility of any particular such development. So, by the same reasoning as before, it seems that no particular explicit proposition can be determinately true in any given work. Thus explicitism suffers from much the same type of flaw as implicitism. What should the (would-be) explicitist say about this argument? Two general types of reply are possible. On the one hand, one could deny the conclusion and try to find some problem with the argument. This would presumably involve finding some important difference between explicit and non-explicit propositions such that the reasoning holds for one type of proposition but not the other. The second possible reply involves biting the bullet and accepting the nihilistic result that there are no truths in fictions (or no nontrivial such truths, anyway). I'll consider both strategies in turn. As for the first strategy, I can't see any obvious difference between explicit and nonexplicit propositions that wholly solves the explicitist's problem. That is, I don't know of a way to specify a rule that carves out an interesting class of explicit propositions that are immune from revision by possible canonical relatives, in the sense described above. That's not to say that the explicitist has nothing at all to say for herself, though. There are some asymmetries between the two situations that leave explicitism looking somewhat better off than implicitism. For instance, it doesn't seem possible for every explicit proposition in a given work to be made false (at one time) by some possible canonical relative. For in virtue of what would the two works then count as canonically related? Whether or not the canonical relative relation holds between a pair of works, after all, is determined in large part by the presence of significant overlap or agreement between the contents of the two works. At the very least, some degree of compatibility between the contents is surely required. And we have neither agreement nor compatibility in the case where W2 asserts the falsity of absolutely everything asserted in W1. So a canonical relative of some work W can't make every explicit proposition in W false, on pain of failing to meet a necessary condition on canonical relatives. This is interesting because there doesn't seem to be any similar restriction involving non-explicit propositions. There's nothing obviously problematic about W's having a canonical relative that makes any number of non-explicit propositions false (or, alternately, true) in the story associated with W. A follow-up to Moby-Dick, for instance, might have agreed with everything stated explicitly in the original novel, but denied arbitrarily many propositions that the original didn't explicitly deal with ('Ishmael is allergic to latex', 'New Zealand suffered a butter shortage in 1851', etc.). There's no reason why any number of such denials should prevent one work from being canonically related to another. To summarize, if W2 is to be a canonical relative of W1, then there must be some substantial degree of compatibility between what's true in the fiction associated with W2 and what's explicitly stated in W1. But there needn't be any such compatibility between what's true in W2's fiction and what isn't explicit in W1. This may be an encouraging result for the explicitist. Unfortunately, though, it isn't enough to solve the problem. For even if it's true that no canonical relative of W can make every explicit proposition in W false (all at once), this doesn't imply that any particular explicit proposition in W is immune from such falsification. Nor does there seem to be any direct path from the first claim to the second. So the problem persists. Given some work W, we wanted to find a specific set of explicit propositions that are determinately true in the fiction associated with W, hence necessarily also true in any canonical relative of W. But we still don't know how to do this. Perhaps someone wiser can solve the problem on behalf of explicitism. (Of course, any plausible solution for the explicitist's version of the problem may also be a solution for the implicitist's version, and vice versa. Any attempt to offer a solution as an argument for the superiority of one view over the other should take this into account.) But let me set the issue aside for now to discuss the other possible response to the problem. The other response, as I said, involves biting the bullet and accepting the conclusion of the argument-that is, the claim that there aren't any (nontrivial) explicit truths in fictions.9 If there aren't any explicit truths, then presumably there aren't any implicit truths either, so it seems reasonable to call this view nihilism about truth in fiction. (It's perhaps worth noting that 9 'Nontrivial' in the sense of 'not logically true'. Whether or not you should accept this qualifier depends on your views about consistency and fiction. If you think that fictions can't contain contradictions, then you should think that an explicit tautology in a work is determinately true in the work, since no possible canonical relative can make it false. If you think that contradictory fictions are possible, then there's no reason to accept this. I mostly ignore this complication in the rest of the section. nihilism isn't incompatible with explicitism, as it's been defined here. On the contrary, nihilism is a version of explicitism, since the nihilist claim 'There are no truths in fiction' implies the explicitist claim 'All truths in fiction are explicit truths'. But of course nihilism is a highly aberrant version of explicitism, so it makes sense to treat it as a largely distinct view.) On the face of it, nihilism seems even more incredible than ordinary explicitism. But I think a case can be made in its favor. First of all, note that nihilism needn't be as revisionary or bizarre as it might at first seem. Like other kinds of explicitists, nihilists can consistently hold that we're permitted (or obligated) to imagine or suppose certain things when we read works of fiction, even though the contents of these suppositions aren't determinately true in the corresponding story. (This was more or less the argument of section 5.) So nihilism needn't require us to massively revise our ordinary ways of engaging with fiction. But the nihilist isn't limited to such purely defensive maneuvers. I think nihilism can also tell a reasonable story about what's wrong with the notion of truth in fiction. To the extent that we find this diagnosis plausible, we have additional reason to take nihilism seriously. In general, the nihilist might argue, the notion of truth according to a particular source involves something like the following idea. First we have a source S of type T-a work of fiction, a personal testimony, a mathematical theory, or whatever. (The source can be represented as a set of sentences.) Second, we have a consequence relation ⊢T for sources of type T. The consequence relation tells us how to determine what's true according to our source: a proposition p is true according to S if and only if S ⊢T p. The properties of the consequence relation vary with the type of source in question. For instance, if the source is a mathematical or scientific theory, then the familiar consequence relation ⊢ of classical logic will typically be called for. (So, the claim 'According to number theory, it's true that there are infinitely many primes' amounts to the claim 'Number Theory ⊢ "There are infinitely many primes"'.) If the source is a piece of testimony in English, then we'll presumably want a consequence relation ⊢E that encodes semantic facts about English in addition to purely formal or logical facts. (If Donna said 'Steven is my nephew', then it's true according to her testimony that Steven is the son of one of Donna's siblings, since 'Steven is my nephew' ⊢E 'Steven is the son of one of my siblings'.) In order to have a reasonable notion of truth according to a source, the consequence relation appropriate for that type of source ought to have certain formal properties. One of these properties is arguably monotonicity. (A consequence relation is monotonic when consequences can't be lost by adding more information to the premise set. In other words, for all sets of sentences S and S′ of type T, and for all propositions p, the relation ⊢T is monotonic iff S ⊢T p implies S ∪ S′ ⊢T p.) The importance of monotonicity lies in the fact that monotonic consequence relations represent secure and revision-proof forms of inference, while nonmonotonic consequence relations represent defeasible or provisional forms. This distinction matters because the notion of truth according to a source presumably involves what's definitively ratified by the source, not merely what the source tentatively or conditionally suggests. If I say 'I like eating pears, there's a pear here now, and I'm hungry', for instance, it's clearly not true according to my testimony that I'll soon eat the pear, even if a listener is defeasibly warranted in supposing that I'll do so on the basis of the testimony. (The listener's warrant might be defeated by the additional information that the pear is moldy, or that I'm fasting today, for example.) Such considerations suggest that only a monotonic consequence relation can give rise to a proper notion of truth according to a source.10 When monotonicity fails, we can at best talk about defeasible implication (and the non-truthlike status it bestows). The moral, the nihilist might argue, is the following. In domains governed by monotonic consequence relations (e.g. mathematics), it makes sense to talk about truth according to a source (e.g. a mathematical theory), since we have a way to specify the information that's definitively and unconditionally nailed down by the source in question. But this isn't the case with fiction. As the previous arguments have shown, there's no reasonable (nontrivial) consequence relation that can do the necessary work here. We have at best 'defeasible supposition in fiction' rather than truth in fiction, and the logic of this type of supposition is thoroughly non-monotonic: whenever we have W1 ⊢F p, there always exists a possible work W2 such that W1 ∪ W2 ⊬F p. 10 To be more precise, what's needed to justify any particular claim of the form 'p is true in F' is just that the particular inference involved satisfy the monotonicity condition. (It's possible for a consequence relation that's nonmonotonic in general to exhibit monotonic behavior in certain situations.) This qualification doesn't matter much for present purposes, though, since the arguments given above (if sound) show that any reasonable consequence relation for fiction behaves monotonically only in trivial cases, if at all. Still, the nihilist needn't think that the debate about truth in fiction has achieved nothing worthwhile. Presumably the properties of ⊢F (and the corresponding 'defeasibly supposable' status) are well worth investigating, and it's natural to view much of the literature so far as doing precisely this. The mistake was just to think that there's something called 'truth according to a fiction', analogous to 'truth according to a mathematical theory' and similar notions, involving a straightforward monotonic relationship between the contents of literary works and those of the associated fictions. Is nihilism the right view about truth in fiction, or can some stronger version of explicitism (or even implicitism) be defended? I confess to having certain nihilist leanings, but more work needs to be done before the issue can be settled. Though there's certainly more to say about many of the issues I've raised, I lack the space to venture further here. If I've done nothing else, I hope to have at least persuaded other philosophers that there's an argument worth having, and that matters are much less straightforward than has usually been assumed. I believe it's long since time that implicitism's age of innocence came to an end.11 11 Many people talked with me about this paper, and I'm happy to be able to thank them. My biggest debt is to Mahrad Almotahari, who read several drafts of the paper and has given me much wise counsel. I also got good advice and valuable comments from Walter Edelberg, John Holbo, Neil Van Leeuwen, Ira Newman, Mallory Webber, Lauren Woomer, and two anonymous referees for the BJA, as well as from audiences at UIC and at the 2013 Annual Meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. Finally, I thank Michael Forest and Walter Edelberg for introducing me to aesthetics, and more importantly for showing me how I wanted to do and teach philosophy.

Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:11 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 123 6 The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation Adam Lerner Some people care about doing the right thing as such. They want to do the right thing under that description. These people have what has come to be known as a de dicto desire to do what is right.1 Some people who have a desire to do what's right as such desire to do what's right only as a means. They want to do the right thing in order to avoid punishment, or as a way of doing what God or their mother would approve of, or because it would be a sign that they are predestined for salvation. But many care about doing the right thing for its own sake: because it's the right thing. They have a final desire to do what's right as such. This desire is an instance of what I will call pure moral motivation (PMM).2 Other instances of PMM include the desire to avoid doing what's wrong as such, the desire to promote what's good as such, and the desire to prevent what's bad as such. Contemporary views in metaethics have been built to satisfy familiar desiderata: accommodating Moorean open questions, explaining the connection between moral judgment and moral motivation, accounting for the supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, and many others. In this chapter, I introduce a new desideratum: vindicating the rationality of PMM. I argue that PMM is often rational, and that any adequate view must accommodate this fact. The puzzle of PMM is to explain how that can be done. I argue that solving the puzzle poses a serious challenge for the standard views in metaethics.3 In Section 6.1, I argue that PMM is at least sometimes rational. In Section 6.2, I explain why non-cognitivism has trouble accommodating 1 The terminology originates with Smith (1994, pp. 74–6). 2 McGrath (2009) provides the inspiration for both the terminology and the chapter title. 3 While I focus onmoralmotivation in this chapter, I believe the puzzle arises for every kind of pure normative motivation. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:12 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 124 the rationality of PMM. In Section 6.3, I introduce two principles regarding the conditions under which final desires and preferences are rational. In Sections 6.4 and 6.5, I draw on these principles to argue that synthetic naturalism and non-naturalism both have trouble accommodating the rationality of PMM. In Section 6.6, I explain why analytic naturalism has trouble accommodating the rationality of PMM. Section 6.7 concludes. 6 .1 . THE RATIONALITY OF PMM At the heart of moral practice lies moral inquiry. And at the heart of moral inquiry lies the constitutive aim of discovering the moral truth; one cannot engage in moral inquiry without having a desire to discover the moral truth. People regularly engage in moral inquiry. So they must have a desire to discover themoral truth.Whywould anyone want to discover themoral truth? Any number of things might motivate someone to seek the moral truth. They might get paid to do it. They might want to predict what virtuous people will do in certain circumstances so they may exploit their virtuous character. They might just be curious. But this is not why most people seek the moral truth. Most people seek the moral truth because they want to act in accordance with the moral truth. They want to do the right thing as such.4 And they want to do it for its own sake. They have a final desire to do the right thing as such.5They exhibit PMM. In this section, I argue that it can be rational to have PMM.6 I offer two types of cases in which it's rational to choose to engage in moral inquiry and in which the best explanation of why ordinary people do this is that they 4 In desiring to do the right thing as such, one conceives of the thing one wants to do as the right thing. One desires it under that description, the thing that has the property of being right. When one has a merely de re desire to do the right thing, one conceives of the thing one wants to do under some alternative guise-say, as the thing that saves the drowning child. A de re desire to do the right thing counts as a desire to do the right thing because the object of the desire is right, not because it's conceived to be. 5 We can understand final desires by contrasting them with instrumental desires. S's desire that P is an instrumental desire just in case S has that desire only because (a) S desires something else Q, and (b) S believes that P raises the probability of Q either by causing, realizing, or signifying Q. (When I say that S has that desire only because of these further facts, I mean these further facts together constitute S's sole rationale for that desire.) S's desire is a final desire just in case S's rationale for their desire does not consist only in pairs of claims like (a) and (b) (cf. Harman, 2000; McDaniel and Bradley, 2008). 6 For purposes of this chapter, a motivation is rational if and only if the person who has the motivation possesses at least some good reason of the right kind to have that motivation and it's their possession of this reason that sustains that motivation. For someone to possess a reason to have some motivation, it isn't enough that there be some reason for them to have it: that reason must be within their ken (cf. Lord, 2015). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 124 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:14 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 125 have PMM. I argue that because in both types of cases the choice to engage in moral inquiry is rational, the PMM that lies behind this choice must itself be rational. 6.1.1. Pure Moral Inquiry with Full Information Delilah owns a factory farm. She knows everything there is to know about what goes on inside a factory farm. She also knows everything there is to know about how factory farms impact the environment, the economy, and people's gustatory experiences. But Delilah has never thought about whether it might be wrong to run a factory farm. Or maybe she has given it some thought, but she hasn't come to a settled view. She now faces a decision: should she sink time and effort into trying to figure out whether running a factory farm is right? Suppose Delilah chooses to deliberate. She seems perfectly rational in making this choice. Why would Delilah make this choice? Clearly, she has a desire to know what's morally right in this case. But presumably she doesn't want this bit of moral knowledge for its own sake. She wants it because she wants to do what's right.7 Importantly, this desire to do what's right must be a desire to do what's right as such. If Delilah merely had a de re desire to do what's right, then she would desire to do it under some non-moral description. But if she wanted to do what's right under some non-moral description, she would already know what act she would have to perform in order to satisfy her desire to do what's right-after all, she already knows all of the morally relevant nonmoral facts about the case. So she wouldn't deliberate. So when Delilah chooses to deliberate, she must be acting on a desire to do what's right as such.8Now suppose she doesn't want to do the right thing in order to avoid punishment, or as a way of doing what her mother wants, or to confirm that she's bound for heaven. She wants it for its own sake. Her desire to do what's right is a final desire. This shows that in choosing to deliberate, Delilah is acting on PMM. Is it rational for Delilah to have this PMM? Yes. Why? Because Delilah acts rationally in choosing to deliberate. And if an agent rationally chooses to 7 Or at least, she wants to avoid doing what's wrong. 8 Alternatively, she may be acting on a second-order final (de dicto) desire to do whatever final desires constitute (de re) desires to do what's right (Dreier, 2000, p. 632). Or she may be acting on a desire to do what's just or benevolent, as long as justice and benevolence each are irreducibly moral or have an irreducibly moral component Since these alternative desires essentially have moral content, they are still instances of PMM. So what I go on to say about the de dicto desire to do what's right applies just as much to these desires. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 125 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:15 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 126 φ, then the desires she acts on in making that choice are rational.9 Thus, we have a case in which PMM is rational.10 A Humean might object that this merely shows Delilah isn't irrational in acting on her PMM. They might hold that PMM is a deep-seated final desire that cannot itself be subject to rational assessment. I disagree. It seems it would be rational for Delilah to act on PMM even if she knew that doing so would likely defeat an even more deep-seated desire of hers (e.g., getting rich). What this shows is that when we say Delilah's PMM is rational, we're not just saying it's immune to rational criticism. We're saying that it's positively rational-that she has some good reason to have that desire. Delilah's case may sound strange. Does any actual person ever take themselves to know all of the relevant non-moral facts and still engage in moral inquiry by deliberating or seeking out pure moral testimony? Indeed, pure moral inquiry of this kind is perfectly familiar. When people find themselves puzzling over whether it's okay to get an abortion, whether they're giving enough to charity, or whether they should stop eating meat, they aren't always just wondering about how the world is in non-moral respects. They often take themselves to know all of the relevant non-moral facts. Likewise, people often go to an impartial third party to tell them how to resolve a dispute, even when the third party knows no more about the dispute than they do. In such cases, people rationally choose to engage in moral inquiry, and the only plausible explanation of why they do so is that they have PMM. So Delilah's case is not all that unusual. PMM is common and often rational. 6.1.2. Pure Moral Inquiry with Conceptual Limitations Painfree has never felt pain before. He has just come across an opportunity to torture some puppies, and he thinks this would be fun. But he stops to ponder whether it would be right to do this. As he reflects, the village's moral expert swoops in and informs him that there is an experience he has never had-pain-whose nature bears on whether it's right to torture puppies. (Suppose Painfree already has excellent reason to believe the village's moral expert is a moral expert.) The moral expert cannot tell Painfree anything about the intrinsic nature of the experience. But the 9 While cases where it's rational to desire that one act (or be disposed to act) irrationally are familiar from the literature on rational irrationality, I know of no cases in which someone acts rationally (i.e., responds adequately to their reasons) but in so doing acts on an irrational desire. 10 Although my argument does not depend on it, I also believe Delilah is praiseworthy (cf. Smith, 1994; Arpaly, 2002; Weatherson, 2014). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 126 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:16 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 127 expert does tell Painfree that what the experience is like bears on whether it's right to torture puppies. Unfortunately, just before the expert can tell Painfree how it bears on whether it's right, the expert gets hit by a bus. Suppose then that the village sadist-having overheard Painfree's conversation with the expert-walks up and offers Painfree the opportunity to learn what pain feels like, free of charge. After deliberating, Painfree decides to accept the sadist's offer. Why would Painfree do this? He isn't trying to figure out whether "pain" refers to something he antecedently cares about- he doesn't know anything about pain, so he hasn't any opinion about it. In accepting the sadist's offer, then, he must be trying to figure out whether "pain" refers to something that it's wrong to cause. Why does he want to know this? He must want to know this because he wants to do what's right. Now suppose that Painfree does not think that doing what's right as such would promote the satisfaction of any of his other desires. It follows that his desire must be a final desire. Because a final desire to do what's right is an instance of PMM, this shows that Painfree must have PMM. It also shows that Painfree's PMM is rational. Why? Because Painfree acts rationally in accepting the sadist's offer. And because Painfree acts on PMM in accepting the sadist's offer, his PMM must be rational. So we have another case where PMM is rational. While Delilah's situation seems unusual, Painfree's situationmight appear fantastical. He is not merely uncertain which of various non-normative ways the world might be is actual. There are certain non-normative ways the world might be that he cannot even conceive. His ignorance is not empirical; it's conceptual. Are we ever in Painfree's position? Yes. This occurs whenever we know there is some morally relevant non-moral fact whose nature we don't know. For example, one might think that how morally responsible an addict is for the wrongs they commit in order to obtain drugs is partly a function of what it's like to be an addict, and that one cannot know this without having been an addict. Likewise, perhaps there are morally relevant facts about living through war or being oppressed that one cannot even imagine until one has been to war or been oppressed. In cases like these, we regularly defer to individuals who know morally relevant facts that we cannot even conceive.We defer to recovering addicts on the question of how to treat people who are in the grip of an addiction. We defer to war veterans on howwe should treat prisoners of war. Andwe defer to people who are oppressed on how they should be treated. In so doing, we are acting on a final desire to do what's right as such-we are acting out of PMM.And just as Painfree is rational to defer on the basis of PMM, so are we. At this point, I take myself to have provided compelling evidence that there are circumstances in which it's rational to have PMM. I assume in OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 127 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:17 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 128 what follows that any adequate metaethics ought to account for this fact- and I argue that it's surprisingly difficult to see how any of the standard views in metaethics could. Those who remain unconvinced by the arguments in this section can interpret what follows as an argument for a conditional claim: if PMM is rational, then it's hard to see how any of the standard views in metaethics could accommodate that fact. 6 .2 . NON-COGNITIVISM According to cognitivism, moral judgments are (genuine, full-fledged) beliefs. They're in the business of describing reality, of attributing moral properties to actions, people, and states of affairs. They can be true or false in a non-deflationary, non-minimalist sense. Non-cognitivism is the denial of cognitivism. Non-cognitivism comes in many flavors. But all pure versions of noncognitivism share one feature in virtue of which they are incompatible with the rationality of PMM: they deny that we have moral concepts that represent genuine moral properties.11 This shared assumption makes it impossible for non-cognitivism to explain how it could be rational to have PMM since it implies that it's not possible to have PMM in the first place.12 The reason why is that PMM is a final desire to (e.g.) do what's right as such-to do the right thing under that description-and it is thereby partly constituted by a moral concept that represents a genuine moral property. Since non-cognitivism denies the existence of such concepts, it must deny the existence of PMM. This shows non-cognitivism cannot solve the puzzle of PMM, narrowly construed. But it does not show that it cannot solve the puzzle of PMM, broadly construed. The puzzle of PMM, broadly construed, is to explain how it can be rational to engage in (pure) moral inquiry. I argued that we must assume people act on PMM because this provides the best explanation of why people engage in moral inquiry. The non-cognitivist denies the existence of PMM. In its place, they must find some other mental state- let us call it non-cognitivist PMM or NCPMM-that it's rational to have and 11 Even if the non-cognitivist can "earn the right" to speak of such concepts, a commitment to these concepts does not figure in their ground-level account of moral thought and talk (Blackburn, 1998). 12 For purposes of this chapter, I assimilate hybrid versions of non-cognitivism (e.g., Ridge, 2014; Toppinen, 2013; Schroeder, 2013) to the naturalistic views I go on to discuss. While they may be able to account for the possibility of PMM, it's unclear whether they can account for the rationality of PMM. Thanks to Mike Ridge for discussion. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 128 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:18 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 129 that can play the same role as PMM in explaining why people engage in moral inquiry. Only by identifying such a state can they solve the puzzle of PMM, broadly construed. In order to evaluate whether NCPMM satisfies these two desiderata, we need a better idea of what it could be. The non-cognitivist has two options. They can either identity NCPMM with a desire that has exclusively nonmoral content, or else they can identify it with a motivational state that lacks representational content altogether. I will consider each strategy in turn. I will argue that while both can explain why people engage in moral inquiry, neither can explain why people are rational in doing so. On the first strategy, the non-cognitivist must find some final desire whose content doesn't involve a moral property, and this desire must be able to explain why we engage in moral inquiry. I submit that the only motivational state that satisfies this job description is a final desire to engage in moral inquiry. If the non-cognitivist attempted to identify NCPMM with any other desire (e.g., the desire to do what one would want to do after engaging in moral inquiry or to do what one's true self wants to do), there would be overwhelming pressure to identify the content of this desire with doing what's right. And this would just be to abandon non-cognitivism in favor of some form of naturalism. So the only desire the non-cognitivist can identify with NCPMM is a final desire to engage in moral inquiry. If the non-cognitivist chooses to identify NCPMM with a final desire to engage in moral inquiry, then they will have shown that NCPMM can explain why people engage in moral inquiry. But in order to solve the puzzle of PMM, broadly construed, they must show that it's rational to have this state. And in fact, it doesn't seem rational to have this state. While it might be rational to have an instrumental desire to engage in moral inquiry-as a way of doing something intellectually stimulating, or as a way of increasing the probability of doing what's right-it isn't rational to have a final desire to engage in moral inquiry. Now consider the second strategy. On this strategy, the non-cognitivist identifies NCPMM with a motivational state that has no representational content whatsoever and yet can still explain why people engage in moral inquiry.13 Such a state would have to be a brute disposition to φ when one has the belief that φ-ing will increase the probability that one does what's right.14 If the non-cognitivist chooses to identify PMM with such a brute disposition, they will have shown that NCPMM can explain why people 13 Thanks to Eric Hubble for offering this line of response in conversation. 14 Or the categorical basis of such a disposition. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 129 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:19 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 130 engage in moral inquiry. But again, in order to solve the puzzle of PMM they must show that it's rational to have this state. And it doesn't seem rational to have this state, because it doesn't seem that this brute disposition is the kind of state that it can be rational or irrational to have in the first place. While some brute dispositions might be rational to have, this doesn't seem to be one of them. Perhaps it's rational to have the brute disposition to believe P when you believe Q and Q is good evidence for P. But the brute disposition to engage in moral inquiry when you believe that doing so will lead you to do what's right is not like a disposition to respond appropriately to one's reasons. It's more like a pure association, a mere tendency to pass from one mental state to another. While it might be rational to try to cultivate in oneself brute dispositions of this sort, the dispositions themselves are not rational or irrational. There is no right kind of reason to have states like these. But suppose for the sake of argument that it's rational to have this brute disposition. If this were true, then the non-cognitivist would have found a state that it's rational to have and that can explain why people engage in moral inquiry. But that is not yet to solve the puzzle of PMM, broadly construed. In order to do that, the non-cognitivist must show that not only having this brute disposition but acting on it-i.e., engaging in moral inquiry-is rational. I will now argue that they cannot do this. If we grant that it's rational to have the disposition in question, what obstacle is there to concluding that it's rational to act on this disposition? Recall that the disposition in question is a disposition to φ when one has the belief that φ-ing will increase the probability that one does what's right. I will argue that once we have a better understanding of what this belief is according to non-cognitivism, we will see that acting on this brute disposition is not rational. I have called the state in question a "belief." But this belief appears to have moral content. As such, the non-cognitivist cannot take it at face value. They must reduce it either to a genuine belief with non-moral content, or else to a pro-attitude of some kind. On either option, the moral inquirer comes out looking irrational. First, consider the possibility that the "belief " in question is a proattitude. As a pro-attitude, it must be a pro-attitude toward something or other. And it seems the only thing that could be the object of this proattitude is the act, whatever it is, that one would perform after engaging in moral inquiry. This makes the pro-attitude into a final de dicto desire to do what one would do after engaging in moral inquiry. Unfortunately, a final de dicto desire to do what one would do after engaging in moral inquiry and other desires like this are not desires it's rational to have. As I argue in Section 6.6 against a version of analytic naturalism, it can often make sense OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 130 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:20 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 131 to have an instrumental desire to do what one would do after engaging in moral inquiry, but it's bizarre to want to do whatever one would do after engaging in moral inquiry for its own sake. So if the non-cognitivist reduces the belief in question to a pro-attitude, they cannot vindicate the rationality of engaging in moral inquiry, and so fail to solve the puzzle of PMM, broadly construed. Now consider the possibility that the belief in question is a genuine belief with non-moral content. If so, it would have to be the belief that engaging in moral inquiry increases the likelihood that one will give money to charity, or help an elderly person across the street, or . . . , where each disjunct is an action, naturalistically described, toward which one already takes the proattitude required by the non-cognitivist to count as judging that action to be right. The problem with this proposal is that it cannot explain why any rational person would bother to engage in moral inquiry. Why? Because it implies that people who engage in moral inquiry already have a settled view about which of their options they ought to take. But this makes people who engage in moral inquiry look irrational, for it means they already have an answer to the question they pursue in moral inquiry. Genuinely inquiring whether P when one is already certain that P is, if not impossible, irrational. So again, the non-cognitivist cannot vindicate the rationality of engaging in moral inquiry, and so fails to solve the puzzle of PMM, broadly construed. 6.3 . AN EPISTEMIC CONSTRAINT In Sections 6.4 and 6.5, I evaluate synthetic naturalism and non-naturalism. In evaluating these views, I draw on the following principle: The Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire. For any property P, if you do not know P's essence, it is not rational to finally desire that P be instantiated as such.15 Why endorse this Epistemic Constraint? Suppose that I have never before experienced the taste of Vegemite. In fact, I have only just now learned that Vegemite exists. Upon learning that it exists, I find myself overcome with a 15 What is the essence of a property? For these purposes, the essence of a property is what makes that property the property it is. It is the property's complete intrinsic nature. The complete intrinsic nature of a simple property is a matter of what it is in itself. The complete intrinsic nature of a complex property is a matter of what simple properties and relations it's made up of, and what those properties and relations are in themselves. Importantly, necessary features of a property may not be part of its essence. It may be a necessary feature of goodness that God loves it without God loving it being part of its essence (cf. Fine, 1994). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 131 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:21 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 132 desire to taste Vegemite as such.16 And this isn't just any desire. It's a final desire. My rationale for wanting to taste Vegemite isn't that doing so will increase the probability that some other desire of mine will be satisfied. My rationale is that it's tasting Vegemite. Is it rational for me to have the Vegemite Desire? It isn't. Why? Because I don't know enough about what it's like to taste Vegemite-I don't know enough about the intrinsic nature of the experience. All I know about it is that it's a taste experience. I need to know more-I need to know something about the Vegemite taste-before I can rationally desire it for its own sake. How much more? Suppose I learn a bit more about the intrinsic nature of Vegemite's taste without learning its essence-I learn that Vegemite's taste is, among other things, salty. Can I rationally have a final desire to taste Vegemite as such once I know this much? No. At best, I could rationally have a final desire to taste something salty as such. And this final desire is not the same as a final desire to taste Vegemite as such. To see why I'm only in a position to rationally have a final desire to taste something salty as such, consider how I would go about explaining why I desire to taste Vegemite. If asked why I desire to taste Vegemite, I could not rationally say that it's because it's Vegemite. The only rational answer I could give is that I desire to taste Vegemite because it tastes salty. And this reveals that my desire to taste Vegemite is not a final desire. It's an instrumental desire based on my final desire to taste something salty and my means-end belief that tasting Vegemite is a way of tasting something salty. This same line of reasoning can be repeated for any version of the case in which my knowledge of how Vegemite tastes falls short of knowing its essence. Furthermore, it can be repeated for any case in which I desire something whose essence I don't know. There's nothing special here about the nature of subjective experience. Whenever I lack knowledge of an object's essence, my desire for that object can only be instrumental if it is to be rational.17 It may seem that the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire makes rational final desire hard to come by. For example, many think that if it's rational to have a final desire for anything as such, it's rational to have a 16 Assume my concept of Vegemite directly refers to Vegemite. It's in virtue of deploying this concept that I manage to have a desire to taste Vegemite as such rather than, e.g., a desire to taste what everyone actually refers to using the term "Vegemite." 17 Experiencing the taste of Vegemite can allow one to know the essence of that experience only if property dualism is true. Even if property dualism is false, the Epistemic Constraint is compatible with the existence of a rational final desire in the vicinity: the final desire to have whatever experience I know under such-and-such a mode of presentation (i.e., the phenomenal character of tasting Vegemite). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 132 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:22 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 133 final desire for knowledge as such. But the lesson of the literature responding to Gettier's seminal (1963) article is that we don't know the essence of knowledge. So if the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire is correct, final desires for knowledge as such are not rational. Since they are rational, the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire faces an apparent counterexample. Whether this objection succeeds depends on whether we know the essence of what we finally desire. Take the case of knowledge. The failure of the Gettier literature doesn't show that we don't know the essence of knowledge. People have strong intuitions about whether knowledge obtains in Gettier cases. If this ability to determine whether knowledge obtains extends to all possible cases, then we seem to have at least tacit knowledge of knowledge's essence. And this may be all that's required to make final desires for knowledge rational. But even if our ability to determine whether knowledge obtains does not extend to all possible cases, we may still know the essence of knowledge in some other way, so long as its essence does not consist in what falls within its extension. If we don't-if the essence of knowledge consists in what falls within its extension and we don't know what falls within its extension- then the Epistemic Constraint seems to get the right result: it isn't rational to finally desire knowledge. If it were, it would be rational for someone to finally desire to have knowledge in some case, to not know whether they have knowledge in that case, and to know all of the other facts about that case. But clearly someone who knew all the facts that could ground their having knowledge (whether their belief was true, reliably formed, etc.) and yet did not know whether they have knowledge could not rationally have a final desire that they have knowledge. This person would irrationally desire they know-not-what. Even so, there are other cases where it clearly seems rational to have a final desire for P as such even though one clearly does not know P's essence. For example, most people want Mom to be happy as such. (Suppose "Mom" directly refers to one's own mother.) Even supposing people know the essence of happiness, no one knows the essence of Mom. And yet people have a final desire that Mom is happy as such, and they seem to be rational in having this desire. This shows there is a class of exceptions to the Epistemic Constraint. What unifies this class? Notice that the rationale for the Mom Desire must involve facts about Mom's extrinsic nature. If asked why one wants Mom to be happy, one's reply must be something like "Mom gave birth to me" or "Mom raised me" or "Mom and I are pretty close." These replies all invoke facts about Mom's extrinsic properties. This suggests that you can be rational in having a final desire for an object when you don't know OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 133 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:23 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 134 the essence of that object so long as you know the essence of that object's extrinsic nature and the object's extrinsic nature makes the object worth caring about for its own sake. Having noticed that there is this class of exceptions to the Epistemic Constraint, we can safely ignore it. In what follows, I argue that synthetic naturalism and non-naturalism cannot vindicate the rationality of PMM because the Epistemic Constraint is true and these views imply that we don't know the essence of any moral property. Even though the Epistemic Constraint has exceptions, it isn't plausible to resist this argument by saying that PMM constitutes such an exception. This is because facts about the extrinsic nature of moral properties play no part in any virtuous person's rationale for having PMM. If asked why they desire to do the right thing, neither Delilah nor Painfree would cite anything about the extrinsic nature of rightness-they wouldn't say "Because my mother wants me to do the right thing." They would say "Because it's right." So even if there are exceptions to the Epistemic Constraint, PMM isn't one of them. Although the arguments in Sections 6.4 and 6.5 are stated most succinctly using this principle, I will now offer a second, less controversial principle that can do the same work. This is the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Preference: for any two properties X and Y, if you cannot distinguish the intrinsic nature of X from the intrinsic nature of Y, you cannot remain rational while finally desiring the instantiation of X as such more than you finally desire the instantiation of Y as such. So if I have just learned not only that Vegemite exists, but that there is another substance- Marmite-that also exists, and all I know about the intrinsic nature of either is that they're salty, then I cannot rationally desire to taste one more than the other. This result is eminently plausible, and its plausibility does not turn on anything specific about taste sensations. So the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Preference poses an equally severe problem for the standard views in metaethics: the problem of explaining why it's rational to want to do what's right more than what's not right. 6 .4. SYNTHETIC NATURALISM According to synthetic naturalism, moral properties are identical to natural properties, and statements identifying moral properties with natural properties are synthetic, a posteriori truths. The most prominent version of synthetic naturalism is Cornell Realism, and the most prominent defender of Cornell Realism is Richard Boyd. I will argue that our Epistemic Constraints show that synthetic naturalist views such as Boyd's cannot easily account for the rationality of PMM. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 134 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:25 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 135 Boyd models his metasemantics for moral concepts on the externalist metasemantics for natural kind concepts championed by Kripke and Putnam. On this view, a concept has the referent that it does in virtue of standing in an appropriate causal relation to its referent. A key upshot of his view is that, just as we can have the concept of "water" without knowing that the essence of water is H2O, we can possess a concept that refers to the property of being right without knowing the essence of that property: "we can and do refer to things such that we certainly don't intend to refer to them under anything like the descriptions which in fact identify their true natures" (Boyd, 2003, p. 549). Moreover, we will not know the essence of the property of being right until we reach the end of moral inquiry: "The question of just which properties and mechanisms belong in the definition of [the property of being right] is an a posteriori question-often a difficult theoretical one." (Boyd, 1988, p. 197) Boyd takes this to be a positive feature of the view, for it enables it to accommodate Moorean open questions. As Moore observed, for any natural property N, it appears to be an open question whether anything that has that property is good. This is allegedly problematic for a naturalist view on which the identity of goodness with N is analytic. If the identity of goodness with N is settled by the meaning of "goodness" and "N," how could people who are competent with the concepts expressed by these terms question the identity of goodness and N? Open questions are no embarrassment for Cornell Realism, for Cornell Realism predicts that competent speakers would find even true identity claims to have the appearance of being open. On this view, the identity of N with goodness is a synthetic, a posteriori truth, not a conceptual truth: "If the good is defined by a homeostatic phenomenon the details of which we still do not entirely know, then it is a paradigm case of a property whose 'essence' is given by a natural rather than a stipulative definition" (Boyd, 1988, p. 210) Because one can refer to the property of being right (or in this case, the property of being good) without knowing its essence, someone who hasn't reached the end of inquiry can competently doubt that any given N constitutes its essence, even if it does. The problem for Cornell Realism should by now be obvious. The feature of Cornell Realism that allows it to accommodate Moorean open questions is ultimately a bug. It's a bug because, together with the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire, it falsely implies that PMM is not rational. The argument is simple. According to the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire, it's never rational to have a final desire for the instantiation of some property P as such if you don't know the essence of P. According to Cornell Realism, no one knows the essence of the property of being right. (And no one will, until they reach the end of moral inquiry.) OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 135 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:26 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 136 Therefore, if Cornell Realism is true, it's never rational for ordinary people engaged in moral inquiry to have a final desire to do the right thing as such. Since it's rational for ordinary people engaged in moral inquiry to have this desire, this poses a serious problem for Cornell Realism. I have just argued against Cornell Realism relying on the Epistemic Constraint on Final Desire. But the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Preference poses an equally severe problem for Cornell Realism: that of explaining why it's rational to want more strongly to do what's right as such than to do what's not right as such. To see why, consider that whatever the property of being right is, there will be a very similar property being right* which is just like being right, except that its essence doesn't include φ-ing. Suppose we have an agent who is in a "hard case" and is thus unsure whether φ-ing is right. Suppose this person wants to do what's right as such for its own sake.Nowwe can ask this person: why not desire to dowhat's right* for its own sake instead? After all, doing what's right* and doing what's right appear to you to be indistinguishable. Youmay know that φ-ing lies within the essence of one and not the other, but you don't know whether it lies within the essence of doing what's right or the essence of doing what's right*. So why, then, finally prefer to do the right thing rather than the right* thing? If the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Preference is true, what rationality requires in this case is indifference. But since it does seem rational to finally prefer doing what's right overwhat's right*, this poses a serious problem forCornell Realism. 6.5 . NON-NATURALISM Non-naturalism is a form of cognitivism, but it denies that moral properties are identical with natural properties. Instead, it takes moral properties to be a species of non-natural properties. Is non-naturalism compatible with the rationality of PMM? If non-naturalism is to allow for the rationality of PMM, then non-naturalism must avoid the problem faced by synthetic naturalism; it must allow everyday people to know the essence of moral properties. But it must also avoid a familiar objection to non-naturalism: that non-natural moral properties are not worth caring about for their own sake. These two desiderata must be satisfied if nonnaturalism is to solve the puzzle of PMM. Consider the second desideratum first. Some have thought that nonnatural properties cannot be worth caring about for their own sake. Here is a characteristic remark from Frank Jackson: Are we supposed to take seriously someone who says, "I see that this action will kill many and save no-one, but that is not enough to justify my not doing it; what really OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 136 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:27 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 137 matters is that the action has an extra property that only ethical terms are suited to pick out"? In short, the extra properties would [be] ethical "idlers". (1998, p. 127) Some non-naturalists reply to Jackson's challenge by claiming that they never took non-natural moral properties to be worth caring about for their own sake in the first place.18 This reply, however, simply concedes that nonnaturalism cannot solve the puzzle of PMM. Fortunately, we can find nonnaturalists who believe non-natural moral properties are worth caring about. For example, inOnWhat MattersDerek Parfit repeatedly claims that if there are no non-natural moral properties, "Sidgwick, Ross, and I, and others would have wasted much of our lives" (2011, pp. 12, 304, 367) But why think non-natural moral properties have an essence that makes them worth caring about? At this point, the best bet for the non-naturalist is to give up on describing the essence of being right and to just claim that the essence of being right, ineffable as it is, makes it worth caring about for its own sake. Just as someone pressed to explain why they desire pleasure for its own sake can do no more than point to the nature of the experience itself, someone pressed to explain why they desire to do what's right for its own sake may be able to do no more than point to the nature of being right.19 "To know it is to love it," they might say. However plausible this move is, it will not allow the non-naturalist to solve the PMM. And that is because non-naturalism fails the first desideratum considered above: it cannot explain how ordinary moral inquirers could know the essence of a non-natural moral property. In order to show that this desideratum is satisfied, the non-naturalist must show that it's possible to stand in a special relation of acquaintance with that property, a relation that delivers knowledge of its essence.20Moreover, they must show that ordinary moral inquirers actually stand in this relation to non-natural moral properties. I will argue that standard versions of non-naturalism cannot show this. What would an essence-revealing relation of acquaintance look like? The most vivid example of such a relation comes from visual experience. Articulating a view he attributes to Bertrand Russell, Mark Johnston writes that "one naturally does take and should take one's visual experience as of, e.g., a canary yellow surface, as completely revealing the intrinsic nature of canary yellow, so that canary yellow is counted as having just those intrinsic and 18 See, e.g., FitzPatrick (2014, p. 564). 19 Cf. Moore (1903, p. 7). 20 The kind of acquaintance I have in mind corresponds to what Dasgupta (2015, p. 464) has in mind: "Let us say that a subject S is acquainted with x iff the nature of x is directly presented or revealed to S (this is just a label, not an analysis)." OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 137 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:28 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 138 essential features which are evident in an experience as of canary yellow" (1992, p. 223). Likewise, it's plausible to think that the essence of Vegemite's taste is completely revealed to someone who tastes Vegemite. The case of canary yellow provides a model for how the essence of a property can be revealed through experience. But standard versions of non-naturalism reject the idea that moral properties are the kinds of properties we can be acquainted with in conscious experience.21 So what other option is there? Perhaps standing in a special causal relation to an entity can give one knowledge of its essence, even if that causal relation doesn't give rise to any conscious experience of the object's nature. Unfortunately, standard versions of non-naturalism hold that moral properties are causally inert.22 So this proposal is also a non-starter for standard versions of non-naturalism. It would be too quick to conclude at this point that we don't know the essence of non-natural moral properties. After all, it's plausible to think we know the essence of certain logical relations and mathematical entities, but it isn't plausible to think we're causally connected to or immediately acquainted with them (Dasgupta, 2015, pp. 464–5; Chalmers, 2012, p. 404). So how does one come to know the essence of a logical or mathematical entity? A natural proposal is that we have this knowledge by having logical and mathematical concepts that play an appropriate role in our cognitive economy (Chalmers, 2012, p. 466). Can a similar proposal show that we know the essence of non-natural moral properties? Whether such a story could be told depends on whether an appropriate conceptual role can be found for our moral concepts. I will consider two proposals. On the first proposal, the appropriate conceptual role consists in being able to apply the concept in exactly those cases in which it's correctly applied. This proposal holds that one might know a moral property's essence by knowing the complete truth about what lies in its extension across all possible worlds. Unfortunately, this proposal is a non-starter, for the cases where PMM appears most clearly rational-cases of people engaging in moral inquiry-are precisely cases where people lack knowledge of what lies in the property's extension. So non-naturalists who accept this proposal cannot deliver the verdict that PMM is rational. 21 For possible exceptions, see Oddie (2005), Atiq (unpublished manuscript), and Johnston (2001). 22 For exceptions, see Shafer-Landau (2012), Wedgwood (2007), Cuneo (2006), and Oddie (2005). Although these views allow for causal efficacy, more work needs to be done to show that this causal efficacy allows us to know the essence of any moral entity (cf. Langton, 1998; Lewis, 2009; Locke, 2009; and Dasgupta, 2015). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 138 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:29 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 139 On the second proposal, the appropriate conceptual role has less to do with our disposition to apply the concept and more to do with how we behave once we've applied it. Indeed, Ralph Wedgwood and David Enoch have offered such accounts in an attempt to explain how we can come to think about non-natural moral properties in the first place (Wedgwood, 2007; Enoch, 2011). Can such accounts also explain how we could know a moral property's essence? No. On these views, a mental representation refers to a non-natural moral property in virtue of playing a certain "downstream" conceptual role. For example, on Wedgwood's view, I count as competent with the concept of being what I ought to do just in case believing that I ought to φ commits me (in the relevant sense) to φ-ing. This is a very easy condition to satisfy. Indeed, it doesn't require that I have any true beliefs about what I ought to do. I could believe the only thing I ever ought to do is torture puppies for fun and yet still count as competent with the concept of being what I ought to do, so long as in believing that I ought to torture puppies I commit myself (in the relevant sense) to torturing puppies (cf. Schroeter and Schroeter, 2009, pp. 4–9; Gibbard, 2003, pp. 28–29, 149–50). Even if Wedgwood's view is correct as an account of how our thoughts manage to latch onto the non-natural moral property of being what I ought to do, the present case shows that this account cannot also show that we know that property's essence. This is because it's implausible to think that I could believe that the only thing I ever ought to do is torture puppies while at the same time knowing the essence of being what I ought to do. Although it's plausible to think that knowing the essence of being what I ought to do is compatible with not knowing what has that property in hard cases, it isn't at all plausible to think that someone could know that property's essence while simultaneously believing that all they ought to do is torture puppies. Knowing a moral property's essence can't come that far apart from knowledge of what lies in its extension. I have argued that non-naturalism cannot vindicate the rationality of PMM because it cannot show how ordinary moral inquirers could know any moral property's essence. This argument goes through only if the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire is true. But the same conclusion can be reached using the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Preference. The problem is that non-naturalism has a hard time explaining how we could learn how the essence of being right differed from, say, the essence of being right*. The typical routes by which we would come to know this difference are closed off: we aren't acquainted with them in experience, and we don't causally interact with them. And it's hard to see how having a concept that plays the role specified by Wedgwood could tell us anything about the essence of being right-or at least anything that wasn't also shared by being OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 139 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:30 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 140 right*. Lastly, we might know that the action we are inquiring about falls into the extension of the one but not the extension of the other, but we don't know which-if we did, we wouldn't have to deliberate. So even if we reject the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Desire, the Epistemic Constraint on Rational Final Preference creates an equally serious problem for standard versions of non-naturalism. 6.6. ANALYTIC NATURALISM According to analytic naturalism, moral properties are identical to natural properties, and the relevant identity statements are analytic truths. Different versions of the view identify different moral properties with different natural properties, but all versions agree that the correct identities are analytic truths. The leading variant of analytic naturalism is moral functionalism, defended by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit (Jackson, 1998; Jackson and Pettit, 1995). According to moral functionalism, the property of being right (e.g.) is the property of having the property that plays the rightness role in mature folk morality, and this is an analytic truth.23 Unlike Cornell Realism and non-naturalism, moral functionalism allows that everyday people who are competent with moral concepts know the essence of the properties these concepts refer to. They may not be able to articulate a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that captures this essence, but they nevertheless have tacit knowledge of it. So moral functionalism succeeds where Cornell Realism and non-naturalism fail. But moral functionalism faces a problem of its own: although it allows ordinary inquirers to know the essences of moral properties, it takes the essences of these properties to be such that that we have no reason to care about them for their own sake. This is because it identifies the property of being right with the property of having the property that plays the rightness role in mature folk morality. According to Jackson, folk morality is "the network of moral opinions, intuitions, principles and concepts whose mastery is part and parcel of having a sense of what's right and wrong, and of being able to engage in 23 In their initial statement of the view, Jackson and Pettit remain neutral on whether rightness should be identified with the property of having the property that plays the rightness role (i.e., the property of having the realizer property) or with the property that plays the rightness role (i.e., the realizer property itself ). If we understand rightness to be the property of being right, then the latter interpretation makes moral functionalism into a version of synthetic naturalism, a version that fails for the same reason that Cornell Realism fails: it implies that ordinary moral inquirers don't know the essence of being right. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 140 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:32 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 141 meaningful debate about what ought to be done" (Jackson, 1998, p. 130). Mature folk morality is "where folk morality will end up after it has been exposed to debate and critical reflection (or would end up, should we keep at it consistently and not become extinct too soon)" (Jackson, 1998, p. 133). So, roughly, the property of being right is the property we would treat as right if we took our ordinary sense of right and wrong and cleaned it up by thinking and arguing for a long time. Unfortunately, whether an act instantiates this property doesn't seem to matter for its own sake. Why should we care for its own sake about doing what we would treat as right under such conditions? A satisfactory answer to this question would have to come by way of a richer description of what it would be to treat something as right under such conditions, which Jackson supplies. According to Jackson, "to believe that something is right is to believe in part that it is what we would in ideal circumstances desire," and being what we would in ideal circumstances desire is part of what it is to have a property that plays the rightness role in mature folk morality (1998, p. 159). This suggests that to desire that we do the right thing is to desire in part that we do what we would desire if we were fully informed, coherent, etc. as such.24 And doesn't it make sense to care for its own sake about whether you're doing what you would desire under such ideal conditions? No. It may make sense to care instrumentally about the fact that an act would be what we would in ideal circumstances desire-after all, this fact strongly suggests that the act has a distinct property that's worth caring about for its own sake. But it makes little sense to care for its own sake about the fact that φ-ing would be what we would in ideal circumstances desire. At least, it doesn't make sense to care as strongly about this fact as it does to care about whether we do what's right. Caring so strongly about whether our act satisfies the desires we would have in ideal conditions for its own sake seems fetishistic. So if moral functionalism identifies our strong desire to do what's right with a strong desire to do what we would in ideal circumstances desire, it can't explain why it would be rational for us to engage in moral inquiry as frequently as we rationally engage in moral inquiry. 6 .7 . CONCLUSION I have argued that the standard views in metaethics all have trouble vindicating the rationality of PMM. Although the prospects for non-cognitivism 24 A move like this makes moral functionalism into a type of ideal observer or ideal advisor theory (e.g., Firth, 1952; Smith, 1994). OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 141 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:33 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 142 and synthetic naturalism are bleak, some plausible form of analytic naturalism or non-naturalism may yet be developed that can solve the puzzle of PMM. While it isn't clear what that view will look like in all its details, we know in advance that it will have two features that no standard view has both of. First, unlike standard versions of synthetic naturalism and non-naturalism, it will have to allow that everyday moral inquirers know the essence of moral properties despite not knowing whether the acts they inquire about lie in their extension. Second, unlike standard versions of analytic naturalism, the essences it assigns to moral properties must make those properties worth caring about for their own sake. It remains an open question whether there is an adequate view that can satisfy both of these constraints. But we have reason to be optimistic. Since each constraint is satisfied by at least one of the standard views, we know that each constraint can be satisfied in principle. And we have no reason to doubt they can both be satisfied by a single view. Suppose it turns out that these constraints can't both be satisfied by a single view. We then have a choice. We can either conclude these are not genuine constraints, or we can take the fact that no view satisfies them as a new argument for error theory about morality. I myself would be inclined toward error theory. But that is an argument for another day.25 References Arpaly, N. (2002). Moral Worth. Journal of Philosophy, 99 (5), 223–45. Atiq, E. H. (unpublished manuscript). Intuitionism, Humeanism, and the Metaphysics of Desire. Blackburn, S. (1998). Ruling Passions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Boyd, R. N. (1988). How to Be a Moral Realist. In G. Sayre-McCord (Ed.), Essays on Moral Realism (pp. 181–228). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boyd, R. N. (2003). Finite Beings, Finite Goods: The Semantics, Metaphysics and Ethics of Naturalist Consequentialism, Part I. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66 (3), 505–53. Chalmers, D. (2012). Constructing the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cuneo, T. (2006). Moral Facts as Configuring Causes. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 87 (2), 141–62. 25 Thanks to audiences at Princeton University, the University of Michigan, the Central European University, and the 2016 Chapel Hill Metaethics Workshop. Special thanks to David Heering, Eric Hubble, Mark Johnston, Sarah McGrath, Joseph Moore, Mike Ridge, Gideon Rosen, Thomas Schmidt, Michael Smith, Nat Tabris, and two anonymous reviewers for extensive discussion and written feedback. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 142 Adam Lerner Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:34 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 143 Dasgupta, S. (2015). Inexpressible Ignorance. Philosophical Review, 124 (4), 441–80. Dreier, J. (2000). Dispositions and Fetishes: Externalist Models of Moral Motivation. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 61 (3), 619–38. Enoch, D. (2011). Taking Morality Seriously: A Defense of Robust Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fine, K. (1994). Essence and Modality. Philosophical Perspectives, 8, 1–16. Firth, R. (1952). Ethical Absolutism and the Ideal Observer. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 12 (3), 317–45. FitzPatrick, W. (2014). Skepticism about Naturalizing Normativity: In Defense of Ethical Non-Naturalism. Res Philosophica, 91 (4), 559–88. Gettier, E. (1963). Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? Analysis, 23 (6), 121–3. Gibbard, A. (2003). Thinking How to Live. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harman, G. (2000). Desired Desires. In Explaining Value (pp. 117–36). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, F. (1998). From Metaphysics to Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jackson, F. and Pettit, P. (1995). Moral Functionalism and Moral Motivation. Philosophical Quarterly, 45 (178), 20–40. Johnston, M. (1992). How to Speak of the Colors. Philosophical Studies, 68 (3), 221–63. Johnston, M. (2001). The Authority of Affect. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 63 (1), 181–214. Langton, R. (1998). Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, D. (2009). Ramseyan Humility. In D. Braddon-Mitchell and R. Nola (Eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (pp. 203–22). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Locke, D. (2009). A Partial Defense of Ramseyan Humility. In D. BraddonMitchell and R. Nola (Eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (pp. 223–41). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lord, E. (2015). Acting for the Right Reasons, Abilities, and Obligation. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 10 (pp. 26–52). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDaniel, K., and Bradley, B. 2008. Desires. Mind, 117 (466), 267–302. McGrath, S. (2009). The Puzzle of Pure Moral Deference. Philosophical Perspectives, 23 (1), 321–44. Moore, G. E. (1903). Principia Ethica. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oddie, G. (2005). Value, Reality, and Desire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parfit, D. (2011). On What Matters: Volume Two. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ridge, M. (2014). Impassioned Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroeder, M. (2013). Tempered Expressivism. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 8 (pp. 283–313). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schroeter, L., and Schroeter, F. (2009). A Third Way in Metaethics. Noûs, 43 (1), 1–30. Shafer-Landau, R. (2012). Evolutionary Debunking, Moral Realism, and Moral Knowledge. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, 7 (1), 1–37. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi The Puzzle of Pure Moral Motivation 143 Comp. by: ANEESKUMAR A Stage : Proof ChapterID: 0003430211 Date:24/2/18 Time:17:56:36 Filepath:d:/womat-filecopy/0003430211.3D Dictionary : OUP_UKdictionary 144 Smith, M. (1994). The Moral Problem. Oxford: Blackwell. Toppinen, T. (2013). Believing in Expressivism. In R. Shafer-Landau (Ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 8 (pp. 252–82). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Weatherson, B. (2014). Running Risks Morally. Philosophical Studies, 167 (1), 141–63. Wedgwood, R. (2007). The Nature of Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 24/2/2018, SPi 144 Adam Lerner

Supernatural, social, and self-monitoring in the scaling up of Chinese civilization1 Hagop Sarkissian Department of Philosophy The City University of New York, Baruch College In Book II of Plato's Republic, there is an extended dialogue between Socrates and Glaucon on the nature of justice. In the course of this dialogue, Glaucon recounts to Socrates the legend of the ring of Gyges. As the legend has it, generations prior, in the land of Lydia, a shepherd was tending his herd when a sudden violent earthquake split the earth around him. Climbing down into the newly formed chasm, the shepherd discovers a bronze horse containing within its hollow core the corpse of a large, humanlike figure wearing nothing save a ring on one hand. The shepherd pockets the ring. Later, he puts it on and sets on his way to meet with his friends, only to discover that, once in their midst, they do not seem to notice his presence. He is invisible to them. He realizes that the ring has granted him the power of invisibility-of anonymity. Soon, this otherwise unassuming and unremarkable shepherd, with no prior history of wickedness, sets off for the royal palace of Lydia, seduces the queen, contrives to murder the king, and assumes royal power for himself. As a philosopher, I was reminded of this ancient tale while reading Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict, for it contains the seed of the idea that anchors the book: monitoring spurs prosocial behavior, and in the absence of monitoring prosociality is compromised. In the legend, the ring cloaks the shepherd of Lydia in anonymity, and once free from the fear of reprisal his behavior devolves into depraved pursuit of self-interest. What has kept any of us, after all, behaving in prosocial ways? Norenzyan's account posits different answers depending on the size of one's social group. In small-scale societies, where individuals can keep track of one another, where reputations count and anonymity is scarce, social pressures are sufficient to ensure that individuals cooperate with one another and act in prosocial ways. Transparency abounds. The gaze (and thus the potential repercussions) of others is hard to evade. Social monitoring, kin bonds, reciprocal altruism, and related cultural norms and practices are enough to ensure that individuals are able to build trust in one another, which in turn allows for cooperative projects to get off the ground 1 Forthcoming in Religion, Brian, and Behavior for a symposium on Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton, 2013). 2 (124-126). Without such trust, the costs involved in undertaking cooperative endeavors, coupled with the risks of being exploited by anonymous, unrelated others, would be prohibitive. Groups risk losing stability in proportion to their size. What, then, allows for large-scale cooperation? How did our ancestors scale up from smaller groups to large societies? Norenzayan focuses on one prominent solution that serves to both remove anonymity and raise the stakes for defection-namely, supernatural monitoring. Supernatural monitoring has its roots in the older, earthly notion of social-monitoring. Yet supernatural watchers fill in gaps where social monitoring falls short; big gods are always watching, and they have vast powers to enforce prosociality. Social monitoring is limited, after all, because "it depends on the actual or implied presence of others; it also depends on keeping track of others' reputations, which is severely limited by group size. As the number of interactions increase, anonymity creeps back into the situation and reputational mechanisms break down" (23). Social surveillance is a powerful and reliable mechanism to promote prosocial behavior for small groups; however, when societies scale up and interactions among strangers become commonplace, supernatural observation can arise to induce cooperation and render individuals trustful of one another. Norenzayan's account is compelling. But there is an elephant in this room, and it is from China-one of the largest and most enduring civilizations on the planet, yet one also lacking a rich tradition of belief in big gods or supernatural monitoring. Does the scaling up of Chinese civilization mark a counterexample to the book's main thesis? Norenzayan is careful in presenting his theory, noting in several places that belief in supernatural monitoring is not a necessary (nor perhaps sufficient) feature for societies to successfully scale up (e.g. 9, 134-135). He also notes that supernatural monitoring can work in concert with other factors to promote cooperation among strangers. Nonetheless, I would like to make some brief comments about Norenzayan's own brief comments concerning the question of China. For while I agree with him that supernatural monitoring exists at the outset of ancient Chinese civilization, I believe it plays a very small role in explaining how it scales up. Monitoring itself is central, but it is of the more mundane kind. What should we expect to find when assessing whether a group or society has struck upon supernatural monitors as a solution to large-scale cooperation? Norenzayan claims that in scaling up from small groups to large and complex societies, certain general patterns emerge, which can be summarized in four points (124): 1) Big gods go from rare to common 3 2) Morality and religion become more intertwined 3) Rituals and faith displays become more organized, uniform, and regular 4) Supernatural punishment a) centers on violations of group norms, and b) increases in potency (e.g. salvation, eternal damnation, eons of karma, hell) Do we find these patterns in early China? In making his case that China falls under the rubric of his theory, Norenzayan focuses largely on the first point-that is, he focuses on the question of whether we find evidence of big gods in early China. Here, he is correct in claiming that Shang Di (Lord on High) plays the role of a supernatural monitor during the Shang Dynasty (1600-1046 BCE), the earliest dynasty for which we have significant historical records. Shang Di is depicted as approving or disapproving, supporting or abandoning, and otherwise rewarding or punishing sovereigns for excelling in royal virtue on the one hand, or failing on the other. (This theme is found, for example, in the Book of Odes-the earliest extant collection of folk songs and poems ca. 1000 to 600 BCE.) So early China has big gods in its earliest records. The evidence concerning Shang Di also suggests a positive answer to Norenzayan's second point. Moral considerations are indeed intertwined with Shang Di's approval and disapproval (e.g. Thote 2009). The head of the Shang royal clan, for example, receives Shang Di's approval or disapproval to the extent that he carries out his duties of protecting the people and allowing them to flourish. However, after the conquest of the Shang by the Zhou (1045 BCE), Shang Di is replaced by the notion of Tian (or Heaven). Tian appears, at the outset, as the progenitor or chief ancestral deity of the Zhou royal line, and is identified as the same entity as the former Shang Di. Yet with Tian we have a mitigation in monitoring and punishment. Tian loses its anthropomorphic characteristics and becomes less interested in human affairs. Eventually, Tian is significantly naturalized, taken to refer as much to the patterns and propensities inherent in the natural world as to any deity. A similar general pattern emerges with regards to Norenzayan's third point. Rituals do become more organized, uniform, and regular. However they are also increasingly neglected. Moreover, there is a growing theory of ritual itself in the classical period recognizing its instrumental value: participation in ritual is important because it tames selfish tendencies and strengthens interpersonal ties, thus promoting beneficial consequences (e.g. Puett 2013). With Norenzayan's second and third points, then, there are questions as to how large a role they play in scaling up Chinese society. What about the fourth point? Norenzayan discusses the Mohists (p.206), who constitute a prominent example of a manifestly religious movement railing against the cultural elites of their time (ca. 5th-3rd centuries BCE) for rejecting supernatural monitoring and punishment, for 4 neglecting the will of heaven (Tian), and for denying the efficacy of ghosts. The Mohists emerged during a time when old, kinship-based political structures were becoming more open and meritocratic, and when the various kingdoms and fiefdoms comprising the classical Chinese world were scaling up through alliances and warfare. The Mohists attributed much of the chaos and immorality of their time to the waning of religious beliefs. (They found disbelief among the political and cultural elite to be especially pernicious, as their attitudes would infect the masses.) The way to restore order is to demonstrate the existence of ghosts with the power to punish and reward. There can be no misreading the following Mohist passage: "If the ability of ghosts and spirits to reward the worthy and punish the wicked could be firmly established as fact throughout the empire and among the common people, it would surely bring order to the state and great benefit to the people" (Ivanhoe & Van Norden 2005, 104). Here we do have explicit discussion of supernatural monitoring as a phenomenon. Yet the Mohists' protestations signal its demise rather than its vigor. The Mohists, after all, found it difficult to convince others of the efficacy of ghosts and spirits and Tian. Furthermore, the type of punishing invoked throughout the Mohist corpus isn't quite everlasting or hellish. (A prominent example of the kind of supernatural punishment the Mohists had in mind is the ghost of a slain person coming back to exact justice by slaying the person who had brought about his demise.) The Mohists have no concept of salvation in the hereafter, nor do they believe that there is some other realm to which we go after earthly demise (Fraser 2007). The rewards and punishments, such as they are, are meant to accrue to one during one's lifetime. In this light, it is not difficult to see why this belief would strike others as entirely lacking credibility; after all, there is abundant virtue that goes unrewarded, and vice unpunished, to have serious doubts as to whether supernatural punishment was credible. We can speculate that the lack of eternal damnation on the one hand, and salvation on the other, might help to explain why belief in big gods stalled. Supernatural punishment and reward of the type discussed by the Mohists seem insufficient to induce cooperation beyond what is available through more mundane measures. Heaven is described as observing, rewarding, and punishing, but the rewards and punishments are left unspecified. Ghosts and spirits are invoked with greater detail and with stories of revenge after death, but these anecdotes fail to convince. So we don't find anything like Norenzayan's fourth point among the Mohists. Nor do we find it in the earlier Shang period. When supernatural monitoring falls short, social monitoring steps in. And we do indeed find it to be a prevalent aspect of the Mohists' program of promoting prosocial behavior. The Mohists maintained that heaven (Tian) provided the ultimate ethical standard (a cluster of notions 5 including order, abundance, and care), and that everyone ought to conform to this standard. Doing so, however, required constant social monitoring. Heaven itself cannot induce cooperation to its own ethical standard. Instead, individuals must 'conform upwards' by evaluating one another and report any defections away or deviations from the ultimate ethical standard. Good old social monitoring, then, was a key cog to prosocial behavior-even for the Mohists. The sense of being monitored and of conforming one's behavior to others' expectations is itself an old idea in China-older and more widespread than the Mohists. As Norenzayan himself has pointed out, the rice agriculture found in ancient China (particularly in the south) required much extensive coordination and cooperation in order to succeed (Nisbett 2003; Nisbett et al. 2001). Hierarchical, centralized organization arrives early in China for this reason, and along with it comes a commitment to acting in ways conducive to communal flourishing. This leads to harmony being a central moral value in the classical period (e.g. Li 2006). Maintaining harmony requires being attuned not only to one's responsibilities and relationships to others, but also to how one's actions might be impacting the group. This requires a sense of self-awareness, including sensitivity to oneself as a social actor, to what others' expectations are, and to how one's behavior may be interpreted by others (Sarkissian 2010). This brings us to a final form of monitoring in early China-self-monitoring. Supernatural monitors fill an important gap by making sure that one does not defect or violate group norms when no one else is around. Big gods are there "to watch even when no one is watching, to care when no one cares, to threaten when no one can threaten" (27). But, of course, even when there is no one else present (supernatural or otherwise), one can monitor oneself. This notion is central to early Confucian ethical practice. For example, a famous passage from the first chapter of the "Doctrine of the Mean", a section of the Record of Ritual, claims that "There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore the superior man is watchful over himself, (even) when he is alone". The idea is simple enough: one can be habituated into taking an external viewpoint on one's own behavior-that is, to being a self-monitor. One could then serve as a role model to others, especially those below one in the social hierarchy (Munro 1969). This tendency to monitor oneself, to be aware of others' expectations, and to mind one's impact on others is not only found in a number of classical texts but also persists today in societies that inherit Confucian cultural values (Heine et al. 2008; Sarkissian 2014). 6 So I believe Norenzayan is correct in claiming that there are supernatural monitors in ancient China. However, they likely play a minor role in explaining the scaling up of classical Chinese civilization. Supernatural monitoring is parasitic upon social monitoring, and the latter seems a more prominent theme in the classical texts themselves. "Perhaps," Norenzayan writes, "the Chinese managed to create secular alternatives to religion earlier and more successfully than Western civilization" (135). This seems closer to the truth. As the classical period approaches the founding of the Qin Dynasty and the unification of the Chinese world (221 BCE), there is widespread emphasis on building efficient and reliable institutions, of promulgating clear laws backed with punishment, and of centralizing governing structures based on meritocratic criteria, all as ways to incentivize cooperative and prosocial behavior within rapidly expanding societies. As China scales up, big gods get left behind. References Fraser, Chris (2007). "Mohism." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Winter 2007 Edition. Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2007/entries/mohism/> Heine, Steven J, Takemoto, Timothy, Moskalenko, Sophia, Lasaleta, Jannine and Henrich, Joseph (2008). "Mirrors in the head: Cultural variation in objective self-awareness." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(7): 879-887. Ivanhoe, Philip J. and Van Norden, Bryan W. (2005). Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing. Li, Chenyang (2006). "The Confucian ideal of harmony." Philosophy East and West, 56(4): 583-603. Munro, Donald J. (1969). The Concept of Man in Early China. Stanford, Stanford University Press. Nisbett, Richard E. (2003). The Geography of Thought. New York, The Free Press. Nisbett, Richard, Peng, Kaiping, Choi, Incheol and Norenzayan, Ara (2001). "Culture and systems of thought: holistic versus analytic cognition." Psychological Review, 108(2): 291-310. Puett, Michael (2013). "Critical approaches to religion in China." Critical Research on Religion, 1(1): 95-101. Sarkissian, Hagop (2010). "Minor tweaks, major payoffs: the problems and promise of situationism in moral philosophy." Philosopher's Imprint, 10(9): 1-15. Sarkissian, Hagop (2014). Is self-regulation a burden or a virtue? A comparative perspective. In The Philosophy and Psychology of Virtue: An Empirical Approach to Character and Happiness. N. Snow and F. Trivigno (ed.). New York, Routledge 7 Thote, Alain (2009). Shang and Zhou funeral practices: Interpretation of material vestiges. In Early Chinese Religion: Part One: Shang through Han (1250 BC–22 AD). J. Lagerwey and M. Kalinowski (ed.). Boston, Brill

SIMPOSIO/SYMPOSIUM CHRISTOPHER BENNETT The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment E. MARAGUAT Presentation/Presentación C. BENNETT Précis of The Apology Ritual/Resumen de The Apology Ritual J. M. PÉREZ BERMEJO Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory A. DUFF Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual J. L. MARTÍ The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice Some Remarks on Bennett's The Apology Ritual S. ROSELL Responding to Wrongdoing: Comments on Christopher Bennett's The Apology Ritual C. SANDIS The Public Expression of Penitence C. BENNETT Replies to My Commentators teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 63-66 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 63-66] Presentation Edgar Maraguat In his book entitled The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment [Cambridge University Press, 2008] Christopher Bennett attempts to answer the legal theoretical question: 'Why punish?' In this aim, he develops an essentially retributivist argument that incorporates what he considers to be useful insights of restorative positions. His long-winded reasoning rehearses and settles quite a few moral, philosophical and legal practice issues, and while it might not prove completely convincing from beginning to end, given its plausible lack of some middle term, it does bode excellent results for this type of approach, highlighting brilliantly how tackling metaphysical problems can not only have an impact on practical or political debates, but also lead to specific conclusions. What the book intends to provide is an ideal or philosophical model, neither a historical nor a legal reconstruction of penal practices in Western societies. Such a model relies, as is the norm in this field, on presumably common intuitions, at least in liberal cultures, about moral emotions and their propriety, freedom of conscience, citizens' autonomy, the domain of public wrongs, fairness and proportionality and the like. On this basis, Bennett attempts to deduce a system of criminal justice capable of standing the test of ethical legitimacy. The need to overhaul the legal and moral underpinnings of criminal justice seems assumed by most, but not all, commentators. In Bennett's case, this demand stems from his global rejection of traditional justifications that conceive punishment as a convenient way to meet collective ends, such as crime prevention or public edification and moral education, or psychological aims, such as wrongdoers' moral improvement. The strategy of building on intuitions, values, widespread selfunderstandings, existing consensus or the overlap of individual moral viewpoints – explicitly endorsed in the comments of Martí, Duff and Pérez Bermejo – undoubtedly appears only superficially Hegelian. More genuinely Hegelian is the rationale offered for retribution: the public offender has a right to be punished, in accordance with his moral and rational status. Bennett seeks to avoid the traditional and crude retributivist motivation of making the offend63 64 Edgar Maraguat ers 'pay dearly' for their deeds, based on plain vengefulness or the victim's possible satisfaction of 'seeing (the wrongdoer) suffer'. Therefore, although he willingly admits his theory 'looks back' on the crime and on the reactions it might have elicited, it also 'looks forward' to restoring the moral and civil credentials of the convict. This compromise leads Bennett to draw on restorative strategies and procedures in order to outline a reconfiguration of penal practices. In fact, the 'apology ritual' is thus named (instead of, say, the public condemnation ritual) precisely because it rests on the normative theoretical idea of what the offenders could and should do in order to regain their fellow citizens' confidence. According to the synopsis, the book lays out three distinct but interwoven arguments: the Apology Ritual Argument strictly speaking, the Penance Argument and the Right to Be Punished Argument. The first contends, on the one hand, that the symbols best suited to the public condemnation of crime may be found in the way we react spontaneously to everyday abuses. On the other hand, what matters for the state is the formal expression of censure, so the process of punishment does not require the amends – the apology – to be sincerely wanted by the offender: a ritual suffices. The Penance Argument claims the necessity of selecting, among available symbols of disapproval, those that show the offence is taken seriously and open the door to the offenders' authentic 'dissociation from the wrong.' According to Bennett, such a separation is achieved when the wrongdoers internalise the withdrawal of their peers' previous 'goodwill', and ultimately through their subjection to 'something penitential.' The withdrawal of 'goodwill' is justified by the offenders' violation of the expectations generated by their participation in some relationship (in the final analysis, a civil or political one), a situation that needs to be 'marked' by a certain suspension of recognition, though not by the offenders' eviction as independent members of the relationship. The Argument of the Right to Be Punished does not aim to defend the inclusionary nature of punishment, in other words, the fact that by condemning, the state takes not only the crime but also the convict seriously as an effective member of the damaged relationship; this had already been made clear in the second argument, especially in the discussion on the internalisation of goodwill withdrawal. If anything, what Bennett still needs is to buttress his previous argument against sceptics who would question our ultimate control over our actions as well as our status of qualified participants in moral relationships. Bennett offers no metaphysical solution to those doubts, but skirts them by resorting to the erstwhile Kantian and, in any case, Hegelian reasons for us to treat each other as rational and responsible agents who must be required to answer for their actions, for better or for worse. The 'right to be punished' concept would thus contain some truth, in Daniel Dennett's sense that we indeed have a vital interest in being held accountable for our deeds. Presentation 65 The contributors to the discussion cast doubt on several aspects of those arguments. Martí, to begin with, seems to question the need for a retributivist justification of punishment. According to him, coercion in general and penal practice in particular are sufficiently supported by our liberal sense of legitimacy, which entitles the state to coerce citizens into behaving correctly and to instil them some sense of justice, that is, to educate them. Martí, Duff and Pérez Bermejo also dissent to Bennett's defence of the apology ritual, for complementary reasons. Duff asserts, convincingly, that imposed apology is doomed to be no more than mock apology. Martí adds that in moral relationships, where Bennett seeks a model for his criminal apology ritual, apology not only comes about independently of punishment, but usually avoids or substitutes it. Sandis seems to hint in the same direction when he suggests, following Winch and Weil, that someone who sincerely wishes to expiate guilt may no longer be expected to restore the breached relationship. Martí believes that for the apology to be more than a heuristic tool in the hands of the judges who dictate punishment, in other words, for the apology to be effectively offered by the wrongdoer, it must be sincere and not ritualistic. Pérez Bermejo agrees about the need for Bennett's apology to convey the highest possible sincerity, although he also doubts that the convict's forum internum should have a role to play in criminal justice and deplores Bennett's support of restorative considerations in setting the quantum of punishment. In general, Pérez Bermejo and Duff, while explicitly approving of Bennett's updated retributivist strategy, hold to an essentially communicative view of criminal prosecution (Sandis seems tempted by the same perspective). This being said, Pérez Bermejo's version of communication tends to be more austere than Duff's. The latter conceives it as a two-way process during which the offender's display of specific responses is required, taken into account and encouraged, potentially leading to his 'moral reparation'; the former, however, feels that the restorative elements in Bennett's theory – those that look forwards – are at odds with the broader retributivist framework, involving a relapse into instrumentalism, arbitrariness and, thereby, impairment of the rule of law. As for Rossell, he dedicates part of his contribution to criticising the Penance Argument. Instead of questioning the conceptual nexus between apology and punishment, he rebuffs the necessary link between condemnation and punishment or, to be more precise, between condemnation and 'suffering-oriented adverse emotional reactions.' In other words, he opposes the vindictive or retributive view of condemnation. Rossell deems that the often – legitimately – praised cases of Gandhi and King, cited in Bennett's book, prove that genuine condemnation, even when it is moving and hits its target, does not automatically imply retribution for the harm inflicted. Whoever may own the right interpretation of those cases, the objection adds to Duff and 66 Edgar Maraguat Martí's cautiousness about taking the private cycle of condemnation and apology as a model for legal punishment. In the last contribution, Sandis discusses the very idea – aptly described as 'elusive' – of a right to be punished, thus touching obliquely on Bennett's third argument. This notion, his comment shows, does not readily fit in the common understanding of rights as liberties, nor in the concept of inalienable rights such as life or freedom, taken as a whole. This, he reckons, must explain why the expression is usually found between quotation marks. In his analysis, Sandis identifies the disadvantages and counterproductive effects of two ways of conceiving the right to be punished, by seeing punishment either as a payment for harmful behaviour or as a path towards moral restoration (in Melden's words, 'moral ratification'). Regarding the first interpretation, he objects among other things – and for Wittgensteinian reasons – that it blurs the basically transgressive nature of crimes. As for the second one, he draws on examples from Woody Allen's work to claim that the necessary and sufficient conditions for moral restoration cannot be determined. The book was presented and discussed in a symposium held by the Nomos Network for Applied Philosophy on the 27th and 28th of January, 2011, at the University of Valencia. I would like to give thanks to the members of the organizing committee for their invitation to edit these proceedings, as well as to Luis M. Valdés, who participated in the sessions, for accepting to publish them in a special issue of Teorema. My gratitude also goes to the University of Valencia, the Ministry of Science and Innovation and the University of Barcelona, who supported the symposium, and to those who took part in the meeting: Josep Corbí, Manuel García-Carpintero, Carlos Moya, Fabian Dorsch, Francisco Javier Gil, Tobies Grimaltos, Jules Holroyd, Sandra Marshall, Adèle Mercier, Mari Mikkola, Pablo Rychter, Pepa Toribio, Jennifer Saul and Jordi Valor. Departament de Metafísica i Teoria del Coneixement Facultat de Filosofia i Ciències de l'Educació Universitat de València Avenida Blasco Ibáñez 30 46010 Valencia E-mail: [email protected] teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 67-71 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 67-71] Presentación Edgar Maraguat Christopher Bennett ofrece en su libro The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment [Cambridge University Press, 2008] una respuesta a la pregunta jurídico-teórica: '¿por qué castigar?'. Para ello, construye una justificación fundamentalmente retribucionista que integra los que él juzga aciertos de las posturas restauracionistas. El suyo es un argumento de largo aliento, que revisa y responde no pocas cuestiones filosófico-morales y de práctica legal, y que, si es difícil que convenza al lector de principio a fin, por la plausible falta de algún término medio, coloca bajo una luz muy favorable un acercamiento al asunto de esa índole, al tiempo que muestra asombrosamente cómo la resolución de algunos problemas metafísicos, no sólo no deja intactas las cuestiones prácticas, públicas, políticas, sino que conduce a decidirlas de cierto modo. La meta del libro es un modelo ideal o filosófico: ni una reconstrucción histórica ni legal de la práctica penal. Un modelo cuya definición, como es norma en este campo, se funda sobre intuiciones que se presumen corrientes, al menos en nuestro espacio cultural liberal, sobre las emociones morales y su propiedad, la libertad de conciencia, la autonomía de los ciudadanos, el ámbito de las 'malas acciones' de carácter público, la equidad y proporcionalidad y cosas semejantes. Sobre esa base Bennett intenta razonar un tipo de práctica penal que pueda superar la prueba de la legitimidad ética. La necesidad de revisar la justificación moral y jurídica de la justicia penal parece asumida por la mayoría de comentaristas, aunque no por todos. En el caso de Bennett viene determinada por el rechazo global de las justificaciones que hacen de la pena un instrumento para lograr bien fines colectivos, como la edificación o educación moral de la ciudadanía o la prevención de futuros crímenes, bien fines psicológicos, como la mejora moral de los condenados. La estrategia por la que se parte de intuiciones, valores, auto-comprensiones comunes, del consenso o solapamiento de puntos de vista morales individuales, tiene seguramente un aspecto sólo superficialmente hegeliano (que, en todo caso, Martí, Duff y Pérez Bermejo aprueban explícitamente en sus comentarios). Más hegeliana es, desde luego, la razón para el retribucionis67 68 Edgar Maraguat mo: que el delincuente tiene derecho a ser castigado, de acuerdo con su carácter moral racional. Bennett quiere evitar, ciertamente, una motivación cruda y tradicional de la retribución, basada en el sentimiento (vengativo) de la necesidad de 'hacer pagar' por lo hecho o, no digamos, en la satisfacción que a las víctimas puede proporcionar 'ver sufrir'. Por ello, aunque él mismo dice que su "teoría" mira hacia atrás, hacia el delito y hacia las reacciones que debe haber despertado, mira también hacia delante, hacia la restauración de las relaciones morales y civiles del acusado. Esta posición de equilibrio es la que mueve a Bennett a tener en cuenta las estrategias y procedimientos restauracionistas en el rediseño –a grandes rasgos– de la práctica penitenciaria. De hecho, si la propuesta ha de denominarse 'el ritual de la disculpa' –y no, por ejemplo, el ritual de la condena pública– es porque la clave teórico-normativa la proporciona para Bennett lo que el delincuente puede y debe hacer para hacer posible la restauración de la confianza de sus conciudadanos en él. El libro consiste, según analiza el précis, en tres argumentos distinguibles pero imbricados: el Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa (estrictamente tomado), el Argumento de la Penitencia y el Argumento del Derecho a Ser Castigado. El primero defiende, para empezar, que los símbolos adecuados para la condena pública del delito hay que buscarlos en el modo en que reaccionamos cotidiana y espontáneamente a los atropellos, y, en segundo lugar, que, estando el Estado obligado a condenar o expresar censura, no es esencial al castigo que la enmienda –la 'disculpa'– sea deseada por el delincuente, y por tanto basta que adopte la forma de un rito. El Argumento de la Penitencia ha de probar a continuación que entre los símbolos disponibles para expresar reprobación resultan obligatorios los que muestran que el delito es tomado seriamente y pueden además conducir al causante a 'disociarlo del daño'. Esta disociación, según Bennett, la opera la interiorización de la retirada de la "buena voluntad" con la que los demás nos tratan habitualmente y, al fin y al cabo, por el sometimiento a "algo con carácter penitencial". La retirada de esa "buena voluntad" se justifica como la consecuencia apropiada del hecho de que el delicuente haya violado las expectativas intrínsecas a la participación en cierta relación (en definitiva la relación civil o política), hecho que ha de 'marcarse' por medio de cierto nivel de suspensión del reconocimiento que en otras circunstancias le correspondería, aunque no quede desahuciado como miembro (independiente) de ese tipo de vínculo. El Argumento del Derecho al Castigo, finalmente, no tiene por objeto la defensa del carácter incluyente de la pena: que, al condenar, el Estado no sólo toma en serio el delito, sino que toma en serio al condenado como miembro efectivo de la relación dañada, pues esto es algo que ha dejado ya claro el argumento previo (concretamente, la justificación de la interiorización de la retirada de la buena voluntad). Si acaso, lo que resta es defender el argumento Introducción 69 anterior de las dudas escépticas que puede despertar, tanto las relativas a nuestra falta última de control sobre lo que hacemos, como al carácter de participantes cualificados –moralmente autosuficientes– en esas relaciones. Bennett no tiene una respuesta metafísica para estos recelos, pero se ve dispensado de ofrecerla apelando a las en su día razones kantianas y, en todo caso, razones hegelianas para tratarnos unos a otros como seres sensibles a razones y por ello responsables, a los que hay que pedir cuentas y exigir que respondan por lo que han hecho, para bien y para mal. Habría contenida en la idea de 'derecho al castigo' una porción de verdad: que, como ha defendido Daniel Dennett, los primeros interesados en que nos pidan cuentas por lo que hacemos somos nosotros mismos. Los participantes en la discusión siembran dudas sobre muchos aspectos de estos argumentos. Martí, por de pronto, parece no sentir la necesidad de un argumento retribucionista a favor de las penas como el de Bennett, y defiende que la coerción en general y la práctica penal en particular están suficientemente amparadas por nuestro sentido liberal de la legitimidad: que el Estado está facultado para coaccionar a los ciudadanos para que se comporten correctamente y a promover un sentido mínimo de justicia entre ellos, esto es, a educarlos. Tanto Martí como Duff y Pérez Bermejo protestan además contra la defensa del ritual de la disculpa que realiza Bennett, por razones complementarias. Duff hace valer, verosímilmente, que una disculpa impuesta sólo puede ser un simulacro de disculpa. Martí añade a esto que la disculpa a la que recurrimos en nuestras relaciones morales –según Bennett, el mejor modelo para el ritual de la disculpa penal– no sólo es independiente del castigo, sino que normalmente lo desactiva o evita. Sandis apunta en la misma dirección, parece, cuando sugiere, de acuerdo con Winch y Weil, que si alguien siente verdaderamente la necesidad de expiar una culpa, deja de parecernos necesario un castigo que restaure la relación que ha quebrado. Martí piensa que si la disculpa ha de ser algo más que un recurso heurístico para el juez o jueces a la hora de fijar una pena determinada, es decir, si ha de ser ofrecida de forma efectiva por parte del condenado, entonces ha de ser sincera y no meramente ritual. Pérez Bermejo piensa lo mismo: que Bennett debería favorecer en su teoría una disculpa con el más alto grado de sinceridad, en la medida en que se pueda llegar a ella, sólo que, por otro lado, rechaza que el fuero interno de los condenados tenga algún papel que desempeñar en la práctica penal y deplora en general la voluntad de Bennett de tener en cuenta propuestas restauracionistas en la fijación del quantum de la pena. En general, Pérez Bermejo y Duff, que simpatizan explícitamente con la estrategia retribucionista modificada de Bennett, prefieren una visión del enjuiciamiento criminal esencialmente comunicativa (también Sandis parece tentado por ella). Pero Pérez Bermejo diríase que vindica una versión más austera de la comunicación que Duff. Éste habla de un proceso bidireccional, 70 Edgar Maraguat en que se tienen en cuenta, se exigen y se fomentan las respuestas específicas del condenado que pueden conducir a una "reparación moral". Pérez Bermejo, por el contrario, considera que los elementos restauracionistas de la teoría de Bennett –los que miran hacia delante– no son coherentes con el marco retribucionista general, y suponen una recaída en el instrumentalismo, la arbitrariedad y, por ende, el menoscabo del imperio de la ley. Rossell dedica parte de su contribución a objetar, más bien, contra el Argumento de la Penitencia. En lugar de poner en cuestión el vínculo conceptual entre disculpa y castigo, él pone en duda la conexión necesaria entre condena y punición o, más precisamente, entre la condena y las "reacciones emocionales adversas orientadas al sufrimiento". Dicho de otro modo, opone resistencia a una visión de la condena según la cual ésta es forzosamente vindicativa o retributiva. Rossell juzga que los casos históricos –generalmente admirados– de Gandhi o King, a los que Bennett apela en su libro, prueban precisamente que la condena real –incluso cuando es conmovedora para su blanco y tiene en él el efecto que persigue– no tiene por qué implicar una retribución por el daño recibido. Sea quien sea quien interprete adecuadamente esos casos, su objeción abunda en lo discutible del carácter modélico del ciclo privado de condena y disculpa para la punición legal, que tampoco aprueban Duff o Martí. Sandis, por su parte, discute en la última contribución la idea misma – que con tino califica de "elusiva"– de un derecho a ser castigado (y, así, aunque oblicuamente, el tercer argumento). Sus comentarios muestran que esta noción no se compadece bien con el entendimiento habitual de los derechos como libertades, pero tampoco con el concepto de derecho inalienable que aplicamos a la vida o la libertad, tomada como un todo. Esto explica, como él reconoce, que la idea aparezca en el libro, normalmente, entrecomillada. En su análisis se consideran las limitaciones o efectos contraproducentes de dos intentos de darle sentido: bien tomando los castigos como pagos por conductas en principio dañinas, bien tomando los castigos como ocasiones para la restauración moral o, en palabras de Melden, para la "ratificación moral". Entre otras cosas, se objeta contra la primera interpretación que desdibuja el carácter transgresor de los delitos (por razones wittgensteinianas) y, contra la segunda, al hilo de algunas ilustraciones proporcionadas por la filmografía de Woody Allen, que no pueden determinarse condiciones necesarias y suficientes para tal restauración. La presentación de la obra y su discusión fue objeto de un simposio celebrado los días 27 y 28 de enero de 2011 en la Universitat de València, organizado por la Nomos Network for Applied Philosophy. Quiero agradecer al resto de miembros del comité que preparó el encuentro la invitación a editar estas actas, y en particular a Luis Valdés, que participó en las sesiones, la voluntad de acogerlas en un número especial de Teorema. Las instituciones que respaldaron el simposio –la propia Universitat de València, el Ministerio de Introducción 71 Ciencia e Innovación, la Universitat de Barcelona– merecen también una palabra de agradecimiento, así como todos los que tomaron parte aquellos días en la discusión del libro y los comentarios: Josep Corbí, Manuel García-Carpintero, Carlos Moya, Fabian Dorsch, Francisco Javier Gil, Tobies Grimaltos, Jules Holroyd, Sandra Marshall, Adèle Mercier, Mari Mikkola, Pablo Rychter, Pepa Toribio, Jennifer Saul y Jordi Valor. Departament de Metafísica i Teoria del Coneixement Facultat de Filosofia i Ciències de l'Educació Universitat de València Avenida Blasco Ibáñez 30 46010 Valencia E-mail: [email protected] pedidos [email protected] www.krkediciones.com teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 73-83 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 73-83] Précis of The Apology Ritual Christopher Bennett RESUMEN En este trabajo resumo los argumentos principales de mi libro The Apology Ritual. Llamo la atención sobre tres líneas principales de argumentación, tomándolas en un orden inverso al de aparición en el libro. Primero, dirijo la mirada a la justificación expresiva-comunicativa del castigo por parte del estado que ofrece el libro. En segundo lugar, al argumento a favor de la afirmación de que sentirse verdaderamente arrepentido trae consigo la exigencia de que se asuma algún tipo de penitencia. Y, en tercer lugar, me ocupo del argumento a favor del "derecho a ser castigado", tal y como lo interpreto, según el cual hay un estatuto importante asociado a que uno sea tratado como un agente responsable. PALABRAS CLAVE: castigo; justicia penal; retribución; emoción; responsabilidad; penitencia. ABSTRACT In this paper I summarise the main arguments of my book The Apology Ritual. I draw attention to three main lines of argument, taking them in reverse order to that in which they appear in the book. First, I look at the book's communicativeexpressive justification of state punishment. Secondly, I look at the argument for the claim that feeling properly sorry involves a requirement to undertake some sort of penance. And thirdly, I look at the argument for the "right to be punished": as I interpret it, that there is an important status associated with being treated as a responsible agent. KEYWORDS: Punishment; Criminal Justice; Retribution; Emotion; Responsibility; Penance. I. INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW In this introductory piece, I would like to set out three of the main arguments from The Apology Ritual [C. Bennett, The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008]. I will start from the end of the book, as it were, hoping that this might shed 73 74 Christopher Bennett some fresh light on the topics the book covers. The book ends up with a theory of state punishment that is in some key ways backward-looking or retributive. That is to say, it defends a justification for inflicting some setback on the offender for their offence according to which such a response does justice to what the offender has done, rather than bringing about some further good. However, the argument for state punishment is meant to escape the pitfalls of more basic forms of retributivist theory of punishment that rest on an unappealing brute claim that offenders deserve to suffer. The Apology Ritual argument sees the central aim of state punishment as proportionate condemnation of moral wrongs – or at least those moral wrongs that are the business of the collective (for which Duff [Duff (2001)] has appropriated the term "public wrongs"). And in explaining why condemnation has to involve punishment, it draws on a parallel between punishment and those retributive reactions that seem appropriate in interpersonal interactions. Hence I will review the arguments of the book by starting with where I end up and working back through some of the steps to which my conclusion commits me. I will then show how I attempt to defend those commitments by looking at the parallel with interpersonal interactions. So the arguments we will look at here are: 1) the Apology Ritual argument; 2) the Penance argument; and 3) the Right to be Punished argument. Before going into these arguments in more detail, a quick overview of the way the three fit together might be helpful. The Apology Ritual argument tries to establish that the decent state needs a reprobative institution, and that such an institution will have to be retributive to the extent of a) imposing hardship, and b) deriving its justification for imposing hardship from the need to take the offence seriously. One key objection that reprobative theories of punishment face – for instance, in Joel Feinberg's classic paper [Feinberg (1974)] – is the demand to explain why, if condemnation of an offence is necessary, it could not be issued verbally, or symbolically. How does the argument that hardship is necessary resist lapsing back into a more basic form of retributivism? The argument for a) in The Apology Ritual doesn't take the common retributivist route of looking at the way in which something like outrage at an offence makes us want to inflict harm on offenders. Rather it derives from the fact that an appropriate response to the offence on the part of the offender will involve willingly assuming some burden as a way of making amends. Hence we need something like the Penance argument to explain why penitential amends proportionate to the offence are a necessary part of an appropriate response to that offence. The Penance argument needs to explain why a response to offenders that didn't involve treating offenders in a certain way in order to do justice to their offence (such as the purely verbal or symbolic communication of condemnation) would fail to take the offender and offence seriously. Finally, the Penance argument assumes that the demand for penance is a compelling one Précis of The Apology Ritual 75 for the offender. But this involves a certain view of identity and responsibility, and so we need an argument that spells out that view and defends it against some of the concerns that philosophers have traditionally had about moral responsibility. This is the role of the Right to be Punished argument, the conclusion of which is that we owe it to offenders that we should hold them responsible, on the grounds that doing so is constitutive of treating them as a capable and independently functioning member of a relationship. II. THE APOLOGY RITUAL ARGUMENT One way to motivate intuitions when dealing with a question like that of the justification of punishment is to attempt to put oneself, imaginatively, into a society in which the institution in which one is interested doesn't exist, and then ask whether there would be a need for that institution. So: if punishment didn't exist, would we need to invent it? The reason for trying this thought-experiment is not so that we will be in a position to assert the rational necessity, for all forms of human society, of the institution of punishment, let alone in order to make claims about the actual historical genesis of the institution of punishment. Rather the thought experiment, it is hoped, might illuminate the place of the institution of punishment in our values and our selfunderstanding. For instance, one way of justifying punishment would be to show that, however unattractive or unpleasant punishment might be, it is in fact a necessary part of something else that is more uncontroversially good. If punishment really is a necessary part of that good then the appearance of unattractiveness can be dispelled. But such an account might also help us to understand better what punishment is really there for, and hence to understand how we might do it better, undistracted by other competing but false accounts of what it does. From the overview given in the first section, it might already be obvious that the strategy for the justification of punishment adopted in The Apology Ritual is to claim that punishment is necessary in order to take wrongdoing seriously. Taking wrongdoing seriously is something that many people will agree is an important aim. Therefore if punishment is necessary to do that – if the absence of punishment would be in some way to tolerate wrongdoing – then we could perhaps see that punishment, up to that point, is justified. (It is worth noting, at this point, that the same strategy goes through the whole book: the Penance and Right to be Punished arguments will also be found to rest on a conception of what it is to respond to human wrongdoing in a way that is sufficiently morally serious.) Let us start, then, with the notion of a decent society. I don't mean "decent" as a term of art, as in Margalit's conception of the society that allows its citizens to live free from humiliation [Margalit (1998)]. I simply have in 76 Christopher Bennett mind a hopefully uncontroversial claim, that a decent society is one that won't stand for, or won't tolerate, certain things being done by its citizens. The decent society is one that is organised in line with certain values, and a reasonable view of these values will extend to the lives of its citizens (and not just its own citizens), their environment, the common institutions of society, the lives of future generations, and so on. Now because it is citizens themselves that have to be the agents of the promotion and respect of these values, it follows that a society that has values must hold that citizens ought not to act in certain ways: it will hold that citizens have responsibilities. Now imagine a society in which there was no system of criminal justice of any sort, by which I mean no mechanism in which society collectively takes action against someone who violates their responsibilities. The difference between our society and this alternative society is that in the alternative the society takes no action to mark the action as impermissible or intolerable. In such a society, it may be true to say that citizens have those responsibilities, but it can't be said that the society is one that, collectively, takes those responsibilities seriously. At any rate this society is not one that regards its citizens as bound by those responsibilities. If the society takes no action to mark the actions as impermissible or intolerable it is hard to see how that society could be claimed to regard those responsibilities as binding. Otherwise put, the decent society has to condemn those acts that are intolerable. That will do at present for the argument that a state that takes a stand on certain values needs an institution of censure: an institution that marks certain acts as beyond the pale. The question now is whether punishment is necessary for such censure to take place. The argument for this point begins with the observation that, for an act to be an act of condemnation, it must meet certain conditions, one of which is that it should be symbolically adequate. Like a well-formed proposition, it needs to take a certain form in order to have condemnatory meaning. Now, if this is accepted, the next question that arises is where the relevant symbols are to be found. The answer that the Apology Ritual argument gives is that the symbolism of condemnation will have to connect state condemnation of crime in some way with the way in which we react to wrongdoing in everyday life. Our intuitive expectations about reactions to wrongdoing are inextricably linked to the practices of dealing with wrongdoing that we play out time and time again in interpersonal life. Thus, in order to find the symbolism that will express condemnation, we should look at the emotional behaviour that surrounds wrongdoing in nonstate situations. This should then direct our attention at the range of emotions that we experience towards wrongdoers. Of course, we should not be uncritical in our drawing on the emotions. Some emotions are mean-minded, ungenerous, malicious, cruel, egoistic, and so on. But some emotions, it might be, can survive critical reflection. It is ideally those emotions that we will want to draw Précis of The Apology Ritual 77 on. Critical reflection on the emotions will look at a) how the emotion portrays the wrongdoer, and whether that is compatible with our considered view, and b) what is a proportionate emotional response to the situation. The idea is that we therefore come up with some view about what a proportionate and appropriate emotional response to wrongdoing would be, and seek in some way to replicate that in punishment. One way to do that would be to argue that emotions like blame and indignation lead us to attack the wrongdoer and inflict suffering on him, and that in this way such emotions are directly analogous to punishment. However, it is not at all clear that blaming can justifiably lead to such aggressive responses. Blame, on my view, is characterised more by withdrawal from the offender than by the active infliction of suffering. My approach is rather to argue that we should look at the reaction that we think the offender should have to the offence. Self-blame, or guilt, I argue, leads to penitential action; and though penitential action can often get out of proportion, we have a fairly determinate sense of how a person's willingness to make amends should match the seriousness of their breach (such that an offer of insufficient amends can add insult to injury by showing that the offender has failed to grasp the seriousness of what they have done). In other words, the properly sorry person will be motivated to do something to make up for the offence. And it is this fact that gives us our symbolism for expressing proportionate condemnation. In imposing a certain level of amends on an offender we express condemnation in a symbolically adequate way: we condemn the wrong as being of a certain gravity by expressing how sorry the offender ought to be for what they have done. Since the role of the state is simply to express censure, it is not essential to the success of punishment that the offender makes the amends willingly. The state's role is simply to express censure, and it is not clear that it properly has a role of ensuring that the offender is truly guilty. Hence the process of making amends is one that the offender can engage in purely ritualistically, without appropriate motivations. Such a scenario would not be ideal; but it would not prevent the state from having expressed due condemnation of the act. The Apology Ritual argument raises various questions, of course. The one I want to concentrate on at the moment is the crucial question of why an offender who is properly sorry should be motivated to penitential action. This is an important claim because it is not enough for the Apology Ritual argument that the connection between having done wrong and making amends should be widely accepted, or that many people accept it. That might be enough if the point of punishment was to get people to realise that the state disapproves of an action, to communicate disapproval: if that was the point then the state should use whatever symbols the folk use. But the Apology Ritual argument is more ambitious, since it holds that, for some very serious actions, acts that constitute condemnation are necessary because not to con78 Christopher Bennett demn would be to acquiesce in the offence. Therefore the symbols used for condemnation have to be, not just those that happen to be in use, but those that actually dissociate us from the wrong. Penitential action seems like a candidate here; at any rate those who undertake it experience it as a way of dissociating themselves from their action. But the question is, are they right to experience it in that way? In order to answer that question, we need the Penance argument. III. THE PENANCE ARGUMENT The Penance argument states that penance is the offender's withdrawal of goodwill from himself. It rests on an explanation of why withdrawal is an appropriate reaction to an offender; and then sees penance as the internalisation of this reaction. Penance occurs when the offender accepts blame. The argument in defence of this view starts from a claim about relationships that a) are valuable in the sense that we look on them as part of what makes our lives good and worthwhile, and b) that are structured, in part, by one's being subject to certain responsibilities. It looks at what is involved in being included in such relationships. When one is included by others in a certain relationship, I claim, they treat you in ways that mark you out as a member of that relationship. Some of these forms of "special treatment" or "recognition" are things such as greetings, inquiries after one's well-being, types of care and affection, etc., by which people affirm their shared participation in a relationship they regard as an important tie. But other marks of recognition have to do with being asked to perform the duties that are part of the relationship, or to get involved with the activities we are involved with as a member of that relationship. Friendship is a good example of this. To be a friend to someone is to recognise that there is such a thing as being a good friend to someone. That is to say, there are certain standards or responsibilities to the relationship, standards the meeting of which is constitutive of being in that relationship. If one has no regard whatsoever for those standards, and if the person involved has no claim on your time and attention that marks them out as someone in that relationship with you, then it is not clear whether the relationship really exists. So the first premise in the argument is that there are marks of "recognition," distinctive forms of treatment that one gets when one is a member of a certain relationship. Now in between the two extremes of being a truly good friend and being no friend at all, lies a large grey area where the question of what friends can reasonably demand of one another is settled. The part of this continuum in which I am interested, is that in which a person a) violates the basic standards that can be reasonably expected of her in the context of that relationship but without b) thereby no longer being in that relationship. In that case it Précis of The Apology Ritual 79 is not that she is (literally) no friend at all – she is, after all, still subject to the demands of the relationship. (The fact that the demands of that relationship still make a claim on her shows this.) However, the question arises how one should take that violation of friendship seriously – assuming, that is, that the friendship still holds, is still important, but has been violated. First of all, one might take various courses of prudential action, in order to protect one's own feelings, say, or to stop wasting any more time in the relationship. On those grounds they might withdraw from the relationship or break it off. However, I am interested in something different. As I have said before, I am interested in behaviour that is not forward-looking, but rather is constitutive of taking the violation of friendship seriously. And here the thought is that one wants to do something that prevents one acquiescing in or condoning what the other person has done. One wants to resist the claim, implicit in the violation, that these are the terms on which the friendship might proceed. My claim is that the basic retributive intuition is that one should not simply remain on good terms with the person because that would be to imply that one went along with their way of behaving. If one has that intuition, there is a question how one should show one's non-acquiescence. One might confront the person, explaining to them why one feels that their behaviour was beyond what is reasonable. However, I think that it will also be the case that, until the person has accepted the justice of your complaint, you will also find it necessary to alter the terms of the relationship with the person, and will do so by withdrawing some of the "marks of recognition" that you would have given the person otherwise. Hence the thought that moral disapproval expresses itself essentially in a withdrawal of goodwill or recognition. One withdraws from the relationship, partially and temporarily, not in order to protect oneself or save one's precious time, but rather because to treat the person as if nothing had happened would be to condone or acquiesce in the violation of the relationship. Therefore the terms of the relationship have to alter. It is important also to distinguish this backward-looking expressive behaviour from forward-looking communicative behaviour. The point is not that one wants to communicate one's disapproval to the offender. For if this was the case the question would arise whether withdrawal of recognition was the best way to communicate disapproval: it would become a contingent question. Whereas the question of the fittingness of withdrawal behaviour has rather to do with the non-contingent matter of whether it does justice to the gravity of the wrongdoing. Blame is therefore not essentially communicative, but rather forms part of that large realm of expressive behaviour that is often neglected by moral philosophers, such as saying sorry, expressing gratitude, mourning, expressing joy, and so on. In this realm the standards of "getting it right" are akin to aesthetic standards; they have to do with whether the behaviour does justice to the situation, or captures it. It is not a forward-looking aim. 80 Christopher Bennett When one is oneself the offender, what happens if one accepts the disapproval of others and takes their part? If my story is correct, one will withdraw recognition from oneself. One will feel it impossible to be on good terms with oneself and give oneself the usual respect and good treatment. One way in which this will come out is the feeling of guilt which, as a number of writers have acknowledged, is a feeling of self-alienation, or selfsplitting. But this analysis also explains why the guilty person might feel compelled to undergo something penitential. The meaning of penance derives from the fact that one cannot be on good terms with oneself and will have to treat oneself less well until the offence has been dealt with. What this will actually involve in any particular instance is a large question, but it seems an observable fact about the phenomenology of moral experience that we judge the sincerity of a person's remorse by their unwillingness to look for the normal benefits that accompany a good life, in a manner proportionate to their understanding of the seriousness of their wrong. All this suggests, then, that the imposition of penitential amends is an appropriate symbolisation of "how sorry one ought to be": a certain amount of amends is what the "virtuous offender" would feel compelled to make in a situation of wrongdoing. IV. THE "RIGHT TO BE PUNISHED" ARGUMENT The argument so far has been that, with respect to interpersonal relationships, taking violations of the demands of a relationship seriously requires blame (withdrawal) and hence penance on the part of the offender; and that, with respect to the decent state, taking "public wrongs" seriously requires imposing penitential amends, in order to appropriately symbolise the necessary condemnation of the offence. But the retributive responses in which I am interested could also be seen as a way of taking the wrongdoer seriously, since seeing the action as an offence involves seeing it as the action of an agent bound by certain demands. The Penance Argument makes it clear that, in blaming, the offender is seen as a member of that relationship that has been violated. The argument therefore claims, contrary to many of the common criticisms of retributivism, that retributive responses can be inclusive – and, indeed, necessary for inclusion. That is the truth I claim can be found in the seemingly strange idea of the "right to be punished". I now want to explain how this argument can be defended against two objections. The first objection is what in the book I call the "sceptical argument from luck". It states that, since control is a necessary condition of true moral responsibility, the fact that we are not ultimately in control of what we do (because what we do is conditioned by who we are and how we think, and we are not ultimately in control of that) means that we are not ultimately morally Précis of The Apology Ritual 81 responsible, and that it is therefore unfair to blame anyone for wrong actions. One way to see what is wrong with this challenge is to ask how we should treat offenders (or "offenders") if the conclusion of the argument were to be accepted. One possibility would be that we should, as far as possible, simply accommodate disruptive behaviour, as we might accommodate the disruptive behaviour of someone with Tourette's Syndrome; and that insofar as we cannot accommodate or tolerate it, we should take minimally harmful steps to protect ourselves against it. This is, indeed, to deal with "wrongdoing" as if it is analogous to a condition such as Tourette's. The problem with this analogy is that it denies that we have an important form of freedom, and hence that we are free in respect of wrongdoing in a way that the Tourette's sufferer is not in control of his shouting and swearing. The crucial difference between the Tourette's case and that of the wrongdoer is that the person who does wrong does so because he thinks that it is all right to act in that way. Why is that a morally critical distinction? Because one might think that one is free in the sense that one has the ability, if one thinks about it well enough and imaginatively enough, a) to recognise that some acts are impermissible or intolerable, and b) to conform one's behaviour to what one thus recognises. What this ability amounts to can be seen if we look at our engagement in the practice of shared inquiry. Shared inquiry rests on the assumption that our conclusions can be guided by considerations that we can recognise in common. Only a person who is responsive to relevant considerations when they are put to her can seriously be engaged by others in a shared inquiry. Furthermore the practice of shared inquiry into practical matters of what to do and feel is so essential to social interaction that the denial of freedom in this sense would limit one's life chances severely. Therefore being treated as free in this sense – and hence responsible in the sense that one can be called to account for one's beliefs and actions and expected to recognise relevant considerations counting for and against acting that way – is an important form of inclusion and one that, when one has it, should be affirmed and recognised. The analogy between the Tourette's sufferer and the wrongdoer threatens to overlook the importance of this distinction. We have now sketched the answer to the first objection. However, the second objection arises immediately from the response to the first. Let's say we grant that it is important to treat the agent as free in the sense that she can engage in shared inquiry. In that respect we might draw the conclusion that a given agent has the "right to be treated as one who can appropriately be held to account." But it does not give us a "right to be punished." Rather it suggests a non-retributive response to wrongdoing, which is that we engage the wrongdoer in dialogue about why what she did was wrong, aiming to get her to engage imaginatively with the considerations that count against acting as she did. It is not clear why the inclusion of the offender in an important 82 Christopher Bennett form of social interaction requires that she be subjected to retributive reactions such as blame and withdrawal. The response to this objection draws a distinction between being an agent who can be engaged in a practice of shared inquiry, and who is therefore capable of learning and adjusting their behaviour to what they learn, and an agent who is an independently functioning member of a particular relationship, capable by himself of recognising his responsibilities and conforming with them. Thus in the book I distinguish between those who, with respect to the responsibilities of a particular relationship, are apprentices (who are capable of learning but need guidance), and those who are qualified practitioners (who can reasonably be expected to function independently). My claim is that the symbolism of withdrawal is appropriate for qualified practitioners, but not for apprentices, and that entering into dialogue about the wrong with qualified practitioners and without the symbolism of withdrawal is inappropriate since it doesn't recognise that, even if the agent acted as he did through a failure in imagination or moral understanding, the qualified practitioner has a responsibility to take the necessary steps to full recognition of his responsibilities himself. If he needs guidance then it is up to him to seek guidance; therefore if he fails to seek guidance and thence does wrong, the wrong is a failure to do something that it was his responsibility to do. My interest is therefore in the importance within social interaction of our being treated as qualified practitioners, and hence as independently – without guidance or intervention from others – capable of recognising what, in a given situation or relationship, can reasonably and justifiably be expected of us. My view rests on the claim that a) it is hugely important to be recognised, with respect to at least some areas of our lives, as qualified practitioners, since those who are not so qualified are not given the same liberty, privacy, and room for individuality and creativity, as those who are; and b) that when a qualified practitioner does wrong, they are in the position of being a member of a relationship whose basic terms they have violated, and the appropriate way to respond to that, in order not to accept or condone or acquiesce in it, is to withdraw (partially and temporarily) the marks of recognition that would normally go with membership of that relationship. That is the kernel of truth in the "right to be punished".* Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield 45 Victoria Street Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] Précis of The Apology Ritual 83 NOTES * I am very grateful to the NOMOS network for giving me the opportunity to stage a symposium on my book The Apology Ritual. I would like to thank the organisers of the symposium at the University of Valencia, particularly Josep Corbí and Edgar Maraguat. I would also like to thank Luis Valdés for his help in organising the publication of these papers in teorema. REFERENCES DUFF, R. A (2001), Punishment, Communication and Community, Oxford: Oxford University Press. FEINBERG, J. (1974), "The Expressive Function of Punishment", in Doing and Deserving, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 95-118. MARGALIT, A. (1998), The Decent Society, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 84-94 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 84-94] Resumen de The Apology Ritual Christopher Bennett ABSTRACT In this paper I summarise the main arguments of my book The Apology Ritual. I draw attention to three main lines of argument, taking them in reverse order to that in which they appear in the book. First, I look at the book's communicative-expressive justification of state punishment. Secondly, I look at the argument for the claim that feeling properly sorry involves a requirement to undertake some sort of penance. And thirdly, I look at the argument for the "right to be punished": as I interpret it, that there is an important status associated with being treated as a responsible agent. KEYWORDS: Punishment; Criminal Justice; Retribution; Emotion; Responsibility; Penance. RESUMEN En este trabajo resumo los argumentos principales de mi libro The Apology Ritual. Llamo la atención sobre tres líneas principales de argumentación, tomándolas en un orden inverso al de su aparición en el libro. Primero dirijo la mirada a la justificación expresivo-comunicativa del castigo por parte del estado que ofrece el libro. En segundo lugar, considero el argumento a favor de la afirmación de que sentirse verdaderamente arrepentido trae consigo la exigencia de que se asuma algún tipo de penitencia. Y, en tercer lugar, me ocupo del argumento a favor del "derecho a ser castigado" tal y como lo interpreto, según el cual hay un estatuto importante asociado a que uno sea tratado como un agente responsable. PALABRAS CLAVE: castigo; justicia penal; retribución; emoción; responsabilidad; penitencia. I. INTRODUCCIÓN Y PANORAMA En esta pieza introductoria me gustaría destacar tres de los argumentos principales de The Apology Ritual [C. Bennett, The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2008]. Empezaré por el final del libro, con la esperanza de, por así decir, arrojar alguna nueva luz sobre los asuntos que el libro abarca. El libro acaba con una 84 Précis de The Apology Ritual 85 teoría del castigo por parte del estado que en ciertos aspectos clave es retrospectiva o retributiva. Esto quiere decir que defiende una justificación para infligir algún tipo de revés al delincuente (offender) por su delito, según la cual esa respuesta hace justicia a aquello que el delicuente ha hecho y no se puede decir que produce en la misma medida un bien ulterior. Sin embargo, el argumento a favor del castigo por parte del estado se supone que evita los escollos con los que tropiezan formas más básicas de la teoría retribucionista de la pena, basadas en la idea pura y dura y poco atractiva de que los delincuentes merecen sufrir. El argumento de The Apology Ritual considera que el propósito más importante del castigo por parte del estado es la condena proporcionada de las malas acciones (wrongs) morales –o, al menos, de las malas acciones morales que son asunto de la colectividad (para las que Duff [Duff (2001)] se ha apropiado del término "malas acciones públicas (public wrongs)"). Y, para explicar por qué la condena tiene que involucrar una pena, se apoya en el paralelismo que hay entre la pena y esas reacciones retributivas que parecen apropiadas en las interacciones interpersonales. De ahí que vaya a revisar los argumentos del libro empezando por el final y desandando algunos de los pasos con los que mi conclusión me compromete. Luego mostraré cómo trato de defender esos compromisos examinando el paralelismo con las interacciones interpersonales. Así pues, los argumentos a los que prestaremos atención aquí son: 1) el Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa; 2) el Argumento de la Penitencia; y 3) el Argumento del Derecho a Ser Castigado. Pero antes de entrar en el detalle de estos argumentos podría servir de ayuda que proporcionara brevemente una visión de conjunto del modo en que los tres encajan entre sí. El Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa intenta establecer que un estado que es como debe ser (decent) necesita de una institución reprobatoria, y que semejante institución tendrá que ser retributiva hasta el punto de a) imponer sufrimientos y b) derivar la justificación para hacerlo de la necesidad de tomarse el delito en serio. Una objeción clave a la que tienen que hacer frente las teorías reprobatorias de la pena –por ejemplo, en el trabajo clásico de Joel Feinberg [Feinberg (1974)]– es la exigencia de que se explique por qué, siendo la condena del delito necesaria, no se podría aplicar verbal o simbólicamente. ¿Cómo evita el argumento de que el sufrimiento es necesario una recaída en formas más básicas de retribucionismo? El argumento a favor de (a) en The Apology Ritual no sigue la vía retribucionista común de volver la mirada hacia el modo en que algo parecido a la indignación ante un delito nos hace querer infligir daño a los delincuentes. Más bien deriva del hecho de que una respuesta apropiada al delito de parte del delincuente involucrará la aceptación voluntaria de alguna carga a modo de reparación. Por tanto, necesitamos de algo parecido al Argumento de la Penitencia para explicar por qué las reparaciones de tipo penitencial proporcionales al delito son una parte necesaria de la respuesta apropiada a ese delito. El Argumento de la Penitencia 86 Christopher Bennett tiene que explicar por qué una respuesta a los delincuentes que no involucrara tratarlos de cierto modo para hacerle justicia al delito (tal y como lo sería la comunicación puramente verbal o simbólica de una condena) fracasaría a la hora de tomarse en serio al delincuente y el delito. Finalmente, el Argumento de la Penitencia supone que la exigencia de penitencia es obligatoria para el delincuente. Pero esto implica cierta concepción de la identidad y la responsabilidad, así que necesitamos un argumento que explicite esa visión y la defienda contra algunas de las preocupaciones que los filósofos han expresado tradicionalmente a propósito de la responsabilidad moral. Éste es el papel del Argumento del Derecho a Ser Castigado, cuya conclusión es que estamos obligados para con los delincuentes a hacerlos responsables, y esto sobre la base de que hacerlo es constitutivo de tratarlos como miembros capaces y funcionalmente independientes de una relación. II. EL ARGUMENTO DEL RITUAL DE LA DISCULPA Un modo de motivar intuiciones cuando tratamos de cuestiones como la de la justificación de la pena es intentar situarse uno mismo, imaginariamente, en una sociedad en la que la institución por la que nos interesamos no existe y preguntarnos, entonces, si habría necesidad de una institución tal. Así pues, si no existiera la pena, ¿necesitaríamos inventarla? La razón para ensayar este experimento mental no es tanto que [después de hacerlo] estaremos en condiciones de afirmar la necesidad racional, para todo tipo de sociedad humana, de la institución de la pena, no digamos ya de decir algo sobre su génesis histórica real. Más bien, se espera que el experimento mental ilumine el lugar de la institución de la pena en el conjunto de nuestros valores y nuestra comprensión de nosotros mismos. Por ejemplo, un modo de justificar la pena consistiría en mostrar que, a pesar de lo poco atractiva y desagradable que la pena puede ser, es de hecho una parte necesaria de otra cosa que es buena en un sentido menos controvertido. Si la pena fuera realmente una parte necesaria de ese bien, entonces la apariencia de falta de atractivo podría conjurarse. Pero tal concepción podría ayudarnos además a comprender mejor para qué existe la pena y, por tanto, a entender cómo podríamos mejorarla, no tentados ya por otras concepciones, rivales pero falsas, de su función. A la vista del panorama ofrecido en la primera sección, podría resultar ya obvio que la estrategia para la justificación de la pena adoptada en The Apology Ritual es afirmar que la pena es necesaria con vistas a tomar el delito seriamente. Tomarse el delito seriamente es algo que mucha gente estará de acuerdo en que es un fin importante. Por consiguiente, si la pena es necesaria para hacerlo, si la ausencia de pena significa, en algún sentido, que el delito es tolerado, entonces podríamos entender que la pena está, hasta ese punto, justificada. (Vale la pena señalar aquí que la misma estrategia atraviesa todo Précis de The Apology Ritual 87 el libro: los Argumentos de la Penitencia y del Derecho a Ser Castigado vendrán también a descansar sobre la concepción de en qué consiste responder al delito del hombre de un modo que sea moralmente serio). Empecemos, pues, por la noción de sociedad que es como debe ser (decent). No utilizo 'decent' como si fuera un término técnico, como ocurre en la concepción de Margalit de una sociedad que permite a los ciudadanos vivir libres de humillaciones [Margalit (1998)]. Tengo en mente, simplemente, una afirmación que espero que no sea controvertida: que una sociedad que es como debe ser es una sociedad que no respaldará, o que no tolerará, que los ciudadanos hagan ciertas cosas. Una sociedad así es tal que está organizada de acuerdo con ciertos valores, y una concepción razonable de esos valores se extiende por la vida de los ciudadanos (y no sólo de sus ciudadanos), a su entorno, a las instituciones comunes de la sociedad, a las vidas de generaciones futuras, etcétera. Pues bien, puesto que son los ciudadanos mismos quienes tienen que ser los agentes de la promoción y el respeto de estos valores, se sigue que una sociedad que tiene valores debe sostener que los ciudadanos no deberían actuar de ciertos modos: sostendrá que los ciudadanos tienen responsabilidades. Imaginemos ahora una sociedad en la que no existe un sistema de justicia penal de ningún tipo, y con ello me refiero a un mecanismo por el que la sociedad emprende colectivamente acciones contra quien conculca sus responsabilidades. La diferencia entre nuestra sociedad y esa sociedad alternativa es que en la alternativa la sociedad no hace nada para señalar tal acción como inadmisible o intolerable. En semejante sociedad podría ser correcto decir que los ciudadanos tienen esas responsabilidades, pero no se puede decir que la sociedad es tal que, colectivamente, se toma en serio esas responsabilidades. En cualquier caso, esa sociedad no considera que sus ciudadanos estén sujetos a esas responsabilidades. Si la sociedad no hace nada para señalar las acciones como inadmisibles o intolerables, es difícil ver cómo se puede decir que la sociedad considera que esas responsabilidades son vinculantes. Dicho de otro modo, una sociedad que es como debe de ser tiene que condenar esos actos intolerables. Esto funciona por ahora como argumento a favor de que un estado que se posiciona con respecto a ciertos valores tiene necesidad de una institución de censura: una institución que marque ciertos actos como extralimitaciones. La cuestión ahora es si la pena es necesaria para que esa censura tenga lugar. El argumento a favor de esto parte de la observación de que, para que un acto sea un acto de condena, tiene que satisfacer ciertas condiciones, una de las cuales es que debe ser adecuado simbólicamente. Como una oración bien formada, tiene que adoptar cierta forma con vistas a tener un significado condenatorio. Pues bien, si esto se acepta, la siguiente cuestión que se plantea es dónde se pueden encontrar los símbolos relevantes. La contestación que el Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa ofrece es que el simbolismo de la condena tendrá que conectar de alguna manera la condena del delito por parte del estado con el modo en que reaccionamos ante el delito en la vida cotidiana. 88 Christopher Bennett Nuestras expectativas intuitivas sobre las reacciones ante el delito están inextricablemente vinculadas a las prácticas de tratar con delitos en las que participamos una y otra vez en la vida interpersonal. Así pues, con vistas a dar con el simbolismo que expresará la condena, hemos de considerar el comportamiento emocional que rodea al delito en situaciones que no son competencia del estado. Esto ha de dirigir nuestra atención hacia el espectro de emociones que experimentamos hacia quienes delinquen. Por supuesto, no deberíamos dejar de ser críticos cuando recurrimos a las emociones. Algunas emociones son mezquinas, no generosas, maliciosas, egoístas, etcétera. Pero algunas emociones, podría ser, pueden sobrevivir a la reflexión crítica. Es a esas emociones a las que queremos recurrir. La reflexión crítica sobre las emociones considerará a) cómo la emoción retrata al delincuente, y si es compatible con el punto de vista que estamos considerando, y b) cuál es una repuesta emocional proporcionada a la situación. La idea es que, así, llegaremos a tener una visión sobre cuál sería una respuesta emocional proporcionada y apropiada, y buscar entonces un modo de reproducirla en la pena. Un modo de hacer esto sería argumentar que emociones como la censura y la indignación nos conducen a atacar al delincuente y a causarle sufrimientos y que, en este sentido, esas emociones son directamente análogas a la pena. Sin embargo, no está en absoluto claro que censurar pueda conducir justificadamente a tales respuestas agresivas. La censura, desde mi punto de vista, se caracteriza más por un rechazo del delincuente que por causar activamente sufrimiento. Mi enfoque consiste más bien en argumentar que deberíamos contemplar la reacción que pensamos que el delincuente debería tener ante el delito. La auto-censura, o la culpa, razono, conduce a la acción penitencial; y aunque la acción penitencial rebase a menudo la proporcionalidad, tenemos un sentido bastante determinado de cómo la disposición de una persona a llevar a cabo una reparación debe corresponder a la seriedad de su infracción (de modo que una oferta de reparaciones insuficientes puede agregar sal a la herida, al mostrar que el delincuente no ha logrado captar la seriedad de lo que ha hecho). Con otras palabras, la persona genuinamente arrepentida estará motivada a hacer algo para compensar el delito. Y es este hecho el que nos proporciona el simbolismo para expresar una condena proporcionada. Al imponer cierto nivel de reparaciones al delincuente expresamos condena de un modo simbólicamente adecuado: condenamos el mal causado como algo que tiene cierta gravedad al expresar cuán apenado debería estar el delincuente por lo que ha hecho. Puesto que el papel del estado es simplemente el de expresar censura, no es esencial para el éxito de la pena que el delincuente haga la reparación de modo voluntario. El papel del estado es puramente el de expresar censura, y no está claro que tenga el de asegurar que el delincuente se sienta verdaderamente culpable. Por eso, el proceso de reparación es tal que el delincuente puede participar de un modo puramente ritual, sin las motivaciones corresPrécis de The Apology Ritual 89 pondientes. Semejante escenario no sería el ideal; pero no impediría que el estado hubiera expresado la debida condena del acto. El Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa suscita varias cuestiones, por supuesto. Una en la que me quiero concentrar ahora es la cuestión crucial de por qué un delincuente que se siente propiamente apenado por lo que ha hecho debería estar motivado para actuar penitencialmente. Esto es importante, porque no es suficiente para el Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa que la conexión entre haber actuado mal y la reparación sea ampliamente aceptada, o que mucha gente la acepte. Tal cosa podría bastar si el objeto de la pena fuera que la gente se diera cuenta de que el estado no aprueba una acción, comunicar desaprobación: si ese fuere su objeto, el estado debería usar cualquier símbolo empleado por la gente. Pero el Argumento del Ritual de la Disculpa es más ambicioso, pues sostiene que, con respecto a algunas acciones muy serias, los actos que constituyen la condena son necesarios, porque no condenar vendría a ser condescender con el delito. Por lo tanto, los símbolos usados para condenar han de ser, no los que sucede que están en uso, sino los que nos disocian efectivamente del daño realizado. La acción penitencial parece aquí una buena candidata; en todo caso, quienes emprenden tal acción la experimentan como un modo de disociarse de su acción previa. Ahora bien, la cuestión es: ¿tienen derecho a experimentarla de ese modo? Y para contestarla, necesitamos del Argumento de la Penitencia. III. EL ARGUMENTO DE LA PENITENCIA El Argumento de la Penitencia establece que la penitencia consiste en que el delincuente retira la buena voluntad con que se trata a sí mismo. Descansa sobre la explicación de por qué la retracción es una reacción apropiada hacia el que delinque; y luego ve la penitencia como una interiorización de esta reacción. La penitencia tiene lugar cuando el delincuente acepta la censura. El argumento en defensa de esta concepción parte de una afirmación sobre las relaciones: a) que son valiosas en el sentido de que las consideramos parte de lo que hace nuestras vidas buenas y dignas de ser vividas, y b) que están estructuradas, parcialmente, por la sujeción a ciertas responsabilidades. Contempla lo que está implicado en estar incluido en tales relaciones. Cuando uno está incluido por otros en una cierta relación, sostengo, es tratado de maneras que lo distinguen como miembro de la relación. Algunas de estas formas de 'trato especial' o 'reconocimiento' son cosas tales como saludos, preocupación por el bienestar de uno, ciertos tipos de atención y de afecto, etc., por medio de los cuales la gente afirma su participación común en una relación que es considerada un lazo importante. Pero otras señales de reconocimiento tienen que ver con que se demanda que se cumpla con los deberes que son parte de la relación, o que uno se involucre en actividades 90 Christopher Bennett que trae consigo la relación. La amistad es un buen ejemplo de esto. Ser el amigo de alguien pasa por reconocer que existe algo así como ser un buen amigo de alguien. Esto significa que hay ciertos estándares o responsabilidades para con la relación, estándares cuya satisfacción es constitutiva de la participación en la relación. Si uno se desentiende totalmente de esos estándares, y si las personas implicadas no tienen derecho alguno sobre tu tiempo y atención que las distinga como personas que mantienen cierta relación contigo, entonces no está claro que la relación exista realmente. Así pues, la primera premisa del argumento es que hay señales de 'reconocimiento', formas distintivas de trato que se le otorgan a uno cuando participa en cierta relación. Ahora bien, entre los extremos de quien es verdaderamente un buen amigo y quien no es un amigo en absoluto hay una gran área gris en la que se decide la cuestión de qué pueden los amigos exigir razonablemente. La parte de este continuo por la que me intereso es aquella en que una persona a) conculca los estándares básicos a los que está sujeto lo que puede esperarse razonablemente de ella en el contexto de la relación, pero b) sin por ello dejar de mantener esa relación. En tal caso, no ocurre que (literalmente) esa persona no sea amiga en absoluto – después de todo, está todavía sujeta a las exigencias de la relación. (El hecho de que las exigencias de esa relación todavía la interpelen es una muestra de ello). Sin embargo, la cuestión que se suscita es cómo se debería tomar en serio la violación de la amistad – dando por supuesto que la amistad subsiste, que es importante todavía, pero que ha sido quebrantada. Antes que nada, se podrían adoptar diversas medidas de prudencia con vistas a, digamos, proteger los propios sentimientos, o a dejar de perder el tiempo en esa relación. Sobre esta base, uno podría renunciar a la relación o interrumpirla. No obstante, me intereso por otra cosa. Como he dicho, me interesa el comportamiento que no mira hacia delante, sino que es constitutivo del tomarse en serio la violación de la amistad. Y lo que se piensa aquí es que uno quiere hacer algo que evite la condescendencia con, o la convalidación, de lo que ha hecho la otra persona. Uno quiere ofrecer resistencia a la pretensión, implícita en la violación, de que estos sean los términos en los que podría continuar la amistad. Mi postura es que la intuición retributiva básica es que uno no debería sin más mantenerse en buenos términos con la persona, porque eso implicaría que uno consiente ese modo de comportarse. Si se tiene esa intuición, se plantea la pregunta por cómo uno debería mostrar su propia intolerancia. Podría enfrentarse a esa persona, explicarle por qué uno siente que su comportamiento ha traspasado los límites de lo razonable. Sin embargo, creo que también ocurrirá que hasta que la otra persona haya aceptado la justicia de nuestra queja nos parecerá necesario alterar los términos de la relación con ella, y lo haremos retirando algunas de las 'señales de reconocimiento' que de lo contrario le concederíamos. De ahí que se piense que la desaprobación moral se expresa esencialmente por la retirada de la buena voluntad o el reconocimiento. Uno se aparta de la relación, parcial y temporalmente, no con vistas a protegerPrécis de The Apology Ritual 91 se o a ahorrarse un tiempo precioso, sino más bien porque tratar a esa persona como si nada hubiera ocurrido sería condonar o tolerar la violación de la relación. Por lo tanto, los términos de la relación han de cambiar. También es importante distinguir este comportamiento expresivo que mira hacia atrás del comportamiento comunicativo que mira hacia delante. El asunto no es que uno quiera comunicar la propia desaprobación a quien comete un delito. Pues si ése fuera el caso, se plantearía la pregunta de si la retirada del reconocimiento era la mejor manera de comunicar la desaprobación: eso se convertiría en una cuestión contingente, mientras que la cuestión de la oportunidad de la retracción tiene más bien que ver con la cuestión no contingente de si hace justicia a la gravedad del delito. La censura no es, por tanto, esencialmente comunicativa, sino que forma parte más bien de un amplio espacio de comportamiento expresivo que es con frecuencia olvidado por los filósofos morales e incluye la expresión de disculpas, la expresión de gratitud, los lamentos, la expresión de gozo, etcétera. En este espacio los estándares de 'corrección' están emparentados con los estándares estéticos; tienen que ver con si el comportamiento le hace justicia a la situación o la 'capta'. Este comportamiento no tiene un propósito prospectivo. Si uno es quien delinque, ¿qué ocurre cuando acepta la desaprobación de otros y se pone en la piel de ellos? Si mi reconstrucción es correcta, él mismo se retirará el reconocimiento. Sentirá que es imposible mantenerse en buenos términos consigo mismo y concederse el respeto y buen trato habitual. Esto puede resultar en un sentimiento de culpa que, como muchos autores han reconocido, es un sentimiento de auto-alienación o auto-escisión. Pero este análisis explica también por qué la persona culpable podría sentirse empujada a soportar algún tipo de penitencia. El significado de la penitencia deriva del hecho de que uno no puede estar en buenos términos consigo mismo y de que tendrá que tratarse peor hasta que se haya resuelto lo que ha hecho. Qué haya de implicar esto, de hecho, en un caso particular es una cuestión muy amplia, pero me parece que es un hecho observable de la fenomenología de la experiencia moral que juzgamos la sinceridad del remordimiento de una persona por la falta de pretensiones con respecto a los beneficios normales que acompañan a la vida buena, de un modo proporcionado a su comprensión de la seriedad de la injusticia. Todo esto sugiere, pues, que la imposición de reparaciones penitenciales simboliza apropiadamente 'cuán apenado se debería estar': una cierta cantidad de reparaciones es lo que el 'infractor virtuoso' debería sentirse forzado a realizar en una situación de delito. IV. EL ARGUMENTO DEL 'DERECHO A SER CASTIGADO' Hasta aquí la argumentación ha sido que, con respecto a las relaciones interpersonales, violar seriamente las exigencias de una relación demanda 92 Christopher Bennett censura (retirada o rechazo) y por tanto penitencia de parte del delincuente; y que, con respecto al estado que es como debe ser, tomarse en serio las 'malas acciones públicas' exige imponer reparaciones penitenciales, con vistas a simbolizar apropiadamente la condena necesaria del delito. Pero las reacciones retributivas en que estoy interesado podrían verse también como modos de tratar al delincuente en serio, ya que considerar una acción como un delito implica que sea vista como la acción de alguien que está sujeto a ciertas obligaciones. El Argumento de la Penitencia deja claro que, al ser censurado, el delincuente es visto como miembro de una relación que ha sido violada. El argumento afirma, por ello, en contra de muchas de las críticas comunes al retribucionismo, que las respuestas retributivas pueden ser incluyentes y que, de hecho, son necesarias para la inclusión. Ésta es la verdad que digo que puede hallarse en la idea aparentemente extraña de un 'derecho a ser castigado'. Quisiera explicar ahora cómo puede defenderse este argumento de dos objeciones. La primera objeción es lo que en el libro denomino 'el argumento escéptico a partir de la suerte'. Dice que, puesto que el control es una condición necesaria de la verdadera responsabilidad moral, el hecho de que no controlemos en última instancia lo que hacemos (porque lo que hacemos está condicionado por lo que somos y cómo pensamos, y no tenemos un control último sobre eso) indica que no somos en última instancia responsables, y que por tanto es moralmente injusto censurar a alguien por sus malas acciones. Un modo de ver en qué falla este cuestionamiento es preguntar cómo deberíamos tratar a los delincuentes (o "delincuentes") si hubiera que aceptar la conclusión del argumento. Una posibilidad sería que tuviéramos simplemente, en la medida de lo posible, que acomodar el comportamiento disruptivo, como hemos de hacer con el comportamiento de quien padece el síndrome de Tourette; y en la medida en que no pudiéramos acomodarlo o tolerarlo, tendríamos que dar los pasos menos gravosos posibles para protegernos de él. Esto es, en efecto, habérselas con el 'delito' como si hubiera una analogía entre él y una condición como la de Tourette. El problema de esta analogía es que niega que tengamos un tipo de libertad importante, que seamos libres con respecto al delito en el sentido preciso en que el paciente de Tourette no lo es respecto del gritar y el maldecir. La diferencia crucial entre el caso Tourette y el del delincuente es que la persona que actúa mal lo hace porque piensa que está bien actuar así. ¿Por qué es esta una distinción moral crítica? Porque uno podría pensar que es libre en el sentido de que tiene la capacidad, si piensa empleando suficiente imaginación y como es debido, de a) reconocer que algunos actos son inaceptables e intolerables, y b) adaptar el propio comportamiento a lo que así se reconoce. Se puede entender lo que significa esta capacidad si observamos nuestra implicación en la práctica de la investigación compartida. La investigación compartida se asienta sobre el supuesto de que nuestras conclusiones pueden guiarse por consideraciones que pueden reconocerse en común. Sólo una persona que responde, cuando se le hacen, a Précis de The Apology Ritual 93 consideraciones relevantes puede participar seriamente con otras en una investigación compartida. Es más, la práctica de la investigación compartida sobre cuestiones prácticas respecto de qué hacer y sentir es tan esencial a la interacción social que la negación de la libertad en este sentido limitaría severamente las oportunidades vitales. Por tanto, ser tratado como libre en este sentido –y por ello como responsable en el sentido de que a uno se le pueden pedir explicaciones por lo que cree y hace y se espera que identifique las consideraciones relevantes a favor y en contra de actuar de cierta manera– es una forma importante de inclusión, una forma que, cuando se disfruta de ella, debería ser afirmada y reconocida. La analogía entre el paciente de Tourette y el delincuente amenaza con pasar por alto la importancia de esta distinción. Con esto he bosquejado una respuesta a la primera objeción. No obstante, la segunda objeción surge inmediatamente de la respuesta a la primera. Aceptemos que concedemos la importancia que tiene que el agente sea tratado como libre en el sentido de que puede participar en una investigación conjunta. En ese sentido, podríamos sacar la conclusión de que un agente dado tiene 'derecho a ser tratado como alguien al que se le puede, apropiadamente, pedir cuentas'. Pero eso no nos proporciona un 'derecho a ser castigados'. Más bien favorece una respuesta no retributiva al delito, que consiste en entablar un diálogo con el delincuente sobre por qué lo que hizo estuvo mal, con la intención de que tome en consideración, con imaginación, ciertas cosas que hablan en contra de lo que hizo. No está claro por qué la inclusión del delincuente en una forma importante de interacción social tendría que requerir que fuera sujeto a reacciones retributivas como la censura y el rechazo. La respuesta a esta objeción traza una distinción entre ser un agente que puede participar en la práctica de la investigación, y es por ello capaz de aprender y ajustar su comportamiento a lo que aprende, y un agente que es un miembro funcionalmente independiente de una relación particular, capaz por sí mismo de reconocer sus responsabilidades y atenerse a ellas. En consecuencia, distingo en el libro entre aquellos que, con respecto a las responsabilidades de una relación particular, son aprendices (quienes son capaces de aprender pero necesitan de guía) y quienes son participantes cualificados (de quienes se puede esperar razonablemente que funcionen independientemente). Mi tesis es que el simbolismo del rechazo es apropiado para los participantes cualificados, pero no para los aprendices, y que entablar un diálogo sobre lo que se ha hecho mal con los participantes cualificados y sin el simbolismo del rechazo es inapropiado, puesto que no reconoce que, incluso cuando el agente actuó como lo hizo por un déficit de imaginación o comprensión moral, el participante cualificado tiene la responsabilidad de dar los pasos necesarios para reconocer plenamente y por sí mismo sus responsabilidades. Si necesita guía, entonces le toca buscarla; por lo tanto, si no la busca y en consecuencia hace algo malo, la maldad obedece a que no hizo algo que era su responsabilidad hacer. 94 Christopher Bennett Mi interés reside, por ello, en la importancia que tiene dentro de la interacción social que seamos tratados como participantes cualificados y, por consiguiente, como seres capaces de reconocer de forma independiente –sin guía ni intervención de otros– qué se puede esperar razonable y justificadamente de nosotros en una situación o relación dada. Mi visión se basa en la afirmación de que a) es enormemente importante ser reconocido como participante cualificado, al menos en relación a algunas áreas de nuestra vida, ya que a quienes no lo son no se les otorga la misma libertad, privacidad y espacio para la individualidad y la creatividad que al resto; y b) que cuando un participante cualificado hace algo mal, está en una situación en la que es miembro de una relación cuyos términos básicos han sido violados, y que el modo apropiado de responder a eso, con vistas a no aceptarlo, condonarlo o tolerarlo, es retirar (parcial y temporalmente) las señales de reconocimiento que acompañarían normalmente la implicación en la relación. Éste es el núcleo de verdad que hay en el 'derecho a ser castigado'. Traducción de EDGAR MARAGUAT Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield 45 Victoria Street Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] NOTAS * Estoy muy agradecido al grupo NOMOS por darme la oportunidad de participar en un simposio sobre mi libro The Apology Ritual. Me gustaría dar las gracias a los organizadores del simposio en la Universitat de València, muy en particular a Josep Corbí y Edgar Maraguat. Querría también dar las gracias a Luis Valdés por su ayuda en la organización de la publicación de estos artículos en teorema. REFERENCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS DUFF, R. A (2001), Punishment, Communication and Community, Oxford: Oxford University Press. FEINBERG, J. (1974), "The Expressive Function of Punishment", in Doing and Deserving, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 95-118. MARGALIT, A. (1998), The Decent Society, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 95-107 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 95-107] Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo RESUMEN El siguiente análisis comparte la defensa de Bennett del retribucionismo y, concretamente, de su versión denunciatoria. El problema es que, para resolver los problemas de estas versiones, Bennett confía en las teorías de la "justicia restauradora", y asume algunos de sus postulados doctrinales. El resultado es una teoría compleja que, tal vez, pueda reconstruir adecuadamente algunas prácticas morales, pero que tropieza con serios problemas de consistencia con la práctica jurídica. PALABRAS CLAVE: castigo, regla, práctica jurídica, retribucionismo, justicia restauradora. ABSTRACT The following comments side with Christopher Bennett's defence of retributivism and his preference for a denunciatory version. Unfortunately, Bennett resorts to the socalled restorative theories as a theoretical complement of this version of retributivism, and borrows from them some important assumptions. The result is a complex theory that could be an accurate reconstruction of some moral practices, but has problems of adequacy regarding some features of legal practice. KEYWORDS: Punishment, Rule, Legal Practice, Retributivism, Restorative Theories. This paper contains an important level of agreement with The Apology Ritual. With regards to the philosophy of punishment I am also a retributivist, and the following ideas do not express a deeply confrontational approach. In coherence with this position, the first part of this essay contains a defence of the main theses of Christopher Bennett's book. After the first section, I will add a second and a third part in which I will make explicit some disagreements with Bennett's position. It is relatively simple to outline the focus of the discrepancy. Bennett sides with a denunciatory version of the retributivist theory, and contributes with a sophisticated reconstruction of this version which apparently overcomes some of its traditional difficulties. This reconstruction borrows some assumptions from the so-called 95 96 Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo restorative theories: the belief that any offender owes a sincere apology to the victim, which involves a disposition to make amends and to restore the relationships that have been damaged by his action. I agree with Bennett that the denunciatory branch of retributivism is partially correct, but also an incomplete explanation of punishment. We need a theoretical supplement to complete this explanation. However, the restorative models are not the best candidate to play this role. Following this outline, the second part of my comments focuses internally on Bennett's answer to the question 'why punish?' I maintain that Bennett's theory could be an accurate reconstruction of some moral practices, but it has problems of adequacy regarding some features of legal practice. In the third part, I focus upon the source of many of the problems of the theory, the unnatural alliance of a retributivist theory with the restorative theories. I. IN PRAISE OF BENNETT'S THEORY A theory of punishment explores basically why, when, and how much we should punish. It is commendable that the book focuses on the first of these questions. In other terms, it does not dissolve the problem 'why punish' in the problem 'when we should punish'. We fall into one of these amalgamating theories when we maintain that the entire reasoning behind any justified punishment of an action is that this action is wrong, so that the real problem of a theory of punishment is to establish a list of moral wrongs.1 However, these theories skip the relatively independent question of what is the legitimacy of the practice of punishment as a whole, regardless of the morality or immorality of any single action that might be classified as a crime by any single criminal law. Bennett is clear and unambiguous on the nature of the theory he pursues: his book is a normative construction and not just a description or an analysis of the existing practices [Bennett (2008), p. 197]. This is again praiseworthy as methodological ambiguities are not uncommon in this subject.2 But, assuming that the author and I agree upon the importance of normative theory, I will seize the chance to highlight one of the attributes of any normative theory. A normative theory must satisfy a dimension of minimal fit with the practice it refers to, and it cannot be incompatible with its necessary elements. We do not construct our theories under the dictates of reality; however neither do we write them on a completely blank paper. The aim of this warning is not to deny the aspiration to bind within our normative theory all the positive legal practices. I concur with Bennett that legal practice is a moral practice [Bennett (2008), p. 166]. However, we should also admit that legal practice is a peculiar moral practice and, if we suggest a moral justification of punitive practice, it must be a theory fitting with these peculiarities. Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory 97 If the issue of minimal fitness is problematic for Bennett's theory it will be addressed throughout this commentary. But, for the time being, my conclusion is that this particular issue plays an important role in his favour. More specifically, the general description of legal practice fits very well with Bennett's strategies to reject scepticism and instrumentalism, for which he displays solid and convincing arguments.3 Ruling out scepticism, I also support the dedicated search for a moral justification of legal punishment. The book does not consist in a purely definitional strategy reduced to an analysis of general legal concepts. Moral strategy is necessary because law is basically a moral practice. But it is also necessary because we cannot make a purely legal theory of punishment without being involved in a vicious circle: in this case, we would probably define 'punishment' appealing to the notion of 'crime' or 'offence';4 but, if we want to define 'crime' or 'offence' in purely legal terms, it would probably be unavoidable to resort to the concept of punishment [Kelsen (1960), p. 114]. And ruling out instrumentalism, my following comments regard retributivism. Bennett considers generally two retributivist roads of moral justification: firstly that punishment is based on the principles of fairness and secondly that punishment is conceived as an expression of our disapproval, reprobation or reproach for the moral wrong contained in the crime. Basically, he rejects the first road, and assumes that the moral answer to the question 'why punish?' must come from the second branch of retributivism, from a denunciatory theory of punishment.5 Denunciatory theories have traditionally been objected to for several reasons. Bennett focuses on the most important criticism:6 that these theories may explain why we express moral disapproval, condemnation, resentment... but the question 'why punish?' still remains. Does moral denunciation really demand the imposition of pain and suffering?7 There seems to be here a logical gap that should be filled with an additional justification which would inevitably be more urgent in legal punishments. Answers to this thorny question have many times been disappointing.8 Bennett openly faces this challenge, and we will now consider if his accomplishments provide a convincing answer. II. BENNETT'S RETRIBUTIVIST PROPOSAL For a legal philosopher, a good reason to enjoy Bennett's work is that it is easy to detect in its pages many echoes of some of the most important debates of contemporary jurisprudence. Firstly, Bennett's strategy to justify punishment is an analysis of moral rules and practices constructed from the point of view of their participants, driven to grasp what he calls the 'normative expectations' of the participants 98 Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo in an offence. This method reminds us of the analysis from the internal, hermeneutical point of view suggested by Hart to understand what sharing a social rule means. Following Bennett and Hart, we would say that, if we participate together in a moral practice under important moral rules, and if you break one of these rules, 'I do necessarily disapprove of your doing (If I don't disapprove, it turns out that I don't adhere to that standard)' [MacCormick (2008), p. 168],9 and, if I really respect you as a moral agent with which I share the moral practice, I will have to express my condemnation, and to expect from you some feelings of blame, guilt and, finally, the acceptance of punishment as a justified response. Secondly, Bennett's representation of the practice of punishment fits perfectly with one of the main claims of Ronald Dworkin's legal theory: that we have to portray any legal or moral practice in its best light. If we are going to reconstruct a social practice like the practice of punishment, we cannot simply focus on the empirical routines or the daily habits of most of the participants; we have to start putting in order the main principles and values that inspire it [Dworkin (1986), p. 52]. Bennett therefore attempts to draw on good examples of moral practice. We could define these examples as practices where the participants sincerely aspire to fulfil and satisfy the moral demands and expectations of the practice. Focusing on the best examples of punitive practices and its moral demands, Bennett concludes that the moral way of dealing with an offender is not by teaching him values or criticising morally his behaviour, which would offend his autonomy and full membership: it is by condemning him and demanding that he makes amends. On the other hand, a moral participant cannot simply accept his degradation in the practice; the moral way of redeeming himself is by saying sorry [Bennett (2008), p. 110]. And, when an apology is sincere, it expresses suffering, and involves a disposition or an expectancy of receiving it, which is equivalent to the acceptance of 'making some amends'. That is why our practice of punishing can be morally justified: this practice is justified because it represents or symbolizes this virtuous performance of our moral practices. It is useless to reply that most of our criminals do not intend to say sincerely sorry, or to object that, by presuming apologies or urges of redemption, we are taking for granted a strong moral consensus which is far from our contemporary pluralistic societies, where we do not appreciate social denunciation of all the crimes [Nino (1980), p. 277]. We reconstruct a theory of punishment from a virtuous example of moral practice, one that works out correctly the principles, demands and expectations that inspire it. The result is a normative procedure, a protocol or a ritual of imposing punishments that perfectly represents these principles, demands and expectations. Bennett's theory is not constructed from the point of view of the victim, because it does not forget the offender.10 However, it is not made either from the point of view of the 'bad man': it is made from the point of view of a real moral agent in a moral Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory 99 practice that, in the case of the offender, is named the 'virtuous offender' [Bennett (2008), p. 177]. I will start precisely with this point of view of the virtuous offender to challenge the adequacy of the theory in the legal domain. This model assumes in the offender not just the expression of a claim of forgiveness; if an apology is morally sincere, it must be the result of an internal attitude including an acknowledgment of the wrongness of the behaviour and some sincere states of shame, guilt and affliction. The virtuous offender does not only do the right thing (to express an apology): he does it from the right psychological impulses. The problem is that, as it is remarked from Kant, law is only concerned with the forum externum, and not with the forum internum [Kant (1907-1914), p. 214].11 To obey a legal rule is related to external actions, and it does not include conditions such as the performance for the right reasons, or the personal adherence to the content of the rule. Sensu contrario, it does not require from the offender to recognize that he made a wrong action, or the mental states of guilt, shame... basically, we cannot construct a fitting theory of punishment on the presupposition of a sincere apology. Any theory dependent on internal states does not fit with the fact that many of our criminals are unable to satisfy these internal conditions. It could be replied that Bennett's theory is a normative theory constructed from what we demand morally each other, and we would not treat the offenders morally if we would not expect and demand from them these attitudes. But the answer is that legal practice cannot and actually does not demand these attitudes, and it does enough to respect citizens as moral agents just by demanding an external action of conformity and punishing them when this action is not performed. Two illustrations could show that legal practice cannot either expect or demand these internal attitudes. The first one is the offender we could define as recalcitrant or incorrigible: it is not that he wrongly abstains from showing the required feelings; he is in fact unable to show them, and it is unlikely to presume them. The second is clearer, and consists in cases where we can detect an incompatibility between the morally virtuous offender – from whom Bennett constructs his theory – and obedience to law. As we know, we live in very pluralistic societies respecting morality and conceptions of the good, so that our laws are in a substantial part a kind of overlapping consensus called for many authors a merely 'political' consensus. It is not an exceptional case – on the contrary, as our pluralism is deeper and deeper, it is a more and more frequent situation – that there is a serious discontinuity between the personal conception of the moral life and the demands of law.12 Of course, I am not suggesting that all these individuals make a good exercise of practical reason by disobeying law; the only implication is that we cannot likely expect or demand from them sincere feelings of shame, guilt or sincere claims of apology. It could be true for many people that our emotional attachments are deeper respecting the public political values than the conceptions of the good 100 Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo life, but I do not think we can generalize this assumption, and to construct a theory around it. Even in the most ideal of the contexts, you cannot expect or represent a sincere apology from a doctor that, for moral reasons, practices an abortion where it is a crime, or vice versa, or from an objector of conscience, or from a civil disobedient, or from any case belonging to the growing package of conflicts between law and moral conception of the good.13 Leaving aside the problems of elementary fitness with our legal practice, the complex framework of internal feelings and mental dispositions involves the theory in some ambiguities and conflicts that could have been avoided in a more economical model. Bennett says emphatically that his theory does not pursue the offender's repentance as a psychological fact. More specifically, he says that his theory does not look for repentance because it is not a 'communicative' theory, a message to the offender in order that he can understand the reasons of the punishment and adopt the proper attitudes: it is simply an 'expressive' theory in which we try to represent the right terms of the relationship between state and offender. Bennett's precautions with the concept of repentance are explainable: some authors, even retributivists, hesitate to punish the repented offender,14 and some others, because they link clearly 'punishment' to 'external imposition', consider that the central model of punishment does not involve the cases where there is repentance and voluntary disposition to make amends.15 However, we heard before that Bennett's theory represents what he called the normative expectations and the emotional structure derived from the wrongdoing considering the virtuous participants in moral practice. If one of my normative expectations is that you should say sorry, why should a theory of punishment dispense with repentance? Which would in this case be the role played by the 'virtuous' offender? We know that often it is not realistic to expect from the offender a sincere repentance. However, in a theory where the attitudes of blame and apology are contemplated as the right attitudes, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that repentance should be pursued whenever it is possible and as much as possible. Probably, this aim would require a dialogue with the offender and her active participation, as well as institutional arrangements to implement these demands. The conclusion is that the principles of Bennett's theory push the institutional demands much closer to the restorative models than Bennett avows. Nevertheless, Bennett tries to escape from a general and broad commitment in practice with the restorative models, and his elusive strategy is to adopt an expressive theory in which we simply represent 'the adequate symbols for condemnation' rather than the search for repentance, reform and reconciliation as 'something actually to be achieved' [Bennett (2008), p. 197]. But the first question is, once again, what would be the use of this concern with the proper attitudes of the offender if punishment is just an expression of whoever condemns. An expressive theory could have dispensed perfectly with all this complex internal background [Sigler (2010), Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory 101 p. 386]. The second question is how we are going to claim the frustration of a normative expectation if it is not through a communication, a message addressed to the offender. If our legal system is a set of general norms, it is because our legal practice is an exchange of reasons where our actions and positions must be accounted for with the right reasons, with norms previously recognized as valid and binding. When the action consists in removing some fundamental rights and downgrading the status of one of our co-participants in a social practice, our duties of accountability are even more demanding. It means that this practical decision must be especially reasoned and supported with general arguments previously recognized by the own offender as rules of the game, and not just with simple expressions. We condemn with rules because we have a duty of accounting for and justifying our decision, and rules play this role because they are abbreviations of moral reasoning. An expressive theory jeopardizes the whole enterprise of justifying punishment, of giving appropriate reasons to the question 'why punish'. Against Bennett, it is apparent that a communicative theory is unavoidable; but a communicative theory does not need to go more deeply into the forum internum of the offender: it can restrict itself with the point of view of the sender of the message, regardless of the attitudes of the recipient. I think the purely denunciatory theory agrees better with this simple communication of a denunciatory message from the sender – the authority – to the wrongdoer. Bennett's theory also embraces the concept of suffering as a necessary ingredient. To represent what we may call a sincere apology means to represent a mental state of affliction in which the wrongdoer accepts some unpleasant burdens [Bennett (2008), p. 121]. Punishment is not for Bennett a simple return of suffering: he only sustains that, morally speaking, a disposition to suffering is a necessary part in the ritual we call the practice of punishment. However, once again, the theory's internalism brings some problems. Especially in a legal practice, punishment is a deprivation of some rights, and if this normative and objective deprivation is subjectively or psychologically viewed by the criminal as a suffering is a contingent matter. We can assume that it will happen in most of the cases, but it might not happen in some others. At least for the recalcitrant offenders, punishment is the lesser of two evils, because for them it is worthwhile to keep on offending despite being punished, so punishment cannot be interpreted as a utility loss. Modern legal systems avoid degrading punishments; however, even when they forget this aspiration, they avoid presenting them as mere exhibitions of suffering and pain: lethal injection aspires to be a painless execution of a sadly degrading penalty. Punishment is not administered thinking about the infliction of subjective or empirical pain: it makes justice, estimates and imposes the right price or the right payment owed to society in terms of its legal measures of value; to add an ingredient of suffering in this description is unnecessary. 102 Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo Finally, the internalism of Bennett's theory has further unwelcome consequences. For example, a theory of punishment coherently inserted in a whole theory of state coercion is preferable to another one in which principles of criminal law would be substantially different to the principles ruling the security and public order. Obviously, we are talking about different activities. But, although different, there are clear similarities: they both consist in limitations of rights for disturbances in the exercise of other people's rights and for which state does not have to compensate economically; repression must be proportionate to these disturbances, and we reject any instrumentalist view of public order in which the goal could legitimate any mean: on the contrary, these activities are surveyed later by the judges, who check if repression was proportionate and justified. However, because Bennett's theory of punishment is overburdened with internal attitudes, it has to separate drastically the practice of punishment and activities of public order: as Bennett cannot distinguish attitudes of sorry and shame in the last examples, he even compares these activities with the public decision of keeping some individuals in quarantine for medical reasons [Bennett (2008), p. 196]. This depiction reduces public order operations to crude instrumentalism. The conclusion is that Bennett's theory does not provide a complete structure of reasons to justify legal punishments. The question 'why deprive the offender of some fundamental rights instead of simply expressing our disapproval?' still remains. We said before that, respecting its institutional consequences, Bennett's concepts should lead to a more restorative theory he declares. In fact, restorative theory is the most important partner of Bennet's theory. However, this partnership is unable to solve the problems of denunciatory theories. III. BENNETT'S NON-RETRIBUTIVISM In Bennett's Introduction we can read an unambiguous statement: punitive legal system should be 'as restorative as possible' [Bennett (2008), p. 5]. However, Bennett's doctrine is substantially different to the restorative versions we are accustomed to read: it is formalised, centralised and coercive, feels uneasy with the hypothesis of shows of repentance from the victim [Bennett (2008), pp. 139, 148], and does not leave a broad space for private arrangements in which state agents are just mediators.16 Bennett represents what we would call a deep application of restorativism in criminal institutions under the label laissez-faire conceptions of restorative justice. He rules out these conceptions as fundamental criminal answer; but, even when he rejects them, he remarks some advantages involved in its implementation: a) it enlarges our experience and information: for example, the offender is able to know the offensive consequences of his actions, and the Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory 103 amends he could make; b) it promotes the recognition of the other [Bennett (2008), p. 176]. These advantages explain why he reserves a non trivial role to private arrangements between victim and offender, concretely the specification of the quantum of punishment: the judge could indicate the broad margins of the penalty, and victim and offender could privately pinpoint the exact amount within these margins [Bennett (2008), p. 180]. Finally, what underlies these concessions is the mediation of another view of punishment not exactly fitting with the retributivist one, and for which the aim of punishment is essentially restorative, because it tries to repair the relationships broken by the offense [Bennett (2008), p. 154]. Sadly, the marriage with restorative punishments reveals again important problems of adequacy with legal practice. We talk about making 'amends', which basically means to fix or to repair some damage, either the private damage inflicted to the victim or the public damage consisting in the loss of confidence in public relationships. The problem with this conception, especially regarding the relationships with the victim, is that it is a departure from the public nature of criminal institutions, and it is more like an approach to civil compensation that we can find in tort law. This restorative interpretation of punishment fits with the private law principles of corrective or restitutive justice, but not with retributive justice. In this interpretation, punishment is a way of compensating for damages. However, the wrongness of the criminal offence is not linked to a material or subjective harm, but to an objective violation of rights, or, in other words, an attack against the most important moral values of the community. The second problem, especially regarding the relationships with the community, is that the theory comes dangerously close to instrumentalism: at least the quantum of punishment does not look to the past, but the future, because how much we have to punish is a function of our purpose of re-establishing the relationships of confidence between offender and community, and not strictly the seriousness of the offence.17 Once this restorative view of punishment is rebutted, both supposed advantages of the laissez-faire models are not available. In a public law like criminal law and in public procedures like criminal procedures is a mistake to suppose that the more we hear from the interests of the victim the more we know of the crime and the most appropriate will be the punishment. These considerations are relevant for the civil compensation of a material damage, but not for a public criminal matter consisting essentially in the transgression of a community value. As we know, it is quite possible that the private victim did not suffer any damage,18 did not feel any offence at all,19 or felt the offence, but forgave the offender... and, despite all these circumstances, the criminal process starts and finishes with a punishment.20 Bennett shows knowledge of these circumstances [Bennett, 2008, p. 136], but he does not take them properly into account: there is no room in the criminal context for the 'restitution contracts' talked about by the restorative theories [Zehr (1990), p. 164], a 104 Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo category in which we could include the contracts on quantum of punishment suggested by Bennett. This public nature of punishment and criminal procedure makes Bennett's concessions to dialogue and communication between private victim and offender irrelevant. As we have seen, the subjective feelings of victims are often misleading respecting the violation of law. In the example of Judith, Bennett regrets that, with our current methods, she would be involved in a very unpleasant duty of proving the culpability of the offender. I do not see how a process of face to face debate with the offender could be less unpleasant. Finally, a long discussion about nature of rules could be brought out here. It is only possible to hint that rules work as exclusionary or pre-emptive reasons [Raz (1979), pp. 21-23],21 and, unlike other kind of norms, their application blocks any deliberation on their underlying moral reasons: as we said before, rules are the abbreviations and conclusions of a moral reasoning, and that is why they satisfy a need of accountability and justification; however, they also are conclusions because, due to the institutional dimension of law, they conclude the moral debate. A new debate within a court about the reasons of the rightness of the rules and the offensive nature of the behaviour is in my view completely at odds with a system of rules like criminal law. As well as a conflict with the public nature of criminal law, to empower the victim with an entitlement to determine the quantum of punishment jeopardizes the strict interpretation of the rule of law in criminal law, captured by the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege. Restorative theories are a grievous departure from this principle.22 We have to remember here that any return to 'private' justice blurs the differences between revenge and punishment [Nozick (1980), p. 368]: determination of punishment is a historical conquest of justice against public and private abuses, and any surrender to private agreements or to the imagination of the judge would be a step back in justice leading to different punishment in identical cases, Mikado style punishments,23 incoherence and arbitrariness. Bennett avows some of these dangers in his limited devolution model, but accepts them as a price worth paying [Bennett (2008), p. 180]. In his Introduction, he judges as a danger our tendency to reduce punishments to jail and fines [Bennett (2008), p. 9]. However, we have reasons to be happy with the strict determination, and even with the historical process that contradicts his judgment: the unification and convergence of punishments in a small list. Departamento de Historia del Derecho, Filosofía Jurídica, Moral y Política Universidad de Salamanca Campus Miguel de Unamuno 37007 Salamanca E-mail: [email protected] Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory 105 NOTES 1 In my view, Michael Moore's theory is a clear example of this procedure. Moore also assumes a perfectionist theory of law and state according to which 'because an action is morally wrong there is always a legitimate reason to prohibit it with criminal legislation' [Moore (1997), p. 70]. Therefore, he willingly accepts a very disturbing consequence: there are reasons that moral misdemeanours or minor peccadilloes, such as family lies, should be punished by the state. It is true that other considerations can defeat the need of punishment, but this need is undoubtedly binding [Ibid. 640 y ss]. 2 Hart [(1968), p. 236], for example, is supposed to provide a purely normative theory; however, he refutes some views of the theory of responsibility offering a single argument: the existence of a positive and highly controversial institution of English law, the crimes of strict liability. For a 'normative' refutation of this figure, see Nino (1980), pp. 183 y ss. 3 As the famous 'Jacques the Fatalist' said, 'rewards are just illusions of goodhearted people, and punishments the expression of fear of the mean people' [Diderot (2008), p. 229 (my translation)]. 4 Flew (1954), pp. 291 ss.; Hart (1968), pp. 4-5. 5 'Censure-theories are the most promising way of developing the retributivist tradition' [Bennett (2008), p. 186]. 6 Therefore, he does not consider other important objections. It could be said, for example, that denunciatory theories jeopardize the legal principle of retroactivity because immorality exists before and after the enactment of the legal rule. It could be said too that, being the only justification of punishment, these theories bear reasons to relax the principle nulla poena sine lege when moral condemnation in a particular crime would be especially and unpredictably intense. 7 Feinberg (1970), p. 101; Hanna (2009), p. 242. 8 For example, to say that punishment is necessary to reinforce social solidarity or to give cohesion to the moral practices turns the theory into a variety of instrumentalism in which we graduate the scale of punishment according to a prospective goal, and we view denunciation as a kind of stimulus to induce obedient behaviour [Hart (1968), p. 235; Moore (1997), p. 90]. Other versions search for a different goal: moral improvement of offender; they are included by Nozick in 'teleological retributivism' [Nozick (1981), p. 371]. Other ways of filling this gap between 'denunciation' and 'infliction of pain' are not more satisfying. To say that punishment works as a symbol of communitarian condemnation does not explain its necessity: Nino (1980), pp. 205-6. Some authors have given up any hope of a self-sufficient retributivist theory, and confess that, answering this question, retributivism must be completed with an instrumentalist model of general prevention [Von Hirsch (1998), pp. 39ff.]. 9 Following Hart's theory, we would add that primary social rules (rules imposing duties) require analytically a secondary rule imposing punishments to the breakers of primary duties. 10 Von Hirsch (1998), pp. 28-9, warns against theories that interpret practice of punishment as something we do against them. 11 Bennett separates his rituals from the exhibitions of 'inner attitudes' [Bennett (2008), p. 154]. However, his ritual is constructed on assumptions about appropriate 106 Juan Manuel Pérez Bermejo feelings and expected psychological attitudes: 'But it draws its symbols from emotions and expectations that are deeply intuitive' [Ibid., p. 149]. 12 On these concepts see Rawls (1991), pp. i-xxvii, 35-40, 133-168. 13 The list of counter-examples is not vulnerable to the accusation of not being a list of central cases of legal punishment. It could be admitted if punishment were controversial in some or all of these situations. And it is true that a minority of these cases is controversial, but controversy is not about why punish, but about how much. Even in civil disobedience it is commonly required the disposition to accept the punishment as a bond or guarantee of the civility of the action, so that the disobedient could obtain a diminished penalty [Bedau (1961), p. 661; Nozick (1981), p. 390; Rawls (1969), p. 247; Wasserstrom (1963), p. 796]. 14 What Nozick calls 'teleological retributivism' is in trouble to justify this punishment, and the the rest of retributivists, according to Nozick, are uncomfortable justifying it [Nozick (1980), p. 365]. 15 Lucas (1980), p.125; Betegón (1990), p. 195. 16 'Restorative justice would not be the major or fundamental criminal justice response' [Bennett, (2008), p. 144]. Immediately after, he judges his theory as 'an alternative to restorative justice' [Ibid., p. 146]. 17 'After all, restorative justice is in some way forward-looking' [Bennett (2008), p. 22]. 18 See 'profound offences' [Feinberg (1985), Vol. II, pp.50ff.]. 19 Feinberg enhances that wrong is an objective concept attached to a violation of rights, [Feinberg (1985), III, p. 2]. We see examples of a pro-active defense of the offender by his victims in many of the so called 'domestic violence' cases. 20 There is an important exception in the so called Spanish law 'private' and 'semi-private' crimes. In the first ones (slander and libel), charges must be submitted to the tribunal by the victim (not by the public prosecutor), and punishment is excluded if she pardons the offender [see 215, 1 of Spanish Criminal Code]. However, these crimes are not less public in nature than the rest; what is private is the mean of proof: it happens that a third person cannot proof the happening of a real slander, and we need an action from the victim to confirm it. 21 Even Dworkin [(1986), p.143] acknowledges that the exclusion of underlying moral reasons must be radical in a peculiar department: criminal law. 22 [Zehr (1990), pp. 185-6)] even rejects the concept of crime, and suggest the broader concept of 'harmful behaviour'. The most, he adds, we can accept 'crime', although not in technical legal terms, but in full context: moral, social, economic, political, etc. 23 This danger is visible when Bennett demands community services 'with symbolic link to the nature of the offence' [Bennett (2008), p. 178]. He even let restorative justice outweigh the demands of legal consistency in many situations [Ibid., p. 181]. REFERENCES BEDAU, H. A. (1961), "On Civil Disobedience", The Journal of Philosophy, vol. LVIII, pp. 653-664. Some Familial Problems in the Retributivist Theory 107 BENNETT, C. (2008), The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. BETEGÓN, J. (1990), La justificación del castigo, Madrid, Centro de Estudios Constitucionales. . DIDEROT, D. (2008), Jacques el fatalista, Madrid, Santillana. DWORKIN, R. (1986), Law's Empire, Oxford, Hart Publishing. FEINBERG, J. (1970), 'The Expressive Function of Punishment', in Doing & Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsability, Princeton, Princeton University Press, pp. 95-118 –– (1985), The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, Oxford, Oxford University Press. FLEW, A. (1954), 'The Justification of Punishment', Philosophy, vol. 29, pp.291-307 HANNA, N. (2009), 'The Passions of Punishment', Pacific Philosophical Quaterly, vol.90, pp. 232-250. HART, H. L. A. (1968), Punishment and Responsability, Oxford, Clarendon Press. HIRSCH, A. VON (1998), Censurar y castigar, Madrid, Trotta. KANT, I. (1907-1914), Die Metaphysik der Sitten, P. Natorp (ed.), VI, Berlin, Berlin Akademie. KELSEN, H. (1960), Reine Rechtslehre, Vienna, Franz Deutick. LUCAS, J. R. (1980), On Justice, Oxford, Oxford University Press. MACCORMICK, N. (2008), 'Sanctions, Punishment, Justice', in H.L.A. Hart, Second edition, Stanford, Stanford University press, pp. 168-185. MOORE, M. (1997), Placing the Blame, Oxford, Clarendon Press. NINO, C. S. (1980), Los límites de la responsabilidad penal, Buenos Aires, Astrea. NOZICK, R. (1981), Philosophical Explanations, Oxford, Clarendon Press. RAWLS, J. (1969), 'The Justification of Civil Disobedience', in Bedau, H. A. (ed.) Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice, Indiannapolis, Pegasus, pp. 240-256. –– (1993), Political Liberalism, New York, Columbia University Press. RAZ, J. (1979), The Authority of Law, Oxford, Clarendon Press. SIGLER, M. (2010), 'Review to 'The Apology Ritual', Ethics, vol. 120, pp. 382-386. WASSERSTROM, R. (1963), 'The Obligation to Obey the Law', Los Angeles Review, vol.X, pp. 790-797. ZEHR, H. (1990), Changing Lenses, Scottdale, Herald Press. teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 109-117 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 109-117] Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual Antony Duff RESUMEN Bosquejo aquí una ruta alternativa hacia una concepción del castigo penal muy semejante a la de Bennett, aunque basada más en una concepción política de la comunidad política y sus ciudadanos que en una concepción moral de nuestras relaciones sociales como individuos, y dando más importancia de lo que él le da al proceso penal. Pero además sugiero que necesitamos revisar algunos aspectos importantes de su concepción para explicar cómo la pena puede imponerse justamente a un delincuente que no coopera, en línea con el tipo de concepción que yo favorezco y que él critica. PALABRAS CLAVE: castigo, disculpa; ritual; proceso judicial; responsabilidad. ABSTRACT I sketch an alternative route to an account of criminal punishment very like Bennett's, though drawing more on a political conception of a polity and its citizens than on a moral conception of our social relations as individuals, and placing more importance than he does on the criminal trial; but I suggest that we need to revise certain important aspects of his account to explain how punishment can be justly imposed on an unwilling offender - in line with the kind of account for which I have argued, and which he criticises. KEYWORDS: Punishment; Apology; Ritual; Trial; Responsibility. There is much with which to agree, and to admire, in Bennett's fine book [Bennett (2008)]:1 in this brief paper I sketch an alternative route to an account of criminal punishment very like his, though drawing more on a political conception of a polity and its citizens than on a moral conception of our social relations as individuals (both dimensions are crucial to an adequate understanding of criminal punishment); but I suggest that we need to revise certain important aspects of his account - in line with the kind of account for which I have argued, and which he criticises.2 109 110 Antony Duff I. TAKING CRIME SERIOUSLY Normative theorising must start from where we are. We can therefore begin with the idea of a liberal polity, of the kind in which we can plausibly aspire to live.3 This will be a republic of citizens - of members who for the most part recognise each other as fellows who are engaged together in a common project, a civic enterprise, of living together as citizens. Its core values will include the equal concern and respect that citizens owe each other [Dworkin (1989)], as well as individual freedom and privacy. Given such a concern for freedom and privacy, and a familiar liberal commitment to pluralism, the civic enterprise that constitutes its public life (its members' lives as citizens) will be limited in its scope and its claims: it will encompass only a limited dimension of citizens' lives, most of which will be lived in the other, smaller practices and communities to which they also belong; nor will it take an interest (as illiberal political communities might) in the deeper or more inward aspects of their lives - in their souls, as one might put it. Nonetheless a liberal polity will have a public realm, constituted by the civic enterprise, and structured by the values by which the polity defines itself - values that must in fact be shared by most of its members, and that must be able plausibly to claim the allegiance of all members. The public realm is the realm of matters that are 'public' in the sense that they properly concern all citizens, simply in virtue of their membership of the polity. A central task for the polity, as for any community, is therefore to work out what falls within the public realm, and what is rather a 'private' matter that should not concern the whole polity. It must work out an account of the res publica: of what is our collective business in the civic enterprise. Likewise, a university must decide what belongs to its public realm as an academic community: which aspects of its members' lives and activities are of proper interest to the academic community, and which should rather count as private. In a properly democratic polity, the structure and scope of the civic enterprise will be determined by public deliberation (a deliberation that is itself an essential part of the civic enterprise). We cannot discuss the character or the likely results of such a deliberative democracy here [see Pettit (1999), Martí (2006)], but must ask what role (if any) such a polity would find for a system of criminal law and punishment. Much of the polity's public business, much of what goes on in the civic enterprise, does not immediately create a role for criminal law. A polity will, for instance, see it as part of its business to protect its members against various kinds of harm (both those that can flow from natural causes and those that can flow from human action); it will also plausibly see it as part of its role to provide and sustain procedures through which citizens can try to resolve disputes and conflicts peacefully and to secure compensation for harms they suffer at others' hands. In further specifying, and then pursuing, such ends Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual 111 as these the polity might of course come to find a role for the criminal law, but as so far specified they do not point us in that direction. We come closer to finding a role for criminal law, as a distinctive mode of law, when we note that a decent polity will be concerned not only with harms and their prevention or remedy, or with disputes and their peaceful resolution, but with wrongs done or suffered by its members, and with the provision of an appropriate response to such wrongs. It will not of course take an interest in all wrongs: for many wrongs are, as far as the polity is concerned, private wrongs that are not its business.4 But it will take an interest in wrongs that are public in the sense that they violate the values that define and structure the civic enterprise: for to ignore such wrongs would be to betray the values that are violated, to which the polity is supposedly committed; and it would be, as we will see, to betray both victims and perpetrators of such wrongs. Three questions now arise. First, how should a liberal polity and its members respond to public wrongs committed by and against its members? Second, how should the perpetrators of such wrongs respond to their own wrongdoing? Third, how (if at all) should the polity's collective response be related to or determined by the way in which the perpetrators either do or should respond? One of the merits of Bennett's book is that it shows the importance of the third of these questions - a question that theorists of punishment too often ignore, by talking of punishment simply as something that 'we' inflict on 'them'.5 A plausible liberal republican answer to these questions gives the criminal law a central role. The first distinctive task of a system of criminal justice, discharged by the substantive law, is to define the range of public wrongs, of violations of the polity's defining values, that merit a formal, public response. These are the wrongs of which we have decided that we must take collective notice as wrongs. They should not be ignored, or treated merely as sources of harms that require repair or as private conflicts to be resolved (perhaps with our collective help) by those directly involved; they should be publicly defined and condemned as wrongs. Those public definitions constitute the core of the substantive criminal law, which defines the whole range of criminal offences (as well as the defences that can negate the wrongfulness of the commission of such offences). Second, the criminal law must also make provision for an appropriate public response to the commission of such public wrongs: if we take such wrongs seriously, as violations of the values that define our polity (and of their victims' rights), we cannot merely condemn them in advance and in the abstract, or seek to prevent them; we must also respond after the event to their concrete commission. Central to this response, in a liberal republic, is the criminal trial, understood as a process of calling to public account [Duff et al. (2007)]. The trial summons an accused person to answer to a charge of public wrongdoing (even if the answer might initially be simply 'Not Guilty'), 112 Antony Duff and to answer for that wrongdoing if it is proved against him - to answer for it either by offering a defence which shows his commission of the offence to have been justified or excused, or by accepting conviction and the formal censure that a conviction communicates. Trials as thus understood are a proper way of taking public wrongs seriously. They do justice to the victim, as someone who has been not merely harmed but wronged, by trying to identify the wrongdoer and call him to account; and they do justice to the wrongdoer by treating him as a responsible citizen who can be held to account for his actions. A crucial feature of trials as callings to account is that they are in this way inclusionary: they display a recognition of the victim as a fellow whose wrongs we make our own, and of the wrongdoer as a member of the polity who is answerable to his fellow citizens.6 The culmination of the criminal trial is the verdict: either an acquittal, which declares that the presumption of innocence to which the defendant was entitled remains undefeated; or, if guilt is proved, a conviction, which amounts not merely to a factual finding that the defendant committed the crime charged, but to a formal condemnation of that commission, and so also a formal censure of the defendant for committing it. A 'Guilty' verdict and the condemnation it contains are addressed to the defendant, as marking a judgment on his conduct that he should make his own - which will involve coming to accept and feel his own guilt. This is a matter on which I think Bennett goes wrong, in portraying blame (of which the criminal conviction is a formal version) as having an intrinsically exclusionary character, and the acceptance of guilt as involving a kind of self-lowering. Blame, he argues, involves the 'withdrawal of the respect' or 'recognition' to which the wrongdoer would otherwise have been entitled [pp. 105-7]; and this seems to become a 'withdraw[al] from' the offender, which is naturally (but not inevitably) expressed by 'cutting' him [p. 108; see p. 147]. If the wrongdoer recognises his own guilt, and blames himself, this then involves 'withdrawal of that respect for oneself that one would have been due', and that remorseful recognition will be properly expressed in 'penitential behaviour' that might seem, and that would otherwise be, 'servile or masochistic' [pp. 116-7]. Now blame, of others or of oneself, can take these forms: it is all too tempting to exclude or demean the wrongdoer, and to expect him to debase himself. But in a liberal polity that takes seriously an idea of equal concern and respect, these are temptations that we should resist (as we should in our private lives): it is possible (albeit often difficult, especially when faced by heinous wrongs) for blame to be a mode of communication with a fellow member of the normative community whom we still respect as such - to be an inclusionary rather than an exclusionary response; and it is possible (although often difficult) for a wrongdoer to express her apologetic recognition of what she has done in ways that do not even appear 'servile or masochistic'. Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual 113 This now gives us an initial answer to our three questions. First, we should collectively respond to public wrongs by calling those who commit them to public account. Second, the wrongdoers should themselves respond by being willing to answer, through such a public process, for what they have done. Third, our collective response should be such as to call, enable and persuade the wrongdoers to answer for what they have done; that is why criminal trials are legitimate only if they do give the defendant a fair chance to answer the charge. But what of punishment, the deliberately burdensome imposition that typically follows on a criminal conviction? A major challenge for a liberal republic is to work out whether and how criminal punishment can treat those subjected to it with the respect and concern that is due to them as citizens. Punishment as actually imposed in our existing systems is of course all too often exclusionary in its meaning, and oppressive and demeaning in its impact. If that is what criminal punishment as imposed by the state must always be, then it has no place in a liberal republic; but perhaps it need not be like that. II. FROM CENSURE TO PUNISHMENT VIA APOLOGY? Why should the criminal process not end with the defendant's formal conviction: why should we go on to impose the material burden of punishment? Is this to be explained instrumentally, as a way of deterring or hindering future wrongdoing (in which case it will be hard to justify as something that citizens could respectfully impose on each other or on themselves)? An initial answer is that if punishment is to express condemnation adequately, it must do so in an appropriate language, and that penal hard treatment of appropriate kinds constitutes a language of condemnation that both offenders and victims can be expected to understand. But Bennett also argues, insightfully, that in trying to understand what punishment can be and can do we must also look at what the offender owes to those whom she has wronged - both to the direct victims of her crime, if there are any, and to her fellow citizens. What she owes is some form of apology - an apology that must, if it is to have the weight and seriousness required, be expressed in some kind of burdensome penitential action. It is by undertaking such actions that the wrongdoer can restore herself to community with those whom he wronged; and so, Bennett argues, it is appropriate that the punishment we impose on the offender should consist in what she ought to do to make apologetic amends for her offence - that it 'mak[es] her act as she would were she genuinely sorry for her offence' [p. 146; see also pp. 147, 171]. Now this seems to me just the right move to make if we are to show criminal punishment to be something that liberal citizens can impose on each other, and accept for themselves, and it fits plausibly with the account sketched in 114 Antony Duff the previous section of how a liberal polity should respond to public wrongs. What we must try to do is to bring the offender to answer for her actions; that involves, from our side, an attempt to bring her to recognise the wrong she did, and to accept her own culpable responsibility; and, from her side, a remorseful recognition of her wrongdoing and an attempt to make amends for it. Punishment, of a suitable kind,7 can serve both these goals at once: it can give appropriate material form to the message that we must try to communicate to the offender, and constitute an appropriate moral reparation from the offender to the polity. However, Bennett's explanation of this 'Apology Ritual' raises one puzzle, whose resolution will require some amendment to his account. The puzzle is this. Apology, whether purely verbal or given material expression in some kind of penitential act, is something that the apologiser does. If the wrongdoer owes apology to those whom he wronged, we can properly tell him that this is what he ought to do; we can even demand that he do it, on pain of further criticism if he refuses: but we cannot do it for him; nor can we do it to him - nothing we do to him can constitute him apologising to us. In the case of our formal public responses to public wrongdoing, the same thing is true. Through the criminal court, we can collectively tell the convicted offender that he ought to apologise for what he has done. Since we are dealing here with public apology between people who are relative strangers (related only as fellow citizens), the apology will properly be expressed in a formal, public language, and the court can properly prescribe what it should be: this, the court can say, is what you must do to make amends for your wrong; and 'this' might consist in, for instance, undertaking a number of hours of unpaid community service of a suitable kind, or in paying a suitable amount of money, or even in putting oneself into penitential isolation for a period of time. This would be a system of non-coercive self-punishment: offenders would be told what they must do, by way of an Apology Ritual; and it would be up to them, on pain of further censure if they refuse or fail, to undertake it.8 But criminal punishment is not like that. Some sentences, as things are now, are simply imposed on an essentially passive offender: he is taken from court to prison to serve his time; or his fine is deducted from his wages. Other sentences, it is true, are initially required rather than imposed, and this could be made true of all sentences: the offender is required to turn up to undertake his community service or to meet his probation officer; he can be required to pay the fine himself; and he can (as happens in some jurisdictions for some offences) be required to present himself on a specified date to serve his term of imprisonment. But even when the offender is required to undertake his sentence, rather than passively suffering its imposition, the punishment remains coercive; for he knows that if he fails to do what he is required to do he will either have it imposed on him, or will suffer some further sanction Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual 115 which will itself in the end be imposed on him if he remains recalcitrant. Now when what is required of a person is that he pay for the harm he has caused, by way of damages awarded in a civil suit, it is not crucial that he make the payment himself: damages can be imposed rather than just required (his bank accounts or possessions can be sequestered), since what matters is that the cost falls on the person who culpably caused the harm - not that he actively pay the cost. But apology is different: nothing that is simply done to the offender, or imposed on him, can constitute his apologising for his crime. It is true that even if he undertakes his sentence only because he is threatened with some coercive imposition if he fails, we can still say that he has apologised - he has undertaken the Apology Ritual; a key feature of rituals is that they can be undertaken reluctantly, unwillingly, or under duress. But what is simply imposed, as punishments may in the end be imposed, cannot be an apology. Bennett does not take sufficient notice of this problem. He talks of what an offender must 'undertake' by way of apologetic ritual, and of 'making' or 'undertaking' amends; but he also talks of 'impos[ing] amends' on the offender [p. 148], and this should strike us as incoherent: amends, of their nature, must be made or undertaken; they cannot be imposed. One way to resolve this problem would be to abandon the attempt to justify punishment as a coercive institution, and argue that we cannot justify anything more than a non-coercive requirement that offenders undertake the Apology Ritual. Such a radical solution would be in various ways problematic, not least because we would probably find (as abolitionists often find) that coercive punishments are simply replaced by other, non-punitive ways of coercing actual or potential offenders - ways no less morally problematic than punishment. But we can avoid this conclusion by taking a path that Bennett rejects [pp. 188-97] - by seeing criminal punishment as an enterprise in communication, which is intended not merely to express our condemnation to the offender, but also to elicit an appropriate response (recognition, remorse, and apologetic reparation) from her. Punishment, on this view, aspires to be or become a two-way process of communication: a process through which the polity seeks to communicate to the offender a morally adequate grasp of her wrongdoing, and through which she can, if she does recognise it, communicate her apology to the polity. This might sound, and indeed is, very close to Bennett's view, but it differs in the small but crucial respect that it focuses not merely on expression, but on communication. Expression is a one-way process: it does not of its nature seek any specific response from the person (if there is one) to whom it is made. By contrast, communication seeks a response: it is, or aspires to be (since the response might not be forthcoming) a two-way process.9 The criminal trial, as normatively described in the previous section, is a communicative process: it calls on the defendant to answer to the charge, and 116 Antony Duff to answer for his actions if he is proved to have committed the offence. A conviction similarly seeks a response, of remorseful recognition of guilt, from the defendant. If we are then to justify the burdensome punishment to which the convicted defendant is sentenced, it seems to me that we cannot adequately do so in the purely expressive terms that Bennett uses: it is not enough to say that this is the appropriate way to express our response, since other ways, including symbolic punishments that involve no material burden, are available. Nor is it enough to add that what we impose on the offender is what he should anyway undertake for himself by way of apologetic reparation, since we have seen that what is merely imposed cannot constitute an apology. But what we can say, perhaps, is that the burdensome punishment constitutes a communicative attempt to persuade the offender to face up to his crime, and to accept (indeed, to undertake or undergo willingly) his punishment as appropriate reparation for that wrongdoing. That attempt might fail, in which case the wrongdoer has not apologised: but given the importance of trying to bring him to recognise and respond appropriately to his own wrongdoing (which is in part a matter of taking him seriously as a fellow member of the normative community), the attempt can still be justified, without having to claim that it constitutes the amends that the offender is refusing to make.10 I cannot discuss or defend this account further here. All I hope to have argued here is that whilst Bennett's account of punishment is imaginative, important, and largely plausible, the idea of the apology ritual cannot do as much work as he wants it to do. In particular, it cannot as it stands justify imposing punishment on the offender who refuses to undertake the ritual for himself: to justify that, I suggest (if it can be justified), we need to turn back to the more ambitiously communicative kind of account that Bennett rejects. Department of Philosophy School of Law School of Arts and Humanities University of Minnesota University of Stirling Minneapolis Stirling, FK9 4LA Scotland, UK MN 55455, USA E-mail: [email protected] NOTES 1 Future bare page references in the text are to this book. 2 See Duff (2001) and (2007): Bennett (2008), pp. 188-97. 3 As always in normative theorising, the scope of this 'we' is problematic; my only hope here is that most readers of this comment will recognise the 'we' as including them. Penal Coercion and the Apology Ritual 117 4 The chief error of traditional legal moralism [Moore (1997)] is not to think that the criminal law is properly focused on wrongdoing, but to think that all wrongdoing is, in principle, the criminal law's business. 5 Others who do attend to this question, though with results very different from Bennett's, include Adler (1992) and Tadros (2011). 6 I talk here of the criminal law as dealing with wrongs committed by citizens against each other. We must also explain its authority over temporary residents who are not citizens; we should see them as guests. 7 We should think here not of such problematic punishments as imprisonment, but of more suitable sentences such as Community Service Orders. 8 Furthermore, since we are dealing with a public ritual, we need not inquire into the offender's sincerity: so long as he does undertake the ritual, that is enough. 9 Another difference is that communication is essentially a rational process that appeals to the other person's understanding, whereas expression might aim only to arouse (or manipulate) emotions. 10 It is still true, however, that what we impose on or require of the offender must be something that would be appropriate, were he to undertake it himself, as moral reparation for his crime; and that from respect for the privacy of individual conscience, we should not inquire intrusively into whether he is undertaking it, in the appropriate spirit, for himself: this should meet some of the objections that Bennett and others raise to this communicative conception of punishment. See further Duff (2001), pp. 115-29; (2011), pp. 372-7. REFERENCES ADLER, J. (1992), The Urgings of Conscience, Philadelphia, Temple University Press. BENNETT, C. (2008), The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. DUFF, R. A. (2001), Punishment, Communication and Community, New York, Oxford University Press –– (2007), Answering for Crime, Oxford, Hart. –– (2011), 'In Response', in Cruft, R., Kramer, M. and Reiff M. (eds.), Crime, Punishment and Responsibility, Oxford, Oxford University Press, pp. 351-79. FARMER, L., MARSHALL, S. E. and TADROS, V. (2007), The Trial on Trial (3): Towards a Normative Theory of the Criminal Trial, Oxford, Hart. DWORKIN, R. M. (1989), 'Liberal Community', California Law Review vol. 77, pp. 479-504. MARTI, J. L. (2006), La república deliberativa. Una teoría de la democracia, Madrid, Marcial Pons. MOORE, M. S. (1997), Placing Blame, Oxford:, Oxford University Press. PETTIT, P. (1999), Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Oxford, Oxford University Press. TADROS, V. (2011), The Ends of Harm, Oxford, Oxford University Press. teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 119-129 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 119-129] The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice Some Remarks on Bennett's The Apology Ritual José Luis Martí RESUMEN Este artículo plantea cuatro observaciones o comentarios sobre el libro The Apology Ritual de Christopher Bennett. Primero, defiende la existencia de diversos conceptos de disculpa, todos ellos relevantes, que sin embargo no aparecen suficientemente distinguidos en el libro. Segundo, sostiene que no resulta claro el por qué la disculpa debería desempeñar un papel tan central en los ámbitos jurídicos, y estar conceptualmente relacionado con la idea de castigo, especialmente cuando al menos en los casos paradigmáticos desarrollados de la práctica de la disculpa, que tienen lugar en ámbitos no jurídicos, la disculpa y el castigo parecen excluirse mutuamente. Tercero, objeta la idea de ritualidad, afirmando que nuestros sistemas jurídicos penales no deberían abstenerse de requerir, al menos idealmente, sinceridad y firme convicción en la práctica de pedir disculpas por parte del que comete un delito. Y, finalmente, se opone a la argumentación de Bennett sobre lo que una democracia liberal puede hacer legítimamente a la hora de intervenir sobre las razones, actitudes u opiniones de sus ciudadanos. PALABRAS CLAVE: justicia penal, castigo, disculpas, democracia, legitimidad. ABSTRACT This paper sets out four brief remarks or comments on Christopher Bennett's book The Apology Ritual. First, it argues that there are different relevant concepts of apology, which are not differentiated in the book. Second, it claims that it is not clear why the role for apology in legal contexts needs to be so central and conceptually related to punishment, especially when, at least in its paradigmatic cases developed in non-institutional contexts, apology and punishment seem to be inimical. Third, it argues against rituality, stating that our penal systems should not refrain from requiring, at least ideally, sincerity and firm conviction in apologies by the offender. And it finally opposes Bennett in the idea of what a legitimate liberal democracy is allowed to do in terms of intervening in its citizens' reasons, attitudes or opinions. KEYWORDS: Criminal Justice, Punishment, Apology, Democracy, Legitimacy. 119 120 José Luis Martí Christopher Bennett's The Apology Ritual is an engaging, persuasive and thought-provoking book [Bennett (2008)]. In a highly worked and reworked field such as the theory of punishment, it is stimulating to read ambitious and general theories like the one advocated by Bennett. This book brings some fresh air, even when it is significantly and admittedly grounded or aligned with Antony Duff's communicative theory of punishment [cfr. Duff (2001, 2007, 2010)]. Bennett's main argument is Hegelian – and Duffian – in inspiration: punishment is justified because it is something we owe to the offender in order to treat her as an autonomous person and to restore her status as a full member of our political community [Bennett (2008), p. 8]. It should be based on "a cycle of blame and apology," and more concretely on a ritual of apology. When someone commits a crime this is violating one of the most central rules in a democratic society, but she still deserves respect as a fully autonomous citizen. We must therefore express our censure for what she did; otherwise we would be treating her as a child who is unworthy of any explanation of our reaction, not as an autonomous person [Bennett (2008), p. 8]. And since the practice of blaming seems pointless unless we inflict some punishment, what we owe the offender is also some kind of "symbolically adequate" and proportionate punishment, even if it is some kind of hard treatment. As Bennett suggests, "the appropriate symbols are to be found in the practice of apology." In other words, "expressing the need for apology is the central motivation of punishment" [Bennett (2008), p. 8]. The adequate amount and kind of punishment is, ideally, the one that a wrongdoer who sincerely apologizes to the victim expressing her guilt and repentance would deem and make an appropriate amend for her crime. And this entails, in almost all cases, hard treatment. A simply symbolic or formal expression of censure or blame would be insufficient. That is why, again, for Bennett the basis for punishment must be an adequate cycle of blame and apology. Apology is "our fundamental means to 'make things right' in the face of having done wrong" [Bennett (2008), p. 7]. Although I agree with much of what Bennett maintains in this book, the aim of this comment is to introduce, not necessarily criticism, but at least some points for discussion. Thus, with no other introduction, I will present my four different and brief remarks. I. THE CONCEPT OF APOLOGY My first remark has to do with the concept of apology itself. The term "apology" is not univocal, but rather it seems to refer to two different concepts, or two variants of the same concept. The difference between them lies in the intention or the purpose associated with apology, and is relevant to my comments The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice 121 below. The first concept, which I will call "expressive," views apology as something that the apologizer needs to do for herself without expecting or requesting any particular reaction from the addressee of that apology. Thus, assuming its sincerity, apology would serve the purpose of expressing the sort of remorseful feelings that its author possesses about what she intentionally or negligently did wrong. These feelings can be of sorrow, guilt, remorse, regret or even repentance – a list of emotions that appear without being distinguished from one another indistinctly in several parts of Bennett's book. Apology so understood is an act of communication because it contains a message that the apologizer wants to be made known to the addressee of the apology, but it does not require any specific response from the addressee. It is only unidirectional communication. Apology serves here purely expressive purposes. And this practice has some value, we may accept, independently of whether the addressee accepts the apologies or not, whether he forgives the offender or not. In contrast, sometimes we apologize with a different purpose: we attempt to generate or provoke a particular response in the addressee. This is the case, for example, when we apologize and request forgiveness from the victim, something that could be called a "requesting apology," since it requests the addressee to say or do something in particular. In cases of a "requesting apology," we may also find expressions of sorrow, guilt or repentance on behalf of the apologizer. But they are not necessary. Perhaps, we may concede, that the offender actually have feelings of guilt or remorse is a necessary condition of a sincere apology, but the expression of such feelings, at least for this second concept, remains nevertheless contingent. Sometimes it will be convenient to express such feelings as a means to achieve the aim of obtaining a requested response, but at times this may be even counterproductive. There is also communication in this second concept of apology, but one of a different kind: bidirectional or interactive communication. The requesting element introduces the expectation of a response from the addressee. He can, of course, accept or reject the apology, forgive or not forgive the wrongdoer, but he is invited to say something in response. It is interesting to note that in the case in which the apologizer is looking for forgiveness and the addressee of the apology does not forgive the wrongdoer, we can affirm that the apology has been somehow frustrated. Finally, two conditions of requesting an apology will be important for another of my comments later on. First, in contrast to the purpose of expressive apologies, the final aim of a sincere requesting apology from the point of view of the apologizer must be some sort of reconciliation, or at least some improvement in her personal relationship with the addressee. Second, both the apologizer and the addressee of the apology need to enjoy a minimal degree of autonomy. A completely insane individual cannot meaningfully apologize. Similarly, a non-minimally-autonomous person cannot be the addressee of a request, since only a minimally autonomous person may respond 122 José Luis Martí in a meaningful way. This required degree of autonomy, though, might be very minimal. My 3-year-old Pablo is not a fully autonomous person, but he certainly is the author of some wrongdoings. And I believe, and try to teach him, that he has the duty to apologize for them, as well as the right to receive apologies from me when I do something wrong which harms him. Now, Bennett does not distinguish between these two concepts of apology. He seems to presuppose that the expressive element is always present in the practice of apology, but his main argument in the book depends entirely on the second concept of apology, more concretely, on a particular variant of it. The ideal of apology envisaged by Bennett is one in which the apologizer not only feels and expresses sorrow, guilt, remorse and repentance, and not only asks the victim for forgiveness, but she also proposes to make some kind of amend or penitence to compensate for the wrong she committed in order to recover her status as a full member of a particular community. The request, then, goes beyond the mere asking for forgiveness. Apology, so understood, looks for some kind of acceptance from the addressee about the appropriateness of the proposed penitence – what according to Bennett would constitute the ideal punishment that can rightly be inflicted on the wrongdoer. In this variant of the second concept, the addressee might consistently respond by denying his forgiveness for the wrong committed, and accepting at the same time the proposed penitence or punishment. For the same reason, the apologizer might request the addressee to accept his amends or punishment in compensation for the produced harm, without accompanying this request with the expression of certain feelings of guilt or repentance, or without asking for forgiveness. What is more, a wrongdoer might well say, a) that she does not feel sorrow, nor guilt, nor remorse, nor repentance; b) that she is accordingly not looking for forgiveness of any kind; but c) that she recognizes that she did something that produced harm and is willing to compensate the victim for that harm. The question is, though, if this constitutes a case of apology. And I do not think it does. This case will preserve the central element in Bennett's argument on the justification and determination of punishment under ideal conditions, which include the wrongdoer's recognition of having produced harm and her disposition to somehow compensate the victim for it, on the one hand, and the victim's acceptance of such amends, on the other. But this is not necessarily connected to the practice of apology. If this is true, apology – actual or ritual – has only a contingent role to play in the justification of punishment. II. THE EXTENSION OF APOLOGY TO LEGAL CONTEXTS We have developed our practice of apology in non-institutional or nonlegal contexts. Apology seems in general a good starting point in any process The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice 123 of communication between the author of a wrongdoing and the victim of it, especially in contexts in which legal institutions are absent. When someone commits a wrong harming someone else, if they minimally respect each other, and especially if they care about the future of their relationship, it may certainly be adequate to begin to talk about what happened with an apology. This is true in cases in which the committed wrongdoing is moral in kind, even when it does not have any legal relevance. But it seems also appropriate in other cases with no moral relevance at all, as in most of the situations in which I want my son Pablo to apologize. I take these non-institutional cases to be the paradigmatic cases of our social practice of apology, since it is in these contexts in which such practice has developed and is statistically more frequent. The absence of institutionalized response gives apology a centrality that virtually disappears as soon as some kind of legal institution intervenes. In private moral relations with no legal relevance, there is no other punishment or sanction apart from social reprobation or the victim's negative reaction. In these cases, a requesting apology seems especially important. It may be precisely intended to avoid such social reprobation or such victim's reaction. Thus, at least in these cases, apology seems an instrument to avoid punishment, rather than a vehicle conducive to, or a justification of, such punishment. Consider the case of my son Pablo again. I normally punish him when he does not want to apologize. And I exonerate him from punishment as soon as he truly apologizes and repents. We might therefore conclude that at least in these paradigmatic cases apology seems inimical, rather than congenial, to punishment. Now, Bennett proposes extending the practice of apology from these non-institutional cases to the legal processes of criminal responsibility, in which they currently play no role at all. What is more, he wants to give it a central role in the justification and determination of punishment. So, he needs to provide a double argument. First, he needs to prove that it may be desirable to extend this practice to legal cases, and more specifically to criminal legal cases. Let us concede that point. I agree with Bennett on the importance of leaving some room for apology in legal contexts. I would defend its application to help solve conflicts of both private and public law, for instance, like those concerning a tort law liability case, or a breach of contract, or a traffic violation, or tax evasion. And I am willing to accept its role in criminal justice processes too. But Bennett needs to provide an argument for a second claim: that the ritual of apology must have a central role in criminal justice, and that far from being inimical to punishment, as it seems to be in the paradigmatic cases of the practice of apology, here it lies at the basis of the justification and determination of punishment. 124 José Luis Martí Now, whatever the reason may be for extending the practice of apology to legal contexts such as those mentioned two paragraphs above, it does not seem to be necessarily related to punishment, since there is no punishment in private law cases nor in many public law ones. Even in the context of criminal justice, if it seems appropriate to leave some room for the practice of apology, it is apparently so regardless of the presence or absence of punishment. The example Bennett uses to open his book, the Bryson and Judith case, is compelling to show why we should leave some room for apology in many legal contexts, but it still does not show why the ritual of apology occupies such a central role that would make it worthy of justifying and determining criminal punishment. III. THE RITUALITY OF APOLOGY Imagine that Bennett is right in placing apology at the center of our justification of criminal punishment. What he defends is nevertheless a ritual view of apology, not necessarily an actual one. And this produces some important ambiguity in his theory. Part of his examples try to show why we should introduce some room for apologies in our criminal justice processes, like the Bryson case. But he also states in several parts of the book that apology does not need to be even present in our actual processes of responsibility. The book's title itself claims for some ritualistic view of the importance of apology. But this leads to an obvious question: what does ritual apology mean here? According to Bennett, we need apology as a ground for determining the symbolically adequate blaming reactions that we owe to a wrongdoer [Bennett (2008), p. 8]. An ideal wrongdoer who sincerely feels guilt and repentance would freely make the kind of amends and accept the just penitence that would achieve atonement. And this is consequently the kind of punishment we owe to such a wrongdoer. A ritual apology would be, therefore, nothing other than a heuristic device that legislators and judges need to use in order to justify in abstraction and concretely determine the punishment to be inflicted in a particular case. We do not expect real wrongdoers to apologize and to themselves propose the punishment they have the right to receive. Neither do we expect also the public to explicitly express its outrage towards the wrongdoing that she committed. That's why the Apology Ritual "is an artificial and symbolic procedure" [Bennett (2008), p. 149]. Moreover, Bennett is explicit in saying that: this account is compatible with freedom of conscience in that, although it focuses on making offenders undertake apologetic action, the action has to be such that it is possible successfully to complete it regardless of whether or not it The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice 125 is sincere. It is for this latter reason that the view is called the Apology Ritual: rituals are often castigated as empty and formal because they need not engage 'inner' attitudes, but it is precisely this vice that is a virtue in this context, since – it might be argued – the state [...] has no business giving our sentences the explicit aim of which is to make offenders genuinely penitent [Bennett (2008), p. 154; see also p. 172ff]. I disagree with Bennett, though, in this respect: I think the idea of ritual here is not a virtue but as much of a vice as in some other contexts. But let me first ask again what this rituality means. Although this quote is quite explicit, it still does not completely disambiguate Bennett's theory. Is the Apology Ritual just a counterfactual procedure, as Bennett sometimes qualifies it, that officials – legislators and judges, mainly – need to follow to justify and determine punishment? Is it only a heuristic device? If so, no specific rituality must take place in actual criminal justice processes. Or is it a ritual procedure that offenders need to follow, doing and saying certain things, even if they are not sincerely felt? If it is only a heuristic device to be used by officials, apology – actual or ritual – does not need to play a role at all in actual legal contexts. It is something that needs to take place only in judges' heads. But this seems not to leave any role to rituality. Moreover, I cannot see then why Bennett insists in several parts of the book on the idea that his theory is close to a particular interpretation of restorative justice, one for which the actual communication between the wrongdoer and the victim becomes important and has some important room for actual processes of apology [Bennett (2008), p. 175-183]. Or why he uses the Bryson case to convince us of the appropriateness of leaving some room for actual apology to occur in criminal justice processes. If, on the contrary, apology needs to be importantly present in our actual processes of criminal responsibility, in the form of something that the offender is encouraged or required to say to the victim, I do not see then why the rituality might be considered a virtue rather than a vice. When I teach my son Pablo to apologize for something he did, I need to make him understand that apology has value only if he is sincere in his expression of sorrow and guilt. Insincere apology seems a perversion of such value, and instrumentalization of the practice of apology in the wrongdoer's benefit, that far from helping reconciliation, far from restoring the previous relationship or status, far from fixing things, may make them much worse if detected. Thus, the practice of apology in real processes of criminal responsibility cannot be merely ritual. Finally, if it is actual apology the one which is valuable, and not a ritual one, why can Bennett affirm that apology is the key element to justify and determine punishment? He is certainly not claiming that we need to impose those punishments which are actually proposed by the offenders when they 126 José Luis Martí apologize. He is aware that we cannot rely on this actual procedure to determine sanctions. But this leads us to the counterfactual or heuristic procedure to be used by the judge again. And this means that either Bennett is right in emphasizing the rituality dimension, in which case apology becomes nothing more than a device of counterfactual reasoning that loses an important part of its relevance, or else apology itself is really valuable, in which case we must drop or at least lessen the idea of rituality and we lose its connection with the determination of punishment. My hunch is that Bennett emphasizes the idea of rituality because of a wrong view of what liberal legitimacy requires. This is, at least, what I understand from his response to the objection I reproduce here [Bennett (2008), pp. 172-173]. He seems to presuppose that requiring sincerity to apologizers would be a form of interference in their freedom of conscience. He says that "to make offenders genuinely penitent" is not the state's business [Bennett (2008), p. 154], and that "the state must regard the offender restored simply by virtue of having completed the sentence" [Bennett (2008), p. 173]. But this is not, in my opinion, what a liberal view of legitimacy and freedom of conscience requires, which leads me to my next and final remark. IV. DEMOCRACY, LEGITIMACY AND A SENSE OF JUSTICE Republicans and many liberals, among others, have stressed the idea that for the democratic state to survive it is necessary that citizens display a certain degree of civic dispositions or virtues. As the republican view – which I favor – may turn out to be more controversial in this respect, let me just outline a typical liberal response to this problem. A liberal state must remain neutral regarding the conceptions of the good advanced by its citizens to be legitimate [Rawls (1971), pp. 27-30, 392-394]. To express it in Rawlsian popular terms, the law and the state must refrain from adopting any particular comprehensive doctrine [cfr. Rawls (1993), Lectures IV and V]. Any state that violates this principle will be operating as a perfectionist state and cannot be legitimate. Among other implications of this anti-perfectionist view, some basic freedoms such as freedom of conscience or freedom of religion must be guaranteed by the law. Liberal legitimacy, consequently, will prohibit any attempt of the state's institutions to force their citizens to adopt any particular moral view, and more precisely any particular conception of the good. Now, this does not mean that the state cannot intervene at any rate to favor or even impose a particular conception of the right. On the contrary, from the liberal point of view legal coercion it is legitimate to enforce precisely those principles which comprise the liberal conception of the right, or the content of a political overlapping consensus among reasonable comprehensive doctrines. The state is certainly entitled to coerce its citizens in order The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice 127 to make them behave rightly. This is exactly what a legitimate criminal law must do. But it is not only this. The liberal state is also allowed to use appropriate means to make it possible for citizens to understand and accept the reasons why this particular conception of the right needs to be enforced, as well as the personal disposition to act according to it. It needs to promote such a minimal and shared sense of justice among its citizens, as Rawls has called it, since otherwise it would not have stability, which is in turn a further condition of its political legitimacy [Rawls (1971), pp. 41, 236, 274-275, 295-296, 442, and (1993), p. 19, 35, 77, 141]. True, direct coercion cannot rank as "appropriate means" in order to promote such sense of justice. Moreover, personal autonomy would somehow be compromised if we tried to do this. But only because part of what it is valuable in having such dispositions and beliefs is the fact that one has achieved them autonomously. Instruments like education seem much more acceptable – and effective. But we should not restrict the idea of education to something that happens within the walls of schools, or even colleges and universities. Why should our criminal justice processes not incorporate an educational dimension articulated through not mere rituality, but through a truly and sincere exchange of beliefs and opinions? In effect, the state cannot legitimately aim to have its citizens oppose murder because of a particular moral or religious conception of the sacredness of human life. But the state of course can require not only that its citizens not commit murder, but that they understand and accept the reasons why murder is forbidden; which are, in short, the reasons why it is legitimate to forbid murder, or even, the reasons why murder is a public wrong. From this point of view, the liberal state is entitled to seek that citizens' recognize it as a wrong and feel sorrow and guilt when they commit it, and why not, that they express such feelings publicly when they are blamed for that wrong. I am not saying that the state may legitimately force the offenders to sincerely apologize. As I said, that would violate their autonomy, and would be ineffective too. But why should it not leave some room for sincere apology and congratulate it when it does happen? Bennett states that "Whether [the offender] is genuinely remorseful or not is not relevant to his relations with the state" [Bennett (1998), p. 173]. But it is one thing to say that the state cannot coercively impose such remorse and quite another that having it is irrelevant for his relations with the state, which is, by the way, one of the victims of the public wrong. The state might well welcome sincere apologies from the offender by, for instance, lessening or reducing the punishment. And, in any case, the state is certainly allowed to promote the conditions under which all citizens may share a minimal sense of justice and understand and accept the reasons why the overlapping consensus is the basis of their political legitimacy. 128 José Luis Martí Let me expand a little bit this last idea. In a fully democratic community, the use of coercion to ensure the respect and obedience to law is legitimate, since this is what legitimacy precisely means. If a citizen commits a public wrong, we – as a community – need reasons to justify the imposition of punishment. These reasons, of course, depend ultimately on a particular theory of legitimacy as well as on a justificatory theory of punishment. But I do not need to enter now into such complexities. If the criminal law is legitimate, then by definition we possess reasons to justify its imposition. What we owe to the offender, before punishing her, is to offer her such reasons, that is, to provide her a public justification of the measures to be taken. Now, offering reasons to the wrongdoer about the legitimacy of the punishment we are going to inflict involves some kind of deliberative process. It cannot be only unidirectional communication from the judge to the offender, in which the former "ritualistically" reads some section of the law, with no care about whether the offender endorses or accepts, or even understands, what she is being told. It entails a much richer notion of what a process of criminal responsibility aims at. It means to transform such a process into a genuinely deliberative procedure; a procedure in which the offender, the state and the direct victim of the public wrong actively participate, having the chance to expose and discuss their respective views. Of course, such a deliberative process must leave a privileged role for the expression of censure or blame towards the committed public wrong. What is more: being involved in a deliberative process as such does not mean that the judge needs to be disposed to be convinced by the offender, for instance, of the illegitimacy of the criminal code. The offender has the right to receive explanations of the reasons why such a code as well as the punishment to be imposed are legitimate. But the criminal justice process is not the institutional moment to challenge the legitimacy of the law. In any case, I am convinced that in criminal justice processes like this one an important place for apology must be reserved. The expression of guilt, remorse and repentance by the offender may turn out to be very important for achieving a mutual understanding of the wrong committed and the legitimacy of the punishment to be inflicted. But apology only has value in this context when it is actual, not ritual, and honest or sincere. I am not denying that some elements of rituality may help to make things easier. Judicial processes in general are highly ritualized, and for good reasons. But the central value of an apology in a legal process, as in the most paradigmatic cases developed in noninstitutional contexts, depends entirely on its sincerity, among other things. To recognize this does not compromise liberal legitimacy. It does not entail adopting a perfectionist view. It does not violate state's liberal neutrality. To take care of the sincerity of the offender's claims during a trial, even of those related to her personal feelings and attitudes, is not "interfering in her freedom of conscience," at least when they are related to a public wrong. The Limits of Apology in a Democratic Criminal Justice 129 To take care not only of its citizens' behavior, but also of their beliefs and attitudes towards the conception of the right (or towards those public wrongs), is the state's business.* Departament de Dret Universitat Pompeu Fabra Edifici Roger de Llúria (campus de la Ciutadella) Ramon Trías Fargas, 25, 08005 Barcelona, Spain E-mail: [email protected] NOTES * I want to thank all those individuals with whom I informally discussed about Bennett's book and about these comments, including Hugo Seleme and Andrew Williams, and of course to all the participants in the symposium on this book organized by Josep Corbí at the University of Valencia, for the wonderful discussions held there. Finally, I want to thank Julie Scales for her linguistic advice on the final version of this short paper. REFERENCES BENNETT, C. (2008), The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. DUFF, R.A. (2001), Punishment, Communication, and Community, Oxford, Oxford University Press. –– (2007), Answering from Crime, Oxford, Hart. –– (2010), 'Inaugural Address: Towards a Theory of Criminal Law?', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXXXIV, pp. 1-28. RAWLS, J. (1971) [1999], A Theory of Justice, 2nd ed., Cambridge (Mass.), The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. –– (1993), Political Liberalism, New York, Columbia University Press. pedidos [email protected] www.krkediciones.com teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 131-139 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 131-139] Responding to Wrongdoing: Comments on Christopher Bennett's The Apology Ritual Sergi Rosell RESUMEN En este artículo se presentan tres dificultades principales para la posición de Bennett. En primer lugar, ¿no está el retributivismo en una situación peor si se admite (como hace Bennett) que aquello por lo que somos moralmente responsables, y culpables, está en gran medida sujeto a la suerte? En segundo lugar, nuestras prácticas morales incluyen reacciones a las malas acciones, que consideramos apropiadas y a menudo admirables, en las que no parece haber presente ningún elemento de hostilidad. Finalmente, existen diferencias importantes entre la censura y el castigo que ponen en cuestión la meta de entender y justificar el castigo legal como una mera proyección de la censura. PALABRAS CLAVE: censura, castigo, retribución, responsabilidad moral, suerte. ABSTRACT I present here three main difficulties for Bennett's account. First, it seems that retributivism is in a worse position if we admit (as Bennett does) that that for which we are morally responsible, and blameable, is to some extent subject to luck. Second, our moral practices include reactions to wrongdoing in which no vindictive element seems to be present, and we still regard them as appropriate and often admirable. Finally, there are important differences between blame and punishment that make problematic the aim of understanding and justifying legal punishment as a mere projection of blame. KEYWORDS: Blame, Punishment, Retribution, Moral Responsibility, Luck. Christopher Bennett's aim in The Apology Ritual (2008) is to put forward a philosophical theory of punishment which is fundamentally retributivist, although it also includes significant insights from restorative justice. In particular, he offers an account of legal punishment modelled on the ordinary practices of blame and apology. So, a first key point is for him to show that there is an appropriate link between legal (formal, state) punishment and the 131 132 Sergi Rosell ordinary notions of blame (as a kind of moral or interpersonal sanction) and apology (as the wrongdoer's morally expected response to her own wrong in interpersonal contexts). Additionally, Bennett argues that blame involves adverse reactive attitudes by whose expression we withdraw our goodwill or respect to the wrongdoer, which in turn involves a commitment to retribution, i.e. to hard treatment or to making the wrongdoer suffer. On this view, when we genuinely blame someone, we are necessarily treating her harshly or intending to make her suffer, as something we owe to her. So, a second key point is for him to convincingly argue that blame is non-contingently connected to the idea of hard treatment or the willingness to see the offender suffer (in response to wrongdoing), since this connection seems essential for a theory to count as retributivist. Both points are crucial for the success of the book's overall argument. I have to confess that I tend to sympathise with much of what Bennett has to say, especially regarding his account of moral responsibility and his reply to the sceptical Argument from Luck. But beyond this general sympathy, I have some particular reservations regarding the two crucial steps of his account that I have mentioned - i.e. the analogy between ordinary blame and apology, and state punishment, on the one hand; and the commitment to hard treatment, on the other - on which I want to press here. I will start by commenting on Bennett's answer to the luck argument and will then move on to discuss his account of blame, and will finish with the issue of the projection of this account to legal punishment. I. 'THE ARGUMENT FROM LUCK' Both Bennett's articulation of the sceptical argument against moral responsibility and his answer to it are quite remarkable. Instead of framing the discussion about the possibility of moral responsibility in the traditional terms of whether this is or is not compatible with determinism, Bennett shifts the scenery and rephrases the debate in terms of luck - or lack of control, luck and control being antithetical. This has an evident advantage, which is the inclusion of cases of agents acting in indeterministic scenarios in which control is also absent. The real issue, at the end of the day, is the challenge that lack of (full) control poses on moral responsibility. Interestingly too, he puts the challenge in terms of fairness: 'only if we had ultimate control over ourselves could it be just or morally appropriate to treat us in that way: the presence of luck makes that [hard] treatment unjust' [p. 50]. In answering this challenge, Bennett puts forwards a novel defence of Peter Strawson's (1962) account of moral responsibility which relies on the idea of the wrongdoer's 'right to be punished' and is also an argument for the need of retribution. I will discuss this argument in the next section. At present Responding to Wrongdoing:... 133 I want to propose a distinction regarding the role of luck in moral responsibility judgments which, subsequently, I will apply to Bennett's reply to the Argument from Luck. One evident way in which the presence of luck is disturbing regarding moral responsibility is that it could undermine the kind of freedom or control required for moral responsibility. This is what is typically at issue in the sceptical challenges to moral responsibility and the point is that if we lack the kind of freedom or control required for moral responsibility we are not morally responsible at all, with the result that moral responsibility is an illusion. But there is another way in which luck can interfere in moral responsibility, which is the way involved in the so-called issue of moral luck. Even if we were morally responsible agents who were real originators of our actions and character, some accidental or circumstantial factors could still interfere with our actions and even our character, so that cases of moral luck could anyhow be presented. Take for instance the case of an influent libertarian like Robert Kane [see esp. Kane (1996)], who must accept that, in his self-determining and self-forming willings and actions, what action the agent specifically ends up performing is partially a matter of luck, even though she had good reasons for willing and performing any of the different actions at stake and is no doubt morally responsible for the one actually performed, independently of which one it is. Of course, compatibilists are in general supposed to be more ready to accept the existence of (at least, some kinds of) moral luck. The issues of moral responsibility scepticism and moral luck are thus partially independent, despite the fact that both questions are connected and the further back we go in uncovering aspects of agents' actions and character, the closer the sceptical challenge to moral responsibility and the moral luck issue become - to the extent that, at some point, both questions may rest on the same issue. Now, it seems to me that Bennett mainly focuses on the first issue - his Argument from Luck is certainly a reformulation of the sceptical argument - and does not clearly address the second - the moral luck issue. But this second issue is also a potential problem for the fairness of retribution, independently of the first one. Let us accept that his reply to the Argument from Luck is sound (as I mainly regard it to be). Nevertheless it seems that moral luck - particularly, in the circumstances we face and in the consequences of our actions - raises extra doubts about the fairness of retributive responses, since agents may still not be equally in control of their actions and character or may be more or less lucky in the circumstances that they have to face or in the results of what they do. I find difficult to infer from what Bennett says in the book what his position concerning moral luck (in its different kinds) is. Maybe we should conjecture from his answer to the sceptical argument (especially after its restatement on pages 59 to 62) a favourable disposition to endorse moral luck, given his acknowledgement that there is room for luck in the extent to 134 Sergi Rosell which people will be subject to the reactive attitudes, since these are responsive to the agent's exhibition of the character trait that reflects her response to the moral demands and having this trait or not may not be her fault [pp. 61-2]. Another clue, though it is not clear to me where it points to, comes from his remarks about the need to take some account of luck, in order to discount accidental action, action from ignorance and the like, or the lack of the capacity for full engagement in interpersonal relationships and moral capacities. The rationale for discounting these cases is that luck is conditioning features which are irrelevant to the assessment of the quality's of a person's will [p. 62]. So, in a plausible interpretation, this account would not exclude circumstantial moral luck, but would surely reject consequential moral luck, since consequences (at least those unforeseeable) may be supposed to be irrelevant to assess one's quality of will. To restate my main point in this section, even if Bennett has successfully showed that the sceptical argument illegitimately infers from our absence of ultimate control that we are not morally responsible at all, he has acknowledged that a lot of luck enters into the sphere of moral agency; so that his opponent could just say: 'Ok, I accept that (a certain amount of) luck does not preclude moral responsibility, but it definitely calls for a milder reaction to wrongdoing, since luck is unequally distributed.' Therefore, a successful reply to the sceptic is still far from paving the way for retribution. I move on then to Bennett's direct argument for retributivism. II. BLAME AND RETRIBUTION Building on Strawson's insights, Bennett argues for retributivism by presenting an interpretation and defence of the idea that a wrongdoer has 'the right to be punished' - or, more exactly, 'the right to be evaluated as a member of moral relationships' [p. 62]. Each of us, as rational and morally capable agents, has the right to be taken seriously as a member of moral relationships, and this involves not suspending expectations and demands toward someone who does not meet previous expectations or demands, but rather holding her accountable for her deeds. So, the proper reaction to wrongdoing is to withdraw our goodwill, which is the way we have of showing our disapproval of this person's not meeting the relationship's demands. Not to blame wrongdoers would amount to fail to recognise or respect them as full members of valuable social relationships. Moreover, we express this withdrawal through adverse reactive attitudes, such as indignation and resentment. And these reactive attitudes are retributive in nature. Thus, Bennett reconstructs Strawson's account as 'a normative argument in favour of retributivism, or at least in favour of certain emotional attitudes that we can see as the basis of our sense of retributive justice' [p. 51]. Responding to Wrongdoing:... 135 I tend to agree with most of this story. However, my doubt is whether it is not possible for us to blame (or to judge morally blameworthy) someone, without expressing (or just feeling) any kind of suffering-aimed adverse emotional reactivity towards her. Indeed some historical morally admirable figures, like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, are supposed to have maintained this kind of non-vindictive response to wrongdoing - at least in certain crucial occasions. It is assumed that their condemnation of their oppressors or opponents lacked any adverse reactivity in the way retributivism requires. They apparently attempted to change their oppressors' behaviour by appealing to their conscience, i.e. through dialogue and mere moral argument, avoiding any wish of making them suffer. Bennett presents a dilemma in understanding King's and Gandhi's attitudes: either their responses were retributive in a minimal sense, and this is the only way of recognising their adversaries as qualified members of some shared moral relationship; or they were not retributive at all, but then they were disrespectful to those towards whom they were addressed [pp. 109-110]. Certainly, this last interpretation would imply that Gandhi and King considered themselves as morally superior to their adversaries, but this seems contrary to our natural understanding of their conducts and the admiration they generate. So, it may seem that the first interpretation is the right one. I agree that the second interpretation is inappropriate - it clearly contradicts our intuitions about the case - but also is Bennett's final judgment that King's and Gandhi's attitudes involved a minimal retributive aspect. The crucial point is whether we can interpret their attitudes as expressing the right respect owed to qualified members of the relationship, i.e. as taking seriously enough their actions as self-governing, without these attitudes having to involve any retributive element. On a non-vindictive view of blame, King and Gandhi did change their attitudes toward their oppressors, as a response to their abuse or deterioration of the relationship, but they did it with no need of expressing any retributive attitudes. If this characterization is plausible (and this is the issue), it seems that it clearly fits better with our shared understanding of King and Gandhi's attitudes and the merit we confer to them. Let us consider the following speech, from Anton Chekhov's short story New Villa, which I take as representing a clear case of the kind of nonvindictive blame that I have in mind. The engineer Kutcherov and his wife arrive at a little village with the governmental mission of building a bridge. Once there, they get captivated by the countryside charm and decide to build their own house near the village. The Kutcherovs want to establish a good relationship with the villagers, but the villagers misuse the Kutcherovs' good will and, after some time of unfruitful trying, the engineer goes to meet the villagers and addresses them: 136 Sergi Rosell I've been waiting to talk to you for some time, lads,' he went on. 'The thing is, your cattle have been in my garden and woods every day since early spring. It's all been trampled up. Your pigs have dug up the meadow, they've ruining the vegetable plot, and I've lost all the saplings in my wood. I can't get on with your shepherds, they bite your head off if you ask them anything. You trespass on my land every day, but I do nothing, I don't get you fined, I don't complain. Now you've taken my horses and bull - and my five roubles. 'Is it fair, is it neighbourly?' he went on, his voice soft and pleading, his glance anything but stern. 'Is this how decent men behave? One of you cut down two young oaks in my wood a week ago. You've dug up the Yeresnevo road, and now I have to go two miles out of my way. Why are you always injuring me? What harm have I done you? For God's sake, tell me! My wife and I do our utmost to live with you in peace and harmony; we help the peasants as we can. My wife is a kind, warm-hearted woman; she never refuses to help. That is her dream-to be of use to you and your children. You reward us with evil for our good. You are unjust, my friends. Think of that. I ask you earnestly to think over it. We treat you humanely; repay us with the same coin. [...] Rodion, who always understood everything that was said to him in some peculiar way of his own, heaved a sigh and said: We must pay. "Repay in coin, my friends"... he said [Chekhov (1998), pp. 210-1]. It is clear in the story that Rodion the blacksmith - leader of this side of the villagers - does not really understand what he and his fellows are being told. Kutcherov does not seem to be looking for retribution, but is just prompting them to think about all the wrong things they have been doing to him. Some may say that this is more a sort of complaint than proper blame, but it definitely appears to be a reaction that is responsive to the wrong done, but nonvindictive at all. My point is not that this kind of non-retributive response is the only appropriate one ever, but that non-retributive blame is also a genuine kind of blame, together with retributive blame.1 And if this is so, then blame is not necessarily retributive (nor characteristically retributive, since cases like this are significant), although it might still be typically or more frequently retributive. Kutcherov just wants them to realize how badly they have been acting, and then to stop acting like that. I can't find this disrespectful to them as full, qualified members of the relationship.2 In short, I find Bennett's answer to the challenge arisen by King and Gandhi cases unappealing because either our praise for them is due to the kind of non-retributive dialogue that they propose; or, if this praise could be made compatible with a minimal retributive factor, then it would be a somewhat trivial one, in order for the case not to lose its intuitive appeal - an appeal which lies in the contrast between their calm attitudes (or low tone in adverse feelings where the retributive element, if any, is definitely negligible), and clearly overt retributive responses or 'vindictive sentiments.' It seems to me then that Bennett, in accordance with his own account, should rather conclude that the attitudes displayed by King and Gandhi are not exResponding to Wrongdoing:... 137 amples of a superior or even appropriate form of blaming behaviour which merits imitation - or that Kutcherov's second reaction (see footnote 1) is always more appropriate than the first one. If our responses to wrongdoing ought to be proportional, in terms of showing the right amount of retributive reactivity or of making the wrongdoer suffer, then King and Gandhi responses are clearly inadequate. An additional reason that Bennett offers for considering King and Gandhi's response as retributive is their thinking that their oppressors had the obligation to put things right in order to redeem themselves, 'for this would be a sign that, however they expressed it, they did blame their enemies in the sense of seeing distance between them that had to be made up before they could treat one another normally' [p. 111]. But this argument is unacceptably assuming that any recognition of an offence and of the obligation of putting things right involves a commitment to retribution. It sounds like taking for granted that only the presence of retributive aspects can make the difference, when we are precisely investigating whether a kind of blame that dispenses with retribution is viable. III. FROM BLAME TO PUNISHMENT The final point that I want to address is that of the continuity between the notions of blame and apology, and state punishment - as an institutional version of the former [p. 152 ff]. Certainly, there exist both important analogies and disanalogies between them, and actually Bennett's argument relies on a shared general structure, modelled upon ordinary blame and apology, but it also stresses important differences which mean that that structure should be only ritualistically projected to legal punishment - resulting all together, it is fair to say, in a nicely and robustly articulated account.3 However, it is still true that a crucial difference between them could turn out to be fatal for the project of grounding legal punishment on an account of ordinary blame and apology, so that they may require independent and distinct justifications. I will conclude, therefore, by putting forward a possible crucial difference regarding the distinct effect of blame and punishment on their receiver. I find it plausible to assume that blame and punishment have different sorts of success or felicity conditions. In particular, I am thinking of the different role played by the recipient in blame and punishment. Even if blame and punishment are both ways of responding to wrongdoing, blame seems to depend upon the recipient's attitude in a way that punishment does not. This is because, in order to actually impact on the recipient, blame needs to be acknowledged by her. I do not mean that a person cannot actually be blamed unless she acknowledges the blame, but just that blame does not affect the blamed person if she does not perceive it as just or justified.4 If someone in138 Sergi Rosell tends to blame me, but I regard this blame as unjust, I will not typically feel blamed. Punishment, however, does not depend to the same extent on the receiver's response to it. A person will be punished –– in the sense that she will be hard treated, as retributive punishment implies –– even if she does not recognise this punishment as justified. In this sense, and very roughly put, blame is subjective (or requires some kind of rational endorsement by part of the recipient), whereas punishment is objective (i.e. it is independent of the subject's appraisal). And this is surely related to the fact that blame calls for a kind of internal response to wrongdoing, which appeals to reason; whereas punishment is only externally connected to wrongdoing and not in the space of reasons. Of course, there are some complications here. It is true that the same objective punishment can be differently experienced by different people, bringing about lower or higher rates of suffering. In addition, blame can also have a social force independent of an individual's endorsement. But putting these complications aside, the point generally holds: blame does not impose by itself a burden on the wrongdoer; it rather requires the addressee's grasping of its moral force, leaving it up (to a significant extent) to the wrongdoer's conscience coming to accept it or not. Now, the consequence that I want to draw is that, because legal punishment has a more objective, externally imposed impact on the recipient than blame, which makes it potentially more harmful and less rationally controllable by its recipient, it is then not unreasonable to think that its justification cannot be a mere projection of the very justification of blame, but it rather requires a distinctive ground. If this is so, then Bennett's (and other blame-based punishment theorists') agenda should be radically amended.5 There is definitely a lot to praise in Chris Bennett's sophisticated book, which is much richer than what can surely be inferred from my comments here - featuring notable arguments for the importance of the restorative part of the cycle of blame and apology, or the ritualistic and expressive aspects of his account. I hope these comments may prompt him to further clarify some fundamental aspects of his view.6 Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield 45 Victoria Street, Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom E-mail: [email protected] NOTES 1 In fact, after this first reproach proving useless, Kutcherov will utter a more outraged kind of blame some days later: Responding to Wrongdoing:... 139 He fixed his indignant gaze on Rodion. 'My wife and I have treated you as human beings, as equals,' he went on. 'But what about you? Oh - what's the use of talking? We shall end up looking down on you, very likely - what else can we do?' Making an effort to keep his temper, in case he said too much, he turned on his heel and marched off [Chekhov (1998), p. 216]. Very likely, this is a more typical or overt blaming response, but I can't see why here the blaming person is more respectful to the addressee's standing in their relationship. Indeed, in this case no further expectation in recovering the relationship seems to be present, what surely makes more difficult subsequent apology and reconciliation. 2 This sort of blame should not be simply understood as merely aiming at moral (re)education. In my view, the most plausible interpretation of Gandhi and King's appeal to conscience is as aiming at moral improvement, which can be construed as a cooperative task between equals, in which qualified participants are not prevented from engaging. 3 Exploring and accounting for these analogies and disanalogies is Bennett's main task in Part III. 4 I am not referring to the felicity conditions of the very speech act (of blaming) - i.e. those conditions that must hold for a speech act of a particular kind to count as such - but to the further conditions for the success of the particular kind of moral address which blame consists in. 5 Bennett might acknowledge this disanalogy and consider it as actually conferring more support to the necessity of a merely ritualistic implementation of the blame model for punishment. My worry with this is that an account that takes every analogy as giving support to the projection and every disanalogy as supporting the different (ritualistic/non-ritualistic) implementation of the common model would be a nonfalsifiable account. 6 I am grateful to Chris Bennett and Josep Corbí for their comments on early versions of this paper, as well as to the audience of its oral presentation at the V Nomos Meeting. I also thank support coming from the research project 'Alternatives, Belief, and Action' (FFI2009-09686), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and the Generalitat Valenciana's VALi+d Programme. REFERENCES BENNETT, C. (2008), The Apology Ritual. A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge & New York, Cambridge University Press. CHEKHOV, A. (1998), 'New Villa,' in his The Steppe and Other Stories; translation and edition by Ronald Hingley, Oxford, Oxford University Press. KANE, R. (1996), The Significance of Free Will, Oxford & New York, Oxford University Press. STRAWSON, P. (1962). 'Freedom and Resentment', Proceedings of the British Academy, 48: 1-25. Reprinted in his Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays, London & NewYork, Routledge, 2008. teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 141-152 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 141-152] The Public Expression of Penitence Constantine Sandis RESUMEN Este trabajo explora críticamente la comprensión expresivista del castigo que está en el corazón del libro de Christopher Bennett, The Apology Ritual. Parece haber una tensión en el tratamiento simultáneo por parte de Bennett de los delincuentes como gente a la que, por un lado, se le ofrece la oportunidad de ejercer su derecho a reparar el daño y, por otro, como sujetos que son sentenciados por mor de una expresión apropiada de su condena. Defiendo, en cambio, que el castigo infligido por el estado no puede realizar la función de purga, que quienes comenten un delito no lo necesitan para redimirse y que no confiere la redención, automáticamente, como algo que fuera de suyo, a alguien que no se arrepiente. Si, como Bennett parece sugerir, el 'derecho a ser castigado' tiene que incluir una dimensión ética, no puede ser simplemente un derecho a sufrir por lo que uno ha hecho, pues la reacción éticamente apropiada al crimen tiene que respetar también el derecho que uno tiene a ser reconocido como el criminal que fue y a que se le dé ocasión de reparar públicamente el daño que causó. PALABRAS CLAVE: penitencia, justicia restauradora, derecho al castigo, castigo comunicativo, restauración. ABSTRACT This paper critically explores the expressivist understanding of punishment which lies at the heart of Christopher Bennett's book The Apology Ritual. There seems to be a tension in Bennett's simultaneous treatment of offenders as people who are, on the one hand, being offered the opportunity to exercise their right to make amends and, on the other, being sentenced for the sake of an appropriate expression of their condemnation. I propose instead that state-inflicted punishment cannot easily serve a purging function, that offenders do not need it to redeem themselves, and that it does not automatically bestow redemption on the unrepentant as a matter of course. If, as Bennett seems to suggest, the 'right to punishment' is to include an ethical dimension, it cannot simply be a right to suffer for one's deeds, for the ethically appropriate reaction to crime must also respect one's right to be recognised as the criminal that one is, and be given a chance to make public amends for it. KEYWORDS: Penitence, Restorative Justice, Right to Punishment, Communicative Punishment, Restoration. 141 142 Constantine Sandis The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former. SIMONE WEIL, The Need for Roots, 1942-3. I. DECENT OFFENDERS AND THE DUTY TO PUNISH Christopher Bennett's The Apology Ritual is motivated by an important yet frequently neglected concern regarding the obstacles that certain legal procedures create for decent offenders who wish to apologise for their crimes and make appropriate amends. Bennett illustrates this with the following narrative: When taken away by the police car, Bryson was in the middle of an apology to the victim, an apology that he no doubt sees as inadequate to the situation, but which he feels compelled to make nevertheless...Under our present system, the police bundle Bryson off and from that point on he has little or no chance to have contact with Judith...the severity of the sanction may make it less likely that he ever expresses how sorry he is to his victim [Bennett (2008), p. 4]. According to Bennett, the problem is best addressed by striking a balance between retributive and restorative theories of justice by means of statesanctioned apologies which respect wrongdoers as agents whose actions are subject to moral and rational evaluation [Ibid, p. 41ff].This is to be achieved, he suggests, by sentencing them to serve whatever punishment decent people – such as Bryson in the example above – would freely choose for themselves.1 Such apology rituals enforce criminals to act as if they are sorry, regardless of whether or not they actually are so. Bennett's proposal is intended to respect the fact that we have a duty to punish offenders and consequently wrong them if we pardon crimes against their wishes, compelling them to accept an unwanted gift. Inter alia, Bennett argues not only that apology rituals enable us to express a condemnation owed to offenders, but that such expression is the chief purpose of punishment: [...] a good way to express how wrong we think an act is would be by making the offender do what we think someone who was sorry enough for their offence would feel it necessary to undertake by making amends [Bennett (2008), p. 146] [...] the fundamental job of the criminal sanction [...] is simply to express proportionate condemnation [Ibid, p. 148] [... ] the main purpose of punishment is condemnation of the offender for a "public wrong"' [Ibid, p. 152] [...] Setting The Public Expression of Penitence 143 an amount of amends is an 'intuitive way of expressing condemnation' [Ibid, p. 174] [...] there is a role for the criminal sanction – understood as what I have called the apology ritual – as an expression of collective condemnation of crimes [Ibid, p. 175]. This expressivist understanding of punishment lies at the heart of Bennett's suggestion that state-sanctioned apologies should be ritualistic. Yet there is a tension in the simultaneous treatment of offenders as people who are, on the one hand, being offered the opportunity to exercise their right to make amends and, on the other, being sentenced for the mere sake of an appropriate expression of their condemnation. The extent to which this tension can be relieved hangs on the precise sense that we give to the elusive notion of a 'right to punishment'.2 What follows is an exploration of certain details of Bennett's proposed account, offered on the premise that the spirit of his law can only be strengthened through criticisms of its letter. II. EXERCISING THE RIGHT TO COMMUNICATE REMORSE All rights are de facto limited by recipients' lack of power to waive any correlative obligations. According to an influential legal tradition, rights are thereby akin to liberties whose exercise we may but need not pursue, having 'some measure of control over the correlative obligation' [Holmes (1881), p. 214; cf. Hart (1955), pp. 180-3 & (1973), pp. 171ff.]. So conceived, the right of offenders – decent or otherwise – to be treated as autonomous agents entails a choice to be punished, and an opportunity to input into what the punishment should be [see, for example, Morris (1968)].3 In opposition to this tradition, it has been proposed that there are 'rights which do not leave [the bearer] free to waive anything at all', such as that of a team's right to a throw-in [White (1984), p. 108]. But is it not misleading to claim the team has a right to a throw-in if it has no choice but to take one? A team may have the right to claim a throw-in when none was given, but only if they were equally within their rights not to claim one. Similarly, an offender has a right to be punished if no sentence is given. In the case of a compulsory sentence, however, it seems misleading to insist that she had a right to it. At most, to have something that one is entitled to forced upon one is to have a right that one is prevented to exercise. A fortiori, if the reason for making punishment compulsory is to be that offenders have some kind of right to it, the right in question can only be one whose exercise they are denied a twoway power over. One possible move here, inspired by Hegel, would be to maintain that in choosing to do something which they know they will be punished for offenders are already choosing to be punished [cf. Hegel (1821), § 99R].4 This 144 Constantine Sandis position presumes a somewhat distorted notion of choice, eliciting responses such as the following one by John Deigh: At most, one who chooses to commit a criminal offense chooses to place himself in jeopardy of being punished or, if determination of his guilt is a foregone conclusion, to incur a liability to punishment [Deigh (1984), p.197].5 Perhaps the correct conclusion to reach is that no theory of why statesanctioned punishment is necessary can be built solely upon the notion of a 'right to punishment'. For it may be that what offenders have a right to is not punishment per se but, rather, the choice of publically condemning themselves. This is not to defend abolitionism, but merely to recognise the ethically significant difference between (a) making offenders do what they would choose to do if they were decent and (b) offering them a genuine opportunity to freely make amends, over and above whatever condemnation is expressed by the state. Conversely, victims have a right to receive genuine apologies, and this too can only happen if offenders are given the agential space to make their own amends. A valuable strategy between (a) and (b) is that of attempting to ensure that the offender realises that she needs to make amends. In Antony Duff's conception of it, a political community: owes it to the victim, whose wrong it shares, and to the offender as a member of the normative community, to try to get the offender to recognize that wrong and to make a suitable apology for it...We owe it to victims and to offenders to make the attempt to secure repentance, self-reform, and reconciliation...that attempt is worth making even if it is often likely to fail, since in making it we show that we do take crime seriously as a public wrong and address the offender as someone who is not beyond redemption. [Duff (2001), pp. 114-5].6 There are numerous different ways of trying to facilitate such a recognition, some more orthodox than others. In the films The Yes Men and Yes Men Fix the World, for example, political activists Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno pose as CEOs of organisations such as DOW Chemical and Shell making public apologies on their behalf. They 'accept' full responsibility for the past actions of the companies they pretend to represent, 'offering' vast sums in compensation to the victims of disasters which the companies have been implicated in. The intended effect of these stunts is to put the organisations in question in the difficult position of having to either disassociate themselves from the offers made in their name, thereby worsening their public images, or allow themselves to be manipulated into parting with huge amounts of money, with the possible benefit of improving their ethical reputations (they always choose the former). There is, however, a third option available to the The Public Expression of Penitence 145 CEOs, namely that of wholeheartedly endorsing the apology made on their behalf, adding that they should have been pro-active of their own volition. To sincerely respond this way is to freely exercise the right to make amends. Victims are unlikely to be persuaded by apologies shown to have triggered by hoaxes and will even less impressed in cases were apologies sanctioned by the state, on pain of further punishment. Could offenders in such circumstances truly choose to be punished? According to Duff the answer is 'yes', so long as we make the punitive procedure a form of inclusionary moral communication, allowing offenders the opportunity to fully co-operate in any legal action taken. Duff argues that, if administered correctly, a penitential punishment that is communicative – as opposed to merely expressive – can retain a distance which infringes neither the autonomy nor the emotional privacy of those punished [Duff (2001), ch. 3.2ff; cf. Duff (1986), p. 240ff.]. On this view, offenders are free to treat their punishment as they please: a penance, a prudential deterrent, a cost they are happy to pay etc. [ibid, pp. 125-6]. After all, the argument goes, there is no such thing as forcing someone to apologise sincerely. It is up to them to decide what kind of punishee they are to become. In the first of his 2009 Reith lectures Michael Sandel describes the practice of treating a fine as a fee: A study of some Israeli childcare centres offers a good real world example of how market incentives can crowd out non-market norms...parents sometimes came late to pick up their children, and so a teacher had to stay with the children until the tardy parents arrived. To solve this problem, the childcare centres imposed a fine for late pick-ups. What do you suppose happened? Late pick-ups actually increased [...] Introducing the fine changed the norms. Before, parents who came late felt guilty; they were imposing an inconvenience on the teachers. Now parents considered a late arrival a service for which they were willing to pay [...] Part of the problem here is that the parents treated the fine as a fee. It's worth pondering the distinction. Fines register moral disapproval, whereas fees are simply prices that imply no moral judgement. When we impose a fine for littering, we're saying that littering is wrong. Tossing a beer can into the Grand Canyon not only imposes clean-up costs; it reflects a bad attitude that we want to discourage. Suppose the fine is 100 dollars and a wealthy hiker decides it's worth the convenience. He treats the fine as a fee and tosses his beer can into the Grand Canyon. Even if he pays up, we consider that he's done something wrong. By treating the Grand Canyon as an expensive dumpster, he's failed to appreciate it in an appropriate way [Sandel (2009), lecture 1]. We sometimes talk of 'paying the price' for our mistakes. But a person who literally views all penalties as prices is doomed to conclude that one can never be punished for breaking the law because, strictly speaking, one can never break it. Such a person may well choose to be 'punished' in choosing to commit a crime, but only does so because she misperceives the law as 146 Constantine Sandis nothing more than a list of the rates (monetary or otherwise) of performing certain actions or, even worse, the cost of being caught performing them. So construed, the law doesn't say 'don't do A' but 'A will cost you x amount of time and/or money'. If nothing counts as breaking a law then, to paraphrase Wittgenstein, nothing could count as following it either, in which case it's no law at all [Wittgenstein (1953), § 201]. The state may communicate to citizens its wish that penalties be treated as deserved punishments rather than advertised costs, but it cannot force them to treat them so. Offenders may apologise voluntarily for a variety of reasons (from true remorse to the hope of leniency through 'good behaviour'), but they may also refuse to do so, thereby requiring authorities to threaten with further penalties or invoke force. As Harry Frankfurt's initial scenario of Jones being threatened to do something which he had already decided to do 'no matter what' demonstrates, not being able to do otherwise (in the relevant sense) does not in itself relieve one of the responsibility for doing what one is made to do [Frankfurt (1969), p. 3ff.]. It can, however, deprive the agent of autonomy. Not treating offenders as mere 'dogs' does not alone suffice to give them the 'freedom and respect' they are due [cf. Hegel (1821), § 99A]. One further worry with both Bennett and Duff's proposals is that it is often impossible for the victim to know which motive the offender is acting from (carrot, stick, or remorse), at least until after any eventual release. Indeed, the more sincere the offender, the less satisfied she will be with nonvoluntary punishment. As Bennett himself maintains: [a]n apology works when it is sincere: that is, when it expresses the wrongdoer's acceptance that what she did was wrong and her repudiation of it...the apology has to express the fact that the wrongdoer understands her action as wrong, that it matters to her [Bennett (2008), p. 115]. The above view is stated within the context of a discussion of informal restoration, Bennett arguing further on that: the state [...] has no business giving out sentences the explicit aim of which is to make offenders genuinely penitent [Bennett (2008), p. 154-5]. Be that as it may, the opportunity to publically express genuine penitence is one owed to the offender, yet threatened by enforced ritualistic amends. The criteria for whether an offender has repented are counterfactual ones: what would the offender have done if the penalty hadn't been enforced, and/or her sentence could not have been shortened for good behaviour? Ideally, offenders should have the opportunity to make amends which are legally supererogatory. Bennett's favoured penal system does not prevent them from doing so, of course, but one which actively provides them with a means of commuThe Public Expression of Penitence 147 nicating and effecting any desire to make amends in a way that is beneficial to the community harmed, as well as to the victim, would arguably be preferable. III. THE EXPIATION OF GUILT One of the many virtues of The Apology Ritual is that it presents a legal notion of punishment that is sensitive to moral concerns. Accordingly, Bennett conceives of the 'right to punishment' to include the inward-looking possibility of redeeming oneself through suffering and guilt for blameworthy actions or omissions [Bennett (2008), pp. 115ff.].7 He is here in broad agreement with A. I. Melden, who writes: [...] what is important about the claim that there is a human right to punishment is...the idea that punishment serves to purge those upon whom it is imposed of their guilt and by thus redeeming them enables them once more to join their lives with others. Punishment as the means adopted to purge persons of their guilt is, in fact, a mark of the respect we have for those to whom it is applied, for even the guilty who need to be punished in order to be redeemed are to be respected for the rights that they have [Melden (1977), pp. 183-4]. This redemptive theme, familiar from Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, is explored in Woody Allen's trilogy on unpunished murder, with unsettling results. In the first film, Crimes and Misdemeanours, the atheist life-saving and charity-donating doctor Judah Rosenthal literally gets away with murder. Initially 'plagued by deep-rooted guilt' and soon 'on the verge of a mental collapse-an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police', he one day awakens to find that 'his life is completely back to normal'. Once in a while he has a bad moment, but 'the killing gets attributed to another person-a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit' and 'in time, it all fades'. Or so it seems. For the murderer finds himself in quasi-confession, the above quotations all taken from a purported idea for a film that which he offers to an aspiring film maker he meets at a cocktail party. The latter is unconvinced: Here's what I would do: I would have him turn himself in, because then your story assumes tragic proportions, because in the absence of a god, or something, he is forced to assume responsibility himself. Then you have tragedy [Allen (1989)]. 'But that's fiction' the murderer replies, 'you've seen too many movies'. In Gus Van Sant's movie adaptation of Blake Nelson's Paranoid Park, teenager Alex accidentally kills a security guard and keeps it secret until his guilt compels him to make a confession, though (here again) not to the authorities. 148 Constantine Sandis Like Raskolnikov, and Allen's modern-day variations on his type, Alex falls seriously short of being decent qua offender. Regardless of this, the question of whether and if so how he is to be purged is not one which can be answered in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. The second film in Allen's series, Match Point, opens with the following narration by the Dostoyevsky-reading murderer Chris Wilton8: The man who said "I'd rather be lucky than good" saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It's scary to think so much is out of one's control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn't, and you lose [Allen (2005)]. The visual accompaniment shows a tennis ball hitting the top of the net; the frame freezes and we do not see which side the ball comes down on. Towards the end of the film, Chris throws the incriminating evidence (some jewellery) into the river Thames, but a ring hits the top of a rail and bounces onto the road. If this were a game of tennis, the 'match point' would have been lost. As it happens, the result precipitates Chris' not getting caught (the ring is picked up by a drug dealer who is soon after killed in a feud). But it does not follow that he has won the match point. Indeed, it is not clear what, if anything, could count as 'winning' here, inviting the viewer to question the view that being lucky amounts to having it easy and/or 'getting away' with things. Chris attempts convince the apparitions of his two victims that he did what he did out of necessity, and is consequently able to suppress his guilt, telling them that 'you have to learn to push the guilt under the rug and move on, otherwise it overwhelms you'. This is soon followed with him the followed, however, with the following confessional statement: It would be fitting if I were apprehended [...] and punished. At least there would be some small sign of justice – some small measure of hope for the possibility of meaning [Allen (2005)]. One may cause an offender to suffer by refusing him official punishment. But such an act could only serve to purge his guilt if it is itself understood as an act of punishment. In not being caught or sentenced, Chris has lost the chance to receive the punishment he deserves (and has a right to), a victim of the fact that he is not decent enough to immediately turn himself in. The film's final shot of him at a complete emotional loss makes it clear that this weakness will continue to plague him. Melden characterises the poverty of such a stance well: The Public Expression of Penitence 149 the individual, blemished as he is, would be dishonest with others if, were he to live with them as he did before the blemish was revealed in his offence, and dishonest with himself were he to adopt the usual methods of concealing the moral flaw from himself. For such a person there is the need to suffer the punishment and only in this way to do the penance that is required. Remorse is not enough. What is required is the constant reminder of the fault manifested in the misdeed in order that the individual may attain that moral ratification within himself that is the expiation of his guilt [Melden (1977), p. 182]. In the final part of the trilogy, Cassandra's Dream, one of two murdering brothers, Terry, considers suicide but ultimately decides that the only way to 'wipe the slate clean' and 'straighten it out' is to turn himself in and serve his punishment. Somewhat paradoxically, Melden paradoxically hold that the very suffering which causes offenders like Terry to seek punishment is itself punishment enough if the need for it is unmet: To demand one's punishment as a matter of one's right may well demonstrate that one has no moral need for, and ought not to be given, the punishment for which one clamours. For one who cries out for the punishment he deserves as a matter of right is already suffering the pangs of remorse and suffering the contrition of heart and repentance that punishment itself is designed to secure but which in that instance is sheer suffering that serves no useful purpose [Melden (1977), p.181]. Peter Winch considers a similar objection to the attempt to tie punishment to repentance: [...] if the offender truly has repented when he comes to be punished, then there is nothing more for the punishment to achieve in that regard. On the other hand, if the offender is not repentant, then whatever happens to him is not punishment (in the 'ethical' sense of the word I have tried to develop) [Winch (1972), p. 219]. While the objection is onto something, Winch rightly notes that there is also something amiss with it. He illustrates through the following passage from Simone Weil, quoted with approval: In the life of the individual, the innocent must always suffer for the guilty; because punishment is expiation only if it is preceded by repentance. The penitent, having become innocent, suffers for the guilty, whom the repentance has abolished. Humanity, regarded as a single being, sinned in Adam and expiated in Christ. Only innocence expiates. Crime suffers in quite a different way [Weil (1970), pp. 115-16]. 150 Constantine Sandis The upshot of all this is that state-inflicted punishment cannot easily serve a purging function. Offenders do not need it to redeem themselves and it does not automatically bestow redemption on the unrepentant as a matter of course (though it is certainly possible for a ritualistic simulation to activate the real thing).9 If, as Bennett seems to suggest, the 'right to punishment' is to include an ethical dimension of the sort alluded to be Winch and Weil, then it cannot simply be a right to suffer for one's deeds. The ethically appropriate reaction to crime must also respect one's right to be recognised as the criminal that one is, and be given a chance to voluntarily make public amends for it.10 Department of History, Philosophy, and Religion Oxford Brookes University Harcourt Hill Campus Oxford, OX2 9AT, UK E-mail: [email protected] NOTES 1 Being decent is a matter of degree rather than kind. Duff (2001) distinguishes between the morally persuaded offender [pp. 116-7], the shamed offender [pp. 117-8], the already repentant offender [pp. 118-120], and the defiant offender [pp. 121-25]. All but the last may qualify as relatively decent. 2 Bennett keeps the phrase in scare quotes throughout his book. In what follows I shall consider certain understandings of it, but it would take a much lengthier piece (if not a book) to present anything that even approximates an exhaustive analysis of the main contenders. 3 Morris takes the right to be treated as a person to be and 'inalienable' right acquired simply 'by virtue of being human' [p. 127]. I do not agree, but none of what follows rests on either of us being right. 4 This is not the place to engage in Hegel exegesis Still, it is worth noting that Hegel's use of 'Recht' is much looser than any notion standardly associated with the term 'right'. 5 I return to a further possibility further below. 6 As Duff subsequently notes, this is not an all-or-nothing question, and the appropriate extent of resources to be devoted to such efforts will vary from case to case. 7 Like Bennett, I leave aside here the issue of the appropriateness of apologising for things one is not to blame for, save to register that there is no reason to think that such apologies are purely a matter of etiquette and thereby immune from any guiltrelated norms [see Sandis (2010)]. 8 At one point in the film we even see him consulting the Cambridge Companion to Dostoyevskii. The Public Expression of Penitence 151 9 The question is an empirical one and results will doubtlessly vary from one individual to another. No specific sentence can in itself be identical to the punishment that an offender has a right to. 10 This paper was first presented at the 5th Nomos Conference, on The Apology Ritual, University of Valencia, 27-8 January 2011. Many thanks to all the participants, especially Christopher Bennett, Josep Corbí, Fabian Dorsch, Antony Duff, Jules Holroyd, and Sandra Marshall for their incredibly helpful questions, criticisms, and suggestions. Thanks also to David Dolby, Max de Gaynesford, Arto Laitinen, and Berta Pérez for very fruitful conversations and, especially, to Edgar Maraguat for insightful comments which helped to improve an earlier draft. REFERENCES ALLEN, W. (1989), Crimes and Misdemeanors, New York, Orion Pictures. –– (2005), Match Point, London, BBC Films & Dreamworks. –– (2007), Cassandra's Dream, New York, The Weinstein Company. BENNETT, C. (2008), The Apology Ritual: A Philosophical Theory of Punishment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. BICHLBAUM, A., BONANNO, M., & ENGFEHR, K. (2009), Yes Men Fix The World, New York, HBO. DEIGH, J. (1984), 'On the Right to Be Punished: Some Doubts', Ethics, 94, pp.191-211. DOSTOYEVSKY, F. (1866/1952), Crime and Punishment, trns. tr. D. Magarshack, London, Penguin. DUFF, A. R. (1986), Trials and Punishments, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. –– (2001), Punishment, Communication, and Community, Oxford, Oxford University Press. FRANKFURT, H. G. (1969), 'Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility', Journal of Philosophy, LXVI, No. 23. Reprinted in his The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 1-10, to which any page numbers given refer. HART, H. L. A. (1955), 'Are there any Natural Rights?', Philosophical Review, 64, pp. 175-91. –– (1973), 'Bentham on Legal Rights', in Simpson, A. W. B. (ed.),Oxford Essays in Jurisprudence II, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 171-201. HEGEL, G. F. W. (1821/1952), The Philosophy of Right, trns. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press. HOLMES, O.W. (1881), On the Common Law, Boston, Little, Brown, and Co. LEATHERBARROW, W.J. (ed.) (2002), Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. MELDEN, A. I. (1977), Rights and Persons, Oxford, Blackwell. Morris, H. (1968), 'Persons and Punishment', The Monist, Vol. 52, No. 4, pp. 475501. Reprinted in (ed.) A. I. Melden, Human Rights, California, Wadsworth, 1970, pp.111-134, to which any page numbers given refer. NELSON, B. (2006), Paranoid Park, New York, Viking Press. OLLMAN, D., PRICE, S., & SMITH, C. (2004), The Yes Men, New York, United Artists. SANDEL, M. (2009), A New Citizenship: The Reith Lectures, London, BBC Radio Four. 152 Constantine Sandis SANDIS, C. (2010), 'The Man Who Mistook his Handlung for a Tat: Hegel on Oedipus and Other Tragic Thebans', Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 62, pp. 1-18. VAN SANT, G. (2007), Paranoid Park, New York, ICF Films. WEIL, S. (1970), First and Last Notebooks, Oxford, Oxford University Press. WHITE, A. R. (1984), Rights, Oxford, Clarendon Press. WINCH, P. (1972), Ethics and Action, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. WITTGENSTEIN, L. (1953/2009), Philosophical Investigations, 4th edition, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, & J. Schulte, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell. teorema Vol. XXXI/2, 2012, pp. 153-169 ISSN: 0210-1602 [BIBLID 0210-1602 (2012) 31:2; pp. 153-169] Replies to My Commentators Christopher Bennett First of all, I would like to thank the participants very much for their generous, thoughtful and searching discussions of my book. I have found the process of engaging with their criticisms very fruitful. In this section I will deal with each commentator in turn, attempting to state what I take to be the main points at issue, before turning to my response. This method may lead to some repetition in my responses, but dealing with matters in this way allows me to engage with the precise formulation of the commentator's point. I have taken the commentators in alphabetical order. 1. RESPONSE TO BERMEJO Bermejo rejects my claim that we should reform our criminal justice processes to increase their resonance with our extra-legal expectations about reactions to wrongdoing. He seeks to convict me of the errors of restorative justice theorists who argue for similar conclusions. Although I present my view as a third way between the traditional criminal justice and the restorative alternative, drawing from the strengths of each, Bermejo argues that "principles of Bennett's theory push the institutional demands much closer to the restorative models than Bennett avows" [p. 100] . First of all, Bermejo thinks that I am wrong to base my view on a conception of the virtuous offender, because law is not concerned with a person's virtue, but rather with their external conformity to law. Furthermore, "in a theory where the attitudes of blame and apology are contemplated as the right attitudes, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that repentance should be pursued whenever it is possible and as much as possible" [ibid.]. Now I think that the claim that law is not concerned with virtue but only with external conformity has to be understood in a nuanced way. Some acts become criminal only when they have a certain motivation; some defences cite motivational factors as an exculpatory or mitigating factor (e.g. provocation) that might affect culpability; and some motivational features can be taken as ag153 154 Christopher Bennett gravating or mitigating at sentencing (e.g. in hate crime). But setting this aside, my view does not require that the offender display "an internal attitude including an acknowledgement of the wrongness of the behaviour and some sincere states of shame, guilt and affliction" [p. 99]. Rather the task of criminal justice, as I understand it, is to make proportionate condemnation of the offender, dissociating itself from his action where remaining silent would imply acceptance. Therefore it is not the case that my view commits me to pursuing repentance as far as possible. Bermejo might then ask why I bother with the "apology" side of the apology ritual: "What would be the use of all the concern with the proper attitudes of the offender if punishment is just an expression of whoever condemns. An expressive theory could have dispensed perfectly with all this complex internal background" [p. 100]. The answer to this has to do with the symbolic aspects of condemnation that I claim justify imposing some determinate burden on the offender. Only because the virtuous offender would find such a burden meaningful if properly sorry is it meaningful to impose such a burden in order to express condemnation. Bermejo also points to the important fact that, in a pluralistic, democratic society, even criminal law is bound to be in part based on "political" consensus. The force of punishment, on my view, is that it proclaims that the offender should be sorry enough for the offence that they would willingly take on the burden the sentence imposes on them as penance. But would it be more honest for the law to openly admit its nature as a political compromise and thus drop the supposed appeal to conscience that (I claim) is part of the force of the criminal sanction? One response to this is to say that, even in the case of the conscientious civil disobedient, there is a wrong involved in taking himself to have the authority to act as he did: his action neglects the fact that his act was rightly subject to the authority of law. However, this response still leaves a problem, which is that the punishment condemns the offender, not merely for the wrongful arrogation of authority, but for the wrongful destruction of human life (e.g. in abortion or euthanasia). The best response to this problem, it seems to me, is not to follow Bermejo in saying that the criminal law should admit itself to be a product of political consensus, but rather to explain why, or under what conditions, the criminal law can rightfully present itself as the political community's authoritative collective view of what standards of behaviour citizens owe to one another. We need an argument for this view, which I admit in my book I do not provide. Bermejo also attacks my suggestion, at the end of the book, that a condemnatory institution of punishment could retain some of the advantages of restorative justice if the sentencer indicates the broad margins of the penalty, and victim and offender agree the precise nature of the activity. He argues that this is too close to private law principles of corrective or restitutive justice, or the paying of damages, and does not address the aspect of the crimi- Replies to My Commentators 155 nal offence that is not material harm but "an objective violation of rights, or, in other words an attack against the most important moral values of the community." However, Bermejo seems to assume that my talk of amends can only signify private restitutive amends. It is true that some writers on restorative justice have sought to reform criminal justice in this direction [see e.g., Barnett (1977)]. My position, however, is that one who acts wrongly becomes liable to two sorts of amends, one being restitutive, the repair of material harm, and the other penitential. Penitential amends seek to address the wrongfulness of the action. My thought is that the imposition of penitential amends on an offender by a public institution as an act of collective condemnation would avoid the problems he notes with the private law model. Bermejo also attacks my suggested integration of censure and restorative mediation in sentencing policy. He sees this as threatening "incoherence and arbitrariness", and even jeopardising rule of law principles such as that there should be no punishment or crime in the absence of a duly enacted law in force at the time of the offence. However, on my proposal this restorative initiative enters into the criminal justice process only after conviction and sentencing. Only then can the restorative initiative be made compatible with the sentencing process doing its job of expressing some determinate degree of condemnation for the offence. I agree that the devolution of even limited sentencing powers would make it hard to achieve strict consistency in sentencing. But, firstly, strict consistency is only achievable if one has a particularly inflexible way of categorising offences and their accompanying punishments. Secondly, Bermejo notes that I allow that some loss of consistency might be a price worth paying, but he does not say what I think it would be worth paying for. What I am concerned to preserve, and what Bermejo himself neglects, is that the criminal justice process might become something that its participants can experience as a meaningful enactment of the reactions they would take to be appropriate when the criminal act is viewed as the wrong it is. One thing I take to be valuable in the restorative justice movement is its seriousness about crime and its rejection of the notion that crime should become the preserve of a bureaucracy that categorises offences in ways that are opaque even to the educated moral consciousness. 2. RESPONSE TO DUFF Duff thinks that I go wrong in portraying blame as having an intrinsically exclusionary character. This is a particularly serious charge for me because, as Duff recognises, the argument for blame as withdrawal also plays a role in explaining why the wrongdoer who fully recognises the significance of what he has done can be expected to undertake penitential amends, and in explaining why penance has the character it does – that is, of something bur- 156 Christopher Bennett densome. However, Duff thinks that such exclusion is incompatible with the equal concern and respect that members of a liberal political community should have for one another. In response, there are three points I would like to make. 1) Duff reads "withdrawal" from the offender as essentially involving "cutting the offender off" and excluding – and, to be fair, I have sometimes attempted to dramatise the essence of blame by giving such examples [see e.g. Bennett (2002)]. But withdrawal is a scalar notion, and the extent of the withdrawal should fit the nature of the crime. What I mean by proper "withdrawal" doesn't have to involve treating someone as though she were not there: that is, literally excluding her from community. I have (I think) always emphasised that the withdrawal should be partial and temporary. I am happy to allow that there can be many ways in which withdrawal can be registered. The key intuition that my talk of withdrawal is meant to pick up on is what I call the distancing intuition: that, whatever else happens, if you have done something intolerable then things can't stay the same between us; the relationship has to alter in a way that reflects the seriousness of the wrong. If this way of phrasing the intuition seems acceptable, we might then ask how the relationship must alter. And the answer presumably has to do with "not being on good terms" any longer. And this is the crucial thing I mean by "withdrawal of recognition". My talk of withdrawal is not meant to commit me to the view that, whenever you are not on good terms with someone, you ought to cut them off. Rather it commits me to the view that, when wrongdoing has occurred, you ought not to be on good terms with the wrongdoer. We should then consult our best understanding of how we act towards wrongdoers when we are not on good terms with them. I suspect that when we look at what we do we will realise that cutting people off, though sometimes the best way to do it, can also sometimes be a blunt instrument. 2) One of the reasons that cutting someone off is sometimes effective in symbolising moral distancing and sometimes not is because of the dual nature of withdrawal. Duff is wrong to characterise me as holding that blame has an "intrinsically exclusionary character". Rather my view is that it only makes sense to blame someone who is "one of us" and hence that blame is precisely a way of including someone in the moral community. This is one of the aspects of the meaning of the "right to be punished" strategy, which after all, attempts to show why, if one is bound to treat someone as a member of a community bound by shared normative expectations, it might also be necessary to have certain retributive responses to her should she violate those expectations. The exclusionary treatment of blame is precisely the way to recognise the offender as a member of the moral community. The practical import of this claim is that, when we are trying to give form to our judgement of the offender's moral position – that is, when we are trying to find a form of behaviour that does justice to her moral position – we have to find a form Replies to My Commentators 157 that recognises his problematic position as a member of the moral community who has done one of those things that, qua member of that community, one must on no account do. 3) My third point is more ad hominem. As Duff notes, the notion of withdrawal plays the important role in my account of providing an explanation of why penance comes to seem necessary for the repentant offender. If, on the other hand, we follow Duff in rejecting talk of withdrawal, it raises the question what kind of justification penance can be given. Duff recognises that penance can be a vehicle for remorse and repentance; and that claim has some intuitive resonance. Emotional states do seem to have behavioural manifestations – what we sometimes call the expression of emotion. So it may be said that penance is simply the (appropriate) expression of remorse. But first of all, even if this claim about penance were widely accepted, we would still understand it better if we could say something about why penance is appropriately connected to repentance. And secondly, many people look on claims about penance askance and see them as a hangover from a JudaeoChristian period of European history that we would be better off without. My project has been to explore a characterisation of the repentant offender, to try to explain why penance might come to seem attractive to such an offender, and thus to address this need to give some justification for the claim that penance is the appropriate expression of remorse and repentance. This doesn't, of course, show that my substantive story about penance as self-withdrawal is the right one. But the point is ad hominem: I think Duff needs to come up with some explanation of why penance is the appropriate vehicle for repentance, and I don't think that he has done so yet. Duff's second concern has to do with the significance of apology within criminal justice. He argues that apology "is something that the apologiser does" and that, as a matter of the logic of the act, no one can do it for him – "nothing we do to him can constitute him apologising to us". But, he thinks, this raises a puzzle as to how to integrate apology into criminal justice. Duff imagines a situation in which courts issue some formal condemnation that would include a demand for an apology – and this might include a demand for amends. This would be a system of "non-coercive self-punishment". Criminal punishment, on the other hand, is coercively imposed "on an essentially passive offender". Therefore "what is simply imposed, as punishments may in the end be imposed, cannot be an apology". I think the question is why I cannot simply agree with this. Duff points out that I do talk about "imposing amends" on the offender. And he is right that this would be "incoherent" if my claim was that, in such a situation, they retained the moral character of voluntarily made amends. However, I would have to make that claim only if I were committed to the view that the offender owes a public apology to his fellow citizens in the sense that he must make such an apology as a condition of his resuming the civil status that is 158 Christopher Bennett suspended after his conviction. But that is not my view. My view is that it may be true, morally speaking, that the offender owes his fellow citizens an apology. That may be something that affects his relations with (some) citizens, as they might rightly blame him if he does not give such an apology. However, I argue that the offender's making or not making of this apology is not something that the state should make a condition of the offender having or losing the basic civil rights and liberties that are at issue in punishment. If the state were to do that then it would be committed to having a concern with whether the apology was made sincerely or not, and I argue that this would be intrusive. Rather my view is that the offender can have his civil rights and liberties restored when he has been subjected to the relevant condemnation, regardless of how he has responded to that condemnation. Therefore I am not committed to the view that the offender's amends have the same significance in punishment as they do in standard cases of apology. Why, then, do I use the language of amends? Because the way to find adequate symbols for condemnation, on my account, is to symbolise how sorry the offender ought to be for what he has done. How does one symbolise how sorry a person ought to be without imposing amends, or, as I might put it more carefully, imposing action on an offender of the sort that he might spontaneously undertake as amends were he properly sorry? Duff himself thinks that the way out of this problem is to present the imposition of punishment as communicative rather than simply condemnatory: part of our reason for imposing some burden as punishment, he thinks, is a reasonable hope that the offender come to see its justice and hence receive it as penance. Only when it is performed willingly can it have the character of penance. However, there are numerous reasons for rejecting this account. For instance: 1) If we have the aim of communication, awakening repentance, do we not invite the question whether the imposition of penance is the best way to make someone repentant? If the answer to this question is negative then we have lost our justification for punishment. 2) If the avowed role of criminal justice is communicative then why should punishment be bound to respect limits of proportionality rather than something more individualistic punishment tailored for each criminal? 3) Doesn't Duff's story assume some conception of the expressive role of the imposition of punishment/penance, in so far as he takes it that the offender can receive the punishment as the proper expression of condemnation? In other words, Duff's account seems to rest on the suppressed assumption that the imposition of something that could be willed as penance has fitting expressive power as a mode of formal condemnation. If so, then it is not open to Duff to reject the notion of the expressive function of punishment as one-way: certain forms of communication rest on the recognition of the expressive power of the vehicle of communication. It is this expressive power that needs to be explained. Replies to My Commentators 159 Thus I attempt to explain something that seems at the heart of Duff's account, namely how the undertaking of penance, or the imposition of what one would will as penance if truly sorry, can have expressive power. And I seek to make this central to a censure theory of punishment without taking on some of Duff's problematic commitments e.g. that a highly expensive coercive state process should find its justification in aiming at the offender's repentance. 3. RESPONSE TO MARTÍ Martí also has concerns about the use to which I put the notion of apology in my account. I hope I am capturing the main burden of his argument if I characterise it as follows: 1) Martí is sympathetic to my claim that it is important to place apology at the heart of criminal justice; 2) he thinks, however, that I lose what is important about apology by making the apology merely ritualistic; and 3) Martí rejects my reasons for thinking that the role of apology need be merely ritualistic. Before addressing some of Martí's more specific points, I would like to clarify something about my quite specific interest in the notion of apology. I hope this will address some of Martí's opening remarks. One of the overarching aims of my account of punishment has been to vindicate Duff's use of the notion of penance in his own theory of punishment. One strand of this defence comes in what in my précis I call the Penance Argument. But my defence of the notion of penance also in part simply involves reminding readers that something like penance – some kind of symbolic amends – is part of what makes a successful apology – and that apology is a very familiar part of the furniture of the moral life. This "familiarisation" is important, because penance can be thought a strange notion, with unwelcome connotations. My point is to puncture this "gut" scepticism that many have by reminding people how familiar we are with penance (though we may not call it such) in actual practice. Willingness to undertake, not merely restitutive, but penitential amends is one of the acts that is constitutive of being properly sorry. Being properly sorry is, in turn, one of the success conditions of an apology. Now it is particularly the notion of penitential amends that is central to my account, and in some respects I could have been clearer if I had talked about the penitential amends ritual rather than the apology ritual. Thus I agree that there is much to the notion of apology that is not relevant to my account – for instance, that an apology is normally addressed to a particular person, and normally asks for some response. Nevertheless, what I want to concentrate on is the essence of apologetic or remorseful action that applies in all cases of wrongdoing – for after all, many cases of wrongdoing have no direct victim, and therefore require no "requesting" apology; or cause no material damage, and therefore require no restitutive amends. Penitential amends is a universal 160 Christopher Bennett requirement of virtuous response across all cases of wrongdoing in a way that apology addressed to a victim is not: therefore it is the need to make such amends that I make central to my account. Nevertheless, I seek to leave open the possibility that, in cases where there is a victim, and victim and offender are willing, a meeting between the two can take place in which an apology can be given. The reason it makes sense to make penitential amends central, on my account, is that I am concerned to find a way to make state condemnation of crime meaningful. However, Martí thinks that this takes the attraction out of the appeal to apology: If [apology] is only a heuristic device to be used by officials, apology, actual or ritual, does not need to play a role at all in actual legal contexts. It is something that needs to take place only in judges' heads. But this seems not to leave any role to rituality. Moreover, I cannot see then why Bennett insists ... that his theory is close to a particular interpretation of restorative justice, one for which the actual communication between the wrongdoer and the victim becomes important and has some important room for actual processes of apology" [p. 125]. Martí in this passage draws a distinction between two ways in which I might be appealing to the notion of apology: one, where apology is used merely as a heuristic thought process to help us imagine what is the appropriate sentence; and the other, where apology is something that ought actually to be given by the offender. One question that I might ask in response is whether this dichotomy is mutually exclusive. For instance, when Martí is explaining what he means by a heuristic device, he says it is something "that legislators and judges need to use in order to justify in abstraction and concretely determine the punishment to be inflicted in a particular case." Now it depends what Martí means here by "justify in abstraction", but one possibility is that this is a recognition that apology, on my account, does not simply play a role in helping us fix ideas about what sentence will fit a particular crime, but is central to the story about why something like punishment is necessary at all. On my account, it is in part because something penitential has to be part of a morally satisfactory response of a perpetrator to a wrong that the imposition of something onerous on the wrongdoer (punishment) is necessary. So one role for apology/penance is justificatory. However, because it has this justificatory role, the penitential amends are something that the offender does have to carry out: what the justificatory story is supposed to justify is the imposition of penance. That's what it turns out that justified punishment is, on my account. And because of this, imagining a case in which some actual apology could be made is an important heuristic device for fixing a sentence. So I don't see that I am forced to make a choice between the terms of Martí's distinction. Replies to My Commentators 161 My response to Martí so far rests on the claim that the fundamental state purpose in coercively imposing some penance is condemnation, rather than giving the offender the opportunity to say sorry to his victim, or to make amends, or to achieve reconciliation or forgiveness. As Martí points out, my reasons for thinking that the state's business is limited to condemnation are in part to do with the importance of freedom of conscience: that it would be wrong for the state to force an offender to be party to a situation in which he would feel bound to express some sentiments, and present them as sincere, even if they are not. Now, Martí diagnoses my concern for freedom of conscience as rooted in a commitment to state neutrality and avoidance of any comprehensive conception of the good. He points out, quite rightly I think, that if this were my position, I would be on shaky ground, for even the neutral liberal might have grounds to "favour or even impose" a particular conception of the right. Thus as long as the values being enforced are values of public reason rather than the values of some particular faction within the political community, the liberal can agree that such values can and should be promoted. I think that this is a good argument, and presumably is needed to explain why moral education can go on in schools in an avowedly neutral liberal state, and why the state can undertake all manner of public health education campaigns, etc., aimed at adults. However, I think that Martí has given the wrong diagnosis of the importance of freedom of conscience by linking it with liberal neutrality: rather the key value that freedom of conscience defends is, as I will now explain, integrity or authenticity. The question Martí's criticism raises is whether it follows from the fact that the liberal or republican state should promote belief in certain values (which I agree with), that it is therefore also "entitled to seek that citizens recognise [a crime] as a wrong and feel sorrow and guilt when they commit it, and why not, that they express such feelings publicly when they are blamed for that wrong" [p. 127]. The first thing to note is that there are two things that can be meant by "seeking that citizens recognise the crime as wrong and experience appropriate feelings." Of course, any act of expressing condemnation claims validity for itself, and thus seeks the agreement of like-minded others, and in particular seeks the agreement of the person who committed the wrong. Expressive acts are always communicative in this sense: they are couched in a communicative medium; they embody and respond to some conception of a situation that, it is claimed, others should likewise affirm. If guilt and sorrow can be seen as constituents of proper understanding then in that sense condemnation always seeks such a response from an offender. However, this way of framing the matter puts our reason to express condemnation in the dominant position, and sees communication coming about as a result of the offender grasping the appropriateness of the expressive act. The expression is prior in the sense that it is the vehicle for communication (and thus we have to ex- 162 Christopher Bennett plain how the expressive act is the proper bearer of some meaning before we can explain how communication can take place). However, another thing that might be meant by seeking that citizens recognise the crime as wrong and experience appropriate feelings is something more educative and individual-centred. If one's main concern is, not to give form to one's repudiation of the offender's action (i.e. as an expressive act), but rather to help the offender to such a repudiation himself, one will be confronted with the question of the best way of achieving that goal. And while it may be the case that the best way to instil guilt and sorrow in the offender is to express due condemnation, in many cases it surely will not be. One will have to look at each individual offender and her sensibilities in order to judge what strategy to take. If communication is our aim then our approach must be individualised: the process must take the form, and the duration, necessary for each offender. If expression is in the dominant position, on the other hand, as in the first option sketched above, then it is the due and proportionate expression that we are aiming at, rather than the instilling of some state of mind in the offender. My claim is that it is expression rather than communication that should be the state's business in criminal justice. Now I need to make it clear how my point is compatible with all sorts of perfectly legitimate public education initiatives that might be carried out to disseminate and encourage understanding and acceptance of the state's values. One important difference between the two cases is that public education initiatives always leave the recipient free to dissent. This is not simply freedom in the sense that belief formation always requires a certain freedom – and that one can never be forced to form a certain belief. Rather the sense of freedom at issue is that the dissenter is not to be penalised for having failed to assent to the claim that he is presented with. Now it might be disputed that a public education campaign does leave the offender free in this sense. After all, perhaps the dissenter who decides not to look after himself by e.g. stopping smoking will then be judged to have been given "fair warning" and made to contribute to the costs of his own medical treatment. However, this would not be the same as incurring extra punishment as a result of the failure to assent to some claim. Whereas if the criminal process dispenses with proportionality and goes on until the offender is prepared to repent then clearly the failure to assent is what is being targeted. Of course, Martí might argue that the offender's other rights, as well as considerations of efficient use of state resources, are likely to prevent great abuses of proportionality, or great intrusiveness. However, Martí might nevertheless propose that it is legitimate to put offenders in a situation in which – to paraphrase Duff – their attention might be forced on the wrongness of what they have done. This is something I allow on my model, but only if the offender (and victim) consents. Where there is no consent, and the offender rejects e.g. the justice of the charge, or the authority of the state to hold him to Replies to My Commentators 163 account, then according to my model the state can (and should) still impose a burden on the offender in order to symbolise condemnation, but must be content to accept the offender as having "done his time" once he has been subjected to that burden, regardless of the spirit in which he does it. Martí's objection to me raises the question whether the state could force offenders to attend e.g. a restorative justice meeting even when there is no consent. It seems if the fundamental aim of the criminal justice system is educative or communicative (in the sense I argue against) then the answer might be yes, if that is what it takes to communicate effectively. Martí will then ask me what would be wrong with doing this. My answer to this now appeals, not to liberal neutrality, but to respect for basic integrity or authenticity: if offenders are placed in such a situation, where they have some reason to dissent from the verdict, they would be under psychological pressure to buckle under and give an apology that they didn't believe in and which didn't reflect their fundamental view of the matter. The issue here has to do with whether it would be humiliating for the person to have to do this. The key guiding thought on my account has to do, therefore, not with liberal neutrality, but with the fact that respecting the dignity of offenders requires a certain respect for their authenticity, that is, their right that their public avowals and statements, those things in which they present themselves as expressing what they deeply believe in, should reflect what they really do deeply believe in. The decent state should not put citizens in a position in which they have to dissemble about their fundamental beliefs for fear of the consequences. It should not give them strong incentive to act in a way that they might afterwards reasonably regard as craven or humiliating. Therefore while we should welcome public education based on values to which the state is committed, we should reject the use of "educative" means in criminal justice that put offenders in a position of having to choose between presenting a false face on some weighty issue and enduring some hardship as the cost for their honesty. The problem here can be dramatised if we take a case of someone convicted for murder for having practised euthanasia on a patient with an irreversible, painful and deteriorating condition. This act is criminal, but many think it morally permissible, or even right (in the case where euthanasia has been requested). This is only an example, but any realistic justice system will convict many people who are morally innocent. Wouldn't the system Martí advocates compound the wrong done to these people? Having said all this, I should acknowledge that there is an unresolved issue raised by Martí's point. For it is one thing to say that the state cannot coercively impose remorse and another to say that being remorseful or not is irrelevant to the offender's relations with the state. Now "relations with the state" can mean various things. The question my position raises is whether the offender's being remorseful or not should be relevant to the offender's 164 Christopher Bennett having the basic rights and liberties that are removed or altered in punishment. The decent state should allow a diversity of opinions, even about the validity of the state's criminal code, or its authority to rule, and people should be able to have these opinions without fear (perhaps within limits) – however much it might also be a legitimate state purpose to argue against or otherwise counteract those opinions. However, one might worry that my argument proves too much, since it might show that it was wrong to allow expressions of remorse to enter as relevant mitigating circumstances at sentencing, or in parole board hearings. On this issue, my feeling is that I need to do some further work. 4. RESPONSE TO ROSELL Rosell's first objection to me is that, even if I am correct to argue that the presence of a certain amount of luck in the circumstances of human life does not preclude moral responsibility, it does call for a milder reaction to wrongdoing, since luck is unequally distributed. In other words, doesn't the unequal distribution of luck have to be recognised somehow in retributive justice? Rosell's point is a good one, and seems to me to merit further thought. I can only offer some suggestions here. If we want to accept Rosell's point, there are various possibilities. One would be to follow Nussbaum in "Equity and Mercy" in arguing that recognition of the fact that we are not the "sole authors of our lives" should lead us, not to deny moral responsibility and desert of some sort of retributive responses, but rather to tone down our sense of what kinds of responses are proportionate to what offences [see Nussbaum (1993)]. Recognising the extent to which our actions are products of contingency rather than autonomous, self-causing will should lead us to take individual culpability less seriously. Another possibility would be to follow a view that might be attributed to Bernard Williams in seeing moral responsibility as more akin to strict liability in law: we see the person as guilty or polluted as a result of the offence, but, knowing that his becoming so is largely a matter of luck as well as choice (and that choices themselves are largely conditioned by luck), our reaction to his moral state, while perhaps retributive in some sense, can and should also be combined with something like pity for what he has become (and has not in any simple sense brought upon himself) [see Williams (1993)]. The argument for keeping the distinctively blaming, fault-ascribing aspect of our retributive reactions seems to me to stem from the intuition aroused by asking something like the question "What did he think he was doing?" The act was one that the perpetrator came to see as good, as choiceworthy, and yet its contrary aspects – its wrong-making features – could and should have been evident to him. It is the fact that he accepted this view of Replies to My Commentators 165 the act as choice-worthy, and was prepared to set the stamp on it in action, in the face of everything that counts against it, that evokes our blame. I agree that this is a point that needs further attention, but I register my view that it is hard to imagine a real case in which we might come across someone who had willed such a wrongful action, and was capable of seeing its other sides, and yet not find ourselves asking, with the distinctive note of blame, "What did he think he was doing?" The important implied note is that it is a basic responsibility, for some "us", to remain vividly aware that such an act is not choice-worthy at all. Rosell's Chekhov example, which figures in his second objection, is a good one. The example seems to count against my view that a proper appreciation of culpable wrongdoing must involve coming to see the action as changing the relationship that is possible between the relevant parties, and in particular that it must involve withholding some of the respect that is normally a concomitant of that relationship. With all such apparent counterexamples, it is possible for me to respond either by convicting the apparently admirable non-retributive response of missing something important, or of claiming that the response does, despite appearances, involve something that would count as withdrawal or distancing. In response to this example I am tempted to take the first tack. I think that Rosell's example makes it clear that, in The Apology Ritual, I don't say enough about moral obligation and what is distinctive about being bound to do certain actions, and the role of obligations as distinctive sorts of reasons informing our retributive reactions. It is characteristic of the passage quoted that, insofar as Kutcherov uses condemnatory language, it is the language of virtue and vice: "Is this how decent men behave?" "You are unjust, my friends." Kutcherov clearly thinks that Rodion has good reason to treat him and his wife humanely. But what we don't get a sense of from this passage is that Kutcherov thinks that he and his wife have a right to that treatment, and that the Rodion is failing in an obligation owed to them. We get the sense that Kutcherov regards Rodion as an equal in the sense of being open to the relevant considerations, when those considerations are presented to him in the right way. But we don't get the sense that Kutcherov regards Rodion as an equal in the sense that they share a duty or obligation to behave towards one another in accordance with certain standards. Indeed, it is perhaps hard to see what obligation would amount to if it were not connected with the thought that it is the minimal acceptable standard of treatment between (qualified and self-governing) persons in a given relationship, and that the violation of that standard makes one's standing in that relationship problematic. The Chekhov example is also complicated by the fact that the question whether blame is a necessary response to wrongdoing is always more complex in first-personal cases. When one is oneself the victim, or one of the victims, then one can have a certain moral leeway to waive one's right to be indignant. 166 Christopher Bennett But now re-write the Chekhov example so that Kutcherov is complaining, not about how Rodion has treated him, but rather about how he has treated a vulnerable third party who will not make any response herself. Are our intuitions still that blame in my sense can acceptably be foregone? In a further strand of this objection, Rosell rejects the relevance of my claim that, if one responds to wrongdoing with the assumption that something would need to be done to put things right, then that shows an acceptance of retribution. My line of thought is this. Where the amends that are taken to be appropriate include penitential and not merely restitutive amends, this must be because we think that the offender should blame herself – since, on my argument, penance stems from one's treating oneself less well than one normally would, as a result of one's wrong, just as blame involves withdrawal of the normal standards of treatment. Therefore an expectation of penance involves the claim that self-blame is appropriate. But where self-blame is appropriate, blame is pro tanto appropriate. Although blame can be expressed in various ways, and some of these can involve something less than "cutting the wrongdoer off" – i.e. literal withdrawal – the normal state of affairs is that the relationship with the offender must alter, especially as the wrongdoer fails to respond to exhortation. Rosell's final objection is that punishment has some features that make it quite unlike blame, specifically that its effect as a cause of suffering is not dependent on the offender understanding and accepting its force; and therefore we should not expect the justification of punishment to be connected with the justification of blame. However, while I accept the premises, namely that punishment has features that make it quite unlike blame, I reject the conclusion, that the justification of punishment can be entirely divorced from that of blame. Blame and punishment share a fundamental part of their justification because they are both responses that aim to do justice to the significance of wrongdoing by condemning it. Furthermore, the way in which blame and punishment operate differently as condemnation explains the other differences – they do not require that we abandon the view that punishment is condemnation. The fundamental thing that condemnation must do, on my view, is to capture the fact that the wrongdoer's act has altered the relationship that it is now possible to have with her. Therefore what we are looking for in the case of both blame and punishment is a response to the wrongdoer that embodies this new state of things. However, because of the context in which they are carried out, blame and punishment need to do this differently. Punishment is a formal procedure for the issuing of authoritative condemnation on the behalf of some group or collective, by agents in a proper position to issue such condemnation on the group's behalf. Blame takes place in the context of interactions with a person that are often reasonably intimate and to which the participants can be presumed to be committed. Therefore in blame the offender's moral standing can be adequately captured and made clear by Replies to My Commentators 167 various often subtle departures from the treatment the offender would normally think herself entitled to. Formal condemnation, on the other hand, is more of a performance, and has something of the ceremonial about it. In order to avoid being merely ceremonial, however, it has to make its point with a greater splash – although it has the same end as blame, namely doing justice to the significance of the wrong. Making formal condemnation meaningful therefore requires, I argue, the imposition of something on the offender that indicates how far from being in good standing her wrong has placed her. This is the role for imposed amends. These amends, because they are onerous and imposed, can be experienced as hardship even by an offender who does not accept their justice. But this does not show that the justification for blame and punishment is radically different. On the contrary, the differences stem from the fact that they do the same expressive job in different contexts. 5. RESPONSE TO SANDIS Sandis opens his comment with the concern that no theory of state punishment can be built solely on the notion of a "right to punishment". This is because the notion of having a right to something (say, some benefit or opportunity) implies that one be free to take it up or not; whereas punishment is coercively imposed. "At best, to have something that one is entitled to forced upon one is to have a right that one is prevented to exercise." There is an important difference, Sandis points out, between a system that allows offenders freely to make amends and one that forces them to do what they would do if they were decent. Although my account may be justified in taking the latter approach, it should not claim to be the former. However, I am not pretending to introduce a voluntary element into punishment with my talk of the right to be punished. As others have explained, there are two ways of thinking about rights: rights as delineating proper respect for status; and rights as securing benefits or protection of interests. John Deigh (1984) applies this dichotomy to the right to be punished. If we accept that at least some rights fall into the first category then there might be things that a person may have a right to that cannot be waived, for instance, if they are rights to respect for one's basic moral status. The right to be punished, on this interpretation, would be a right that one would have – and could not waive – if it is constitutive of respect for a certain important moral status. It is this first tradition of thinking about the right to be punished that I seek to elaborate. In the book, I skirt round debates about rights and go straight for a defence of the claim that punishment, or rather some retributive response, is constitutive of respect for one's status as a qualified moral agent. But it seems to me that one could equally well couch the claim in the lan- 168 Christopher Bennett guage of rights, arguing that one has a right to be respected as a qualified moral agent, a right one cannot waive, and hence a right to be punished. As Sandis reads the right to be punished, however, it leads him rather towards the idea that the state has a duty to provide her with the benefit of moral reconciliation (and hence that the right to be punished is the right to some benefit rather than respect for status). He quotes Melden on "the idea that punishment serves to purge those upon whom it is imposed of their guilt and by thus redeeming them enables them once more to join their lives with others." Criticising the view he attributes to me, Sandis then argues that state punishment cannot serve this purging function – e.g. not with repentant offenders. "Offenders do not need it to redeem themselves, and it does not automatically bestow redemption on the unrepentant ..." He concludes that I need some further argument to explain why criminal must be given the chance to make public amends. However, I can agree that it is not the opportunity to make public amends that justifies state punishment, while claiming that there is still an important link between state punishment and the redemptive power of suffering. My argument is that punishment is the political community's way of expressing condemnation of, and hence dissociating itself from, a wrongful action, and that the practice of apology and, specifically, making amends, is a (probably) uniquely powerful way of symbolising such condemnation and making it meaningful. On my view the political community has a duty to stand up for certain values, and to resist complicity with or implication in violations of those values, and for that reason it has a duty to condemn certain forms of wrongdoing. But my view rejects two more ambitious theses – that the state has a duty to "try to get the offender to recognise that wrong and make a suitable apology for it"; and that the state has a duty to give the offender the opportunity to expiate the wrong. Both of these approaches see punishment as essentially paternalistic, and motivated by the offender's moral welfare. They are committed to a) the thesis that the offender is better off if he expiates his offence; and b) the view that it is the place of the state, as an aspect of its proper concern for the offender, to seek to promote the offender's moral welfare, albeit subject to certain constraints. The advantage of my account is that it takes an argument for why someone who accepts and understands the significance of their wrongdoing would find penance compelling, shows how state punishment derives its condemnatory force from the connection with penance, but remains uncommitted to a) or b). Department of Philosophy University of Sheffield 45 Victoria Street Sheffield S3 7QB, United Kingdom E-mail [email protected] Replies to My Commentators 169 REFERENCES BARNETT, R. (1977), "Restitution: A New Paradigm of Criminal Justice", Ethics 87, pp. 279-301. BENNETT, C. (2002), "The Varieties of Retributive Experience", Philosophical Quarterly 52, pp. 145-163. DEIGH, J. (1984), "The Right to be Punished: Some Doubts", Ethics, 94, pp. 191-211. NUSSBAUM, M. (1993), "Equity and Mercy", Philosophy and Public Affairs 22 (2), pp. 83-125. WILLIAMS, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Question disputée sur la connaissance en Dieu. (English translation p. 3 & sq.) La découverte de la Métaphysique d'Aristote au Moyen-Âge a jeté un trouble certain sur ce que l'on croyait acquis auparavant : l'omniscience de Dieu sur toutes choses. Aristote affirme, en effet, que le seul objet de connaissance digne de l'intelligence divine, c'est Dieu lui-même, car tout autre objet, nécessairement extérieur et inférieur à lui, entacherait sa dignité absolue. Ce jugement au sommet de toute l'oeuvre du Philosophe a donné lieu, du fait de sa concision, à plusieurs interprétations. A1ère lecture : Dieu ne connaît rien d'autre que lui-seul. Saint Bonaventure, mais d'autres avant lui, en ont conclu que le Dieu d'Aristote ne pouvait connaître autre chose que lui-seul, et ignorait, par conséquent, le reste de l'univers. Bonaventure a vu là un motif supplémentaire de condamnation de cette philosophie apparemment si contraire aux articles de la foi chrétienne. B2ème lecture : Dieu connaît l'effet dont il est la cause propre, à savoir l'être de toutes chose. L'effet est la similitude de sa cause. Or, Dieu, en tant qu'Être-Même Subsistant, est la cause propre de l'être de toutes choses. Donc, en connaissant sa propre essence comme Être-Même, Dieu connaît toutes choses parce que l'être de chacune est une similitude de son essencemême, comme l'essence de l'effet est similitude de l'essence de la cause. Cependant, cette thèse donne elle-même lieu à deux conceptions différentes : a. Les philosophies émanatistes néo-platoniciennes et arabes jusqu'à Averroès ont conçu la notion d'être comme une sorte d'universel signifiant l'existence. Être serait une forme générique à laquelle s'ajoute par le jeu des causes secondes, les déterminations de vivant, animal, homme, etc. Donc, Dieu étant cause de l'être des choses, n'a de celles-ci qu'une connaissance très globale et indéterminée comme l'est leur être. b. Une telle interprétation, comme la précédente, est évidemment incompatible avec la foi catholique, et donc avec le commentaire que Thomas d'Aquin donne de la Métaphysique d'Aristote. Selon les actuels néothomistes, le Dieu de saint Thomas est cause de toutes les déterminations les plus concrètes des êtres. L'actus essendi, l'acte d'être, en effet, est l'actualité de tous les actes et la perfection de toutes les perfections. C'est l'acte d'être qui actualise toutes les déterminations de l'essence jusque dans leurs moindres concrétisations. Or, l'Être-Même Subsistant qui est acte pur, est la cause propre de l'acte d'être de toutes choses, qui est similitude de la cause dans l'effet. Donc, en se connaissant lui-même, Dieu connaît toutes choses dans leurs moindres déterminations en connaissant l'acte d'être de chacune. CMais, là contre : Il existe, selon ces néothomistes, une distinction réelle de l'essence et de l'acte d'être, puisque c'est l'acte d'être qui vient actualiser les potentialités de l'essence. Si donc, c'est l'acte d'être qui est l'effet propre de la causalité divine et qu'il se distingue réellement de l'essence, doit-on en conclure que l'essence n'est pas l'effet propre de la causalité divine ? et donc que Dieu ne connaîtrait pas les essences ? a. Si oui, dans ce cas, comme ce sont les essences qui différencient les actes d'êtres en les limitant chacun à leur propre détermination, les actes d'être strictement considérés en eux-mêmes sont absolument indéterminés, mais d'une indétermination positive ou intensive, comme le pensaient Gilson ou Fabro. Si donc Dieu connaît l'acte d'être parce qu'il est son effet propre, et que l'acte d'être en lui-même est indéterminé, alors Dieu, qui ne connaît pas les essences, connaîtrait un acte d'être 2 totalement indéterminé, un peu comme le pensait Averroès. Dieu aurait, comme on l'a imputé aux philosophes émanatistes néo-platoniciens et arabes, « une connaissance générale mais non particulière des réalités de notre monde » b. Mais si au contraire, on maintient que Dieu connaît les essences (ce qui paraît plus compatible avec la révélation de la Création) i. Alors, il faut dire que l'essence est un effet propre de Dieu. Mais si l'effet propre de Dieu est l'acte d'être, alors, l'essence est acte d'être, et il n'y a plus de distinction réelle entre les deux. ii. Ou bien doit-on dire qu'essence et acte d'être sont deux effets propres réellement distincts de Dieu ? Mais si l'un est acte d'être, alors l'autre est non-acte d'être, en opposition de contradiction (il n'y a pas de tiers entre être et non-être). 1. Donc l'essence strictement considérée en elle-même serait non-être absolu, comme le voulait Platon. C'est d'ailleurs aussi ce que pensait Thomas d'Aquin pour qui l'essence n'est rien tant qu'elle n'est pas en acte. 2. Il faudrait donc dire que parallèlement à la création de l'acte d'être, Dieu crée le non-être absolu. Cela paraît fort paradoxal et irrecevable dans la foi. DLe raisonnement principal de cette objection se syllogise ainsi : a. Tout effet propre de Dieu est acte d'être (première thèse) b. Donc, aucun non-acte d'être n'est effet propre de Dieu (Négation conséquente, Majeure prosyllogisme) c. Or, toute essence est non-acte d'être (mineure prosyllogisme) (Distinction réelle entre les deux) d. Donc, aucune essence n'est effet propre de Dieu (Conclusion prosyllogisme) e. Mais tout objet de connaissance de Dieu est effet propre de Dieu (seconde thèse, Majeure syllogisme) f. Or, aucune essence n'est effet propre de Dieu (mineure syllogisme, Conclusion prosyllogisme) g. Donc aucune essence n'est objet de connaissance de Dieu (Conclusion syllogisme) ETrois attaques possibles de ce raisonnement principal : a. Attaque de la thèse du prosyllogisme : i. Certains effets propres de Dieu ne sont pas actes d'être (contradictoire) ii. Aucun effet propre de Dieu n'est acte d'être (contraire) b. Attaque de la mineure du prosyllogisme : i. Certaines essences sont des actes d'être (contradictoire) ii. Toute essence est un acte d'être (contraire) c. Attaque de la Majeure du syllogisme : i. Certains objets de connaissance de Dieu ne sont pas effets propres de Dieu (contradictoire) ii. Aucun objet de connaissance de Dieu n'est effet propre de Dieu (contraire) La question est donc la suivante : comme la conclusion du syllogisme est inacceptable selon la foi, et sans doute selon la raison, quelle est (ou quelles sont) l'attaque (ou les attaques), parmi les trois, qu'il faut entreprendre et comment la (ou les) développer afin d'arriver à une conclusion vraie ? Mail : Guy Delaporte 3 Disputed question on knowledge in God. (Shame on my so poor english!) The discovery of Aristotle's Metaphysics in the Middle-Ages has troubled what was previously considered as acquired: God's omniscience over all things. Aristotle asserts, in fact, that the only object of knowledge worthy of divine intelligence is God himself, for any other object, necessarily external and inferior to him, would taint his absolute dignity. This judgment at the summit of the Philosopher's work gave rise, because of its concision, to several interpretations. A1st reading: God knows nothing but himself. Saint Bonaventure, and others before him, concluded that Aristotle's God could know nothing but himself, and therefore ignored the rest of the universe. Bonaventure saw this as an additional reason for condemning this philosophy, apparently so contrary to the articles of the Christian faith. B2nd reading: God knows the effect of which he is the proper cause, namely the being of all things. The effect is the similitude of its cause. God, as the Being-Himself Subsistent, is the proper cause of the being of all things. So, knowing his own essence as Being-Himself, God knows all things because the being of each thing is a similitude to its very essence, as the essence of the effect is similitude of the essence of the cause. However, this thesis itself gives rise to two different conceptions: a. Neo-Platonic and Arab emanatist philosophies up to Averroes conceived the notion of being as a kind of universal, meaning existence. Being would be a generic form to which is added by the effect of second causes, determinations of living, animal, man, etc. Therefore, God being the cause of being of things, has of them only a very global and indeterminate knowledge as is their being. b. Such an interpretation, like the previous one, is obviously incompatible with the Catholic faith, and therefore with Thomas Aquinas' commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. According to the today's neothomists, the God of St. Thomas is the cause of all the most concrete determinations of beings. The "actus essendi", the act of being, indeed, is the actuality of all acts and the perfection of all perfections. It is the act of being that actuates all the determinations of the essence down to their slightest realizations. Now, the Being-Himself Subsistent, which is pure act, is the proper cause of the act of being of all things, which is similitude of cause in effect. So, by knowing himself, God knows all things in all their ultimate determinations while knowing the act of being of each one. CBut, against: There is, according to those neothomists, a real distinction of the essence and the act of being, since it is the act of being which comes to actualize the potentialities of essence. If, then, it is the act of being which is the proper effect of divine causality and if it really differs from the essence, should we conclude that the essence is not the proper effect of divine causality? and therefore that God would not know the essences? a. If so, in this case, as it is the essences that differentiate the acts of beings by limiting each to their own determination, the acts of being strictly considered in themselves are absolutely indeterminate, but of a positive or intensive indeterminacy, as Gilson or Fabro thought. If, then, God knows the act of being because it is his proper effect, and the act of being in himself is indeterminate, then God, who does not know the essences, would know an act of being totally indeterminate, much as Averroes 4 thought. God would have, as attributed to the neo-Platonic and Arab emanatist philosophers, "a general but not particular knowledge of the realities of our world" b. But if on the contrary, it is maintained that God knows the essences (which seems more compatible with the revelation of Creation) i. Then, it must be said that the essence is a proper effect of God. But if God's proper effect is the act of being, then the essence is an act of being, and there is no longer any real distinction between the two. ii. Or should we say that essence and the act of being are two truly distinct effects of God? But if one is act of being, then the other is non-act of being, in contradiction's opposition (there is no medium between being and not being). 1. Thus, the essence strictly considered in itself would be absolute nonbeing, as Plato intended. This is also what Thomas Aquinas thought, for whom essence is nothing until it is in act. 2. It should therefore be said that in parallel with the creation of the act of being, God creates absolute non-being. This seems very paradoxical and inadmissible for faith. DThe main reasoning for this objection is syllogized as follows: a. All God's proper effect is act of being (first thesis) b. Thus, no non-act of being is God's proper effect (Consequent Negation, Major of prosyllogism) c. Now, all essence is a non-act of being (minor of prosyllogism) (real distinction between the two) d. Thus, no essence is God's proper effect (Conclusion of prosyllogism) e. But any object of knowledge of God is God's proper effect (second thesis, Major of syllogism) f. Now, no essence is God's proper effect (minor of syllogism, Conclusion of prosyllogism) g. Thus, no essence is object of knowledge of God (Conclusion of syllogism) EThree possible attacks of this main reasoning: a. Attack on the thesis of prosyllogism: i. Some of God's proper effects are not acts of being (contradictory) ii. No God's proper effect is an act of being (contrary) b. Attack on the minor of prosyllogism: i. Some essences are acts of being (contradictory) ii. All essence is an act of being (contrary) c. Attack on the thesis Major of Syllogism: i. Some objects of God's knowledge are not God's proper effects (contradictory) ii. No object of God's knowledge is God's proper effect (contrary) The question is therefore: as the conclusion of the syllogism is unacceptable according to faith, and maybe, according to the reason, what is (are) the attack(s), among the three, that must be undertaken and how develop it (them) in order to come to a true conclusion? Mail : Guy Delaporte

Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador * Docente de Filosofía de la Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial y de la Universidad de las Américas. Licenciado en Filosofía por la Universidad del Salvador, de Buenos Aires. Magíster en Filosofía y Magíster en Tecnologías Aplicadas a la Práctica y Gestión Docente, por la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. Forma sugerida de citar: BALLADARES, Jorge, 2013. "Una racionalidad emergente en la educación". En: Revista Sophia: Colección de Filosofía de la Educación. No 14. Quito: Editorial Universitaria Abya-Yala. Jorge Balladares Burgos [email protected] / Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial / Quito Abstract Is it possible to think about an education that responds to contemporary needs? Is there a new way to think for an emerging education? This paper invites the reader to reflect philosophically about the educational challenges from a new emerging rationality. Besides the logic and instrumental reason of Modernity, the emerging rationality appears in education as an inclusive, colloquial and integrative new way to think. Keywords Rationality, emerging, inclusive, discernment, education. Resumen ¿Se puede pensar en una educación que responda a las necesidades contemporáneas? ¿Es posible un nuevo modo de pensar para una educación emergente? El presente artículo invita al lector a reflexionar filosóficamente los desafíos educativos a partir de una nueva racionalidad emergente. Frente a la lógica y razón instrumental de los procesos de modernización, una racionalidad emergente irrumpe en el escenario educativo como un nuevo modo de pensar inclusivo, participativo, dialógico e integrador. Palabras clave Racionalidad, emergente, inclusivo, discernimiento, educación una racionalidad EmErgEntE En la Educación Emerging rationality in education * 142 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación Introducción Hoy en día nuestro país experimenta una serie de cambios en la educación. Pasar de un modelo educativo centrado en los contenidos y en la memoria hacia un modelo de educación basado en la crítica, reflexión autónoma, trabajo colectivo y desarrollo de destrezas con criterio de desempeño se convierte en un verdadero reto. En este sentido, la reflexión filosófica nos invita a pensar lo que pasa en la educación y qué es la educación en sí. En este contexto, se ha venido hablando de una crisis de la educación. Parecería que nuestros modelos educativos no han respondido a las necesidades laborales de nuestra sociedad, con la consecuente migración de varios compatriotas a otros países. Un cierto enciclopedismo mal entendido sumado a la acumulación de conocimientos a través de la memorización ha marcado un estilo educativo poco fructífero en las últimas décadas. Se cuestiona la falta de preparación de los docentes debido a las bajas remuneraciones, lo que ha forzado al maestro a ser un mero repetidor de conocimientos y a acumular horas-clase antes que dedicar su tiempo a ser un pedagogo e investigador. En los últimos años la diferencia de oportunidades entre la educación privada y fiscal ha abierto la brecha educativa entre los que más tienen (y tienen más oportunidades de acceso al conocimiento) y los que tienen menores posibilidades de acceso. Una carencia de calidad educativa en todos los niveles también ha sido cuestionada en los últimos años, situando a nuestro país en categorías por debajo de la media según los estándares de calidad internacional. En esta perspectiva, el presente artículo quiere brindar una respuesta al contexto educativo actual desde la filosofía, proponiendo una racionalidad emergente que permita superar aquella racionalidad instrumental y formal, propia de la modernidad, y situarnos ante una nueva racionalidad inclusiva, comunitaria, dialógica y propositiva. Pensar de una nueva manera o buscar otro modo posible de pensar en función de la educación, nos sitúa ante un nuevo punto de partida en la filosofía de la educación. Una breve retrospectiva de la educación en el Ecuador Desde los tiempos antiguos, en Occidente, la humanidad ha estado preocupada por la educación de las nuevas generaciones. El mundo clásico se dedicó a formar ciudadanos y guerreros al servicio del Estado; las civilizaciones antiguas se centraron en transmitir y conservar sus tradiciones en torno a las clases o divisiones sociales que había en aquellos tiempos. En la Edad Media la formación del ser humano se basó en la 143 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos dimensión espiritual como camino para llegar al más alto conocimiento humano. Durante el Renacimiento se da un giro en torno a la visión de la educación, donde se considera a la persona como su eje central, a través del conocimiento científico; aquí se establece la necesidad de la educación del ser humano de acuerdo a las leyes de la naturaleza. A partir del siglo XIX, la educación va adquiriendo un sentido más liberal, en contraposición a la religión, hasta llegar a fines del siglo XX, cuando el hecho educativo gira en torno a las nuevas tecnologías y las sociedades informáticas y del conocimiento. En nuestro país debemos recordar que el modelo de educación en tiempos de la Colonia venía de Europa y era impuesto. Ya en la República las posiciones encontradas entre educación religiosa y educación laica llevaron a la toma de posturas radicales entre ambos estilos educativos. Una educación religiosa tuvo a las órdenes confesionales en el Ecuador (jesuitas, dominicos, franciscanos, salesianos, entre otros) como sus principales baluartes. Mientras que la educación laica tuvo su sustento en un Estado liberal que promovía las igualdades entre hombres y mujeres, buscaba el desarrollo integral del ser humano y se declaraba como no confesional. A mediados del siglo XX la educación laica se configuró en torno a una educación pública sustentada por el Estado y una educación privada fue promovida por determinados círculos sociales o iniciativas particulares.1 Asimismo, la pobreza extrema en nuestro país motivó a una serie de organizaciones sin fines de lucro y al Estado nacional a implementar programas de alfabetización y educación popular. Hoy en día, las nuevas tecnologías de la educación e información insertan a la educación en una cultura digital y es parte de esa gran aldea global de la información y del conocimiento. El modelo educativo con el que contamos hoy ha sido producto de un proceso histórico que ha ido a la par de los cambios políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales del Ecuador. En esta perspectiva históricocultural, una forma de pensar a través de una racionalidad determinada no ha sido ajena a este acaecer de la educación en el país y está inserta en una línea de continuidad con la tradición de Occidente. Si nuestro país ha experimentado los procesos de la Modernidad, de alguna u otra manera, hemos asumido sus diferentes formas de racionalidad. A continuación se planteará lo que implicó el proceso de modernización y sus diferentes formas de racionalidad. 144 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación Las formas de racionalidad en la Modernidad y su crisis Juan Carlos Scannone menciona que la sociedad moderna generó sus respectivas formas de racionalidad. En el siglo XVII aparece una sociedad ilustrada con una lógica de racionalidad analítica, instrumental, abstracta, lineal y formal (Scannone, 1996: 145-192). Todo esto favoreció a las ciencias, matemáticas y técnicas, al comercio desarrollado en el mercantilismo y al derecho natural universal-abstracto. Con el mito del progreso indefinido aparece un hombre ilustrado, enciclopédico, cuyo horizonte de comprensión se basa en el entendimiento abstracto. Con esta forma de racionalidad, la educación no estuvo exenta de la influencia del enciclopedismo de Voltaire, D'Alambert y Diderot, que buscó en el educando una acumulación de conocimientos para poder llegar a un sujeto "perfectamente" educado. Las sociedades modernas inician una segunda etapa en los siglos XIX y XX, en la que se sistematiza la lógica cultural, según Scannone. La racionalidad pasa a ser funcional y dialéctica: se supera lo analítico, pero no lo formal; la libertad se vuelve menos abstracta, pero se enmarca en un sistema. La libertad del hombre se realiza en la mediación de la libertad de todos y de un "todo". Esta racionalidad funcional y dialéctica desemboca en una praxis total, que busca cambios de la realidad circundante y que lleva a momentos de liberación del ser humano. La educación, especialmente en América Latina, asumió esta racionalidad funcional y dialéctica a través de propuestas de educación liberadoras que buscaban el cambio social, consideraban al oprimido como sujeto protagónico de su educación, que aspiraba la transformación de los modelos educativos tradicionales. Para Abel Jeannière, la Modernidad, como movimiento históricocultural, tiene cuatro revoluciones, que son la científica, la política, la cultural y la técnica (Jeannière, 1990: 499-510). La revolución científica rompe con la comprensión mediadora-simbólica del mundo, ya que lo considera autorregulado con leyes y acciones que lo gobiernan y lo regulan. La política rompe con los privilegios de la sociedad estamentalmente jerarquizada y entra con una concepción funcional de la sociedad y de la democracia. La Ilustración será la que dará pie a la revolución cultural con la autonomía de la razón y la libertad sin la tutela de las autoridades externas. Por último, la revolución técnica permitirá al ser humano pasar del trabajo agrario-artesanal al trabajo industrial y posindustrial. La Modernidad desarrolla la idea antropológica de un hombre autocentrado en su capacidad racional, dominador de la naturaleza por medio del conocimiento científico. Se puede decir que surge un superhombre (al mejor estilo de Nietzsche) que se instala para dominar el mundo, 145 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos la naturaleza, la imaginación y el destino de los seres humanos. Pablo Cifelli afirma que en la Modernidad "se desarrolla una concepción sustancialista que postula lo humano como una esencia que se da de hecho y al que le corresponden determinadas características como la asociación de la novedad con lo valioso, el postulado voluntarista del cambio social y la inflación ideológica y los sueños utópicos" (Cifelli, 1994). Por su parte, Bolívar Echeverría caracteriza la Modernidad a través de cuatro procesos: 1. "Sujetización", que consiste en el deseo del sujeto por constituirse como independiente y como fundamento de su propia naturaleza. 2. "Progresismo", que considera la historicidad como parte del cambio en la vida humana, en procesos de innovación y renovación. 3. "Urbanicismo", propio de las sociedades modernas que constituyen su mundo de la vida desde el orden y no desde el caos, desde la civilización y no desde la barbarie. 4. "Capitalización", que lleva al desarrollo de las naciones a través de la acumulación del capital, donde la dimensión económica predomina sobre la dimensión política en la sociedad civil (Echeverría, 2000). Ante estas cuatro características mencionadas por Echeverría, se puede inferir que la racionalidad en la Modernidad plantea la autonomía racional del ser humano desde la sujetación y tiene una linealidad del tiempo desde el progresismo. A su vez, tiene un carácter universal y civilizatorio desde el urbanismo, y cuenta con la acumulación de la riqueza como modo de vida, desde la capitalización. No obstante, en los últimos tiempos se ha pregonado una crisis de la Modernidad que nos lleva a plantear un fin de la historia o final de las ideologías. En este sentido, la racionalidad moderna también está mediada por esta crisis o tiempo de cambio, y que nos invita a pensar en una nueva forma de racionalidad. A partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX empieza a hablarse de la "crisis de la Modernidad". La crisis de los paradigmas científicos, el fracaso de los sistemas filosóficos totalizantes y de los sistemas políticos totalitarios, la derrota de las ideologías, las dos guerras mundiales y sus consecuencias, la limitación del desarrollo y el progreso con su consecuente deterioro ecológico y humano, etc. Todos estos hechos ponen en situación de cambio a este movimiento histórico-cultural y se inicia el 146 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación debate (Scannone, 1992: 1023-1033). Esta crisis afecta la manera de comprender y de vivir la Modernidad: De ahí que, usando una expresión abstracta y general, podamos afirmar que hoy está en crisis la modernidad, entendida como un tal ethos histórico-cultural. Este nació en Europa con el surgimiento de los tiempos modernos y la emergencia de la burguesía como clase. Incluye un determinado proyecto de hombre y sociedad [...]. Dicho proyecto antropológico y cultural implicó un determinado tipo de racionalidad que a la vez lo justificaba y lo posibilitaba: la racionalidad cuantitativa y técnico instrumental. Esta, de hecho, tendió a erigirse como exclusiva y excluyente, es decir, tendió a unidimensionalizar la existencia humana y a erigirse como única razón humana y como razón universal (Scannone, 1990: 19). Alain Touraine hará una nueva reinterpretación de la Modernidad a partir de una forma de concebir a los individuos desde sus universos. Para este autor, en la Modernidad se relacionan dos universos: el universo técnico-económico de los empresarios y el universo sociocultural de la marginalidad, la exclusión y los grupos étnicos. Dichos universos conviven en la Modernidad y aunque parece que el universo técnico-económico triunfase con su razón instrumental y la colonización a través del dinero y el poder, el universo socio-cultural se vuelve resistencia contra dicha instrumentalización de la sociedad ejercida por el universo técnicoeconómico. De esta manera, las identidades se vuelven mecanismos de defensa contra la exclusión y la marginalización y además nos sitúan ante la búsqueda de nuevas formas de vida y mundos de la vida cotidiana de la gente (Touraine, 2006: 67). Dentro de las salidas de la Modernidad, Touraine reconoce cambios de concepción: la idea de estrategia sustituye a la de gestión; el cambio social reemplaza al de sistema social. Ya el sujeto deja de ser histórico para pasar a ser un sujeto individual que se descompone en la sucesión de presentaciones. Este nuevo sujeto vive su vida en simulacros, por una serie de códigos sin referente alguno, si describiésemos el imaginario social del hombre actual massmediatizado, diríamos que a este lo constituye el programa de tv, la web 2.0, la llamada a celular, el cd de música, el archivo en la computadora, etc. La posmodernidad, en sus diferentes acepciones, puede constituirse en un peligro para el pensamiento social al aniquilar lo que tiene que ver con la historicidad. Frente a una crisis de la Modernidad surge la pregunta: ¿se han completado procesos de modernización en América Latina? ¿Qué problemas han causado los procesos de modernización incompletos en nuestro país? Una crisis de la Modernidad en América Latina, a partir de procesos 147 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos no completos, ha originado una serie de problemas de orden económico y social, afectando muchas veces la estabilidad política, educativa y cultural de los países. Pobreza, subdesarrollo, analfabetismo, inflación, migración, delincuencia, narcotráfico, entre otros, son algunos de los problemas que acarrea nuestro continente. Ante esta realidad, la educación debe recuperar su papel crítico de los procesos dominantes y alienantes, que nos permita situarnos en nuevos puntos de partida para la búsqueda de soluciones. Desde las consecuencias de los procesos incompletos de modernización en América Latina, a Enrique Dussel le preocupa y repudia el clamor de los pobres que son excluidos de los sistemas establecidos. A partir de una irrupción del pobre en el horizonte filosófico, lo establecido y oficial se vuelve una totalidad que margina a una exterioridad constituida por pobres y excluidos de los sistemas. De esta manera, Dussel reconocerá las estructuras de la injusticia: si una persona domina estable o históricamente a otra persona, se encuentra en una praxis de dominación institucional y social. Cuando un individuo nace, entra desde siempre dentro de esta trama institucional que lo antecede y lo determina. Esto es lo que Dussel reconoce como estructuras del mal (Dussel, 1986). Desde este planteamiento dusseliano pueden identificarse los procesos de la Modernidad como pertenecientes a lo que él propone como proyecto vigente. Dicho proyecto oficial justifica la exclusión, dominación y muerte del pobre. Por otro lado, abre las puertas para plantear el "proyecto de liberación", que es el objetivo utópico de la finalización de la dominación y que comporta el "principio de esperanza". El proyecto vigente tiene una moral de lo enseñado, de lo establecido y dominante, mientras que el proyecto de liberación plantea una ética en la praxis –acción y relación– hacia el otro como otro. En el diálogo que realiza con Karl Otto Apel, la propuesta de Dussel refleja la misma preocupación que recoge el filósofo alemán en cuanto al avance de la Modernidad (Dussel, 1994: 97). Mientras la ética del discurso de la comunidad de comunicación de Apel se queda en una crítica, la filosofía de la liberación de Dussel plantea una praxis que terminará en opciones concretas. La ética del discurso reconstruye con sus argumentos una moral de la justicia universal. En cambio, Dussel incorpora la compasión y la solidaridad frente a los excluidos. Por eso, desde una perspectiva latinoamericana, además de la crítica y la deconstrucción a nivel del pensamiento, se incluye la praxis, el acto relacional a favor de los excluidos y necesitados. Además de realizar reflexiones sobre las causas y consecuencias de los procesos de modernización, implica una acción y respuestas concretas frente a la problemática que origina la Modernidad: pobreza, exclusión, marginalidad, migración, dominación, entre otros. 148 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación Luego de este análisis surge las siguientes inquietudes: ¿es posible hablar de un nuevo tipo de racionalidad? ¿Se puede proponer una racionalidad que considere nuestras categorías y formas de ser latinoamericanos? ¿Será factible proponer una racionalidad desde la emergencia de los procesos histórico-sociales-culturales-éticos de nuestros pueblos como una forma de superación de la racionalidad lógica e instrumental de la Modernidad? Estas preguntas inspirarán nuestra reflexión filosófica a continuación. Una nueva racionalidad emergente Para una comprensión crítica de la Modernidad en América Latina, para saber aceptar lo positivo de los procesos de modernización y a su vez rechazar lo negativo, se hace necesario partir de la concepción de Dussel del "otro". Desde el encuentro "cara a cara" se comprenden las demandas del otro desde el propio mundo de la vida: el mundo del otro puede hacerse "mi mundo". Al abrirse al otro, se rompe con el universo personal (Dussel, 1986). Para Juan Carlos Scannone el "yo" que aparece en la estructura del lenguaje en forma nominativa, pasa a ser un "heme aquí" en acusativo, lo que abre la posibilidad de pasar de un "yo individual" a un "nosotros" ético-histórico (Scannone, 1986: 367-386). Este nuevo colectivo que parte de la experiencia latinoamericana se vuelve ético en sus relaciones internas: el yo, tú, él/ella y ellos/as se armonizan y respetan sus diferencias, acogiéndose mutuamente en el seno del "nosotros". Por otro lado, este nuevo colectivo es histórico porque se vuelve protagonista de la historia, a través de sus actores, de sus decisiones, de sus crisis afrontadas y superadas. Y esta perspectiva del "nosotros" da pie para indagar sobre una racionalidad emergente. Para conceptualizar lo que es una racionalidad emergente, parto de la definición de Josef Estermann, quien considera a la racionalidad como un paradigma o modelo característico de un cierto grupo, dentro del cual las múltiples expresiones de la vida tienen una explicación coherente y significativa. En este caso, el mismo grupo con su respectiva racionalidad no tematiza los presupuestos o los "mitos fundantes", sino que los vive (Estermann, 1998: 64). Juan Carlos Scannone menciona un nuevo tipo de racionalidad que promueve comunidades vivas fundadas en el diálogo y dialogando con otras comunidades vivas, en las que se da tanto la unidad como la diferencia al mismo tiempo. Esta racionalidad emergente abre un espacio compartido e interdialógico, donde se reconocen las diferentes 149 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos particularidades dentro de una comunidad. La razón humana no considera a esta comunidad como la sumatoria de singularidades de manera abstracta, sino que la comunidad se vuelve protagonista de un proceso histórico de mutuo enriquecimiento. De aquel modo de ser meros emisores de nuestra identidad y receptores de otras particularidades, pasamos a formar parte de un verdadero proceso de universalización (Scannone, 1996: 83). Frente a la crisis, la racionalidad emergente nos debe llevar a una visión creativa y solidaria. Cuando citamos la creatividad, ella nos introduce hacia nuevas alternativas y posibilidades de generar recursos. Esta creatividad se enmarca en una lógica del "¿por qué no?" –si siempre se ha hecho de esta manera, ¿por qué no intentar otra forma?, ¿por qué no buscar otra alternativa?–; en cuanto a una racionalidad emergente solidaria, esta debe llevar a los sujetos a sentirse copartícipes de la lucha contra el desempleo, a tener una mentalidad solidaria hacia aquellos –que por la falta de empleo– se encuentran peleando por sobrevivir. Así, una racionalidad emergente creativa y solidaria frente al desempleo y la inestabilidad laboral nos permite insertarnos en una "lógica de gratuidad" (Scannone et al., 1995), que muchas veces contrasta con las lógicas de los sistemas formales establecidos. La racionalidad emergente también implica una praxis emergente, de vital importancia tanto para la cultura como para la sociedad. El trabajo, como praxis emergente, será la muestra en forma concreta de las contradicciones y posibilidades reales de síntesis entre los procesos de modernización y la herencia cultural de Latinoamérica. Además de estar en juego la producción objetiva de bienes y servicios, el trabajo será fuente de autorrealización del hombre emergente en creatividad y solidaridad. En este sentido, el trabajo debe ser dignificante, humanizador y creador de cultura, sin dejar de ser económicamente eficaz y rentable. Esto será posible en la medida que se constituyan sujetos interactuantes, sujetos creadores de riqueza y de cultura, sujetos solidarios con su comunidad, sujetos que se valoren a sí mismos (Balladares y Avilés, 2008). De igual forma, se puede reconocer una racionalidad políticoemergente que motive un nuevo tipo de unidad cultural y política en el mundo. Desde una perspectiva de comunicación y comunión, una racionalidad político-emergente nos lleva a replantear la democracia como forma de gobierno "de todos" y "para todos", y no solamente una delegación de poder. En este sentido, la razón humana no es solamente una abstracción, sino que se convierte en protagonista y partícipe de un proceso histórico en aras al bien común. Finalmente, esta racionalidad emergente participativa y solidaria – que nos permite insertarnos en la mencionada lógica de gratuidad– apli150 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación cada al ámbito educativo, permite percibir que el arte de enseñar no vale por su materialidad, sino por la posibilidad de transmitir una rica herencia cultural y de conocimientos que vaya de generación en generación. De ahí que la gratuidad nos permite, además, fundamentar los aprendizajes colaborativos y cooperativos en la idea de que el saber se comparte y pero no se mezquina, se gestiona y no se limita. Luego de este análisis, es posible hablar de una nueva racionalidad emergente, que incorpore otra lógica desde la gratuidad, la solidaridad, la participación y el diálogo desde nuestra experiencia del "nosotros" latinoamericano. Y esta nueva racionalidad plantea desafíos a la educación como ámbito privilegiado de la formación de mentes y voluntades, y por qué no, configurada de nuestra racionalidad. Desafíos de una racionalidad emergente para la educación Desde esta perspectiva de la racionalidad emergente se plantean nuevos desafíos para los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje en el Ecuador. A continuación mencionamos algunos de ellos: 1. Una síntesis vital entre la herencia humana y cultural con lo válido de los procesos de modernización: una racionalidad emergente debe lograr síntesis transformadoras entre lo tradicional y lo nuevo, entre lo propio de nuestra idiosincrasia cultural y los nuevos conocimientos; entre los contenidos y las destrezas, entre la competencia y la solidaridad. 2. Recuperar la originalidad: volver a tener un modo de pensar auténtico, creativo e innovador se presenta como desafío para la educación. La copia o las malas imitaciones de modelos extranjeros han venido fracasando desde hace muchos años. La educación tiene el desafío de proponer proyectos innovadores que tengan una incidencia en la sociedad ecuatoriana y que no sean la copia de proyectos de otros países que poco o nada han respondido a nuestra realidad. 3. Educación incluyente: brindar oportunidad a todos por igual, sobre las diferencias sociales, económicas, étnicas, culturales, ideológicas y religiosas. Una racionalidad emergente propone la tolerancia de la diversidad de ideas, puntos de vista y experiencias de vida. 4. Dialogismo: esta racionalidad emergente busca el diálogo como mediación eficaz para la convivencia en comunidad y la comunicación. En un diálogo todos los interlocutores deben estar en 151 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos igualdad de condiciones y no puede haber interlocutores que sometan o estén por encima de otros imponiendo sus ideas. Todos los interlocutores dialogan entre sí en una relación disenso-consenso. Habrá ocasiones que las ideas sean yuxtapuestas, contrarias o contradictorias, pero una racionalidad emergente debe llevar a consensos. 5. Discernimiento: una racionalidad emergente nos propone como desafío un continuo discernimiento entre lo positivo y lo negativo de la realidad. Ser críticos ante situaciones adversas, pero comprensivos ante el mundo real. Se adopta lo bueno, se resiste lo dañino y se transforma en todos los niveles desde lo propositivo. Este discernimiento emergente lleva al ser humano a revalorar la integración, la gratuidad, la creatividad, la participación y el consenso. Desde una racionalidad emergente, el currículo educativo, instrumento orientador de la actividad académica de la escuela, debe ser flexible, integrador de conocimientos actuales como tradicionales, que fomente la creatividad y originalidad de los educando. Asimismo debe procurar el diálogo continuo entre los diferentes actores de la comunidad educativa, proponiendo espacios de diálogo y continua reflexión a través de la crítica y el discernimiento que conduzca a la toma de decisiones. Además, una racionalidad emergente debe mediar el desarrollo de pensamiento de los educandos, considerándola como un eje transversal dentro del proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Si desde la filosofía se puede plantear un nuevo tipo de racionalidad, ¿por qué no pensar en una educación emergente más propia y auténtica para nuestra forma de ser latinoamericanos? Conclusión La educación en Ecuador tiene como desafío actualizar y fortalecer su currículo, y responder a las necesidades del país desde un perfil de egreso del estudiante competente más acorde a la realidad. Para ello, este trabajo busca recuperar una racionalidad emergente propia de nuestra forma de "ser" y "estar" en América Latina, que permita integrar tanto la sabiduría de la tradición como los desafíos de los cambios contemporáneos. Una racionalidad emergente permite ampliar la perspectiva de la simple racionalidad instrumental y técnica, e integrar las diferentes dimensiones humanas como respuesta al contexto de la educación actual 152 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación desde la filosofía. Esta nueva forma de pensar nos sitúa ante una nueva racionalidad inclusiva, participativa, dialógica, comunitaria y propositiva, que busca en la comunión de la diferencia una vía de realización y de alcanzar el bien común. El ser educable se constituye como fascinante para el quehacer filosófico y nos invita a preguntarnos sobre la educación y el porqué de ella. La educación ha sido una preocupación continua de la humanidad, a través de la historia y las diferentes culturas, cambiando y adaptándose a las necesidades de los diferentes colectivos a través del tiempo y los espacios. El desafío, hoy, consiste en la búsqueda de una educación emergente que surja desde una nueva racionalidad como otra forma de ser educable-educado. Notas 1 Tomado de Filosofar Educativo: http://filosofareducativo.blogspot.com Bibliografía BALLADARES, Jorge 2006 Lo político: una revalorización para la política en América Latina. Quito: Educom. 2011 Módulo de filosofía y sociología I. Quito: SED-UTE. BALLADARES, Jorge y AVILÉS, Mauro 2008 "Aportes para una antropología filosófica desde la perspectiva del trabajo en América Latina". Intercambio 2006-2007. Jahrbuch Stipendienwerkes Lateinamerika-Deutschland. Berlin: Lit Verlag. CIFELLI, Pablo 1994 La encrucijada cultural contemporánea. Buenos Aires: La Crujia. DUSSEL, Enrique 1986 Ética comunitaria. Madrid: Paulinas. 1994 (comp.) Debate en torno a la ética del discurso de Apel. México: Siglo XXI. ECHEVERRÍA, Bolívar 2000 Las ilusiones de la Modernidad. Quito: Tramasocial. ESTERMANN, Josef 1998 Filosofía andina. Quito: Abya-Yala. JEANNIÈRE, Abel 1990 "Qu'est-ce la modernité?". En: Études. No 373, París, pp. 499-510. SCANNONE, Juan Carlos 1986 "Filosofía primera e intersubjetividad. El a priori de la comuni dad de comuni ca ción y el nosotros ético-histórico". En: Stromata. No 42. San Miguel, pp. 367-386. 153 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos SCANNONE, Juan Carlos 1990 "Hacia una pastoral de la cultura". En: Evangelización, cultura y teología. Buenos Aires: Guadalupe. 1992 "El debate sobre la modernidad en el mundo nor-atlántico y en el tercer mundo". En: Concilium. No 244. Madrid: Verbo Divino, pp. 1023-1033. 1996 "Nueva modernidad adveniente y cultura emergente en América Latina". En: Argentina, tiempos de cambio. Buenos Aires: San Pablo. SCANNONE, Juan Carlos et al. (eds.) 1995 Hombre y sociedad . Reflexiones filosóficas desde América Latina. Bogotá: Indo-American Press Service. TOURAINE, Alain 2006 Crítica de la Modernidad. México: FCE. Fecha de recepción del documento: 8 de enero de 2013 Fecha de aprobación del documento: 15 de abril de

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: http://www.elsevier.com/copyright Author's personal copy Barack Obama's South Carolina speech§ Alessandro Capone Department of Philosophy, University of Palermo, Via San Francesco P 105, 98051 Barcellona PG ME, Italy 1. Introduction This paper connects with my work on pragmemes (Capone, 2005), based, in turn, on Mey's work (Mey, 2001). As Mey says: Speech acts, in order to be effective, have to be situated. That is to say, they both rely on, and actively create, the situation inwhich they are realized. Thus, a situated speech act comes close towhat has been called a speech event in ethnographic and anthropological studies (Bauman and Sherzer, 1974): speech as centred on an institutionalized social activity of a certain kind, such as teaching, visiting a doctor's office, participating in a tea-ceremony, and so on. In all such activities, speech is, in a way, prescribed: only certain utterances can be expected and will thus be acceptable; conversely, the participants in the situation, by their acceptance of their own and others' utterances, establish and reaffirm the social situation in which the utterances are uttered and in which they find themselves as utterers (Mey, 2001, 219). Pragmemes are speech actswhose effects obtain through the use of language as situated in culture. I have outlined the theory of pragmemes in the Introduction to this special issue. In particular, I have stressed the connection between the theory of pragmemes and Hyme's notion of communicative competence and Dennett's (1991) theory of memes – concepts which can Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 27 April 2010 Accepted 10 June 2010 Keywords: Pragmemes Barack Obama Personification Speech A B S T R A C T In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from the perspective of pragmemes. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin, 1981, 1986) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of 'personification'1 (The Economist, December 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just expose it as if it came from himself, but gets another person (fictitious or, plausibly, real) to voice it. Since in an electoral speech, he cannot reasonably get people on stage to voice his ideas, he personifies ideas by narrating what people told him. His stories are his way of personifying his ideas. The discourse strategy he uses serves to reverse the direction of influence from the people in control to the people controlled (see Van Dijk, 2003). In this paper, I also argue that Barack Obama's speech contains echoes of Martin Luther King Jr's 'I have a dream speech' and that its structure is best understood in the light of Afro-American sermons. I explain analogies and disanalogies.
2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. § I would like to expressmy thanks to Dan Sperber, JacobMey, Neal Norrick, Sarah Blackwell and Alessandro Duranti for their encouragement and advice. I would also like to thank Nicola Owtram for his very detailed comments. I am grateful to Ira Noveck, who helped with the transcription. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1 Personification is an ontological metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsev ier .com/ locate /pragma 0378-2166/$ – see front matter
2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.06.011 Author's personal copy be propagated by cultural transmission, contrasting them to Chomsky's theory according to which language is biologically determined in our DNA. In the introduction I have also addressed the issue of intentionality and that of cancellability. Intentionality is a mental phenomenon: it is usually a mental cause that prompts either linguistic or nonlinguistic actions. Linguistic intentionality is what animates a speech act: it is the reason why the speech act is proffered as well as the intended consequence of the speech act. If all goes well, and the speaker's communicative purpose is understood properly, the addressee will fulfil that purpose. 'Intention' originally meant 'aiming at'. So, it is reasonable that an utterance should aim at something (its purpose) and be fulfilled if the purpose is taken up. Whether pragmemes are cancellable or not is a deep question, which cannot be resolved here. However, I maintain that in a number of cases pragmemes are non-cancellable aspects of meaning. In my previous work on pragmemes, including the Introduction, I dealt with illocutionary force, but it should be said that pragmemes may involve more than that. While Mey specifically deals with speech act force and claims that this is a function of context (he calls the speech act in context 'pragmeme'), I deal with the issue of the speaker's/author's intentionality and I address the question: whose voice is the one expressed in a speech act? I propose that Mey's notion of the pragmememust encompass not only illocutionary force but also intentionality, as well as the phenomenon of voicing (see Capone, forthcoming). I do all this by analysing a speech by Barack Obama. In my paper on pragmemes (Capone, 2005), I dealt with inferential augmentations occurring due to societal norms of utterance interpretation. Presumably those inferences were of a non-cancellable type. In this paper, I argue that an important type of inference is the one concerning responsibility for the utterance. Who is the author/ principal of the utterance? (The notion of responsibility mainly covers both content and style. The person who is responsible for an utterance is the person who worked out the content of the utterance and (also, usually) put it into a linguistic shape. Normally, this person is associated with the person who animates a speech. But it can be dissociated, as in the case of ambassadors. Responsibility is associated with bearing the consequences of the action). In the text I shall examine in this paper, I shall focus on the attribution of responsibility/intentionality on the basis of rich features of the context of utterance and of the social norms operative in that context. I argue that the political speech is of paramount importance in attributing intentionality as belonging to both the speaker and the audience and that an important rhetorical strategy is to maximize such possible attributions. The structure of the paper is as follows. First of all, I expose the methodology utilized in the paper, after that I discuss the context of the speech event, then I outline the content of the paper, subsequently I move on to the analysis of the data and to the discussion. I sum the key notions in the conclusion. The transcription of the speech is provided in Appendix 1. In Appendix 2 I expand the discussion of the echoes of Martin Luther King Jr. 2. Methodology In this paper I analyse Barack Obama's South Carolina speechwith a view to contextualize this speech event and analyse it in an intertextualway. Themain idea is thatwe should analysewhat is said byObama by reference towhat other people said. The aim of the paper is to draw a number of theoretical conclusions on the basis of the discussion of the data, mainly in relation to the notion of footing, as revisited by Duranti and Goodwin. A lot of attention will be devoted to the transcription, since it will furnish us theoretical tools for understanding the relationship between Obama and the audience, which is one of animator/principal. I propose to devote serious attention to pauses and to the predictive power of intonation, lengthening and softening of speech. The transcription of the speech and the transcription symbols are in Appendix 1. The text has been numbered to facilitate understanding of the analysis. Themethod I used in extracting theoretical considerations was to start with a theoretical framework (Goffman's notion of footing connected with Bakhtin's notion of polyphony), to see how that framework could be applied to the text analysed, and then move on to theoretical considerations which modify the framework by connecting it to the framework of the ethnography of communication. 3. The context (the historical and cultural background) It is important to provide information about the historical and cultural context in which the speech is situated. This will help readers understand the speech. 3.1. The historical context The speech occurs in January 2008, a period of financial crisis for America and its economic partners, such as Europe. This is a period in which America has accumulated an enormous public debt (not to mention the individual Americans' negative bank balances) and in which some economists (e.g. Loren Goldner) have made dire predictions about the future. Such predictions have partially turned out to be true, witness the recent partial stock exchange collapse (due to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, fear of economic recession, and the persistent weakening of the US dollar). In addition to the economic crisis (partly due to the USA's misguided involvement in the Iraq war), USA's prestige has suffered enormously from revelations that the CIA had fabricated evidence of a (military) nuclear build-up in Iraq, as well as from the failure of the military campaign in Iraq itself, where the local government is hardly capable of resisting military attacks from hostile forces inside the nation (fomented by Al Qaeda). Even if Europeans may be partially unaware of America's situation at the moment, the situationwas brought out into the open by a series of financial disasterswhich affected the financial world – especially banks A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 2965 Author's personal copy and companies specializing in mortgages. These events are hinted at by Obama's speech. Barack Obama presents himself as the person who brings change and who promises to deliver the changes forecast by Martin Luther King Jr. Barack Obama's speech, therefore, cannot lack echoes of Martin Luther King Jr's words. These words, too, are embedded in some kind of main speech. 3.2. The cultural context Now that we have sketched the historical context, a few words will suffice to sketch the cultural context. Electoral speeches are public settings where audiences can respond to some of the things said by a speaker. Of course, audiences are restricted in what they may do in response to what a speaker says, being for the most part confined to the production of displays of affiliation (e.g. applause, cheers, and laughter) or disaffiliation (e.g. by booing or jeering). These displays, as Atkinson (1984) says, involve simultaneous, coordinated activities by a group of people and have the characteristic that they can be done together (for example, applause is an activity that can be done effectively by a number of people). If audiences were not restricted in their production of (visible or audible) displays of affiliation/disaffiliation, one easily imagines the sort of chaos that would characterize public meetings. According to Atkinson (1984), there are conventions for orderly participation by the audience in such meetings; he points out that in his transcriptions, one could notice that the audience's response often occurs slightly before or immediately after the end of the last sentence. This induces the analyst to conclude that there must be techniques for anticipating/projecting pauses at turn transition. Atkinson claims that names, lists of things, contrasts, and self-praise or other-criticism are techniques which prompt audience affiliation (in addition to other prosodic techniques, such as a marked difference in volume, downward shifts in intonation, etc.). More should be said about the influence of Afro-American sermons onObama's speech. I postpone the detailed analysis of Obama's speech in terms of this influence to a section inwhich I argue, followingDuranti (1991), that a portion of speechmay contain more than one voice, and that Afro-American sermons are a type of speech event where the intense participation of the audience involves exactly the kind of phenomenon discussed by Duranti and exemplified by Obama's speech. For the time being, I refer to Davis (1987), who provides a detailed description of the overall structure of the African American sermon as a narrative event. He identifies five major components of traditional Black sermons: (i) preacher tells the congregation that the AMEN ANDHALLELUJAH PREACHING sermonwas provided by God; (ii) preacher identifies the theme, followed by a Bible quotation; (iii) preacher interprets the scripture literally and then broadly; (iv) each unit of the sermon contains a secular-versus-sacred conflict and moves between concrete and abstract; (v) closure is absent, and the sermon is left open-ended. In general, it appears that Barack Obamamakes the most of the characteristics of black styles for rhetorical purposes (see Kochman, 1981). While in this short paper I cannot do justice to the long list of differences between English white and black styles, a few differences seem to be of relevance to the discussion at hand. Blacks aremore likely to take the orator's stance of passionate involvement and argument with the adversary; for them confrontation signifies caring about something; they require responses on the part of the addressee; they may agitate to increase the level of emotional intensity and response. It is intuitively clear that (sustained) genuine emotion in Barack Obama's speech serves to project the impression that he cares about the USA's destiny. 4. Content Before proceeding to the analysis of the speech event in question, I want to dwell on the key notions I will discuss. 4.1. On polyphony In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from a particular pragmatic perspective. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin2, 1981, 1986) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of 'personification' (The Economist, December 13th, 2007).When he voices an idea, he does not just expose it as if it came from himself, but gets another person (fictitious or, plausibly, real) to voice it. Since, in an electoral speech, he cannot reasonably get people on stage to voice his ideas, he personifies ideas by narrating what people told him. His stories are his 2 To simplistically reduce polyphony to amultiplicity of voices, of course, is to oversimplify things. For Bakhtin, a person is always changing and there are different manifestations of the same person. Furthermore, a person can change as a result of what other people think or say of him. Polyphony is related to Bakhtin's notion of unfinalizability. As to the concept of the unfinalizable self, individual people cannot be finalized, completely understood, known, or labeled. Though it is possible to understand people and to treat them as if they are completely known, Bakhtin's conception of unfinalizability respects the possibility that a person can change, and that a person is never fully revealed or fully known in the world. The notion of a multiplicity of voices is connected with the idea that reality is changeable, since a person is influenced by other people's attitudes to her. Poyphony is also related to truth. Polyphonic truth requires the representations of more than one voice. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–29772966 Author's personal copy way of personifying his ideas. The discourse strategy he uses serves to reverse the direction of influence from the people in control to the people controlled (see Van Dijk, 2003).3 4.2. On footing I want to formulate explicitly what I have said so far in the terminology proposed by Goffman in his work on 'footing'.4 According to Goffman, one can distinguish various roles in relation to what a person says in her utterance. As an animator of discourse, a speaker simply reads and recites a script that she need not have created. As an author, a speaker both composes and utters the words she speaks. As a principal, a speaker is responsible for the positions or opinions advanced, but need not necessarily be the animator or even the author. In fact, the principal can sometimes be a social institution. As Goffman says: When one uses the term ''speaker'', one often implies that the individual who animates is formulating his own text and staking out his own position through it: animator, author, and principal are one (2007: 397). Goffman also writes: Sometimesonehas inmind that ''aprincipal'' (in the legalistic sense) is involved,whosebeliefshavebeen told, someonewho is committed towhat thewords say.Note that onedeals in this casenot somuchwithabodyormindaswith aperson, active in some particular social identity or role, some special capacity as a member of a group, office, category, relationship, association, or whatever, some socially based source of self-identification. Often this will mean that the individual speaks, explicitly or implicitly, in the name of ''we'', not ''I'' ( . . . ) the ''we'' including more than the self (Goffman, 2007). My initial suggestion that in the case of an electoral speech, it is the audience that in part establishes the meaning of what is said, and that the speaker's intention somehow coincideswith that of the audience, is confirmed bywhat Goffman says about themain speaker being both the animator (the sounding box) and the author/principal of his speech. In the same vein, still in accordance with Goffman, the audience could very well be the ''principal'' in the sense that the main speaker speaks on its behalf; that is, the speaker speaks in the name of ''we'', not ''I''. After all, to win an election a speaker must become the representative of a community of people (an aggregate of social groups), and to become such a representative one must show/prove that one's voice is the voice of the nation, or at least expresses the voice(s) of the nation. This is at the heart of Barack Obama's argumentative strategy. The structure of his speech proves that he has a right to become a representative of the people, the people's president, as he is able to express the various voices which constitute the people (to speak with the words of the people, adopting their styles). Above, I have utilized Goffman's notions (as introduced in the 'footing' article; 2007) to overcome some of the defects an author such as Goodwin finds there. According to Goodwin (2007), in Goffman's conceptualization of 'footing', speakers and hearers inhabit separateworlds, with quite different frameworks being used for the analysis of each; thismakes it difficult to build a model in which different kinds of participants act in concert. In contrast, my analysis brings out how the speaker and the hearer can perform concerted actions together. 4.3. Connecting polyphony and footing One may wonder about the connection between polyphony and footing. Surely there is a connection, since every time a speakerwants to express the voice of another, she has a technique available: 'quoting', that is to say acting as an animator. Of course, quoting is not the only device that can be used to express other people's voices. One can use stories and, since stories have as part of their structure an evaluative unit, it goes without saying that the evaluative part must be attributed either to the character of the story or to the narrator. In the case in point, the narrator (Barack Obama) identifieswith the characters of the story and thus the evaluative parts can be seen as coming from the characters' lips. When stories and their evaluative units are injected into the narration, the devices of polyphony and footing merge, as a character's voice is seen as associated with an evaluation and this evaluation is seen as coming from the character's voice, not only from the narrator's voice.Which voice belongs to whom can be determined through inference, and this is the reasonwhy footing is involved in the first place, since footing is based on inferences as to who is the animator, who is the author and who is the principal (Capone, forthcoming). These inferences need to be situated. In the present paper, I, therefore, cast my observations in the framework of what is usually called ''ethnography of communication'' (Hymes, 1964). The focus of analysis of Hymes and his associates 3 Duranti (2006b) writes that the language of politics has been presented and studied in terms of its ability to persuade an audience (of peers, subjects, and superiors) to go along with the speaker's view of the world and his or her proposal (Perrot, 2000). In much of this literature, the successful political leader is seen as a skilful manipulator who controls a variety of linguistic resources – from elaborate metaphors to paralinguistic features like volume, intonation, and rhythm – through which listeners can be convinced to accept a course of action (including the action of voting for the speaker). (Duranti, 2006b, 467) 4 'Footing' refers to the various representations of participation roles. Is a person participating as (mere) animator, as author, or as principal? An animator simply voices a speech but does not take responsibility for that. The author is involved in writing the speech, but need not take responsibility for that. The principal usually takes responsibility for his words. A speaker is, by default, animator, author and principal (Capone, forthcoming) unless there are heavy contextual clues that prevent this inference from arising. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 2967 Author's personal copy is the speech act (the actual speech act) that occurs in a context (the context is understood both as the set of events that surround the actual event, as well as the set of cultural norms in which it is embedded). A communicative event is to be considered as embedded in culture; thus, the analysis cannot fail to take into consideration crucial information that makes up the culture in which the speech act occurs. Hymes is mostly interested in describing 'communicative competence', in other words in defining the kinds of behaviour that are acceptable in a certain speech event, embedded in a given culture for the participants in the event in question. As Bauman and Sherzer (1974) and Mey (2001) say, speech as centred on an institutionalized social activity of a certain kind is, in a way, prescribed: only certain utterances are expected and will, thus, be acceptable. In the present paper, I follow Hymes in the way he focuses on the culture in which the speech event is immersed, the situation which elicited the communicative event, the form of the message (its rhetorical structure), the participation framework (which, I argue, is interconnected with the issue of form), and the oral channel (the oral medium). 5. Analysis In this section I provide analytic considerations on the text investigated, in which I put to work notions like polyphony and footing. 5.1. Collaborative strategies Pre-planned though it may be (it is clear, from the comparison with other speeches by Barack Obama and other electoral speeches, that many segments are recycled from previous speeches and recited by heart), the text is, after all, the result of a collaboration between the main speaker (Obama) and the secondary speakers (the audience). It may be the case that the segments of speech attributed to the audience are also pre-planned, being elicited by the organizers of the campaign who have mixed in with the audience. However, the choral character of the audience's responses attests that, although these segments of speech may have been artificially induced (and thus may not be completely spontaneous), they have a deep resonance in the audience's sentiment. The only points at which the audience's reactions are weaker are those in which BarackObama talks about the sacrifices involved; this seems to attest to the naturalness and instinctiveness of the audience's responses, which come from the heart and not just from following a script and responding to prompts from Obama's collaborators who suggest what to say (see Wharry, 2003). Interestingly, in other speeches by Obama (transcribed for the benefit of the people visiting Obama's homepage), the audience's contribution is onlyminimally acknowledged by sentences such as 'people chanting' or 'people cheering'. However, if we watch the video, we can register the audience's verbal reaction as utterances proffered chorally (often in the way of chanting), such as: ''Yeswe can'', ''We can change'', ''Yeah'', ''No'', ''Right'', etc. The length of the audience's responses varies, but it appears that there is a perfect synchrony between the speaker and the audience, as the audience is able to distinguish short from long pauses and does not disturb or disrupt themain speaker's words. To transform short pauses into long pauses would inevitably affect comprehension, as it would prevent the speaker's sentences from being articulated in their syntactic complexity. 5.2. Long pauses Longpauses are recognizablyplaceswhichdonotdisrupt comprehensionand syntactic articulation– theyare recognizedas places that the speaker wants the audience to recognize as such, and as places appropriate for long pauses and animated reactions. But what devices does the speaker employ for signalling the length of an intended pause? Presumably, a long pause may give rise to a long period of chanting, cheering, etc., but it is not sufficient on its own to project the speaker's intention. Instead,weneed tofind outwhether there is away for the audience to predictwhat is intended by the speaker to be recognised as a long pause. Tannen's (2007) suggestion that slower and softer speech is predictive of long pauses seems to be borne out by myannotationof this speech event. And if it is true that slower speech and softer speech are predictivedevices, the textmust be seen as a collaborative enterprise in which the audience is in someways used by the main speaker to voice a kind of theatrical speech – the audience is used as a choral dramatis persona. But to be so used, theremust be some instinctive collaborative spirit in the speech event, something which a speaker cannot impose, but only obtain by commanding respect. 5.3. Vagueness and co-construction of meaning Another point I would like tomake is that themain speaker's speech acts aremeant to be interpreted, not by following the speaker's univocal intention,5 but by participating in a process through which the audience's intentionality accrues to the main speaker's intentionality (meaning is being collaboratively created). There are two ways in which this process can happen: on the one hand, a political speech is in itself an interpretation of the audience's feelings and needs, and is meant to 5 Like Duranti, I am aware of the problems inherent in a notion of intentionality in which intentions are univocal, pre-determined, a priori with respect to what happens in interaction. Granting that, in many cases, intentions are in the head of those who speak, there are cases in which intentionality is build collaboratively between the speaker and the hearer. The literary text is perhaps the best example. The electoral speech is a case in which the speaker's and the audiences' intention are not separate. The speaker speaks for the audience, and, thus, his intentionality ideally alsomirrors the audience's intentionality. It's simply impossible to separate the speaker's and the audience's intentionality. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–29772968 Author's personal copy vocalize them. In a sense, the speaker/author has to produce a text which conforms with, or even mirrors, the audience's intentionality.6 This is not a matter of hypocrisy or demagogy, but the obvious consequence of the commonplace that a politician must represent the audience's needs, feelings, worries, etc. On the other hand, the speaker/speech writer may use words that in some ways allow the audience to build its own intentionality. The audience, in other words, is allowed to construct the meaning of certain, deliberately vague expressions by adding their own understanding of the events that are alluded to. This is what Myers calls 'strategic vagueness' (Myers, 1996). When the main speaker says ''We are tired of business as usual in Washington''7 (line 25), he presumably means ''we are tired of the external influence of financial corporations on government'', alluding to the fact that government is being dominated by the lobbies, an idea expressed later on in the text.8 Another interesting case is that in which meaning is determined not only by the speaker, but also by the hearers. Thus, when Obama talks about ''big money inWashington'', he presumably alludes to politicians that are part of the government: as Duranti (2006b) says, in the context of political discourse, ''Washington'' is a metonym for ''the federal government'', which includes elected and non-elected officials that are influenced by financial interests. 5.4. Polyphony The polyphonic structure of Obama's electoral speech rests on the idea that the main speaker/author and the audience/ principal need to converge on the same meaning, by constructing it collaboratively. In fact, the main speaker, by including (narrative) inserts in his speech (lines 90–105), which represent the voices of his electorate, announces and emphasizes the level of constructed shared intentionality with his audience. The idea that a text incorporates many distinct voices is due to Bakhtin (1981, 1986) andwill be very fruitful in the context ofmy analysis of Barack Obama's speech.WhatObama does, in his speech, is to draw materials from previous (antecedent) discourses, thus instantiating what Kristeva (1986) calls 'horizontal intertextuality', a termindicating theways inwhich textsandwaysof talking refer toandbuildonother texts anddiscourses.As Bakhtin would say, Obama is ''appropriating'' discourses and voices which are not his own (Johnstone, 2002, 139) and he is subordinating them to his own voice. Similarly Goodwin (2007) points out that very often, speakers talk by renting and recycling the words of others. Whether the same process of intentionality co-construction by speaker and hearer occurs in ordinary speech is less clear. Surely English, like Italian, is a language in which there is a cultural bias in favour of the author/principal of the utterance determining the level of intentionality. It is, in a basic sense, the speaker's intention we have to reconstruct, especially in practical contexts where the speaker utters directives, questions, and other speech acts with a focus on action (and interaction).9 The challenge to this idea of the 'sovereign speaker' in literary theorizing is interesting, but does not seriously impugn the notion that in everyday interaction the speaker's intentionality is the focus of comprehension. There are, however, severely circumscribed contexts in which the hearer may help the speaker bring out what s/hemeans, by selecting verbal forms which reflect more accurately whatever thoughts s/he wants to express. One of these contexts is the psychotherapeutic dialogue; another is the academic context of thesis/essay writing in which a tutor helps a student bring out his thoughts by selecting verbal forms more accurately expressing those same thoughts; a further context is that of the editorial process, in which an editor fulfills a 'maieutic' role in helping bring forth the writer's intended meaning. Additionally and most interestingly, the electoral speech is yet another of those contexts in which the main speaker/author and the audience/principal ''come together'' to construct meaning in a joint cooperative effort, in which the speaker is a sort of 'ventriloquist' (in Bakhtin's words), representing the audience by acting out their voices, and thus building electoral success on a correct representation of what the audience wants her to say. The audience, in its turn, expresses approval by filling out the deliberate pauses and uttering their consensus/disagreement with the intentions thus voiced; by doing this, they contribute to the co-construction of meaning along with the speaker/politician. The deliberate pauses that a speaker makes are known to the audience as having to be filled by manifestations of approval/disapproval (cheering, chanting, etc.). True, such responses may be piloted, being prompted by the organizers who have blended inwith the audience proper (as I indicated at the beginning of this section); however, the fact that the audience expresses a weaker approval in connection with certain parts of the speech (namely, the parts implying great sacrifices, possiblemistakes, false beginnings, etc. See lines 39, 83, 84, 85)means that audience participation is real, that the audience is emotionally involved and acts instinctively and in accordance with their sentiments. 5.5. Comparison with preaching discourse in Afro-American sermons Comparison with Afro-American preaching discourse may be of interest in further deepening these considerations. Actually, there is notmuch in terms of content in the speech by BarackObama to induce us to categorize it as belonging to the 6 This may look like a problematic notion. If the audience does not speak, but listens passively, then it is not completely clear that their intentionality is expressed or is in the air. However, there are at least two reasons for thinking that the audience's intentionality is in the air: the success of the electoral speech depends on the extent to which the speaker's words mirror what is in the mind of the audience; the audience participates and even by short responses can corroborate the words of the speaker and, thus, express intentions. 7 I show later that this is an echo from Martin Luther King's Jr. 8 The expression 'business as usual inWashington' has two implicit arguments – by . . . – and –with . . . . – to be filled inferentially. The first slot is filled by 'politicians' and the second slot is filled by 'businessmen'. 9 As Goodwin says, the case of reported speech is admittedly an exception. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 2969 Author's personal copy tradition of Afro-American preaching discourse. In fact, Obama is very careful to say that religious differences should not affect his political action.10 Yet, we have reasons to think that Barack Obama has been influenced by Afro-American preaching discourse. Onemay suggest that it is the concepts which Barack Obama is making reference to – and the concepts, one might argue, have a universal appeal – that may have originated in the speech of a black men, but then ascended to universal value by a universal acquiescence to the ideas originally voiced. I would like to propose that it is not only concepts and ideals that Barack Obama appropriates and ventriloquizes in his speech, but that he also appropriates the tradition of Afro-American preaching discourse. Wharry (2003), in her most interesting article about Afro-American sermons, points out that such sermons rely on the presupposition that the audience should participate by uttering responses. This ties in verywellwith Bakhtin's notion of polyphony, in thatmultiple voices can be heard as giving support to an idea unit. It also ties in with Goffman's notion of footing, in that the preacher acts in his capacity as animator and the audience acts in his capacity as principal. The call-response technique is typical of this type of sermons. This technique supports the idea that, in interaction,meaning is being co-constructed, being the responsibility both of the speaker and of the hearer. The response (usually of a choral type) can express agreement or disagreement. Wharry explicitly says that the lack of a response is not heard as the indication that the audience is listening, but as an indication of disagreement. This is what happens in Obama's speech too: the audience participates saying ''Yes'' or ''No'' and when the responses are feeble, as after portions of text where the political leader reminds the audience of the sacrifices and suffering that awaits them, they may be interpreted as a failure to endorse Obama's words (lines 81–84). The call-response marker in Afro-American sermons is usually constituted by utterances such as ''Say Allelujah'', but Wharry also acknowledges that intonation and increase in volume play a role. The dialogic structure of Obama's speech serves to unify the speaker and the audience in the same way as it serves to unify the preacher and the audience in a religious Afro-American congregation. The speech should give the appearance of being constructed jointly by the speaker and the audience. So, in this sense we could say that Obama's speech parallels at least one feature of Afro-American discourse. Another characteristic of Obama's speech that parallels a feature of Afro-American discourse is its rhythmic structure – rhythm is more fundamental than grammar, and at many points we have the impression that rhythm prevails over grammaticality – the exigency of issuing a syntactically elegant discourse. Rhythm is achieved by devices such as repetition, volume increase, speed, etc.11 Another characteristic that Obama's speech shares with the Afro-American religious tradition is that it gives the impression of not being a written discourse. It gives the impression of being a mixture of parts which have been written and parts which have been created at the moment. The fact that he often recycles parts of previous speeches corroborates this impression. He gives the impression that his speech is sensitive and responds to the occasion and to the audience he faces. Another characteristic of Afro-American sermons is that the preachermoves continually from the abstract to the concrete (and vice versa) (Davis, 1987). This is exactly what Obama does. According to Davis (1987), there is in religious sermons a structure according to which the preacher initially says that he received ideas from God (this point in the structure is called 'elevation'); immediately after this point, his/her style becomes heightened and takes on a chant-like character. Obama,whodoes not utter a religious speech, surely cannot use this 'elevation' unit; after all, he does not claim to be inspired by God. Yet, it is natural to analyse what he says immediately following the greetings as a unit paralleling the 'elevation', on the basis of contextualization cues provided by intertextuality (Gumperz, 2003, 222). It is interesting to note that Obama somehow transforms the Afro-American religious tradition. It is enough to look at the incipit of his speech to say that he does so. After the greetings section, there is something like an 'elevation' section. He says: Well over two weeks ago/ we saw the people of Iowa/ proclaim that our time for change has come (lines 9–10) His style shifts afterwhat I call the transformed 'elevation' unit. To startwith, the style is not excited, aswhen he greets the crowd and gives thanks to a number of people. But from thatmoment on, his style becomes heightened and takes on a chantlike cadence. It is like saying that he takes his inspiration from the people he aims to represent. There is surely a shift in footing here, exactly as there is one in the 'elevation' unit in Afro-American religious speeches: the speaker becomes an 'animator' of someone's else (important) voice (in the same way as the priest becomes the animator of God's voice). The last characteristic of Obama's speech that closely resembles Afro-American sermons is the ending. The ending is left open-ended (Davis, 1987). On a first view of the video of Obama's South Carolina's speech, I was dissatisfiedwith its ending, I instinctively felt that there was no ending device, the end came abruptly without an effort to signal that it was upcoming (I even thought that I had seen only a fragment of the video). After all, the speech finishes with the words: we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words / ''Yes we can'' (lines 137–139) If there is an indication that the speech is over that comes from ''sums up the spirit'' (after all a conclusion needs to sumup a speech); and the final utterance is pretty open-ended: ''Yes, we can'' (we can do what?). The utterance lends itself to an infinity of meanings. 10 However, an article in Time February 18, 2008 speaks of Obama's messianism, referring to a sentence Obama uttered in the Super Tuesday speech: ''We are the ones we've been waiting for''. 11 Repetition has been shown by Atkinson (1984) to be involved in techniques for eliciting applause in political speeches. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–29772970 Author's personal copy 5.6. Goodwin and the co-construction of meaning Interestingly, what happens in this electoral speech is similar, in structural terms, to the situation described by Goodwin (2007), in which a man whose speech has been impaired due to a severe stroke, can communicate by using his daughters' speech, bymerely vocalizing brief responses such as ''yes'' and ''no''. Goodwin asks himself how a person who does not utter any speech can be an author or a principal (in Goffman's terms)? The answer is that the communicative situation is responsible (at least in part) for the shifting conventional identification between the animator and the author/principal. In the sameway that an aphasic person can rely on his daughters to issue the speech hewould like to issue, the crowd around a political speaker relies on the speaker to issue the speech theywould like to issue. The relationship between the principal and the animator is not one of telepathy, but one of rationally guessing what kind of issues and attitudes the represented person would like to have addressed. The political leader has to guess what is of importance to her electorate, and her success is based on that of his rational guesses. She will be successful in representing an electorate only if she is successful in addressing the kind of issues thatmatter to them and is able to express their attitude to them. In slogan form, towin over the electorate, youmust represent the complex articulation of the electorate; andmost importantly, you have to speak using the electorate'swords, thus showing that you really knowwhat the their plights are, that you belong to them. The politician has a duty to represent her electorate. She must not just speak with the words of the electorate in order to obtain an electoral victory but she will be held responsible for the position she has taken. This notion of 'representing the electorate' is taken very seriously in Anglo-American countries, where the represented often write letters to their representatives in order to speak of a certain problem and where politicians often reply in writing to the letters they receive. The notion of representing another person is taken very seriously by a responsible politician, and it is this traditionwhich Barack Obamawants to revive and reinvigorate. 5.7. Ventriloquizing In this section I investigate how Barack Obama uses ordinary stories in order to support his ideas. What he does is to give voice to a number of people through his narrations. We find both supportive voices and antagonistic voices. 5.7.1. Ventriloquizing (supportive voices) Towards the end of his speech, Barack Obama introduces some voices he has heard (he actually refers to ''the voices we carry on from South Carolina'', implying that he has stopped to listen to these voices). He does what Goodwin (2007) calls putting certain persons on stage as characters, animating them as figures, as in the extract corresponding to lines 90–105. By introducing the voices he has heard in South Carolina, Obama gives the impression that he is in touch with reality, but he also makes the audience feel that they are listening to real, authentic voices. What does the trick is the framing device ''Theirs are the stories and voices we carry on from South Carolina'' (line 90). This framing device has a prospective function in that it signals to the hearers what the next textual unit is about: what follows is not just one story12 but a series of (connected) stories and voices. The stories are not just there formere narration, but they also afford the politician a chance to interpret them. In the first story, he says ''That's what she is looking for'' (line 93); in the second story, he says ''she needs us to reform the education system'' (line 95); in the third story, he says ''he needs us to stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship our jobs overseas'' (line 99); in the fourth and fifth stories (which are about the same topic), he says ''they need us to come together and put an end to a war that should have never been authorized'' (lines 105–106). In addition to forming a moral conclusion for each of his story, he moves on to a global conclusion to the summation of these stories: So understand this South Carolina / the choice in this election is not between regions / or religions / or genders (Right) / it's not about rich vs poor (Right) / young vs old (Right) / and it is not about Black vswhite (Yeah applausewewant change 6) / This election is about the past vs the future. (Lines 107–108) It is interesting to note that, while the local moral conclusions for each of these stories rely on some kind of descriptive generalization which could belong either to the main speaker or to the voice reported, at this point of the speech Obama moves on to a global moral conclusion that contains an injunction: ''So understand this''. This is at the same time a framing expression, embracing in its scope all of the previous stories. Hence, Obama's ''So'' does not connect with the last story in the series or with a particular one, but with the whole set of stories. Obama's use of a framing device such as ''There are stories and voiceswe carry on from South Carolina'' indicates the scope of the ''So'' in this context as a typical inferential connective: one idea is the consequence of another, such that we have to accept the former because of the earlier occurrence of the latter (Schiffrin, 1988); in contrast, its status as an inferential marker usually associated with orders/injunctions is less clear. Still, the injunction here sounds as a kind of categorical imperative: onemust arrive at the conclusion x, given the evidence y, and in particular, one's understanding is involved in passing from y to x. The imperative is a syntactic category associated with 12 A story is a narration unit which has a certain canonical structure, such as 'orientation' (introducing and identifying the participants in the action: the time, the place and the initial behavior); 'complication' (the arising of a major problem), 'resolution' (resolution of a major problem), 'coda' (The end of a narrative is frequently signaled by a Coda, a statement that returns the temporal setting to the present), 'evaluation' (in which one shows one's moral attitude to the events narrated). A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 2971 Author's personal copy the speaker's voice. The fact that the imperative is being used to draw a conclusion from stories voiced through real people's stories is perhaps a signal that now the politician's voice is making itself heard, summing up and representing the chorus of voices heard so far. The speech within the scope of 'so' presents different voices. The main speaker's voice comes immediately after the negatives, the negative sentences presumably vocalizing the voices of his opponents. As Labov (1972) says, negative constructions can serve to bracket important ideas. 5.7.2. Ventriloquizing the opponents The speech does not only include the actual people's voices, but also gives room to the voices of political opponents.While the actual people's voiceswere associatedwith descriptive referring expressions (e.g. ''Themotherwho can't getMedicaid to cover all the needs of her sick child'' (lines 90–91), ''The Maytag worker / who is now competing with his own teenager for seven dollars an hour at Wal-Mart'' (lines 97–98), ''that woman who told me that she hasn't been able to breathe since the day her nephew left for Iraq'', (lines 113–115), etc.), the opponents' voices are expressed using impersonal demonstrative pronouns (e.g. ''There are those whowill continue to tell us that we can't do this / that we can't have what we're looking for / that we can't have what we want (Yes, No) / that we are peddling false hopes'' (lines 113–115). These are not real demonstrative pronouns as they can be replaced with nouns like 'people' (e.g. 'There are people who will continue to tell us . . . '); semantically, these demonstratives are more like indefinite pronouns ('someone'). In other words, the voices attributed to the opponents are anonymous as they are not associated with anyone in particular. They are not the voices of real people, but of 'lobbies', abstract collection of vested interests. To such anonymous voices, Obama replies by quoting real voices: I think of that elderly woman / who sent me a contribution the other day / an envelope that had a money order for 3 dollars and one cent (Yeah applause 5) ** / along with a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope / so don't tell us change is impossible / that woman knows change is possible. (lines 117–121) Then he again lends voice to his opponents: when I hear the cynical talk that Black and white and Latinos can't join together and work together (line 121) This voice, too, is anonymous (though qualified by a negative adjective). To this voice, Obama replies using a particular person's voice: I think about that Republicanwomanwho used towork for StromThurmond /who is nowdevoted to educating Inner City children/ and who went out into the streets of South Carolina / and knocked on doors for this campaign (Yeah)** / don't tell me we can't change (lines 126–128) Then Obama adds his own voice, summing up the import of the ensemble of voices: So don't tell me we can't change (lines 128–129). This is an echo of the message implied by the woman who sent him a cheque for three dollars and one cent. There is a resonance between the people's voices and the main speaker's voice; one reflects the others, one amplifies the others. The overall effect is that of multiple echoes being produced, of multiple resonance. In the end, it is not even clear who echoes whom; compare, for example, this excerpt from Time, February 11th, 2008 (p. 36): ''( . . . ) Obama is a fresh face. His opponents promise to fight, but Obama promises healing. His is the native tongue of possibility, which is the native tongue of the young. And if he happens to be light on details –well, what are details but the dull pieces of disassembled dreams? ''I had a friend who told me this was impossible, quoting all these political science statistics at me to show that it's hopeless to try to organize students'', says Michelle Stein, 20, ( . . . ). ''Now he says, 'You were right, I was wrong. Where do I sign up?''' This author is quite right in identifying the language of possibility with the language of young people, so this somehow corroborates my view that Obama's speech encapsulates other people's voices and that it also creates further resonances, as people in their discussions echo this language. Perhaps we need to reflect more on the identification of the 'language of possibility' with the language of young people – suffice it for now to say that younger people use the language of (simple) conditionals, while elderly people speak the language of counterfactual conditionals. Elderly people may have a speculative interest in counterfactual conditionals, whereas young people have a practical interest in exploring a reasoning based on possibility: the simple conditional is at the basis of future decisions. Elderly people have made all their most important decisions, whereas the young still have to face decisions in the light of reasonings in which possibilities feature as crucial elements. One further reason for identifying the language of possibility with the language of young people, is that young people are usually more likely to believe in change, in things happening, in a newworld. The elderly people are more used to expecting things to behave in the way they always did. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–29772972 Author's personal copy The overall effect of this technique is very theatrical. The politician acts outmany voices: both those of his opponents and those of the people who support him. However, he puts together the stories told by the real people's voices by subordinating them to his own voice. This is verymuch like conversational storytelling, inwhich a narrator tells a story to support hismoral conclusion, and then another storyteller tells his own story either to support that conclusion or to contradict it. It is well known that storytelling is closely linked to establishing social bonds and shared values, and to asserting membership in a group (Norrick, 1997, 199–220). 5.8. On stories and rhetorical strategies According to Duranti (2006b), stories play an important role in connecting a political candidate emotionally to the people he addresses in public speech.13 In the actual situation, the question naturally arises in which group Obama wants to claim membership. Since the stories he tells are many and deal with socially distinct groups, in his speech he identifies with each respective social group. His electoral purposes arewell served by narrating stories that allow him to identify with each social group; his hidden agenda is to persuade all social groups to vote for him. The electoral purpose is best served by providing narratives constructing an authentic account, that is, an account that resonates with the teller's understandings and sensibilities of what it was like to participate in the events being narrated (Ochs, 2007, 47). The stories Obama uses are actually ministories or minimal stories (to use a term by Johnstone, 2003). In terms of Labov andWaletzky (1967) they lack an abstract and a resolution, yet they display bits of orientation (setting, participants), an evaluation, and a coda (making connections with the present). The lack of resolution is rhetorically connected with the success of the electoral speech: the speaker offers to provide a resolution to such stories. The whole speech event is theatrical, because the audience hosts some of the dramatis personae, the organizers of the event, who suggest to the crowdwhat to say, who elicit the crowd's cheering or chanting. But are the crowds themselves, the people participating in the theatrical event, dramatis personae as well? Much of what happens makes us come to this conclusion. The crowd is acting out a ritual: the chanting, the cheering, is not spontaneous but is part of a script. The crowd is the audience proper, but for repeated periods of time, they act as well. Hence, at times the crowd is no longer the audience, while the speaker's role shifts to that of being audience. The convergence between the people's voice and themain speaker's voicemakes themain speaker onewith the voices he acts out. The main speaker represents himself as one who represents the people's voices. If it is the people's voices that are represented in this speech, then the audience and the speaker work together in the construction of meaning, just as the speaker constructs meaning on the basis of the people's voices. The audience is entitled to read into the speech a communicative intention that does not just reside in the head of the main speaker, but also in the heads of the individuals whose voices he recounts. The cheering, the chanting, the various occurrences of 'Yeah', 'Right', or 'No' (the latter in response to the anonymous voices of the political opponents), entitle themain speaker to claim identificationwith the audience; but if he is speaking on their behalf, then there is also identity in the intentions. 6. Discussion In this paper, I considered the case of an electoral speech event in which, despite the fact that rhetoric is present, manipulation is kept at a minimum, as the speaker does not attempt to persuade the audience to come to his side, to accept his views, given that he presents his views as coming from the people. In Obama's speech, I analyzed the case in which a politician makes use of the people's voices in order to show that he correctly represents the needs and sentiments of his nation, thus being entitled to represent them as a political leader and to do what is good for them. The speech emerges not as something for which (only) Obama is responsible, but as something for which the people (in particular those attending the electoral speech) are responsible. Obama's success lies in the fact that he manages to persuade the audience that the speech does not come from him, but from their own voices. Here, electoral victory must be seen as success in representing the speaker as a person who impersonates the audience's needs and sentiments. Obama manages to project himself as a person who animates (in Goffman's sense) a speech for which not he, but the people are responsible. Electoral success is granted him because the people can consider themselves the principal (again, in the sense of Goffman): the persons, institutions, or collections of communities which are ultimately responsible for what is said in the speech. What is going on here is a complex process, inwhich (following Duranti, 2006a) the speaker'smeaning is a construction on the part of the audience as well. As Vološinov (1973, 86) says, ''the word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whoseword it is and for whom it is meant''. In our case, the process of speaking is actually somewhatmore complicated, in that by way of literary citations, Obama recycles parts of Martin Luther King's ''I have a dream'' speech (see Time, December 3, 2007, p. 21 below). The phenomenon described in this article resembles closely what Lauerbach (2006) calls voicing: 13 However, Duranti considers stories of belonging in which a candidate narrates past experiences that connect him with the audience in order to show that that he is an ideal representative in so far as he has shared experiences with the audience. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 2973 Author's personal copy Representing the discourse of others functions as a device whereby speakers can distance themselves fromwhat is being expressed, positioning themselves in a Bakhtinian dialogic universe of voices other than their own (White 2000). In Goffman's (1974, 1981) terms, a figure other than the speaker is being animatedwithout the speaker being understood to be either the author of the words or to be responsible for them. This type of representing discourse will be called 'voicing' here (Lauerbach, 2006, 198–199). In the present paper, I hope to have established a connection between the institution of the electoral speech and the notion of the participatory framework. In the electoral speech, a powerful transformation is effected: while speech in ordinary circumstances is associated with a speaker who is, at the same time, animator, author, and principal, in the electoral speech transcribed above we have witnessed how the role of principal may become uncoupled from the roles of animator and author. Somewhat surprisingly, in the context of the electoral speech, the audience has been attributed the role of principal, while the main speaker has been relegated to the role of animator/ author. What happens in an electoral speech such as the one analyzed here can perhaps best be described in terms of Duranti's felicitous terminology of translocutionary act. A translocutionary act, according to Duranti, is an act whose pragmatic force is realized by transcending clausal, as well as individual speech act boundaries. Duranti (1991) writes: The very notion of Translocutionary Act also tries to account for a view of linguistic communication as not simply consisting of a series of individual intentions that are realized through conventional linguistic acts (Searle, 1983), but as a complex activity that involves mutually constituted and sequentially sustained units that defy a characterization of meaning as primarily originated in the speaker's mind.What wewould like to allow instead is for a definition of meaning as something existing between speakers (Vološinov, 1973). I agree with Duranti and Brenneis (1986) that audiences are always in one way or the other co-authors, sometimes contributing to the construction of form, sometimes contributing to the determination of meaning. I also agree with Duranti (2006a) that the concept of intentionality is part of Western culture and that in some other cultures – like that of the Samoan people – mind-reading is not even attempted in the evaluation of action. According to Johnstone (2000:139), these ideas ''have challenged the conventional view that speakers are naturally and completely in control of their utterances''. However, contrary to this view, I find that political speeches are quite unique in this respect, because they create the expectation that the main speaker and the audience converge in their interpretation of the speech's meaning. The text of an electoral speech is a text in which the barriers between the speaker/author's and the audience/principal's intentionalities are corroded, and where convergence is implied (given the fact that the speaker/author interprets the sentiments of the audience and represents such sentiments in his speech); alternatively, the speech favours certain semantic slots where deliberately vague expressions are picked up in order to express exactly what the audience would like to express by them. Duranti's ideas remind us of some original work by Mey (2001). However, when one reads Mey's ideas one has an outlook which coheres to a greater extent with the ideas I presented in this paper. What I did in this paper was to connect intertextuality with the communicative situation (or the speech event) saying that there is something inherent in certain speech events that brings out the possibility of animating the audience's words. When we read Mey (2001: 221), we see that he also connects the idea that languages uses are situated in specific communicative events with the idea that meaning is created by an interactional process in which speakers and hearers participate on equal footing. My analysis of Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech sustains Duranti's/Mey's notion that both the speaker and the hearers participate in the construction of meaning. First of all, it is the type of convention involved in the communicative event 'electoral speech' that effects the transformation required to see the connection of Obama's voice with the voice(s) of the audience. Second, Obama frequently prompts the audience to unite their voices with his. Third, there are many slots in the speech in which, due to lexical vagueness, the audience is invited to join the speaker and complete his authorial work. Fourth, Obama invokes or acts out voices that can be seen as representing the audience's voices, thus making it appear that the audience is the principal on behalf of whom he is seen to be speaking. No doubt the use of all these various techniques makes a strong case for the idea that meaning is projected as ''something existing between speakers'' (Vološinov, 1973). 7. Conclusion Summingup, in this paper I have discussed the notions of footing andpolyphony in order tomake sense ofwhat happens in a particular discourse. In particular I have shown that BarackObamaventriloquizes the voices of ordinary people in order to support his campaign, while also incorporating the voices of his opponents which are marked stylistically as different (anonymous) from those of the people who support his ideas. The main idea of the paper is that Obama takes seriously the politician's role as representative (of the people) and expresses the voices he wants to represent in order to support his ideas about politics, in respect to which he presents himself as the animator, while giving ordinary people the role of principals. A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–29772974 Author's personal copy Appendix 1. Transcription of Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech The following transcription makes use of a few extra symbols. ** stands for overlapping speech. / stands for a segment differentiated from a previous speech segment through a deliberate pause. Such a pause allows Obama to take a breath or to elicit consensus (cheering, chanting, vocal agreement, etc.). The numbers in bold (e.g. 10) indicate the length of the pauses (in terms of seconds) in which chanting, cheering, etc. occurs. In this transcription, I also use a special symbolism to indicate speech becoming slower or softer. When speech becomes softer, I use italics. When speech becomes slower, I underline it. (Compare that according to Tannen, 2007, a speaker can project a pause to invite a response from the recipient (in this case, the audience) by making her speech softer or slower). I use boldface (except for numbers) to indicate a conspicuous rise-fall intonation. Below is my transcription of the communicative event. Yes we can **Yes we can Yes we can Yes we can Yes we can Yes we can 6) Thank you. (Yes we can 5) (Yes we can)/ Thank you. ** (Yes we can 10)/ Thank you. Thank you everybody./ Thank you./ Thank you South Carolina / Thank you./ Thank you (Yeah 1) / Thank you South Carolina (Yeah) / Thank you to the rock ofmy lifeMichelle Obama / (Yeah 7) Thank you toMalia and Sasha (Natasha) Obamawhohaven't seen their daddy in a week (Yeah 8 / Thank you to Pete Skidmore (Yeah 1) ** for his outstanding service to our country and being such a great supporter of this campaign ** (Yeah 6) / Well over twoweeks ago /we saw the people of Iowa/ proclaim that our time for change has come (Yeah Yes we can) 5/ But there are those who doubted (No) / this country's desire for something new (No) /who said ''Iowa was a fluke (No) 2 / not to be repeated again''. (No) / Well tonight the cynics who believed that what began in the snows of Iowawas just an illusion (No) /were told a different story by the good people of South Carolina (Yeah yes we can 16). After four / (Yes we can)/after four great contests / in every corner of this country / we have themost votes (Yeah) 2 / themost delegates (Yeah Yes we can 9)/ and themost diverse coalition of Americans_(Yeah)** that we've seen in a long long time **(Yeah we can change) 25 / There you can see it in the faces here tonight (Yeah) 3 / they are young and old (yeah 3) / rich and poor (Yeah3) / they are black and white (Yeah 3) / Latino and Asian and Native American (Yeah) 6 / They are Democrats fromDesMoines/ and independents from Concord / and yes some Republicans from rural Nevada (yeah) 3 / andwe've got young people all across this country (Yeah) 8 / who havenever had a reason to participate until now (Yeah) / and in nine days / in nine short days / nearly half of the nation/ will have the chance to join us in saying that we are tired of business as usual inWashington (Yeah) 4 **/we are hungry for change / andwe are ready to believe again ** (Yeah) (we want change 8) / but if there is anything though that we have been reminded of / since Iowa / is that the kind of change we seek / will not come easy (yeah) 2 / now partly because we have fine candidates in this field fierce competitors who are worthy of our respect and admiration (Yeah) 5 / and as contentious as this campaignmay get/ we have to remember that this is a contest for the Democratic nomination (Yeah) 2 / and that all of us share an abiding desire to end the disastrous policies of the current administration (Yeah) 7 / But there are real differences between the candidates (Yeah) 2 / We are looking for more than just a change of party in the White House (Yeah) 2 / We're looking to fundamentally change the status quo inWashington (Yeah) 5 / It's a status quo that extends beyond any particular party and right now that status quo is fighting back with everything its got (yeah) 2 / with the same old tactics that divide us and distract us from solving the problems people face (Yeah) 1 / whether those problems are health care the folks can't afford or themortgages they cannot pay (Yeah) 2 So this will not be easy (no) 1 /Make nomistake about what we are up against (yes) 1 / We are up against the belief that it's alright for lobbyists to dominate our government (no) / that they are just part of the system in Washington (no)/ Butweknow that the undue influence of lobbyists is part of the problem / and this election is our chance to say (Yeah) 5 ** that we are not going to let them stand in our way/ anymore ** (No) 8 /We are up against the conventional thinking that says your ability to lead as president comes from longevity in Washington / or proximity to the White House / but we know that real leadership is about candor / and judgement / and the ability to rally Americans from all walks of life around a common purpose (Yea) 3 ** / a higher purpose ** (yeah) / we are up against decades of bitter partisanship that caused politicians to demonize their opponents instead of coming together (Yeah) 2 / to make college affordable (Yeah) 2 / or energy cleaner (Yeah) 2 / It's a kind of partisanship where you are not even allowed to say that a Republican had an idea (Yeah) 2 / even if it's one you never agreedwith (Yeah) 2. That's the kind of politics that is bad for our party / It is bad for our country/ and this (Yeah) is our chance to end it once and for all (Yeah) 10 / We are up against the idea that it's acceptable to say anything and do anything towin an election (No) / Butweknow that this is exactlywhat'swrongwith our politics / This is why people don't believe what their leaders say anymore / This is why they tune out / And this election is our chance to give the American people a reason to believe again (Yeah) 5 / But let me say this South Carolina / what we have seen in these last weeks is that we're also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign / but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want be as a nation (Yeah) 2. That's a politics that uses religion as a wedge (yeah) 2 / and patriotism as a bludgeon (Yeah) 2 / a politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even votewithin the confines of the categories that supposedly define us (Yeah) 3 /The assumption that young people are apathetic (No) 6 / The assumption that Republicanswon't cross over (No) 3 / The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor (No) 2 / and that the poor don't vote (No) 2 /The assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate/ whites can't support A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977 2975 Author's personal copy Afro-American candidates / that Blacks and Latinos cannot come together/ We're here tonight to say that this is not the America we believe in (Yeah, Yes we can) 15 / I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina / or a black South Carolina / I saw South Carolina (Yeah) 6 / I saw crumbling schools/ that are stealing the future of black children andwhite children alike (Yeah) 3 / I saw shuttered mills and homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from all walks of life / And many women of every colour and creed/ who serve together and fight together and bleed together under the same proud flag / I saw what America is and I believe in what this country can be (Yah) 2 / That is the country I see / **. That is the country you see / Yeah But now it is up to us to help the entire nation embrace this vision ** (Yeah) (we can change) 20 Because in the endwe arenot up just against the ingrained and destructive habits ofWashington/ We are also strugglingwith our own doubts / our own fears / Our own cynicism / the change we seek has always required great struggle and great sacrifice (Yeah)1 / and so this is a battle in our own hearts and minds / about what kind of country we want / and how hard we're willing to work for it (Yeah) / So let me remind you tonight / that change will not be easy / change will take time (Yeah) 1/There will be setbacks (Yeah) 1 / and false starts (Yeah) 1 / and sometimes we'll make mistakes (yeah) 1 / but as hard as it may seemwe cannot lose hope (Yeah) 1 because there are people all across this great nation/who are counting on us (Yeah) 2 /who can't afford another four years without health care ** (Yeah applause) 5 / They can't afford another 4 yearswithout good schools (Yeah) 3 / They can't afford another 4 yearswithout decentwages (Yeah) 3 / because our leaders couldn't come together and get it done ** (yeah) 3. Theirs are the stories and voices we carry on from South Carolina/ Themotherwho can't get Medicaid to cover all the needs of her sick child / she needs us to pass a health care plan that cuts costs (yeah) **/ and makes health care available and affordable/ for every single American / That's what she's looking for ** (Yeah) 7 / The teacher who works another shift at Dunkin Donuts after school/ just to make ends meet / she needs us to reform our education system (Yeah) / so that she gets better pay andmore support (Yeah) / and her students get the resources that they need to achieve their dreams (Yeah) 3 The Maytag worker / who's now competing with his own teenager for a seven-dollar-an-hour job at the localWalMart because the factory hegavehis life to shut its doors/heneedsus to stopgiving taxbreaks to companies that shipour jobsoverseas (Yeah)**6 and start putting them in the pockets ofworking Americans who deserve it ** (Yeah) / and put it in the pockets of struggling home owners who are having a tough time / and looking after seniorswho should retirewithdignity and respect (yeah)3 / thatwomanwho toldme that she hasn't been able tobreathe / since thedayhernephewleft for Iraq/or the soldierwhodoesn'tknowhis child becausehe'sonhis_thirdor fourth or even_fifth tour of duty (Yeah) 2 / they need us to come together and put an end to a war that should have never been authorized (yeah) ** / and should have never been waged **(Yeah applause we can change 13 / So understand this South Carolina/ thechoice inthiselection isnotbetween regions / or religions /orgenders (right) / it'snotaboutrichvspoor (Right) / young vs old (Right)/ and it is not about black vswhite (Yeah applause Yes we can) 6 / This election is about the past vs the future (Yeah applause) 5 It's aboutwhetherwe settle for the samedivisions and the distractions and dramas that passes for politics today Orwhetherwe reach for a politics of common sense/ and innovation / a politics of shared sacrifice / and shared prosperity / There are thosewhowill continue to tell us thatwe can't do this / thatwe can't havewhatwe're looking for / that wecan'thavewhatwewant (yes, no) / thatwearepeddling falsehopes /buthere'swhat I know/ I know thatwhenpeople say we can't overcome all the big money and influence in Washington (Yeah) 2 / I think of that elderly woman/ who sent me a contribution theotherday/anenvelope thathadamoneyorder for threedollars andone cent (Yeahapplause)5 ** / alongwith a verse of scripture tucked inside the envelope / ''sodon't tell us change is impossible''/ thatwomanknows change is possible ** (Yeah)/when I hear the cynical talk thatblacksandwhites and latinos can't join together andwork together / I amreminded of latino brothers and sisters/ I organized with / and stood with / and fought with / side by side/ for jobs and justice on the streets of Chicago/ So don't tell us change (Yeah) ** can't happen **(Yeah applauseWe can change) 11 /When I hear thatwe'll neverovercome the racialdivide inourpolitics / I thinkabout that republicanwomanwhoused towork forStromThurmond / who is now devoted to educating Inner City children / andwhowent out into the streets of South Carolina / and knocked on doors for this campaign (Yeah)** /don't tellmewecan't change (Yeswe can)5 /Yeswe can /Yeswe can /Yeswe can change/ **(Yeswecan)7Yeswecanheal thisnation (Yeah)3 /Yeswecanseizeour future (yeah)3 / andasweleave thisgreat state /with a newwind in our backs (Yeah) 3 / and we take this journey across this great country (Yeah) 2 / a country we lovewith the message we've carried from the plains of Iowa / to the hills of New Hampshire (Yeah) 3, from the Nevada Desert to the South Carolina coast (Yeah)3 / the samemessagewehad /whenwewereup / andwhenweweredown (Yeah)3** / that out ofmany weareone (Yeah)3 /Thatwhilewebreathewewillhope (Yeah)**3Andwherewearemetwithcynicismanddoubtand fear and thosewho tell us thatwecan't, wewill respondwith that timeless creed that sumsup the spirit of theAmericanpeople in three simplewords/ ''Yeswe can'' **(Yeswe can) /Thank you South Carolina (broken off here . . . ) (Yeswe can)/ Thanks / I love you.** (Yes we can) Appendix 2 When I read, in an article in Time (December 3rd, 2007, p. 21), that Barack Obama's speeches reverberatewith the voice of Martin Luther King Jr., asking us to reflect on ''the fierce urgency of now'', I read the ''I have a dream'' speech to see to what extent King's style (or voice) is present in Obama's South Carolina's speech. Not surprisingly a number of echoes could be found (for example, Barack Obama repeats Martin Luther King's expression 'business as usual'). In addition, there are borrowed metaphors, such as the wind as a symbol of change (King's ''the whirlwinds of revolt'', compare Obama's ''with a newwind in our back''); there are concepts Obama repeats, e.g., when he says that people should begin to believe in politics again (compare King: ''We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississipi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–29772976 Author's personal copy he has nothing for which to vote''); like Martin Luther King, Obama lists geographical names as a way of suggesting spiritual unity (see also Wharry, 2003 on this notion); also, he uses stylistic effects such as long lists of coordinated structures, with contrasting modifiers (Obama:'s ''I did not travel around this state over the last year and see a white South Carolina / or a black South Carolina / I saw South Carolina'' is reminiscent ofM.L. King's ''One day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers''). Obama's usage of idealistic enthusiasm (''that timeless creed'') is parallel to King's (''with this faith''). References Atkinson, Max, 1984. Public speaking and audience responses. In: Atkinson, M., Heritage, J. (Eds.), Structures of Social Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 370–409. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. C. Emerson, M. Holquist. University of Texas Press, Austin. Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. V.W. McGee. University of Texas Press, Austin. Bauman, Richard, Sherzer, Joel (Eds.), 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Capone, Alessandro, 2005. Pragmemes. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1355–1371. Capone, Alessandro, forthcoming. Default Semantics and the Architecture of the Mind. Journal of Pragmatics. Davis, Gerald, 1987. I Got the Word in Me and I Can Sing It, You Know. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Dennett, Daniel, 1991. Consciousness Explained. Penguin, London. Duranti, Alessandro, Brenneis, Donald, 1986. The audience as co-author. Special issue of Text 6/3, 239–247. Duranti, Alessandro, 1991. Four properties of speech-in-interaction and the notion of translocutionary Act. In: Verschueren, J. (Ed.), Pragmatics at Issue: Selected Papers from the International Pragmatics Conference, Antwerp, August 17–22, 1987, vol. I. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 133–150. Duranti, Alessandro, 2006a. The social ontology of intentions. Discourse Studies 8/1, 31–40. Duranti, Alessandro, 2006b. Narrating the political self in a campaign for U.S. Congress. Language in Society 35, 467–497. Goffman, Erving, 1974. Frame Analysis. An Essay in the Organization of Experience. Northeastern Press, Boston. Goffman, Erving, 1981. Forms of Talk. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia. Goffman, Erving, 2007. Footing. In: Monaghan, L., Goodwin, J. (Eds.), Voicing: Reported Speech and Footing in Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 396–400. Goodwin, Charles, 2007. Interactive footing. In: Holt, E., Clift, E. (Eds.), Voicing: Reported Speech and Footing in Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 16–46. Gumperz, John, 2003. Interactional sociolinguistics. In: Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 215–228. Hymes, Dell, 1964. Introduction: towards ethnographies of communication. American Anthropologist LXVI/6, 13–35. Johnnstone, Barbara, 2000. The individual voice in language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29 . Johnstone, Barbara, 2002. Discourse Analysis. Blackwell, Oxford. Johnstone, Barbara, 2003. Discourse analysis and narrative. In: Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 635–649. Kochman, Thomas, 1981. Black and White Styles in Conflict. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Kristeva, Julia, 1986. In: Moi, T. (Ed.), The Kristeva Reader. Blackwell, Oxford. Labov, William, 1972. Language in the Inner City. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, pp. 354–405. Labov, William, Waletzky, Joshua, 1967. Narrative analysis: oral versions of personal experience. In: Helm, J. (Ed.), Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. University of Washington Press, Seattle, pp. 12–44. Lauerbach, Gerda, 2006. Discourse representation in political interviews: the construction of identities and relations through voicing and ventriloquizing. Journal of Pragmatics 38, 196–215. Mey, Jacob, 2001. Pragmatics. An Introduction. Blackwell, Oxford. Myers, Greg, 1996. Strategic vagueness in academic writing. In: Ventola, E., Mauranen, A. (Eds.), Academic Writing: Intercultural and Textual Issues. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 3–17. Norrick, Neal, 1997. Twice-told tales: collaborative narration of familiar stories. Language in Society 26, 199–220. Ochs, Elinor, 2007. Narrative lessons. In: Monaghan, L.,Goodwin, J. (Eds.),A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 41–49. Perrot, Laurent, 2000. La rhétorique dans l'antiquité. Librairie Générale Français, Paris. Searle, John, 1983. Intentionality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Schiffrin, Deborah, 1988. Discourse Markers. Blackwell, Oxford. Tannen, Deborah, 2007. Conversational signals and devices. In: Monaghan, L., Goodwin, J. (Eds.), A Cultural Approach to Interpersonal Communication. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 150–160. Van Dijk, Teun, 2003. Critical discourse analysis. In: Schiffrin, D., Tannen, D., Hamilton, H. (Eds.), The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 398–415. Vološinov, Valentin Nikolaevich, 1973. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Wharry, Cheryl, 2003. Amen and Hallelujah preaching: discourse functions in African American sermons. Language in Society 32, 203–225. Dr Alessandro Capone carries out his research at the University of Palermo. He has a doctorate from the University of Oxford. Hewrote extensively on pragmatics. He is now co-editing a book on 'de se' attitudes to be published by CSLI, Stanford. He has edited 'Perspectives on language use and pragmatics. A volume in memory of Sorin Stati' (Lincom, Muenchen, 2010). A. Capone / Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2964–2977

W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 1 This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publications in European Journal of Social Theory on July 2015 (Issue published on August 2016). Available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431015594443 Work, recognition and subjectivity: Relocating the connection between work and social pathologies Marco Angella Paris Nanterre University, France As from the thirties, the primary aim of the Frankfurt School critical theory was to understand why the exploitation produced by the capitalistic organization of labor did not lead to a revolution and a new social system. The innovative elements introduced to address this issue, including analysis of the "culture industry", the dialectical methodology and the interdisciplinary approach, greatly enhanced and extended the scope of the left-Hegelian tradition, and more generally the field of critical social theory. The concept of work was still an essential component – one among others, admittedly, 2 |M a r c o A n g e l l a but perhaps the most important – of the dimensions needed to account for social processes of domination (Herrschaft) and alienation. Essential as it is, however, this concept had never been used to analyze the concrete reality of human interactions in the work process. Progressively, Horkheimer and Adorno abandoned the search in the dynamics of labor, or indeed in any human relationship or behavior for a viable way out of domination. Even Marcuse, whose critical approach was closer to contemporary social praxis, explained the processes of alienation and domination with abstracts categories (Renault, 2008), without adopting the perspective of the individuals concretely involved in the work processes. Thus, in the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theorists, the concept of work remains too abstract to be used for a philosophical-sociological critique of the concrete dynamics of alienation and domination within work as an activity. Let us now briefly turn to Habermas, the most important philosopher of the second generation of Frankfurt School theorists. In his philosophy, the concept of work clearly loses the importance previously attributed to it. There is no doubt that Habermas' introduction of the concept of differentiated rationality enriched critical social theory, but it is of little help in forging a concrete critique of work alienation and its consequences for ethical and political life. The sphere of "instrumental rationality" can be criticized only indirectly, insofar as it encroaches upon the sphere of "communicative action". The critique is defensive and external: it does not affect the immanent developing of the W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 3 sphere of instrumental rationality, because the only criterion to evaluate this kind of rationality is its efficiency. In the field of critical social theory, neither the first nor the second generation of the Frankfurt School critical theorists has the right tools to formulate an incisive critique of the concrete processes of work alienation and reification. By contrast, the third generation seems to reconsider work as an essential component, not only because it can be alienated/alienating, but also because it is a vehicle of emancipatory demands. In what follows, I will present a succinct analysis of Axel Honneth's thought on the concept of work and propose an approach attributing it with a more substantial role in social theory. To this end I will embark upon a reappraisal of the importance of the material and psychological dimensions of the subject's interactions at work. My aim is to demonstrate that the normative demands associable with these dimensions are, like the normative demands of recognition, immanent and relatively universal. In other words, I will argue that the normative ideals that can be associated with one's bodily and psychic life (at work and beyond) are not necessarily, and not all, utopian in the negative sense (abstract and unrealistic). If this proves to be true, then it will have important consequences for those who are interested in the kind of critical social theory Axel Honneth is engaged in. They could take these normative demands of emancipation as reference in further developing analysis of the sociological, political and moral implications of the transition from "Fordist" to "Post-Fordist" organization of labor. 4 |M a r c o A n g e l l a Axel Honneth's concept of work In a recent article on the role of recognition in the social division of labor (Honneth, 2010)1, Honneth conceives of work as firm vehicle of individual and collective striving for emancipation. His strategy is to associate mutual recognition – along with its normative expectations of social emancipation – with the structure of labor as a system that implies and allows for social reproduction. By working, individuals contribute not only to the material reproduction of their society, but also to the formation of their own identity, the social division of labor being the core of one of the three spheres of recognition2. From this point of view, the concept of work has a twofold value: insofar as it makes social reproduction possible, it is the root of our "common good", and insofar as it defines one of the dimensions of recognition – that of esteem –, it also serves as root of the individual's identity. Let us now consider how the construct of a vehicle of social and normative progress enters into this concept of work. Honneth contends that, along with the development of the social division of labor, recognition develops relations of solidarity. By participating, through the market, in the constitution and reproduction of their "common good", individuals perceive themselves as mutually related (Honneth, 2010: 234)3. It is the interweaving of mutual recognition and the labor market that leads to this kind of self-comprehension. Individual and collective aims converge through W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 5 recognition; being able to contribute to the common good means contributing to one's own well-being and autonomy – and vice-versa. From Honneth's perspective, this means that it is not only legitimate but also imperative (from a normative point of view) to protest when the existing social and working conditions do not allow people to feel appreciated for their contribution to the development of their community. Indeed, from the very outset, the key idea in Honneth is that only when individuals, tacitly at least, give their (normative) "consent" to the relations of domination related to the market, can they legitimately protest against them (Honneth, 1991). This, however, is precisely what they do, in that they are not merely dominated through the market but, by participating in it, they actively contribute to the formation of their own identity (Honneth, 2010). Disrespect (Missachtung) in the sphere of the market undermines this identity. Individuals need integrity of personal identity to participate freely and fully in their social activities. In order to reestablish this integrity, they are compelled to struggle for recognition. From an historical point of view, this struggle for recognition delineates a form of social progress we can interpret as a process of (inter)subjective emancipation (Honneth, 1995)4. With normative reconstruction of the intersubjective expectations regarding the market sphere we can measure the scope of both social progress and regression within it (Honneth, 2014). This conception of work is decidedly cogent in that it allows us to determine the links between individuals striving for emancipation and objective social dynamics 6 |M a r c o A n g e l l a through the interconnectability of the following three instances: 1) Firstly, the connection between emancipatory demands and work is based on the normative expectation of recognition and depends on the consideration (esteem) we receive for our own contribution, as cooperating workers, to the common good. Despite social inequality and differences in the value attributed to particular lines of work, the social division of labor organizes work in a way that theoretically allows every individual to feel recognized for his or her contribution (Honneth, 1995: 126–130, 179). As noted above, if individuals are denied due recognition (disrespect, Missachtung) for this contribution, they are not only entitled to protest, but they are also (normatively) compelled to struggle in order to reestablish recognition5. Honneth's main contention is that this struggle leads to the institutionalization of a surplus of recognition (i.e. to an emancipation that, in the case of work, means a more differentiated, extended and fair evaluation of people's contribution to the common good)6. 2) Secondly, the connection between emancipatory demands and work is immanently included in the process of social reproduction. It is true that work – which is the basis of this reproduction – is managed with codified rules that guarantee its effective performance. However, for Honneth, the market itself is based on mutual recognition. In other words, even though work responds to an instrumental rationality, the social division of labor is rooted in the implicit norms of recognition that are also responsible for the individuation and socialization of the subject7. The social division of W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 7 labor is always rooted in our ethical life. Thus, through the division of labor, the striving for emancipation on the part of the individuals is involved in the reproduction of society8. 3) Thirdly, through this involvement with social reproduction, the concept of emancipation surpasses the limits of what would otherwise remain mere individual desires and takes on an objective and universal dimension. Starting from this basis, Honneth is able to criticize the theoretical approaches that ground their critique of work on either an aesthetic paradigm or the interactive conception typical of craftwork9. Such approaches have not only become obsolete in modern organization of labor, but refer to an ideal of work that is not interpreted as something involved in the process of social reproduction. Enjoying an aesthetic, playful or rich interaction with the object of our work does not affect the way our society is able to renew itself: hence such ideals can only persist within strictly circumscribed areas, having no place in a universal and immanent critique. Certainly, the qualitative, interactive, aesthetic and manual aspects of work must still exist, and even retain a certain importance, but the material development of the society can proceed without them. Since, for Honneth, recognition forms the basis of the social division of labor in the era of the capitalist market, only the normative ideals that constitute expression of mutual recognition are vitally linked with social reproduction. Through mutual 8 |M a r c o A n g e l l a recognition, these ideals acquire an emancipatory potential that is not only normative, but also, and at the same time, immanent and universal. On the contrary, the manual, bodily, aesthetic, material and psychological interactions, insofar as they are not involved in the formation of the norms of recognition, have no claim to any such potentiality. Even if the normative ideals associated with these interactions were present, their realization, if any, would be nothing more than expression of a mere subjective wish. We are now able to draw some conclusions from this brief analysis of the role of work in Honneth's recent re-elaboration of the concept. Even though it conceptualizes work as a possible vehicle of social and normative evolution, the theory of recognition seems to underestimate the importance of material interactions within it (Deranty, 2007). Conversely, my hypothesis is that these interactions, as well as the psychic dimension implied in the work process, are among the ways to enrich, both normatively and phenomenologically, the concepts of alienation and (the striving for) emancipation within the sphere of work and beyond. Taking into account the bodily (physical and psychological) dimension of work does not imply abandoning a normative theory, nor bowing to an excessively relativistic approach (i.e. abandoning two of the most important premises of Honneth's theory). In the following pages, I will argue how it can legitimately claim a much more essential position from the perspective of critical social W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 9 theory along the lines of the Frankfurt School. Body and work. Beyond recognition To ensure that theory does not diverge from the actual development of social reproduction we have to assume the same criteria of immanence and universality found in Honneth's conception of work10. According to the latter, recognition in the sphere of work is essential both for the constitution of the subject's identity and for social reproduction. In turn, a model of critical theory that attempts to integrate bodily, psychic and material interactions has to show that they are necessary both to the subject's formation and to the reproduction of society. In doing so, this model aims to enhance the normative potential of the theory without losing the cogency of Honneth's critical social theory. Material interactions and subject formation The French work psychologist Christophe Dejours introduced the idea that not only sexuality – which was at the center of classical psychoanalytic theory – but also work are among the most important components in the formation of a subject's identity11. Dejours conceptualizes the human psyche as the living milieu where a twofold exteriority meets. On one hand, the exteriority of the subject's own body, in the sense mainly of a sensitive, physical body; on the other hand, the exteriority of the reality of 10 |M a r c o A n g e l l a work, essentially as material reality. The hypothesis is that the problems we encounter facing this material reality are able to recompose – through the "psychic work" of which dreams are a key example – the identity of the subject (Dejours, 2009, tome 1). Dejours considers the "psychic work" (Arbeit) of the individual as an attempt to overcome his or her suffering in dealing with the material resistance of the reality of work (poïesis)12. Through this psychical re-elaboration, subjectivity – i.e. the subject's ability to feel pleasure and create and discover new dimensions of his or her own sensibility – is enhanced. In other words, through engagement in this effort to tackle the "material" resistance of reality to our action – the adjective "material" referring precisely to this opposition of exteriority to our effort – subjectivity is able to enrich itself and flourish. What is interesting here is that, according to Dejours, these aspects are "in part at least, inaccessible by means other than work and the experience of what it is able to provide access".13 While what one has inherited in one's past life (whatever this inheritance might be, cultural or inbred) severely limits this kind of progress, it is nevertheless still possible. Such progress can be achieved if the individual is able to overcome the difficulties of work, re-elaborate and sublimate them. This hinges mostly on elements that he or she cannot control, like the interactive processes that have led to his or her formation as from birth14. However, for Dejours, some leeway is open for the subject's evolution. In this case, W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 11 through the experience of work, the worker not only learns to know his or her limits and awkwardness, but also to extend the repertoire of emotional impressions and discover new virtuosities (...). Because it is also in this way that subjectivity grows and changes: by bodily recognition of the world and, through this recognition, by self-knowledge. To work is not only to produce but also to challenge one's own body, with the opportunity to become more sensitive than before, and thus to increase the capacity to experience pleasure. (Dejours, 2009, tome 1: 163)15 According to Dejours, the role of recognition in forming an individual's identity in the sphere of work16 has to be integrated with his or her capacity to address the myriad problems imposed by the material reality of work. Not only accidents and impediments, but also the normal activity of achieving a goal in a workplace requires the effort to fight a material resistance. Mutual recognition is rooted in this material substrate of resistance. Due to our struggle against it, this substrate is directly involved, through our psychical re-elaboration (Arbeit) of the effort, in the constitution of our subjectivity. Therefore, the (trans)formation of our subjectivity partially depends on the material activity of work17. We form our subjectivity and its ability to feel pleasure through the interactions with family and friends during childhood. Through the endurance of tackling the reality of work and the intra-psychic re-elaboration of the suffering that it implies, the subject has a chance to sublimate this suffering into pleasure. The material interactions in the workplace give us a "second chance" to overcome our blockages and transform our subjectivity by enhancing its capacity to feel pleasure and thrive18. From this point of view the purpose of critical social theory should be to illustrate whether or 12 |M a r c o A n g e l l a not the actual organization of labor facilitates the daily efforts of individuals to overcome the problems they come up against while dealing with the reality of work. Material interactions and social reproduction With this approach, Dejours opens the way to interpretation of the material and bodily aspects of work interactions as a central dimension in the subject's constitution. Thus, we are able to consider this dimension as one of the essential components in the development of the social pathologies related to work. Neglect of it often has negative effects on the subject's development and flourishing. Can the same also be said for social reproduction? Only by demonstrating that material interactions in the workplace are essential both for the subject's formation and for social reproduction can we affirm the immanence and universality of the normative demands related to these interactions. This is essential if we mean to maintain the accuracy and strengths of Honneth's social theory. Certainly, these demands deserve attention and are worthy of consideration even though they remain subjective demands, depending on the individual's constitution. And yet the model of critical social theory we are concerned with would have a stronger potential if we were able to connect these subjective aspects with the objective development of our societies. Let us now consider one of the major objections that can be raised against this conception of work. The fact is, we always encounter problems and impediments in our W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 13 daily life, and we can call this reality a "material" reality insofar as it presents some resistance to our achieving our goals. What, then, is the specificity of the "material reality" at work? Why should the resistance of the reality of work be different from the material reality we face every day? How can the work activity be distinguished from other activities? In order to answer these questions we have to look deeper into the concept of work as used in the psychodynamics of work. In this discipline, work is not primarily "the wage relation or employment". Although it is an activity that produces "values or wealth" and, for this reason "it is the stake of domination relationships" (Il est l'enjeu de rapports de domination) (Dejours: 2009, tome 1: 185), work "cannot be reduced to its social dimensions: the social relations surrounding it, relations between the workers, or power relations". These dimensions have an essential role in defining the real organization of work (Dejours 2011a: 219-221) 19 . However, what primarily characterizes work is the fact that working implies being able to find a way to perform what the work organization's rules and directives require, and this always calls for strategies that allow the individual to depart from these same rules and directives. The human and non-human reality – made up not only of inanimate material but also of colleagues, whether subordinate or senior – that the individuals deal with at work is what stands between the given organization of the work tasks and their actual realization. As an activity that bridges "the gap between the prescriptive" and the 14 |M a r c o A n g e l l a "concrete reality" of its performance, work is both a social relationship and a technical, bodily interaction with the environment. Work, for Dejours, is what is implied, in human terms, by the fact of working: gestures, know-how, the involvement of the body and the intelligence, the ability to analyze, interpret, and react to situations. It is the power to feel, to think, and to invent. In other words, for the clinician, work is not above all the wage relation or employment but 'working', which is to say, the way the personality is involved in confronting a task that is subject to constraints (material and social). What emerges as the main feature of 'working' (for the clinician once again) is that, even when the work is well conceived, even when the organization of work is rigorous, even when the instructions and procedures are clear, it is impossible to achieve quality if the orders are scrupulously respected. Indeed, ordinary work situations are rife with unexpected events, breakdowns, incidents, operational anomalies, organizational inconsistency and things that are simply impossible to predict, arising from the materials, tools, and machines as well as from other workers, colleagues, bosses, subordinates, the team, the chain of authority, the clients, and so on. In short, there is no such thing as purely mechanical work. This means that there is always a gap between the prescriptive and the concrete reality of the situation. This gap is found at all levels of analysis between task and activity, or between the formal and informal organization of work. Working thus means bridging the gap between prescriptive and concrete reality. However, what is needed in order to do so cannot be determined in advance; the path to be navigated between the prescriptive and the real must constantly be invented or rediscovered by the subject who is working. Thus, for the clinician, work is defined as what the subjects must add to the orders so as to reach the objectives assigned to them, or alternately, what they must add of themselves in order to deal with what does not function when W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 15 they limit themselves to a scrupulous execution of orders. (2007: 72; see also 2009, tome 2: 20-21) One may contend that not only work but also normal everyday life is always subject to norms, constraints and rules that inhibit our actions: they offer resistance to us, and we have to tackle this resistance. From the perspective adopted in this article, however, the specificity of work lies within the objective work needed for social reproduction and the subjective activity of working, which implies engagement of subjectivity (bodily and psychic) well beyond working hours. What Dejours calls le travail vivant, "working" as an activity, is the creative process that, addressing the prescriptions for work, overcomes the problems entailed with the practical implementation of these prescriptions. Without this kind of invisible work, which lies behind the codified rules, "exceeds any limit assigned to working hours" and mobilizes "the whole of the personality" (Dejours, 2007: 77) 20 , the objective working process may not be able to function properly and its effectiveness, as well as its quality, may suffer. Without the travail vivant, for Dejours, no labor organization could be viable. If the workers "strictly adhere" to the codified norms, if they "meet exactly the commands, in absolute obedience", then "it is a disaster" and "nothing works, the production fails. No company, no workshop works if the operators become obedient" (2009, tome 1: 26)21. If companies and workshops achieve their productive goals, it is because the invisible working activity continues behind the production processes, even though their formal organization tends to prevent it. However, the subsequent social and technical 16 |M a r c o A n g e l l a pressure – that is, the pressure of the prescribed organization of work – on the creativity and autonomy of the subjects has at least two negative and related effects: it is a source of suffering for the subject and consequently lowers the quality of work. To put it in plain terms: the social organization of work can facilitate either the realization of the individual's creativity, expression, cooperation and autonomy, and the psychic reelaboration of the challenges he or she encounters tackling the realities of work, thus enhancing the individuals' own subjectivity and the quality of production – or, vice versa, it can hinder these processes. On this basis we are able to find the relation we have been looking for. The development of subjectivity can be associated with social reproduction. By the same means by which subjects seek to overcome difficulties, to sublimate suffering and enhance their subjectivity – i.e. by the travail vivant (working) and the psychic work (Arbeit) related to it – the reproduction of society (social organized work, poïesis) continues in quality and does not risk blockage or deterioration. Subjectivity and work are to a certain extent complementary: social reproduction hinges partly on an activity that, at the same time, enhances the subject's identity. This enhancement is achieved not only at the level of individual consideration for his or her contribution to the common good, as in Honenth's theory, but also at the level of the sensibility, of the aesthetic pleasure experienced and, more generally, at the level of interactive exchanges with the human and non-human environment in the workplace and beyond. W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 17 Conclusions On these bases, it is possible to re-evaluate the social pathologies concerning work making reference to the concept of alienation (Haber 2007; Renault 2006). Suffering in the workplace becomes a pathology when the objective conditions of the organization of work obstruct a living and interactive exchange with the concrete realities of the working environment. This may come about, for instance, by separating workers, excluding them from cooperative activity, overloading them with tasks, requiring of them excess in performance and competitiveness, or expecting them to tackle tasks for which the material and organizational conditions are inappropriate. In these cases, the risk is that the subjects may concentrate all their efforts on defenses against suffering, adopting a rigid behavior, unable to overcome the difficulties that may occur, possibly leading to regression in subjectivity, acceptance of domination, insensitivity to his or her own suffering as well as others', violence (both at work and beyond) (Dejours 2011b, 1998; Deranty 2010: 186–190, 213–216), reduced vitality, a sense of humiliation and of inability to adapt, and dynamics that may exceptionally lead to suicide (Bègue and Dejours, 2009). Similarly, the concept of emancipation increases in critical value by integrating those material and bodily dimensions that remain partially in the shade in Honneth's theory. According to Dejours, the move towards a context in which individuals can 18 |M a r c o A n g e l l a exercise their creativity in the workplace and which, consequently, enhances their subjectivity, i.e. "emancipation" in and through work, depends on the establishment of a favorable and supporting living-work environment. It hinges on political decisions (Dejours, 2009, tome 2: 178, 198–208) 22 to implement measures in this direction. However, politicians hardly seem likely to adopt such measures in the contemporary neoliberal context, although we can demonstrate, as does Dejours, that unsatisfactory conditions can lead to deterioration in the quality of work. Workers can find the power to play an important role in political policy only if they have sufficient scope to engage and cooperate with one another. But it is precisely this kind of cooperative scope – essential to establish a travail vivant-friendly environment – which they lack in the contemporary organization of work. On the basis of this diagnosis, critical social theory following in the lines of the Frankfurt School should analyze the pathologies of work and propose alternative models to organize it in accord with social practices23. We can justify this approach by showing how the suffering caused by inappropriate work organization – which is unacceptable in itself, raising severe moral concerns – is counterproductive both in the production process (material reproduction) and beyond it. By pushing the performance and competitiveness ideal to the extreme, post-Fordist work organization negatively affects the well-being of the people who work and the quality of the social reproduction as a whole (Deranty 2008). The mediation between these two aspects lies in the concept of subjectivity we can infer W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 19 from Dejours' theory. The subject's ability to overcome suffering and sublimate it constitutes the connection between the effects of work on subjectivity and the political, ethical and social consequences of work organization. By facilitating the formation of subjective defenses against suffering, the post-Fordist organization of work creates "massive amounts of anxiety" and destroys not only "individuals lives" but also "social bonds and communities". (Deranty, 2008: 457, 444) However, recognition is not the only element at stake in these harmful effects of work on individual and collective life. Mutual recognition is rooted in basic layers of bodily and psychical interactions. Through the depletion of subjectivity, the ability of the subject to activate the psychic investment in the human and non-human environment and interact within it positively is also affected. The sphere of work is not isolated from the other spheres of subjective and social life. The alienating processes cannot be separated from one another: deleterious organization of work has a negative effect on the other spheres of human interaction and vice versa24. Thus, from the perspective of this paper, improved cooperation amongst workers and the normative demands that could ensue are based on recognition of the worker's contribution to the common good – they are based on the impossibility, without the recognition of this contribution, to establish a positive relationship with oneself. Improved cooperation amongst workers and the related normative demands are also based, however, on the indispensable preconditions to establish living and interactive work activity. In other words, they 20 |M a r c o A n g e l l a derive from the difficulty, without this kind of work activity, to establish rich and flourishing relationships with oneself, and indeed with the human and the non-human environment. What could lapse into crisis, and possibly call for a response that could be the start of collective action, is not only the intersubjectively formed identity of an individual, but also the subjectivity of an individual, the constituents of which are something more than mutual recognition. Notes 1 In this work, Honneth confirms and deepens his previous argumentation on the third sphere of recognition (esteem). See Honneth (1995, chapter 5). In doing so, he rejects what he himself had sustained in an early contribution on work, considering the latter as an activity where interactive and material interactions generate critical insight and the autonomy of the workers is essential. See Honneth (1980). For an analysis of the shift in Honneth's thoughts on work, see Smith (2009). 2 According to The struggle for recognition, the identity of an individual takes shape within the spheres of Love, Right and Solidarity. The social division of labor is the core of the sphere of solidarity (Honneth, 2010, 1995: chapter 5) 3 Referring to Durkheim, Honneth affirms that "market-mediated relations give rise to social relations in which the members of society are able to form a particular, 'organic' form of solidarity, because the reciprocal recognition of their respective contributions to the common good gives them a sense of connectedness". Furthermore, referring to Hegel, Honneth argues that "in the system of markedmediated exchange, subjects mutually recognize each other as private autonomous beings that act for each other and thereby sustain their livelihood through the contribution of their labor to society", (Honneth, 2010: 230). 4 The concept of emancipation seems inappropriate in regard to Honneth's theory. Honneth does not provide a revolutionary account of work (and of praxis in general). Rather, he conceptualizes social evolution from within the development of the "structure of modern legal relations". (Honneth, 1995: 118) Furthermore, this evolution is a long and difficult process whose results are not guaranteed (Honneth, 1995: chapter 6 and 8). However, I think we are authorized to use this concept to the extent that 1) from an objective point of view, it is an open question as to whether the struggles for recognition will lead to just an internal evolution of already existent values and rights or to the shaping of a different social-economical organization and, 2) from the (inter)subjective point of view, it is possible to relate the struggle for recognition to enhancement of the subjects' ability to flourish. This internal (and weaker) concept of emancipation should be distinguished from the external (and stronger, revolutionary) one, which was the concept the first generation of the Frankfurt School would use. Social progress, for Honneth, begins from within a normatively legitimate social order. In this paper, I use the weaker concept of emancipation and aim to enhance it. W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 21 5 Subjects are compelled to struggle because they need recognition in order to establish a good relationship with themselves. Of course, the immanent need for reaction does not necessarily imply that struggle will ensue. In this chapter, Honneth simply illustrates the psychological connection between the experience of being treated unjustly and the possibility for subjects to discover that this experience depends on (a denial of) recognition (Honneth, 1995: chapter 6). 6 For the notion of "surplus" of recognition, see Honneth (1995), Fraser and Honneth (2003). For a critique of the notion of surplus, see Angella (2012) 7 "The 'social order' of the market, as it is termed nowadays, thus encompasses not only positive legal regulations and principles that fix the conditions for the freedom to contract and engage in economic exchange, but also a series of unwritten, inexplicit norms and rules that implicitly determine – before any market-mediated transactions take place – how the value of certain goods is to be estimated and what should be legitimately respected in the exchange". (Honneth, 2010: 232) Thus, even though the sphere of economics assumes autonomous identity, based on its own rules, it will always be founded on implicit moral norms. 8 The formation of emancipatory demands depends on recognition; recognition is the basis of the social division of labor; the division of labor is the root of social reproduction; thus the emancipatory demands are connected to social reproduction. 9 For Honneth, the "romanticized model of the craftsman and the aesthetic ideal of artistic production" stems from an age of capitalist development which still evidenced both the possibility of direct interaction with the object of work and command of the practical and theoretical knowledge leading the subject to develop some autonomy in the process of production. If, since then, they have taken on utopian characteristics, it is because they appeared to be incompatible with the tasks of social reproduction (Honneth, 2010: 225–229). For the importance of the craftsman model in the ancient and contemporary world, see Sennett (2008). 10 In this regard, although close to it, my endeavor departs from that of Jean-Philippe Deranty, who is developing a rich concept of work where the aspects of recognition are bound up with work as a subjective activity. Unlike Honneth, Deranty does not believe that in order to have normative value, subjective and material norms related to work must be universal. Rather, we have to distinguish between the fact that subjects at work need "a certain level" of autonomy (that is, they need to cooperate and express themselves in concrete work activity), and the idea that "the whole production process must be organized" to respond to such norms. This would be unrealistic. Deranty illustrates that "just because a claim cannot be maximally universalized does not necessarily make it normatively irrelevant" (Deranty, 2011). In agreement with this approach, I would like to go further. Through use of the same fundamentals, that is, the "psychodynamics of work", one can relatively universalize the norms related to work as a subjective and material activity by illustrating that this kind of work is essential to social reproduction. Insofar as we are able to do this, these norms are neither unrealistic nor confined to the sphere of the subject's activity. They are immanent not only from a subjective perspective, but also from an objective one (i.e. from the perspective of the social reproduction the market is capable of). However, I do not think integrating this kind of bodily and psychical interactions into Honneth's theory is compatible with his intention to renew the paradigm of Critical Theory on the basis of recognition. In this regard, I interpret my attempt to reinforce the concept of alienation/emancipation at work as something that destabilizes the foundation of Honneth's theory of recognition. 11 Works of Christophe Dejours in English can be found in Christophe Dejours (2011a; 2007). For detailed explanations of "psychodynamics" and of its contribution to a philosophy of work, see JeanPhilippe Deranty (2010; 2009) and Christophe Dejours, Jean-Philippe Deranty (2010). For a detailed presentation from the perspective of critical social theory, see Jean-Philippe Deranty (2011; 2008) 22 |M a r c o A n g e l l a 12 The material resistance is the resistance that reality offers to the action of a subject aiming at accomplishment of the work task. For the distinction of Arbeit and Poïesis, see Dejours (2009: tome 1). Arbeit designates the psychic work in a Freudian sense. By contrast, poïesis denotes work as a medium of social reproduction, which Freud neglected according to Dejours. 13 "(...) pour une part au moins, inaccessibles autrement que par le travail proprement dit et par l'expérience inédite à quoi il peut donner accès" Dejours (2009, tome 1: 72). Thus, work is irreplaceable for constitution of the subject. It does not "constitute one contingent challenge among others for subjectivity", but rather it is "a necessary condition for the emergence of subjectivity" (Dejours, 2007: 78) 14 The root of Dejours' conception of the centrality of work in transforming subjectivity is a theory of subject formation he draws from Jean Laplanche. Referring to the latter, Dejours attributes an essential role to the relationship between the newborn and his or her attachment figure. This relationship is of the utmost importance in forming an "erotic body" (different from the biological one) able to feel pleasure, to perceive the multiple aspects of one's sensibility, and to enhance one's own subjectivity. See Dejours (2009: tome 1, chapter 4-5). For the theory of the "erotic body" and the formation of subjectivity through the combined action of sexuality and work, see chapters 2 and 3. Dejours contends that, through work, one can enhance (or damage) the sensibility of the "erotic body" he or she formed through childhood interactions with the attachments figure. For the formation of the "erotic body" see also Dejours (2003) 15 "Par l'expérience du travailler, il [celui qui travaille] apprend à connaître ses propres limites, ses maladresses, mais il étend aussi en lui le répertoire de ses impressions affectives et découvre de nouvelles virtuosités (...). car c'est aussi de cette façon que la subjectivité s'accroît, se transforme: par la reconnaissance charnelle du monde et à travers elle par la connaissance de soi. Travailler, ce n'est pas seulement produire, c'est mettre son corps à l'épreuve, avec une chance d'en revenir plus sensibles qu'avant cette éprouve, donc d'accroître ses capacités d'éprouver du plaisir". 16 Not only cultural recognition of the social function of the subject, but also specific recognition of 1) the technical skills involved in the production processes, and 2) recognition of the beauty and quality of the work product. Only colleagues (whatever their status, peer or senior) who know the job and are able to evaluate it can grant each other this kinds of recognition. See Dejours (2009, tome 2: 36–37, 104–108). 17 See the example p. 169-175, Dejours (2009, tome 1). This "psychic work" can possibly lead to modification of the "organization" of "sexuality". 18 "the relation with work can be a second chance to overcome the limitations imposed on the development of the erotic body by the fateful ineptitudes of the adult in playing with the baby's body" ("le rapport au travail peut être une deuxième chance pour dépasser les limites imposées au développement du corps érogène par les inaptitudes funestes de l'adulte à jouer avec le corps de l'enfant"), Dejours (2009, tome 1: 163–164). 19 For Dejours, the "real work organization", that is, the organization needed to exercise the activity of working and carry out the tasks, is never the one prescribed. The real work organization is always a "compromise" between "labor and management", thus "a product of social relations". 20 As we have seen, dreaming can be interpreted as part of one's work (Arbeit) insofar as it is indispensable for the subject's re-elaboration of the difficulties encountered. The same applies to the subject's life beyond working hours. The "subjectivity as a whole is involved" in work. The "strictly spatial separation, notwithstanding its adoption by classical sociology and psychology, is radically contradicted as soon as the dynamics of the psychic and social processes are taken into account. The working of the psyche cannot be divided up. Persons involved in defensive strategies to combat suffering in work do not leave their psychic behavior in the changing room. On the contrary, they take W o r k , r e c o g n i t i o n a n d s u b j e c t i v i t y | 23 their mental constraints with them and need the cooperation of family and friends to keep their defenses ready for when they return to work". Moreover, it can "be shown that the entire family economy is called upon to help its members face the constraints of the work situation. Nor are children spared by the dynamics of their parents' relationship to work, to the point that their own development is deeply marked by it, even in the construction of their sexual identity". (Dejours, 2011a: 249–50) 21 "S'ils respectent exactement les ordres, dans une obéissance absolue (...) c'est une catastrophe! (...). Et plus rien alors ne fonctionne, la production tombe en panne. Aucune entreprise, aucun atelier ne fonctionne si les opérateurs deviennent obéissants". 22 The connection between political policy and workplace processes seems to be weak, though. Work by itself should facilitate generation of the cooperation necessary to the constitution of an environment that favors travail vivant. Its maintenance, however, depends on political will, which does not occur spontaneously. How does one establish such an environment, if the contemporary organization of work hinders the cooperation that should form and support it? 23 As in Honneth's theory, this approach should be relatively neutral regarding the means and the purposes of a struggle aiming at transforming work organization (Honneth, 1995: 162–163, 179). It is up to the individuals' evaluation of what are the (historically changing) presuppositions of a good work environment to decide the forms of a changing praxis as well as the forms of a renewed work organization. With regard to this praxis, however, critical theory should have both a clarifying and a proactive role. It should indicate and analyze social pathologies through normative reconstruction, as Honneth does with his concept of recognition (Honneth 2014). It should also be more audacious, introducing alternatives that are not yet fully elaborated in the social practices and propose them to the public in order to open up debate on their suitability. 24 For alienation and reification concerning the non-human environment (external nature), see Angella (submitted manuscript, 2015). On reification, see Angella (2014). 24 |M a r c o A n g e l l a References Angella M (2012) L'individualisation par la socialisation. Quelle place pour la psychanalyse? Quelques inconséquences dans la théorie de la reconnaissance d'Axel Honneth. Consecutio temporum. Hegeliana/Marxiana/Freudiana, 2(3). Available at: http://www.consecutio.org/category/numero-3/freudiana-numero-3/ Angella M (2014) Les limites du concept de réification chez Axel Honneth. In: Chanson V, Cukier A, Monferrand F, (eds.) La réification. 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Review of Jack Knight & Melissa Schwartzberg, eds, NOMOS LXI: Political Legitimacy (New York University Press, 2019) for Perspectives on Politics Enzo Rossi University of Amsterdam [Penultimate version, forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics, 2020] According to a familiar narrative, John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (1971) prompted a revival of Anglophone political philosophy. Whatever one makes of that narrative, it's undeniable that work on justice dominated the last quarter of the 20th century, and even the turn to global issues that characterized the subfield at the turn of the century. Now that Rawls's influence is on the wane, so is the almost puritanically moralistic focus on justice. Other historically central and more pertinently political concerns have come back to the fore-chiefly among them, legitimacy, understood not in narrow legalistic terms or as an ancillary to justice, but as a central feature of the normative landscape.1 The renewed interest in legitimacy has borne fruit, for instance in the form of new conceptual approaches that distance themselves from the oldfashioned notion of legitimacy as the correlate of political obligation (Applbaum 2010) (Adams 2017), or in the growing realist revival that makes legitimacy the central concern of normative political theory (Williams 2005) (Rossi 2012) (Sleat 2015). Now Jack Knight and Melissa Schwartzberg have masterfully edited a Nomos volume on legitimacy in the best tradition of this series: a solid cross-section of work in a burgeoning field. The volume is in three parts. Part I contains mostly conceptual work on the philosophical foundations of legitimacy. Part II offers chapters on a range of normative legitimacy problems. The essays in Part III deal with the interface between the conceptual, normative, and empirical study of legitimacy. The editors' introduction does an excellent job of summarizing each of the twelve chapters, so here I will focus on just three that I take to be representative of the volume's tenor. My selection is inevitably idiosyncratic, so it shouldn't be taken as a judgment about the chapters' relative quality. Amanda Greene's "Is Political Legitimacy Worth Promoting?" is one of the most ambitious contributions in Part I of the volume. Beside answering the titular question, the paper provides a fully-fledged theory of legitimacy as "quality assent". The view is that a regime is legitimate just in case (i) enough of its 1 Though Rawls had already brought legitimacy back on the agenda with Political Liberalism (1993), much of the reception of that work has focused on legitimacy as a way to make pluralism safe for liberal justice, rather than on legitimacy per se (Rossi 2019). 2 subjects judge that there is some value in being a subject of that order, and (ii) those judgments are compatible with the regime's "essential claim of rule", namely "the provision of basic security for all subjects" (72). If, say, someone's assent to the regime is combined with a rejection of the regime's aim to provide basic security to all those subjected to it, then their assent doesn't contribute to legitimacy. There's much to like about Greene's chapter, especially the worthwhile and largely successful effort to isolate legitimacy from other normative concerns. However, one can't help but notice a similarity between Greene's view assent and Bernard Williams's realist theory of legitimacy, centered on what he calls the "Basic Legitimation Demand", i.e. the provision of order in ways that are in some non-moralized sense acceptable to the regime's subjects (Williams 2005, 4–6). Or rather, there is at least one difference, but I do not think that it is well-motivated. For Williams acceptance of a political order "does not count if the acceptance itself is produced by the coercive power which is supposedly being justified" (ibid., 6). Greene rejects such a criticaltheoretic enhancement of her notion of assent, because epistemic defects do not necessarily make acceptance incorrect. She identifies two types of epistemic defect: "where the content of the belief is false [and] where the process of belief formation involves manipulation or deception." (82). It is true that neither of those defects guarantees incorrect acceptance, and Greene cautions us against prizing "having correct beliefs at the expense of everything else that might matter" (83). But this move circumvents the most salient question: it's possible that a regime may brainwash its citizens into a correct acceptance, but how likely is that? And why take this epistemic risk?2 Moving on to Part II, Jennifer Rubenstein's "The Political Legitimacy of International NGOs" provides an excellent example of how normative political theory can fruitfully be brought to bear on issues that are typically the preserve of empirically-minded scholars. The chapter's main contention is that applying the tools of political theory to the INGO legitimacy debate "has the potential to (re)politicize those debates in surprising and salutary ways, especially if the criteria for political legitimacy attached to this project include democratic criteria." (251). While I find Rubenstein's insertion of the normative perspective into the debate valuable, I am left wondering why she chose to retain the standard, state-centric notion of legitimacy as the right to rule, rather than relying on more expansive accounts, such as N.P. Adams's idea of institutional legitimacy as the "right to function without coercive interference" (Adams 2017, 2). For Adams, "legitimacy answers a very specific fundamental question: must we allow this institution to carry on, or may we coercively interfere with it?" (ibid., 6). The suggestion is that it is possible to capture the relevant normative dimensions 2 For an example and sustained discussion of this kind epistemic critique see (Rossi and Argenton forthcoming). 3 of an INGO's power without falling into the sometimes forced parallel with a ruling authority. I found Part III of the volume the most refreshing, as it really breaks down the barrier between empirical and normative approaches to legitimacy. Sanford Gordon and Gregory Huber's chapter is an excellent example of how this may be done. The chapter's strategy is to draw on the normative literature to enhance a positive definition of legitimacy. Specifically, justifiability and obligation are deployed to sharpen the generally agreed-upon idea that there is more to social cooperation than material incentives: "obligation implies a motivation to comply apart from extrinsic, material motivations; while justification implicates citizens' beliefs about authorities and institutions." On this account, legitimacy is "a feature of an equilibrium in which citizens' intrinsic motivations are enhanced by those beliefs about authorities, and the actions of governing institutions are consistent with those beliefs." (329) While I am inclined to agree that such an account should prove empirically productive-in fact the authors' review of a large body of empirical literature in light of their definition sheds much light on some recurring confusions-I would like to point out a normative complication, namely the possible decoupling of justification and obligation. As A. John Simmons argued, whether I have an obligation to comply with an authority and whether that authority's commands are justified are two completely separate questions (Simmons 1999). However, far from agreeing with Simmons that legitimacy is purely a matter of obligation rather than justification, I wonder whether we couldn't simplify our analytic categories by making obligation redundant: tying legitimacy to the convergence of perceived obligation and justifiability might obscure the fact that beliefs in justifiability might enhance intrinsic motivation without the need to invoke the notion of obligation. The preceding remarks should give a sense of the import of Nomos XXI. There is much to learn from each of the chapters I haven't been able to discuss here. Anyone with an interest in political legitimacy-be they a theorist or an empirically-minded scholar-would do well to consider this volume a reference point. References Adams, N P. 2017. "Institutional Legitimacy." Journal of Political Philosophy: DOI: 10.1111/jopp.12122 Applbaum, Arthur Isak. 2010. "Legitimacy without the Duty to Obey." Philosophy & Public Affairs 38(3): 215–239. Rossi, Enzo. 2012. "Justice, Legitimacy and (Normative) Authority for Political Realists." Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 15(2): 149–164. 4 ---. 2019. "The Twilight of the Liberal Social Contract." The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1945–2015. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rossi, Enzo, and Carlo Argenton. Forthcoming. "Property, Legitimacy, Ideology: A Reality Check." Journal of Politics. Preprint URL: https://philpapers.org/rec/ROSPLI-2. Simmons, A J. 1999. "Justification and Legitimacy*." Ethics 109(4): 739–771. Sleat, Matt. 2015. "Justice and Legitimacy in Contemporary Liberal Thought." Social theory and practice 41(2): 230–252. Williams, Bernard. 2005. In the Beginning Was the Deed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

/19 Horror, Fear, and the Sartrean Account of Emotions Andreas Elpidorou University of Louisville andreas[dot]elpidorou[at]Louisville[dot]edu Penultimate draft | Forthcoming in The Southern Journal of Philosophy (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)2041-6962) Abstract Phenomenological approaches to affectivity have long recognized the vital role that emotions occupy in our lives. In this paper, I engage with Jean-Paul Sartre's well-known and highly influential theory of the emotions as it is advanced in his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. I examine whether Sartre's account offers two inconsistent explications of the nature of emotions. I argue that despite appearances there is a reading of Sartre's theory that is free of inconsistencies. Ultimately, I highlight a novel reading of Sartre's account of the emotions: one that is phenomenologically accurate, free of inconsistencies, and that enjoys the support of textual evidence. Keywords: phenomenology; emotions; Sartre; horror; fear 1. Introduction In the concluding pages of his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre introduces a distinction between two types of emotions: Thus there are two forms of emotion, according to whether it is we who constitute the magic of the world to replace a deterministic activity which cannot be realized, or whether the world itself is unrealizable and reveals itself suddenly as a magical environment (Sartre 1939/2004, 57).1 The distinction between the two types of emotions appears to be an afterthought on Sartre's behalf. Two observations corroborate this judgment. First, up until that point in the Sketch, there was no mention of the two types of emotions. Second, the distinction is advanced only after Sartre's own realization that his hitherto account of emotions "does not explain the immediate reactions of horror and wonder that sometimes possess us when certain objects suddenly appear to us" (STE 55). It is only by admitting of a distinction between two types of 1 Hereinafter, all references to Sartre 1939 will be indicated by "STE" followed by the pagination of the English translation. 2/19 emotions that Sartre is able to account for certain spontaneous or immediate emotional reactions within his theory. Afterthought or not, Sartre judges this distinction to be compatible with the ideas advanced and developed up to that point (STE 56). Indeed, by Sartre's own account, the pages found between the covers of the Sketch contain a coherent theory of emotions. Not all readers of the Sketch, however, are convinced that Sartre's account is free of inconsistency or tension. Robert Solomon, for example, calls Sartre's introduction of a second type of emotions "a disaster" (Solomon 2006, 106). He opines that it undermines Sartre's own claim that all emotional behavior is purposive. Sarah Richmond argues that the concluding pages of the Sketch betray Sartre's "indecisiveness" as to how to understand magic (Richmond 2010, 153). This indecisiveness is important, Richmond points out, for it is symptomatic of an underlying tension between two ways of understanding emotion. More recently, and in response to these charges, Anthony Hatzimoysis defends Sartre from accusations of inconsistency. After a consideration of Sartre's position, he concludes that "the discussion in the final pages of the Sketch is consistent with Sartre's main analysis of emotion" (Hatzimoysis 2014, 83). 2 In this paper, I revisit this debate and evaluate Hatzimoysis' conciliatory reading. I show that there is indeed a way of articulating a reading of the Sketch that is free of inconsistencies. Yet, such a reading diverges significantly from the one that Hatzimoysis offers in his attempt to save Sartre's position. Ultimately, in this paper, I highlight a novel reading of Sartre's account of the emotions: one that is phenomenologically accurate and that at the same time enjoys the support of textual evidence. 2. Emotions and Magic According to Sartre, emotions are experiential episodes that are prompted by the perception of difficulties. During these episodes the world is magically transformed, often through the use of one's body, in an attempt to overcome such difficulties. This brief summary of Sartre's account requires unpacking. Emotional consciousness is primarily and for the most part unreflecting consciousness. Emotional episodes, in other words, are first and foremost ways through 2 Other discussions of Sartre's account of the emotions include: Hatzimoyisis 2010; Mazis 1983; Solomon 1975; and Weberman 1996. See also Elpidorou 2016. 3/19 which we apprehend the world, and during such episodes, one is only non-thetically conscious of oneself (STE 34, 36-8, 42; cf. Sartre 1943/1984, 435).3 Indeed, neither the self nor consciousness itself is (typically at least) the positional object of one's emotional consciousness (STE 38). For instance, the experience of boredom is not primarily (nor typically) an experience about boredom. Nor is it an experience about ourselves as bored subjects. It is rather the world, or a part of it, that is found to be boring. Above all, emotions are ways in which one apprehends, experiences, and relates to the world.4 As Sartre emphasizes, "emotional consciousness is [...] primarily consciousness of the world" (STE 34), a "mode of our conscious existence, one of the ways in which consciousness understands [...] its Being-in-the-world" (STE 61).5 In our everyday, concernful existence, worldly entities are presented to us already as part of a causal and instrumental nexus (STE 38-9). Entities invite or afford certain actions. In order to attain the ends that one desires, one first needs to secure the already prescribed means that lead to those ends. Quite often, however, we are either unable to achieve the desired means or the means simply cease to be available. It is when we find ourselves in such difficult and unyielding situations – situations in which normal, practical means cannot bring about the desired ends – that emotions arise. During an emotional episode, we confer to worldly entities or situations alternative qualities than the ones that they are perceived to have in their instrumental guise. Emotions are consequently ways of transforming the world. Yet, they do not alter the world's material constitution. Rather, emotions effectuate a magical transformation. That is to say, emotions change our world by changing our consciousness of it. By altering our expectations, worldviews, beliefs, or desires, we alter the world that we live in. "Emotional behaviour," Sartre writes, "seeks by itself, and without modifying the structure of the object, to confer another quality upon it" (STE 41). 3 The nature of non-thetic (or non-positional) consciousness is discussed in Sartre 1936-7/1960. See, especially, the following pages: 40-1, 44-9, and 56. 4 Similar claims about the nature of emotions can also be found in The Imaginary. There Sartre writes: "[T]he feeling of hate is not consciousness of hate. It is consciousness of Paul as hateful; love is not, primarily, consciousness of itself: it is consciousness of the charms of the loved person" (Sartre 1940/2004, 69). cf. Sartre 1936-7/1960, 63f. For a discussion of the role that Sartre assigns to emotions in aesthetic experiences, see Elpidorou 2010. 5 Emotions are thus not accidental modifications of consciousness: they are not superfluous features of human existence. They are instead constitutive of our human existence and are ways in which we embody our worldly and interpersonal existence. 4/19 Indeed, in emotional consciousness, the world is no longer given in its instrumental guise. Or so Sartre holds. Instead, during an emotional episode, we "live it [the world] as though the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic" (STE 40; see also Sartre 1943/1984, 392, 509, 573-4). By disclosing a world in which deterministic processes no longer hold, emotions also reveal a world in which the difficulties that we previously encountered – difficulties that presuppose a deterministic and instrumental world – are now magically gone. Emotions offer us solutions to problems that we are unable to solve using ordinary, practical means. Insofar as the transformation that emotions effectuate on the world is magical it is also in a sense ineffective: after all, emotions do not really change the world. Yet, this feature of emotions should not lead us think to that emotional episodes are insignificant, impotent, or somehow merely symbolic. The qualities that are magically projected upon the world during such episodes are taken by us to be properties of the world itself; they are not recognized as our own projections (STE 49, 51).6 "[T]he man who is angry sees on the face of his opponent the objective quality of asking for a punch on the nose" (Sartre 1943/1984, 228). We are absorbed by the world in which we live through our emotional consciousness. Emotional consciousness, according to Sartre, "lives the new world it has thereby constituted – lives it directly, commits itself to it, and suffers from the qualities that the concomitant behavior has outlined" (STE 51). During emotional episodes, consciousness is "caught in its own [emotional] snare" (STE 52). 3. The Double Role of Magic The above description of Sartre's account suggests that in emotional episodes the world is magically transformed because our consciousness of the world has changed. "I find him 6 Here one can discern certain similarities between Sartre's theory of the emotions and his account of bad faith (Sartre 1943/1984). Both cases involve a type of misrepresentation of which we are not fully aware (STE 50). And in both cases, consciousness acts in a way that restricts its own freedom (STE 4952). The "origin of emotion," Sartre writes, "is a spontaneous debasement" (STE 52). During emotional episodes, consciousness abases itself (STE 56) and it is held "captive to itself" (STE 52). For more on the similarities between Sartre's account of the emotions and bad faith, see Richmond 2010. By juxtaposing Sartre's discussion of Janet's patient (STE 45) to his example of bad faith of the woman on a date (Sartre 1943/1984), Richmond makes a convincing case that in both instances consciousness denies its own freedom (Richmond 2010, 152). For more on bad faith, see Bernasconi 2006, Ch. 4; Cox 2006, 101-4; Eshleman 2008a and 2008b; Manser 1987; Perna 2003; Santoni 1995 and 2008; and Webber 2009 and 2010. 5/19 hateful," Sartre writes, "because I am angry" (STE 61). According to this reading of Sartre's account, magic is not a feature of the world. The world is not revealed to us as magical from the very beginning; rather it is we who bring magic to a deterministic world. Near the end of the Sketch, Sartre introduces a different account of the role of magic in emotional experiences. Consider Sartre's example of experiencing horror after suddenly seeing a grimacing face pressing against the window: In the state of horror, we are suddenly made aware that the deterministic barriers have given way. That face which appears at the window, for instance – we do not at first take it as that of a man, who might push the door open and take thirty paces to where we are standing. On the contrary, it is presented, motionless though it is, as acting at a distance (STE 57). What this passage shows, I wish to argue, is that in the case of horror the world itself is apprehended as magical. And it is apprehended as such without requiring a transformation. As a result, horror cannot be accounted for by the analysis of emotions offered by Sartre up until that point in the Sketch. Unlike fear, joy, and anger, horror does not involve the transformation of a deterministic world into one that is governed by magic. The above passage is crucial, for if I am right, it points to a tension in Sartre's account of emotions. Unfortunately, it is also a challenging passage in that it resists a straightforward interpretation. In fact, the passage admits of at least two interpretations.7 According to the first one, Sartre's claim that "we are suddenly made aware that the deterministic barriers have given way" should be understood to mean that even in the case of horror, consciousness still brings about a magical transformation of the world. What differentiates horror from others emotions is the speed by which such a transformation takes place. Horror is immediate: the world is swiftly transformed by emotional consciousness. In contrast, the second interpretation reverses the order of interaction between consciousness and world. It is not emotional consciousness that transforms the world; it is the world -which already appears as magical -that affects consciousness in an emotional way. The horrible or horrifying is not in any way conferred or projected onto the world. It is encountered as already a part of the world. If the first interpretation can be captured by the motto "I find the world to be 7 I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to address this ambiguity. 6/19 horrifying because I am horrified," the second one is captured by the motto "I am horrified because I find the world to be horrifying." Despite the availability of both interpretations, there is only strong textual support in favor of the latter. First, the discussion of horror takes place in the context of Sartre's own realization that the theory of emotions that is presented in the first 20 or so pages of part III of the Sketch fails to account for certain immediate emotional reactions such as that of horror. Indeed, the quoted passage immediately follows Sartre's admission that there are two types of emotions. Context thus makes it clear that horror is used by Sartre as an example of the second type of emotions, namely, emotions during which the world is itself revealed to consciousness as already magical and which do not require a transformation by consciousness (STE 57). Second, there are additional passages in the surrounding pages that support the contention that during horror the world is presented to us as already magical. Consider, for example, the following passages: We have seen how, during an emotion, the consciousness abases itself and abruptly transmutes the deterministic world in which we live, into a magical world. But, conversely, sometimes it is this world that reveals itself to consciousness as magical just when we expect it to be deterministic. It must not, indeed, be supposed that magic is an ephemeral quality that we impose upon the world according to our humour. There is an existential structure of world which is magical (STE 56; emphasis added). Here again [i.e., in the case of horror] then, we find the same elements and the same structure as we were describing a little while ago, except that in the former case the magic and the meaning of the emotions came from the world and not from ourselves. Naturally, magic, as a real quality of the world, is not strictly limited to the human (STE 58; emphasis added). So, even if Sartre's "grimacing face at the window" example is ambiguous, his description of the role and character of magic in the experience of horror is not. If in the case of horror, magic is understood as a real quality or structure of the world, as something that is not imposed upon the world by us, and as something that is not limited to the human, then it must be concluded that during horror, the world is given to us as already magical. In other words, it must be concluded that the experience of horror does not require a magical 7/19 transformation. The horrible or horrifying, as Sartre himself insists, is not possible in a deterministic world. As he states, it can "appear only in a world which is such that all the things existing in it are magical by nature" (STE 59). Or even more tellingly, "to experience any object as horrible, is to see it against the background of a world which reveals itself as already horrible" (ibid.). The horrible is thus found, not projected.8 Consequently, Sartre's account of the emotions ends up making use of a double understanding of magic. On the one hand, during emotional experiences such as fear (STE 42-3), sadness (STE 43-5), and joy (STE 46-7), we transform both our consciousness and our experience of the world the instrumental, deterministic world disappears and in its place a magical world is ushered in. Emotions, Sartre writes, "are ... reducible to the constitution of a magic world, by making use of our bodies as instruments of incantation" (STE 47; cf. 57). On the other hand, during certain other emotional episodes such as in horror, terror, or wonder, we apprehend the world magically from the very beginning. Magic, according to this latter analysis of the emotions, is not a quality that we assign to the world. Rather, in its very existential structure the world is magical. The tension between the two accounts offered by Sartre is palpable (see also Richmond 2010). Is it our emotional consciousness that constitutes a magical world or is a magical world that which surrenders us in an emotional consciousness? Can emotions be both? 4. Looking for Consistency Hatzimoysis has recently argued that despite appearances, Sartre's account of horror is consistent with his main analysis of the emotions as magical transformations of the world. Hatzimoysis' ingenious strategy is to show that even in the immediate emotional reaction of horror there is a behavior that not only bestows finality and purpose to the emotion of horror, but which is also indicative of a magical transformation. Let us return to Sartre's example. Upon seeing the grimacing face, one is frozen with terror. Hatzimoysis claims that by standing still "the subject might wish that the whole scene, including the threatening presence outside the window, 'freezes' with himself" (Hatzimoysis 2014, 82). He continues: "He [the subject 8 Lest I be misunderstood, I should make clear that the second interpretation of horror is neutral with regard to whether the experience of horror is capable of bringing about a further magical transformation – that is, whether during an episode of horror it is possible to magically transforming a world that is already encountered as magical. I shall consider this possibility in Section 5. What the second interpretation insists on is simply this: horror differs from the emotions considered so far in the Sketch insofar as magic does not originate from the subject but from the world. 8/19 who experiences horror or terror] aims to cancel the threat by cancelling its acting at a distance: what is 'frozen' is not only oneself in terror, but also the apparently imminent threat" (ibid.). Freezing, Hatzimoysis holds, is an appropriate behavior to the experience of seeing the grimacing face, for by freezing the subject freezes (or at least, aims to freeze) with him/her the world and thereby to "cancel the threat" (ibid.). Hence, freezing offers (or attempts to offer) a magical solution to the difficulty or threat that the subject encounters. At first glance, Hatzimoysis' response appears to solve the problem. Hatzimoysis maintains that in the emotional experience of horror, the agent still brings about a magical transformation of the world (ibid., 83). In other words, there is a way of reading the emotion of horror that fits within Sartre's account of emotions as magical transformations of the world. Yet upon further examination, the above reading of horror proves to be incapable of saving Sartre's account. Recall that the significance of emotions lies in the fact that emotional consciousness allows us to effectuate a certain transformation of the world. When things get too difficult, when we can no longer find a solution via ordinary means, consciousness is transformed into emotional consciousness and with it the instrumental world disappears. But if with certain emotions the world is given to us as already magical, it is unclear in what sense emotions are escapes from, or solutions to, perceived difficulties. Emotions are solutions to problems – problems, notice, that arise within a deterministic and instrumental world – only because emotional consciousness changes the manner in which we relate to and experience the world. During emotional episodes, the world ceases to be "governed by deterministic processes" (STE 40); it is instead governed by magic. However, if there are emotions in which the world is given as magical, as I argued is indeed the case for horror, then those emotions are neither transformations of the world nor in any evident way solutions to experienced difficulties. They are neither of these because we have not changed our mode of relating to the world – we have not moved from an instrumental mode of relating to the world to a magical one. We do not experience the horrifying first in an instrumental world and only then, in an attempt to escape from it, we experience the world as magical. The perceived difficulty in the case of horror – i.e., the horrifying – from which we seek an escape is not a difficulty or problem that arises within, and depends on the presence, of the deterministic and instrumental world. We experience the horrible (or that which is horrifying) in a world that is already magical (STE 58). Return to Sartre's example of seeing 9/19 the grimacing face. Why is the experience of seeing the face one of horror and not one of fear? If there is a distinction between fear and horror – as Sartre clearly thinks that there is – then there must be a reason why the experience of seeing the face is of the former emotional type and not of the latter. The reason, I believe, is clear: such an experience is horrible because the face is already experienced as magical; it is presented as an entity that is immune to our deterministic expectations.9 The problem with the account offered by Hatzimoysis can now be clearly stated: Hatzimoysis' account still operates under the assumption that during horror the instrumental world is transformed into an emotional – i.e. magical – one. He says so clearly in the following passage: Sartre asserts that 'in the very act of catching sight of [the face], window and distance are emptied of their necessary character as tools. They are grasped in another way'; and that way is explicated in terms of his main account of the transformation of the instrumental into the emotional world (Hatzimoysis 2014, 83; emphasis mine). As I argued in the previous section, however, we should take seriously Sartre's comments regarding the two types of emotions. What is more, we should also follow Sartre in maintaining that horror is an example of the second type of emotions and consequently, during horror, the world is already given to us as magical. Indeed, unlike emotions that fall within the first category, the horrifying is not the product of the use of our body. "The behaviour which gives its meaning to the emotion is no longer our behaviour; it is the expression of the body of the other being" (STE 58). No transformation is needed in order to experience that which is horrifying. Once again, the horrific is not projected or conferred onto the word; it is instead encountered in it. Thus, Hatzimoysis' proposed reading cannot be accepted. As it is clear from the above passage, his view is premised on the claim that freezing involves a move from an instrumental world to one governed by magic. Such a claim, however, runs contrary to Sartre's understanding of horror. 9 The distinction between horror and fear strongly suggests that emotions, according to Sartre, cannot be individuated solely in terms of their behavioral manifestations. Both horror and fear can agree in their behavioral manifestations – e.g., during both horror and fear the subject freezes – yet they are still distinct emotions. Stated otherwise, emotions for Sartre are not individuated solely in terms of the solutions that they offer; they are also partly individuated in terms of the problems that give rise or motivate such solutions. 10/19 5. Horror in the Light of Fear I hold that during horror the world itself is experienced as horrifying. The horrific (or horrible) is not a quality conferred to the world by consciousness; it is not the result of a move from experiencing the world as deterministic to experiencing it as being governed by magic. There is no need for such a transformation, for that which horrifies us is already experienced as magical. Still, couldn't one make the case that the emotional experience of horror brings about some kind of transformation? That is, even if we accept Sartre's insistence that during horror the world is given to us as magical, one could still insist that freezing during horror changes the way the magical world is experienced. Such a change in the way that one experiences the world will be a transformation of the world, albeit of a world that is already experienced as magical. What is more, such a transformation could somehow suffice to solve the experienced difficulty. In this section, I consider this interpretative move. I argue that even if freezing is somehow capable of magically transforming a world that is already experienced as magical, the transformation effectuated by freezing is incapable of offering a solution to the experienced difficulty. Sartre's own remarks concerning passive fear could be read as lending support to the view that freezing during horror is a type of escapist behavior and consequently pregnant with the possibility of providing the subject with a solution to a difficulty. In a rich passage that is worth quoting, Sartre writes the following: Take, for example, passive fear. I see a ferocious beast coming towards me: my legs give way under me, my heart beats more feebly, I turn pale, fall down and faint away. No conduct could seem worse adapted to the danger than this, which leaves me defenceless. And nevertheless it is a behaviour of escape; the fainting away is a refuge. But let no one suppose that it is a refuge for me, that I am trying to save myself or to see no more of the ferocious beast. I have not come out of the non-reflective plane: but, being unable to escape the danger by normal means and deterministic procedures, I have denied existence to it. I have tried to annihilate it. ... And, in the event, I have annihilated it so far as was in my power. Such are the limitations of my magical power over the world: I can suppress it as an object of consciousness, but only by suppressing consciousness itself (STE 42). 11/19 For Sartre, fainting furnishes the subject with an escape from a difficult situation. By fainting the subject becomes oblivious to the danger; the subject loses consciousness of the danger. Indeed, by fainting and thereby losing consciousness, one magically transforms the world into one in which the threat is no longer present. Sartre is, of course, quick to point out that fainting during the experience of passive fear is neither an effective solution nor a strategy that is adopted by the subject in an attempt to save himself or herself. It is not the former, for fainting, as a magical transformation of the world, is severely limited: it fails to take away the danger. And it is not the latter because experiencing fear is unreflective: when one experiences fear, one remains conscious of one's world – one is not conscious of oneself nor of one's emotional states. Still, the emotional experience of fear along with its behavioral manifestations is a type of escape. Even if the danger does not disappear, the threat ceases to be present to the subject. It is both surprising and somewhat irritating that Sartre's discussion on passive fear focuses exclusively on fainting and fails to mention what is the most common behavioral manifestation of passive fear, namely, freezing (Marks 1987). Still, one can speculate as to how Sartre would explain freezing in the sight of a threatening situation. In summarizing his view on fear, he writes: "The real meaning of fear is now becoming apparent to us. It is a consciousness whose aim is to negate something in the external world by means of magical behaviour, and will go so far as to annihilate itself in order to annihilate the object also" (STE 43). This passage is suggestive. If fear is an attempt to magically negate a threat, then under the assumption that freezing is a behavioral manifestation (or an expression) of fear, then freezing should also be understood as an attempt to negate the threat. When one cannot outrun, hide from, or fight a predator, one finds refuge in freezing. By freezing oneself, one freezes (or better one attempts to freeze) magically the perceived threat. Consequently, if one takes seriously Sartre's view that fear is a solution to a perceived difficulty, then one could argue that freezing is a transformation of the world. But if freezing behavior in fear constitutes a transformation of the world, then freezing behavior in horror ought to do the same. Thus, the case of freezing allows one to argue for a parallel or analogous treatment of the emotions of horror and fear. The analogy with fear, however, does not work. That is for at least two reasons. First, it is rather unclear whether freezing even in the case of fear succeeds in transforming the 12/19 world. The world does not change when the subject freezes herself; nor does the subject's perception of the world change in an obvious way. Fainting has a clear effect on one's consciousness of the world; freezing does not. Here, I am not precluding the possibility that freezing could have certain effects on how one perceives the world. For example, it has been shown that in a state of boredom one's experience of the passage of time becomes altered: time seems to be moving more slowly (Conrad 1997; Fenichel 1953; Hartocollis 1972; Martin et al. 2006; O'Connor 1967). Perhaps freezing has a similar effect. Thus, I am not objecting to the claim that freezing might have an effect on one's perception of the world. Rather, what I am objecting to is the use of unsubstantiated claims about the nature of the psychological effects of freezing in an attempt to bolster or support an interpretative position. In other words, whether freezing – during fear or horror -has certain effects on one's perception of the world is a matter that ought to be investigated empirically. It is not an issue that should be settled, or even speculated, from the armchair. Hence, until the presumed effects of freezing are both clearly articulated and supported by findings in the relevant sciences, it remains unclear, to say the least, that freezing in the case of fear constitutes a transformation of the world. But there is another, stronger reason why the analogy with fear does not help. This reason persists even if one were to show that freezing in the case of passive fear changes the way that one experiences the world. The experience of horror is quite unlike that of fear. To fail to see this difference is to fail to take seriously both the phenomenology of horror and Sartre's own position. Horror is a more encompassing or enveloping emotion than fear. In fear there is a possibility of escape. This is a premise of Sartre's reading of active fear. Fleeing away from the threat in active fear is an appropriate response because we can, by using our own bodies, transform the world in such a way that the difficulty has disappeared (STE 43). However, in the case of horror, the whole world is magical. To repeat a line that I quoted above: "the horrible can appear only in a world which is such that all the things existing in it are magical by nature" (STE 59; emphasis added). Even if turning our backs on the fearful somehow negates the threat, turning our backs on the horrible does not make the horrible disappear. Similarly, even if we assume that freezing is somehow successful in negating the fearful, it cannot be assumed that freezing would be equally successful in the case of horror. 13/19 Thus, the main problem with trying to understand horror in light of fear is this: in the case of fear a solution to the perceived difficulty is possible. That is because fear, according to Sarre, arises out of our engagement with a deterministic and instrumental world. Consequently, the possibility of magically transforming the world and thereby alleviating the difficulty remains open. In the case of the horror, however, the world is already experienced as magical. As a result, the difficulty that gives rise to horror appears to be persistent; it is immune to attempts to transform the world. To be clear, what militates against the claim that freezing during horror can offer the subject a solution to the perceived difficulty is not the claim that freezing cannot magically transform a world that is already magical. The issue is not whether another magical transformation is possible. Rather, the issue is that any such transformation has to take place within the context of an already magical world. As Sartre points out, during horror, everything is magical and "the only defences against them are magical" (STE 59). But in all of the examples that Sartre offers, emotions can provide solutions to experienced difficulties only if the following claims both hold true: (a) the encountered difficulties are ones that arise out of our concernful and practical engagement with the world; and (b) consciousness can transform the deterministic world into a magical one. But in the case of horror, all bets are off. The world is given to us as magical. The horrible does not arise out of our embodied engagement with a deterministic world; it is already there. Consequently, it is a mistake to hold that the difficulty associated with the horrible can be solved or alleviated by a magical transformation. Freezing would have been capable of offering the subject with a solution only under the assumption that the world is first given to us as deterministic. Freezing already presupposes that something can be frozen. It presupposes that what we wish to freeze (or what we aim to freeze) is something that can (even in principle) be frozen. But the perceived threat or horrifying entity is not the type of entity that can be frozen. After all, how can one freeze the magical, i.e., that which does not behave in accordance to deterministic principles? Sartre himself is skeptical that magical transformations are capable of alleviating difficulties that arise within a magical context. Magic seems to offer no relief from magic and Sartre makes this point rather clearly, I believe, in his brief discussion of dreams in the Sketch. In dreams, both the dangers (or difficulties) that we encounter and the various possible solutions to them that are afforded to us are of the same nature: they are both magical. But 14/19 precisely because they are both magical, the latter prove to be ineffective against the former. Sartre writes: The horrible can appear only in a world which is such that all the things existing in it are magical by nature, and the only defences against them are magical. This is what we experience often enough in the universe of dreams, where doors, locks and walls are no protection against the threats of robbers or wild animals for they are all grasped in one and the same act of horror. And since the act which is to disarm them is the same as that which is creating them, we see the assassins passing through doors and walls; we press the trigger of our revolver in vain, no shot goes off. In a word, to experience any object as horrible, is to see it against the background of a world which reveals itself as already horrible (STE 59-60). What I am urging, therefore, is the realization that the magical does not play by the same rules as the deterministic. The difficulties that arise within a magical context are immune to solutions that are effective in a deterministic context. As Sartre writes, "[t]o reduce a distance is still to be thinking in terms of distance" (STE 59). Similarly to freeze the magical or the horrifying is still to be thinking in terms of what can be frozen; it is still to be thinking in deterministic terms – terms which are not applicable in a magical world. Thus, to treat the horrifying as something that can be frozen is to negate both the distinctive character of horror and the fact that the horrifying arises in a magical world. 6. An Alternative Reading The scope of my position should be made clear. I have argued that since the world in the experience of horror is given to us as already magical, freezing is incapable of offering a solution to what we find horrifying. Such a claim suffices to raise problems for Hatzimoysis's conciliatory reading of the Sketch. It also, I believe, brings to the fore a problem with Sartre's account as commonly understood. If all emotions are ways of transforming the world into something that is no longer governed by deterministic processes, then, by Sartre's account, horror is not an emotion. That is because during an episode of horror, no such transformation takes place. Rather, and as Sartre himself makes clear, during the experience of horror, the world is already presented to us as magical (STE 56, 58-9). If, on the contrary, horror is 15/19 assumed to be an emotion, then not all emotions can be assumed to be transformations of the world and, consequently, not all emotions are solutions to difficulties that we encounter in the instrumental world. Hence, either Sartre has to give up his insistence that horror is an emotion or give up the claim that all emotions are magical transformations of the world. He cannot have both. I think that readers of Sartre should embrace the latter option. But by embracing this latter option, one does not have to give up the contention that there is a unified account of emotions in the Sketch. One only has to alter slightly that in which this account consists. First, we should follow Sartre in accepting that there are two types of emotions depending on whether it is we who bring magic to the world or the world is given to us as magical. Importantly, however, both experiences should be categorized as emotional, for in both cases consciousness experiences a magical world. As Sartre emphasizes, "[e]motion may be called a sudden fall of consciousness into magic; or if you will, emotion arises when the world of the utilizable vanishes abruptly and the world of magic appears in its place" (STE 601). Hence, regardless of the etiology of the appearance of magic – be it due to our own doing or not – emotional consciousness is a magical consciousness. Second, we should not hold that emotions are transformations of the world. Rather, we should hold that emotions are ways of experiencing the world as magical. Some emotions (fear, joy, anger, etc.) do indeed transform our world magically by transforming the way that we experience and relate to it. In active fear, for instance, one often flees from the threat. Fleeing is not a calculated attempt to protect or hide oneself but a "magical behaviour which negates the dangerous object with one's whole body, by reversing the vectorial structure of the space we live in and suddenly creating a potential direction on the other side" (STE 43). In the case of active fear, the world is transformed by our embodied actions. And this transformation takes place after the perception of a threat or danger. Still, there are emotions during which the world is disclosed to us immediately as magical. During horror, for example, there is no time for one to transform the world: the world is not first experienced in its instrumental guise and only then it is transformed into a magical one. The very experience of horror is the experience of a horrifying and thus magical world. Finally, emotions should not be understood as solutions to perceived difficulties that arise solely within a deterministic context. Rather emotions should be understood as attempted solutions to difficulties that are made present to us either within a deterministic world (e.g., in the 16/19 case of fear, sadness, and anger) or within a magical world (e.g., in the case of horror and wonder). In some cases, emotional consciousness will succeed in solving the perceived difficulties. Passive sadness, for instance, changes the manner in which we perceive the world so that we no longer assign any value to items that we previously cherished. As such, we are spared the trouble of trying to acquire those ends. Or, in an episode of anger, one raises the volume of one's voice and in so doing, avoids hearing what others might have to say. In other cases, however, the difficulty is so urgent, pressing, or ubiquitous that no matter what we do, we cannot escape it. The experience of the horrific, for instance, seems to be precisely such a case. 10 The suggestion that emotions are attempted solutions (sometimes successful, other times not) to encountered difficulties is meant to safeguard Sartre's contention that emotions are purposeful. Emotions can be invested with a purpose and finality even if their purpose is not met, and, indeed, even if such a purpose can never be met. This point is often overlooked, I believe, by readers of Sartre who, in an attempt to render his account consistent, hold that all emotions are solutions to perceived difficulties. In my view, a conciliatory reading of Sartre's account is possible only if one gives up that assumption. Indeed, the reading that I am offering compels us to realize that some difficulties are irresolvable. The existence of a solution to an experienced difficulty is predicated on the assumption that one can move from an instrumental world to a magical world. However, as Sartre himself admits, there are emotions – e.g., horror, terror, wonder – for which such a move is not an option. Still, the impossibility of solving a difficulty emotionally (or magically) does not militate against the claim that such states are emotional (i.e., states through which the world is experienced as magical). Freezing is still an attempt – hopeless, it seems, for it cannot change the manner in which we relate to and experience the world -to solve the difficulty. As such, horror is not bereft of purpose or meaning. Horror, at least as the emotion is embodied and lived through freezing, is an attempt to escape what seems to be inescapable. Stated otherwise: during the emotion of horror, freezing is an unreflective attempt to solve a problem that appears to be unsolvable. 10 Perhaps one could maintain that the only way to escape (i.e., negate or forget) a horrifying world is to faint and thereby to lose consciousness. There are two problems however with insisting that fainting is an appropriate behavior during the experience of horror. First, Sartre fails to mention fainting as a possible behavioral manifestation of horror. He instead considers only freezing. Second, fainting is not a unique solution to the experience of something horrifying: every perceived difficulty can be (at least temporarily) negated or forgotten by fainting. 17/19 The Sketch, I conclude, does offer a unified account of emotions. Emotions are ways of experiencing a magical world, i.e., a world that is no longer governed by deterministic principles. As such, they are attempted solutions to perceived difficulties. Since, however, there are two ways of experiencing a magical world, there are also two types of emotions. 11 11 I would like to express my gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers who have read and commented on a previous version of this paper. The paper has greatly benefitted from their detailed and discerning comments. 18/19 References Bernasconi, Robert. 2006. How to Read Sartre. London: Granta. Conrad, P. 1997. It's boring: Notes on the meanings of boredom in everyday life. Qualitative Sociology, 20, 465–475. Cox, Gary. 2006. Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. Elpidorou, A. 2010. Imagination in Non-Representational Painting. In Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism, edited by J. Webber, 15-30. London: Routledge. ------------. 2016. The Significance of Boredom: A Sartrean Reading. In Philosophy of Mind and Phenomenology: Conceptual and Empirical Approaches, edited by D. O. Dahlstrom, A. Elpidorou, and W. Hopp. New York: Routledge. Eshleman, Matthew. 2008a. The Misplaced Chapter on Bad Faith, or Reading Being and Nothingness in Reverse. Sartre Studies International 14: 1–22. ------------. 2008b. Bad Faith Is Necessarily Social. Sartre Studies International 14: 40–7. Fenichel, O. 1953. On the psychology of boredom. In The collected papers of Otto Fenichel Vol. 1, edited by O. Fenichel, pp. 292-302. New York, NY: W. W. Norton. Hartocollis, P. 1972. Time as a dimension of affects. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 20, 92–108. Hatzimoysis, A. 2010. Emotions in Heidegger and Sartre. In The Oxford Handbook of Emotion, edited by P. Goldie. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ------------. 2014. Consistency in the Sartrean analysis of emotion. Analysis 74 (1), 81-3. O'Connor, D. 1967. The phenomena of boredom. Journal of Existentialism, 7(27), 381-399. Manser, Anthony. 1987. A New Look at Bad Faith. In Sartre: An Investigation of Some Major Themes, edited by S. Glynn. Aldershot: Avebury Press. 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Kirkpatrick, New York: Hill and Wang. ------------. 1939/2004. Esquisse d'une théorie des emotions. Paris: Hermann; Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. London: Routledge Classics, 2004. Sartre, J.P. 1940/2004. L'imaginaire: Psychologie phenomenologique de l'imagination. Paris: Gallimard; The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. J. Webber. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. ------------. 1943/1984. L'Étre et le néant: Essai d'ontologie phenomenologique Paris: Gallimard; Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Solomon, R. 1975. Sartre on Emotions. Journal of Philosophy 72 (17), 583-4. ------------. 2006. Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts: Experience and Reflection in Camus and Sartre. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webber, J. 2009. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: Routledge. ------------. 2010. Bad Faith and the Other. 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Antireductionist Interventionism Reuben Stern∗ Benjamin Eva† February 7, 2020 Forthcoming in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science‡ Abstract Kim's causal exclusion argument purports to demonstrate that the non-reductive physicalist must treat mental properties (and macro-level properties in general) as causally inert. A number of authors have attempted to resist Kim's conclusion by utilizing the conceptual resources of Woodward's (2005) interventionist conception of causation. The viability of these responses has been challenged by Gebharter (2017a), who argues that the causal exclusion argument is vindicated by the theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). Since the interventionist conception of causation relies crucially on CBNs for its foundations, Gebharter's argument appears to cast significant doubt on interventionism's antireductionist credentials. In the present article, we both (1) demonstrate that Gebharter's CBN-theoretic formulation of the exclusion argument relies on some unmotivated and philosophically significant assumptions (especially regarding the relationship between CBNs and the metaphysics of causal relevance), and (2) use Bayesian networks to develop a general theory of causal inference for multi-level systems that can serve as the foundation for an antireductionist interventionist account of causation. 1 Introduction According to non-reductive physicalism, mental properties are not identical to physical properties, but nevertheless supervene on physical properties. The rough idea is that mental and physical properties are non-identical because the mental is multiply realized by the physical, but that everything is nevertheless physical in the sense that fixing something's physical properties fixes its mental properties. Non-reductive physicalism has struck many philosophers as plausible, but Jaegwon Kim (1989, 2000, 2003, 2005) has argued that it has an untoward consequence - namely, that mental properties are causally inert. ∗Kansas State University, 66506, Manhattan, Kansas – https://sites.google.com/view/reubenstern/home – [email protected]. †University of Konstanz, 78464, Konstanz, Germany – https://be0367.wixsite.com/benevaphilosophy – [email protected]. ‡Both authors accept full and equal responsibility for what follows. 1 M1 M2 P1 P2 Figure 1: Informal Exclusion Argument To illustrate Kim's argument, consider the following toy example from Kim (2005). Let P1 and P2 represent an agent's physical states at times t1 and t2, respectively. Similarly, let M1 and M2 represent their mental states at those times. Now, let us follow the non-reductive physicalist in assuming (i) that M1 and M2 supervene on P1 and P2 (respectively) and (ii) that P1 is a sufficient cause of P2. 1 The question at issue is whether these assumptions are compatible with regarding M1 as a cause of M2 or P2. Suppose we know that P1, P2, M1 and M2 are instantiated and are curious about what causally explains M2's instantiation. Since the non-reductive physicalist contends that the occurrence of P1 is sufficient for the occurrence of P2, and that the occurrence of P2 is sufficient for the occurrence of M2, there is no causal work for M1 to accomplish that goes over and above the causal contribution of P1. Hence, were M1 to cause M2, then M1 and P1 would causally overdetermine M2. 2 But according to Kim, this can't be right because effects are not systematically overdetermined by their causes, and we therefore must either reject non-reductive physicalism or accept that M1 is not a cause of M2. Moreover, because the same argument applies when it comes to explaining the occurence of P2 (since P1 is likewise a sufficient cause of P2), M1 cannot cause P2, and it thus seems that we must either reject non-reductive physicalism or accept that mental properties are causally inert, period. Crucially, it's easy to see that the exclusion argument, as presented here, can be straightforwardly applied to demonstrate the causal inefficacy of any macro-level properties that are multiply realizable by micro-level counterparts.3 There is a vast literature analyzing the soundness of this informal version of the exclusion 1This assumption is often referred to as the "causal completeness of the physical" or the "causal closure of the physical." Interestingly, as we'll see in Section 4, the causal completeness assumption is superfluous when Kim's argument is viewed through the lens of CBNs. 2The same goes for P2 since M1 and P1 threaten to causally overdetermine P2 in exactly the same way. 3This aspect of our informal reconstruction of Kim's argument may lend some reason to doubt that it's not faithful to Kim's original argument since (as an anonymous referee helpfully points out) Kim (2003, p. 167) maintains that his argument does not imply the general thesis that a whole object cannot have causal powers over and above those had by its parts. (This suggests that Kim would take issue with the claim that his argument applies to the general class of multiply realizable macro-level properties.) If there is legitimate reason for this concern, this need not trouble the reader. For even if our reconstruction is not faithful to Kim's original argument, it is faithful to many descendants of Kim's argument that have occupied the literature - see, e.g., Baumgartner (2010), Gebharter (2017a), Polger et al. (2018), Sober and Shapiro (2000), and Woodward (2008). Any reader who shares this concern is welcome to view our paper as a response to the descendants of Kim's argument that apply to the general class of multiply realizable macro-level properties, rather than Kim's argument itself. 2 argument. Of particular interest here is the recent strand of literature in which a number of authors (e.g., Hitchcock (2012), List and Menzies (2009), Polger et al. (2018), Raatikainen (2010), Shapiro and Sober (2007), Shapiro (2010), Weslake (2015), and Woodward (2008, 2014)) assess Kim's argument through the lens of Woodward's (2005) interventionist account of causation. While some authors (e.g., List and Menzies (2009), Polger et al. (2018), and Woodward (2014)) have contended that an interventionist understanding of causation undermines some crucial premises of the exclusion argument, others (e.g., Baumgartner (2010) and Gebharter (2017a)) have argued that an interventionist conception of causation actually vindicates Kim's argument. Our aim in this article is to take the first steps towards developing a formally rigorous interventionist theory of multi-level causation by providing its foundations in terms of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs). The resulting framework not only reconciles the interventionist conception of causation with nonreductive physicalism, but also fills some significant theoretical lacunae in extant interventionist theories. More specifically, the plan is this. We begin (§2) by providing a concise overview of the Spirtes et al. (2000) theory of CBNs and describing its relation to Woodward's (2005) interventionist account of causation. We then (§3) generalize the theory of CBNs so that it allows for the consideration of variables that enter into synchronic (non-causal) asymmetric supervenience relations. With this generalized framework in place, we subsequently (§4) reconstruct and criticize Gebharter's (2017a) vindication of the exclusion argument in terms of CBNs (by arguing that it relies on some highly contentious hidden premises concerning, first, what counts as an appropriate variable set in the context of multi-level causal inference, and, second, the relationship between CBNs and the metaphysics of causal relevance). We then (§5) develop a general approach to causal inference in multi-level settings that can be used to ground a plausible and formally rigorous interventionist theory of multi-level causation, and argue (§6) that the resulting theory can be used to make progress on some extant problems in the causal inference literature. Finally, we conclude (§7) by considering our approach against the backdrop of some examples from classical discussions of antireductionism. 2 Causal Bayesian Networks and Interventionism The axiomatic theory of causal Bayesian networks (CBNs), as developed by e.g. Spirtes et al (2000) and Pearl (1988, 2009), provides the formal foundations for Woodward's (2005) interventionist theory of causation. We begin by providing a brief overview of the CBN formalism and its relationship to Woodwardian interventionism. To start, suppose that there exists a set V of variables whose causal relationships we are interested in studying. Each variable V ∈ V has some discrete set of mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive possible values.4 For example, we might consider the variable Mt whose possible values represent the possible mental states mi of an agent at a fixed time t. 5 The causal structure over V is the set of direct causal relationsips that obtain among the variables in V.6 This structure can be depicted as a directed acyclic graph (DAG) in which the nodes represent the variables in V and 4The framework extends to continuous variables, but we limit our discussion to the discrete case for ease of exposition. 5Throughout the paper, italicized capital letters refer to variables, and italicized lowercase letters refer to their values. 6See Woodward (2005) for a philosophical analysis of what constitutes a 'direct cause' in this framework. 3 X Z Y Figure 2: Common Effect Structure the edges represent the direct causal relationships that obtain between pairs of variables in V.7 For example, the DAG in Figure 2 represents a causal structure in which X and Y are both direct causes of Z and in which neither X nor Y is a direct cause of the other. If X is a direct cause of Y , we say that X is a parent of Y and that Y is a child of X. A directed path between two variables X and Y is an ordered sequence of variables D = 〈X, ....., Y 〉 such that each variable in the sequence is a child of the variable that comes before it. If there exists a directed path from X to Y , we say that Y is a descendant of X and that X is an ancestor of Y .8 If there does not exist a directed path from X to Y , we say that Y is a non-descendant of X.9 Among other things, the theory of CBNs provides the beginnings of a recipe for inferring causal structure from observational data. Specifically, suppose that you are interested in describing the causal structure over some variable set V. Suppose also that you have observational data regarding the ways in which the values of the variables in V are correlated with one another. We can formalize this supposition by assuming that you have access to some full probability distribution Pr over the variables in V, where Pr is informed by the observational data about these variables. The CBN axioms provide rules for interpreting the implications of Pr for the causal structure of V. In particular, the axioms rule out many possible causal structures as incompatible with the empirical evidence encoded in Pr. The first and most fundamental axiom is the Causal Markov Condition (CMC), which Hausman and Woodward (1999) argue is "implicit in the view that causes can be used to manipulate their effects," and thus implicit in Woodward's (2005) interventionist account of causation. Causal Markov Condition (CMC): A graph G and a probability distribution Pr satisfy the Causal Markov Condition if and only if every variable X in V is probabilistically independent of its nondescendants conditional on its parents according to Pr.10 The CMC encodes the assumption that causes screen off their effects. It is a generalization of Reichenbach's (1956) Principle of the Common Cause, which says that if variables X and Y are (unconditionally) correlated, then either X (directly or indirectly) causes Y , Y (directly or indirectly) causes X, or X and Y are (direct or indirect) joint effects of a common cause. To illustrate, suppose that V = {X,Y, Z} and that we know that X and Y are (unconditionally) 7A graph is acyclic if it does not contain any causal loops. The restriction to acyclic graphs encodes the idea that causal relevance is asymmetric in the sense that X cannot be both a cause of Y and an effect of Y . 8For technical reasons that need not concern us here, X is also considered a descendant of itself. 9Again, the one exception is when X and Y denote the same variable. We neglect this case in the body for ease of exposition. 10Where two variables X and Y are said to be probabilistically independent (or simply independent) when for any values x, y of X and Y , P (y|x) = p(y). 4 correlated. The CMC entails that the causal structure depicted in Figure 2 cannot be right, since it posits neither any (direct or indirect) causal relationship between X and Y nor any common cause of X and Y . Thus, the CMC by itself somewhat restricts the range of candidate causal structures that are compatible with a given body of empirical evidence. Still, the CMC does not narrow down the set of possible DAGs very much. For example, any fully connected DAG (in which there exists a directed edge between every pair of variables) is always consistent with the CMC. This underscores the fact that the CMC sticks its neck out with with respect to which edges must be included given Pr, but does not stick its neck out with respect to which edges should be absent given Pr. Contrapositively, the CMC dictates which probabilistic independencies must obtain given the absence of edges, but does not say which dependencies must obtain given the inclusion of edges. This means that the CMC must be supplemented with some additional condition in order to render the inclusion of a directed edge informative. The weakest (and therefore least controversial) axiom that is standardly assumed in addition to the CMC is the Causal Minimality Condition (CMIN).11 In order to state the CMIN, we need to introduce the notion of a proper subgraph. A DAG G′ is a proper subgraph of G if and only if (i) G and G′ are defined over the same variable set, and (ii) the set of parent-child relationships that obtain in G′ is a proper subset of the set of parent-child relations that obtain in G. Causal Minimality Condition (CMIN): A graph G and a probability distribution Pr satisfy the Causal Minimality Condition if and only if there exists no proper subgraph G′ of G such that G′ and Pr jointly satisfy the CMC. To illustrate the inferential power of the CMIN, suppose that X and Y are probabilistically independent given any value of Z, but are unconditionally correlated. Then both of the DAGs in Figure 3 satisfy the CMC. However, the DAG on the right is not minimal. By deleting the edge from X to Y , we obtain the proper subgraph on the left, which still satisfies the CMC since X and Y are by hypothesis probabilistically independent given any value of Z. Thus the CMIN provides advice insofar as it tells us that we would be mistaken to treat X as a direct cause of Y in this case since there is a more economical representation of the causal structure that is compatible with what we know about the probabilistic relations between variables. Intuitively, the CMIN can be interpreted as telling us to include only those causal relationships that are necessary to ensure that the CMC is satisfied, or, alternatively, as requiring that each directed edge is encoding some actual dependence. Moreover, like the CMC, the CMIN has been shown by Zhang and Spirtes (2011) to be presupposed by interventionists in nearly every single case of causal inference that we ever actually confront.12 How do these conditions underlie interventionism? Very roughly, the CMC is what ensures that the intervention on X is correlated only with its effects, and the CMIN is what 11See Forster et al. (2018) for recent discussion of the CMIN and its stronger counterparts. 12Zhang and Spirtes' (2011) point applies whenever the probability distribution over V is positive - i.e., when every possible assignment of values over V is assigned positive probability. We will see that when we consider variables that enter into non-causal dependence relations, the probability distribution over the variable set at hand is often not positive. But when the variable set is restricted to variables that are distinct in the sense required to qualify as the relata of causal relations, the distribution is very often (and perhaps always) positive. See Stern (forthcoming) for more discussion of this issue. 5 X Z Y X Z Y Figure 3: Minimal and Non-Minimal DAGs ensures that the intervention on X is correlated with all of its effects.13 Thus the CMC and CMIN jointly provide the axiomatic foundations for the theory of CBNs and the interventionist account of causation.14 There is just one more assumption of the CBN framework that we must introduce here, largely because it will play a crucial role in our analysis of Gebharter's (2017) CBN-theoretic parsing of the exclusion argument. The assumption concerns the kinds of variable sets to which the CBN axioms can be legitimately applied. Consider the variable set V = {IC, SL}, where IC and SL represent daily ice cream sales and suntan lotion sales. Plausibly, these two variables are highly correlated (high suntan lotion sales are strongly indicative of high ice cream sales). Thus, when applied to V, the CMC implies that there is some causal relationship between IC and SL. But this, of course, is implausible. The problem is that we've neglected the fact that the correlation between IC and SL is causally explained by some latent common cause - e.g., the weather (W ). Omitting this common cause from the variable set V leads us to make a spurious causal inference, but when we consider the extended variable set V+ = {IC, SL,W}, we see that the structure in which W is represented as a common cause of SL and IC (and no other causal relationships obtain) satisfies both of the axioms (provided that SL and IC are screened off by W ). Thus, the problem can be remedied by stipulating that we can only legitimately apply the CBN axioms to variable sets which are causally sufficient, where V is said to be causally sufficient if and only if for any X,Y ∈ V, if Z is a common cause of X and Y , then Z ∈ V.15 The restriction to causally sufficient variable sets is a common background assumption in the theory of CBNs. 13We will see later that there are cases where the intervention on X is not unconditionally correlated with some effect of X (because of path cancellation), but even in these cases, the intervention on X is correlated with the relevant effect when one of the canceling paths is blocked by conditioning on an intermediate variable. The CMIN is what entails this conditional dependence. 14Strictly speaking, what Zhang and Spirtes (2011) show is that if the CMC is satisfied and one interprets direct causation in an interventionist manner, then the CMIN holds. Thus this is the precise sense in which their result bears on the foundations of interventionism. But there are other results in the offing. Gebharter and Schurz (2014) show how that the CMC and CMIN can be used to derive the interventionist treatment of direct causation, and Gebharter (2017c) and Stern (forthcoming) show that the CMC and the CMIN can be used to underwrite Woodward's non-direct notions of causal relevance in many contexts. 15There are numerous ways to narrow the set of common causes that must be included in a variable set. We opt for this stronger constraint in order to simplify things. 6 3 Generalizing Causal Graphs Because the CMC is stated in terms of causal dependencies (insofar as parents and non-descendants are defined in terms of direct and indirect causal relations), the CMC and the CMIN cannot be justifiably assumed in multi-level settings - i.e., settings in which V is permitted to contain variables X and Y such that Y (asymmetrically) supervenes on X. The basic problem is that the CMC accounts for correlations by positing causal dependencies, but in multi-level settings, these correlations can be due to non-causal asymmetric supervenience dependencies. For example, if we assume the axioms over a variable set that includes one variable representing your current psychology and another representing your current neurophysiology, then, because the state of your psychology is evidentially relevant to the state of your brain, the axioms entail that either your current brain state causes your current psychology, or that your current psychology causes your current brain state. But this seems unreasonable since your current brain state and your current psychology are neither spatiotemporally distinct nor individually manipulable, and the relata of causal relations are spatiotemporally distinct and individually manipulable. So assuming the CBN axioms in a multi-level setting typically leads to spurious causal inferences. Might there be a way of revising the CMC and CMIN in order to incorporate non-causal asymmetric supervenience dependencies? Perhaps it prima facie seems that we cannot because some asymmetric supervenience relations are very clearly not causal relations. But as Schaffer (2015) notes,16 there are many structural similarities between the two notions. First, just as causes explain their effects, but not vice versa, it seems that the subvenient explains the supervenient, but not vice versa. To use Schaffer's example - just as one can explain Koko the gorilla's current psychological state with a causal story about previous events in her life, but not vice versa, one can explain Koko's current psychological state in terms of her current neurophysiology, but not her neurophysiology in terms of her psychological state. Second, and especially important here, it seems that supervenience relations undergird probabilistic screening-off relations in much the same way that causal relations do (see Schaffer (2015: 56-57)). If the well-being facts supervene on the psychological facts and the psychological facts supervene on the physical facts, then the physical facts are probabilistically independent of the well being facts conditional on the psychological facts. Similarly, if two aspects of a system supervene on its more fundamental properties, then the supervenience base screens off the two aspects. For example, if the color and electrical conductivity of a surface both supervene on that surface's subatomic structure, then color and conductivity are clearly probabilistically independent when we specify the surface's subatomic structure to a sufficient degree of precision.17 This suggests that we may be able to generalize the CBN framework to allow for the consideration of variable sets whose members supervene on one another. There is a sense in which Gebharter (2017a) has already accomplished this feat (since he deploys the framework in the current setting), but we prefer to reformulate the CBN axioms in our own way by introducing new terminology that will earn its keep in subsequent applications. However, insofar as it relates to the analysis of the exclusion argument, our generalization is materially equivalent to Gebharter's. 16Schaffer is primarily interested in grounding rather than supervenience, but the structural analogies he observes all carry over to the supervenience case. 17This follows from the fact that the subatomic structure fixes both. 7 The easiest way to revise the CBN framework so that it accommodates asymmetric supervenience dependencies is to reinterpret the significance of a directed edge in a DAG disjunctively - i.e., so that the presence of a directed edge from X to Y no longer signifies that X is a direct cause of Y , but rather signifies that either X is a direct cause of Y , or Y directly (asymmetrically) supervenes on X. Let us say that if either (i) X is a direct cause of Y , or (ii) the value of Y directly (asymmetrically) supervenes on the value of X, then X is an e-parent of Y and that Y is an e-child of X.18 An e-directed path between two variables X and Y is an ordered sequence of variables D = 〈X, ....., Y 〉 such that each variable in the sequence is an e-child of the variable that comes before it. If there exists an e-directed path from X to Y , we say that Y is an e-descendant of X and that X is an e-ancestor of Y . If no e-directed path from X to Y exists, then we say that Y is a non-e-descendant of X.19 With this terminology in hand, we can slightly modify the causal modeling axioms in order to incorporate non-causal supervenience dependencies as follows. Multi-Level Markov Condition (MMC): A graph G and a probability distribution Pr satisfy the Multi-Level Markov Condition if and only if every variable X in V is probabilistically independent of its non-e-descendants conditional on its parents according to Pr. Multi-Level Minimality Condition (MMIN): A graph G and a probability distribution Pr satisfy the Multi-Level Minimality Condition if and only if there exists no proper subgraph G′ of G such that G′ and Pr jointly satisfy the MMC. The basic motivation behind the generalized axioms is simple. In the standard setting, the CBN axioms can be interpreted as specifying which causal relations we need to posit in order to adequately account for all the observed correlations. When we generalize the setting to allow for variables which supervene on one another, we introduce the possibility that the observed correlations are indicative of supervenience relations, rather than causal relations. The MMC takes this possibility into account by generalizing the CMC condition in the obvious way-i.e., by accounting for observed correlations via dependence relations which could be either causal relations or supervenience relations. Gebharter (2017a) provides a list of three independent justifications for a multi-level generalization of the CBN framework, but we think the most compelling motivations are (1) that causal and supervenience relations seem to ground screening off relations in much the same way, (2) that there are concrete realistic causal inference tasks in which it is intuitively desirable to consider multi-level variable sets (and it is prima facie desirable that we be allowed to continue using the theory of CBNs in these cases), and (3) that the MMC and MMIN axioms are intuitively plausible generalizations of the CMC and CMIN that provide plausible solutions to difficult causal inference problems (as we will see in §6). Furthermore, we should note that readers who remain unconvinced by these considerations still have something to gain from the present analysis. Specifically, in section §4, we show that even if one accepts Gebharter's generalization of CBNs to the multi-level setting, it is still possible to reject his purported vindication of the causal exclusion argument on his own terms 18We prefix these notions with 'e-' because both causal relationships and asymmetric supervenience relationships capably support explanations. 19As before, the one exception is the case where X and Y denote the same variable. Just as we treated X as a descendant of itself, we treat X as an e-descendant of itself. 8 - i.e., within the generalized framework. Now, one concern that one might have about the generalized axioms is that although they may be useful for identifying when two variables are related by some dependence relation, they do not specify the nature of the dependence. For example, imagine that the axioms identified some DAG as compatible with Pr in which X is an e-parent of Y . The axioms don't tell us anything about whether we should regard X as a direct cause of Y or, alternatively, as a supervenience base of Y . Clearly, if we want to get an accurate picture of the causal structure of V, we need a way to distinguish between the edges that represent causal dependencies and those that represent supervenience relations. Towards this end, it is helpful to characterize exactly what it means for the value of one variable to asymmetrically supervene on the value of another variable in a probabilistic setting.20 Since it is often said that Y asymmetrically supervenes on X when (i) changes to Y necessitate changes to X but not vice versa, and (ii) X determines Y , it is natural to say that Y supervenes on X when (i) multiple values of X are compatible with some value of Y but not vice versa, and (ii) any value of X fixes the value of Y. Here, a value x of X can be understood as "compatible" with a value y of Y when Pr(x|y) > 0, and x can be said to "fix" the value of Y when Pr(y|x) = 1 for all values of X and Y .21,22 For example, when we say that your psychological state asymmetrically supervenes on your physical state, it is implied that there are multiple distinct physical realizations compatible with your psychological state, but that there are not multiple distinct psychological realizations compatible with your physical state (since your physical state fixes or determines your psychological state). With this rough characterization of asymmetric supervenience dependencies in place, we can begin to investigate what distinguishes supervenience relations from causal relations in multi-level settings in which MMC and MMIN are assumed. At first pass, it is attractive to claim that Y supervenes on X exactly when (i) Y is an e-descendant of X, (ii) multiple values of X are compatible with some value of Y but not vice versa, and (iii) any value of X fixes the value of Y. It is clear, we think, that these three conditions are necessary for Y to asymmetrically supervene on X, but it is less clear that they are jointly sufficient because this rules out the possibility of some 20As we emphasize below, there may be reason to think that metaphysical asymmetric supervenience relations cannot be fully characterized in terms of probability theory. Still, it's important to get the probabilistic signature right - especially since this is where the action lies in the context of incorporating asymmetric supervenience relations into the CBN framework. 21When supervenience is understood in this way, it is clear that the operative probability distributions will not generally be positive in the sense that every assignment of values over V is assigned positive probability. This means that the MMIN cannot be justified in multi-level contexts on the grounds that Zhang and Spirtes (2011) show that interventionist treatments of causation presume the CMIN. But this shouldn't surprise or worry us too much. First, we share this assumption with Gebharter (2017a), so it is clearly appropriate to assume as we engage with his version of the exclusion argument. Second, since interventionist treatments of causation traditionally say nothing about when supervenience relations should be posited, it is obvious from the get-go that no such formal result or justification is in the offing. The assumption of the MMIN thus rests simply on its plausibility as a generalization of the CMIN to multi-level contexts. If the CMIN is plausible when no supervenience relations are present, then, by our lights, the MMIN is plausible when they are. 22Because our probabilistic characterization of supervenience specifies nothing in addition to these determination relations, it is neutral between every theory of supervenience that says that when Y supervenes on X, there is no change in Y without a change in X. 9 kinds of deterministic causation (if no dependency can be both a supervenience dependency and a causal dependency). Consider a system defined over a variable L that encodes whether a light is on or off, and another variable S that encodes whether a switch is engaged in one of three positions: off, dim, or bright. If putting the switch into any position other than 'off' is sufficient for the light's being on, then a directed edge from S to L meets the conditions for supervenience. So despite the common intuition that the dependence between the S and L is causal, it appears to count as an asymmetric supervenience relation, rather than a causal relation. There are a several ways to respond to this. First, since supervenience dependencies are typically regarded as synchronic, we can add a fourth condition to the analysis requiring that X and Y must not be spatiotemporally distinct in order for Y to supervene on X. With this condition in place, all four conditions can be treated as individually necessary and jointly sufficient without yielding the verdict that L supervenes on S since L and S describe spatiotemporally distinct states of affairs. Second, one might acknowledge that L supervenes on S, but contend that L can supervene on S and be caused by S when L and S describe spatiotemporally distinct states of affairs. This response has something going for it since the value of S determines the value of L in exactly the same way that is characteristic of supervenience, but it requires a rather drastic revision to the philosophical lexicon since we do not typically characterize one and the same dependency as both causal and supervenient.23 Finally, one can respond that S does not cause L despite appearances because, for one reason or another, the dependence between S and L does not meet the conditions required for causation. This last response may strike some as the least intuitive since philosophers sometimes write as though deterministic causation is the norm. But as it turns out, through the lens of MMC and MMIN, there is at least some reason to treat a dependency as non-causal when it meets the first three conditions. Hausman (1998) convincingly argues that many plausible analyses of causal relevance are committed to the claim that if X causes Y , then Y is also caused (causally influenced) by some means that are independent from X.24 As things turn out, it is true (given MMIN and MMC) that Y cannot be caused by means independent from X if X and Y jointly meet the first three necessary conditions for supervenience provided above (because no minimal graph contains an edge that can represent such a dependence). So there is at least some good reason to think of these relations as non-causal. At any rate, we assume in what follows that we have access to a principled method for distinguishing edges that represent causal dependencies from edges that represent supervenience dependencies. We don't stick our necks out regarding which method is best, and the reader is welcome to fill in the gaps however they see fit. We now turn to our reconstruction of Gebharter's (2017a) CBN-theoretic formulation of the exclusion argument in our multi-level framework. 23For those who regard supervenience as a completely formal dependence, this may not require any revision to the concept (since cases like the light switch still exemplify scenarios in which there is no change in one variable without change in another). We take no stand on whether a purely formal characterization of supervenience is more useful for philosophical purposes than others that are additionally intended to capture some metaphysical dependence between higher and lower level properties. 24A cause of Y qualifies as independent from X if and only if it is neither causally downstream nor upstream from X and X and Y are not (indirect or direct) effects of some common cause. 10 M1 M2 P1 P2 Figure 4: Assumed Dependencies in Exclusion Argument 4 CBNs and Causal Exclusion The table is now set to consider the exclusion argument against the backdrop of our generalized axiomatic framework.25 Recall the simple example where P1 and P2 are variables whose values are given by the possible physical states of an agent at times t1 and t2, respectively. Similarly, let M1 and M2 be variables whose values are given by the agent's possible mental states at those times. Suppose that the agent's mental state at a time supervenes on their physical state at that time, i.e., the value of P1/P2 fixes the value of M1/M2. Suppose further that the agent's physical state at time t1 causally influences (and is correlated with) their physical state at time t2. These assumptions straightforwardly require that we posit each of the directed edges that are depicted in Figure 4. This is in line with the usual formulation of the exclusion argument, where it is assumed that M1 and M2 supervene on P1 and P2, and that P1 directly causally influences P2. The question now is whether the generalized CBN axioms require/allow us to add additional edges from M1 to P2 and/or M2. First, we need to check whether the DAG in Figure 4 (call it 'G') satisfies the MMC. According to the MMC, G requires only that M1 and M2 are independent conditional on any value of P1 or P2. And indeed, it is easy to see that both of these conditional independencies are guaranteed to hold by the supervenience assumptions outlined above. Specifically, since M1 is assumed to supervene on P1, conditioning on any value of P1 will uniquely fix the value of M1. And once the value of M1 is fixed with probability 1, it can no longer be correlated with M2 (or with any variable whatsoever). Symmetric reasoning shows that the independence of M1 and M2 given P2 is guaranteed by the assumption that M2 supervenes on P2. Thus, the two conditional independencies which are required for G to satisfy the MMC are indeed guaranteed to hold by the assumptions of the exclusion argument. This immediately entails that any DAG G∗ which - (i) respects the assumptions of the exclusion argument, and (ii) includes an edge from M1 to either P2 or M2 - is bound to violate the generalized minimality condition MMIN. Why? Since G itself satisfies MMC, any supergraph of G will not qualify as minimal (including those in which there are edges protruding from M1). At first blush, this looks like an elegant formal vindication of the causal exclusion argument. Assuming only the multi-level generalizations of the basic axioms of the theory of CBNs (and the supervenience of the mental on the physical), we seem to have demonstrated the causal inefficacy of mental phenomena. Furthermore, there is a clear sense in which the argument given here justifies 25The formalization of the argument given here is somewhat different from Gebharter's formalization, but not in any way that affects the philosophical analysis that follows. 11 the intuition behind Kim's original exclusion argument. The standard informal version of the exclusion argument is based on the idea that mental causation is in some sense redundant (since all the real causal work is being done at the physical level), and that positing mental causation leads to overdetermination. Similarly, the argument from MMIN shows that it is possible to have an adequate representation of causal structure (in the sense of satisfying the MMC) without including any mental causation. So mental causation is theoretically superfluous, and positing it means positing redundant causal relations. As Gebharter puts it, Our result may be interpreted as empirically informed support for epiphenomenalism or as evidence against non-reductive physicalism: If causation is characterized by means of the causal Markov condition and the causal minimality condition, we assume that mental properties are non-identical to their physical supervenience bases, and that every physical property has sufficient physical cause, then mental properties cannot act as causes for physical properties or as causes for other mental properties – they possess no causal power. (Gebharter 2017a: 364) At this stage, it's worth pausing to note that in our reconstruction of the exclusion argument, the 'causal closure of the physical' assumption plays no role. In particular, unlike Gebharter (2017a), we do not assume that every physical property has sufficient physical cause.26 Indeed, we don't assume that the relationship between P1 and P2 is deterministic in any way. We assume only that P1 has some causal influence on P2, and leave the nature of that causal relationship completely unspecified. This is significant, since the causal closure assumption has been the source of much controversy (regarding both its plausibility and its proper formulation) in the literature (see e.g. Baker (1993), Hendry (2006) and Stapp (2005)), and dispensing with the assumption seems to significantly strengthen Kim's argument.27 Overall, then, the generalized CBN axioms ground a formally rigorous statement of the causal exclusion argument that seems to entail, in full generality, the causal inefficacy of mental phenomena (given nonreductive physicalism).28 Moreover, the resulting formulation of the argument dispenses with one of the strongest and most controversial premises of the standard formulation of the exclusion argument (the causal closure of the physical). So as far as CBNs are concerned, things may seem to look good for the exclusion argument. But not so fast. It's time to put the champagne back on ice. 26In later work, Gebharter (2017b) himself acknowledges that this assumption need not play any role and produces his own alternative formalization of the argument that dispenses with the causal closure condition. 27It is worth noting that Kim provided an alternative version of his own argument that relied on the causal closure assumption rather than any claim about supervenience. This version is neither strictly stronger nor strictly weaker than our own. 28It is worth noting that, unlike previous interventionist discussions of the exclusion argument, this reconstruction focuses primarily on the implications of the multi-level CBN axioms, rather than on the formally related problem of representing macro-level interventions in multi-level settings. We intend to return to this latter issue in future work that generalizes Eva and Stern's (2019) interventionist treatment of causal explanatory power to multi-level settings. 12 BC TH P Figure 5: Birth Control, Pregnancy, Thrombosis 5 Antireductionist CBNs In the previous section, we showed that any DAG which represents the causal structure of the variable set V = {P1, P2,M1,M2} in a way that satisfies some antireductionist commitments and MMC and MMIN will depict M1 as causally inert. But this observation alone is not sufficient to warrant the conclusion that M1 is causally inert. To illustrate, consider Hesslow's (1976) example (depicted in Figure 5), according to which taking birth control (BC) probabilistically promotes thrombosis (TH) if you are pregnant (or if you aren't), but also reduces the risk of thrombosis by reducing the risk of pregnancy (P ). Now, further suppose that the probabilistic effect of BC that is mediated by P cancels out the probabilistic effect that is due to BC's direct effect on TH. The graph in Figure 5 accurately captures the true causal structure over the variable set V = {TH,BC,P}. But this is not the only variable set that is deemed appropriate for consideration in this context. Since the variable P is not a common cause of BC and TH, there is nothing wrong with omitting it from the variable set under consideration (at least according to standard practice). Thus the variable set consisting only of BC and TH is considered fair game for causal inference. But when we apply the CMC and the CMIN to the reduced variable set V− = {BC, TH}, we obtain a DAG that does not include any causal arrows despite our background knowledge that BC is causally relevant to TH. For, by stipulation, BC and TH are probabilistically independent, which means that no directed edges are required in order to satisfy the CMC, and hence that the completely unconnected graph is minimal. The lesson of this is of course not that BC is causally irrelevant to TH. Rather, it's that we cannot conclude that there is no causal relationship between two variables when we find that those variables are not linked by a directed edge in some admissible DAG over some causally sufficient variable set. That's just not the way that the epistemology of causation is related to its metaphysics - i.e., the absence of an arrow in a DAG does not always mean the absence of a causal relationship in the world. For, it could be that there exists another causally sufficient variable set relative to which there does exist an admissible DAG in which X is depicted as a cause of Y . And in some cases, this is enough to indicate that X really is a cause of Y (e.g., when X and Y are BC and TH). To make things a bit more precise, consider the following two principles concerning the relationship between the existence of admissible DAGs over causally sufficient variable sets and the causal structure of the world. 13 Strict Causation Principle (SCP): In order for a variable X to count as causally relevant to a variable Y , it must be the case that for every causally sufficient variable set V containing X and Y , there exists a directed path from X to Y in some admissible graph over V. Weak Causation Principle (WCP): In order for a variable X to count as causally relevant to a variable Y , there must be some causally sufficient variable set V containing X and Y such that there exists a directed path from X to Y in some admissible graph over V. If we employ the SCP, then we are forced to conclude that in cases like the one describe above, BC is not a cause of TH, which looks like the wrong verdict. More generally, it seems that the SCP sets the bar too high for identifying the presence of causal relations in the world. In contrast, the WCP gets the case just right. Since BC is depicted as a cause of TH in an admissible DAG over some causally sufficient variable set, it's consistent with the WCP that BC really is a cause of TH. Of course, since the WCP and the SCP only specify candidate necessary conditions for causal relevance, one must identify some other truths about causal relevance in order to identify conditions that are jointly sufficient. But if, for example, causes temporally precede their effects, then as Stern (forthcoming) argues, we can justifiably infer that X is causally relevant to Y whenever X is a direct cause of Y relative to some causally sufficient variable set, where the operative notion of 'direct cause' takes stock of the fact that causes must temporally precede their effects.29 Similarly, according to Woodward (2008b), if we use his (2003) interventionist treatment of causation to find that X is a "contributing cause" of Y relative to some variable set, then we can safely infer that X is causally relevant to Y , simpliciter. We return now to the CBN-theoretic reformulation of the exclusion argument. In this context, in order to infer a DAG from a probability distribution, we must assume more than just that causes temporally precede their effects since there are now non-causal relations at play. But if we additionally assume that non-causal supervenience edges must go from the more fundamental (micro-level) to the less fundamental (macro-level),30 then, as we've implicitly shown above, any DAG over the variable set V = {P1, P2,M1,M2} that satisfies MMC and MMIN will depict M1 as causally inert. Since there's no reason to think that V omits any common causes, we know that there is an admissible DAG containing M1 and M2 relative to which M1 is not depicted as a cause M2. And the same goes for M1 and P2. Thus if we assume the SCP, then M1 turns out to be causally inert. But as we've just argued, we don't even need to consider the multi-level setting in order to see that the SCP condition is too strong - i.e., even in the single-level setting, there are cases where two variables are causally related despite the fact that the relation is not apparent relative to some appropriate variable set. Hence our advocacy of the WCP over the SCP. And once we replace the SCP with the WCP, the observation that M1 is depicted as causally inert relative to some causally sufficient variable set is not enough to warrant the conclusion that M1 is causally inert in the world. It could be that, like BC, the causal efficacy of M1 is revealed in some variable 29To be clear, Stern's treatment of causal relevance is in keeping with the WCP insofar as he argues that X is a cause of Y exactly when X is a direct cause of Y relative to some causally sufficient variable set. The temporal aspect of Stern's treatment of causal relevance comes in at the level of his understanding of direct causal relevance, and thereby provides a necessary condition for causal relevance that works in tandem with the WCP and the axioms of the CBN framework. 30In this paper, we always make this assumption in multi-level contexts. 14 M1 M2 P2 M1 M2 Figure 6: Minimal DAG's over V1 and V2 sets, and masked in others. So the antireductionist has an escape route. They can adopt the WCP and attempt to identify some other causally sufficient variable set relative to which there exists some admissible DAG that depicts M1 as causally efficacious, thereby vindicating the antireductionist's conviction that mental events need not be causally inert. Two natural variable sets to consider here are V1 = {P2,M1,M2} and V2 = {M1,M2}. The DAGs in Figure 6 satisfy both MMC and MMIN for these variable sets.31 The set V1 is obtained by omitting M1's supervenience base P1, and relative to the minimal DAG over V1 depicted in Figure 6, M1 is represented as a direct cause of P2. The set V2 is obtained by omitting both of the physical variables, P1 and P2, and relative to the minimal DAG over V2 depicted in Figure 6, M1 is represented as a cause of M2. Thus, if we are happy to accept the variable sets V1 and V2 as causally sufficient, then the WCP allows M1 to qualify as a cause of both P2 and M2. The antireductionist can make a simple argument to get across the finishing line here. Neither P1 nor P2 are common causes of any pairs of variables under consideration. The only causal relation that either P1 or P2 stand in with respect to these variables is that P1 causally influences P2. By stipulation, the dependence of M1/M2 on P1/P2 is a supervenience relation, not a causal relation. So neither V1 nor V2 omit any common causes. Ergo, they are both causally sufficient variable sets. So the antireductionist can conclude that regarding M1 as a cause of both P2 and M2 is perfectly consistent with the WCP. Fans of Kim's exclusion argument may be unimpressed by this response. They can counter that like the CMC and the CMIN, the definition of what counts as an appropriate variable set needs to be generalized upon moving to the multi-level setting. In particular, they can propose that we replace the normal definition of causal sufficiency with the following natural multi-level generalization. E-Parent Sufficiency: A variable set V is e-parent sufficient if and only there do not exist any variables L,X, Y such that (i) L /∈ V, (ii) X,Y ∈ V, and (iii) L is a common e-parent of X and Y in an admissible graph over the extended variable set V ∪ {L}. This is just the obvious generalization of the causal sufficiency condition to the multi-level setting. To get a feeling for how it works, recall the variable sets V1 = {P2,M1,M2} and V2 = 31Here, we assume only that M1 is correlated with P2 and M2. This is a very weak and compelling assumption, given the premises of the exclusion argument (that M1 and M2 supervene on P1 and P2 and that P2 is causally influenced by and correlated with P1). In fact, if we suppose that all values of P1 and P2 have positive prior probability, then the assumption follows from the premises. It is also assumed by Gebharter (2017a) in his formulation of the exclusion argument. 15 {M1,M2}. Neither set is e-parent sufficient since they both omit the variable P1, which is an eparent of M1 and P2 when added to V1, and an e-parent of M1 and M2 when added to V2. So neither of the variable sets that the antireductionist uses to resist the exclusion argument satisfies the natural multi-level generalization of causal sufficiency. This means that fans of Kim's argument can resist the antireductionist's rebuttal by arguing that we should adopt a version of the WCP that is articulated in terms of e-parent sufficiency rather than causal sufficiency, and, in the process, block the conclusions that the antireductionist draws from V1 and V2. According to this line of thought, the dispute between antireductionists and their opposition rests on a disagreement about what variable sets can be legitimately considered when investigating the causal structure of multi-level systems.32 If, on the one hand, we require only that variable sets be causally sufficient, then the antireductionist is apparently able to demonstrate the causal efficacy of mental properties. However, if, on the other hand, we require satisfaction of the generalized e-parent sufficiency condition, then the CBN-theoretic vindication of the exclusion argument appears to go through successfully. Thus the crucial question is whether there is any principled reason to replace the standard causal sufficiency condition with the much stricter e-parent sufficiency condition. To the extent that there is independent reason for non-reductive physicalists to countenance the existence of macro-level causal relations, there appears to be reason to side with causal sufficiency. Remember that Kim's argument is supposed to show that non-reductive physicalism has the untoward consequence of implying that macro-level properties are causally inert. If antireductionists can consistently avoid this untoward consequence by siding with causal sufficiency over e-parent sufficiency, then even Kim should agree that there is reason to side with causal sufficiency. But the issue is complicated by the fact that not every non-reductive physicalist regards the consequence of macro-level epiphenomenalism as untoward. These philosophers' motivations differ from one to the next,33 but they are typically in agreement that scientific practice should be revised so that higher-level causes are not countenanced. This dispute between the epiphenomenalist and the antireductionist is unfortunately not one that we can settle here. In order to do so, we would have to take stock of the many arguments offered on both sides, and there simply isn't enough space in this paper to do so effectively. What we can show, however, is that Kim's conditional conclusion - i.e., that if non-reductive physicalism is true, then macro-level properties are causally inert - is false when viewed through the lens of CBNs. This follows from what we've already demonstrated - i.e., that CBNs can be used to develop an account of multi-level causal inference that is consistent with both non-reductive physicalism and the causal efficacy of macro-level properties simply by siding with causal sufficiency over e-parent sufficiency. Thus by demonstrating the existence of 32Polger et al. (2018) make a similar point. Their response to Kim's argument is that mental variables and physical variables should not be in competition, and their argument turns on their observation that it's inappropriate for interventionists to consider variable sets that include P1 and M1 (or P2 and M2) under the assumption of the CMC. Here, we are more ecumenical about what variables can be considered alongside each other - indeed, we generalize the usual CBN framework partially to allow for consideration of variable sets that Polger et al. rightly deem problematic in the standard CBN setting - but we agree with Polger et al. that at least as far as CBNs are concerned, the debate turns on what variable sets should be considered appropriate for causal inference. 33For example, Gebharter (2017a) can be interpreted as championing epiphenomenalism on the grounds that it follows from his preferred view of causation in conjunction with the the thesis that mental properties supervene on micro-level physical properties, while Segal (2009) champions epiphenomenalism on the grounds that mental properties are dispositional, and dispositions are not causally efficacious. 16 this choice point in the development of interventionism, we've shown that not all non-reductive physicalist interventionist roads lead to epiphenomenalism, and have thereby revealed new paths to antireductionist interventionism. Still, there are some extant arguments in the literature that prima facie seem to provide positive reason to side with e-parent sufficiency over causal sufficiency on the grounds that e-parent sufficiency correctly falsifies some causal generalizations that are in terms of non-projectible predicates (e.g., 'jade' in Kim's famous (1992) example),34 while causal sufficiency problematically countenances these causal generalizations as true. In the next section, we show that there is yet another constraint on variable sets that shares e-parent sufficiency's ability to rule out these problematic causal generalizations without sharing e-parent sufficiency's vindication of full-blown macro-level epiphenomenalism. 6 Difference Maker Sufficiency We expect that some philosophers will contend that there are real scientific contexts where it is of utmost importance that we attend to the way in which some macro-level property is realized, and that in these contexts, it is e-parent sufficiency that gets things right. For example, in Kim's (1992) example, chemists err if they study minerals in terms of what we once called 'jade' rather than in the more fine-grained terms of 'jadeite' and 'nephrite' (where 'jade' designates the disjunction of 'jadeite' and 'nephrite') because it matters whether a given instance of jade is actually jadeite or nephrite when it comes to predicting its chemical behavior. In the causal inference literature, this same problem has reared its head in the so-called "cholesterol problem." Following Spirtes and Scheines (2004), suppose that high density cholesterol (HDC) causally inhibits (and is negatively correlated with) heart disease (D) and that low density cholesterol (LDC) causally promotes (and is positively correlated with) heart disease. Furthermore, let the variable TC ('total cholesterol') denote the sum of high and low density cholesterol, i.e. TC = HDC + LDC. Suppose also that in actual fact, TC is positively correlated with D. People with high total cholesterol have, on average, a significantly higher risk of heart disease. However, the specific make up of an individual's total cholesterol has a major impact on their risk of heart disease. Two individuals with the same total cholesterol can have very different risks of heart disease. For example, an individual with HDC = 80 and LDC = 120 will have a much higher risk than an individual with HDC = 120 and LDC = 80, even though they both have TC = 200. In this context, the question of what happens when we intervene to set the value of total cholesterol to some particular value seems to have no determinate answer. If we increase an individual's total cholesterol by feeding them something that increases their high density cholesterol, then the intervention may reduce the risk of heart disease. But if we increase total cholesterol the same amount by feeding them something that increases their low density cholesterol, then their risk of heart disease will be significantly increased. The problem is that interventions on TC are too "fat-handed" for determinate inference. In this case, the realizers make a difference. And e-parent 34Kim (1992) famously argues that special science kinds are not autonomous from lower-level kinds on the grounds that generalizations about jade cannot be included in good science, and must instead be replaced with generalizations about jadeite and nephrite. 17 sufficiency redirects our attention towards these realizers. To see this, note that V = {TC,D} is not e-parent sufficient because its omits the common e-parent, LDC ×HDC.35 So e-parent sufficiency forces us to consider the variable whose values are realize the values of TC. In contrast, causal sufficiency permits us to neglect TC's realizers (since V = {TC,D} is causally sufficient).36 By the same token, e-parent sufficiency also forces us to consider whether a given instance of jade is jadeite or nephrite when considering its bearing, e.g., on whether it scratches a steel nail (because the variable that denotes whether something is jadeite, nephrite, or neither is a common e-parent of the variable that expresses whether something is jade and the variable that expresses whether something scratches a steel nail), while causal sufficiency allows one to ignore whether a given instance of jade is jadeite or nephrite when considering the same query (because the variable that denotes whether something is jadeite, nephrite, or neither is not a common cause of whether something is jade and whether something scratches a steel nail). Thus the cholesterol problem prima facie seems like grist for Kim's mill. We submit that it's too early to claim victory for e-parent sufficiency because there is yet another constraint on variable sets that solves the cholesterol problem without implying full-blown macro-level epiphenomenalism. Recall that the motivation for regarding the cholesterol case as supporting e-parent sufficiency is that e-parent sufficiency forces us to attend to LDC × HDC. This is prima facie desirable because the effect of TC on D varies with different realizations of TC. In probabilistic terms, this means that TC does not screen off its realizers from D.37 An individual's total cholesterol may tell us something about their risk of heart disease, but we would gain significantly more information about that risk if we additionally knew the specific way in which their total cholesterol is realized in terms of low density cholesterol and high density cholesterol. If it were the case that TC screened off LDC × HDC from D, then the effect of interventions on TC would be perfectly well specified, since we could just choose an arbitrary realizing value of LDC × HDC for the value to which TC was set, and this arbitrary choice would make no difference to the probability distribution over D. So the intuition that we must attend to LDC × HDC over and above TC is reliant on the fact that TC does not screen off its supervenience base LDC × HDC from D. Similarly, the reason that 'jade' strikes us as a non-projectible chemical predicate is that it does not screen off its realizers from its chemical behav35Here, LDC×HDC denotes the Cartesian product of HDC and LDC. By definition, TC supervenes on this variable, and by stipulation this variable is correlated with D. Given MMC and the fact that TC doesn't screen off LDC ×HDC from D, we can infer that LDC ×HDC is (relative to this variable set) a direct cause of D. 36This variable set is typically treated as causally sufficient in the literature, but there could be reason to believe that it's not since, e.g., whether someone has a fatty diet is causally relevant to their total cholesterol and whether they get heart disease. Moreover, it may be that the cholesterol problem isn't so problematic when we attend to these common causes of TC and D since their presence in V implies constraints on what counts as a bona fide intervention on TC relative to V, and thereby rules out some problematic "interventions". (For example, we cannot intervene to increase someone's total cholesterol by giving them bacon cheeseburgers because this is not independent from whether they have a fatty diet.) We are interested in pursuing this line of reasoning further, but abstain from doing so here for reasons of brevity. It's worth noting, though, that if we can make good on this line of reasoning - i.e., on using considerations of causal sufficiency to solve the cholesterol problem - then this only helps the antireductionist's case (since siding with causal sufficiency over e-parent sufficiency wins the debate for the antireductionist). Thus there is no reason to worry that we are pulling the wool over the reader's eyes by not pursuing this line of reasoning here. 37See Chalupka et al. (2017) and Woodward (2010) for a related diagnosis cholesterol-like problems. 18 ior - e.g., from whether the the steel nail gets scratched. This all motivates the following definition Difference Maker (DM) Sufficiency: V is DM sufficient if and only if there do not exist any variables L,X, Y such that (i) L /∈ V, (ii) X,Y ∈ V, (iii) L is a common e-parent of X and Y in an admissible graph over the extended variable set V ∪ {L}, and (iv) it is not the case that either X screens off L from every variable in V \ {X,L} or that Y screens off L from every variable in V \ {Y,L}. It is easily observed that DM sufficiency is a strictly weaker requirement than e-parent sufficiency. While e-parent sufficiency requires the inclusion of all common e-parents (since it just says that the first three sub-conditions must be satisfied), DM sufficiency requires only the inclusion of those common e-parents that satisfy the fourth sub-condition - roughly, those e-parents that are not screened off from everything in the variable set by one of their e-children. To illustrate, let's apply DM sufficiency to the cholesterol problem. Consider again the set V = {TC,D} under the assumption that TC does not screen off D from LDC × HDC. Since LDC ×HDC is a common e-parent of TC and D (as observed above) and TC does not screen it off from D (or vice versa, by symmetry of independence), it follows that LDC ×HDC, TC, and D jointly fulfill the four conditions on L,X and Y in the definition of DM sufficiency. Thus, as desired, V is not DM sufficient in this case. Like e-parent sufficiency, DM sufficiency forces us to attend to TC's supervenience base, LDC ×HDC. This means that DM sufficiency provides a natural weakening of e-parent sufficiency that is still capable of solving the cholesterol problem. Crucially, DM sufficiency does not require that we always include all common e-parents of the variables being considered, and thereby manages to vindicate some macro-level causal claims. It rather requires that we include just those common e-parents that make a difference in the sense that the effects of interventions on variables that supervene on those e-parents are underspecified.38 ,39 Now, there are two obvious criticisms that one could level at the DM sufficiency condition, which we reply to in turn. First, fans of causal sufficiency may worry that DM sufficiency is not significantly weaker than e-parent sufficiency, and that, like e-parent sufficiency, it still invalidates most of the causal claims of the special sciences. It is rarely the case that a variable completely screens off its supervenience bases from the variables to which it is (or seems to be) causally related in the real world. For example, it is economic orthodoxy that productivity causally influences 38Note that there is a strong affinity between the motivating intuitions behind our definition of DM sufficiency and the treatment of causal proportionality given by List and Menzies (2009). List and Menzies argue that higher level causes trump lower level causes whenever the effect is insensitive to variations in the lower level realizers of the prospective higher level cause. This condition is not fulfilled by the total cholesterol variable in the cholesterol problem, so advocates of List and Menzies' view would presumably acknowledge the need for a definition of sufficiency that does not entail the causal efficacy of total cholesterol. And like List and Menzies, our definition of DM sufficiency focuses on whether the effect is sensitive to the higher level cause's lower level realisers when the cause is held fixed. 39Observe that DM sufficiency renders the question of whether a variable's supervenience base must be included as dependent on what other variables are included in the variable set. For example, while we need to include the jadeite/nephrite variable when considering the effect of jade on whether the nail is scratched (because this makes a difference to whether the nail is scratched), we don't need to include it when we're exclusively concerned with the effect of jade on the price of jewelery in an economy whose participants are unaware of the difference between jadeite and nephrite. 19 economic growth. But productivity supervenes on both the number of hours worked and the value of the output of that work. And it seems implausible to claim that productivity completely screens off economic growth from these two factors. So when assessing the causal influence of productivity on growth, DM sufficiency will always require us to include an extra variable that corresponds to hours worked and the value of the output, and relative to this larger variable set, productivity will typically be represented as causally inert. Thus, like e-parent sufficiency, DM sufficiency prima facie seems to invalidate most macro-level causal claims. If this is right, then DM sufficiency is of limited use to enemies of epiphenomenalism. We are sympathetic to this challenge, but it's important to note that it does not bear on the central argument of our paper. These considerations may push us towards causal sufficiency over DM sufficiency, but, again, the antireductionist interventionist's case is resolutely made if causal sufficiency is the appropriate constraint in multi-level contexts.40 What matters for our argument is that it undercuts the alleged advantage that e-parent sufficiency has over its competitors by representing an option that aptly diagnoses problematic macro-level causal claims (e.g., involving jade and total cholesterol) as false without implying full-blown epiphenomenalism. Here, we submit that DM sufficiency improves upon e-parent sufficiency by providing us with a tool that distinguishes those cases where macro-level properties are not autonomous from those cases where they are. Another prospective criticism of DM sufficiency is that it can lead one to omit common causes in the single variable setting and, in so doing, yield spurious causal inferences. To illustrate, consider three pairwise correlated variables, C,E1, E2 and suppose that (i) C is a common cause of E1 and E2, and (ii) C is not a difference maker for E1/E2, i.e. C is screened off from E2 by E1. Then the DM sufficiency condition will allow us to make causal inferences over the variable set V− = {E1, E2} - i.e. it will allow us to omit the variable C from our consideration of the relationship between E1 and E2. And since E1 and E2 are correlated, we will be forced to infer a causal relationship between them. But it's perfectly possible that the correlation between E1 and E2 is due entirely to their sharing a common cause C, in which case the inferred relationship is spurious. So DM sufficiency is too weak insofar as it allows for the consideration of too many variable sets, and thereby licenses some of the spurious inferences that were prohibited by causal sufficiency. In order to respond to this criticism, it will be instructive to briefly consider exactly what it means for C to count as a (direct) common cause of E1 and E2. A popular and intuitive formalization of this claim is that C counts as a direct cause of both E1 and E2 relative to the variable set V = {C,E1, E2}, obtained by adding C to V− = {E1, E2}. But we've still not specified precisely what it means for one variable to count as direct cause relative to V. There are two plausible options. On the first option, X is a direct cause of Y relative to V if X is a direct cause of Y relative to every admissible minimal graph over V. On the second option, X is a direct cause of Y relative to V if X is a direct cause of Y relative to some admissible minimal graph over V. Call the first condition the 'stringent' condition and the second condition the 'lax' condition. Suppose that we adopt the stringent condition. Then C's being a common cause of E1 and E2 means that every admissible minimal graph over V = {C,E1, E2} represents C as a direct cause of E1 and E2. But we've stipulated that C is not a difference maker for E1/E2, meaning that E1 40At this juncture, it's worth stressing that some violations of DM sufficiency may be worse than others. It's plausible that a given violation is problematic to the extent that the omitted supervenience base makes a difference. This scalar property can perhaps be analyzed in terms of degrees of correlation, but we leave this for a later date. 20 C E1 E2 C E1 E2 Figure 7: Minimal DAGs over {C,E1, E2} when C is not a difference maker for E1/E2. screens off C from E2. This in turn entails that the right most DAG in Figure 7 is minimal, and hence that there exists an admissible minimal graph over V = {C,E1, E2} in which C is not a direct cause of E2. Since we're adopting the stringent condition, this implies that C is not really a common cause of E1 and E2. So when we adopt the stringent condition, we automatically rule out the possibility of there existing variable sets which satisfy the DM sufficieny condition while leaving out common causes, and the criticism simply dissolves. Now let's consider the lax condition. Given this understanding of 'direct cause', C's being a common cause of E1 and E2 means that there exists some admissible minimal graph over V in which C is represented as a common direct cause of E1 and E2. Thus the lax condition says that it is indeed the case that C counts as a common cause of E1 and E2, since the left DAG in Figure 7 represent C as a direct cause of both E1 and E2. But note also that the right most DAG in Figure 7 represents E1 as a direct cause of E2. The lax condition also implies that E1 counts as a direct cause of E2 relative to V. This then suggests that the the inference that E1 is causally related to E2 is not spurious at all. So either one adopts the stringent condition, in which case DM sufficiency never leads one to leave out common causes in the first place, or one adopts the lax condition, in which case the causal verdicts that one obtains by leaving out common causes are all non-spurious. Either way, the problem is defused. How does this all bear on the status of the exclusion argument? As before, we adopt the WCP in favor of SCP. This means that in order to establish the possible causal efficacy of M1, we only need to find one DM sufficient variable set V such that M1 is represented as causally efficacious in some minimal graph over V. As before, a salient option here is V = {M1,M2}, i.e. the variable set that omits the physical realizers of the relevant mental states. Whether this set is DM sufficient depends on whether M1 screens off P1 from M2. And whether that is the case, or approximately the case, is a substantive empirical question that probably cannot be settled from the armchair. Either way, there doesn't seem to any a priori reason to rule out the possibility that mental variables like M1 sometimes screen off their realizers from other mental variables like M2, which means that we cannot rule out the possibility that V is DM sufficient. And since M1 is represented as a cause of M2 in a minimal graph over V, advocates of DM sufficiency can't rule out the possibility of mental causation a priori. Thus like causal sufficiency, DM sufficiency allows for the construction of an antireductionist theory of multi-level causal inference. 21 7 Conclusion It's time to take stock. In the first few sections of the paper, we considered a natural generalization of the CBN framework to the multi-level setting, and concluded that the soundness of Gebharter's CBN-theoretic formulation of the causal exclusion argument hinges on the question of which variable sets can legitimately be considered in the context of multi-level causal inference. Then, we argued that on some plausible ways of constraining variable sets in multi-level settings, the causal exclusion argument does not go through successfully. More specifically, opting for causal sufficiency as a constraint results in the full-blown vindication of antireductionism, while opting for DM sufficiency vindicates a more moderate brand of antireductionism. To see the picture more clearly, it may be helpful to consider its application to Putnam's (1975) peg. In order to vindicate the autonomous explanatory power of macro-level properties, Putnam famously considers the example of a wooden board containing two holes. The first hole is circular with a diameter of 1 inch and the second hole is square with a length of 1 inch per side. A cubical peg that is 15/16 of an inch on each side will fit through the second hole, but not the first. According to Putnam, this is explained entirely by the macro-level properties of the peg and the holes, as described above. From an explanatory perspective, the micro-level properties of the peg are redundant. Once you know the macro-level properties, the micro has no further role to play. It is exactly this screening off property (referenced in DM sufficiency) that accounts for the fact that nothing is gained from attending to the micro-details in this case. That is, because the nature of the peg's realization base makes no difference for the effect of its size on whether it will fit, DM sufficiency says that it's fine to ignore the peg's realization base. But in other examples (e.g., the cholesterol case or Kim's (1992) jade example), the macro-level property's effects vary with how it is realized, and DM sufficiency correspondingly requires that we include the realization base. If we side with DM sufficiency over causal sufficiency, then we get a nice picture of why Putnam's peg is a legitimate causal kind and why Kim's jade is not - i.e., DM sufficiency requires that you attend to whether the jade is jadeite or nephrite (and in the process repudiates the legitimacy of 'jade' as a cause), while it does not require that you attend to the realizer of Putnam's peg (and thus does not repudiate the legitimacy of Putnam's peg as a causal kind). Of course, as we mentioned earlier, if we side with DM sufficiency, then we condemn a great many causal claims that are part and parcel of the special sciences (since the micro-details often do make some difference). 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Religions 2020, 11, 80; doi:10.3390/rel11020080 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Article A Perspectival Account of Acedia in the Writings of Kierkegaard Jared Brandt 1,*, Brandon Dahm 2,* and Derek McAllister 3,* 1 Department of Philosophy, Dallas Baptist University, Dallas, TX 75211, USA 2 Department of Philosophy, Franciscan University of Steubenville, Steubenville, OH 43952, USA 3 Department of Philosophy, Baylor University, Waco, TX 76798, USA * Correspondence: [email protected] (J.B.); [email protected] (B.D.); [email protected] (D.M.) Received: 2 January 2020; Accepted: 28 January 2020; Published: 10 February 2020 Abstract: Søren Kierkegaard is well-known as an original philosophical thinker, but less known is his reliance upon and development of the Christian tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, in particular the vice of acedia, or sloth. As acedia has enjoyed renewed interest in the past century or so, commentators have attempted to pin down one or another Kierkegaardian concept (e.g., despair, heavy-mindedness, boredom, etc.) as the embodiment of the vice, but these attempts have yet to achieve any consensus. In our estimation, the complicated reality is that, in using slightly different but related concepts, Kierkegaard is providing a unique look at acedia as it manifests differently at different stages on life's way. Thus, on this "perspectival account", acedia will manifest differently according to whether an individual inhabits the aesthetic, ethical, or religious sphere. We propose two axes for this perspectival account. Such descriptions of how acedia manifests make up the first, phenomenal axis, while the second, evaluative axis, accounts for the various bits of advice and wisdom we read in the diagnoses of acedia from one Kierkegaardian pseudonym to another. Our aim is to show that Kierkegaard was not only familiar with the concept of acedia, but his contributions helped to develop and extend the tradition. Keywords: acedia; sloth; Deadly Sins; Kierkegaard; despair; boredom; aesthetic; ethical; religious; immediacy 1. Introduction For the Christian tradition, the vice of acedia [ακηδία] has been one of the most serious vices, featuring prominently in lists of the Deadly Sins from Evagrius and Cassian to Gregory and Aquinas. Traditionally, acedia has been characterized as a slothfulness, weariness, or even sorrow, in particular with respect to one's religious duties and love for God. It was said to manifest in one of two ways: a kind of listlessness (hence the common translation of sloth) or restlessness.1 Acedia has enjoyed a renewal of interest over the last 100 or so years,2 this after theoretical analyses of acedia having all but 1 See (Cassian 1894), Institutes, X.VIII, "... those who will not work are always restless, owing to the fault of idleness." 2 The boundaries, as with anything in history, are not well-defined. We have in mind, firstly, Anglican Bishop Francis Paget (1891). About mid-century, there is Josef Pieper (Pieper [1935] 1986; Pieper [1948] 1952) and Siegfried Wenzel (1960), among others. Acedia has been of interest even to famous literary figures like Aldous Huxley, who discusses a secular form of the vice in his essay "Accidie" (Huxley [1923] 1928); Evelyn Waugh, who portrays acedia in religious terms, albeit from the perspective of an agnostic, in his Brideshead Revisited (Waugh [1945] 1999); and T. S. Eliot, who, according to Colón (2011), threads the theologically robust form of acedia through his post-conversion works Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot 1935) and Four Quartets (Eliot [1934] 1948). As it turns out, T. S. Eliot even wrote the original English translation introduction to Pieper's (1952). Religions 2020, 11, 80 2 of 23 disappeared since the High Scholastic period.3 There are many possible explanations one could give of this fact,4 but we will not pursue this here. Instead, we will focus on one writer, Søren Kierkegaard, who precedes this recent renaissance, who himself paid close attention to the vicious side of human nature and whose erudition supplied him with the means to explore it. At first glance, Kierkegaard's work is not an obvious place to turn to in a discussion of acedia; he uses the word 'acedia' only once.5 Nevertheless, there is good reason to think that some of the central phenomena he investigates are closely related to acedia. For instance, early on in the resurgent interest in acedia, Josef Pieper (Pieper [1935] 1986; Pieper [1948] 1952) uses, inter alia, Kierkegaardian concepts in his analysis of acedia. Since then, Kierkegaardian concepts have come to appear regularly in discussions of the vice. These discussions have been occasioned by discussion of the vice instead from thematic discussions of acedia in Kierkegaard. So, it is not surprising that there is no consensus regarding just which Kierkegaardian concept most neatly parallels acedia. Some writers, including Pieper, claim that one of the forms of despair in The Sickness Unto Death is acedia.6 Others identify the vice as the melancholy or depression [Tungsind] discussed in Either/Or.7 Still others see a connection between acedia and Kierkegaardian notions like boredom8 or spiritual trial.9 In our view, all of these proposals are, in some sense, correct. There are, in fact, strong parallels between each of these concepts and acedia. We see this as part of the very design of Kierkegaard's authorship: to subject specific phenomena (including acedia) to close scrutiny from diverse perspectives, the result of which is a more thorough analysis of the phenomena. To be more precise, we argue for the following thesis. Beyond simply exhibiting a prior familiarity with acedia (both de dicto and de re), Kierkegaard's philosophical and theological categories also reveal his own novel contribution to the capital vices tradition in the form of extending and developing our understanding of acedia. To be clear, our thesis does not require that Kierkegaard deliberately intended to develop acedia as such, but that his own thinking reflects deep and extensive elements of older Chrisitan traditions, whether he encountered these through reading or ecclesial practice, such that in his thinking can be found a natural extension of the tradition on acedia.10 We call this novel contribution his perspectival analysis of acedia. The perspectives he considers are, in Kierkegaardian terminology: the aesthetic life, the ethical life, and the religious life. 11 This perspectival analysis has two axes: 3 Discussions of its application in the life of the believer continued during the 14th–15th centuries in practical theological works like confessional instructions, catechetical handbooks, sermons, and encyclopedias for clergy. But even this change in emphasis reveals that theoretical discussions of acedia had long since subsided since the High Scholastic era. Cf. Wenzel (1960, pp. 174–81). Wenzel also sees in this change in acedia's emphasis a shift to external, particular, confessional "concrete faults, [rather than on] abstract states of mind" (p. 177). 4 For example, perhaps it is because the vice had characteristic beginnings in the monastic form of life, which itself faded from prominence; or perhaps the earlier Scholastic theoretical treatments had settled the issue (or maybe rather they were too obscure). 5 This came in a short journal entry in 1839. We will have more to say about this below. Apart from another, even shorter, journal entry in 1849 (NB10: 23 1849, SKS 21, 269), which is more of a mention than a use of the word, in connection with Bonaventure's work, there is no other significant interaction with the actual term. (We argue, of course, that he was interacting significantly with the concept under different terminology.) 6 See (Pieper [1935] 1986; Pieper [1948] 1952; DeYoung 2015). 7 See (Cappelørn 2008; Ferguson 1994). 8 See (Kuhn 1976; McDonald 2009; Pattison 2013). 9 See (Podmore 2011, 2013). 10 For example, "Kierkegaaard refers to pagan virtues as 'glittering vices' (SKS 9, 60; Kierkegaaard 1995, WL 53; Kierkegaaard 1980a, SUD 46). The term, also used by other Church Fathers, is explicated in [Augustine's] Civitate dei [XIX, 25]" (Puchniak 2008, p. 13). Cf. Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources Volume 4, Kierkegaard and the Patristic and Medieval Traditions (2008) for more. 11 There is little doubt that a perspectival account of acedia can be offered, perhaps even has been offered (we can only speculate), using different developmental categories, but Kierkegaard's spheres lend themselves particularly well to showcasing this. As we shall see, it is important not to place too much weight on the stages/spheres as clear categories, as Kierkegaard sometimes lumps them together (SUD 45). Religions 2020, 11, 80 3 of 23 (i) phenomenal axis: the experience of acedia in different life stages,12 (ii) evaluative axis: the diagnoses of acedia from different life stages. Thus, for example, the experience of acedia from the perspective of the aesthetic life (hereafter, "aesthetic acedia") is distinct from the experience of acedia from the perspective of the ethical life (hereafter "ethical acedia"), and so on. More than this, each of these can be diagnosed or evaluated from differing, higher perspectives (as depicted in Figure 1)13: for instance, a diagnosis of aesthetic acedia as given from the aesthetic sphere is distinct from a diagnosis of aesthetic acedia as given from the ethical sphere. (Readers of Either/Or will recognize immediately that this is the difference between A's evaluation of himself and Judge Wilhelm's evaluation of A's condition.) Figure 1. Kierkegaard's Perspectival Analysis of Acedia. If our thesis is correct, we think it has residual benefit in that a perspectival account of acedia resolves the lack of consensus in the secondary literature we have mentioned above (viz., which Kierkegaardian concept most closely matches acedia). In Section 2, we give a brief conceptual history of acedia as it appears in the Christian tradition from the Desert Fathers to the Scholastics. More than a simple overview, Section 2 is critical for showing the complexity of acedia-its object, its effects, its provenance, and its remedies-a complexity which must be grasped in order to see how it is beautifully interwoven through Kierkegaard's authorship. Sections 3 and 4 discuss Kierkegaard's analysis of acedia as it appears in two important works: Either/Or and The Sickness Unto Death, respectively.14 Across Kierkegaard's authorship, we see a portrait of acedia from different perspectives (life stages); and, hence, we see different aspects of acedia being emphasized depending on the work. Finally, in Section 5, we close with an evaluation of Kierkegaard's contribution to the Christian tradition on acedia. 2. Acedia in the Christian Tradition 12 For shorthand, we sometimes will refer to these as "types of acedia", but to be sure, they are properly speaking a description of the phenomenal experience, or what-it-is-like, to be afflicted with acedia from the perspective of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres, respectively. 13 It seems that, at least in Kierkegaard's works, a lower sphere does not diagnose a higher. However, DeYoung (2009, p. 19) says, "when we read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, we see a portrait of the vice of sloth in explicitly religious terms (although narrated by an agnostic character)." 14 Space prohibits the consideration of more, but we think other works within the corpus can support the extension of our thesis: for instance, despair [Fortvivlelse] in Works of Love, the last two 'anxieties of the heathen' in Christian Discourses, and, Concept of Anxiety. In a longer version of the project, we propose that the various forms of anxiety discussed in Concept of Anxiety represent manifestations of acedia in the diverse life stages as follows: Anxiety of Spiritlessness (Aesthetic), Anxiety Defined Dialectically as Fate or Guilt (Ethical or Ethical-Religious), and Anxiety about the Good (Religious). Religions 2020, 11, 80 4 of 23 Both Evagrius of Pontus (345–399) and John Cassian (360–435) included acedia in their lists of the eight "evil thoughts" [λογισμοι, logismoi]15 or "principal faults"16-indeed, Evagrius calls it "the most troublesome of all" (Praktikos, 28). The Desert Fathers often described acedia in terms of a daimon [δαίμων] that brought a certain weariness or aversion to the work at hand: "The demon of ακηδία, also called 'noonday demon,' is the most oppressive of all demons. He attacks the monk about the fourth hour and besieges his soul until the eighth hour... [sending] him hatred against the place, against life itself, and against the work of his hands..."17 Both Evagrius and Cassian, in differing manners of emphasis, present the twofold effect of acedia as listlessness and restlessness. Cassian actually verbally conjoins both effects as a synonym for acedia: "somno otii vel acediae" ("by idle slumber or by acedia") (Institutes, X.21). In phenomenally rich language, Cassian describes acedia as a "weariness or distress of the heart"18 which is closely related to sorrow [tristitia] 19 and prevalent among those who live in solitude (Institutes, X.I). Cassian emphasizes the twofold impact that acedia can have on a monk: And so the true Christian athlete20 who desires to strive lawfully in the lists of perfection, should hasten to expel this disease also from the recesses of his soul; and should strive against this most evil spirit of [acedia] in both directions, so that he may neither fall stricken through by the shaft of slumber, nor be driven out from the monastic cloister, even though under some pious excuse or pretext, and depart as a runaway (Institutes, X.V). The vice of acedia typically produces one of two effects in its victim: either an overwhelming laziness or listlessness, or a restlessness that makes the monk want to abandon his post or simply to immerse himself in work other than the task at hand. Cassian notes that one can follow upon the other: "...those who will not work are always restless, owing to the fault of idleness" (Institutes, X.VIII). The first effect, listlessness, can be captured in all sorts of rich, colorful behavioral description- idleness, laziness, slothfulness-but the actual underlying motus driving all these perceivable behaviors is a person's inner life, namely, the individual's will. Either the monk experiences velleity, a diminished exercise of the will, or abulia, a complete absence of any movement of will. The second effect, restlessness, is a kind of busyness, but should not be mistaken for productive busyness. It is 15 Hierotheos Vlachos (1994) explains the significance of these thoughts, or logismoi: "The Holy Fathers do not talk about concepts (skepsis) but about thoughts (logismoi)... Conceptions are rational suggestions, while thoughts (logismoi) are rational suggestions combined with the appropriate stimuli and images brought in either by sight, by hearing, or by both" (p. 45). As such, "logismoi" taken generally need apply to sinful or bad thoughts, but the context here makes it clear that the Desert Fathers understand these eight logismoi as normatively bad. 16 Cf. Harmless (2004): Evagrius "calls them 'thoughts,' not sins" (p. 312; cf. 218). "[Evagrius's] list would become, with slight modification, the seven deadly sins and enjoy a venerable place in the spirituality of the Middle Ages... The one who brought Evagrius's scheme to the Latin West was his disciple, John Cassian, who discussed them at length in two works, The Institutes and The Conferences" (p. 322). 17 Wenzel (1960, p. 5) quoting Evagrius of Pontus, Praktikos, 12. This translation appears to be Wenzel's own, based on Ευαγριου Περι των οκτω λογισμων προς Ανατολιον, the Greek text preserved in Migne's (PG, Tome 40, Migne 1863, pp. 1271–78, esp. 1273–74). 18 "... quod Graeci ἀκηδίαν vocant, quam nos taedium sive anxietatem cordis possumus nuncupare." 19 It is unclear whether Cassian's Institutes were written originally in Greek or Latin (and one's answer to this will likely presuppose an answer to the question of who the real Cassian was). According to Migne's (PL, Tome 49, Migne 1846, pp. 9–11) historico-literary note which precedes Cassian's opera omnia, some Greek idiomatic phrases show up in Cassian's writings, making it possible that all of our extant copies are translations of original Greek manuscripts. Yet, while some books of the Institutes are preserved in Greek codices not older than the seventh century, the earliest printed edition was produced in Latin in Venice in 1481 (Tzamalikos 2012, pp. 112, cf. 124). Tradition aligns Cassian with the Latin Fathers: note Migne's placement of his corpus in the series Latina rather than the series Graeca. 20 As in ἀθλητής, or he who competes for a prize. Cf. 1 Cor. 9:24; Acts 20:24; Phil. 3:14; 2 Tim. 4:7–8. Religions 2020, 11, 80 5 of 23 characterized by a deep, inarticulable aversion to the meaningful, God-given, spiritually-imbued work of the cloister, in favor of other tasks that either are not as urgent, are not as important, or are simply not the task given to this individual monk. This latter effect of restlessness may thus actually result in activities that are "entertaining," or, as we would say in English, "diversions."21 Following Evagrius and other Egyptian monks,22 Cassian identifies the principal remedy for acedia as its opposing virtue, fortitudo (strength, courage) (Conferences, V.23). However, Cassian arguably places more point of emphasis than did previous writers on a second chief remedy: work by hand. For all the apparent tension between these two very different remedies, however, there is strong reason to conclude that the remedy for acedia with respect to one's inner life is to practice fortitudo, while the remedy for acedia with respect to one's outer life is manual work.23 Rather than meaningless activity, manual work is dignified when it has the proper end. Cassian's exhortations suggest that manual labor could be just as noble as brotherly love (1 Thess. 4:9), in that acedia (inquietudo, otiositas, anxietas sive taedium cordis) could be quieted and the heart made tranquil by a renewed, purposeful focus on meaningful work. From its beginning, acedia was designated as a capital vice, no doubt in part due to its twofold effect and its tendency to open the door to many other temptations. While Cassian was the first to establish a fixed progeny for each of the logismoi,24 Pope Gregory I (540–604) provides a memorable image, likening the capital vices to leaders of an army: For the tempting vices...some of them go first, like captains, others follow, after the manner of an army. For all faults do not occupy the heart with equal access...For when pride, the queen of sins, has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins, as if to some of her generals, to lay it waste. And an army in truth follows these generals, because, doubtless, there spring up from them importunate hosts of sins (Moralia in Iob, 31.45.87). In the case of acedia, we will find evidence of both tendencies-laziness and restlessness-among its "daughter" vices: "From [acedia] there arise malice, rancor, cowardice, despair, slothfulness in fulfilling the commands, and a wandering of the mind on unlawful objects" (Moralia in Iob, 31.45.88). Finally, the Scholastics, principally St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), round out the analysis by identifying the root of acedia qua sin, both its object and its cause. While the early Fathers like Cassian had included both tristitia (sadness) and acedia among the principal vices (their list had eight members), Aquinas lists only acedia among the Sins, while listing tristitia, properly speaking, only among the passions. But, ever the master of nuance, Aquinas assigns acedia (qua passion) as a species of tristitia. A person experiences tristitia when she perceives the conjoining of something bad to 21 The Romance languages preserve this connection even more clearly: such as divertir (Fr., Sp., Pt.), from divertere (Lat.), which can mean variously "to divert/distract" or "to entertain"; as well as the derived adjectives divertente (It.) and divertissant (Fr.), which mean "entertaining", "funny", or "amusing". 22 Who had advised that the "main remedy against ακηδία was to keep the cell, to practice endurance, to nourish supernatural hope, and so on" (Wenzel 1960, pp. 21–22). 23 While Cassian "recommends cultivating fortitude and keeping the cell" in his Conferences, he goes through the whole Institutes "[speaking] only of manual work" (Wenzel 1960, p. 22, emphasis added). This tension is easily explained by examining Cassian's purpose for writing and the audience he had in mind for each work. "[T]he Collationes [Conferences] treats of the monk's 'inner dispositions,' whereas the Instituta [Institutes] is concerned with the external regulations given to a [cenobitic] monastic community in need of a rule" (Wenzel 1960, p. 22; cf. Conferences, Pt. I preface). 24 Since there is no model or analogue for such progenies in earlier writers, it is likely that Cassian's source for these progenies, in the case of acedia, derived from Paul's epistle to the Thessalonian church, commentary on which Cassian devotes roughly half of Book X (Institutes, X.7–16). The relevant passages are 1 Thess. 4:9–11 and 2 Thess. 3:6–15 An additional source might have been 1 Tim. 5:13, where we get the grouping "idlers, gossipers, and busybodies." Cf. Wenzel (1960, p. 21). Religions 2020, 11, 80 6 of 23 herself.25 The specific sorrow that is acedia characteristically occurs when, in sorrow, "the mind is weighed down so much, that even the limbs become motionless" (I.II.35.8.co). Like most passions tristitia is morally neutral when considered apart from a particular object or degree,26 yet tristitia becomes bad either when (a) a person, in her sorrow, misperceives a genuine good as evil [malum], or when (b) sorrow is immoderate, or ungoverned by reason.27 We see both happen in the specific case of acedia qua passion. In the first place, acedia goes awry when it manifests as "sorrow for spiritual good" (II.II.35), specifically, "sorrow about spiritual good in as much as it is a Divine good" (II.II.35.3). Thus, acedia undermines caritas (charity),28 by robbing a person of the joy which is its proper effect. Rather than experiencing joy, the person instead shrinks sorrowfully away from union with God precisely because she misconstrues this great good as a bad. In the second place, more simply, acedia goes awry when it manifests immoderately.29 Thomas is clear that even "a sorrow over what is genuinely bad is bad in its effect if it burdens [aggravet30] a man in such a way that it draws him back totally from good works [totaliter a bono opere retrahat]" (II.II.35.1.co).31 Clearly acedia's sluggish effects echo in this shrinking away from good works. Aquinas goes on to give an insightful explanation of the daughter vices of acedia: "no one can remain for a long time without pleasure and with sadness, [hence] it is necessary for something to arise from the sadness" (ST II.II.35.4.ad2).32 Because a person cannot stay long in such sadness or active aversion, he either (a) withdraws from what's causing the sadness or (b) passes on to other things in which to take pleasure. The latter movement (b) is so uncomplicated that it be summarized in one daughter vice, a wandering of the mind on unlawful objects (evagatio mentis circa illicita). Thomas assigns the other five daughter vices to (a), indicating that there are various ways to characterize this withdrawing, whether by flight or fight. (i) Flight from man's spiritual end is despair 25 See Aquinas (1947), STh I.II.35–9. Crucially, acedia also is the name given to a species of tristitia, which, when taken in this sense of a passion, is not necessarily morally bad. Thomas discusses the two in two separate places in the Summa: acedia qua passion in I.II.35.8, and acedia qua sin in II.II.35. 26 We do not claim that all passions in themselves are morally neutral; rather, we purposely limit the claim to all passions at the level of genus considered apart from any object (to the extent this is possible). Cf. Miner (2009, p. 93) who says, "This Article [I.II.24.4] qualifies any simple view according to which Aquinas regards the passions as neither good nor evil in themselves." For example, "Envy is a passion that is evil in its species. Defined as sorrow for another's good, envy is evil per se. It is impossible to suffer envy toward the right person, at the right time, and in the right way." 27 "Wherefore sorrow, in itself, calls neither for praise nor for blame: whereas moderate sorrow for evil calls for praise, while sorrow for good, and again immoderate sorrow for evil, call for blame. It is in this sense that sloth [acedia] is said to be a sin" (II.II.35.1.ad1, emphasis added). 28 Aquinas defines charity as "a certain friendship of man with God, founded upon a sharing of eternal blessedness. Now this sharing is not according to natural goods, but rather according to gifts freely given ... So charity can neither be in us naturally, nor by natural powers that are acquired, but only by an infusion of the Holy Spirit, who is the love of the Father and the Son, whose participation in us is created charity itself" (II.II.24.2). 29 Interestingly, (b) concerns not the object but the mode of sorrow, that is, the way in which it manifests, moderately or immoderately. And while the moderation of sorrow is done by reason, this error is different from (a), which seems to be more properly an error of reason, since it is misidentifying the good object as bad. These both, however, seem to come in degrees (How bad? How immoderate?), which makes it difficult to say how vicious any instance of acedia is (thus our use of "goes awry" as opposed to "becomes vicious"); and whether this degree of badness tracks with the distinction between acedia qua passion that is bad per se because of its object (cf. Miner 2009, p. 93), and acedia qua capital sin. (It is not clear when one becomes the other, but that may be an inherent issue of vagueness.) Perhaps Thomas's discussion of venial and mortal sin with respect to acedia may be of help here (II.II.35.3.co). 30 Meaning "weighed down." Thomas speaks generally of sorrow as metaphorically "weighing down" (I.II.37.2.co), but also two species of tristitia in particular: anxietas / angustia (I.II.35.8.arg3), and acedia (I.II.35.8.co). 31 This implies that a moderate acedia (qua passion) can be morally good, namely, when the object of moderate acedia is an evil. And a certain reading of Thomas seems to confirm this (cf. II.II.35.1.ad1). 32 Recall, sadness is fundamentally aversion to anything that presents as evil; in this case, by "the sadness" Thomas is referring to acedia, "a very special kind of such a negative reaction of the appetite...very intimately linked to the deepest roots of man's affective and volitive life" (Wenzel 1960, p. 55). Religions 2020, 11, 80 7 of 23 (desperatio). Flight from the means to that end is either (ii) pusillanimity (shrinking from spiritual hardships that accompany the "counsels"), or (iii) listlessness (torpor) concerning the precepts (shrinking from fulfillment of the commands of justice in general, as with the Decalogue). "Such flight," Wenzel puts it, "sometimes leads to a sort of inner fighting against the causes of aversion."33 (iv) Rancor is characterized by fighting against those persons who embody spiritual goods; (v) whereas malice (malitia) is that same inner battle against the spiritual goods themselves. Regardless of which daughter vice obtains, it obtains fundamentally as a result of that sadness, or aversion to, the Divine good. From this discussion, we can summarize the traditional view of acedia in the following way: it is a sorrow over or a being weighed down away from divine good, in a way that is contrary to the rest that one ought to find in God. Its twofold effect is improper rest (listlessness, idleness) and restlessness. Fundamentally, its remedy consists in proper rest in God and His Goodness. To that end, acedia's principal remedy, fortitudo, serves to strengthen the inner life through weariness and struggle, whereas its secondary remedy, manual work, can lead one to inner quietude. Aquinas's examination of its object and cause, along with his eudaimonistic framework that emphasizes man's proper end, union with God, reinforces the idea that work is dignified, especially when it is done in light of one's vocation given by God. Aquinas's account is also helpful is revealing how subtly acedia-a surreptitious logismos from its beginning-can creep from passive affect to outright willful sin. Importantly, though not obvious given its monastic origins, acedia is not unique to monks: from Cassian onward, knowledge of acedia steadily spread outward from the cloister into the wider world, where it became recognized as a common affliction among all men.34 With this in mind, we will turn to Kierkegaard's work to see how his writings help to extend and develop the concept of acedia as it manifests in the individual, from the religious to the aesthete. 3. Extending the Tradition: Acedia in Either/Or In keeping with our thesis, our examination of Either/Or reveals the following themes. First, Kierkegaard is no doubt familiar with the Christian capital vices tradition. More than this, in Either/Or, one can see from him a natural extension and development of this tradition with the presentation of different perspectives of acedia. It should go without saying that a full perspectival analysis of acedia does not appear at once in this or any single work.35 Thus, the perspectives we see in Either/Or are limited to the following: of the firsthand experience of acedia from the aesthetic life (or, "aesthetic acedia") (Vol. I), and that of the diagnosis or evaluation of aesthetic acedia as seen from both the aesthetic sphere (Vol. I) and the ethical sphere (Vol. II). Although we shall examine them individually in what follows, Volumes I and II of Either/Or should be considered as a whole. 36 Whereas Vol. I contains a collection of writings and correspondence from an unnamed aesthete who is referred to only as "A", Vol. II contains the letters to A from Judge Wilhelm.37 Both characters are creations of Søren Kierkegaard, who, of course, is the author of both volumes. In considering both volumes of Either/Or as of one piece, we can see more 33 (Wenzel 1960, p. 51). 34 As Harmless (2004, p. 373) puts it, "Cassian, more than anyone else, brought Egypt to the West." Cf. Wenzel (1960, pp. 18–23ff.) and Bloomfield (1952, pp. 69–74ff.). 35 In addition, there are certain familiar (albeit partial) aspects or elements of the traditional concept of acedia emphasized here in this work that may or may not be emphasized in Kierkegaard's other works. Specific to Either/Or, for instance, we see special attention paid to the twofold effects of acedia: laziness/listlessness and restlessness/busyness, especially as it relates to one's occupation and aversion to work, yet not explicitly how this work relates to God or divinely given vocation. 36. We use the Hong edition for both volumes. In text we cite volumes I and II as EO I and EO II, respectively. (Kierkegaard 1987a, 1987b) 37 On the one hand, it is not clear how much of A's writings are actually known to Wilhelm, and so these letters are not necessarily meant to be understood as replies. On the other hand, Kierkegaard is the origin behind both pseudonyms, so it is not unreasonable to think they are fashioned as a dialectic. Indeed, Kierkegaard removes himself even more by employing a further pseudonym, Victor Eremita, as editor of the whole work, a move which apparently provoked much consternation-cf. (McCarthy 1978, pp. 56–57). Religions 2020, 11, 80 8 of 23 clearly the continuity in Kierkegaard's own thinking, including, but not limited to, his understanding of acedia. 3.1. Volume I Through his discussion of his own state and reflection on how to deal with it, A the aesthete presents us with a distinctively aesthetic acedia. Despite obvious differences, there are deeper similarities between A's self-reported aesthetic acedia and the Christian tradition's descriptions of acedia that come into relief especially when we read the texts alongside one another.38 For example, in EO I near the beginning of the so-called Diapsalmata, 39 A starkly reports an experience of something like acedia (though he presumably does not know it by that name40): I don't feel like doing anything. I don't feel like riding-the motion is too powerful; I don't feel like walking-it is too tiring; I don't feel like lying down, for either I would have to stay down, and I don't feel like doing that, or I would have to get up again, and I don't feel like doing that, either. Summa Summarum: I don't feel like doing anything (EO I, 20).41 In addition to this vivid description, A alternates (both here in the Diapsalmata and in various later sections) between a few select terms to describe his phenomenal state: Tungsind ("heavymindedness"; "melancholy"), 42 Sorg ("sorrow"; "sadness"), 43 and Kjedsommelighed ("boredom"; "tediousness"; "weariness").44 The term Tungsind has no direct English equivalent,45 so we leave it untranslated from here onward whenever possible.46 It should be noted that "boredom" as used here conveys a deeply existential, spiritual, or psychological state. The Hongs translate Kierkegaard's choice of Kjedsommelighed in EO to the English "boredom", but it seems that Kierkegaard had in mind something much more robust than the usual connotation of "boredom". Instead of using the words 38 For longer discussions of these parallels, see (Podmore 2011, pp. 50–-67; Pattison 2013; McDonald 2009). 39 Or scraps of paper written by A, which the editor tells us "could best be regarded as preliminary glimpses into what the longer pieces develop more coherently" (1987a, EO I, 8). Diapsalmata is related to "psalm", a term roughly meaning "refrain"; it is an overt allusion to Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Cf. Furtak (2009, pp. 71–72). 40 As we see later, Judge Wilhelm expressly identifies A's condition as acedia. 41 This passage is taken from a longer journal entry which Kierkegaard himself wrote in 1837 (JP (SKS/ KJN) V 5251; Pap. II A 637), which suggests that he may have been wrestling with this very phenomenon. Kierkegaard reveals in a separate journal entry (JP (SKS/ KJN) V 5631; Pap. IV A 221) that even more of his own "aphorisms ... could have been used very well." Cf. the Hongs' historical introduction in EO I, ix. 42 "In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant-my depression [Tungsind]. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, he beckons to me, calls me aside, even though physically I remain on the spot. My depression [Tungsind] is the most faithful mistress I have known-no wonder, then, that I return the love" (EO I, 20). "Wine no longer cheers my heart; a little of it makes me sad- much, depressed [tungsindig]" (EO I, 41). 43 "I say of my sorrow [Sorg] what the Englishman says of his house: my sorrow is my castle" (EO I, 21). 44 "How dreadful boredom [Kjedsommelighed] is-how dreadfully boring; I know no stronger expression, no truer one, for like is recognized only by like. Would that there were a loftier, stronger expression, for then there would still be one movement. I lie prostrate, inert; the only thing I see is emptiness, the only thing I live on is emptiness, the only thing I move on is emptiness. I do not even suffer pain" (EO I, 37). 45 Cappelørn (2008) points out terms that are nearby, himself preferring "spleen": "The German terms Schwermut and Weltschmertz, the French term ennui, and the English terms "Byronism" and "spleen" are all designations for the world-weariness, aestheticism, and loss of values that were common themes for European romantic writers. And it is in this group of terms that the Danish Tungsind belongs" (p. 133). 46 On this score, Cappelørn (2008) writes, "if it is a cultural-linguistic fact that no English word is fully equivalent to Tungsind, Hannay's 'melancholy' is nonetheless clearly preferable to the Hongs' 'depression'" (p. 132). Cappelørn himself ultimately prefers "spleen" to either of these. We avoid using the Hongs' translation of Tungsind as "depression", in part, because of the misleading modern-day connotations associated with that word. And we do not follow Cappelørn all the way in rendering the term as "spleen" because we simply do not use that word in that sense today. For reservations on using "melancholy", see (Cappelørn 2008, pp. 132–33). Religions 2020, 11, 80 9 of 23 Kjedsomhed ("boredom") or kjedelig ("boring"), which are found elsewhere in his authorship, 47 Kierkegaard seems to have actually combined these together into Kjedsommelighed ("boringboredom"48) in order to underscore the way it deeply permeates the soul. A close reading of "The Rotation of Crops" in light of the traditional, monastic advice for dealing with acedia reveals not only Kierkegaard's familiarity with the tradition, but also what is distinctive about aesthetic acedia. To mention just a few similarities here, in The Institutes, Cassian had cautioned the brothers against idleness through a reading of St. Paul's letters, counseling that acedia is thus fought by manual labor (especially), perseverance, and staying in one's place [stabilitas loci]. Each of these three pieces of advice on resisting acedia can be seen in "The Rotation of Crops." This is all we shall say for now about aesthetic acedia according to the phenomenal axis, as we turn next to the evaluative axis.49 Taking up more space in EO I is the second axis, the diagnosis or evaluation of aesthetic acedia, specifically from the aesthetic perspective. This includes A's judgment about what his condition is, how to understand it, and ultimately how he proposes to remedy it. This is most clearly seen in the section "The Rotation of Crops," named after the method A devises for dealing with this aesthetic acedia he calls boredom [Kjedsommelighed]. To begin with, A states simply "all people are boring [kjedsommelige]" (EO I, 285). "Boredom [Kjedsommelighed] is the root of all evil" (EO I, 285), and therefore operates as a negative or repelling first principle of action that is "not merely repelling but infinitely repulsive" (EO I, 285). Contrary to received wisdom, then, idleness itself is not the root cause of one's troubles: Idleness, we are accustomed to say, is the root of all evil. To prevent this evil, work is recommended. But ... Idleness as such is by no means a root of evil; on the contrary, it is a truly divine life, if one is not bored. To be sure, idleness may be the occasion of losing one's property, etc., but the noble nature does not fear such things but does indeed fear being bored. The Olympian gods were not bored; happy they lived in happy idleness. (EO I, 289) If man's purpose is to work, A argues, then the idleness/work antithesis would be correct; but assuming, as A does, that "man's destiny is to amuse himself," the correct antithesis is actually rather boredom/amusement (EO I, 290). Put another way, while idleness can be canceled by work, boredom cannot, for work and boredom are not opposed, "as is seen in the fact that the busiest workers of all, those whirring insects with their bustling buzzing, are the most boring of all..." (EO I, 290). We should therefore attempt to cancel not idleness, but boredom, by engaging in its opposite, amusement. So far, A's evaluation of and remedy for aesthetic acedia in some ways runs counter to the Christian tradition regarding acedia. For instance, the tradition would not recommend amusement itself as a remedy. While the tradition does recommend work and manual labor, something A adamantly thinks fails, it does not recommend it solely. Importantly, that labor must be imbued with special vocational meaning, an element that, when included with work, would more likely keep boredom at bay. Perhaps this added element of meaning and worthwhileness is what A is really after in his remedy, so we must read on. Next, A discusses two rival ways to implement amusement as a solution to boredom: what individuals ordinarily do, and his own proposal. Indeed, "All who are bored cry out for change" (EO I, 291),50 but most people get it wrong when they try to fix it. This first attempt A calls "vulgar," 47 In both volumes of EO in particular, according to Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (www.sks.dk), "Kjedsommelighed" appears eighteen times, "Kjedsomhed" zero times, and "kjedelig" twice. In fact, "Kjedsomhed" appears only twice in Kierkegaard's published writings, once in his unpublished writings, and once in his journals. 48 Or perhaps "boring-ness", as suggested by Marilyn Piety (p.c.). Each of the three Danish words begins with the root "K(j)ed" and are constructed, in the usual compounding manner of Germanic languages, using various of the following suffixes: "-som" = "-some" (characterized by some specific condition or quality); "- (m)el" = "-al"; "-ig" = "ongoing" as in "-y" (n. to adj.); "-hed" = "-ness" (adj. to abstract n.). 49 There is of course more one can say about A's firsthand description of aesthetic acedia, and we shall say more, but in conjunction with later material. 50 "Forandring raaber Alle, der kjede sig, paa." Religions 2020, 11, 80 10 of 23 "inartistic," and "based on an illusion" (EO I, 291). The ordinary bored man often simply tries "changing the soil," that is, changing his external circumstances (e.g., moving to the city, eating with new cutlery, etc.) (EO I, 291–92), or else by engaging in work characterized by "indefatigable activity" merely to avoid his boredom (EO I, 289). Even a remedy this vulgar has some perceivable effect. It can awaken the will from the velleity or abulia that we see in acedia's first effect, listlessness, but this remedy is not lasting, since such temporary diversions cannot sustain amusement. Moreover, as A recognizes correctly, work simply qua indefatigable activity "shuts a person out of the world of spirit and places him in a class with the animals, which instinctively must always be in motion" (EO I, 289). This of course calls to mind acedia's second effect, restlessness (e.g., an urge to leave one's cell, to depart the cloister, etc.). Trading one effect of acedia for another, it is not surprising that this method fails to cancel boredom. In contrast to the ordinary method of "continually changing the soil" (EO I, 291), A's own proposal, "like proper crop rotation, consists in changing the method of cultivation and the kind of crops" (EO I, 292). In this way, one practices stability of place and stays with the same soil. Such limitation is crucial to the method and "the sole saving principle in the world," forcing one to be resourceful in being amused (EO I, 292). The key insight of this method is that one must change oneself instead of one's surroundings in order to avoid boredom: "one ought to develop not so much extensively as intensively" (EO I, 298). A offers three strategies for cultivating oneself so as to achieve amusement: forgetfulness, guarding against social relations, and arbitrariness. Fundamental towards achieving these three is a prior principle: "it is essential to have control over one's moods" (EO I, 298). Perseverance and calm deliberation are necessary for resourcefully and creatively cultivating amusement, lest one falls into further boredom (EO I, 291). The first strategy for guaranteeing amusement, one must become skilled in forgetfulness: To forget-this is the desire of all people, and when they encounter something unpleasant, they always say: If only I could forget! But to forget is an art that must be practiced in advance. To be able to forget always depends upon how one remembers, but how one remembers depends upon how one experiences actuality. (EO I, 293). If we are used to experiencing things too vividly in either direction, good or bad, then we will be unable to forget. So, we must dampen the vividness of our positive experiences-"nil admari [marvel at nothing] is the proper wisdom of life" (EO I, 293)-by being judicious about how we enjoy. We must only enjoy in a way that allows us to recollect, or not, on our own terms. This requires practicing a mistrust of experience and distancing ourselves from actuality so that even "when in the midst of enjoyment one looks at it in order to recollect it" (EO I, 294). "When an individual has perfected himself in the art of forgetting and in the art of recollecting in this way, he is then able to play shuttlecock with all existence" (EO I, 293). The second strategy for guaranteeing amusement, one must guard against friendships, relations, and other "superfluous thirds" (EO I, 295), ever tempering one's own expectations of happiness from others, and imbuing the insignificant with significance. A advises staying clear of the commitments of friendship (EO I, 295–96), marriage (EO I, 296–98), and official posts (EO I, 298).51 But importantly, "Even though one stays clear of official posts, one should nevertheless not be inactive but attach great importance to all the pursuits that are compatible with aimlessness; all kinds of unprofitable pursuits may be carried on" (EO I, 298).52 Indeed, "It doesn't take much to amuse a child" (EO I, 298). A thinks we ought still to vary the soil, or external circumstances; just as a farmer has many acres and must let 51 "It may be thought that such conduct leaves unpleasant recollections, that the unpleasantness consists in the diminishing of a relationship from having been something to being nothing. This, however, is a misunderstanding. The unpleasantness is indeed a piquant ingredient in the perverseness of life. Moreover, the same relationship can regain significance in another way" (EO I, 296). 52 While this seems to contradict A's previous tip, it seems nevertheless true that one's attaching great importance to something otherwise insignificant does not entail that one's experience of that thing would be vivid. Religions 2020, 11, 80 11 of 23 some lie fallow at times, so we must have some variety of life experiences. But more crucial is learning to use one's moods (perhaps an analogue to the different types of crops) with the right soil at the right time: "one must continually vary oneself, and this is the real secret" (EO I, 298). To this end, one must have control over one's moods to the degree possible, which involves recognizing the signs of a mood arising and its effect on oneself and others. Such self-control and understanding will also allow one to provoke others to amusement by influencing their moods-e.g., making a boring, sentimental person amusing by making them peevish through teasing (EO I, 299). The final strategy for guaranteeing amusement, as A explains: "Arbitrariness is the whole secret" (EO I, 299). Together with the ability to forget and to vary oneself, the agronomist of amusements can avoid boredom in any situation, by leveraging arbitrariness. "It is popularly believed that there is no art to being arbitrary, and yet it takes profound study to be arbitrary in such a way that a person does not himself run wild in it but from himself has pleasure from it" (EO I, 299). A recounts an example of an acquaintance who was prone to boring philosophical lectures during conversations. Upon discovering that he could follow the man's perspiration from its beginning on his forehead to its hanging off of the man's nose, A was amused by the man instead of bored. To practice arbitrariness, "something accidental must be made into the absolute and as such into an object of absolute admiration" (EO I, 299–300). Here, one's ability to play shuttlecock with existence releases oneself from being caught up in what is actually happening so that one can notice amusing, incidental features. Further, one's ability to vary oneself helps one be ready to be entertained by the amusements available. "The accidental outside of a person corresponds to the arbitrariness within him. Therefore, he always ought to have his eyes open for the accidental, always to be expeditus [ready] if something should come up" (EO I, 300). Thus ends A's own aesthetic evaluation of aesthetic acedia. Before we turn to the Judge's ethical evaluation of aesthetic acedia, let us see how A's account fares next to the Christian tradition. First, A certainly supplies the aesthete with a rule of life for pursuing good (i.e., amusement) and avoiding evil (i.e., boredom), 53 but similarities fade beyond this. Unlike the Desert Fathers, the aesthete recognizes no higher good than amusement, and boredom is not an expression of something deeper going wrong; it itself is the greatest evil and must be avoided. This of course runs counter to Christian monastic and Scholastic accounts of acedia, which takes God and loving him as the highest good, and separation from God as the greatest evil. Second, A correctly identifies boredom as a powerful kind of repelling force, reminiscent of the desert monk restlessly pacing the halls, avoiding work. A also rightly recognizes, like Evagrius and Cassian, that boredom will not be defeated merely by indefatigable activity, movement, work, or escape. Instead, one must remain where he is and persevere with calm deliberation. To this extent, A's theory reflects an improvement over merely "changing the soil," or one's external circumstances. But while this strategy seems to address both of acedia's effects, listlessness and restlessness, it will not do to remedy acedia sufficiently if the Christian tradition is correct about acedia reflecting a deeper spiritual problem.54 To recall A's words, to ignore this aspect is, in some sense, to "shut a person out of the world of spirit" (EO I, 289). Third, there appears to be some similarity in how both A and the Christian tradition recognize that a calling beyond oneself-whether it be sanctification, special vocation, friendship, marriage, or official post-is a contributor to acedia. Reflecting closely upon this similarity and others, such as their common recognition of being tied to something causing boredom, paradoxically illuminates for us just how different the two views really are. For A, all people are boring; it is a universal problem regardless of station, whereas the Christian tradition considers it a religious problem, which, though universal, is grounded in one's God-given vocation. A greater disparity, however, lies in the direction to which the advisor points. A points the aesthete away from these external, higher callings; the 53 As Karsten Harries (2010) points out, "the polarity of the interesting and the boring replaces the traditional polarity of good and evil; similarly, it replaces the traditional polarity of beauty and ugliness" (p. 98). 54 But of course, rather than contraindicate the Christian tradition, this only reaffirms it. Since the Christian tradition predicts that the aesthete, unconcerned with the things of heaven, will not consider spiritual solutions. Religions 2020, 11, 80 12 of 23 Christian tradition ushers him towards it. A's suggestions aim only at stirring up amusement and minimizing or avoiding ubiquitous boredom; the Christian tradition advises leaning into the boredom, with proper end in sight, so it is transformed as no longer boring. And it is here where we see the two fully come apart, because it matters infinitely what the individual is ushered towards. For this, we must mature beyond the aesthetic sphere, beginning naturally with what someone in the ethical sphere would say about aesthetic acedia. 3.2. Volume II The second volume of Either/Or contains the letters that Judge Wilhelm wrote to A. The Judge argues that for any individual there is an unavoidable either/or choice between the aesthetic life and the ethical life. But what does it mean to live [a]esthetically, and what does it mean to live ethically? What is the [a]esthetic in a person, and what is the ethical? To that I would respond: the [a]esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes. (EO II, 178). A's problem, the Judge explains, is that he is stuck in a kind of immediacy. The aesthete cannot provide a proper account of the aesthetic life because he is trapped in the moment and "can in a higher sense explain nothing" (EO II, 179). To understand the Judge's analysis of aesthetic acedia, we must understand the five important stages that constitute the aesthetic life. We only briefly review the first three stages, while the last two stages will be key for understanding the distinctiveness of an ethical analysis of acedia. Recall, as even A noted, that all aesthetic individuals assume a life-view (i.e., "a conception of the meaning of life and of its purpose") that revolves around the idea that life is meant to be enjoyed (EO II, 179). These individuals are distinguished by whatever condition they use to measure their enjoyment.55 In Stage 1, the condition is immediately qualified physically; enjoyment is defined in terms of physical conditions like health and beauty. In Stage 2, the condition is now placed outside the individual in something like wealth, honors, or falling in love. With Stage 3, the condition is internal to the individual, but she is not responsible for it in any way. For example, enjoyment is found in exercising one's talents. Before considering the fourth stage, Wilhelm points out how the first three stages have a kind of unity and coherence. Whether it be one's beauty, wealth, or talent, each of these stages revolves around a single thing. "What they build their lives upon is something simple, and therefore this lifeview is not fragmented as is the life-view of those who build upon something intrinsically multiple" (EO II, 183). Such is the next stage, which Wilhelm notes he will dwell on a bit longer. For our purposes, we note the motion of the stages is already moving the aesthete away from having a unified personality; this, we think, demonstrates the intrinsic tendency for the aesthetic life-view to disperse and fragment, which only accelerates in the final stages. In Stage 4, the idea that life is meant to be enjoyed is interpreted as "Live for your desire" (EO II, 183). Here the condition seems to be internal, but numerous external conditions (e.g., having enough money) must be in place for one to carry out this life-view. The Judge mentions the emperor Nero as a particular example of someone at this stage. 56 He claims that Nero's nature was essentially constituted by Tungsind. This is not the genius melancholy that A is familiar with. Nero's nature was [Tungsind]. In our day, it has become somewhat prestigious to be [tungsindig]; as far as that goes, I can well understand that you find this word too lenient; I 55 "But the person who says that he wants to enjoy life always posits a condition that either lies outside the individual or is within the individual in such a way that it is not there by virtue of the individual himself. I beg you to keep rather fixed the phrases of this last sentence, for they have been carefully chosen" (1987b, EO II, 179; italics in original). 56 For an in-depth and insightful discussion of this passage, see Cappelørn (2008). Religions 2020, 11, 80 13 of 23 hold to an ancient doctrine of the Church that classifies [Tungsind] among the cardinal sins. (EO II, 185). Again, Kierkegaard displays his familiarity with the capital vices tradition. In fact, in a journal entry from 1839, he discusses it explicitly, mentioning both acedia and tristitia by name.57 While this entry establishes Kierkegaard's own familiarity, along with a special interest in both of these vices; it is unclear, from Wilhelm's comments alone, whether Wilhelm is referring to acedia or tristitia.58 To gain clarity on this issue, we will need to pay close attention to Wilhelm's portrait of Nero. The Judge describes Nero as having enjoyed a vast variety of pleasures throughout his life, but as he grows older he begins to require new and diverse pleasures, "because only in the moment of pleasure does he find rest" (EO II, 186). Yet as soon as the moment of pleasure is over, Nero "yawns in sluggishness" (EO II, 186), suggesting that, rather than a true rest in God, it is rather a misplaced rest which the early Fathers had associated with acedia. Eventually, Nero loses even this ability to rest in pleasures, his soul overcome with "an anxiety that does not cease even in the moment of enjoyment" (EO II, 186), a state reminiscent of acedia's second effect, restlessness. Wilhelm locates the source of Nero's Tungsind in his being "immediate spirit" which is "ripe for immediacy" yet which fails to lay hold of immediacy: What, then, is [Tungsind]? It is hysteria of the spirit. There comes a moment in a person's life when immediacy is ripe, so to speak, and when the spirit requires a higher form, when it wants to lay hold of itself as spirit. As immediate spirit, a person is bound up with all the earthly life, and now spirit wants to gather itself together out of this dispersion, so to speak, and to transfigure itself in itself; the personality wants to become conscious in its eternal validity. If this does not happen, if the movement is halted, if it is repressed, then [Tungsindet] sets in (EO II, 188–89). Nero, for his part, had at some point come to the realization that life is more than immediate pleasure and gratification, but he ultimately dismissed this and returned to his life of immediacy. This rejection underscores Wilhelm's adamancy that Tungsind is not merely a mood that one falls into, but is a sin;59 "it is the sin of not willing deeply and inwardly, and this is a mother of all sins" (EO II, 189). Now, rather than despair of his judgment, the Judge encourages the aesthete to look on the bright side.60 Melancholy can be beneficial if it teaches a person "to bow in true humility before 57 "What in a certain sense is called "spleen" and what the mystics knew by the designation "the arid moments," the Middle Ages knew as acedia (αχηδια, aridity). Gregoria, Moralia in Job, XIII, 435: Virum solitarium ubique comitatur acedia.... est animi remissio, mentis enervation, neglectus religiosae exercitationis, odium professionis, laudatrix rerum secularium. [Wherever aridity encompasses a solitary man...... there is a lowering of the spirit, a weakening of the mind, a neglect of religious practice, a hatred of profession, a praise of secular things.] That Gregory should emphasize virum solitarium points to experience, since it is a sickness to which the isolated person [is exposed] at his highest pinnacle (the humorous), and the sickness is most accurately described and rightly emphasized as odium professionis and if we consider this symptom in a somewhat ordinary sense (not in the sense of churchly confession of sins, by which we would have to include the indifferent church member as solitarius) of self-expression, experience will not leave us in the lurch if examples are required. 20 July 1839. The ancient moralists show a deep insight into human nature in regarding tristitia among the septem vitia principalia." (JP (SKS/ KJN) I 739). 58 Not to mention, the journal entry was written during Kierkegaard's doctoral studies over two years prior to the publication of Either/Or. 59 Pieper (Pieper [1935] 1986) notes this when he discusses despair, a kind of which (despair of weakness) Pieper argues is acedia. "Today when we speak of despair we are usually referring to a psychological state into which an individual 'falls' almost against his will. As it is here used, however, the term describes a decision of the will. Not a mood, but an act of the intellect. Hence not something into which one falls, but something one posits. The despair of which we are speaking is a sin. A sin, moreover, that bears the mark of special gravity and of an intensity of evil." 60 "But the person who wants to be eminently endowed will have to tolerate my placing the responsibility upon him and his capacity to be more at fault than other people. If he looks at this in the proper light, he will not Religions 2020, 11, 80 14 of 23 the eternal power" (EO II, 189). In fact, this very movement of submission-which the Judge goes on to call "repentance" (EO II, 216)-is the only true remedy for Tungsind (EO II, 189). Finally, the Judge finally turns to Stage 5, which he calls "despair itself" (EO II, 194). Wilhelm had previously noted that all the aesthetic stages are disguised forms of despair,61 but he also thinks that despair itself is a stage of its own, and that A inhabits this stage. According to Wilhelm, despair is the recognition that one's very life and pursuits are meaningless and vain. Here we see a direct parallel with the Christian tradition, which held that despair was one of the daughter vices of acedia.62 While despair is indeed vicious, the Judge once again points out a redeeming element: despair, like Tungsind, can lead one to repentance. Thus concludes Wilhelm's ethical analysis both of aesthetic acedia as a whole and of A's more reflective aesthetic attempt, in his theory of crop rotation, to cancel aesthetic acedia. Taking Stage 4 and 5 together, it is now clearer that Wilhelm was indeed talking about acedia. Of course, the major addition at Stage 4 is the external condition: the very enjoyment the aesthete longs for is transcendent. Indeed, the aesthete at these stages has become more reflective and has progressed a bit more towards the ethical sphere. The aesthete recognizes that his desires aim outwards, but still they are not satisfied. The Judge seems to think that it is simply the failure to obtain this transcendent immediacy, without which the "immediate spirit" which is "ripe for immediacy" sloughs into sullenness as Tungsind sets in. While the Christian tradition would agree, the key absence here is the proper object, the proper good, which is God. It is insufficient, as the Judge recommends, to repent before an unnamed, presumably impersonal "eternal power"-where is the joy in that? If Aquinas is indeed correct that caritas engenders joy, it is hard to see how joy, let alone caritas itself (i.e., love of and friendship with God), has a place here. With this absence, this ethical analysis of aesthetic acedia proves to be incomplete. In sum, Either/Or presents us with a clear portrait of aesthetic acedia, both from the aesthetic (Vol. I) and the ethical perspective (Vol. II). There is some temptation to infer, from Judge Wilhelm's own claims, what an ethical acedia might look like, but we caution against this since Wilhelm is not expressly concerned with evaluating the ethical sphere. For that we turn to another work, The Sickness Unto Death. 4. Synthesizing the Tradition: Acedia in The Sickness Unto Death63 Having expanded upon the traditional account of acedia to include its aesthetic manifestation in Either/Or (1843), Kierkegaard provides through his concept of despair in The Sickness Unto Death (1849) a more comprehensive and thoroughgoing analysis of all the different manifestations of acedia: from the aesthetic, to the ethical, to the religious spheres. The boundary cases are easier to identify- aesthetic acedia in the lowest form, unconscious despair, and religious acedia in the highest form, defiant (and demonic) despair-but the manifestations in between will require a more nuanced explication. As for the two axes, we try to stay faithful to Anti-Climacus' own exposition: there are moments when he devotes more to describing than evaluating, and vice versa, so the sections below reflect this imbalance. see this to be a disparaging of his personality, even though it will teach him to bow in true humility before the eternal power" (EO II, 189). 61 "Consequently, it is manifest that every [a]esthetic view of life is despair, and that everyone who lives [a]esthetically is in despair, whether he knows it or not" (EO II, 192). 62 See Gregory (1844, Moralia in Iob, 31.45.88) and Aquinas (1947, STh II.II.35.4). In fact, Thomas's view seems to imply that despair occupies a central place among the daughter vices of acedia, given that despair is associated with the avoidance of the end (the divine good) rather than with the avoidance of certain means to that end (e.g., precepts and counsel-whose associated daughter vices would be listlessness and pusillanimity, respectively). 63 We cite the Hong edition (Kierkegaard 1980a) as SUD. Religions 2020, 11, 80 15 of 23 For Anti-Climacus,64 despair fundamentally arises as the result of a mis-relation in the elements of the self or in the self's relation to God (SUD 15). 65 Hence, a self which is not in despair is appropriately related both internally (within the self) and externally (to God). Anti-Climacus explains that despair is thus sin (SUD Pt. II) and only by its removal can a person become a fully integrated self,66 wherein "the self rests transparently in the power that established it" (SUD 14). Later on, AntiClimacus identifies this state as the state of faith (SUD 82). Although Anti-Climacus considers despair both objectively and subjectively, we, for want of space, track here with the latter, of which there are three main forms.67 First, there is unconscious despair: despair that is ignorant of being in despair. By far the most common form, those who suffer from this type have a mis-relation in the self yet are unaware of it. Beyond this, despair is conscious, where we find the second and third types of despair, distinguished respectively by the way in which the self responds to its despairing condition: the despair of weakness occurs when the self in despair does not will to be oneself, whereas defiant despair occurs when the self in despair wills to be oneself. 4.1. Unconscious Despair: Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair The form most unlike what we normally call "despair" is also the most common form of despair.68 Anti-Climacus describes those who suffer from this type of despair as being ignorant of "having a self and an eternal self" (SUD 42). "Such a despair, in comparison with more active, defiant forms, almost possesses a kind of innocence. Here the problem with the person is simply that she does not understand that she was created to be spirit."69 Usually this person will even tend to become angry when others attempt to enlighten him about the self he could become. Anti-Climacus explains: "Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (SUD 43). Asking the reader to imagine the self as a multi-level house, Anti-Climacus compares this person to one who lives only in the basement: "Every human being is a psychical-physical synthesis intended to be spirit; this is the building, but he prefers to live only in the basement, that is, in sensate categories" (SUD 43). Clearly, Anti-Climacus is describing the aesthete (SUD 45) who, caught in immediacy, is ignorant of having a self-let alone an eternal self. The parallels to aesthetic acedia as illustrated and analyzed in Either/Or are obvious. Acedia's twofold effect of listlessness and restlessness is prominent-as when Anti-Climacus points out the many different outward forms that unconscious despair, in its "spiritlessness" (SUD 45), can take: "whether the state is a thoroughgoing moribundity, a merely vegetative life, or an intense, energetic life, ... [it] is still despair" (SUD 45). Furthermore, in keeping with earlier analyses of acedia, any form of rest offered by unconscious despair is contrary to the proper rest which is available to a self free 64 Kierkegaard describes Anti-Climacus in his journals as being a "Christian on an extraordinarily high level" (JP(SKS/ KJN) VI 6433). Kierkegaard chose the pseudonym because he did not feel qualified to deliver its message. In a certain sense, Kierkegaard wanted to place himself under the judgment of the book, along with other readers. 65 In fact, Anti-Climacus begins his explication of the various forms of despair by exploring the crucial aspects of the self that must be related. He claims that the human self is a synthesis in two important dimensions: finitude/infinitude and possibility/necessity. Any time that one of these qualities is emphasized to the exclusion of its opposite, the self will find itself in despair. 66 Present in the very word despair ["Fortvivlelse"] is the notion of a natural unity being split into two ["tvi"], the self apart from God, which entails the self being split apart from oneself. 67 Anti-Climacus has two ways of explicating the different forms of despair: according to the "constituents of the synthesis" (pp. 29–42) [see fn. 44]-what can be termed the objective-and according to the level of consciousness of the person in despair (42–74)-what can be termed the subjective. These are not mutually exclusive, but are simply two ways of analyzing what is the same thing. Our discussion prioritizes the latter, since Anti-Climacus devotes more time to it and the parallels with acedia are more visible. 68 Anti-Climacus acknowledges that this form is, in keeping with common parlance, "not despair in the strict sense" (SUD 13). 69 (Evans 1990, p. 79). Religions 2020, 11, 80 16 of 23 from despair (i.e., the person who has faith). "Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) ... every such existence is nevertheless despair" (SUD 46). One might object that the connection with acedia is tenuous, that these parallels are mere superficial resemblances, chiefly because acedia's characteristic object-sorrow over the Divine good-is conspicuously absent. There are two things to say at this point. First, a person in unconscious despair is, by definition, unaware of her true condition, unaware at all that she was created to be spirit and certainly unaware of the Divine good. Consequently, it is unsurprising that we find no explicit mention of a self which, consumed as it is by the sensate, sorrows over or feels weighed down away from the Divine good. Second, a deeper analysis reveals that this form of despair does involve sorrow over a Divine good. If the human self is a relation that is established by God (cf. SUD 14), that self can be seen as a Divine good. This idea is suggested when Anti-Climacus writes, "to have a self, to be a self, is the greatest concession, an infinite concession, given to man, but it is also eternity's claim upon him" (SUD 21). When this self is not properly related to itself and to God, the result is a type of sorrow that Anti-Climacus calls despair. Thus, the object of the aesthete's despair (i.e., being split apart from God and self) is in part this Divine good-even though he is unaware of it. Unconscious despair is strange; it "cannot be defined [a]esthetically" (SUD 45), that is, understood from the aesthetic sphere. Here, Anti-Climacus turns our attention from the phenomenal axis to the evaluative axis, where we see what may be called an "ethical-religious" evaluation of aesthetic acedia.70 From this perspective, it is clear why this strange state is yet despair. "It would be stupid to deny," says Anti-Climacus, that, from the aesthetic perspective, "the natural man can and does lead a life very rich in [a]esthetic enjoyment" (SUD 45). Yet an aesthetic evaluation of aesthetic acedia is by itself insufficient for fully explaining the badness of acedia. "[T]he [a]esthetic category of spiritlessness does not provide the criterion for what is and what is not despair; what must be applied is the ethical-religious category: spirit or, negatively, the lack of spirit, spiritlessness" (SUD 45–46). So we move up. 4.2. Despair of Weakness: In Despair Not to Will to Be Oneself 71 All forms of despair from this point on are conscious despair, in greater or lesser degrees.72 Despair of weakness comes in two distinct varieties, the first of which is less severe: despair over the earthly or over something earthly (SUD 50ff.) and despair of the eternal or over oneself (SUD 60ff.). We will discuss these in turn. 4.2.1. Variety 1 Though in conscious despair, the self in the first variety of despair of weakness is very similar to that in unconscious despair. He lives in immediacy and deals in the dialectics of pleasant/unpleasant and good luck/bad luck (SUD 51). Those who are more purely immediate place their identity in external things like wealth and reputation (SUD 53). These people fall into despair when they lose a particular earthly thing and despair over that particular loss. Those who are more 70 At this point, note (again) how Kierkegaard often lumps together categories, such as the "ethical-religious" (SUD 45), from which certain theoretical complications can arise. Hence it is important not to place too much weight on the stages/spheres as clear categories. 71 Pieper (Pieper [1935] 1986; Pieper [1948] 1952) and DeYoung (2015) both hint at the connections between this form of despair and acedia, but no one seems to have spelled out the relation in much detail. 72 In order to be conscious of being in despair, Anti-Climacus thinks that the self needs to know what despair is and needs to have a certain level of self-understanding. Both of these elements of knowledge, however, come in degrees (cf. Evans 1990, p. 78); so one can experience this form of despair without a perfect understanding of despair or of oneself. Anti-Climacus also mentions that this form is more intensive than the preceding form of despair because the self has a higher degree of self-consciousness (SUD 48). Nevertheless, this despair is a step closer to the cure, since it is at least conscious of being in despair. Religions 2020, 11, 80 17 of 23 reflective place their identity in their capacities and talents, which are less external but still earthly; here one despairs "not just of this or that, but over the whole of earthly goods" (SUD 60).73 AntiClimacus claims that despair of weakness over the earthly, in either of its severities, "is the most common form of despair" (SUD 57).74 With this despair of weakness over the earthly, Anti-Climacus is describing yet another form of aesthetic acedia, very similar to the sort of reflective aesthetic acedia exhibited by the reflective aesthete A in EO, who is aware of and aims to cancel his boredom. This form of aesthetic acedia requires a higher level of consciousness. Here, one is conscious of one's despair, and to some degree conscious of oneself as spirit, but lacks an "infinite consciousness of the self" (SUD 50). The fact that this person lives a life of immediacy and mistakenly identifies her self in terms of external criteria ensures that she remains within the aesthetic sphere. Furthermore, it is her low level of consciousness regarding her self (a Divine good established by God) that produces the despair. 4.2.2. Variety 2 Despair of weakness's second variety (SUD 60ff.) is more severe and rarer (SUD 63): despair of the eternal [and] over oneself.75 "This despair," Anti-Climacus remarks, "is a significant step forward. If the preceding despair was despair in weakness, then this is despair over his weakness, while still remaining in the category" (SUD 61). He who despairs of the eternal "himself understands that it is weakness to make the earthly so important, that it is weakness to despair" (SUD 61), yet he remains frozen in place. "[I]nstead of definitely turning away from despair to faith and humbling himself under his weakness, he entrenches himself in despair and despairs over his weakness" (SUD 61). In one sense it is similar to defiant despair, since "this new despair comes from the self" rather than seemingly "from the outside" as when one loses earthly goods (SUD 62). It is still, however, classified as a despair of weakness because of the nature of the response. It is how one might react as a son who is disinherited by his father: "the self does not want to acknowledge itself after having been so weak... in despair it does not wish, so to speak, to hear anything about itself" (SUD 62). This response is far from defiantly willing to be a self.76 With this form of despair, we find Anti-Climacus' description of ethical acedia-i.e., ethical acedia as diagnosed from the religious sphere (see Figure 1). With a higher consciousness of self, this person has moved out of the aesthetic category of immediacy and seeks to become a unified self- the hallmark of the ethical sphere-yet fails to become a self. The resulting state is psychological tension. On the one hand, there "sits the self, so to speak, watching itself, preoccupied with...not willing to be itself"; on the other hand, such preoccupation means the self is "yet being self enough to love itself" (SUD 63). No longer an aesthete in immediacy, Anti-Climacus calls this state "inclosing 73 The reader will notice that this analysis closely parallels that of the judge in Either/Or II. 74 This apparently contradicts what Anti-Climacus claims earlier (SUD 45), that unconscious despair, "This form of despair (ignorance of it) is the most common in the world." There are two possible explanations. Either Anti-Climacus is restricting the scope of his later claim (SUD 57) to the kinds of despair that are recognized in common parlance as despair, in which case unconscious despair would be excluded from consideration; or perhaps Anti-Climacus means to include unconscious despair in his later claim, which he characterizes as "Despair over the earthly or over something earthly" (SUD 56). 75 Here, Anti-Climacus draws our attention to his use of 'of' in the phrase "despair of the eternal." In a footnote, he explains that what we despair over is the occasion that makes us fall into despair and can be any number of things (e.g., a bad investment, a failed marriage, etc.). On the other hand, what we despair of is "that which, rightly understood, releases us from despair: of the eternal, of salvation, of our own strength, etc." (SUD 61). Part of what makes these lower forms of despair so problematic, says Anti-Climacus, is that a person "so passionately and clearly sees and knows over what he despairs, but of what he despairs evades him" (SUD 61). 76 In Anti-Climacus' own words, "this new despair comes from the self, indirectly-directly from the self, as the counter-pressure (reaction), and it thereby differs from defiance, which comes directly from the self" (SUD 62). Religions 2020, 11, 80 18 of 23 reserve" [Indesluttethed] ... which is the very opposite of immediacy (SUD 63).77 In this state, one hides one's despair while carrying on with the externals of life like everything is normal.78 "The selfinclosing despairing person goes on living horis succesivis [hour after hour]: even if not lived for eternity, his hours have something to do with the eternal and are concerned with the relation of his self to itself-but he never really gets beyond that" (SUD 64). Anti-Climacus intimates that this form of despair marks an important point of transition-either to deeper forms of despair or to faith. One can think of this kind of despair as a crossroads of "inclosing reserve" [Indesluttethed's crossroads], whereby the self-"if it does not stop there and just mark time on the spot" (SUD 65)-may feel inclined to choose one of three paths. Going forward, if he does not move on to the first path, "the right road to faith" (SUD 65), the other paths both lead to worse forms of despair. Second, this kind of despair can intensify and become defiant despair, considered in the next section. Third, this kind of despair can "break through and destroy the outward trappings in which such a despairing person has been living out his life as if in an incognito" (SUD 65). With respect to this third path, Anti-Climacus continues, it ultimately branches into two, both of which involve an extreme form of restlessness that is characteristic of acedia: a person in this kind of despair will hurl himself into life, perhaps into the diversion of great enterprises; he will become a restless spirit whose life certainly leaves its mark, a restless spirit who wants to forget...Or he will seek oblivion in sensuality, perhaps in dissolute living; in despair he wants to go back to immediacy, but always with the consciousness of the self he does not want to be (SUD 65–66). Either branch on this third path returns the self to the aesthetic sphere: one either seeks fulfillment in one's own accomplishments or seeks oblivion in sensuality, but in both the self wants to ignore the eternal.79 Clearly a descent to the aesthetic sphere will not leave the self unmarked; it still has some higher degree of self-knowledge, "always with the consciousness of the self he does not want to be" (SUD 66)-and indeed, in his weakness, cannot bring himself to be. Hence this is far more damaging to one's soul than unconscious despair simply, because it heightens one's culpability. (And hence Anti-Climacus' disclaimer that "No despair is entirely free of defiance" (SUD 50).) Despite the self's descent to the aesthetic sphere, this state must nevertheless be recognized as a kind of ethical acedia; even though one attempts to solve one's despair by aesthetic means, one does so from a place of willful ignorance of the eternal.80 77 The Hongs translate this as "inclosing reserve," but as Evans has noted it literally means "shut-up-ness": "Such a person may be outwardly well-adjusted and sociable, but the outwardness is only a 'false door' that the true self hides behind" (Evans 1990, pp. 80–81). One wonders whether "becoming withdrawn" might also be an appropriate rendering. 78 Here, "our man in despair is sufficiently self-inclosed to keep this matter of the self away from anyone who has no business knowing about it-in other words, everyone-while outwardly he looks every bit 'a real man.' He is a university graduate, husband, father, even an exceptionally competent public officeholder, a respectable father, pleasant company, very gentle to his wife, solicitude personified to his children. And Christian?-Well, yes, he is that, too, but prefers not to talk about it, although with a certain wistful joy he likes to see that his wife is occupied with religion to her upbuilding" (SUD 63–64). 79 These branches parallel neatly with acedia's twofold effect: producing either a restless person, who desires to make some sort of impression or just to forget, or a person who seeks an improper rest in the form of a return to a lower self. Either way, the self here never attains true rest in God (cf. SUD 49). 80 We see another kind of ethical acedia when the self remains at these crossroads, remains in the ethical sphere. For this self, "who in his inclosing reserve marks time on the spot" (SUD 66) and who "entrenches himself in despair and despairs over his weakness" (SUD 61), there are two possible outcomes. The greatest danger is suicide, for the self isolates itself from others; otherwise, the completely inclosed person may confide his weakness to someone, though suicide still presents a danger (SUD 66). There is yet another connection to acedia here in the unfortunate, perhaps surprising, association between monastic acedia and suicide. As one historian remarks, "A melancholy leading to desperation, and known to theologians under the name of 'acedia,' was not uncommon in monasteries, and most of the recorded instances of mediaeval suicides in Catholicism were by monks" (Lecky 1869, pp. 55–56). Religions 2020, 11, 80 19 of 23 It is possible that a religious acedia may also be found lurking in the despair of weakness of the eternal (60ff.) which we have been discussing. One might argue the following way. Just as, by taking the third path at Indesluttethed's crossroads, ethical acedia can manifest as a return to the aesthetic sphere, so religious acedia can manifest as a return to the ethical sphere. The person of faith in the religious sphere, in contrast to the despairing person, "definitely turn[s] away from despair to faith and humbl[es] himself under his weakness" (SUD 61). Supposing that, even in the religious sphere, the person of faith is presented with fresh opportunities to realize her own weakness, she faces the decision all over again: she can remain in a state of humility and faith, or she can fall into despair over her weakness, which would involve a return to the ethical sphere.81 Perhaps this is what AntiClimacus has in mind in Part Two with the sin of despairing over one's sin (SUD 109ff.).82 4.3. Defiant Despair: In Despair to Will to Be Oneself With the next form of despair-defiant despair-we encounter a more intensive despair which requires the will's active participation. While it is true that "No despair is entirely free of defiance" (SUD 50), defiant despair is characterized by its defiance. Rather than passive lack of willing ("not to will to be oneself", whether velleity or abulia as in acedia's first effect, listlessness), it is active willfulness ("to will to be oneself"). Indeed, one arrives here via the second path at Indesluttethed's crossroads: no longer in immediacy, the self in inclosing reserve is the subject of despair which intensifies to become defiant despair. Defiant despair, Anti-Climacus says, is "really despair through the aid of the eternal," albeit "the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self" (SUD 67). Rather than taking the first path, where "also through the aid of the eternal ... the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself" (SUD 67; cf. Mt. 16.26, Mk. 8.36), the self in defiant despair "is unwilling to begin with losing itself but wills to be itself" (SUD 67). What is this self it wills to be? Certainly not the self given to him: no, "he himself wants to compose his self" (SUD 68). At this level of despair, the self is more conscious of "what despair is and that one's state is despair" (SUD 67); likewise, the self is more conscious that it is an infinite self. "This infinite self, however, is really only the most abstract form, the most abstract possibility of the self" (SUD 68). Here the self imagines, in its own estimation, what perfect self it could be-yet with no input from its Creator, "severing the self from any relation to a power that has established it, or severing it from the idea that there is such a power" (SUD 68). Instead, it "wants to be master of itself or to create itself, to make his self into the self he wants to be" (SUD 68). Once again, cases of defiant despair come in degrees of severity.83 In less severe cases, the self is an "acting self," actively courting "imaginative constructions" of itself. In more severe cases, the (apparently more mature) self is "acted upon" and passively hindered by the temporal;84 overestimating this or that temporal difficulty or 81 The robustness of this possibility seems to hinge upon both (a) what one's theological commitments will permit and (b) just what one makes of the religious sphere (i.e., what is it to definitely turn away from despair?). 82 No doubt the comparisons are getting more and more complex the higher one goes, but this is no fault of Kierkegaard. This complexity arises from the Christian tradition itself, which, as we discussed in Section 1, identified acedia as a capital vice-associating it with numerous "offspring" vices. Thus, complexity arises in Anti-Climacus' analysis because going further up the degrees of despair, it is more difficult to tell whether he is describing phenomena the tradition identifies as acedia proper or one of acedia's daughter vices. So, while Anti-Climacus may in his psychological analysis of despair include these further vices of acedia along with acedia proper within a single kind of despair, we can still conceptually distinguish between them and note that acedia proper serves as the origin for these others. Returning to where we left off, then, it becomes easier to digest how the higher, more willful kinds of despair are still, at their roots, kinds of acedia. 83 This division into less and more severe defiant despair parallels the preceding tier, despair of weakness, with its division of despairing over the earthly and despairing of the eternal, respectively. 84 Though it seems less defiant, here the self is being "acted upon" by the temporal because it is more drawn to the eternal. A refusal of the eternal's help despite this marks this state as more defiant. Religions 2020, 11, 80 20 of 23 imperfection, it despairs of the eternal's help and consolation (SUD 70). In both, however, the self wills to be oneself.85 We believe, especially considering the heightened awareness, and subsequent rejection, of the infinite self as given by an eternal Sovereign power, that this level of defiant despair approaches the mortal sin of acedia. Acedia is a mortal sin, properly speaking, when it is "complete" [perfecta]-i.e., when one's reason has consented to the act (ST II.II.35.3.co).86 When this happens, reason "consents in the dislike, horror and detestation of the Divine good, on account of the flesh utterly prevailing over the spirit" (ST II.II.35.3.co). Anti-Climacus himself seems to affirm the distinction when he says, in his discussion of the connection between despair and sin, "sin is not the turbulence of flesh and blood, but is the spirit's consent to it" (SUD 82). It is difficult to say whether with this acedia one properly inhabits the religious sphere- especially Religiousness B (cf. CUP 555ff.)-nevertheless, we shall use the nomenclature religious acedia to describe acedia at the level of defiant despair. It must be said, however, that not all instances of religious acedia are mortal sin. As Thomas acknowledges, acedia is found even in "perfected men": "In saintly men one finds some incomplete movements of acedia, which nonetheless do not reach all the way to the consent of reason" (ST II.II.35.3.ad3). This is perhaps the case with the possible religious acedia we discussed earlier with respect to despair of weakness; its being a venial sin, "a mere beginning of sin in the sensuality alone, without attaining to the consent of reason" (II.II.35.3.co), would explain why it is better classified as weakness than as defiance. 4.4. Demonic Despair: In Despair to Will to Be One's Own Self87 Demonic despair is intensified defiant despair, at the highest level of consciousness, aware of God and of his self as given by God, but utterly rejecting the whole thing. "Himself is what he wills to be. He began with the infinite abstraction of the self, and now he has finally become so concrete that it would be impossible to become eternal in that sense; nevertheless, he wills in despair to be himself" (SUD 72). The self here becomes sour and enraged.88 It seems entry to demonic despair comes via that defiant despair which despairs of the eternal. Wishing to transcend the temporal, he is nevertheless hampered by some particular pain or distress "that does not allow itself to be taken away from or separated from his concrete self" (SUD 72) And so he obsesses over this torment until finally it becomes a demonic rage. "Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting; now it is too late" (SUD 72). Here, Indesluttethed becomes so inclosing, so reserved, it "could be called an inwardness with a jammed lock" (SUD 72). Such a picture of active and informed rejection of the Divine good in exchange for one's own self can be nothing short of the mortal sin of acedia. 5. Conclusions We began this paper by pointing out that numerous connections have been made between Kierkegaardian concepts and the capital vice of acedia, and that there is a need for clarity and consensus in the project. We have taken a small step toward this goal by looking at two of Kierkegaard's texts which offer the most direct parallels with acedia. In Either/Or, we saw that the notions of Tungsind and Kjedsommelighed seemed to capture all of the important features of the traditional conception of acedia. Similarly, the various forms of despair in The Sickness Unto Death 85 Anti-Climacus explains, "But this is also a form of the despair, to be unwilling to hope in the possibility that an earthly need, a temporal cross, can come to an end. The despairing person who in despair wills to be himself is unwilling to do that." (SUD 70–71). 86 Otherwise, "if the sin be a mere beginning of sin in the sensuality alone, without attaining to the consent of reason" (II.II.35.3.co), then it is merely a venial sin. 87 To borrow a locution from Jeff Hanson. Although Anti-Climacus uses the same for this as with the other kinds of defiant despair-"despair to will to be oneself" (SUD 68)-it is clear that he has in mind something quite strong. Instead of "oneself", abstractly, the self wills to be "himself" concretely (SUD 72). 88 Curiously, Wenzel points to a common Scholastic pseudo-etymology for acedia which had impact on the tradition: acidus ("sour"), at one time its "standard derivation" (Wenzel 1960, p. 54). Religions 2020, 11, 80 21 of 23 captures those important features as well. While the parallels are strong in each case, it might seem that we have merely contributed to the disarray that has characterized the project of bringing Kierkegaard into conversation with the traditional view of acedia. There are two things to be said at this point. First, as this paper has revealed, a certain level of disarray is appropriate. Kierkegaard is clearly addressing the phenomenon of acedia in different ways and with different terminology. Second, this disarray is precisely what makes Kierkegaard's view of acedia so insightful and illuminating. He does not examine the phenomenon from one perspective and then move on. Instead, he recognizes the complexities of acedia and seeks to appreciate them in his analysis. Part of the genius of Kierkegaard is to examine different spheres of life from the inside, granting them a kind of integrity without simply reducing them to another sphere's analysis. The acedia found in each sphere is similar. Kierkegaard helps us see the perspectival nature of acedia by examining each form on its own terms and from higher spheres. Thus, Kierkegaard's analysis helps us avoid the temptation of reducing the morally and experientially complex acedia into a single phenomenon which fails to do justice to the diverse manifestations. Thus, in Either/Or we encounter a brilliant depiction of the phenomenon as it appears in the aesthetic life (Part I) and an ethical analysis of that depiction (Part II). Then, in The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus presents religious analyses of the phenomenon in each sphere of life. He elucidates an aesthetic version of acedia in two forms of despair: despair that is ignorant of being despair and the first variety of despair in weakness. The second variety of despair in weakness provides an analysis of acedia as it can appear in the ethical or religious spheres. The presence of faith is the criterion for determining which type of acedia is present: if the despair comes after the state of faith, it is religious acedia. While each analysis is important, Kierkegaard gives us reason to prioritize the last. In discussing the idea of spiritlessness in The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-Climacus makes the following remarks: the [a]esthetic conception of spiritlessness by no means provides the criterion for judging what is despair and what is not, which, incidentally, is quite in order, for if what is spirit cannot be defined [a]esthetically, how can the [a]esthetic answer a question that simply does not exist for it...No, the [a]esthetic category of spiritlessness does not provide the criterion for what is and what is not despair; what must be applied is the ethical-religious category (SUD 45). Thus, while the earlier analyses contain important insights, only the perspective represented by Anti-Climacus can analyze the phenomenon of acedia in all its manifestations. In conclusion, Kierkegaard's perspectival discussions of acedia make an important contribution to our understanding of this perennial topic for two reasons. First, Kierkegaard fills a lacuna in the conceptual analysis by exploring the ways in which acedia appears outside the religious life. For the Desert Fathers and for Aquinas, discussions of acedia were limited to the struggles of believers. Second, the perspectival character of Kierkegaard's analysis gives us a much better understanding of the phenomenon. This feature of his account can be extremely helpful in our attempts to counsel those who are in the grip of this destructive vice.89 Author Contributions: Conceptualization, J.B., B.D. and D.M.; writing-original draft preparation, B.D., J.B. and D.M.; writing-review & editing, D.M., J.B. and B.D. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. Funding: This research received no external funding. Acknowledgments: The authors wish to express gratitude to C. Stephen Evans for comments on earlier versions of this paper and for his several graduate seminars on Kierkegaard. Conflicts of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest. 89 Though we have not addressed it much in this paper, Kierkegaard has much to offer on the topic of the remedies for acedia. We hope to consider this aspect of his view in future work. Religions 2020, 11, 80 22 of 23 References Aquinas, Thomas. 1947. Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas Aquinas. 5 vols. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Bros. Press. Bloomfield, Morton W. 1952. The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to The History of A Religious Concept, With Special Reference To Medieval English Literature. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press. Cappelørn, N. J. 2008. Spleen Essentially Canceled-Yet a Little Spleen Retained. Translated by K. Brian Söderquist. In Ethics, Love, and Faith in Kierkegaard. 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Bad by Nature: An Axiological Theory of Pain This chapter defends an axiological theory of pain according to which pains are bodily episodes that are bad in some way. Section 1 introduces two standard assumptions about pain that the axiological theory constitutively rejects: (i) that pains are essentially tied to consciousness and (ii) that pains are not essentially tied to badness. Section 2 presents the axiological theory by contrast to these and provides a preliminary defense of it. Section 3 introduces the paradox of pain and argues that since the axiological theory takes the location of pain at face value, it needs to grapple with the privacy, self-intimacy and incorrigibility of pain. Sections 4, 5 and 6 explain how the axiological theory may deal with each of these. Before starting, two methodological caveats are in order. First, the goal is here to understand what pains are: we want to spell out the nature of pains, that is, their essence or real definition (Fine, 1994). Perhaps that nature is multifaceted: perhaps pains have several essential features. To express these, I shall use the following expressions interchangeably: "one essential feature of pain is to be F", "pains are essentially F", "part of the nature of pains is to be F", "what it is to be a pain is in part to be F".1 Second, the following purports to shed light on the nature of pain from the stance of descriptive metaphysics. One working assumption is therefore that at least part of the nature of pain is correctly captured by our pre-theoretical conceptions. Ordinary thinking about pain cannot be completely misguided (on pain of not being about pain), and may even prove subtler than expected. 1. Two dogmas about pain Contemporary literature on pain tends to agree on two broad views about the nature of pain. The first may be called "ExperienceDependence": Experience-Dependence: part of the nature of pains is to be either experiences of bodily episodes, or experienced bodily 1See Correia (2006) on such generic essentialist statements. episodes.2 That pains are by nature experiences of bodily episodes is a view endorsed in the IASP definition of pain, and constitutes the common denominator of a wide variety of theories of pain such as perceptualism (Armstrong, 1993; Pitcher, 1970) evaluativism (Helm, 2002; Cutter and Tye, 2011; Bain, 2012; this volume) and recent adverbialist accounts (Aydede, this volume). The second way to essentially connect pains with experiences is to identify pain with experienced bodily episodes. Thus pains may be equated to experienced physical bodily processes (Smith et al., 2011), to mind-dependent bodily sense-data (Jackson, 1977), or to some experienced sui generis bodily pain-quality on a par with pressures and temperatures. Note that even when reference is made to some physical episodes or qualities which, contrary to sense-data, may exist independently from experiences thereof, pains are not equated to such physical episodes or qualities simpliciter, but to such episodes or qualities qua experienced. All in all, the first standard assumption about pain is that if we scrutinize the nature of pain, some experience will always be found, either because pain is itself an experience, or because pain is essentially the object of some experience. Experiences - or mental cognates: consciousness, feeling, perception...- necessarily figure in pain's definiens. The second, perhaps even more widely shared, assumption about pain is that if we scrutinize the nature of pain, no value will ever be found. Pains are essentially non-axiological phenomena. Call that second standard assumption "Value-Independence": Value-Independence: it is not part of the nature of pains to be bad. It is not in the essence of pain to be value-laden. Pain's badness is not part of pain's nature. Value-Independence may be rephrased in the following way. Let us use "painfulness" as a topic-neutral term meant to capture the property, whatever it is, which makes a (bodily or mental) episode be a pain: Painfulness: the property, whatever it is, in virtue of which an episode is a pain. 2I shall eschew talk of consciousness to avoid vexing terminological issues, but the idea may be rephrased by saying that a pain either involves (i) the transitive consciousness of some bodily episode or (ii) a bodily episode of which one is transitively aware. By stipulation, then, pains are painful episodes. In this terminology, Value-Independence amounts to saying that painfulness is not a value. Is Value-Independence really an orthodox assumption? Two objections may be raised against that proposal. The first stresses that pains are widely held to be necessarily bad. This is true, but it is important to see that pains can be necessarily bad without being essentially bad. Compare with knowledge. Although knowledge is often held to be necessarily good, knowledge is scarcely ever defined in terms of its goodness. The same holds true of pain, following Value-Independence. When philosophers insist that pain is always bad, they do not want to suggest that "being bad" is part of the definiens of pain. In Fine (2002)'s terms, "It is no part of what it is to be pain that it should be bad". Rather, the nature of pain is held to constitute the supervenience basis or ground of the badness of pain. It does not include that badness. This standard and often tacit assumption is clearly spelled out by Zangwill (2005): "Pain necessitates (or suffices for) badness even though it is not part of pain's essence (or nature or being or identity) to be bad." A second objection to the present claim that Value-Independence is orthodox is that evaluativism, one chief contemporary theory of pain, does analyze pains in term of values. Evaluativism (Helm, 2002, Cutter and Tye, 2011, Bain, 2012) accounts for pains by appealing to experiences representing some bodily episodes (disturbances, damages...) as being bad for us. It is true indeed that evaluativism uses value-terms in its analysans of pain. But, first, these value-terms lie within the scope of a non-factive psychological connective. "Experiencing x as bad" does not entail "x's being bad". Hence, although pains, according to evaluativism, are essentially dependent on something feeling bad, they are not essentially dependent on anything being bad. Second, even when such evaluations are veridical, the value that is then actually exemplified is not a value of pains, but of their object, of what pains are about - typically, bodily damages (Bain, 2012). Thus Value-Independence is in fact subscribed to even by evaluativists about pain. To claim that it is part of the nature of pain to represent its object as being bad is not to claim that it is part of the nature of pain to be bad. Representing bodily disturbances as bad constitutes, according to the standard evaluativist picture, the supervenience basis or ground of pain's badness. Pain's badness, here again, is a consequence, but not a part, of pain's nature. On the whole, neither the view that pains are necessarily bad nor evaluativism contradicts Value-Independence. That ValueIndependence represents the orthodox view is reflected in the division of labor within the field: psychologists, neuroscientists and philosophers of mind study the nature of pain; moral philosophers and value theorists try to shed light on its value. By wrapping Experience-Dependence and Value-Independence together, one arrives at a fairly orthodox position about pains that could be called "Pain Psychologism": Pain Psychologism: It is in the nature of pains to be experiences or experienced, but it is not in the nature of pains to be bad. 2. The Axiological Theory of Pain I believe that both Experience-Dependence and ValueIndependence are mistaken: pains do not essentially depend on experiences, but they do essentially depend on value. Call this antipsychologism about pain: Pain Anti-Psychologism: It is neither in the nature of pains to be experiences nor to be experienced, but it is in the nature of pains to be bad. To get to the version of Pain Anti-Psychologism to be defended here, let us first zoom out so as to consider the broader class of unpleasant or disagreeable sensations, which includes pains, but also dizziness, tiredness, itches, prickles, nauseas, etc. (Corns, 2014). Being painful, accordingly, is only one way of being disagreeable. Trivially, what all disagreeable sensations have in common is that they are disagreeable. Value-Independence holds that disagreeableness is a mental, non-axiological property. I believe, on the contrary, that what all these disagreeable bodily sensations have in common is that they are bad in some way. Disagreeableness is an axiological, non-mental property. More precisely: Axiological Theory of Disagreeable Sensations: x is a disagreeable sensation of S=df x is an episode in S's body which is finally, personally and pro tanto bad for S. Disagreeableness is the final, personal, pro tanto and negative value of bodily episodes. Let me explain. To say that pains and other disagreeable sensations are finally bad is to say that they are not instrumentally bad: pains are bad in themselves, independently of the value of their effects. Pain may well accrue some instrumental value as well, but such an instrumental value is typically positive.3 3The concept of final value is distinct from the concept of intrinsic value. An intrinsic value is a value that supervenes on the intrinsic properties of its bearers. A To say that pains or other disagreeable sensations are personally bad, by contrast to being bad simpliciter, is to say that their badness is related to the subject of the pain: a pain is bad for its subject, in a way it is not for others. Personal values should not be conflated with subjective values: some things may be bad for Julie (a poison, say) without her knowing or experiencing that they are bad for her (Rønnow-Rasmussen, 2011). Note that the axiological theory is compatible with many different accounts of final personal values. Pain's badness may be taken to be a primitive non-natural property, analyzed in in terms of fitting-attitudes (Rønnow-Rasmussen, T., 2011), in terms of aptness to harm (Cutter and Tye, 2011; see Zimmerman 2009 for a defense of the symmetrical view that personal goodness should be analyzed in terms of benefit), etc. To say that pains or other disagreeable sensations are bad pro tanto, by contrast to being bad in toto, amounts to saying that pains are not necessarily bad overall. Perhaps pains are good or neutral on the whole, that is, all things considered - for instance because of their positive instrumental value. Likewise a medicine may be bad with respect to its taste, but good overall, because it saves life. This way of characterizing the disvalue of pain and other disagreeable sensations is generally accepted (see e.g. Goldstein, 1989). But, as seen above, the standard take is that such final, personal pro tanto negative values are not essential to pain and other disagreeable sensations, but only necessary to them. In accordance with Pain Psychologism, disagreeableness is typically considered a non-axiological, mental property, which constitutes the supervenience basis of pain's disvalue. The Axiological theory maintains by contrast that disagreeableness is a negative value, so that being bad is part of what it is to be a disagreeable sensation. To get an axiological account of pains from such an axiological account of disagreeable sensations, one simply needs to specify further the way in which bodily episodes are bad. Disagreeableness, as a personal final pro tanto disvalue of bodily episodes, is a thin value. Painfulness, I submit, is a thicker value, a value with more descriptive content. Being painful is a way of being disagreeable, that is, a way of being finally personally bad. As there are two main ways to get thick concepts from thin ones (see e.g. Tappolet, 2004; Elstein and Hurka, 2009; Roberts, 2011), there are two main ways to arrive at painfulness from disagreeableness. The first is to argue that what makes painfulness thicker than disagreeableness cannot be final value is a value that is not instrumental. Some final values may be extrinsic (Rabinowicz & Rønnow-Rasmussen, 2000). This may be the case of disagreeableness: if disagreeableness is a personal value, it supervenes not only on the intrinsic properties of the bodily episodes it accrues to, but also on relations between such episodes and the subject to which that body belongs. disentangled. Painfulness would be irreducibly thicker than disagreeableness: it would be a primitive thick value of the personal, pro tanto final kind. The second is to argue that the descriptive content of painfulness may be disentangled further (for instance, in terms of the kind of bodily episodes it accrues to - some possible candidates being bodily disturbances, damages, disorders, threats thereof, intense pressures or extreme temperatures). I shall here remain neutral on this issue and will only assume that painfulness is a thick value falling under the thinner value of disagreeableness. Axiological Theory of Pain (ATP): x is a pain of S=df x is an episode in S's body which is finally, personally and pro tanto bad in the relevant way for S. In other words, a pain is a painful bodily episode, where being painful is understood as a thick value falling under the thin final personal pro-tanto value of being disagreeable. The ATP is a version of anti-psychologism about pain. The term "experience" does not figure in pain's definiens, but the term "badness" does - and does not figure in the scope of any attitude. Using again "painfulness" as a topic-neutral term to denote the property, whatever it is, in virtue of which an episode is a pain, the contrast between the ATP and Pain Psychologism may be represented as follows: Although unorthodox, the view that algedonic properties such as pleasantness, unpleasantness, disagreableness or painfulness are value properties is not unprecedented. It has been embraced in various versions by Meinong (1972: 91, 95), Scheler (1973: 97, 105), Hartmann (1932, vol. 1: 131-2, vol. 2: 160), Von Wright (1963, chap. 4), Goldstein (1989; 2000), Mendola (1990), Rachels (2000), Hewitt (2008) and Mulligan (2009). Here is Von Wright: Most writers in the past regard pleasure as either some kind of sensation or as something between sensation and emotion. Moore, Broad, and the nonnaturalists in general take it for granted that pleasantness is a 'naturalistic' attribute of things and states and not an axiological term. This, I think, is a bad mistake. (Von Wright, 1963: 63) Here are two initial motivations in favor of the ATP. The first is that in the standard psychologist picture, painfulness and pains' badness end up being phenomenologically redundant. The badness of a pain is not presented as an additional property, on top of its being a pain. Insofar as phenomenology is a good guide to the nature of pain, the distinction between the pain-making property of pains and the value of pain does not capture any genuine difference: P1 Our typical experiences of pains present us with pains as they are. (Experiences of pains are not systematically misleading.) P2 Our typical experiences of pains present us with painfulness - the property, whatever it is, in virtue of which pains are pains. (Pains are experienced as such, not as smells or sounds.) P3 Our typical experiences of pains present us with pains as being bad. Pains feel bad. P4 Our typical experiences of pains do not present us with the badness of pains as distinct from, and additional to, their painfulness. Pains are not experienced as being painful and, on top of that, bad. C Pains' badness is not distinct from painfulness. A similar argument is put forward by Goldstein (2000) with respect to pleasure, to the effect that pleasure's goodness is essential to it. The second motivation in favor of the ATP is that equating the essential property of pains with a value helps to solve the heterogeneity problem of pains - the problem of identifying what the multifarious kinds of bodily pains have in common: what is the sensory resemblance between the intense freezing pain of an almost frozen foot and the diffuse hot pain of an sunburned back? (Clark, 2006) If painfulness is construed a non-axiological property or quality, this problem seems indeed intractable. But equating painfulness with a value paves the way for plausible answer: what all bodily pains have in common is being bad for their subject. Clark puts his finger on that solution: For my part, when I reflect on these episodes of pain, the only common quality I can find in the feelings so designated seems to be that expressed by the general term 'bad' or 'aversive' (Clark, 2006) Clark does not endorse the ATP, however - for him, what all pains have in common in that their subject is disposed to avoid them. But it is telling that he naturally uses "bad" to capture the property common to all pains. As it happens, many answers to the heterogeneity problem -what all pains have in common is to be averted, to be worthy of being averted, to be disliked...- echo wellknown reductionist strategies with respect to values. A possible diagnosis is that such theories are presenting as a single account what it is fact the conjunction of two theories: an axiological theory of pain surreptitiously parceled with a reductionist theory of values. In the rest of this paper, I want to argue that on top of avoiding the phenomenological redundancy of pain's badness, and of providing a neat solution to the heterogeneity problem of pains, the ATP paves the way for a promising way of handling the vexing paradox of pain. 3. The ATP and the Paradox of Pain Are pains in the mind or in the body? This question raises the famous paradox of pain - acutely described in Hill, 2005; this volume; Aydede, 2009; 2013; this volume. The three following features of pain suggest, first, that pains should be in the mind: Privacy: Only the subject of a pain can directly access it. If Julie has a pain, John cannot feel Julie's pain (in the way Julie does; see De Vignemont's chapter, on accessing the pain of others, this volume). Self-intimacy: Pains are necessarily felt or experienced. If Julie has a pain, Julie feels the pain she has (see Pereplyotchik's chapter on pain and consciousness, this volume). Incorrigibility: Feeling or experiencing a pain entails having a pain. If Julie feels that she has a pain, Julie has a pain (see LanglandHassan's chapter on pain and incorrigibility, this volume). But a fourth feature of pains suggests that pains are not mental: namely, pains seem to be located in the body. Since mental episodes do not, from a descriptive standpoint, have bodily locations (although their reductive basis may have one, such as the brain), pain's bodily location runs afoul of the view that pains are mental. The paradox of pain is thus that the Privacy, Self-Intimacy and Incorrigibility of pains seem irreconcilable with their bodily location. The standard way of handling the paradox is to give priority to the three mental aspects of pains, by endorsing ExperienceDependence, and to try to account, one way or another, for the phenomenon of pain location. The ATP takes the opposite route: take pain's location at face value, and try to explain Privacy, Self-Intimacy and Incorrigibility in some other way. Rejecting Experience-Dependence on behalf of the location of pain is not an unprecedented move. Stumpf (1928) argues - tracing back his view to Malebranche - that pains are neither experiences nor emotions, but located qualities on a par with sounds and colors. As Bain (2007) usefully recalls, within analytic philosophy, the view that pains are objective conditions of the body has been endorsed or suggested by Cornman (1977); Graham and Stephens (1985); Newton (1989). More recently, Reuter (2011) and Reuter, Philips and Sytsma (2013) have argued on experimental grounds that in the folk conception, pain is an objective bodily condition rather than an experience or sense-datum. Hill (2005; this volume) argues that at least one concept of pain is that of a bodily disturbance. The ATP therefore belongs to the family of theories that equate pains with some objective bodily conditions rather that with mental states. But contrary to other objectivist theories of pain, the ATP equates pains with value-laden bodily conditions. Thanks to this, I shall now argue, the ATP is better suited than other objectivist theories to deal with the Privacy, Self-Intimacy and Incorrigibility of pains. More precisely, under the ATP: • Privacy can be accounted for by relying on the axiological distinction between personal and impersonal values; • Self-intimacy can be accounted for by appealing to the metaphysical distinction between modal and essential accounts of ontological dependence. • Incorrigibility can be explained away thanks to the psychological distinction between pain and suffering. 4. Tackling Privacy According to the ATP, the value of pain is personal: Julie's pain is not bad simpliciter (as are moral values) but bad for her, in a way it is not bad for Paul. That pain's essential badness is personal is, I suggest, what explains pain's essential Privacy. To get Privacy from personal badness, one needs to adopt a further but plausible claim about the epistemology of personal values: the only ways to directly access the final badness of x for Julie is to be Julie. Paul can only indirectly access what is good for Julie, by putting himself in Julie's shoes. Julie has privileged access to what is good for her. Accessing what is good for her requires first empathizing with her (Rønnow-Rasmussen, 2011: 60). Since on the ATP personal badness is essential to pains, pain's Privacy holds true of pain in virtue of its axiological constituent. In other words, because it is in the nature of pain to be personally bad, a pain can only be directly accessed by the person for whom it is bad. It should be stressed that such a proposal by no means entails that pains are Experience-Dependent. As stressed above, that her pain is bad for Julie does not entail that Julie's pain is bad in her eyes, nor that she experiences her pain as bad. The ATP entails that pains are person-dependent, not that they are experience-dependent. The following analogy may help shed light on the present proposal. Pains, as the ATP understands them, share many features with reflections - e.g. the reflection of the moon on the sea. Thus, once personal values are recognized as essential ingredients of pains, pains accrue some metaphysical perspectivality and, consequently, some epistemological privacy, which closely resemble those of reflections. Metaphysically, first, reflections are dependent on a viewpoint. This notwithstanding, reflections are independent from their being experienced. Reflections are not mere appearances in our mind, purely intentional objects. That reflections do not depend on our experiences of them is shown by the following facts: (i) experiences of reflections can be veridical or illusory (ii) closing one's eyes does not destroy the reflection of the moon at the viewpoint one occupies (iii) contrary to mind-dependent objects, reflections can be can be photographed4 (iv) reflections may cause warming and even fires. In the very same way that reflections are viewpoint-dependent but experience-independent, pains, thanks to their essential personal value, are subject-dependent but not experience-dependent. Second, because of their metaphysical perspectivality, reflections are epistemologically private in the sense of being directly accessible only from the very point of view on which they essentially depend. Here again, the analogy with pains is quite strong. In the same way than the reflection of the moon at a viewpoint can only be directly seen from that viewpoint, the badness of a pain for a person can only be directly felt by that person. And in the same way that to access the moon's reflection from Julie's viewpoint one has to imagine oneself occupying Julie's viewpoint, to access Julie's pain one has to put oneself in her shoes. Thus pains- qua personally bad -,like 4As Russell, 1914, liked to recall in connection with closely similar examples, "The photograph cannot lie". reflections, are private without being experience-dependent. 5. Tackling Self-Intimacy Self-Intimacy, on the face of it, straightforwardly entails Experience-Dependence: if pains cannot exist without being experienced, then, trivially, pains depend on experience. A first reaction, on behalf of the ATP, is simply to reject SelfIntimacy by defending the possibility of unfelt pains (see e.g. Palmer, 1975; Pereplyotchik, this volume). Although I sympathize with this line of thought, I am willing to grant Self-Intimacy so as to suggest that, under the ATP, it can be reconciled with ExperienceIndependence. The starting idea is that the above argument from Self-Intimacy to Experience-Dependence relies on a flawed conception of ontological dependence (Fine, 1995; Lowe, 2001; Correia, 2006). Suppose, as some old Catholic representations have it, that God sees everything. God being a necessary being, this entails that nothing can exist without being seen by God. Yet we do not want to conclude from this that everything is sense-data of God, that everything depends on God's seeing. The reason is, to paraphrase Fine (1995), that the source of the necessity in question does not lie in the dependent nature of the world, but in the necessary and omniscient nature of God. That x cannot exist without y does not yet establish that x ontologically depends on y. This impossibility has yet to flow from the nature of x. This paves the way for the following account of Self-Intimacy, compatible Experience-Independence. Pains are indeed necessarily felt, but the source of this necessity does not lie in pain's nature. Rather, it lies in the pain-tracking nature of consciousness. Consciousness is, with respect to pains, like God with respect to the world: it feels all of them. Thus, the reason why there are no unfelt pains is not that pains are experience-dependent but that consciousness is pain-attracted. Why should it be so? Objectivist accounts of pains that accept Value-Independence have no clear answer available. If pains are on a par with sounds, smells, colors or other physical events, there is no reason why consciousness should track pains more than these.5 If, on the other hand, pains are essentially bad for us, it is no wonder that pains attract consciousness. One of the essential functions of consciousness could be to monitor what is finally (dis)valuable for us. This proposal faces however the following immediate objection: 5 See Findlay (1961: 177) for a converging argument with respect to the motivational power of pains. even if consciousness tracks by nature things that are bad for us, there is no guarantee that such things will lie within its field. Thus something finally bad for Julie may happen in her toe, but because of some nociceptive defect, Julie may fail to experience it. The ATP seems to entail that this finally bad episode would be an unfelt pain, thereby contradicting Self-Intimacy. Self-Intimacy may however be rescued by restricting what counts as Julie's body. One may argue that if something bad for her is going on in Julie's toe, and that she cannot feel it, then this toe is not really hers. The parts of our body in which no algedonic sensations can be felt - such as the tips of our hairs, nails or teeth - are in one sense not ours: they do not belong to our affective body (De Vignemont and Massin, 2015). If dysfunctions of the nociceptive systems modify the boundaries of the body that counts as ours, pain may be necessarily felt without being essentially felt. 6. Tackling Incorrigibility I have argued that the ATP is compatible with - and even helps explain - Privacy and Self-Intimacy. My proposal for dealing with Incorrigibility - experiencing a pain entails having that pain - is different: I shall argue that Incorrigibility is false but that the ATP helps to disclose the grain of truth underlying it. The case against Incorrigibility is relatively straightforward. Referred pains - where a pain is felt in another location than the one in which it really is - show that the felt location of a pain can be illusory (Hill, 2005). Phantom limb pains - where a pain is felt in an amputated limb - show that experiences of pain can be hallucinatory. Although people suffering from phantom limb pains may well be in pain, in a sense to be elucidated soon, they still do not have a pain, as compellingly argued by Bain (2007). Pains can be mis-located, and even hallucinated. Incorrigibility, as it stands, should be rejected. If the case against Incorrigibility is so simple, why does Incorrigibility sound so compelling? The motivation underlying it seems to be that when Julie insists, sincerely, that she has an intense pain in her amputated limb, it will not do to reply to her that she's plain wrong. There is something she's right about. What is it? The ATP points to the following answer. Bad things call for negative affective reactions: injustice calls for indignation; culpability calls for guilt; dangers call for fear, etc. Since pains, according to the ATP, are essentially bad, one is led to wonder: what is the appropriate affective reaction to pain? The answer, I submit, is suffering. Pains should be suffered. Enjoying a pain, or being indifferent to it, are incorrect affective responses to pain. Although they are sometimes conflated or put under the same heading, pain and suffering are categorially distinct (a point rightly urged by Scheler, 1973: 105; 256-258; 333-338). Suffering - like fear, admiration, hate - is an emotion: an affective intentional state directed towards some (real or merely apparent) object or episode. Pains - like itches, tickles, nauseas - are non-intentional bodily episodes. Suffering is an attitude, pain is not. Pain is located, suffering is not. Pains are worthy of being suffered; suffering is our fitting affective reaction to pain. Although the distinction between pain and suffering becomes patent once pains are recognized as essentially bad, the ATP is not the only way to get to it. Feldman (2004) has championed the corresponding distinction between attitudinal and sensory pleasures;6 Hill's distinction (this volume) between peripheral pain and central state pain closely matches the distinction between pain and suffering7; and clinicians have long been aware that "It is suffering, not pain, that brings patients into doctors' offices in hopes of finding relief" (Loeser, 2000; see also Cassel, 1995). With the pain/suffering distinction in hand, it becomes easy to account for the intuition underlying Incorrigibility. When Julie insists, sincerely, that she has an intense pain in her amputated limb, what she says is literally false. She has no pain in her limb, because she has no limb. But Julie is genuinely suffering from a hallucinatory pain. The plausibility of Incorrigibility relies on a conflation between pain and suffering. One may suffer a pain that one does not have, in the same way that one may fear a danger that one does not face. Suppose Julie hallucinates a tarantula over her head and insists that she is in real danger. She is not infallible about dangers for all that, quite the contrary. But she really is frightened by her hallucinatory perception. Likewise for her phantom limb "pains": she has no pain, but her pain hallucinations prompts genuine suffering. When we say, with an air of paradox, that Julie is in pain although she has no pain, what we mean is that Julie is genuinely suffering in reaction to a hallucination of pain. 6Two differences between the present view and that of Feldman are worth noting, though. First, Feldman (2004, p. 84) uses "disenjoying" instead of "suffering" to express the opposite of "enjoying". Second, while on the present proposal pains are worthy of being suffered (but not necessarily so), Feldman maintains that sensory pleasures are necessarily enjoyed. See Massin (2013) for an overview of different ways of drawing the sensory/attitudinal pleasures distinction. 7Although I fully agree with Hill on the distinction, I disagree with him on two more superficial points. First, I disagree that the central affective state corresponds to our concept of pain. The concept of suffering is the one that captures such a negative mental state. Second and relatedly, I disagree with him that folk psychology fails to distinguish the two algesic concepts. For instance, we speak of "suffering pain" and consider it inappropriate (but not impossible or meaningless) to enjoy pain. Can we say more about the nature of suffering and its relation to pain? Suffering can be analyzed in terms of evaluative content, or suffering can be equated to some sui generis intentional mode. According to evaluative-content accounts of suffering, to suffer a (real or apparent) pain just is to experience/feel/perceive this pain as bad. According to intentional-mode accounts of suffering, to suffer a (real or apparent) pain is a sui generis affective attitude directed at the pain, an attitude we embrace in reaction to the pain being experienced as bad. Suffering being an emotion, this debate is an instance of the broader debate within emotions theory, between the so-called perceptualist accounts of emotions - which equate emotions to experiences of value (see e.g. Tappolet, 2000) - and the attitudinal account of emotions, which equates emotions to reactions to experiences of valuable things (see e.g. Mulligan, 2007; Deonna and Teroni, 2012). Without prejudging that complex issue, it may be noticed that pain asymbolia may provide a further reason to embrace the later, intentional-mode account of suffering. Pain asymbolics not only report feeling pain but, even more bafflingly, sometimes describe their pain as hurting and painful (see e.g. Grahek 2007: 45, Bain 2014). Distinguishing the experience of the badness of a pain from the normal suffering reaction to it allows us to take these reports at face value. On that proposal asymbolics do experience their pain as bad, but fail to suffer it. Feeling x as bad and suffering x are distinct: the latter is the normal and correct reaction to the former. Subjects with phantom limb pains suffer from pains they feel, but do not have; patients with pain asymbolia fail to suffer from pains they have and feel. In sum, equating pains with bodily episodes that are personally bad in a way allows us to (i) straightforwardly account for the location of pains; (ii) avoid the phenomenological redundancy between pain's badness and pain's painfulness; (iii) solve the heterogeneity problem for pains; (iv) explain the privacy of pain; (v) explain the self-intimacy of pain; (iv) explain away the incorrigibility of pain.8 Related Chapters 8I am very grateful to Jennifer Corns and David Bain for invaluable comments on this paper, as well as to the participants in the conference "The role of phenomenal consciousness ", Glasgow, 24 October, 2015. 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Synthese (2018) doi: 10.1007/s11229-017-1594-6 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory HAIM GAIFMAN Columbia University YANG LIU University of Cambridge In his classic book "the Foundations of Statistics" Savage (1954, 1972) develops a formal system of rational decision making. It is based on (i) a set of possible states of the world, (ii) a set of consequences, (iii) a set of acts, which are functions from states to consequences, and (iv) a preference relation over the acts, which represents the preferences of an idealized rational agent. The goal and the culmination of the enterprise is a representation theorem: Any preference relation that satisfies certain arguably acceptable postulates determines a (finitely additive) probability distribution over the states and a utility assignment to the consequences, such that the preferences among acts are determined by their expected utilities. Additional problematic assumptions are however required in Savage's proofs. First, there is a Boolean algebra of events (sets of states) which determines the richness of the set of acts. The probabilities are assigned to members of this algebra. Savage's proof requires that this be a σ-algebra (i.e., closed under infinite countable unions and intersections), which makes for an extremely rich preference relation. On Savage's view we should not require subjective probabilities to be σ-additive. He therefore finds the insistence on a σ-algebra peculiar and is unhappy with it. But he sees no way of avoiding it. Second, the assignment of utilities requires the constant act assumption: for every consequence there is a constant act, which produces that consequence in every state. This assumption is known to be highly counterintuitive. The present work contains two mathematical results. The first, and the more difficult one, shows that the σ-algebra assumption can be dropped. The second states that, as long as utilities are assigned to finite gambles only, the constant act assumption can be replaced by the more plausible and much weaker assumption that there are at least two non-equivalent constant acts. The second result also employs a novel way of deriving utilities in Savage-style systems-without appealing to von Neumann-Morgenstern lotteries. The paper discusses the notion of "idealized agent" that underlies Savage's approach, and argues that the simplified system, which is adequate for all the actual purposes for which the system is designed, involves a more realistic notion of an idealized agent. KEYWORDS: subjective probability, Savage postulates, partition tree, Boolean algebra. Emails: H. Gaifman <[email protected]>, Y. Liu <[email protected]>. 1 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu 1. Introduction Ramsey's groundbreaking work "Truth and Probability" (1926) established the decision theoretic approach to subjective probability, or, in his terminology, to degree of belief. Ramsey's idea was to consider a person who has to choose between different practical options, where the outcome of the decision depends on unknown facts. One's decision will be determined by (i) one's probabilistic assessment of the facts, i.e., one's degrees of belief in the truth of various propositions, and (ii) one's personal benefits that are associated with the possible outcomes of the decision. Assuming that the person is a rational agent-whose decisions are determined by some assignment of degrees of belief to propositions and utility values to the outcomes-we should, in principle, be able to derive the person's degrees of belief and utilities from the person's decisions. Ramsey proposed a system for modeling the agent's point of view in which this can be done. The goal of the project is a representation theorem, which shows that the rational agent's decisions should be determined by the expected utility criterion. The system proposed by Savage (1954, 1972) is the first decision-theoretic system that comes after Ramsey's, but it is radically different from it, and it was Savage's system that put the decision-theoretic approach on the map.1 To be sure, in the intervening years a considerable body of research has been produced in subjective probability, notably by de Finetti (1937a,b), and by Koopman (1940a,b, 1941), whose works, among many others, are often mentioned by Savage. De Finetti also discusses problems related to expected utility. Yet these approaches were not of the decision-theoretic type: they did not aim at a unified account in which the subjective probability is derivable from decision making patterns. It might be worthwhile to devote a couple of pages to Ramsey's proposal, for its own sake and also to put Savage's work in perspective. We summarize and discuss Ramsey's work in Appendix A. The theory as presented in Savage (1954, 1972) has been known for its comprehensiveness and its clear and elegant structure. Some researchers have deemed it the best theory of its kind: Fishburn (1970) has praised it as "the most brilliant axiomatic theory of utility ever developed" and Kreps (1988) describes it as "the crowning glory of choice theory." The system is determined by (I) The formal structure, or the basic design, and (II) The axioms that the structure should satisfy, or-in Savage's terminology-the postulates. Savage's crucial choice of design is to base the model on two independent coordinates: (i) a set S of states (which correspond to what in other systems is the set possible worlds) and (ii) a set of consequences, X, whose members represent the outcomes of one's acts. The acts themselves, whose collection is denoted here as A, constitute the third major component. They are construed as functions from S into X. The idea is simple: the consequence of one's act depends on the state of the world. Therefore, the act itself can be represented as a function from the set of states into the set of consequences. Thus, we can use heuristic visualization of two coordinates in a two1. "Before this [Savage's 1954 book], the now widely-referenced theory of Frank P. Ramsey (1931) was virtually unknown." (Fishburn, 1970, p. 161) 2 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory dimensional space. S is provided with additional structure, namely, a Boolean algebra B of subsets of S, whose members are called events (which, in another terminology, are propositions). The agent's subjective, or personal view is given by the fourth component of the system, which is a preference relation, ≽, defined over the acts. All in all, the structure is: (S, X,A,≽,B) We shall refer to it as a Savage-type decision model, or, for short, decision model. Somewhat later in his book Savage introduces another important element: that of constant acts. It will be one of the focus points of our paper and we shall discuss it shortly. (For contrast, note that in Ramsey's system the basic component consists of propositions and worlds, where the latter can be taken as maximally consistent sets of propositions. There is no independent component of "consequences.") Savage's notion of consequences corresponds to the "goods" in vNM-the system presented in von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944). Now vNM uses gambles that are based on an objective σ-additive probability distribution. Savage does not presuppose any probability but has to derive the subjective probability within his system. The most striking feature of that system is the elegant way of deriving-from his first six postulates-a (finitely additive) probability over the Boolean algebra of events. That probability is later used in defining the utility function, which assigns utilities to the consequences. The definition proceeds along the lines of vNM, but since the probability need not be σ-additive, Savage cannot apply directly the vNM construction. He has to add a seventh postulate and the derivation is somewhat involved. We assume some familiarity with the Savage system. For the sake of completeness we include some additional definitions and a list of the postulates (stated in forms equivalent to the originals) in Appendix B. As far as the postulates are concerned, Savage's system constitutes a very successful decision theory, including a decision-based theory of subjective probability. Additional assumptions, which are not stated as axioms, are however required: (i) in Savage's derivation of subjective probability, and (ii) in his derivation of personal utility. These assumptions are quite problematic and our goal here is to show how they can be eliminated and how the elimination yields a simpler and more realistic theory. The first problematic assumption is the σ-algebra assumption: In deriving the subjective probability, Savage has to assume that the Boolean algebra, B, over which the probability is to be defined is a σ-algebra (i.e., closed under countable infinite unions and intersections). Savage insists however that we should not require the subjective probability to be σ-additive. He fully recognizes the importance of the mathematical theory, which is based on the Kolmogorov axioms according to which B is a σ-algebra and the probability is σadditive; but he regards σ-additivity as a sophisticated mathematical concept, whose comprehension may lie beyond that of our rational agent. Rationality need not require having the abilities of a professional mathematician. In this Savage follows de Finetti (it should be noted that both made important mathematical contributions to the theory that is based on the Kolmogorov axioms). It is therefore odd that the Boolean 3 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu algebra, over which the finitely additive probability is to be defined, is required to be a σ-algebra. Savage notes this oddity and justifies it on grounds of expediency, he sees no other way of deriving the quantitative probability that is needed for the purpose of defining expected utilities: It may seem peculiar to insist on σ-algebra as opposed to finitely additive algebras even in a context where finitely additive measures are the central object, but countable unions do seem to be essential to some of the theorems of §3-for example, the terminal conclusions of Theorem 3.2 and Part 5 of Theorem 3.3. (p. 43) The theorems he refers to are the places where his proof relies on the σ-algebra assumption. The σ-algebra assumption is invoked by Savage in order to show that the satisfaction of some axioms regarding the qualitative probability implies that there is a unique finitely additive probability that agrees with the qualitative one. We eliminate it by showing that there is a way of defining the finitely additive numeric probability, which does not rely on that assumption. This is the hard technical core of the paper, which occupies almost a third of it. We develop for this purpose a new technique based on what we call tri-partition trees. Now this derived finitely additive probability later serves in defining the expected utilities. Savage's way of doing this requires that the probability should have a certain property, which we shall call "completeness" (Savage does not give it a name). He uses the σ-algebra assumption a second time in order to show that the probability that he defined is indeed complete. This second use of the σ-algebra assumption can be eliminated by showing that (i) without the σ-algebra assumption, the defined probability satisfies a certain weaker property "weak completeness" and (ii) weak completeness is sufficient for defining the expected utilities. The second problematic assumption we address in this paper concerns constant acts. An act f is said to be constant if for some fixed consequence a ∈ X, f (x) = a, for all x ∈ S.2 Let ca denote that act. Note that, in Savage's framework, the utilityvalue of a consequence depends only on the consequence, not on the state in which it is obtained. Hence, the preorder among constant acts induces a preorder of the corresponding consequences:3 a ≥ b ⇐⇒ Df ca ≽ cb where a, b range over all consequences for which ca and cb exist. The Constant Acts Assumption (CAA) is: CAA For every consequence a ∈ X there exists a constant act ca ∈ A. 2. Savage's notion of constant act can be seen as a structural equivalent of "degenerate lotteries" in the vNM model, where a degenerate lottery δa assigns probability 1 to a given outcome a. 3. Preorders are defined at the end of this section, where terminologies and notations are discussed. 4 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory Savage does not state CAA explicitly, but it is clearly implied by his discussion and it is needed in his proof of the representation theorem. Note that if CAA holds then the above induced preorder is a total preorder of X. By a simple act we mean an act with a finite range of values. The term used by Savage (1972, p. 70) is 'gamble'; he defines it as an act, f, such that, for some finite set, A, f−1(A) has probability 1. It is easily seen that an act is a gamble iff it is equivalent to a simple act. 'Gamble' is also used in gambling situations, where one accepts or rejects bets. We shall use 'simple act' and 'gamble' interchangeably. Using the probability that has been obtained already, the following is derivable from the first six postulates and CAA. Proposition 1.1 (simple act utility). We can associate utilities with all consequences, so that, for all simple acts the preference is determined by the acts' expected utilities.4 CAA has however highly counterintuitive implications, a fact that has been observed by several writers.5 The consequences of a person's act depend, as a rule, on the state of the world. More often than not, a possible consequence in one state is impossible in another. Imagine that I have to travel to a nearby city and can do this either by plane or by train. At the last moment I opt for the plane, but when I arrive at the airport I find that the flight has been canceled. If a and b are respectively the states flight-as-usual and flight-canceled, then the consequence of my act in state a is something like 'arrived at X by plane at time Y.' This consequence is impossible-logically impossible, given the laws of physics-in state b. Yet CAA implies that this consequence, or something with the same utility-value, can be transferred to state b.6 Our result shows that CAA can be avoided at some price, which-we later shall argue-is worth paying. To state the result, let us first define feasible consequences: A consequence a is feasible if there exists some act, f ∈ A, such that f−1(a) is not a null event.7 It is not difficult to see that the name is justified and that unfeasible consequences, while theoretically possible, are merely a pathological curiosity. Note that if we assume CAA then all consequences are trivially feasible. Let us replace CAA by the following much weaker assumption: 2CA There are two non-equivalent constant acts ca and cb. 4. In order to extend that proposition to all acts, Savage adds his last postulate, P7. See also Fishburn (1970, Chapter 14) for a detailed presentation. 5. Fishburn (1970) who observes that CAA is required for the proof of the representation theorem, has also pointed out its problematic nature. This difficulty was also noted by Luce and Krantz (1971), Pratt (1974), Shafer (1986), Joyce (1999), Liu (2015), among others. 6. Fishburn (1970, p. 166-7) went into the problem at some detail. He noted that, if W(x) is the set of consequences that are possible in state x, then we can have W(s) = W(s′), and even W(s) ∩ W(s′) = ∅. He noted that, so far there is no proof that avoids CAA, and suggested a line of research that would enrich the set of states by an additional structure of this paper (see also Fishburn, 1981, p. 162). The decision model in Gaifman and Liu (2015) (also sketched in Section 4) avoids the need for an additional structure, as far as simple acts are concerned. 7. A null event is an event B, such that, given B, all acts are equivalent. These are the events whose probability is 0. See also Appendix B. 5 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu (Note that 2CA makes the same claim as postulate P5; but this is misleading: while P5 presupposes CAA, 2CA does not.) Having replaced CAA by 2CA we can prove the following: Proposition 1.2 (simple act utility*). We can associate utilities with all feasible consequences, so that, for all simple acts, the preference is determined by the act's expected utilities. It is perhaps possible to extend this result to all acts whose consequences are feasible. This will require a modified form of P7. But our proposed modification of the system does not depend on there being such an extension. In our view the goal of a subjective decision theory is to handle all scenarios of having to choose from a finite number of options, involving altogether a finite number of consequences. Proposition 1.2 is therefore sufficient. The question of extending it to all feasible acts is intriguing because of its mathematical interest, but this is a different matter. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In what immediately follows we introduce some further concepts and notations that will be used throughout the paper. Section 2 is devoted to the analysis of the notions of idealized rational agents and what being "more realistic" about it entails. We argue that, when carried too far, the idealization voids the very idea underlying the concept of personal probability and utility; the framework then becomes, in the best case, a piece of abstract mathematics. Section 3 is devoted to the σ-algebra assumption. It consists of a short overview of Savage's original proof followed by a presentation of the tri-partition trees and our proof, which is most of the section. In Section 3.3, we outline a construction by which, from a given finite decision model that satisfies P1-P5, we get a countably infinite decision model that satisfies P1-P6; this model is obtained as a direct limit of an ascending sequence of finite models. In Section 4, we take up the problem of CAA. We argue that, as far as realistic decision theory is concerned, we need to assign utilities only to simple acts. Then we indicate the proof of Proposition 1.2. To a large extent this material has been presented in Gaifman and Liu (2015), hence we contend ourselves with a short sketch. Some Terminologies, Notations, and Constructions Recall that '≽' is used for the preference relation over the acts. f ≽ g says that f is equi–or–more preferable to g; ≼ is its converse. ≽ is a preorder, which means that it is a reflexive and transitive relation; it is also total, which means that for every f , g either f ≽ g or g ≽ f . If f ≽ g and f ≼ g then the acts are said to be equivalent, and this is denoted as f ≡ g. The strict preference is denoted as f ≻ g; it is defined as f ≽ g and g ≽ f , and its converse is denoted as ≺. Cut-and-Paste If f and g are acts and E is an event then we define ( f |E + g|E)(s) =Df { f (s) if s ∈ E g(s) if s ∈ E, where E = S − E = the complement of E.8 8. Some writers use ' f ⊕E g' or '( f , E, g)' or ' f Eg' or ' [ f on E, g on E ] ' for this definition. 6 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory Note that f |E+ g|E is obtained by "cutting and pasting" parts of f and g, which results in the function that agrees with f on E, and with g on E. Savage takes it for granted that the acts are closed under cut–and–paste. Although the stipulation is never stated explicitly, it is obviously a property of A. It is easily seen that by iterating the cut–and– paste operations just defined we get a cut–and–paste that involves any finite number of acts. It is of the form: f1|E1 + f2|E2 + . . . + fn|En where {E1, . . . , En} is a partition of S. Recall that, for any given consequence a ∈ X, ca is the constant act whose consequence is a for all states. This notation is employed under the assumption that such an act exists. If ca ≽ cb then we put: a ≥ b. Similarly for strict preference. Various symbols are used with systematic ambiguity, e.g., '≡' for acts and for consequences, '≤' and '<' for consequences as well as for numbers. Later, when qualitative probabilities are introduced, we shall use ⪰ and ⪯, for the "greater-or-equal" relation (or "weakly more probable" relation) and its converse, and ≻ and ≺ for the strict inequalities. Note that, following Savage, we mean by a numeric probability a finitely additive probability function. If σ-additivity is intended it will be clearly indicated. 2. The Logic of the System and the Role of "Idealized Rational Agents" The decision theoretic approach construes a person's subjective probability in terms of its function in determining the person's decision under uncertainty. The uncertainty should however stem from lack of empirical knowledge, not from one's limited deductive capacities. One could be uncertain because one fails to realize that such and such facts are logically deducible from other known facts. This type of uncertainty does not concern us in the context of subjective probability. Savage (1972, p. 7) therefore posits an idealized person, with unlimited deductive capacities in logic, and he notes (in a footnote on that page) that such a person should know the answers to all decidable mathematical propositions. By the same token, we should endow our idealized person with unlimited computational powers. This is of course unrealistic; if we do take into account the rational agent's bounded deductive, or computational resources, we get a "more realistic" system. This is what Hacking (1967) meant in his "A slightly more realistic personal probability;" a more recent work on that subject is Gaifman (2004). But this is not the sense of "realistic" of the present paper. By "realistic" we mean conceptually realistic; that is, a more realistic ability to conceive impossible fantasies and treat them as if they were real. We indicated in the introduction that CAA may give rise to agents who have such extraordinary powers of conceiving. We shall elaborate on this sort of unrealistic abilities shortly. The σ-algebra assumption can lead to even more extreme cases in a different area: the foundation of set theory. We will not go into this here, since this would require too long a detour. It goes without saying that the extreme conceptual unrealism, of the kind we are considering here, has to be distinguished from the use of hypothetical mundane 7 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu scenarios-the bread–and–butter of every decision theory that contains more than experimental results. Most, if not all, of the scenarios treated in papers and books of decision theory are hypothetical, but sufficiently grounded in reality. The few examples Savage discusses in his book are of this kind. The trouble is that the solutions that he proposes require that the agent be able to assess the utilities of physical impossibilities and to weigh them on a par with everyday situations. Let us consider a simple decision problem, an illustrative example proposed by Savage (1972, p. 13–14), which will serve us for more than one purpose. We shall refer to it as Omelet. John (in Savage (1972) he is "you") has to finish making an omelet started by his wife, who has already broken into a bowl five good eggs. A sixth unbroken egg is lying on the table, and it must be either used in making the omelet, or discarded. There are two states of the world good (the sixth egg is good) and rotten (the sixth egg is rotten). John considers three possible acts, f1: break the sixth egg into the bowl, f2: discard the sixth egg, f3: break the sixth egg into a saucer; add it to the five eggs if it is good, discard it if it is rotten. The consequences of the acts are as follows: f1(good) = six-egg omelet f1(rotten) = no omelet and five good eggs wasted f2(good) = five-egg omelet and one good egg wasted f2(rotten) = five-egg omelet f3(good) = six-egg omelet and a saucer to wash f3(rotten) = five-egg omelet and a saucer to wash Omelet is one of the many scenarios in which CAA is highly problematic. It requires the existence of an act by which a good six-egg omelet is made out of five good eggs and a rotten one.9 Quite plausibly, John can imagine a miracle by which a six-egg omelet is produced from five good eggs and a rotten one; this lies within his conceptual capacity. But this would not be sufficient; he has to take the miracle seriously enough, so that he can rank it on a par with the other real possibilities, and eventually assign to it a utility value. This is what the transfer of six-egg omelet from good to rotten means. In another illustrative example (Savage, 1972, p. 25), the result of such a miraculous transfer is that the person can enjoy a refreshing swim with her friends, while in fact she is ". . . sitting on a shadeless beach twiddling a brand-new tennis racket"-because she bought a tennis racket instead of a bathing suit-"while her friends swim." CAA puts extremely high demands on what the agent, even an idealized one, should be able to conceive. CAA is the price Savage has to pay for making the consequences completely independent of the states.10 A concrete consequence is being abstracted so that only its 9. "Omelet" obviously means a good omelet. 10. This price is avoided in (Ramsey, 1926) because for Ramsey the values derive from the propositions and, in the final account, from the states. CAA is also avoided in Jeffrey (1965, 1983), because the Jeffrey-Bolker system realizes, in a better and more systematic way, Ramsey's point of view. That system however is of a different kind altogether, and has serious problems of its own, which we shall not address here. 8 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory personal value remains. These values can be then smoothly transferred from one state to another. Our suggestion for avoiding such smooth transfers is described in the introduction. In Section 4 we argue that the price one has to pay for this is worth paying. Returning to Omelet, let us consider how John will decide. It would be wrong to describe him as appealing to some intuitions about his preference relation, or interrogating himself about it. John determines his preferences by appealing to his intuitions about the likeliness of the states and the personal benefits he might derive from the consequences.11 If he thinks that good is very likely and washing the saucer, in the case of rotten, is rather bothersome, he will prefer f1 to the other acts; if washing the saucer is not much of a bother he might prefer f3; if wasting a good egg is no big deal, he might opt for f2. If our interpretation is right, then a person derives his or her preferences by combining subjective probabilities and utilities. On the other hand, the representation theorem goes in the opposite direction: from preference to probability and utility. As a formal structure, the preference relation is, in an obvious sense, more elementary than a real valued function. If it can be justified directly on rationality grounds, this will yield a normative justification to the use probability and utility. The Boolean algebra in Omelet is extremely simple; besides S and ∅ it consists of two atoms. The preference relation implies certain constraints on the probabilities and the utility-values, but it does not determine them. This, as a rule, is the case whenever the Boolean algebra is finite.12 Now the idea underlying the system is that if the preference relation is defined over a sufficiently rich set of acts (and if it satisfies certain plausible postulates) then both probabilities and utilities are derivable from it. As far as the probability is concerned, the consequences play a minor role. We need only two non-equivalent constant acts, say ca, cb, and we need only the preferences over twovalued acts, in which the values are a or b. But B has to satisfy P6′, which implies that is must be infinite; moreover, in Savage's system, which includes the σ-algebra assumption, the set of states, as well as Boolean algebra, should have cardinalities that are 2א0 at least. Our result makes it possible to get a countable Boolean algebra, B, and a decision model (S, X,A,≽,B) which is a direct limit of an ascending sequence of substructures (Si, X,Ai,≽i,Bi), where the Si's are finite, and where X is any fixed set of consequences containing two non-equivalent ones. This construction is described briefly at the end of the next section. 11. The preference relation is not "given" in the same way that the entrenched notion of probability, with its long history, is. The preference relation is rather a tool for construing probability in a decision theoretic way. John can clarify to himself what he means by "more probable" by considering its implications for making practical decisions. In a more operational mood one might accord the preference relation a self-standing status. Whether Savage is inclined to this is not clear. He does appeal to intuitions about the probabilities; for example in comparing P6′ to an axiom suggested by de Finetti and by Koopman, he argues that it is more intuitive, (and we agree with him). This is even clearer with regard to P6-the decision-theoretic analog of P6′ which implies P6′. 12. This is the case even if the number of consequence is infinite. There are some exceptions: if ca and cb are non-equivalent and if E and E′ are two events then the equivalence: ca|E + cb|E′ ≡ cb|E′ + ca|E implies that E and E′ have equal probabilities. Using equivalences of this form makes it possible to determine certain probability distributions over a finite set of atoms. 9 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu 3. Eliminating the σ-algebra Assumption 3.1. Savage's derivation of numeric probabilities Savage's derivation of a numeric probability comprises two stages. First, he defines, using P1-P4 and the assumption that there are two non-equivalent constant acts, a qualitative probability. This is a binary relation, ⪰ , defined over events, which satisfies the axioms proposed by de Finetti (1937a) for the notion of "X is weakly more probable than Y." The second stage is devoted to showing that if a qualitative probability, ⪰ , satisfies certain additional assumptions, then there is a unique numeric probability, μ, that represents ⪰; that is, for all events E, F: E ⪰ F ⇐⇒ μ(E) ≥ μ(F) (3.1) Our improvement on Savage's result concerns only the second stage. For the sake of completeness we include a short description of the first. 3.1.1. From preferences over acts to qualitative probabilities The qualitative probability, ⪰, is defined by: Definition 3.1. For any events E, F, say that E is weakly more probable than F, written E ⪰ F (or F ⪯ E), if, for any ca and cb satisfying ca ≻ cb, we have ca|E + cb|E ≽ ca|F + cb|F. (3.2) E and F are said to be equally probable, in symbols E ≡ F, if both E ⪰ F and F ⪰ E. Savage's P4 guarantees that the above concept is well defined, i.e., (3.2) does not depend on the choice of the pair of constant acts. The definition has a clear intuitive motivation and it is not difficult to show that ⪰ is a qualitative probability, as defined by de Finetti (in an equivalent formulation used by Savage): Definition 3.2 (qualitative probability). A binary relation ⪰ over B is said to be a qualitative probability if the following hold for all A, B, C ∈ B: 1. ⪰ is a total preorder, 2. A ⪰ ∅, 3. S ≻ ∅, 4. if A ∩ C = B ∩ C = ∅ then A ⪰ B ⇐⇒ A ∪ C ⪰ B ∪ C. (3.3) 10 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory For a given decision model, which satisfies P1-P4 and which has two non-equivalent constant acts, the qualitative probability of the model is the qualitative probability defined via Definition 3.1. If that qualitative probability is representable by a quantitative probability, and if moreover the representing probability is unique, then we get a single numeric probability and we are done.13 The following postulate ascribes to the qualitative probability the property which Savage (1972, p. 38) suggests as the key for deriving numeric probabilities. P6′ For any events E, F, if E ≻ F, then there is a partition {Pi}ni=1 of S such that E ≻ F ∪ Pi for all i = 1, . . . , n. Note that P6′ is not stated in terms of a preference relation (≽) over acts. But, given the way in which the qualitative probability has been defined in terms of ≽, P6′ is obviously implied by P6 (see Appendix B). As Savage describes it, the motivation for P6 is its intuitive plausibility and its obvious relation to P6′. Before proceeding to the technical details that occupy most of this section it would be useful to state for comparison the two theorems, Savage's and ours, and pause on some details regarding the use of the probability function in the derivation of utilities. 3.1.2. Overview of the main results We state the results as theorems about qualitative probabilities. The corresponding theorems within the Savage framework are obtained by replacing the qualitative probability ⪰ by the preference relation over acts ≽, and P6′ by P6. Theorem 3.3 (Savage). Let ⪰ be a qualitative probability defined over the Boolean algebra B. If (i) ⪰ satisfies P6′ and (ii) B is a σ-algebra, then there is a unique numeric probability μ, defined over B, which represents ⪰. That probability has the following property: (†) For any event A and any ρ ∈ (0, 1), there exists an event B ⊆ A such that μ(B) = ρ * μ(A). Theorem 3.4 (main theorem). Let ⪰ be a qualitative probability defined over the Boolean algebra B. If ⪰ satisfies P6′, then there is a unique numeric probability μ, defined over B, which represents ⪰. That probability has the following property: (‡) For every event, A, every ρ ∈ (0, 1), and every ε > 0 there exists an event B ⊆ A, such that (ρ − ε) * μ(A) ≤ μ(B) ≤ ρ * μ(A). Remark 3.5. (1) Probabilities satisfying (†) were called in Section 1 "complete" and those satisfying (‡) were called "weakly complete." 13. Some such line of thought has guided de Finetti (1937a). Counterexamples were however found of qualitative probabilities that are not representable by quantitative ones. First to be found were counterexamples in which the Boolean algebra is infinite. They were followed by counterexamples for the finite case, in particular, a counterexample in which the qualitative probability is defined over the Boolean algebra of all subsets of a set consisting of 5 members, (cf. Kraft et al., 1959). 11 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu (2) Given a numeric probability μ, let a ρ-portion of an event A be any event B ⊆ A such that μ(B) = ρ * μ(A) . Then (†) means that, for every 0 < ρ < 1, every event has a ρ-portion. (‡) is a weaker condition: for every A, and for every ρ ∈ (0, 1), there are ρ′-portions of A, where ρ′ can be strictly smaller than ρ but arbitrarily close to it. (3) For the case A = S, (†) implies that the set of values of μ is the full interval [0, 1]. But (‡) only implies that the set of values is dense in [0, 1]. Obviously, the satisfaction of P6′ implies that the Boolean algebra is infinite, but, as indicated in Section 3.3 it can be countable, in which case (†) must fail. (4) That the constructed probability is complete, i.e., satisfies (†), is proven in Chapter 3 of Savage (1972), which is devoted to probabilities. This property is used much later in the derivation of expected utilities in Chapter 5. In Section 3.2.4 below we will show that the probability that is constructed without assuming the σ-algebra assumption is weakly complete, and in Section 4 we will show that weak completeness is sufficient for assigning utilities to consequences. As remarked in (3), (†) implies that the set of values of is the real interval [0, 1], implying that the Boolean algebra must have the power of the continuum. There are however examples of countable models that satisfy all the required postulates of Savage (Theorem 3.3.5). Therefore, one cannot prove that the probability satisfies (†), without the σ-algebra assumption. 3.1.3. Savage's original proof The proof is given in the more technical part of the book (Savage, 1972, p. 34-38). The presentation seems to be based on working notes, reflecting a development that led Savage to P6′. Many proofs consists of numbered claims and sub-claims, whose proofs are left to the reader (some of these exercises are difficult). Some of the theorems are supposed to provide motivation for P6′, which is introduced (on p. 38) after the technical part: "In the light of Theorems 3 and 4, I tentatively propose the following postulate . . . ." Some of the concepts that Savage employs have only historical interest. While many of these concepts are dispensable if P6′ is presupposed, some remain useful for clarifying the picture and are therefore used in later textbooks (e.g., Kreps, 1988, p. 123). We shall use them as well. Definition 3.6 (fineness). A qualitative probability is fine if for every E ≻ ∅ there is a partition {Pi}ni=1 of S such that E ≻ Pi, for every i = 1, . . . , n. Definition 3.7 (tightness). A qualitative probability is tight, if whenever E ≻ F, there exists C ≻ ∅, such that E ≻ F ∪ C ≻ F. Obviously the fineness property is a special case of P6′, where the smaller set is ∅. It is easy to show that P6′ ⇐⇒ fineness + tightness, and in this "decomposition," tightness is "exactly" what is needed in order to pass from fineness to P6′. 12 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory Remark 3.8. (1) Savage's definition of "tightness" (p. 34) is different from the notion of tightness given above – it is more complicated and has only historical interest, although the two are equivalent if we presuppose fineness. (2) Let us say that the probability function μ almost represents ⪰ (in Savage's terminology "almost agrees with" ⪰) if, for any E, F: E ⪰ F =⇒ μ(E) ≥ μ(F). (3.4) Since E ⪰ F ⇒ F ≻ E it is easily seen that if μ almost represents ⪰ then it represents ⪰ iff E ≻ F =⇒ μ(E) > μ(F) (3.5) Savage's proof presupposes fineness, and its upshot is the existence of a unique μ that almost represents ⪰. Now fineness implies that if E ≻ ∅, then μ(E) > 0.14 With tightness added, this implies (3.5). Hence, under P6′, μ is the unique probability representing ⪰. Savage's proof can be organized into three parts. Part I introduces the concept of an almost uniform partition, which plays a central role in the whole proof, and proves the theorem that links almost uniform partitions to the existence of numeric probabilities. Before proceeding recall the following: 1. A partition of B is a collection of disjoint subsets of B, referred to as parts, whose union is B. We presuppose that the number of parts is > 1 and is finite and that B is non-null, i.e., B ≻ ∅. 2. It is assumed that no part is a null-event, unless this is explicitly allowed. 3. By an n-partition we mean a partition into n parts (this is what Savage calls n-fold partition). 4. We adopt self-explanatory expressions, like "a partition A = A1 ∪ * * * ∪ An" which means that the sets on the right-hand side are a partition of A. Definition 3.9. An almost uniform partition of an event B is a partition of B into a finite number of disjoint events, such that the union of any r + 1 parts is weakly more probable than the union of any r parts. An almost uniform n-partition of B is a n-partition of B which is almost uniform. The main result of Part I comprises what in Savage's enumeration are Theorem 1 and its proof, and the first claim of Theorem 2 (on the bottom of p. 34), and its proof. The latter consists of steps 1–7 and ends in the middle of p. 36. All in all, the result in Part I is: 14. To see this, let P1, . . . , Pn be a partition of S such that Pi ⪯ E for all i = 1, . . . , n. Then, for some i, μ(Pi) > 0, otherwise μ(S) = 0. Hence μ(E) > 0. 13 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu Theorem 3.10. If, for any n < ∞, there is an almost uniform n-partitions of S, then there exists a unique numerical probability μ which almost represents ⪰. The proof of this result consists mainly of direct computational/combinatorial arguments; it is given with sufficient details and does not use the σ-algebra assumption. We shall take the theorem and its proof for granted. Part II consists in showing that fineness and the σ-algebra assumption imply that there exist almost uniform n-partitions for arbitrary large numbers n (together with the theorems of Part I this yields a unique probability that almost represents the qualitative one). This part is done in Theorem 3. The latter consists of a sequence of claims, referred to as "parts," in which later parts are to be derived from earlier ones. The arrangement is intended to help the reader to find the proofs. For the more difficult parts, additional details are provided. Many claims are couched in terms that have only historical interests. For our purposes, we need only to focus on a crucial construction that uses what we shall call "iterated 3-partitions" (cf. Section 3.1.4 below). This construction is described in the proof of Part 5 (on the top of p. 35). As a last step it involves the crucial use of the σ-algebra assumption, we shall return to this step shortly. Part III of Savage's proof consists in the second claim of the aforementioned Theorem 2. It asserts that the numeric probability, which is derivable from the existence of almost uniform n-partitions for arbitrary large n's, satisfies (†). The proof consists in three claims, 8a, 8b, 8c, the last of which relies on on the σ-algebra assumption. The parallel part of our proof is the derivation of (‡) without using the σ-algebra assumption. The proof is given in Section 3.2.4 below. 3.1.4. Savage's method of iterated 3-partitions In order to prove Part 5 of Theorem 3, Savage claims that the following is derivable from the laws of qualitative probabilities and fineness. Theorem 3.11 (Savage). For any given B ≻ ∅ there exists an infinite sequence of 3partitions of B: {Cn, Dn, Gn}n, which has the following properties:15 (1) Cn ∪ Gn ⪰ Dn and Dn ∪ Gn ⪰ Cn (2) Cn ⊆ Cn+1 , Dn ⊆ Dn+1, hence Gn ⊇ Gn+1 (3) Gn − Gn+1 ⪰ Gn+1 These properties imply that Gn becomes arbitrary small as n → ∞, that is: 15. The proof of the existence of such a sequence was left to the reader. Fishburn (1970, p. 194– 197) reconstructs parts of Savage's work, filling in missing segments. Part 5 of Theorem 3 is among the material Fishburn covers. Fishburn presupposes however a qualitative probability that satisfies P6′ (F5 in his notation). Therefore his proof cannot be the one meant by Savage; the latter uses only fineness. We believe that it should not be too difficult to make such a proof, or to modify Fishburn's proof of part 5, so as to get a proof from fineness only. The matter is not too important, since the problem of the σ-algebra assumption concerns qualitative logic that satisfies P6′. Besides, we can trust Savage that his claims are derivable from fineness alone. 14 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory (4) For any F ≻ ∅, there exists n such that Gm ≺ F for all m ≥ n. Note. Condition (3) in Theorem 3.11 means that Gn is a disjoint union of two subsets, Gn = Gn+1 ∪ (Gn − Gn+1), each of which is ⪰ Gn+1. In this sense Gn+1 is less than or equal to "half of Gn". Had the probability been numeric we could have omitted the scare quotes; it would have implied that the probabilities of Gn tend to 0, as n → ∞. In the case of a qualitative probability the analogous conclusion is that the sets become arbitrary small, in the non-numerical sense. Savage provides an argument, based on fineness, which derives (4) from the previous properties. The argument is short and is worth repeating: Given any F ≻ ∅, we have to show that, for some n, Gn ≺ F. Assume, for contradiction, that this is not the case. Then F ⪯ Gn, for all ns. Now fineness implies that there is a partition S = P1 ∪ * * * ∪ Pm such that Pi ⪯ F, for i = 1, . . . , m. If F ⪯ Gn, then P1 ⪯ Gn, hence P1 ∪ P2 ⪯ Gn−1, hence P1 ∪ P2 ∪ P3 ∪ P4 ⪯ Gn−2, and so on. Therefore, if 2k−1 ≥ m, then S ⪯ G1, which is a contradiction. Definition 3.12. Call an infinite sequence of 3-partitions of B, which satisfies conditions (1), (2), (3), a Savage chain for B. We say that the chain passes through a 3-partition of B, if the 3-partition occurs in the sequence. We presented the theorem so as to conform with Savage's notation and the capital letters he used. Later we shall change the notation. We shall use ordered triples for the 3-partition and place in the middle the sets that play the role of the Gn's. The definition just given can be rephrased of course in terms of our later terminology. Figure 3.1 is an illustration of a Savage chain. Presenting the Savage chain as a sequence of triples with the Gns in the middle, makes for better pictorial representation. And it is essential when it comes to trees. The fact that Dn ∪ Gn ⪰ Cn, Cn ∪ Gn ⪰ Dn, and the fact that Gn becomes arbitrary small suggest that Gn plays the role of a "margin of error" in a division of the set into two, roughly equivalent parts. Although the error becomes arbitrary small, there is no way of getting rid of it. At this point Savage uses the σ-algebra assumption, he puts: B1 = ∪ n Cn and B2 = (∪ n Dn ) ∪ (∩ n Gn ) . (3.6) Remark 3.13. The rest of Savage's proof is not relevant to our work. For the sake of completeness, here is a short account of it. B1, B2 form a partition of B, and ∩ n Gn ≡ ∅. Assuming P6′, one can show that B1 ≡ B2; but Savage does not use P6′ (a postulate that is introduced after Theorem 3), hence he only deduces that B1 and B2 are what he calls "almost equivalent" – one of the concepts he used at the time, which we need not go into. By iterating this division he proves that, for every n, every non-null event can be partitioned into 2n almost equivalent events. At an earlier stage (Part 4) he states that every partition of S into almost equivalent events is almost uniform. Hence, there are almost uniform n-partitions of S for arbitrary large ns. This together with the first claim of his Theorem 2 (Theorem 3.10 in our numbering) proves the existence of the required numeric probability. 15 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu Figure 3.1: Savage's error reducing partitions We eliminate the σ-algebra assumption by avoiding the construction of (3.6). We develop, instead, a technique of using trees, which generates big partitions, and many "error parts," which can be treated simultaneously. We use it in order to get almost uniform partitions. 3.2. Eliminating the σ-algebra assumption by using tripartition trees So far, trying to follow faithfully the historical development of Savage's system, we presupposed fineness rather than P6′. If we continue to do so the proof will be burdened by various small details, and we prefer to avoid this.16 From now on we shall presuppose P6′.17 First, we give the 3-partitions that figure in Savage's construction a more suggestive form, suitable for our purposes: Definition 3.14 (tripartition). A Savage tripartition or, for short, a tripartition of a nonnull event, B, is an ordered triple (C, E, D) of disjoint events such that: i. B = C ∪ E ∪ D ii. C, D ≻ ∅, 16. Under P6′, E ≡ ∅ implies A ∪ E ≡ A; if only fineness is assumed this need not hold, but it is still true that A ∪ E can be made arbitrary small, by making A arbitrary small. 17. Our result still holds if we presuppose only fineness, provided that the unique numeric probability is claimed to almost represent, rather than represent, the qualitative one. See (3.4) in Section 3.1.3 and the discussion there. 16 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory iii. C ∪ E ⪰ D and E ∪ D ⪰ C. We refer to E as the error part, or simply error, and to C and D as the regular parts. We allow E to be a null-set, i.e., E ≡ ∅, including E = ∅. The case E = ∅ constitutes the extreme case of a tripartition, where the error is ∅. In diagrams, ∅ serves in this case as a marker that separates the two parts.18 3.2.1. Tripartition trees Recall that a binary partition tree is a rooted ordered tree whose nodes are sets, such that each node that is not a leaf has two children that form a 2-partition of it. By analogy, a tripartition tree, T , is a rooted ordered tree such that: (1) The nodes are sets, which are referred to as parts, and they are classified into regular parts, and error parts. (2) The root is a regular part. (3) Every regular part that is not a leaf has three children that constitute a tripartition of it. (4) Error-parts have no children. Figure 3.2 provides an illustration of a tripartition tree, written top down, in which the root is the event A, and the error-parts are shaded. Note. No set can occur twice in a partition tree. Hence we can simplify the structure by identifying the nodes with the sets; we do not have to construe it as a labeled tree. (In the special cases in which the error is empty, ∅ can occur more than once, but this should not cause any confusion.) Additional Concepts, Terminologies, and Notations 1. The levels of a tripartition tree are defined as follows: (1) level 0 contains the root; (2) level n + 1 contains all the children of the regular nodes on level n; (3) level n + 1 contains all error nodes on level n. 2. Note that this means that, once an error-part appears on a certain level it keeps reappearing on all higher levels. 3. A tripartition tree is uniform if all the regular nodes that are leaves are on the same level. From now on we assume that the tripartition trees are uniform, unless indicated otherwise. 4. The height of a finite tree T is n, where n is the level of the leaves that are regular nodes. If the tree is infinite its height is ∞. 5. A subtree of a tree is a tree consisting of some regular node (the root of the subtree) and all its descendants. 18. Under P6′ the case E ≡ ∅ can, for all purposes, be assimilated to the case E = ∅, because we can add E to one of the regular parts, say C, and C ∪ E ≡ C. But under fineness non-empty null-sets cannot be eliminated in this way. 17 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu Fi gu re 3. 2: A tr ip ar ti ti on tr ee T of A 18 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory 6. The truncation of a tree T at level m, is the tree consisting of all the nodes of T whose level is ≤ m. (Note that if m ≥ height of T , then truncation at level m is the same as T .) 7. Strictly speaking, the root by itself does not constitute a tripartition tree. But there is no harm in regarding it as the truncation at the 0 level, or as a tree of height 0. Remark 3.15. (1) An ordered tree is one in which the children of any node are ordered (an assignment, which assigns to every node an ordering of its children, is included in the structure). Sometimes the trees must be ordered, e.g., when they are used to model syntactic structures of sentences. But sometimes an ordering is imposed for convenience; it makes for an easy way of locating nodes and for a useful twodimensional representation. In our case, the ordering makes it possible to locate the error-parts by their middle positions in the triple.19 (2) The main error part of a tree is the error part on level 1. (3) It is easily seen that on level k there are 2k regular parts and 2k − 1 error-parts. We use binary strings of length k to index the regular parts, and binary strings of length k − 1 to index the error-parts, except for the main error-part. Figure 3.1 shows how this is done. The main error-part of that tree is E. We can regard the index of E as the empty binary sequence. (4) We let T range over tripartitions trees and TA over tripartition trees of A. We put T = TA in order to say that T is a tripartition tree with root A . To indicate the regular and error parts we put: TA = (Aσ, Eσ), where σ ranges over the binary sequences (it is understood that the subscript of E ranges over sequences of length smaller by 1 than the subscript of A.) To indicate also the height k, we put: TA,k = (Aσ, Eσ)k. Various parameters will be omitted if they are understood from the context. Definition 3.16 (total error). The total error of a tree T , denoted E(T ), is the union of all error-parts of T . That is to say, if T = TA = (Aσ, Eσ), then E(T ) =Df ∪ σ Eσ. If T is of height k then E(T ) is the union of all error-parts on the k-level of T . This is obvious, given that all error-parts of level j, where j < k, reappear on level j + 1. For the same reason, if j < k, then the total error of the truncated tree at level j is the union of all error-parts on level j. Now recall that a Savage tripartition (C, E, D) has the property that C ∪ E ⪰ D and C ⪯ E ∪ D (cf. Definition 3.14). This property generalizes to tripartition trees: 19. Yet, the left/right distinction of the regular parts is not needed. Formally, we can take any regular part, B, which is not a leaf, and switch around the two regular parts that are its children, keeping the error part fixed: from Bl EBr to BrEBl ; at the same time we switch also the subtrees that are rooted in Bl and Br. The switch can be obtained by rotating (in a 3-dimensional space) the two subtrees. Such a switch can be considered an automorphism of the structure: Our tripartition trees can be viewed as ordered trees, "divided" by the equivalence that is determined by the group of automorphisms that is generated by these rotations. All the claims that we prove in the sequel hold under this transformation group. 19 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu Figure 3.3: Claim in the proof of Theorem 3.17 Theorem 3.17. Let TA be a partition tree of A of height k, then, for any regular parts Aσ, Aσ′ on the kth level, the following holds; Aσ ∪ E(TA) ⪰ Aσ′ Aσ′ ∪ E(TA) ⪰ Aσ (3.7) Proof. We prove the theorem by induction on k. For k = 1 the claim holds since (A0, E, A1) is just a Savage tripartition. For k > 1, let T ∗A = (Aσ, Eσ)k−1 be the truncated tree consisting of the first k− 1levels of TA. By the inductive hypothesis, for all regular parts Aτ , Aτ′ on the k − 1 level of T ∗A , Aτ ∪ E(T ∗A ) ⪰ Aτ′ Aτ′ ∪ E(T ∗A ) ⪰ Aτ (3.8) The rest of the proof relies on the following claim. Claim. Assume that the following holds (as illustrated in Figure 3.3): A1 ∪ E1 ⪰ B1 B1 ∪ E1 ⪰ A1 A2 ∪ E2 ⪰ B2 B2 ∪ E2 ⪰ A2 (3.9) and ( A1 ∪ E1 ∪ B1 ) ∪ E ⪰ ( A2 ∪ E2 ∪ B2 ) ( A2 ∪ E2 ∪ B2 ) ∪ E ⪰ ( A1 ∪ E1 ∪ B1 ) . (3.10) Then C1 ∪ (E1 ∪ E ∪ E2) ⪰ C2, where C1 is either A1 or B1 and C2 is either A2 or B2. That is, the union of any regular part on one side of E with E1 ∪ E ∪ E2 is ⪰ any regular part on the other side of E. Proof of Claim. WLOG, it is sufficient to show this for the case C1 = A1 and C2 = A2. The other cases follow by symmetry. Thus, we have to prove: A1 ∪ (E1 ∪ E ∪ E2) ⪰ A2. (3.11) Now, consider the following two cases: 20 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory (1) If B1 ⪰ A2, then we have (A1 ∪ E1) ∪ E ∪ E2 ⪰ B1 ∪ E ∪ E2 ⪰ A2 ∪ E ∪ E2 ⪰ A2. (2) Otherwise B1 ≺ A2. Suppose, to the contrary, that (3.11) fails, that is, A2 ≻ A1 ∪ (E1 ∪ E ∪ E2). Since A1, E1, E, E2, A2, B2 are mutually exclusive, we have: A2 ∪ B2 ≻ A1 ∪ (E1 ∪ E ∪ E2) ∪ B2 ⪰ A1 ∪ E1 ∪ E ∪ A2 ≻ A1 ∪ E1 ∪ E ∪ B1. The first inequality follows from the properties of qualitative probability. The second inequality holds because E2 ∪ B2 ⪰ A2 in (3.9) and the third holds since we assume that A2 ≻ B1. But, again from (3.9), we have A1 ∪ E1 ∪ E ∪ B1 ⪰ A2 ∪ E2 ∪ B2 ⪰ A2 ∪ B2. Contradiction. This proves (3.11). By symmetry, other cases hold as well. This completes the proof of the Claim. Getting back to the proof of the theorem, assume WLOG that in (3.7) Aσ is to the left of A′σ. Now each of them is a regular part of a tripartition of a regular part on level k − 1. Consider the case in which Aσ appears in a tripartition of the form (Aσ, Eλ, Bσ) and A′σ appears in a tripartition of the form (Bσ′ , Eλ′ , Aσ′). There are other possible cases, but they follow from this case by symmetry arguments. In fact, using the the "rotation automorphisms" described in footnote 19, they can be converted to each other. We get: Aσ ∪ Eλ ⪰ Bσ Bσ ∪ Eλ ⪰ Aσ Aσ′ ∪ Eλ′ ⪰ Bσ′ Bσ′ ∪ Eλ′ ⪰ Aσ′ . (3.12) Since Aσ ∪ Eλ ∪ Bσ and Aσ′ ∪ Eλ′ ∪ Bσ′ are regular parts on the k − 1 level of TA, the inductive hypothesis (3.8) implies:( Aσ ∪ Eλ ∪ Bσ ) ∪ E(T ∗A ) ⪰ ( Aσ′ ∪ Eλ′ ∪ Bσ′ ) ( Aσ′ ∪ Eλ′ ∪ Bσ′ ) ∪ E(T ∗A ) ⪰ ( Aσ ∪ Eλ ∪ Bσ ) . (3.13) Clearly, (3.12) and (3.13) are a substitution variant of (3.9) and (3.10). Therefore the Claim implies: Aσ ∪ ( E(T ∗) ∪ Eλ ∪ Eλ′ ) ⪰ Aσ′ Aσ′ ∪ ( E(T ∗) ∪ Eλ ∪ Eλ′ ) ⪰ Aσ. (3.14) Since E(T ) is disjoint from both Aσ and Aσ′ and E(T ∗) ∪ Eλ ∪ Eλ′ ⊆ E(T ), we get (3.7). 21 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu 3.2.2. The error reduction method for trees Note that trees that have the same height are structurally isomorphic and there is a unique one-to-one correlation that correlates the parts of one with the parts of the other. We have adopted a notation that makes clear, for each part in one tree, the corresponding part in the other tree. This also holds if one tree is a truncation of the other. The indexing of the regular parts and the error parts in the truncated tree is the same as in the whole tree. Definition 3.18 (error reduction tree). Given a tree, TA = (Aσ, Eσ)k, an error-reduction of T is a tree with the same root and the same height T ′A = (A′σ, E′σ)k, such that for every σ, Aσ ⊆ A′σ. We shall also say in that case that T ′ is obtained from T by error reduction. Remark 3.19. (1) A is the union of all the regular leaves and the total error, E(TA). If every regular part weakly increases, it is obvious that the total error weakly decrease: E(T ′) ⊆ E(T ). Thus, the term 'error–reduction' is justified. The reverse implication is of course false in general. The crucial property of error-reducing is that, in the reduction of the total error, every regular part (weakly) increases as a set. (2) The reduction of E(T ) is in a weak sense, that is: that is, E(T ′) ⊆ E(T ). The strong sense can be obtained by adding the condition E(T ′) ≺ E(T ). But, in view of our main result, we do not need to add it explicitly as part of the definition. (3) Error reductions of Savage tripartitions (i.e., triples) is the simplest case of error reduction of trees: each of the two regular parts weakly increases and the error part weakly decreases-this is the error reduction in trees of height 1. (4) It is easily seen that if T ′ is an error-reduction of T and T ′′ is an error-reduction of T ′, then T ′′ is an error-reduction of T . The proof of our central result is that, given any tripartition tree, there is an errorreduction of it in which the total error is arbitrarily small. That is, for every non-null set F, there is an error-reduction tree of total error ⪯ F. The proof uses a certain operation on tripartition trees, which is defined as follows. Definition 3.20 (mixed sum). Let TA = (Aσ, Eσ)k and T ′A′ = (A ′ σ, E′σ)k be two tripartition trees of two disjoint events (i.e., A ∩ A′ = ∅), of the same height, k. Then the mixed sum of TA and T ′A′ , denoted TA ⊕ T ′ A′ , is the tree of height k, defined by: TA ⊕ T ′A′ = (Aσ ∪ A ′ σ, Eσ ∪ E′σ)k. (3.15) The notation TA ⊕ T ′A′ is always used under the assumption that A and A ′ are disjoint and the trees are of the same height. Lemma 3.21. (1) TA ⊕ T ′A′ is a tripartition tree of A ∪ A ′ whose total error is E(TA) ∪ E(T ′A′). 22 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory (2) If T ∗A and T + A′ are, respectively, error reductions of TA and T ′ A′ , then T ∗ A ⊕ T + A′ is an error reduction of TA ⊕ T ′A′ Proof. The operation ⊕ consists in taking the union of every pair of corresponding parts, which belong to tripartitions of two given disjoint sets. Therefore, the first claim follow easily from the definitions of tripartition trees and the laws of qualitative probability (stated in Definition 3.2). For example, for every binary sequence, σ, of length < height of the tree, we have Aσ,0 ∪ Eσ ⪰ Aσ,1 and A′σ,0 ∪ E′σ ⪰ A′σ,1. In each inequality the sets are disjoint, and every set in the first inequality is disjoint from every set in the second inequality. Hence, by the axioms of qualitative probability we get:( Aσ,0 ∪ A′σ,0 ) ∪ ( Eσ ∪ E′σ ) ⪰ ( Aσ,1 ∪ A′σ,1 ) The second claim follows as easily from the definition of error-reduction and the laws of Boolean algebras. Theorem 3.22 (error reduction). For any tripartition tree TA and any non-null event F, there is an error-reduction tripartition T ∗A such that E(T ∗A ) ⪯ F. Proof. We prove the theorem by induction on k, where k = height of TA. If k = 0, then formally TA consists of A only. Hence the base case is k = 1, and the only error part is on level 1. Let the tripartition on level 1 be (A0, E, A1). We now apply the following result that is implied by Fishburn's reconstruction of the proofs that Savage did not include in his book:20 Claim. Given any tripartition (C0, E0, D0), there is a sequence of tripartitions (Cn, En, Dn), n = 1, 2, . . . that constitute a Savage chain such that (C1, E1, D1) is an error reduction of (C0, E0, D0). Applying this Claim to the case (C0, E0, D0) = (A0, E, A1) we get an infinite Savage chain that begins with (A0, E, A1). For some n, En ⪯ F. This proves the base case. Note. Before proceeding, observe that, for any integer m > 1, every non-null event F can be partitioned into m disjoint non-null events. This is an easy consequence of fineness.21 In what follows we use a representation of ordered partition trees of the form: [ TB1 , . . . , TBm ] where m > 1 and the Bi's are disjoint non-null sets. This includes the possibility that some TBi 's are of height 0, in which case we can replace TBi by Bi. The root of the tree is the union of the Bi's, and the Bi's are its children, ordered as indicated by the indexing. The whole tree is not necessarily a tripartition tree, but each of the m subtrees is. For 20. See the proof of C8 (and the claims that lead to it) in Fishburn (1970, p. 195–198). 21. Since F ≻ ∅ there exists a non-null subset F1 ⊆ F such that F ≻ F1 ≻ ∅. This is established by considering an n-partition S = S1 ∪ ... ∪ Sn such that Si ≺ F for all i = 1, ..n, and observing that there must be two different parts, say Si, Sj, whose intersections with F are ≻ ∅; otherwise, F ⪯ Sk, for some k, contradicting Sk ≺ F. Put F1 = F ∩ Si; then F1 and F − F1 are non-null, and we can apply the same procedure to F − F1, and so on. 23 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu example, [B, B′, TC, TD] denotes a partition tree in which (B, B′, C, D) is a 4-partition of the root, the root being the union of these sets, B and B′ are leaves, and C and D are roots of the tripartition trees TC and TD. Now, for the inductive step, assume that the induction hypothesis holds for k and let TA be a tripartition tree of height k + 1. Then TA is of the form:[ TBl , E, TBr ] where TBl and TBr are of height k. Given any F ≻ ∅, we have to construct a treepartition of TA of total error ≺ F. Partition the given F into 5 non-null events: F1, F2, F3, F4, F5; as observed above, this is always possible. If E is a null set, then we apply the induction hypotheses to each of TBl and TBr , get error-reductions in which the total errors are, respectively, less–than–or–equal–to F1 and F5, and we are done. Otherwise we proceed as follows. Using again the Claim from Fishburn's reconstruction, we get a tripartition of E: (Cl , E∗, Cr), where E∗ ⪯ F3. Ignoring for the moment the role of E∗ as an error part, we get: [ TBl , Cl , E ∗, Cr, TBr ] Note that in this partition the root, which is A, is first partitioned into 5 events; Bl and Br are roots of tripartition trees of height k, and Cl , E∗, and Cr are leaves. Using the induction hypothesis, get an error-reduction T ∗Bl of TBl and an error-reduction T ∗ Br of TBr , such that E(T ∗Bl ) ⪯ F1, and E(T ∗ Br) ⪯ F5. Get an arbitrary tripartition tree TCl of Cl , and an arbitrary tripartition tree TCr of Cr each of height k (every non-null set has a tripartition tree of any given height). Using again the inductive hypothesis, get error-reductions, T ∗Cl and T ∗ Cr , such that E(T ∗ Cl ) ⪯ F2, and E(T ∗Cl ) ⪯ F4. This gives us the following partition of A: [ T ∗Bl , T ∗ Cl , E ∗, T ∗Cr , T ∗ Br ] . Now, put TA0 = T ∗Bl ⊕ T ∗ Cl and TA1 = T ∗ Br ⊕ T ∗ Cr , then[ TA0 , E ∗, TA1 ] is a tripartition tree of A of height k + 1. Call it T ∗A . By Lemma 3.21, E(TA0) ⪯ F1 ∪ F2 and E(TA1) ⪯ F4 ∪ F5. Since E ∗ ⪯ F3, together we get: E(T ∗A ) ⪯ F. Theorem 3.22 is our main result and we shall refer to it as the error reduction theorem, or, for short, error reduction. We shall also use error reduction for the process in which we get tripartition trees in which the error is reduced. Remark 3.23. In a way, this theorem generalizes the construction of monotonically decreasing sequence of error–parts in Theorem 3.11. But, instead of reducing a single error–part (the shaded areas in Figure 3.1), the method we use reduces simultaneously all error-parts in a tripartition tree. 24 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory 3.2.3. Almost uniform partitions Recall that a partition {Pi}ni=1 of a non-null event A is almost uniform if the union of any r members of the partition is not more probable than the union of any r + 1 members. In Theorem 3.10 we rephrased a result by Savage, which claims that if, for arbitrary large values of n there are almost uniform n-partitions of S, then there is a unique numeric probability that almost represents the underlying qualitative one. We noted that Savage's proof requires no further assumptions regarding the qualitative probability, and that if we assume P6′ then the probability (fully) represents the qualitative one (cf. Remark 3.8 above). Using repeated error reductions, we shall now show that for arbitrary large ns there are almost uniform n–partitions of S. Definition 3.24. Given C ≻ ∅, let us say that B ≪ 1n C if there is a sequence C1, C2, . . . , Cn, of n mutually disjoint subsets of C, such that C1 ⪯ C2 ⪯ * * * ⪯ Cn and B ⪯ C1. The following are some simple intuitive properties of ≪. The first two are immediate from the definition, and in the sequel we shall need only the first. Lemma 3.25. (1) If B ≪ 1n C, and if A ⪯ B and C ⊆ D then A ≪ 1 n D. 22 (2) If B ≪ 1n C then B ≪ 1 m C for all m < n. (3) For any C, D ≻ ∅, there exists n such that, for all B, B ≪ 1 n C =⇒ B ⪯ D. (3.16) Lemma 3.26. Let T = (Aσ, Eσ) be a tripartition tree of height k, then, given any n and any regular part Aσ on the kth level of T , there is an error reduction, T ′, of T , such that E(T ′A) ≪ 1 n A′σ. (3.17) Here A′σ is the part that corresponds to Aσ under the structural isomorphism of the two trees. Proof. Fix Aσ and let {Ci}ni=1 be a disjoint sequence of events contained in it as subsets, such that C1 ⪯ C2 ⪯ . . . ⪯ Cn. Using error reduction, get a tree T ′ such that E(T ′) ⪯ C1. Consequently, E(T ′A) ≪ 1 n Aσ. Since the parts are disjoint and under the error reduction each regular part in T is a subset of its corresponding part in T ′, A′σ is the unique part containing Aσ as a subset, which implies (3.17). Lemma 3.27. Given any tripartition tree T = (Aσ, Eσ) of height k and given any n, there is an error reduction T ′ = (A′σ, E′σ) of T such that, for every regular part A′σ on the kth level, E(T ′) ≪ 1n A′σ. 22. Note however that from B ≪ 1n C and C ⪯ D we cannot infer B ≪ 1 n D. The inference is true if we assume C ≺ D; this can be shown by using the numeric probability that represents the qualitative one-whose existence we are about to prove. There seems to be no easier way of showing it. 25 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu Proof. Apply Lemma 3.26 repeatedly 2k times, as σ ranges over all the binary sequences of length k. Since the regular parts can only expand and the total error can only contract, we get at the end an error reduction, T ′, such that E(T ′) ≪ 1n A′σ, for all σ. Theorem 3.28. Let T be a tripartition tree of height k, then there is an error reduction T ′ of T such that the following holds: If Ξ1 and Ξ2 are any two sets of regular parts of T ′ of the kth level that are of equal cardinality r, where r < 2k−1, and if Aτ is any regular part of T ′ on the kth level that is not in Ξ1 ∪ Ξ2, then we have∪ Aσ∈Ξ1 Aσ ∪ E(T ′) ⪯ ∪ Aσ∈Ξ2 Aσ ∪ Aτ . (3.18) Proof. Apply Lemma 3.27 for the case where n = 2k−1 and get a reduction tree T ′ of T such that E(T ′) ≪ 1 2k−1 Aσ for all regular parts Aσ on the kth level of T ′. Let Ξ1 and Ξ2 and Aτ be as in the statement of the theorem, then we have: E(T ′) ≪ 1 2k−1 Aτ . By Definition 3.24, this means that there is a sequence {Ci} of disjoint subsets of Aτ of length 2k−1 such that: E(T ′) ⪯ C1 ⪯ C2 ⪯ * * * ⪯ Cr ⪯ Cr+1 ⪯ * * * ⪯ C2k−1 2k−1∪ i=1 Ci ⊆ Aτ (3.19) where r is the cardinality of Ξ1 and Ξ2. Let A1, A2 . . . , Ar and B1, B2 . . . , Br be enumerations of the members of Ξ1 and Ξ2, respectively. Obviously, we have E(T ′) ⪯ Ai and E(T ′) ⪯ Bi for all i = 1, . . . , r. Since E(T ′) ⪯ C1, we get by Theorem 3.17: Ai ⪯ Bi ∪ E(T ′) ⪯ Bi ∪ Ci for all i = 1, . . . , r. Since all parts are disjoint, we get ∪r i=1 Ai ⪯ ∪r i=1 Bi ∪ ∪r i=1 Ci, that is: ∪ Aσ∈Ξ1 Aσ ∪ E(T ′) ⪯ ∪ Aσ∈Ξ2 Aσ ∪ r∪ i=1 Ci ⪯ ∪ Aσ∈Ξ2 Aσ ∪ Aτ (3.20) which is what we want. Remark 3.29. The last theorem claims that for every tripartition tree T of height k, there is an error reduction T ′ such that, for every two disjoint sets, Ξ1 and Ξ2 of regular leaves (parts on level k) of equal cardinality, r < 2k−1, if A is a leaf that does not belong to Ξ1 ∪ Ξ2, then ∪ Ξ1 ∪ E(T ′) ⪯ ∪ Ξ2 ∪ A. (Here ∪ Ξ1 is the union of all members of Ξ1.) It is not difficult to see that if A is any regular part of T ′, and if Ai(i = 1, . . . , 2k − 1) are the rest of the regular leaves, then the following collection of sets is an almost uniform partition of S: { A ∪ E(T ′), A1, . . . , A2k−1 } . 26 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory Note that in comparing the qualitative probabilities of unions of two subsets of the family, we can assume that they have no common members, because common members can be crossed out, via the qualitative-probability rules. This implies that we need to compare only the union of r and r + 1 members, where 2r + 1 ≤ 2k, which implies r < 2k−1. Hence, we can assume the restriction on r in the last theorem. All in all, the last theorem implies that there are almost uniform partitions of S of arbitrary large sizes. This, as explained before, implies the existence of a unique finitely additive probability that represent the qualitative probability. 3.2.4. The proof of the (‡) condition Next we demonstrate that the (‡) condition holds. As we shall show in Section 4, this property will play a crucial role in defining utilities for simple acts, without using the σ-algebra assumption. Theorem 3.30. Let μ be the probability that represents the qualitative probability ⪰. Assume that P6′ holds. Then, for every non-null event, A, every ρ ∈ (0, 1) and every ε > 0 there exists an event B ⊆ A, such that (ρ − ε) * μ(A) ≤ μ(B) ≤ ρ * μ(A). Proof. As stated by Savage, there is a Savage chain for A, that is, an infinite sequence of 3-partitions of A: (A′n En A′′n)n, n = 1, 2, . . . such that: (i) A′n ∪ En ⪰ A′′n and A′n ∪ En ⪰ A′′n (ii) A′n+1 ⊇ A′n, A′′n+1 ⊇ A′′n , hence En+1 ⊆ En (iii) En − En+1 ⪰ En+1. This, as shown in Fishburn's reconstruction, is provable without using the σ-algebra assumption. Consequently we get: (1) μ(A′n) + μ(En) ≥ μ(A′′n) and μ(A′′n) + μ(En) ≥ μ(A′n), which imply: (a) |μ(A′n)− μ(A′′n)| ≤ μ(En). (2) μ(En+1) ≤ (1/2) * μ(En), which implies: (b) μ(En) ≤ (1/2)n−1. Since μ(A) = μ(A′n) + μ(En) + μ(A′′n), we get from (a) and (b): μ(A′n) −→ 1/2 * μ(A), μ(A′′n) −→ 1/2 * μ(A). Since both A′n and A′′n are monotonically increasing as sets, μ(A′n) and μ(A′′n) are monotonically increasing. Consequently, we get: μ(A′n) ≤ 1/2 * μ(A) and μ(A′′n) ≤ 1/2 * μ(A). All these imply the following claim: 27 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu Claim 1. Let A be a non-null set. Then, for every ε > 0, there are two disjoint subsets of A, A0 and A1, such that, for i = 0, 1: 1/2 * μ(A)− ε ≤ μ(Ai) ≤ 1/2 * μ(A). Call such a partition an ε-bipartition of A. Call ε the error-margin of the bipartition. We can now apply such a bipartition to each of the parts, and so on. By "applying the procedure" we mean applying it to all the non-null minimal sets that were obtained at the previous stages (the inductive definition should be obvious). Claim 2. Let A be any non-null set. Then for every k > 1 and every ε > 0, there are 2k disjoint subsets of A, Ai, i = 1, . . . , 2k, such that: 1/2k * μ(A)− ε ≤ μ(Ai) ≤ 1/2k * μ(A). (This claim is proved by considering k applications of the procedure above, where the error-margin is ε/k.) Note that since Claim 2 is made for any ε > 0, and any k > 1, we can replace ε by ε/2k * μ(A). Thus, the following holds: (+) For every ε > 0, k > 1, there are 2k disjoint subsets, Ai, of A, such that: 1/2k * μ(A)− ε/2k * μ(A) ≤ μ(Ai) ≤ 1/2k * μ(A). The following is a reformulation of (+) (∗) For every ε > 0, k > 1, there are 2k disjoint subsets, Ai, of A, such that: μ(Ai) ∈ [ 1/2k * ( μ(A)− ε ) , 1/2k * μ(A) ] . Similarly, (‡) can be put in the form (∗∗) Fix any non-null set A. Then for every ρ < 1, and any ε′ > 0, there is a set B ⊆ A, for which μ(B) ∈ [( 1 − ε′ ) * ρμ(A), ρμ(A) ] . All the subsets that are generated in the process above are subsets of A. Therefore A plays here the role of the "universe," except that its probability, μ(A), which must be non-zero, can be < 1. In order to simplify the formulas, we can assume that A = S (the universe). The argument for this case works in general, except that μ(A) has to be added as a factor in the appropriate places. Thus the proof is reduced to proving that, of the following two conditions, (◦) implies (◦◦). (◦) Given any ε > 0 and any k > 1, there are 2k disjoint subsets, Ai, such that, for all i, μ(Ai) ∈ [ 1/2k ( 1 − ε ) , 1/2k ] . (◦◦) Given any 0 < ρ < 1 and any ε′ > 0, there is a set B such that μ(B) ∈ [ ρ ( 1 − ε′ ) , ρ ] . 28 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory Now let ρ′ = ρ * (1 − ε′); then (◦◦) means that given 0 < ρ′ < ρ < 1, there is B such that μ(B) ∈ [ρ′, ρ]. Let θ < ρ. Since θ and ρ are infinite sums of binary fractions of the form 1/2k, it is easily seen that there is a finite set of such fractions whose sum is in the interval [θ, ρ]. Since, 1/2m = 2 ( 1/2m+1 ) , it follows that there are k and l < 2k, such that l/2k ∈ [θ, ρ]. Let Ai be the disjoint sets that satisfy (◦) and let B be the union of l of them. Then (1 − ε) * ρ ≤ μ(B) ≤ ρ. Remark 3.31. It's worth repeating that (‡) does not rely on the σ-algebra assumption, but (†) does. That (†) cannot be obtained without the σ-algebra assumption is shown by the existence of countable models, as shown in §3.3. 3.3. Countable models The σ-algebra assumption implies that the Boolean algebra of events has at least the cardinality of the continuum. Its elimination makes it possible to use a countable Boolean algebra. All that is needed is a qualitative probability, ⪰, defined over a countable Boolean algebra, which satisfies P6′. There are more than one way to do this. Here is a type of what we shall call bottom up extension. In what follows, a qualitative probability space is a system of the form (S,B,⪰), where B is a Boolean algebra of subsets of S and ⪰ is qualitative probability defined over B. Definition 3.32. Let (S,B,⪰) be a qualitative probability space. Then a normal bottom up extension of (S,B,⪰) is a pair consisting of a qualitative probability (S′,B′,⪰′) and a mapping h : S′ → S, of S′ onto S, such that for every A, B ∈ B, h−1(B) ∈ B′ and A ⪰ B ⇐⇒ h−1(A) ⪰′ h−1(B). Remark 3.33. The extension is obtained by, so to speak, splitting the atoms (the states in S) of the original algebra. This underlies the technique of getting models that satisfy P6′. In order to satisfy P6′ we have, given A ≻ B, to partition S into sufficiently fine parts, Pi, i = 1, 2, . . . , n, such that A ≻ B ∪ Pi for all i = 1, . . . , n. If we start with a finite Boolean algebra, the way to do it is to divide the atoms into smaller atoms. The intuitive idea is that our states do not reflect certain features of reality, and that, if we take into account such features, some states will split into smaller ones. This picture should not imply that P6′, which is a technical condition, should be adopted. The intuitive justification of P6′, which has been pointed out by Savage, is different. We have shown that, starting from a finite qualitative probability space we can, by an infinite sequence of normal extensions, get a countable space (that is, both S and B are countable) that satisfies P6′. We can also get models with other desired features. The proof of the following theorem, which is not included here, uses techniques of repeated extensions that are employed in set theory and in model theory. Theorem 3.34 (countable model theorem). 29 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu (1) Let (S0,B0,⪰0) be a finite qualitative probability space and assume that the qualitative probability is representable by some numeric probability. Then there is an infinite countable model, (S,B,⪰), which forms together with a mapping, h : S → S0 , a normal extension of (S0,B0,⪰0), and which satisfies P6′. (2) Let Ξ be any countable subset of (0, 1) and let μ be the numeric probability that represents ⪰ (which exists by (1) and by our main result). Then we can construct the model (S,B,⪰) in such a way that μ(A) /∈ Ξ for every A ∈ B. This theorem implies, for example, that for all n, no number of the form 1/n, where n > 1, and no number of the form (1/2)n, where n > 0, are among the values of μ. Now de Finetti and Koopman proposed axiom systems for subjective probability that included an axiom stating that there are partitions of S into n equal parts for arbitrary large n's. Our theorem shows that, without the σ-algebra assumption, P6' does not imply the existence of a probability that satisfies that axiom. Savage found P6′ more intuitive than their axiom (and indeed it is), but was somewhat puzzled by the fact that it implies that axiom. Our last theorem solves this puzzle. It shows that without the σ-algebra assumption it does not imply their axiom. Remark 3.35. So far we have been dealing with the Boolean algebra only. But in order to state the results within the full perspective of Savage's system, we shall state them as results about decision models, that is, about systems of the form (S, X,A,≽,B). This is done in the following theorem. In what follows f ◦ g is the composition of the functions f and g, defined by ( f ◦ g)(x) = f (g(x)). It is used under the assumption that the domain of f includes the range of g. Theorem 3.36. Let (S, X,A,≽,B) be a decision model that satisfies P1-P5 (where P5 is interpreted as the existence of two non-equivalent constant acts, but without assuming CAA). Assume that S is finite and there is a probability over B that represents the qualitative probability. Then there is a Savage system, (S∗, X∗,A∗,≽∗,B∗), that satisfies P1-P6 and there is a function h that maps S∗ onto S such that the following holds: (i) S∗ and B∗ are countable, (ii) for all A ∈ B, h−1(A) ∈ B∗, (iii) X∗ = X, (iv) f ∈ A∗ iff f ◦ h ∈ A, (v) f ∗ ≽∗ g∗ iff f ◦ h ≽ g ◦ h. As noted, the proofs of these theorems employs techniques of model-theory and settheory. Here is a rough idea of one basic techniques from set theory. At every stage of the repeated extensions we ensure that a particular instance of P6′ should be satisfied. As the model grows, there are more cases to take care of, but we can arrange these tasks so that after the infinite sequence of extensions all are taken care of. We shall not go into more detail here. 30 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory 4. A Simpler Utility Function for Simple Acts In discussing the possibilities of extending the utility to non-simple acts, Savage remarks: The requirement that an act has only a finite number of consequences may seem, from a practical point of view, almost no requirement at all. To illustrate, the number of time intervals that might possibly be the duration of a human life can be regarded as finite, if you agree that the duration may as well be rounded to the nearest minute, or second, or microsecond, and that there is almost no possibility of its exceeding a thousand years. More generally, it is plausible that, no matter what set of consequences is envisaged, each consequence can be particularly identified with some element of a suitably chosen finite, though possibly enormous, subset. If that argument were valid, it could easily be extended to reach the conclusion that infinite sets are irrelevant to all practical affairs, and therefore to all parts of applied mathematics. (Savage, 1972, p. 76–77) In the last sentence Savage claims that the argument in favor of restricting ourselves to simple acts should be rejected; otherwise this argument would also imply that in applied mathematics we need not consider infinite sets. But Savage's system main goal is to serve as a foundation for subjective (in his terminology, personal) probability- clearly a philosophical goal, which makes it a different kind of thing than a piece of applied mathematics. In applied mathematics one uses, as a rule, σ-additive probabilities, for reasons of convenience and efficiency; but Savage avoids, because of philosophical qualms, the adoption of σ-additivity as an axiom of his system. In the continuation of the above quote Savage points out the very high benefits that accrue in mathematics from the use of infinite sets, which "can lead to great simplification of situations that could, in principle, but only with enormous difficulty, be treated in terms of finite sets." Yet, his system cannot be treated merely as a piece of mathematics. As a mathematician, Savage is interested in generalizing various concepts and theorems, for the sake of the mathematical significance of the generalization. As we shall presently show, CAA can be avoided, if we limit ourselves to simple acts, and, as far as the philosophical goal of his system is concerned-this is all that matters. For, as we noted in the first two Sections, CAA implies a rather dubious notion of "rational agent." Note that it is known, and anyone who follows Savage's derivation can easily check it, that in the Savage system all that is needed for defining the probabilities are two non-equivalent constant acts.23 That is, instead of using CAA we posit 2CA, i.e., there are two non-equivalent acts. Assume that they are c0 and c1 and that their 23. This observation is also noted in (Fishburn, 1981, p. 161) where the author remarked that "[as far as obtaining a unique probability measure is concerned] Savage's C [i.e., the set of consequences] can contain as few as two consequences" (see also Fishburn, 1982, p. 6). Fishburn (1970, §14.1–3) contains a clean exposition of Savage's proof of (3.1); and see especially §14.3 for an illustration of the role of P1–P6 played in deriving numerical probability. 31 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu corresponding consequences are a0 and a1. Assume, WLOG, that c0 ≺ c1. Savage's technique of getting qualitative probabilities can be now applied, so that for every E, F ∈ B we define: E ⪰ F ⇔Df c1|E + c0|E ≽ c1|F + c0|F. (4.1) Then ⪰ is a qualitative probability. We can now represent it by a uniquely determined numeric probability, μ. Under the σ-algebra assumption, Savage's construction gives us a probability that satisfies (†). Without the σ-algebra assumption, our construction gives us a probability that satisfies (‡). Recall that a feasible consequence is a consequence, a, for which there is an act f ∈ A, such that f−1(a) is not null. We shall now show how, using the probability μ, we can assign utility values to all to feasible consequences, so as to get an expected utility function defined over all simple acts. This is done without assuming CAA. Let u(x) the utility of consequence x. We start by putting u(a0) = 0, u(a1) = 1. This means that the acts c0 and c1 fix the basic utility scale. Without appealing to CAA we shall now assign utilities to all feasible consequences. To do this, we use the probability μ, which we have derived already. The definition is simpler if μ satisfies (†). Therefore we shall provide this definition first, and then point out the modification that will give us the utility assignment, if the probability satisfies (‡). At the end we get a utility assignment for all simple acts, where neither the σ-algebra assignment nor CAA are assumed. 4.1. Constructing utilities under the (†) condition Consider now any feasible consequences a ∈ X and let g be an act such that g−1(a) is not null. Let A = g−1(a) and let c∗A =Df g|A + c0|A. By definition, c∗A yields a if s ∈ A, status quo, (i.e., 0) – otherwise. Let U( f ) be the utility value of the act f , which we have to define. To define utilities, we compare c∗A with c0. If c ∗ A ≡ c0, we put u(a) = 0. Otherwise there are three possibilities: (i) c1 ≽ c∗A ≻ c0 (ii) c∗A ≻ c1 (iii) c0 ≻ c∗A In each one of these possibilities, the utility of c∗A and that of a can be defined as follows. Let μ be the numeric probability derived under the (†) condition. Then for case (i), let ρ = sup { μ(B) ∣∣∣ B ⊆ A and c∗A ≽ c1|B + c0|B}. (4.2) Define U[c∗A] = ρ and u(a) = ρ μ(A) . (4.3) For case (ii), let ρ = sup{μ(B) | B ⊆ A and c1 ≽ c∗A|B + c0|B}; define U[c∗A] = 1/ρ and u(c) = 1/[ρ * μ(A)]. Case (iii) in which the utility comes out negative is treated along similar lines and is left to the reader. 32 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory This assignment of utilities leads to a representation of the utility of any simple acts, f , as the expected utilities of the consequences, that appear as values of the act, where, WLOG, we assume that each consequence a of f is feasible. As noted by Savage, this definition works, if we assume that μ satisfied (†). The proof is straightforward. 4.2. Constructing utilities under the (‡) condition If μ satisfies the weaker condition (‡) the definition has to be modified. Here is the modification for the case c1 ≽ c∗A ≻ c0. From this it is not difficult to see what the modification is in the other cases. Instead of (4.2), let ρ = sup { μ(B) ∣∣∣∣∣ ∀ε > 0 ∃B′ ⊆ A[ μ(B)− ε ≤ μ(B′) ≤ μ(B) and c∗A ≽ c1|B′ + c0|B′ ]} . Define utilities of cA and a as in (4.3), then we are done. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for pointing out an error in an early version of this paper. A. Ramsey's System The following is an overview of Ramsey (1926). All page numbers refer to this publication. Ramsey was guided by what he calls "the old–established way of measuring a person's belief," which is "to propose a bet, and see what are the lowest odds which he will accept" (p. 170). He finds this method "fundamentally sound," but limited, due to the diminishing marginal utility of money (which means that the person's willing to bet may depend not only on the odds but also on the absolute sums that are staked). Moreover, the person may like or dislike the betting activity for its own stake, which can be a distorting factor. Ramsey's proposal is therefore based on the introduction of an abstract scale, which is supposed to measure true utilities, and on avoiding actual betting. Instead, the agent is supposed to have a preference relation, defined over gambles (called by Ramsey options), which are of the form: α if p, β if ¬p. It means that the agent gets α if p is true, β otherwise; here p is a proposition and α, β, . . . are entities that serve as abstract payoffs, which reflect their values for the agent. Among the gambles we have: α if p, α if not-p, which can be written as: "α 33 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu for certain." (Note that this does not imply that the agent gets the same value in all possible worlds, because the possible world can carry by itself some additional value.) If neither of the two gambles G1 and G2 is preferred to the other, the agent is indifferent between them and they are considered to be equivalent. Obviously, bets can be easily described as gambles of the above form. Ramsey does not use the more general form (of which he was certainly aware): α1 if p1, α2 if p2,. . . , αn if pn; because, for his purpose, he can make do with n = 2. When he has to define conditional degrees of beliefs he uses gambles with n = 3. Concerning propositions Ramsey tells us that he assumes Wittgenstein's theory, but remarks that probably some other theory could be used as well (p. 177 fn. 1). As for α, β, . . ., his initial explanation is somewhat obscure.24 But shortly afterwards it turns out that the values are attached to the possible worlds and that they can be conceived as equivalence classes of equi-preferable worlds: Let us call any set of all worlds equally preferable to a given world α value: we suppose that if a world α is preferable to β any world with the same value as α is preferable to any world with the same value as β and shall say that the value of α is greater than that of β. This relation 'greater than' orders values in a series. We shall use α henceforth both for the world and its value. (p. 178) Obviously, the preference relation should be transitive and this can be imposed by an axiom (or as a consequence of axioms). Also the equivalence relation mentioned above should have the expected properties.25 We thus get an ordering of the values, which Ramsey denotes using the standard inequality signs; thus, α > β iff α for certain is preferred to β for certain. He also uses the Greek letters ambiguously; thus, if α for certain is equivalent to β for certain, this is expressed in the form: α = β. All in all, the Greek letters range over an ordered set. The main task now is to "convert" this ordered set into the set of reals, under their natural ordering. Ramsey takes his cue from the historical way, whereby real numbers are obtained via geometry: as lengths of line segments.26 This requires the use of a congruence relation, say ∼=, defined over segments. In our case, the line comes as an ordered set, meaning that the line and its segments are directed; hence αβ ∼= γδ also implies: α > β ⇔ γ > δ. In Ramsey's notation '=' is also used for congruence; thus he writes: αβ = γδ. (This agrees with Euclid's terminology and notation, except that in Euclid capital roman letters are used for points, so that, "AB is equal to CD" means that the segment AB is congruent to the segment CD.) Under the identification of α, β, γ, δ, . . . with real numbers, αβ = γδ, becomes α − β = γ − δ. Ramsey's idea is to define αβ = γδ by means of the following defining condition, where the agent's degree of belief in p is 1/2. 24. "[W]e use Greek letters to represent the different possible totalities of events between which our subject chooses-the ultimate organic unities" (p. 176–177). 25. For example, axiom 3 (p. 179) says that the equivalence relation is transitive. Additional properties are implied by the axioms on the whole. 26. Or rather, as the ratios of a line segments to some fixed segment chosen as unit. 34 A Simpler and More Realistic Subjective Decision Theory Cong Segments α if p, δ if ¬p is equivalent to β if p, γ if ¬p. The underlying heuristics seems to be this: If α, β, γ, δ are identified with real numbers and if (Cong Segments) means that the expected utilities of the two gambles are the same, then an easy computation of expected utilities, for the case in which p is believed to degree 1/2, shows that (Cong Segments) is equivalent to: α − β = γ − δ. This reasoning presupposes however that the truth (or falsity) of p does not have, by itself, any positive or negative value for the agent. Ramsey calls such propositions ethically neutral. The precise, more technical, definition is: an atomic proposition p is ethically neutral "if two possible worlds differing only in regard to the truth of p are always of equal value" (p. 177); a non-atomic proposition is ethically neutral if all its atomic components are. Now, if p is ethically neutral, then the agent's having degree of belief 1/2 in p is definable by the condition: Deg Bel 1/2 For some α = β, α if p, β if ¬p is equivalent to β if p, α if¬p. Hence, (Cong Segments) can be used to define αβ = γδ, provided that p is an ethically neutral proposition believed to degree 1/2. Ramsey's first axiom states that such a proposition exists. Using which, he defines the congruence relation between directed segments and adds further axioms, including the axiom of Archimedes and the continuity axiom, which make it possible to identify the values α, β, γ, . . . with real numbers. Applying systematic ambiguity, Ramsey uses the Greek letters also for the corresponding real numbers (and we shall do the same). Having established this numeric scale of values, Ramsey (p. 179-180) proposes the following way of determining a person's degree of belief in the proposition p: Let α, β, γ be such that the following holds. p(α, β, γ) α for certain is equivalent to β if p, γ if ¬p.27 Then the person's degree of belief in p is (α − γ)/(β − γ). Of course, the definition is legitimate iff the last ratio is the same for all triples (α, β, γ) that satisfy p(α, β, γ). Ramsey observes that this supposition must accompany the definition, that is, we are to treat it as an axiom. A similar axiom is adopted later (p. 180) for the definition of conditional degrees of belief, and he refers to them as axioms of consistency. Now the only motivation for adopting the consistency axiom is expediency. The axiom states in a somewhat indirect way that the Greek letters range over a utility scale. Consider the two following claims: Consist Ax There is x, such that, for all α, β, γ, p(α, β, γ) IFF (α − γ)/(β − γ) = x. Utility Scale There is x, such that, for all α, β, γ, p(α, β, γ) IFF α = x * β + (1 − x) * γ. 27. If p is not ethically neutral then the gamble is supposed to be adjusted already, so that β contains the contribution of p and γ-the contribution of ¬p. 35 Haim Gaifman and Yang Liu In both claims 'p' is a free variable ranging over propositions, which has to be quantified universally. The second claim states that the value scale established using all the previous axioms is a utility scale – where the number x, which is associated with the proposition p is its subjective probability; (i.e., there is no problem of marginal utility and the acceptance of a bet depends only on the betting odds). Now, by elementary algebra, the two claims are equivalent. This means that the consistency axiom is a disguised form of the claim that there is a function that associates with each proposition a degree of belief, such that the value scale over which the Greek letters range is a utility scale. Ramsey goes on to define conditional probability, using conditional gambles, which comes with its associated consistency axiom. This is followed by a proof that the degrees of belief satisfy the axioms of a finitely additive probability, and some other properties of conditional probability. To sum up, Ramsey's goal was to show how subjective probabilities can, in principle, be derived from betting behavior (where the stakes are are defined in terms of a suitable utility scale). His excessively strong axioms are motivated largely by this goal. B. Additional Definitions and Savage's Postulates We provide a list of Savage's postulates. These are not the postulates stated and discussed in the book, which are supposed to be accepted on grounds of rationality, but a reformulation of them by Savage, which appears on the reverse side of the book's cover. They are stated using the concepts and notations introduced in Section 1 and Section 3.1 together with the following notions of conditional preference and null events: Definition (conditional preference). Let E be some event, then, given acts f , g ∈ A, f is said to be weakly preferred to g given E, written f ≽E g, if, for all pairs of acts f ′, g′ ∈ A, if 1. f agrees with f ′ and g agrees with g′ on E, and 2. f ′ agrees with g′ on E, then 3. f ′ ≽ g′. That is, f ≽E g if, for all f ′, g′ ∈ A, f (s) = f ′(s), g(s) = g′(s) if s ∈ E f ′(s) = g′(s) if s ∈ E. } =⇒ f ′ ≽ g′. (B.1) Definition (Null events). An event E is said to be a null if, for any acts f , g ∈ A, f ≽E g. (B.2) That is, an event is null if the agent is indifferent between any two acts given E. 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Chai, David, Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness Albany: State University of New York Press, 2019, 216 pages Eric S. Nelson1 Published online: 1 April 2019 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019 Recent Anglophone philosophical interpretations of the Zhuangzi 莊子 often tend to construe the text (based on selective ahistorical readings of isolated passages) as articulating forms of skepticism, relativism, and nihilism, relying on modern Western epistemic and normative categories unfamiliar to classical Chinese discourses and the composite multilayered text associated with the enigmatic figure ZHUANG Zhou莊周. In Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness, David Chai offers a philosophically systematic and hermeneutically nuanced elucidation of the Zhuangzi in relation to its historical context, subsequent Chinese reception, and contemporary philosophical concerns. The author displays great erudition by taking into consideration the historical context of the text by contrasting it with recently uncovered excavated texts such as the Hengxian 恒先 (Primordial Constancy) and Huangdi Sijing 黃帝四經 (Four Classics of the Yellow Emperor), the Daodejing道德經, and other early Daoist and eclectic sources, and the extended history and variety of Chinese commentaries that are frequently ignored in Western philosophical accounts of the Zhuangzi, thereby revealing the text's complexity and richness. Chai counterpoises the commentary of GUO Xiang 郭象, which through its rendition of the text has deeply shaped the Western discourse concerning the Zhuangzi, with an array of other sources that indicate more hermeneutically and conceptually satisfying alternative interpretations (48). In this first of three envisioned volumes (173), Chai's analysis promises to transform Zhuangzi studies by providing a historically informed, textually nuanced, philosophical interpretation of the neglected cosmological and ontological dimensions of the Zhuangzi in relation to its fundamental question of nothingness. This innovative work clarifies the Zhuangzi's cosmology, ontology, and ethos of a Daoist life-praxis of forgetting and composing the heart-mind through the meontological priority of generative nothingness. From the Western ontological and theological perspective that posits and prioritizes first entities such as God and being, one of the challenges of genuinely Dao (2019) 18:291–294 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11712-019-09663-6 * Eric S. Nelson [email protected] 1 Division of Humanities, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong encountering early Chinese thought, including the sources identified with Daoism, is the notion of a generative becoming and functioning of nothingness from which being and nonbeing, dao 道, the one (yi 一), and the myriad things (wanwu 萬物) arise and return. Mḗ-ón (μή-ὄν) is Greek for "not-" or "non-being," and meontology the inquiry into nonbeing and nothingness. Chai modifies this expression in Chapter 1 of this study, undertaking what could be described as a "meontological turn" in contrast to the prioritization of the discourse of being. This turn-intimated in the Chinese commentarial tradition-not only has noteworthy implications for interpreting the Zhuangzi, but for ontology itself. For example, whereas Martin Heidegger formulated the ontological difference between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiende), and Being as the primordial philosophical question of Western metaphysics, Chai's first chapter articulates a compelling Daoist alternative in tracing the structure and significance of a distinctive meontological difference between two senses of wu 無, namely, ontic nonbeing and ontological nothingness, through an analysis of wuwu 無無 in the Zhuangzi that argues that this doubling is not a denial but a radicalization of wu (3). Such radical nothingness is not derivative, relative, or a merely negative nonbeing; it generatively constitutes reality in Zhuangzi's cosmogenesis and orients Daoist arts and practices of life as discussed in the ensuing chapters. What sort of world is generated by cosmogenic nothingness? In Chapter 2, Chai examines the dao 道 as the ontological emergence of the Thing (wu 物) from the indistinguishable unity of undifferentiated oneness (the One) and the ontic plurality of the myriad things (wanwu 萬物) from their root in the Thing (36–37), tracking how the Zhuangzi moves from the phenomenology of traces (ji 跡) to the meontology of the traceless (wuji 無跡). Through a movement of reversal or return (fan 反), the Thing is released from linguistic and psychological conventions and traps through the gift of nothingness operating in it (38–39). The cosmology of the Zhuangzi orients and is necessary for interpreting Daoist arts of life-practice that are the focus of the Zhuangzian narratives of Butcher Ding (Pao Ding 庖丁) cutting up the ox, the cicada catcher, and the belt-buckle maker. These narratives are not only about becoming habitually skillful through repetitive action. As the text repeatedly reveals, they are models of nourishing life and exemplify the life-praxis of returning to the dao (48–49). Chai can accordingly offer a comprehensive interpretation of the connections between the cosmological, linguistic, and practical passages of the Zhuangzi that is lacking in other contemporary philosophical approaches. The Zhuangzian life-praxis is one of unletting and undoing (55), nurturing and preserving "that which lies within things" (52). Chai is deeply attuned to the metaphors, images, and aesthetic and poetic dimensions of the text, describing how nothingness orients life-praxis as a dance (52–54). He likewise attends to its ethical significance. Daoist practices of letting-be and releasement cannot be adequately described as egoistic or altruistic in the Western moral sense of these terms, as it undoes both self and things, allowing them their own self-repose (56). The fasting of the heart-mind (xinzhai 心齋), in which qi 氣 attains a condition of emptiness (xu 虛), is part of composing the heart-mind that harmonizes in vital quietude both internal emotions and external things. In Chapter 3, Chai describes how the Zhuangzi engages in a series of reflections on death, mortality, and temporality that radically differ from the understanding of time as 292 Eric S. Nelson a linear series of static now points and signifies the possibility of abandoning the need for time. In the Zhuangzi, human temporality and mortality are contrasted with the dao's cosmogenesis. The practice of undoing the anxieties of temporality and emptying time indicates a nothingness that determines rather than is determined by time (68). The dao manifests itself to an extent as the functioning, changing, and temporalizing of nothingness through which the restfulness of nothingness is disclosed. Consequently, there is no negation of, or flight from, time, but a practice of letting-go of time as duration and death through the composure of nothingness. The heart-mind's composure is neither a monistic nor mystical union, insofar as it allows each thing to be its own self-generative center (76). Furthermore, letting-go is portrayed in the Zhuangzi through various forms of uselessness (wuyong 無用), forgetting (wang 忘), and the freedom of carefree wandering (xiaoyao you 逍遙遊). The last three chapters turn our attention to the life-praxis of nothingness indicated in the Zhuangzi, beginning with uselessness in Chapter 4. The Zhuangzi reverses ordinary expectations and judgments of what counts as useful and useless, providing anticonventional models of Daoist arts of life-practices. Daoist "naturalness" and self-so-ness (ziran 自然), things following their own grain, are exhibited through images of the useless, the disfigured, the grotesque, and the withered, which operate as exemplars of nourishing, composing, and preserving life (95). The useless tree is an image of life in contrast to a praxis shaped by the distancing proxy of calculative utility (92). Modern epistemic interpretations of the Zhuangzi presuppose that the text is concerned with knowing vis-à-vis not knowing, understanding with respect to doubt (93). This interpretation discloses how the Zhuangzi is concerned with how to live in accordance with dao through uselessness. Resting in uselessness is the art of nourishing life. Chai distinguishes three forms of uselessness in the Zhuangzi. One of them concerns the releasement and taking in of nothingness as, for instance, the inner-void takes and keeps in an empty vessel that gives and receives (92–93). The dao uselessly nourishes through nothingness, and the withering of the creativity and generativity of nothingness in the useful, the calculative, and the artificial is the loss of the dao's nourishing power: "From nothingness all things arise, and from uselessness all things obtain their use" (99). The ethos of the life-praxis of the dao is accordingly letting and allowing natural spontaneity to occur. The self-generating ordering of things is not a static hierarchy, however, as it is characterized by the dance of harmony and cacophony, balancing and chaos. In Chapter 5, Chai depicts the Daoist ethos of forgetting-a forgetting that must forget forgetting itself that is far more radical than cognitively doubting epistemic contents-as "a perpetual letting-go of names and designations" (109). Forgetting is a practice of return (110), and in letting traces return to their tracelessness (113). There are three basic forms and practices of forgetting that Chai designates: epistemological, phenomenological, and cosmological. Forgetting is not so much about knowing or not knowing memories and cognitive-perceptual contents; it is an art of emptying in sittingin forgetfulness (zuowang 坐忘), composing the mind, and letting the myriad things return to themselves. In emptying, one forgets names, images, and the constructed meanings of things through forgetting the traces of things (115); one forgets being and non-being in the meontological functioning of nothingness. The genuine self is accordingly self-forgetting (108). Such forgetting is a non-forgetting of the genuine and the real in contrast to "forgetting that which is real" (chengwang誠忘) (116). Without being Review of Zhuangzi and the Becoming of Nothingness 293 restrained by retaining and burdened by the anxiety of losing, emptiness and stillness are the conditions for receiving and responding (119). The notion of freedom in the Zhuangzi has been highly contested. As delineated in Chapter 6, it is not so much freedom in Western senses of freedom of the will, the individual subject, or its negative or positive liberty. Chai contends that the sense of freedom articulated in the Zhuangzi is primarily onto-cosmological and consists of the meontological harmonizing of things and a life-praxis of letting-go of things and the self in forgetting, composing the heart-mind, and carefree wandering. This is indicated in the discussion of the three heavenly or natural patterns (tianli 天理) of heavenly differentiation (tianni 天倪), heavenly measure (tianjun 天均), and heavenly harmony (tianhe 天和) that are sheltered in the freedom, mystery, and silence of nothingness (140). These three principles unground rather than ground according to the dao (154). They are practices of redistributing and equalizing measures, not a demand for undifferentiated sameness (147). The art and cultivation of dao in the Zhuangzi, enacted by the "gatherer of authenticity" (caizhen 采真) (165–166), is liberated from instrumental calculations and purposes, and their anxieties, in being oriented toward a nonpurposive and nondeliberative natural action (172). The value of this book lies not only in its content that reveals Zhuangzi's philosophical sophistication, but also in its hermeneutical approach. It is a virtue of Chai's interpretive and argumentative strategy to indicate novel ways in which it can and should be interpreted as an interconnected whole counter to tendencies that construe it as an assortment of disconnected ideas and arguments. Weaving the text's diverse threads in relation to the meontological question of nothingness, Chai's ambitious work offers a significant hermeneutical strategy for interpreting the cosmology, ontology, and ethics of the Zhuangzi that pushes our understanding of meontology and Daoist studies in new directions. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. 294 Eric S. Nelson

W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 1 Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument William Child I start with three questions about our concepts of conscious states. (1) How do I understand what it is for me to be in pain? (2) How do I understand what it is for someone else to be in pain? (3) Is the property of pain that I ascribe to others on the basis of what they say and do the same as the property I ascribe to myself without evidence? Wittgenstein's response to those questions involves a general anti-platonism about properties or standards of similarity. What it is for one thing to be similar to another, or to have the same property as another, he thinks, is not dictated by reality itself; it depends on our classificatory practices and the standards of similarity they embody. It comes more naturally to us to classify things in some ways than others. But no property or standard of similarity is intrinsically or objectively more natural than any other: more natural simplicter. Wittgenstein's view stands in sharp opposition to the contemporary doctrine of natural properties.1 For the natural properties view holds precisely that there is an objective hierarchy of naturalness amongst properties, a hierarchy that does not depend in any way on our concepts or practices. I want to explore the interaction between Wittgenstein's position about sensations and sensation language and his anti-platonism. Some anti-Wittgensteinian views in the philosophy of mind make essential appeal to the idea of natural properties. What are the prospects for such views? Do they pose a threat to a broadly Wittgensteinian position about sensations and sensation-language? 1. Wittgenstein's position and the rejection of natural properties One way of answering the questions with which we started involves what we might call the model of introspection and identity. On this view the answers to questions 1 and 2 are, in the broadest outline, as follows: 1. I understand what it is for me to be in pain from the first-person case. (As Wittgenstein puts this view: 'it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means'.2) I single out a kind of sensation on the basis of how it feels in the first-person case, and I associate the word 'pain' with sensations of that introspectively-identified kind. 2. I grasp what it is for someone else to be in pain by extension from the first-person case: what it is for someone else to be in pain is for her to be in the same kind of conscious state that I am in when I am in pain. (As Wittgenstein puts the view: 'if I suppose that someone else has a pain, then I am simply supposing that he has just the same as I have so often had'.3)4 1 Locus classicus: David Lewis, "New Work for a Theory of Universals," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 61 (1983) and "Putnam's Paradox," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62 (1984). For development and discussion see Theodore Sider, Writing the Book of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 4th edn., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), §293. 3 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §350. 4 We shall see later how, on this approach, an answer to question 3 falls naturally out of the answer to question 2. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 2 Wittgenstein famously argues against both parts of that account: the idea that we can single out the property of pain by introspective ostension in the first-person case; and the idea that we can understand the word in third-person ascriptions by appeal to the idea of another person's being in the same kind of state as me. At both points, his argument essentially depends on his general opposition to the metaphysics of natural properties. Wittgenstein's opposition to stage 1 of the introspection-and-identity model is a central aspect of the private language sections of Philosophical Investigations. A crucial theme of those sections is that one cannot give meaning to a word for a kind of sensation by introspective ostension, in a way that does not rely on any links with behavior or external circumstances. That is the burden of Wittgenstein's discussion of the private sensation diarist in Philosophical Investigations §258. The point of that discussion, as I read it, is this. In order to give a meaning to a word, I must establish a standard of correctness for uses of the word: a standard that distinguishes between a correct and an incorrect application of the word. The private linguist thinks she can establish such a standard of correctness by concentrating her attention on the sensation she is having at a particular point and undertaking to use the word 'S' for all sensations of the same kind. But, Wittgenstein asks, what is it for something else to be the same kind of sensation as this one? There are indefinitely many different possible standards of similarity. And no one way of classifying sensations as similar or different is any better, or more correct, than any other. What it takes for one sensation to belong to the same kind as another is not determined by the nature of things; it has to be understood by reference to a humanly-created standard of similarity. But in order for there to be a humanly-created standard of similarity, there has to be a practice of classification; a technique of applying a word.5 And the private linguist, Wittgenstein argues, cannot establish a classificatory practice by a one-off act of introspective association. Wittgenstein's argument depends on his general anti-platonist insistence that the world itself does not dictate what it takes for one thing to belong to the same kind as another. For suppose there is simply a fact of the matter, independent of our concepts and our practices of classification, about what it takes for one sensation to belong to the same kind as another. In that case, there will similarly be a practice-independent fact of the matter about whether the sensation the private linguist has today is the same kind of sensation as the one she had yesterday when she introduced her word 'S'. So when the diarist attends introspectively to a particular sensation and says, 'I shall use the word "S" to refer to sensations of the same kind as this one', she will, pace Wittgenstein, thereby establish a standard of correctness for future applications of the word 'S'. Or so, at least, the propertynaturalist will argue. We can trace a similar dialectic in connection with Wittgenstein's opposition to stage 2 of the introspection-and-identity model. Suppose that, contrary to the private language sections, I do understand the word 'pain', in the first instance, solely on the basis of my introspective awareness of my own pain. On the introspection-and-identity model, I then grasp what it is for someone else to be in pain by appeal to the principle that for someone else to be in pain is for her to be in the same kind of state that I am in when I am in pain. Wittgenstein famously rejects that idea: That gets us no further. It is as if I were to say, 'You surely know what "It's 5 o'clock here" means; so you also know what "It's 5 o'clock on the sun" means. It means simply that it is just the same time there as it is here when it is 5 o'clock.' – The explanation by means of sameness does not work here. For I know well enough that one can call 5 o'clock here and 5 o'clock there 'the same time', but I do not know in what cases one is to speak of its being the same time here and there. 5 For the point about a technique, in this context, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §262. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 3 In exactly the same way, it is no explanation to say: the supposition that he has a pain is simply the supposition that he has the same as I. For what's surely clear to me is this part of the grammar: that one will say that the stove has the same experience as I if one says: it's in pain and I'm in pain.6 His point is this. The principle, 'for someone else to be in pain is for her to be in the same state that I am in when I am in pain', is true. But I cannot extract a conception of what it is for someone else to be in pain merely from the principle about sameness of state, by itself. For there are indefinitely many different possible states of S that could count as S's being in the same state that I'm in when I feel pain. Appealing to the notion of sameness of state, then, is not by itself enough to specify what it takes for S to be in pain; I need some substantive understanding of what it takes for S to be in the same state as me. As before, Wittgenstein's position depends on his anti-platonism. For suppose there are natural properties. Then, it seems, we can appeal to sameness of property in explaining what it is for someone else to be in pain. For in that case the explanation, 'for S to be in pain is for her to be in the same state that I am in when I'm in pain', does single out a definite condition for the truth of 'S is in pain'. 2. Peacocke on concepts of conscious states Christopher Peacocke has offered an account of our concepts of conscious states that directly challenges Wittgenstein's view by endorsing a version of the natural properties view and accepting the model of introspection-and-identity.7 Examining that account is a helpful way to explore the issues about natural properties and sensation concepts. According to Peacocke, our grasp of the concept pain is 'anchored' in the first-person case: in our awareness of our own feelings of pain. At a first pass, Peacocke's proposal is that possessing the concept pain involves two things: (i) knowing what it is like to feel pain; (ii) having tacit knowledge that for someone else to be in pain is for them to be in the same conscious state that one is in oneself when one is in pain. But that is only a first pass. To understand the idea of someone else being in the same conscious state that I am in when I am in pain, I must grasp the idea of someone other than myself being a subject of experience at all. And in Peacocke's view, just as my grasp of the concept pain is anchored in my knowledge of what it is like to be in pain, so my grasp of the concept conscious subject is anchored in my knowledge of what it is like to be a conscious subject. He holds, further, that the concepts conscious state and conscious subject are interdependent: a conscious state is, in its nature, a state of a conscious subject; and a conscious subject is, in its nature, a thing that has conscious states. In line with that interdependence, Peacocke's full view is that grasping the concept pain involves satisfying this more complex condition: (i) knowing what it is like to feel pain; (ii*) having tacit knowledge that for someone else to be in pain is (a) for them to be something of the same kind as me (a subject); and also (b) for them to be in the same state I'm in when I'm in pain.8 In what follows, I shall ignore this complication, and focus just on the simple account given by clauses (i) and (ii) above. But we should remember that Peacocke's full account is more complex. We can note three important features of this account. First, Peacocke's idea is that one's grasp of what it is for someone else to be in pain is explained by one's grasp of what it 6 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §350. 7 Christopher Peacocke, Truly Understood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 5. 8 For this formulation, see Peacocke, Truly Understood, 175. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 4 is for one to be in pain oneself, together with knowledge of the identity. As I have said, Wittgenstein does not deny that, when S is in pain, S is in the same state that I am in when I am in pain. What he denies is that we can appeal to that identity in explaining what it is for S to be in pain. But that is precisely what Peacocke thinks we can do: his account deliberately and explicitly rejects this Wittgensteinian view. Second, as Peacocke stresses, his account assumes a doctrine of natural properties.9 Mental properties, he thinks, are 'properties in their own right'; they do not need to be reduced to anything else in order to count as genuine properties. By the same token, the notion of identity of conscious state across different subjects is 'a notion in good standing' which does not require 'further elaboration, in terms of functional role' or anything else. So to grasp the idea of someone else being in the same conscious state that I am in when I am in pain, I do not need any further specification of what it takes for someone to be in the same conscious state as that. To see why Peacocke's account requires this sort of naturalism about properties, suppose that the natural properties view were false; so, considered in itself, any conscious state in someone else would have an equally good claim to be counted the same kind of conscious state as my state of pain. Then the clause, 'for S to be in pain is for S to be in the same conscious state that I am in when I am in pain', would not specify a determinate condition for the truth of 'S is in pain'. On the assumption that there are natural properties, however, it is at least arguable that we can appeal to a basic notion of sameness of conscious state to specify what it takes for S to be in pain. Third, Peacocke claims two advantages for his account of concepts of conscious states. In the first place, it explains the uniformity of meaning between first-person and thirdperson ascriptions of pain and other conscious states. Since what it is for someone else to be in pain is explained in terms of her being in the same conscious state that I am in when I'm in pain, there is no danger that the property of pain that I ascribe to other people might be different from the property of pain that I ascribe to myself.10 By contrast: other theories, and especially some forms of 'criterial' accounts favored by some neoWittgensteinians, have famously had difficulties in explaining how the same thing is meant in . . . first-person and third-person psychological ascriptions.11 A second advantage Peacocke claims for his account is that it explains how it is possible to understand the thought that someone else is in pain without knowing what would count as evidence that she is in pain.12 He takes it as obvious that understanding third-person ascriptions of pain is independent of knowing what counts as evidence that someone else is in pain – citing with approval Rogers Albritton's observation that one might have the concept toothache yet simply have 'no notion how people with toothache [are] likely to behave, these days.'13 Wittgensteinian views, Peacocke thinks, again have difficulty in accommodating that insight. Is Peacocke's account successful? Does it offer a viable alternative to Wittgenstein's position? 9 As Peacocke puts it, his account assumes 'a certain irreducible realism' about properties (Truly Understood, 179; all quotations in this paragraph of the main text are taken from that page). The kind of realism about properties that Peacocke has in mind is some version of the natural properties view; that is what is needed if the appeal to the notion, 'same conscious state as this', is to do the work that he requires. 10 This explains the point advertised in note 4 above: that, on an account that appeals to identity in answering our initial question 2 ('How do I understand what it is for someone else to be in pain?'), the answer to question 2 brings with it an answer to question 3 ('Is the property of pain that I ascribe to others on the basis of what they say and do the same as the property I ascribe to myself without evidence?'). 11 Peacocke, Truly Understood, 165. 12 Peacocke, Truly Understood, 177. 13 Rogers Albritton, "On Wittgenstein's Use of the Term 'Criterion'," in Wittgenstein: The Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. Pitcher (London: Macmillan, 1968), 248. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 5 3. Approaching the middle ground We have seen that Wittgenstein's rejection of natural properties plays a crucial role both in his argument against the possibility of defining sensation words by introspective ostension and in his argument against the possibility of appealing to identity to explain what it is for someone else to be in pain. So, on the face of it, someone who accepts the doctrine of natural properties has a ready way of bypassing Wittgenstein's concerns about both aspects of the model of introspection and identity. Peacocke's account of our concepts of conscious states takes exactly that route. I shall argue, however, that the opposition between Wittgenstein's anti-platonist account of our concepts of sensations and the view of sensation-concepts that is suggested by the natural properties view is not as straightforward as it may initially seem. On the one hand, someone who takes the natural-properties view cannot avoid making some appeal to our classificatory practices in explaining our concepts of conscious states. On the other hand, the content of Wittgenstein's anti-platonism needs careful unpacking and, if it is developed in a way that preserves common-sense intuitions, there is less distance than there may initially seem to be between the Wittgensteinian account of sensation-concepts and the account we get from a plausible application of the natural properties view. My suggestion is this. If we start with the natural properties view, we will find ourselves moving towards Wittgenstein's practice-based account of our concepts of conscious states. If we start with Wittgenstein's anti-naturalist account, we will find ourselves moving towards some form of natural properties view. I do not say that we will reach the same position whatever our starting point. But I do say that we should explore the middle ground that lies between an extreme naturalism and an extreme anti-platonism about sensation properties: the correct view surely lies somewhere in this middle ground. 3.i From natural properties to classificatory practices Suppose we accept the metaphysics of natural properties: any set of things shares, or defines, a property; but some properties are objectively more natural than others. What impact does that view about the metaphysical status of properties have on the question, which properties our words or concepts pick out? Lewis's suggestion is this. It is possible for a word or concept to pick out a highly unnatural property: 'quus' and 'grue' are examples of that. But relatively natural properties are more eligible referents for our words than less natural properties; they are the default referents. Unless we do something to upset that default (for example, by explicitly defining a word so as to pick out a highly unnatural property), our words and concepts will pick out relatively natural properties rather than relatively unnatural properties. On this view, the naturalness of properties plays a role in determining the reference of our words. But naturalness does not determine reference all by itself; our classificatory practice plays some role, too. One reason why practice plays an essential role in determining the reference of our word 'pain', or our concept pain, even if we accept the metaphysics of natural properties, is that someone who feels pain on an occasion has an experience that instantiates a number of different properties. Her sensation is a pain. But it is something more specific: an intense, gnawing toothache. And it is something more general: a bodily sensation. Consider an account of sensation-concepts like Peacocke's, on which my grasp of the concept pain is anchored in my singling out sensation-properties in the first-person case. What determines which particular property I do single out; what determines that my word 'pain', say, applies to pains in general, rather than being restricted to toothache? Peacocke's answer is, crudely, that I am disposed to apply my word 'pain' to any sort of pain I feel, and not just to toothache; my use of the word is as he puts it 'keyed to instances in [me] of the property of W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 6 being a pain'14 rather than instances of some more restricted property. Even given the existence of natural properties, then, the meaning of a sensation term is not established by ostension alone; classificatory practice plays a crucial role in determining which property I am picking out.15 Another reason for thinking that classificatory practice must play a role in determining the referents of our sensation-terms starts with an example from Wittgenstein: A tribe has two concepts, akin to our 'pain'. One is applied where there is visible damage and is linked with tending, pity etc. The other is used for stomach-ache, for example, and is tied up with mockery of anyone who complains. 'But then do they really not notice the similarity?' – Do we have a single concept everywhere where there is a similarity? The question is: Is the similarity important to them? And need it be so?16 It seems clear that the people in Wittgenstein's example have legitimate concepts. Call the concept they apply to pain with visible damage pain1 and the concept they apply to pain without visible damage pain2. And suppose that, in the objective hierarchy of naturalness, the property of pain is the most natural property that is instantiated in the kinds of circumstance in which these people apply their concept pain1 to someone. Should we say that their concept pain1 therefore refers to pain, rather than the more restricted property, pain1? If we interpret their concept that way, we must say that, when they refuse to apply their concept pain1 in cases of pain without visible damage, they are simply wrong about the extension of the concept. But that seems highly implausible. The situation seems rather to be this. Our concept pain picks out the property of pain. The other people's concept pain1 picks out a different property: the property of pain-with-visible-damage. And the difference between the reference of our concept and the reference of theirs is not a matter of any difference in the properties that are instantiated in people who belong to the two different communities. It is, rather, a matter of the difference between our practice of using our concept pain and their practice of using their concept pain1. As before, even given the existence of natural properties, which property a word or concept picks out is in part a matter of our classificatory practice.17 Once we see that point in the current case, it seems clear that our practice of applying our words in the way we do will have a crucial role in determining the reference of our concepts in very many other cases, too. For these reasons, then, even if we accept the metaphysics of natural properties, and even if we accept that properties that are relatively natural are more eligible referents for our words than properties that are less natural, we must also accept that our classificatory practices play a vital role in determining which properties our words pick out. If we start from the natural-properties view, we are driven towards the Wittgensteinian view that what it takes for one thing to count as similar to another, or as having the same property as another, is not dictated by reality itself but depends in part on our classificatory practices. 3.ii From classificatory practices to natural properties On Wittgenstein's view, I said, what it takes for one thing to count as similar to another is not determined by reality itself but depends in part on our classificatory practices: on what we 14 Peacocke, Truly Understood, 189. 15 For a similar stress on the role of recognitional abilities in determining which property I pick out with a sensation-concept that I introduce by introspective ostensive definition, see Brian Loar, "Phenomenal States (Second Version)", in The Nature of Consciousness ed. Ned Block et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 16 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology Volume II, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. Luckhardt and M. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), §638. 17 Note the obvious similarity between this argument and Burge's argument about the way in which the reference of a term like 'arthritis' depends on the social practice of applying it in a particular way (see Tyler Burge, "Individualism and the Mental," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy IV (1979)) W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 7 find it natural to count as similar to what. But how exactly does similarity, or sameness of property, depend on our practices? We can distinguish two different ways of developing the basic idea. One development leads to an extreme anti-realism about properties and standards of similarity. The extreme view is certainly distinct from any version of the naturalproperties view. But it is deeply counterintuitive and it is hard to think that this is the view that Wittgenstein intends. A second way of developing the basic idea leads to a modest realism about properties. That is a plausible view in its own right, and is plausibly ascribed to Wittgenstein. But it appeals to a notion of sameness of property that cannot be spelled out in terms of our actual human capacities to classify things as being similar to, or different from, one another. So, I shall argue, even if we start from a Wittgensteinian, practice-based conception of properties, we cannot avoid accepting some element of the natural properties view. Suppose we introduce some word by reference to a set of examples: 'The word "F" applies to this, this, and this, and to anything else that is relevantly similar to these things'. The general anti-platonist intuition is that what it takes for something to be relevantly similar to the examples is a matter of our classificatory practice. But how exactly should we understand the role of our classificatory practice in defining a standard of similarity? The extreme view is that what it takes for a thing to be similar to the examples is determined by what we actually judge to be similar when we consider the matter and classify the thing as being F or not-F (or what we would judge to be similar if we were to consider it and classify it as F or not-F). Whether or not the application of the word 'F' in a particular case is correct, then, is directly determined by what we actually say (or would say) when we consider that particular case and reach a verdict. But that is a radically revisionist view. We ordinarily think that whether some word 'F' applies to an object depends on two things: the meaning that we have given to the word; and the way the object is. It does not depend on what we would in fact say if we were to consider the question and reach a verdict about whether or not the object is F. On the contrary, we think, when we do consider an object and judge that it is F, our judgement is true or false in virtue of whether or not the object meets the standard of F-ness that we have already laid down. But the current view explicitly rejects that common-sense thought. Similarly, we ordinarily think that the standards of similarity and correctness associated with our words and concepts extend to new cases in a way that is not restricted by our actual capacity to apply them. Our actual human capacities are limited: there are calculations that are too large or complex for us to be able to complete; objects that are too small or inaccessible for us to be able to observe and classify; environments that are too hostile for us to be able to investigate. But, we think, the standards of similarity and correctness that we establish in connection with cases that we are able to calculate or classify apply determinately to these other cases. There is, we think, a fact of the matter about the correct result of applying our mathematical operations to a new case, even if it exceeds our calculative capacities; there is a fact of the matter about whether some object that is too small or inaccessible for us to classify is in fact similar to other things by our standards of similarity; and so on. But, as before, the extreme view rejects that ordinary thought. If what counts as similar to what is determined by what we actually classify (or would classify) as similar, our standards of similarity simply do not extend to cases that transcend our classificatory capacities. That is a possible view. And it is a view that some interpreters have ascribed to Wittgenstein.18 But it involves the wholesale rejection of basic elements of our 18 See e.g. Michael Dummett, "Wittgenstein on Necessity: Some Reflections," in his The Seas of Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Dummett ascribes to Wittgenstein the view that 'it is only our doing [a] calculation and "putting it in the archives" that constitutes its result as being that obtained by doing it correctly; so, if we never do that calculation, there is no one correct result' (Dummett, "Wittgenstein on Necessity", 459). The view that Dummett attributes to Wittgenstein is even more radical than the position W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 8 ordinary thought. If that is the view that Wittgenstein intends, then his image of himself as a philosopher who leaves everything as it is seems radically mistaken. That is one way of understanding the basic anti-platonist intuition that what it takes for one thing to be similar to another is a matter of our classificatory practices. The alternative way of understanding the basic intuition shares the idea that there are numerous different possible standards of similarity that are consistent with an initial set of examples. It shares the idea that no one of these possible standards of similarity is objectively the correct one, or objectively 'straighter' or more natural than any other. And it shares the idea that what ties a word or concept to a particular standard of similarity is that that is the standard embodied in the way we find it natural to classify things. But, on the modest view, once we have done enough to single out a particular property by classifying things as similar to, or different from, one another in the way we do, there is simply a fact of the matter about whether or not something has that property: a fact of the matter that is not determined by how we actually classify it when we come to consider the matter (or how we would classify it if we were to consider the matter). Our classificatory practices play a crucial role in establishing standards of correctness for our words and concepts. But the standards we establish are not limited by our own actual ability to apply them; there are facts of the matter about how our concepts apply to things in cases to which we ourselves are unable to apply them. It seems fair to say that this modest realism has something in common with the natural properties view, insofar as it involves a view of the naturalness or sameness of properties on which what it takes for one thing to have the same property as another is not limited by our actual human capacities to tell whether or not they have the same property. The modest realist insists, for instance, that there is a fact of the matter about whether some object that is too small or inaccessible for us to examine has the same property that we attribute to objects that we can examine and categorize. But what does it take for this small or inaccessible object to have the same property as the property that we identify in objects that we can examine? It cannot be that we actually classify it (or would classify it) as having the same property; for, in the nature of the case, our classificatory capacities do not extend to the object in question. The modest realist's view must be that, once we have singled out a property through our classificatory practice in cases we can consider, there is simply a fact of the matter about what it is for a tiny or inaccessible object to have the same property as that. And that use of the notion of sameness of property, as I have said, has something significant in common with the natural properties view. The picture is one in which, in picking out the properties we do, we latch onto properties that are there anyway: properties whose status as genuine properties does not depend on us, our concepts, or our practices of classification. That is what allows us to single out properties in a way that extends beyond our own ability to identify instances. 4. Defending the middle ground. I have argued that an adequate account of our concepts of conscious states must occupy a middle ground, which gives a role in determining the content of those concepts both to our actual classificatory practices and to a notion of naturalness or sameness of properties that cannot be understood simply in terms of what we do in fact find it natural to classify as similar to what. And I have suggested that Wittgenstein's view has just that form. But does discussed in the text, since it rules out any appeal to subjunctives about the results we would get if we were to do a calculation that no-one ever actually performs. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 9 this middle ground really exist? We can approach that question by considering Peacocke's critique of a 'neo-Wittgensteinian' view. Recall that, on Peacocke's view of the concept pain, what comes first in the order of explanation is the property of pain. The account appeals to that property at two stages: first, in explaining our grasp of the concept pain in the first-person case; and then in explaining how we understand ascriptions of pain to other people. Now Peacocke anticipates a neoWittgensteinian objecting to his account on the grounds that 'there simply is no property of being in pain that has all the characteristics needed by [Peacocke's] account'.19 'Under this response', he says, 'it is legitimate to speak of the property of being in pain, but this property of a mental event must be regarded as a construct out of human conceptual reactions and expressive capacities, in a way that is incompatible with its being causally and rationally explanatory of thinkers' first-person judgements that they are in pain'20. Peacocke argues that this neo-Wittgensteinian view is inadequate. He faces it with a dilemma. Suppose, first, that we treat the property of pain 'as a construct out of human conceptual reactions and expressive dispositions'. In that case, our account will fail to make sense of the range of applications of the concept pain that we actually take to be intelligible. We can, for instance, understand the thought that octopuses, dolphins, and whales feel pain. But such creatures have no 'distinctively human reactions and expressive dispositions'. So if we understand the property of being in pain as a construct out of such reactions and dispositions, we cannot understand the thought that these creatures feel pain. In response to that horn of the dilemma, the neo-Wittgensteinian may offer a different view, saying that 'a role in human conceptual and expressive life' plays an essential role in singling out the property of pain – in fixing the reference of the concept pain – but that 'the very same conscious property could be instantiated by creatures for which it does not have that role'. But, Peacocke objects, if the neo-Wittgensteinian takes that view, the position collapses into a version of Peacocke's own account. For 'if there is such a real conscious property that has a nature independently of human conceptual reactions and expressions, then it can play a role in making first-person judgements rational', and it can play a role in explaining how we can understand third-person ascriptions of pain without knowing what would count as evidence that they were true. And that is just the view that Peacocke is promoting. Care is needed in assessing Peacocke's objection to the 'neo-Wittgensteinian' view, for two reasons. On the one hand, as we saw in 3.i, Peacocke's own account itself gives some role to our classificatory practices in specifying exactly which property it is that a person picks out in the first-person case, because it gives a role to her disposition to apply the word 'pain' to all pains she feels, and not simply to a wider, or a more restricted, set of feelings. So Peacocke's own view is not the most uncompromising application of the natural-properties view. On the other hand, as we saw in 3.ii, the idea that the property of pain is an artefact or 'construct' of our classificatory practices can be developed in different ways: developed one way, it involves a radical anti-realism; developed in another way, it leads to a modest form of realism. I will proceed by considering the effectiveness of Peacocke's complaint considered as an argument against the kind of modest realism about properties that I described in section 3.ii. It may be that that is not exactly the kind of neoWittgensteinian view that Peacocke has in mind. Since, however, he suggests that every form of neo-Wittgensteinianism about properties will be vulnerable to versions of the objections he raises, our discussion will certainly be relevant to assessing his argument. 19 Peacocke reports that this objection was suggested to him by Crispin Wright. The objection is closely related to the points I made in section 3.i above. 20 Peacocke, Truly Understood, 190. Subsequent quotations in this paragraph of the text are taken from pp. 190-1 of Peacocke's book. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 10 The first horn of Peacocke's dilemma is that, if the neo-Wittgensteinian presses the idea that pain is a 'construct out of human conceptual reactions and expressive dispositions', she will be unable to make sense of ascriptions of pain to certain non-human animals, ascriptions that obviously do make sense. But that criticism seems ineffective against the position I have outlined. Nothing in Wittgenstein's position requires that a state of some other mammal only qualifies as a pain if the creature itself has human-style conceptual reactions to pain or expresses pain in exactly the ways that human beings express it. What matters for the intelligibility of ascribing pain and other experiences to creatures of some kind is whether the states in question play a role in the creatures' lives that is sufficiently similar to the role that pain plays in our lives. And a state of a whale or a dolphin can meet that standard without the creature needing to have concepts or specifically human interests, and without the creature behaving in exactly the ways that humans do. So Wittgenstein's view does make room for understanding ascriptions of pain and other sensations to non-human animals whose lives and behavior are very different from ours. It is plausible that, when we move beyond the simple case of pain, we will quickly reach cases where, on Wittgenstein's approach, the concepts we apply to human beings will not be straightforwardly applicable to creatures that lack the dispositions and conceptual capacities that we humans possess. It is hard to see how to make sense of ascriptions of hope or grief, for instance, to creatures whose interests, capacities, and reactions are radically different from the kinds of interests, capacities, and reactions that we have.21 But that is as it should be: it really is unclear that we can make sense of a whale, a cat, or a sheep experiencing grief, envy, hatred, and so on. So much for the first horn of the dilemma that Peacocke poses for a neoWittgensteinian view. What of the second horn: the argument that, if we regard human reactions to, and expressions of, pain simply as singling out a property of pain that can play a role in causally explaining self-ascriptions of pain, and in making sense of ascriptions of pain in cases where we have no idea what would count as evidence for the presence of pain, then our position collapses into Peacocke's version of the natural properties view? In the first place, there is no reason why a Wittgenstein view of pain cannot accept that the judgement 'I am in pain' is a causal response to pain. It is an obvious, commonsense truth that we ascribe pain to infants long before they exhibit any linguistic or conceptual reactions to pain. Equally obviously, an infant's being in pain stands in causal relations to other events and states of affairs. It is caused by physical impacts and injuries. It causally affects the child's future behavior: the burned child avoids the flame because getting burned was painful. And it causally affects other people's behavior; we treat the child with sympathy and concern because she is in pain. I see nothing in Wittgenstein that conflicts with these common-sense truths. Now consider what happens when the child learns to apply the word 'pain' to herself. We teach the child to judge 'I'm in pain' in circumstances where we already know, on independent grounds, that she is in pain; in doing so, we are teaching her to respond to her pain by judging that she is in pain. Once the teaching has succeeded, the response of judging 'I'm in pain' is, as Peacocke puts it, 'keyed to' the occurrence of pain in the child. There is no reason for a Wittgensteinian to deny that, when the child judges 'I'm in pain', she makes that judgement because she is in pain. And there is no reason for her to deny that that is a causal because; the child's judging 'I'm in pain' is causally explained by her being in pain. But recognizing that our self-ascriptions of sensations are causally responsive to the sensations we self-ascribe does not undermine the Wittgensteinian idea that our classificatory practices play an essential role in determining which properties we pick out. Recall 21 For brief comments on the cases of hope and grief, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, part II §§1-2. W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 11 Wittgenstein's example of the people who have two concepts – pain1 and pain2 – where we have the single concept pain. The reference of these people's terms 'pain1' and 'pain2' is not fixed merely by the nature of the properties instantiated in this community. What determines the reference of the terms is in part their actual classificatory practice. But that is completely compatible with the point that self-ascriptions are causally responsive to occurrences of the properties that are thereby self-ascribed. In Wittgenstein's imagined community, selfascriptions of the form 'I'm in pain1' are by and large causally explained by the presence of instances of pain1; self-ascriptions of the form 'I'm in pain2' are by and large causally explained by the presence of pain2. In the second place, I have already argued that the Wittgensteinian view, as I have characterized it, can accommodate the fact that we can understand third-person ascriptions of pain in cases where we have no idea what would count as evidence that someone else is in pain. Our classificatory practice has an essential role to play in determining which property we are picking out; but once we have singled out that property, we can go on to make sense of ascriptions of the same property in cases that transcend our actual human capacity to tell whether or not something has the property. So I think Peacocke is wrong to suggest that if we take that view of properties then we have given up a neo-Wittgensteinian position and have instead adopted his own view. It might be suggested that my disagreement with Peacocke about the prospects for a Wittgensteinian view is a purely verbal one. On the one hand, it might be claimed, my allegedly Wittgensteinian form of modest realism is not a distinctively Wittgensteinian position at all but is, rather, a version of the kind of realism about properties that Peacocke himself recommends. On the other hand, it may be suggested, what Peacocke means by a 'neo-Wittgensteinian' position is what I have described as extreme anti-realism about properties: the kind of view on which what it is for x to belong to the same kind as y can be understood only in terms of how we find it natural to classify x when we actually consider the case (or how we would find it natural to classify x if we were to consider the case). So, the suggestion goes, I am not in the end opposing Peacocke's view that there are really only two kinds of position available: an unacceptable anti-realism or constructivism about properties; and a sensible form of realism. The difference is only over where to locate Wittgensteinian views in this dichotomy: I think Wittgenstein's views lead us to the modest realist position; Peacocke thinks they lead us to the unacceptably anti-realist position. Settling that disagreement is of course important for the interpretation and assessment of Wittgenstein's views. But, on this line of thought, there is no substantive philosophical disagreement between me and Peacocke. This irenic conclusion seems premature, however. I agree that Peacocke and I are maneuvering in the same general area. We both reject the extreme anti-realist or constructivist view of properties. And we both reject the most radical alternative, on which the naturalness of properties determines which properties our words and concepts pick out all by itself, with no contribution at all from our classificatory practice. But, as I said in 3.i, Peacocke's position seems to me to give insufficient recognition to the role of our actual classificatory practices in determining which properties our concepts of pain and other conscious states pick out. Different linguistic communities may employ concepts that pick out different properties, even if there are no differences in the properties that are actually instantiated in those communities' environments. We cannot make sense of these differences in properties picked out unless we recognize that our classificatory practice plays a larger role than Peacocke allows in defining or specifying what counts as sameness of property. 5. Conclusion W. Child – "Sensations, Natural Properties, and the Private Language Argument" – forthcoming in K. Cahill and T. Raleigh eds, Wittgenstein and Naturalism, Routledge. 12 I suggested at the start of 3.i that, if our account of concepts of conscious states starts from a commitment to natural properties, we are bound to recognize on reflection that there is a role for our actual classificatory practices in determining which properties our concepts pick out. On the other hand, if we start from the anti-platonist idea that the notions of similarity or sameness of property must be understood in terms of our classificatory practice, we are bound to recognize that we also need a notion of sameness of property that extends beyond our limited capacity to apply our own concepts and categories. I have argued for three conclusions. First, that the suggestion just outlined is correct: an account of our concepts of conscious states must, as I have put it, occupy the middle ground that gives a role both to our classificatory practices and to a notion of sameness or naturalness that extends beyond our limited capacities to recognize similarity or sameness of property. Second, that Wittgenstein's own view is a position of that general kind: in the terms of 3.ii, he advances a version of modest realism. Third, that Peacocke's objection to neo-Wittgensteinian views is unsuccessful. No doubt there is room for refinement and expansion of these conclusions. But the correctness of these general conclusions – both about the location of the right position in this debate and about the form of Wittgenstein's view – seems clear.22 22 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference, 'Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Mind, and Naturalism', at the University of Bergen in June 2015. I am grateful to the participants in that conference, and especially to the organizers, Kevin Cahill and Thomas Raleigh, for very helpful comments and discussion.

Critical Legal Thinking - Law and the Political - Crying for Repression: Populist and Democratic Biopolitics in Times of COVID-19. by Karsten Schubert • 1 April 2020 We live in very Foucauldian times, as the many think-pieces published on biopolitics and COVID-19 show. Yet what is remarkable-biopolitically- about the current situation has gone largely unnoticed: We are witnessing a new form of biopolitics today that could be termed populist biopolitics. Awareness of this populist biopolitics helps illuminate what is needed today: democratic biopolitics. Traditional analyses of biopolitics focus on state and medical institutions and how they govern the behavior of individuals and the people. These analyses carve out the (potentially) repressive effects of such biopower on individuals and communities. Governing in the time of an epidemic is biopolitics in its purest form-it is no surprise that Agamben (Foucault et al. 2020) interpreted the severe measures that the state implemented in terms of their repressive effects. But more moderate analyses of the current situation also focus on the agency of government: Philipp Sarasin (Sarasin 2020) reminds us that there is no singular concept of biopolitics in Foucault's work, but rather that Foucault offers a careful differentiation of distinct modes of power employed as responses to an epidemic, which again focuses on the state's reaction to coronavirus. Such biopolitical analysis are "top-down" and have no conceptual place for agency, freedom, and democratic decision-making. This focus of biopolitical theory on state institutions and repressive power is, however, only a side-effect of Foucault's central contribution to critical social analysis: Namely, to show that repressive power works within subjects, as Fair Access Home Key Concepts Counterpress Subscribe Submissions Contact Webseite, von Citavi 5.7 in PDF konvertiert am 01.04.2020 20:25, Abweichungen vom Original möglich. they are constituted by power in the process of subjectification. It is (apparently) unclear in this framework of subjectification how agency, freedom, resistance, and emancipation can be conceptualized-accordingly, this seeming lack of clarity is one of the most widely discussed questions in Foucault scholarship (Lemke 2019; Schubert 2018). To counterbalance the focus on repressive power in biopolitical theory, in recent years there have been attempts to conceptualize "democratic biopolitics," which accounts for the agency of citizens and activists and their active participation in biopolitics. This usage of democratic biopolitics is both analytical-following Foucault's insight that power comes from below, it is necessary to take into account the manifold participants in biopolitical processes-and normative: Participation, political, and ethical deliberation of biopolitical developments is something to be valued and supported. I developed such a concept of democratic biopolitics in my discussion of HIV-Pre-Exposition-Prophylaxis (PrEP) and show that PrEP is not (only) a strategy of big pharma to make money, but actively wanted by and developed with the gay community (Schubert 2019). PrEP is part of an ethical re-negotiation of sex in the gay community and can help to destigmatize sex and fight homonormativity. Because of the complex involvement of the affected community and the emancipatory effect this biotechnology has on gay lives, PrEP is an ideal case for developing the concept of democratic biopolitics. Coming back to COVID-19, Panagiotis Sotiris (Sotiris 2020) suggested, against Agamben's repression narrative, that we can develop democratic biopolitics in the handling of the coronavirus epidemic. Along the same lines of my analysis of the ethical deliberations of sexual practices in the gay community, he imagines collective care in a non-coercive way in which practices like socialdistancing are deliberated democratically, thus not only based on "the authority of experts" but on a "democratization of knowledges". Both concepts-traditional biopolitics focusing on the repressive state and democratic biopolitics focusing on the emancipatory agency of activists and the community-fail to account for a new form of biopolitical normalization and repression that occurs in the pandemic: Populist biopolitics. As populism is a degeneration of democracy, populist biopolitics is a degeneration of democratic biopolitics. It is a repressive and paternalistic form of democratic biopolitics, i.e. when members of the community and not the state engage in biopolitics that limits freedom and normalizes others. Populist biopolitics occurs both online and offline when members of the community shame each other for supposedly irrational and unsolidaristic behavior such as, for example, leaving the house or meeting with friends, encapsulated in #staythefuckathome. Populist biopolitics also occurs in more formal political discourse, when the state is pressured to enact stricter regulations on the population. Populist biopolitics is mostly visible in countries where state repression is comparatively low, such as Germany. Before Germany enacted a nationwide ban on social contact, there were widespread demands for more authoritarian measures, and blaming and shaming of those who made use of their rights to meet. For example, the famous sociologist Armin Nassehi managed to combine both shaming and the demand for authority when he tweeted a picture of a dense crowd on a market in Munich, commenting: "In the end, the modern version of the authoritarian character celebrates here: the right thing will only be done if it is expressly ordered." Social Following (https://twitter.com/ArminNassehi/status/1239606706948247552) Denouncing the people who made use of their (at the time, still allowed) right to meet in groups as authoritarian is a misconception of the liberalism enabled by a state that can be mostly trusted in its epidemiological considerations, as I would say is the case in Germany. Trusting the state to establish reasonable rules enables us to live free from the paternalism of community control. In contrast, populist biopolitics' community deliberation and enforcement of the "right thing" is very dangerous, as the history of the stigmatization of people living with HIV shows The populist biopolitics of Corona allows us to sharpen the young concept of democratic biopolitics, when put in relation to the notions of populism and democracy as discussed in political theory. Following Müller (Müller 2016), populists claim to represent the true interests of the people by monopolizing moral truth and thus reject pluralism. Populist biopolitics in times of coronavirus shares these elements: We are called to do the only morally right thing, to protect the people, which is said to work only through draconian social distancing measures. This framing is not pluralist deliberation but speaking the moral and political truth in the name of the people-we can see how, in states such as Hungary and Israel, this framing can be misused by actual populist leaders to establish authoritarian measures. Democracy, by contrast, is pluralist. This pluralism needs to be ensured by constitutional law, as well as lived according to individual ethics. Thus, democratic biopolitics is inherently pluralistic. Democratic biopolitics involves the participation of many actors-politicians, epidemiologists, and other experts, for example social scientists, and members of civil society, among others. It needs to weigh different policy aims, such as preventing the collapse of the health care system while reducing the impact on the economy. Finally, and most importantly, democratic biopolitics needs a commitment to the rule of law and must always reflect the proportionality of measures taken. Biopolitical theory can learn from this pandemic that biopolitics is not primarily a matter of repressive state and medical power, but rather an occasion for democratic deliberation. Nevertheless, such democratic biopolitics can go wrong and degenerate into populist biopolitics. We see here, contra Sotiris, and also contra my analysis of the democratic biopolitics of PrEP, that community involvement is not enough to advance emancipatory democratic biopolitics. On the contrary, especially in times of crisis, the general community tends to populist biopolitics, making moral judgements driven by fear that ignore the social impact of confinement measures and how these measures unequally affect people who occupy different social positions. While more democratic deliberation of biopolitics is needed, the pandemic calls for guidance by science and careful politics, severely limited by the rule of law and checks and balances that defend democracy against authoritarian ambitions. Legal proportionality should be the answer of democratic biopolitics to populist calls for repression. While this call for political institutions seems prima facie 'unfoucauldian', it is actually inherent to Foucault's concept of freedom as social critique, as I argue elsewhere (Schubert 2020). Democratic biopolitics is empty when it is not embedded in robust democratic institutions. Dr. Karsten Schubert is an Assistant Professor for Political Theory at the Alber-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg, www.karstenschubert.net  13.6K  3.9K Email Address Posts by Email Join 3,346 other subscribers Enter  Tags: Biopolitics COVID-19 Democratic Biopolitics Populist Biopolitics References Foucault, M., G. Agamben, J. L. Nancy, R. Esposito, S. Benvenuto, D. Dwivedi, S. Mohan, R. Ronchi, and M. de Carolis. 2020. Coronavirus and philosophers. http://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-andphilosophers/. Accessed 1 April 2020. Lemke, Thomas. 2019. Foucault's analysis of modern governmentality. A critique of political reason. London, Brooklyn, NY: Verso. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2016. What Is Populism? Philadelphia, Pa: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sarasin, Philipp. 2020. Mit Foucault die Pandemie verstehen? – Geschichte der Gegenwart. https://geschichtedergegenwart.ch/mitfoucault-die-pandemie-verstehen/. Accessed 1 April 2020. Schubert, Karsten. 2018. Freiheit als Kritik. Sozialphilosophie nach Foucault. Bielefeld: transcript. Schubert, Karsten. 2019. The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP. In Biopolitiken – Regierungen des Lebens heute, ed. Helene Gerhards and Kathrin Braun, 121–153. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. Schubert, Karsten. 2020 (accepted). Freedom as Critique. Foucault Beyond Anarchism. Philosophy & Social Criticism: ? Author's Manuscripts: https://www.academia.edu/42463537/Freedom_as_Critique._Foucault_ Beyond_Anarchism Sotiris, Panagiotis. 2020. Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible? https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/14/against-agambenis-a-democratic-biopolitics-possible/. Accessed 1 April 2020. ← International Economic Law & COVID-19 Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *  1 comment for "Crying for Repression: Populist and Democratic Biopolitics in Times of COVID-19." 69 SHARES a FACEBOOK d TWITTER t SUBSCRIBE Reply Sarel 1 April 2020 at 4:09 pm Wonderful. I would caution about over-emphasising the repressive nature of biopolitical dispositif, but within the context of the paper, it is correct. I am probably going to be enamoured with the idea of 'populist biopolitics' for the rest of the week. Thank you so very much. Comment * Name * Email * Notify me of follow-up comments by email. Notify me of new posts by email. Post Comment This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. 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EUROPEAN JOURNAL FOR PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 7/3 (AUTUMN 2015), PP. 3-25 DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY FROM THE STANDPOINT OF HISTORICALISM, SCIENTISM, AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL REALISM CHARLES TALIAFERRO St. Olaf College Abstract. Phenomenological realism, in the tradition of Dietrich von Hildebrand, is advanced as a promising methodology for a theistic philosophy of divine and human agency. Phenomenological realism is defended in contrast to the practice of historicalism – the view that a philosophy of mind and God should always be done as part of a thoroughgoing history of philosophy, e.g. the use of examples in analytic theology should be subordinated to engaging the work of Kant and other great philosophers. The criticism of theism based on forms of naturalism that give exclusive authority to the physical sciences (or scientism) is criticized from a phenomenological, realist perspective. Our understanding of human agency and our understanding of the ultimate nature of reality (its origin, if any, and its sustaining structure) are interwoven. As Paul Churchland observes, if one adopts a fundamentally physicalist (or materialist) account of the cosmos as a whole, it is likely one will adopt a physicalist view of human persons. "Most scientists and philosophers would cite the presumed fact that humans have their origins in 4.5 billion years of purely chemical and biological evolution as a weighty consideration in favor of expecting mental phenomena to be nothing but particularly exquisite articulation of the basic properties of matter and energy."1 Conversely, if one is a theist or open to theism, according to which all the matter and energy that exists (and the cosmos as a whole) is created and sustained by am omnipresent, all good, omniscient, omnipotent God, one will have more philosophical space 1 Paul M. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 211. 4 CHARLES TALIAFERRO for understanding human agents in non-reductive terms (as more than matter and energy). This essay is about the framework and methodology for engaging in reflection on divine and human agency. In particular, I propose we consider two obstacles that stand in the way of developing a constructive philosophy of divine and human agency in the form of what I call historicalism and scientism. Before defining these terms, I ask you to join me in a work of imagination. Imagine that you and I are attending a meeting of philosophers and theologians when an analytic philosopher of religion named Kevin proposes to defend a coherent understanding of human and divine agency. Taking up a philosophy of human agency first (that he intends to use in developing a view of divine agency), Kevin asks us to consider the process he goes through in fixing Allison's cup of coffee in the morning. He asks us to reflect about whether his free agency would be compromised if someone had (without Kevin's knowledge) planted a chip in his brain that would create in him an urge to bring Allison coffee if it ever happened that he got distracted or, due to some irritable mood swing, the whole task bored him. Now imagine this objection is raised: "Wait a minute! What about Kant? Or Fichte? Or Hegel? Didn't they make some important contributions on the nature of selfawareness, deliberation, and causation?" In response, Kevin concedes that, of course, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and others, are seminal contributors to these matters. And imagine Kevin goes on to plead with his audience that he was (like many analytical philosophers) simply assuming some standard, common sense notions of agency and familiarity with some widely known thought experiments (in this case, Kevin was assuming acquaintance with the work of Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt). As the philosophers and theologians did not seem happy with Kevin's vantage point, imagine Kevin decides it might be better to postpone his account of human agency and so he proposes, instead, to develop a philosophical model that provide a coherent way to understand the Nicene Creed. But before Kevin can begin to develop his first power point slide, there is an objection: "How can you simply use the creed as a starting point without taking into account Schleiermacher?" The above scenario reflects what in this essay I will be referring to as historicalism. 'Historicalism' is an invented term for the view that serious philosophical inquiry needs to be grounded in the history of philosophy such that (for example) a philosophy of God or of human 5DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY freedom that is launched only by the kinds of examples and thought experiments we find in mainstream analytic philosophy is a very bad idea. Instead, such a philosophical investigation should be couched in terms that engage philosophical history involving (at the least) Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. From the standpoint of historicalism, to engage in philosophical theology using the creeds or Biblical texts without taking into account Schleiermacher and hermeneutics would be like exploring Lamprechtsofen, the deepest cave in the Austrian Alps, alone without a map or source of light. In this essay I consider the historicalist challenge to a constructive, theistic account of divine and human agency, along with considering an objection that comes from what is sometimes called scientism. By 'scientism' I mean any of the wide variety of philosophical methods that give primacy to the natural sciences; scientism is represented by what are considered strict forms of naturalism.2 Historicalism and Scientism present different specific obstacles to philosophical theology; scientism is explicitly atheistic (or non-theistic) whereas historicalism is compatible with any number of theistic positions. But they both impede the kind of philosophical theology that is customary in analytical philosophy or theology: both are positions that are elitist insofar as they both involve a highly advanced, (special or elite) educated perspective on history and science. I will be contrasting historicalism and scientism with phenomenological realism, a position that is certainly well represented in the history and the philosophy of science, but it is a method that (in my view) speaks more directly to the generally well educated inquirer (one that is educated but not on the level of specialization of work in historicalism and scientism). There are three sections that follow: the first sketches the challenge of historicalism and scientism. Section two then offers an account of phenomenological realism as a promising methodology in its own right as well as providing a healthy alternative to historicalism and scientism. I defend what I refer to as the contextual primacy of phenomenological realism and propose that philosophical, historical inquiry (as in 2 Strict naturalism includes eliminative physicalism as well as philosophies that recognize the mental as real but not given any irreducible explanatory significance. On the latter view, an explanation of some event may include mental relata but these are wholly supervenient upon physical (that is, non-mental) events and laws. For an overview of various sorts of naturalism, see Naturalism co-authored by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro. 6 CHARLES TALIAFERRO historicalism) and the appeal to science is secondary and dependent upon what may be called the philosophical climate as opposed to what I will describe as a more general philosophical ground. A third section considers the cultural significance of phenomenological realism. I propose that phenomenological realism provides us with good reason to insure that the practice of philosophy is widespread culturally in a fashion that promotes the love of wisdom that, in turn, helps foster the foundations for a pacific, democratic republic. I refer to this general, foundation as a philosophical ground. In reference to the case of Kevin, I hope to show that his methodology is well justified in the context of a general philosophical ground, but he should address matters of history and science given certain, specific philosophical climates. The burden of section three will be to offer some guidelines on distinguishing ground and climate philosophically. I. A CRITIQUE OF THEISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF HISTORICALISM AND SCIENTISM There are at least two reasons behind historicalism. The first may be referred to with a rhetorical questions: Why re-invent the wheel? And the second involves an appeal to humility and solidarity. Why re-invent the wheel? For all we know, past philosophical work may have already established certain philosophical positions. For example, perhaps Kant has established definitively that we do not have am immediate grasp (or awareness) of ourselves as substantial individual subjects who endure over time. If so, shouldn't we not begin with Kevin's report of his ordinary experiences, but with Kant's arguments and conclusions in the Critique of Pure Reason? Arguably, sustained, rigorous reflection would bring to light Kant's particular reasoning, but there is no need for us to approach the topic de nova when Kant has already succeeded in establishing a cluster of relevant points. It also might be the case that Kant was a towering genius and that, without his aid, we would not be able to reproduce and confirm his arguments, but that once we are acquainted with his historically significant findings we may come to see their compelling force. A second reason behind historicalism is that it is a reflection of intellectual humility and solidarity with philosophers and theologians of the past. We who are working in philosophy and theology today 7DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY are inheritors of an immense body of work historically. There may be something cowardly about mindlessly accepting the results of past inquiry, but doesn't humility and an awareness of our working in continuity with past thinkers give us good reason to approach our topics historically? Arguably there would be something arrogant or a sign of a lack of gratitude in some field of inquiry to ignore past inquiry. The study of law, for example, seems especially important to approach in historical terms. To assess, for example, positivism versus natural law theory only in terms of the present moment without couching our arguments and positions historically seems quite inappropriate (especially considering the ways in which the very concept of law involves appeal to past precedence, enduring common law, and so on). Why think philosophy or theology is any different? As for scientism, let us go back to the meeting with Kevin. Imagine that when Kevin refers to God's action, there is an objection: What sense can possibly be made referring to the action of an incorporeal being? A commonplace criticism of a theistic account of divine and human action is that it involves a Cartesian metaphysic in which an incorporeal, non-physical God causally interacts with the physical, spatially extended world. This is purportedly completely at loggerheads with a scientific philosophy, which presupposes (or assumes or asserts) that we have a clear understanding of causation in the physical world, but little to no understanding about the non-physical. Evan Fales offers this account of what counts as proper evidence, a method that explicitly rules out theism: I suggest that we have evidence-abundant evidencethat the only sources of energy are natural ones. Our evidence is just this: whenever we are able to balance the books on the energy (and momentum) of a physical system, and find an increase or decrease, and we look hard enough for a physical explanation of that increase or decrease, we find one. There is no case in which, given sufficient understanding of a system, we have failed to find such a physical explanation. Of course, such an explanation may be lacking for a time. There are famous cases-e.g., the deviations in the orbit of Uranus, and the apparent lack of energy conservation in meson decay-that challenged this this understanding. In each such case, the books have ultimately been balanced by the discovery of a physical cause-here, Neptune and the neutrino, respectively.3 3 Evan Fales, Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles (London: Routledge, 2010), 16. 8 CHARLES TALIAFERRO The success of the natural sciences are a vindication of the sufficiency of the physicalist or materialist project of accounting for the cosmos, exposing the comparative mysteriousness and opacity of theism and theistic explanations. Herman Philipse offers the following critique of theism from the standpoint of how we have a meaningful, materially based-understanding of human agency but no idea about how such agency would be coherent in the context of the non-physical: How can one meaningfully say that God listens to our prayers, loves us, speaks to us, answers (or does not answer our supplications, etcetera), if God is also assumed to be an incorporeal being? For the stipulation that God is an incorporeal being annuls the very conditions for meaningfully applying psychological expressions to another entity, to wit, that this entity is able in principle to display forms of bodily behaviour which resemble patterns of human behaviour. In other words, the very attempt to give a meaning and a possible referent to the word 'God' as used in theism must fail, because this attempt is incoherent.4 This objection to theism has many adherents, including Michael Martin, Paul Edwards, Kai Nielson, et al.5 Evan Fales presses his case against theism by exposing the emptiness of theistic explanations. Fales asks theists to identify the mechanisms or tools that God employs in creation. Fales offers this picture of the ostensible, scientific inscrutability of theism: Can God cause things to happen in a spatiotemporal world inhabited by matter and (if not reducible to material processes) finite minds? If God can, then it is hard to see why, in principle, this could not be discovered by scientific investigation (by which I mean here simply properly careful and controlled empirical observations and suitable inferences there from). If God cannot, then it is hard to see why He would be of any religious significance at all. He would, after all, be both impotent and unknowable.6 Fales contends that if philosophical theologians appeal to omnipotence and omniscience in an effort to fill out an account of the modus operandi 4 Herman Philipse, God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 101-102. 5 For a book-length treatment of this objection see my Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6 Evan Fales, Divine Intervention: Metaphysical and Epistemological Puzzles (London: Routledge, 2010), 2. 9DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY of God, they are engaging in a kind of magic trick: The theologian's appeal to these features of the divine nature [God's omnipotence and omniscience] rather resembles the waving of a magician's wand. When a magician waves his wand which with his right hand, we may reasonably wonder what, while our attention is momentarily distracted, he is doing with his left. Appeal to omnipotence and omniscience does not answer our question so much as it merely repeats it. How are we to understand divine omnipotence? How is it that God can do all the things He is understood to be able to do? Or, to put the question a bit differently: Omnipotence is a dispositional property. What categorical properties of God underwrite it, and how, exactly, do they do so?7 The charge that the theistic appeal to God's power is explanatorily vacuous or unacceptably obscure is endorsed by Herman Philipse, Jan Narveson, Michael Martin, and others. II. HISTORICALISM AND SCIENTISM FROM THE STANDPOINT OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL REALISM I am using the term phenomenological realism to refer to the philosophical method employed by Dietrich von Hidebrand (his methodology has also been called realist phenomenology), shared by Max Scheler, Reinhardt Grossman, Roderick Chisholm, and, most recently, by Stan Klein. Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977) is not widely known in mainstream philosophy today, but he is very much celebrated by Roman Catholic philosophical theologians (including John Paul II) and his form of phenomenological realism has a stability and precision that (in my view) is superior to the better known German philosopher who shares in the practice of this form of phenomenology, Max Scheler. According to phenomenological realism, our primary starting point in our philosophy should be a critical study of what Hildebrand referred to as the datum of experience as this is revealed to us pre-philosophically. In the context of ethics as well as in terms of building up our general account of human nature and action, we need to apprise ourselves of what first and foremost appears to us as the data that our philosophical accounts need to address. In order to understand this moral sphere, we must immerse ourselves, as it were, in the rich qualitative plenitude of a moral datum and 7 Ibid, 3. 10 CHARLES TALIAFERRO bring ourselves to a full state of "wondering" about it. We must seek to analyze the datum, delve into its nature, explore its relations with other fundamental data of experience, and, finally, inquire into the presuppositions which have to be fulfilled in order that a man may be endowed with moral goodness. In pursuit of our inquiry, however, let us be on our guard against all constructions and explanations which are incompatible with the nature of moral data as presented in experience or which in any way fail to do full justice to them. Thus we must, time and again, come back to the most explicit and unrestricted experience of moral data, and confront every result of our exploration with the full flavor of the experienced data themselves.8 Hidlebrand is quite explicit about the importance of getting to the datum that is prior to our philosophical reflections: Before we begin the analysis of our topic, some fundamental remarks of an epistemological nature are in order. These will serve to clarify further the few introductory remarks we have made thus far. This work starts from "the immediately given," that is, from the data of experience. The reader will be able to estimate properly our results only if he is willing to hold in abeyance for a while all theories which are familiar to him, and which provide him with a set of terms which he is accustomed to use in sizing up that which is immediately given. I want to begin from the beginning, suspending all theories concerning the moral sphere.9 Hildebrand's form of phenomenology differs from Husserl (who was one of Hildebrand's teachers) insofar as he does not seek to suspend (or bracketed) judgment of what is real in the course of his phenomenological account of values or persons. Phenomenological realists like Hildebrand, Scheler, Grossman, Chisholm, and Klein are each committed to the reality and integrity of humans as agents who act for purposes and with reasons. Moreover, they maintain that there is nothing revealed by a close study of human agency that agency itself is either necessarily (that is, exclusively) anthropomorphic nor restricted to what is physical; on this later point, they each maintain that our concept of what is physical is not as clear or intelligible as our concept of what is mental (subjective, experiential, mind). Their philosophical methodology is therefore not adverse (or, put 8 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Christian Ethics, (New York: McKay, 1952), 1. 9 ibid, 2. 11DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY more positively, their methodology is genuinely open) to the coherence and plausibility of theism. Consider again the challenge of historicalism, the view that appeals to what seems experientially evident have been thoroughly undermined by philosophers of the past. Simply to assume we know what we are talking about when using (for example) Harry Frankfurt cases of when a person acts freely in the absence (or presence) of alternative possibilities is to shirk our duty as philosophers to take seriously Kant's view that the self is unobservable (a view shared by Hume, among others) and any number of incompatible alternatives (Nietzsche versus Parfit versus Kim ...) and so on. Let us return to the case of Kevin. What struck philosophers and theologians at the imagined meeting is that Kevin did not begin his presentation by indicating why he seems to presuppose (or believe outright) that he can observe himself serving coffee or that he has reason to believe that he is doing anything (as an agent). Moreover, why think that he, Kevin, is a person or self? Why shouldn't we adopt a Kantian or Humean or a no-self account of selves defended by Parfit? According to historicalism, Kevin may be sincere, well intentioned, and philosophically astute, but he has not undertaken a serious analysis to be evaluated in terms of our own contemporary judgments and/or intuitions when these are not evaluated in light of the history of philosophy. Phenomenological realism does not provide us with reasons to ignore the history of philosophy, but it gives us a tool for evaluating past (current and future) philosophy and it has a contextual primacy that provides Kevin with prima facie justification for beginning with his ordinary beliefs about fixing coffee as well as with beginning philosophy with a text from the Creed of Chalcedon. Consider phenomenological realism and the history of philosophy. Hildebrand does not begin his investigations with a philosophical engagement with Kant, Hegel, et al. Does this position fall prey to the why re-invent the wheel? position or does it conflict with an appeal to humility and solidarity with the past? It is hard to see why when one takes seriously the fact that in the history of philosophy itself, so many philosophers have similarly sought to carry out philosophical inquiry into the nature of the self, perception, values, and so on, without first engaging in an elaborate historical preface. In the modern era, Thomas Reid, Bishop Butler, Franz Brentano, G.E. Moore, Roderick Chisholm and others adopt a method very similar to Hildebrand's. As Chisholm writes in Person and Object: "Leibniz, Reid, Brentano and many other 12 CHARLES TALIAFERRO philosophers have held that, by considering certain obvious facts about ourselves, we can arrive at an understanding of the general principles of metaphysics."10 Hildebrand's work is clearly in the same tradition as Chisholm's. So, going back to the two reasons behind historicalism, it may be argued that the history of philosophy is more like discovering different ways to travel rather than inventing and re-inventing wheels. Each generation can learn from the past, but each generation of philosophers also needs to test their own views (and the arguments of the past) in light of their own experience and reflection. In my view, phenomenological realism turns out to be in solidarity with the past – given that philosophers of the past also appealed to their own experience and reflection to advance their own positions. According to Hildebrand himself, he is adopting a model of philosophy that goes back long before Chisholm to at least Aristotle who, while he gives some attention to his philosophical forebears Aristotle summarily dismisses their views when it comes to him developing his own philosophy: I want to start with the moral experience itself. In the same way Aristotle, speaking about the soul, says at the beginning of the second book of his De Anima: "Let the foregoing suffice as our account of the views concerning the soul which have been handed an by our predecessors; let us now dismiss them and make as it were a completely fresh start, endeavoring to give a precise answer to the question, What is soul?"11 Following von Hildebrand, I believe that it is through a searching, faithful understanding of what each of us knows as persons that we have good experiential grounds for thinking that the earlier datum (persons reason with each other, etc.) has substantial philosophical importance. I referred earlier to the contextual primacy of phenomenological realism. Let me fill this out and then propose that the importance of the history of philosophy depends on what may be called philosophical climates. I propose that the primary context that virtually all philosophers and theologians do assume when engaging in debate consists in a whole series of beliefs and practices that seem indispensable. Here is a sketch of such beliefs and practices: 10 Roderick Chisholm, Person and Object, (La Selle: Open Court Publishing, 1976), 15. 11 Dietrich von Hildebrand, Christian Ethics, (New York: McKay, 1952), 2. 13DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY There are people who engage in deliberation, presenting reasons for why this or that philosophy is more reasonable than some alternative; persons engage each other in conversation and lectures; they read papers; eat meals; breath; go hiking and engage in other forms of exercise; they sleep; develop friendships; make decisions; publish papers and books; make jokes; laugh; cry; they sometimes make love; they are part of various communities; some have children and participate in large family living; some are professors who have students and some are students who have professors, while others are independent scholars. They typically find each other morally responsible for their actions and those of others; they praise some persons for their humility and wisdom and do not admire the arrogant and narcissistic. Sometimes these people go to church to pray or they may pray silently and (not to leave out the obvious) they are born and they will die. Billions of people in the world practice in some religious tradition and, in doing so, some recite creeds, meditate on Holy Scripture, and so on. Some believe there is an afterlife for individuals, some believe that an individual afterlife is possible but not likely, while still others believe that it is not possible for individual persons to survive the death of their bodies. Last but not least, some people prepare coffee for their spouses and quite a large number of persons adhere to the Creed of Chalcedon. I suggest that recognizing the above is practically indispensable as commitments of persons in community. Arguably, it would require extraordinary reasons to deny that billions of people recite creeds or to deny that persons argue with each other, presenting reasons why one belief is more reasonable than another. And, outside of a seminar room or conference in which the topic is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with a focus on B132 and A352 and/or Parfit's Reasons and Persons, it would be very odd to question whether a philosopher can confidently describe his fixing coffee for his wife or to question the philosophical interest in setting out to see if there might be a philosophical model that makes sense of a creed that millions of people subscribe to. This latter observation about seminar and conference rooms, however, brings up a point that should be made about philosophical climates. In the final section of this paper, I will argue that Hildebrand's phenomenological realism has some important cultural implications in terms of supporting a just, pacific, democratic republic. But for now, I suggest that such a democratic outlook is compatible with the specialized practice of philosophy in which Kevin (in our original 14 CHARLES TALIAFERRO thought experiment) truly does owe a response to Kant, et al. That is because certain sites may be constructed that are dedicated to Kant et al. In such a site, there is what may be called a philosophical climate that needs to be addressed. Different sites will come with different conditions that need to be taken on board. One need not address Wittgenstein's private language argument at a meeting of the Hume Society, without there being special conditions that would make this fitting. But consider a conference or a site dedicated to the philosophy of divine and human nature, and not one dedicated to Kant or Parfit on divine and human nature. I believe that there are enough of what appear to be good "common sense" reasons for objecting to the Kantian and Parfitian arguments so that Kevin (in our thought experiment) need not halt his work to make important contributions to Kant or Parfit studies. Consider, first a Kantian objection; I indemnify this as 'Kantian' in order to indicate that it is derived from a standard interpretation of Kant's work, without getting tied up in the details of Kantian texts and multiple non-standard interpretations. Here, then, is a Kantian objection: strictly speaking, you do not observe yourself because (unknown to you) there might be an undetectable switching of selves such that (rather than you enduring over time as the self-same person) you are a series of selves, constantly being switched and your memories and apparent continuous consciousness perishing and being re-created. Obviously this is painfully succinct (an historicalist will probably see such a summary as horrifying), but it is one reasonable and widely recognized line of reasoning many find in Kant's work.12 The Kantian counter-point faces an avalanche of objections: for reasons lying in the philosophy of time (we must endure in time in intervals, not from instant to instant as an instant takes up no time whatever), the switching would have to take place during intervals. How long would these be? If very brief (a Nano-second) then you would be (strictly speaking) a different self who finished reading these sentence from the one who began reading it. In fact, you might be the hundred billionth self in the series. This hypothesis seems to collide with any apparent phenomenological understanding of the experience of thinking and speaking. Speaking of series, if a self is constantly being switched, how would one come up with the experience of series or successive changes (like listening to a song)? Even Kant recognized 12 See, for example, J. Bermudez, "The Unity of Apperception in the Critique of Pure Reason," European Journal of Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1994): 213-40. 15DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY that a series of experiences is not the same thing as the experience of a series.13 I believe that the prospect of undetectable switching should no more dissuade Kevin from believing he is the same person who is brining Allison some coffee on Monday as him bringing her coffee later that day than he should be skeptical that he is carrying the same cup of coffee because God might be continuously annihilating the coffee and re-creating it. What about a Parfitian objection – should it prevent Kevin from using his common sense case in his philosophy of human agency? Parfit, like Hume, faces the objection that he is unable to do justice to the overwhelming awareness each of us has as persons who experience and act in the world as subjects and who live and move and have our being from a first-person point of view. Kevin does not need to, nor could he, identify himself (his thoughts, actions or his body) using indexicals (this is my body) without having an antecedent understanding of himself as an enduring subject. For him to think and intentionally to act on the desire to bring Allison a cup of coffee he needs to be able to think and act as the self-same individual who is providing another individual person a beverage. Imagine a Parfitian world in which Kevin is not a self but a series of causally interwoven physical and mental events. Arguably, an event is not itself something that is conscious. Persons or things are conscious; events may involve conscious persons or organisms but an event itself has no conscious awareness.14 These worries are not sufficient to dissuade someone committed to Parfit's philosophy of mind, but they do express prima facie real worries that a Parfitian needs to address and they provide some reason to think Kevin's work is not discredited (or tarnished) until he has more fully addressed Parfit's no-self account of the self. I believe that essentially the same scenario obtains when Kevin turns to the Creed of Chalcedon and he meets with the objection that he has not addressed the work of Schleirmacher. If Kevin is presenting his work to 13 In The Critique of Pure Reason A364N, Kant hypothesizes that after a protracted period of time, a self might think it has endured over a series of events, but all that has happened is that a the data of a series of selves with their conscious states (selves who have ceased to be and been successively replaced then ceased to be and then replaced, etc. have been transmitted to the self at the end of the series. 14 For an extended treatment of the objections I am raising to Kantian and Parfitian arguments see the excellent book, The Conscious Self by David Lund (New York: Humanity Books). 16 CHARLES TALIAFERRO a scholarly society dedicated to the work of Schleiermacher, then I believe that the philosophical climate demands attention to Schleiermacher. In that domain, it would make greater sense to preface the analytical model of the trinity with a critical evaluation of Schleiermacher's appeal to intuition and feeling. It might even be possible to use analytic tools to unpack some of Schleirermacher's monistic tendencies in which individuals remain individuals and yet are bound up in some overall quasi-Spinozist unity. But while analytical philosophy does need to take seriously what I am referring to as philosophical climates, I suggest that the bare existence of such climates elsewhere does not overshadow or render uninteresting a philosopher seeking to make sense of what billions of ordinary people adhere to. Let us now turn to scientism from the standpoint of phenomenological realism. As noted earlier, let us consider scientism to be the claim that the physical world is all that there is; its contents are causally closed to anything nonphysical; and the explanation for any event is either in the physical sciences or in modes (e.g. the social sciences) that can be shown to supervene on or be explained through bridge laws in the physical sciences. I think that scientism is deeply problematic for many reasons, including the fact that it rests on terms that are profoundly under determined. I shall propose in reply that we lack any clear understanding of what it is to be physical or what counts as physical explanations, and so the thesis of causal closure is suspect from the get-go. Moreover, I propose instead that we have (and necessarily have) a clearer conception of what may be called (by virtually all philosophers "in the game") mental causation than we do of physical causation (which tout le monde treats as causal relations between mind-independent things –events, properties, objects et al). First, let us take stock of the current state of play of scientism in the philosophy of mind. In Mind and a Physical World, Jaegwon Kim writes: The shared project of the majority of those who have worked on the mind-body problem over the past few decades has been to find a way of accommodating the mental within a principled physicalist scheme, while at the same time preserving it as something distinctive –that is, without losing what we value, or find special, in our nature as creatures with minds. (Kim 1998, 2) This position (of a triumphant quasi or near-enough physicalism) may have to be modified somewhat, given the many arguments that have been 17DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY deployed against physicalism in works such as After Physicalism edited by Benedict Paul Gocke, Contemporary Dualism: A Defence edited by Andrea Lavazza and Howard Robinson, and The Waning of Materialism edited by Robert Koons and George Bealer, among others. But there have been, and there still are, an impressive number of philosophers who share, with Kim, a confident picture of the physical world, and a considerably less confident understanding about how to fit in what we think of as mental. Consider three more philosophers who give primacy of intelligibility to the physical world and physical causation. Daniel Dennett writes: "I declare my starting point to be the objective materialistic, thirdperson world of the physical sciences."15 D.M. Armstrong offers this classic, succinct statement of his metaphysical position: "Naturalism [is] the doctrine that reality consists of nothing but a single, all-embracing spatio-temporal system."16 Here is Michael Tye's position: On the naturalist view, the world contains nothing supernatural ... at the bottom level there are microphysical phenomena governed by the laws of microphysics, and, at higher levels, phenomena that not only participate in causal interactions describable in scientific laws but also bear the general ontic relationship to microphysical items as do the entities quantified over and referred to [in] such higher-level laws as those which obtain in, for example, geology and neurophysiology.17 In the wake of such positive claims about what is physical, no wonder some philosophers think that the idea of what may be nonphysical is suspect. Stepping back a bit, how clear a concept do we have of the physical world and how does that match our concept of what many philosophers classify as mental, as featured in the list cited above in this essay: our thinking, conceiving, feeling, seeing, hearing, tasting, valuing, observing, and so on? Contrary to the assumed orientation in philosophy of mind, I propose that our ordinary beliefs and commitments (as revealed in phenomenological realism) offer us no clear concept of what is physical or material and that subsequent philosophical reflection on the world 15 Daniel Dennett, The Intentional Stance, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 5. 16 D.M. Armstrong, "Naturalism, Materialism, and First Philosophy," Philosophia 8, 2-3 (1978): 261. 17 Michael Tye, "Naturalism and the Problem of Intentionality," Midwest Studies in Philosophy 19, (1994): 129. 18 CHARLES TALIAFERRO and the sciences have not generated any clear consensus on what is physical. Most importantly, I maintain that we cannot even begin to try to understand what is physical unless we can trust and understand our reasoning and conceptual powers, for without these we cannot even begin to consider whether or not mind-independent objects have mass, volume, size, color, odor, sound, taste, sensory qualities of heat (as opposed to heat as in mean kinetic energy) and whether the physical consists in individual things (particles) or events or fields. Following the lines of phenomenological realism, I suggest that priority of intelligibility and clarity should be acknowledged as the mental, and that none of the above conceptions of the physical (from Kim to Tye) can be any clearer or more intelligible than the mental. This is evident in the case of when the physical is analyzed in terms of that which is inter-subjective or those things which more than one person can (in principle) observe. Such an analysis (that invokes the 'thirdperson' point of view) must presuppose an antecedent confidence and understanding of subjectivity and observation (known in and from the first and second person point of view). No statements of what is physical can be more certain than that which is mental and if it turns out that we should conclude that the mental is physical, this will be due to our confident exercise of intentional reasons, not due to our substituting non-intentional relations for intentional ones. (The latter would be impossible without our ongoing exercise of intentionality.) Let us review the earlier statements by our various physicalists or near-enough physicalists. In Fales' case, surely our concepts or ideas of "evidence," "physical," "energy," "deviation," "energy conservation" have primacy over what are not concepts or ideas. In response to Kim, I suggest that it is impossible to have a clearer conception of "a principled physicalist scheme" than you can of a "scheme" which, I assume, is a concept or way of conceiving. And Kim's statement as a whole seems to commit him solidly to the reality of the mental; "accommodating" and "valuing," and grasping principles are mental acts. The point may be so obvious as to hardly bear pointing out, but it reveals the inescapable primacy and essential lucidity of the conceptual, the mental or the reality of our thinking, assessing, valuing, and so on, as opposed to what is posited in the sciences. Michael Tye writes impressively of laws of nature, and yet we can have no conception of a law of nature unless we can trust the reality and reliability of our concepts and the reality of mental causation. In this context, 'mental causation' would be evident 19DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY in our grasping laws of nature, of comprehending when it is that certain molecular, atomic, nuclear and subnuclear events cause or explain other molecular, atomic, nuclear and subnuclear events. We only grasp a law of nature if we can trust our reasoning, whether this is cashed out in terms of a covering law model, counterfactuals, or we adopt a philosophy of causation that recognizes basic powers. This involves the use of mental causation insofar as a person grasps the relevant causal relata, and whether the relata is immanent, located in spacetime, or transcendent and non-spatiotemporal, grasping laws of nature involves our reasoning that if certain antecedent and contemporary events obtain then there is reason to believe this will bring about (or cause or explain) another event. The causal elements in the course of a person's reasoning may be vast and complex, but for reasoning to occur, the conclusions a person draws must (in a crucial, ineliminible way) be in virtue of grasping the relevant premises and inferential rules. From simple mathematics in which we reason that the answer is 2 based on our summing 1 + 1, to astrophysics, it is essential that we draw conclusions in virtue of grasping reasons and entailments or inferential relations. While the following seems to be mind-numbingly obvious, it seems to be overlooked or under-appreciated: microphysics, geology, and neurophysiology cannot be practiced unless there are microphysists, geologists, and neurophysiologists, and each of them must necessarily work with concepts, observations, theories, being able to grasp entailment relations, the laws of logic, and so on. Consider an objection: All that the above reasoning establishes (or makes reasonable) is that we must have facility with our thinking, reasons, and concepts in order to draw conclusions about the nature of the world. It does not mean we understand what thinking is or reasoning or concepts. After all, someone might have no idea whatsoever about what makes a car go, but she can drive it expertly and get anywhere she wants. Reply: The analogy needs to be pressed further. Imagine that the driver has no idea at all about driving, let along all the particulars involving roads, wheels, petals, traffic laws et al. She must have an idea about a massive number of interwoven practices and how to bring about changes in order even to get into what she rightly thinks of as a car. For her to be agnostic or to profess to having no idea why driving a car involves her knowing what to do seems to border on us imagining a zombie driver. 20 CHARLES TALIAFERRO What about Philipse and Fales? Both philosophers seem to assume that we have a clear idea of what it is to be physical (material or corporeal) and what is different about physical and nonphyscical causes. Do we? Can we rightly assume that what is physical is solid, dense stuff; it is uniform, made up of distinct particulars, compared to which the non-physical, whatever that is, is spooky and mysterious? Actually, much of 20th century physics seems to lead us to think that the physical world is more spooky than we imagined; consider Bertrand Russell's observation: "Matter has become as ghostly as anything in a spiritual séance."18 I suggest that Noam Chomsky is correct that "The notion of 'physical world' is open and evolving" and, as I argued above, that it is not sufficiently precise to use as a lucid alternative to that which is 'non-physical.'19 Proposals that, for example, being spatial is a necessary condition for being physical seems problematic given the history of philosophers (from the Cambridge Platonists to G.E. Moore and H.H. Price) who treat spatial things and events as non-physical (including the visual field, sense data, dream images, after-images, etc). Philipse seems to assume some form of behaviorism, requiring a God who hears and responds to prayers to act in ways that are similar to the way we humans listen and respond to one another. Unfortunately for Philipse, even if it is granted that his implicitly anthropomorphic understanding of God is a fair representation of theism, behaviorism seems thoroughly discredited when it comes to humans (the anthropos is anthropomorphic).20 In further considering the objections of section one, it is worth noting the peculiarity of Fales' first argument which appears to have this form: if God cannot (or is not?) knowable or discernable scientifically, then God is impotent or unknowable. Imagine we conclude that we cannot know scientifically what Shakespeare meant in all his plays. Would it follow that the Bard is impotent? That seems doubtful. What about unknowable? Perhaps some non-scientific means are sufficient for us to have reasonable beliefs about what the Bard meant. Von Hildebrand thought that we can have some experiential awareness of God and this is of the kind that many philosophers have since come to use in theistic 18 Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Philosophy, (London: Routledge, 2009), 78. 19 Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representations, (New York: Columbia, 2005), 5-6. 20 See A Brief History of the Soul by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2011). 21DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY arguments from religious experience.21 This, in principle, would provide conditions in which one can offer a phenomenological account of what it is for persons to experience the divine or sacred. On Fales' demand that a proper theistic account needs to offer an account of how God acts, this again, seems to be an example of anthropomorphism or likening God to a being who is the subject of laws of nature as opposed to their author. In theistic tradition, God is believed to possess divine attributes in ways that are interconnected. I happen to be in the Anselmian or prefect-being tradition and understand God's power, knowledge, essential goodness and the like, as being made evident by God's unsurpassable excellence. I have defended the ontological – and other theistic – arguments elsewhere.22 Fales's characterization of omnipotence as a purely dispositional property in search of a categorical property is (at least) misleading, insofar as traditional theism sees God's powers (of knowledge and to bring about states of affairs) as basic, and not due to the causal powers of any intermediary. Does this make them obscure or empty? It is hard to see why when one can recognize conceptually explanations in terms of intentions or purposes by created persons that are not reducible to non-intentional and non-purposive explanations. For the sake of argument, let us concede that in actual fact, human beings intentional agency can be reduced to the non-intentional, it still does not follow that such a reduction is necessarily the case so that (a) it could not be otherwise or (b) there could not be forms of intentional agency whose intentions are not reducible. Fales' analogy with magic therefore seems far-off. Theists do not do the equivalent of sneak rabbits into hats. They rather address the very nature of what counts as an ultimate, unsurpassable great or excellent reality; to complain that such a reality or being needs to meet the standards of explanation that befit beings of less excellence seems wide of the mark.23 21 See, for example, The Rainbow of Experiences, Critical Trust, and God: A Defense of Holistic Empiricism by Kai Man Kwan (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). 22 See Contemporary Philosophy of Religion by Charles Taliaferro (Hoboken: WileyBlackwell, 1998). 23 For an overall look at the relevant philosophical domains, see The Routledge Companion to Theism ed. by C. Taliaferro, V. Harrison, S. Goetz (London: Routledge, 2013). Fales' demand for the means by which God acts reminds us of cases when philosophers insisted that we cannot explain human volition without positing some intermediate such as a higher order volition to have a volition, and so on ad infinitum. Many philosophers of human agency make use of the notion of basic acts, which do not 22 CHARLES TALIAFERRO By way of a further defense of divine and human agency from a theistic point of view, consider a final barrage of three, interrelated objections concerning the project of this essay and a summary response. Objection one: Appealing to phenomenological realism only expands a list of what needs to be explained scientifically. Science has shed enormous light on our intentional action. But what further science can shed light on divine agency? The scientific inscrutability of divine agency shows theism to be anti-scientific. Objection two: Appealing to phenomenological realism entrenches us in the status quo of ideas and ideals. It used to be common sense to appeal to demon possession. Surely we need a better alternative. Objection three: Phenomenological realism gives us data that is thoroughly neutral in terms of the deep philosophical theories historically and in our own time. Imagine evaluating a Spinozist metaphysics and epistemology in light of phenomenological realism! There is a long tradition of philosophers who think that some metaphysic or epistemology is true or well grounded, but it cannot work in the life of practical engagement. David Hume realized he needed to play backgammon from time to time to escape his reasoning and conclusion in the study, but that did not give him a philosophical reason for thinking his ruminations in the study were spurious. On the first objection, it is obvious that the natural sciences (especially brain sciences) along with the social sciences have shed a great deal of light on human agency, but none of it has given us good reason (in my view) to adopt a reductionist or identity theory of the mental. This is partly due to the problem of even knowing what is physical, but it is also due to the important difference between the sciences establishing correlations of the mental and brain and other bodily processes and events versus identity. The inescapability of the mental actually provides us good reason for thinking that practicing neurologists implicitly presuppose a form of dualism, even if they profess otherwise .24 As noted above, the fact that theistic explanations do not yield scientific scrutiny (identifying what mechanisms God uses when God acts) is no more require further volitions or intentions. See, for example, Person and Object by Roderick Chisholm. La Salle: Open Court, 1976. 24 This is made evident in the essay "Neuroscience: Dualism in Disguise" by Riccardo Manzotti and Paolo Moderato from Contemporary Dualism: A Defense (London: Routledge, 2014). 23DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY reason to dispense with theistic explanations than we would have reason to dispense with explanations of mathematical propositions in terms of logical entailment because such explanations are non-biological. As many have argued, there is reason to think theism provides a foundation for science and, from such a point of view, it is anything but anti-science.25 Two, phenomenological realism reveals our use of reason to be self-correcting and providing a foundation for the critical investigation of the credibility of our beliefs. The legacy of von Hildebrand is an ongoing, rigorous self-criticism. As a matter of historical significance, von Hildebrand's philosophy led him to radically oppose the status quo of his society, risking his life facing up to anti-Semitism and fascism in Europe. Third, I propose that Spinoza and Hume (and their progeny) do face some prima facie objections as revealed in phenomenological realism. Spinoza does need to provide reasons (and he actually does so) for why we should set aside what appears to be our experiential awareness of our possessing powers to make changes in conditions that are contingent. Hume does need reasons for adopting the bundle theory of the self, his view of causation and our observations about the world, and (to his great credit) he offers such reasons. By providing some reasons in this essay why Kevin does not need to stop practicing his philosophy of human and divine agency in order to first engage Kant and Parfit, I am not denying that Kant and Parfit have provided us with rich and intriguing arguments we should pursue on their own. The thrust of this essay is not at all antiphilosophical; it is simply a matter of knowing what philosophers need to do in order to successfully make their case in specific projects. Limitations of space requires that I refer readers to where I have employed phenomenological realism to explicitly support a nonreductive account of human persons and divine agency. I develop this most recently in The Image in Mind, which extends considerably an earlier project of defending what I call integrative dualism and integrative theism.26 In the space remaining, I propose to make an observation 25 In The Routledge Companion to Theism, see the entries on Naturalism, Natural Sciences, Evolution, Physical Cosmology, Psychology, Cognitive Science. 26 See The Image in Mind co-authored with Jil Evans (London: Continuum, 2010) and Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). A reviewer of an earlier version of this essay asks how one might settle disagreements among phenomenological realists. Imagine one phenomenological realist reaches the conclusion that libertarian agency is right, whereas another concludes with compatabilism. While there is no convenient algorithm to decide matters, I suggest 24 CHARLES TALIAFERRO about the cultural significance of our philosophical methodologies and, in particular, the significance of phenomenological realism. III. THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL REALISM What do historicalism and scientism have in common? In a sense, both are elite positions insofar as both require advanced education in the humanities and sciences respectfully. Ordinary persons do not worry about Kant's argument about the possibility of undetected switching of themselves. Nor does the everyday person suspect that their purposes, desires or even consciousness itself may not exist. Phenomenological realism, in contrast, treats our everyday, apparent conceptions of ourselves and the world as real and trustworthy, subject to critical review. A good example of this involves our experience of the world in color. A phenomenological realist may well (as I do) come to conclude that mind-independent objects do not have the colors they appear to as intrinsic properties of the objects themselves, nonetheless the evident experience of color gives us very good reason to resist the effort to deny that persons actually experience color (or those who deny that subjective experiences of color do not exist). Because Hildebrand, and other phenomenological realists, promote a philosophical method that takes seriously our ordinary experience there is a sense in which it is quite natural that Hildebrand promoted the widespread practice of philosophy in culture in which ordinary persons may be drawn to the practice of philosophy as the love of wisdom. Arguably, among persons who sincerely pursue the love of wisdom with a balance of courage and humility, there will be great resistance to intellectual manipulation, an openness to the reasons of others, the fostering of alternative viewpoints in which persons may freely assess and critically review. In my view, Hildebrand's phenomenological realism, implemented culturally, would naturally be very much in line with what Karl Popper describes as the open society. that we distinguish between a phenomenological analysis of agency itself (the firstperson awareness of oneself when acting) and our commitments or convictions on the level of theory. Although it is impossible to argue for this here, my own view is that we do experience ourselves as agents in a fashion that gives evidential presumption to libertarianism, however this prima facie justification can be overcome by theoretical reasoning supporting determinism and compatabilism. For the record, I think the prima facie evidence favoring libertarianism is not defeated by further philosophical reflection. 25DIVINE AND HUMAN AGENCY In this respect, phenomenological realism is helpful in promoting what may be called the philosophical ground for an open society. Hildebrand had an outstanding record as an opponent of the enemies of an open society. He was an early and sustained opponent of fascism and anti-Semitism before and during World War Two. Hildebrand was a German citizen, though born in Italy who had to flee Nazi forces, moving from Germany to Austria, then to Switzerland and eventually to the United States. His opposition to Nazism was especially dangerous in terms of his personal security in Austria. The Nazi ambassador to Austria, Franz von Papen wrote "That damned Hildebrand is the greatest obstacle for National Socialism in Austria. No one causes more harm" and he proposed that Hitler order the assassination of Hildebrand, "the architect of the intellectual resistance in Austria."27 I do not suggest that historicalism and scientism should be rejected because they are elitist or that phenomenal realism should be adopted because it promotes a democratic culture. But I do suggest in closing that in our reflections on the philosophy of divine and human nature, we take into account the cultural implications of our philosophical methods. For practical persons, it is impossible to see historicalism or scientism as the mainstay for mainstream cultural exchanges. There are and should be special sites for specialized historical and scientific inquiry. But there are also good reasons for those of us who are philosophers and theologians to promote a philosophical foundation that supports an open society in which these more specialized pursuits can flourish. Acknowledgement. I thank all those who have helped with my reflections on phenomenological realism, including Georg Gasser, Johannes Groessl, Lukas Kraus, and all those who attended the conference "Divine Action in the World: Philosophical and Theological Inquiry". 27 Dietrich von Hildebrand, My Battle Against Hitler (New York: Image, 2014).

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Cognition journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit Original Articles When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations Simon Cullen Princeton University, United States A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: True self Action Explanation Person/situation distinction Prejudice Responsibility A B S T R A C T When explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse nonagential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with lowand high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative. The concept of the true self plays a central role in folk psychology (Strohminger, Knobe, & Newman, 2017). Beliefs about the true self predict people's intuitions about personal identity (De Freitas, Cikara, Grossmann, & Schlegel, 2018; Prinz & Nichols, 2016, chap. 26; Strohminger & Nichols, 2014, 2015), what a person values (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2013), whether a person is happy (Newman, De Freitas, & Knobe, 2014; Phillips, Misenheimer, & Knobe, 2011), weak-willed (Newman et al., 2014), morally responsible (Newman et al., 2014), and leading a meaningful life (Schlegel, Hicks, Arndt, & King, 2009; Schlegel, Hicks, King, & Arndt, 2011). Moreover, beliefs about the true self appear to moderate intergroup bias (De Freitas & Cikara, 2018) and decision satisfaction (Kim, Christy, Hicks, & Schlegel, 2017). Collectively, these studies reveal a powerful tendency for people to attribute characteristics they perceive as virtuous to the true self; immoral characteristics tend to be represented as more superficial aspects of the self (De Freitas, Cikara, Grossmann, & Schlegel, 2017; De Freitas, Tobia, Newman, & Knobe, 2016). For example, when participants consider an evangelical Christian man who believes homosexuality to be immoral while also finding himself sexually attracted to men, prejudiced participants are less likely to represent the agent's sexual orientation as part of his true self (Newman et al., 2013). This paper explores the role that beliefs about the true self play in what may seem an unrelated area of psychology-the study of the cognitive processes that incline people to explain behavior in more or less situational terms. The distinction is a familiar one. Both commonsense and scientific psychology distinguish actions that arise from within an agent from those that are attributable to the circumstances in which the agent acts (e.g., Frankfurt, 1971; Heider, 1983/1958; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1973; Smith, 2005; Watson, 1996). To help make the distinction more concrete, consider Darley and Batson's classic (1973) finding: seminary students could be made six times less likely to help an apparently injured person simply by being placed in circumstances where they felt they had to hurry to give a sermon. When we consider one of the hurried seminarians rushing off to give his sermon, ignoring the injured man, we tend to see his callousness as caused by his randomization into the Hurried experimental condition (Darley & Batson, 1973). To borrow a common metaphor, the experimental manipulation may seem to 'externally determine' the hurried seminarians' antisocial behavior (Batson, Darley, & Coke, 1978). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2018.06.021 Received 18 November 2017; Received in revised form 26 June 2018; Accepted 26 June 2018 E-mail address: [email protected]. Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 0010-0277/ © 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T Intuitions like this one appear to be widely shared (Kunda & Nisbett, 1986; Ross, 1977); however, the cognitive processes that underlie such intuitions remain unclear (Sabini, Siepmann, & Stein, 2001). How do people classify actions along the 'person/situation' dichotomy? A major theoretical tradition in social psychology holds that people locate the causes of actions and events in much the same 'commonsense' way that scientists do-namely, by assessing whether they occur only in the presence of an external pressure, or whether they also occur in the absence of that pressure (Kelley, 1967, 1973). Applied to our previous example, such accounts hold that we judge the seminarian's callous behavior to result from 'the situation' because we believe he would have acted benevolently in sufficiently many other sufficiently similar circumstances (Hewstone & Jaspars, 1987; for philosophical insights see, e.g., Lewis, 1986; Woodward, 2006). Theorists have developed this basic picture in many ways, but they have tended to agree that laypeople, like scientists, aim to rely on causal-statistical ('covariation') information when explaining morally valenced human actions. However, recent research on the concept of the true self suggests that people may rely on strikingly unscientific considerations for this purpose. In particular, the degree to which an action appears to arise from features of the agent's circumstances may depend on whether the action appears to express the agent's true self. If we represent agents as fundamentally virtuous, our explanatory preferences-i.e., whether we tend to emphasize more agentor more situation-focused factors when explaining an action-may in turn depend on our moral attitudes towards the action. That is, we may prefer situation-focused explanations to the extent that we perceive a mismatch in the moral valences of the agent's action and true self. To illustrate this idea, consider again one of the hurried seminarians. On the hypothesis to be explored here-the mismatch hypothesis-people tend to explain his callousness in terms of the experimental condition into which he was randomized, to the extent that they believe (a) his action was immoral, and (b) his true self is virtuous. On this view, our beliefs about how valenced actions covary with features of the situation should have a small impact on our explanatory preferences relative to the impact of our beliefs about whether actions are essencedisclosing. (Psychologists often use 'self-disclosing' to refer to any behavior that expresses something about an agent. In philosophical action theory, the term is used more narrowly to refer only to actions that express something about an agent's true self. To avoid confusion, this paper uses the unfamiliar term 'essence-disclosing' in this narrower, action-theoretic sense.) While the mismatch hypothesis has not been explicitly discussed or explored in previous research, several independent lines of evidence suggest that it warrants investigation. Jones and Nisbett (1972) famously hypothesized that we prefer to explain our own actions in terms of features of the situations in which we act, while we prefer to attribute other agents' actions to their 'internal' dispositions. The mismatch hypothesis predicts this asymmetry in the case of immoral behaviors. For, researchers have consistently found that we tend to regard ourselves as morally better than average (Epley & Dunning, 2000; Klein & Epley, 2016), which suggests that the valence of any given immoral behavior is somewhat more likely to conflict with our assessments of our own true selves than with our assessments of other agents' true selves. Thus, the mismatch hypothesis predicts the traditional actor-observer asymmetry when the target action is immoral. However, parallel reasoning suggests that the mismatch hypothesis predicts the opposite asymmetry for virtuous behavior-since good actions are less likely to conflict with our assessments of our own true selves than with our assessments of other actors'. Consistent with this prediction, an authoritative meta-analysis found no evidence for a morally neutral actor-observer asymmetry (Malle, 2006). Rather, the classic asymmetry appeared in studies where participants explained negative events, but reversed in studies where they explained positive events, as the mismatch hypothesis predicts. The same reasoning appears to apply to intergroup explanatory preferences. If in-group members tend to think of themselves as having morally better true selves than out-group members, the mismatch hypothesis predicts that they will be more likely, compared to base rates, to produce agent-focused explanations for their own members' praiseworthy acts and situation-focused explanations for their blameworthy acts. Members of the out-group will get the opposite treatment. Social psychologists have coined the phrase 'ultimate attribution error' to describe this very patterning (Pettigrew, 1979). Taylor and Jaggi (1974) first investigated intergroup attribution in southern India, against the backdrop of Hindu-Muslim conflict. They asked Hindu participants to imagine themselves in various situations with either a Hindu or a Muslim interlocutor. In all scenarios, Hindus were more likely to give agent-focused explanations for the virtuous behavior of another Hindu agent. The study was replicated in Malaysia with Malay and Chinese subjects (Hewstone & Ward, 1985). If the tendency of ingroup members to regard themselves as, on average, morally better than out-group members (Ellemers, Pagliaro, Barreto, & Leach, 2008; Leach, Ellemers, & Barreto, 2007; Levine & Campbell, 1972; although, cf., De Freitas & Cikara, 2018) extends to assessments of their true selves, the mismatch hypothesis appears to predict the patterning of intergroup explanatory preferences. (Note that the model does not assume all agents are represented as maximally or equally virtuous.) The present studies The patterning of laypeople's explanatory preferences suggests that the mismatch hypothesis is a promising initial account of the conditions that incline people to emphasize more agentor situation-focused explanations. However, previous research has not investigated the influence of people's beliefs about the true self on their explanatory preferences. The present studies begin exploring this question. Studies 1–3 found that participants' moral attitudes towards an action predict their explanatory preferences far better than their beliefs about how causally sensitive the action is to features of the agent's circumstances. This is true both for Western (North American) and nonWestern (Indian) participants. Studies 4 and 5 supported the hypothesis that these surprising patterns reflect a more general feature of folk psychology identified in recent research, namely, a bias to represent agents as possessing morally virtuous true selves. The results indicate that people often prefer situation-focused explanations because they resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. Study 4 tested this hypothesis by examining the conditions under which moral luck undermines the perception that an agent is fully responsible for his actions. Study 5 tested the hypothesis in the context of partisans' explanations of in-group and out-group political identities. 1. Study 1: Explaining gay sex Consider the following vignette, adapted from Newman et al. (2013): Mark was born into a Christian family that eventually deteriorated, leading his parents to divorce. After being pushed out of home early, Mark met a new group of friends, some of whom were in same-sex relationships. Mark believed that homosexuality is morally wrong, and he encouraged his new friends to resist their attractions to people of the same sex. However, Mark himself was attracted to other men. He openly acknowledged this to his friends and discussed it as part of his own personal struggle. Mark believed that it was his duty to resist his feelings for other men, and he vowed to live a morally decent life the only way he could-by remaining celibate. But Mark sometimes failed to live up to his values. For example, one day, after a bad fight with his father, Mark went to see his friend Bill. They shared a bottle of wine and talked for hours. That night, Mark hit on Bill and they ended up having sex. Many explanations for the agent's action are possible. On the one hand, his encounter with Bill plausibly depended to some degree on S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 166 features of his situation: for example, the influence of his new friends and the fight he had with his father. On the other hand, facts about the agent himself and his sexual dispositions also seem important. What inclines people to prefer more agentor situation-focusedexplanations? Using a similar vignette, Newman et al. (2013) found that both Liberals and Conservatives represent the agent's true self as virtuous. Thus, given the strong association of attitudes to homosexuality and political identification (Inbar, Pizarro, & Bloom, 2009; Inbar, Pizarro, Knobe, & Bloom, 2009), the mismatch hypothesis predicts that participants with relatively positive attitudes towards homosexuality should be more inclined to endorse agent-focused explanations and less inclined to endorse situation-focused explanations. Study 1 tested these predictions. 1.1. Methods 1.1.1. Participants Participants were 403 adults ranging in age from 19 to 75 years (M=36, 55% female). In all studies, participants were recruited using mTurk, provided informed consent, and were paid $0.20–$0.30. 1.1.2. Procedure Participants read a vignette like the one described above. (All vignettes are reproduced in Appendix A.) The vignette made available various explanations for the agent's action, which participants rated (counterbalanced for order) on scales ranging from 1 ('completely disagree') to 9 ('completely agree'). Four explanations cited more agentfocused factors-e.g., the agent had sex with another man because he is gay-and four cited more situation-focused factors-e.g., the agent had sex with another man because of the influence of his new friends (Table 1). To report the degree to which his action seemed essencedisclosing-i.e., expressive of his true self-participants rated the statement "By having sex with Bill, Mark showed who he most truly is, deep down" on a scale from 1 ('completely disagree') to 9 ('completely agree'). The short form of Herek's (1998) Attitudes to Gay Men (ATLG) scale served as a measure of the degree to which participants perceived the agent's action as immoral. Participants rated the following statements (counterbalanced for order) on scales ranging from 1 ('completely disagree') to 5 ('completely agree'): *I think male homosexuals are disgusting; *Male homosexuality is a perversion; Male homosexuality is a natural expression of sexuality in men; *Sex between two men is just plain wrong; Male homosexuality is merely a different kind of lifestyle that should not be condemned (*reverse-coded). As an attention check, one item instructed participants to "select 'agree' for this question." Participants responded to two questions intended to test their comprehension of the vignette: "How will Mark feel the next day when he reflects on his action?" (proud/ashamed), and "What does Mark believe?" (that homosexuality is moral/that homosexuality is immoral). On the final page of the survey, participants rated themselves on a scale from 1 ('extremely conservative') to 7 ('extremely liberal') and indicated their age and sex. 1.2. Results Three hundred and sixty-four participants correctly responded to the comprehension checks. Responses from participants who failed a check were excluded, but this had no meaningful effect. 1.2.1. Factor analysis Tests of factorability indicated that participants' ratings of the eight explanations were suitable for factor analysis. For every item, there was at least one other with which it was correlated at r⩾ .5. The KaiserMeyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .78, above the recommended threshold, and Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant, χ2(28)= 1190, p < .001. Principal component analysis with varimax rotation was therefore used to extract factor scores. Two components with eigenvalues greater than 1 emerged that together explain 65% of the variance in participants' ratings of the eight explanations (Table 1). The four intuitively situation-focused explanations loaded strongly onto the first component, which modeled 42% of the variance in responses, and the four intuitively agent-focused explanations loaded strongly onto the second component, which modeled the remaining 23%, indicating that the explanations were appropriately grouped into dichotomous categories. 1.2.2. Attribution and moral attitudes The attitudes to homosexuality scale was highly reliable (Cronbach's =α .94). Correlation coefficients were therefore calculated for ATLG scores and the disaggregated person and situation components extracted via factor analysis. ATLG scores predicted participants' preferences for both agent-focused explanations, r(362)= .32, 95% CI: [.23, .42], p < .001, and situation-focused explanations, r(362)=−.45, 95% CI: [−.54,−.36], p < .001, indicating that prejudice may lead people to emphasize situation-focused rather than agent-focused explanations for homosexual behavior. Bootstrap mediation analysis (Hayes, 2013) was used to test the hypothesis that beliefs about whether the agent's action expresses his true self ('essence-disclosure') mediate the effect of attitudes to homosexuality on explanatory preferences. ATLG scores were set as the independent variable with essence-disclosure ratings as mediator and person scores as DV (Fig. 1). Consistent with the mediation hypothesis, the analysis revealed a significant indirect effect: ab= .10, 95% CI (bootstrapped): [.05, .17]. (All bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals were calculated using 5000 bootstrap samples.) 1.3. Discussion This study found that participants' moral attitudes towards homosexuality powerfully predicted the degree to which they favored more agent-focused or situation-focused explanations for an erotic encounter between two men. Moreover, the results were consistent with a model according to which the effect of people's moral attitudes on their explanatory preferences is partially mediated by their beliefs about Table 1 Factor loadings from exploratory principal component analysis on ratings of the eight action-explanations (Study 1). Items are Likert-ratings of potential explanations of the agent's homosexual encounter. Factor loadings with values> .5 are bolded. Fig. 1. Mediation (Study 1). ∗p < .001. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 167 whether the encounter expressed the agent's true self. Since people tend to believe that the agent's true self is virtuous regardless of their attitudes towards homosexuality (Newman et al., 2013), these results appear to support the mismatch hypothesis. Participants who perceived a mismatch in the valences of the agent's action and true self rated the situation attributions more highly and saw the action as less expressive of the agent's true self than did those who perceived no such mismatch. The agent-focused explanations followed the reverse pattern. The associations between participants' ratings of the eight explanations are also noteworthy. The fact that two-thirds of the variance in participants' explanatory preferences can be modeled by two orthogonal factors suggests that participants were responding to an underlying dichotomy when they assessed the explanations for the agent's action. The fact that the explanations intuitively classified as agentfocused and those intuitively classified as situation-focused neatly sorted onto these two factors (Table 1) suggests that the relevant dichotomy is the intuitive person/situation distinction. This result helps to allay concerns about whether the dichotomy reflects an important feature of how human beings actually explain intentional behavior (e.g., Malle, 2011; Malle, Knobe, O'Laughlin, Pearce, & Nelson, 2000). 2. Study 2: The role of causal information It might be objected that whereas participants with negative attitudes towards homosexuality may be more inclined to think that the agent's sexual orientation is fundamentally something he has chosen, participants with more positive attitudes may think that he was born gay and there's not much use in fighting it (Haider-Markel & Joslyn, 2008; Jayaratne et al., 2006; Lewis, 2009; Suhay & Jayaratne, 2012). Thus, because people tend to believe that actions arising from innate traits are more stable across time and less sensitive to environmental variation than those acquired as result of choice (Gelman, 2003; Gelman, Heyman, & Legare, 2007; Haslam, Bastian, & Bissett, 2004), the results of Study 1 might be explained on the hypothesis that our attitudes to homosexuality influence the degree to which we perceive same-sex attraction as causally sensitive to variations in the agent's situation. In particular, high-prejudice participants may be more likely than low-prejudice participants to represent the agent's action as causally sensitive to specific features of his situation. This difference may explain why high levels of anti-gay prejudice predict a strong preference for situation-focused explanations of the agent's erotic same-sex encounter. Study 2 tested this rival explanation against the mismatch hypothesis by directly manipulating the degree to which participants viewed the agent's action as causally sensitive to his circumstances. North American mTurkers tend to have highly positive attitudes towards homosexuality-the median ATLG score among North American participants is 21 out of 25 (Fig. 3). Study 2 also sought to replicate the basic valence-explanation asymmetry with participants who hold more negative attitudes towards homosexuality. Indian populations tend to have more negative attitudes towards sexuality and sexual orientation than North American populations (Asthana & Oostvogels, 2001; Patel, Mayer, & Makadon, 2012; Tahmindjis, 2014). Moreover, researchers have found evidence for belief in the virtuous true self when studying participants in the United States, Russia, Singapore, and Colombia (De Freitas et al., 2018), suggesting that this belief reflects a species-typical feature of human psychology. Thus, relative to North Americans, we should expect Indian participants to be significantly: 1. more inclined towards situation-focused explanations, 2. less inclined towards agent-focused explanations, and 3. less inclined to view the action as essence-disclosing. Study 2 tested these predictions with a sample of English-speaking Indian participants recruited via mTurk. 2.1. Methods 2.1.1. Participants A new group of 238 North American participants ranging in age from 18 to 74 years (M=35.8, 48% female) were recruited using mTurk. Additionally, 252 Indian participants ranging in age from 21 to 68 years (M=32.6, 22% female) were recruited using mTurk. TurkPrime (Litman, Robinson, & Abberbock, 2017) was used to verify that these participants were located in India. 2.1.2. Procedure Participants were randomized into one of three conditions. The vignette for the Baseline condition was drawn from Study 1 without modification. The two other conditions were formed by appending one or the other of the following texts to the end of the original vignette: Person condition: Most people don't find Bill attractive, but Mark has often been sexually attracted to Bill. In fact, Mark often experiences attraction to other men, too. Situation condition: Most people don't find Bill attractive, and in the past Mark himself has rarely felt sexually attracted to Bill. In fact, Mark rarely experiences attraction to other men, either. Participants who read that Mark rarely finds Bill or other men attractive should come to represent Mark's behavior as highly causally sensitive to his situation (i.e., it exhibited low "consistency" and high "distinctiveness"). For, if the traits which led to his encounter with Bill were causally insensitive to relevant changes in his circumstances, the agent would commonly experience same-sex attraction. Thus, because participants in the Situation condition read that he is not commonly attracted to other men, they should be more likely than participants in the Person condition to judge that his actions were highly causally sensitive to the details of the situation. To test this hypothesis, participants rated the following (counterbalanced) statements: Weak robustness: If he were in the very same circumstances in the future, how probable do you think it is that Mark would have sex with Bill again? (1: Not at all probable – 7: Extremely probable.) Strong robustness: Imagine that a week goes by until Mark next sees Bill. Now Mark is feeling much better about the fight with his father and is generally back to his usual self. How probable do you think it is that Mark will have sex with Bill on this occasion? (1: Not at all probable – 7: Extremely probable.) All other methods were drawn directly from Study 1. 2.2. Results (North American participants) Two hundred and six participants passed the comprehension checks. Responses from participants who failed at least one check were excluded, but this did not meaningfully affect the pattern of results. 2.2.1. Manipulation checks To test whether the experimental manipulation affected participants' beliefs about how causally sensitive the agent's action is to features of the situation, two-way ANOVA tests were conducted using experimental condition as the independent variable and weak or strong robustness as the dependent variable. The experimental manipulation had a significant effect on participants' ratings of both weak robustness, F(2,203)= 9.2, p < .001, and strong robustness, F(2,203)= 7.3, p= .001. Post-hoc tests revealed that participants in the Situation condition, who read that the agent has rarely experienced same-sex attraction, gave significantly lower ratings of weak robustness, d=−0.63, 95% CI: [−0.92,−0.33], and strong robustness, d=−0.56, 95% CI: [−0.85,−0.27], than did participants in the Person and Baseline conditions. However, the Person and Baseline conditions did not differ meaningfully on either measure (ps > .5). S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 168 These results indicate that the experimental manipulation succeeded in making the agent's behavior seem more causally sensitive to environmental factors in the Situation condition. Notably, in this condition, participants were significantly less likely to predict that the agent would repeat his actions in similar circumstances in the future. 2.2.2. Factor analysis Participants' ratings of the eight explanations were suitable for principal component analysis (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin= .74; Bartlett's test of sphericity: χ2(28)= 616, p < .001). Replicating Study 1, the four intuitively situation-focused explanations loaded strongly onto a single component, which explained 40% of the variance, and the four intuitively agent-focused items loaded strongly onto a second component, which explained the remaining 22%. 2.2.3. Attribution and moral attitudes Herek's attitudes to homosexuality scale was again highly reliable (α = .95). ATLG scores and dummy variables representing the experimental conditions were regressed against situation scores, person scores, and essence-disclosure ratings. ATLG scores significantly predicted all three dependent variables (Table 2). Additionally, the experimental manipulation had a small, borderline-significant effect on participants' ratings of the agent-focused explanations but did not predict any of the other measures. Repeating the analysis using ratings of the individual explanations as DVs revealed that the Situation condition differed significantly only on two of the eight explanations: compared to the Person and Baseline conditions, participants in the Situation condition gave lower ratings to the statements "Mark had sex with Bill because he is gay," t(204)= 2.4, p= .017, d=0.35, 95% CI: [0.06, 0.64], and "Mark had sex with Bill because he is attracted to men," t(204)= 3.5, p < .001, d=0.51, 95% CI: [0.22, 0.84]. These data raise the possibility that the experimental manipulation did not affect participants' preferences for the agent-focused explanations directly; rather, learning that Mark reliably finds neither Bill nor other men attractive may cause participants to represent his encounter with Bill as less revealing of his true self, which may in turn make the agent-focused explanations seem less appropriate. To test this hypothesis, a bootstrap mediation analysis (Hayes, 2013) was conducted using an independent variable that was coded '1' if a participant was randomized into the Situation condition and '0' otherwise, essence-disclosure ratings as the mediator, and participants' mean ratings of the agent-focused explanations as the dependent variable (Fig. 2). The analysis indicated that the degree to which the agent's action appears to reflect his true self significantly mediated the effect of the Situation condition on participants' ratings of the agent-focused explanations: ab=−.20, 95% CI: [−.41,−.04]. 2.3. Replication with Indian participants Two hundred and two Indian participants correctly responded to the attention and comprehension checks. Data from other Indian participants were excluded. The sample skewed strongly male, however, no significant differences emerged between male (N=159) and female (N=43) participants on any measure (ps > .5). While the results found with North Americans replicated with Indian participants (Table 3), there were large differences between how the two groups explained the agent's action (Fig. 3). Compared to North Americans, Indian participants were significantly: 1. more inclined to favor situation explanations, t(406) = 11.0, p< .001, d = 1.1, 95% CI: [0.88, 1.30], 2. less inclined to favor person explanations, t(406) = −7.1, p< .001, d = −0.70, 95% CI: [−0.90, −0.50], and 3. less inclined to view the action as essence-disclosing, t(406) = 2.4, p = .016, d = 0.24, 95% CI: [0.04, 0.43]. To test whether moral attitudes towards homosexuality have a similar influence on Indian and North American participants' explanatory preferences, ATLG scores and dummy variables representing nationality and experimental condition were regressed against agent scores, situation scores, and essence-disclosure ratings in fully crossed models. Indian nationality did not have any effect (ps > .5). Similarly, there were no significant interactions between IVs (ps > .5). However, moral attitudes to homosexuality (as measured by ATLG scores) continued to predict participants' ratings of the agent-focused explanations, β =.32, 95% CI: [.23, .41], p < .001, the situation-focused explanations, β =−.37, 95% CI: [−.46,−.28], p < .001, and the essence-disclosure measure, β =.27, 95% CI: [.17, .36], p < .001, confirming all predictions derived from the mismatch hypothesis. This is noteworthy as Indian participants held strikingly more negative attitudes towards homosexuality than did North Americans, d=−0.90, 95% CI: [−1.10,−0.69], p < .001. 2.4. Discussion This study found that both North American and Indian participants' moral attitudes towards homosexuality are highly predictive of their preferences for agent-focused vs. situation-focused explanations of an erotic encounter between two men. By contrast, beliefs about how the action covaried with changes in the actor's circumstances did not reliably predict explanatory preferences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, people are less inclined to explain same-sex attraction in terms of the agent's sexual orientation when they are told that he does not reliably find other men attractive. However, it is surprising that this effect is so much smaller than the effect of people's moral attitudes towards homosexuality. For predicting how someone will explain a same-sex encounter, it is far more useful to know about their prejudices than it is to know the degree to which they represent the agent's erotic feelings as causally covarying with his situation.Moreover, data from Indian participants indicates that this finding is unlikely to reflect a uniquely WEIRD concept of human agency (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010). Instead, consistent with previous research (De Freitas et al., 2018), belief in the virtuous true self appears to reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Table 2 Summary of regression models from Study 2 (North American sample). Notes: baseline condition omitted; to compare the effect sizes of categorical and continuous predictors, this table provides ηp 2 values. aR2 = .20, F(202,3)= 16.8, p < .001. bR2 = .15, F(202,3)= 12.2. p < .001. cR2 = .13, F(202,3)= 9.7, p < .001. Fig. 2. Mediation (Study 2). ∗∗p < .05; ∗∗∗p < .001. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 169 3. Study 3: Generalizing The case for the mismatch hypothesis would be considerably strengthened if the effect of moral attitudes on our explanatory preferences could be measured using a variety of target actions that, unlike sex between two men, do not reflect dispositions that we believe to be innate or chosen depending on our moral attitudes towards the actions (Haider-Markel & Joslyn, 2008). Studies 3a and 3b therefore attempted to replicate the basic mismatch effect using varied stimuli unrelated to sexual orientation. 3.1. Study 3a: Abortion 3.1.1. Participants Participants were 204 North Americans ranging in age from 18 to 69 years (M=33, 49% female). 3.1.2. Procedure All participants read a vignette about a college senior, Kate, who discovers she is pregnant and later decides to have an abortion (see Appendix A for the complete vignette). The vignette made available various explanations for her decision (Table 4). Next, participants read that "Some of our actions reflect who we are deep down; they reveal our true selves," and rated the statement "Kate's decision to have an abortion reflects what she wants deep down." Participants then responded to two items aimed at measuring their beliefs about the causal sensitivity of Kate's decision to her circumstances: Weak robustness: If she were in the very same circumstances again, how probable is it that Kate would have another abortion? Strong robustness: Imagine that two years later Kate has another unwanted pregnancy. Now she lives in a different part of the country and is working as an intern at a hospital. How probable is it that she will also abort this second pregnancy? Finally, participants completed a novel Moral Attitudes to Abortion (MATA) scale consisting of the following items (counterbalanced for order): Having an abortion is a disgusting thing to do; Abortion is just plain wrong; *Access to abortions should be free and easy; Abortion is only ever justified when a pregnancy seriously threatens the mother's life; Doctors who perform abortions are evil. All other materials were drawn without modification from previous experiments. 3.1.3. Results One hundred and eighty-seven participants correctly responded to the comprehension checks. Responses from participants who failed more than one check were excluded, but this had no meaningful effect. Factor analysis. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy was .50, slightly below the recommended threshold. However, the mean inter-item correlation was high, r(185)= .77, and Bartlett's test of sphericity was significant, χ2(6)= 129, p < .001. PCA with varimax rotation was therefore used to extract factor scores. Two components emerged that together explained 76% of the variance in participants' ratings of the four explanations (Table 4). Consistent with Studies 1 and 2, the two intuitively agent-focused explanations loaded strongly onto the first component which modeled 41% of the variance, and the two intuitively situation-focused items loaded strongly onto the second component which modeled the remaining 35%, indicating that participants drew the intuitive distinction, as intended. Attribution and moral attitudes. The Moral Attitudes to Abortion (MATA) scale was highly reliable (α = .94), so the items were summed to create an overall MATA score. MATA scores and robustness ratings were regressed against three dependent variables: situation scores, person scores, and essence-disclosure ratings (Table 5). In each model, moral attitudes significantly predicted the dependent variable. Weak Table 3 Linear models from Indian sample (Study 2). Baseline omitted. aR2 = .09, F(198,3)= 6.5, p < .001. bR2 = .11, F(198,3)= 8.0, p < .001. cR2 = .05, F(198,3)= 3.4, p= .02. Fig. 3. North American and Indian participants (Study 2). Note: box plot boundaries are Q1, Q2, Q3, Q3+1.5 * IQR (Tukey-style). Table 4 Factor loadings from exploratory principal component analysis (Study 3a). Items are Likert-ratings of potential explanations for the agent's decision to abort her pregnancy. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 170 robustness significantly predicted essence-disclosure ratings; however, strong robustness was not a significant predictor in any model. 3.2. Study 3b: Islamic conversion 3.2.1. Participants Participants were 201 North Americans ranging in age from 18 to 55 years (M=36, 45% female). 3.2.2. Procedure Participants read a vignette about Jane, a girl born into a Christian family that eventually deteriorates, leading her parents to divorce. Jane's mother pushes her out of home, leading her to meet new friends at the local mosque: "Jane valued what she saw as their moral uprightness, and she perceived a kind of moral clarity in Islamic texts which she found reassuring. She came to believe that Islam is the one true path to God. Eventually, Jane decided she would convert to Islam." (See Appendix A for the complete vignette.) Participants then rated potential explanations for the agent's decision (Table 6). Next, participants rated the statement "Jane's decision to convert to Islam reflects her true self-who she is at the deepest level." Because religious conversion is an event that is unlikely to reoccur within a single person's life (Smith & Cooperman, 2015), Study 3b did not attempt to measure participants' beliefs about how the agent's decision would covary with features of her situation. Participants then completed a novel Moral Attitudes to Muslims (MATM) scale consisting of the following items (counterbalanced for order): *Muslims are less intelligent; *Muslims are dirty; *Muslims are more likely to commit crimes; Most Muslims do NOT support violence against innocent people; I would feel comfortable being in close personal contact with a Muslim; Muslims are peaceful people. All other methods were equivalent to Study 1. 3.2.3. Results One hundred and eighty-three participants passed the comprehension checks. Responses from participants who failed at least one check were excluded, but this had no meaningful effect. Factor analysis. Participants' ratings of the eight explanations were again suitable for PCA (Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure: .69; Bartlett's test of sphericity: χ2(15)= 396, p < .001). Consistent with previous experiments, factor loadings expressed the intuitive person/situation dichotomy (Table 6). The three intuitively situation-focused explanations loaded strongly onto the first component which modeled 46% of the variance, and the three intuitively agent-focused items loaded strongly onto the second component which modeled 24% of the variance, indicating that participants distinguished between the explanations in the expected way. Attribution and moral attitudes. The Moral Attitudes to Muslims (MATM) scale proved highly reliable (α = .93), so responses to the individual items were summed to form overall MATM scores. Pearson correlations were calculated for MATM scores and explanatory preferences. Participants' MATM scores predicted both person ratings, r= .33, 95% CI: [.19, .47], t(181)= 4.6, p < .001, and situation ratings, r=−.48, 95% CI: [−.60, .−35], t(181)=−7.6, p < .001. Replicating previous results, MATM scores strongly predicted the degree to which participants viewed the agent's decision as expressing her true self, r= .40, 95% CI: [.27, .54], t(181)= 5.8, p < .001, suggesting that beliefs about the true self may mediate the effect of moral attitudes on explanatory preferences. To test this hypothesis, a bootstrap mediation analysis (Hayes, 2013) was performed using MATM scores as the independent variable, essence-disclosure ratings as the mediator, and person scores as the dependent variable (Fig. 4). Consistent with the mediation hypothesis, the analysis revealed a significant indirect effect: ab= .21, 95% CI: [.12, .33]. Notably, the direct effect of moral attitudes on person attribution was relatively small when true-self ratings were included in the regression model, β = .12, 95% CI: [−.01, .25], t(181)= 1.8, p= .081. 3.2.4. Discussion Consistent with the mismatch hypothesis, Studies 3a and 3b revealed powerful associations between participants' moral attitudes and their explanatory preferences. Thus, because these studies employed stimuli unrelated to sexual orientation, the results of Studies 1 and 2 are unlikely to reflect a distinctive bias associated with anti-gay prejudice. In particular, they are unlikely to reflect any systematic relationship between moral attitudes towards homosexuality and beliefs about whether same-sex attraction arises from choice or innate disposition. Rather, the association of moral attitudes both with explanatory style and with the degree to which actions appear expressive of actors' true selves appears to be surprisingly general. 4. Study 4: Good deeds of passion Studies 1–3 indicate that people's explanatory preferences and beliefs about essence-disclosure are related. One hypothesis consistent with these results is that beliefs about whether an action expresses the agent's true self mediate the effect of participants' moral attitudes on their explanatory preferences. That is, people may treat a perceived mismatch in the moral valences of the action and the agent's true self as evidence that the action did not express the true self, and this may in turn incline them towards explanations of the action which do not implicate the true self. Such explanations tend to highlight features of the agent's environment or upbringing. Because people tend to represent the true self as virtuous (Newman et al., 2013), this hypothesis predicts that people may favor a situationfocused explanation when explaining a bad deed but ignore that same explanation when explaining a virtuous one (cf., Newman et al., 2014; Pizarro, Uhlmann, & Salovey, 2003). We can return to Darley and Table 5 Summary of regression models (Study 3a). aR2 = .09, F(198,3)= 6.5, p < .001. bR2 = .11, F(198,3)= 8.0, p < .001. cR2 = .05, F(198,3)= 3.4, p= .026. Table 6 Factor loadings from exploratory principal component analysis (Study 3b). Items are Likert-ratings of potential explanations for an agent's decision to convert to Islam. Factor loadings with values> .5 are bolded. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 171 Batson's (1973) study to illustrate the asymmetry. Recall that Darley and Batson found that unhurried seminarians were six times more likely than hurried seminarians to help a stranger slumped in a doorway. As noted, when people focus on hurried seminarians who ignore the victim, they judge that the callous behavior is explained by the experimental manipulation. However, this situation-focused explanation can seem much less attractive when we consider the helpful participants in the Relaxed condition; it may seem that whereas the Hurried condition masked participants' true selves, the Relaxed condition allowed them to shine through. So here we seem to have two agents that are causally sensitive to the environment in precisely the same way, yet a situation-focused explanation ("he acted because of the experimental condition into which he was randomized") does not seem appropriate for the unhurried seminarian who helped the victim. If our beliefs about whether actions are essence-disclosing mediate the effect of moral valence on our preferences for agentor situation-focused explanations, this pattern is exactly what we should expect to find. Because we tend to represent agents as 'deep down' normatively aligned with ourselves, when the hurried seminarians ignore the victim, their actions seem less essence-disclosing than when the relaxed seminarians help the victim. This may be what leads us to favor situationfocused explanations in one case but not the other. Study 4 explored this hypothesis by investigating the conditions that incline people to attribute an action to luck. 4.1. Methods 4.1.1. Participants Participants were 502 North Americans ranging in age from 18 to 70 years (M=32, 44% female). 4.1.2. Procedure The experiment employed a 2 (valence: good vs. bad)× 2 (moral luck: emphasized vs. not emphasized) × 2 (DV: responsibility vs. essence-disclosure) between-subjects design. Participants read one of four vignettes about a person born in the United States in the early 1800s who does something immoral (owns and mistreats slaves) or virtuous (helps slaves escape). In two conditions, the vignettes emphasized the role of chance in the agent's life: Chance played a big role in Tom's life. He was born in the Northern [Southern] United States in the early 1800s, but as a baby he was adopted by Southern plantation owners [Northern abolitionists] who raised him in the South [North]. If he had been raised by his biological parents, he would have grown up in the North [South], and he would have led a morally better [worse] life. But as a matter of fact, Tom himself went on to own slaves [work on the Underground Railroad to help people escape from slavery], and in this way he hurt [helped] many people over the course of his life. The control conditions simply omitted the features expected to focus participants on the role of luck in the agents' lives: Tom was born in the Southern [Northern] United States in the early 1800s. Tom owned many slaves [worked on the Underground Railroad to help people escape from slavery] and in this way he hurt [helped] many people over the course of his life. To ensure that any similarities in participants' responsibility and essence-disclosure ratings would not be an artifact of the survey design, participants were randomly assigned to rate either the agent's degree of responsibility or the degree to which his action was essence-disclosing: Responsibility: "How negatively [positively] does Tom deserve to be judged?" (1=Not at all negatively [positively], 7=Extremely negatively [positively].) "How much blame [praise] does Tom deserve?" (1=No blame [praise] at all, 7= Extreme blame [praise]). Essence-disclosure: "Helping [harming] people did not reflect Tom's true self-the person he really is deep down" (1= strongly disagree, 9= strongly agree). The two responsibility measures were counterbalanced for order and the essence-disclosure measure was reverse-coded. All other methods were consistent with previous experiments. This experiment required a measure of the degree to which participants attribute an agent's actions to luck that did not itself make the role luck plays in all people's lives salient. For example, from one's own perspective, the place of one's birth is entirely a matter of luck. Thus, if participants had been asked "Did the agent own and mistreat slaves [work on the Underground Railroad] because he was raised in the South [North]?" this would effectively have made the situation-focused explanation salient in both the Luck and Control conditions. The connection between luck and moral responsibility suggests that we can use participants' responsibility attributions to gauge the degree to which they explain an action in terms of situational luck (Levy, 2011; Nagel, 1979; Williams, 1981). This approach seems unlikely to make luckbased explanations salient to participants in the Control conditions. 4.2. Results Four hundred and seventy-six participants correctly responded to the attention check; participants who failed were excluded. 4.2.1. Essence-disclosure Essence-disclosure ratings were regressed against luck and valence in a fully crossed design. The resulting model, presented in Table 7a, was significant, R2= .20, F(3,230)= 20, p < .001. Main effects emerged for both luck and valence (Fig. 5) such that participants rated working on the Underground Railroad as much more essence-disclosing than owning and mistreating slaves, d=0.85, 95% CI: [0.58, 1.11]. Critically, a significant luck × valence interaction emerged. When the agent was described as owning and mistreating slaves, participants who read that he had been adopted by Southerners gave significantly lower essence-disclosure ratings than participants who did not read this information. Thus, emphasizing the role of luck in the agent's life reduced the degree to which participants rated his highly immoral behavior as expressive of his true self, d=−0.73, 95% CI: [−1.11,−0.34]. However, when the agent was described as helping people to escape from slavery, emphasizing the role that luck played in his life did not lead participants to rate his action as less essence-disclosing, d=0.08. 4.2.2. Responsibility Responses to the two responsibility items were highly consistent ( =α .91), so they were averaged to create a composite responsibility score. The analysis was repeated with responsibility scores as the dependent variable. The resulting model (Table 7b) was significant, R2= .28, F(3,238)= 31, p < .001. Main effects again emerged for both luck and valence such that participants more strongly praised the Underground Railroad worker than they blamed the slave owner, d=1.1, 95% CI: [0.79, 1.33]. Mirroring the patterning of essenceFig. 4. Mediation (Study 3b). Note: only the indirect effect was significant. ∗∗∗p < .001. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 172 disclosure ratings, the effect of luck × valence was also significant. When the agent was described as owning and mistreating slaves, participants who read that he had been adopted by Southerners gave significantly lower responsibility ratings than participants who were not provided with information about luck. Thus, emphasizing the role of luck in the agent's life also reduced the degree to which participants rated him as responsible for immoral deeds, d=−0.61, 95% CI: [−0.97,−0.25], but had no meaningful effect on how praiseworthy he appeared for virtuous deeds. 4.3. Discussion The substantial reduction in blame ratings in the Bad Luck condition indicates that participants in that condition were more likely to explain the Northern-born agent's immoral deeds in terms of his unlucky adoption by Southern plantation owners. However, because we see no reduction in praise ratings in the Good Luck condition, it seems participants did not similarly explain the Southern-born agent's virtuous deeds in terms of his fortunate adoption by Northern abolitionists. Thus, participants were more inclined towards a situation-focused explanation for an immoral action than for a virtuous action, even when the same explanation was made salient in the very same way. The close symmetry of responses to the essence-disclosure and responsibility items is especially noteworthy as different participants responded to each measure. The hypothesis that beliefs about essencedisclosure mediate the effect of moral attitudes on explanatory preferences provides a natural explanation for this association: because we implicitly assume that the true self is good, immoral deeds appear less essence-disclosing than virtuous deeds. This suggests that the asymmetry in whether we perceive an agent's actions as essence-disclosing leads to an asymmetry in how we explain the agent's action: situationfocused explanations appear more appropriate when we explain why a person owned and mistreated slaves than they do when we explain why a person helped slaves escape. In turn, this explanatory asymmetry leads us to less strongly blame the slave-owning agent, but does not lead us to view the slave-helping agent as less praiseworthy because his actions do not challenge the presumption that his virtuous deeds expressed his true self. This account is consistent with the mediation results from Studies 1–3 and provides further independent support for the hypothesis that beliefs about essence-disclosure mediate the effect of mismatching valences on explanatory preferences. However, while it seems very likely that working on the Underground Railroad is widely represented as morally better than owning human beings, it is plausible that it is also represented as having been rarer. Thus, participants are likely to know that in the antebellum South, for the purpose of categorization, owning slaves was less informative than working on the Underground Railroad. It is possible that this difference in the diagnostic value of the actions might interact with the presence or absence of luck. An ideal concluding study, therefore, would show that beliefs about essence-disclosure mediate the effect of moral attitudes on explanatory preferences in a context where the target actions are widely known to be equally diagnostic. Few actions split participants into two large and easily identifiable groups who attach equal-and-opposite moral valences to actions known to be equally common; however, recent research indicates that there are at least two: voting Democratic and voting Republican. Thus, Table 7 Linear models predicting essence-disclosure and responsibility ratings. Fig. 5. The effect of luck and valence on ratings of essence-disclosure and responsibility (Study 4). Note: different participants rated the essence-disclosure and responsibility items. Dashed vertical-lines within boxes display 95% CIs around the means. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 173 this paper's final study explores how partisans explain the political behavior of rivals as compared to fellow partisans. 5. Study 5: Partisan attribution In discussing his conversion to Islam, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar commented that for people born into their religion, "it is mostly a matter of legacy and convenience." For converts, however, "it is a matter of fierce conviction and defiance ... because we need a powerful reason to abandon the traditions of our families." This is understandable since religious disagreements within pious families are often costly (Boyatzis, Dollahite, & Marks, 2006); a fact which helps to explain why they are relatively rare (Kelley & Graaf, 1997). Because partisan conflict within families is also costly and rare, parallel considerations apply to political identities (Crawford & Pilanski, 2014; Jennings, Stoker, & Bowers, 2009; Kohn, Slomczynski, & Schoenbach, 1986). For example, we learn much more about a Liberal agent's values if we learn she was raised by Conservatives rather than by fellow Liberals. The significant diagnostic value of a family-dissonant political identity suggests that people should prefer to explain such identities in agent-focused terms. However, against a backdrop of intense affective polarization (Clifford, 2017; Huddy, Mason, & Aaroe, 2015; Iyengar, Sood, & Lelkes, 2012; Iyengar & Westwood, 2015), the mismatch hypothesis predicts that moral attitudes will play an important role in modelling how people explain the actions of allies and rivals. For example, agent-focused attributions should seem less appropriate when explaining why someone defected for the rival party, despite the high diagnostic value of that action. Researchers studying the moral-psychological bases of political ideology have reliably found that Conservatives tend to value ingroup loyalty and respect for authority more than Liberals (e.g., Feldman, 2003; Graham, Nosek, & Haidt, 2012; Gunther & Kuan, 2007; Haidt & Graham, 2007; Kohn, 1989; Schwartz, 2006; Schwartz, Caprara, & Vecchione, 2010). This suggests that Conservative participants may perceive a more serious moral violation when an agent is disloyal to his family. If so, the degree to which this highly diagnostic action is attributed to the agent himself may additionally depend on participants' own political identities. Study 5 therefore aimed to explore three questions: How do partisans' moral attitudes influence the explanations they provide for out-group political identities, and how strong is this effect relative to the effect of a highly diagnostic action such as converting to a family-dissonant ideology? Are Conservatives more reluctant than Liberals to accept agent-focused explanations for family-dissonant identities? Are these effects mediated by the degree to which an agent's political identity appears to express her true self? 5.1. Methods 5.1.1. Participants Participants were 670 North Americans ranging in age from 18 to 74 years (M=37; 59% female). 5.1.2. Procedure The experiment employed a 2 (family ideology: liberal vs. conservative) × 2 (agent ideology) between-subjects design. Participants were asked to either imagine an agent who grew up in a conservative family or to imagine one who grew up in a liberal family. The agent was also described as either liberal or conservative, generating four experimental conditions. In the agent-family consonant conditions, when agent and family shared a common political identity, participants read: Imagine a person, Sam, who grew up in a politically conservative [politically liberal] family. Like his parents, Sam often voted for Conservative [Liberal] candidates. In the agent-family dissonant conditions, when agent and family were ideologically opposed, participants read: Imagine a person, Sam, who grew up in a politically conservative [politically liberal] family. However, unlike his parents, Sam often voted for Liberal [Conservative] candidates. In all conditions, participants rated the reverse-coded statement "Voting liberal [conservative] did not reflect Sam's true self-the person he truly is deep down" on a scale ranging from 1 ('Strongly disagree') to 7 ('Strongly agree'). Because explanations typically seem more or less appropriate for different explananda, participants rated different attributions in the family-dissonant and family-consonant conditions. In the family-consonant conditions, participants rated a paradigm situation-focused attribution: "Sam voted conservative [liberal] because that's how he was raised." In the family-dissonant conditions, participants rated a paradigm agent-focused explanation: "Sam voted conservative [liberal] because of his most cherished values." The essence-disclosure and attribution items were counterbalanced and followed by an attention check. On the next page (where the vignette was hidden), participants reported the ideologies of the agent and his family. Participants identified as Liberal, Conservative, or 'other'. Selecting 'other' prompted participants to enter their identification in their own words. Finally, participants provided basic demographic information. 5.2. Results Five hundred and eighty participants passed the attention checks; 295 identified as Liberal and 193 as Conservative. Because our primary interest is in partisans, 'others' were not included here.1 Participants who failed to correctly identify the political identity of the agent or his family were excluded. 5.2.1. Essence-disclosure Dummy variables for agent, family, and participant identities were coded '1' for Conservative and '0' for Liberal. A dummy variable, Consonance, was coded '1' iff the agent and family supported the same ideology. To explore the effects of consonance and perceived valence side by side, essence-disclosure ratings were regressed against participant identity, agent identity, and agent-family consonance in a fully crossed model. The resulting model (Table 8) was significant, R2= .085, MSE=2.2, F(7,479)= 6.3, p < .001. As expected, relative to when the agent conformed with his parents' favored ideology, his political identity was seen as more essence-disclosing when he defected to a family-dissonant ideology (0.64 points). Critically, however, sharing an ideology with the participant also had a large, positive effect (0.92 points), indicating that perceived valence influenced essencedisclosure ratings across conditions. An unexpected main effect of participant identity emerged such that Conservatives gave slightly lower essence-disclosure ratings. 5.2.2. Attribution Moderation analysis was used to explore the participant-agent interaction. Participant identity was set as the focal predictor with agent identity and agent-family consonance as moderators. The resulting model was significant, R2= .10, MSE=1.9, F(7,479)= 7.4, p < .001. As Table 9a shows, sharing the agent's ideology led participants to emphasize the relevance of his values in the dissonant cases (+1.3 points) and to downplay the relevance of his upbringing in the consonant cases (−1.2 points) (Fig. 6). Table 9b describes in more detail how participants' ratings were conditioned by agent and family 1When data from Independents was analyzed separately, no significant effects emerged on either measure. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 174 identity. When the agent defected to Liberalism, Conservative participants were highly reluctant to attribute his political identity to his values (−1.2 points). However, when the agent defected to Conservatism, both Liberal and Conservative participants rated his values as equally important to explaining his politics (0.021 points). Participants' responses were more evenly biased when the agent conformed with his family's favored ideology. Relative to Liberals, Conservatives emphasized the agent's upbringing when explaining Liberal conformism (0.54 points) and downplayed the agent's upbringing when explaining Conservative conformism (−0.65 points). 5.3. Conditional process analysis The analyses above suggest that participant identity may moderate the effect of agent-family consonance by moderating the degree to which the agent's political identity appears to express his true self (Fig. 7). Conditional process analysis (Hayes, 2013) was used to explore this hypothesis. Participant identity was set as the focal predictor, with agent identity and agent-family consonance as moderators and essencedisclosure ratings as mediator. The analysis indicated that the conditional effect of agent-family consonance was mediated by essence-disclosure ratings, B = 0.12, SE = .11, 95% CI (bootstrapped): [−.051, .43]. In a subsequent exploratory analysis, the size of this effect more than doubled when outliers were excluded, B = 0.31, SE = .15, 95% CI (bootstrapped): [.085, .69]. (Tukey's convention of ± 1.5 × IQR classified 13 data points as outliers.) When the analysis focused on agent-family dissonant cases, the difference between the conditional indirect effects was large, indicating that the effect of valence on how participants explained a family-dissonant identity was substantially mediated by the degree to which the agent's identity appeared to reflect his true self, B = 0.64, SE = .21, 95% CI (bootstrapped): [.30, 1.1]. 5.4. Discussion This study found that partisans' explanatory preferences do not consistently reflect the insight that a family-dissonant identity provides more information about a person's values than the 'legacy and convenience' of a family-consonant identity. Rather, our explanatory preferences reflect the diagnostic value of defection only when we evaluate agents who defect to our own political ideology. If an agent instead defects from our ideology, the effect of his defiance is totally swamped by the effect of our disapprobation. In practice, this means that we end up seeing his values as not more relevant to explaining his defection, but less so. Indeed, our reactions are so biased that when an in-group member abandons our ideology, his values appear even less relevant to explaining his action than legacy and convenience appear to explaining out-group political conformity. While Conservatives were particularly inclined to discount the importance of an agent's values when he rejected his parents' ideology, Liberals were reluctant to acknowledge the explanatory relevance of a Liberal agent's upbringing to his family-consonant identity. If political partisans represent both in-group and out-group members as essentially virtuous, we may be able to understand these differences as a reflection of the different values that Liberals and Conservatives tend to hold (e.g., Feldman, 2003; Graham et al., 2012; Gunther & Kuan, 2007; Haidt & Graham, 2007; Kohn, 1989; Schwartz, 2006; Schwartz et al., 2010). From the perspective of predominantly Conservative values, a familydissonant Liberal identity is doubly bad: first, because it is Liberal, and second, because the agent defied authority and was disrespectful to his parents. But from the perspective of Liberal values, a family-dissonant Liberal identity is doubly good: first, because it is Liberal, and second, because the agent defied authority and was disrespectful to his parents. Hence, conditional on the mismatch hypothesis, values strongly associated with partisan identities appear to be consistent with the pattern of attributions that we see in the data. These results suggest one way that belief in the virtuous true self may contribute to affective polarization. The more convinced we are of the virtuousness of an out-group member's true self, the more difficult it will be to recognize that her values are at work when she makes choices that are, from our perspective, morally wrong. Because we doubt that she is moved to action by her values, it may seem she is acting 'in bad faith' when she is really pursuing her deepest commitments. Indeed, belief in the good true self may help us to represent our rivals' projects as wrong not only from our own perspective, but also from theirs. If the way our minds represent agents biases us towards explaining moral dissent in non-agential terms, then perhaps this may lead coercion to seem easier to justify than it should. (This paper concludes with a brief discussion of other reasons to regret the virtuous true self bias.) 6. General discussion Collectively, the studies presented here point to a large and robust effect of our moral attitudes and true-self beliefs on how we explain valenced behavior. This effect appears to arise from a general tendency to represent agents as possessing true selves that are, to a surprising degree, aligned with our own values (Newman et al., 2013; Strohminger et al., 2017). Because of this bias, actions of which we approve tend to seem more expressive of our own and others' true selves, and this causes us to prefer more agent-focused attributions. 6.1. Responsibility 6.1.1. Luck Philosophers have long noticed that reflecting on the role that luck plays in human life tends to diminish our sense that we are morally responsible agents (e.g., Levy, 2011; Nagel, 1979; Williams, 1981). For example, but for the terrible misfortune of being born in Germany after the First World War, a boy who would in fact go on to become a German Table 8 Linear model predicting essence-disclosure ratings from participant ideology, agent ideology, and agent-family consonance (Study 5). Note: Reference categories are Liberal and dissonant. Table 9 (a) Effect of participant-agent interaction on ratings of each attribution (Study 5). Note: the attribution rated was agent-focused (values) in the agent-family consonant cases and situation-focused (upbringing) in the agent-family dissonant cases. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 175 soldier might instead have gone on to lead a morally innocuous life (perhaps in Australia). Reflecting on this fact and its terrifying dual might shake our sense that soldiers of the past were fully responsible. Theorists have been tempted to explain the apparent blame-mitigating power of luck by positing 'control principles' which hold that agents are only considered responsible to the degree that their actions seem to be under their control (e.g., Nagel, 1979). Applied to the vignettes explored above, these principles suggest that we blame the adopted Northern-born agent less because we recognize that his actions are, to some significant degree, caused by the extreme misfortune of his being adopted by plantation-owning Southerners-something that was never under his control. However, the present results suggest that this plausible-sounding analysis is in fact incorrect. It predicts that learning about the parallel role that luck played in the Southern-born agent's coming to help people will reduce our sense that he is praiseworthy for his virtuous deeds, but this prediction was not supported by the data. Theorists have often attempted to analyze the concept of luck in 'modal' terms-i.e., in terms of how events and actions causally covary within contextually specified sets of initial conditions, frequently modeled as possible worlds (e.g., Coffman, 2007; Levy, 2011; Pritchard, 2006). These analyses are all based on the intuitive idea that an event or action is lucky to the degree that it could easily have failed to occur. For example, on these views, winning the New Jersey State Lottery counts as enormously lucky because of how easily the winner could have ended up like any of an enormous number of losers, even holding fixed all (or most) of the conditions that in fact led to a windfall. In popular philosophical terminology: an event is influenced by luck to the degree that it does not occur in sufficiently many nearby possible worlds in which the relevant initial conditions obtain. Theorists disagree about how to elaborate this intuition into a satisfactory account of moral luck. However, reminiscent of classical accounts of the person/ situation distinction, many philosophers have attempted to understand luck primarily in terms of the nature of the causal relations that condition outcomes on contingent features of the environment. The present studies indicate that ordinary people rely on a fundamentally different concept of luck, at least when they attempt to understand and explain morally valenced actions. According to this folk concept, the moral valences of an agent's true self and action are relevant to whether she was the beneficiary (or victim) of luck. 6.1.2. Determinism Reflecting on the (putatively) deterministic nature of our universe affects people's responsibility judgments quite differently depending on whether the target action is represented as virtuous or immoral (Nelkin, 2011; Pizarro et al., 2003; Wolf, 1980). In particular, determinism appears to undermine blame far more readily than praise. (In this context, 'determinism' is the claim that the laws of nature and the state of the universe in the distant past jointly entail a unique future.) Some theorists hypothesize that this determinism-valence asymmetry arises because people tacitly shift between two distinct conceptions of responsibility (e.g., Watson, 1996). On this view, when we judge that a determined agent is responsible for her virtuous deeds, we make a judgment about responsibility in the sense of 'attributability'-i.e., that the action is essence-disclosing. However, when we judge that an agent is less blameworthy because we believe her immoral deeds to be causally determined, we make a judgment about responsibility in the sense of 'accountability'-i.e., that the agent is less deserving of contempt or punishment on account of her action. This explanation is designed to preserve the idea that from within each perspective there is no determinism-valence asymmetry: causally determined agents can be responsible in the sense of attributability for both virtuous and immoral deeds; but in the sense of accountability they can be responsible for neither. The findings reported here tell against this ambiguity-based explanation of the asymmetry. People's judgments Fig. 6. Ratings of two attributions: the agent supported a family-consonant candidate "because that's how he was raised" (left), and the agent supported a familydissonant candidate "because of his most cherished values" (right). Fig. 7. Conceptual diagram for mediated conditional moderation analysis (Study 5). Lines represent causal pathways and line-arrow intersections represent moderation of one effect by another. Dashed lines show the indirect conditional effect of perceived valence on attribution. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 176 about accountability–"How negatively or positively does [the agent] deserve to be treated?"-display the same asymmetry as their judgments about essence-disclosure (Fig. 5). As noted above, this is powerful evidence against ambiguity-based explanations, as different participants responded to the two outcome measures. Another common explanation for the determinism asymmetry begins with the idea that responsible agents must possess the ability to 'do the right thing for the right reasons' (e.g., Nelkin, 2005; Wolf, 1980). On this account, when we assess whether an agent is responsible for φ-ing, we first assess whether there was most reason for the agent to φ. If we judge that there was not, we will only hold the agent responsible to the degree that we believe he could have done other than φ. (Since we do not have most reason to perform immoral deeds, if the agent was able at the time of action to do the morally right thing, then he must have been able to do something other than φ.) On the other hand, if we believe that the agent was φ-ing for the very reason in virtue of which it is right to φ, then we will not be interested in whether he could instead have done some other, immoral deed. After all, a cool-headed mother who can restrain herself while her children are helplessly trapped in a house fire does not seem, intuitively, more praiseworthy than one whose love renders her unable to resist a perilous rescue attempt-even if the cool-headed mother effortlessly wills herself to behave like the loving mother (Wolf, 1980). Recent experimental research may appear to support this explanation of the determinism-valence asymmetry (e.g., Pizarro et al., 2003). However, because the asymmetry also appears to arise when we consider cases, like those in Study 4, where blameworthy agents are (presumably) able to do otherwise, the present studies suggest that this explanation is incorrect (also see Newman et al., 2014). Remarkably, the same asymmetry seen in our judgments about causally determined agents appears to arise even when there is no suggestion that the agents were overcome by irresistible emotions, that they are the denizens of deterministic universes, or that they lacked the ability to do the right thing for the right reasons. Hence, it seems implausible that the asymmetry arises because the folk theory of responsibility only requires that agents can do otherwise when they behave immorally. By contrast, the determinism asymmetry makes sense if our explanatory preferences behave as the mismatch hypothesis describes. For, when we perceive a mismatch in the moral valences of the action and the agent's true self, we will tend to represent the action as concealing the true self, if there are suitable situation-focused explanations available. The mismatch hypothesis therefore suggests that the role of causal determinism is to make available a powerful, situation-focused explanation for any action at all-the laws of nature and the state of the universe in the distant past made me do it. If true, this helps to explain why we sometimes judge that an agent who behaves badly by φ-ing in a deterministic universe is less blameworthy than an otherwise-similar agent who φs in an indeterministic universe (Feltz & Millan, 2015; Nichols & Knobe, 2007; but cf., Murray & Nahmias, 2014). 6.2. The ego-syntonic/ego-dystonic distinction In their important commentary on the actor-observer literature, Sabini et al. (2001) argued that the intuitive person/situation distinction is between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic actions, i.e., between actions agents endorse reflectively and those they do not. The classic example is an 'unwilling addict' who may desire a substance while also hoping that this desire fails to lead her to use the substance (Frankfurt, 1971). Her occurrent desires seem not to reflect what she would want were she cool, calm, and collected. To the degree that this is so, her drug use is ego-dystonic. This understanding of the distinction parallels popular compatibilist theorizing and generates many of the same verdicts as the mismatch hypothesis. However, the ego-syntonic/ego-dystonic dichotomy cannot capture the full range of intuitions revealed by the present studies. For example, while most people in Studies 1–2 agreed that the agent's sexual attraction to men was not something he endorsed reflectively (i.e., that it was ego-dystonic), people with different attitudes towards homosexuality differed greatly in how they explained the agent's homosexual behavior. If we analyze the distinction in terms of the dichotomy between ego-syntonic and ego-dystonic actions, this variance must remain unexplained. Sabini et al.'s insight is to understand situation-focused explanations in terms of causes that are "external not to the person, but to the person's self." However, to capture intuitions about cases like the ones studied here, the self must be understood as the true self, and the concept of the true self is not exhausted by what a person reflectively affirms-or indeed, by any other naturalistic, non-evaluative feature of his psychology. Rather, when explaining morally valenced actions, we will discount an agent's own affirmations when we disapprove of his reflectively endorsed attitudes. For example, although Mark's erotic feelings appear to be ego-dystonic (unlike his religiously motivated beliefs),2 this fact does not prevent people with positive moral attitudes towards homosexuality from seeing his same-sex encounters as essencedisclosing. The folk concept of the true self allows that we can be mistaken in what we reflectively endorse: our true selves are something we must discover (Bench, Schlegel, Davis, & Vess, 2015). Thus, analyzing the person/situation distinction in terms of reflective endorsement appears to treat as constitutive what is really heuristic. 6.3. Strategic benefits of belief in the virtuous true self Why do our minds represent agents as divided into true and superficial selves, and why do we tend to assume the true self is aligned with our own values, even when the agent belongs to a stigmatized outgroup? One approach to these questions (e.g., De Freitas et al., 2017; Newman et al., 2014; Strohminger & Nichols, 2014) begins with the idea that the true-self concept reflects a more general tendency of human minds to represent the surface features of animals (among other categories) as caused by hidden, underlying essences (Gelman, 2003). This hypothesis-psychological essentialism-is plausibly relevant to explaining why people represent the self as divided, but it seems less satisfying as an explanation for why members of stigmatized groups are represented as 'deep down' normatively aligned with the self. However, this surprising finding has emerged with participants from both independent and interdependent cultures (De Freitas et al., 2018, and Study 2 of the present work), suggesting that belief in the virtuous true self may be a species-typical feature of human psychology. Thus, it is worth considering (however speculatively) whether it may have helped to solve difficult sociobiological problems that our evolutionary ancestors would have faced repeatedly (Williams, 2008). Consider someone who believes that gay sex is a grotesque moral wrong, for example, a high-prejudice participant from Study 1. This participant will surely have a powerful moral reaction to gay sex, yet this need not color her representation of the agent's true self (cf., De Freitas & Cikara, 2018). Indeed, even when participants were told that the agent regularly experiences erotic attraction to a variety of other men (in Study 2), the most highly prejudiced participants continued to explain the agent's same-sex encounter in non-agential terms (a bad upbringing, traumatic sexual experiences, stress-induced weakness, and so on). This illustrates one of the strange consequences of representing the self as divided: at least according to folk psychology, it seems you don't have to be good to be good deep down. Belief in the virtuous true self may therefore have been adaptive because it allowed people's responses to norm violators to come apart from their responses to norm violations. This might have been useful for many reasons. To appreciate one possible strategic benefit, consider A 2 Indeed, prior to 1987, Mark might have received treatment (probably, aversion therapy) for 'ego-dystonic homosexuality'-a diagnosis that had replaced 'sexual orientation disturbance' in the American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, DSM-III. S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 177 and B, two members of a tight-knit, traditionally structured tribe. Because they live cooperatively in the same village, if A believes B shares his values and interests, and B believes the same of A, they will both be substantially correct-a fact which may lead to significant fitness benefits for each (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, 2000; Johnson & Earle, 2000). Now consider two members of two distinct tribes. They do not cooperate in a more than incidental way, and even this is limited to a small region where their respective territories overlap. Consequently, their values and interests are often in conflict (Diamond, 2013). The effect of the virtuous true self bias on these two agents will be to make each insensitive to the interests of the other, reducing the risk that either will incur harms or sacrifice benefits for someone in whom he has no fitness stake. Shameless nepotism may seem to provide a more elegant solution. Why not make the moral value of an action depend, in part, on the identity of the actor? Perhaps humans use both strategies to focus their moral concern on members of their own ethnic, racial or language groups (Bernhard, Fischbacher, & Fehr, 2006). However, indiscriminately representing agents as, deep down, normatively aligned with the self may have better reconciled two opposing demands biology places on moral norms (McCullough, Kurzban, & Tabak, 2013). First, moral norms need to win the alliance of most members of a cooperating group, else morality will not serve one of its primary functions-effectively coordinating the group's behavior (DeScioli & Kurzban, 2009). Thus, effective moral norms must have at least the pretense of impartiality. This pressure helps to explain why the moral value of an action is often taken to depend on features of the action, rather than the identity of the actor. However, moral agents must also be somewhat parochial, lest morality lead them to emit benefits or absorb costs for people unlikely to return the favor. Belief in the virtuous true self might have been adaptive because it helped our ancestors to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent demands. More generally, defaulting to the belief that others are normatively aligned with the self may have helped to mitigate some of the biological costs induced by our sensitivity to moral norms. For example, belief in the virtuous true self may have helped vengeful agents to mend beneficial relationships after retaliating against severe norm violators (McCullough et al., 2013). Speculations like these are famously difficult to test, yet they suggest clearly enough that there may have been surprising benefits to indiscriminately representing other agents as normatively aligned with the self. Thus, psychological essentialism may explain why people develop the true-self concept, while strategic sociobiological benefits may explain why the true self tends to be represented as virtuous. 6.4. Why it may be better not to believe people are virtuous The preceding discussion and this paper's first two studies may also illuminate how representing the true self as virtuous can lead to painful inner conflicts and may slow the rate at which social norms change. As recently as the 1960s, law and social pressure led many gay men to undergo 'reparative' medical treatments-commonly, electric shockbased aversion therapy (Haldeman, 1991). Meanwhile, childhood abuse, parental neglect, mental illness, and demonic possession of the sort described by the Bible were all alleged to explain homosexuality. The mismatch hypothesis suggests that this association may be explained, in part, by cognitive processes that preexist political ideology. It may also help to explain why, even today, the belief that sexual orientation is innate predicts support for gay rights (Jayaratne et al., 2006; Wood & Bartkowski, 2004). When people are asked a technical question, such as whether a human trait is innate, they will often respond by consulting their intuitions about a seemingly related question (Cullen, 2010), such as whether that trait expresses the agent's true self. This suggests that belief in the virtuous true self may incline people to reject genetic attributions for negative traits. In the United States, attitudes towards homosexuality began to improve markedly in the 1970s, a period during which genetic explanations of homosexuality became more widely accepted (Hicks & Lee, 2006; Sherkat, Powell-Williams, Maddox, & De Vries, 2011). Perhaps people came to represent sexual orientation as 'innate' and this facilitated a broad change in their attitudes towards homosexuality (Sheldon, Pfeffer, Jayaratne, Feldbaum, & Petty, 2007; Wood & Bartkowski, 2004;); however, the mismatch hypothesis suggests that the causation may have traveled in the reverse direction. For example, cohort effects may have improved attitudes towards homosexuality (Andersen & Fetner, 2008; Treas, 2002) and this may have caused same-sex attraction to appear more essence-disclosing ('innate'). Thus, a tendency to represent the true self as virtuous may also help to explain the continued attraction of psychotherapies aimed at 'reorienting' nonheterosexuals (Dean Byrd, Nicolosi, & Potts, 2008; Haldeman, 2002). The diversity of human values ensures that people who live in large, high-density societies will regularly interact with non-normative agents (Esmer & Pettersson, 2007; Haidt & Graham, 2007; Norris & Inglehart, 2011). Because we represent the true self as virtuous, we tend to view such agents as, in some deeper sense, normatively aligned with ourselves. But there is little reason to believe that this involves representing them as ethically competent or ourselves as having corresponding pro tanto reasons to respect their stated preferences. To the contrary, commitment to the hidden virtuousness of non-normative agents seems to involve representing these agents as the unwitting victims of external forces that mask their underlying ethical capacities. 7. Conclusion A long tradition in psychology holds that our explanatory preferences are primarily driven by causal-statistical ('covariation') information (e.g., Kelley, 1967, 1973, 1987). In the present studies, however, the explanatory preferences of both North American and Indian participants were surprisingly unrelated to such information. By contrast, the mismatch hypothesis robustly predicted explanatory preferences across actions as varied as having consensual gay sex, aborting a pregnancy, converting to Islam, owning slaves in the antebellum South, and identifying as Conservative or Liberal today. Thus, the results reported here are plausibly general and should emerge whenever people explain valenced actions. Theorists of responsibility often appear to assume that intuitive judgments about essence-disclosure primarily reflect facts about how actions are related to agents'mental states (e.g., Frankfurt, 1969; Smith, 2005; Sripada, 2016; Watson, 1996). However, the studies reported here support a strikingly different account of the processes underlying these intuitions. Researchers pursuing true self theories of responsibility should address the extent to which such processes provide appropriate inputs to normative theorizing. Supplementary materials Supporting data Supporting data for this work are archived on the Open Science Framework: http://osf.io/mk8ft. Argument visualization An interactive map of this paper's argument is available online: http://wdce.simoncullen.org. Acknowledgments Thanks to Joshua Knobe, Gideon Rosen, Sarah-Jane Leslie, and Shamik Dasgupta for extensive feedback on this work, and to three anonymous reviewers for Cognition who provided many helpful comments. This publication benefited from a grant from the John Templeton Foundation; however, the opinions expressed in this S. Cullen Cognition 180 (2018) 165–181 178 publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation. Appendix A. Vignettes A.1. Study 1 Mark was raised in a large family. They went to church [temple] every week and were dedicated to charity. For most of Mark's childhood the family was very happy. But his parents began to fight, and eventually they divorced. Mark's family members grew uninterested in religion. This especially hurt him, since he had always felt a deep spiritual calling. Soon after the divorce, Mark's mother found a new husband and started a new family. Mark's mother began to ignore him, and when Mark turned 16, his mother thought he should leave home. Out of home, Mark started hanging out with a new group of kids, some of whom were in same-sex relationships. Mark believed that homosexuality is morally wrong, and he encouraged his new friends to resist their attractions to people of the same sex. However, Mark also realized that he himself was attracted to other men. He openly acknowledged this to his friends and discussed it as part of his own personal struggle. Mark believed that resisting his attraction to other men was his duty to God, and he vowed to live a morally decent life by remaining celibate. However, Mark sometimes failed to live up to his values. For example, one day, after a bad fight with his father, Mark went to see his friend Bill. They talked for hours over a bottle of wine. That night, Mark hit on Bill and they ended up having sex. A.2. Study 2 A.2.1. Baseline As in Study 1. A.2.2. Situation As in Study 1, with the following appended: Most people do not find Bill attractive, and in the past Mark himself has rarely felt sexually attracted to Bill. In fact, Mark has rarely experienced attraction to men other than Bill. A.2.3. Person As in Study 1, with the following appended: Most people do not find Bill attractive, but in the past Mark has often felt sexually attracted to Bill. In fact, Mark has often experienced attraction to men other than Bill, too. A.2.4. Substitutions for Indian participants 'Mark' → 'Aarav'. 'Bill' → 'Arjun'. 'duty to God' → 'duty' A.3. Study 3a Kate is a senior at college. Just like many of her friends, after graduation Kate plans to spend a year working for a charity organization before pursuing her dream of going to medical school. Kate has recently discovered that she is pregnant. And what's worse, her boyfriend broke up with her just a week earlier. When she tells her parents, their reaction is clear: although they will support her no matter what she decides, they both think that she should abort the pregnancy. Kate's friends also agree that she should get an abortion. Kate's local health clinic offers the procedure. After thinking it over, Kate decides to have an abortion. A.4. Study 3b Jane was raised in a large family. They went to church every week and were dedicated to charity. For most of Jane's childhood the family was very happy. But her parents began to fight, and eventually they got divorced. Jane's family members became uninterested in religion. This especially hurt her, since she had always felt a deep spiritual calling. Soon, Jane's mother found a new husband and started a new family. Her mother began to ignore Jane, and when Jane turned 16, her mother thought Jane should leave home. Out of home, Jane needed money. She was good looking, so she started working as a model. But Jane's modeling agent pressured her to lose weight, which disgusted her and she soon quit modeling. Jane started hanging out with a new group of kids, some of whom were Muslim. Jane was intrigued by their religion and decided to learn more about Islam. She discovered that many of these kids were also involved in charity through their mosque. 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The Non-factive Turn in Epistemology: Some Hypotheses * John Turri [email protected] Abstract: I evaluate non-factive or truth-insensitive accounts of the ordinary concepts used to evaluate beliefs, evidence, assertions, and decisions. Recent findings show that these accounts are mistaken. I propose three hypotheses regarding how philosophers defending these accounts got things so wrong. I also consider one potential consequence for the discipline. Keywords: truth; belief; evidence; assertion; decision; philosophical method Introduction Philosophical research often aims to illuminate familiar and important concepts from our everyday lives, such as knowledge, morality, belief, assertion, or freedom. This is a worthwhile project because these concepts reflect how we ordinarily view the world and our place in it. As one great twentieth-century philosopher memorably put it, these concepts help constitute "the manifest image," our shared commonsense framework for understanding ourselves and the world around us. So delineating them is "a task of the first importance" (Sellars 1963, ch. 1). Philosophers have long assumed that patterns in ordinary usage and commonsense should This is the final version of a paper to appear in Veli Mitova (Ed.), The Factive Turn in Epis* temology (Cambridge University Press). Please cite the final, published version if possible. !1 constrain philosophical theorizing about such concepts. Aristotle wrote that a philosophical theory of the good life should be evaluated 'in the light [of] ... what is commonly said about it' (Aristotle 350 BCE/1941, 1098b, 9-11). Led by J.L. Austin, ordinary language philosophers claimed that 'ordinary language' should get 'the first word' in philosophical theorizing (Austin 1956, p. 11). John Locke claimed that a theory of knowledge should be informed by how we ordinarily act and talk about knowledge (Locke 1690/1975, bk. 4.11.3-8). Similarly, many lines of research in contemporary epistemology are based on assumptions about ordinary thought and talk about knowledge, or 'commonsense epistemology' (for a review, see Turri 2016a). One reason for this methodological preference is that if theorizing disconnects from commonsense views, it will not be about the concepts in question. In short, the theorist will have changed the subject. The Non-factive Approach Suppose that Maria is a watch collector who owns over ten thousand watches. She cannot keep track of all her watches by memory alone, so her accountant maintains a detailed inventory of them. Maria knows that the inventory isn't perfect, but it is extremely accurate. Someone asks Maria, 'Does your collection contain a 1990 Rolex?' Maria consults the inventory and it says that she does have one. And this is just another occasion where the inventory is right. Does Maria's evidence justify her in believing that the collection contains a 1990 Rolex? Now imagine a case exactly like the one just described except that it is Mario who collects watches and maintains an !2 inventory, and this is one of those rare cases where the inventory is wrong. Does Mario's evidence justify him in believing that the collection contains a 1990 Rolex? Can the fact that the inventory is right in the one case but not the other create a difference in what Maria and Mario are justified in believing? According to a dominant view in contemporary epistemology - the non-factive or truthinsensitive approach to belief evaluation - the answer is a resounding 'no'. On this view, Maria and Mario are equally justified because they have 'exactly the same reasons for believing exactly the same thing' (Feldman 2003, p. 29; see also Conee and Feldman 2004). Their evidence and justification are equivalent across the cases, we are told, despite the variation in truth. Focusing on more extravagant examples, consider a staple of contemporary epistemology, the notorious thought experiment involving a radically deceived 'brain in a vat'. Could you not be floating in a tank while super-psychologists stimulate your brain electrochemically to produce exactly the same experiences you are now having, or even to produce the whole sequence of experiences you have had in your lifetime thus far? (Nozick 1981, p. 167) Leading epistemologists tell us that it is 'beyond question at an intuitive level' that such victims are 'justified' in their beliefs about their surroundings (BonJour 2003, pp. 185-186). 'The intuition' here, we are told, is that you and your victimized counterpart in the super-psychologist's tank have 'equally good evidence' for your respective beliefs (Russell 2001, p. 38; see also Cohen 1984, pp. 281-2). 'Intuitively,' the fact that your victimized counterpart is systematically deceived 'makes no difference at all' (Wedgwood 2002, p. 349). We have an 'overpowering incli- !3 nation to think' - indeed, 'we are convinced' - that the two of you have equally good evidence (Fumerton 2006, p. 93). This is known as 'the parity intuition' (Turri 2015a). Philosophers who defend opposing views (e.g. Sutton 2007; see also Goldman 1979, Greco 2010, Littlejohn 2013) are accused of defending an 'extraordinary' and 'dissident' doctrine lacking in 'intuitive credentials' (Conee 2007) that diverges from the 'historically standard and seemingly obvious' account (BonJour 2003, p. 7). The factive or truth-sensitive approach, we are told, deviates from 'the usual' and 'traditional' approach to belief evaluation, according to which there is no essential connection between justification and truth; moreover, the traditional approach is concerned with the 'ordinary concept' of justification, so truth-sensitive theories 'are not concerned' with justification as it is ordinarily understood (Chisholm 1989, pp. 75-6; see also Cohen 1984, pp. 283-4, 293 n. 1). In short, in the manifest image, justification is truth-insensitive. Evidence Surprisingly, those claiming that the ordinary concept of justification is truth-insensitive have not supported their claims with relevant evidence. Equally surprisingly, theoretical debate proceeded for decades without anyone seriously challenging the unsubstantiated claims or testing whether they are true. If we have an overpowering inclination to think that truth is irrelevant to justification, if our very concepts indicate that truth makes no difference to justification, then that should be readily detectable in people's judgments. A recent series of studies investigated precisely this issue. More specifically, researchers !4 tested how people ordinarily evaluate beliefs in relation to truth. In one study, participants read a simple scenario about an agent and evaluated the agent's belief (Turri 2015a, Experiment 1). Researchers manipulated whether the relevant proposition was true or false. One of the scenarios tested was very similar to the one about Maria the watch collector, discussed above: Maria is a watch collector who owns over ten thousand watches. She cannot keep track of all her watches by memory alone, so her accountant maintains a detailed inventory of them. Maria knows that the inventory isn't perfect, but it is extremely accurate. Someone asks Maria, "Do you own a 1990 Rolex Submariner?" Maria consults the inventory and it says that she does have one. In fact, she does [not] have one. The only difference between the 'true' and 'false' versions of the story occurred in the very last sentence: in the true version she 'does' have one, whereas in the false version she 'does not'. After reading the scenario, participants recorded a belief evaluation. In order to test belief evaluation using a range of vocabulary, not just 'justification,' researchers manipulated how the belief evaluation was phrased. More specifically, participants were randomly assigned to receive one of the following questions: What does Maria's evidence justify her in believing? What is Maria justified in believing? What should Maria believe? What is it rational for Maria to believe? What is the responsible thing for Maria to believe? What is it reasonable for Maria to believe? !5 In each case, participants selected from the same six response options: - "I definitely have one" - "I have one" - "I probably have one" - "I probably do not have one" - "I do not have one" - "I definitely do not have one" For all six ways of phrasing the belief evaluation, the proposition's truth value strongly affected people's response. When the proposition was true (i.e. she did have one), the central tendency was to select the flat-out belief, 'I have one.' But when the proposition was false (i.e. she did not have one), the central tendency was to select the probabilistic, 'I probably have one.' This pattern occurred across all six ways of phrasing the evaluation and multiple narrative contexts. These results show that our ordinary ways of evaluating belief and evidence are truth-sensitive. (For additional evidence supporting this conclusion, see Turri 2015b.) In another study, people compared the evidence of a normally embodied human to the evidence of his victimized 'brain in a vat' twin (Turri 2015a, Experiment 3). Participants read a scenario about two agents, Harvey the human and Louis the brain in a vat: Harvey is a healthy human adult sitting on his patio in a fine neighborhood. Harvey is currently enjoying a variety of perfectly vivid sensory experiences, thanks to a team of scientists who helped save his life with a supercomputer that detected a heart condition. Harvey was unaware that scientists could do that, just as he was un- !6 aware that he had a bad heart condition in the first place. Everything seems perfectly normal to him now. The scientists monitor him regularly. As Harvey sits there on his patio, it seems as though a reddish four-legged animal with pointy ears and bushy tail is walking through a nearby flowerbed. To Harvey, it seems like he is looking at a fox. His experiences seem entirely natural. And things are exactly as they seem to Harvey: as he sits there on his patio, he is looking at a fox. Louis is a healthy human brain sitting in a vat of fluid in a fine laboratory. Louis is currently enjoying a variety of perfectly vivid sensory experiences, thanks to a team of scientists creating them through a supercomputer that is hooked up to Louis. Louis was unaware that scientists could to that, just as he was unaware that his body died and he was put in a vat in the first place. Everything seems perfectly normal to him now. The scientists monitor him regularly. As Louis sits there in his vat, it seems as though a reddish four-legged animal with pointy ears and bushy tail is walking through a nearby flowerbed. To Louis, it seems like he is looking at a fox. His experiences seem entirely natural. But things are not as they seem to Louis: as he sits there in his vat, he is not looking at a fox. After reading the scenario, participants were asked, 'Who has better evidence for thinking that he's looking at a fox?' There were seven response options: Definitely Harvey Harvey Probably Harvey !7 Neither Probably Louis Louis Definitely Louis The central tendency was to evaluate Harvey's evidence more favorably. The most common response was 'Definitely Harvey' and nearly 80% of participants agreed or were inclined to agree that Harvey's evidence was better. This same pattern occurred regardless of the order in which participants read the paragraphs about Harvey and Louis, and regardless of whether participants answered a series of comprehension questions before deciding who had better evidence. These results show that on the ordinary way of evaluating belief and evidence, a brain in a vat's evidence is inferior and, thus, that 'the parity intuition' is not widely shared. These findings on the truth-sensitivity of belief evaluations are mirrored by other recent findings on evaluation of assertions and decisions. Related to the unsubstantiated claims that the ordinary concept of justification is truth-insensitive, some philosophers have also claimed that our ordinary concepts of what a person should assert or decide to do are truth-insensitive. But a substantial and growing body of studies has found that these evaluative concepts are also deeply sensitive to whether a proposition asserted or acted upon is true (Turri 2013; Turri and Blouw 2015; Turri 2015c; Turri 2015d; Turri 2016b; Turri 2016c; Turri 2016d; Turri in press; Turri and Buckwalter in press; Turri, Friedman and Keefner in press). For example, one study on assertability tested the case of Maria, described above. Instead of asking participants about what Maria should believe, researchers asked what Maria should say !8 to the person who asked whether she owned a Rolex (Turri 2013). When the inventory was correct that she owned one, the overwhelming majority judged that she should assert that she has one. But when the inventory was incorrect and she did not own own, the overwhelming majority judged that she should not assert that she has one. Instead, the central tendency was to judge that she should say that she 'probably' has one. Another study on decision-making also tested a version of Maria's case. In this version, Maria learns if she owns a certain watch, then she needs to make an appointment to revise her insurance policy, which will take several hours; but if she does not own one, then she does not need to make an appointment. When the inventory was correct that she owned one, the overwhelming majority judged that she should make the appointment. But when the inventory was incorrect and she did not own own, the overwhelming majority judged that she should not make the appointment. Interestingly, in many of these studies, researchers also found that the effect of truth-value on what an agent should believe, assert, or decide was mediated by knowledge attributions. This suggests that these evaluative concepts are sensitive to what is true because they are sensitive to what the agent knows to be true. Hypotheses The results just discussed raise a question: how did philosophers get these ordinary evaluative concepts so wrong? Contemporary epistemology reached a point where it was viewed as a 'turn' - or, in one commentator's memorable phrase, 'a fashionable stampede' (BonJour 2003, p. 8) - for the field to take seriously the hypothesis that these evaluative concepts are factive or truth- !9 sensitive. But this means that somehow the field had turned itself in the wrong direction. How did this happen? What explains the misbegotten non-factive or truth-insensitive turn in contemporary epistemology? One possibility is that philosophers relied on typical judgments about something that is truth-insensitive, which they either misunderstood or misdescribed using vocabulary that, as it turns out, actually expresses highly truth-sensitive evaluations. A prime candidate for this is blamelessness. Early arguments for truth-insensitive theories were based on linking justification and blamelessness (Ginet 1975; Chisholm 1977; Cohen 1984; BonJour 1985; for review and discussion, see Alston 1988; Plantinga 1993). The basic idea is that blamelessness is truth-insensitive, and justification just is blamelessness, so justification is truth-insensitive. A systematically deceived brain in a vat is not to blame for his false beliefs, so those beliefs are justified. Similarly, Maria is not to blame for trusting the highly reliable inventory on those rare occasions when it is wrong, so her beliefs based on the inventory are justified. However, recent work has demonstrated that justification is not blamelessness, as those categories are ordinarily understood. Instead, ordinary evaluations of belief and evidence are highly truth-sensitive whereas blame attributions are truth-insensitive. In one study, participants read a scenario about an agent, Victor. To Victor it seems that he is having a perfectly ordinary experience of looking at a fox. In the 'true' version, things are exactly as they seem: Victor is a normal human looking at a fox. In the 'false' version, things are not as they seem: Victor is a normal human but he is not looking at a fox. In the 'BIV' ('brain in a vat') version, things are not as they seem: Victor is a brain in a vat and he is not looking at a fox. In response to the true version, par- !10 ticipants judged that Victor has good evidence for thinking that he is looking at a fox, and they judged that he should believe that proposition. But in response to the false and BIV versions, participants judged that Victor only thinks that he has good evidence that he is looking at a fox, and they judged that he only thinks he should believe that proposition. At the same time, in response to all three scenarios, participants strongly judged that Victor should not be blamed for thinking that he is looking at a fox. Overall, then, evaluations of belief and evidence differed strongly between the true version, on one hand, and the false and BIV versions, on another, whereas blame attributions were the same across all three versions. In short, evaluations of belief and evidence were truth-sensitive whereas blame attributions were truth-insensitive (Turri 2015a, Experiment 2). Thus it could be that philosophers were initially misled into positing that justification is truth-insensitive because they misidentified it with blamelessness, which, ordinarily understood, is truth-insensitive. Some of these philosophers later abandoned the claim that justification is blamelessness, but they continued asserting that justification is truth-insensitive. For example, as one leading epistemologist recently wrote, While I am, alas, one of those responsible for the idea that being epistemically responsible or satisfying one's epistemic duties is tantamount to being justified in the internalist [i.e. truth-insensitive] sense, it is in fact relatively easy to see that this is wrong, indeed that being epistemically responsible or satisfying one's epistemic duties ... is not even sufficient for internalist justification. (BonJour 2003, pp. 175-6) In rejecting the claim that justification is blamelessness, these philosophers did not realize that !11 they abandoned the mistaken but understandable intuitive basis for claiming that justification is truth-insensitive. A second possibility is that philosophers fell victim to a common human error. A large body of research in social psychology has shown that the motivation to blame someone often leads people to distort facts and interpret them in a way that justifies their negative reactions. This tendency is known as blame validation (Alicke 1992; Alicke 2000). New research has revealed a related tendency known as excuse validation (Turri 2013; Turri and Blouw 2015). The motivation to exculpate often leads people to distort facts and interpret them in a way that justifies their emotional reaction. For example, when people recognize that someone has blamelessly broken a rule, this can lead them to claim, paradoxically, that no rule was broken at all. Excuse validation is a very robust tendency: it occurs when evaluating a wide range of activities, in both women and men, when the consequences of rule-breaking are trivial and when they are momentous, and when people evaluate other people's statements about blameless rule-breaking, rather than judging it directly for themselves. There is no reason to believe that philosophers are immune to excuse validation. One hypothesis, then, is that the desire to excuse agents for blamelessly forming false beliefs leads some philosophers to describe the beliefs as 'justified' or the agent's evidence as 'good'. A third possibility is that there are actually two ordinary concepts of justification, one truth-sensitive and the other truth-insensitive. For the vast majority of people, the truth-sensitive concept is either the only or the dominant one. However, for a minority of people, the truth-insensitive concept is either the only or the dominant one. Sometime around the 1970s, Anglo- !12 phone epistemology was populated by an improbably high proportion of people from the minority. This group reflected on their (dominant) concept and concluded that justification is truth-insensitive. They also concluded that this was the ordinary and traditional concept shared by nearly everybody. This is an instance of the false-consensus effect, whereby we tend to overestimate the extent to which others share our views (for a review, see Marks and Miller 1987). The three possibilities just reviewed are not intended as an exhaustive list. Neither are they necessarily mutually exclusive. Conclusion Philosophers can legitimately investigate concepts and theories from nearly any specialized field of inquiry. Some philosophers study the properties of formal languages, the metaphysical implications of quantum mechanics, or the ultimate basis of attribute agreement. These specialized fields investigate phenomena unfamiliar from everyday life, introduce new concepts, and often produce surprising or counterintuitive results, such as the relativity of simultaneity or quantum entanglement. That the results might be counterintuitive or even shocking is not a serious objection, even if it motivates people to seek objections. But when philosophers aim to illuminate important ordinary concepts - to delineate part of the manifest image - stark divergence from commonsense is a warning sign that something has gone seriously wrong. Leading proponents of truth-insensitivity have repeatedly described their theories as delineating our ordinary concepts, and this is how I have evaluated them. But there could be other le- !13 gitimate motivations for such theories. Another motivation could be to prescribe different concepts or practices. One might acknowledge that, beyond blamelessness, the concepts we ordinarily use to evaluate beliefs, assertions, and decisions are truth-sensitive but then proceed to argue that they should be abandoned and replaced by truth-insensitive evaluative concepts. I expect that in order to be any good, such arguments must be informed by findings from cognitive and social science on how people actually reason and the likely consequences of adopting prescriptive proposals. Mere appeals to intuition, anecdotal social observation, or armchair generalizations about our psychological tendencies, ordinary behavior, or 'the tradition' will not suffice. If a prescription's proponents cannot provide evidence that it will promote better outcomes, then they cannot expect it to be taken seriously. In this respect, academic philosophy has fallen far behind related fields, such as psychology and artificial intelligence, in leading the way toward conceptual change that could promote social and cultural benefits (e.g. Kosko 1993; Kahneman 2011; Lieberman 2013; Gigerenzer 2014). Standard practice in Anglophone 'analytic' philosophy is to rely on introspection and anecdotal social observation to characterize ordinary concepts. This method has led to many serious mischaracterizations. The findings on truth and belief evaluation (discussed above) are just one example. Other examples include widespread claims about conceptual relationships between knowledge and belief, knowledge and reliability, knowledge and error possibilities, knowledge and context, knowledge and inference, personal identity and the spatial properties of persons, lying and truth-value, moral obligations and ability, moral responsibility and free will, moral responsibility and determinism, and many others (for reviews, see Turri 2016a; Turri under review; !14 Buckwalter and Turri in press; Buckwalter in press). In each case, our ordinary concepts differ greatly from what philosophers have confidently claimed. The implications of this are potentially significant. I will discuss one. Many people might be alienated by the verdicts philosophers treat as obvious or commonsensical. For instance, imagine students taking an introductory epistemology course. They are asked to consider a radically deceived brain in a vat undergoing experiences qualitatively similar to those of a normal human. The intuition here, they are told, is that the brain in a vat and normal human are equally justified in all of their beliefs. This intuition contradicts the vast majority of people's judgment about the case, but it is treated as a touchstone for constructing and evaluating theories of justification. Before long, some students might conclude that they are not good at philosophy (Buckwalter and Stich 2014, section 4). But, I suspect, it is equally likely that students will conclude, along with Thomas Reid, that if this is how philosophers conduct their business, then philosophy is 'justly ridiculous' (Reid 1764/1997, p. 21). It is not in the field's interest to be viewed so negatively, especially because of easily avoidable errors. Acknowledgments - For feedback I thank Nathan Haydon, Veli Mitova, and Angelo Turri. 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22 PERSONAL IDENTITY AND BRAIN IDENTITY Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner Introduction Say you are looking at an old picture of your high school graduation and recognize yourself as the teenager with the funny haircut. Perhaps, from today's perspective, the haircut is not all that fashionable anymore, but nonetheless you are certain that the person in the picture is you. But what makes it true that you today and the teenager in the picture are identical-or one and the same person over time? This is a question of diachronic personal identity. In order to answer these kinds of questions, we must know the criterion of personal identity. In other words, we want to know what the necessary and sufficient conditions are that account for a person persisting from one time to another. Numerical and Qualitative Identity When philosophers debate personal identity, they are mostly concerned with numerical identity, the relationship that can hold only between a thing and itself. Numerical identity appears to require absolute or total qualitative identity. The puzzle is how, despite qualitative changes, a person still remains one and the same and persists through time and change. For example, say Jane radically changed in her personality traits, as well as in her appearance, due to a religious conversion. These changes, however, do not make Jane cease to exist altogether; they rather alter her qualitative identity. In questions about numerical identity, we look at two names or descriptions and ask whether these refer to one and the same person at different times or to different persons. The basis for being distinctively concerned about one's own future in a way that is inevitably different from how we are concerned about someone else's future is widely believed to be grounded in numerical identity. However much you will change, you shall still exist, if there will be someone living who will be numerically identical to you. It goes without saying that it is impossible for a single person at different times to be identical to themselves in a strict numerical sense, especially if taking into account that the human body's cells are constantly replaced and the brain cell connections and chemistry are frequently changing minute to minute. But this isn't the kind of identity that raises questions concerning one's own survival over time. It is rather what David Wiggins (1967) calls the "conditions of persistence and survival through change". An understanding of personal identity that persists 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 335 31-05-2017 17:52:07 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 336 through change is, both from a pretheoretical point of view and after conceptual analysis, more compelling than the appeal to strict numerical identity (wherein a person is somehow immutable and unchanging). So when we think of a person remaining one and the same over time, we don't usually think that this prevents that person from undergoing qualitative changes. It would be absurd to claim that you aren't the person you were yesterday because your hair grew a tiny bit overnight. For this reason, accounts of personal identity must allow for persons to change in their qualitative features and nonetheless account for their persistence through time. It is widely held (although some philosophers disagree) that questions about numerical identity must always be determinate, that is, whether you will exist some time in the future must always have a clear-cut 'yes/no' answer (Evans, 1985). Criteria of Personal Identity In what follows, we give a swift overview of the most widely held criteria of personal identity and point to some of their implications and problems. Identity, Reductionism and Nonreductionism According to reductionist theories, personal identity is reducible to more particular facts about persons and their bodies. The approach is to describe a particular relation (call it Relation R) that accounts for how person X is identical to a later existing person Y by virtue of X and Y being R-related. In other words: X is one and the same person as Y, if and only if X stands in Relation R to Y. In principle, Relation R is believed to be empirically observable. However, there is major disagreement about what Relation R consists in. Philosophers disagree about which particular ingredients determine the relation that constitutes personal identity. In the contemporary debate, most philosophers hold one or another form of a reductionist account. According to physical/biological reductionism, a person is identical over time so long as they remain the same living organism. For example, you are identical to the fetus you once were because a biological trajectory of your current body can be traced back to the fetus that once was in your mother's womb. A more widespread version of reductionism is psychological reductionism, according to which a person is identical over time so long as their different temporal parts are connected through psychological continuity. For example, you are identical to the person in that high school graduation picture because your current mental states (memories, desires, plans, intentions etc.) are connected through overlapping chains of psychological connectedness. We'll discuss seminal versions of both biological and psychological reductionism in more detail in the following section. In contrast to reductionist theories of personal identity, nonreductionists believe that personal identity is not reducible to more particular facts about persons and their brains and bodies but rather consists in a nonanalyzable, or simple, 'further fact'; for example, an indivisible entity that eludes further analysis by being all by itself the necessary and sufficient condition for personal identity over time. Derek Parfit (although himself endorsing a reductionist criterion) describes the notion of a further fact as "separately existing entities, distinct from our brains and bodies, and our experience" (Parfit, 1984, 445). Nonreductionists thus claim that personal identity consists in a special ontological fact, a Cartesian Ego (going back to Descartes' substance dualism) or a soul; or stated in a less antiquated way, the view is that personal identity consists of some mental entity that is not reducible to neural mechanisms in the human brain. In the contemporary discussion in philosophy of mind, few philosophers advocate for nonreductionist accounts of personal identity because those accounts are, at least to the majority of philosophers, metaphysically 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 336 31-05-2017 17:52:07 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 337 contentious. It is argued that nonreductionists in the debate on personal identity take an obscure metaphysical belief and inflate it into a conceptual core conviction. Psychological Continuity and Animalism Granting the aforementioned concerns about nonreductionism, we will not further elaborate on these accounts. Instead, we focus on the two most paradigmatic reductionist accounts of personal identity: seminal versions of the psychological continuity theory and animalism. According to the psychological continuity criterion of personal identity, X and Y are one and the same person at different points in time if and only if X stands in a psychological continuity relation to Y. You are the same person in the future (or past) as you are now if your current beliefs, memories, preferences and so forth are linked by a chain of overlapping psychological connections. Among philosophers who advocate for psychological approaches to personal identity, there is dispute over several issues: What mental features need to be inherited? What is the cause of psychological continuity, and what are its characteristics? Must it be realized in some kind of brain continuity, or will 'any cause' do? The 'any cause' discussion is based on the counterfactual idea that personal identity that is realized by psychological continuity would still hold, even if this continuity would no longer be instantiated in a brain. For example, would psychological continuity still determine identity if the personality was instantiated in a computer program? That is to say, what happens if the psychological relations that define personal identity get replicated and instantiated in a nonbiological entity or in more than one biological entity? Since psychological continuity could in principle divide, another issue is whether a 'nonbranching clause' is needed to ensure that psychological continuity holds to only one future person. It has been argued that the logical possibility of psychological continuity splitting into more than one successor evokes the need of blocking such scenarios by implementing a one–one clause into the criterion (we'll come back to this point in the section on fission cases). According to animalism, you are the same being in the future (or past) as you are now (or have been earlier), as long as you are the same living biological organism. A human animal, or for that matter any organism, persists as long as its capacity to direct those vital functions that keep it biologically alive are not disrupted. If X is an animal at time t and Y exists at time t*, X and Y are identical if and only if the vital functions that Y has at t* are causally continuous (without splitting into two or more successors) with those that X has at t. Presumably this will be the case only if Y is an animal at t*. So anything that is an animal at one time will always be an animal, and identity between an animal at one time and at another time is maintained when those vital functions are causally continuous. For animalists, psychological features have no bearing on personal identity because human animals go through periods without having any mental functions. The difference between these two criteria becomes apparent when considering cases at the margins of life. A fetus has no psychological features, and thus according to the psychological continuity view, no person is diachronically identical to a fetus. Whereas for the animalist, a fetus and the person it later becomes are identical by virtue of being the same (single) living organism. The same holds for other cases in which human organisms lose their mental capacities but remain biologically alive. Thought Experiments Hypotheticals such as John Locke's famous 'Prince and the Cobbler' are still widely discussed in the metaphysical debate on personal identity (Weinberg, 2011). Locke asks what would happen if the soul of a prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the prince's life, were to enter the 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 337 31-05-2017 17:52:07 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 338 body of a cobbler. Locke suggests that as soon as the cobbler's body is invaded by the prince's soul, the cobbler would be the same person as the prince, accountable only for the prince's actions. But who would say the prince was, in Locke's term, the same 'man' or human animal? With this thought experiment, Locke suggests that persons, unlike human animals, are only contingently connected to their bodies. Locke further maintains that what constitutes a person, and moreover the same person, is consciousness, the awareness of one's thoughts and actions: "Nothing but consciousness can unite remote existences into the same person" (Locke, 1694/1975, 464). Referring to a man he had met who believed his soul had been the soul of Socrates, Locke asks, "If the man truly were Socrates in a previous life, why doesn't he remember any of Socrates' thoughts or actions?" Locke even goes so far as to say that if your little finger were cut off and consciousness should happen to go along with it, leaving the rest of the body, then that little finger would be the person-the same person that was, just before, identified with the whole body (Locke, 1694/1975, 459–460). On these grounds, Locke and his modern-day successors establish that wherever your mental life goes, you as a person follow. Brain Transplants In the spirit of Locke's 'Prince and the Cobbler', brain transplant thought experiments figure prominently in the personal identity literature. Recently the idea has entered the public debate as a science fiction prospect for future medical use. The story goes something like this: imagine someone's brain (or their cerebrum as the seat of their distinct psychology) is transplanted into someone else's empty skull (or their brain with a removed cerebrum). Then we are asked to ponder: who is the person that wakes up after the operation has been performed; is the resulting person identical to the 'brain donor' or to the 'body donor', or is it an altogether different person? Ever since Sydney Shoemaker (1963) introduced these sorts of imagined cases into the modern debate, they are frequently presented as support for psychological continuity theories and seen as troublesome for competing views. Particularly, they are fairly often regarded as more or less decisive evidence against animalist takes on personal identity. However, there are at least two lines of reasoning against this interpretation. Advocates of bodily continuity theories such as Bernard Williams (1970) have claimed that a variant of brain transplants, sometimes described as 'body swapping', actually works in favor of bodily continuity views. By slightly altering the story, Williams has shown that our intuitions as to who the resulting person will be can easily tilt. Modern-day animalists such as Eric Olson (1997) are allies in this interpretation of brain transplants. Paul Snowdon (2014) has recently presented further arguments questioning the alleged support for psychological continuity theories gathered from hypothetical brain transplants. Another, more general line of criticism comes from Kathleen Wilkes (1988), who claims that due to an inevitable lack of detail in the description of hypothetical scenarios, conclusions drawn from there often lead to a false reliance on predictions about how our concept of personal identity would apply in the imagined case. On this view, brain transplant thought experiments do not support psychological continuity theories but simply track intuitions that have no bearing on our concept of personal identity. Fission Cases Despite their initial appeal, psychological continuity theories share a severe problem. Unlike identity, psychological continuity is not necessarily a one–one relation; that is, psychological continuity does not necessarily hold only to one future/past person but can hold to many. For example, fission scenarios, either based on purely hypothetical cases or based on brain bisection 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 338 31-05-2017 17:52:07 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 339 (corpus callosotomy), as put forward, among others, by Thomas Nagel, show that psychological continuity does not follow the logic of an identity relation (Nagel, 1971). Cutting the connection between the two hemispheres is used as a treatment to restrict epileptic seizures to one hemisphere. Callostomized patients develop unconnected streams of consciousness in both visual fields, resulting in sometimes contradictory descriptions and actions. It has been reported that patients simultaneously tried to embrace their partners with one hand and push them away with the other (Sperry, 1966). It is possible in principle, then, and in accordance with empirical evidence, that psychological continuity can divide when the physical brain is divided, and thus, multiple persons can be psychologically continuous. As David Lewis and others pointed out, identity is necessarily a one–one relation that can by definition only hold to itself, whereas psychological continuity is only contingently a one–one relation and may become one–many (Lewis, 1976). Imagine that a split-brain patient's two hemispheres were transplanted into two different heads. Both resulting people would stand in a psychological continuity relation to the original person. Therefore, as Bernard Williams argued, psychological continuity is unable to meet the metaphysical requirements of a criterion for personal identity unless a nonbranching clause is added that ensures that psychological continuity can only be a one–one relation (Williams, 1970). Nevertheless, the addition of such a nonbranching clause is not fully convincing either, because, as Derek Parfit claimed, a nonbranching clause has no impact on the intrinsic features of psychological continuity and is therefore unable to explain the difference between the importance that we attach to identity and the relative unimportance of psychological continuity if it takes a branching form. So, if you are psychologically continuous with only one person, identity holds, but as soon as someone else is also psychologically continuous with the original person, identity vanishes. In any case, identity could not be sustained over time, since two persons would diverge in their experiences and their psychological contents before very long. Parfit famously concluded that "identity is not what matters" (Parfit, 1984). The Brain Criterion Given the aforementioned difficulties facing psychological continuity views-some of which result from detaching psychological continuity from brain continuity-and the counterintuitive implications of animalism, another criterion of personal identity has gained some recent support. According to philosophers Thomas Nagel and Jeff McMahan, personal identity is secured through brain identity (Nagel, 1986; McMahan, 2002). This is an attempt to base personal identity on solid empirical grounds, and it opens up new possibilities of cohering philosophical accounts of personal identity with neuroscientific evidence. This notion of personal identity has recently been discussed in the context of neuroscience (Northoff, 2001; 2004). More specifically, manipulation of the brain may change not only its neuronal functions but also its psychological and mental functions. For instance, implantation of tissue or electrodes into the brain may change the neuronal underpinnings of psychological features that are considered crucial in psychological continuity views. Does this mean that brain manipulation entails manipulation of personal identity? If so, one would assume brain identity to be a necessary and/or sufficient criterion of personal identity. The recent insight into the empirical functioning of the brain raises a whole new field for the philosophical discussion of personal identity: the relationship between personal identity and the brain. Since the brain cannot be understood in a purely conceptual manner but must rather be explored empirically, this new field must necessarily link conceptual and empirical domains and thus be truly neurophilosophical in the genuine sense of the term. We'll now discuss Nagel's 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 339 31-05-2017 17:52:07 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 340 and McMahan's brain view of personal identity in some detail; subsequently we offer some neurophilosophical reflections on these two approaches. You Are Your Brain: Thomas Nagel Nagel (1986) considers the brain as both a necessary and sufficient criterion for personal identity, stating that "I am my brain" (Nagel, 1986, 64–5, 69). Nagel thinks that questions of personal identity are determinant-necessarily yielding a 'yes/no' answer. Personal identity, for Nagel, is nonconventional in the sense that it does not imply its own necessary and sufficient conditions, thus containing an 'empty position' that must be filled by an 'additional fact' (Nagel, 1986, 71). Nagel compares the term 'identity' with the term 'gold', saying that, before the chemical formula for 'gold' was discovered, the term 'gold' contained an 'empty position' that was later filled by an 'additional fact': the chemical formula for gold. The same goes for personal identity and the brain. We currently have no idea about the 'additional fact' that might potentially fill the 'empty position' in personal identity. According to Nagel, the 'additional fact' in the case of personal identity must bridge the gap between the subjective experience of the person, that is, its first-person perspective and its 'I' on the one hand, and the objective, necessary structures, that is, its third-person perspective and its physical body on the other. Since the brain might eventually bridge this gap between subjective experience and objective structures, it may be considered a suitable candidate to fill the 'empty position'. The subjective component of personal identity comes into play as introspective evidence for persistence over time via some form of psychological continuity. The objective dimension of personal identity comes into play through the brain, which, being a physical organ, has purely objective features that enable us to track a person's identity without relying on fallible introspection. But at the same time, the brain accounts for subjectivity. Subjectivity and Objectivity Nagel thinks that personal identity cannot be fully "understood through an examination of my first-person concept of self, apart from the more general concept of 'someone' of which it is the essence" (Nagel, 1986, 35). Nagel further believes that personal identity cannot be defined a priori. A 'subject of consciousness' must be able to self-identify without external observation; but these identifications must correspond to those that can be made on the basis of external observation. Thus, there are both firstand third-personal features of the self and its identity over time. There must be a notion of objectivity, Nagel says, which applies to the self, for it is clear that the idea of a mistake with regard to my own personal identity makes sense. The objectivity underlying this distinction must be understood as objectivity with regard to something subjective. The question is how the idea of the same subject can meet the conditions of objectivity appropriate for a psychological concept. It is subjective (not merely biological) but, at the same time, admits the distinction between correct and incorrect self-identification. The Brain as a Bridge Between Subjectivity and Objectivity What could perform the function of a special type of material substance that also has irreducible subjective features? Subjects of experience are not like anything else. While they do have observable properties, the most important thing about them is that they are subjective, and it is their subjective mental properties that must be accounted for. Nagel suggests that the concept of the self is open to 'objective completion' provided something can be found that straddles the 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 340 31-05-2017 17:52:07 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 341 subjective/objective gap. Something whose objective persistence is among the necessary conditions of personal identity is needed, but only if this objectively describable referent is in a strong sense the basis for those subjective features that typify the persistent self. It must refer to something essentially subjective, often identifiable nonobservationally in the first-person perspective and observationally in the third-person perspective, and something that is the persisting locus of mental states and the vehicle for carrying forward familiar psychological continuities when they occur. Nagel thinks that the brain is the most plausible contender to fulfill both the objective and subjective demands of personal identity. I could lose everything but my functioning brain and would still be me. Accordingly, the brain might be considered an 'additional fact' in Nagel's sense. On the one hand, the brain must be considered the necessary foundation for the possibility of subjective experience, since without a brain we remain unable to experience anything. On the other hand, the brain is the carrier of psychophysiological processes that remain essential for regulation and maintenance of the body. In contrast to other organs like, for example, the liver or kidney, the loss of the brain is accompanied by the loss of personal identity. The brain must subsequently be regarded as a necessary and sufficient condition for personal identity. However, Nagel concedes, due to our current lack of empirical knowledge, this assumption must be considered a preliminary hypothesis. 'Physico-Mental Intimacy' As we have said, Nagel claims that the brain bridges the gap between the subjective experience of mental states and psychophysiological states. The brain can therefore not be considered a purely physical organ since, for Nagel (1986), mental states and subjective experience cannot be reduced to physical properties (57, 74). In addition to physical properties, the brain must therefore be characterized by mental properties. Nagel speaks of a so-called physico-mental intimacy (in an ontological sense) as an "apparent intimacy between the mental and its physical conditions" (Nagel, 1986, 20). Due to these mental properties, the brain shows a special kind of 'insideness' that accounts for its foundational character for subjective experience: "It [the brain] can be dissected, but it also has the kind of inside that can't be exposed to dissection. There's something it is like from the inside to taste chocolate because there's something it's like from the inside to have your brain in that condition that is produced when you eat a chocolate bar" (Nagel, 1987, 34–35). Accordingly, the brain can be described mentally and physically, and both may be traced back to what Nagel calls a "fundamental essence" (Nagel, 1979, 199). This fundamental essence can be defined by complex forms of organization and combinations of matter-an "unusual chemical and physiological structure"-, which shows both proto-physical and proto-mental properties (Nagel, 1979, 201). However, neither the exact definition of both kinds of properties nor their relation is clearly determined. Thus, both important conceptual and empirical details are in need of further clarification. Embodied Minds: Jeff McMahan Another recent version of the brain criterion is the view that Jeff McMahan (2002) dubbed the 'Embodied Mind' account. McMahan argues that the continuity of parts of the brain that generate and sustain consciousness is both necessary and sufficient for personal identity over time. In order to survive as the same person over time, the capacity of a person's consciousness must be realized by the continuity of the same brain. 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 341 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 342 Minds McMahan holds that a mind is individuated by reference to its physical embodiment, just as an individual mental state is. A particular memory, for example, continues to exist only if the tissues of the brain in which it is realized continue to exist in a potentially functional state. Likewise, a particular mind continues to exist only if enough of the brain in which it is realized continues to exist in a functional or potentially functional state. This neatly explains how minds persist. If a single mind has hitherto been realized in certain regions of a single brain, then, the undivided survival and continued, self-sufficient, functional integrity of those specific regions is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of the continued existence of the same mind (for further details see McMahan, 2002, 66 ff ). McMahan's take on personal identity is practical; he thinks that the basis for an individual's egoistic concern about the future is the physical and functional continuity of enough of those areas of the individual's brain in which consciousness is realized. The person persists as long as the capacity to support consciousness is preserved. Now, usually the functional continuity of these areas of the brain entails broad psychological continuity. But in the very earliest phases of an individual's life and in some instances near the end, the same mind or consciousness persists in the absence of any degree of psychological connectedness from day to day. McMahan's criterion stresses the survival of one's basic psychological capacities, in particular the capacity for consciousness; it does, however, not require the continuity of any of the particular contents of one's mental life. For example, one continues to exist throughout the progress of Alzheimer's disease until the disease destroys one's capacity for consciousness (McMahan, 2002, 71). Brain Continuity McMahan distinguishes among three types of continuity of the brain. His idea of physical continuity of the brain is applicable in either of two ways. It could involve the "continued existence of the same constituent matter" of the brain that generates and sustains consciousness or "the gradual, incremental replacement of the constituent matter of the brain over time" (McMahan, 2002, 68). In the latter sense, the brain, like most other organs of the human body, can survive gradual cellular turnover, which, on his view, is congruent with physical continuity. Thus, the core principle in preserving physical continuity over time is that there is sufficient integration between the old and new matter, which rules out in advance the compatibility of rapid replacement with physical continuity. Closely related to physical continuity is what McMahan calls functional continuity. This involves roughly the continuity of basic psychological capacities of the brain-in particular, the brain's capacity for consciousness, which is sufficient for minimal functional continuity. A third and obviously less important type of continuity for McMahan is organizational continuity. It involves the continuity of the various tissues of the brain that underlie the connections among the distinctive features of one's psychology. These include the connection between an earlier experience and a later memory of it. One would think that functional and organizational continuity presuppose physical continuity, but McMahan assumes that, as long as certain functions or patterns of organization are preserved, there will be functional or organizational continuity even if the relevant functions or patterns of organization are not preserved in the same matter. So McMahan's criterion of personal identity and egoistic concern is physical and minimal functional continuity of the brain; more specifically, enough of the relevant areas of the brain in which consciousness is generated and sustained-to be capable of preserving the capacity for 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 342 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 343 consciousness (McMahan, 2002, 67–69). I am the same entity today as I was yesterday because the same brain supports the same capacity for consciousness it supported yesterday. The continuity of the distinctive features of my mental life (memories, beliefs etc.) is incidental to my survival; what is important is physical continuity of the brain. Reducing personal identity to physical and minimal functional continuity of the brain distinguishes McMahan's view from other accounts, such as psychological continuity views that include organizational continuity in the criterion of personal identity. McMahan thinks that the continuing capacity for consciousness is a sufficient basis for egoistic concern about one's own future and should, therefore, be a sufficient basis for personal identity, other things being equal. Since McMahan holds that a person begins to exist with the onset of (or the capacity for) consciousness in their organism, fetuses and patients with brain damage potentially fall under the category of beings with future interests as well. McMahan tries to make this work by emphasizing that unlike identity, the basis for egoistic concern can be present in degrees. Defending a morality of respect, McMahan makes the distinction between the badness of death and the wrongness of killing when it comes to beings with little psychological life like fetuses. The badness of death for persons themselves can vary dramatically from one person to another-young, old, gifted, ungifted and so on. The wrongness of killing someone doesn't depend on their egoistic concern about their future. Killing a person is equally wrong in each case because it violates respect for the person. Neurophilosophical Reflections After having considered the two most prominent views advocating brain identity as the criterion for personal identity over time, we are now in a position to critically reflect on these views from a neurophilosophical perspective. Subsequently, we sketch in broad strokes a few additions to the existing literature on brain identity that might be helpful to tie up some of the loose ends. Is Personal Identity an 'Additional Fact'? Nagel assumes an 'additional fact' about the brain in his concept of personal identity. This 'additional fact' should be empirically accessible. However, the psychological data show no hints or indications for such an 'additional fact.' Nobody experiences anything but their personality, which they regard as the sum of their psychological functions. In contrast, we do not define (or experience) our personalities (and personal identities) by any particular property or fact which could be regarded as equivalent to Nagel's 'additional fact'. Nagel could argue that this 'additional fact' is epistemically not directly accessible and somehow unknowable. This leaves him with the following three options: (1) The 'additional fact' might not be accessible at all, neither first-personally nor third-personally. In this case, the 'additional fact' remains in principle hidden from us. One might consequently consider the 'additional fact' as rather mysterious; accordingly, this option does not seem to be very attractive. (2) The 'additional fact' might be accessible but merely third-personally. Then it should be detectable in neuroscientific investigations that rely on the third-person perspective. However, such an 'additional fact' has not yet been detected in neuroscientific investigations of the brain. This option thus remains empirically rather implausible. (3) The 'additional fact' might be accessible merely first-personally, though in a disguised or indirect form. In this case, the 'additional fact' might not be accessible as a 'fact' but rather as a particular type of state as distinguished from neuronal states. Instead of looking for an 'additional fact', one should then aim at revealing an 'additional state' and its relation to the brain. What could this 'additional state' be? Is it a mental 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 343 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 344 state? If mental states do account for the 'additional state' as a disguised form of the 'additional fact', and thus the brain, mental states must then reflect the access to one's own brain from the first-person perspective. We may perceive our own brain states thus not as brain states but as mental states. Our brain as the 'additional fact' can thus be accessed only indirectly via mental states as 'additional states'. This probably comes closest to what Nagel has in mind (or rather in his brain?). Conversely, we remain unable to access our own brain as a brain from the first-person perspective. This epistemic inability of our own brain to access itself directly as a brain can be called an 'autoepistemic limitation' (Northoff, 2004). This 'autoepistemic limitation' may be subserved by specific principles of functional brain organization that prevent the brain from directly perceiving itself as a brain. These principles of functional brain organization may thus fulfil the same role as the chemical formula for gold in Nagel's example. Accordingly, 'autoepistemic limitation' might account for what Nagel means by 'additional fact', although his formulation 'I am my brain' should then be rephrased as 'I am my brain, but due to autoepistemic limitation, I remain unable to directly access myself as a brain'. Moreover, an investigation of the empirical mechanisms underlying 'autoepistemic limitation' requires direct relationships between empirical functions and epistemic abilities/inabilities, that is, a so-called epistemic–empirical relationship (Northoff, 2004). This in turn makes the development of 'neuroepistemology' (Northoff, 2004) as an 'epistemology on a neurological basis' (Kuhlenbeck, 1965, 137) necessary. 'World–Brain Relation' as 'Additional Fact'? The mere physical continuity of the brain is by itself not sufficient to account for personal identity over time. Nagel assumes an 'additional fact,' and McMahan seems to take the brain only as the seat of consciousness. How can we determine the 'additional fact' in a nonmental way without reverting to any kind of metaphysics involving mental features like consciousness? The proponent of the brain criterion may argue that the presupposition of the brain as a mere placeholder for mental features deflates the importance of the brain. We may do better by considering the brain itself. But then we are again confronted with the problem that the brain itself does not seem sufficient for personal identity. All criteria that rely on the brain presuppose the brain as an isolated organ (or just as the seat of consciousness). However, there are empirical data that suggest that the brain and its own spontaneous activity, for example, its intrinsic activity, are strongly dependent upon the respective environmental context. For instance, a study by Duncan et al. (2015) showed that traumatic life events in early childhood impact the brain's spontaneous activity in adulthood: the higher the degree of early traumatic childhood life events (i.e., either a greater number of traumatic events or events that are more traumatic), the higher the degree of spatiotemporal disorder (e.g., entropy, in the brain's spontaneous activity in adulthood). This makes it clear that the brain is not an isolated organ encapsulated in the skull that communicates with the environment only through the body. For instance, the brain can shift the phase onset of its fluctuations (in different frequency ranges) in accordance with the onset of tones in the external environment (see chapter 20 in Northoff, 2014b, for details). That is apparent when we listen to music and swing our perceptions and movements in tune with the rhythm. Such direct coupling between brain and environment has also been described as 'active sensing' or the brain's 'sixth sense' (van Atteveldt et al., 2014). This and other examples (Northoff, 2014b; 2016) make it clear that the brain is a highly context-dependent organ that stands in direct relation to the respective environment, with the latter impacting, modulating and sculpting the former. Taken in this sense, the brain can no longer be considered an isolated organ but a relational organ that can 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 344 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 345 be characterized by what we describe as a world–brain relation or 'environment–brain unity' (Northoff, 2014b). Why is the characterization of the brain as 'environment–brain unity' relevant for determining personal identity? The relation in which the brain stands to its environment is apparently an intrinsic and thus defining feature of the brain as brain. If so, one may assume that this world– brain relation may account for the 'additional fact' Nagel was searching for when he conceived of the brain as seat of personal identity. One may then want to rephrase Nagel as saying, 'I am my world–brain relation', rather than, 'I am my brain'. The assumption of physical continuity as suggested by McMahan may then need to be replaced by relational continuity: as long as I stand in a continuous relation to the world, I remain identical even if my brain and its physical continuity change. Such relational continuity presupposes a different ontology, however. Instead of a property-based ontology, one may then want to suppose a relational ontology that comes close to what Alfred North Whitehead described as 'process ontology' (Whitehead, 1929/1978). Process ontology takes the continuous change and dynamics, and thus the flux of being, as the most fundamental unit of existence and reality. Ontology is here essentially dynamic with continuous change across time and space. That stands in opposition to property-based ontology in which specific properties (like physical or mental properties) that are static and nonchangeable are assumed as the basic units of existence and reality. Personal Identity as 'Physico-Mental Intimacy'? Patients with brain implants report a close interaction between their mental states and the physical substitutes, that is, the cells or the stimulating electrode (Northoff, 2001). For example, they describe the feeling that they could influence the brain by their psychological and mental states. Nagel's assumption of 'physico-mental intimacy' might thus be considered as empirically plausible. The subjective experience of being able to influence mental states both via one's own brain tissue and through implants would not be possible without some kind of 'physico-mental intimacy'-subjectively accessible via the first-person perspective. Does this epistemic characterization of 'physico-mental intimacy', however, justify the inference of physical and mental properties in an ontological sense? Such an epistemic-ontological inference is, for example, reflected in Nagel when he infers from the epistemic description of a special 'insideness' to underlying ontological properties. This type of inference might be called an 'epistemic-ontological fallacy' (Northoff, 2004b) in which one falsely infers from epistemic or knowable characteristics to ontological properties or the essence of being. However, even if one allows for epistemic-ontological inferences, the ontological assumption of mental properties of the brain, as distinguished from its physical properties, cannot easily be justified: though mental states can be experienced in the first-person perspective, their experience cannot be directly linked to one's own brain because of 'autoepistemic limitation'. If, however, mental states cannot be directly linked to one's own brain, any type of epistemicontological inference from mental states to mental brain properties remains impossible. Nagel could, however, argue that if mental brain properties cannot be inferred from the experience of mental states in the first-person perspective, they may at least be inferred from the third-person perspective. This is problematic, too, because we do not experience mental states in a thirdperson perspective. Instead, we observe physical states in the third-person perspective. One may consequently infer mental brain properties from the observation of physical states. This inference also remains questionable, since physical states can be entirely accounted for by physical properties without need to infer any mental brain properties. Accordingly, either type of inference of mental brain properties from physical brain properties lacks evidence. 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 345 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 346 The criterion of physical–mental intimacy may be considered in a novel light in the context of the postulated world–brain relation. If the world-brain relation is a necessary condition of possible mental states, one may replace physical–mental intimacy by 'neuro-ecological intimacy'. 'Neuro-ecological intimacy' refers to the fact that the brain stands in an intimate and mutually dependent relationship with its respective ecological context. Only if there is such ' neuro-ecological intimacy' can we have mental states at all. Loss of mental states, as in loss of consciousness, goes along with loss of world–brain relation and its neuro-ecological intimacy. For instance, patients in the vegetative state have lost consciousness and are no longer able to relate to the world in a meaningful way-their brains have lost their world–brain relation and are henceforth no longer relational but isolated (see what follows for more details). Organizational and Functional Dissociation An interesting feature in McMahan's account is the possible dissociation between organizational and functional brain continuity. McMahan's insistence on minimal functional continuity as the bearer of personal identity-without access to the particular content of mental states such as memories-suggests that what he has in mind is phenomenal continuity. Since McMahan thinks that this sort of phenomenal continuity is enough to secure the distinct concern for one's own future, it remains to be shown how minimal functional continuity can do the trick. In situations of phenomenal disruptions of consciousness (such as falling into a dreamless sleep), one wonders how one could tell that there is any connection between a conscious state before and after the disruption occurs. If there is no psychological continuity whatsoever, it seems that there is in principle no way to differentiate between one's own conscious state and someone else's conscious state just by reference to the first-person perspective. The only way to be sure of one's own identity, following McMahan, would then be to see a neurologist and have her check if it is still the same minimal functional continuity that supports my phenomenally disconnected states of consciousness. This, of course, would reduce personal identity to the third-person perspective and thus seems inadequate as a basis for egoistic concern about the future. 22.1 Spotlight: Mind–Body Identity: Are We Just Our Brains? Kimberly Van Orman Before we can consider questions about personal identity, free will, consciousness and others in the philosophy of mind, we need an answer to the metaphysical question: What is the relationship between the mind and the body? There are many possibilities available in the logical space: that only nonphysical minds exist (idealism), only brains are real (eliminative materialism), minds and brains both exist but are essentially the same thing (reductive materialism), minds and brains exist but are fundamentally different things (substance dualism), minds are a nonphysical property of brains (property dualism) and minds are not nonphysical but are defined in terms of their functional properties, like software that runs on brains (nonreductive materialism). Of these, four come up most frequently: two dualist and two materialist views. Dualism is committed to the idea that minds are fundamentally distinct from brains. There are two main forms of dualism: substance and property. Substance dualism is most 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 346 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 347 associated with René Descartes, who held that minds are made of a nonphysical substance distinct from physical brains and bodies, although the two different substances can interact. This is a view that easily and intuitively fits with the idea of a soul that can survive the death of the body. Few philosophers today accept this view as likely to be true. The centrality of the brain to mind is evident in cases where physical damage to the brain seems to result in a person changing in ways fundamental to who they are as a person. That should not happen if substance dualism is true. In addition, if the mind were a completely nonphysical substance, we would need an account of how something with absolutely no physical properties could have any effect on a world in which physical events seem to always have physical causes. Property dualism doesn't require that the mind be a completely separate substance. It accepts the brain as the seat of the mind but holds that the mind is an emergent property that cannot be reduced to the physical. Property dualism can better account for what we know about the brain; however, it still has a problem explaining how the nonphysical mind can make physical changes in the brain. Some philosophers committed to property dualism have given up on the idea that minds can have causal properties. On this view, called epiphenomenalism, minds are both nonphysical and noncausal properties that arise out of the functioning of the brain. With regard to neuroethical concerns about identity and authenticity that arise, for instance, in the context of cognitive enhancement, substance dualism would deny that we, as distinct individuals, are essentially our brains. This implies that enhancements that specifically target physical brain function would not threaten an identity whose locus is the nonphysical mind. For property dualism, it's possible that changes to the brain could affect one's mind. Every version of materialism (also known as physicalism) is committed to the idea that there is only one basic kind of matter in the world-physical matter. The principle of supervenience describes a dependency relation that attempts to capture this notion that everything is in some sense physical. When an entity or property (e.g., a mind) supervenes on another (e.g., a brain), then if they share all the same physical properties (down to the subatomic level), they share the same mental ones. Reductive materialism is the idea that the mind and the brain are just two ways of talking about the same thing. On this view, for any type of mental state (for example, being in a specific kind of pain), there will be an underlying physical type. In theory, we could give a physical definition for any mental state (since they're the same thing). For example, pain of type p would be defined in terms of the physical brain states that it's identical with. This view is also called type identity theory. This take on materialism captures the intuitive idea that minds and brains are simply the same thing, just described in different language. Changes to the brain also constitute changes to the mind. To the extent that we are concerned about the integrity, authenticity or identity of the self, reductive materialism holds that brain and mind are identical, which implies that changes to the brain would constitute changes to the mind/self. Nonreductive materialism accepts supervenience and holds that minds are fundamentally physical. However, it does not accept the idea that minds and brains are identical. A mental state is defined as a specific kind (for example, a pain, an emotion, an intention) based on its relationships to other mental states, the situation of the body (senses, physical location, condition) and the behaviors it gives rise to. For a nonreductive materialist, minds are to 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 347 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 348 brains as software is to hardware. There is nothing nonphysical going on, but at least some of the causal force comes from what's going on in the mind. This view is sometimes called token identical materialism since it holds that any individual (token) mental state will be identical with a token brain state. It denies that we can get type identity because it holds that some mental states can be multiply realizable-for example, my mental state of affection for my cat might be realized in my brain differently than your (identical) mental state is realized in yours. However, even though our particular brain structure might differ, we share the same type of mental state, since it comes up when we each see our cats and leads us to walk over and scratch their ears and leads to other cat-friendly thoughts. For nonreductive materialism (as in property dualism), whether targeted or widespread alterations in the function of the physical brain would threaten personal identity will depend on the nature of the alterations and whether we see a significant change in mental status. Minds and brains are not identical, but they are interdependent. Some problems will be related to the software (mind), and others will be related to the hardware (brain). Given some configurations of the hardware, the software won't function properly. Similarly, for some changes in the brain (such as we see with severe trauma), mental states could be changed enough to raise concerns about whether one's identity has changed. Bibliography Chalmers, D. (2002) Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. Oxford University Press. Montero, B. (2008) On the Philosophy of Mind. Wadsworth Publishing. Ravenscroft, I. (2005) Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner's Guide. Oxford University Press. 'World–Brain Relation' and First-/ Third-Person Perspective One may now want to raise the question of how our criterion of world–brain relation stands in relationship to the distinction between firstand third-person perspective. The discussion of personal identity revolves largely around the question of whether the firstand/or the thirdperson perspective provides necessary and/or sufficient conditions for personal identity. We argue that the world–brain relation cannot be accessed through the third-person perspective since it cannot be observed as such. Nor can the world–brain relation be experienced as such via the first-person perspective since it is prephenomenal rather than phenomenal (Northoff, 2014b). How then can we characterize the world–brain relation in perspectival terms? We assume that the world–brain relation remains by itself nonperspectival, meaning that it is neither firstnor third-personal. How, though, can we then apprehend and access the world–brain relation if not through the firstand third-person perspective? We claim that we can access the world–brain relation only in an indirect way by inferring from combined experience and observation in very much the same way that Nagel suggests the need for a correspondence between the firstand third-person perspectives. At the same time, a proper world–brain relation may be conceived of as a necessary or predisposing condition for the possible perspectival differentiation between the firstand third-person perspectives (Northoff, 2014b). One may consequently feature the world–brain relation as preperspectival rather than as completely nonperspectival or perspectival: the prefix 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 348 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 349 'pre–' indicates here that the world–brain relation is the necessary condition of subsequent perspectival access to reality in terms of first-, secondand/or third-person perspectives. In contrast, it would be nonperspectival when there is no relationship at all between world–brain relation and the different perspectives. Why is the distinction between preand nonperspectival important for personal identity? We postulate that such preperspectival features need to be continuous in order to preserve our personal identity. If the world–brain relation is disrupted, becoming nonperspectival rather than preperspectival, we may lose our personal identity, including our relation to the world. For instance, patients in vegetative state, who have lost consciousness, lose the neuro-ecological intimacy of their world–brain relationship, which renders the latter nonperspectival. That, in turn, makes it impossible for them to take on any kind of perspective, neither firstnor second-person perspective (as manifest in the absence of first-person experience and second-person intersubjectivity) nor third-person perspective (as manifest in the absence of third-person observation). Neuroethical Considerations and Future Directions We now turn to briefly indicate how some of the discussed features relate to neuroethical concerns of personal identity. We do so by looking at patients in the vegetative state and at dementias. Questions about the personal identity of these patients might affect decision-making authority over these patients, including the authority of previously expressed desires in advance directives. We will indicate how a world–brain relation and neuro-ecological account of personal identity illuminate such hard cases. Patients in a permanent vegetative state have irreversibly lost consciousness. These patients are unable to relate to the world in a meaningful way. In our terminology, their world–brain relation is disrupted, rendering their personal identity discontinued. Even though these patients are biologically alive, in that their vital functions are artificially sustained, there's nothing left of the relational component that would enable the person that previously inhabited the biological organism to relate to the world. Due to this lack of preperspectival world–brain relation, there is no more first-personal experience, and so one might conclude that the person has vanished. What is left is a 'nonrelational organism' on life support-an organism that once was a constitutive part of a person's identity. This description might paint a picture of how to ontologically characterize these patients, but does it allow for a clear-cut neuroethical evaluation of these scenarios when it comes to previously expressed desires in advanced directives? This issue is far from being straightforward and comes with a substantial commitment to normative ethical convictions. We won't attempt a decisive answer here but merely hint at two possible interpretations. On one view, the person that previously expressed their desire to, say, be kept on life support even if their consciousness is irreversibly lost might be seen to have normative authority over an organism that once was the host of their personhood, even if the person vanished. This is so, perhaps, because there is no other person inhabiting that organism who could claim authority. On a different interpretation pertaining to the same point, one might aver that precisely because there is no person inhabiting that organism anymore, a previously expressed directive has no authority, and so it should be up to the closest relatives or guardian to decide. Cases of dementia, especially in its very late stages, are even more difficult to evaluate both ontologically and normatively. There is no question that in early stages of dementia, the person still relates to the environment in their usual way. When the gradual decline of personcharacteristics proceeds, the way in which the person relates to their environment potentially changes in a great many different ways. Nonetheless, there seems to be still enough of the world–brain relation in place so as to preserve personal identity, not necessarily because of the 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 349 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Georg Northoff and Nils-Frederic Wagner 350 contents of psychological continuity that are inevitably lost toward the end of that neurodegenerative disease but because there is a continuous uninterrupted way in which the same person relates to their environment due to an ongoing world–brain relation. The person might have lost some of their distinct psychological features, but the very basis for their being able to relate to the world remains, and so their personal identity is preserved. If this is so, one would think, there are at least prima facie reasons to make the case that previously expressed desires should continue to bear normative authority even if the person in their current stage can no longer remember having expressed these desires. It goes without saying that this issue becomes ever more difficult if current desires contradict previously expressed ones. Both scenarios illustrate how a relational account of personal identity might be able to offer empirically informed normative guidance in cases where purely metaphysical views of personal identity either decide by fiat or leave the issue open entirely. Needless to say, a relational look at these cases is still in the fledgling stage, and so it becomes apparent that future interdisciplinary neuroethical studies are needed in order to get a more firm grip on these vexing issues. In conclusion, future investigations of personal identity may want to discuss (1) the model of the brain; (2) the brain's relationship to the world; (3) the interplay between world–brain relation and consciousness, including its epistemological features like auto-epistemic limitation; and (4) the notion of brain continuity as in regards to both world–brain relation and consciousness. This may, in turn, provide the ground for the future development of a brain-based and neuroecological (rather than brain-reductive and neuronal) account of personal identity. Further Reading DeGrazia, D. (1999) "Persons, Organisms, and the Definition of Death: A Philosophical Critique of the Higher-Brain Approach". Southern Journal of Philosophy 37, 419–440. Lewis, D. (1976) "Survival and identity". In A. Rorty (Ed.). The Identities of Persons. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 17–41. MacIntyre, A. (1984) After Virtue. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Noonan, H. (2003) Personal Identity. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Northoff, G. (2014a) Unlocking the Brain. Volume I: Coding. New York: Oxford University Press. Northoff, G. (2014b) Unlocking the Brain. Volume II: Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press. Schechtman, M. (2014) Staying Alive-Personal Identity, Practical Concerns, and the Unity of a Life. New York: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199684878.001.0001 References Atteveldt van, N., et al. (2014) Multisensory integration: Flexible use of general operations. Neuron 81(6): pp. 1240–1253. Duncan, N.W., Hayes, D.J., Wiebking, C., Tiret, B., Pietruska, K., Chen, D.Q., . . . Northoff, G. (2015) Negative childhood experiences alter a prefrontal-insular-motor cortical network in healthy adults: A preliminary multimodal rsfMRI-fMRI-MRS-dMRI Study. Human Brain Mapping 36(11): pp. 4622–4637. Evans, G.M. (1985) Collected Papers, Antonia Phillips (Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon. Kuhlenbeck, H. (1965) The concept of consciousness in neurological epistemology in brain and mind. In J.R. Smythies (Ed.). Brain and Mind: Modern Concepts of the Nature of the Mind. New York: Routledge, pp. 102–143. Lewis, D. (1976) Survival and identity. In A.O. Rorty (Ed.). The Identities of Persons. Berkeley: University of California Press. Locke, J. (1694/1975) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P. Nidditch (Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 350 31-05-2017 17:52:08 Personal Identity and Brain Identity 351 McMahan, J. (2002) The Ethics of Killing: Problems at the Margins of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nagel, T. (1971) Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness. Synthese 22: pp. 396–413. ---. (1979) Mortal Questions. London: Routledge. ---. (1986) The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---. (1987) What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Northoff, G. (2001) Personale Identität und Operative Eingriffe in das Gehirn. Paderborn: Mentis. ---. (2004a) Am I my brain? Personal identity and brain identity-A combined philosophical and psychological investigation in brain implants. Philosophia Naturalis 41: pp. 257–282. –--. (2004b) Philosophy of the Brain: The Brain Problem. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. –--. (2014) Unlocking the Brain. Vol. II: Consciousness. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press. –--. (2016) Neurophilosophy and the Healthy Mind. Learning from the Unwell Brain. New York: Norton. Olson, E. (1997) The Human Animal: Personal Identity Without Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Parfit, D. (1984) Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shoemaker, S. (1963) Self-knowledge and Self-identity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Snowdon, P. (2014) Persons, Animals, Ourselves. New York: Oxford University Press. Sperry, R. (1966) Brain bisection and mechanisms of consciousness. In J.C. Eccles (Ed.). Brain and Conscious Experience. New York: Springer, pp. 84–108. Weinberg, S. (2011) Locke on personal identity. Philosophy Compass 6(6): pp. 398–407. Whitehead, A.N. (1929/1978) Process and Reality. New York: Free Press. Wiggins, D. (1967) Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Wilkes, K. (1988) Real People. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Williams, B. (1970) The self and the future. Philosophical Review 79(2): pp. 161–180. 15031-0845e-2pass-r02.indd 351 31-05-2017 17:52:

This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 1 **This is a Pre-Print Draft** **Please DO NOT Quote This Version** Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution Christopher J. Austin Abstract The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (AE) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if AE can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory‟s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the framework of contemporary evolutionary developmental biology, an evolved essentialism is available. The reformulated theory of AE offered in this paper not only fails to fall prey to the typical collection of criticisms, but is also independently both theoretically and empirically plausible. The paper contends that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. Within contemporary philosophy of biology, there is perhaps no greater maligned theory than Aristotelian Essentialism (AE). Now that the rosy dawn of Aristotelian metaphysics has faded into twilight1, citing the essence of an organism as an explanatory principle is indicative either of a rather hopeless scientific naiveté or else a dogmatic entrenchment in scholasticism. It is generally agreed that the sun set upon AE for a simple, yet powerful reason: the advent of evolutionary theory. According to the implications of that theory, kind-essences are an ontological superfluity which the world not only has no need of, but simply cannot countenance. However, evolutionary theory has recently had its own paradigm shift, ushered in with the rise of the union between it and developmental theory. With its increasing emphasis on modular, structural explanations of morphological novelty and variation, evolutionary developmental biology (evodevo) has arguably prompted a substantial reshaping of our understanding of the very nature of biological individuals. In light of this reformation, the question naturally arises: what is it to be the what-it-is-to-be of an organism? In what follows, I suggest that the answer to that question is one best interpreted within the ontological framework of AE. I contend that, properly understood, essence belongs in the age of evolution. Aristotelian Essentialism vs. Evolution First things first: what exactly is AE? One can find many distinct (though often overlapping) definitions in the literature, but here, for the sake of simplicity, and without wishing to rehearse decades of debate, I focus on a simple three-point definition. An Aristotelian essence is (a) comprised of a natural set of intrinsic properties which (b) constitute generative mechanisms for particularised morphological development which (c) are shared among groups of organisms, delineating them as members of the same „kind‟. Regarding (a), the set of properties that comprise an essence and define a natural kind cannot be extrinsic, or relational properties – abstract properties of phylogenetic lineage or interbreeding relations, etc. – and their being a collection must not be a result of our conceptual practices (on account of discipline convention or theoretical interests), but instead reflect a structural grouping that is mind-independent: the set of properties that define a natural kind are chosen by nature, not nous. Regarding (b), the properties that comprise an essence are causal properties, teleologically "directed toward" particular anatomical and eidonomical ends. 1 I borrow this colourful phrasing from Hacking (2007). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 2 Thus AE presents, as Lennox (1987: 340) puts it, a type of „teleological essentialism‟: these groups of properties are causally responsible for the continual shaping and organising of the particularised ontogenic development of the organisms which possess them.2 Regarding (c), being possessed by a great number of organisms and reflecting the ways in which nature is "carved at the joints", these property groupings sort organisms into kinds, functioning as inductively rich „information stores‟ about their members‟ typical morphological development.3 That said, although the essences of AE are certainly typological – in that they sort organisms into developmental types they are not taxonomical: strictly speaking, AE is a thesis about the source and nature of ontogenic development, not a methodological prescription for classificatory definitions.4 Importantly, note that in endorsing (a)-(c), AE entails a rather particular ontological commitment concerning fundamentality. For the defender of AE, what is fundamental about the world (and is thus primitively explanatory with respect to the biological realm) is stability, or invariance – it is the unchanging, shared set of kind-defining intrinsic properties which ontologically "lie at the bottom" of organisms. Variation on the other hand, according to AE, is therefore non-fundamental: the wide range of property mosaics peppered throughout the organisms that populate the natural world are an ontological result of, and hence must be explained by reference to, the invariant natures – or essences of those organisms. It is the endorsement of this ontological priority, and its declaration of the dominance of the unchanging over the changing, which has engendered what has long been viewed as the most singular error of any essentialist theory in biology: for AE‟s commitment to the so-called „natural state model‟ is nearly universally understood as standing in direct conflict to the contemporary cornerstone of our understanding of the biological realm – namely, the theory of evolution and the process of natural selection. Indeed, AE has been thought by many to be "...precisely the „typological‟ perspective...that Darwin had to displace".5 Because I take it that AE‟s commitment to the natural state model is the primary source of the contemporary distaste for that theory, I will consider it in detail here. When the „natural state model‟ is mentioned, it is likely that most will have in mind Mayr‟s (1976: 27) popular (and overtly Platonic) phrasing that, on this model, "...[t]here are a limited number of fixed, unchangeable „ideas‟ underlying the observed variability [in nature], with the eidos (idea) being the only thing that is fixed and real, while the observed variability has no more reality than the shadows of an object on a cave wall"; here the essences of natural kinds are the Platonic eidoi, while the various distinct instances of the morphogenetic profiles of those kinds are the observed variability. This statement is rather incendiary but, as gestured at in the outline above, the general idea is correct, and AE is committed to it: differentiation of specific property exemplification among members of the same natural kind comes about via various "accidental" exploitations of its essential properties, these properties themselves being both (kind-) defining and unchanging. But of course, by the lights of evolutionary theory, this view of the world simply has it backwards: it is variation which is primitive, not fixity. As Gould (1985:160-161) puts it, "[v]ariation is the raw material of evolutionary change [which] represents the fundamental reality of nature, not an accident about a created norm".6 This view is bolstered by the fact that, just as one would expect if the stasis that the natural state model posits were not fundamental, the vast majority of empirical evidence suggests that there are no ontologically privileged sets of properties genetic or otherwise which all members of (purported) 2 Cf. Wilkins (2013), Devitt (2008). 3 As Elder (2008: 345) notes: "If a plurality of organisms is to populate a genuine natural kind...more is needed than just that the same phenotypic traits crop up in member after member of the plurality. The same traits must recur across all the organisms for a common reason". 4 Cf. Lennox (2001), Pellegrin (1987), and Balme (1987). 5 Griffiths (2002: 77). 6 Cf. Okasha (2002: 191). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 3 natural kinds share.7 The lack of such evidence, as Okasha (2002: 196) rightly points out, has led "virtually all philosophers of biology [to] agree that...it is simply not true that the groups of organisms that working biologists treat as [members of the same natural kind] share a set of common morphological, physiological or genetic traits which set them off from other [kinds]".8 And what‟s perhaps worse, not only is it nearly universally agreed upon that the invariability posited by the natural state model is nowhere to be found, it is likewise agreed that such invariability runs counter to the very core of the evolutionary world-view: for the sine quo non of the process of natural selection is the existence of a substantial amount of phenotypic and genetic heterogeneity among (purported) members of the same natural kind.9 Furthermore, as Sober (1980: 374-377) convincingly argues, even if there were a stable and unchanging set of properties shared among members of a delineated natural kind, those properties would be incapable of playing the role that AE requires of them. According to (b), the essence of a natural kind is an intrinsic set of causal, goal-directed properties which define a particular developmental path towards a specific „morphological profile‟ (according to its kind). In the parlance of the natural state model, the essence of a natural kind is causally productive of an intrinsically privileged developmental plan, one which represents the „natural state‟ of the members of that kind, with variations on this natural state representing destructive deviations attributable to the pervading un-natural causal influence of an organism‟s environment. However, while the discovery of the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity has taught us that a developing organism‟s environment is an important and major source of phenotypic variation, it has also taught us that there simply is no such thing as an environment-independent phenotypic trait – and hence, by extension, no such thing as a natural state, produced purely by an intrinsically specified pathway of particular morphological development.10 Indeed, more and more empirical research suggests that the developmental specification of morphological features via environmental stimuli is not only a functionally ubiquitous phenomenon, but one that may play a vitally important part in the evolutionary process.11 Thus, even if we were to grant that there exist shared sets of intrinsic properties among groups of organisms that demarcated them as members of a particular natural kind, AE‟s requirement that this intrinsic essence must function – and do so in some way independently of the extrinsic environment – as the "prime mover" with respect to an organism‟s specified morphological development is a theoretical demand which the biological realm does not and cannot meet. The Evolution of Essentialism These critiques of the natural state model collectively function as a powerful reason for abandoning the metaphysical machinery of AE – this I do not wish to deny. What I deny, as I will argue below, is that these critiques must sound the theory‟s death knell. To my mind, the lesson they teach is not that AE ought to be extinct, but rather that if the theory is to survive in a contemporary landscape it, like all else, must evolve. Thus I‟ve no hesitancy in affirming that the objections of the previous section are devastating for a certain naïve, primitive form of AE – perhaps even for the form which Aristotle himself advanced. Indeed, I am more than happy to let the specific letter of that primitive progenitor pass away, if there is available a novel, more sophisticated contemporary form of the theory which properly retains the former‟s spirit. It is my contention that just such a theoretical advancement is available, once we understand that the Aristotelian dunamis which lies at the heart of that ancient form of essentialism is but the obscure, imprecise ancestor of the subsequently developed, specified and complex contemporary 7 This lack of evidence has arguably led to the formulation of the „Homeostatic Property Cluster‟ view of natural kinds see Boyd (1999), Wilson (1999), and Wilson, Barker, and Brigandt (2007). 8 See also Griffiths (2002), Hull (1992), and Sober (1980). 9 Cf. Wilson (1999: 190), and Okasha (2002: 197). 10 For a general overview, see Whitman & Agrawal (2009) and Schlichting & Smith (2002). 11 See Fusco & Minelli (2010) and West-Eberhard (2003). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 4 concept of dispositionality. The evolution of this central concept, I suggest, capably courts the viable evolution of AE. Dispositional properties are inherently causal properties – they are responsible for the coming about of particular states of affairs („manifestation states‟) upon the occurrence of some other state of affairs („stimulus conditions‟).12 These properties function as ontological "switches" of sorts, causally mediating the influence of certain activating conditions to produce particular states of affairs. The property of „negative charge‟, for instance, is widely understood dispositionally – when its bearers meet with a like-charged particle (its stimulus condition), they repel with a particular momentum (its manifestation state). Of course, this (and examples of its ilk from "fundamental" ontologies) are the exception, for while it‟s possible for dispositions to be realised by a single material element, they are more often than not realised by an entire system, or complex network of interacting elements: if upon receiving the appropriate conditions that network initiates a sustained step-wise progressive interplay among its nodes which leads to their production of a particular end state, that complex of elements realises a dispositional property.13 Thus dispositions are functionally defined with respect to their specific stimulus/manifestation pairs: whatever performs the function of causally mediating the occurrence of a specific manifestation state upon the occurrence of specific stimulus conditions is an instance of the disposition defined by that particular pair.14 Importantly, when we designate a particular structure as an instance of a functionally defined property, we are operating at a certain level of abstraction – one that eschews the more specific details of the causal pathway by which that function is performed and focuses on the general end states between which that pathway runs. When a dispositional property is realised by a particular system then, the pathway from „stimulus‟ to „manifestation‟ often "reaches over" a wide, multi-stage causal gap – thus, when such a gap is reliably and repeatedly bridged (upon the appropriate conditions being realised), we are afforded evidence of the existence of these properties.15 In abstracting to these end states, we not only abstract away from the particulars of that pathway – that is, the various links comprising the causal chain between those states – but also the various particular ways in which that pathway might be traversed. Accordingly, because there are many distinct instances of a particular type of stimulus condition which might lead to distinct instances of a particular type of manifestation state, the two states which define a disposition are determinables, not determinates. When a dispositional property is realised by a system then, that system is capable of producing a wide, gradientlike range of quantitatively distinct manifestation states, each representing a particular instance of its manifestation type, according to its particular stimulus input. Dispositional properties are therefore functional in a second sense, in that they establish a functional relation between a set of input values – that is, particular determinate instances of certain determinable stimulus conditions and a set of output 12 Dispositions are often contrasted with „categorical‟ properties – those whose nature must be imbued with causality from higher-order laws of nature, or else some flotilla of possible worlds. For discussions of the distinction, see Ellis (2010), Oderberg (2009), and Cross (2005). 13 Even the seemingly simple philosopher‟s paragon of dispositionality – „fragility‟ – is realised (in most cases) by a complex physical microstructure, and „breaking‟ is in fact a complex, multi-stage process featuring the aligning of various micro-events that represent decreasing degrees of structural integrity. 14 That dispositional properties are responsible for establishing this type of causal connection between two states is the basis for their ubiquitous assignment as truthmakers for subjunctive conditionals (especially counterfactuals). However, spelling out precisely what the truthmaking role is, and showing that dispositional properties play it with respect to those conditionals turns out to be exceptionally tricky. As it happens, I won‟t be making use of that concept here, as I‟ve no need for it. For a good discussion of the related issues, see Austin (2015b) and Eagle (2009). 15 I‟ve said "reliably and repeatedly" purposely here, as dispositional properties do not necessitate their manifestations – a fact ensured by the possibility of so-called „masks‟, properties or processes which interrupt the causal activity of dispositional properties. See Eagle (2009), Schrenk (2010), and Mumford & Anjum (2011) for good discussions of the issue. This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 5 values – that is, particular determinate instances of certain determinable manifestation states.16 In other words, more specifically, dispositional properties establish a causal link of functional co-variance of state-values between two variables.17 Because dispositions reliably and repeatedly produce particular end states, they are often understood as teleological, goal-directed properties – they are causally "directed toward", and are thus for those ends. When a system is goal-directed toward a particular end, it exhibits the phenomenon of persistence18: it maintains the production of its end state "as a result of changes occurring in the system that compensate for any disturbances taking place (provided these are not too great) either within or [external] to the system, disturbances which, were there no compensating changes elsewhere, would prevent the realisation of the [end state]".19 The causal process which dispositional properties initiate and mediate is characterised by this sort of "course correcting" towards a particular end state, which they do in a systematic and non-accidental fashion – that is to say, reliably and repeatedly, over a wide-range of changes/perturbations.20 In the framework of AE, organisms are ontologically sorted into natural kinds in virtue of sharing sets of causal properties which both generate and subsequently shape their morphological development it is my contention that these "powerful" properties are dispositional properties. The relevant question then is: is AE‟s ontology, armed with this contemporary gloss, consistent with our current understanding of the biological realm? I propose that it is – for my claim is that the advent of evolutionary developmental biology has afforded us a unique view of that realm, one whose requisite ontology is dispositional, and whose foundational principles just are those of AE: for evo-devo is a framework in which morphological variation is derived from invariant, functional causal mechanisms which serve as highly conserved "deep homologies", underwriting a vast array of organismal diversity. In order to make the argument for the viable evolution of AE by way of evo-devo, I turn now to the specifics. Recall that, if AE is to be plausible, there must be a set of causal capacities – on my gloss, a set of dispositional properties – jointly responsible for an organism‟s particularised morphological development. The question is: in any particular organism, are there discrete properties which function as generative mechanisms with respect to particular phenotypic traits? According to evo-devo, there most certainly are21: for one of the guiding principles of that framework is the modularity of development, according to which "...developmental systems are decomposable into components that operate according to their own intrinsically determined principles".22 These separable and distinct „developmental modules‟ are identified with highly internally integrated genetic regulatory networks which "interpret" particular intraand intercellular signalling into downstream (spatial and temporal) regulatory control via the production of transcription factors, resulting in patterns of expression which specify the particularised developmental pathways of discrete morphological structures.23 In other words, these modules are each responsible for the specified development of a particular morphological structure in a developing organism, and 16 In the dispositions literature, this fact is often referred to as dispositions being "multi-track". See Martin (2008), Manley and Wasserman (2008), Jacobs (2011), and Vetter (2013) for fuller discussions. 17 This is a species of the relation that Lewis (2000: 190) called „causal influence‟ which forms the conceptual bedrock of Woodward‟s (2003; 2010) influential theory of causation. 18 Of course, not all dispositions are strongly goal-directed in this sense, but the ones which will concern us here – namely, those that populate the biological realm certainly are. 19 Nagel (1977: 272). 20 See Walsh (2012), and Mayr (1992). 21 Indeed, as many have now argued, „modularity‟ may very well be a necessary requisite for the process of evolution: we may need variability to occur within discrete elements which doesn't affect other elements if organisms are going to survive mutations and be subsequently subject to selection pressures. See Lewontin (1978) and Altenberg (1995). 22 Müller (2008: 10). 23 See Winther (2001), Bolker (2000), and Von Dassow & Munro (1999). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 6 accordingly, are individuated with respect to the structure whose development they are causally responsible for, evidence for which is gathered either by ectopic expression experiments24, or else by the principled decomposition of genotype-phenotype mappings.25 Indeed, although discovering the niceties of the regulatory architecture which comprises these developmental modules is an interesting and thus far fruitful research programme (especially with respect to its prowess in establishing molecular-based phylogenetic lineages), what is most important is their generative specificity with respect to particular morphological structures. This is underscored by the fact that these modules‟ role in the production of such structures is characterised by a highly robust, degenerative process – one underwritten by their constitutive genetic regulatory networks‟ ability to maintain integrity by means of its non-isomorphic elements becoming isofunctional26 – , and is one which, over time, and in successive generations, may become autonomised, gaining a kind of independence from their (original) underlying genetic mechanisms.27 Accordingly, causal explanations of the development of the structures associated with these modules eventually operate at high „causality horizons‟ – that is, at explanatory levels "above" the workings of its molecular constituents.28 Recall that if AE is correct, the ontological ground floor of organisms consists in collections of properties which are (jointly) causally responsible for their specified morphological development – that is, in collections of dispositional properties, each "directed toward" the development of a particular morphological structure. Even on the general reading just given, I think it‟s easy to see that AE is consistent with evo-devo: the fundamental ontological postulates of the latter –„developmental modules‟ – can be conceptualised as instances of the ontological cornerstones of the former. In other words, from the Aristotelian point of view, developmental modules are dispositional properties.29 The developmental modules of evo-devo are causally responsible for the specified production of their associated morphological structures in developing organisms in virtue of their serving as a functional bridge between intraand inter-cellular signalling and specific downstream genetic expression patterns which initiate particularised developmental pathways resulting in the formation of those structures. These modules therefore function as ontological "switches", causally mediating the influence of certain activating conditions to produce particular states of affairs: given the appropriate stimulus conditions, developmental modules reliably and repeatedly produce particular end states. And it is with respect to these end states (read: morphological structures) that these modules are functionally individuated: for what is important, theoretically, to the definition of a particular module is not the particularities of the genetic regulatory networks (or hierarchical sets of such networks30) which undergird its activity, but rather the role it plays in morphological development. Thus, these "higher order" modules are defined after the fashion of dispositional properties, at a certain level of abstraction – away from the various complexities of the aforementioned particularities – and are therefore able to be conceptually (and in some cases, as mentioned above, physiologically) "disassociated" from any specific underlying mechanism and constitutive processes. Not only are these modules functionally individuated 24 This technique was especially prominent in Halder et al. (1995); For a general contemporary review in a particular case, see Ashery-Padan & Gruss (2001). And for an analysis of the expression patterns of modules in particular, see Raff & Sly (2000). 25 See Wagner & Altenberg (1996). 26 See Edelman & Gally (2001), Von Dassow et al. (2000), and Whitacre & Bender (2010). 27 This is discussed with particular examples in Müller & Newman (1999), and Müller (2003). 28 See Salazar-Ciudad & Jernvall (2013) for the concept of „causality horizons‟ in explanations of developmental morphology. 29 Though this general application has been made – in Wagner (2000) and Eble (2005)– , it has only been very briefly stated, and not explored in any depth. 30 It‟s plausible that there are at least four distinct "levels" of morphological organisation – see Rasskin-Gutman (2003). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 7 with respect to their end states, but they are plausibly "directed toward" those states – for the degenerative robustness of their underlying networks is an instance of the dispositional, teleological phenomenon of persistence.31 Having satisfied the basic conceptual criteria, let us call these developmental modules, in line with the Aristotelian metaphysic, phenomodulatory dispositions. Of course, according to AE, it‟s not enough that there exist collections of causal properties which are responsible for the morphological development of the organisms which possess them – these collections must also be (a) shared among certain sets of organisms, representing a kind of ontological stability, or invariance, and yet somehow function to (b) ontologically ground the "accidental" morphological variation among those sets. The question is: are there shared sets of phenomodulatory dispositions among groups of organisms which function to ontologically underwrite a wide range of their morphological variation? According to evo-devo, there most certainly are: for one of the fundamental posits of that framework is the existence of conserved developmental resources whose inherent plasticity is the causal ground of phenotypic variation. Indeed, in a notable shift from the neo-Darwinian perspective, evo-devo favours a „structuralist‟ approach32, wherein the diversity of organismal development is understood to be underwritten by a drastically less diverse set of developmental modules which themselves constrain and specify the variability of their associated morphological structures according to their own "generative rules".33 We now know that the morphological structure produced by a single developmental module, being underwritten by a particular genetic regulatory network, is capable of a wide variety of intraand inter-cellular environmentally induced phenotypic variation: alterations in „positional information‟ consisting mainly of heterochronical and heteropical changes in hormonal and endocrinal signalling – results in qualitative alterations of the phenotypic character of that structure; this is the phenomenon of phenotypic plasticity, attested to by the reality (read: quantifiability) of reaction norms.34 This is possible because, as evidenced by the evo-devo paragon of HOX regulatory networks, these modules are situated in the "bottleneck" of the process of development, between a host of upstream signalling pathways and a certain set of downstream „target genes‟, the latter of which are responsible for producing the "building blocks" of particular morphological structures.35 Because these regulatory networks are thus positioned, they function as causal mediators, interpreting cascades of upstream "inputs" into downstream "outputs" via their production of transcription factors which enact (spatial and temporal) regulatory control at the cis-regulatory sites of downstream target genes which directly specify cell fate.36 Thus, alterations in their input values are causally correlated with corresponding alterations in their output values – that is, with alterations in the qualitative character of their corresponding morphological structure.37 This fact brings with it two important points, the first being that a common set of modules possessed by the members of a single species is able to ground a wealth of their morphological variation for one and the same developmental module can be responsible for a wide variety of phenotypic variation in a particular structure as a result of (broadly construed) environmental influences: as described above, alterations in upstream signalling are interpreted by these modules into downstream regulatory control 31 Thus, in the context of dynamical systems theory, the morphological structures associated with these modules are often characterised as „attractor-states‟ which shape the "valleys" of an organisms‟ epigenetic landscape, resulting in many distinct developmental pathways leading to the same end-state. See Jaeger & Monk (2014), and Striedter (1998). 32 See Amundson (2005) for an excellent in-depth discussion of the „structuralist‟ paradigm and its relation to that of the Modern Synthesis. 33 Cf. Müller (2008). 34 See West-Eberhard (2003), and Pigliucci (2001). 35 For more on the concept of the „developmental hourglass‟, see Galis & Metz (2001) and Kalinka et al. (2010) 36 See Mann & Carroll (2002), Gurdon & Bourillot (2001), and Tabata (2001). 37 See Schlichting & Pigliucci (2002), and Aubin-Horth & Renn (2009). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 8 over a (shared) set of "building block" target genes, resulting in morphological changes in the development of that structure. Thus on this small, intra-species scale, the morphological variation of particular traits can be accounted for by the causal activity of a shared set of developmentally plastic modules. More important perhaps is the second, rather surprising point that even inter-species morphological variation of particular traits is often grounded in the causal activities of a shared set of developmental modules; this is the so-called phenomenon of deep homology.38 Here, as a result of distinct species possessing distinct sets of downstream target genes – and hence, distinct sets of regulatory regions – a single, shared developmental module, producing a particular set of transcription factors, is capable of controlling the specified formation of two seemingly distinct morphological structures. In other words, on evo-devo‟s „structuralist‟ framework, even the more extreme qualitative variation of a particular morphological structure present in two otherwise distinct groups of organisms is often causally underwritten by a shared developmental module. Importantly, these modules which function as "units of stability" (Eble 2005: 223) underlying the morphological variation among seemingly intractably qualitatively diverse structures in distinct populations are themselves primarily responsible for that variation. On account of their aforementioned roles as causal mediators between upstream signalling pathways and downstream target genes, these shared developmental modules are not only responsible for the development of a particular morphological structure in distinct sets of organisms39, but also for variations on that structure: their generative competence in defining a trait‟s „morphospace‟ – the representation of its possible structural permutations is an intrinsic affair.40 In other words, it is their inherent plasticity that grounds these modules‟ ability to function as the causal basis for the morphological variation on their associated structures, as the specification of their reaction norms representing the functional relation between upstream signalling and downstream targets is a role which is "immanent to the system".41 On the evo-devo framework then, there exist shared, discrete developmental elements within and among populations of species which are intrinsically causally responsible for the specified development of a certain generalised morphological structure, and which causally control the production of the various particularised forms of that structure. As I hope by now is clear, the operative ontology of that framework centres on phenomodulatory dispositions, and is theoretically consistent with the metaphysic of AE. As discussed above, phenomodulatory dispositions are functionally individuated, causally active elements "directed toward" the development of a particular morphological structure. Importantly however, dispositional properties are functional in a second sense, for the causal role they perform is one of mediating and specifying the causal co-variance of determinate state-values between two determinable variables. Thus, the developmental role of morphological modules in functionally mediating between upstream positional signals and the production of a particular morphological structure is a dispositional role – they function to "interpret" specific, determinate collections of a generalised class of stimulus factors into specific, determinate forms of a generalised manifestation state. Due to this inherent plasticity of dispositional properties, one and the same disposition is able to causally underwrite a wide (though restricted) range of end state variations, and hence serve as the shared, "hidden" foundation of a diversity of qualitative attributes among seemingly fundamentally diverse sets of objects. As we have seen, 38 See Shubin, Tabin, and Carroll (2009), and Wagner (2007). 39 Wagner (2014: 92-93) argues that „character-identity‟ determination (a) cannot be specified by positional information, given that they are variable in and among instances, and that it likewise (b) cannot be specified by downstream target genes, given not only their similar variability, but also their regulatory dependence upon upstream modules. 40 Cf. Newman and Müller (2006), and Newman et al. (2006). For the concept of „morphospace‟ generally, see Rasskin-Gutman (2005), and McGhee (2006). 41 Müller (2008: 19). This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 9 developmental modules, as the ground of "deep homology", serve this same function, and in the same way: they represent a kind of ontological stability, or invariance which grounds the possibility of subsequent derivative, or "accidental" (in the Aristotelian sense) organismal variation. Essentialism Evolved If, as I have claimed, the evidence of evo-devo points us to the existence of phenomodulatory dispositions, and its general explanatory framework mirrors the foundational metaphysic of AE, what then does an evolved essentialism look like? The first, rather general answer, in line with the initial criteria offered, is that an Aristotelian essence is (a) comprised of a set of phenomodulatory dispositions which (b) function as generative modules for particularised morphological development which (c) are shared among groups of organisms, delineating them as members of the same „kind‟. Thankfully, with the above discussion in mind, we can be more specific about these „essential‟ properties, both quantitatively and qualitatively. First, quantitatively: an essence of a natural kind must be comprised of a nested, scalar set of a number of phenomodulatory dispositions – ones whose manifestations comprise a wide-ranged set of more "basic" morphological features (such as the general spatio-temporal axis of an organism and its general morphological shape-differentiation) within which lies a more narrow-ranged set whose manifestations comprise more specified traits (such as head type, eye type, etc.)42 In other words, there are as many essential properties of a natural kind as there are ontologically distinct morphological structures which compose the members of that kind: typically, the higher-up a kind is in the evolutionary chain, the more essential properties it will possess. But secondly, and more importantly, given the nature of phenomodulatory dispositions, the essential properties of a natural kind must be those individually responsible for the morphological development of particular structural type of phenotypic feature – for these are properties which are "directed toward" determinable, not determinate end states. Thus, the essence of a natural kind cannot be identified with a set of particularised morphological structures, but must instead be defined by a set of discrete morphogenetic developmental units, each individually responsible for the potential production of a unified gradient of an interrelated set of quantitative and qualitative permutations on a general architectural theme. In other words, each property that is "of the essence" of a natural kind establishes a wide-ranging and complex structural morphospace with respect to the specified development of each of the morphological features within the compositional make-up of the members of that kind. Utilising the conceptual framework of dynamic systems theory, where morphospace modelling of developmental modules is becoming increasingly important, this claim can be made more precise43: the essential properties of natural kinds are characterised by higher-order „epigenetic landscapes‟ whose topological peaks and troughs represent the various developmental pathways towards the various possible particularised end-states of the morphological structures for which those properties are responsible. Each essential property of a natural kind – that is, each of its phenomodulatory dispositions – is thus defined by a multi-faceted, determinable developmental landscape whose various „attractor basins‟ represent the variety of determinate forms which those properties‟ morphological structures may assume (in correlation with distinct sets of developmental stimuli). The essence of a natural kind then functions as a type of dynamic bauplan which causally undergirds the "static" morphological features typically associated with a set, or sets of organisms: its role is to establish an organism-wide „morphospace‟, shaping and constraining the various possible (and typical) courses of its structural development, and, in any particular 42 Accordingly, given our knowledge of the existence of highly conserved developmental mechanisms – such as "toolkit" genes, discussed earlier – every natural kind will share a significant proportion of their essential properties, these being ontological traces of their evolutionary origins. 43 Davila-Velderrain et al. (2015), Huang (2012), Wang et al. (2011) This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 10 instance, to be the prime mover in the environmentally-determined, particularised exploration of that space.44 Using this criteria, it may be that „cell‟ marks out a biological natural kind, defined by a single essential property: we now have quantitative mappings of the various developmental potentialities of qualitative cell-fate, complete with probability assignments with respect to those fates according to the influence of environmental stimuli, lending empirical credence to the existence of a phenomodulatory dispositional property.45 On a larger scale, the specified homologue variants of developmental modules underwritten by homeotic selector genetic regulatory networks may qualify as essential properties for the sets of organisms which possess them. For instance, the morphological structure of the elytra – the scleratised forewings of beetles – looks to be "of the essence" of the organisms which possess them: these modules, though ubiquitously grounded in the Ubx-abdA regulatory network, provide the causal basis for a wide-reaching reaction norm specifying the development of varying degrees of qualitatively distinct elytra shapes, sizes, colours, etc. among a variety of distinct species according to their varying "upstream" signalling pathways.46 In this way, particular "bottleneck" developmental modules responsible for the formation of the basic set of morphological structures which compose an organism are plausibly instances of phenomodulatory dispositions: though stable with respect to their possession among a wide range of organisms and with respect to their developmental control of a particular morphological structure, they nonetheless provide and specify a wide range of regulatory-dependent inter-structural variability – the precise mapping of which is now being carefully elucidated with the aid of dynamic systems theory. With all of this in mind, it is a clear consequence of this conception of AE that natural kinds cannot be identified with species, but rather must be considered on analogy with the conceptual middle of the taxonomic tree, where the phenomenon of environmental exploitation still occurs in a way that creates seemingly fundamental divides further down – for no collection of particularised instances of a phenomodulatory disposition‟s manifestation-type could represent the ontological division that „natural kind‟ carves. Or to put it another way, again within the framework of dynamic systems theory, because the essence of a natural kind is defined by discrete sets of determinable developmental landscapes, particular collections of determinate end-states within those topologies cannot possibly capture the richer, more expansive conceptual space carved-out by the definition of „natural kind‟: no limited set of developmental trajectories can hope to reconstruct the geometry of an entire topology. In this way, „natural kind‟ is a more inclusive concept than „species‟: the exploration of "morphogenetic space" afforded by the nature of phenomodulatory dispositions outstrips the narrow confines of the more particularised, well-entrenched (read: canalised) developmental pathways which typify the members of particular species. Importantly, with this novel interpretation of AE comes a novel characterisation of what the Aristotelian „natural state‟ is. Because the ontological nature of „essence‟ consists in specified potentiality – that is, dispositionality – the kind-defining „natural state‟ of an organism just is a dynamically plastic, generalised morphological developmental template. In other words, what it is to be a particular natural kind is to be an instantiation of a particular set of specifically patterned developmentally branching morphospaces. That said, it‟s clear that although this form of AE declares stability, not variability to be ontologically fundamental, there is nuanced sense in which variation is fundamental in a certain respect: though the „natural state‟ must be stable with respect to its possession, it is undoubtedly dynamic with respect to its activity – for, as we have seen, the possibility of the causal production of specified 44 For a defence of the „prime mover‟ aspect of this claim, see Austin (2015a). 45 Verd et al. (2014), Bhattacharya et al. (2011) 46 Wagner (2014), Deutsch (2005) This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 11 variability is an intrinsic feature of the properties which compose it.47 Hence, to return to the earlier objections, the defender of AE need not deny that variation is the "raw material of evolutionary change", or even that it represents a "fundamental reality of nature" – indeed, the viability of the theoretical framework of AE requires that the latter be the case. Consequently, on this conception of the Aristotelian natural state, not only is morphological diversity among members of the same kind expected, it is accounted for: it is "of the nature" of kind-defining essential properties to contain within them the potentiality for environmentally-dependent variation on their associated morphological structures and, due to the specific functional role that phenomodulatory dispositions play, no particular instance of such structure within a member of a natural kind can be produced independently of its intraand inter-cellular environment. In other words, because the kinddefining natural state of an organism just is a set of functional correlations between various values of environmental factors and various morphological responses, phenotypic diversity among members of the same kind is simply a consequence of their fundamental ontology.48 Understood in this way, Sober‟s (1980: 374-377) aforementioned objection now looks to rest upon the horns of a false dilemma: no particularised form of a kind‟s morphological traits is "more natural" than any other – as each of them are in fact grounded in the „natural state‟ – and although the „natural state‟ functions as an intrinsic developmental plan, no particular instance of a natural kind develops independently of the causal context of its environment. Not only does this conception of the Aristotelian „natural state‟ allow and account for this sort of morphological variation within a natural kind, but due to the nature of phenomodulatory dispositions as "higher-order", functional properties, it likewise allows and accounts for genotypic variation therein – thus, it is an essentialism that eschews any crude form of genetic reductionism.49 For the Aristotelian natural state, on the conception offered here, cannot be grounded in any particular genetic configuration: while it‟s true that if any particular genetic architecture is going to realise a phenomodulatory disposition it must perform a certain developmentally central causal role, any such configuration (and elements thereof) that does perform that role is an instance of that dispositional property. As in developmental systems theory, because a particular epigenetic landscape which maps-out the developmental fate of a system is specified by a higher-order, topological structure, any set of mechanistic underpinnings which comprise a system which satisfy that structure‟s dynamics realises that landscape.50 In this way, the aforementioned eventual evolutionary "disassociation" of developmental modules from their underlying generative mechanisms – and therefore, the phenomenon of intra-kind genetic diversity can be understood as an inevitable consequence of the very ontology of „essence‟. If we take on board this novel conception of the Aristotelian „natural state‟, it‟s clear that the various historically damaging critiques of that model presented at the outset of this paper now simply collectively miss their mark. And all of this goes to show that, in the context of the proper niche – constructed from a dispositional characterisation of „essence‟ and a corresponding reformulated understanding of the Aristotelian „natural state‟ as a kind of metaphysically dynamic bauplan – , and having 47 In fact, it‟s for this very reason that Wagner (2014: 20) refers to his modelling of developmental modules as a theory of „variational structuralism‟. 48 According to this conception of the Aristotelian „natural state‟, if we want to carve the world into proper natural kinds, it won‟t be enough to group together organisms which share exact morphologies – rather, as evo-devo has taught us, we must look conceptually underneath those morphologies. 49 If, as Rosenberg (2001) argues, the process of natural selection operates on function, and is rather "blind" to structure, we shouldn‟t expect the essence of a natural kind, being so central to the process of ontogenic development, to be necessarily tied-up to a particular material realisation base. 50 Jaeger & Monk (2014), Dupré (2013), Rosa & Exteberria (2011), Gilbert & Bolker (2001) This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 12 been refined by the selective pressures of the conceptual challenges of contemporary biology, an evolved essentialism is at hand. Summing Up As both the experimental utility and explanatory scope of the theoretical framework of evo-devo have substantially increased over the years, there has been a corresponding, though admittedly small resurgence of AE in the philosophy of biology, one to which this paper aims to contribute.51 A central theme of this movement has been the claim that not only are essentialism and evolution not in conflict, but that the latter in some way requires the former. Though the theory of AE presented here differs importantly in both method and detail from these other works, it may nonetheless function as an expression of that same motif, understood as a more empirically discerning and metaphysically precise property-based account of how the ontological commitments of the contemporary framework of evo-devo lay bare what that requirement consists in. To that end, I have argued that if we re-conceptualise AE‟s original ontology of capacities in the form of contemporary dispositional properties, and subsequently understand the Aristotelian „natural state‟ within the explanatory framework of evo-devo, we are afforded an essentialism that is not only theoretically plausible, in virtue of it being immune to its most prominent objections, but also empirically plausible, in virtue of it being in no way in conflict with, and perhaps even functioning as the conceptual foundation of contemporary evolutionary theory. That said, in offering a general metaphysical theory of what it is to be an Aristotelian natural kind, I have purposely remained silent on the details of the further, future project of offering a specific empirical theory of which particular collections of developmental modules qualify as Aristotelian natural kinds. The reason for this silence is simple: the sole aim of this paper has been to propose and elucidate the metaphysical structure of a novel, empirically informed AE. Although such a theory may provide the conceptual foundations of a focused empirical research programme, this is a project which should not, and indeed cannot be carried out from the armchair: the subsequent success or failure of the search for and classification of biological natural kinds according to the proposed ontological divisions of this form of AE is a matter which must be decided by more than mere metaphysics. With that in mind, there remain undoubtedly important areas for further conceptual work – among them, providing a theory of the origination of novel natural kinds, and the process by which this might take place, as well as elucidating potential empirical methods for discerning distinct natural kinds, and their various accompanying epistemological difficulties.52 Although I think there‟s philosophically fruitful work to be done in both of these areas, I here leave them for another time, with the hope that this paper might function as the conceptual bauplan for their subsequent study. Acknowledgements I am grateful for the generous support of the Analysis Trust. 51 Most notably by Walsh (2006) and Boulter (2012), and to a lesser degree Devitt (2008). 52 In the context of evo-devo, these sorts of studies may already be taking place. With respect to (a), investigating the effect of regulatory novelties on homology-generating pathways via mutation or epigenetic marking may be a viable way of discerning the arrival of novel phenomodulatory dispositions: see Wagner (2014), and Webster & Goodwin (2006). With respect to (b), the method of distinguishing two homologous modules in virtue of their nonoverlapping sets of morphospace „character states‟ may constitute an empirical method of detecting the presence of distinct phenomodulatory dispositions: see Wagner‟s (2014) discussion of representing the „variational modalities‟ of homologous structures. This is a pre-print version of Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution, Synthese (forthcoming). The final publication will be available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1066-4 13 References Altenberg, L. (1995). Genome Growth and the Evolution of the Genotype-Phenotype Map. In W. Banzhaf, & F. 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Vol.:(0123456789) Erkenntnis https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-019-00191-6 1 ORIGINAL RESEARCH Coordination in Thought Henry Clarke1 Received: 12 April 2018 / Accepted: 20 November 2019 © The Author(s) 2019 Abstract Coordination in thought is the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. Such treatment can be indirect, via an identity belief, or direct. Direct coordination presents a problem concerning how this treatment is justified. Dickie (Fixing reference, OUP, Oxford, 2015) accounts for the justification of coordination in terms of aptness to a motivational state: coordination serves to fulfil a need to represent things outside the mind. I argue that this account gets the problem coordination presents wrong, and so does not present an adequate solution. While the material of that account may be reconfigured to provide a more promising proposal, I argue that this depends on a specious psychology of belief, and will anyway end up being circular. I propose an account that, while similar in some ways, improves on both the official and reconfigured Dickie-style accounts, and points to some broader conclusions about the nature of rational cognition. 1 Introduction Beliefs are mental states that are about, or refer to, things in the broad sense that encompasses objects, persons, places, times, and so on. It is possible for a believer to have, and highly likely that she will have, several beliefs that are about the same thing. Whether or not two beliefs are about the same thing, it is possible for the believer both to treat them as such and not to do so. The problem of coordination in thought concerns cases in which beliefs are treated as about the same thing, the matter of what they are in fact about aside. In a recent discussion, Dickie (2015; unadorned page numbers are references to this text) picks out why coordination presents a problem by contrasting two ways of treating one's beliefs as being about a single thing that is 'essential to a right account of justification for our inferential practices' (80). One requires having a belief to the effect that the subject of one set of beliefs (Cicero, say) is identical to the subject of another set of beliefs (Tully). In such a case of indirect coordination, one believes * Henry Clarke [email protected] 1 Birmingham, UK H. Clarke 1 3 that Cicero is Tully, and so also that everything one believes about Cicero is also true of Tully, and vice versa. In the case of direct coordination, one simply takes the beliefs to be about a single thing without an identity belief. This is shown in how the beliefs are taken as premises in inferences. One form an inference may have can be represented like this: (i) a is F (ii) a is G (iii) Therefore, something is F and G. In this representation, the name 'a' appears twice in the premises of the inference to the generalised conclusion. Such an inference may be justified or not: If you are not justified in treating the terms as co-referential, then even if they do co-refer, as far as you are concerned this will be a mere matter of luck...[A]n inferential move that will generate a true conclusion only if the subject is lucky is not justified.... [I]f we are to explain what justifies a subject in moving from (i) and (ii) to (iii), we must explain what justifies a subject in treating token singular terms as co-referential. (ibid.) And this explanatory task 'arises wherever the validity of an inference depends on the co-reference of token singular terms it contains' (ibid.). The task cannot be undertaken by appeal to identity beliefs. At some point, inferences that involve treating beliefs as about the same thing must trade on identity, in Campbell's (1987/88) phrase, since identity premises must themselves be coordinated with the others. A believer can be justified in treating her beliefs as being about the same thing. But the obvious way for the justification to come about, an identity premise, cannot be the only way, and it is not clear what the other way might be. Hence coordination presents a problem. Or does it? Linguistic terms belong to types, tokens of which have the same reference; so directly coordinated terms might be thought of simply as somehow involving type-identical terms, as in the double occurrence of 'a' in the schema above.1 But, as Dickie points out, 'the problem is that the relevant notion of sameness of type will have to be cashed out in terms of the notion of thoughts justifiably treated by the subject as about the same object, which is what we are trying to explain' (82). A different sort of solution holds that the justification 'rests on pre-existing unity relations between the beliefs-unity relations that are an artefact of the way these beliefs are formed'.2 So, for example, if one has a body of coordinated beliefs formed on the basis of a stream of perceptual experience of an object, 'you take the property information delivered through the perceptual channel, and marshal it into 1 Fodor (2008), Sainsbury and Tye (2012), and Prinz (2002) can be seen as proponents of this sort of view, though they do not address the problem of coordination directly. It is possible that there might be a response to the circularity worry that Dickie outlines, though the issues are complex and it is not possible to provide a full discussion here. At the very least the circularity worry is a challenge that makes the appeal to types unattractive. 2 Dickie cites Campbell (op. cit.) and Recanati (2012). Lawlor (2001) argues for a similar view. 1 3 Coordination in Thought a body of beliefs which you treat as about a single thing.... [Y]our justification for treating the premises as about a single thing comes from the underlying unity relations secured by the way the beliefs are formed'. The problem is that 'this picture can be sustained only if the underlying bundling of information is itself justified.... [I]f bundling together information into bodies of belief according to these strategies is something we just do, rather than something we are justified in doing-it is hard to see how an appeal to the unity the strategies deliver can play the suggested role'.3 Neither proposal works, so it remains unclear how direct coordination is justified. The aim of this paper is to approach this problem through a critical discussion of the solution proposed by Dickie. Thinking through its shortcomings will help with formulating a more promising solution. Dickie's official account of justified direct coordination relies on the idea that believers have a basic need to represent things outside the mind. It combines this with the claim that bodies of belief-that is, networks of coordinated beliefs-are characterised by proprietary means of justification, which are specific ways in which a thinker is disposed to revise or maintain those beliefs in the face of new information. The idea, which will be set out in Sect. 2, is that these means of justification serve to fix the reference of the beliefs that make up the body of beliefs all together, so providing a reliable way of fulfilling the need, and so making the coordination of beliefs justified. The objection to this account is that it rests on a mistaken conception of the problem. That coordination fulfils a need does not bear on the problem in the way that the account supposes. As I will argue in Sect. 3, what is needed is an indication of sameness of reference, and fulfilling the need to represent is orthogonal to this. The characterisation of beliefs that Dickie employs in this account might be reconfigured to give a different solution, on which the proprietary means of justification do the work. The problem is that they can do so only by presupposing what is to be explained. Showing this is the aim of Sect. 4. These objections motivate an alternative approach, presented in Sect. 5, on which it is the presence of the inferential dispositions distinctive of coordinated beliefs themselves that serve, under appropriate conditions, to indicate that the beliefs are about the same thing. This account overlaps with Dickie's in some respects, though the differences are significant and point to some more general conclusions about the nature of rational cognition. 2 Dickie's Official Account I begin by setting out Dickie's official account. This has a number of components, so I will go over it in some detail. Dickie begins by casting the justification of coordination (that is, direct coordination-I will usually drop this qualification) as an instance of a form of justification of behaviour, 'aptness in virtue of motivational state' (91). This is a 3 Proponents of the appeal to mental files go further than Dickie's brief remarks suggest. I note also that 'structural unity' need not be tied to how beliefs are formed; this point is discussed below. H. Clarke 1 3 generalisation of what may be the more familiar idea of aptness in virtue of- justification by-intention. This comes in two degrees of strength. Behaviour is weakly justified by an intention 'just in virtue of being selected by the intention'. Behaviour is strongly justified by an intention if and only if '(a) it is weakly justified by the intention, and (b) it is a reliable means to the intention's fulfilment' (86). Dickie elaborates the notion of selection by intention by responding to an objection: Why think that 'selected by' means anything more than just 'caused by'? And if 'selected by' just means 'caused by', why think that the notion of weak justification is genuinely normative? (94–5) In response, Dickie sketches a 'generic' notion of guidance, in the form of a schematic description of a mechanism that is guided by a motivational state. Such a mechanism (A) has a goal-representation (i.e. an representation of the end-state of a process), (B) has a feedback mechanism that generates information about the current status of the system, and (C) behaves in a way jointly determined by the goal represented and information about current status, in such a way that (D) the behaviour determined by the goal-representation and the feedback mechanism tends towards the end-state. Dickie emphasises that 'guidance is reason-generating only where the goal-representing state is a conscious personal-level state of a subject. When the goalrepresenting state is a state of this kind, we say that it provides a "reason" for the actions to which it gives rise' (98). Behaviour is a reliable means of fulfilling a guiding intention when the (D)tendency is a non-lucky way of fulfilling the motivational state. There may be tricky questions about how exactly to understand reliability and non-luckiness, but I will take it as understood for present purposes. Justification as aptness to a motivational state is, then, to be understood as guidance on the (A)–(D) model. Dickie claims that not only intentions can figure as a guiding motivational state, but also needs-more precisely, basic needs. A basic need is 'a personal-level mental state which, like an intention, can guide action, but which, unlike an intention, does not have propositional content' (100). A specifically basic need-involving version of weak/strong justification by motivational state can be easily formulated (101–2). When applied to coordination, aptness to guiding motivational state gives us the claim that 'the information-marshalling moves involved in direct coordination are motivated by the need to represent, and are justified because apt to their guiding motivational state' (103). The need to represent is obviously important in the context of setting out her view of coordination, though Dickie provides little detail about it. We are told 1 3 Coordination in Thought that thinkers have a basic need to represent objects or individual things, but not much more. Perhaps Dickie simply takes it as a given that we have such a need and what it is. Perhaps that is right; there may be no illuminating gloss on what a need is, but it is fairly straightforward to provide examples, like the need for water. And it is hard to imagine what a human life would be without the live possibility of forming beliefs (possessing knowledge) about individual things in the world around us. Dickie also does not really argue for the claim that '[d]irect coordination of information carried by perception and testimony into bodies of belief is guided by the need to represent' (ibid.), though one might take this to be supported by being part of (what may be) the best explanation.4 Dickie does offer more explicit support for the idea that coordination is apt to the need to represent. This involves two claims. One is REFERENCE AND JUSTIFICATION: S's 〈α〉 beliefs are about o iff justification for holding them converges on o (so that, in general, if S is justified in believing 〈α is Φ〉, S will be unlucky if o is not Φ). (103) Justification for a belief is to be understood as its being part of a body of beliefs. Bodies of belief, according to Dickie, have proprietary means of justification that converge on an object. A proprietary means of justification is a specific 'trumping' route to justification-a route to justification for 〈α is Φ〉 beliefs such that the subject is disposed to treat justification for believing 〈α is Φ〉 generated by this route as overriding justification for believing 〈α is not Φ〉 generated by any other. (51) Such trumping routes to justification converge on an object when it excludes situations where o does not have the properties attributed to it. The second claim is that, 'as a matter of empirical fact', coordinated bodies of beliefs 'match' properties of the object (that is, accurately attribute properties to their referents) picked out by the proprietary means of justification (102). Dickie argues for this empirical claim at some length, but we can grant it for present purposes. By contrast, surprisingly little is offered by way of support for the claim that bodies of beliefs have trumping routes to justification, given how important it is for supporting the view of coordination. I will return to this in Sect. 4. With these claims in place, the account of coordination as apt to fulfil the need to represent runs as follows. Bodies of belief are constituted by beliefs that are directly coordinated. They have trumping routes to justification that determine the reference of those beliefs. So coordinating beliefs is part of what gets them their referential content, so what makes them represent things, thus fulfilling the need. When 4 One problem that might be explored further turns on the idea that the need is a state identified in terms of its content, its fulfilment condition (to represent things outside the mind), though Dickie does not make it clear how the interactions between this state and the other parts of the mechanism are contentinvolving. The interaction is presumably also a causal one, but nothing is said about how it is both causal and content-involving. H. Clarke 1 3 the proprietary means of justification is in empirical fact reliable, then the need is fulfilled in a non-lucky way. Therefore, on Dickie's account, coordination is both weakly and strongly justified by aptness to the need to represent. Does this solve the problem? 3 The Reason's Not the Need Dickie sets out the problem of coordination as concerning the justification of coordination behaviour (or 'information-marshalling moves'). By itself, this is unobjectionable. What is objectionable, however, is the move from this to the idea that the kind of justification we are after is justification as aptness. While it may seem a little high-handed to say that Dickie's solution is based on a mistaken conception of the problem, this can be shown by looking again at Dickie's introduction of the problem in terms of the contrast between direct and indirect coordination. Dickie raises the problem of coordination as concerning inferential luck, then relates it to Anscombean practical knowledge (knowledge about what one is doing possessed in virtue of one's intentions), then casts coordination as behaving in a certain way, and the problem as one of justifying that behaviour, and finally comes up with coordination as a behaviour which is justified because apt to a motivational state (see 91). The question about what justifies coordination is raised in the context of its role in inference, and the answer fixes on how coordination is justified as a means to fulfilling a need. The objection I want to press is that the end-point does not have enough to do with the initial problem to count as a solution. Insofar as coordination raises a potential shortcoming in response to which justification is required, aptness to motivational state is irrelevant. The question is not just where there something positive we can say about coordination. It has specifically to do with the inferences distinctive of coordination: whether the presupposition made by those inferences is a rational one to make. 3.1 Rationally Presupposed Identity In what sense do directly coordinated beliefs involve a presupposition? Coordination is treating one's beliefs as being about the same thing. Treating one's beliefs as being about the same thing may be manifested in many ways, but one sure sign is that the thinker will be disposed to involve them in certain forms of inference. A clear example of such an inferential disposition is that involving the inference from two beliefs attributing distinct properties to something to the existentially general conclusion that there is something with both of those properties. The contrast between direct and indirect coordination lies in how those beliefs are combined to get that sort of conclusion. Indirect coordination occurs when there needs to be an identity belief; direct coordination occurs when there does not need to be an identity belief. In the case of indirect coordination, the identity belief is needed to indicate that the otherwise uncoordinated beliefs are about the same thing. Without this, the thinker would be only lucky if the inference turns out to be valid. This 1 3 Coordination in Thought applies also in the case of directly coordinated beliefs-except there is no identity belief to do that job. The problem of direct coordination comes from the fact that the role filled by the identity belief, to indicate sameness of reference in the inferences that the thinker is disposed to make, still needs to be filled when identity is presupposed by, and not represented as a premise in, the inference. The identity premise does this indirectly. The point about inferences trading on identity is that, at some point, all inferences that involve repeated 'terms', multiple beliefs about something, require something to play that role directly. It cannot be identity beliefs all the way down. This is the sense in which directly coordinated beliefs involve a presupposition: they are beliefs for which the thinker is disposed to make inferences that presupposes sameness of reference. The problem of direct coordination is to explain what fills this role-what indicates sameness of reference-in the direct case, given that it cannot be an identity belief that figures as a premise.5 The identity of what the beliefs are about is taken for granted, not explicitly entertained, but as the thinker is justified in doing so, there must be something that indicates that the identity obtains. None of this diverges much from how Dickie sets up the problem. Now I want to add some additional detail. An inference might result in a true belief, and so be successful in some sense, but be lucky. There are two dimensions in which a disposition to engage in an inference that presupposes identity that is lucky would be lacking. The luckiness-making features would also obtain in the case that it does not result in a truth. So we can suspend the question of truth, and concentrate on potential shortcomings that such an inference may have. First, an inference being lucky is like a guess: the process leading up to it was not one that an epistemically responsible person would undertake. Second, drawing an inference without something to indicate that it is valid would be like finding oneself with an unaccountable conviction that something is the case: neither process nor result makes sense as a coherent part of the thinker's cognitive life. The shortcomings concern epistemic responsibility and self-understanding. The problem of coordination is the problem of accounting for how inferential dispositions involving directly coordinated beliefs can have these properties, where this must be done in terms of a feature of those beliefs and not an additional belief. There are obvious overlaps between the two properties: both have to do with rationality, with the reasons that bear on what we think and do, and both concern an apparent feature of our cognitive lives that stands in need of explanation, or else a revision in our self-image is called for. There is, nevertheless, an asymmetry between them. The question about responsibility cannot really be answered in the absence of some answer to the question about self-understanding; to have a sense of 5 Is the presupposition a belief, or something else? While it is true that the presupposition has truth conditions, and involves a 'pro-attitude' towards that content, I am inclined to say that it is not a belief, or if it is, it is very different from normal beliefs. In any case, the point is that an identity which is presupposed in an inference does not figure in the inference as a premise, for the reasons rehearsed in Sect. 1. If the reader is puzzled about how the presupposed identity can interact with the inference if not as a premise, then they have grasped the puzzling nature of coordination. A positive account of coordination ought to resolve this puzzle. Dickie's account fails to do this, as I argue below; I attempt to do better in Sect. 5. H. Clarke 1 3 what speaks in favour of an aspect of one's cognition is to some extent to understand one's thinking. By contrast, the question about self-understanding may be raised, and answered, independently of any view about the epistemic status of the presupposition. It matters for understanding rational cognition, even in the absence of a compelling answer to the question about epistemic responsibility. And while it is perhaps a given that coordination of beliefs is a rational undertaking (it really does make sense for us to treat our beliefs as being about the same thing), human fallibility means there is at least some room for it to turn out that inferences involve coordinated beliefs fail to be epistemically responsible. Again, that being the case would not obviate the question about self-understanding. It is possible to do something rationally and irresponsibly. In drawing out this additional detail about the problem of coordination, I am not making any claims with which Dickie should disagree. All this is implicit in Dickie's own exposition of the problem, in particular the idea that coordination is justified only if it is luck-excluding. Before identifying the disagreement, I want to emphasise the following point of agreement: an adequate account of justified coordination needs to give an account of conscious, personal-level states of the thinker. Coordination is justified in the relevant sense when a thinker has reason to treat her beliefs in the way distinctive of direct coordination. This reason is an indication that the coordinated beliefs are about the same thing, and so what gives her a sense that the inferences she is disposed to make are valid. If this way of treating her beliefs is to form a coherent part of her cognitive life, it must therefore involve conscious, personal-level states, in the minimal sense that the indication of sameness of reference must be something of which thinker herself is aware. An account that referred to elements of the thinker's sub-personal information processing mechanisms or to personal-level states without connecting these to her conscious mental life would fail by this standard. In the context of her official account, Dickie holds that '[g]uidance is reason-generating only where the goalrepresenting state is a conscious personal-level state of a subject' (99), which tallies with this idea. This does not mean denying that unconscious or implicit beliefs may be coordinated, or denying that information represented at the sub-personal level could be said to be coordinated when processed in some part of the thinker's cognitive system. It does mean denying that the problem we are concerned with here arises in such cases, since the question of the thinker's self-understanding does not apply there. It would require too long a discussion to clarify all the relevant issues concerning the status of sub-personal psychology and the distinction between conscious and unconscious beliefs, so I hereby merely flag this as an assumption I share with Dickie. In brief, coordination presents the problem of rationally presupposed identity when it occurs consciously, because the problem is to show how a thinker can treat her beliefs as being about the same thing in a way that she herself finds intelligible.6 6 Thanks to anonymous reviewers for Erkenntnis for pressing me on various points in this section. 1 3 Coordination in Thought 3.2 Aptness to the Need to Represent Does Not Solve the Problem To review: the problem of (direct) coordination is the problem of saying what it is about coordinated beliefs that would make the believer's disposition to employ those beliefs in inferences that presuppose sameness of reference (a) epistemically responsible and (b) an intelligible part of her cognitive life. This allows us to pinpoint why aptness in virtue of the need to represent (in fact, any application of the idea of aptness in virtue of motivational state) does not solve the problem. Neither aspect of the problem is a matter of instrumental assessment. Showing how coordination behaviour is a means, reliable or otherwise, for achieving something the thinker is motivated (needs, intends, desires, or whatever else) to do is beside the point. This is an instance of a general principle that considerations bearing on the instrumental rationality of an action or behaviour do not answer all of the questions about the rationality of that action/behaviour-especially when it involves acting on a presupposition. To illustrate this, consider another case of a rational action that makes a presupposition. Speech acts sometimes make presuppositions, and may be rational, justified actions. Suppose someone sincerely asks you: 'When did you stop smoking?' That question presupposes that at some point you were a smoker. Maybe the question puzzles you; you want to know how to make sense of their asking that question. An answer might well be: the inquirer intended to discover when you stopped smoking. That intention selects the speech act, so the act is weakly justified; asking the question is a reliable means of fulfilling the intention, so it is strongly justified as well (in the proprietary senses Dickie employs). But it says nothing as to whether the presupposition the act makes itself makes any sense. It says only that the act that made the presupposition made sense, under some description. If there is nothing to say about what the questioner took to speak in favour of the presupposition, then adducing the intention to discover whether you stopped smoking, and the selection of the speech act by that intention, leaves the speech act to that extent unexplained. We have not got a full account. So the move from raising the question about what justifies coordination in the context of its role in inference to answering it by saying that coordination is justified as a means to fulfilling an intention embodies a mistake. Part of the reason for it may be the sort of examples Dickie uses to illustrate and motivate the account.7 Robin Hood is a skilled archer. He is attempting to hit the target. He comports his body just so, lets loose, and hits the bullseye. What justifies him in moving in that way was not that he happened to be successful, but that his movements were controlled by his intention of hitting the target, and were reliable in bringing off that intention. The example is linked to the problem of coordination because they can both be thought of in terms of the justification of behaviour. But the problem of coordination is not a 7 See 87–89ff. H. Clarke 1 3 problem about a how a process achieves success. It is a problem about the nature of the process that may or may not achieve it.8 The dis-analogy between an archer's movements and a coordinated believer is that the latter but not the former is doing something that requires a particular sort of self-awareness which is not easily explained (Dickie's discussion of Anscombean practical knowledge is a missed opportunity in this regard, as it too is a form of selfawareness, specifically of what one is doing; Dickie does not carry this point over to her discussion of direct coordination). Overlooking this difference may make bringing in justification as aptness natural. But it should not be overlooked if we want an accurate conception of what is required. It could be objected that the emphasis this places on inferences involving coordinated beliefs is a mistake. Dickie sometimes formulates the problem of coordination in terms of 'direct coordination strategies' (84) and 'information marshalling moves' (86), which might suggest that her focus is not on what results from coordination, but rather on what results in coordination. What results from coordination are dispositions to engage in inferences that rationally presuppose identity of reference. What results in coordination are exercises of a capacity to form bodies of belief that are involved in such dispositions. So perhaps it is unfair to reject her account as not properly rationalising the resulting inferences, when it is aimed at a rationalisation of the formation processes. The difference between these two things is genuine, but shifting the focus to the formation of coordinated bodies of belief simply faces the same problem, which is that what generates the puzzle about justification concerns the presupposition that is active in the inferential dispositions that those formation processes deliver. The point may still be made that what is distinctively in need of justification about processes of forming coordinated bodies of belief concerns the fact that they result in beliefs involved in a particular pattern of inference. Before concluding this part of the discussion, I want to emphasise that the objection here does not require or suggest any view on the relationship between theoretical and practical, or instrumental, forms of justification for belief. The objection here is not that Dickie's official account offers only instrumental justification (aptness to motivational state) whereas the problem concerns a specifically theoretical form of justification (reasons for something being true). The objection is that showing how coordination is justified because apt to a motivating state doesn't speak to what 8 I take this opportunity to note a puzzling feature of Dickie's use of the archer example. We are meant to wonder what justifies the archer's movements, but we are not told what potential or actual shortcoming of those movements prompts that question. Suppose Robin Hood had missed. It might then appear that shooting in the way he did was a mistake. Being told that it is normally reliable but he was unlucky on that occasion would justify his actions. Or suppose he hit the target but adopted a highly unorthodox style. That might appear to be an irresponsible move (what with the fate of Sherwood Forest being at stake). But if it was a good way of achieving some other desired outcome, like preserving Robin's disguise, it would be justified. These are cases where the potential faults are answered by instrumental considerations. In the case of coordination, the question is raised in the context of non-instrumentally desirable features of the inferences distinctive of coordinated beliefs. Raising the question of justification generically, independent of specifying any specific shortcoming, may mistakenly encourage the view that instrumental justification is to the point. 1 3 Coordination in Thought brings the justification of coordination into question. The justification Dickie's official account provides is justification for the wrong thing-it does not show that the presupposition made by the inferential dispositions distinctive of coordinated belief is justified. That is the case regardless of whether one wants to see the required justification as theoretical or practical. Dickie has a number of things to say on the topic of practical justification for belief and how it might relate to theoretical justification, which turns on whether a belief might be practically justified (because, for example, it reliably fulfils a need), given that practical reasons for believing something may fail to rule out that belief's being false, and so not be truth-conducive. Dickie's view seems to be that practical justification can constitute theoretical justification, insofar as it is at least truth-conducive (see her discussion at 104–8). Whatever this view's merits, it does not speak to the objection because her official account's failure to address the presupposed identity is not due to its offering practical justification rather than theoretical justification for belief. No additional material for an explanation of how a believer may presuppose that her beliefs are about the same thing in an intelligible and responsible way can be found in Dickie's advocacy of the truth-conduciveness of some practical reasons for belief. In the next section, I will look at a way of reconfiguring Dickie's official account in a way that does do that. But Dickie's official account itself offers nothing, practical or theoretical, to show how a thinker who presupposes the identity of her beliefs in inference may make that presupposition responsibly and intelligibly. The moral is that the instrumental considerations Dickie makes use of take us in the wrong direction. Bringing in aptness to the need to represent does not speak to the rationality of presupposing identity. And that is what a solution to the problem about coordination requires. The coordination of beliefs reliably fulfils the need to represent; grant that, and it remains unclear what indicates that the beliefs are about the same thing. I conclude that Dickie's account in terms of aptness to motivational state is based on a mistaken conception of the problem. If justification as aptness is the solution, coordination is not the problem. 4 Reconfiguring Dickie's Account I have set out Dickie's account of the justification of coordination in terms of aptness to motivational state, and objected that it involves a mistaken conception of the problem. What is in need of justification is a presupposition, and that justification needs to take the form of an explanation of what indicates that beliefs taken to be about the same thing are about the same thing, where this cannot be an identity belief. This explanation is not supplied by showing that coordination serves some other end, as the account in terms of aptness to motivational state would imply. However, it should be granted that Dickie's account involves materials that are clearly not a million miles away from what would supply a solution. The need to represent things outside the mind is, after all, something to do with representation, with having beliefs that refer to things. And it follows from what Dickie says about how that need is fulfilled that coordinated beliefs will have the same reference if they H. Clarke 1 3 refer at all. Setting the need to represent to one side, the materials Dickie adduces supplies an account that works like this: as per REFERENCE AND JUSTIFICATION, beliefs get their referential content by being members of bodies of belief that have proprietary means of justification, or trumping routes to justification; bodies of belief are networks of coordinated beliefs; so coordinated beliefs have the same reference if they have any reference at all, because they get their reference in the same way; trumping routes to justification are conscious features of bodies of belief, and so there is a conscious feature of coordinated beliefs that indicates sameness of reference. Call this the reconfigured account. Does it work? When assessing the reconfigured account, it is important not to be overly distracted by the status of REFERENCE AND JUSTIFICATION. Dickie calls this a 'coordination principle', meaning that it coordinates two properties of a belief, its referential content and what justifies it.9 What matters for the reconfigured account is not the relationship between referential content and the means by which beliefs are justified, but rather the more specific claim that proprietary means of justification do reference-fixing work. One could grant that referential content and justification are related in as the principle says, but deny the specific claim. And that is what I propose to do. There are two problems with the appeal to proprietary means of justification. The first is that there are arguably no such things. Bodies of coordinated belief do not go with particular trumping routes to justification, so that cannot be what indicates sameness of reference. The second problem is that, even if there are proprietary means of justification, they can only indicate sameness of reference if there is such an indication already in place. The first objection requires contradicting a claim that Dickie explicitly makes, so it would help to lay out what she says in support of it. As it happens, this is not very much. It is mainly driven by the following example: [C]onsider a situation where you believe 〈That is round〉, 〈That is orange〉, and 〈That is rolling〉 by uptake from a current perceptual link, and an informant you know to be usually reliable comes in, sees what you are looking at, and says 'It's actually made of glass; it will shatter if it falls', so that you form additional beliefs 〈That is made of glass〉 and 〈That is fragile〉. These additional beliefs are justified by uptake from testimony rather than perception. But... you will-unless there is some unusual reason not to-treat perceptual justification for beliefs as trumping non-perceptual justification. (You pick the thing up and find that it yields to your grip; it falls to the ground with a thud, deforming a little but remaining intact. You revise your body of beliefs away from what your informant told you and towards the new perceptual information.) Preparedness to revise beliefs in the direction of the information delivered by perception-letting perceptual justification override non-perceptual- 9 In its various forms, this principle is always stated in the form of a biconditional, although Dickie offers glosses on it that involve more explanatory terms like 'because' and 'in virtue of' (cf. note 21). 1 3 Coordination in Thought is a mark of perceptual demonstrative thought: a body of beliefs is not a body of perceptual demonstrative beliefs unless its subject accords justification by uptake from a perceptual link this kind of trumping status. (50-1) She then goes on to say that [t]he notion of 'proprietary justification' for a body of ordinary beliefs is a generalization from this initial case. A body of ordinary 〈α〉 beliefs is associated with a specific 'trumping' route to justification-a route to justification for 〈α is Φ〉 beliefs such that the subject is disposed to treat justification for believing 〈α is Φ〉 generated by this route as overriding justification for believing 〈α is not Φ〉 generated by any other. (51) The idea seems to be that the example describes a case where it is clear that the believer does indeed have a body of beliefs with a trumping route to justification, and that is enough to justify the claim that all (ordinary) bodies of belief are like this. But the fact that, in the story, the thinker prefers the evidence of her own eyes over the say-so of an interlocutor does not really speak to that. It does speak to how, in general, the thinker is disposed to take more immediate evidence as over-riding less immediate evidence. The claim that bodies of belief feature proprietary means of justification would require that this preference applies specifically to immediate perceptual evidence, and specifically to cases of so-called 'perceptual demonstrative' bodies of belief, rather than to any body of beliefs. But there is no obvious reason to accept either claim on the strength of the example, unless one is already inclined to think that this must be a body of perceptual demonstrative beliefs that works in the way Dickie envisages. Without that, the intended generalisation is not at all compelling. So the claim that there are proprietary means of justification lacks support. There are reasons for thinking that it is false, too. In fact, these can be found in Dickie's own discussion. Her core examples involve bodies of so-called 'perceptual demonstrative' beliefs, as above, and 'proper name-based' beliefs, 'thoughts of the kind standardly made available by grasp of, and standardly expressed using, proper names' (7). But these kinds overlap, and it will be rational not to treat any specific means of justification as a trump in such cases. It is not to the point to insist, as Dickie frequently does, that the account of coordination may be limited in the first instance to ordinary beliefs, where the italicisation marks a specific notion of ordinariness: beliefs concerning easily perceptible objects with ordinary causal profiles (not abstracta, not nano-scale concreta). The point is that ordinary cases are exactly of a kind which seem not to be neatly separated into perceptual demonstrative beliefs and proper name-based beliefs according to proprietary means of justification. Take the following case. My parents recently adopted a dog, Worthington. I have encountered him on a number of occasions. Before I met him, I was told many things about him, using his name. I have a detailed body of beliefs that I take to be about one and the same dog. I am disposed to revise my beliefs when I have a 'perceptual link' with him (I discover from listening that he likes squeaky toys; I discover from my sense of smell that he has recently rolled in something unpleasant), H. Clarke 1 3 and I am disposed to revise them from careful uptake of testimony (I find out that he went to the vet last Tuesday, and that he still barks when the post gets delivered). Is my Worthington body of beliefs a body of perceptual demonstrative beliefs, or proper name beliefs? Sometimes perception is more important, sometimes it is testimony that wins the day. So that body of beliefs must qualify as both-which is to say, neither. There is nothing special about Worthington or this body of beliefs. Any body of beliefs will feature beliefs that bear any number of logical-inferential relations to other (potential) beliefs, which relations will be recognised and exploited by the thinker. Inference is a source of information that can over-ride any other source of justification for a body of beliefs. In the same way, more immediate evidence generally overrides less immediate evidence, so that more immediate evidence rests on a rich background of less immediate inferential support for the wide range of beliefs we have about anything we have any beliefs about (the necessary simplicity of examples used to illustrate claims about the psychology of belief make this point a little too easy to overlook). If we allow inference to be a source of information of this character, then there is no such thing as a body of beliefs with a specific trumping route to justification. The objection so far does not rule out that some bodies of belief are limited in what can act as a 'trumping' justification in the ways that Dickie's categorisation of beliefs requires. So one response to the objection may be to insist that it applies locally, to those bodies of belief. Aside from the fact that there is no obvious reason to think that what makes for justified coordination may differ across different sorts of beliefs in the way this response supposes, the objection is not just that there are counter examples to the claim that bodies of belief have proprietary means of justification. The claim is general. Beliefs are either true or false, and so can stand in logical-inferential relations independently of the information streams that deliver them. We can draw on information we have to add to or modify bodies of beliefs opportunistically.10 To extend the Quinean image, the web of belief does not have its shape dictated by the way its strands were gathered. Proprietary means of justification conflict with this aspect of the psychology of belief. There are, no doubt, ways that this first objection could be resisted, and perhaps there are more substantial motivations to be given. I do not propose to go over them, because the second objection concerns a more fundamental problem with the reconfigured account. In short, the only way of cashing out the notion of a proprietary means of justification for a body of beliefs that is adequate for supplying an indication of sameness of reference for those beliefs requires that there is already justification for coordinating those beliefs. 10 I take the idea of opportunistic exploitation of information from Recanati's (2012) notion of an encyclopaedic mental file. There are similarities between other aspects of Recanati's views and the idea of proprietary means of justification, though I cannot explore them here. Millikan's (2000: 159–192) discussion of the epistemology of identity contains a number of insights relevant to the objection being put forward. 1 3 Coordination in Thought First we need some clarity on what it would be for a coordinated body of beliefs to be associated with proprietary means of justification. I take it that a proprietary means of justification can be thought of as a set modifications to a body of beliefs that would be undergone in response to particular changes in the believer's informational state. A body of beliefs has a particular proprietary means of justification just in case the believer is disposed to make those modifications to that body of beliefs; call these justificatory dispositions. The obvious way to think of an informational state is as a set of propositions; a modification can be thought of as addition or subtraction of a proposition to or from that set (the attendant difficulties with individuating propositions can be suspended for our purposes). It is crucial that a set of justificatory dispositions picks out a proprietary means of justification for a body of beliefs only if it bears on the body of beliefs as a whole. By that, I mean that the change made will potentially involve a modification not just of one belief, but all the beliefs in that coordinated body. It is not that justificatory dispositions are pairings of informational changes with beliefs considered singly, where the body of beliefs with which the means consisting of that set is associated is just a collection of such beliefs. That would lose sight of the idea of a means of justification for a body of beliefs, since the beliefs that the thinker would be disposed to modify will include beliefs that the thinker does not treat as being about the same thing; other beliefs will be modified as well. That would make the appeal to proprietary means of justification clearly over-extend. The question is, how do justificatory dispositions apply to bodies of belief as a whole, rather than in virtue of applying to beliefs in that body considered singly? To apply to a body of beliefs as a whole, when the particular information changes occur, the thinker must be disposed not just to change one belief, but to consider its ramifications for potential changes to all of the beliefs. But why would she do so? There are two possibilities. Either (1) she is disposed to change potentially all the beliefs in that body of belief because she has a reason for treating them as being about the same thing, or (2) she is simply disposed to consider changes to that body of beliefs as a whole as a basic dispositional feature of her psychology. Now we can frame the following objection. If the justificatory dispositions that constitute a proprietary means of justification are of the second variety, then there is no way for them to indicate sameness of reference. We simply have more dispositions the rationality of which we need to account for. Such justificatory dispositions would need to be supplemented with a conscious belief that justification converges on objects. The fact that the body of beliefs has justification that converges on an object does not appear in any way in the conscious features of the beliefs. So the obvious, and as far as I can see fatal, problem with this is that the attribution to thinkers capable of coordinated beliefs of a general belief that justificatory dispositions converge on objects is, to put it mildly, deeply implausible.11 11 Might the problem with a general belief about justificatory dispositions be solved by making it implicit? Dickie's 'methodological prejudice' against profoundly implicit propositional attitudes (see op. cit.: 17–9) would rule it out, but that aside, appealing to an implicit belief would make the account incomplete. A successful account of justified coordination needs to identify a conscious feature of coordinated beliefs that indicates sameness of reference, as discussed in Sect. 3.1. An implicit belief about them is not a conscious feature. Therefore, something would need to be in place that allows the implicit H. Clarke 1 3 If justificatory dispositions that constitute proprietary means of justification are instead of the first variety, then they apply only if there is a reason for treating a body of beliefs as being about the same thing. But a reason for treating a body of beliefs as about the same thing is something that indicates that they are about the same thing. This way of understanding justificatory dispositions supplies an indication that avoids the attribution of wholly unrealistic beliefs to the thinker, but it suffers from the more straightforward problem that it requires there to be already something that indicates that those beliefs are about the same thing. The reconfigured account would then be viciously circular.12 To sum up, it is unlikely that there are proprietary means of justification, but if there are, then to play a role in justifying coordination, they require there to be something already in place that indicates that the body of beliefs is about the same thing. Either way, something independent of the justificatory dispositions must obtain that provides that indication. Dickie's official account therefore cannot be reconfigured to provide a more satisfactory solution to the problem of coordination. 5 Coherence‐Based Bootstrapping Dickie's official account of justified coordination as apt to the need to represent fails to address the problem. The materials of her account can be reconfigured to provide an account that does address the problem, but it turns out to be circular at best. What indicates sameness of reference must operate at a more basic level. In this section, I will propose an alternative account of coordination that meets this requirement. It shares some features with the Dickie-style accounts, which I shall note, but avoids the problems with those accounts. Before presenting her view, Dickie mentions two attitudes towards the problem that she rejects (85). One is to deny that direct coordination is justified, but also to hold that it is the basis for the justification of inferences that 'keep faith' with it because simply an aspect of how we go on cognitively. The other is to hold that it is primitively justified, and so no explanation is needed. Dickie contrasts these two attitudes with a third: to explain what makes coordination justified. She adopts this attitude, and proceeds to offer her account, though her dismissal of the other two options is under-explained. It is perhaps motivated by the thought that we should 12 Dickie discusses a circularity objection at 109–11, also in Dickie 2017, but nothing in either discussion lessens this problem. The circle at issue here is about a claim concerning the justification of coordination, while the circle Dickie discusses is about the status of REFERENCE AND JUSTIFICATION as a metasemantic claim, one that does not directly involve claims about coordination. Dickie's response, to the effect that the metasemantic claim is not meant as a reduction of epistemic to semantic properties, or vice versa, does not resolve, or even address, problem with the reconfigured account. It would anyway be surprising if Dickie did address the circle I identify here, since it arises in the context of an account (the reconfigured account) that Dickie does not countenance, either in her book or elsewhere. Footnote 11 (continued) belief to become a conscious belief, thus returning us to the original problem, the deep implausibility of there being such a conscious belief. 1 3 Coordination in Thought take direct coordination at face value, as a rational feature of our cognitive lives, and attempt to explain this fact. An explanation given on this basis should also work as an argument, as against those who are sceptical, for the idea that we do have reasons to treat our beliefs as being about the same thing in the way distinctive of direct coordination, and show that the justification provided is not primitive or mysterious. However, Dickie's contrast of the three attitudes potentially obscures a kind of explanatory approach that is more promising than either of two accounts considered so far. One can accept that coordination is an aspect of how we do and must go on cognitively, but not say further that, as per the first attitude, the question of justification does not arise, or cannot be answered, as per the second. Rather, the fact that the coordination of our beliefs is a basic and compulsive part of our cognitive lives may be part of a story about its justification. This is the idea behind what Schroeter (2012) calls bootstrapping.13 A bootstrapping account works like this: take the presence of the inferential disposition to infer an existential generalisation from several beliefs for granted, add some conditions that obtain in part because these dispositions are present, and then show how those in conjunction gives rise to something that provides an indication of sameness of reference. On the view I propose, the further conditions that do the work concern the role of the dispositions in supplying information that the thinker relies upon in responding to her various motivational states. This can be broken down into five parts: • Coordinated beliefs are involved in dispositions to make inferences that presuppose identity. • These inferential dispositions are such as to organise and provide information that may be relied upon by the thinker in pursuing her projects and realising her ideals. • The presupposition made by the inferential dispositions can cohere or not cohere with the rest of the thinker's beliefs. • Because the presupposition is made by inferential dispositions which organise and provide useful information that can cohere or not cohere with the rest of the thinker's beliefs, the default for the thinker is that the presupposition is true, which default may be defeated in the event of incoherence. • There is an indication of sameness of reference sufficient for self-understanding when there is no consciously accessible defeater; this indication is sufficient for responsibility when there is no easy route to a consciously accessible defeater. 13 Dickie identifies Schroeter as an advocate of the idea that coordination is primitively justified (see 86 n4). This cannot be quite right, since Schroeter offers an account of how coordination is justified. Schroeter's view is that coordinated beliefs are collectively targets of interpretative axioms, including the principle that representations that get treated as being about the same thing are about the same thing. This appeal to interpretative axioms has obvious affinities with the reconfigured account discussed in the previous section, though it avoids employing a tendentious psychology of belief. One difficulty with it, however, is that the interpretative axioms would appear to have to be something of which the believer is aware, which is not particularly plausible. Strictly speaking, Schroeter's target is an explanation of 'samesaying', or 'coreference de jure'. So it may be that this difficulty does not apply when that is taken into account. The relations between these things and coordination in thought are interesting but beyond the scope of the present discussion. H. Clarke 1 3 More needs to be said about every part, so let me take each in turn: (1) For beliefs to be 'involved' in a disposition is merely a shorthand way of saying that the thinker is disposed to perform inferences of a certain sort with the beliefs as premises-in this case, of the kind that could be represented by a repeated term that refers to a particular. (2) The simplest manifestation of this will be the inference to an existentially general conclusion that conjoins two properties that separate beliefs attribute to the particular in question. Whenever that inferential disposition is present, the beliefs are coordinated; there will be many more interesting inferences that will accompany it, being examples of inductive or abductive inferences which enable the believer to extend what they know and use the information that they have in novel circumstances that arise in the future, to make sense of their past experiences, and negotiate their way around their present environment. This is the sense in which inferential dispositions organise and provide information that may be relied upon by the thinker in pursuing her projects and realising her ideals. It would be a welcome task to spell this out in much more detail, but the general idea is that, if a thinker is motivated to act in certain ways or to attempt to bring about certain ends, then she will rely on information to do that, and her inferential dispositions, including those that presuppose identity, will be essential to her achieving her aims, and perhaps in having aims at all. (3) The presupposition of sameness of reference made by the inferences the believer is disposed to make is not incorrigible. That is, it is possible for a believer to possess information that indicates that the presupposition is not correct. More likely is that the presupposition will cohere; but the point is that the likelihood of coherence makes the possibility, even if remote, of incoherence a live one. The presupposition fails to cohere when what it delivers cannot be true given what other information I am unwilling to give up. To illustrate: I have a body of beliefs about Worthington, whom I believe to be a dog I saw on days d1, d2, and d3, if I find out that at least one of those dogs was not him, but not which one, then my disposition to infer that there is a dog that I saw on d1, d2, and d3 must be dropped. (4) Given the role of coordination in organising and providing information of use in pursuing a thinker's aims, the coherence of the presupposition with the rest of the thinker's information is a matter of concern; whether or not it coheres is something that a coordinated believer will be disposed to monitor. That is, the thinker will reliably modify her inferential dispositions on the basis of possessing information with which they fail to cohere. For this to be the case, the thinker does not have to represent those dispositions and evaluate their coherence. The modification on the basis of incoherent information can be treated as a basic feature of the thinker's psychology, just as the presence of the inferential dispositions may also be treated as basic.14 Similarly, the fact that the coherence of a 14 I propose a characterisation of a mind capable of coordinated thought in Clarke (2018). That characterisation does not address how monitoring is achieved as such, but can easily be extended by positing a functional relationship between the causal basis of the inferential dispositions and the types of rep1 3 Coordination in Thought belief is something that the believer is disposed to monitor does not mean that some more basic evidence needs to be adduced to show that it is coherent. In the case of coordinated belief, it is hard to see how such a process would be so much as possible. Instead, the coherence of the presupposition can be taken (that is, it is responsible and rational to take it) as a given until shown to be incorrect. 'Shown to' can be interpreted in two ways: in terms of consciously accessible defeating information (as in the example given above), or with information that, while not consciously accessible at a given time, could be easily accessed, where what counts as 'easily' is not specifiable outside a particular epistemic context, and where 'access' depends on routes from the information that the thinker currently has via inference, imagination, or straightforward observation. (5) The default correctness of coherent presupposed sameness of reference means that there is an indication of sameness of reference whenever the conditions sufficient for that default obtain. Because the presence of the inferential dispositions and the absence of a consciously accessible defeater are all aspects of a believer's conscious mental life, the indication it provides is sufficient for self-understanding. The coordinated believer does not simply find herself with unaccountable inferential dispositions; there is something to show that they fit in with what else she thinks and does. When there is no easily consciously accessible defeater, that presupposition is also epistemically responsible. I will give this the slightly clumsy label of a coherence-based bootstrapping account. I take it that it is clear why it is coherence-based, and why it counts as a bootstrapping account. What indicates sameness of reference is the presence of the inferential dispositions themselves in a thinker that is motivated and concerned to monitor them, not an additional belief which acts as a premise in those inferences. What makes the presupposition rational is that nothing speaks against the inferential dispositions, and yet they are monitored and open to revision. Being disposed to change one's inferential dispositions in the face of evidence that the presupposition is incorrect, that the presupposed identity fails to obtain, allows the identity to play a rational role in a thinker's inferential dispositions without figuring as the content of a premise. To elaborate this account further, I will briefly spell out three comparisons with Dickie's official and reconfigured accounts before drawing some more general conclusions. The first two comparisons I want to draw turn on the two ways in which coherence-based bootstrapping is obviously very similar to those accounts: it makes appeal both to a thinker's motivational states, and to a particular sort of disposition. Dickie's official account holds that coordination is justified when it is a reliable way of fulfilling the need to represent. That makes a thinker's motivation key to the account. In the same way, the coherence-based bootstrapping account requires resentations of information that would put in place beliefs that would make the inferential dispositions incoherent. Footnote 14 (continued) H. Clarke 1 3 a thinker to have a rich set of motivational states the fulfilment of which depends on the organisation and supply of information through coordination. The key difference is that the appeal to motivational states in the latter account obviously does not involve casting the problem of coordination as one concerning instrumental considerations. The motivational states go towards turning the presence of the inferential dispositions into an indication of sameness of reference, not setting a standard of instrumental assessment for coordination. Both the official and reconfigured accounts make use of the idea of justficatory dispositions, that constitute the possession by a body of beliefs of a proprietary means of justification. These justificatory dispositions may be thought of as a subset of the kind of monitoring dispositions that speak to the coherence or incoherence of the presupposition, though there is no need to make any commitment as to monitoring dispositions constituting a specific route to justification for a body of beliefs. The third comparison turns on the fundamental disagreement concerning the role of reference-fixing properties of beliefs. On both the official and reconfigured accounts, what indicates sameness of reference is tightly connected to what fixes reference. Knowing or being aware of what fixes reference is not the stuff of basic rational cognition, but something which requires the kind of conceptual and theoretical sophistication needed for philosophical theorising of the kind Dickie's book exemplifies. By contrast, coordination is a basic, compulsive, and extremely easy to achieve feature of cognitive life. A correct account of coordination should therefore not turn on recondite claims about psychology or epistemology. Insofar as it requires bringing in conscious aspects of a thinker's mental life, awareness of conditions that fix reference is highly unlikely to be any part of this, given the theoretical sophistication needed to frame so much as a candidate theory of what goes towards fixing reference. There is a rich tradition in thinking about cognition, often undertaken under the rubric of the theory of concepts and taking its inspiration from Frege's writings on sense and reference, that holds that questions about rational thought should, in some form, turn on (often highly tendentious) claims about the way in which intentional mental states such as beliefs get to have their referential properties (how they get to be about particular individuals, how they attribute properties to them, how they pick out particular logical operations).15 At least with respect to coordination, however, we have some evidence for thinking that this will not be the case. Focusing on reference-fixing properties is the wrong place to look for the kind of properties of beliefs that give the basic inferential structure of rational thought. The right place, if the coherence-based bootstrapping account is correct, is the role that the inferences have in a rational life. This point raises issues that go far beyond the remit of the paper. My reason for raising it is precisely to indicate that the foregoing considerations on the problem of 15 Dickie obliquely locates her view within this tradition at 52 n18, where she references Dummett, Evans, Campbell, and Recanati, all of whom explicitly take themselves to be developing Frege's notion of sense. 1 3 Coordination in Thought coordination in thought bear on a wide range of issues concerning the proper understanding of the mind. 6 Conclusion Coordination in thought presents a problem: what makes inferences that presuppose sameness of reference non-lucky? Dickie's official account holds that it is the fact that coordination helps fulfil the basic need to represent things outside of the mind. This fails to solve the problem because it shows only why coordination is instrumentally justified, and does not show how the presupposition it makes is a good one. A reconfiguration of the official account holds that proprietary means of justification serve to fix the reference of coordinated beliefs all together. But the notion of a proprietary means of justification for a body of beliefs lacks support, is of dubious coherence, and anyway cannot supply an indication of sameness of reference that does not depend on there already being one in place. Coordination must be explained in a more basic way. I have sketched a coherence-based bootstrapping account that fulfils this requirement. It is, at least, better than either Dickie's official account or the reconfigured account, and this provides some basis for thinking that reference-fixing properties are not explanatory of this basic feature of rational cognition. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/4.0/. References Campbell, J. (1987/88). Is sense transparent? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 88, 273–292 Clarke, H. (2018). Frege puzzles and mental files. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 96(2), 351–366. Dickie, I. (2015). Fixing reference. Oxford: OUP. Dickie, I. (2017). Reply to Hofweber and Ninan. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 95(3), 745–760. Fodor, J. (2008). LOT2: The language of thought revisited. Oxford: OUP. Lawlor, K. (2001). New thoughts about old things: Cognitive policies and the grounds of singular thought. New York, NY.: Garland. Millikan, R. G. (2000). On clear and confused ideas: An essay about substance concepts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prinz, J. (2002). Furnishing the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Recanati, F. (2012). Mental files. Oxford: OUP. H. Clarke 1 3 Sainsbury, R. M., & Tye, M. (2012). Seven puzzles of thought and how to solve them. Oxford: OUP. Schroeter, L. (2012). Bootstrapping our way to samesaying. Synthese, 189(1), 177–197. Publisher's Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

PB July 2019574 Prabuddha Bharata50 Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu's Unifying Buddhist Philosophy Jonathan C Gold Columbia University Press, 61 West 62 Street, New York, NY 10023. usa. Website: https://cup.columbia.edu. 2014. 336 pp. $65. hb. isbn 9780231168267. his book states: 'This book is a study of the philosophical work of Vasubandhu, a fourth/ fifth-century Indian monk who was perhaps the greatest Buddhist philosopher after the Buddha. Vasubandhu's works are well known in Indian, Tibetan, and East Asian Buddhist traditions. From his time to this day, and without a break, his writings have been widely cited and commented upon, his arguments used and debated, and his accomplishments praised. He is a familiar figure in contemporary Buddhist studies as well ... Everyone knows Vasubandhu. What is remarkable, then, is that we do not, by now, know Vasubandhu very well' (1). And after reading this book, we neither know Vasubandhu nor his works, forget about knowing either 'very well'. And the frivolity that is this book begins with the contradiction that Vasubandhu is admittedly stated as 'perhaps the greatest Buddhist philosopher after Buddha' and then in the same page, Jonathan C Gold goes on to term Nagarjuna, Asanga, Dignaga and Dharmakirti to be of 'comparable stature' to Vasubandhu. Gold insults the Buddha, we are unsure which Buddha, as being a mere philosopher in the first paragraph of the book to ultimately compare the Buddha and Vasubandhu to Nietzsche and Freud (221). Is it not ironical that first this Princeton savant of Buddhism praises Vasubandhu as the greatest Buddhist philosopher above all others and then says that four other Buddhist thinkers are as good as Vasubandhu? Then to prove his non-existent domain-expertise in continental philosophy, Gold says in his first endnote that Vasubandhu was a 'fox' of Isaiah Berlin (249). Within the context of the Jatakas and other Buddhist corpora, to even think of comparing Vasubandhu to a metaphorical fox shows, to put it mildly, a reprehensible lack of Eastern epistemology. Vasubandhu anticipated Vachaspati Mishra, who is acknowledged to be a 'sarva-tantra-svatantra; free from being influenced by different disciplines that one deals with'. That is, Mishra was a scholar with a mastery of every knowledge-domain he studied without becoming biased towards any one of those archaeologies of knowledge. These shows of faux scholarship, like comparing Vasubandhu to Berlin's 'fox', mar(k)s the book under review. To illustrate this point further, one needs to closely read Gold's chapter 'Agency and the Ethics of Massively Cumulative Causality' (176–213). Like his first endnote, where Gold writes, 'I do not really believe', and yet he believes enough to write on what he disbelieves; this chapter is another effort at self-aggrandisement and contradictions, written in the first person and reminiscent of his fetish for heavy-sounding chapter titles that signify nothing. The arrogant title of the first chapter should warn any scholar to stay away from this book: 'Summarizing Vasubandhu: Should a Buddhist Philosopher have a Philosophy?' (1–21). Gold is certainly none to summarise Vasubandhu's works and someone who does not understand what philosophy means, leave alone Buddhist philosophy, is not worth our time. Of course, Buddhism has a philosophy that is distinct from other philosophies. Sunyata or emptiness is an argument or standpoint, vada, which needs pramana, valid proof. Vasubandhu certainly had a particular world view that accommodated his own spiritual journey from being a Sautrantika to being a Yogachara Buddhist. These two vadas, found their greatest advocate in Vasubandhu, who provided their suitable pramanas. Like all Eastern philosophies, Vasubandhu's works arose out of his experiences as a Buddhist monk. Thus, they need to be assessed by someone who is within this experiential Buddhist tradition. As will be shown shortly, Gold, being just a dry structuralist ivory-tower scholar, does not understand Vasubandhu at all. This, in spite of his linguistic and other academic credentials. Contrast this book under review with Malcolm Smith's translation in Buddhahood in this Life: The Great Commentary by Vimalamitra (Somerville, MA: Wisdom, 2016). Smith, though not teaching at Princeton, or, mayhap, because he is not teaching or learning there, has something original and constructive to T 575PB July 2019 Reviews 51 say in his translation. For the problematics and politics of Ivy League education and by extrapolation, professorial appointments, see Evan Gerstmann, 'The Irony of the Elite College Admissions Bribery Scandal', Forbes, 13 March 2019 <https://tinyurl. com/y6d8zeom> accessed 05 June 2019. Now we turn to the narcissistic, hotchpotch, and hilarious chapter, 'Agency and the Ethics of Massively Cumulative Causality', to illustrate why Gold should not be read by anyone serious about Buddhism and Vasubandhu. The chapter begins thus: 'We are trapped, and destined to suffer, by the fact of our birth. Our suffering has, in fact, beginningless causes, and is properly conditioned to continue endlessly. What's more, the Buddhist denial of the personal self-ordinarily the seat of freedom-seems to deny as well the possibility of meaningful human agency. Vasubandhu, as we have seen, is repeatedly found denying agency-even agency in a single momentary event. Yet salvation is possible. It is proposed not through a new kind of agent, but through the very causal, karmic effects that have kept us imprisoned for so long. This chapter seeks to explain how this can work' (176). Gold is incorrect in saying that Vasubandhu repeatedly denies agency and we are confused about which Buddhism is Gold speaking of when he says that Buddhism denies 'the personal self '? Dependent origination is not a denial of the personal self. Further, it is well understood within Buddhist Studies that the Buddha(s) spoke the same truth in different ways for different audiences. The Lotus Sutra and the Lankavatara Sutra are two distinct sutras meant for two distinct groups of subjects with agency. For without agency, these sutras, including Vasubandhu's religious practices qua texts, which arose out of Vasubandhu's agency, would be useless and impossible respectively. When these and other sutras, after being heard, are acted upon, only then do we have a Vasubandhu arising, the pratityasamutpada of Vasubandhu. Thus, Gold is way off the mark when he accuses Vasubandhu of denying agency to the Buddhist subject. Gold's hubris as a non-Buddhist white man aspiring to teach Buddhism to the world is given away by his declaration that: 'For Buddhists, the kind of agency that is available to us sits very close to moral nihilism' (176). So Gold is not a Buddhist by his own admission, and one wants to know who is this 'us' here? And exactly what 'kind of agency' is available to these elite us? Last this reviewer checked; even the Christian Martin Heidegger is not sure much agency is available to the being in the here and the now. It is now clear that Gold is seeking academic scores by making generalisations that mean nothing in particular. He is another Orientalist desperate for academic validation from his quid quo pro white peers. Gold writes of salvation. This is an idea not to be found in Eastern religions. Gold mixes categories that have no similarities except the fact that one suspects that Gold knows more about the topos of salvation than he knows of Buddhist nirvana. Gold belittles the insights of the Tibetan sage Milarepa (180). He begins to talk on and on about his daughter Etta, whom he jokingly says in this supposedly serious treatise, Milarepa never met. This shows that Gold has no clue about the yogic siddhis, which Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains know all seers of the stature of Milarepa to have. Milarepa's and the Buddhist tradition's emphasis on renunciation is also mocked by Gold: 'I am supposed to realize that my attachment to my daughter is deluding me and preventing me from renouncing my home and family and pursuing nirvāṇa. But from a conventional perspective, the actual perspective from which I view my own life, to see my daughter (or my son, or my wife, or my work, etc.) as a fetter would be to deny what I experience to be the meaning of my life. This is a stark example, and that makes for some of the humor in Milarepa's poem. Surely there must be some positive karmic benefit from caring for a daughter' (180). Instead of talking of Vasubandhu's ideas of karmic bonds or Milarepa's insights into karma, we now get to hear of what Gold thinks has karmic benefits! Because there is 'some positive karmic benefit from caring for' Etta, who likes playing basketball (205), Gold will harangue us about how great a parent he is, and how lucky all of them are to be born in the United States: 'As a parent I can take some of the credit, for having provided food and insisting on sleep. I also bought the basketball. I might like to take credit also for my daughter's genetic heritage ... having-been-bornin-the-right-place-at-the-right-time' (206). But while Buddhists and Vasubandhu would PB July 2019576 Prabuddha Bharata52 credit karma as part of Etta's actions, Gold concludes that in the final analysis, all these are possible due to America's scientific progress. What this reviewer finds in this book is the same old refrain of American exceptionalism. Only here, American exceptionalism is contrasted in a positive light to Gold's American non-experiential understanding of Vasubandhu's philosophy. The depth of this book can be summarised by quoting Gold himself: 'All that we need is to know the rock we kick with our foot is empty space' (221). All that we need to know of this book is that it is bereft of coherence and meaning. Subhasis Chattopadhyay Illuminations Walter Benjamin Bodley Head, Penguin Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London, SW1V 2SA. UK. Website: https://www.penguin.co.uk/. 2015. 272 pp. £16.99. pb. isbn 9781847923868. he mysterious Monsieur Chouchani, as it were, fashioned the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas among others. The less mysterious, but for Hannah Arendt's intervention, Walter Benjamin now exerts an influence over us that is more pervasive but this reviewer finds that our understanding of Benjamin has been narrow in scope. We tend to slot him as an atheist whose Marxism is akin to Max Horkheimer's and Theodor Adorno's rabid anti-populist rants. The book under review, which is part of the 'Bloomsbury Revelations' series, includes Benjamin's essay 'The Storyteller'. Unless Benjamin is quoted at some length, his difference from other atheistic existentialists will not be clear: The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times. ... The storyteller takes what he tells from experience-his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom. If now and then, in the course of the centuries, efforts have been made ... to implant instruction in the novel, these attempts have always amounted to a modification of the novel form (87). Benjamin's implicit yearning for 'spiritual greatness' and 'wisdom' is precisely what according to Benjamin is missing from Don Quixote. Like Simone Weil and the popular Jacques Derrida of aporias and of eternal différances, Benjamin yearns for the spiritual within 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (211–44). It is a different matter that this seminal and oftquoted essay has influenced thinkers ranging from Marshall McLuhan to Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard's contempt of popular culture as simulacra is informed by Benjamin's rejection of the popular; of the cultural perversity of the masses: The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values (234). (Continued on page 582) T

Współczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 185Pogra cz . Studia Społeczne. Tom XXII (2013) Andrzej Klimczuk Szkoła Główna Handlowa w Warszawie email: [email protected] WSPÓŁCZESNA POLITYKA SPOŁECZNA WOBEC NIEPEŁNOSPRAWNOŚCI I OSÓB NIEPEŁNOSPRAWNYCH Wprowadzenie Jedną z istotnych kwestii społecznych na początku XXI wieku jest niepełnosprawność. Stanowi ona cechę w sposób istotny różnicującą jednostki i grupy. Osoby o ograniczonej sprawności są narażone na dyskryminację i wykluczenie społeczne, gospodarcze i polityczne. Waga kwestii społecznej osób niepełnosprawnych (dalej: ON) wzrasta wraz ze starzeniem się ludności. Celem niniejszego artykułu jest zwrócenie uwagi na wybrane teoretyczne koncepcje działań na rzecz poprawy wizerunku niepełnosprawności i znoszenie barier ograniczających dostęp ON do różnego rodzaju zasobów, przestrzeni i szans życiowych. Na podstawie krytycznej analizy literatury przedmiotu i badań własnych1 przybliżone zostaną kolejno koncepcja polityki aktywizacji oraz zasady i cele polityki społecznej w holistycznym paradygmacie normalizacji. W podsumowaniu zwrócona zostanie uwaga na możliwe kierunki dalszych badań i analiz. Niepełnosprawność i kwestia socjalna osób niepełnosprawnych Pod pojęciem kwestii społecznej za Daneckim [2001] najogólniej można rozumieć stan blokujący zaspokajanie podstawowych potrzeb ludzkich oraz problem, który szczególnie dotkliwie wpływa na życie i współdziałanie członków danej zbiorowości. Za A. Kurzynowskim [1996] w tym miejscu przyjmuje się, iż polityka społeczna wobec ON stanowi ogół działań podmiotów publicznych 1 Por. [Klimczuk, Siedlecki, Sadowska, Sydow 2013]. Badanie ogólnopolskie zrealizowane w ramach projektu „Centrum Edukacji i Aktywizacji Zawodowej Osób Niepełnosprawnych – Oddziały Bydgoszcz i Łódź", wdrażanego przez Fundację Pomocy Matematykom i Informatykom Niesprawnym Ruchowo dzięki dovnansowaniu ze środków Państwowego Funduszu Rehabilitacji Osób Niepełnosprawnych. Andrzej Klimczuk186 i pozarządowych, które mają na celu wyrównywanie nieuzasadnionych różnic socjalnych, asekurowanie wobec ryzyk życiowych, jak również tworzenie szans do ich funkcjonowania we wszystkich dziedzinach życia społecznego i gospodarczego w sposób umożliwiający pełną integrację ze społeczeństwem. Poprzez niepełnosprawność (ang. disability), najogólniej za Światową Organizacją Zdrowia, rozumie się każde ograniczenie bądź niemożność prowadzenia aktywnego życia w sposób lub w zakresie uznawanym za typowe dla człowieka, przy czym stan ten jest poprzedzony przez niesprawność, uszkodzenie (ang. impariment), [UNIC 2007]. Pod tym pojęciem rozumie się natomiast każdą utratę sprawności lub nieprawidłowość w budowie czy funkcjonowaniu organizmu pod względem psychologicznym, psychovzycznym lub anatomicznym w wyniku określonej wady wrodzonej, choroby lub urazu. Niepełnosprawność prowadzi do ograniczenia w pełnieniu ról społecznych (ang. handicap), czyli mniej uprzywilejowanej lub mniej korzystnej sytuacji danej osoby wynikającej z niesprawności lub niepełnosprawności, która ogranicza lub uniemożliwia pełną realizację roli społecznej odpowiadającej jej wiekowi, płci oraz zgodnej z uwarunkowaniami społecznymi i kulturowymi. Kategorię społeczną osób niepełnosprawnych za Konwencją Organizacji Narodów Zjednoczonych (ONZ) z 2006 roku, która została ratyvkowana przez Polskę w 2012 roku, rozumie się zaś jako obejmującą osoby o długotrwale naruszonej sprawności vzycznej, umysłowej, intelektualnej lub sensorycznej, przy czym stan ten w oddziaływaniu z różnymi barierami, może utrudniać im pełne i skuteczne uczestnictwo w życiu społecznym, na równych zasadach z innymi ludźmi. W artykule przyjmuje się szeroką devnicję ON bez różnicowania grup, gdyż etap ten ma miejsce dopiero przy opracowywaniu polityk szczegółowych podporządkowanych ogólnym zasadom i celom polityki społecznej na rzecz obywateli z ograniczeniem sprawności [Woźniak 2008]. W Narodowym Spisie Powszechnym Ludności i Mieszkań z 2011 roku wyróżniono dwa kryteria podziału ON: prawne (obiektywne) – odnoszące się do osób posiadających aktualne orzeczenie o niepełnosprawności wydane przez organ do tego uprawniony oraz biologicznie (subiektywne) – obejmuje osoby niedysponujące orzeczeniami, lecz odczuwające całkowicie lub poważnie ograniczoną zdolność do wykonywania czynności podstawowych stosownie do swojego wieku [GUS 2012: 63]. Zgodnie z tym spisem w Polsce żyje 4,69 mln ON, czyli stanowią 12,2% wszystkich zameldowanych mieszkańców kraju. Osoby niepełnosprawne prawne stanowią 3,13 mln, a biologicznie 1,57 mln. Kobiety stanowią tu 2,53 mln osób (53,9%) wobec 2,167 mln mężczyzn (46,1%). Większość z tych osób żyje w miastach (64%), co odpowiada stanowi populacji generalnej (61%). Jednocześnie liczba ON prawnie zmniejszyła się względem spisu z 2002 roku Współczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 187 o 1,3 mln poprzez zmiany prawne i zaostrzenie kryteriów przyznawania rent z tytułu niezdolności do pracy. Prognozuje się wzrost liczebności zbiorowości ON głównie z uwagi na proces starzenia się ludności. W prognozie demogravcznej na lata 2008-2035 [GUS 2009: 204, 219] oczekuje się wzrostu liczby osób w wieku 65+ w analizowanym okresie z 5,1 mln (13,5% ogółu ludności) do 8,3 (23,2%). Należy przy tym zauważyć, iż według danych ONZ kluczowym problemem ON jest bezrobocie [UN 2013]. W krajach rozwijających się od 80% do 90% ON w wieku produkcyjnym nie ma zatrudnienia, a w krajach rozwiniętych ta sama wartość wynosi od 50% do 70%. Z badań Eurostatu [2002], (dane z edycji 2011 znajdują się jeszcze w opracowaniu) wynika, że problem bezrobocia ON jest też kluczowy w krajach Unii Europejskiej. W krajach UE 15 zatrudnienie ON osiąga poziom zaledwie 50%, podczas gdy wskaźnik ubóstwa ON jest o 70% wyższy od średniej dla całej populacji. Jednocześnie ponad 1/3 ON to osoby starsze, po 75. roku życia. Według Polskiego Badania Aktywności Ekonomicznej Ludności wskaźnik zatrudnienia ON w wieku 16-64 lat w 2011 roku wynosił 20,7% w porównaniu do 59,3% w populacji generalnej [BPRON 2013]. Współczynnik aktywności zawodowej (udział aktywnych zawodowo, łącznie pracujących i bezrobotnych) wynosił 24,4% i był dwukrotnie niższy niż w populacji generalnej (65,7%). Stopa bezrobocia wynosiła zaś 15,2% wobec 9,8% w ogóle ludności. Badania własne [Klimczuk i in. 2013: 78-80] potwierdzają, iż ON z grupy kobiet i osób 50+ stanowią główne kategorie klientów pozarządowych agencji zatrudnienia w Polsce. Tym samym problem bezrobocia ON uznaje się za istotny, gdyż świadczy o dyskryminacji zwielokrotnionej poprzez nakładanie się na siebie różnych przyczyn dyskryminacji, jakimi są wiek, płeć i niepełnosprawność. Założenia polityki aktywizacji społecznej i zawodowej Wśród przesłanek kształtowania polityki aktywizacji wskazać należy wyłanianie się nowych ryzyk i kwestii socjalnych związanych z przejściem od społeczeństw industrialnych do postindustrialnych. Od lat osiemdziesiątych XX wieku w krajach rozwiniętych wdrażane są takie reformy, które mają na celu adaptację systemów zabezpieczenia społecznego do zmienionych warunków, jak: przesuwanie odpowiedzialności z podmiotów publicznych państwa opiekuńczego na podmioty komercyjne i pozarządowe poprzez decentralizację, komercjalizację, prywatyzację i współdziałanie; położenie nacisku na wspieraAndrzej Klimczuk188 nie zatrudnienia (ang. workfare); oraz uzupełnienie instrumentarium polityki społecznej ukierunkowanego na wsparcie bierne (świadczenia jak renty i zasiłki) o pracę socjalną i usługi aktywizacyjne – ukierunkowane na znoszenie barier w zatrudnieniu i aktywności społecznej oraz wzmacniające kompetencje i umiejętności jednostek i grup [Golinowska 2005]. Najogólniej za A. Karwackim [2010] pod pojęciem polityki aktywizacji rozumieć można bieżące, współczesne przeobrażenia w polityce społecznej związane ze zwrotem ku inwestycjom w kapitał ludzki, promocję pracy i aktywność zawodową oraz efekty tych działań. Polityka ta to potencjał praktycznej zmiany, który powinien mieć odzwierciedlenie w sferze instytucjonalnej (podmiotów) objętych „provlem nowego rządzenia" (ang. new governance pro!le), [ibidem: 68-69]. W tym rozumieniu polityka ta stanowi „bodźce aktywizacyjne obecne w różnych konvguracjach między jednostkami i grupami oraz między instytucjami (podmiotami polityki społecznej) rozumianymi jako producenci oraz dostawcy usług", jak również „idee przewodnie, wskazywane cele i postulaty, ale także (przede wszystkim) praktyczna strona wdrażania tych idei w życie" [ibidem: 70]. Idee przewodnie tej koncepcji stanowią: (1) zaprzeczenie polityki pasywnej, gwarantowania bezpieczeństwa socjalnego poprzez świadczenia; (2) uznanie za działania aktywizujące instrumentów skierowanych do bezrobotnych mogących pracować, a następnie do niezdolnych do pracy, (3) często obligatoryjny charakter uczestnictwa w programach aktywizacyjnych, (4) zerwanie z dekomodyvkacją, czyli budowaniem systemu gwarancji bezpieczeństwa socjalnego w oderwaniu od rynku pracy, (5) próba budowania konsensusu w polityce społecznej poza podziałami ideologicznymi, (6) ograniczenie skali „pasywnych" transferów socjalnych przez wprowadzenie wsparcia warunkowanego, powiązanego z uczestnictwem benevcjentów w programach aktywizujących (inkluzywnych, reintegracyjnych), (7) koncentracja na zatrudnieniu lub odbudowywaniu zdolności zatrudnieniowej (ang. employability), (8) wykorzystanie potencjału instytucji niepublicznych (organizacji pozarządowych) do prowadzenia programów aktywizujących i różnych wspieranych form aktywności na rynku pracy: od zatrudnienia socjalnego na chronionym rynku pracy, przez zatrudnienie subsydiowane na otwartym rynku pracy, do przedsiębiorczości społecznej rozwijanej w sektorze gospodarki społecznej [ibidem]. Jeśli zaś chodzi o praktyczną stronę aktywizacji, to głównym wyzwaniem jest budowanie jej spójności [ibidem]. Zasadne jest bowiem łączenie działań i decyzji podejmowanych na poszczególnych poziomach życia publicznego – godzenie inicjatyw odgórnych i oddolnych oraz analizowanie teoretycznego i praktycznego rozumienia pojęć aktywności, koordynacji i spójności stoWspółczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 189 sowanych w poszczególnych instytucjach i programach. Służyć temu może upowszechnianie modeli „współzarządzania" (ang. governance) – dzielenia i koordynowania zadań między podmiotami – w wielopoziomowej polityce aktywizacji (tabela 1). Tabela 1. Typy współzarządzania (governance) Wyszczególnienie Wymiana Nakaz Dialog Racjonalność formalna i proceduralna substancjalna i zorientowana na cel re…eksyjna i proceduralna Kryterium sukcesu efektywna alokacja zasobów efektywne osiąganie celów wynegocjowane porozumienie Typowy przykład rynek państwo więź Idealny wzór homo oeconomicus homo hierarchicus homo politicus Czasoprzestrzenny horyzont rynek światowy, czas odwracalny terytorium narodowe, horyzont planistyczny reskalowanie i formowanie ścieżek rozwoju Podstawowe kryterium zawodności nieefektywność ekonomiczna nieskuteczność „szum informacyjny", „przegadanie" Wtórne kryterium zawodności rynkowe niedopasowania biurokratyzm, urzędnicza uznaniowość i korupcja niejawność i zakłócona komunikacja Źródło: [Jessop 2007: 10]. Przy czym, w nawiązaniu do koncepcji B. Jessopa [2007] przyjmuje się, że dialog może być uznawany za formę najbardziej adekwatną do warunków społeczeństw i gospodarek sieciowych, szeroko korzystających do koordynacji działań z cyfrowych technologii informatycznych i telekomunikacyjnych oraz oddolnej aktywności obywatelskiej. W polityce aktywizacji zasadne jest uwzględnianie jednostek i grup obywateli oraz podmiotów przynależnych do sektora publicznego, samorządowego, pozarządowego, nieformalnego i komercyjnego. Ich zasięg działalności odnosi się do różnych poziomów struktury społecznej oraz zależny jest od odmiennych kapitałów ekonomicznych, społecznych i kulturowych. Jednocześnie między podmiotami tymi istnieją wzajemne oddziaływania mobilizujące do działania i aktywizujące (rysunek 1). Andrzej Klimczuk190 Rysunek 1. Wdrażanie polityki aktywizacji według A. Karwackiego NIEFORMALNE I KOMERCYJNE PODMIOTY POLITYKI SPOLECZNEJ IDEE PRZEWODNIE POLITYKI AKTYWIZACJI REGULACJE PRAWNE I STRATEGIE NA POZIOMIE UNII EUROPEJSKIEJ REGULACJE PRAWNE I STRATEGIE NA POZIOMIE NARODOWYM Przeobra enia welfare state poprzez formy aktywizowania i zaktywizowania spo!ecze"stwa JEDNOSTKI I GRUPY JEDNOSTKI I GRUPY JEDNOSTKI I GRUPY PUBLICZNE PODMIOTY POLITYKI SPOLECZNEJ SAMORZ#DOWE PODMIOTY POLITYKI SPOLECZNEJ POZARZ#DOWE PODMIOTY POLITYKI SPOLECZNEJ „New governance" jako wzór – a w praktyce wspó!wyst$puj%ce modele rz%dzenia EFEKTY (Z)AKTYWIZOWANIE SPO&ECZNE (Z)AKTYWIZOWANIE ZAWODOWE (RE)INTEGRACJA SPO&ECZNA DZIA&ANIA NA RZECZ INTEGRACJI RZ#DZENIE MENAD'ERSKIE RZ#DZENIE HIERARCHICZNE SAMORZ#DZENIE RZ#DZENIE SIECIOWE Źródło: [Karwacki 2010: 121]. Współzarządzanie w obszarze polityki aktywizacji ON staje się coraz bardziej istotnym wyzwaniem. Jak zauważa się w nawiązaniu do analiz Rymszy [por. 2013] w Polsce niezbędna jest „integracja reintegracji", czyli współdziałanie różnych służb, organizacji i instytucji, które współcześnie wypełniają przede wszystkim przypisane do nich zadania statutowe bez szczególnej dbałości o efekty swojej działalności. Prowadzi to do zjawiska równoległych nieskoordynowanych polityk sektorowych. ON mogą w Polsce korzystać ze wsparcia czterech różnych i relatywnie niezależnych od siebie podsystemów: (1) rehabilitacji ON (między innymi zakłady aktywności zawodowej), (2) poWspółczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 191 mocy społecznej, (3) pośrednictwa pracy i usług rynku pracy (urzędy pracy i agencje zatrudnienia), (4) zatrudnienia socjalnego (między innymi centra i kluby integracji społecznej). Każdy z nich oferuje usługi aktywizujące, które mają odmienne, ale bliskoznaczne i częściowo pokrywające się cele (kolejno: rehabilitacja zawodowa, społeczna i zdrowotna; usamodzielnienie życiowe; zatrudnienie; reintegracja zawodowa i społeczna). Działalność ta nie jest też skoordynowana w ujęciu wielosektorowym, czyli określonej sekwencji zindywidualizowanych działań we współpracy podmiotów publicznych, komercyjnych i pozarządowych. Z badań własnych wynika [Klimczuk i in. 2013], iż w Polsce istotnym problemem jest współpraca pozarządowych agencji zatrudnienia ON nie tylko z publicznymi służbami zatrudnienia, ale też między innymi z instytucjami pomocy społecznej, edukacyjnymi, naukowymi i otoczenia biznesu. Większość z nich nie utrzymuje ze sobą stałych kontaktów lub jest dla siebie obojętna. Publiczne służby zatrudnienia występują zaś w podwójnej roli – zarówno partnera, jak i konkurenta w zakresie wymiany ofert pracy i realizacji projektów z udziałem środków UE. Należy przy tym zaznaczyć, iż ratyvkacja przez Polskę konwencji ONZ o prawach ON i jej monitoring będzie wymuszać w nadchodzących latach integrację polityki społecznej także m.in. w zakresie: równości wobec prawa, projektowania uniwersalnego (dostosowania produktów, usług i architektury do potrzeb wszystkich użytkowników), równego dostępu do edukacji, włączenia cyfrowego, udziału ON w wyborach i ich dostępu do wymiaru sprawiedliwości [Błaszczak 2012]. Zasady i cele polityki społecznej w holistycznym paradygmacie normalizacji Drugą istotną koncepcją we współczesnej polityce społecznej wobec niepełnosprawności i ON jest holistyczny paradygmat normalizacji. Podejście to zaczęło wyłaniać się dopiero w drugiej połowie XX wieku na bazie postulatów rodzących się ruchów społecznych na rzecz sprawiedliwości, praw człowieka i przywracania praw ON [Woźniak 2008]. Zakłada się tu, jak zauważa Z. Woźniak, iż niepełnosprawność jest nie tylko właściwością osoby, lecz też zespołem warunków środowiska społecznego i vzycznego (bariery społeczne, ekonomiczne, prawne, architektoniczne i urbanistyczne), jakie prowadzą do ograniczania ról ON. Rozwiązanie tych problemów wymaga zatem wspierania szeroko rozumianej dostępności w wymiarze: (1) przestrzenno-architektonicznym (głównie: najbliższe otoczenie, instytucje edukacyjne, zatrudnienie), (2) strukAndrzej Klimczuk192 turalnym (zasoby, rynek pracy, świadczenia społeczne), (3) psychospołecznym (partycypacja społeczna), [ibidem]. Rysunek 2. Psychospołeczny i organizacyjny kontekst braku dostępności Brak dost pno!ci rodowisko fizyczne Bariery spo"eczne Bariery strukturalne Bariery psychologiczne Infrastruktura techniczno-organizacyjna Planowanie i zagospodarowanie przestrzenne Wzornictwo Projektowanie Informacja Niska samoocena, motywacja Bezpiecze!stwo osobiste Luki w systemie wsparcia spo"ecznego Ustawodawstwo wiadomo#$ spo"eczna postawy Trudno#ci w komunikacji Koszty Źródło: [Woźniak 2008: 84]. W omawianym ujęciu dostępność stanowi warunek integracji społecznej i normalizacji ogólnie całej kategorii ON. W pierwszym przypadku chodzi o procesy jednoczenia elementów i części składowych w jedną całość, które w życiu społecznym dotyczą wszystkich interakcji między jednostkami i/lub grupami oraz prowadzą do ich powiązania, kooperacji, koegzystencji, dostosowania się czy do rozwiązywania kon…iktów [ibidem: 85]. Tym samym ON bez względu na rodzaj uszkodzenia lub devcytu mają posiadać takie same możliwości uczestnictwa w życiu społecznym, politycznym i gospodarczym, jak i inne osoby. Cele integracji obejmują: tworzenie sytuacji w której ON mają możliwość funkcjonowania podobnie jak inni członkowie społeczeństwa (egalitaryzm), mają szansę budowania i prowadzenia godnego życia, odpowiedniego dla sytuacji ON (zasada z koncepcji jakości życia) oraz są doceniani i posiaWspółczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 193 dają prawa, takie jak inni ludzie (norma wynikająca z katalogu praw człowieka i obywatela), [ibidem: 89]. Pod pojęciem normalizacji rozumie się tu natomiast wszelkie zachowania jednostki o charakterze biovzycznym i psychospołecznym, które mają prowadzić do „tego, by funkcjonować bez wyraźnych zakłóceń (normalnie), na tyle, na ile to możliwe – mimo oznak i symptomów choroby przewlekłej lub ograniczonej sprawności" [ibidem: 86-87]. Dąży się tu do ograniczenia u ON czynników vzjologicznych (bycia osobą chorą, z uszkodzeniami, obdarzoną devcytami) i przyjęcia imperatywu aktywności, jako osoby normalnej w życiu codziennym. Proces ten obejmuje: potwierdzenie własnej indywidualności, tożsamości i osobowości; tworzenie zdolności do funkcjonowania na równi z rówieśnikami; redukowanie poczucia bycia osobą odmienną; osiągnięcia samodzielności i niezależności oraz zdolności do samoopieki; uzyskania maksymalnego poziomu integracji ze społeczeństwem [ibidem]. Jednocześnie normalizacja oznacza akceptację ON, oferowanie im tych samych warunków egzystencji, jakie są oferowane innym obywatelom tak w przestrzeni czasu – cyklu życia, jak i warunków życia – mieszkania, nauki, pracy, odpoczynku. Rynek pracy i edukacja mają zasadnicze znaczenie dla sukcesu całego procesu. Uzasadnia to m.in. ograniczanie barier architektonicznych i komunikacyjnych na drodze do i z pracy, podnoszenie świadomości pracodawców odnośnie umiejętności i kompetencji ON, uwzględnianie ogólnego spadku w krajach rozwiniętych popytu na pracę niewykwalivkowaną oraz devcytu informacji o możliwościach zatrudnienia. Niezbędne jest tu także ograniczanie mitów i stereotypów funkcjonujących na rynku pracy, które prowadzą do zatrudniania ON tylko na stanowiskach związanych z pracami prostymi i powtarzalnymi. Takie negatywne wyobrażenia obejmują między innymi uznanie, iż ON wymagają w pracy pomocy ze strony innych, częściej niż inni opuszczają pracę z przyczyn zdrowotnych oraz że nie posiadają właściwych umiejętności. Podsumowując za cele normalizacji uznaje się: obecność w środowisku vzycznym i społecznym, dokonywanie wyborów, rozwijanie i podtrzymywanie umiejętności, ochronę praw osobistych, odzyskanie podmiotowości i szacunku społecznego, zindywidualizowane traktowanie, kształtowanie dobrych relacji z otoczeniem społecznym, włączenie w nurt życia zbiorowego [ibidem]. Opisana koncepcja nosi miano holistycznej gdyż ujmuje niepełnosprawność jako rezultat luki między zasobami jednostki z ograniczoną sprawnością (jej zdolnościami i możliwościami) a oczekiwaniami i wymaganiami tworzonymi przez jej środowisko społeczne i vzyczne [ibidem]. W tym podejściu realne zagrożenia dla aktywności ON stwarza system organizacji życia zbiorowego – jego struktura instytucjonalna i normatywna, która nie zaspokaja potrzeb ON Andrzej Klimczuk194 i przez co prowadzi do ograniczenia ich samodzielności życiowej i wykluczenia z uczestnictwa w głównym nurcie życia społecznego. W ujęciu holistycznym uwzględnia się cztery wymiary doświadczeń opisujących kontekst życiowy ON: środowisko jednostki, proces stawania się ON, możliwości i potencjał oraz jakość życia. Ten ostatni wymiar jest określany zarówno przez pierwotne, jak i wtórne ograniczenia sprawności, które obejmują także dostęp do rynku pracy. Przestrzenie te przenikają się wzajemnie przez co kształtują warunki życia i rozwoju. Prowadzi to do wniosku, iż integracja i normalizacja wymaga zmian w polityce społecznej i jej programach oraz dostarczania ludziom narzędzi do budowania ich zdolności do prowadzenia aktywnego, niezależnego życia. W holistycznym paradygmacie normalizacji polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności oraz na rzecz osób z ograniczoną sprawnością jest określana jako zorganizowane, kompleksowe oraz międzysektorowe działania służb publicznych i innych podmiotów służące: (1) kształtowaniu, poprawie i ochronie warunków jakości życia oraz statusu społecznego ON, (2) umożliwieniu osobom z ograniczoną sprawnością dostępu do głównego nurtu życia społecznego oraz świadczenia niezbędnych świadczeń socjalno-zdrowotnych, (3) udostępnieniu rozwiązań i urządzeń społecznych oraz technologiczno-organizacyjnych zwiększających szanse samodzielnego funkcjonowania ludzi ON [ibidem: 151]. Polityka ta ma dwa główne zadania. Z jednej strony powinna obniżyć ryzyko występowania niepełnej sprawności, z drugiej zaś chronić warunki oraz jakość życia ON przy jednoczesnym zakorzenieniu w świadomości społecznej kwestii związanych z potrzebami i egzystencją jednostek z ograniczoną sprawnością. Współczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 195 Rysunek 3. Modelowe strategie polityki społecznej wobec niepełnosprawności i osób z niepełnosprawnością RATOWNICTWO LIKWIDACJA LUK I NIEDOBORÓW ANTYCYPACJA WYPRZEDZANIE ZDARZE DYSTRYBUCYJNY SOLIDARYZM GWARANCJE ROZWOJU INTEGRACJA SPO!ECZNA PARTNERSTWO GOSPODARKA RYNEK PRACY, DÓBR, US!UG I "WIADCZE STRATEGIE POLITYKI SPO ECZNEJ WOBEC OSÓB Z NIEPE NOSPRAWNO!CI" INTERWENCJA Ochrona statusu materialnego i spo#ecznego POTRZEBY WARTO"CI PROCESY POLITYCZNE USTRÓJ ASEKURACJA KOMPENSACJA Normalizacja alternatyw$ separacji „niepe#nosprawni, lecz pe#noprawni" Zapobieganie wtórnej niepe#nosprawno%ci PARTYCYPACJA Wyrównywanie utraconych mo liwo!ci Źródło: [Woźniak 2008: 174]. Woźniak [2008] wprowadził do omawianego nurtu koncepcję czterech strategii polityki społecznej wobec niepełnosprawności i osób z niesprawnością. Są to: (1) strategia asekuracyjna (prewencja wtórnego ograniczenia sprawności), (2) strategia kompensacyjna (wyrównywanie utraconych możliwości), (3) strategia interwencyjna (ochrona statusu materialnego i społecznego), (4) strategia partycypacyjna (normalizacja w miejscu separacji połączona z integracją). Pierwsze dwie strategie stanowią głównie domenę działania państwa na szczeblu centralnym, podczas gdy realizacja trzeciej i czwartej powinna odbywać się na poziomie lokalnym z udziałem jednostek samorządu terytorialnego oraz nieformalnych grup obywateli i organizacji pozarządowych. Koncepcja ta jest zatem zgodna z polityką aktywizacji, ale w odróżnieniu od niej wyraźnie odróżnia zasięg realizacji zadań i usług w zależności od poziomu struktury społecznej na którym działają poszczególne podmioty. Jednocześnie właściwie pomija się tutaj rolę podmiotów komercyjnych, które odgrywają istotne w aktywizacji ON role nie tylko jako pracodawcy, ale także jako agencje zatrudnienia i podmioty prywatnego sektora ochrony zdrowia. Poza ramy niniejszego artykułu wykracza próba połączenia w system wskaAndrzej Klimczuk196 zanych strategii z omówionymi podsystemami działającymi w Polsce na rzecz ON. Można zaryzykować jednak twierdzenie, iż zasadne jest w koordynowaniu tych podsystemów uwzględnienie także podmiotów i usług w podziale na wiek, etapy cyklu życia ich odbiorców. Zaproponowane podejścia koncentrują się bowiem głównie na osobach w wieku produkcyjnym (18-59 lat dla kobiet/64 lat dla mężczyzn; po zakończeniu reformy emerytalnej 18-67 dla obu płci), podczas gdy przyjmują niejasne relacje z osobami w wieku przedprodukcyjnym (0-17 lat) i poprodukcyjnym (60+/65+; po reformie emerytalnej 67+). Zasadne jest także pogłębienie analizy zróżnicowania relacji usługowych – ON nie muszą być bowiem traktowane tylko jako użytkownicy czy konsumenci usług tego systemu, ale także jako obywatele i współtwórcy-koproducenci. W analizowanym holistycznym paradygmacie normalizacji za nadrzędne cele polityki społecznej wobec niepełnosprawności i na rzecz ON uznaje się przede wszystkim: zmianę świadomości społecznej umożliwiającą normalizację i integrację; ochronę prawną statusu społecznego ON; poprawę jakości życia ON; wzmacnianie potencjału ON; gwarantowanie ON dostępu do świadczeń i usług socjalno-zdrowotnych; wspieranie inicjatyw ukierunkowanych na poszerzanie dostępu ON do głównego nurtu życia społecznego, przede wszystkim rynku pracy; przystosowanie przestrzeni publicznej do potrzeb ON; aktywne włączenie osób z ograniczoną sprawnością w tworzenie programu społeczeństwa cyfrowego, opartego na wiedzy i kreatywności [por. ibidem]. Do celów tych przypisane są określone zadania do realizacji, w tym między innymi tworzenie infrastruktury (prawnej, organizacyjnej, badawczej) ukierunkowanej na rozwiązywanie problemów niepełnosprawności, wzmacnianie zasobów lokalnych przyczyniających się do zwiększania suwerenności i udziału w życiu społecznym ON; oraz promocja mechanizmów zapobiegających marginalizacji ON (w obszarze pracy, edukacji, zdrowia). Wdrażanie celów i zasad holistycznego paradygmatu normalizacji w praktyce powinno być również łączone z lokalnymi strategiami rozwiązywania problemów społecznych [zob. TUS 2007], tworzeniem partnerstw lokalnych dostosowanych do wielości gminy [zob. Gąciarz i in. 2008] i z promocją dobrych praktyk na rzecz ON dostosowanych do zróżnicowania ich grup [zob. Boguszewska i in. 2011]. W tym miejscu należy podkreślić, iż Z. Woźniak dostosował model czterech strategii polityki społecznej wobec niepełnosprawności i osób z niesprawnością również do prowadzenia i analizowania polityki wobec starości i starzenia się ludności, a w konsekwencji do realizacji polityki budowania relacji międzypokoleniowych zgodnej z rozwijaną przez ONZ od lat dziewięćdziesiątych XX wieku koncepcją „budowy społeczeństwa dla ludzi w każdym wieku" (ang. society for all ages), [zob. Klimczuk 2013: 67]. Można więc twierdzić, iż wdraWspółczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 197 żanie wzajemnie uzupełniającej się polityki i programów na rzecz aktywizacji, ON i starszych może jednocześnie prowadzić do osiągania pozytywnych efektów dla wszystkich grup wieku w danym społeczeństwie, co jest istotne przy prognozowanym szybkim procesie starzenia się ludności Polski na początku XXI wieku. Podsumowanie W artykule zwrócono uwagę na sposoby de"niowania niepełnosprawności i kategorii społecznej osób niepełnosprawnych zgodnie z Konwencją ONZ o Prawach Osób Niepełnosprawnych. Wdrażanie postanowień tego aktu prawnego może wywołać istotne przekształcenia w krajowej polityce społecznej zarówno w wymiarze współpracy istniejących podmiotów, jak też w integracji oferowanych przez nie świadczeń i usług społecznych. Zwrócono uwagę, iż do ograniczania problemów społecznych ON niezbędne jest przede wszystkim zwiększenie ich zatrudnienia poprzez prowadzenie polityki aktywizacji. Polityka ta powinna obejmować nie tylko aktywną politykę rynku pracy z takimi instrumentami, jak pośrednictwo i doradztwo zawodowe, pomoc w aktywnym poszukiwaniu pracy i szkolenia, ale też zindywidualizowanie, dostosowanie tych narzędzi do potrzeb i możliwości odbiorców. Podkreślono, iż wdrażanie polityki aktywizacji wymusza poprawę koordynacji działań tak z perspektywy podziału podmiotów polityki na sektory, jak i na poziomy. Zasadne jest upowszechnianie modeli współzarządzania w relacjach między tymi podmiotami w oparciu o dialog co może prowadzić do lepszego podziału zadań, zasobów, dostępu do informacji, do wyłaniania się nowych rozwiązań oraz rozwiązywania problemów w ujęciu horyzontalnym – z uwzględnieniem wszystkich ich aspektów. W przypadku niepełnosprawności, jak ukazano w holistycznym paradygmacie normalizacji, zasadnicze znaczenie ma spójność nie tylko podsystemów zorientowanych na ON (rehabilitacji, pomocy społecznej pośrednictwa pracy i usług rynku pracy oraz zatrudnienia socjalnego), ale także strategii podejmowanych działań obejmujących odmienne cele i zadania (asekuracyjnej, kompensacyjnej, interwencyjnej, partycypacyjnej). Budowanie spójności tych rozwiązań powinno uwzględniać koncepcję cyklu życia ludzkiego oraz zróżnicowanie relacji usługowych ON z podmiotami polityki społecznej. Wśród dalszych kierunków badań dla krajowych jednostek i instytucji naukowych wskazać można kilka następujących kierunków. Zasadne są analizy Andrzej Klimczuk198 kultury środowiska ON w Polsce z uwzględnieniem postaw, opinii i relacji usługowych z podmiotami polityki społecznej. Badania takie powinny pozwolić na określenie praktyk w których ON są postrzegane nie tylko jako odbiorcy lub konsumenci usług, ale także jako obywatele i koproducenci. Drugi kierunek analiz powinien obejmować zróżnicowanie wewnętrzne środowiska ON ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem procesów samoorganizacji na rzecz obrony i realizacji swoich praw. Trzecim kierunkiem analiz powinny być opisy niepełnosprawności w cyklu życia. Zasadne jest przybliżenie biogra"i ON z uwzględnieniem różnych etapów i obszarów ich relacji z podmiotami polityki społecznej. Czwarty kierunek to analizy przypadków dyskryminacji zwielokrotnionej i przeciwdziałania jej występowaniu, w szczególności w wymiarze instytucjonalnym. Piąty kierunek badań powinien obejmować zbieranie dobrych praktyk zatrudnienia ON na rynku pracy, w tym postawy i rozwiązania pracodawców zatrudniających ON, zajmowanie przez ON wyższych stanowisk w organizacjach i uwzględniających prace specjalistyczne oraz zagraniczne rozwiązania prozatrudnieniowe możliwe do dalszego wdrażania w kraju. Bibliogra a Auleytner J., Mikulski J. (red.), (1996), Polityka społeczna wobec osób niepełnosprawnych. Drogi do integracji, Warszawa Błaszczak A. (red.), (2012), Najważniejsze wyzwania po raty#kacji przez Polskę Konwencji ONZ o Prawach Osób Niepełnosprawnych, Warszawa Boguszewska K. i in. (2011), Zatrudnienie wspomagane. Materiały konferencyjne, Warszawa. Danecki J. (2001), Kwestia społeczna, [w:] B. Rysz-Kowalczyk (red.), Leksykon polityki społecznej, Warszawa: 77-80 Eurostat (2002), EU Labour Force Survey ad hoc module on employment of disabled people – LFS AHM Gąciarz B., Ostrowska A., Pańków W. (2008), Integracja społeczna i aktywizacja zawodowa osób niepełnosprawnych zamieszkałych w małych miastach i na terenach wiejskich. Uwarunkowania sukcesów i niepowodzeń. Raport z badań, Warszawa Golinowska S. (2005), Przyszłość państwa opiekuńczego i systemu zabezpieczenia społecznego, „Polityka Społeczna" nr 11-12: 1-9 GUS (Główny Urząd Statystyczny) (2009), Prognoza ludności na lata 2008-2035, Warszawa GUS (Główny Urząd Statystyczny) (2012), Narodowy Spis Powszechny Ludności i Mieszkań 2011. Raport z wyników, Warszawa Jessop B. (2007), Promowanie „dobrego rządzenia" i ukrywanie jego słabości: re)eksja nad politycznymi paradygmatami i politycznymi narracjami w sferze rządzenia, „Zarządzanie Publiczne" nr 2: 5-25 Karwacki A. (2010), Papierowe skrzydła. Rzecz o spójnej polityce aktywizacji, Toruń Współczesna polityka społeczna wobec niepełnosprawności i osób... 199 Klimczuk A. (2013), Analysis of Intergenerational Policy Models, "Ad Alta: Journal of Interdisciplinary Research" t. 3, nr 1: 66-69 Klimczuk A., Siedlecki M., Sadowska P., Sydow M. (2013), Niepubliczne agencje zatrudnienia osób niepełnosprawnych. Możliwości i dylematy rozwoju w sektorze pozarządowym, Warszawa-Białystok Konwencja o prawach osób niepełnosprawnych (2012), Dz. U. 2012, poz. 1169 Kurzynowski A. (1996), Osoby niepełnosprawne w polityce społecznej, [w:] J. Auleytner, J. Mikulski (red.), Polityka społeczna wobec osób niepełnosprawnych. Drogi do integracji, Warszawa: 17-33 Rymsza M. (2013), Aktywizacja w polityce społecznej. W stronę rekonstrukcji europejskich welfare states?, Warszawa TUS (2007), Niepełnosprawny obywatel a mazowieckie strategie rozwiązywania problemów społecznych, Warszawa Woźniak Z. (2008), Niepełnosprawność i niepełnosprawni w polityce społecznej. Społeczny kontekst medycznego problemu, Warszawa Źródła internetowe BPRON (Biuro Pełnomocnika Rządu ds. Osób Niepełnosprawnych) (2013), Niepełnosprawność w liczbach. Rynek pracy. BAEL, www.niepelnosprawni.gov.pl/ niepelnosprawnosc-w-liczbach-/rynek-pracy/ [25.07.2013] UN (2013), United Nations Enable – Disability and Employment, Secretariat for the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, www.un.org/disabilities/default.asp?id=255 [25.07.2013] UNIC (Ośrodek Informacji ONZ w Warszawie) (2007), De#nicja niepełnosprawności, www. unic.un.org.pl/niepelnosprawnosc/de"nicja.php [25.07.2013] Andrzej Klimczuk200 Summary Contemporary Social Policy Towards Disability and Disabled People Disability is one of the features that di#erentiate individuals and groups in modern societies. People with reduced physical, cognitive and psychological ef- "ciency are particularly exposed to discrimination and social, economic and political exclusion. What is important social issue of people with disabilities in the early 21st century changes by entering into a relationship with the ageing of the population. $e article aims to introduce some theoretical concepts e#orts to improve the image of disability and reduce the barriers faced by persons with disabilities in access to di#erent kinds of resources, spaces and opportunities. A critical analysis of the literature includes: description of the concept of activation policy as well as principles and objectives of social policy in a holistic paradigm of normalization. $is summary contains possible future directions of research and analysis. Keywords: activation, disability, persons with disabilities, normalization, integration, governance

The Disjunctive Hybrid Theory of Prudential Value: an inclusive approach to the good life Joseph Van Weelden Department of Philosophy McGill University, Montreal August 2017 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Joseph Van Weelden 2017 ii Abstract In this dissertation, I argue that all extant theories of prudential value are either a) enumeratively deficient, in that they are unable to accommodate everything that, intuitively, is a basic constituent of prudential value, b) explanatorily deficient, in that they are at least sometimes unable to offer a plausible story about what makes a given thing prudentially valuable, or c) both. In response to the unsatisfactory state of the literature, I present my own account, the Disjunctive Hybrid Theory or DHT. DHT answers to and remedies each of the above inadequacies in a way that no other approach can. This account has the following general structure: Disjunctive Hybrid Theory (DHT): Thing x is basically good for person P if and only if x is either a) cared about (sufficiently and in the right way) by P, b) a bearer of (the right kind of) attitude-independent value, or c) both. Although it follows other recent accounts in combining elements from objective and subjective theories, DHT is a hybrid theory of a quite new kind. This is because it denies both subjective necessity (the constraint that, if thing x is to be basically good for person P, P must have some pro-attitude toward x) and objective necessity (the constraint that, if thing x is to be basically good for person P, x must have some attitude-independent value). I argue that the rejection of both necessity claims is called for if we are to move beyond the enumerative and explanatory limitations of existing accounts. I begin by outlining the general structure of DHT. I then argue, against various recent authors, that desire-satisfactionism remains the most appealing subjectivist approach to prudential value, in that it is best able to capture the central subjectivist insight. This insight is that a person can confer prudential value upon things by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). The subjectivist strand of DHT will thus be a version of desire-satisfactionism, which must be interpreted in line with what I call the object, as opposed to the combo, view. I move on to further motivate and develop the second, objectivist strand of DHT. This part of the theory involves a commitment to robustly attitude-independent prudential goods. I close by addressing some puzzles for the theory, and considering some of its more specific applications. iii Resumé Dans cette thèse, je soutiens que toutes les théories de bien-être [theories of prudential value] existantes sont soit a) insatisfaisantes sur le plan énumératif, en ce qu'elles sont incapables de concilier tout ce qui, intuitivement, est un composant de base de bien-être ; soit b) insatisfaisantes sur le plan explicatif, en ce qu'elles sont, au moins à l'occasion, incapables de fournir une explication plausible quant à ce qui confère à une chose donnée sa valeur de bienêtre; ou encore c) ces deux options. Afin de remédier à cet état peu satisfaisant de la littérature, je présente ma propre approche : la théorie hybride disjonctive (ou THD). La THD répond à chacun des problèmes décrits plus haut et y remédie mieux que toute autre approche. La structure générale de cette théorie est la suivante : Théorie Hybride Disjonctive (THD) : Un certain objet ou état de choses x est bon pour une quelconque personne P si et seulement si x est soit a) un objet de préoccupation suffisante (et qui le soit de manière adéquate) par P, soit b) porteur d'une valeur indépendante de l'état d'esprit de P [attitude-independent value] ; ou encore c) ces deux options. Bien qu'elle s'inscrive dans la continuité d'autres approches récentes en combinant des éléments tirés de théories objectives et subjectives, la THD est une théorie hybride d'un genre plutôt nouveau. Ceci est dû au fait qu'elle rejette à la fois la nécessité subjective (la contrainte selon laquelle une personne P doit avoir une attitude favorable envers une chose x pour que x soit fondamentalement bonne pour P) et la nécessité objective (la contrainte selon laquelle une chose x doit avoir une valeur indépendamment de l'état d'esprit d'une personne P pour que x soit fondamentalement bonne pour P). Je soutiens que le rejet de ces deux affirmations relatives à la nécessité est requis pour dépasser les limites énumérative et explicative des approches déjà existantes. Je commence par exposer les grandes lignes de la structure générale de la THD. Je poursuis en montrant, contre plusieurs auteur-e-s contemporain-e-s, que la théorie désidérative demeure l'approche subjectiviste la plus intéressante pour la valeur de bien-être, en ce qu'elle est l'approche la plus apte à saisir ce que j'identifie comme l'intuition subjectiviste centrale. Cette intuition est la suivante : en se préoccupant de quelque chose suffisamment et d'une manière adéquate, une personne peut conférer une valeur à cette chose sur le plan du bien-être. Le volet subjectiviste de la THD consistera donc en une forme de la théorie désidérative qui doit également, comme je le montrerai, être interprété en conformité avec ce que j'appelle la conception de l'objet, par opposition à celle dite du combo. Je justifie et développe ensuite le second volet, objectiviste celui-là, de la THD. Ce volet de la théorie implique un engagement envers des valeurs de bien-être qui sont résolument indépendantes de l'état d'esprit. Je conclus en abordant des problèmes supplémentaires soulevés par la théorie et en examinant certaines de ses applications particulières. iv Dedication For Grandpa, Oma and Tucker. v Acknowledgements It is not possible for me to list here all the friends, family members, and colleagues whose love, friendship and intellectual support I have leaned on while writing this dissertation. I only hope it will suffice to say that, even if your name does not appear below, I do remember and shall be forever grateful. To begin, I must record my debt to Dale Dorsey, whose course on the philosophy of wellbeing I was fortunate enough to take while still an undergraduate at the University of Alberta. My continuing philosophical preoccupations testify to the impact this first exposure to the topic had on me. Over the course of my time at McGill, I have enjoyed some truly extraordinary supervision. Sarah Stroud is the most diligent and supportive advisor, and the most penetrating reader and critic, an aspiring ethicist could hope to meet with. She has read and commented at length on several drafts of every chapter of this dissertation. Whatever merit the final product has can be traced in large part to her tireless efforts. The opportunity to benefit from Sarah's wisdom, her generosity, and her friendship has been one of the great joys of my academic life. The work that follows has also been vastly improved by exposure to the sharp critical eyes of Iwao Hirose and Andrew Reisner. Andrew supervised me through my early years at McGill and during the first stages of the dissertation writing process, and continued to act as a source of advice and support thereafter. I am tremendously grateful to him for his guidance, which has consistently pushed me to become a better philosopher. Iwao deserves special credit for being generous enough to take over as a supervisor of this project at a rather late stage. His pronounced allergy to BS-ing has served me extremely well as I have reworked and revised this thesis over the past year. I also extend my warmest thanks to the administrative staff at McGill (Judy Dear, Mylissa Falkner, Angela Fotopoulos, Saleema Nawaz Webster, Andrew Stoten) who have helped so much with various practical matters over the years. Over the course of my doctoral studies, I was lucky enough to receive financial and intellectual support from both the Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire sur la normativité (GRIN) and the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRÉ). Both groups also provided me with a venue to present earlier drafts of some of the material that follows to knowledgeable and supportive audiences, an opportunity for which I am most grateful. I wish particularly to thank Jason D'Cruz and Christine Tappolet for helpful comments on these presentations. Thanks also go out to audiences at the Sheffield 'Understanding Value' Graduate Conference and the McGill Philosophy Workshop Series for their comments on previous iterations of some of this work. I was fortunate enough to spend June –July 2015 as a Fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Center for Moral and Political Philosophy, as part of their PhD workshop on WellBeing. I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to all the participants in and organizers of the workshop for their patience in sitting through, and providing helpful notes on, very rough versions of some of the ideas and arguments that appear below. I also thank them for making my vi too brief sojourn in Jerusalem such a rewarding one both professionally and personally. I must give a special shout out to my co-fellows Ron Aboodi, Teresa Bruno, Anthony Kelley, and Catherine Robb, as well as to Dani Attas, Guy Bar Sadeh, David Enoch, Maya Roudner, Wayne Sumner, and Hasko von Kriegstein. Hearty thanks as well to the members of our dissertation writing group, Maiya Jordan, Josephine Nielsen, and Michel Xhignesse, who were of stout enough stuff to read and comment on some of what follows at a painfully early stage of its career. I am also very grateful to Charlotte Sabourin for her help in translating the abstract into French, which saved me from the embarrassment of preparing my own translation. To my McGill philosophy family: you've been the best group of friends and colleagues anyone could wish for, and in the process, you've changed, enriched, and enlivened my world more than I think you can know. Although I regret that I can't thank every one of you who has touched my life in some way by name, I must here give special mention to Helen Baker, Jess Barnes, Marie-Anne Casselot, Melanie Coughlin, Alice Everly, Dave Gaber, Bruno Guindon, Maiya Jordan, Tim Juvshik, Martina Orlandi, Nikki Ramsoomair, Matthew Scarfone, and Michel Xhignesse. I literally (and I use this term judiciously) would not have made it through the past half-decade without you folks. Finally, to my bio-family, especially my grandmother Pat King, my grandfather John Van Weelden, my brother Richard Van Weelden, my sister Tess Van Weelden, and my parents, Rob and Paula Van Weelden: I doubt that any other human being has been blessed with such a limitless fount of familial love and support. There is not a day that goes by where I do not feel immensely lucky to have all of you in my life. The very existence of this thesis, along with everything else that I am or may yet become, I owe to you. vii Contents Abstract ....................................................................................................................................................... ii Resumé ...................................................................................................................................................... iii Dedication ................................................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................. v Contents ................................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 Introducing the Disjunctive Hybrid Theory .......................................................... 9 1.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 9 1.2 Axiological Preliminaries ................................................................................................................. 10 1.3 The Structure of Hybrid Theories ................................................................................................. 13 1.4 Why Go Hybrid? ................................................................................................................................... 17 1.5 Enumerative and Explanatory Pluralisms ................................................................................. 34 1.6 First Steps in Filling Out DHT ......................................................................................................... 48 1.7 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 52 Chapter 2 Desire and the Heart of Subjectivism .................................................................... 54 2.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 54 2.2 Desire-Satisfactionism And Its Critics ......................................................................................... 56 2.3 Dorsey's Judgment Subjectivism ................................................................................................... 64 2.4 The Value-Fulfillment Theory and the Identification Constraint ..................................... 69 2.5 The Value-Fulfillment Theory and the Agency Constraint .................................................. 75 2.6 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................................. 84 Chapter 3 What's Good in Desire-Satisfactionism? ............................................................... 85 3.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 85 3.2 Introducing the Object and Combo Views ................................................................................. 87 3.3 In Defense of the Object View ......................................................................................................... 93 3.4 The Object View and Objectivism ................................................................................................. 96 3.5 Why Not Idealize? ............................................................................................................................... 99 3.6 Against Substantive Constraints.................................................................................................. 110 viii 3.7 In Defense of the Identification Constraint ............................................................................. 113 3.8 Desire-satisfaction and Time ........................................................................................................ 118 3.9 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 122 Chapter 4 The Objectivist Insight ............................................................................................. 123 4.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 123 4.2 The Disjunctive Hybrid Theorist's Challenge ......................................................................... 125 4.3 Attitude-Independent Values, Altruistic Desires, and Adaptive Preferences ............ 127 4.4 Attitude-Independent Values and Common-Sense .............................................................. 130 4.5 Against the Desire Constraint: The Case of Jessica............................................................... 136 4.6 Further Arguments Against the Desire Constraint .............................................................. 142 4.7 Against the Enjoyment Constraint .............................................................................................. 150 4.8 Why Not Perfectionism? ................................................................................................................. 151 4.9 The Objective List and the Explanatory Question ................................................................ 159 4.10 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 167 Chapter 5 A Potpourri of Issues and Implications ............................................................. 168 5.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 168 5.2 The Disjunctive Hybrid Theory of Ill-Being ............................................................................ 170 5.3 Kagan's Worry .................................................................................................................................... 178 5.4 The Question of Weighing .............................................................................................................. 182 5.5 DHT and the Well-Being of Other Beings ................................................................................. 187 5.6 DHT and Meaning .............................................................................................................................. 191 5.7 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................ 195 Conclusion ............................................................................................................................................. 196 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................................... 201 1 Introduction My first exposure to the vast philosophical literature on well-being or (as I will most often call it) prudential value came more than a decade ago, when I was an undergraduate. 1 My initial, untutored response to this literature took the form of a distinct sense that, while each of the extant theories (hedonism, desire-satisfactionism, objective list accounts, perfectionism, and various hybrid approaches) seemed to capture some part of the truth about the good life, they all left something important out. The hedonists were surely right in thinking that pleasure is good for people if anything is. Desire-satisfactionists, on the other hand, seemed to place a muchneeded emphasis on the role that what a person cares about plays in determining her own good. The objective list theorists' claim that there are certain things that are good for any person, regardless of whether that person has any positive attitude towards them, could also muster formidable intuitions in its favour. One apparent weakness of the objective list account, that it does nothing to explain why the things that are on the list are good for people, lent considerable intuitive appeal to perfectionism, which also posits such attitude-independent goods but purports to ground them in deeper facts about human nature. Extant hybrid theories, according to which something must meet both a subjective condition (such as being enjoyed or desired) and an objective value condition if it is to be good for a person, inherited a fair amount of plausibility from the independent appeal of both subjective and objective accounts. 1 Prudential value is that kind of value which adheres to those things that make someone's life (or some period of her life) go better for her. I generally prefer the term 'prudential value' to others such as 'wellbeing' or 'welfare', because it wears on its sleeve the fact that it is a term of art. It is therefore less liable to give rise to confusions or equivocations based on the varied, sometimes conflicting, folk usages of the latter terms. However, anything I say about prudential value could equally well be said about well-being or welfare as most philosophers understand these terms, and for ease of expression I will sometimes employ this latter terminology myself. 2 What is it, then, that each of the above theories intuitively leaves out? The answer to this question is, of course, different in each case. Hedonism seems impossible to square with common judgments to the effect that factors that do not enter one's experience at all can, nonetheless, make a difference to how well off one is. 2 Desire-satisfactionism, in grounding all prudential value in desire, disregards the apparent fact that some things are more worth desiring than others. The objective list theory and perfectionism, by contrast, in making all values attitude-independent, fail to give sufficient weight to what a person cares about. Finally, extant hybrid theories, which introduce both a subjective and an objective criterion but require that both conditions be satisfied, succumb to the objection that the satisfaction of either the subjective or the objective condition is intuitively sufficient for prudential value (at least in many cases). The larger point underlying these criticisms is that none of the extant accounts proves capable of combining and reconciling two distinct insights, both of which, I argue, are indispensable if a theory of prudential value is to be sufficiently inclusive. The first is what I will call the subjectivist insight. This insight, which will serve for us as a lodestone throughout this dissertation, is that a person can confer prudential value upon things by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). 3 Any theory that does not somehow accommodate the subjectivist insight is bound to come up short in two distinct respects, which in turn correspond to two distinct questions that a theory of prudential value must address. First, such a theory will 2 The famous experience machine thought experiment from Nozick (1974, pp. 42-3) taps into intuitions of this sort, but less fanciful illustrations abound. See for instance the discussion of the deceived spouse in Sumner (1996, p.157). As Hawkins (2014, pp.211-2) helpfully points out, there are at least two ways to understand the lesson of such examples. They may be taken to suggest that "mind-independent events count when it comes to assessing my well-being, whether I know about them or not", or that we should place "value on knowledge, i.e. on the obtaining of a certain relation between events on the mind". The important thing to note here is that these two views are equally incompatible with hedonism. I ultimately argue that we should accept both of Hawkins' theses. 3 Cf. Sobel (2016, p.1): "Subjectivism maintains that things have value because we value them. Caring about stuff makes stuff matter." 3 fail at the enumerative or extensional level, in that it will not be able to properly identify the basic constituents of prudential value. Second, the theory will fail at the explanatory level, in that it will not be able to offer a plausible story about why all the things that are prudentially valuable are so. The second, objectivist, insight is that certain things have attitude-independent prudential value, which is to say that they are good for any person, whether or not they are the object of any pro-attitude on that person's part. Intuitively, these goods include certain interpersonal bonds (friendships, familial attachments, romantic love), virtue, achievement, knowledge, autonomy, and pleasure. And again, theories that fail to accommodate the objectivist insight will prove to be inadequate on two fronts. First, even when they agree that the above items are prudentially valuable (as is likely to be so in most cases, given the way that our desires tend to track what we see as valuable), they give the wrong explanation of why this is the case. Second, in certain cases (namely those in which one of the above items is present in a person's life but they have no proattitude towards it), such theories will deliver the implausible verdict that these things are not good for the person. In what follows, I attempt to remedy the unsatisfactory state of the current literature by articulating and defending a new account of prudential value, which I dub the disjunctive hybrid theory or DHT. DHT is a hybrid theory in that it combines elements from both traditional objective and traditional subjective accounts. It is a disjunctive theory in that, unlike extant hybrid approaches, it does not impose either a subjective or an objective criterion as a necessary condition that a thing must satisfy if it is to be prudentially valuable. Rather, it maintains that at least one of these criteria must be met, but adds that the satisfaction of either the subjective or the objective condition is sufficient for a thing's being prudentially valuable. 4 To elaborate, DHT maintains that some of the things that are good for a person are so precisely because the person cares about these things (sufficiently and in the right way). In such cases, the source of the prudential value is the person's pro-attitude, which is sufficient by itself to make its object good for the person. This, in rough outline, is the distinctively subjectivist strand of DHT. The reader will note that, so far, it is just a restatement of what we above identified as the subjectivist insight. The theory does not stop there. It also states that other things are good for a person independently of whether the person has any pro-attitude towards them. This is, again in rough outline, the objectivist strand of DHT, and amounts to a reaffirmation of the second, objectivist insight. Insofar as the theory combines these two strands, it preserves both the subjectivist and the objectivist insights. The resulting account has the following general structure: Disjunctive Hybrid Theory (DHT): Thing x is basically good for person P if and only if x is either a) cared about (sufficiently and in the right way) by P, b) a bearer of (the right kind of) attitude-independent value, or c) both. 4 Although hybrid theories are by now quite well represented in the literature on prudential value, no hybrid theory of this disjunctive kind has yet been developed or defended. Of course, both of its disjuncts require considerable filling out if DHT is to amount to a plausible and informative account of prudential value. So far, the stated content of each strand serves merely as a guarantor of the disjunctive hybrid theorist's commitment to the subjectivist and objectivist insights, respectively. This is a fitting starting point, given that our motivation for developing a 4 The parenthetical clauses are important. This is because a) very different accounts are possible of what is involved in caring about something in the prudentially relevant sense (for plausibly, not all instances of caring about something are prudentially relevant), and b) very different kinds of attitude-independent value might be appealed to in attributing prudential value to a thing (for plausibly, not all kinds of attitude-independent value are prudentially relevant). I discuss these matters at some length below, the former in Chapters 2 and 3, the latter in Chapter 4. 5 hybrid theory with this kind of structure was that only an account drawn along such lines could simultaneously embrace these two distinct insights about prudential value. Yet it also leaves the details of the account drastically underspecified, and even leaves open the question of whether any plausible theory of this kind can be developed. Much of this dissertation will therefore be devoted to the task of elaborating the two strands of the disjunctive hybrid approach, in such a way as to maximize the independent appeal of each strand, as well as that of DHT considered as a whole. I will show that, provided we are careful about how we formulate it, DHT is as plausible as any competing account of prudential value. Indeed, in at least one significant respect, it has the edge over all extant theories. If, as I will argue, theorists of prudential value ought to be especially concerned to avoid what I call the under-inclusiveness objection, DHT thereby becomes the most appealing theory on the market. In Chapter 1, I provide an initial sketch of DHT, illustrating how it fills a lacuna in the existing literature on prudential value. I further motivate the account, by bringing out both how pressing the under-inclusiveness objection is, and how DHT is uniquely positioned to evade it. In the course of this discussion, I show how our new approach sheds light on several distinctions that are current in the literature on prudential value, namely between subjectivism and objectivism, enumeration and explanation, and monism and pluralism. In Chapter 2, I begin to flesh out the subjectivist strand of DHT. I argue that the best way to capture the subjectivist insight is to hold that (at least some of) a person's desires confer value upon their objects. This puts me at odds with Dale Dorsey, who has recently argued that the attitudes that subjectivists should focus on are beliefs rather than desires, as well as with Valerie Tiberius and Jason Raibley, who have argued separately that subjectivism's concern should be with value-fulfillment rather than desire-satisfaction. I show that Dorsey's view is extensionally 6 implausible, in that it proves to be under-inclusive in many cases and over-inclusive in others. I also argue that, depending on what is packed into the notion of value-fulfillment, the latter approach is either compatible with the best version of desire-satisfactionism, or itself underinclusive. The upshot of our discussion is that the subjectivist strand of DHT should take its cue from the venerable tradition of desire-satisfactionism, rather than from either of these more recent subjectivist proposals. Chapter 3 further develops the subjectivist strand of DHT. I argue that, if our theory is to preserve the subjectivist insight, it must adopt what I call the object view of desiresatisfactionism, as opposed to the combo view. Although these interpretations are often not distinguished in the literature (and even when they are, they are often thought not to differ significantly), I show that which reading of desire-satisfactionism we adopt is a factor of crucial importance. It is also critical that we provide a plausible account of which desires matter for well-being. In this connection, I argue that we should not impose any idealizing, procedural constraints on the desires we take to be prudentially relevant, nor should we place a substantive value constraint on the objects of these desires. However, the adoption of an identification constraint, which accords prudential relevance only to those desires that are sufficiently stable, enduring, and integrated into a person's self-conception, can be justified by the subjectivist insight itself. Moreover, this last move, when set alongside DHT's commitment to attitudeindependent goods, allows our theory to deal satisfactorily with the infamous scope problem for desire-satisfactionism. Finally, I address certain issues surrounding the time of benefit and harm that arise for any theorist of prudential value who thinks desire-satisfactionism is at least part of the truth. 7 The purpose of Chapter 4 is to further motivate and develop the second, objectivist strand of DHT. I argue that there is, alongside the subjectivist insight, an objectivist insight that any sufficiently inclusive theory of prudential value must incorporate. I first show that the recognition that there are at least some attitude-independent goods is necessary to avoid certain damning objections to subjectivism. I then argue that it is only by allowing that such goods require no subjective sanction to benefit a person, either in the form of desire or enjoyment, that the hybrid theorist can evade the under-inclusiveness objection. I also consider how, if at all, we can explain the attitude-independent value of these items. I maintain that a locative account, which understands attitude-independent prudential value via an appeal to goodness simpliciter, is more plausible than a perfectionist account. Whether it is also preferable to a primitivist approach, which admits of no such explanation, is an issue I am unable to settle. In Chapter 5, I address some outstanding issues for DHT. The theory as developed in the earlier chapters took a novel approach to the question of what is good for people and why. However, it did not yet tell us anything about what is prudentially bad. I here consider what the most plausible disjunctive hybrid approach to ill-being should look like. When DHT is supplemented in this way, interesting consequences follow. Most significantly, it turns out that the same thing can simultaneously be a basic constituent of prudential value and a basic constituent of prudential disvalue. I argue that, however odd this may at first sound, when correctly understood it is a plausible result and thus not a strike against DHT. This brings us to the issue of how to make trade-offs between attitude-dependent and attitude-independent prudential (dis)value, and between the various attitude-independent prudential goods and bads. I argue that we cannot expect any general weighing principles here, but must evaluate such matters on a case by case basis. I consider the objection that the lack of a precise metric for 8 making such comparisons renders our account anti-theoretical and therefore unappealing. While I grant that, ceteris paribus, theoretical simplicity is a virtue, the truth about prudential value may just be a complicated one, and theorists must allow for this. I round off this discussion by applying DHT to two ongoing debates, concerning the well-being of animals other than adult humans, and the relationship between well-being and meaning in life. My rough undergraduate's sense that the accounts of well-being that have hitherto been proposed are all in certain ways under-inclusive is one that I have never lost. The dissertation before you can thus be read as the culmination of a philosophical journey that began all those years ago. It is an exercise in theory construction, the aim of which is to put forward a theory of prudential value that, for whatever other faults it may have, does not fall victim to this underinclusiveness objection. Even if the reader remains unconvinced that DHT is plausible, let alone preferable to all extant theories, I hope they find something illuminating in the attempt. 9 Chapter 1 Introducing the Disjunctive Hybrid Theory 1.1 Introduction In this first chapter, I begin by laying out some of my central axiological assumptions. I then outline the structure of hybrid theories of prudential value in general, and of the disjunctive hybrid theory in particular. This allows me to situate the disjunctive hybrid theory (hereafter DHT) within the current literature on prudential value, as well as to bring out its distinctive appeal. The main advantage I claim for my account is that it has the potential to be more inclusive than any of the alternatives. DHT is uniquely capable of embracing all the things that intuitively form part of a person's good, while also providing plausible explanations of why these things are good. I argue that we have compelling reasons to strive to construct a theory that is maximally inclusive in this way. Part of what is novel about the account being developed in these pages is that it is not just a hybrid theory but a pluralistic one (it will become clearer below why hybridism and pluralism are here taken to be separate commitments). Drawing on a distinction that several authors have recently made between enumerative and explanatory theories of well-being, I identify two sorts of questions that we might expect a theory of prudential value to answer, the enumerative question and the explanatory question. 1 I show that each of these is susceptible of both monistic and pluralistic answers, on a plausible understanding of these two terms. However, in much of the existing literature it is assumed that, with respect to the explanatory question, one must either offer a monistic answer or concede that there is no answer. One of the subsidiary goals of this 1 Crisp (2006, pp.102-3) introduces this distinction. It is also discussed and put to work by Fletcher (2013) and Woodard (2013). Lin (2017) argues that such a distinction is not useful for classifying theories of well-being. I discuss and respond to his argument in section 1.5. 10 dissertation is to establish that this assumption is unwarranted. DHT is pluralistic with respect to explanation as well as enumeration. What is more, this deep pluralism confers its own advantages upon the theory. This chapter has two main aims; to establish the general framework of DHT, and to show that it has at least one significant advantage over more familiar accounts. In the remainder of this dissertation I will spell out our approach in more detail, further clarifying its structure and its unique virtues. I hope, finally, to convince the reader not only that DHT deserves to be treated as a live option and discussed as a competitor to extant theories of prudential value, but also that we are justified in preferring it to all the alternatives. 1.2 Axiological Preliminaries It is necessary, first, to clarify the basic value-theoretic framework within which I am operating. Throughout this dissertation, I will generally treat the bearers of prudential value as states of affairs. States of affairs, strictly speaking, are those entities referred to by "that"-clauses, for example the state of affairs that Francine is taking pleasure in a beautiful sunset. This should be kept before the reader's mind. If I sometimes talk in a looser way about the prudential valuebearers, this is simply for ease of expression. There is a substantial body of philosophical literature addressing what kind of entities we should take value-bearers in general (and prudential value-bearers in particular) to be. I do not intend to take a side on this issue. For my purposes, I see no harm in speaking as if the proper bearers of prudential value are states of affairs, if only because this is the closest thing to a default position in the literature on prudential value. However, should the reader prefer to conceive of the prudential value-bearers in some other way, the claims that I am making can be quite easily translated without impacting the arguments. 11 Whereas some prudentially valuable states of affairs have their value only derivatively, others have basic or non-derivative prudential value. These last are what I will call the basic constituents of prudential value. The value that they possess, moreover, is a kind of final or noninstrumental value. Although the notion of final value is a familiar one in recent axiology, final prudential value is comparatively under-discussed. To be finally valuable is, roughly, to be valuable in itself or for its own sake. To be finally prudentially valuable for some person P, then, is to be good for P in itself or for its own sake. A first condition on something's being a basic constituent of prudential value, then, is that it be finally prudentially valuable. A second condition is that it does not derive its final value from the final value of any of its proper parts. Finally, we will stipulate that if we had an account of all the basic constituents of prudential value and of their combinations, we would have an account of all the prudential value there is. 2 Everything else that is prudentially valuable is so only insofar as it either includes one or more of these basic constituents as parts, or is a means to their obtaining. Neither the distinction between basic and derivative value nor the distinction between final and instrumental value maps onto the more familiar distinction between intrinsic and instrumental value (if intrinsic value is understood, as it often is, as supervening exclusively on the intrinsic properties of a state of affairs). 3 Of course, many of the things that are derivatively prudentially valuable are so because they are means to the obtaining of intrinsically prudentially valuable states of affairs. Supposing it to be good for Francine to study for that French test on Thursday, to take that weekend trip to Vermont on Friday, and to eschew those Doritos every day, it may yet be that none of these things is good for Francine for its own sake. Rather, the 2 These conditions roughly follow Bradley (2009, pp.4-8). Provided we take sufficient care in specifying the basic constituents of prudential value, the third condition does not rule out the view that the shape of a life (i.e. the way valuable and disvaluable states of affairs are temporally distributed within it) matters to its overall prudential goodness. I wish to remain neutral on this matter. 3 See, for instance, Korsgaard (1983) and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (1999). 12 value of these things may reside entirely in the fact that they contribute to the obtaining of other states of affairs. The studying is plausibly good for Francine because it will lead to an increase in her knowledge, and/or because improving her French will allow her to form more friendships in Montreal. The trip is plausibly good for her because of the pleasures the idyllic Vermont landscape will afford. Refraining from eating Doritos is plausibly good for her because it keeps her in good shape for hockey season. On the other hand, some derivatively valuable states of affairs themselves have intrinsic value, in virtue of having proper parts that are intrinsically valuable. An example is the complex state of affairs in which Francine takes pleasure in observing both the beautiful sunrise and the spectacular sunset. Francine's taking pleasure in the sunrise is intrinsically good for her, and her taking pleasure in the sunset is also intrinsically good for her. The state of affairs consisting of the combination of these distinct, temporally disunified instances of pleasure here seems to inherit the intrinsic value of its parts. This is a somewhat gruesome example, but there are other bearers of derivative intrinsic value that are commonly appealed to in ordinary conversation. If Francine has throughout her life enjoyed many pleasures of the sort described above, and has comparatively few unpleasant experiences to her name, we may say that her life has, overall, been a pleasurable one. The value here is intrinsic, but must nonetheless be distinguished as of a different order than the value borne by individual instances of pleasure. Only the latter have basic intrinsic prudential value. 4 Moreover, we are not assuming that the basic constituents of prudential value are all intrinsically valuable. It is a matter of controversy whether all the things that are basically good 4 The best primer on the notion of basic intrinsic value is Feldman (2000). 13 (for people or in general) are intrinsically good. This dissertation is not an entry in the debate surrounding intrinsicalism about final value, and so will take no side on this issue. 5 This is enough axiological stage-setting for the present. In the next section I offer a sketch of the general structure of hybrid theories of prudential value. This will set the stage for our discussion (in section 1.4) of what is appealing about these theories in general, and about DHT in particular. 1.3 The Structure of Hybrid Theories It is fair to say that hybrid alternatives to the dominant (objective and subjective) theories of well-being have been experiencing a boom in popularity of late. I consider why this is so at some length below, but before we can answer this question we need to get clear on what separates these theories from other, more traditional approaches. The aim of the present section is, accordingly, to identify the distinguishing features of hybrid accounts. To this point, I have been helping myself to the well-worn dualism between subjectivism and objectivism. Thus, I have characterized hybrid theories of prudential value as those which combine elements from objective and subjective theories. If we are to better understand the nature and appeal of hybrid approaches, then, we must acquire a firmer grasp on how the distinction between subjectivism and objectivism serves to classify theories of prudential value. Alas, there is no generally agreed upon way of framing this distinction. Moreover, it is doubtful that we can find any way of identifying the core commitments of subjectivism and objectivism about well-being, respectively, that is neutral with respect to substantive theoretical issues. This is because isolating the core commitments of subjective and objective theories already requires 5 Once more, see Korsgaard (1983) and Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (1999), as well as Kagan (1998). 14 one to take a stand on the question of what is distinctively appealing about each kind of theory. That is, we need to have some idea of what subjective accounts are supposed to do, before we can ascertain whether a given theory deserves to be called subjective. This is equally true in the objective case. I will be operating with one specific account of what makes theories subjective or objective (or both). Although my account of this distinction is neither uncontroversial nor substantively neutral, I will argue that it is at once more intuitive and more fruitful for taxonomical purposes than others on offer. A notable advantage of the approach I defend is that it allows for genuine hybrid theories, namely those that are at once (to some extent) objective and (to some extent) subjective. Hybrid accounts are now quite popular, and ought therefore to be recognized by our taxonomies of theories of well-being. And yet, approaches that take objectivism and subjectivism to be mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive categories do not leave any room for such theories. Perhaps the best-known instance of such a proposal is that offered by Wayne Sumner. 6 Sumner states that "a theory is subjective if it treats my having a favorable attitude toward something as a necessary condition of the thing being beneficial for me". 7 Call the claim that nothing can be basically good for a person if that person does not have some pro-attitude toward it subjective necessity (I ask the reader to remember this claim, as it will be important later). All that is required to make a theory come out as subjective on Sumner's account is that it endorse subjective necessity. Objective theories, in turn, are for Sumner all those that reject subjective necessity. 6 Sumner (1995 and 1996). 7 Sumner (1995, p.768). Tiberius (2007, p.373) endorses more or less the same criterion: "Those defending subjective theories argue that a person's having a positive attitude (or a positive attitude under certain conditions) toward x is necessary for x to count as part of that person's well-being. Proponents of objective theories deny this claim." 15 Sumner's approach forces us to classify any proposed theory as either a version of subjectivism or objectivism, without allowing for any admixture of the two. But surely our taxonomical scalpel need not be wielded so bluntly. Consider a theory that accepts subjective necessity, but insists that it is also a necessary condition on a given thing's being good for a person that it possess some substantive (which is to say attitude-independent) value. Call this second condition objective necessity (again, I urge you to keep this claim before your mind). We will discuss theories with this structure in more detail in the next section. The point now is just that it would be strange to classify these theories as straightforwardly subjective. After all, they explicitly make appeal to attitude-independent prudential goods. This suggests that we would be better served by an approach that is more fine-grained than Sumner's, and that allows us to classify theories of prudential value as purely subjective, purely objective, or as hybrids with both subjective and objective elements. 8 The approach I favour starts by identifying the minimal commitments of both objectivism and subjectivism. First, consider the following claim: Minimal Subjectivism (MS): At least some of the things that are good for a person have their prudential value at least in part because the person has the right kind of pro-attitude toward them. 8 For similar reasons, we should reject the view, propounded in Yelle (2014, p.367) that "a theory of well-being is subjective if and only if it treats an individual's having a positive orientation (e.g. desire, attitude, etc.) towards something as a sufficient condition of that thing's contributing to that individual's well-being" (italics added). This way of carving things up would make DHT itself straightforwardly subjectivist, even as it allows things towards which an individual has no positive orientation to contribute to that individual's well-being. Yelle goes on (pp.367-8): "Objective theories deny this sufficiency...they argue that something can be (directly or immediately) good for one even if one does not regard it favourably or is not positively oriented toward it". Yet this is a misleading passage, insofar as one clearly need not deny the sufficiency claim in order to affirm Yelle's latter claim (indeed, DHT affirms both claims). 16 My proposal is that any theory which satisfies MS should be classified as (at least partially) subjective. We can then move on to compare theories which meet this minimal condition, with respect to how subjective they are. A commitment to subjectivism, on the approach I am recommending, admits of degrees. A thoroughgoing subjective theory would say something like this: Thoroughgoing Subjectivism (TS): All the things that are good for a person have their prudential value solely because the person has the right kind of pro-attitude toward them. Between TS and MS there is room for a wide variety of partially subjective accounts. Thus, one might defend a theory according to which some of the things that are good for a person have their value solely because the person has the right kind of pro-attitude toward them, but other things are prudentially valuable for other reasons (indeed, this is exactly what I will do in the ensuing pages). Alternatively, one could hold that all the things that are good for a person have their value in part because the person has the right kind of pro-attitude toward them, but that these things must also meet some other condition (this is what the joint necessity hybrid theories discussed below claim). One could even defend a view according to which some of the things that are good for a person have their value solely because they are the object of the right kind of pro-attitude, whereas others have their value in part because of the person's pro-attitudes but in part because some other condition is met. Now consider the following claim: Minimal Objectivism (MO): At least some of the things that are good for a person have their prudential value at least in part because they have (the right kind of) attitude-independent value. We can in turn contrast MO with a far stronger claim: 17 Thoroughgoing Objectivism (TO): All the things that are good for a person have their prudential value solely because they have (the right kind of) attitude-independent value. Once again, the approach taken here leaves ample room for theories that fall somewhere between these two poles. Thus, one might defend an account according to which some of the things that are good for a person have their prudential value solely because they are good in some substantive, attitude-independent sense, but where the prudential value of other things is grounded in the person's pro-attitudes (again, this is exactly what I will do in the ensuing pages). One might also hold that all the things that are good for a person have their prudential value in part because they are good in some substantive, attitude independent sense, but that they must also meet some subjective condition (again, this is just what joint necessity hybrid theorists say). Or finally, it might be that some of the things that are good for a person have their prudential value solely because they are substantively good, but others have their value in part because they are substantively good but in part because they meet some other relevant condition. Hybrid theories of prudential value, on the approach I am recommending, are all those which accept both MS and MO. Note that this leaves a lot of space for the hybrid theorist to maneuver, more than has yet been recognized. It is important to bear in mind, as well, that none of the above was put in terms of constraints such as subjective necessity or objective necessity. It is, of course, open to the hybrid theorist to accept one or both necessity claims. However, I see no reason to limit the range of potential hybrid theories in advance to those which endorse either subjective or objective necessity, let alone both. 1.4 Why Go Hybrid? Now that we have clarified what makes a theory of prudential value a hybrid, we can direct our efforts to explaining the appeal of such accounts. I will here consider two quite distinct reasons 18 why a theorist of prudential value might find a theory that accepts both MS and MO compelling (there are doubtless other reasons, but the two I pick out are both prominent and instructive). These reasons correspond, in turn, to two distinct kinds of objection that one may have to nonhybrid versions of objectivism and subjectivism. Moreover, they point us towards quite different versions of hybridism. This section thus provides us with our first occasion to contrast DHT with extant hybrid theories, and affords an initial glimpse into both the novel structure of the former approach and its distinctive advantages. It is possible to identify various typical strategies for arguing against any proposed theory of prudential value, whether it be objective or subjective. Simon Keller has pointed out, what seems difficult to dispute, that there appear to be forceful intuitive counterexamples to all extant accounts of what the basic constituents of a person's well-being are. Moreover, there are quick and easy methods for generating such counterexamples to any theory of this sort that could conceivably be proposed. 9 Here I'll merely point to two of the most prominent such methods, which are of special relevance in the context of hybrid approaches. First, one may charge a theory of prudential value with being too inclusive. That is, it may count as good for a person things that intuitively do not contribute to her good. I will call this the over-inclusiveness objection. All that is required to generate a version of this objection is that we can identify at least one instance in which the theory is committed to treating as good for a person something that, intuitively, lacks any value for her. The striking thing to observe is that both objective and subjective theories are typically seen by their respective critics as undermined by some version of the over-inclusiveness objection. Objective theories, in principle, allow things toward which I have no favourable attitude of any sort to count as basic constituents of my well-being. The thoroughgoing objectivist must 9 Keller (2009, pp.657-60). 19 even admit that states of affairs that I (or some ideal version of myself) would not care about or be motivated to pursue even were I fully informed and fully procedurally rational can be good for me. This, the critics of objectivism hold, divorces me from my own good in a way that renders it difficult (if not impossible) to grasp how it could still be my good. Thus, Peter Railton famously claims that "it would be an intolerably alienated conception of someone's good to imagine that it might fail in any way to engage him". 10 It should be clear enough that this wellknown alienation objection is but one instance of the over-inclusiveness objection. Subjective theories are, in their turn, also charged with being too permissive. One complaint that is often lodged is that even the most sophisticated versions of subjectivism (i.e. those that appeal only to the desires a fully informed and procedurally rational version of oneself would desire that one have) are insufficiently sensitive to the independent value of the objects of the pro-attitudes they take to be prudentially relevant. 11 Sometimes people want things (to stick with the kind of pro-attitude most typically appealed to) that lack any independent value. It seems likely that no system of desire laundering which doesn't appeal to substantive values can rule out the possibility of my being benefited (according to subjectivism) by the satisfaction of desires with trivial, base, or even immoral objects. Again, we can see that this objection from worthless objects is a version of the over-inclusiveness objection, now turned back upon the subjectivist. If one agrees with their critics that the parties on both traditional sides of the debate are too permissive in what they allow to be good for a person, a natural move is to see whether in combining elements of both theories one can arrive at a theory that is less laissez-faire than either would be on its own. This is a plausible explanation for the recent popularity of a certain 10 Railton (2003, p.47). See also the extensive discussion of this worry in Rosati (1996). 11 See for instance Kraut (1994) and Fletcher (2013). 20 kind of hybrid theory. I argued above that neither objective necessity nor subjective necessity should be treated as essential commitments of the hybrid theorist. It is, therefore, all the more striking that the hybrid theories of prudential value that have received the most attention all accept both necessity claims. As Christopher Woodard notes, the following general structure is shared by these extant hybrid accounts: "For any subject S and any thing X, X is a constituent of S's well-being if and only if and because (a) S subjectively engages with X and b) X is objectively good". 12 This is what Woodard calls the joint necessity model. I will refer to all theories with this structure as joint necessity hybrid theories. 13 Such theories have been proposed by Robert Adams, Krister Bykvist, Shelly Kagan, William Lauinger and Derek Parfit. 14 Joint necessity hybrid theories are themselves a subclass of what Alexander Sarch calls objective adjustment theories. 15 The latter include all accounts which take well-being to be composed of subjective engagements of some sort, the prudential value of which is adjusted according to the attitudeindependent value of their objects. Such theories are committed to subjective necessity, but they need not endorse objective necessity. The most discussed of these accounts (namely those elaborated by Adams and Kagan) do seem to endorse objective necessity, and moreover they take the relevant kind of subjective engagement to be taking pleasure in or enjoying the thing. 16 Yet others have advocated an objectively adjusted version of desire-satisfactionism, again with 12 Woodard (2015, p.164). 13 Ibid. 14 See Adams (2002, pp. 93-102), Bykvist (2010b, pp. 50-4), Kagan (2009), Lauinger (2012), Parfit (1984, pp. 501-2). 15 Sarch (2012, p.441). 16 There is a complication here, namely that on some accounts the value of pleasure is itself attitudeindependent. If so, a theory of this kind may not in fact be a genuine hybrid, but rather an objective list approach of a peculiar sort. This would only further support my claim that the potential of hybrid theories has been insufficiently explored. Of course, even if the Adams/Kagan approach is not properly classified as a hybrid theory, it may yet boast distinct advantages over more standard objective accounts. 21 objective necessity built in. 17 An objective adjustment theory that does not incorporate objective necessity may accord some small amount of prudential value to instances of enjoyment or desiresatisfaction even where they lack appropriate objects, but treat this value as comparatively negligible, or even as lexically inferior to the value of subjective engagements with attitudeindependent goods. However, it is also open to such a theory to take a less extreme adjustment function and so depart further from the claim of joint necessity. The key points that all objective adjustment theories agree on are just a) subjective necessity and b) subjective engagement with a substantively valuable object is more valuable than similar engagement with an object that lacks attitude-independent value. It bears remarking that Sarch could just as easily have treated joint necessity theories as a subclass of what we will call subjective adjustment theories. Subjective adjustment theories are all those that take a person's well-being to be composed of attitude-independent goods, the prudential value of which is adjusted according to whether the person has some pro-attitude toward them. Such theories are committed to objective necessity, but need not also incorporate subjective necessity. A subjective adjustment theory that does incorporate subjective necessity may be indistinguishable from an objective adjustment theory that endorses objective necessity. Joint necessity theories, then, can be seen to occupy that point in theoretical space where objective adjustment theories and subjective adjustment theories converge. Plausibly, hybrid theories that build in either of these necessity claims can help us in responding to the over-inclusiveness objection. This goes double for joint necessity hybrids. On these grounds alone, there is something important to be said for such accounts. And yet, there is 17 Lauinger (2012) offers the most sustained defense of this view. Bykvist discusses (and even expresses support for) such a theory in various places, but does not develop it at comparable length (2006a, pp. 2658, 2006b, p.287, 2010a, pp.2-5, 2010b, pp. 50-4). Parfit (1984, pp. 501-2) also gestures toward a hybrid version of desire-satisfactionism, although he never pursues this idea further. 22 another ready-made source of counterexamples to any proposed theory of prudential value, which turns out to be a kind of mirror image of the first. We may also charge such an account with being insufficiently inclusive. That is, the account may rule out, as basic constituents of a person's well-being, certain things that intuitively do count as good for that person. We will call this the under-inclusiveness objection. Both objective and subjective theories have proven susceptible to such intuitive counterexamples. Thoroughgoing subjectivists are forced to deny that anything can be good for a person if that person does not have the appropriate sort of pro-attitude towards it, even intuitive prudential goods like knowledge, friendship, virtuous activity, achievement, autonomy, and pleasure. This claim is difficult to accept. I believe there are things that many of us, philosophers and folk alike, would take to be beneficial for any person, without feeling the need to ascertain whether they are the object of any pro-attitude. In cases (and even if uncommon, such cases surely do exist) where one of these items is instantiated in a person's life without being the object of the right sort of pro-attitude, pure subjectivism thus appears under-inclusive. Thoroughgoing objectivists do not evade this charge either. The claim that when I care (sufficiently and in the right way) about some thing, this is (at least sometimes) sufficient to make that thing good for me, is extremely compelling. It is my own good after all, so shouldn't I have some power to determine what constitutes it, by conferring prudential value upon things I care about, even where those things would not otherwise be valuable? Intuitively, this question should be answered in the affirmative. Thus, in disqualifying anything which lacks attitudeindependent value from counting as a basic constituent of my well-being, pure objectivism also appears under-inclusive. 23 We now seem to find ourselves in a similar position as before, in which thoroughgoing objective and subjective theories both fall prey to ready-made counterexamples. And again, it is worth exploring whether by combining elements from both kinds of theory we can produce an account that is less susceptible to these criticisms. It is obvious that joint necessity hybrid theories are not going to help us defend ourselves against the under-inclusiveness objection. For as we have seen, these theories seem designed precisely to rule out more candidate goods than either thoroughgoing objective or subjective approaches can on their own. If, therefore, it is worthwhile trying to produce a theory which doesn't succumb to the under-inclusiveness objection, we will seemingly need to go in a different direction. The most promising avenue for dealing with the under-inclusiveness objection, I suggest, is to develop a theory that could act as a kind of mirror image of the joint necessity hybrid theories discussed in the previous paragraph, in that rather than combining objective and subjective elements so as to weed out certain things that otherwise would need to be included, it instead combines them in order to include certain things that otherwise would need to be excluded. This naturally points toward a view that combines subjective and objective elements but rejects both subjective and objective necessity. And indeed, the theory I will develop and defend in the following pages is a hybrid account of just this sort. This new hybrid theory has the following structure: Disjunctive Hybrid Theory (DHT): Thing x is good for person P if and only if x is either a) cared about (sufficiently and in the right way) by P, b) a bearer of (the right kind of) attitude-independent value, or c) both. Compare DHT so formulated with Woodard's above-quoted characterization of joint necessity theories, as those which hold that "[f]or any subject S and any thing X, X is a 24 constituent of S's well-being if and only if and because (a) S subjectively engages with X and b) X is objectively good". Minor disagreements in terminology aside, the only difference between DHT and a joint necessity hybrid theory is that the "and" is replaced with an "or": neither subjective engagement nor attitude-independent value is treated as a necessary condition. Rather, the necessary condition is itself disjunctive. Either the presence of (the right kind of) subjective engagement or the presence of (the right kind of) attitude-independent value is necessary. But either alone is sufficient. This move, as far as I can tell, is not anticipated in the literature. Although Sarch, for instance, recognizes that objective adjustment hybrid theories do not need to follow the joint necessity model, he nonetheless takes it to be definitive of such theories that they take the value of objective goods with which one is not at all subjectively engaged to be nil (that is, subjective necessity is still built in). 18 It should be clear enough that the account of prudential value that can best respond to the under-inclusiveness objection will be a hybrid theory with just such a disjunctive structure. DHT thus has at least one important point in its favour, namely that it promises to answer better than any extant approach to one of the most popular lines of objection to both thoroughgoing objective and thoroughgoing subjective theories of well-being. I believe it should, on that account, be treated as at least on a par with those theories that are more often discussed. It seems, moreover, that this sort of account deserves the name of hybrid theory at least as much as accounts that accept subjective and/or objective necessity, even it has a rather different aim and structure. It is important to take stock of what the arguments so far mustered do and do not show. Suppose it is granted that there are good reasons to be concerned about the under-inclusiveness 18 Sarch (2012, pp. 444-7). 25 objection, and that the best way to secure ourselves against the counterexamples it relies upon is to embrace a theory like DHT. If there are equally good reasons to worry about the overinclusiveness objection, and the best way to fortify ourselves against it is to embrace a joint necessity hybrid theory, this at best supports a policy of neutrality between those theories that deal maximally well with the former objection and those that deal maximally well with the latter. 19 Now, I do believe that this conclusion alone would constitute an important step forward in our theorizing, insofar as it would establish that a theory of the kind being developed here merits at least as much consideration as joint necessity hybrid approaches. If the latter are viable candidate theories, so is the former. If nothing else, this would vindicate the idea that the project to be carried out in the following pages of adding flesh to the bones of DHT is of considerable interest. I am not content to stop there, however. I believe there is a compelling case to be made that DHT (provided it is developed carefully) should be favoured over joint necessity hybrid theories, and indeed over every other approach to prudential value. This is a bold claim, and can only be fully vindicated after we have engaged in an extended process of theory development. The best I can do here is provide an initial sketch of my reasons for being more optimistic about the prospects for DHT than I am about joint necessity hybrids. The first point that speaks in favour of DHT bears on how pressing we should take the underand over-inclusiveness worries, respectively, to be. A plausible case can be made that that the under-inclusiveness objection is the more damaging. If this is so, we should be especially concerned to construct a theory that is sufficiently inclusive. The argument for this conclusion 19 I am here presuming that no theory of prudential value can simultaneously make itself immune to both types of intuitive counterexample. The tenor of the literature to this point offers some reason to believe that this is so. I would, of course, be as pleased as anyone to be proven wrong. 26 rests on the following methodological principle, which when theorizing about prudential value seems to me very compelling: The Care Principle (CP): If those who love and care most about person P believe that x is good for P (and desire x for P's sake), this constitutes solid prima facie evidence that x is in fact good for P. I am not the first to observe that the notion of well-being seems to play an especially prominent role when we are thinking about what we want (or should want) for those people we care most about. 20 From the perspective of one who loves a person, the general question "what would make their life go best for them" is commonly foregrounded. By contrast, when we are deliberating about our own lives, the general idea of well-being ordinarily fades into the background, and it is instead the particular objects of our individual desires that engage our attention. 21 This is not to say that we do not (in almost all cases) care about our own well-being, but simply to stress that it is only on those relatively rare occasions when we are willing and able to take up a more reflective stance on the broader course of our own lives that this notion plays an explicit role in our first-personal deliberations. Yet what is special about such occasions seems to be precisely that the person is taking up a position similar to that of anyone else who cares about and loves them. 22 It makes sense for the theorist of prudential value to focus on what someone who occupies such a position would judge to be good for one, given how easy it is for 20 The idea is found, for instance, in Darwall (2004), Feldman (2004) and Scanlon (1998). I will often appeal in my later examples to just such a standpoint on a person's life. The general method has been referred to in the literature as the crib test (see Feldman, pp.9-10), although it is not only in the context of parents and children where this sort of concern arises. 21 Cf. Scanlon (1998, pp.127-133) and Raz (2004, pp.281-7). 22 Cf. Darwall (2004, pp.4-9). Note that I am not here endorsing Darwall's claim that we can analyze well-being in terms of what it is rational to want for someone insofar as one cares about them. Nonetheless, the substantive claim that if x is good for person P, and I care about person P, I ought to desire x for P's sake is at once plausible, and helpful for understanding the role well-being plays in practical thought. 27 careful consideration of one's own good to be effaced, in first-personal deliberation, by more immediate enticements. If our concern is with what ordinary people believe about the constituents of well-being, we ought surely to prioritize those contexts in which this notion is most often appealed to in ordinary thought. CP inherits its considerable plausibility from the above reflections. Moreover, if this principle is accepted, it lends independent support to a theory like DHT. For, if we ask the person on the street what kind of life they would wish for their loved ones (their friends, family members, romantic partners), they are likely, as a start, to point to one filled with things like certain interpersonal bonds (friendship, romantic love, familial love), achievement, important knowledge, virtuous activity, autonomy, and enjoyable mental states. The satisfaction of the loved one's core desires would also likely be highlighted as an important aspect of their wellbeing, in its own right. This is all to say that, when it comes to the kinds of things that are basic constituents of their loved ones' well-being, most people seem to pre-reflectively endorse a view which we can call common-sense pluralism about prudential value. Now let us consider whether this common-sense pluralism builds in a claim like subjective necessity. Here I do not think we can give a single answer. People, even people uncontaminated by philosophy, do not all agree in their intuitive judgments about well-being. I am quite confident that some of the folk would endorse subjective necessity when considering what is good for those they care about, but equally confident that others would not. We should not be surprised or dismayed to find such disagreement, insofar as one's attitudes towards the constituents of a good life (for oneself or others) are heavily shaped by one's own formative experiences. The question is how theorists of prudential value should respond where intuitions conflict in this way. And it is here where I believe CP can help us make progress. 28 If we take CP seriously, we may well be led by the fact that some people intuitively reject subjective necessity when it comes to their loved ones to reject it as theorists. For, this is the only way we can avoid ruling out of contention for the status of basic constituents of prudential value certain things that, precisely according to those who care most about P, would make P's life go better by their presence. Any instance of one of the aforementioned intuitive prudential goods to which P does not have some pro-attitude is disqualified from counting towards P's good, if subjective necessity is accepted. And this is so regardless of what those who love and care about P may think about the prudential relevance of these things for P. However, if CP is a reasonable principle, the fact that at least some of those who care about P would include things toward which P does not have any pro-attitude as constituents of P's well-being is solid prima facie evidence that subjective necessity is false. Turning to the other constraint favoured by various hybrid theorists, CP now firmly in hand, I believe we will find that this methodological principle does not support objective necessity either. Once again there is bound to be disagreement on this question, but many people do share the intuition that the satisfaction of a person's desires (or at least some subset of them) is among the things that contributes to the prudential value of their life. It is not plausible that these people are all, either implicitly or explicitly, importing a substantive value constraint on the objects of the desires that are prudentially relevant. I, at least, want those whom I care most about to have those things that they want, even in cases where I myself fail to see anything worth pursuing about them. Thus, I believe the same considerations that led us to be skeptical of subjective necessity push in the direction of rejecting objective necessity. And of course, recognizing that there are both attitude-independent and attitude-dependent goods, while rejecting both necessity claims, just amounts to endorsing DHT. 29 Those who find the over-inclusiveness objection the more pressing challenge often appear to be operating under the banner of the following very different methodological principle: First Person Veto (FPV): If person P (or an idealized version thereof) would not assent to the judgment that state of affairs x is basically good for P, then x cannot in fact be good for P. Although this is not just a negative restatement of subjective necessity, it is very close to it. The only difference is that it is put in terms of refusing assent to the judgment that a given thing is good for one rather than failing to hold any pro-attitude towards the thing. FPV is thus treated as a trump card that can in principle be pulled out to disqualify any proposed candidate for the status of basic constituent of prudential value. 23 On this view, every individual person has a right of refusal with respect to anything that we might assert to be good for them. Unlike CP, I believe FPV as stated cannot be correct. Indeed, I will discuss several cases that directly count against it in Chapters 2 (see section 2.3, p.66) and 4 (see sections 4.5 and 4.6). For now, the point I wish to press is just that there are no good grounds for taking FPV more seriously than CP. The most plausible explanation for why FPV, or some principle like it, has gained widespread support is that it answers to the intuitively compelling idea that individuals should be allowed a fair amount of autonomy when it comes to judgments about their own wellbeing. For some theorist to insist that certain things are good for me, even if I do not judge these things to have any prudential value (and perhaps could not even be brought around to such a 23 Cf. Hawkins (2010 p.62). "Contemporary theorists of well-being typically view the driving intuition of subjectivism as an attempt to honor the subject's own evaluative judgments about her life...just as in ordinary life we are often reluctant to insist to someone that something she values or wants is not in fact good for her (to do so could seem arrogantly paternalistic), subjective theorists of well-being are reluctant to adopt theories that stipulate that certain items are good for a person who does not herself see them as good. In short, they are reluctant to set up theories that contradict the individual's own evaluative judgments. Subjectivism so conceived is committed to what I shall call the authority of the individual's evaluative perspective." 30 judgment through some idealizing procedure), brings with it an air of philosophical imperialism. At its worst, this sort of attitude may be thought to pave the way for paternalistic interventions. Now, I agree that individuals should be taken to have some sort of authority over what is good for them. My only disagreement has to do with how we, as theorists of prudential value, can best understand the relevant sort of authority. In the first place, I fail to see why P's capacity to veto certain proposed candidate goods by refusing to recognize them should be privileged as somehow a fuller exercise of P's autonomous agency, when compared with P's capacity to confer value upon objects by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). Indeed, if anything the latter seems to me more worthy of respect, if only because it is a more active and constructive exercise of P's agency. Admittedly, one is still to some extent passive when it comes to what one cares about, but this is no less true itof what one judges to be good for one (in neither case is it entirely up to one what one's attitude to a given thing is). In caring about some thing x (and thereby conferring value upon it), it seems that a person is exercising at least as much agency as they are when they refuse assent to some proposed judgment about their own good. And of course, DHT is not only compatible with this capacy of ours to confer prudential value upon the things we care about, it insists upon it. What is more, it is not the case that any paternalistic political conclusions follow from the supposition that some x can be good for person P, even though P would not assent to the judgment that this is the case. The recognition that people are to some extent fallible about the contents of their own good affords no reason to believe that policy-makers are more likely to know what is best for them. Most of us are leery of such claims for good reason. Although CP does imply that the best judge of what is good for P may not be P herself, but rather those who love and care most about her, few of us are so sanguine about our governments as to suppose that 31 they are plausible candidates for this role. Moreover, insofar as autonomy is itself a substantive prudential good (I argue for this claim in Chapter 4), there are good grounds for even one who does genuinely love and care about a person not to interfere with her choices, even where this may seem to be for her own good. From a methodological perspective, then, CP provides us with a sound justification for taking special care to avoid the under-inclusiveness objection. Despite this, other theorists of prudential value have been primarily occupied with the over-inclusiveness objection. This is revealed by the fact that joint necessity hybrids have been the subject of extensive discussion, and DHT has been the subject of virtually none. We must consider in more detail why this is. I suspect that some part of the explanation is the omnipresent threat of succumbing to the alienation worry, which has seemed to many an especially important version of the challenge from over-inclusiveness. The complaint here is that, if we allow things that I do not somehow enjoy or favour to contribute to the goodness of my life for me, we are divorcing me from my own well-being in an objectionable way. On this way of thinking, in merely recognizing attitudeindependent prudential goods we do not make ourselves vulnerable to such criticism. We do this only when we allow such things to enter in as constituents of a person's well-being in their own right, whether or not they are appreciated or endorsed by the person. 24 There is reason to doubt that hybrid theories which accept subjective necessity really have any pronounced advantage over DHT, when it comes to assuaging the alienation worry. Thus, let us imagine a person who cares not at all about the independent worth of the things that 24 Cf. Noggle's claim (1999, p.303) that "if we are measuring the extent to which a life is valuable for the person living it, then it seems that the criteria for evaluation must be those of the agent herself. The ends and goals in terms of which we evaluate the success of a person's life must not, it seems, be completely alien to the agent's own ends and goals." 32 they take pleasure in or desire. All this person cares about in life is feeling as much pleasure as possible and satisfying all their desires. Supposing that such a person has a life that ranks very highly on both the hedonistic and desire-satisfactionist scales before adjustment, how can we justify to this person the (more or less steep) discounting rate that we proceed to apply to the pleasures and satisfactions that involve no engagement with substantive values? It is dubious whether we can do so, at least in any terms that this person will understand and accept. Such a person might well complain that we are introducing alien values, and thereby devaluing her life by appeal to a standard which she cannot endorse. I fail to see why we should treat the imposition of this sort of external standard as less objectionable or illicit than other ways of introducing alien values. Perhaps, then, hybrid theorists should simply accept that we will not be able to satisfy those who are moved by such worries. Indeed, I doubt that it is worth trying to satisfy them, as any anti-alienation constraint will force us to rule out of a person's good things that should not be ruled out. I will defend this point at greater length in Chapter 4. For now, I'll merely note that DHT makes no claim to satisfy an anti-alienation constraint, and that I take this to be a good thing. A preference for hybrids that incorporate subjective necessity might also be defended at the metaethical level by appeal to the special nature of the concept GOODNESS-FOR. That is, we might think that if we are to capture the intrinsic relationality of prudential value, we will have to insist that any x that is a constituent of person P's well-being bear some essential relationship to P's own attitudes. However, we have good reasons to be suspicious of any proposed conceptual analysis that prejudices substantive issues in this way. We can very well grant that prudential value is fundamentally relational without taking the relevant sort of relationality to be the kind that the subjectivist has in mind. In recent years, Stephen Darwall, Richard Kraut, and Guy 33 Fletcher have all developed meta-ethical accounts of prudential value that do just this. 25 Surely it cannot just be conceptually true that to be a constituent of P's well-being some x must be subjectively engaged with by P, given that many competent users of the concept deny this. One needs to provide an independently compelling argument for this position, if it is taken instead as a substantive claim. I do not know where such an argument could come from, and I am not optimistic that there is any to be found. Another reason that the disjunctive possibility has been neglected may be that, in denying objective necessity, DHT leaves itself open to objection on the grounds that it allows objects that lack any substantive value to be good for a person (under the right conditions). Yet again, I believe the correct response to this charge is to bite the apparent bullet. We ought not to restrict the kinds of things that can be good for people, such that if something has no attitudeindependent value it has no prudential value. There is considerable intuitive pull to the idea that things that are otherwise valueless can be good for me precisely because I care about them (sufficiently and in the right way). If a maximally inclusive theory is indeed desirable, we then have reason to reject objective necessity, even if this does open us up to some intuitive counterexamples. Finally, it may be that the reason the disjunctive approach has received such short shrift is because it has been thought that, just insofar as it is disjunctive, it is bound to be ungainly and uninformative. Some may even go so far as to deny that what the disjunctive hybrid theorist offers deserves to be called a theory of prudential value. Indeed, I believe that concerns of this sort are behind many people's refusal to countenance a theory such as DHT. To begin to address such concerns, as well as to better situate DHT in the taxonomical landscape, it is necessary that 25 See Darwall (2002), Kraut (2007), and Fletcher (2012). 34 we now turn to consider another distinction that has been prominent in recent discussions of prudential value, namely that between monism and pluralism. 1.5 Enumerative and Explanatory Pluralisms In this section I further highlight the distinctiveness and appeal of DHT by considering this new hybrid theory in the context of the debate between monists and pluralists about prudential value. I show that, in the theory of prudential value, a commitment to monism or pluralism can take two distinct forms, based on how one responds to two different questions. I call these the enumerative and the explanatory questions. DHT is pluralistic in its response, not just to the former, but also to the latter question. DHT's embrace of such an explanatory pluralism serves to distinguish it from virtually all other theories on offer. If explanatory pluralism about prudential value is itself appealing, and it is my contention that it is, then this provides further support for DHT, alongside the extensional concerns already discussed. The initial schism between monists and pluralists about prudential value arises from their respective responses to what I am calling the enumerative question. The enumerative question is just this: What are the basic constituents of prudential value? The terminology of monism and pluralism naturally suggests that we carve up enumerative views into those which take there to be just one basic constituent of prudential value and those which take there to be more than one. Yet this, clearly, won't do. For no theory of prudential value denies that more than one particular state of affairs is a basic constituent of prudential value. The distinction, then, must be between views according to which there is only one kind of basic constituent of prudential value, and views according to which there are many. We are now immediately on shakier metaphysical ground than we might wish. How does one determine whether two states of affairs are of different kinds? If we don't provide some 35 principled basis for sorting states of affairs into one kind rather than another, the worry is that the distinction between enumerative monism and pluralism is arbitrary. It seems that any theory could come out as monistic, provided we admit sufficiently few distinct kinds of states of affairs. We might, after all, just stipulate that to be a basic constituent of prudential value is to be a state of affairs of the basically prudentially valuable kind and end our carving up of the landscape at this point. This secures enumerative monism by fiat. On the other hand, if we admit sufficiently many distinct kinds of states of affairs, any enumerative view comes out as pluralistic, again seemingly by fiat. Where most theorists of prudential value do not explicitly address this issue, content to rely on the intuitive distinction between kinds and particulars, Eden Lin has recently put forward a proposal about how to divide the basic constituents of prudential value into kinds. 26 A striking consequence of this approach is that it seems to render the distinction between the enumerative and explanatory questions irrelevant for present purposes. Lin argues that all extant theories of well-being address both the enumerative and the explanatory questions. More to the point, he claims that any theory that gives a pluralistic answer at the enumerative level must also be pluralistic at the explanatory level. This is because he thinks that in enumerating the kinds of states of affairs that can serve as basic constituents of prudential value, we are always at the same time proposing an explanation of what makes a given thing a basic constituent of prudential value. If Lin is correct, it should follow that standard objective list accounts are themselves forms of explanatory pluralism. And this is precisely what he argues. Considering an objective list account which includes both pleasure and knowledge on its list, Lin holds that "the fact that you are feeling E is basically good for you in virtue of the fact that it consists in your feeling an episode of pleasure. Moreover, if you know the Pythagorean Theorem, then the fact that you 26 Lin (2017). 36 know the Pythagorean Theorem is basically good for you because it a fact consisting of your knowing something-i.e., a fact of the form that you know that p. On an objective list theory, each basic good on the list corresponds to an explanation of the basic goodness for you of particular facts." 27 The purported upshot is that the only real difference between desire-satisfactionism, for instance, and a pluralist objective list account is that the former entails that the basic constituents of prudential value all belong to a single kind (roughly the kind 'state of affairs that is desired by the subject') and the latter holds that they belong to at least two distinct kinds (for instance, 'state of affairs that is an instance of pleasure' and 'state of affairs that is an instance of knowledge'). Now, unlike those whom Lin is explicitly arguing against, I do not claim that the best way to taxonomize theories of prudential value is by distinguishing them into enumerative and explanatory. However, I am making much of the distinction between the enumerative and explanatory questions in my characterization of DHT's distinctiveness and appeal. If objective list theories should also be seen as giving a pluralistic answer to the explanatory question, then I am not setting out on a new path in articulating and defending a view which embraces explanatory pluralism. My (still very real) disagreement with the objective list approach thus becomes an internal disagreement among explanatory pluralists. This does not touch our central claims, which are that DHT is itself both (a) interestingly novel and (b) plausible. However, it seems to me that the distinction between the explanatory and enumerative questions does help to bring out interesting features of DHT, and can also enhance our understanding of why its potential has not yet been recognized. I will thus briefly respond to Lin's arguments. I am not in a position to defend a particular metaphysics of kinds. Doing so in a way that 27 Ibid. (p.67). Lin's facts can be treated as equivalent to our states of affairs. 37 would convince anyone to change their view would likely require a thesis of its own. I cannot discount the possibility that Lin is right about how theorists of prudential value must individuate kinds, and thus also right about the relative insignificance of the explanatory/enumerative distinction. If this is the case, then the theory I will go on to defend, while still substantively distinctive from anything in the extant literature, will turn out to be less formally novel than I have claimed. However, even if Lin is correct that there is a sense in which an objective list account does offer distinct explanations for the goodness of a given instance of knowledge and a given instance of pleasure, there is another plausible way of understanding such theories which does make them monistic in their response to the explanatory question. Moreover, understood in this same way the theory defended here still comes out as pluralistic. Accordingly, we can still pinpoint a real difference, which survives even in the face of Lin's criticisms. It is just that it requires us to dig deeper than we initially supposed. The alternative way of understanding the objective list account is as follows. There is at bottom only one explanation for why any given thing is a basic constituent of prudential value. In Lin's terms, for any fact x that is basically good for you, it is good for you in virtue of the fact that it has attitude-independent value. Putting this now in the language of kinds, we can say that the things that are good for a person all belong to the kind "state of affairs that possesses attitudeindependent value". The difference between the hybrid view that I am defending, in part under the banner of explanatory pluralism, and the objective list theory is now plain. These theories agree that some of the things that are good for people are good for them precisely because they have attitude-independent value, but DHT adds that other things are good for them precisely because the person cares about them. This is enough to justify the claim that DHT is pluralist at the explanatory level in a sense in which objective list accounts are not. 38 It thus does not really impact our core argument whether we follow recent practice in taking the enumerative question to be in some interesting sense separable from the explanatory one or whether we side with Lin. The essential point is that the theory to be developed here is pluralistic at a deeper explanatory level than extant theories of prudential value. For ease of exposition, I will make use of the enumerative/explanatory distinction going forward, but the reader can feel free to treat this as merely a colourful way of distinguishing between these higher and lower levels of explanation. Let us return now to our previous intuitive distinction between enumerative pluralism, which recognizes that more than one kind of thing is a basic constituent of prudential value, and enumerative monism, which holds that everything that is basically good for a person belongs to a single kind. In thinking about where the extant theories of prudential value stand on this issue, it will be useful to begin with the most influential taxonomy of theories of well-being, Derek Parfit's tripartite division of such theories into mental state, desire-satisfaction, and objective list accounts. 28 Consider first mental state theories. Such views hold that the only basic constituents of prudential value are states of affairs consisting in someone's being in a certain mental state. In the canonical, hedonistic form, the mental states in question are taken to be instances of pleasure. 29 So according to the hedonist, the only things that are basically prudentially valuable are states of affairs consisting in someone's experiencing pleasure. 30 Hedonism is a version of enumerative monism if any theory is. 28 Parfit (1984, pp.493-502). 29 Whether there is anything interesting that all the states we call pleasure have in common, and that can be specified in a non-circular way, is itself a fascinating question to which I will not here attempt an answer. 30 The most sophisticated contemporary defense of a hedonistic account is found in Feldman (2004). Other defenders include Bradley (2009), Bramble (2016) and Crisp (2006). 39 Most contemporary theorists of well-being are not hedonists. Many of them instead accept some version of desire-satisfactionism. In its simplest form, desire-satisfactionism entails that if and only if I desire x, x is a basic constituent of my well-being. Desire-satisfactionism is also a monistic enumerative theory, at least in the sense that the things that are good for a person all belong to the kind 'state of affairs that is desired by the person'. It is, however, more pluralistic than hedonism insofar as it admits states of affairs that are not mental states as basic constituents of prudential value (assuming, what is surely true, that we have desires that are not desires to be in certain mental states). It has often been thought that an unrestricted desiresatisfactionism has unacceptable implications, and for this reason the most popular desire-based views these days are more sophisticated. 31 They hold, for example, that it is only the satisfaction of those desires that a fully-informed and rational version of oneself would want one to have that count towards one's good. 32 These theories will also come out monistic in the sense that we can identify a single kind to which all the things that are good for a person belong (namely the kind "state of affairs that a rational and fully informed version of the person would want the person to desire") but pluralistic in the sense that states of affairs other than mental states will be basic constituents of prudential value. Although we saw above that their view need not be taken in this way, objective list theorists can also plausibly be seen as holding that the basic constituents of prudential value 31 I will consider several of these objections at some length in the ensuing chapters. 32 Railton (1986, p.54) offers a well-known statement of this kind of view: "The proposal I would make, then, is the following: an individual's good consists in what he would want himself to want, or to pursue, were he to contemplate his present situation from a standpoint fully and vividly informed about himself and his circumstances, and entirely free of cognitive error or lapses of instrumental rationality. The wants in question, then, are wants regarding what he would seek were he to assume the place of his actual, incompletely informed and imperfectly rational self, taking into account the changes that self is capable of, the costs of those changes, and so on." 40 belong to more than one kind. We will follow Parfit for the present, in classifying as objective list theories all accounts that hold that the basic constituents of prudential value are good for one regardless of whether one has any pro-attitude toward them. Among the attitude-independent goods that are most often identified are knowledge, virtue, achievement, and friendship. This sort of view has been well-represented in the recent literature. 33 Finally, we have the existing hybrid theories. Some of these will come out as monistic at the enumerative level. Thus, consider the view according to which the basic constituents of prudential value are states of affairs consisting in the enjoyment of excellent objects. This hybrid account in fact comes out as a rather restrictive version of enumerative monism, insofar as the basic constituents of well-being are all pleasurable mental states, and moreover pleasurable states of one specific kind. As we noted above, there are many different hybrid views that might be offered, and some of these will instead be versions of enumerative pluralism. This is obviously the case, for instance, with DHT. Since I am not primarily concerned to defend enumerative pluralism (it is rather a happy consequence of the view I am defending), I will not engage in a more exhaustive discussion of the possibilities at this point. Now that we have a better idea of what our quarry is, we can more directly address the explanatory question. The explanatory question is as follows: what explains why a given thing is a basic constituent of prudential value? We should understand this as asking about any proposed list of basic prudential goods: what is it that makes it the case that all and only these kinds of states of affairs have the relevant sort of value? One who poses this question wants to know not 33 Some of these theories are perfectionist. I class as perfectionist any theory that accords pride of place to some notion of human nature in its claims about the objective prudential goods. The most well-worked out perfectionist theory of prudential value is in Kraut (2007). Other defenders of perfectionism include Brink (2008) and LeBar (2004). Non-perfectionist objective list approaches are defended in Arneson (1999), Ferkany (2012), Fletcher (2013), Hooker (2015) and Rice (2013). 41 just what things are good for us but what grounds our prudential value claims, when such claims are true. What has not always been recognized is that, as with the enumerative question, there are both monistic and pluralistic answers that we can return to such a person. The explanatory monist holds that there is some one size fits all explanation that tells us why any item that appears on the list of basic constituents of prudential value is on the list. The explanatory pluralist, on the other hand, holds that the basic prudential value of distinct states of affairs is also susceptible of distinct explanations. Monistic and pluralistic views must both be distinguished from views according to which there is simply no informative story to tell about why thing x is a basic constituent of person P's well-being. Following Christopher Woodard, we can call these no-answer views. 34 Above, we identified three types of theory that can be understood as (in some sense) offering a pluralistic answer to the enumerative question. These were desire-satisfactionism, objective list theories, and some extant hybrid theories. Let us now consider what each kind of account has to say in response to the explanatory question. Return first to desire-satisfactionism. Desire-satisfactionists tell us that there is only one kind of fact that can make it the case that something is a basic constituent of prudential value, namely that it is the object of (the right sort of) desire. Thus, if we are asked what it is that makes x a basic constituent of prudential value, we can give an answer that is guaranteed in advance to apply equally well to basic constituents of prudential value y and z. In an important sense, then, desire-satisfactionism is a fundamentally monistic theory. 34 Woodard (2013, p.800). 42 What of objective list accounts? These have sometimes been understood as offering only a brute enumeration of the prudentially valuable things. If we take their claims in this way, objective list theorists are just not engaged in the same project as someone like the desiresatisfactionist. Some objective list theorists may take themselves to be pursuing a project of this comparatively modest sort. 35 Such people may be quietists about the explanatory question, or they may be committed to a no-answer view. However, even if we reject Lin's claim that in enumerating the several kinds of prudentially good things we are already engaged in an explanatory project, we have reason to doubt that a mere list of the basic constituents of prudential value could amount to a satisfactory philosophical theory of prudential value. Objective list theorists are therefore advised not to go entirely silent on the explanatory question if they can help it. Before we continue, this last claim calls for elaboration. There are at least two distinct desiderata that any theory of prudential value should strive to satisfy. The first is extensional adequacy. That is, we want the theory to provide a plausible enumeration of the basic constituents of prudential value. Concerns about extensional adequacy are what lay behind the overand under-inclusiveness objections. This desideratum thus plays an important role in motivating DHT (as well as the joint necessity hybrid theories to which we have opposed it). However, there is another desideratum of comparable importance, it seems to me. This is that the theory should give a plausible explanation of why the things that appear in our enumeration of the basic constituents of prudential value are there. If we have no (non-vacuous) story to tell about what would make it the case that states of affairs x, y, and z are all basically prudentially valuable, it is difficult to see what principled way we will have for arbitrating between the disputants when disagreements occur at the enumerative level. If this is indeed the situation we 35 Scanlon (1998, pp.113-26) appears to be one such figure. 43 find ourselves in, I trust I am not alone in thinking that it should very much trouble us. The brute list approach suggests that theorizing about prudential value must in such cases resign itself to stalemate. I am optimistic that we can do better. It is for this reason that I reject the recent suggestion that we adopt a taxonomy that divides theories of well-being into enumerative and explanatory. Rather, we do better to treat the enumerative and explanatory projects as two, not entirely independent, aspects of the theory of prudential value. Attempts to answer the explanatory question can help us to understand what it is that makes the things that we intuitively take to be good for people good for them. If we once arrive at such an understanding, we may in turn be forced to revise some of our intuitive beliefs about what kinds of things are basic constituents of prudential value. We will also have principled grounds for objecting to some candidate goods while admitting others. Thus, we should hold that any account that concerns itself solely with the task of enumerating those things that are prudentially valuable is in an important sense incomplete. Certainly, not all theories that are classified by the traditional taxonomy as objective list accounts are so modest in their ambitions. Perfectionist approaches, such as that recently defended by Richard Kraut, go considerably further. 36 Kraut argues that what all the things that are basically good for human beings have in common is that they are constituents of a human being's flourishing, where this latter notion is unpacked through an appeal to characteristically human capacities. He employs this framework to arrive at a more or less standard list of attitudeindependent prudential goods. However, far from being ungrounded, Kraut's list purports to base itself on deep and quite general claims about the specific content of human nature. Kraut's theory is clearly a version of explanatory monism, regardless of how rich and varied are the goods it admits. For if something is a basic constituent of a person's good, this is always and everywhere 36 Kraut (2007). 44 because it forms part of what it is for this person to flourish as the kind of being it is (namely a member of the species homo sapiens, in all cases with which we are familiar). Although this has not always been adequately recognized, it is open to objectivists who share Kraut's explanatory ambitions to proceed in a quite different way. Guy Fletcher has (separately) defended both the objective list theory and a locative account of prudential value, according to which what explains why something is good for a person is (in part) that it is good simpliciter. 37 The locative account is again quite compatible with a pluralistic enumerative story (as Fletcher's own theory shows). However, neither Fletcher's locative nor Kraut's perfectionist account is any less monistic than desire-satisfactionism at a deeper level of inquiry. In both cases, it is agreed that there is some single (non-trivial, non-disjunctive) necessary and sufficient condition that anything that is a basic constituent of a person's well-being must meet. One of my aims in this dissertation is to press both objectivists and subjectivists on this last point. Theorists of prudential value across the spectrum have tended to agree that at least this much monism must be conceded. However, there are good reasons for dissenting from this view. At the very least, our opponents are not entitled to assume it. DHT, it should be readily seen, is in tension with such an assumption. This theory, recall, denies both objective and subjective necessity. DHT states that sometimes a certain kind of subjective explanation of the prudential value of a given state of affairs is appropriate, and at other times a certain kind of objective explanation is called for. It does not insist that x must satisfy both the subjective explaining 37 Fletcher (2012 and 2013). It must be noted that Fletcher himself accepts, indeed presses, the classification of objective list theories as enumerative (2013, pp.206-209). He does not present the analysis of the relation and the enumeration as parts of one unified theory. Nonetheless, it strikes me that this is an attractive strategy, and moreover one that is open to him. And Fletcher seems to agree when he writes (2012, p.8) that a "positive feature of the Locative Analysis is that it yields a way to give a grounding for objective-list theories of well-being...the analysis imposes informative conditions on what can be good for someone, namely only things that meet the conditions specified in the analysis. This suggests a way of narrowing down and determining what should be on the list." 45 condition (being cared about sufficiently and in the right way by P) and the objective one (possessing the right kind of attitude-independent value) if it is to qualify as a basic constituent of P's well-being. While it is necessary that at least one of these conditions be met, either on its own is sufficient, according to DHT. On this account, it thus seems that we can point to no single (non-trivial and non-disjunctive) set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something's being prudentially valuable. It is instructive to contrast the above structure, once again, with that of joint necessity hybrid theories. These theories, too, purport to explain why the things that are good for a person are such by appealing to both objective and subjective explaining conditions. 38 However, although the explanation of a thing's prudential value involves both objective and subjective elements, for any given prudentially valuable state of affairs this explanation is the same (namely, that both the objective and subjective necessity conditions are met). That is, the explanation is still one size fits all. In this sense, joint necessity hybrid theories remain monistic. Insofar as we have now sketched an account of just this sort, it is evident that there is room in conceptual space for a theory of prudential value that is pluralistic at even this deepest level of explanation. It is therefore puzzling that this alternative has gone almost entirely undiscussed in the literature. 39 Even if it is supposed to be a non-starter, we should at least find 38 It should be noted that Woodard (2015, p.164) distinguishes hybridism, which he understands as a view about the explaining conditions of prudential value claims, from pluralism, which he treats as an enumerative view about how many basic constituents of well-being there are. However, we need some way to distinguish the underlying structure of DHT (which, even if one does not find it plausible, is clearly a view in conceptual space) from that of extant hybrid theories. I believe the most natural way of doing this is by adverting to a deeper kind of pluralism. 39 Sarch (2012) may initially seem to be an exception. He offers an illuminating discussion of what he terms (p.440) "multi-component theories...according to which there is more than one basic source of welfare value for a person (i.e. more than one fundamental good-making property whose instantiations directly and in themselves enhance well-being)." DHT is quite different from any theory Sarch discusses, however. The multi-component hybrid theories Sarch has in mind take both enjoyments and desiresatisfactions to be basic constituents of prudential value, but adjust the value of each according to the independent worth of their objects. If they follow the joint necessity model, such theories are monistic, at 46 some arguments to this effect. Yet not only do we not find anyone arguing for this sort of pluralism, we cannot find any arguments against it. Explanatory pluralism thus seems to be in much the same position as DHT, which is itself but one instance of an explanatorily pluralistic theory (and the most plausible to my mind, although others might be broached). I believe that the reason why explanatory pluralism has generally been neglected is the same as the reason why DHT has not received a fair hearing. No reader, I trust, will begrudge me the observation that philosophers tend to have a fondness for neat and well-ordered theoretical landscapes. The disunity that pluralist accounts embrace seems to render them messier and less illuminating than we have a right to expect. In the case of brute list theories, we are simply handed a heap of apparently unconnected facts to the effect that x, y, z and so on are basically good for people. Confronted with such an unlovely aggregate, we might well lament, echoing Sidgwick's famous refrain, that the cosmos of prudential value has been reduced to a chaos. 40 If someone is going to in good conscience call themselves a value theorist, the thought is that they had better say something about what ties the various basic constituents of prudential value together. Of course, none of the above has prevented shallower forms of pluralism about prudential value from receiving a fair hearing in the literature. However, we might well surmise that these sorts of worries are even more apt to arise once the rot, if such it is, spreads further down. After all, the enumerative pluralist might still hold out the promise of a unified explanatory story. least in the sense just discussed. Among the theories considered by Sarch, even those that do not follow this model all accept subjective necessity. Our theory, again, denies both objective necessity and subjective necessity. Sarch simply does not consider this kind of pluralistic hybrid theory. Woodard (2013, p.791) also notes that "different answers to this [explanatory] question might be proposed for any particular item enumerated." However, he does not defend this view or tell us more about what it might look like. The only sustained defense of a version of explanatory pluralism of which I am aware is Lin (2016). Lin's view, though, is not a hybrid account. Instead, he defends a pluralistic version of subjectivism which he calls disjunctive desire satisfactionism. 40 Sidgwick (1874, p.473). 47 However, as I have laid things out, the distinguishing characteristic of explanatory pluralism is precisely its denial that any such story can be given. It is perhaps little wonder, then, that this sort of approach has not found willing defenders. I do not dispute that theoretical unity is an important desideratum, in ethics as elsewhere. Other things being equal, I too should favour an account of prudential value that could somehow bring all the basic constituents of prudential value under a single aegis. But surely, we ought at least to consider the possibility that no informative and plausible theory of this kind is ever going to be forthcoming. Suppose we do become convinced that this is how things stand. There are two very different ways we might react. As mentioned above, Woodard lumps all views "according to which there is no true, general, and informative answer to the explanatory question" together as no-answer theories. 41 However, this is unjust to explanatory pluralism and to DHT in particular. It is true that one way we might go, upon concluding that there is no unified explanatory story to be had, is to deny that we can give any true, informative answer to the explanatory question. T.M. Scanlon opts for this route, expressing skepticism about the prospects for any theory that could "provide a more unified account of what well-being is, on the basis of which one could see why the diverse things I have listed as contributing to well-being in fact do so". 42 Scanlon, indeed, seems content to give up the search for a theory of prudential value and to fall back on enumerating assorted platitudes about the good life. The other option, which we are pursuing here, treats such counsels of despair as premature. In disavowing the quest for a single, non-disjunctive explanation of all the prudential value facts, we are not automatically throwing our hat in with anti-theorists such as Scanlon. We 41 Woodard (2013, p.800). 42 Scanlon (1998, p.125). 48 need not deny that there is always some true, informative story to tell about what makes it the case that thing x is a constituent of person P's good. DHT emphatically does not deny this. All it asks us to give up is the idea that the same explanation is appropriate for any x. DHT also does not ask us to deny that there is a real evaluative property that is picked out by the term 'prudential value', and only one such property. The disjunctive hybrid theorist only denies that the explanation of why this property is correctly ascribable to a given thing is always the same. Sometimes we will need to appeal to an objective explaining condition, and at other times a subjective explanation will adequately account for the prudential value of the thing in question. The novel structure of DHT rests on the conviction that either an objective or a subjective explanatory account, considered in isolation, will offer at best part of the truth about prudential value (or better, all of the truth part of the time). 1.6 First Steps in Filling Out DHT As it has been formulated so far, DHT is wildly underspecified. If we left things at this stage, the charge that we are not offering an informative theory would be fair. However, I do not intend to stop here. Rather, I aim to show a) that both the subjectivist and objectivist strands of DHT can be developed in ways that are at once explanatorily powerful and intuitively plausible, and b) that when these strands are combined we get a theory that is both extensionally and explanatorily preferable to (because more inclusive than) all extant accounts of prudential value. Here I will only be able to make a start on this task. In the remaining chapters I further develop each aspect of the argument. I take it that one of the primary motivations for hybrid theories is the thought that both subjective and objective theories of prudential value have traditionally got something right, although neither provides a complete picture of the landscape. It is critical, then, in assessing 49 what kind of hybrid theory we should adopt (if any), that we get clear on what that something is in each case. The best hybrid theory will be that which does the best job of capturing the core insights of both subjective and objective theories. I claim that this is DHT. The subjectivist side of DHT's disjunct, recall, says that some x is basically good for some person P if P cares about x (sufficiently and in the right way). This just restates what we earlier called the subjectivist insight, which is that a person can confer prudential value upon things by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). This still leaves many unsettled questions. The idea of caring about something is a very general one, and may be taken to encompass all pro-attitudes (that is, those attitudes that involve 'favouring' or somehow being 'for' some thing). Traditional subjectivists have focused on one particular class of pro-attitudes, namely a person's desires, or some subset thereof. However, this is not the only way that we might try to spell out the subjectivist insight, as several contemporary theorists have illustrated. The first pressing issue for us, then, is whether we do better to formulate the subjectivist strand of DHT in terms of desire or some other attitude. On this matter, I side with the traditionalists, for reasons I will expand on in Chapter 2. My argument there is that focusing on desires allows us to best capture the central subjectivist insight. Although desire-satisfactionism cannot explain why everything that is good for a person is so, this approach contains an important grain of truth (so important that we might even call it a heap of truth). This is the truth that at least some of a person's desires are themselves sufficient to confer prudential value upon their objects. Objectivists, for their part, are fond of remarking that in general we desire things because we see them as good. The charge is thus that desire-satisfactionism gets the relationship between prudential value and desire the wrong way around. I believe this is, in many cases, a fair accusation. It seems wrongheaded to suppose that friendship and achievement are prudential 50 goods only because and while people want them, so that if my friend Gerald suddenly sinks into the worst sort of depression and no longer desires these things they cease to be good for him. We had better say in this case that something has gone far wrong with Gerald, insofar as he has ceased to favour things that are in themselves prudentially valuable. This is, roughly, the objectivist insight. Where the objectivist gets into trouble is in taking desires for things such as friendship and achievement to be the paradigm for all desires. This gives a quite distorted view of how desire in general functions. For consider that many of my desires are for things that are nothing like friendship etc., in that they are not plausible bearers of attitude-independent value. Even if to be moved to desire something I must see something good about it, it does not follow that it actually has any value that is not a mere artifact of my attitude toward it. Take Evangeline's twin desires to someday meet her hero William Shatner and to see Venice preserved. Assume these are her two strongest and most enduring desires. Plausibly, we can tell a story according to which the state of affairs in which Venice is preserved has some independent value. On the other hand, it is very hard to see any attitude-independent value in Evangeline's meeting Shatner (especially if we stipulate that she will be too riddled with anxiety to derive any pleasure from this meeting, should it occur). If the state of affairs in which she meets Shatner would nonetheless be good for Evangeline, as is intuitively the case, this is only because she strongly desires this outcome. Now, we may well wish that Evangeline was not so consumed by such a silly desire. Desiring states of affairs that have some attitude-independent value (and having these desires satisfied) is no doubt prudentially better, other things being equal. Desire-satisfaction seems, that is, to have a double value where the object of the desire is substantively valuable. Insofar as 51 DHT takes this line, it can itself be understood as a kind of objective adjustment hybrid theory, albeit distinguished from those discussed in section 1.4 by its renunciation of objective necessity. And the upshot here is that we had better renounce objective necessity, insofar as the judgment that things go better for Evangeline when this central desire of hers (however silly it may seem) is satisfied is intuitively irresistible. The lesson to be gleaned from Evangeline's case is that human beings do not merely recognize pre-existing value, although the capacity to do so is surely one of our finer abilities. We also introduce new value into the world, insofar as we are creatures to whom things matter. In virtue of the attitudes we take towards objects, we are original sources of prudential value as well as cognizers of it. 43 Other components of a person's well-being, DHT goes on to say, are good for the person simply because they possess (the right kind of) attitude-independent value. The objectivist insight is that there are certain kinds of states of affairs whose instantiation in a person's life improves that life, whoever the person may be. The most plausible bearers of such value can be enumerated as follows: pleasure 44 , virtue, achievement, certain interpersonal bonds (i.e. friendship, family, romantic love), knowledge, and autonomy. The thought that such things are attitude-independent goods is, once more, intuitively hard to resist. Moreover, as I argue in more detail in Chapter 4, we should not suppose that the value of such things for a person is cancelled out if the person lacks any pro-attitude towards them. Suppose, for instance, that I am someone who loves and cares about Francine. Imagine I am asked whether I think it would be a better thing for her (other things being equal) if her life 43 Griffin (2000, p.282), in discussing the ideas earlier expressed in Griffin (1986), encapsulates them as follows: "I thought that the venerable question "valuable because desired, or desired because valuable?" was to be answered 'Neither'". I think, by contrast, that this venerable question should be answered 'Both'. 44 Note that pleasure appears on the list here only on the assumption that it is not reducible to desiresatisfaction. See Heathwood (2007) for a defense of the position that it is. 52 contained more in the way of friendship and achievement. Must I hold off on answering until I have asked the further question: does Francine herself have some pro-attitude to each of these things? This would be an odd reaction. It just seems clear that friendship and achievement are prudentially valuable, and so make a person's life go better. From the perspective of one who cares about Francine, there is no need to ask the further question about Francine's own attitude to these things. True, the desire theorist or hedonist might respond that the reason these things have such obvious prudential value is because they just happen to be the sort of things that all (or almost all) human beings desire or take pleasure in. Yet this is prima facie unconvincing. If the prudential value of these goods were merely coincidental in this way, insisting on an answer to the follow-up question before committing oneself to their being good for Francine would not seem like such strange behaviour. Given that it seems strange indeed, it is much more plausible to hold that the reason people desire such things and take pleasure in them is because they are independently recognized as good. 1.7 Conclusion I am far from claiming that I know how to put forward an account of prudential value that will not have intuitively implausible implications in some cases. That may well be a pipe dream. I also admit that the complicated structure of DHT brings with it significant theoretical challenges. However, DHT need not, it seems to me, leave out of its account of a person's well-being anything that forceful intuitions tell us should form part of such an account. Moreover, it will always be able to offer an intuitively plausible explanation of why a given thing is a basic constituent of prudential value (albeit not always the same explanation). The theory is capable of being, in both these senses, optimally inclusive. And this, I argue, gives it an edge over all extant theories. 53 DHT is not thereby immune to counterexample. I suspect that it will seem overly inclusive to many. However, I propose that we start by endeavoring to build a theory that does not rule out anything that is, plausibly, a basic constituent of prudential value. Only after this initial, optimally inclusive framework is in place should we turn to the difficult matter of paring down our list of constituents, to do justice to our less ecumenical judgments. This strategy has yet to be explored as a way out of the stalemate between various theories of prudential value, all of which have their intuitive advantages. The development and defense of DHT which follows is my attempt to pursue such a methodology as far as it can go. I am as optimistic about the prospects for this approach as one can be about a view that has not yet been considered at any length. 54 Chapter 2 Desire and the Heart of Subjectivism 2.1 Introduction Above, I identified what I take to be the core insight of subjective theories of prudential value, which is that a person can confer prudential value upon objects by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). In this chapter I argue that DHT can best incorporate this insight by modeling its subjectivist strand on desire-satisfactionism. Desire-satisfactionism, in various more or less sophisticated guises, has long been the most well-known and commonly defended subjective theory of well-being. However, it can no longer just be assumed that the best way of capturing what is attractive in subjectivism will focus on desires. In recent years, several philosophers have argued that subjective theories of prudential value should de-emphasize desire in favour of some other attitude, and have developed accounts that do just this. Desire-based theories (if only because they have been dominant for so long) have been found to face formidable difficulties. The prospect of finding a way of expressing the subjectivist insight that does not face the objections that desire-satisfactionism does is thus an enticing one. This is true whether one is a thoroughgoing subjectivist or a hybrid theorist. In this chapter I discuss two recent attempts to develop non-desire-based versions of subjectivism, Dale Dorsey's judgment subjectivism and the value-fulfillment theory defended by both Valerie Tiberius and Jason Raibley. I identify two different strategies that the latter approach can use to mark off value-fulfillment from mere desire-satisfaction, the first in terms of the nature of the attitudes involved, and the second in terms of how the state of affairs which is the object of the relevant attitude is brought about. If the distinction is made in the second way, 55 this brings the value-fulfillment theory into close contact with Simon Keller's view that wellbeing is largely a matter of the achievement of goals. I close by considering Keller's account. I argue that these alternative approaches are unable to accommodate the subjectivist insight as well as desire-satisfactionism can. Dorsey's judgment subjectivism is at once implausibly restrictive in the attitudes it allows to be prudentially relevant, and implausibly permissive. To put this in the terms of the previous chapter, Dorsey's approach succumbs to forceful versions of both the under-inclusiveness objection and the over-inclusiveness objection. For its part, if the value-fulfillment theory marks value-fulfillment off from mere desiresatisfaction by distinguishing the attitudes involved, it turns out to be compatible with a version of desire-satisfactionism that is independently appealing and defensible. However, if it instead concentrates on the way in which the state of affairs that is the object of the relevant pro-attitude is brought about, the value-fulfillment view (like Keller's similar approach) proves underinclusive. The underlying cause of these extensional problems is that these views fail to secure the result that it is whether I care about something (sufficiently and in the right way) that determines whether it is a bearer of basic attitude-dependent prudential value. Desire-satisfactionism, on the other hand, (when correctly understood) allows us to incorporate this core subjectivist insight into our hybrid theory in a satisfying fashion. Perhaps there is some other, yet to be developed, subjective approach that can perform equally well in this respect. But when we consider the different subjective theories that have thus far been proposed, it is evident that the purported advantages that the subjectivist accrues by moving away from desire come at a significant cost. Indeed, this cost is so great that we do better to stick with desire-satisfactionism, even though it comes with its own distinctive challenges. 56 Thus, the conclusion of this chapter is that we have good reason to suppose that some version of desire-satisfactionism forms at least part of the truth about prudential value. In the next chapter, I consider in more detail the question of how the desire-satisfactionist strand of DHT can be most plausibly developed. 2.2 Desire-Satisfactionism And Its Critics Before we can move on to address the respective merits of different versions of subjectivism, it behooves us to consider why desire-satisfactionism has increasingly been under fire from within the subjectivist camp. That is the task of this section. After briefly sketching out the landscape of possible subjective theories, we will consider two objections to desire-satisfactionism that explicitly motivate Dorsey's presentation of his alternative. The first, the scope problem, is by far the more pressing, and has been invoked in support of the value-fulfillment theory as well. We will show that in responding to the scope problem the desire-satisfactionist is not without theoretical resources. Although we provide the beginnings of a response to this challenge here, we will need to return to the scope problem at more length in Chapter 3. It will be useful to start from Dorsey's general characterization of subjectivism as the view (or family of views) according to which "Ø is intrinsically good for x if and only if, and to the extent that, Ø is valued, under the proper conditions, by x" (italics added). 1 This is what Dorsey elsewhere calls the Good-Value Link. 2 Insofar as Dorsey follows Sumner in taking subjectivism and objectivism to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories, his taxonomy looks rather different from ours. It would classify a theory such as DHT as objective, precisely because it denies that the Good-Value link sets out a necessary condition that any thing Ø must 1 Dorsey (2012b, p.407). The reader should take care not to conflate the thin notion of valuing at play here with the much more robust notion to which Tiberius and Raibley appeal. 2 See the reformulation of this principle in Dorsey (2017, p.200). 57 meet if it is to be good for any person x. However, if we weaken Dorsey's Good-Value Link so that it provides only a sufficient, as opposed to a necessary condition, it does seem to articulate an essential commitment that any theory of prudential value must embrace, if it is to preserve the subjectivist insight. Call this modified version of the principle Good-Value Link*. According to Good-Value Link*, then, Ø is basically good for x if Ø is valued, in the right way, by x. 3 The subjectivist insight, to reiterate, is that in caring about something (sufficiently and in the right way) a person can confer prudential value upon it. Plausibly, when we say that Ø is something that x cares about, or alternatively that Ø matters to x, at least part of what we are saying is that x values Ø. Thus, if DHT is to capture the relevant insight, the subjectivist strand of the theory needs to be understood in such a way as will, at a minimum, secure Good-Value Link*. Good-Value Link*, like Dorsey's original principle, is neutral as to how the requisite connection between what a person values and their good is secured. To fill out the theory we thus need to supplement it with what Dorsey calls a theory of valuing. 4 Desire satisfactionists, on this understanding, are those subjectivists who embrace a desiderative theory of valuing. To value 3 I am also here omitting the 'to the extent' clause, and replacing 'under the proper conditions' with 'in the right way'. The former clause I omit because it is incompatible with DHT. As to the latter change, it seems to me that subjectivism is better understood as concerned with what a person actually values, rather than with what they would value if they were different in various ways. This claim is not inconsistent with some degree of idealization of a person's actual attitudes, insofar as such idealization may in principle be needed if a person's attitudes are to match up with what they actually value. Moreover, we need to add the 'in the right way' clause because it is plausible that some instances of valuing are not prudentially relevant. I consider these issues at more length in Chapter 3. 4 Dorsey (2012b, p.408) and Dorsey (2017, p.201). There are other possible theories of valuing, beyond those discussed in this chapter. For instance, one might in principle defend a view according to which valuing is a purely emotional (but non-hedonic) state. However, my focus here is on those theories that have in fact been defended. 58 something, according to the desire-satisfactionist, is just to have the right kind of desire for it. 5 If we start from Good-Value Link*, we thus get the following view: Desire-Satisfactionism* (DS*): Ø is basically good for x if x has the right kind of desire for Ø. According to DS* the presence of the right kind of desire is a sufficient but not a necessary condition, and so it is quite compatible with DHT. As desire-satisfactionism's historical popularity bears out, there is something distinctly intuitive about this way of understanding the connection between a person's good and what they value. 6 And yet, it also threatens to saddle us with well-worn problems. Limitations of space preclude mention of all the challenges that DS* faces. I here consider only those that are directly relevant to the present dispute. These and other issues will be addressed further in Chapter 3. One of Dorsey's main arguments for the superiority of judgment subjectivism is that it sidesteps the so-called scope problem, which has been a persistent thorn in the side of desiresatisfactionists for decades now. 7 The thought that, by directing our focus away from desire, we can do away with this problem is also explicitly part of Raibley's motivation for adopting the value-fulfillment theory. 8 If one (or both) of these alternative approaches can indeed provide a more satisfying response to the scope problem than DS* can, this is a significant point in its favour. The scope problem for DS* is another instance of the over-inclusiveness objection discussed in the preceding chapter. In its traditional form, this problem arises because, while 5 There is a staggeringly wide range of views about what is required for a desire to be "of the right kind". I address this question at some length in Chapter 3. 6 Prominent desire-satisfactionists include Brandt (1979), Goldman (2009), Heathwood (2005), Railton (1986), and Sobel (2016). 7 The locus classicus for this problem is Overvold (1980). It is also discussed at length in Darwall (2002). 8 Raibley 2013 (pp.189-90). 59 many of our desires are clearly prudentially relevant, others intuitively are not. Consider a wellknown example from Derek Parfit. 9 Suppose that I meet an amiable stranger, and learn that the poor fellow is suffering from an apparently terminal illness. Because he is so amiable, I form a desire that this stranger be miraculously cured. If the stranger's illness is indeed cured at some point in the future, it is nonetheless implausible to hold that this state of affairs is basically good for me (assuming that I am unaware of this fact and have, in any case, quite forgotten about him by this time). Any version of DS* that does not impose some restrictions on the desires that matter for one's own well-being suffers from intuitive overbreadth in cases like that of the stranger's cure. Of course, the recognition that an unrestricted version of DS* is over-inclusive does not vitiate the entire approach. There may yet be some plausible and principled way of isolating the prudentially relevant desires, which will allow us to rule out my desire for the stranger's cure. Even if no such fix can be found, it is open to the defender of DS* to hold that our intuitive verdicts about individual cases like that of Parfit's stranger should be accorded no great weight. After all, as was shown in the last chapter, we have yet to find (and perhaps never could find) a theory of prudential value that is immune to such intuitive counterexamples. Alas, the scope problem for DS* cannot be swept aside so easily. For one thing, the above case is far from the only one in which it appears to issue implausible verdicts. Granting that a few apparent counterexamples are not enough to topple a theory of prudential value, the more of these there are (and the more stubborn are the recalcitrant intuitions) the more pressure this puts on the theory. On pain of multiplying such counterexamples, we will need to find some way of ruling out various desires that seem prudentially irrelevant because they are either trivial, 9 Parfit (1984, p.494). 60 pathological, or too remote from our own life. In these categories, respectively, we might place Caroline's desire for a can of cola, Sandrine's desire to smash icicles whenever she sees them, and Josephine's desire that the number of atoms in the universe be prime. 10 Many other cases of each kind could be given. The challenge can be put to the defender of DS* in a still starker way. Set aside intuitive counterexamples for now. If we don't find some way of at least distinguishing altruistic desires from self-interested ones, we risk rendering true self-sacrifice conceptually impossible. 11 Here it is not just that we get unintuitive results in particular cases, rather the very distinction between my own good and the good of other people and things that I care about threatens to collapse. To illustrate this latter problem, consider the case of Gary, who turns down the job of his dreams as a human rights attorney to take an unfulfilling job as a corporate lawyer. Gary's sole reason for accepting the corporate job is that it allows him to stay close to home and care for his mother, who is suffering from terminal cancer. Suppose Gary knows that, if he forfeits the present opportunity, he will never have a career he truly loves. Nonetheless, he cares more about being there for his mother during her last years of life, and so takes the soulless corporate job. Intuitively, we think that in a case like this Gary is simply putting the well-being of his mother before his own. This is seemingly because he has an (other-regarding) desire to make his mother's last years more bearable, that overrules his (self-regarding) desire to have a fulfilling career. Gary's act, in other words, looks to be one of great self-sacrifice. This is no doubt part of 10 The second example is taken from Kraut (1994, p.42). The last is borrowed from Kagan (1998, p.37). 11 On this problem, again see Overvold and Darwall. The most compelling defense of desiresatisfactionism against this charge is offered by Heathwood (2011). Even if Heathwood's defense fails (and it may not), I believe the best version of DHT can deal satisfactorily with this problem. I return to this challenge in Chapters 3 and 4. 61 what we admire about him. And yet, it now seems that we need to find a principled way of distinguishing self-interested desires from altruistic ones, on pain of saying that Gary's apparent act of sacrifice is no sacrifice at all, but is in fact best for him (just insofar as what he most desires is to alleviate his mother's situation). Various theorists have attempted to solve the scope problem by imposing constraints of different sorts on the desires that count. Perhaps the simplest way to do this is to stipulate that it is only desires I have about my own life that count. 12 Such a move may allow one to give the right intuitive verdicts in the cases of Gary, Josephine, and the stranger's cure, although this will depend on just how we draw the boundaries of the person's own life. Presumably, my desire that the number of atoms in the universe be prime is not about my life, whatever it is we mean by this locution. The same can be said of my desire that the stranger will recover. In the case of Gary, however, there is at least a case to be made that this desire is about his own life, even though it is other-regarding. This reflects a deeper problem, which is that there seems to be no principled, non-circular way of classifying my desires into those which are about my life and those which are not. We might try to cash out a restriction of the above sort by claiming that, for a desire to be prudentially relevant for a given agent, the agent must be an essential constituent of the object of the desire. 13 However, this does not help us in dealing with cases of trivial or pathological desires, such as those of Caroline and Sandrine. Moreover, this criterion also appears to be under-inclusive, thus landing us with a different extensional problem. Many desires that seem clearly to be prudentially relevant do not meet the proposed criterion. Suppose, for instance, that 12 This suggestion is found, for instance, in Parfit (1984, pp.494-5). 13 As suggested in Overvold (1980, p.118). 62 I am forced to put my cat up for adoption. Because I love the cat, I fervently desire that it have a good life with its new owners. Intuitively, it matters to the prudential value of my life whether this desire is satisfied. However, although the reason it is prudentially valuable is because I desire it, the state of affairs that is the object of my desire does not here involve me at all. The fact that this state of affairs could obtain even if I did not exist just does not seem relevant to whether (given that I do exist and do desire that it obtains) it is good for me. Many more cases like this could be presented. Although I will say more on this later, let me briefly state how I believe the defender of DS* should respond to the scope problem. The most plausible way to ensure that my desire that the stranger be cured is disqualified from counting towards my good is to claim that it is only what I will call global desires (those which reflect stable, temporally extended goals or commitments with which I identify) that are prudentially relevant. 14 This restriction to global desires also readily explains why fleeting whims such as Caroline's hankering for a cola can be ruled out of prudential relevance. There remain issues with formulating such a restriction, and we will have to be careful to ensure that it does not exclude desires the satisfaction of which does seem to matter to one's well-being. It may be that there are some comparatively fleeting desires that nonetheless are so overpowering that their satisfaction is prudentially relevant. If Caroline wants that can of cola with sufficient intensity, perhaps the satisfaction of this desire does have 14 My usage of this term is admittedly idiosyncratic. Global desires have elsewhere been individuated in terms of their intentional content, rather than via the features mentioned above. Thus, Parfit (1984, p.498) identifies a person's global desires as those that are about "some part of his life, considered as a whole, or about his whole life". This makes versions of DS* that focus only on global desires implausibly underinclusive. Moreover, it does not capture the intuitive difference between those desires that genuinely reflect what a person cares about and those that do not (which is, I think, the underlying motivation for the turn to global desires). This is best understood as a difference, not in the object of the desire, but in the degree to which one identifies with it. I thus see the restriction to global desires (so understood) and the acceptance of what I call the identification constraint as going hand in hand. 63 some impact on her well-being. We should not exclude any desires from prudential relevance by fiat. However, it strikes me that (at the very least) an emphasis on comparatively global over local desires is well justified, and on grounds internal to the subjectivist insight itself. The above maneuver, admittedly, has limited force against other problem cases. There seems to be nothing preventing desires that are compulsive like Sandrine's, or that have remote objects like Josephine's, from counting as global in the relevant sense. Moreover, we are still left with the problem of self-sacrifice, insofar as other-regarding desires, such as Gary's, are often among a person's central conative commitments. Yet note that DHT, which supplements DS* with an objectivist strand, at least avoids rendering self-sacrifice conceptually impossible. This is so even if we do not place any restrictions on the desires that are prudentially relevant. The disjunctive hybrid theorist who embraces DS* can grant that satisfying the desire to stay in town and alleviate his mother's situation is pro tanto good for Gary. This is compatible with the claim that the action motivated by this desire is self-sacrificing, because we can now advert to the attitude-independent prudential goods that Gary is losing out on by acting in this way. Of course, one may still object that the satisfaction of this desire does not seem even pro tanto good for Gary. The same may be said about the desires of Josephine and Sandrine. It is possible that we will have to bite these intuitive bullets. The charge of over-inclusiveness is something the defender of DHT should, at any rate, be accustomed to dealing with. At present, the scope problem remains an issue that any supporter of DS* (as either the whole truth about prudential value or one part of it) must address. In the next several sections, I argue that the benefits that subjectivists supposedly accrue by moving away from desire are to a large extent illusory. Moreover, even if non-desire based subjective theories do enjoy a real advantage when it comes to the scope problem, this gain is not significant enough to offset what 64 is lost when we exile desire from subjectivism. Or so I shall argue. There is one other challenge to DS* that Dorsey presses in arguing for judgment subjectivism, and that is worth briefly considering here, before moving on to the details of his view. Dorsey points out that his approach is immune to a type of paradox which DS* (as well as some other theories of prudential value) appears to run into. 15 The problem arises when we consider a person who desires that their life go badly. If we assume that the person's life is otherwise on the border between going well and going badly, we can seemingly construct cases where the person's life is going well if and only if it is not going well. I will grant Dorsey's claim that judgment subjectivism sidesteps this issue. Yet it remains to be shown that a plausible version of DS* cannot do the same. Bradford Skow has offered what I think is a satisfactory response to the apparent paradox, and the only major adjustment it requires is that we distinguish degrees of desire-satisfaction rather than taking it to be all or nothing (which is in any case a friendly amendment). 16 The threat of paradox thus does not constitute a compelling reason to give up DS*. 2.3 Dorsey's Judgment Subjectivism Dorsey's new version of subjectivism rests on a cognitive theory of valuing, according to which "persons value what they believe is good for them". 17 We thus have a thoroughly judgment-based 15 For discussion of the purported paradox see Bradley (2007), Heathwood (2005, pp.501-503), Mabrito (2013) and Skow (2009). 16 Skow (2009). 17 Dorsey (2012b, p.415). This appears patently circular if put forward as an analysis of the concept GOODNESS-FOR. However, we need not treat Dorsey's view as a conceptual analysis. We may still legitimately worry that the account is rather less informative and interesting than that offered by the desire-satisfactionist. The latter is providing an account (or at least a partial account) of the extension of a given evaluative property, in terms of a class of pro-attitudes that have nothing essentially to do with that 65 subjective theory (hence its name). In this section I will argue that, even if Dorsey's judgment subjectivism (henceforth JS) does fare better than DS* when it comes to the above problems, this advantage is not sufficient to outweigh its disadvantages. To see why, we will first need to get clear on the theory's commitments. Our investigation will reveal that, not only does judgment subjectivism not help with the charge of over-inclusiveness, it also proves under-inclusive. These extensional failures reflect a deeper issue, namely that the attitudes Dorsey is focusing on are insufficiently tied to what the person intuitively cares about. For this reason, JS does not adequately express the subjectivist insight. First, the good. JS can seemingly dispense with the scope problem in straightforward fashion. Dorsey points out that his theory can readily distinguish prudentially relevant instances of valuing something (namely, judgments that something is good for me) from those that are prudentially irrelevant (all others, including judgments that something is good simpliciter or for someone else). Thus, in switching to this new class of attitudes subjectivists can immediately, and in a principled way, isolate those attitudes that are prudentially relevant. Dorsey adds that, according to JS, "I cannot coherently believe that it is good for me to be worse off". 18 All he needs to obtain this result is a weak coherence condition, to the effect that one cannot simultaneously hold evaluative beliefs that are flatly inconsistent, such as "f is (intrinsically) good for me" and "f is (intrinsically) bad for me". Given this coherence condition, there also appears to be no threat of paradox on Dorsey's view. I am prepared to grant Dorsey's point that JS, by contrast with DS*, does not face the scope problem in its classic form. It may also be less susceptible to paradox. But we must also property. Dorsey is giving an account of the extension of the same property in terms of beliefs about that property itself. The subjectivist can, it seems to me, do better. 18 Ibid. (p.423). 66 consider what Dorsey commits himself to in pursuit of these advantages. I cannot resist noting, for a start, that there are people currently employed in academic philosophy (not to speak of the layperson) who avowedly do not believe that there is any such property as goodness for a person. 19 Dorsey's theory has the unsavory implication that nothing is good for such theorists. Although they may not be surprised to hear this, I suspect that most of their friends and colleagues would be. 20 We get the same implication in the more extreme case of the value nihilist, who believes that there are no evaluative properties tout court. 21 Babies and non-human animals (and any other being that lacks the cognitive architecture to make prudential value judgments) also seem stuck in a situation where nothing is either good or bad for them on this view. Even in the case of adult humans, I doubt that Dorsey's view can do justice to our experience of value. Whether or not there are any non-prudential values, it is plausible that we experience many things as having impersonal value, and even consciously judge them to have such value at times. Yet it is also plausible that many of these same things are basic constituents of our own well-being. It does not seem that we must also possess a belief that they have specifically prudential value, if this to be so. In all these ways, JS is intuitively under-inclusive. This suffices to show that, while it does not face the classic scope problem, Dorsey's theory has its own struggles with extensional adequacy. We have so far been considering JS as if it were a complete theory of prudential value. 19 For example, see Brewer (2009) and Hurka (1988 and 1993). The very existence of these figures also constitutes a compelling argument against the principle that, in the last chapter, we called First Person Veto (FPV). FPV states that if person P (or an idealized version thereof) would not assent to the judgment that state of affairs x is basically good for P, then x cannot in fact be good for P. Yet I can personally attest that Hurka, at least, would be unlikely to assent to the judgment that any x is good for him (in conversation). 20 Prominent friends of goodness-for include Korsgaard (2013), Kraut (2007 and 2011), Piller (2015), Rosati (2006), and Sumner (1996). 21 I thank Anthony Kelley (in conversation) for this point. 67 This is perhaps unfair. For our own endgame is not to defend a thoroughgoing desiresatisfactionism, but to vindicate DS* as the best candidate for the subjectivist strand of DHT. Insofar as we are promoting desire-satisfactionism as one strand of a hybrid account rather than as a self-standing theory, we should be assessing judgment subjectivism by the same lights. The proper object of assessment is therefore not a necessity claim, of the kind made by JS, but the sufficiency claim made by the modified approach that we can call JS*. According to JS*, then, Ø is basically good for x if x believes that Ø is good for x. JS*, like DS*, is quite compatible with the existence of attitude-independent prudential goods, and so with DHT. JS* does not have the unintuitive consequences that were bruited above. Even if I do not believe that anything is good for me (whether because I lack the capacity to make such judgments or for some other reason) the presence or absence of the attitude-independent prudential goods in my life still impacts how well it is going for me. Something similar can be said about those particular cases where something intuitively benefits a person despite their having no belief that this is so. However, moving to JS* does not solve all the extensional problems. It remains implausible to hold that, insofar as some welfare-subject does not judge that anything is good for it, nothing matters to it in the sense that theorists of prudential value should be concerned about. It is clear that at least some such subjects (consider again our esteemed colleagues) care about various things. Moreover, so long as this is the case, what matters to them should matter to us as theorists. If we want to preserve the subjectivist insight, we had better not deny this claim. It will not do to say that in all such cases whatever goods there are in the subject's life must be attitudeindependent ones. There is no good reason to believe this, absent an antecedent commitment to JS*. What this suggests to me is that evaluative beliefs are just the wrong sorts of attitudes for 68 subjectivists to focus on, precisely because they fail to track whether things matter to a welfaresubject, and therefore also fail to track what should matter to us. JS* also generates other extensional issues, which we have yet to mention. The account is intuitively over-inclusive in a distinctive way. It saddles us with awkward results in cases where a person believes that something is good for her but does not desire that thing, is not motivated to pursue it, and would derive no satisfaction from attaining it. Plausibly, I can judge that something is good for me without favouring it or being for it at all. 22 Evaluative judgments, understood along Dorsey's lines, do not seem to be, in other words, genuine pro-attitudes. Thus, while JS* does give the agent's attitudes the power to confer prudential value upon objects, and to this extent respects the subjectivist insight, it does so in a way which allows agents to confer value even upon things which they are alienated from (in the sense that these things leave them entirely cold). In doing so, it appears to lose sight of what is most appealing about subjective theories of prudential value. The defender of JS* may counter that, provided one embraces a sufficiently strong kind of internalism about evaluative judgments (according to which they are inherently motivating and affectively laden), one can deny that cases such as those described in the last paragraph are even possible. I do not find this sort of internalism plausible, but I concede that such a view is on the table. The first thing to say in response is that packing more into evaluative judgments does nothing to alleviate the problem of under-inclusiveness discussed above (if anything it exacerbates it). Moreover, it should be noted that a commitment to internalism forms no part of Dorsey's theory, and he at least does not rule out that there can be cases of the sort I have just 22 I am here reminded of my childhood attitude to broccoli, and my present attitude to strenuous physical exercise. 69 described. 23 Yet even in such cases, he insists that the mere belief that the thing is good for me suffices to make it good for me. This is the view I reject. It is now evident that JS* presents us with bullets we should not be eager to bite. If it were conclusively shown that Dorsey's route is the only way to avoid succumbing to the scope objection, perhaps we should still on balance side with his view. We are not yet justified in drawing such a pessimistic conclusion, however. All that history entitles us to conclude is that the scope problem is a formidable challenge for DS*, not that it is a knockdown objection to it. And far from triumphing over DS* on extensional grounds, JS* has itself been shown to be extensionally inadequate on multiple counts. The moral we should draw from the foregoing discussion is that, if a theory is to capture the subjectivist insight, it must develop Good-Value Link* in a way that accurately reflects those things that a person cares about, that matter to her. This is the point on which JS* flounders. 2.4 The Value-Fulfillment Theory and the Identification Constraint In recent years, Valerie Tiberius and Jason Raibley have also argued separately that the subjective element theorists of well-being should be focusing on is not a person's desires. 24 They suggest that we should instead turn our attention to what the person values. The first thing to note about this view is that this is not just the claim that subjectivists should endorse Good-Value Link*. That would not distinguish it from DS* or from JS*, both of which also aim to capture Good-Value Link*. Both Tiberius and Raibley are, instead, pointing us towards values understood in a thicker sense, as a particular kind of attitude. Moreover, in a distinct maneuver 23 Dorsey (2012b, pp.436-437). 24 In Tiberius (2008 and 2011), and Raibley (2010 and 2013). 70 which we will consider in more detail shortly, they each combine this with a specific view about what is involved in fulfilling one's values. Thus, the value-fulfillment theory (VFT) as conceived by both Tiberius and Raibley is a complex animal involving two distinct and separable commitments, both of which serve to render the scope of the view narrower than that of traditional desire-satisfactionism. The first restriction bears on the kinds of pro-attitudes we are to focus on, and is what I will call the identification constraint. In the present section, I argue that this constraint is quite consistent with a plausible version of DS*. The switch from talking in terms of desires to talking in terms of values to this extent turns out to be largely terminological, and the dispute an internal one within DS*. However, both Tiberius and Raibley express support for a second claim, which imports a different kind of restriction, this time on the way in which the state of affairs that is the object of the relevant pro-attitude is brought about. This is what I will call the agency constraint. In the next section, I argue that this second constraint is incompatible with the subjectivist insight and, moreover, results in a theory that is severely under-inclusive. It should accordingly be rejected. Raibley is helpfully up-front about his motivations for favouring a value-based version of subjectivism over a desire-based one, so we will start here with what he himself says. Raibley's worries about desire-satisfactionism, like Dorsey's, chiefly concern the scope of the theory. He is, to begin, troubled by the fact that unrestricted desire theorists allow the satisfaction of any of a person's desires, however trivial or fleeting (Caroline's yen for a cola not excepted) to contribute to that person's well-being. He also presses the familiar worry about desires, such as Josephine's desire that there be a prime number of atoms in the universe, that seem too remote 71 from one's own life for their satisfaction to be relevant to one's well-being. 25 Thus DS* is seen by Raibley as succumbing to the over-inclusiveness objection, for quite traditional reasons. 26 Raibley argues that, in shifting to a more demanding conception of which attitudes are prudentially relevant, we can rein in the scope of subjectivism in an appealing way. To value something, on Raibley's account, is to have a stable non-instrumental pro-attitude towards that thing with which one also stably identifies. More precisely, one values something if and only if one takes their pro-attitude towards it "to be representative of who they are and who they want to be". 27 This is what, going forward, I will refer to as the identification constraint. Tiberius, for her part, also endorses a restriction of roughly the same kind. She writes that, on her conception, "values have a special status in our planning and evaluation, they have greater stability than mere preferences and they are emotionally entrenched in ways that desires might not be". 28 It is apparent that, for Tiberius and Raibley, valuing x typically involves a good deal more than desiring x, or for that matter judging x to be good for one. Valuing may not even be identifiable with any single, isolatable pro-attitude, instead being composed of an integrated complex of emotions, motivations, and judgments. Thus, Tiberius also asserts that to value "is to have a co-ordinated pattern of emotions and motivations toward something that you take to be relevant to how your life goes. Not all values are fully realized-sometimes our motivations to 25 Raibley (2013, pp.189-90). 26 Raibley also claims (2013, pp. 191-192) that values are more closely connected to a) reasons for action and b) a sense of meaning in life, than desires. However, the considerations he musters in each case suggest only that a more nuanced approach is called for if we are to secure such a connection, rather than that we need to appeal to pro-attitudes other than desires. In Chapter 5, I briefly consider the question of what makes a life meaningful. I argue that DHT can give an interesting and appealing gloss on this issue. 27 Ibid. (p.191). 28 Tiberius (2011, p.6). 72 act, our emotions and our judgments are out of sync with each other-but values in their most complete sense include all these elements". 29 Note how much has now been packed into this notion. Among other things, it seems that something like a judgment that thing x is good for me (of the sort Dorsey thought was both necessary and sufficient for x's being good for me) has been deemed necessary on this view as well. However, as we argued above, this sets up an implausibly high bar to clear in certain cases (i.e. those pertaining to all infants and some philosophers). Any theory that is reliant upon such a cognitively involved notion of valuing thus appears to be intuitively under-inclusive. If VFT is to avoid this problem it must relax the above criteria somewhat. The most plausible version of the view will hold that, for something to be among the things I value, it need not be the case that I display towards it the entirety of that complex of motivations, judgments, and emotions that constitutes full-blooded valuing. Indeed, Tiberius suggests as much in the above quoted passage, where she notes that only some of a person's values are 'fully realized'. The defender of VFT might then say that, for something to be valued by me, it is sufficient that any one of the above elements is present. This is to significantly shrink the gap between VFT and desire-satisfactionism, however. For Raibley at least, a central motivation for the shift from desires to values was to rule out of prudential relevance the satisfaction of certain problematic desires, namely those that are fleeting, remote, compulsive, or at odds with the person's broader self-conception. However, if what makes something good for me is the fact that it is valued by me, and this requires only that I exhibit any one of the elements involved in fully realized valuing, the appeal to values does not itself help in dealing with these objectionable desires. For desire is, at the very least, one of those elements. The same goes for the mere belief 29 Ibid. 73 that something is good for me, and so we seem to inherit JS*'s over-inclusiveness problems as well. I do not know where the line is beyond which these theorists actually want to say that I value something, in the sense that makes it good for me. How much further than mere desire (if at all) must we go? This is surely a question of the first importance if we are to fairly adjudicate between VFT* (which again, is simply VFT formulated as a sufficiency rather than a necessity claim) and DS*. The advocate of the value-fulfillment approach needs to tread carefully here. If the standard of valuing is set too high, the theory will exclude from prudential relevance things that do seem relevant. If it is set too low, VFT* loses any advantage it might have had over DS* and runs into precisely the same worries about over-inclusiveness. It seems, moreover, that VFT* should not take a Dorsey-style belief to be either necessary or sufficient for valuing, for the reasons already discussed. VFT*, then, needs a construal of valuing that is restrictive enough that it does not treat every instance of desiring something as an instance of valuing it, but not so demanding that it requires an evaluative judgment. Accordingly, we might understand Tiberius and Raibley as endorsing a more global approach to the question of what the subjective determinants of my good are than that which is proffered by an unrestricted version of DS*. In saying that I value something, we do indeed seem to be saying something more than that I happen to desire it at the present moment. Intuitively, I can strongly desire something in the moment without really valuing it at all. Unlike mere desires my values are, in the first place, presumed to be relatively stable and enduring parts of my overall psychological make-up. They are also presumed to play an important role in my conception of the kind of person I am and want to be. Finally, they are typically associated with a range of emotional, motivational, and behavioural orientations. 74 Desire, understood in the thin sense favoured by many philosophers, may seem by comparison an anemic notion, ill-suited to sit at the root of a subjective theory of prudential value (or of the subjectivist strand of DHT). If this is the right way to pick out values, VFT* has undoubted appeal. For one thing, it helps to disarm the scope problem, insofar as many of one's desires will not meet the above criteria, and so will not count as values in the prudentially relevant sense. Among the desires that will presumably be ruled are those that are fleeting like Caroline's, or remote like Josephine's. Compulsions, such as Sandrine's desire to destroy every icicle she sees, may also be easily dispensed with in this fashion. The same can be said of my desire for the stranger's cure. On the other hand, the above criteria do not seem sufficient to secure the intuitive result in a case like Gary's. Still, if such a turn to values helps deal with most of the kinds of cases that intuitively give rise to the scope problem, this may a good enough reason for subjectivists to revise their view in this way. And yet, shifting from desires to values does not ultimately afford any such advantage. The important thing to see here is that one can endorse an identification constraint on the proattitudes that are prudentially relevant, along the lines sketched above, without abandoning the desire-satisfactionist framework. Few defenders of DS* believe that the satisfaction of any of one's desires contributes to one's well-being. This suggests that desire-satisfactionists are already standardly sorting desires into various classes, only some of which are prudentially relevant. If DS* was obligated to understand its core notion only in the broadest and most generic sense possible, then indeed there would be no room for an identification constraint. There is no need to limit the theory in this way, however. 75 It is nonetheless fair to hold that, if we are to be justified in incorporating such a constraint into DS*, we must provide a principled motivation for it which is grounded in the subjectivist insight itself. I believe that this can be done, and will defend this conclusion at greater length in the next chapter. The basic point is this. DS*, like any other version of subjectivism, stands or falls based on how well it answers to the subjectivist insight. And plausibly, the view can best capture the significance of what a person cares about, what matters to them, what they value (in the minimal sense that the Good-Value Link* is trying to capture), by incorporating an identification constraint. According to this modified version of DS*, the desires that are prudentially relevant, because genuinely reflective of what I care about, are just those that are relatively stable, enduring, and integrated into my self-conception. It is towards this kind of, independently appealing, subjectivist approach that we will move in Chapter 3. In general, it is open to the defender of DS* to recognize as many distinct classes of desire as are needed to best reflect the subjectivist insight, and to accord prudential relevance to only some of them. To this extent, Tiberius and Raibley's critique underestimates the resources of their opponents. Desire-satisfactionists may be well justified in building in an identification constraint, and their theory may then turn out to be extensionally equivalent to VFT* (for all that has been said so far). Perhaps the broader lesson is that we should not be misled by the bloodless way philosophers sometimes talk about desires into thinking that they are necessarily less rich and complex than the attitudes Tiberius and Raibley would have us focus on. 2.5 The Value-Fulfillment Theory and the Agency Constraint Tiberius and Raibley both seem to hold that something other than the identification constraint distinguishes VFT* from DS*. This takes the form of another restriction, which I will call the agency constraint. The agency constraint entails that the satisfaction of a desire for a given state 76 of affairs is only good for me if I have played an active part in bringing about this state of affairs. 30 The introduction of this second criterion brings VFT* into close contact with the view recently defended by Simon Keller, according to which a person's well-being is (at least in large part) determined by the extent to which they achieve their goals. 31 The agency constraint places a restriction, not on the kind of pro-attitude that is prudentially relevant, but on the way in which the state of affairs which is the object of one's pro-attitude must be brought about, if its obtaining is to be good for one. In this respect, and strictly speaking, it is not DS*'s focus on desires that is the value-fulfillment theorist's target anymore. Rather, the disagreement concerns what is required for the fulfillment of those attitudes that are deemed to be prudentially relevant. Although distinguishing desiring from valuing as attitudes is no longer really the point, it is in fact here where the most important difference between VFT* and DS* lies. It is also here where the former approach goes seriously wrong. For, insofar as it incorporates an agency constraint, VFT* cannot adequately capture the subjectivist insight, and so should not be viewed as a genuine competitor to DS*. In endorsing the agency constraint, VFT* takes it to be of vital importance that one realizes one's values through one's own activity. We find in both Tiberius and Raibley the claim that values serve to guide one's actions and practical deliberations, and Raibley explicitly ties the 30 Thus, Raibley (2013, p.192) writes that "one's welfare is increased only when one plays an active role in realizing one's values: it neither benefits nor harms one when a desire that does not prompt action- e.g., the desire that the stranger's illness be cured-is satisfied, even if one knows it has been satisfied." Tiberius is less explicit on this point, but she does state (2011, p.7) that "a person's life goes well to the extent that she pursues and fulfills or realizes things that she values" (italics added). This passage at least suggests that the person must herself play a role in bringing about a desired state of affairs, if it is to count as an instance of value-fulfillment. 31 Keller (2004). For a sketch of a similar view see Dorsey (2011). 77 successful realization of one's values to the exercise of "robustly functioning agency". 32 Indeed, he goes so far as to say that "values-realization is important for welfare because it is a central aspect of functioning agency". 33 So the ultimate test of whether something is relevant to my well-being, on this view, is whether it involves robustly functioning agency. Values (or as we can now characterize them, desires that satisfy the identification constraint), have a special connection with this kind of agency, that other desires lack. Raibley's claim is that it is precisely this feature which makes them the proper focus of the subjectivist. 34 The agency-based approach provides the value-fulfillment theorist with a new angle from which to attack the scope problem. Thus, one method for dealing with the worry about overbreadth is to tie the value of desire-satisfaction to the person's own efforts. This seems to afford a principled, non-arbitrary way of distinguishing those desires that are prudentially relevant from those that are not, and it may be thought that we will not find a better way. For the idea that one's well-being and the exercise of one's agency must be closely connected has its own intuitive pull. At least since Aristotle, philosophers have been attracted to views that accord to individuals a significant degree of control over how well their life is going for them. As human beings, it seems that we are not mere passive receptacles of prudential value. Rather, we are creatures with the capacity to transform the evaluative landscape through our own efforts. One appealing way of unpacking this basic idea ties our well-being to how successful we are, as 32 Raibley (2013, p.206). The model of robustly functioning agency, according to Raibley, also calls for one's values to be coherent, consciously held, responsive to evidence, and connected to a broader framework of affective motivations. These conditions on valuing can, for reasons pointed out above, be equally well met by a suitably refined desire-satisfactionism, and so I will not discuss them further here. 33 Ibid. (p.210). 34 It bears remarking that Raibley, at least, is open to the idea that the satisfaction of even those desires that do not meet the identification constraint (and so do not qualify as values) can make some contribution to one's well-being. However, on his view this is only because such desire-satisfactions can involve robustly functioning agency, if in an attenuated form (pp. 207-8). A more plausible view, as I argue below, is that the satisfaction of one's desires (at least those of them that meet the identification constraint) is good for one even in cases where one is a mere patient. 78 agents of just this sort. This line of thought, taken to its limit, suggests that if we are valueconferring beings it is only through exercising our agency in pursuit of some end that this is so, so that if I play no part in bringing the end about, the mere fact that I desire it cannot make it good for me. When we add to these intuitive considerations the fact that the agency constraint also appears to help in dealing with the scope problem, it is perhaps little wonder that it has won adherents. Keller, similarly, motivates his approach by appeal to the idea that it is in "imposing one's will on the world" that one both lives a good life, and confers value upon things that otherwise lack it. On Keller's view, the achievement of a given goal can be basically good for a person even if the goal lacks any independent value. Thus, to take a modified version of Rawls' famous grass-counter example, the claim is that insofar as the grass-counter devotes a great deal of time and effort to ascertaining precisely how many blades of grass are on his lawn, acquiring this knowledge is good for him. 35 It may be that there would be additional prudential value if the knowledge that he devoted all this time to acquiring was itself valuable rather than trivial (say, if instead of counting grass he was discovering fundamental laws of physics), but the important thing to stress is that this is not a necessary condition on the acquisition of the knowledge being valuable. And the same goes for other instances of achievement. Keller claims, as well, that the only instances of desire-satisfaction that are welfare relevant are those in which I have had a hand in bringing about the desired state of affairs. Moreover, although one could cleave to a more demanding account of achievement, Keller (like Raibley) suggests that, provided my own 35 For the original example, see Rawls (1971, p.432). 79 efforts have played some part in bringing about the object of my desire, this is sufficient to make the obtaining of any desired state of affairs good for me. 36 There is much that is appealing in the picture sketched to this point. It is plausible that one's level of well-being does depend to a significant extent on the successful operation of one's agential capacities, especially the capacity to pursue and realize one's most cherished aims. And yet, we must be careful not to run together prudential value too closely with the degree to which a person is flourishing qua agent. For the hard truth is that are many things over which we have no control, which nonetheless clearly impact how well off we are. Some of these things will enter DHT through its objectivist strand. But, even when we are merely considering which desire-satisfactions make a basic contribution to a person's well-being, we cannot defensibly restrict them to those in which the person plays some active role in satisfying the desire. An example borrowed from Keller himself will help to bring out the unacceptable implications of the agency constraint. Keller asks us to consider the case of Joan, who fruitlessly devotes a great deal of her time and energy to the abolition of one of her nation's laws, which she views as unjust. Although Joan's own efforts fail to make any difference (assume through no fault of her own), the law is subsequently abolished for entirely unrelated reasons. Keller's claim is that the change in law does not in this case make Joan's life any better, regardless of how much she desired this event. "Nothing she does makes any difference. She is not imposing her will upon the world, even if the thing she wills is imposed...Joan's is a life of wasted effort". 37 By far the more plausible position is that, insofar as Joan has a strong, stable, enduring desire that the law be abolished and identifies with this desire, the abolition of the law indeed 36 Bradford (2015) offers the most sophisticated account of the value of achievement in the literature, although she is non-committal as to whether achievements should be understood as prudentially valuable (pp.6-7). 37 Keller (2004, pp.33-4). 80 makes a difference to how well things go for her. This is so even though Joan does not succeed in "imposing her will upon the world". This point becomes harder to dispute if we compare Joan with two of her friends, Jean and Jane. Jean has a much weaker desire than Joan that this law be changed. She rarely thinks about the law at all, although when she does it is with distaste and a wish that it be abolished. And yet, this latter commitment is by no means a deeply engrained or important aspect of her identity. Now suppose that Jean, idle and bored one day, agrees to fill in for a more politically active friend of hers on one of her regular door to door canvassing expeditions. As it happens, Jean knocks on the right door. A powerful business magnate answers, and despite Jean's relatively half-hearted petitioning, he is convinced by her spiel (she happens to remind him of his estranged granddaughter). He ends up donating millions of dollars to the cause, which directly results in the law being repealed. Next consider Jane, who is like Joan in that she cares a great deal about changing this law, but unlike her in that she needs to work two jobs simply to keep food on the table and thus lacks either the time or the resources to contribute to this goal. It is an implication of Keller's view (and it seems of Raibley's as well) that the abolition of the law contributes to some extent to Jean's well-being, but does not contribute at all to Joan's or to Jane's. Is this really what we should say in this case? I suspect most readers will find such a conclusion impossible to accept. Joan and Jane, after all, both care a great deal about the law being repealed. Jean does not. Joan and Jane see their opposition to this law as a central aspect of their identity, and indeed Joan has expended considerable time and effort campaigning against it. Jane would have done the same if she were able to do so. It just so happens that both Joan and Jane are unlucky (Joan in that none of her efforts in pursuit of the goal of abolition end up helping, Jane in that she is not even in a position to make such efforts). 81 Granted, the fact that Joan's effort is wasted is regrettable to some extent. Other things equal, it would surely have gone better with her had she succeeded in bringing about (or at least helping to bring about) a change in the law. But the question is not whether it would have been better for Joan to achieve the goal herself, as opposed to seeing the end she so fervently desired attained through other means. The question is whether, in the latter case, the obtaining of this state of affairs can be dismissed as entirely irrelevant to how well off she is. The comparison with Jean helps us to see that it must make some positive difference to Joan's well-being that her cherished desire has been satisfied, even if her actions are not a part of the causal story that explains why this occurred. This point extends to Jane's case, as well. If we deny it, we are forced to bite the bullet and say that Jean's welfare was more impacted by the repeal of the law than either Joan's or Jane's, even though the latter two care much more about this outcome. This is not something we should be comfortable saying. The plain fact is that sometimes we just get lucky or unlucky with respect to the objects of our desires. However, how lucky or unlucky we are doesn't itself impact how much we care about (or, if you like, how much we value) these objects. How lucky and unlucky we are in this respect does indeed affect how well off we are. However, it doesn't impact what we care about and therefore doesn't affect which states of affairs would be basically good for us if they did obtain. To the extent that we mean to capture the subjectivist insight, we should be concerned above all with what a person cares about, not with what they succeed in bringing about, or even (here let us remember Jane's case) with what they have actually invested any effort in bringing about. It is only the former consideration, and not the latter two, that helps to determine what the basic constituents of someone's well-being are (as opposed to how well things are currently going for them). 82 A more reasonable condition to place on an instance of desire-satisfaction's being prudentially relevant is that one must be willing to exercise one's agency in the pursuit of the desired state of affairs, should one be in a position to do so. I am happy to accept such a counterfactual understanding of the agency restriction. Moreover, the counterfactual reading is quite compatible with DS*. On the other hand, Keller and Raibley are arguing that what matters is whether one causally contributed to bringing about the desired state of affairs. It is here where we should part company, if we wish to preserve that tie between what is good for someone and what they care about that subjectivism is expressly designed to capture. It is worth mentioning here that, insofar as it incorporates an agency constraint, VFT*, (somewhat ironically) does not even satisfy Good-Value Link*. This is because, on this view, for Ø to be basically good for x it does not suffice that Ø is valued, in the right way, by x. Rather, VFT* so understood incorporates a further, external condition to the effect that x must play a causal role in realizing Ø. This latter condition does not bear at all on what x cares about, and so we shouldn't be surprised that through it Good-Value Link* is severed. There is one final point I wish to make about the agency constraint. It may initially seem like a minor quibble, but it will prove important going forward. Recall that the subjectivist insight is precisely that a person can confer basic prudential value upon objects by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). Now, on at least one way of understanding the Keller/VFT* view, it is compatible with this insight, in at least a minimal sense. After all, insofar as I make a given state of affairs my end and exert my own agency to bring it about, it seems that I have thereby made this goal valuable for me, even if it was antecedently worthless. However, we must recognize that there is another, quite plausible way of understanding the value of achieving one's goals. 83 One might hold that the kind of exercise of human agency that is involved in the successful pursuit of goals itself has attitude-independent value. Such a claim may be supported by a perfectionist framework, or it may be explained in some other way, or even taken as primitive. It may, again, be understood as a claim about goodness for a person or about goodness simpliciter. 38 I believe the view that achievement is a substantive good is an independently attractive one. Indeed, when I develop the objectivist strand of DHT in Chapter 4 I will argue that achievement deserves a place on our list of attitude-independent prudential goods. Yet the important thing to note here is just that views like this make the locus of the value the achievement (the complex consisting of the goal and the successful pursuit of it) rather than the desired state of affairs itself. They do not help us express the insight that human beings are value-conferring beings, which we have identified as essential to subjectivism. The threat of a collapse into objectivism thus provides another reason to steer clear of an agency restriction. At the very least, subjectivists should be careful to stress that it is the object of one's pro-attitude that is basically prudentially valuable (so, the goal itself), rather than the complex consisting of the goal and the successful exercise of one's agential capacities in pursuit of it (that is, the achievement). We will see in the ensuing chapter that it is not just in the context of the agency restriction that this threat of a collapse into objectivism arises. If one hopes to maintain a genuinely subjectivist element in one's theory of prudential value, one must recognize that a person's pro-attitudes can confer prudential value upon their objects. This, I will argue, should lead the disjunctive hybrid theorist not only to reject the agency constraint, but also to adopt one particular interpretation of DS*. 38 Hurka (1993, pp.17-18) explicitly takes achievement to be among the things that are good simpliciter, denying that it should be treated as good for a person. Bradford (2015, pp.6-7 and 2016, p.201) discusses both views, but does not make a definitive choice between them. 84 2.6 Conclusion My argument throughout this chapter has rested on my own (admittedly not uncontroversial) conception of the subjectivist insight. As I see it, the beating heart of subjectivism is the idea that in caring about something (sufficiently and in the right way) a person can make it a basic constituent of their well-being. My argument has been that neither JS* nor VFT* can accommodate this insight as well as DS* can. To the extent that these views shift the focus from desires to some other class of attitudes, they prove either under-inclusive or over-inclusive. To the extent that they adopt an agency constraint, they again prove to be under-inclusive. My conclusion is that, if subjectivist theories of prudential value are to avoid losing sight of their original target, they should remain focused on desire-satisfaction, and not incorporate an agency constraint. This holds mutatis mutandis for the subjectivist strand of DHT. 85 Chapter 3 What's Good in Desire-Satisfactionism? 3.1 Introduction In the previous two chapters I introduced and motivated DHT, and argued that the best way to develop the subjectivist strand of such a theory is along desire-satisfactionist lines (I thus labeled this part of the theory DS*). Desire-satisfactionism itself comes in many varieties, and thus there remain many questions to answer before we can move on to discuss DHT's objective elements. The aim of this chapter is to set out the most plausible version of DS*, one that when integrated into DHT can bring with it what is most appealing in subjectivism. This requires, first off, that we draw a distinction between two different interpretations of desire-satisfactionism, the object view and the combo view. Although it may seem to be a mere formality which of these views the disjunctive hybrid theorist adopts, deciding between them is in fact of crucial importance. Indeed, I will show that it is only if we understand DS* in the light of the object view that it genuinely expresses, and so can incorporate into DHT, what we have identified as the subjectivist insight. Once this interpretive issue has been dealt with, we will turn to the topic of which instances of desire-satisfaction should be treated as prudentially relevant. We saw in the previous chapter that an unrestricted DS* runs into the scope problem. In response, various kinds of constraints have been proposed, with the aim of isolating just those desires that matter for wellbeing. We have already ruled out an agency constraint as incompatible with the subjectivist insight. On the other hand, we offered some initial support for an identification constraint, understood in such a way as to emphasize those desires that are comparatively enduring, stable, and integrated into a person's self-conception. Whereas the agency constraint concerns how a 86 desire is satisfied, and the identification constraint concerns the role a desire plays in a person's life, other proposed constraints concern either the conditions under which the desire is or would be formed or retained (we will call these procedural constraints), or the content of the desire itself (we will call these substantive constraints). Procedural constraints typically involve the imposition of some hypothetical idealizing procedure, such that only those desires that would survive after being suitably laundered are accorded prudential significance. Idealization helps deal with some of the cases that give rise to the scope problem. However, it does not help with others. Moreover, shifting our focus from actual to idealized desires comes at a significant cost. The price of idealizing is always that it loosens our grip on what is most compelling in subjectivism, namely the connection it draws between what actually matters to a person and what is good for her. If the corresponding gains were significant enough, this cost might be justified. However, I argue that the kinds of cases that have been used to motivate the imposition of idealizing procedures can be satisfactorily dealt with by other means. The upshot of this discussion is that we should not idealize. I also argue that we should reject any proposed substantive constraints on the content of the desires that are classified as prudentially relevant. One kind of constraint that is defended by certain hybrid theorists places an independent value condition on the objects of these desires. Such a restriction is in fundamental tension with the subjectivist insight, and should accordingly be rejected. Another type of substantive constraint, which we discussed and dismissed in the previous chapter, allows the satisfaction of only those desires that are about my own life to contribute to my well-being. A somewhat similar view holds that the only desires that matter for well-being are those that are about my whole life, rather than any smaller segment of it. This 87 latter proposal should also be rejected, insofar as adopting it renders DS* massively underinclusive. Although I here take a stand against both procedural and substantive constraints, I do not advocate an unrestricted version of DS*. I argue that we are well-justified in restricting the scope of our concern to intrinsic desires, although distinguishing in a plausible way between intrinsic and instrumental desires proves a somewhat complicated matter. I also reaffirm my support for a view that restricts the desires that matter for well-being to those that satisfy an identification constraint. A constraint of this last kind is at least consistent with, and may indeed be demanded by, the governing insight of subjectivism. I close by considering certain issues surrounding the time at which desire-satisfaction benefits a person. If it is to preserve the subjectivist insight, DS* must be understood according to the object interpretation. It also needs to eschew any condition to the effect that the objects of one's desires must possess attitude-independent value, if they are to be basic constituents of one's well-being. Beyond this point, the question of which instances of desire-satisfaction are prudentially relevant is an internecine one to which different answers may be given, consistent with the acceptance of both DS* and DHT. Thus, if certain readers do not agree on all points with the present treatment of these issues, this should not prevent them from taking up and further advancing the broader theoretical framework set out in these pages. 3.2 Introducing the Object and Combo Views In a classic article criticizing desire-satisfactionism, Richard Kraut describes the theory he opposes as holding that, "it is good for one's desire to be satisfied, regardless of the content of 88 the desire. The objects we now want or will want are made good for us by our wanting them". 1 Notice that there is a significant ambiguity in Kraut's reconstruction of the desiresatisfactionist's claims. Is the theorist with whom Kraut is sparring assigning basic prudential value to the state of affairs in which a person's desires are satisfied, whatever their objects may be, or to those very states of affairs that are the objects of a person's desires? As was first pointed out some two decades ago, these are distinct positions, with different implications. 2 Nonetheless, they have usually not been treated this way in the literature, either by desiresatisfactionists or by their critics. This situation would be pardonable if it were a mere technical matter which interpretation we adopted, with no broader implications for our theorizing about prudential value. Among those who haven't simply elided the distinction, this has generally been assumed (I discuss the exceptions below). However, it turns out that the decision between these views has important and wide-ranging repercussions. We will call the first interpretation, according to which it is the state of affairs that is the object of the person's desire that is a basic constituent of prudential value, the object view. The second interpretation, according to which it is the combination of the person's desiring that some state of affairs obtain and that desire's being satisfied that is basically good for the person, we will call the combo view. 3 I begin, in this section, with a more detailed account of the differences 1 Kraut (1994, p.40, italics my own). 2 The first explicit mention of this interpretive issue that I am aware of (and still the best discussion) is found in Rabinowicz and Osterberg (1994). Although their stated focus is preference utilitarianism, much of their discussion is directly relevant to the issue of how best to formulate desire-satisfactionism, precisely as a theory of prudential value. Rabinowicz and Osterberg call the competing interpretations the object and satisfaction interpretations. These views are also discussed and distinguished, under various names, by Bradley (2009 pp.25-30 and 2014, pp.234-6), Bykvist (2002, p.475 and 2006a pp.266-7), Dorsey (2012a pp.272-5 and 2013), Heathwood (2005, p.491), and Sarch (2011, pp.179-81). 3 I am here adopting Bradley's terminology, since it is less apt than Rabinowicz and Osterberg's to cause confusion between the so-called satisfaction interpretation and DS* itself. Although the combo view does not build in anything like an agency restriction, the reader should nonetheless notice the structural similarity between this interpretation of DS* and the view that achievement itself has attitude89 between the object and combo views of DS*. In the next section, I argue that the former view should be preferred, on the grounds that only it secures the result that in caring about a thing (sufficiently and in the right way) a person can confer prudential value upon it. The commitment to this kind of value-conferring is an essential one, if we want our theory to capture what is distinctively appealing in subjectivism. For the purposes of this discussion, it will be convenient to work with the simplest variant of DS*, according to which the satisfaction of any of a person's actual desires is relevant to the person's well-being. This approach is actualist in that it is the desires a person has in the actual world that count, and unrestricted in that it imposes no constraints on which of these are prudentially relevant. Thus, we will call this version of DS* unrestricted actualism. 4 The disagreement between the object and combo interpretations of DS* does not center on the kinds of entities that can bear prudential value. The dispute instead concerns what we might call the location of the basic constituents of prudential value. According to the object view, the basic constituents of prudential value (here identified with the objects of my desires) may be entirely states of the world outside my own head, even though their value is conditional on their bearing the right relation to what is going on in my head. The object interpretation of DS* is, accordingly, consistent with the possibility that none of the states of affairs that are basically good for me are either wholly or partly constituted by my own mental states. Of course, it will almost always be the case that among my actual desires will be desires to be in certain mental states. But it is important to see that on the object view this need not be the case. The objects of my desires are good for me because of my mental states, but that does not entail that in independent value, discussed in the last chapter. I believe this should immediately make one suspicious about whether such a view can really capture the subjectivist insight. 4 On both the object and combo interpretations, to say that my desire for some state of affairs x is satisfied is just to say that I desire that x obtains and x does in fact obtain. Where the object of my desire does not obtain, we will follow standard practice and say that this desire is frustrated. 90 enumerating the things that are good for me we must include such states. To put this in terms of the previously mentioned distinction between the enumerative and explanatory questions, it is only in answer to the latter question that the object view must invoke mental states. It is a contingent matter whether, in response to the enumerative question about my good, we need appeal to such things. That depends on what I am like. On the other hand, the combo view takes the basic constituents of prudential value to be more complicated items, composed of a) the desire that some state of affairs obtain and b) the obtaining of that state of affairs. On this interpretation, all those things that are basically good for me are located at least partly within my own head. At least, this will be the case if DS* is taken to be the whole story, rather than one strand of DHT. One potential reaction to the contrast just drawn is to see the object view as less subjectivist than the combo view. After all, it has often been supposed that a core marker of subjectivism is some kind of commitment to the dependence of prudential value upon the agent's mental states. The most obvious way of securing such a dependence, it might be thought, is to embrace a view according to which the basic constituents of prudential value are themselves all mental states. This may help explain hedonism's perennial appeal. Short of endorsing hedonism, the combo view (if it is understood as a complete account) nonetheless ensures that each basic constituent of prudential value is at least partly composed of some mental state. The object view, on the other hand, does not guarantee that any of the basic constituents of prudential value are constituted either wholly or partly by mental states. This may lead one to conclude that subjectivists (or at least thoroughgoing subjectivists) are better served by adopting the combo view. 91 This is a mistaken conclusion. The considerations in the above paragraph all concerned the respective interpretations' answers to the enumerative question. However, a more fruitful way of gauging the extent to which a theory of prudential value is subjective is in terms of its response to the explanatory question. On the classificatory approach defended in Chapter 1, if a theory holds that at least some of the things that are basically good for a person have their prudential value at least in part because the person has the right kind of pro-attitude towards them, then it is at least partially subjectivist. A thoroughgoing subjectivist view, then, is any theory according to which all the things that are basically good for a person have their prudential value entirely because the person has the right kind of pro-attitude towards them. The object interpretation of DS* is clearly at least partially subjectivist by these lights (whether it is a fullblooded version of subjectivism depends again on whether it is being considered on its own or as one strand of DHT). A commitment to subjectivism thus does not imply that the mental states that explain why certain states of affairs are basically prudentially valuable must themselves be counted among the basic constituents of prudential value. The debate between objectivism and subjectivism is orthogonal to the dispute about whether the basic constituents of prudential value are located within or without the mind. We can bring this out more clearly by considering the following view (or combination of views). Suppose that, in response to the explanatory question, one endorses a locative account of prudential value (we will consider this account in more detail in Chapter 4). According to the locative account, goodness for a person is best understood as goodness simpliciter instantiated in a person's life. On this approach, nothing that is not good simpliciter can be a basic constituent of prudential value. Moreover, all that is needed to explain why something is good for a person is 92 the fact that it possesses this other sort of goodness, together with certain other conditions designed to ensure its connection to the person's own life. Suppose, further, that our locative theorist thinks that the only things that are good simpliciter are mental states of some sort. We can be confident that this is a possible position because it has in fact been defended. G.E Moore famously held that the only way to make sense of goodness for a person is in terms of goodness simpliciter instantiated in that person's life. 5 Nonetheless, prominent among the items that are good simpliciter he included pleasure, provided it is of the right sort. Specifically, Moore claimed that "by far the most valuable things which we know or can imagine are certain states of consciousness which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects". 6 Moore did not himself defend the position that these are the only things that are good simpliciter. However, Donald Regan's recent development of the Moorean approach explicitly denies that anything is basically valuable besides certain mental states of this sort. 7 This revised Moorean theory of prudential combines a) a locative explanatory account, with b) a type of mental state view at the enumerative level. Yet my sense is that a theory like Regan's should not be classified as even partially subjectivist. It certainly should not be treated as more fully subjectivist than the object view. Now that I have clarified what is at stake, I will move on to assess the comparative merits of the object and combo interpretations of DS*. In the next section I argue that the object view is more plausible than the combo view, and better captures the subjectivist insight. 5 Moore (1903, p.99). One can also read Moore as a thoroughgoing skeptic about prudential value. It does not matter here which reading is historically correct. 6 Moore (p.179). 7 Regan (2004). 93 3.3 In Defense of the Object View The subjectivist insight is that a person can confer basic prudential value upon a given thing by caring about it (sufficiently and in the right way). If DS* is to incorporate into DHT what is most appealing in subjectivism, it must therefore be developed in such a way as will express this fundamental idea. According to either of the above interpretations of DS*, the way to pick out what we care about in the right way is by appeal to our desires. It should be clear that, understood according to the object view, DS* expresses the subjectivist insight quite well indeed. To return to our example from Chapter 1, if Evangeline desires to meet William Shatner, then according to the object view (and assuming unrestricted actualism) it is basically good for her to meet him. This is so even though, considered on its own, such a meeting does not seem at all valuable. The fact that Evangeline wants this meeting to occur is the sole source of whatever prudential value it bears. By contrast, the combo interpretation of DS* does not, as it turns out, have the implication that persons can confer prudential value on states of affairs by desiring them. The combination of Francine's desire for x and x itself is a basic constituent of prudential value, and moreover one that is partially constituted by Francine's desire. And yet, x itself is not a basic constituent of prudential value on this view. It is thus not the case that in desiring x Francine confers basic prudential value upon it. As for the compound consisting of the desire and its object, that is taken to be good for Francine regardless of her attitude to it. 8 We are forced to 8 It would be passing strange to claim that the source of the prudential value of such compounds is always a second-order desire that the first-order desire be satisfied. This would, after all, just be to endorse the object view at one remove. Moreover, I see no principled reason for thinking that only desires that have as their object instances of desire-satisfaction possess such value-conferring power. We should also note that a vicious regress threatens if one ventures down this path. If a higher-order desire that my lower-order 94 conclude that my desires do not introduce new basic constituents of prudential value into the world on the combo view, even though the things that are basically good for me constitutively involve my desires. The combo interpretation thus seems fundamentally unable to capture the subjectivist insight. If DS* is interpreted in this way it may not even deserve to be called a subjective theory. Insofar as the essence of subjectivism is tied to the idea of value-conferring (which, even if a controversial understanding, is a plausible one), DS* falls on the wrong side of the divide. Nor can I think of any other plausible approach that will conclusively land the combo view in the subjectivist camp. Call this the problem of creeping objectivism. 9 We should conclude that the combo view does not capture the heart of subjectivism. It is important to see that this is so even if one has a quite different understanding of the subjectivist insight from our own. We have already discussed, and rejected, the view that the essence of the subjectivist idea is best expressed via an anti-alienation constraint, to the effect that a person's good cannot include things which do not somehow resonate with them. 10 But suppose that someone else is moved to accept subjectivism by this kind of consideration. If Francine desires x, this does guarantee that x itself resonates with her. Thus, if DS* is understood according to the object interpretation, all the basic constituents of prudential value it introduces are guaranteed to satisfy the anti-alienation condition. On the other hand, it seems that Francine could, while yet desiring x, be quite indifferent to the following conjunction: I desire x and x obtains. The desire is satisfied is always needed to explain the value of ground-level desire-satisfaction, how then do we explain why it is good for the higher-order desire to be satisfied? We seemingly will need to keep adding new desiderative levels ad infinitum. This is bizarre. It also makes it hard to see how the relevant value gets into the picture in the first place. 9 The reference is to Dreier (2004). This problem for the combo view is raised, although not under this name, in Bradley (2014, pp.234-6). 10 As expressed, for instance, by Dorsey (Forthcoming), Railton (1986), and Rosati (1996). Dorsey (2012a, pp.272-5) also points out that the combo view fails to secure this kind of resonance, and argues against it on these grounds. 95 complex of the desire and its satisfaction is just not what people ordinarily care about. It is not the satisfaction of Francine's desire for x that resonates with her, but x itself. 11 The antialienation constraint is thus not satisfied by the combo view. It is striking that the combo view comes out on the wrong side of the argument, even if we assume a very different understanding of what is appealing in subjectivism from our own. Rabinowicz and Osterberg draw a contrast between the participant and the spectator models of preference utilitarianism, which proves illustrative in this context. The object view appears to map on well to the former model, the combo view to the latter. The former model emphasizes "participation in...projects, the situation is to be viewed from within'. 12 The latter, on the other hand, takes the perspective of a detached impartial spectator. Looking down from such rarefied air, it may well be that what seems valuable is the compound state of affairs consisting of the desire and its satisfaction. But this does not capture what the person really cares about. If we are trying to express the insight that what matters to a person explains, at least to some extent, what is basically good for her, the combo view is a poor candidate. I hope to have brought out by now that a good deal hangs on the decision between these two interpretations of DS*. This is so despite the fact that the object and combo views need not diverge at all in their substantive judgments about how well off people are. 13 It is true that, when it comes to assessing a person's well-being level, nothing much hangs on the choice between the object and combo views. Hence, perhaps, the temptation to treat them as mere notational variants. However, we should not suppose that because two theories of prudential value agree 11 The combo view could seemingly satisfy the anti-alienation constraint only by requiring that Francine have a higher-order desire that her desire for x is satisfied. Whereas the view discussed in the previous footnote would allow the presence of a higher-order desire to confer value upon instances of desiresatisfaction, this view would allow the absence of such a desire to revoke their value. It is untenable for similar reasons. 12 Rabinowicz and Osterberg (1994, p.3). 13 Bradley (2014, p.235) also notes the extensional equivalence of the object and combo view. 96 about people's respective well-being levels they agree on everything that matters. A large part of the task of any such theory is to provide a plausible explanation of why the things that are prudentially valuable are so, and of why certain people are better off than others. Here is a silly example that nonetheless serves to sharpen the above point. Imagine a view according to which x is basically good for any person P if x is something that William Shatner wants for P. Suppose also that all the benevolent Shatner wants for any of us is for us to have exactly what we desire. We now have an approach that, in its extension, differs not at all from either interpretation of DS*. But where DS* is (when understood correctly) plausible, Shatner-satisfactionism is patently absurd. Of course, the combo view is much more intuitively appealing than Shatnersatisfactionism. Indeed, of those who commit to one or the other interpretation, it is noteworthy that one finds support for the combo view among defenders of desire-satisfactionism as well as among its opponents. 14 Nonetheless, we should conclude that the subjectivist insight is better represented by the object view. It follows that, if our aim is to develop DHT so that it incorporates what is most attractive in DS*, and in subjectivism more broadly, we should be adopting an object rather than a combo interpretation. In the next section, I draw out some further implications of this conclusion. 3.4 The Object View and Objectivism Defenders of objective list accounts claim it as an important theoretical virtue of their view that they can accommodate a wide variety of attitude-independent prudential goods. In principle, there seem to be no restrictions on the constituents of the objective list, either with respect to 14 Desire-satisfactionists who favour the combo view include Heathwood (2005, p.491) and Lukas (2010, pp. 3-4). Opponents of the theory who also favour this interpretation include Bradley (2009, pp.25-30) and Sarch (2011, pp.179-81). 97 their number or their nature. One recent stratagem has been to reserve a space on this list for desire-satisfaction. 15 If such a gambit is plausible, it represents a significant victory for the objective list theorist. For not everyone who feels the force of the idea that getting what one wants is among the things that makes an independent contribution to one's well-being is willing to embrace thoroughgoing subjectivism. Some of these people are like myself, in that they also expect a theory of prudential value to accommodate certain objectivist intuitions. If it were the case that the desire-satisfactionist element could be comfortably incorporated into the objective list itself, this would seem a straightforward and attractive way of proceeding. It would also preclude the need for a hybrid theory of the kind I am setting forth. DHT treats the objective list theory and desire-satisfactionism as each getting at part of the truth. Yet, if the objectivist patch above works, there is no longer any call to complicate matters by appealing to two such distinct and irreducible sources of prudential value. We can remain straightforward objective list theorists, and at the same time gain all the perks that the desire-satisfactionist enjoys. Crucially, any hope this maneuver has depends on our adopting the combo view of DS*. On the object reading, it is easy to see that a theory which simply appends the desiresatisfactionist's axiological commitments to an existing list of attitude-independent goods is unpromising. For one thing, the objects of any individual's desires are in principle unbounded in both number and variety. An indefinitely long objective list is not, I take it, something that any theorist of prudential value is willing to countenance. Furthermore, one quickly finds oneself in tangles if one supposes that whatever a person desires is a substantive prudential good. Recall the case of Evangeline, who so fervently desires to meet William Shatner. Suppose now that one of Shatner's most cherished desires, in turn, is that he never meets Evangeline. It follows that the state of affairs in which Evangeline meets Shatner and the state of affairs in which she does not 15 This is suggested, for instance, by Arneson (1999, p.124), Keller (2009, p.659), and Rice (2013, p.6). 98 meet Shatner must both be included on the list of attitude-independent prudential goods. This looks very odd, however. It is, admittedly, not as odd as the claim that both states of affairs are good simpliciter would be. The one, we can say, is good for Evangeline and the other is good for Shatner. But remember that the relevant value is in both cases supposed to be substantive, which is to say wholly independent of Evangeline's or Shatner's attitudes. At this point I do not know what could be meant by this latter qualifier, however. We seem to have lost our grip on the very idea of a substantive prudential good. Thus, if we adopt the object interpretation of DS*, it does not seem that objectivists can capture the subjectivist insight so cheaply. The combo view does not, at least, encounter the above worries. For on this interpretation of DS* we need add only one item to the objective list. Desire-satisfaction is just one more kind of thing, all instances of which have attitude-independent prudential value. The combo reading is thus preferable, if one wants to accord independent prudential significance to desire-satisfaction while remaining a thoroughgoing objectivist. It is worth asking, though, what could explain why desire-satisfaction is good for a person on such a view. I can think of three broad approaches here (I will discuss each in more depth in the next chapter). The first justifies the content of the objective list by appealing to a broadly perfectionist theory grounded in general claims about human nature. 16 The second is the locative approach, which understands what is good for me in terms of goodness simpliciter occurring in my life. The third, primitivist, approach denies that we can offer (or need offer) any non-trivial explanation of why desire-satisfaction (or anything else) appears on the objective list. 17 On the first approach, the attitude-independent value of desire-satisfaction would need to derive from the fact that it realizes our distinctive human capacities, or something to that effect. 16 As in Kraut (2007). 17 As in Scanlon (1998). 99 This, however, sounds implausible, except perhaps if we endorse the agency constraint. But we have seen that there are good independent reasons to reject any such restriction. The second approach is somewhat more compelling. And yet, it does not allow the objectivist to incorporate what is intuitively attractive about subjectivism, and so about desire-satisfactionism, even if it might suffice to render an objective list theory extensionally adequate. Moreover, the ascription of goodness simpliciter to desire-satisfaction sounds decidedly odd to these ears. The primitivist approach we should turn to only if all other options have been exhausted. I conclude that, even if one favours the combo view, desire-satisfaction is not an especially plausible candidate for the objective list. We should, at any rate, not favour this view. 18 One lesson I hope will be drawn from the preceding discussion is that the distinction between the object and combo views is something that more theorists of prudential value should be thinking about. With respect to the unfolding structure of DHT, we have seen that which of these views one adopts makes a big difference. This is not merely a peculiarity of the present project. Despite their extensional equivalence, the object and combo views diverge significantly in their commitments, and we will do well to keep this in mind. 3.5 Why Not Idealize? 18 There is one argument against the object view that I want to briefly consider here, if only because it suggests something interesting about the nature of prudential value. Sarch (2011, p.180) suggests that this interpretation is implausible because it implies that the final, basic prudential value of the desired state of affairs supervenes on something other than its intrinsic features (namely the relation between this object and my mental state). This is only a problem if it is assumed that the final, basic prudential value of a thing must supervene on its intrinsic properties. We need not assume this, and indeed there may be good reason for doubting it. After all, part of what seems distinctive about prudential value is that it is fundamentally relational. Their ability to easily account for this relationality is surely a large part of what makes subjectivist approaches so appealing. But even objectivists must say that x's being valuable for me involves some relation between x and myself. Given this, why shouldn't the relational features of a thing matter to whether it is valuable for me for its own sake? See Dorsey (2012a) for further discussion of this point. 100 Above we were assuming, for simplicity, an unrestricted actualist version of DS*. However, this most straightforward version of the view has been widely criticized. Indeed, the objections to it have been so influential that virtually no contemporary desire-satisfactionist defends unrestricted actualism. 19 It is generally assumed that we need to impose certain constraints on the desires that matter for one's well-being. Such constraints can take several forms. Some of the conditions that it has been suggested desires must meet if their satisfaction is to be good for a person are broadly procedural. Supporters of such constraints, which generally involve some degree of idealization, deny the actualism of the simple desire theory. Other proposed restrictions are substantive, in that they bear on the content of the desires in question. Finally, some argue that we should only accord prudential relevance to those desires that are sufficiently stable, enduring and tied to one's broader self-conception (this is what in the last chapter we called the identification constraint). It is not the actualism but rather the unrestrictedness of the simple theory that the latter two proposals target. I begin, in this section, with a discussion of procedural constraints. I defend the view that DS* should focus on a person's actual, as opposed to idealized, desires. In the ensuing sections I argue that content-based restrictions should also be rejected, before concluding that a content-neutral identification constraint is defensible. Procedural constraints bear on the conditions under which desires have been (or would be) formed or retained. These can take various forms, although they commonly involve some degree of idealization. One kind of view starts from one's actual desires, and specifies that it is only those which one would retain, were one in possession of all the relevant (non-evaluative) information about their objects, that confer basic prudential value upon these objects. Call this the full-information view. A quite distinct view holds that it is only those desires that an ideally 19 Lukas (2010) and Mendola (2009) stand out among the few remaining defenders of the unrestricted view. 101 rational and informed advisor would have on my behalf (or would desire that I have on my own behalf) that count. Call this the ideal advisor view. Although neither of these views leaves our desires as they stand, the latter departs even further from actualism in that it allows things that I have no desire for, as I am presently constituted, to count towards my good. These are but two examples of what we can collectively call idealized desire-satisfaction theories. Theories of this kind have been defended by some of the most prominent figures in the literature. 20 Idealized desire-satisfaction theories all face the same objection. The immediate issue that arises is that, the more we idealize, the further away we seem to move from what the person, as they actually are, cares about. The central thrust of the argument in Chapter 2 was that subjectivists had best not divorce the idea of my valuing a given thing (in the sense that confers prudential value upon it) from the idea of my caring about this thing. If that point was well taken, then in formulating DS*, our chief aim should be to ensure that those desires which track what the person in fact cares about are accorded prudential relevance. However, in shifting the focus away from actual desires, idealization is at least in prima facie tension with this goal. The more extensive the laundering that a person's desires must undergo, the more removed we are from what matters to them as they are in the actual world. This divorce between what matters to the person and what matters to the theorist seems to be, to put it simply, the price of idealization. 21 That said, if the advantages they accrue by moving away from actualism are great enough, this may be a price that desire-satisfactionists should be willing to pay. Before moving on to consider these purported advantages, I should address a response that David Sobel has made to the above line of argument. He is here considering the objection, 20 See Brandt (1979), Railton (1986), and Sobel (2016 [2009]). Sidgwick (1894) has also at times been read as defending such a view, although just what Sidgwick's theory of prudential value was remains a matter of controversy. For a very different reading of Sidgwick see Shaver (1997). 21 Enoch (2005), Loeb (1995) and Rosati (1995) forcefully argue against idealization on similar grounds. 102 pressed by David Enoch, that there is no rationale internal to subjectivism for focusing on idealized as opposed to actual desires. 22 Sobel's reply is as follows: "[T]he most natural way to develop the thought that it is one's desires that determine one's well-being is to hold that it is whether one wants X that determines whether one benefits in getting X. Then we need to distinguish cases where the agent thinks she wants X from cases where it really is X that she wants. How should we mark this distinction? Well, one obvious way is to say that the desire is truly for X when the desire is sustained or created in light of complete and accurate information about what X would be like. When one's desire for X has such a status, we should think that it truly is X that one wants." 23 I believe Sobel is correct in thinking that it is what the person really wants that the subjectivist needs to zero in on. It is also clear that people can sometimes be mistaken about what they really want, and desire-satisfactionism must find a way to accommodate this datum. However, the assertion that I can only truly want x if I know all the relevant information about x (that is, all information that might in principle impact my desire for x), and that otherwise my desire is for something else (call it x*), is implausibly demanding, if for no other reason than that it makes it dubious whether any person has ever truly wanted anything. For complete and accurate information about what fulfilling our desire for x would be like just does not seem to be something that beings with our limitations ever possess. 24 Moreover, we can differentiate between what a person really desires and what they merely think they desire in a much more straightforward way. This requires only that we draw attention to an intuitive distinction that our earlier, rough formulation of actualism skirted over. It has often been suggested that the actualist should be concerned only with the satisfaction of intrinsic desires. 25 Here, to intrinsically desire something is to desire it for its own sake, or noninstrumentally. The relevant contrast is with instrumental desires, which are desires for 22 Again, see Enoch (2005). 23 Sobel (2016 [2009], p.269). 24 This point is developed most fully by Rosati (1995). 25 This is how Heathwood (2005) and Murphy (1999) formulate actualism, for instance. 103 something merely as a means to something else. When we say of someone that 'they think they want x but they in fact want y', one plausible explanation of what is going on is that we are taking them to have confused an instrumental desire for an intrinsic one. If the desire for x is instrumental, it may also turn out to be conditional on mistaken means-end reasoning. For instance, Evangeline may desire to go to Comic-Con this year, but only because she believes that if she attends she will get to meet William Shatner. If, unbeknownst to her, Shatner has cancelled his scheduled appearance, attending Comic-Con is not even instrumentally good for Evangeline, despite her belief that it is. In such a case, we are inclined to say that Evangeline does not really want to go to Comic-Con, because doing so will not really help her achieve the desired end, which is meeting Shatner. If we instead characterize actualism so that it ranges over intrinsic desires only, it is plausible that these do map on to what one really wants. If I genuinely have an intrinsic desire for x, it seems to be x that I indeed want, not x*. This is intuitively so, even if the desire for x would not be retained under conditions of full information. Consider again Evangeline's desire to meet William Shatner. It may be that, if she knew all the relevant facts about Shatner, she would no longer have such a desire. This doesn't change the fact that, as Evangeline is currently constituted, she cares about meeting Shatner as much as she cares about anything else. If the aim of DS* is to capture the subjectivist insight, there is therefore a strong presumption in favour of the view that the state of affairs in which Evangeline meets Shatner is a basic constituent of her well-being. We seem justified, then, in treating actualism as the default version of DS*, any deviation from which comes at a heavy theoretical price. The switch from actual to idealized desires is accordingly in need of special justification, in the form of some distinct theoretical advantage (s). 104 The purported advantages of idealization all bear on the extension of the theory. We saw in the previous chapter that desire-satisfactionists have struggled to deal with the scope problem. The imposition of an idealizing procedure is one more way we might try to restrict the scope of DS* and thereby save its extensional adequacy. However, I will argue that the theoretical gains from idealization are in fact quite minimal, and do not come close to offsetting the cost. Insofar as the full-information view starts from one's actual desires and uses the condition of full-information only to weed out some of them, the idealization involved is more modest than on the ideal advisor view. However, other things being equal, the attractiveness of DS* decreases proportionally as the degree of idealization increases. Thus, if we can show that even the amount of idealization involved in the full-information view is uncalled for, we will not need to consider approaches that idealize even further. We will have undermined the motivation for such accounts at the root. The undoubted appeal of the full-information view derives from the fact that some of our desires appear defective, for the simple reason that they are based upon a false apprehension of their object. Suppose that I am a recovering alcoholic. I desire to drink the clear, bubbly liquid that is in the glass before me, believing it to be ginger ale. As it happens, the liquid in the glass is not ginger ale but champagne. Surely in this case the fact that I desire to drink this liquid does not make it good for me to drink it. Drinking it will, rather, be very bad for me. Thus, any version of desire-satisfactionism that gives the result that it is basically good for me to drink the clear liquid appears over-inclusive. And there are seemingly many other cases where, to borrow Sidgwick's memorable phrase, the object of my desire proves to be "a 'Dead Sea apple,' mere dust and ashes in the eating...". 26 If I only desire some object because I anticipate that it will have certain appealing features that, should this desire be satisfied, I will discover it does not 26 Sidgwick (1894, p.110). 105 have, should we really say that the object of my desire is a basic constituent of prudential value? Cases of this kind suggest that a plausible condition on a desire's having the capacity to confer prudential value on its object is that it not be based on a misapprehension of what that object is like. Although such cases are intuitively forceful, I am not convinced that they show what the critic of actualism thinks they do. First, it is possible for the actualist to grant that, even in the case where I am deceived, it is pro tanto good for me to drink the clear bubbly liquid. This in no way precludes the same theorist from holding that, all things considered, things go better for me in the case where I do not obtain the object of my desire. This is, first, because the satisfaction of the desire to drink what is in the glass is incompatible with the satisfaction of what we are assuming is my much stronger desire to stay on the wagon. What is more, if my accidental indiscretion leads to a relapse, this will likely thwart the satisfaction of many other important desires. We haven't yet mentioned the desire to drink some ginger ale, which is also disappointed. All this suggests that, even for the actualist, I will be worse off on the whole if I drink the champagne than if I refrain from doing so. It is not just that many desires that otherwise might have been satisfied are sure to be frustrated, in the event that I drink the champagne. As I will argue in Chapter 5, the frustration of a desire for a given state of affairs is not itself a good candidate for prudential disvalue. It is better understood as a mere absence of prudential value. The negative side of DS* should instead focus on aversions, such that if I am (sufficiently and in the right way) averse to some state of affairs, it is a basic constituent of prudential disvalue. In the above case, it is evident that I do indeed have an intense aversion to drinking champagne, as well as to many of the likely consequences of such a lapse. 106 Now, when two or more desires cannot be jointly satisfied, we may wish to say that the prudential value of satisfying the stronger desire (s) simply cancels out the prudential value of satisfying the weaker one. On this view, it follows that drinking what is in the glass is not even pro tanto good for me. But the actualist does not have to go this route. They can recognize that it is better for me overall not to drink what is in the glass, without denying that there is also some prudential value in satisfying my desire for the clear liquid. The same kind of response is available in other relevantly similar cases. Admittedly, there will sometimes be intuitive resistance to the idea that satisfying a given desire is even pro tanto good for me, but (as discussed in Chapter 1) we have reason to believe that no theory of prudential value can do without biting some bullets. At any rate, the more important question is what is good for a person all things considered. If an actualist version of DS* can give the intuitively correct verdict about this in the ginger ale/champagne case and others like it, this should be enough for us, given the comparative costs of idealization. 27 If an objector holds the line, and insists that desire-satisfaction lacks even pro tanto prudential value where the desire is based on false beliefs about its object, there is another response that the actualist can give. This reply again makes use of the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental desires. For note that the ginger ale/champagne case only works as an argument against actualism if we characterize the desires involved in one particular way. My intrinsic desire, the example presupposes, is to drink the clear liquid in the glass before me, whatever it may be. In the case where I drink the champagne, this desire is obviously satisfied. Now, this may indeed be one of the desires involved. Still, zeroing in on it threatens to mislead us. For in this case I surely also have a more specific desire to drink some ginger ale. This desire is clearly not satisfied by my drinking the champagne. And, intuitively at least, it is this latter 27 The argumentative strategy here is inspired by Heathwood (2005) and Lukas (2010). 107 more determinate desire that deserves to be privileged. The actualist may then claim that I ultimately have only an instrumental desire to drink the clear liquid that is in the glass. I have this desire insofar as I believe that it is a way of satisfying my intrinsic desire, which is to drink some ginger ale. Given that I am mistaken, and the drinking of this liquid is not a way of getting what I really want, actualists need not accord it even pro tanto prudential value. In this way, it is just like Evangeline's desire to go to Comic-Con. There is, however, a danger with this move. The danger is that in ruling out of prudential relevance all desires that are not intrinsic, we will end up ruling out too many desires. Thus, consider an example Chris Heathwood gives to illustrate the difference between intrinsic and instrumental desire: "If I desire to turn on my CD player only because I desire to hear the Pixies, I am made better off only if the latter, basic desire is satisfied. My desire to turn on my CD player is merely instrumental (or extrinsic): I have it only because I desire something else, and I think the thing instrumentally desired will lead to that something else." 28 My worry is that even Heathwood's desire to hear the Pixies may not come out as intrinsic, given the way that we have so far been characterizing such desires. Presumably, there is some reason why Heathwood desires to hear this band in particular, for instance the fact that hearing them reliably generates a pleasant feeling of nostalgia. But if so, is it really hearing the Pixies that he intrinsically desires, as opposed to the pleasure he anticipates? In a similar vein, let us consider again the desire for ginger ale, and press on the claim that this is an intrinsic desire. For this desire also seems to be conditional on the belief that the object has certain features (i.e. tastiness and bubbliness). If I knew that the ginger ale in the glass would be flat and nasty tasting (perhaps it has been sitting out far too long), I would plausibly lose my previous desire to drink 28 Heathwood (2005, p. 489). 108 it. This again suggests that it is not the ginger ale itself that I intrinsically desire, but something else (perhaps the gustatory pleasure it gives me). Similar reflections suggest that we cannot simply rely on the fact that the desire to drink what is in the glass (or to turn on the CD player) only endures for as long as I believe it to be ginger ale (or believe it will play the Pixies) to rule this desire out of prudential relevance. True, the persistence of the former desire is conditional on the belief that satisfying it is a means of satisfying the latter, purportedly intrinsic desire. Yet we have just seen that the desire to drink the ginger ale is itself conditional on certain background assumptions. Plausibly the same is true of the desire to hear the Pixies. It may turn out that many, if not most, of our desires are conditional on some very limited set of background conditions obtaining. The conditional/unconditional distinction throws the baby out with the bathwater, in that it is unable to distinguish between the desire to drink what is in the glass (or to turn on the CD player) and the desire for ginger ale (or to hear the Pixies). I agree with Heathwood that the desire to hear the Pixies is importantly different from the desire to turn on the CD player. I am convinced that the same is true of the desire for ginger ale and the desire to drink what is in the glass. Still, a sound characterization of this intuitive difference remains elusive. We do not want to be forced to say that in the Pixies case or the ginger ale case our desire is just for pleasure, or for something else on a relatively short list. Donald Bruckner points the way to a more helpful account of the relevant distinction, which does not have the result that there are implausibly few intrinsic desires. Bruckner writes: "Suppose I desire a hammer in order to pound a nail, in order to build a house, in order to stay warm in winter. Then each end mentioned is subordinate to the subsequent end as a means, and the only intrinsically desired end is staying warm in winter. Now suppose I desire to take a walk in the park for the sake of pleasure. I do not mean that walking in the park is a means to 109 pleasure; I mean that pleasure is a constituent part of walking in the park for me. So pleasure is subordinate as a constituent part of walking in the park. I desire walking in the park intrinsically, that is...." 29 I understand Bruckner as making the following point. The desires we want to rule out of independent prudential relevance are those where the object of the desire is expressly conceived as a mere means to some further end. This does seem to isolate a feature of the desires to drink what is in the glass and to turn on the CD player, which is not also a feature of the desires to drink the ginger ale and to hear the Pixies. Even granting that I would no longer desire to drink the ginger ale or to hear the Pixies if I learned that these things would not be pleasurable, I generally do not conceive of the objects of such desires as means to some generic feeling of pleasantness. If asked why I want to drink what is in the glass or turn on the CD player, I am likely to reply with some explanation like "because it is ginger ale, and I want ginger ale" or "because I want to hear the Pixies" rather than with any direct appeal to pleasure. This suggests that what I want is just that distinctive experience that attends the drinking or the hearing. The pleasure is, in Bruckner's terms, a constituent part of the drinking of the ginger ale or the hearing of the Pixies, rather than an end to which these activities are a means. We have a real difference in hand now, and it does not stretch the meaning of the terms to refer to these two types of desires using the traditional labels intrinsic and instrumental, respectively. If the distinction so understood seems too tenuous to rest the fate of the actualist approach on, the reader can always fall back on the first response. Each of these replies is also available to the actualist in the other purported problem cases involving desires based on imperfect information. What this suggests is that imposing a condition of full-information is not necessary, even in those cases where such a restriction is most plausible. Given the intuitive 29 Bruckner (2016, p.20). 110 advantages of avoiding idealization, an actualist version of DS* should therefore be preferred. Before moving on to consider substantive constraints, I have one further observation about idealization as a strategy. This is that the shift from actual to idealized desires has limited force against the scope problem for DS*. Consider again the different types of cases that gave rise to over-inclusiveness worries. In Chapter 2, we pointed to Caroline's desire for a can of cola, Sandrine's desire to smash icicles whenever she sees them, Josephine's desire that the number of atoms in the universe be prime, Parfit's desire that the stranger be cured, and Gary's desire to look after his mother. We can now add cases like ginger ale/champagne, where the desire is based on a misapprehension of the object. A condition of full-information may allow us to rule out Sandrine's and Josephine's desires (although this will depend on how they are specified), along with my desire for the clear liquid. But it does not help at all with the other cases we have mentioned. The scope problem for DS* thus remains nearly as pronounced, on the fullinformation view, as it is for the actualist. This provides further support for our conclusion that, in idealizing, one is forfeiting much of subjectivism's appeal in exchange for comparatively little gain. 3.6 Against Substantive Constraints In this section, I consider whether substantive constraints on the desires whose satisfaction is relevant to one's well-being are any more plausible. I discuss three possible restrictions of this sort. The first imposes an independent value condition on the object of the desire. The second requires that the desire be about some aspect of one's own life. The third counts as prudentially relevant only those desires that are about one's whole life. I argue that we should reject all three proposed constraints. 111 A constraint of the first kind is endorsed by some of my fellow hybrid theorists. These philosophers wish to give independent prudential weight to the satisfaction of desires, without allowing that just anything can be good for a person. 30 Their complaint, again, is that DS* is over-inclusive, here in allowing objects with no substantive value to be basic constituents of prudential value (under the right conditions). There are at least two ways one can formulate such a restriction. The first limits the things that can be basically good for someone to those that have attitude-independent value. Such a restriction sits uneasily with the insight that, in caring about a given thing, a person can confer prudential value upon it that it would not otherwise possess. Once it is granted that a person's desires are original sources of prudential value in cases where the object has some amount (however small) of attitude-independent value, it is hard to sustain the view that desiring something that lacks substantive value confers no prudential value upon it. A theory which incorporated this sort of restriction would, in any case, not be a disjunctive hybrid account (insofar as it accepts objective necessity). The other way of formulating an independent value constraint is more moderate, and correspondingly more plausible. This would limit the states of affairs that can be basically good for someone to those that either possess some substantive value or are substantively neutral. Such a view serves to ensure only that I cannot make anything that is substantively bad good for me, simply by desiring it in the right way. A hybrid theory which incorporated this more modest version of the independent value restriction could still be a disjunctive account (since such a constraint is compatible with the rejection of objective necessity). And yet, I believe we should reject this version as well. If we hold that a person's desires can confer prudential value upon objects that that are not substantively valuable, we should also hold that, provided the person has 30 I believe the first intimation of this view is found in Parfit (1984 pp.501-2). See also Bykvist (2006a, pp. 265-8, 2006b, p.287, 2010a, pp.2-5, 2010b, pp. 50-4) and Lauinger (2012). 112 the right kind of desire for them, even things that would otherwise be disvaluable can be basic constituents of prudential value. I will discuss some issues raised by this implication of my view in Chapter 5. The second type of substantive constraint, which accords prudential relevance only to desires that are about one's own life, is again designed to help in dealing with the scope problem. However, we saw already in Chapter 2 that it is not promising in this role. For it remains vague what the conditions are that a desire must satisfy if it is to be about one's own life. The most plausible ways of spelling out these conditions generate new problems with extensional adequacy (namely, they make the theory intuitively under-inclusive). An alternative way of articulating such a restriction, which we have not yet considered in this context, appeals to what one exerts some effort to bring about. However, given that we have already rejected the agency constraint for independent reasons, this strategy is no longer available. I conclude that, in the absence of some new, better characterization of the boundaries of a person's own life, we should not build this kind of constraint into DS*. The third type of restriction on the content of the desires that matter for well-being takes its cue from the above proposal, but goes even further. We should not be surprised, then, to find that it is implausibly under-inclusive. Recall the distinction, drawn in the last chapter, between local and global desires. I there suggested that, provided this distinction is drawn in such a way as to pick out and privilege those desires that are at least somewhat enduring, stably held, and integrated into one's self-conception, it links up with a plausible version of the identification constraint. Further defense of the identification constraint, so understood, will be provided below. Here I wish to highlight that there is an alternative way of characterizing global desires (which is, indeed, the standard one in the current literature). 113 On this understanding, desires are classified as global or local according to their content. A person's global desires, then, are all and only those which are about either "some part of his life, considered as a whole, or about his whole life". 31 If this is the way one picks out a desire as global, a view which takes only global desires to be prudentially relevant is massively underinclusive. I may have very few such desires, and a more spontaneous person may have none. Not only does this restriction generate the same extensional problems as the previous one, it goes on to rule out most of those desires that intuitively are about my own life (as few of these will truly count as global), including many that will satisfy any plausible construal of the identification constraint. The above are the most plausible candidates for substantive constraints on the desires the satisfaction of which counts towards one's well-being. They have proven as unappealing as their procedural counterparts. We are thus justified in moving forward with a version of DS* that places neither substantive nor procedural constraints on the desires it takes to be prudentially relevant. 3.7 In Defense of the Identification Constraint To this point, the discussion in this chapter has tended in the direction of a maximally inclusive version of actualism. This should be unsurprising, given the general methodological principle which we laid out in Chapter 1. However, there are two restrictions on which desires count for the purposes of DS* that I believe are justifiable, on grounds internal to the subjectivist insight itself. The first is the restriction to intrinsic desires. The second is the identification constraint. 31 Parfit (1984, p.498). 114 The task of DS*, as the subjectivist strand of DHT, is to build the subjectivist insight into our hybrid theory as best it can. Thus, whatever version of DS* we adopt should be such that the basic constituents of prudential value it introduces are precisely those things that one cares about, that most fundamentally matter to one. Insofar as we are here concerned with final, basic prudential value, restricting our focus to things that one cares about as ends, rather than as mere means to some other thing, makes good sense. Moreover, it is plausible to hold that some objects of desire (even where the desire is intrinsic) do not really matter to one, at least not in the sense that the subjectivist insight demands that we recognize. The identification constraint, like the restriction to intrinsic desires, can accordingly be supported by the central subjectivist impulse itself. 32 The fact that adopting such a constraint helps deal with some of the cases that gave rise to the scope objection is a fortunate side effect. The identification constraint differs from those discussed above in that it bears, not on the way a desire is formed or retained or on its propositional content, but on how enduring, stably held, and central to one's identity it is. Strictly speaking, there are three different conditions being imposed here. The first serves to distinguish mere whims or urges, such as Caroline's fleeting desire for a can of cola, from those desires that genuinely reflect what matters to a person. The endurance condition is not enough, however. I may have desires that are very longlasting, but which are of low intensity and easily extinguishable, and so do not intuitively map on to what I really care about. Thus, we seemingly need a further condition to the effect that the desire must be a somewhat firmly engrained, stably held part of one's psychological economy. 32 Cf. Noggle (1999, p.314): "I suggest that in order for desire-satisfaction to matter to a person...those desires must reflect or at least be responsive to her deepest, most central concerns and projects" (italics added). 115 This answers to the fact that caring about something, in the sense the subjectivist is striving to capture, seems to require some degree of investment in or commitment to it. If I could be easily persuaded to give up the desire for x and to move on to something else, one might reasonably question whether x was something that ever mattered to me, in any way that the subjectivist should be concerned with. Finally, the person must identify with the desire, which is to say that she must see it as to some extent constitutive of the person she is. One of the primary ways in which we comprehend ourselves as individuals is through what we care about. It is therefore reasonable, if we are trying to zero in on what fundamentally matters to the person, to focus our attention on those desires that are most central to her own self-conception. There is one more condition that we might plausibly require a desire to meet if its satisfaction is to have independent prudential relevance. I have in mind the counterfactual construal of the agency constraint mentioned briefly in the previous chapter. The view according to which satisfying one's desires is only prudentially valuable when one has played a causal role in bringing about the desired state of affairs is unattractive, for the reasons there discussed. However, to the extent that we mean to isolate just those desires that track what one really cares about, it is plausible that only those that one would be willing to invest at least some effort to satisfy (assuming ability and opportunity, and other things being equal) meet this condition. We can take this last as a rough measure of the intensity of the desire, which seems to be a dimension that the identification constraint should be striving to capture. The reader may worry that, in placing even these constraints on DS*, I am opening myself up to the under-inclusiveness objection, which given the motivation for developing DHT would be counterproductive. This is a legitimate concern. However, I do not think that the actualist is giving up very much in moving from the unrestricted view to this moderately 116 restricted one, which differs only in restricting itself to intrinsic desires and building in an identification constraint. This is because, bearing in mind that the task of DS* is to capture the insight that in caring about something (sufficiently and in the right way) a person can confer prudential value upon it, it is difficult to find compelling counterexamples to our two proposed restrictions. Any such counterexample would need to invoke some desire that is merely instrumental, fleeting, unstable, unrelated to a person's self-conception, or that the person would be unwilling to expend any effort to satisfy, but that (intuitively speaking) is nonetheless genuinely reflective of what this person cares about. There may be intuitive cases of this sort, but none immediately present themselves. Some apparent counterexamples are not genuine counterexamples at all. Take, for instance, the case in which I have a fleeting but powerful desire to drink a glass of water on a hot day. It is surely at least somewhat good for me to drink the water. But we need not accord independent relevance to the satisfaction of my desire to account for this fact. An attractive and sufficient explanation of why it is good for me to drink the water, in this case, is that this will be a rich source of sensory pleasure. DHT, as will be seen in the next chapter, plausibly includes pleasure on the list of attitude-independent prudential goods. The disjunctive hybrid theorist who endorses an identification constraint thus has available a hedonistic explanation in this and similar cases, even if a thoroughgoing desire-satisfactionist would not. 33 33 Of course, if pleasure is itself best analyzed in terms of desire-satisfaction, as Heathwood (2007b) argues, such cases are in fact a counterexample to the identification constraint. That pleasure, however it is analyzed, is basically prudentially good is a datum that any theorist must accommodate. In the case that pleasure is a species of desire-satisfaction, then, we will have to modify our view. On this new understanding, the identification constraint is true except in the case of those desire-satisfactions that are identified with pleasures. I do not think this is implausible, for even if pleasures are desire-satisfactions of some kind, they are surely a special class that deserves special treatment. So even if the Heathwood view 117 Accepting these two relatively modest constraints, moreover, does considerable work in responding to the scope problem for DS*. Many of those cases that are intuitively most problematic involve desires that can plausibly be ruled out by the identification constraint. This is certainly true of Caroline's desire for a can of cola and Parfit's desire that the stranger be cured. It may also be true of Sandrine's desire to smash icicles whenever she sees them and Josephine's desire that the number of atoms in the universe be prime, depending on how these last two are specified. Admittedly, our constraints do not seem to help in the case of Gary and his mother. Preserving a clear distinction between my own good and that of others I care about thus remains a challenge for DS*, insofar as other-regarding desires will in many cases satisfy the identification constraint. However, the disjunctive hybrid theorist who incorporates a version of DS* that includes these proposed restrictions is not without resources even here. A first point is that, when some other-regarding desire does satisfy the identification constraint, it becomes more plausible that an increase in the well-being of the other contributes to one's own well-being. How well the lives of one's children go, for instance, intuitively can impact how well one's own life goes. A view according to which it is only when an other-regarding desire satisfies the identification constraint that it is prudentially relevant can capture what is different about the desire for one's children's well-being and Parfit's desire for the stranger's cure in an intuitive fashion. It also makes conceptual space for self-sacrifice, without introducing substantive constraints. Of course, intuitively we want to allow for the possibility of self-sacrifice even in cases like Gary's, where the desire on which one acts satisfies the identification constraint. This is is right, DHT can remain more or less as is, except that the objective list will have one less entry and the identification constraint will admit of one kind of exception. 118 where the other strand of DHT can help. For once the disjunctive hybrid theorist adds that there are other, attitude-independent, factors that matter to how well off a person is, the threat of losing the intuitive distinction between self-interested and altruistic concerns does not arise, even in the case of Gary and his mother. It is evident that, in rejecting the fulfilling job as a human rights lawyer and taking the soulless corporate job, Gary is sacrificing things that are substantively prudentially valuable. For one thing, insofar as he is taking a job he hates, he will find his life less pleasurable for this choice. Moreover, Gary is also making himself far less likely to achieve one of his central life goals, which is to use his legal training to help others. Appealing to such considerations in this case is quite natural, and suffices to remove any lingering worry about the conceptual possibility of self-sacrifice on DHT. It remains the case that in incorporating any restrictions into DS* we are leaving the theory to some extent vulnerable to the under-inclusiveness objection. No doubt some will be more concerned about proposed counterexamples to the identification constraint than I am. Allow me to stress again, then, that within the broader framework of DHT there is a fair amount of space to disagree about the details. The only two points which I consider non-negotiable are a) the choice of the object over the combo interpretation of DS*, and b) the rejection of the stronger kind of substantive value constraint. Otherwise, we can afford to be ecumenical. 3.8 – Desire-satisfaction and Time In this section, I briefly consider a set of puzzles that arises for any theory which incorporates a desire-satisfactionist element. One important complaint about such theories is that they have unacceptable implications when considering the question of when--i.e., at what time-a person is 119 benefited by desire-satisfaction. 34 I would be remiss if I concluded our discussion of DS* without addressing this issue. In what follows I sketch the view I favour, and explain why I favour it. If certain readers find this view difficult to accept, this should not stand in the way of their acceptance of DS* or of DHT. Those who are sympathetic to the theory in its general outline are free to plug in their preferred account of the time at which the satisfaction of a desire benefits a person. To isolate the issue at hand, we will again work with an unrestricted actualist version of DS*. According to unrestricted actualism, for any x, if I desire x, x is a basic constituent of prudential value. Even this simplest version of DS* quickly runs into complications when we begin to reflect on what is good for me beyond the present moment. This is, first, because many of the desires that I currently have are for things that I will not desire in the future. It is thus quite possible that, although I presently desire x, I will lose that desire before the time at which x obtains. If so, is the obtaining of x at t2 good for me then simply because I desire that it obtains now at t1, even though I will lose this desire somewhere along the way? The affirmative answer sounds strange. We might deal with such cases by holding that the desire for x must persist at the time that x obtains, if an instance of desire-satisfaction is to be prudentially relevant. 35 However, there are other cases that are more difficult to handle. We also have desires that are about the past. For instance, I now strongly desire that I had kept up my skating lessons as a child. That desire, unfortunately, will never be satisfied. Yet there is no reason to deny that I can also have a present desire for some state of affairs that in fact 34 See Bradley 2009 (pp.21-5), Sumner (1996, p.127) 35 Heathwood (2005) adopts this requirement and calls it concurrence. Bradley (2016) and Sarch (2013), neither of whom are desire-satisfactionists, nonetheless argue that if one is a desire-satisfactionist one should adopt a concurrence requirement. 120 did obtain in the past. Suppose that I am an orphan who never knew my mother and father, but that I nonetheless desire that my parents loved me and regretted giving me up. If this desire meets the identification constraint, it is plausible that I am better off in the case where it is satisfied. However, it does not seem that we can locate the benefit to me at the time at which the desired state of affairs actually obtained. After all, it may be that I only developed this desire recently, and that previously I cared not a whit what my parents' attitude to me was. This suggests a troubling sort of backwards causation, wherein a mere change in my current attitude to past events can change how good or bad they were for me, precisely at the time at which they occurred. Many also believe that one can be benefited or harmed by events that occur after one's death. 36 If one of my central desires throughout my life was to leave enough behind in my will for my children to live in comfort and security after my death, it seems to matter to how well my life went for me whether this is the case. Again, if I dedicated my career to preserving certain rare manuscripts, and these go up in flames shortly after I pass away, this intuitively makes some difference to the prudential value of my life. These examples suggest, first, that the view according to which desire-satisfaction can only benefit one if the desire persists at the time at which its object obtains is implausible. For, in cases of posthumous desire-satisfaction, not even the desirer persists, let alone the desire itself. Further, when combined with the view that desiresatisfaction benefits a person at precisely the time that the desired states of affairs obtains, these cases suggest that one can be benefited at a time at which one does not exist. Perhaps this is not a non-starter, but it is certainly strange, and we should try to avoid it if we can. 36 See, for instance, Feinberg (1984, pp.82-94), Griffin (1986, p.23), Grover (1989) and Parfit (1984, p.495). 121 We can block the unintuitive results with respect to both past-regarding and posthumous desires if we hold that desire-satisfaction can make a person's life go better, without that benefit being assignable to any particular time. 37 This does not preclude us from holding that when desires change or are lost over time what is good for a person correspondingly changes. It simply denies that in every instance where desire-satisfaction makes a difference to how well one's life goes we can pinpoint a precise time at which it does so. The intuitively odd results in the above cases all rested on the assumption that we can and must do this. In denying this assumption we can avoid the unpalatable results. Now, some may find the cure in this case worse than the disease. Those who take this line must either provide another story which can avoid the unintuitive consequences, or bite the bullet. It is important to see, however, that rejecting the relevance of posthumous desire-satisfaction is not enough to let such people of the hook, insofar as there is still the (less-discussed) matter of past-regarding desires. I want, finally, to highlight one point that is often overlooked. Discussions of posthumous harm and benefit have tended to see these phenomena as posing a challenge specifically for desire-satisfactionism (or theories like mine that include a desire-satisfactionist element). However, any view which takes achievement to be part of what makes a person's life go well for them also has the consequence that events after one's death matter to one's well-being. Thus, the 37 John Broome offers the following analogy while defending the view that benefits and harms need not be assigned a specific temporal location (2008, p.51): "Suppose the text of a book is shortened before it is published: the last chapter is cut out. The book is shortened by six thousand words, but all the earlier chapters are left intact. Then six thousand words are cut from the book; yet no words are cut from any page in the book. This is so even though every word in the book appears on a particular page. Moreover, had the book been published in the longer, uncut version, every word in the longer book would have appeared on a particular page. The number of words cut from the book is determined by comparing the whole book as it is, with the whole book as it would have been had it not been shortened. It is not determined by comparing any particular page with that same page as it would have been". 122 objective list theorist who reserves a place for achievement on their list of prudential goods must also address the problem of posthumous harm and benefit (if it is a problem). The only theories of prudential value that can confidently claim to avoid this kind of complexity are those according to which something must enter directly into a person's experience, if it is to benefit or harm the person. However, the reasons for rejecting such an experience requirement are so compelling that whatever intuitive advantage is gained by thus ruling out posthumous benefits and harms is sure to be outweighed. 38 3.9 Conclusion We now have a much clearer idea of how the subjectivist strand of DHT can best be formulated. Once more, I leave it up to the reader whether they wish to depart from the above conclusions, in the direction of either more or less inclusiveness. The central points this chapter sought to establish were a) that the subjectivist strand of DHT should be a version of DS*, b) that it should be understood according to the object interpretation, and c) that it should allow a person's desires to confer prudential value even upon states of affairs that lack any attitude-independent value. If we agree on this much, then we agree on the chief points. The task of the next chapter is to further motivate and develop the second, objectivist, strand of DHT. This allows us to finally integrate the objective and subjective elements of the theory, to form a single, maximally inclusive, approach to prudential value. 38 Nozick (1974, pp. 42-3) famously argues against such a requirement via the experience machine thought experiment. Although there are issues with Nozick's framing of the case, when suitably refined, as for instance by Fletcher (2016, pp.14-16), I believe it is as close to a knockdown objection to the experience requirement as one can hope for in this area of philosophy. 123 Chapter 4 The Objectivist Insight 4.1 Introduction In the previous two chapters, we explored the question of how the subjectivist strand of DHT can be most plausibly developed. The task of the present chapter is to motivate and fill in the other, objectivist, side of our new hybrid theory. I argue that there is an objectivist insight that any satisfying theory of prudential value must respect, and which can only be adequately expressed by incorporating a robustly attitude-independent element into our account. I show, moreover, that going hybrid in this way allows us to answer some of the most compelling objections to desire-satisfactionism. I consider several ways in which we might supplement DS*, so as to embrace the objectivist insight. One type of view retains a desire constraint to the effect that one must desire something if it is to be basically good for one, but adjusts the value of instances of desiresatisfaction according to the attitude-independent value of the thing desired. The result is a nondisjunctive hybrid theory with both objective and subjective elements. One important aim of this chapter is to establish that DHT, which rejects the desire constraint, should be preferred to this kind of hybrid view. Those who accept our arguments against the desire constraint may yet be tempted to include an enjoyment constraint, to the effect that a person must enjoy or take pleasure in a substantively valuable object if it is to be a basic constituent of prudential value. When combined with DS*, the result is a doubly hybridized disjunctive theory, according to which there are two fundamentally distinct sources of prudential value, desire-satisfaction and the enjoyment of objects with attitude-independent value. I argue that we should also reject the enjoyment constraint. The disjunctive hybrid theory defended here is thus committed to the 124 staunchly objectivist claim that, as Richard Arneson has aptly put it, "the goods in an individual's life need not be tinged with enjoyment nor colored by desire". 1 We are left to wonder what, if anything, explains why certain things possess such attitude-independent prudential value. One route is to borrow the perfectionist's explanatory story. However, there are a litany of convincing objections to perfectionism, some of which extend to any theory that is even partially perfectionist. Although these criticisms may not be fatal, it is worth exploring whether a non-perfectionist, objective list approach can better meet our needs. There are at least two distinct ways of understanding the structure of such accounts. We may see the entries on the objective list as possessing attitude-independent prudential value in a primitive sense that does not admit of further explication. Alternatively, we might understand the theory to be appealing to some more fundamental evaluative notion. The objective element of prudential value may then be explained by the person's standing in the right relation to things that possess this other (not itself prudential) kind of value. If we take the more basic value property to be goodness simpliciter, in accord with what we have called the locative account, this view emerges as a clear explanatory rival to perfectionism. A seeming advantage of the locative account is that it possesses greater explanatory depth than the primitivist approach. The primitivist view, however, has the notable advantage of avoiding any commitment to the existence of a controversial property like goodness simpliciter. I will briefly explain why I 1 Arneson (1999, p.142). Arneson continues: "In other words, for something to qualify as intrinsically enhancing an individual's well-being, it (1) is neither necessary nor sufficient that the individual actually desire that thing, and (2) is neither necessary nor sufficient that the individual actually enjoy (or have some other sort of positive experience of) that thing" (italics my own). Despite the misleading suggestion that this is only a restatement of the claim we quoted above, it is quite possible to accept that claim while denying both (1) and (2). For the above-quoted claim bears only on the necessity of desire or enjoyment, not on their sufficiency. DHT, as defended here, does in fact hold that it is sufficient for something to qualify as intrinsically enhancing an individual's well-being that it be desired or enjoyed. It is not, however, necessary. 125 favour the locative account, but I leave it open to those attracted to DHT to take a different approach to the attitude-independent prudential goods if they are so inclined. 4.2 The Disjunctive Hybrid Theorist's Challenge To begin, we should note something striking about the dialectical position we have found ourselves in. It is common for defenders of objective theories to make their case, at least in part, by arguing that it is only through the introduction of attitude-independent values that we can avoid adopting an overly permissive view of what is good for people. This style of argument is found in the work of, among others, Richard Arneson, Brad Hooker, Guy Fletcher and Richard Kraut. 2 Fletcher puts the point this way: "[t]he mistake that the desire-fulfilment theory makes is that of allowing one's desires and attitudes to play an unrestricted explanatory role, one that goes beyond their being elements of well-being enhancers. The theory does this by treating our desiring something as being sufficient to make something good for us...The theory claims that things are good for us because we desire them. It is this feature of the desire-fulfilment view that gives rise to the 'scope problem' for these theories – namely that too many things come out as good for us." 3 The basic claim here is that DS* is fundamentally untenable, because over-inclusive. And the besetting sin of the theory, according to Fletcher, is that it is too laissez-faire in what it will allow to count as a basic constituent of a person's well-being. Fletcher's suggestion, moreover, is that this problem arises precisely because DS* allows a person's pro-attitudes to confer value on objects that lack attitude-independent value. If Fletcher is correct that it is this latter commitment that gives rise to the scope problem, then the most straightforward way to deal with this problem is to impose a substantive value constraint, such that nothing that does not possess some attitudeindependent value can be a basic constituent of prudential value. This last, of course, is just the 2 See Arneson (1999, 124-5), Hooker (2015, p.17), Fletcher (2013, p.216) and Kraut (1994, p.40-2). 3 Fletcher (2013, p.216). 126 claim that we have been calling objective necessity. As we have seen, one can accept objective necessity while holding that prudential value also has a subjective element. However, as we argued in the last chapter, the imposition of an attitude-independent value constraint appears to forfeit what is most appealing in subjectivism. I have been arguing throughout that a commitment to the value-conferring power of a person's desires, far from a weakness in a theory of prudential value, is essential if such a theory is to preserve the subjectivist insight. If so, our theory of prudential value had best not incorporate any claim of objective necessity. It follows, then, that our argument for supplementing DS* with a commitment to attitude-independent prudential goods must take a quite different form from that rehearsed above. In motivating the objectivist strand of DHT, we are not relying on the charge that subjectivism succumbs to the over-inclusiveness objection, so that its scope must somehow be reined in via an appeal to attitude-independent prudential goods. Although the theory does introduce substantive goods, this does not here serve to make the subjectivist side less inclusive, but instead makes the theory as a whole more inclusive. DHT states that, alongside those things that a person confers prudential value upon by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way), are other things that are prudentially valuable regardless of the person's attitude to them. These latter are the attitude-independent (or substantive, or objective) prudential goods. DHT thus recognizes two distinct sources of prudential value, one attitude-independent (objective) and one attitude-dependent (subjective), and holds that either is sufficient to make something basically good for a person. That is, it is a hybrid that rejects both objective and subjective necessity. 127 To show that we should introduce attitude-independent prudential values into our theory in just this way, what we must show is that, although DS* expresses part of the truth about prudential value, on its own it is fated to be either extensionally inadequate, explanatorily inadequate, or both. It is to this task that I now turn. I will argue that there are considerations that strongly favour the inclusion of an objective element in our theory of prudential value, and which do not rely on the objection that subjectivism is over-inclusive. Of course, even if this point is granted, that does not yet constitute support for DHT, specifically. The argument will thus proceed in steps. First, I show that theories that exclude attitude-independent values fail to respect certain widely shared intuitions about well-being (that is, they offer implausible answers to both the explanatory and the enumerative questions in certain cases). Next, I show that hybrid theories that appeal to attitude-independent values but embrace subjective necessity (either in the form of a desire constraint or an enjoyment constraint) are extensionally inadequate, because under-inclusive. Coupled with our previous rejection of objective necessity, this points us towards a hybrid account that accepts neither objective nor subjective necessity, that is, towards the theory we are calling DHT. 4.3 Attitude-Independent Values, Altruistic Desires, and Adaptive Preferences In making the case for the inclusion of an objectivist strand in our theory, we will begin by picking up on a point made in the last chapter (section 3.7). We noted there that appealing to attitude-independent prudential goods does some work in dealing with the scope problem for DS*, even absent a commitment to objective necessity. Although the identification constraint allowed us to rule out of prudential relevance several of the desires that gave rise to overinclusiveness worries, there remained cases like that of Gary. Gary's desire for his mother's last 128 years to be as bearable as possible surely satisfies the identification constraint. Nonetheless, in acting on this desire Gary is intuitively sacrificing his own well-being for the sake of his mother's, and a theory of prudential value should be able to make sense of this judgment. One strategy is to advert to other desires Gary possesses, which will be frustrated if he turns down the job offer so he can care for his mother. 4 But this does not wholly do away with the problem, as the objector can still respond that, insofar as Gary decides to stay with his mother, the desire for her good must have counted for more (at least with him) than all these other desires combined. But if this is so, there is at least a plausible case to be made that this desire should count for more with the theorist as well. However, if we supplement DS* with a commitment to attitudeindependent prudential goods, there is room to say that even if Gary's life contains more desiresatisfaction related prudential value in the case where he stays home with his mother, his acting to secure her happiness is a genuine instance of self-sacrifice. This is just because, in so doing, he is sacrificing various other prudential goods, for instance his own enjoyment of his life and the achievement of important career goals. Thus, if we think it important to draw a clear line between Gary's well-being and that of anyone else (including those he most cares about), this provides some initial impetus for going hybrid. Another powerful objection to desire-satisfactionism, which we have yet to mention, is based on the observation that, in the world as it stands, many people's desires are formed and/or modified in response to straitened or oppressive circumstances. This has been called the problem 4 See Heathwood (2011). Heathwood's argument is admittedly quite compelling. If it turns out that DS* can deal satisfactorily with self-sacrifice on its own, this does little damage to our broader argument. We can sufficiently motivate the introduction of attitude-independent prudential values without relying on this point. I discuss it here only because various people do worry about this purported problem for DS*, and it is therefore worth stressing that, if it is a problem, it is not one for our theory. 129 of adaptive preferences, and it poses a formidable challenge to the desire-satisfactionist. 5 It is worth noting that, even if we had not already rejected idealization, moving from an actualist version of DS* to a full-information or ideal advisor view does not do away with this problem. At least in many cases, it is not lack of knowledge about the features of one's situation that gives rise to adaptive preferences, but such knowledge itself. It may be eminently reasonable to desire only those things that one has some chance of obtaining. If one's desires are formed or modified based on a clear-eyed perception of what one can realistically expect, we lack any grounds for criticizing them on an idealized, any more than on an actualist, view. And yet, if we allow the satisfaction of desires that are adjusted down in this way to wholly determine a person's level of well-being, we seem forced to say that members of the most disadvantaged and oppressed groups, provided they have adapted their desires in response to these bleak conditions, are no less well-off than the most privileged among us. What is more, it appears that on a thoroughgoing desire-satisfactionist approach, anyone could in principle make her life go better simply by flicking a switch that would cause her to have fewer and easier to satisfy desires. Such implications are profoundly unintuitive, even offensive. 6 7 5 For more detailed discussion of this problem see Elster (1982), Nussbaum (2001), Qizilbash (2006), and Sen (1987). It is worth noting that both Nussbaum and Sen present this objection while arguing for the capabilities approach. Understood as a theory of prudential value, the capabilities approach has affinities with both perfectionism and objective list accounts. However, capabilities theorists often seem to be concerned more to give an account of the public indicators or markers of well-being, rather than of the basic constituents of prudential value themselves. Because of this complication, I have elected to set these approaches aside in what follows. 6 Baber (2010) argues that a thoroughgoing DS* can deliver intuitively plausible verdicts in such cases, so long as it considers, not only a person's actual desires, but also desires that the person has in nearby possible worlds. I cannot provide a full response to Baber's proposal here, but will only reiterate a point I made in the previous chapter, which is that any such move away from actualism comes at a significant cost. 7 Barnes (2009) convincingly argues, with particular focus on the desires of those with physical disabilities, that objectivists (or hybrid theorists like ourselves) must be very careful about dismissing actual people's stated preferences as mere products of distorting adaptation. But note that, insofar as DHT accords independent prudential relevance to the satisfaction of all intrinsic desires that satisfy the 130 The challenge from adaptive preferences loses a fair bit of its bite when DS* is presented as only one strand of a hybrid theory that recognizes various attitude-independent prudential goods. On any such hybrid account, how well off a person is can no longer simply be equated with the extent to which her desires are satisfied, even if this is one element that goes toward determining her well-being level. We must now factor in the presence or absence of attitudeindependent prudential goods as well. Provided we can generate a plausible list of such goods (more on this later, but at a minimum I believe such a list will include virtue, knowledge, achievement, interpersonal bonds such as friendship and familial or romantic love, and autonomy) we should also be able to deliver plausible comparative assessments of individuals' well-being. 4.4 Attitude-Independent Values and Common-Sense There is a more general point that inveighs in favour of supplementing DS* with a commitment to attitude-independent prudential values. This is that, as discussed in Chapter 1, people's pretheoretical judgments about well-being apparently involve a commitment to a plurality of substantive goods. Such appeals to 'common-sense' can of course only take us so far. Still, in constructing a philosophical theory of prudential value we must give some weight to people's intuitive judgments about their own well-being and (we have argued even more importantly) that of those they care about. Otherwise we do not even know where to start. Moreover, any theory we did generate would not be answerable to anything outside of itself. The upshot is that we cannot afford to simply ignore the deliverances of common-sense. And the folk theory of well- identification constraint, whether or not they are adaptive, there is no need for it to be in the business of judging which are problematically adaptive and which are not. The point here is just that some are, and that this supports the inclusion of attitude-independent goods. 131 being, to the extent that there is one, seems to be (at least partially) objectivist with respect to both enumeration and explanation. 8 As we argued in Chapter 1, the folk theory comes out most clearly when we ask ourselves what the person on the street would judge to be good for, and desire for the sake of, someone whom they love and care about, for instance their own child. This lies behind the general methodological principle we there called CP, which states that: If those who love and care most about person P believe that x is good for P (and desire x for P's sake), this constitutes solid prima facie evidence that x is in fact good for P. If this principle is plausible, as I believe it is, then it is a matter of great import what the content of these everyday beliefs about (and desires for) the well-being of our loved ones is. Again, I don't doubt that this will depend to an extent on the people involved. Still, I am confident that it will not generally be exhausted by a belief that it would be good for the loved one if their own desires (or some subset of them) were satisfied, and a subsequent desire that this be the case. This is not to deny that we want those people we care about to have what they themselves want, or that we take this to be good for them. But we also want other things for them, and take other things to be good for them. We surely want them to enjoy their lives, which suggests that at a minimum we also take pleasure to have prudential value. This might point us towards hedonism rather than a pluralistic objective list. But we also want the lives of those we care about to instantiate other things that we take to be in themselves valuable, such as certain interpersonal bonds (friendship, romantic love, familial love), virtue, knowledge, achievement and autonomy. Many of us, at least, would see a life that was very high in pleasure but that lacked these other things as in some way bereft. Likewise, a life that ranked very high on the scale of desire-satisfaction but very low in all these other areas (if we can even 8 See Rice (2013) for a defense of the objective list theory which makes much of this point. 132 imagine such a life for a human being) seems a sadly limited one. This is not to say that such lives could not be all things considered good for the person living them, in that they would contain more prudential value than disvalue. Still, if the attitude-independent prudential goods of friendship, love, virtue, important knowledge, achievement, and autonomy are not instantiated in a person's life, this constitutes an important deficit. If we now add pleasure as the final entry on this list (on the assumption that it cannot be reduced to desire-satisfaction), I believe we have a tolerably complete list of substantive prudential goods, and moreover one which takes its cue from our common-sense pluralism about well-being. There are various responses that might be made to the above line of argument. It is just possible that our pre-theoretic intuitions about well-being are hopelessly confused and/or contradictory. If so, the task of the theorist of prudential value is, not to vindicate these intuitions (which may not be possible), but rather to separate the wheat from the chaff of common-sense. 9 However, we should not assume in advance that common-sense pluralism is ineradicably confused. Rather, we should first do the work of constructing a coherent and plausible theory that answers as well as we can make it to our pre-theoretic intuitions (these being the best data we have to go on), before resigning ourselves to the fact that this cannot be done. It is also possible that our apparent pluralism is only skin-deep. It may be that, in thinking about what is good for those they care about, people are failing to keep in mind the distinction between final and instrumental prudential values. This is not a distinction that forms part of our everyday conceptual apparatus, so it should not surprise us if non-philosophers tend to neglect it. 10 Perhaps, then, it is just because friendship, love, knowledge, virtue, achievement, and autonomy are rich sources of pleasure for human beings that common-sense judges them all to 9 See Kraut (2007, p.2) for something like this suggestion. 10 This possibility is discussed in Fletcher (2016, p.54). 133 be good. If this were the case, then the intuitive data would ultimately support hedonism rather than a pluralistic objective theory. It might also be pointed out (and this is surely an apt observation) that the entries on the above list are things that creatures of our sort tend to desire. But if so, we might suppose that in providing such an enumeration of the things that we want for those whose well-being we are invested in, we are simply ticking off those things that we imagine would satisfy their most important desires. There is, admittedly, no way to conclusively establish that either of these reductive stories is false. However, there is also no reason to assume that one of them must be true. And as a matter of methodology, it behooves us to take people's judgments at face value, absent independent reasons not to. At least, this strikes me as the more respectful route. To this last reply the skeptic about attitude-independent prudential goods may respond as follows. We do have some evidence that the pluralistic judgments of common-sense are not what they seem. This stems from the fact that, if we imagine ourselves in the same position as before, but stipulate that our friend does not desire any of the things on the purported objective list, our confidence that having these things makes her life go better seems to waver, if it does not entirely disappear. A defender of hedonism can similarly point out that, if we stipulate that our friend will not derive any pleasure from the entries on the list, it is much more plausible to deny that they are beneficial to her. As we have seen, one can defend an approach to prudential value that has an objective element, while also granting that one must have some positive orientation toward the attitudeindependent goods if they are to benefit one. This is precisely what those hybrid views which incorporate subjective necessity do. Thus the above observations (even if apt) do not help us to decide between a thoroughgoing version of DS* or hedonism, and this kind of hybrid view. The 134 case in favour of the hybrid approach might then be buttressed by appealing to the previously mentioned fact that lives that are high in pleasure and desire-satisfaction but lacking in the other proposed goods tend to be ranked rather low by common-sense. I am not sure what common-sense really tells us about the value that friendship, virtue, knowledge, achievement, and autonomy would possess if they were neither desired nor enjoyed. The fact that our judgment that such things are good for a person becomes less assured when we imagine that the person is wholly indifferent to them does not show that we ascribe no value to these things in such cases. It may be that we simply find it hard to believe that a human being could truly possess such evident goods without responding positively towards them. Moreover, when it comes to at least some of these items (friendship and achievement, for instance), a case can be made that they constitutively involve certain pro-attitudes. We may not be assuming that a loved one must have some second-order pro-attitude, such as a desire for friendship, for a given friendship to be good for them. We may just be implicitly denying that anyone can genuinely experience friendship without being in some sense positively engaged with it. 11 The upshot is that our common-sense judgments do not give the lie to DHT, but they also do not favour it over other hybrid theories. The intuitive data does lend support to the idea that some kind of hybrid account is needed, so we should not consider this discussion of the folk theory of prudential value wasted. Still, we have yet to vindicate the way in which DHT, in particular, goes about incorporating this objectivist insight. What we must now show is that a theory which combines objective and subjective elements, while denying subjective necessity, should be preferred over those hybrid views that accept subjective necessity. 11 Fletcher (2013 and 2016) has forcefully pressed this point. He offers a novel type of objective list approach, which accepts as a constraint on the objective goods it recognizes that they must be in this way pro-attitude-involving. Although I agree with much of what Fletcher says, I ultimately cannot endorse such a constraint, for reasons I discuss below. 135 There are two distinct questions that we must be careful not to run together. The first is, whether an item on the objective list must be desired if it is to count towards someone's good. The second is, whether the person must enjoy or take pleasure in a substantively valuable thing if it is to contribute to their well-being. Those that answer the first question in the affirmative are endorsing what we will call the desire constraint. Those that answer 'yes' to the second query accept what we will call the enjoyment constraint. Both are ways of accepting subjective necessity. They have very different implications, however. One could accept the enjoyment constraint while still defending a kind of disjunctive hybrid theory, consisting of DS* and another strand that incorporates objective elements. The difference between such a view and DHT, as it is being developed in these pages, is that the latter strand is itself hybridized by means of a requirement that the attitude-independent goods must also be enjoyed. This theory, then, is a hybrid twice over. 12 Although I do not favour the enjoyment constraint, for the reasons explained below, it is nonetheless worth emphasizing that such a restriction can be integrated into a hybrid account with a disjunctive structure, albeit not the version of DHT defended here. If the reader is prepared to embrace any theory of prudential value that takes this novel form, I consider that a victory for my approach. On the other hand, the desire constraint is not in this way reconcilable with the broader disjunctive hybrid framework. One can combine such a constraint with a commitment to attitudeindependent prudential values in two ways. The first, taking seriously the arguments of the previous chapters, acknowledges that our desires can confer value upon otherwise valueless (or even bad) objects. However, it adds that desire-satisfaction is even more valuable when the object of one's desire is a substantive prudential good. The attitude-independent goodness here 12 One can understand such a theory as a hybrid of DS* and the view, defended by Adams (2002) and Kagan (2009), that well-being consists in the enjoyment of the excellent. 136 acts as a kind of supercharger, lavishing bonus value upon states of affairs that would in any case have some prudential value qua desired. The resulting hybrid theory denies objective necessity, and to this extent is more appealing than joint necessity hybrids. A theory of this sort could still be interestingly novel, and might constitute a move in the direction of the sort of inclusive approach that we are recommending. Still, just insofar as it accepts the desire constraint, it is implausible. The second way of combining the desire constraint with an objectivist element is, of course, to adopt a joint necessity hybrid theory that includes a substantive value constraint. As we argued above, a constraint of the latter kind is incompatible with the subjectivist insight and should accordingly be rejected. 4.5 Against the Desire Constraint: The Case of Jessica I will now argue that we should reject both versions of subjective necessity. I begin in this section by considering the desire constraint, which is both more clearly incompatible with DHT and less independently plausible. The best way to argue this point will be to look at specific instances of purported attitude-independent prudential goods, and see whether we really do think that these things have no value at all where the person does not desire them. What such an investigation reveals is that that any theory which accepts the desire constraint is bound to be extensionally inadequate, because under-inclusive. 13 I want the reader, first, to recognize how extreme the desire constraint actually is. It entails, not just that the prudential value of the entries on the objective list is enhanced when they are desired, but that something must be the object of one of my desires if it is to contribute (basically) to my well-being at all. The hybrid theorist 13 Trivially, this will include DS* considered as a self-standing theory, and so the arguments that follow are also further arguments against a thoroughgoing desire-satisfactionist approach. 137 with whom we are arguing needs to insist on this point, on pain of giving up the game to our disjunctive hybrid approach. Bearing this in mind, let us start by considering the case of knowledge. My claim is that at least some sorts of knowledge are basically prudentially valuable, and that this is so whether or not the knowledge is desired. To see why this is plausible, consider the case of Jessica. Jessica was raised in a fundamentalist Southern Baptist household. Homeschooled until the age of 18, she never received an adequate scientific education, and entered college quite convinced that the Earth and its denizens were created, roughly as is, by God six thousand years ago. It is now the end of Jessica's first year on campus, and she knows her previous belief to be false. Although Jessica values knowledge in the abstract, this is knowledge that she never sought and now fervently wishes she had never acquired, given the crisis of faith she is presently undergoing. My own sense is that, even though Jessica did not desire this kind of knowledge in advance and is negatively disposed to it now, it is, at the very least, pro tanto good for her to know this important scientific truth. 14 I hope the reader shares this intuitive response to Jessica's case. I can foresee several objections to it. Let me take them in turn. First, the knowledge that creationism is false may have significant instrumental value for Jessica, insofar as remaining committed to such a widely-discredited view is liable to cause others to take her less seriously. We must, accordingly, take care that our judgment that Jessica is benefited by the knowledge does not rest on a confusion between final and instrumental value. 14 The case of Jessica also constitutes another counterexample to the principle that in Chapter 1 we called First Person Veto (FPV). FPV, recall, says that if person P (or an idealized version thereof) would not assent to the judgment that state of affairs x is basically good for P, then x cannot in fact be good for P. Jessica would not plausibly assent to the judgment that her new knowledge is good for her in the case described. If we nonetheless think that this knowledge is prudentially valuable, this is reason to reject FPV. 138 For of course even DS*, considered as a stand-alone view, can accord instrumental prudential value to all sorts of things one does not desire. It is unlikely that such a confusion stands behind the intuitive verdict in this case, however. We can add to the example the detail that Jessica has always planned, and still plans, to return to her former creationist milieu and teach Sunday school when she finishes college. Given that this is her life plan, the scientific knowledge she possesses is likely to cause only conflict with those closest to her, as well as continued internal discomfort. Here we are imagining that the things Jessica most strongly, stably, and enduringly desires are a) to maintain harmonious relationships with her friends and family back home, and b) to be free from her own nagging doubts about her faith, and that these desires are central to her self-conception. The knowledge that creationism is a sham thus seems bound to thwart the satisfaction of the very desires that are most significant to Jessica's well-being, from the point of view of DS*. Here, Jessica's knowledge is clearly not instrumentally valuable for her (if anything it is instrumentally disvaluable). If we still hold that Jessica's knowledge is prudentially valuable in such a case, we must be according it final prudential value. And indeed, it does seem that knowing this deep truth about the world is to some extent good for Jessica even here. Plausibly it is not good for her all things considered. But remember that to undermine the desire constraint we need only establish that there is some pro tanto prudential value in the possession of such knowledge, even where it is not desired. Keeping this last point in mind, I suspect that most readers will share my judgment. Jessica's case thus provides intuitive support for the claim that knowledge is an attitude-independent prudential good. There is a response that can be made on behalf of the defender of the desire constraint (or any other defender of the view that knowledge has only instrumental value). It might be claimed 139 that focusing in on an exceptional case like Jessica's, and simply stipulating that the knowledge is not instrumentally good for her, generates unreliable judgments. It is possible that our intuitive response to the above case is merely an artifact of our (usually reliable) belief that knowledge is useful for getting whatever it is that a person desires. When presented with a purported exception like that of Jessica, we may be unable to really convince ourselves that the case is as described. If so, despite seeming to ascribe final value to the knowledge in Jessica's case, we may instead be implicitly reiterating our general commitment to knowledge's instrumental value. Although we cannot entirely rule out this possibility, I do not think it should greatly concern us. As a general point of methodology, it is good practice to take people's intuitive judgments about individual cases at face value, absent some independent reason not to do so. This does not require us to deny that folk intuitions about well-being at times rest on confusions, and so do not really reveal what they seem to, or that they are sometimes simply mistaken. It is nonetheless common ground amongst most philosophers working in this field that intuitions about particular cases are an important piece of data that we must work with in constructing a theory of prudential value. If nothing else, they are invaluable tools for arguing against proposed theories. If our opponent has decided that such intuitions ought to be disregarded entirely, they will have thereby rendered whatever theory they favour, and every other theory of prudential value (as far as they are concerned) immune to case-based counterexamples. This has the look of a pyrrhic victory. If they are not counselling us to simply ignore intuitions about cases, our opponent has two moves available. First, they may reject the specific methodological principle suggested above. However, I do not think they should find this option attractive, especially if they are subjectivists. After all, one of the purported advantages of subjective theories is that 140 they are non-paternalistic, in that each of us is taken to have a distinctive kind of authority over our own good. Yet there is also something objectionably paternalistic in insisting that those who would aver that Jessica's knowledge is good for her. even in the above case, must somehow be confused about what they believe (whether because of an illicit slide from a general to a particular claim, or for some other reason). This is quite a different sort of paternalism from that which subjectivists accuse their opponents of, but it looks like paternalism just the same. If any part of the motivation for one's view is an anti-paternalist stance, this therefore seems an unpalatable move. If the general methodological point is deemed appealing even by the subjectivist, they will need to provide specific reasons for thinking that the judgment that Jessica's knowledge is valuable is confused, or otherwise not what it seems. But if we have been sufficiently clear in our stipulation that Jessica's knowledge is not in the above case instrumentally beneficial, and we nevertheless judge that it is good for Jessica to know the truth about creationism, I do not know what these reasons could be. The only thing objectionable about such a verdict (from the perspective of the subjectivist) is that, if correct, it conflicts with their theory. Surely the more principled approach is to take people's common-sense judgments in cases like this seriously. If we do so, and if I am right in supposing that my intuitive judgment in Jessica's case is the commonsensical one, we now have compelling prima facie evidence that knowledge (at least sometimes) has basic prudential value, even in the absence of a desire for it. It is no doubt true that in most cases where knowledge is prudentially valuable it is either desired intrinsically, or conducive to the satisfaction of other important desires. As to the first point, if knowledge is indeed a substantive good, we should not be surprised to find that most of us recognize its value and therefore quite sensibly desire it. It is central to the view defended here 141 that human beings, as well as being conferrers of prudential value, are also quite adept at recognizing the presence of attitude-independent value. When we desire knowledge, it is reasonable to hold that in this case the desire follows the value, and not the other way around. That said, if it turns out that knowledge reliably helps us to acquire whatever it is that we most want, this does present a kind of puzzle for the theorist who also accords it final, attitudeindependent prudential value. At least, such an apparent coincidence calls out for explanation. We must be careful, however, not to just take for granted the instrumental value of knowledge. Jessica's case may not, in fact, be all that unusual. Various psychological studies have suggested that people with falsely inflated beliefs about their own characteristics and abilities tend to be happier and more successful than people who are scrupulously realistic in their estimations of themselves and others. 15 We cannot rely too much on such (admittedly controversial) findings. I only wish to note that I, at least, do not find them all that surprising. False beliefs can, intuitively, be most useful in certain situations. If instances where knowledge (particularly self-knowledge) is not only not instrumentally beneficial, but instrumentally harmful, are at all common, there is no mysterious coincidence to account for. Moreover, knowledge of oneself and one's abilities is intuitively a pro tanto prudential good, even if it turns out to have harmful consequences as a matter of course. This lends additional support to the view that the prudential value of knowledge is (at least sometimes) final rather than instrumental. It may be protested that in our response to Jessica's case we are conflating, not different kinds of prudential value, but prudential value and moral or perfectionist value. We may think that Jessica has an obligation to educate herself, and that to the extent that she does this it makes her life morally better. Moreover, we may be concerned about the impact of her previous false beliefs on other people (for instance, through their influence on her voting patterns), and be 15 See for instance Taylor (1989). 142 smuggling in such considerations, which seem irrelevant to how well Jessica's life is going for her. Finally, we may be confusing how good Jessica's life is for her with how good it is as an instance of a human life. These are all genuine confusions that we must be wary of. I am particularly sympathetic to the last concern, and it is one that I will raise myself later in this chapter. But none of these stories plausibly accounts for our judgment in the case of Jessica. Or, at least, they are not the whole story. Even when we are careful to cordon off these other factors, there is still some respect in which it seems clearly better for Jessica to have this new scientific knowledge. A last question to consider is whether the intuitive response to Jessica's case is best explained by her new knowledge having final prudential value, or by her previous false belief having final prudential disvalue. We have so far been silent on the question of what the basic prudential bads are. But it could be the case that having false beliefs (especially about important scientific matters) is a substantive prudential bad, even if knowledge is not a substantive good. This would be an interesting (and perhaps a surprising) disanalogy, but it is not one we can rule out in advance. I will return to the question of what the negative side of a disjunctive hybrid approach should look like in the next chapter. For now, it is enough to note that the view that knowledge about the fundamental nature of the world has no value in the absence of a desire for this knowledge becomes highly implausible, once it is granted that false beliefs about the same things have substantive prudential disvalue. Jessica's case provides us with sufficient reason to reject a desire constraint on the value of knowledge. In the next section I turn to consider the other attitude-independent goods. 4.6 Further Arguments Against the Desire Constraint 143 Knowledge, of course, is only one among many proposed substantive goods, and it is not one that every objectivist would wish to include. 16 I began with it because it is here that we have perhaps the clearest case of an attitude-independent prudential good, among the most plausible candidates for the objective list. If we have made a convincing case that knowledge is basically prudentially valuable, whether or not it is desired, we have thus gone a good part of the way towards establishing our broader conclusion. Recall, we are proposing to fill out the objective list with the following items: certain interpersonal bonds (friendship, romantic and familial love), virtue, achievement, autonomy and pleasure. As Guy Fletcher has usefully highlighted, at least some of these goods appear to involve some positive affective/attitudinal orientation as a part of their very nature. 17 For instance, genuine friendship or love presumably cannot exist in the absence of certain proattitudes directed at one's friend or lover. Achieving a goal, at a minimum, requires that one desires the state of affairs one brings about. And pleasure surely cannot leave the person who feels it completely cold. Virtue and autonomy seem to have a closer affinity with knowledge, as I will discuss below. It is important to see that one can grant that (at least some of) the entries on the objective list are constitutively attitude-involving, without giving up on the idea that they are (in an important sense) attitude-independent. For none of what was said above suggests that, for an item on the proposed list to be good for one, one must have some pro-attitude towards that very good. That is to say, the object of one's pro-attitude need not be the purported good itself, even if 16 Among recent objective list theorists, Rice (2013, pp. 14-5) and Hooker (2015, pp.22-3) include knowledge on the list but Fletcher (2013, pp. 214-6) does not. Perfectionists about well-being have tended to see at least some kinds of knowledge as basically prudentially valuable. Kraut (2007) is the most prominent recent example. 17 Fletcher (2013, pp. 216-7) 144 the good itself involves the having of certain pro-attitudes. 18 While friendship, achievement, and pleasure all plausibly have pro-attitudes built in to them, it does not at all follow that one confers value upon these things by means of any pro-attitude. Indeed, the most plausible position is that, even if one has a higher-order con-attitude towards them, such things remain a pro tanto benefit to one. Consider the following case. Jill, like Jessica, was raised in a rigid fundamentalist household. She has been led to believe that romantic relationships between women are sinful. Despite her desire to live up to the moral principles which have been firmly inculcated in her and in which she still believes, and despite making prolonged efforts to repress her feelings, she falls in love with Jacqueline. Jill never gives up the belief that she is doing something morally wrong in being with Jacqueline. Nor does she ever lose the desire to not be in love with her (if she could take an anti-love potion she would immediately do so). Still, in every other respect this is a highly rewarding, enjoyable, and mutually supportive romantic relationship. Jill simply always has a powerful higher-order desire not to be in precisely this sort of relationship. 19 It is implausible to hold that the mere fact that Jill desires not to be in this relationship cancels out all the prudential value that the relationship would otherwise possess. There seems to be something inherently worthwhile about such a relationship, something that does not have to wait on any higher order subjective sanction to be good for a person. I would be surprised to find that this is not most people's read on this case. I suspect that some will be suspicious of this example precisely because they will find it hard to believe that there is not some desire of Jill's that is satisfied by being in this relationship. And of course, insofar as it is a rewarding, 18 On this point see Arneson (1999, pp.136-141), Fletcher (2013, pp.215-7 and 2016, pp. 59-75), and Rice (2013, pp. 11-14). 19 This case again pulls double duty, in that it also provides us with yet more reason to reject FPV. Jill would not plausibly assent to the judgment that this relationship, which she firmly believes is morally wrong and does not desire to participate in, is basically good for her. 145 enjoyable, and supportive relationship there are doubtless many such desires. But why anyone would feel entitled to assume that one of these desires must be a desire for this very relationship, I do not see. This just seems to re-describe the case, in such a way as to make it a different one. If the objector's claim is that our case, as previously characterized, is impossible, we can point out that there are relevantly similar cases which are clearly possible, because actual. It may seem that, in making so much of the fact that Jill does not desire to be in this precise relationship, I am stacking the decks unfairly. For, granting this point, it may still be the case that Jill has some higher-order desire that is satisfied by her relationship with Jacqueline. Although Jill does not desire to be in such a relationship with Jacqueline, and indeed is averse to this state of affairs, she plausibly does have a more general desire to be in a loving and supportive romantic relationship, which happens to be satisfied by her relationship with Jacqueline (and perhaps could not be satisfied otherwise). If this is so, then even a defender of the desire constraint can seemingly deliver the verdict that this relationship is basically good for Jill. 20 This points to a general challenge for the line of argument we are pursuing. It seems that, for any case that might be presented as a counter-example to the desire constraint, once our opponent retreats to a high enough level of generality they will be able to postulate some desire that is satisfied by the obtaining of the relevant state of affairs. Even in Jessica's case it may be claimed that, although she does not desire the knowledge that creationism is false, she does have 20 Lauinger (2013) presents a similar argument, in the course of defending a hybrid theory which incorporates a desire constraint. My objection to this argument is the same as that expressed below. If we fix it so that the desire constraint is trivially satisfied whenever a substantive prudential good is plausibly instantiated in a person's life, as Lauinger's view appears to do, this constraint ceases to be a useful tool for theorizing about prudential value. At any rate, one cannot just insist that whenever an attitudeindependent good is instantiated in a person's life there must be some desire that is responsive to it. This would no doubt be a fine thing, but it would also be a quite spectacular stroke of luck. We are surely not entitled to assume that there will be such harmony between our desires and what is independently desirable. 146 a general desire for knowledge. To the extent that she has such a generic desire, Jessica's knowledge now also seems to satisfy the desire constraint, rather than serving as a counterexample to it. Clever though it is, this maneuver preserves the desire constraint's plausibility at the cost of making it almost entirely trivial. If such a constraint is to do any theoretical work, it should not be the case that anything that could be proposed as a basic constituent of prudential value satisfies it. 21 Yet this is the result that looms if we respond to cases like Jessica's and Jill's by retreating to an ever-higher level of abstraction in characterizing the person's desires. We must stop this slide at some point, but the question is where. As far as I can see, the only way that the defender of the desire-constraint can reasonably do this in cases like Jill's and Jessica's is by privileging the absence of the more determinate desires (for this relationship and this knowledge) over the presence of the generic desires (for a relationship and knowledge). That is, the fact that Jill precisely does not want to be in a relationship with Jacqueline, and that Jessica specifically does not want to know that creationism is false, must be taken as cancelling out the more general desires, at least when it comes to satisfying the desire constraint. On this view, if a person has a desire for a given kind of thing in the abstract, but lacks any desire for a given instance of this kind, the fact that this person does not desire the specific instance is what is relevant, from the point of view of the desire constraint. I believe this is in line with what most advocates of such a constraint are trying to say. At any rate, something like this understanding of the desire constraint's function is called for if it is to be non-trivial. The defender of the desire constraint is thus forced, after all, to deliver the unintuitive 21 On the other hand, if the desire constraint turns out to be in this way consistent with a theory that is maximally inclusive in its response to the enumerative question, I am thus far more amenable to it. However, such a constraint still seems explanatorily wrongheaded, for reasons discussed below. 147 verdicts in the cases of Jill and Jessica. I now turn to consider whether the desire-constraint is any more plausible with respect to the other attitude-independent goods. The case of Jill should also lead us to doubt that, if pleasure is to have basic prudential value, it must be desired. For given Jill's condemnatory attitude towards her relationship with Jacqueline, it is likely that she will also be ill-disposed to the pleasures that she derives from it. It may yet be that her relationship with Jacqueline is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment in her life. It again seems wrongheaded to hold that the rich and varied pleasures that attach to this relationship do not have any value for Jill, if she does not desire them at a higher level of reflection. On our proposed list of attitude-independent prudential goods, this leaves only achievement, virtue, and autonomy to deal with. Take achievement first. Once more, it is implausible to hold that one must desire a given achievement if it is to be basically good for one. Consider, for instance the following example from Richard Arneson: "Suppose Samantha writes a brilliant poem but denies that this achievement has any value or in any way enhances her life. Her ground for this dismissal is a shallow and silly aesthetic theory that she has thoughtlessly embraced. In these circumstances, her failure to endorse her achievement does not negate its value for her". 22 Although Arneson puts things in more cognitive terms, we can plausibly add that Samantha had no desire to achieve this thing. Still, her achievement is intuitively good for her. Or now consider a modified version of Keller's Joan, one who actually succeeds in getting the law repealed. It is surely not the case that, for Joan's achievement to be prudentially valuable, she must desire not only that the law be abolished, but that she herself achieve this end. Perhaps Joan does not really care how the law is overturned or by whom, but only that it is overturned (indeed, this is the more plausible account of Joan's psychology given what we know about her 22 Arneson (1999, p.136). This example is another clear strike against FPV. 148 commitments). It would be strange to say that in such a case the achievement itself lacks any prudential value. The desire constraint should accordingly be rejected here as well. Now for the case of virtue. For simplicity (and because I find it a plausible approach), I will assume that Thomas Hurka's recursive account is correct. On this view, virtue consists in being positively oriented towards things that are substantively good, and negatively oriented towards substantive evils. 23 The various virtues are then individuated according to whether they involve loving the good or hating the bad, and which specific goods or bads they are responsive to. We can make our case most impressively here by focusing on a virtue which consists in having the correct attitude towards the bad. I have in mind compassion, or being appropriately pained by the pain of others. Consider, then, the case of Jake. Jake has been led, via a long series of hardships and disappointments, to the following conclusion. Other people are not at all to be esteemed, and are unworthy of compassion. It is thus Jake's fondest desire to be rid of the pain he feels at witnessing the vast suffering around him. And yet, he is a naturally compassionate person and cannot help being moved by the afflictions of others. The question now is whether Jake would be better off if he succeeded in ridding himself of his pesky softheartedness. Not all things considered better off, since thinking that it would be a net prudential gain if Jake achieved his desire is compatible with thinking that the virtue of compassion has pro tanto prudential value. The point I wish to press is just that there is some important respect in which it is better for Jake if he continues to be a compassionate person. As ever, we cannot be entirely confident that this judgment does not involve some confusion between prudential value and moral or perfectionist value. Still, as long as we are as clear as possible about the question we are asking, our intuitions in such cases deserve to be taken seriously. I find that the intuition that Jake would be pro tanto 23 See Hurka (2001). Adams (2006) defends a very similar view. 149 worse off if he conquered his compassion does not desert me, even when I place the notion of prudential value, as distinct from other evaluative notions, as clearly as I can before my mind. I thus find myself pushed yet again to reject the desire constraint. 24 Autonomy, finally, is a rather special case. As I will understand it here, autonomy is the capacity to form and pursue one's own conception of the good without interference. It thus has fundamentally to do with what a person cares about, and so is closely connected to the subjectivist insight. Yet autonomy seems to have prudential value in its own right, and not only instrumentally, as a precondition for the successful pursuit of whatever one happens to desire. This is, in the first place, because the process through which one's desires are formed can itself be more or less autonomous. Indeed, this seems to be part of the problem with certain kinds of adaptive preference formation. The deferential wife, who after years of domination and abuse manages to convince herself that what she desires most is for her husband's will to be done in all things, is plausibly not autonomous, even if no obstacles are placed in the way of her pursuit of this goal. 25 Intuitively, both a) the extent to which one has decided for oneself what one cares about, and b) the extent to which one is able to pursue what one cares about in the absence of obstacles, matter to how well off one is. It is an extremely complicated question just what is required for desires to be autonomously formed, and we need not engage this matter here. The essential point is that it seems undeniable that the deferential wife would be better off if her desires were more reflective of her own free choice, and less reflective of her domineering 24 I trust it is clear to the reader that our intuitions in Jake's case are, again, incompatible with FPV. 25 I believe the deferential wife example originates in Hill (1973, pp.5-6), and it has been often discussed since, for instance by Friedman (1985). Hawkins (2008), Sen (1987, pp.45-6), and Sumner (1996, pp.162171) explicitly discuss this sort of case as a challenge to subjective theories of prudential value. 150 husband's whims. This is so even if she herself is by now so convinced of her husband's comparative rectitude that she does not desire this sort of autonomy. 26 This concludes our case against the desire constraint. If it is convincing, what it shows is that a hybrid theory that includes DS* as one of its strands should take a disjunctive form. This does not yet settle the question of whether the other strand of such a disjunctive hybrid theory should incorporate an enjoyment constraint. 4.7 Against the Enjoyment Constraint The enjoyment constraint has undoubted appeal, and one can accept it while still preserving the disjunctive hybrid framework we are elaborating. However, the cases of Jessica, Jake and the deferential wife suggest that we should reject this constraint as well. Jessica, recall, not only did not desire her newfound knowledge, but is now distressed rather than pleased by it. This does not, it seems, cancel out its value for her. To put the point more generally, in the world we live in a great many important truths are also unpleasant ones. If the reader shares my sense that knowledge of such truths nonetheless has (at least pro tanto) prudential value, this is reason to reject the enjoyment constraint. Jake also does not take any pleasure in his own virtue (rather, the opposite is true). Once again, the sad truth of the matter is that virtue is not always pleasant, and indeed is sometimes painful. On the recursive account, after all, virtue does not just consist in being favourably disposed towards the good but also in disfavouring the bad. Even if, in a world where there were only substantive goods, the claim that virtue is always enjoyed might be sustainable, this is not how things now stand. We must, then, either give up the idea that virtue always has pro tanto prudential value or reject the enjoyment constraint. I believe the latter option is preferable. Finally, it seems that the deferential wife is better off in the case where her 26 At the risk of belaboring the point, this also looks like another counterexample to FPV. 151 desires are autonomously rather than deferentially formed, even if she does not derive any enjoyment from this fact. The cases of Jessica, Jake and the deferential wife also suggest that we should not follow Fletcher in restricting the entries on the objective list to items that constitutively involve proattitudes. For even if this is true of other plausible candidates for the objective list, it does not seem to be true of knowledge, virtue and autonomy. Of course, one might take this as prima facie evidence that knowledge, virtue and autonomy do not belong on such a list. But I don't see what would justify anyone in insisting on this point, once it is admitted that there are attitudeindependent prudential goods. There are no independent grounds for assuming in advance that any such goods must at a minimum be pro-attitude-involving. This might be a happy result for purposes of responding to worries about alienation, or for making sense of the relationality of prudential value (although I am skeptical about how far such a constraint really helps with either task), but we cannot guarantee it in advance. Rather we must assess proposed attitudeindependent prudential goods as they arise. And if we do this, we will be inclined to accord prudential value to knowledge, virtue and autonomy regardless of whether they fit any such pattern. 4.8 Why Not Perfectionism? The above arguments were sufficient to illustrate why a theory that supplements DS* with a commitment to a plurality of attitude-independent prudential goods, while rejecting the enjoyment constraint as well as the desire constraint, is appealing. This still leaves us with some pressing questions about how the objectivist strand of DHT can best be developed. I begin here with the most fundamental issue, namely what, if anything, explains why the attitudeindependent prudential goods have basic prudential value. In tackling this question, the natural 152 first step is to look at how the extant objective theories deal with this matter. There are two broad approaches worth considering here, perfectionist and objective list accounts. 27 Defenders of thoroughgoing objectivism generally fall into one of these two camps. The perfectionist camp is marked off by the kind of explanatory story it offers. The distinctive claim of perfectionism is that those things that are basically good for a person are so in virtue of the fact that they exercise, develop, or otherwise involve certain excellences of human nature. The alternative approach, by contrast, has traditionally been marked off by what it does not do. Objective list accounts are typically seen as refraining from giving any answer to the explanatory question. 28 We should not see these as the only two options, however. Surely one who takes there to be attitude-independent prudential goods, but who does not share the perfectionist's distinctive ambitions, need not thereby renounce the project of addressing the explanatory question. Thus, if we take perfectionism and the objective list approach to exhaust the conceptual space that the objectivist might occupy, we should not understand the latter view as committed to such quietism. Rather, when I refer to objective list accounts I have in mind all objective theories that reject the particular explanatory story that perfectionism offers. 29 This leaves room for objective list theorists to be more or less modest in their own ambitions. Indeed, in the next section I consider two ways of elaborating the objective list approach that are markedly different in how they deal with the explanatory question. 27 Kraut, who in recent work defends a broadly perfectionist theory of well-being, prefers to call his account 'developmentalist' (2007, p.136). However, as perfectionism remains the more widely used term for this sort of approach, it will be convenient to follow standard practice and classify Kraut's view under this heading. We must only keep in mind that such theories need not see human perfection as either a realistic or useful goal. What marks them off, rather, is an emphasis on certain characteristic excellences of human nature. Scanlon, meanwhile, suggests that objective list approaches might better be called 'substantive good' approaches (1999, p.113). However, I will again stick with the standard terminology. 28 See for instance Fletcher (2013, pp.214-5), Scanlon (1999, p.125). 29 It is also open to us to treat perfectionism as just one instance of an objective list approach. However, perfectionism, as a tradition in the well-being literature, has developed in a way that is sufficiently independent of other objective accounts to justify giving it an independent hearing here. 153 The question before us now is whether the objectivist strand of DHT should take its cue from the perfectionist, or whether some sort of objective list account ought to be preferred. Let us therefore consider in more detail what a perfectionist approach to the attitude-independent prudential goods might look like. We will take Richard Kraut's theory as our model, as it is the most fully fleshed out in the recent literature. Kraut's theoretical starting point is different from our own. He begins by asking, 'what is it, in general, for some thing x to be good for some entity y'? In the background is an assumption that there is only one such good-for relation, and that it is the same whether we are interested in what is good for an oak tree, what is good for a dog, or what is good for a human being. According to Kraut, this must be understood as a suitability relation. That is, x is good for y if and only if x is suitable to an entity of just y's sort. 30 This somewhat vague idea of suitability is spelled out by Kraut via an appeal to the more familiar notion of flourishing. An organism flourishes when it does well or succeeds as precisely the kind of being it is, by developing the various characteristic excellences that are attainable by beings of this kind. To know what counts as a flourishing human (or oak tree) life, we thus need to begin from some idea of the specific nature of human beings (or oak trees). Kraut claims that the substantive upshot of such an investigation is that "a flourishing human being is one who possesses, develops, and enjoys the exercise of cognitive, affective, sensory, and social powers (no less than physical powers). Those, in broadest outline and roughly speaking, are the components of well-being." 31 We now have in hand, in rough outline, a list of attitude-independent prudential goods, and it is one that agrees closely with our own, except insofar as Kraut endorses (or at least flirts 30 Kraut (2007, p.87). 31 Ibid. (pp.136-137). 154 with) the enjoyment constraint. The question is whether a Kraut-style perfectionist approach can provide a promising explanatory account of DHT's objectivist enumerative claims. 32 I will now argue that DHT should not attempt to ground its list of attitude-independent goods in this fashion. The perfectionist line does have its attractions. Perhaps most importantly, it introduces a satisfying unity into our account, at least on the objectivist side. This is a clear theoretical virtue. Such an approach may even allow us to unify the two strands of DHT, or at least to draw an interesting parallel between them. Very sketchily, that story might go something like this. For each of us, there are two fundamentally distinct sources of prudential value. The first, attitudeindependent source stems from certain features that we share with all members of the species homo sapiens. The second, attitude-dependent source stems from certain features that are (at least potentially) peculiar to us as individuals, namely our own desires. Although very schematic, this picture is intuitive as far as it goes. Where I suspect that the (disjunctive) perfectionist is going to run into trouble is in attempting to fill out any such schema. The perfectionist approach is premised on two central assumptions. The first is that there is a human nature with some definite content. The second is that the content of this human nature explains why certain things are good for humans. Both assumptions are problematic. Of course, at the most abstract level, perfectionism need not take any stand on what the content of human nature is. However, if it is to help us pick out the things that have attitudeindependent prudential value, the perfectionist approach needs to say something about what our nature actually is. It might be thought that perfectionists could shrug off this burden by starting 32 We are not, therefore, assessing the merits or weaknesses of perfectionism as a complete theory of prudential value. This pre-empts some of the more obvious objections to a view like Kraut's. 155 from a commitment to a given list of substantive prudential goods, and then working back to find what they have in common (as opposed to deriving this list from an independent account of human nature). The problem with this latter strategy is not that it gets the direction of explanation the wrong way around (I also doubt that we can or should start from scratch in our theorizing about well-being) but that, if the appeal to human nature is even to yield a helpful elucidation of what the intuitive prudential goods have in common, this nature must be accorded some definite content. In filling out a perfectionist account so that it does explanatory work, we thus need to identify certain core features of human nature. One reason for casting a suspicious eye on attempts to do this is the fear (quite understandable given the disreputable history of this notion) that they will have the effect of affirming and crystallizing harmful assumptions. We appear to lack a standard of human nature that is independent of our own judgments about what makes a given person an exemplary member of our species. But it is plausible that such judgments, which do not involve thinking directly about what is good for another human being but instead about how good that human being is (as measured up to some standard for the species), are especially likely to be contaminated by all kinds of biases (many of which are ableist, homophobic, racist, sexist, transphobic etc.). The perfectionist may try to cut off such objections by offering an account of the core capacities of human nature (and so of which capacities it is prudentially good to develop and exercise) that does not rely on prior intuitions about what makes a person a good instance of a human being. Such an account would need to provide principled reasons for isolating only certain features of human persons as characteristic of them, in the sense relevant to prudential 156 value attributions. No perfectionist has yet offered a plausible candidate for this role, and I doubt that any is forthcoming. One traditional strategy has been to appeal to the capacities that are distinctive of human beings. This strategy, famously, led Aristotle to identify the human good with the excellent exercise of rationality. 33 There are devastating objections to any perfectionist approach that relies on such a distinctiveness claim to isolate the relevant human capacities, however. First, the fact that something is a distinctive human trait or capacity does not plausibly suffice to ensure that it is worth exercising or developing. Human beings may be the only organisms with the capacity for willful cruelty, but if so, the exercise of this capacity is not thereby made valuable. Perhaps this problem can be solved if we remain at a higher level of generality in our characterization of the distinctive capacities. The distinctiveness criterion still faces a more intractable challenge, which is that it makes what is good for human beings contingent in surprising and implausible ways. Suppose we follow Aristotle in taking theoretical and practical rationality to be the only distinctive capacities of human nature. We then discover that there are rational extraterrestrials, and that we are therefore not distinctive in our possession and exercise of either form of rationality. It clearly does not follow that we have been mistaken all along in thinking that the excellent exercise of our rational capacities was prudentially valuable. There may, indeed, be no capacity that is distinctive of human beings. It is absurd to hold that, if so, nothing is good for us. We cannot, then, isolate the prudentially relevant aspects of human nature by appeal to what is distinctive of our species. This puts the onus on the contemporary perfectionist to show that we can do this in some other, principled way. Thomas Hurka suggests that the capacities whose exercise is valuable in the perfectionist sense are just those that are essential to human 33 NE Book 1, Chapter 7. 157 beings as living organisms. 34 There is no longer any appeal to distinctiveness here, and so we need not worry about ET overturning our theory. However, it is very difficult to pick out which traits are essential to humans in this way and which are not. Hurka's preferred theory takes practical and theoretical rationality, as well as certain aspects of our physical embodiment, to be the essential human capacities. This allows his theory to count physical achievements as valuable exercises of human nature, thereby helping avoid the charge of intellectual snobbery. Yet, I do not see what reason we have for isolating just these capacities, other than that they are the basis of a plausible list of goods. There are individual members of the species homo sapiens who lack either form of rationality. Plausibly, certain non-human animals possess both. We still do not seem to have a principled ground for taking these and only these capacities to be at the core of human nature. 35 Let me close on a note of caution. This is that we must be careful to distinguish prudential value from perfectionist value. 36 The perfectionist value of a human life concerns whether it is a good instance of such a life, relative to those we pick out as exemplars. This is most plausibly seen as a species of goodness of a kind. Goodness for is not, at least on the face of it, kind-relative in this way. It is certainly not so by definition. Thus, the perfectionist about wellbeing is making a substantive claim to the effect that the prudential value of a person's life tracks its perfectionist value. While this claim could be true, it is not conceptually true. Once we have prised apart these different concepts, however, it remains to be shown why how well my life is 34 Hurka (1993). 35 For similar criticisms of the appeal to essential capacities, see Kitcher (1999). Note that even if Hurka's list of essential capacities did prove to be independently plausible, and to map onto a plausible list of goods, the explanatory claim that when some capacity is essential to human nature exercises of it are prudentially valuable precisely for this reason remains dubious. For critical discussion of this latter claim see Dorsey (2010, pp.64-8). 36 On this point see Haybron (2007, pp.16-9), Hurka (1993, pp.17-8), and Sumner (1995, pp.23-24 and pp. 78-80). 158 going for me should be taken to be species-relative in the way perfectionists claim. Someone like Kraut may see this as the only way to explain why, although the good-for relation is always the same, what is good for a particular organism varies depending on the comparison class. However, we need not accept either the claim that there is only one good-for relation, or the claim that the only way to make sense of certain goods as accessible only to humans is in terms of some kind-relative notion of goodness. 37 These positions require independent grounding. In the absence of compelling arguments for them, the worry that perfectionists are zeroing in on the wrong target remains pressing. The above reflections should make us doubt that a perfectionist account of the attitudeindependent prudential goods is the best way to go. The perfectionist approach, we have seen, is most plausible when it is not challenged to articulate what the content of human nature is. This might suggest that the perfectionist would do better to remain non-committal on the issue of what the relevant human capacities are. Perhaps, that is, we can be confident that there is a human nature even without knowing anything concrete about what makes it up. The perfectionist about attitude-independent prudential goods, understood in this light, is saying only that, whatever turns out to be substantively good for humans, the explanation of this goodness will be some generic fact about human nature. There is less to object to in such a minimal characterization of the perfectionist commitment, if only because it is so vague. However, what such an approach gains in plausibility it forfeits in explanatory power. Little to no theoretical work is being done by the appeal to human nature at this stage, it seems. What is more, I see no 37 For extended criticisms of Kraut's claim that there is only one good-for relation see Behrends (2011) and Rosati (2009). No objectivist would deny that certain attitude-independent goods are only accessible to beings with certain capacities. The requisite capacities may, in turn, be ones that only humans have, and in this sense, we may characterize the corresponding goods themselves as 'distinctively human'. It does not follow that the explanation of why these things are good for human beings must appeal to the capacities that are distinctive of or essential to our species. See Arneson (2010, pp.737-8) for a defense of this point. I will discuss this matter at greater length in Chapter 5. 159 reason to assume in advance that if something is an attitude-independent prudential good its goodness must be explicable in even these minimally perfectionist terms. This is something that should be discovered (or not) by considering the various candidate goods. Although nothing we have said above constitutes a knockdown objection to the perfectionist approach, the various thorny problems it faces make pursuing an alternative account reasonable. This is what I will do below. 4.9 The Objective List and the Explanatory Question On rejecting the perfectionist framework, there are at least two distinct ways in which a believer in attitude-independent prudential goods might proceed. One avenue, mentioned above, simply denies that we can offer any informative, non-trivial explanation of why the things that are substantively good for people are so. When asked why thing x is good for person P, that is, we can only respond that it possesses attitude-independent prudential value. There is no deeper or more fundamental evaluative fact explaining why certain things have prudential value for a person. I will call this the primitivist approach to the substantive prudential goods. I believe even the primitivist approach should not be understood as wholly abandoning the project of answering the explanatory question. 38 This becomes clearer when it is considered in the context of DHT. As we argued in Chapter 1, this theory is best seen as giving a pluralistic answer to the explanatory question. Notice that this is still the case, even if DHT takes over the primitivist's response (as far as it goes) to the question of what explains the prudential value of the items of the objective list. For any thing x, we can still ask, 'what makes it the case that x is basically good for person P'? And the answer is still different in different cases. Sometimes we 38 On this point see Arneson (1999, pp.118-9). Although he here has the look of a primitivist, in Arneson (2010, pp.736-9) he appears to favour the locative account, which I turn to below. 160 have to appeal to the attitude-independent value of x, and sometimes we need only appeal to the fact that P has the right kind of desire for it. This much is common ground, whether we favour a perfectionist account of the prudential value of knowledge, friendship et al., a primitivist approach, or some other explanation. We can thus see that, at least when it comes to prudential values which have not yet been classified as either attitude-dependent or attitude-independent, there is some explanatory work being done even by the primitivist account. The more appropriate complaint, then, is that the explanation in this case stops earlier than the theorist has a right to expect. That said, explanations do need to come to an end somewhere. It is important as well to guard against potential misinterpretation. Some of what was said above may have led the reader to suppose that the primitivist is positing a distinct objective list for each person. Although I suppose that this is a possible view (that is, there might be attitudeindependent goods that are nonetheless not good for every person who possesses them) it is not the view under discussion, nor do I think it is tempting. The primitivist is thus still committed to the claim that the substantive prudential goods are good for individual people because they have the more general property of being good for any person who possesses them. DHT, of course, adds that other things are good for individual people because of their particular desires. So again, the two strands of DHT map on to two different sources of prudential value, one that is common to all persons and one that depends on a person's own pro-attitudes. This is shared ground whether we adopt a primitivist or a perfectionist approach. Other things being equal, theories that are explanatorily deeper are doubtless to be preferred. It is thus worth exploring whether the fact that certain things have the property of being good for any person who possesses them can be plausibly grounded in more fundamental facts. If there is a story to tell here which is not susceptible to the objections that perfectionism 161 faces, but which nonetheless offers more explanatory depth than the primitivist approach, we will have good reason to favour it. Fortunately, we do not have to start from scratch in formulating such an alternative. On the approach I have in mind, the presence of attitude-independent prudential goods is explained in terms of facts about what has a specific type of objective, non-prudential value. When it comes to such things as knowledge, pleasure, friendship, achievement, virtue, and autonomy, this view holds that these things are good for me because a) they are good simpliciter and b) they bear the right sort of relation to me. 39 I follow recent practice in calling this the locative account of attitude-independent prudential value. 40 The locative account, although long ignored, has had prominent defenders both historically and among recent theorists. 41 Where the approach suggested here differs is that it would take the locative account to be just one part of the truth about prudential value. This difference helps in addressing some of the objections to this account. Both aspects of the locative account, as set out above, demand clarification. With respect to (a) the question is how we should understand the type of value that is being invoked to explain why a given thing x is good for a given person P. It is interesting to note that the locative account breaks with the perfectionist approach only on this point. Perfectionists hold that for something 39 It is, of course, a burden on the defender of such a view to capture the essential relationality of prudential values. If one rejects subjective necessity, as I have argued we should, this seems to become an even greater challenge. There is, after all, a sense in which subjectivist accounts have the relationality already built in (and we could perhaps say the same about a Kraut-style perfectionist account). I consider this challenge further below. 40 This name for the account originates, I believe, in Kraut (2007, p.84). Kraut there launches an impressive fusillade against the view, which is continued in Kraut (2011). I consider some of his objections below, but the initial point to keep in mind is that his attack is squarely focused on approaches which take the locative account to be the whole truth about prudential value. The view considered here therefore escapes much of his fire. Fletcher (2012) defends what he calls the 'Locative Analysis of good for'. Although I reject the account as an analysis of the relation or concept, much of what Fletcher argues in his paper can be taken on board here, if it is taken instead as an explanation of why there is an objective list, and why it contains the entries that it does. 41 See Moore (1903, p.99), Ross (1930, p.151), Fletcher (2012), McDaniel (2014). 162 to be good for a person, it must make the person's life a better instance of a human life. Thus, they are taking prudential goodness to be fundamentally related to goodness of a kind (which seems itself to be a kind of objective, non-prudential value). Accordingly, the perfectionist and the locative accounts both share the following broad schema: When it comes to such things as knowledge, pleasure, friendship, and achievement, these things are good for a person because a) they have some kind of objective, non-prudential value and b) they bear the right sort of relation to the person. Call this the locative schema. If we do not go the perfectionist route because of the problems outlined in the last section, then we must think carefully about how to understand goodness simpliciter, so that this way of filling out the locative schema does not face similar objections. With respect to (b), we surely need to say something about what the relation is that must obtain between an objectively good thing and a person, if this thing is also to be good for this person. If the locative account proves unable to give a plausible answer to these questions, we may well be justified in staying with either a perfectionist or a primitivist approach. There are reasons to be optimistic about the locative account's ability to discharge its obligations with respect to the above questions, however. First, let me address the issue of how to understand the objective non-prudential value to which the locative theorist is appealing. One likely explanation for the disfavour into which the locative account has fallen is the fact that its most prominent early defender, G.E. Moore, combined it with a controversial commitment to goodness simpliciter as a non-natural, unanalyzable property. 42 Skepticism about Moorean goodness has tended to discredit the locative view by association. However, the commitment to goodness simpliciter that is required by the locative account is not a commitment to absolute goodness, understood in the Moorean way. 42 Moore (1903). 163 As Guy Fletcher highlights, in the course of his recent defense of a locative analysis, employing the notion of goodness simpliciter to help understand prudential goodness does not rule out a buck-passing or fitting attitude analysis of the former. 43 The locative account assumes that there is some such notion, but it is neutral with respect to whether it can be reduced to other, perhaps more naturalistically acceptable, terms. Granting that even the claim that the concept of goodness simpliciter is meaningful and useful is subject to dispute, the commitments of the locative account are thus more modest than one might have thought. We must then ask what a bare commitment to goodness simpliciter does amount to. In general, in attempting to shed light a given evaluative property, a fruitful strategy is to point to the kinds of attitudes that the presence of that property makes appropriate or fitting. 44 In the case of goodness simpliciter, the following claim is plausible: If x is good simpliciter, then x is such that it is fitting for every agent to favour it (where the generic notion of favouring encompasses both having various pro-attitudes towards x and acting in various ways with respect to it). If one holds that there is at least one x that satisfies the above conditions, then one is committed to the existence of goodness simpliciter (as I understand it). What, then, does this have to do with attitude-independent prudential value? The locative account proposes that what makes it the case that some things are good for person P independently of P's pro-attitudes is, in part, that these things are good simpliciter. That is, the things that have attitude-independent value for P are things that it would be fitting for everyone (including P) to favour. This is a plausible claim with respect to each of the substantive goods canvassed above. Of course, the 43 Fletcher (2012, p.14 fn. 46). 44 I am not here proposing a reductive analysis of goodness or any other evaluative concept in terms of fitting attitudes. I am pessimistic about the prospects for such analyses, although nothing I say here is incompatible with such a project. 164 proponent of the locative account will need to say more, insofar as there are things that it would be fitting for everyone (including P) to favour that are manifestly not good for P specifically. Attitude-independent prudential value is goodness simpliciter with something extra added. It is to that something extra which we now turn. Prudential value is a fundamentally relational type of goodness. 45 This makes it incumbent on the defender of a locative approach to the attitude-independent prudential goods to provide a plausible characterization of the relation that must obtain between some objectively good thing and a person, if it is to be good for that person. Fortunately, I believe there is a satisfactory account of this sort already on offer. This is that provided by Fletcher. 46 He stipulates that for some objective good G to be good for some person X, G must be essentially related to X. This relationality clause imposes the following three conditions: "1.G requires the existence of X in order to be the case. 2. G cannot persist in the absence of X. 3. G could not be the case without being X's." 47 I believe these conditions do an adequate job of distinguishing between goodness simpliciter and attitude-independent prudential value. Only if something is both good simpliciter, and related to X in the above ways, does it possess attitude-independent goodness for X. We have discussed the following substantive prudential goods: knowledge, pleasure, virtue, certain interpersonal bonds, achievement, and autonomy. When these goods are instantiated in a 45 Rosati (2006, 2008, and 2009) develops this point most fully, in a series of fascinating papers. 46 Fletcher (2012). The reader will note that I am here only borrowing the third clause of Fletcher's purported analysis. The full analysis only succeeds by appealing to the very slippery notion of agentrelative reasons for attitudes, and for that reason alone I would be loath to accept it. Again, I do not claim to be analyzing anything here. 47 Ibid. (p.5). It should be noted that Fletcher's relationality clause (that is, his way of filling out the second part of the locative schema), could also be combined with a different account of the kind of nonprudential value involved. 165 person's life, they do seem in every case to meet the above conditions. Take, for instance, Samantha's achievement of writing a brilliant poem. 48 Insofar as it is Samantha's achievement in writing the poem (as opposed to the mere fact that the poem exists and was written by somebody) that is basically good for Samantha, this good cannot exist if Samantha does not exist, or without being Samantha's. Taken in this light, the locative account is compatible with the view that everything that is good simpliciter is essentially related to some welfare subject. Thus, in appealing to this type of value we are not committing ourselves to the existence of goods that are impersonal in the sense that they float free of individual's lives. This goes some way towards allaying the worries of skeptics about Moorean goodness like Kraut. 49 The locative account does not need to be metaphysically extravagant. It also need take no side on the issue of whether goodness simpliciter is itself a reason-providing property (as noted above, it is compatible with a buckpassing analysis). Insofar as the belief in the reason-providing powers of this sort of goodness appears to be the real target of Kraut's attack, the locative account is untouched by his critique. The locative account is not being presented here as the whole truth about prudential value. It would, indeed, be implausible to hold that everything that is good for a person must also be good simpliciter. Prudential value is evidently relational in a deeper way than the locative view alone can capture. This is, I think, precisely because of the role that the person's own proattitudes play, in conferring prudential value upon their objects. It would be strange to claim that things which inherit all their prudential value from one person's desires are thereby also objectively valuable, in the sense that it is fitting for every other person to favour them. DHT can accommodate the fact that some things that are good for people are relational in this deeper 48 See Arneson (1999, p.136). 49 Kraut (2011). 166 sense, which the locative account alone does not capture. It merely adds that there are also things that are good for a person just because they are good simpliciter and this person is suitably related to them. DHT thus incorporates both robustly objectivist and robustly subjectivist elements, without losing sight of the essential relationality of prudential value in either case. It does suggest that this relationality admits of a stronger and a weaker form, depending on the nature of the good in question. Yet this seems plausible. The locative account boasts a further advantage. Many have found the relation between goodness simpliciter and goodness for a person so mysterious as to justify banning one or the other from philosophy. 50 Others, less extreme, have nonetheless claimed that one of these notions is wholly reducible to the other. Although the drive to simplify our ethical theories by minimizing the fundamental notions relied upon is an understandable one, I believe both notions play important roles. The partially locative account of prudential value considered here, if correct, entails that we cannot do without either type of goodness, or fully reduce either one to the other. If the proper explanation of why some of the things that are basic constituents of prudential value are so appeals to goodness simpliciter, we cannot discard the latter notion without misunderstanding the former. If other things that are basic constituents of prudential value are so for quite different reasons, unrelated to goodness simpliciter, we also need not fear that the former notion will collapse into the latter. I cannot claim to have established such an ambitious conclusion here, but I have tried to show that such a partially locative approach has some appealing features. If nothing else, I hope this will encourage further exploration of the relationship between goodness for and goodness simpliciter. 50 The enemies of goodness simpliciter include, besides those already mentioned, Geach (1956), Foot (1985), and Thomson (1994). On the other side, again see Brewer (2009) and Hurka (1988 and 1993). 167 The main goal of this section was to establish the locative account as a reasonable approach to the attitude-independent goods. My somewhat tentative suggestion is that, when it comes to providing an explanatory grounding for DHT's objectivist strand, it is the most promising approach. Still, if the reader is sympathetic to the broader disjunctive hybrid framework but prefers one of the other alternatives, I do not insist upon this last claim. 4.10 Conclusion This concludes the general exposition and defense of the new, inclusive theory of prudential value I call DHT. In the fifth and final chapter of this dissertation, I address some of the outstanding challenges that the disjunctive hybrid theorist must still grapple with. I also consider DHT's implications for some specific puzzles about prudential value. 168 Chapter 5: A Potpourri of Issues and Implications 5.1 Introduction I have so far left various pressing challenges for DHT unaddressed. Insofar as the theory defended in this dissertation is in many ways a novel one, it was necessary to spend a fair bit of time establishing its general structure, and developing its two distinct strands, before we could proceed to tackle the finer details. The goal of this chapter is to tie up these theoretical loose ends, and to answer some of the questions that have most probably occurred to the reader. I begin by reflecting on the form that the negative side of a disjunctive hybrid approach should take. Historically, philosophers of well-being have often treated the identification of the basic constituents of prudential value as exhausting their task. However, this is to leave the issue of what the prudential bads are unsettled. The importance of supplementing whatever account of well-being one favours with an account of ill-being has recently been pressed by Shelly Kagan. 1 Although one could in principle accept DHT's positive claims without committing to any specific account of prudential disvalue, I here take up Kagan's challenge on behalf of the disjunctive hybrid theorist. If we supplement DHT with an account of prudential disvalue designed to mirror the positive side of the story as closely as possible, we are led to some interesting conclusions. In particular, this approach implies that cases where the same thing (indeed, the very same feature of the same thing) simultaneously possesses both basic prudential value and basic prudential disvalue are possible. Although this may initially sound paradoxical, 1 The term 'ill-being' is itself taken from Kagan (2014). Kagan's paper is thus far the most sustained treatment of the subject. The issue of what desire-satisfactionists, in particular, should say about ill-being is discussed at some length in Tully (2017), and more briefly in Heathwood (2015), Lin (2016), Lukas (2010), Sarch (2013), and Skow (2009). 169 if we are careful in how we formulate our claims, such cases do not constitute a compelling objection to this extension of DHT. This last point leads to another question, namely; how are we to assess the comparative value of the disparate prudential goods (and now bads) that a disjunctive hybrid approach recognizes, so that we can make reasonable trade-offs between them? My response here is in line with that which any other enumerative pluralist might offer. Any proposed systematic ordering of the various basic constituents of prudential value (and disvalue) is, on such a pluralist view, going to come out as implausible. In the case of DHT, it does not matter for such comparisons whether what explains why something is prudentially valuable is that it is the object of the right kind of desire, or that it has attitude-independent value. Which of two prudentially valuable things is better for a person is a question that can only be settled by paying careful attention to the specificities of the case, rather than via some general appeal to the kinds of goods involved, or to the way in which their prudential goodness is explained. Some may object that such an approach does not satisfy one of the desiderata for an adequate theory of prudential value, in that it fails to provide a standard metric for comparing the value of distinct prudential goods. Although I admit that if we could find a plausible metric of this sort that would be all the better, we should not be optimistic that one is forthcoming. DHT is in any case preferable to an account that imports an implausible metric, or that leaves out certain intuitive goods and twists the shape of the ones it does recognize, in pursuit of theoretical simplicity. Finally, I consider the application of DHT to a pair of ongoing debates. One interesting issue, which we have so far touched on only briefly, concerns how to deal with welfare-subjects other than adult humans. DHT at once allows for a fair amount of enumerative and explanatory 170 convergence in its approach to the well-being of different kinds of welfare subjects, without eliding the important differences between such subjects. It can thus deliver intuitively plausible results when so applied, which, we will see, distinguishes it from some other popular theories. The question of what makes a life meaningful (and of how meaning in life is related to prudential value) has also been a hot topic in recent years. DHT allows us to offer an appealing gloss on the relation between meaning in life and prudential value. The substantive prudential goods, it can say, are also what introduce meaning into a person's life. DHT can thus secure a close connection between meaning in life and prudential value, while maintaining the intuitive independence of these notions. For meaning cannot simply be equated with prudential value, insofar as only some of the things that are good for a person possess attitude-independent value. These are but two examples of the potential of DHT to provide new and illuminating perspectives on vexed debates. I believe there are many other questions in ethics that we could apply this theory to, with similarly fruitful results. However, I stop here for now, in the hope that I have sufficiently illustrated DHT's appeal, and so laid the groundwork for such future explorations. 5.2 The Disjunctive Hybrid Theory of Ill-Being The best explanation of why philosophers have given short shrift to the question of what makes a person's life go badly, is that they have been assuming that the negative side of the story would straightforwardly reflect the positive side. Suppose, for instance, that one is a hedonist. Although the claim that pain is the only basic prudential bad does not fall out immediately from the claim that pleasure is the only basic prudential good, it does follow quite naturally. 2 Suppose, instead, 2 That said, even with respect to hedonism, things may not be so clear-cut. It is true that hedonists sometimes treat pain and pleasure as simply opposed mental states. But there are manifestly unpleasant 171 that one holds that the basic constituents of prudential value are all those states of affairs that the person has the right kind of desire for. Again, it might seem that the account of prudential disvalue will simply mirror the positive account, so that the desire-satisfactionist need not devote any special attention to this matter. However, by now things have already become more complicated. This is because there are at least two, quite different, strategies for constructing a theory of ill-being that could complement desire-satisfactionism about well-being. 3 The first, and the more popular, is what I will call the frustration approach. 4 Just as the account of prudential value focuses on desire-satisfaction, this view holds that the account of prudential value should focus on desire-frustration. P's desire for x is satisfied if and only if x obtains, and frustrated if and only if x fails to obtain. The frustration approach says that whereas the satisfaction of the desire for x is basically good for P (provided the desire is of the right kind), the frustration of this desire is basically bad for P. This approach strikes me as implausible. Admittedly, desire-satisfactionism does imply that, insofar as the states of affairs that one desires do not obtain, one's life does not go as well as it would have had they obtained. Desire-frustration is thus clearly worse than desire-satisfaction. However, the absence of prudential value does not yet amount to the presence of prudential disvalue. Intuitively, the lack of desire-satisfaction (which is all that I mean by desire-frustration) mental states that we would not ordinarily call painful (consider a persistent itch). Perhaps, instead, we should take the opposite of pleasure to be displeasure, with pain as just one sub-type of the latter. 3 Kagan (2014, p.268-72) identifies the same two options. Where he differs is on the question of which way the desire-satisfactionist should go. However, note that Kagan's only objection to what I will call the aversion approach (an objection which I consider later in this chapter) is that, when combined with desire-satisfactionism's positive account, it allows for the same feature of the same state of affairs to be both basically prudentially bad and basically prudentially good. As I will argue below, this does not constitute a serious objection to an approach to the prudential goods and bads. 4 In the recent literature, Heathwood (2015), Lin (2016), Lukas (2010) and Tully (2017) favour this approach. 172 seems to be just such an absence. Moreover, it is easy enough to explain why one's life goes better when one's desires are satisfied without positing that their frustration is bad in itself. Here we must not to be misled by terminology. Frustration, where this is understood as a type of mental state, is clearly prudentially disvaluable. But in the present context 'frustration' no more connotes a negatively valenced mental state than 'satisfaction' connotes a positively valenced one. If we suppose that I could be plugged into a machine that would produce in me 50 new desires, none of which are satisfied, it indeed seems that plugging in would make my life worse. However, this is only because the addition of so many unsatisfied desires would, almost inevitably, cause me to experience certain unpleasant mental states. If we stipulate that undergoing this procedure does not cause any displeasure, the claim that plugging in negatively impacts my well-being is no longer compelling. In sum, the view that desire frustration is a substantive prudential bad is not well-supported. There is a more plausible way for the desire-satisfactionist to proceed, which I will call the aversion approach. The aversion approach identifies as basically prudentially bad, not the failure of states of affairs that one desires to obtain, but the obtaining of states of affairs that one is averse to. Aversion is here identified as whatever the negative attitudinal counterpart of desire is (we do not need to settle the question of the exact nature of this attitude). The strategy, then, is quite straightforward. We are merely switching a pro-attitude for the corresponding con-attitude, and in doing so the prudential valence of the state of affairs at which the attitude is directed is also switched. This approach to ill-being thus mirrors desire-satisfactionism's approach to wellbeing in an intuitive and orderly fashion. Of course, we are interested in DS* as one strand of DHT, rather than in desiresatisfactionism as a complete account of prudential value. If we now formulate the aversion 173 approach so that it reflects DS*, so construed, it tells us that some of the things that are basically bad for P are so just because P has the right kind of aversion to them. We must still specify what is required for an aversion to be of the right kind. I believe the most plausible position is that the prudentially relevant aversions are all those that are intrinsic rather than instrumental, and that satisfy the identification constraint. The case for restricting the aversions that matter to how well off one is in these two ways (and in no other way) is the same as that for placing similar constraints on desires. I will not rehearse it again, but will only reiterate that aversions (no less than desires) must genuinely reflect what a person cares about if they are to have independent prudential relevance. The subjectivist strand of the disjunctive hybrid approach to prudential disvalue is now before us. Insofar as the theory of prudential value has a robustly objectivist strand, we can reasonably expect that prudential disvalue will also have attitude-independent elements. And yet the task of identifying these attitude-independent elements of ill-being is not a straightforward one. It does not seem that we can simply flip the story we gave about the prudential goods, if only because some of those we have identified don't have any intuitive negative correlate. Still, although the reflections that follow are somewhat piecemeal, there are good grounds for holding that there is an objective list on the negative side of the prudential value ledger as well, and for placing certain items on it. Some of the items on the list of attitude-independent prudential goods are easier to match with negative counterparts than others. Recall that the substantive goods proposed in the last chapter were as follows: pleasure, knowledge, achievement, certain interpersonal bonds, autonomy, and virtue. The first and last entries on this list are the most amenable to such treatment. In the case of pleasure, the natural move is to follow the hedonist and take pain to be 174 the equivalent prudential bad. And indeed, pain is as plausible a candidate for basic prudential disvalue as anything. Virtue, meanwhile, has its own intuitive mirror image in the form of vice. Once again, the view that vice is a prudential as well as a moral evil is independently attractive. So far, then, we do intuitively have substantive prudential bads corresponding to each good. However, the other four entries on our objective list are more challenging, if what we are after is a theory of ill-being that neatly reflects the positive account. Kagan proposes that ""the state in which you believe P even though P is false and you are believing in the face of overall evidence to the contrary" is basically prudentially bad.5 I agree that this claim is, in many cases, plausible. This could perhaps afford us the negative counterpart of knowledge. However, matters are complicated by the fact that, in other instances, being in such an epistemic state seems at most instrumentally, as opposed to finally, prudentially disvaluable. It thus appears that we need to factor in what one's belief is about. Having unjustified false beliefs about the fundamental nature of the world and one's relationship to it is intuitively bad for one, and not only instrumentally. Having unjustified false beliefs about wholly trivial matters, by contrast, is plausibly not bad for one at all. Moreover, having false beliefs about the fundamental nature of the world and one's relationship to it is plausibly bad for one even if one's beliefs are justified. Considerations of truth and falsity and considerations of justification thus seem to have independent intuitive significance, and their interplay is bound to be quite complicated. For there are various distinct epistemic states in this range that we now must give an account of. If knowledge has basic prudential value, it is plausible that states that fall just short of knowledge (that is, certain cases of unjustified true belief and justified false belief) also have some value, especially where the state falls short of knowledge through no fault 5 Kagan (2014, p.281). 175 of the agent. At least, we would not want to say that such states are all prudentially disvaluable, if for no other reason than that, if this were the case, a sure way to avoid allowing such prudential evils into one's life would be to refrain from forming any beliefs. This is evidently not a good strategy. Except for the point about the object of one's belief, the above issues all arise from the fact that knowledge is what Kagan calls a 'structured good', in that it requires that several distinct conditions, whose obtaining is independent of each other, be met. 6 For any such good, there is a burden on us to say how states that meet some but not all these conditions are to be viewed. We might wonder, for instance, how unjustified true belief and justified false belief compare, and whether one of these is always worse than the other. I do not pretend to know how to provide a prudential ranking of epistemic states, nor am I optimistic that we can do so even in principle, except on a case by case basis. Perhaps the most we can say with confidence is that at least some instances of false belief are basically prudentially bad, and that this badness is exacerbated where the false beliefs in question are a) unjustified, and b) about maximally general, deep aspects of reality. A state of false belief that meets these conditions is, if you like, the opposite of the basic prudential good of knowledge. Achievement is likewise a structured good. Minimally, it requires setting oneself a goal, taking certain steps to bring about that goal, and succeeding in exerting one's will on the world in this way. The first two conditions can clearly be met in the absence of the third (remember our old friend Joan). Although both knowledge and achievement are structured goods, and thus inherit some of the same complexities, it is even more difficult to locate a plausible negative counterpart to the latter. Insofar as achievement has an intuitive opposite, it is failure. But we do 6 Ibid. (2014, pp. 281-2). 176 not, I think, want to say that failure is basically prudential bad. On the contrary, attempting to achieve some goal but failing to do so seems, at least in many cases, to be prudentially valuable, even if it is less good for one than succeeding in attaining one's goal (again think of Joan). Certainly, if we compare failing in some worthwhile endeavour to not attempting it at all, I doubt many of us would judge that the person who does not even make the effort is better off. Achievement essentially involves the successful exercise of one's practical agency in pursuit of some end. Perhaps, then, to the extent that there is a corresponding prudential bad, it is neglect of one's agential capacities. Yet even this is best seen not as a substantive prudential evil but as the absence of, not just achievement itself, but also the subsidiary prudential goods involved in pursuing one's goals. We thus have both an interesting parallel between knowledge and achievement, and an apparent disanalogy. The value of knowledge and the value of achievement are both related to the successful exercise of agency (in the one case theoretical and in the other practical). However, at least in many cases, unsuccessful exercises of theoretical agency seem to be substantive prudential bads. This can be due either to a lack of justification or to a lack of fit with the world. Yet nothing similar seems to be true in the case of practical agency. Indeed, I cannot find a basic prudential bad corresponding to the basic good of achievement at all. I am also not able to identify plausible prudential bads corresponding to friendship or to romantic and familial love. The natural move would be to take bad relationships (toxic friendships, dysfunctional familial relations, codependent romantic entanglements) to be basic constituents of ill-being. However, although these sorts of relationships often do make a person's life all-things-considered worse, this does not require us to identify the relationships themselves (as opposed to their various harmful effects) as substantive bads. Moreover, the view that it is 177 better for a person to have even toxic friendships, dysfunctional familial relations, and codependent romantic affairs than to have none of these things is a plausible one. Yet this does not square well with the claim that these are prudential bads (as opposed to inferior or degraded instances of prudential goods). If we think that one is better off having even bad interpersonal relationships than having no close interpersonal bonds, we might suppose that the basic prudential bad is instead the absence of such relationships. But again, this is to falsely equate the absence from one's life of certain prudential goods with the presence in it of prudential evils. In the case of autonomy, it seems more likely that there is a substantive prudential bad in the vicinity. If we consider again the deferential wife, the fact that she is so dominated by her husband intuitively reflects not just the absence of the prudential good of autonomy but the presence of a basic prudential bad. Her circumstances, after all, are distinctly destructive of her identity and self-respect. Following standard English usage, we may call the prudential evil in this case heteronomy, where this should be understood to encompass not only external barriers to self-realization and self-respect but also internal, psychological ones. The upshot of the preceding discussion is that there are fewer identifiable prudential bads than there are goods. We listed six attitude-independent prudential goods in the previous chapter. We have so far only been able to pinpoint four corresponding bads, namely pain, vice, some kinds of false belief, and heteronomy. There may be others, but it does not seem that we will be able to read them off from the positive account. It would, of course, have been neater and more convenient if we could present treatments of well-being and ill-being that were perfect mirror images. That said, one cannot reasonably impose this as a desideratum that the disjunctive hybrid approach, or any other approach to this topic, must meet. One of the recurring themes of this dissertation is that, when it comes to prudential value (and now disvalue), the truth is sometimes 178 messy. We must not overvalue theoretical simplicity, if this comes at the cost of getting things right. Rather than straining to make the negative and positive sides of our account correspond to each other more precisely, it is therefore better to push forward with the provisional list of attitude-independent prudential bads we now have in hand (allowing that we may find other intuitively plausible candidates, or need to refine the existing ones). 7 This, then, roughly constitutes the objectivist strand of a disjunctive hybrid approach to prudential disvalue. 5.3 Kagan's Worry Now that we have both strands of a disjunctive hybrid approach to ill-being before us, we can combine them with DHT itself to give a complete picture of the prudential landscape. An interesting, and perhaps surprising, consequence that emerges is that the same feature of the same thing can simultaneously be (basically) prudentially valuable and (basically) prudentially disvaluable. Kagan claims that this result is so troubling as to provide grounds for rejecting any approach to the prudential goods and bads that implies it. In this section I consider Kagan's worry, and argue that it shows only that we must be careful in how we understand the claims of the disjunctive hybrid approach. It does not constitute a compelling objection to this (or any other) treatment of prudential value and disvalue. There are at least two distinct ways in which such a situation can arise on our approach. First, one can have the right kind of desire for something that is a basic prudential bad. The rejection of any kind of substantive value constraint on the content of the desires that are relevant to one's 7 We should, moreover, allow that there may be entries on the negative side of the prudential ledger that have no counterpart on the positive side (just as there seem to be certain basic prudential goods that cannot be matched with corresponding bads). I cannot here think of a plausible candidate, but I do not wish to preclude this possibility. 179 well-being is what allows for this. DHT is committed to accommodating the subjectivist insight, according to which in caring about something (sufficiently and in the right way) a person can confer prudential value upon it. In rejecting objective necessity, it says that this is so even if the object of one's desire lacks any antecedent value. Once the theory has gone this far, it has no principled grounds for denying that one's desires can confer prudential value even upon objects that are substantively disvaluable. If we compare a case where the object of one's desire is neither independently valuable nor independently disvaluable with one in which it has some slight amount of attitude-independent disvalue (and hold all else constant), it is implausible to hold that in the first case there is some attitude-dependent prudential value conferred and in the second there is none. We should therefore concede this point. Insofar as we hold that the substantive badness of (some feature of) a state of affairs, and one's having the right sort of desire for it, are independent sources of (respectively) prudential disvalue and prudential value, it follows that cases where (the same feature of) the same state of affairs is at once prudentially bad and prudentially good are possible. Recall that we also placed no substantive constraints on the contents of one's prudentially relevant aversions. It thus seems that one can also confer prudential disvalue upon any object by having the right kind of aversion toward it. In cases where the object of one's aversion has attitude-independent prudential value (and I again see no principled reason to rule out such cases), we will again have to say that this object is at once basically prudentially good and basically prudentially bad. The specter thus arises of the disjunctive hybrid approach issuing conflicting verdicts in certain situations. Suppose that one of David's most central desires is to see his bitter business rival Joshua come to ruin, precisely so that he may rub Joshua's failure in his face. David does 180 not himself take any steps to bring about Joshua's downfall, but only because he fears the repercussions. Nonetheless, at long last a stroke of good fortune hits, and Joshua loses most of his money to a sophisticated email scam. It seems that twisting the knife on his rival in this case is, in some respect, good for David. After all, in doing so he is satisfying one of his fondest desires (that is why it made sense to call Joshua's misfortune a stroke of good luck, from David's perspective). Once objective necessity is denied, it is difficult not to conclude that the satisfaction of David's desire is at least pro tanto good for him. However, the desired state of affairs (namely, David's tormenting of Joshua) may simultaneously be pro tanto bad for David. Torturing a fellow human being in this way is a paradigm case of a vicious action. If we were correct in the previous chapter in identifying vice as a substantive prudential bad, we thus have an instance of a state of affairs that is at once a basic prudential bad and a basic prudential good (due to the very same feature). To illustrate the other side of the apparent problem, we can return to the case of Jill discussed in Chapter 4. Recall that Jill is in a loving, committed, mutually supportive and rewarding romantic relationship with Jacqueline. However, she has been brought up to believe that such relationships are sinful. We can, it seems, imagine that Jill not only does not desire to be in this relationship, but is actually averse to her romantic involvement with Jacqueline. It does not seem to follow that being in this otherwise healthy relationship has no prudential value. Yet there is clearly also prudential disvalue in being in a romantic relationship to which one is averse. Jill's relationship with Jacqueline thus seems to be at once basically prudentially valuable and basically prudentially disvaluable. 181 Kagan protests that "the idea that a single feature of a single object could be both intrinsically good and intrinsically bad for you simultaneously" 8 is intuitively unacceptable, so that any approach that implies it is a non-starter. Although presented as an objection to the aversion approach, if Kagan is correct that this is an unpalatable consequence, it also serves as an objection to our disjunctive hybrid treatment of the prudential goods and bads. And this is so regardless of whether we take our cue from the aversion approach or from the frustration approach. In either case, we must allow for situations in which the (same feature of) the same object is simultaneously a basic constituent of prudential value and a basic constituent of prudential disvalue. The worry here is overblown. For notice that nothing prevents the disjunctive hybrid approach from delivering a verdict about whether a given state of affairs is all things considered prudentially valuable or disvaluable, in cases like the two above. This will have to be done by comparing the degree of prudential value or disvalue arising from one's desire or aversion (a function presumably of the intensity of the desire or aversion, along with other factors such as its duration) with the attitude-independent prudential badness or goodness of the object. In some cases, it may be that these will cancel each other out, so that the object of the relevant proor con-attitude is all things considered prudentially neutral. More often, one or the other side will outweigh the other. In such cases the prudential value or disvalue that is outweighed does not cease to exist, and so the state of affairs remains pro tanto prudentially bad even if it is all things considered prudentially good (or vice versa). Responding to Kagan's challenge thus requires only that we take careful note of the distinction between pro tanto and all things considered prudential value and disvalue. I concede 8 Kagan (2014, pp. 270-1). 182 that if our account ever gave the result that the same feature of the same state of affairs is both an all things considered prudential good and an all things considered prudential evil this would be a damning indictment of it. However, this is not something the disjunctive hybrid approach need ever say. It is committed only to the view that states of affairs that have pro tanto prudential value can also have pro tanto disvalue. This is not so surprising, nor does it constitute a serious problem for the account, provided it can render plausible verdicts about what is all things considered best for a person. 5.4 The Question of Weighing If the disjunctive hybrid approach is to deliver any all things considered verdicts at all, it must be possible to compare the prudential value of distinct states of affairs, including sometimes comparing attitude-independent prudential goods with those that are grounded in the person's desires. The process of making such comparisons is liable to be a complicated and inexact one, but alas that is par for the course in the evaluative domain. Still, we surely do want the theory to render clear and definitive overall judgments in at least some cases, if only where one or the other verdict is intuitively obvious. There are times when we do know what is all things considered best for a person, and the disjunctive hybrid account had best accommodate this fact. The alternative would be to remain at the level of pro tanto judgments, and in every case to stay silent on the issue of how the various prudential goods and bads trade off against each other. This is an unappealing resting place. Some degree of comparability is thus assumed by the disjunctive hybrid approach as it is being developed here. Bear in mind that this is a very minimal assumption, however. All it requires is that there is a single scale of prudential value/disvalue, on which each prudentially good or bad thing falls somewhere. That does not yet tell us anything 183 about how to weigh these various goods and bads against each other. One temptation we should certainly resist is any claim to the effect that either one source of prudential value (attitude-dependent or attitude-independent) or one kind of attitude-independent prudential good (for instance, pleasure or virtue) always trumps another. Such a proposal may be especially alluring when we are faced with cases in which the same object has both attitudedependent prudential value and attitude-independent prudential disvalue (or vice versa). It is consistent with the denial of objective necessity (and even with the view that desires can confer prudential value on objects that are otherwise disvaluable) to hold that desires enter in as tiebreakers between states of affairs that are equal with respect to substantive value, but can never make the obtaining of the substantively worse state of affairs all things considered prudentially better. 9 The tie-breaking view clearly fails to accord sufficient prudential relevance to what a person cares about. Yet without going so far as to endorse this view, one could still hold that, although one can confer some pro tanto prudential value upon a state of affairs with attitudeindependent prudential disvalue, one can never make such a state of affairs all things considered good for one. And yet, even this position is unsustainable. Thus, suppose we compare two states of affairs, the first of which is substantively neutral, and the second of which possesses some small amount of attitude-independent prudential disvalue. If one of a person's central desires is that the latter state of affairs obtain, it is hard to believe that it would nonetheless be better for the person if the former obtained. We should be suspicious of such claims of lexical priority. The same point extends to comparisons between the various attitude-independent prudential goods themselves. 9 Bykvist (2010) expresses support for the tie-breaking view. Sobel (2016 [1997], p.70) discusses a similar view, according to which "the agent's preferences are (perhaps even) sufficient for determining her good in some contexts deemed matters of "mere taste" ...". 184 The key point to bear in mind is that all the prudential goods which DHT recognizes can be present in a life to wildly varying degrees. The defender of the view that one of them is lexically prior to any other must hold that any amount, however negligible, of the one always outweighs any amount, however large, of the other. Such a position proves untenable. It is worth mentioning here a closely related claim that may be tempting, even to those who reject the general priority of one source of (or kind of) prudential good over another. In a forthcoming paper, Theron Pummer points out that one of the consequences of a pluralist approach to prudential value is that lopsided lives are possible. 10 These are lives that instantiate certain goods to a very high degree, but are either very low or completely lacking in others. Pummer argues that the possibility of lopsided lives (he focuses particularly on those that are lacking in pleasure but high in other basic prudential goods) poses a problem for the enumerative pluralist. I will not discuss the details of the argument here, except to note that the problem Pummer points to only arises if one holds the view that the overall prudential value of any life that is sufficiently low in one of the prudential goods cannot exceed finite limit X. If the amount of this one prudential good in the life falls below some given magnitude (M), the claim is that this imposes a definite cap (X) on how good that life can be overall, regardless of how bounteous it may be in the other prudential goods. Indeed, even if we continue increasing the level of each of the other goods ad infinitum, the life's overall prudential value can never rise above X. We will call this the capping view. Pummer suggests that pluralists should find the capping view intuitive, at least in the case of pleasure. 11 I suspect he is right that, at a rough intuitive level, many do make such judgments. 10 Pummer (Forthcoming). 11 Ibid. 185 However, once we start to think more reflectively about the issue, I trust most of us will agree that this view is implausible. For, as Pummer points out, the capping view makes our verdicts about someone's overall well-being absurdly oversensitive to very small differences in the level of one specific good. 12 This is because, even though it makes no general claim about one prudential good being lexically prior to another, the capping view introduces such priority wherever the level of the specified good in a life falls below M, and the overall prudential value of the life reaches X. The priority asserted, moreover, is that of whatever amount of the one good would be sufficient to reach M (no matter how small this may be) over any amount of all the other goods combined. This is even less plausible than the general claim that a given good is lexically prior to some other. The lesson we should draw is that wherever a lexical element is introduced into our theorizing about prudential value, and however big a role it plays, it should be rejected. Pluralists should not see the fact that a life is low or even completely lacking in any one prudential good as imposing a cap on how good it can be overall for the person living it. We can, though, say that such a life could always be improved by the addition of the good in question (or by an increase in the amount of it). This should be enough for us. The above paragraphs predominantly served to rule out certain claims, namely general lexical priority and the capping claim. They told us little about how we should go about weighing either attitude-independent and attitude-dependent prudential values, or different kinds of attitude independent goods, against each other. I doubt that we can conclude very much in general about how to make such trade-offs. I am confident that no basic constituent of prudential value is lexically prior to any other, either in general or after some limiting point, for the reasons sketched above. I am also confident that there is no general priority of attitude-independent over 12 Ibid. 186 attitude-dependent values, or vice versa. Beyond this, however, confidence quickly runs out. We will always have to look at the particular instances of the prudential goods and bads in question, and decide on a case-by-case basis which outweighs the other. If the inexactitude that this introduces is taken to undermine the account, this is a fault that our approach shares, to some extent, with every other version of enumerative pluralism. Some, indeed, have taken such considerations to count very strongly in favour of enumerative monism. Thus, Ben Bradley argues as follows: "...[P]luralists must tell us, for example, how to compare the effect on well-being of a certain amount of pleasure with the effect of a certain amount of knowledge...To the extent that the pluralist refuses to tackle these questions she abandons the philosophical project of understanding well-being; she admits defeat. A theory that tells us that A, B, and C are intrinsically good, but does not tell us why those things are on the list or how to weigh them, does not give us what we initially wanted out of a theory of well-being. We wanted enlightenment, but we are provided instead with a list, and are told not to look any deeper. This is not theorizing, but a refusal to theorize. In what follows I will not treat pluralism as a distinct theory, since in the absence of a weighing principle, we do not have a theory with any testable implications at all." 13 Bradley's position here is a distinctly uncharitable one, however. Even if he is correct that the lack of a general principle for comparing the various prudential goods and bads is a relative drawback of pluralist approaches, this cannot constitute a decisive objection. For it may well be that, upon correct identification of the basic constituents of prudential value, we will find that they do not admit of such a standard metric. Surely, we cannot just stipulate that there must be one. Otherwise, we may allow ourselves to be led, by the antecedent conviction that any acceptable theory will include a comprehensive weighing principle, to an overly narrow account of the basic constituents of prudential value themselves. Moreover, it is not as if our approach denies that we can compare the value of the various goods it admits, or that there is always some 13 Bradley (2009, pp. 16-17). 187 right answer to the question of what is all things considered best for a person. It simply denies that in engaging in such comparisons, and seeking such answers, we can rely upon any one-sizefits-all principle. It is instructive to compare Bradley's objection to pluralist approaches to a common objection to the pluralist deontology of W.D. Ross. 14 Thus, some of Ross's critics complain that he does not offer a moral theory at all, but simply an unconnected heap of duties. 15 DHT (and pluralist theories of prudential value in general) may similarly be accused of providing only an unconnected heap of prudential goods. However, just as the truth about morality may be too complicated to be reduced to any single factor, the same may be true of prudential value. And just as on the Rossian view we can't say that one source of moral reasons always trumps another, but must consider all the morally relevant factors before we can know what our all things considered duty is, so we can't say that one source of prudential value or one kind of prudential good always trumps another. Rossian pluralism is, at the very least, a reasonable approach to the question of how our moral duties are determined. I don't see, then, how we can rule out in advance that a similarly complex web of considerations might need to be appealed to, in ascertaining what is all things considered best for a person. 5.5 DHT and the Well-Being of Other Beings One desideratum on any theory of prudential value is that it not issue implausible results when applied to welfare subjects other than adult humans. Eden Lin has recently argued that 14 As most fully developed in Ross (1930). 15 This way of phrasing the objection is borrowed from McNaughton (1996). For a brief but clear statement of this worry about Rossian pluralism see Heathwood (2007). Ross's prima facie duties are, of course, strictly speaking neither prima facie nor duties. Rather, they should be understood as distinct sources of moral reasons, all of which play a role in determining what one's actual duty is. 188 sophisticated versions of subjectivism (namely, those which appeal to pro-attitudes requiring a level of cognitive complexity that human infants and non-human animals appear to lack) are unable to satisfy this desideratum. 16 In this section I consider this objection, and show that even if it vitiates certain thoroughgoing subjectivist theories, it does not touch DHT. DHT not only survives the test cases of babies and animals unscathed, but gives more plausible results than several of its competitors. It is at least arguable whether all sentient beings have desires. Even if babies and most nonhuman animals do have desires of a comparatively crude sort, they do not plausibly possess anything like the more cognitively involved pro-attitudes that sophisticated subjectivists invoke. Such subjectivists thus seem to be backed into a corner, where they must choose between the absurd claim that nothing is prudentially valuable for beings that lack sufficiently sophisticated attitudes, or the unintuitive (and in other ways problematic) claim that their well-being is entirely discontinuous with ours. 17 DHT, insofar as it recognizes both attitude-dependent and attitude-independent prudential goods, can accommodate what seems right about sophisticated subjectivism without running into these problems. Recall that the subjectivist strand of DHT, DS*, incorporates an identification constraint on the desires it deems prudentially relevant. Although I do not wish to rule out that babies and some other animals may have desires that satisfy this constraint, it is evident that a being could be sentient (that is, could experience pleasure and pain) without having any such desires. Such beings clearly have a welfare, however. DS*, if considered by itself, would thus be susceptible to Lin's charge. However, we are not here considering DS* on its own, but as one 16 Lin (2015). 17 Again, see Lin (2015) for discussion of the implausible consequences that follow from this latter claim. 189 strand of DHT. It is therefore open to us to recognize only desires that satisfy the identification constraint as sources of attitude-dependent prudential value. So, long as there is at least one other source of prudential value, which is accessible to all sentient beings, the subjectivist strand of our theory introduces no new difficulties. The idea of value-conferring that plays such an important role in DHT as applied to adult humans will simply not enter into its treatment of animal and infant well-being, if these entities lack the relevant kind of desires. It is important to see that, insofar as DHT admits sensory pleasure as a distinct source of prudential value, it does not face objections of the sort that haunt thoroughgoing versions of sophisticated subjectivism. 18 One datum that any theory of prudential value should accommodate is that there is substantial overlap between the well-being of an adult human and that of a cat or of a human infant. DHT, in taking pleasures to be basic constituents of prudential value, can accommodate at least this degree of convergence between the well-being of adult humans and that of other welfare-subjects. When we reflect on what is good for our cats and our babies, we find that, just as pleasure is among the most immediately apparent constituents of our own wellbeing, it is also the primary, and perhaps the sole, constituent of infant and animal well-being. Moreover, at least when we consider the simplest sensory pleasures, they seem to be good for us in precisely the same way and for the same reason that they are good for these other sentient beings. Indeed, I believe part of the historical appeal of hedonism lies in its ability to capture this commonality. When it comes to sensory pleasure (and pain) all sentient creatures, regardless of cognitive sophistication, are in the same boat. 18 This is so whether pleasure is best understood as an attitude-independent prudential good or as reducible to desire-satisfaction. If the latter, we must simply extend the scope of DS* to include pleasures, as well as desires that satisfy the identification constraint. In any case, the status of pleasure as a basic prudential good is non-negotiable on any defensible version of DHT. 190 As to the other attitude-independent prudential goods that DHT recognizes, at least some of these items are plausibly only accessible to some welfare-subjects, and in certain cases only to adult humans. Note that this is a quite different claim from the perfectionist's assertion that prudential value is inherently kind-relative. If friendship, achievement, autonomy, virtue, and knowledge enhance the well-being of adult humans but not that of other sentient beings, this is plausibly because beings must possess sufficient cognitive sophistication to realize such goods in their lives. This is quite compatible with holding that the presence of these goods in the life of any sentient creature would enhance its well-being, just as it would enhance the well-being of any sentient creature with desires that satisfied the identification constraint to obtain the objects of these desires, and just as it in fact enhances the well-being of any sentient creature when it feels pleasure. The prudential goods that are accessible to a given organism do, on this view, depend to some extent on what the organism is like. However, the divergence here arises from practical considerations, as opposed to being built into the very nature of prudential value. 19 Alternatively, the disjunctive hybrid theorist might simply hold that the content of the objective list is different depending on the kind of organism we are talking about, and that this fact is not susceptible of further explanation. This would be in the spirit of the primitivist approach discussed in Chapter 4, whereas the approach discussed in the previous paragraph fits better with the locative account (insofar as, if something is good simpliciter, it is natural to suppose that it is also good for any creature in whose life it is instantiated). As long as the primitivist recognizes that at least one of the entries on the list (namely pleasure) is shared between humans and other animals, they can secure the necessary overlap between the wellbeing of adult humans and that of other welfare subjects. As discussed in the last chapter, I find 19 Cf. the similar claim in Arneson (2010, pp.737-8). 191 the primitivist approach less satisfying. However, I present it here as an option that is wholly compatible with DHT. The picture sketched so far should be a broadly appealing one. DHT does not have to rely on any bold claims about the relationship between prudential goodness and goodness of a kind (although the perfectionist route remains open to those who prefer it). And yet, it is still able to capture the fact that certain prudential goods are, at least as far as we know, instantiated only in human lives. Moreover, unlike hedonism or a thoroughgoing objective list view, it can capture the way in which we are, again as far as we know, unique among the animals in our capacity to confer prudential value upon objects. It does the latter without thereby committing us to the unintuitive result that the well-being of adult humans and that of our fellow creatures is wholly discontinuous, either when it comes to explaining why the things that are good for us are so or when it comes to enumerating these goods. For again, pleasure is good for me for the same reason and in the same way that it is good for my baby and my cat. This strikes me as an important insight of hedonism which DHT does well to preserve. 5.6 DHT and Meaning Although the stereotypical picture of the philosopher that prevails among laypeople is of a figure afflicted by tormenting reflections about 'the meaning of life', this is not a matter that has been much discussed within the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. 20 However, the question of what (if anything) makes a life meaningful has received more attention of late. Susan Wolf has 20 A note on terminology: As it is doubtful whether life itself is even the sort of thing that admits of a meaning, I prefer to talk instead about individual lives 'being meaningful' or (even better) 'containing meaning'. I borrow from Wolf (2010) the idea that there can be meaning in life in this latter sense even without there being a meaning of life in any grand cosmic sense. 192 been the most eloquent and persistent advocate of the view that meaning in life is a phenomenon that deserves to be an object of philosophical study. 21 In this section, I argue that DHT can help secure the plausible result that meaning is both highly relevant to the prudential value of a life, and distinct from prudential value in an important sense. One way it might do this is by taking over Wolf's own hybrid account of meaning in life as subjective engagement with things that have attitude-independent value. 22 However, Wolf's requirement of subjective engagement is not, I think, plausible. I thus prefer a different approach, which sees meaning as entering in with certain of the attitude-independent prudential goods we have separately identified, regardless of whether the person has any pro-attitude towards them. Such a view better reflects common intuitions about the relationship between well-being and meaning in life, while preserving the distinctness of these notions. When we ask how well a person's life is going, there are multiple distinct dimensions along which we may evaluate it. As we have already had occasion to point out, the relationships between these dimensions are not clear-cut, and it is sometimes difficult to know which of them we are relying upon in delivering our verdicts. We have been focusing on the prudential dimension. However, prudential evaluations are themselves closely connected with certain other modes of assessment. One of these is moral. We evaluate people's lives, as well as people themselves, as morally good or bad. I have argued that moral virtue is one of the basic constituents of well-being, and vice one of the basic constituents of ill-being. Insofar as virtue is just one of several attitude-independent prudential goods, and there is also the subjectivist side of the story to consider, the moral and prudential evaluation of a life can obviously come apart. It is possible that a life could rank very high from the perspective of morality but very low from that 21 In Wolf (2010) and Wolf (2016), among others. 22 As developed most fully in Wolf (2010). 193 of prudence. Yet this is not to say that prudential evaluation and moral evaluation are wholly separable. They are not and cannot be, if moral virtue is part of what makes a life go well for the person living it. What I wish to suggest is that meaning in life should be taken to be related to prudential value in a somewhat similar way. One element of a life's going well, overall, for the person living it, is its being meaningful. However, as meaningfulness is not all there is to prudential value, rankings of lives on the meaningfulness scale and the prudential scale can again come apart. This might, then, suggest to the reader that meaningfulness should have appeared on the list of prudential goods enumerated above. The reason it did not is also the reason why, I think, the question of meaning in life has seemed so special and so pressing. The meaningfulness of a life seems to reflect, and indeed to be constituted by, the presence in that life of a variety of attitude-independent prudential goods. An assessment of the degree of meaning in a life is thus not best seen as ascribing to it a certain amount of some distinct, separable prudential good. Rather, such assessments involve a more synoptic judgment about how rich one's life is in various goods on the objective list. Once we have started down this road, it is tempting to identify the meaningfulness of a life straightforwardly with the attitude-independent prudential value it contains. However, there is a complication that prevents us from taking this step. When one considers our list of substantive goods, one of them seems to stand out as lacking any plausible connection to meaning in life. Where the presence in a life of friendship, love, virtue, achievement, autonomy and important knowledge does intuitively contribute to how meaningful the life is (even if one does not take this to be all there is to meaning), the presence of pleasure does not seem to be tied to meaning in life in the same way. 194 As we have noted several times, pleasure is an outlier among the attitude-independent goods for a different reason, namely that its status as attitude-independent is open to question. This is because some accounts of pleasure make it reducible to desire-satisfaction. We have so far tried to remain neutral on the matter of how pleasure can best be analyzed by leaving it on the objective list (albeit with a question mark attached). One way of making meaningfulness and attitude-independent prudential value track each other exactly would be to give up this stance and exile pleasure from the list. However, we do not need to take such an extreme step, in order to explain why pleasure does not contribute to a life's meaningfulness. For even if pleasure is a substantive prudential good, it is a distinctive one, in that ascriptions of pleasure need not go beyond one's own mental state. Pleasure does not seem to constitutively involve the kind of connection between oneself and the outside world that other attitude-independent goods involve, that is. One can plausibly see the presence of this connection between self and world as accounting at least in part for the prudential value of these goods, as well as for their contribution to the meaningfulness of one's life. We now seem to have learned something more about what these varied goods have in common, and thereby enriched DHT itself. The way in which our account of meaning in life will run follows naturally from what was said above. If meaningfulness is just equated with the presence of certain attitude-independent prudential goods in a life, and these goods do not (we have argued) require the sanction of any pro-attitude, then neither will meaningfulness itself. Now, I think this is a salutary result, both because it offers a clear way of distinguishing evaluations in terms of meaningfulness from all things considered prudential evaluations, and because it is independently plausible. One feature of our intuitive notion is that meaning in life often arises from surprising sources, including activities and relationships that the person is not themselves positively disposed to. The 195 staunchly objectivist approach to meaningfulness I am suggesting can accommodate this phenomenon very well, whereas any view that imposes a subjective engagement constraint struggles to do so. It should, nonetheless, be emphasized that one who favours a Wolf-style hybrid account of meaningfulness could also combine it with DHT. The main difference here is that, on such a view, meaningfulness would itself incorporate elements from both strands of the disjunctive hybrid. One would still be able to draw a clear distinction between prudential value and meaningfulness. Thus, whether or not one agrees with the specific approach to meaning in life I have proposed, it is an advantage of DHT that it can account for the importance of judgments of meaningfulness, and tightly connect them to prudential assessments, without forfeiting the independence of these two modes of evaluation. 5.7 Conclusion In this chapter I have addressed some of DHT's dangling threads, and considered some specific applications of this new approach to prudential value. I have shown that, when applied to such issues as ill-being, the well-being of infants and non-human animals, and meaning in life, DHT performs as well as (and in some cases considerably better than) its chief competitors. I have not here considered all the potential objections to the theory, although I console myself with the thought that, regardless of one's favoured theory of prudential value, this looks to be a Sisyphean task. I have, however, shown that some of the objections that might most naturally have occurred to the reader can be satisfactorily addressed, provided we formulate DHT with sufficient care. 196 Conclusion In this dissertation, I argued that all extant theories of prudential value are either a) enumeratively deficient, in that they are unable to accommodate everything that, intuitively, is a basic constituent of prudential value, b) explanatorily deficient, in that they are at least sometimes unable to give a plausible story about what makes a given thing prudentially valuable, or c) both. In response to this unsatisfactory state of the literature, I presented my own account, the Disjunctive Hybrid Theory or DHT. DHT answers to and remedies each of the above inadequacies in a way that no other approach can. Although it follows other recent accounts in combining elements from objective and subjective theories, ours is a hybrid theory of a quite new kind. This is because it denies both subjective necessity (the constraint that, if thing x is to be basically good for person P, P must have some pro-attitude toward x) and objective necessity (the constraint that, if thing x is to be basically good for person P, x must have some attitude-independent value). The rejection of both necessity claims is called for if we are to move beyond the enumerative and explanatory limitations of existing accounts. We should reject subjective necessity because, as I argued at length in Chapter 4, it rules out, as basic constituents of prudential value, certain things (such as Jessica's knowledge and Jill's relationship) that no theory should rule out. Moreover, even if a theory that accepts some version of subjective necessity (whether it be in the form of a desire constraint or an enjoyment constraint) can be made to deliver the right enumerative results, it still gives the wrong explanation of why things like Jessica's knowledge and Jill's relationship are prudentially valuable. Knowledge and romantic love (as well as virtue, autonomy, achievement, friendship, pleasure, and perhaps certain other items) are basically good for any person because they have 197 attitude-independent prudential value. This is the objectivist insight which any satisfying theory of prudential value needs to capture, and which comes into conflict with any version of subjective necessity. Thoroughgoing subjective theories such as desire-satisfactionism, along with any hybrid theory which endorses subjective necessity, are for this reason inadequate. We should reject objective necessity because there is also a subjectivist insight that theorists of prudential value cannot afford to ignore. The subjectivist insight is that a person can confer prudential value upon things by caring about them (sufficiently and in the right way). This is so, moreover, even if these things lack any independent value. As I argued in chapters 2 and 3, the best way to capture this insight is to hold, with the desire-satisfactionist, that P's desires are (in at least some cases) themselves original sources of prudential value. Evangeline's desire to meet William Shatner is sufficient to make the state of affairs in which she meets William Shatner basically good for her. Insofar as this state of affairs lacks any attitude-independent value, however, objective necessity would rule it out as a basic constituent of her good. Again, even if a theory that accepts objective necessity could be made to deliver the intuitively right enumerative results, it would leave something important out of its explanation of why meeting Shatner is good for Evangeline, namely the value-conferring role of Evangeline's own desires. Thoroughgoing objective theories such as perfectionist or objectivist list accounts, along with any hybrid theory which endorses objective necessity, are on these grounds inadequate. Granting that the subjectivist strand of DHT should be modelled on desiresatisfactionism, it remains crucial that this be done in the right way, as I showed in Chapter 3. We should, first, insist upon an object rather than a combo interpretation of the desiresatisfactionist axiology, on pain of losing our grip on the subjectivist insight. What is more, if our theory of prudential value is to be extensionally and explanatorily adequate, it should focus 198 on a person's actual (as opposed to idealized) desires, and reject any substantive constraints on the contents of the desires that have prudential relevance. On the other hand, an identification constraint, to the effect that for a desire to confer prudential value upon its object it must be sufficiently enduring, stably held, and integrated into one's self-conception, is justifiable on grounds internal to the subjectivist insight itself. A constraint of this last sort can also help in dealing with the intuitive scope problem for desire-satisfactionism, thereby ensuring that DHT can offer a plausible enumeration, as well as a plausible explanation, of the basic constituents of prudential value. The general thrust of this dissertation is toward a theory of prudential value that is maximally inclusive. As we saw in Chapter 1, the under-inclusiveness objection to which DHT is thus responding is one reliable source of intuitive counterexamples to proposed accounts of prudential value. This objection also has a mirror image, which we called the over-inclusiveness objection. Moreover, every theory of prudential value thus far defended has been the target of both types of objection, at different points and from different angles. I am not so bold as to suppose that I, alone, have here hit on an account that is not subject to either of the foregoing objections. What I do think can fairly be claimed for my account is that, more than any other extant theory, DHT does not intuitively leave anything out, either at the enumerative or at the explanatory level. At least with respect to the under-inclusiveness objection, then, the theory performs better than any other. Admittedly, it would be preferable if we could somehow produce a theory that would easily dispense with both types of intuitive counterexample at once, as opposed to girding itself against the one while rendering itself vulnerable to the other. However, I doubt this can be done. The wiser course may then be to focus on disarming just one of the above objections, and to structure one's theory's accordingly, only later proceeding to fortify the 199 general structure as well as one can against the other. This has been our strategy in the preceding pages. Why, then, do I opt to concentrate on the under-inclusiveness objection, rather than its opposite? Although the special concern for inclusiveness shown here may be in part a matter of philosophical temperament, I have also argued that it is grounded in a methodological principle that would in any case be plausible. According to the care principle (or CP): If those people who love and care most about person P believe that x is good for P (and desire x for P's sake), this constitutes solid prima facie evidence that x is in fact good for P. This principle is, in turn, justified by two underlying considerations. The first is that, in constructing a theory of prudential value, we have no better data to start from than the common-sense judgments of ordinary people. The second is that people's common-sense judgments about well-being generally come through most clearly when they are reflecting on what they want (or should want) for those whom they love and care about. My claim is that when we take these considerations, and the principle derived from them, seriously, we find ourselves pushed toward a theory like DHT. One point I want to stress in closing is that the broad approach laid out here is expressly meant to be a flexible one. In embracing DHT, one is committing only to an account with the following structure: Thing x is good for person P if and only if x is either a) cared about (sufficiently and in the right way) by P, b) a bearer of (the right kind of) attitude-independent value, or c) both. The fact that both disjuncts are so underspecified, which prompted us to spend so much of this dissertation unpacking them, can also be taken as an advantage. I tried to give the most plausible construal I could of each strand of DHT. If problems arise for my specific approach to either strand, it may be that the theory will need to be modified in certain ways to better express its two core insights. DHT is quite capable of adapting in this way without giving 200 up what is distinctive and appealing about the theory. 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A C T A U N I V E R S I T A T I S L O D Z I E N S I S FOLIA G ERM ANICA 3, 2002 Jerzy Starnawski POLONICA W „ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR DIE ÖSTERREICHISCHEN GYMNASIEN" (1850-1918) Powszechnie wiemy, jakie były osiągnięcia i jakie znaczenie narodowe oświaty polskiej na terenie Galicji, zwłaszcza od czasu uzyskania autonomii (1867). Powszechnie wiemy, że w latach, w których nie było w uniwersytetach asystentów, droga do katedr na Wydziale Filozoficznym, tj. obejmującym wszystkie dyscypliny humanistyczne i matematyczno-przyrodnicze, dwu uniwersytetów polskich (Lwów i Kraków), rozwijających się wspaniale, wiodła poprzez szkołę. Nauczyciele mający doktoraty i nie zaniedbujący pracy naukowej dochodzili do habilitacji. Wówczas jako docenci obowiązani byli co drugi rok dać uniwersytetowi 10 godzin wykładowych bezpłatnych dla utrzymania przywileju nazywającego się venia legendi, ale w szkole mieli wówczas przywilej otrzymania zniżki godzin do ośmiu, a więc pełną pensję nauczyciela gimnazjalnego pobierali za osiem godzin lekcyjnych. W ten sposób docentura była opłacalna, a przede wszystkim w wypadku wakansu na katedrze we Lwowie lub w Krakowie stanowiła wstęp do katedry. Była często konkurenq'a: wybierano jednego spośród kilku. I chlubną kartą w dziejach uniwersytetów polskich było to, że często wybierano najlepszego z najlepszych. W arto przypomnieć, jakie mieli nauczyciele szkół galicyjskich możliwości publikacji płodów swego pióra. Od dawna istniał obyczaj wydawania przez dyrekcję gimnazjum rocznych sprawozdań, które obok części urzędowej, informacyjnej, zawierały zwykle rozprawę jednego z nauczycieli. Była w swoim czasie, około 1950 r., „nagonka" na owe rozprawy ze sprawozdań jako na prace przyczynkarskie, mało ważne. Oczywiście poziom był różny, ale można przytoczyć wiele przykładów rozpraw ze sprawozdań gimnazjalnych, których poziom odpowiadał poziomowi prac ogłaszanych w tym czasie w czasopismach naukowych. A jakie były czasopisma naukowe stojące otworem przed nauczycielami galicyjskimi? Możliwości stosunkowo duże otworzyły się w okresie powstawania branżowych towarzystw naukowych. W 1887 r. Towarzystwo Historyczne powołało do życia „Kwartalnik Historyczny" , równocześnie Towarzystwo Literackie im. Adama Mickiewicza - „Pamiętnik TL i AM " , później (od 1902 r.) zamieniony na „Pamiętnik Literacki" , wówczas gdy TL i AM, zachowując Mickiewicza jako patrona, stało się towarzystwem historyków literatury w ogóle. Nieco później niż oba towarzystwa wymienione zawiązało się Towarzystwo Filologiczne, które powołało do życia organ „Eos" (1894-) i Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze, którego organ nazywał się „Lud" (1895-), ale już wcześniej, nie w Galicji, lecz w Warszawie wychodziła „Wisła" (1887-), i tu także, w Warszawie, począł wychodzić „Przegląd Filozoficzny" (od 1897-), a wcześniej od obu wymienionych „Prace Filologiczne" (1885-). Nauczyciele byli zrzeszeni w Towarzystwie Nauczycieli Szkół Średnich i Wyższych, które uprzedziło towarzystwa poszczególnych dziedzin, wydając od 1885 r. „M uzeum" , i w Towarzystwie Pedagogicznym, którego organem była „Szkoła" (od 1886 r.). Wymienione pisma, z wyjątkiem kilku warszawskich, wychodziły w stolicy Galicji, we Lwowie. Tu także, od 1873 r. z „Gazety Lwowskiej" emanowało ważne pismo, stojące na należytym poziomic, „Przewodnik Naukowy i Literacki" , którego łamy dostępne były nauczycielom gimnazjalnym. Autorom ważnych prac, bardziej ogólnych, także nauczycielom, mógł być dostępny wydawany w Krakowie od 1864 r., dość elitarny, „Przegląd Polski" , stańczykowski, jezuicki „Przegląd Powszechny" (od 1884 r.). Na tym tle nic bez znaczenia dla nauczycieli gimnazjalnych całej Galicji było pismo wydawane w Wieniu już od 1850 r., „Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien" . Od początku, od recenzji Euzebiusza Czerkawskiego z nowego wydania Józefa Mrozińskiego Pierwszych zasad gramatyki języka polskiego (Lwów 1850) - (1850 R. 1 s. 358-367), aż po recenzję dzieła Raimunda Friedricha Kaindla o Polsce (1916), ogłoszoną w roczniku ostatnim istnienia austro-węgierskiej monarchii (1917/1918 R. 68 s. 76-77), w każdym niemal roku spotyka się wzmianki o sprawach polskich i nazwiska polskie. Łącznie jest około 130 nazwisk (autorzy artykułów i recenzji, autorzy polscy recenzowani przez obcych). Niektóre nazwiska powtarzają się wielokrotnie. Jeżeli jednak weźmie się pod uwagę objętość pisma (grube tomy wydawane co roku, liczące nieraz ponad 1000 s.), udział Polaków był zauważalny, ale nie był duży. Prym trzymała filologia klasyczna jako nauka międzynarodowa. A ponieważ niektórzy filologowie przemawiali z pozycji historyka starożytnego, przeto historia starożytna była przedmiotem omówienia na łamach pisma przez polskich autorów znacznie częściej niż historia powszechna epok późniejszych, niż historia Polski, bo i ta nie była całkowicie pominięta. W niniejszym przeglądzie pomija się prace nic dotyczące nauk humanistycznych, zresztą nic tak liczne jak prace z zakresu humanistyki. Przyjmuje się kolejność: od nauk historycznych ku filologicznym. Nieliczne były prace dotyczące geografii Polski. Początek w tym zakresie dał Bronisław Trzaskowski, nauczyciel w Rzeszowie, w Tarnowie, także w Drohobyczu. Ogłosił on ostrą recenzję podręcznika J. Bellingera Krótki rys jeograjii we dwóch kursach dla młodzieży gimnazjów niższych i wyższych, który z 4 wydania (1853) przełożył na język polski W. Schmidt (Bochnia 1854) - (1854 R. 5 s. 889-891). Po pół wieku dopiero znalazła się druga recenzja; tym razem i autor pracy, i recenzent byli geografami sławnymi, działającymi później w niepodległej Polsce: Stanisław Pawłowski jako nauczyciel gimnazjum w Stanisławowie powitał recenzją Eugeniusza Romera Atlas geograficzny dla I klasy (Lwów 1908) - (1909 R. 60 s. 337-338). W zakresie historii Polski pierwszym „głosem" była recenzja pracy Henryka Lewińskiego Przemyśl und sein altes Schloss (Przemyśl 1858) pióra Adolfa Fischera z Wiednia (1859 R. 10 s. 582-583), a więc Austriaka, który mógł przeczytać pracę napisaną po niemiecku. Recenzja jest bardzo pochlebna, wiedeński czytelnik wskazał tę pracę jako przykład godny naśladowania przez inne ośrodki. Po trzydziestu latach milczenia recenzentem prac dotyczących historii Polski w mniejszym lub większym zakresie był J. Loserth z Czerniowiec (później z Grazu). Jako mieszkaniec Bukowiny znał język polski na tyle, by móc czytać i recenzować prace w naszym języku. Zrecenzował prace: S. Kwiatkowskiego Jan Giskra z Brandysu . Rys biograficzny z X V w. (Lwów, Gimn. im. Franciszaka Józefa, 1886) - (1888 R. 31 s. 274); Alfreda Lewandowskiego Napoelon II und die Polen (Seret 1887) - (1889 R. 40 s. 276-277); Ferdynanda Bostla Die Piotrkower Constitution vom J. 1525 (Lwów, II Gimn., 1890) - (1891 R. 42 s. 856); D. Werenki Nachrichten über die Städte „Cecina" und „Tschernowitz" und deren Besitzverhältnisse im J. 1782 (Czerniowce 1898) - (1900 R. 51 s. 375). Niemal równocześnie sporo recenzji prac dotyczących historii Polski opublikował Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (1866-1930). Urodził się i aż do 1914 r. mieszkał w Czerniowcach, gdzie był profesorem „für österreichische Geschichte". Zajmował się szczególnie Bukowiną i pograniczem polsko-ruskim. Z zakresu historii Polski zrecenzował w „Zeitschrift..." prace publikowane głównie w sprawozdaniach gimnazjalnych: W. Waśkowskiego Z przeszłości Okusza... - (Bochnia 1891) - (1893 R. 44 s. 91); J. Rychlika Kościół kolegiaty Wszystkich Świętych w Jarosławiu (Jarosław 1893) - (1895 R. 46 s. 1147); Jerzego Harwoty Cieszyn i Ziemia Cieszyńska... - (Przemyśl 1893) - (ibidem, s. 1146-1147); Kazimierza J. Gorzyckiego Kwestia lennego zwierzchnictwa Polski do Pomorza za rządów Kazimierza Wielkiego (Lwów, IV Gimn., 1895 s. 3-48) - (1897 R. 48 s. 945); Edwarda Kozłowskiego Mikołaj Tungen. Spór o biskupstwo warmińskie, 1467-1479 (Bochnia 1896/1897) (ibidem, s. 470-471); Karola J. Nitmanna Geneza ,,kwestii orientalnej" i je j rozwój aż do bitwy pod Mohaczem w r. 1526 (Bochnia 1897/1898 s. 3-38) - (1899 R. 50 s. 470); Eliasza Kokorudza Über die altruthenische Rechtsdenkmale (Lwów, Akad. Gimn., 1897/1898, 1898/1899) - (ibidem., s. 1149-1150); Józefa Wyrobka O pokrewieństwie domu Habsburgów i Habsbursko -Lotaryńskiego z narodowymi dynastiami w Polsce, Litwie i Rusi (Brzeżany 1901) - (1902 R. 53 s. 851). Kaindl, już jako profesor w Grazu (od 1914), wydał książkę Polen. M it einem geschichtlichen Überblick über die polnisch-ruthenische Frage (Leipzig 1916). Recenzję tej pracy ogłosił w „Zeitschrift..." В. Imendörffer z Wiednia (1917/1918 R. 68 s. 76-77). Ze względu na 48 lat przeżytych na Bukowinie, głównie w Czerniowcach, znał Kaindl dobrze kraje sąsiednie (a w tym Polskę) i ich historię. Interesowały go zwłaszcza problemy pogranicza polsko-rusińskiego. Przeceniał wkład kultury niemieckiej w życie polskie, przywoływał świadectwa zaczerpnięte z Kromera i z Bartłomieja Zimorowicza. Sformułował dobitnie: „Wenn irgend ein Volk dem deutschen auf diesem Gebiete dank schuldet, so ist es das polnische Z kolei historia powszechna średniowieczna i nowożytna' (starożytną omawia się razem z filologią klasyczną). Zainteresowanie pracami z historii powszechnej napisanymi przez Polaków i wydanymi w Polsce, niestety po niemiecku, przyszło w 1858 r. Ukazały się równocześnie recenzje prac: Michała Markiewicza Geschichte der Gesandtschaft Kaiser Maximilians II im J. 1557 an die Königin Elisabeth von England (Tarnopol 1857) O ttokar Lorenz (1858 R. 9 s. 337-338); Zygmunta Sawczyńskiego Die neuburgundischen Reiche von ihrer Entstehung bis zur Vereinigung unter Rudolph II (cz. 1 - „bis 888") Kraków 1857) Theodor Sickel (ibidem, s. 342-343). Praca Paula Wallnöfera, nauczyciela Gimnazjum Ewangelickiego w Cieszynie, wydana po niemiecku, Der Antheil des Babenberges Leopold des Fürsten an der sogenannten III Kreuzzuge... - (Cieszyn 1861) tylko ze względu na miejsce wydania stanowi polonicum. Recenzował ją Alfons Huber (Innsbruck) (1863 R. 14 s. 394-395). Upłynęło wiele lat, zanim przyszło do nowych recenzji prac polskich autorów z zakresu historii powszechnej. Recenzentami byli wymienieni już autorzy z Czerniowiec. R. F. Kaindl zrecenzował pracę K. Krotowskiego Norwegia pod względem kultury (Nowy Sącz 1891) - (1893 R. 44 s. 93); J. Loserth pracę Kornela Kozaka Über den Streit des österreichischen Herzog Friedrich II von Babenberg mit Kaiser Friedrich II (Czerniowce 1896) - (1897 R. 48 s. 671). Polski podręcznik, bardzo długo w różnych wydaniach używany w szkołach, Wincentego Zakrzewskiego Historia powszechna dla wyższych klas szkoły średniej, przełożony został na język ukraiński (tłumaczem był Ołeksander 1 Historię starożytną omawia się razem z filologią klasyczną. Barwinskij) - (Lwów 1900), z przeznaczeniem do używania w szkołach z ukraińskim językiem wykładowym. Recenzję, raczej krytyczną, ogłosił W. Biłeckij ze Lwowa (1903 R. 54 s. 57-61). Zauważone były pewne wypowiedzi polskich autorów na temat pedagogiki. Euzebiusz Czerkawski, który po długim stażu szkolnym został profesorem Uniwersytetu Lwowskiego, w roku obejmowania katedry uniwersyteckiej ogłosił w „Zeitschrift..." rozprawę Die wichtigsten gymnasialpädagogischen Probleme, deren Lösung der Organisations-Entwurf für österreichische Gymnasien vom Jahre 1849 unternimmt oder anregt (1871 R. 22 s. 690-713, 773-794, 871-885). Ujęcie było oczywiście ogólne. Odwoływał się Czerkawski do polskiej literatury pedagogicznej z Łukaszewicza Historią szkól w Koronie na czele. Był Czerkawski członkiem zespołu, którego wyniki prac ogłosił w artykule Rozprawy i wnioski Komisji powołanej w r. 1879 przez galicyjską radę szkolną krajową do zbadania sprawy reformy gimnazjów (Lwów 1882. Odb. z „Przewodnika Naukowego i Literackiego"); omówienie ukazało się w „Zeitschrift..." - (1882 R. 33 s. 559-560). Dla przypomnienia: w gimnazjach klasycznych nauka języków miała być wykładana następująco: łaciński kl. I-III 8 g., IV-VI 6 g., VII-VIII 5 g.; grecki kl. IV-VIII po 5 g. w każdej klasie; polski kl. I-II 4 g., 1II-IV 3 g., V-VI 2 g., VII-VII1 3 g.; niemiecki kl. I-III 6 g., IV-VIII 4 g. Przydział godzin języka polskiego wydaje się na pierwszy rzut oka krzywdzący. Trzeba jednak pamiętać, że kurs literatury w 1879 r. kończył się na Krasińskim w dodatku wiedza o wielkich romantykach dopiero kiełkowała; trzeba pamiętać, że wielka trójca powieściopisarzy nie była wtedy jeszcze „wielką trójcą" . Pracę Czerkawskiego Übersichtstabellen über die Mittelschulen Europas (Lwów 1889) zrecenzował w „Zeitschrift..." J. Rappold (1890 R. 41 s. 933). Ten sam Rappold zrecenzował równocześnie pracę F. Źródłowskiego Das Schulwesen und seine Verwaltung (Leipzig 1889). Edward Dworski, zasłużony pedagog galicyjski (przypomnijmy: inicjator Księgi ku czci Słowackiego, złożonej z prac nauczycieli, 1909), ogłosił w „Zeitschrift..." rozprawę o przeciążeniu uczniów, Die Überbürdungsfrage (1885 R. 36 s. 717-724). Wspomniany Trzaskowski ogłosił wraz z Karolem Kunzem i z Janem Pawlicą pracę Organisations-Entwurf der österreichischen Einheitsmittelschulen... - (Kraków 1892); zrecenzował ją J. Loos (1894 R. 45 s. 159-163). Propedeutyka filozofii była przedmiotem szkolnym, przynajmniej w maturalnej klasie (wyjątkowo czasem przedmiot był rozkładany na dwie ostatnie klasy). Artykuł o programie przedmiotu, Zur Propädeutikfrage, napisał Aleksander Pechnik z Tarnowa (1898 R. 49 s. 165-177). Ale i rozprawy z zakresu filozofii, obok recenzji, jawiły się także. Kornel Jaskulski (Radowce) ogłosił w „Zeitschrift..." sporą rozprawę Über den Einfluss der vorkritischen Ästhetik Kants auj Herder (1900 R. 51 s. 192-222) i zrecenzował pracę ks. Jana Nuckowskiego TJ Zasadniczy punkt wyjścia w badaniu filozoficznym (Chyrów 1898) - (ibidem, s. 1044 1045). Recenzję pracy Bazylego Szczurata Wundts Apperzeptionstheorie (Brody 1903) ogłosił Johannes Schmidt (1905 R. 56 s. 479 480), recenzję ks. Eugeniusza Ilełczyńskicgo SJ Zarysu wstępu do filozofii religii (Chyrów 1904) Stanisław Schneider (1907 R. 58 s. 192). Germanistyka wypełniała, co zrozumiałe, znaczną część łamów „Zeitschrift..." . Obchodzi nas tylko udział w tej dziedzinie Polaków i polskich środowisk. Z działalności Franciszka Tomasza Bratranka, który w latach 1852-1881 był profesorem filologii germańskiej w UJ, odnotować trzeba przegląd recenzyjny pt. Deutsche Lesebücher (1854 R. 5 s. 773-792, 874-889; 1855 R. 6 s. 143-159, 581-590). Po latach praca Bratranka Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und Kaspar Graf von Sternberg (1820-1832) - (Wien 1866) otrzymała w „Zeitschrift..." recenzję, której autorem był Karl Tomaschek (1867 R. 18 s. 175-180). W latach poprzedzających autonomię Galicji było w tej prowincji wiele gimnazjów niemieckojęzycznych. Sprawozdania gimnazjalne nazywały się Jahresberichte. W niemieckojęzycznych sprawozdaniach gimnazjum w Samborze Johann Baptist Klemsch ogłosił pracę Über die ,,Orthographie" (1854). Ostrą recenzję napisał Juliusz Feifalik z Wiednia (1855 R. 6 s. 614-615). Praca, która stanowi polonicum tylko dlatego, że ukazała się w Polsce, recenzowana na łamach pisma to Manuela Raschkego Eine vergleichende Betrachtung beider Blütezeiten der deutschen Dichtung (Cieszyn, Ewangelickie Gimnazjum, 1858). Przedmiotem był wiek XIII i wiek XVIII literatury niemieckiej. Rozprawę omówił K. Reichel z Wiednia (1859 R. 10 s. 574-576). W Wielkopolsce, przypomnijmy, język wykładowy w szkołach był niemiecki. Dyrektor realnej szkoły w Poznaniu, Hermann Geist, ogłosił sprawozdania pt. Zwei Lessing-Feste gefeiert in der Städtischen Realschule I. Ordnung zu Posen an des Dichters 150-jährigen Geburtstage, 22. Januar 1879 und 100-jährigen Todestage, 15 Februar 1881 (Poznań 1881). Pozycję tę recenzował August Sauer (1881 R. 32 s. 917). Był Sauer (1855-1926), dodajmy nawiasem, w latach 1879-1883, a więc wtedy właśnie, gdy opublikował wymienioną recenzję, zastępcą profesora w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim. W 1883 r. odszedł do Grazu. Nie był jednak nieczuły na to, co się dzieje w nauce polskiej: poglądy Bronisława Chlebowskiego, wygłoszone na zjeździe im. Jana Kochanowskiego w 1884 r., za pośrednictwem Sauera infiltrowały do nauki austriackiej2. Następcą Sauera przez trzy dziesiątki lat od 1883 r. był Richard M aria Werner (1854-1913), sławny autor dzieła Lyrik und Lyriker, w pewnej mierze badacz Mickiewicza, którego poznał z inspiracji swego kolegi, historyka literatury polskiej, Romana Piłata. Był Werner szanowany, obchodził 1 Por. J. Starnawski, Sylw etki lwowskich historyków literatury, Łódź 1997, s. 35-36. Tam dawniejsza literatura przedmiotu. wc Lwowie jubileusz (1904). Wśród uczniów ceniących mistrza wskazać można m. in. Karola Irzykowskiego i Juliusza Kleinera. Jednakże w początkowej fazie działalności popadł Werner w konflikt z nauczycielstwem galicyjskim. Profesor uniwersytetu w tej dobie w jakiejś mierze prezydował nauczycielom gimnazjalnym, delegowany bywał do szkół na przewodniczącego komisji maturalnej. Werner, obserwując u młodzieży szkolnej błędy w języku niemieckim, także błędy nauczycieli, m. in. w formułowaniu tematów, ogłosił w „Zeitschrift..." artykuł Der deutsche Unterricht an den galizischen Mittelschulen (1889 R. 40 s. 262-270). Postulował, by nauczyciele gimnazjalni języka niemieckiego w Galicji powoływani byli z niemieckiego obszaru językowego. Artykuł wywołał ostrą polemikę. Na łamach „Zeitschrift..." przeciw Wernerowi wystąpił Konstanty Łukaczowski (Nochmals „der deutsche Unterricht an den Galizien-Mittelschulen", druk. wraz z repliką Wernera, Vorläufige Erwiderung, 1889 R. 40 s. 675-684). Polemika przeniosła się na łamy polskich czasopism. Referat na posiedzeniu Koła lwowskiego Towarzystwa Nauczycieli Szkół Średnich i Wyższych wygłosił Józef Czernecki (W sprawie artykułu p. Wernera. Rzecz czytana na powiedzeniu Kola lwowskiego. „M uzeum" 1889 R. 5 s. 487-505). Sprawa była zresztą poruszana w TNSW przed wystąpieniem Wernera. Obszerny referat Ludwika Ćwiklińskiego, wygłoszony na posiedzeniu, opublikowany został pt. W sprawie nauki języka niemieckiego w galicyjskich szkołach średnich z językiem wykładowym polskim i ruskim („M uzeum" 1887 R. 3 s. 336-360, ożywiona dyskusja ibidem, s. 360-371). Ćwikliński postulował, by nauka języka niemieckiego była prowadzona na należytym poziomie, ale nie domagał się tak radykalnych zmian, jak w rok później Werner. Zabrał też głos Kazimierz Morawski, profesor UJ (Prof. Werner o nauce języka niemieckiego w gimnazjach galicyjskich, „Przegląd Polski" 1889 R. 23z 276 s. 645-651); przyznając Wernerowi częściowo rację, zauważył, że: 1) język niemiecki jest w szkołach wykładany należycie, 2) nie jest to język narodowy mieszkańców kraju. Postulat Wernera na szczęście nie wszedł w życie. Werner zrecenzował na łamach „Zeitschrift..." pracę K arola Bobrzyńskiego , nauczyciela II Gimnazjum w Krakowie, Zur literarischen Plagiatfrage (Kraków 1898) - (1900 R. 51 s. 88-89). Bobrzyński proponował systematykę plagiatów. Werner w zasadzie zgodził się z nim. Zacytował Geibela: Kaum weiss ich, was mein eigen, Was nur ein Echo war. Inny recenzent Bobrzyńskiego, G. Hergel (ibidem, s. 288), nie zgadzał się z Bobrzyńskim. Jedną jeszcze recenzję ogłosił Werner w „Zeitschrift..." , tym razem bardzo pozytywną, rozprawy Jana Jakóbca, uczącego w szkole jeszcze po drugiej wojnie światowej, autora powszechnie używanych podręczników, drugiej wojnie światowej, autora powszechnie używanych podręczników, Friedrich Schlegels Entwicklungsgang vom Klassizismus zum Romantismus (Kraków, Gimn. Św. Jacka, 1907) - (1907 R. 60 s. 382-383). Pisał: „In geschmackvoller Darstellung und einfacher nur durch wenige Polonismcn gestörter Sprache skizziert der Verfasser die Jugendintcressen Fr. Schlegels Znany z różnych kierunków działalności Albert Zipper recenzował na łamach „Zeitschrift..." : przekład Schillera Demetriusa dokonany przez Stefana Morawieckiego (Kraków, III Gimnazjum, 1900) - (1902 R. 53 s. 188-189); przekład Goethego Iphigenie auf Tauris dokonany przez Piotra Parylaka (Cieszyn 1900) - (1902 R. 53 s. 188) i pracę Michała Magiery Stosunek Zachariasza Wernera do literatury polskiej z uwzględnieniem „Wandy" Wężyka (Wadowice 1902, s. 1-28) - (1905 R. 56 s. 281-282). Wydanie szkolne dram atu Grillparzera Ahnfrau, opracowane przez Juliusza Ippoldta, pracującego jeszcze po drugiej wojnie światowej (Lwów 1904) zrcccnzował bardzo pozytywnie Josef Erber, nauczyciel z Jasła - (1905 R. 56 s. 475). Ten sam Erber zrecenzował opracowane przez Ludomiła Germana i Karola Petelenza Ćwiczenia niemieckie dla IV klasy szkoły średniej (Lwów 1904) - (1905 R. 56 s. 667). Dominik Źelak, germanista wykładający swego czasu w Stanisławowie, później w Tarnopolu, ogłosił jako nauczyciel w Tarnopolu pracę porównawczą germanistyczno-anglistyczną Tieck und Shakespeare (Tarnopol, Szkoła Real., 1899/1900 s. 3-42; 1900/1901 s. 3-31). Recenzję ogłosił W. Duschinsky z Wiednia (1903 R. 54 s. 472). Żelak był, dodajmy, także autorem rozprawki „M akbet" na tle teorii dramatycznych (Stanisławów, Szk. Real., 1899 s. 3-18). Nieco później zajął się zagadnieniem Polenlieder, rozprawkę Mikołaja Lenaua poezje o Polsce (Tarnopol 1902 s. 3-35) wstęp, wybór tekstów w oryginale i w przekładach zrecenzował Albert Zipper (1905 R. 56 s. 281). W porównaniu z germanistyką nadzwyczaj ubogo przedstawia się na łamach „Zeitschrift..." romanistyka, co zrozumiałe jest, gdyż język francuski nie był wykładany w szkołach. Do odnotowania jest zaledwie kilka pozycji. Pracę Jana [Bołoz-]Antoniewicza, później wybitnego historyka sztuki, w młodości germanisty i komparatysty, wydaną po niemiecku i w Niemczech, Ikonographisches zu Chretien de Troyes (Erlangen-Leipzig 1890, a więc pracę z zakresu nic tylko filologii lecz i z historii sztuki, zrecenzował Joseph Wastler (1890 R. 41 s. 1103-1104). Tadeusz Grabowski, wieloletni profesor historii literatury polskiej, przy końcu życia romanista, ogłosił jako nauczyciel szkoły realnej w Krakowie rozprawkę Aleksander Dumas syn i współczesny teatr francuski (1900). Recenzję w „Zeitschrift..." napisał (1901 R. 52 s. 667) Karl M erwart z Wiednia, najwidoczniej znający język polski. Krótkie studium Z. Szymańskiego z Nowego Sącza, Comparaison du theatre de Racine avec celui de Corneille (Nowy Sącz 1901 s. 1-11), napisane w języku francuskim, a więc międzynarodowym, zrecenzował W. Duschinsky z Wiednia (1903 R. 54 s. 471-472). Książkę Leona Wróblewskiego Französische Skizzen (Berlin 1913) omówił Hans Maver (1914 R. 65 s. 956-957), a więc Giovanni Maver. Jest to pierwsze, nieznane bibliograficznie, polonicum Ma vera. Bardziej ubogo przedstawiała się na łamach „Zeitschrift..." kiełkująca dopiero anglistyka polska. Pierwszym anglistą na katedrze w polskim uniwersytecie był Roman Dyboski. Jego studium monograficzne Tennysons Sprache und Stil (Wien-Leipzig 1907) powitał entuzjastyczną recenzją, choć kilka lat spóźnioną, Johann Ellingcr z Wiednia (1912 R. 63 s. 908-910). Pisał: „Das gediegene Buch ist den Anglisten bestens zu empfehlen; für die Erforscher der neueren englischen Sprache wird es unentbehrlich sein" . Filologia klasyczna obecna była w „Zeitschrift..." w dawce bardzo wysokiej. Dlaczego tak się stało? przypomnijmy „siatkę godzin" proponowaną przez Czerkawskiego, według której w gimnazjum ośmioklasowym 77 godzin miało być poświęcone językom starożytnym. Być może, iż postulaty zgłoszone w 1879 r. nie w pełni był realizowane, ale jeśli nawet zredukowano je co nieco, przynajmniej trzy etaty filologów były potrzebne w każdym ośmioklasowym gimnazjum nie mającym klas równoległych, i trzy katedry filologii klasycznej były w obu uniwersytetach galicyjskich. Postulował Czerkawski lekturę autorów łacińskich począwszy od III klasy, greckich od VIII. Przewidywał: Neposa, Cezara (nie tylko Commentarii de hello Gallico, ale i ... de bello civili), Owidiusza Metamorfozy i elegie, Liwiusza, Wergiliusza Eneidę i Georgiki, Sallustiusa, Cycerona mowy i pisma filozoficzne w dużym wyborze (Cało maior, Laelius, Tusculanae disputationes, De officiis), Tacyta Annales, Horacego. Z pewnością czytano wymienionych autorów w dużych fragmentach, prawdopodobnie ponad 1000 wersów rocznic. Lektura z greki miała objąć w dużej dawce Ksenofonta (Anabaza, Cyropedia, Wspomnienia o Sokratesie), w dużej dawce Homera, nadto Plutarcha, Platona i Sofoklesa. Dodajmy, że gimnazja w Galicji były w większości klasyczne, niemal do wyjątków należały szkoły realne. Dodajmy także, iż kadrę filologów mieliśmy począwszy od ca 1870-1880 r. doskonałą, zarówno w obu naszych uniwersytetach, jak i w galicyjskich gimnazjach. Byli tacy, którzy debiutowali w „Zeittschrift..." i rozprawami ogłoszonymi na łamach niemieckojęzycznego pisma zwracali na siebie uwagę świata nauki. Zasługuje na wydobycie z zapomnienia przywitanie w „Zeitschrift..." powstania „Eos" . Gdy w 1894 r. wyszedł zeszyt 1 tomu 1, ukazała się notka (1895 R. 46 s. 274), w której czytamy: [...] ein Unternehmen, das für die Entwicklung der philologischen Studien in Galizien von grosser Bedeutung ist" . Nieco dalej: Nach dem ersten Hefte [...] können wir der jungen Schöpfung ein günstiges Prognostikern stellen. Po ukazaniu się tomu 2. (1895) Karl Wotkc z Wiednia pisał (1896 R. 47 s. 494 496): Obwohl es erst seit zwei Jahren besteht, so kann man doch sochon von einem bedeutenden Fortschritte sprechen [...]. Wir sehen [...] dass diese Zeitschrift selbst strengeren Anforderungen genügt; sie gewährt uns einen Einblick in die Werkstätte der classischen Philologen Polens, die unter Ćwiklińskis und M orawskis3 Leitung rüstig schaffen und arbeiten. Pismu składał autor najlepsze życzenia. Jak miło przypomnieć te wypowiedzi dziś, gdy „Eos" ma już ponad 100 lat istnienia, a liczba wydanych roczników przekroczyła cyfrę 85, gdy reputacja pisma jest poza granicami Polski niezachwiana. Przykłady przytoczone są jednak z okresu, w którym filologia klasyczna w Polsce stanęła na prawdziwych wyżynach, co datujemy na lata 1876-1877. W 1876 r. katedrę w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim objął Ludwik Ćwikliński, w 1877 r. zaczął wykładać w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim, w ciągu trzech pierwszych lat jako doskonale zapowiadający się docent, ale od 1880 r. profesor, Kazimierz Morawski. Zaczął się okres świetności filologii. Lata poprzednie nie były zupełnie jałowe i znajdowało to wyraz na łamach „Zeitschrift..." , ale była to prehistoria w stosunku do wspaniałych dokonań późniejszych. Filologię klasyczną traktuje się tu łącznie z historią starożytną jako Altertumswissenschaft. Zaszczyt pierwszej wypowiedzi na łamach „Zeitschrift..." z zakresu starożytności przypadł Janowi Kruszyńskiemu ze Lwowa, który zrecenzował gruntownie W. Ptitza część I niemieckiego podręcznika do geografii i historii dla wyższych klas gimnazjalnych, poświęconą starożytności, wydaną w K oblencji w 1852 r. (1853 R. 4 s. 401-408), sam w „Jahresbericht des k.k. deutschen Obergymnasium und der damit verbundenen polnischen vier Parallelclassen bei den Dominikanern in Lamberg" ogłosił (1853) rozprawę Die römische Plebs in ihrer politischen Entwicklung vom Ursprünge bis zur völligen Glückstellung mit den Patriciern. Recenzję ogłosił Gustaw Wilhelm Linker (1853 R. 4 s. 600 601), nb. później znany jako profesor na gruncie Krakowa (1856-1859) i Lwowa (1861-1871), dobry fachowiec, nieprzychylnie nastawiony do Polaków4. 3 Ludwik Ćwikliński był profesorem w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim, Kazimierz Morawski w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim. Towarzystwo Filologiczne zawiązało się we Lwowie; Ćwikliński, pierwszy prezes, założył i redagował przez szereg lat „E os". 4 Por. J. Smereka, Filologia klasyczna w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim do czasów Zygmunta Węclewskiego i Ludwika Ćwiklińskiego, „Eos" 1937 t. 38 z. 1 s. 61-75. Pracę z zakresu gramatyki greckiej, K arla Burkkarda Über die PersonalEndungen des greichischen Verbums und ihre Entstehung (Cieszyn 1853) zrecenzował Georg Curtius z Pragi (1854 R. 5 s. 584-586). Rozprawa wyraźnie dydaktyczna, Józefa Czajkowskiego, dyrektora gimnazjum w Bochni, Die heidnischen Classiker als Bildungsmittel der jetzigen Gymnasialjugend („Programm des k.k. Staatsgymnasium in Bochnia" , 1853) zrecenzowana została przez A. Wilhelma (1854 R. 5 s. 404). Ten sam temat podjął wymieniony już Bronisław Trzaskowski w rozprawie Die heidnischen Schriftsteller and christlichen Gymnasien (Tarnów 1856) - (rec. L. Just, 1857 R. 8 s. 331-333). Przypomnieć trzeba, że działający nieco później wielki filolog i humanista, jakim był Kazimierz Morawski, postulował w swoim czasie usunięcie z lektury szkolnej Cezara jako autora „krwawego" . Na temat dydaktyczny zabrał głos dr Tachau, dyrektor II Gimnazjum we Lwowie, autor pracy Über die Ursachen des Verfalles des Studiums der lateinischen Sprache und über die M ittel zur Hebung derselben (Jahresbericht..., 1854). Zrecenzował ją H. Bonitz z Wiednia (1855 R. 6 s. 765-768). Jan Cipser ze Stanisławowa ogłosił w Sprawozdaniach swego gimnazjum za 1854/1855 r. studium Quintus Horatius Flaccus als Dichter, Bürger und Mensch. Zrecenzował ją F. Hochegger (1856 R. 7 s. 264-265). Jan Krystyniacki, znany jako badacz Sarbiewskiego (o czym będzie), był równocześnie z Cipserem horacjonistą. Rozprawę Über die Abfassungszeit den Zweckund Gedankengang von Horat. Sat. I 4 („Jahresbericht des k.k. zweiten Gymnasiums in Lemberg" 1856 s. 3-10) zrecenzował wymieniony już G. W. Linker (1857 R. 8 s. 286-287). Również Linker zrecenzował pracę Tytusa Zegadłowicza, nauczyciela z Bochni, Überblick der Culturzustände des Altertums. Eine historische Skizze (Bochnia 1856) - (1857 R. 8 s. 308-309), z kolei studium Augusta Benfelda Quaestiuncula de Horatii epistolae libri secundi primae versibus (Tarnów 1857, s. 73-75) - (1858 R. 9 s. 330). Zdarzyło się, że przedmiotem recenzji w „Zeitschrift..." stała się praca polskiego filologa klasycznego, Józefa Piechowskiego, De ironia ..Iliadis", wydana w Moskwie (1856). Omówił ją Adam W ahrmund z Wiednia (1857 R. 8 s. 720-723). Rozprawa G. Biermanna, nauczyciela gimnazjum ewangelickiego w Cieszynie, Ottokars II Stellung zur römischen Curie und zum Reich (Cieszyn 1857) stała się przedmiotem recenzji Ottokara Lorenza (1858 R. 9 s. 338-339). Józefa M. Karski Horae Platonicae (Bochnia 1858) zrecenzował wymieniony już H. Bonitz (1859 R. 10 s. 323-329). O wiele więcej głosów filologów klasycznych z Polski, jak również recenzji ich prac, coraz liczniejszych i coraz bardziej znaczących, pojawiło się na łamach „Zeitschrift..." w ostatnim ćwierćwieczu XIX w. Przez wiele lat aktywnym recenzentem polskich prac był Jan Wróbel, pochodzący ze Śląska Opolskiego, profesor w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim (1867-1870), z kolei w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim (1871-1875), wreszcie w Czerniowcach. Mimo pochodzenia ongiś polskiego, na co wskazuje nazwisko, wykładał po niemiecku, podobno nic władał językiem polskim, a przynajmniej znajomość jego była bierna. Przeniesienia z Krakowa do Lwowa i ze Lwowa do Czerniowiec tym były spowodowane, że w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim a nieco później w Lwowskim nie było możliwe utrzymanie niemieckiej katedry filologii5. Pisywał on w „Zeitschrift..." wiele. Pomija się rozprawy, sprawozdania, recenzje nie stanowiące polonicum. Ale polonica są bardzo liczne, i co interesujące szczególnie, pochodzą z lat 1876-1893, a więc z czemiowieckiego okresu działalności Wróbla. Listę wypowiedzi obchodzących nas otwiera Programmenschau (1876 R. 27 s. 927-940), doskonały przegląd galicyjskich sprawozdań gimnazjalnych, zawierający m. in. bardzo pozytywną recenzję przekładu Edypa króla, dokonanego przez Jana Czubka (Tarnów 1876, s. 3-69). W tym samym roczniku entuzjastycznie i wnikliwie ocenił Wróbel rozprawę Leona Kulczyńskiego Kilka słów o Macieju Kazimierzu Sarbiewskim, szczególnie o stosunku jego do Horacego (Sprawozdanie Gimnazjum Św. Anny w Krakowie 1875) - (1876 R. 27 s. 856-861). W dwa lata później wystąpił w jednym roczniku z kilkoma recenzyjkami (krótkimi) prac polskich filologów: Andrzeja Makowskiego Zakres władzy Oktawiana i jego zbawienny wpływ na zarząd prowincyj (1878 R. 29 s. 306); Edwarda Fiderera Horacego List VI księgi //Sprawozdanie Gimnazjum im. Franciszka Józefa we Lwowie, 1877) - (ibidem, s. 548 rec. krytyczna); Leona Orzechowskiego O ,,Agrykołi" Tacyta wraz z komentarzem c. 41 do końca (Rzeszów 1877) - (ibidem, s. 548); Ludwika Małeckiego O Bóstwie wedle pojęć Sofoklesa (Nowy Sącz 1877) - (ibidem, s. 549). Wykładający nie na polskiej ziemi Józef Ogórek ogłosił w Sprawozdaniach z Rudolfswert (1876/1877) łacińską pracę De Socrate marito paterąue fam ilias (rec. W róbla ibidem, s. 547). Nie uszła uwagi W róbla Romana Palmsteina Rzecz o znaczeniu studiów humanitarnych w starożytności (Lwów, Franc. Józef, 1878) - (1880 R. 31 s. 304-306), ani rozprawa Romana Spitzera Rozkład i upadek cesarstwa rzymskiego zachodniego pod wpływem germańskich osadników (Brzeżany 1881) - (1883 R. 34 s. 156). Równocześnie bardzo pozytywną recenzją powitał Wróbel rozprawę Franciszka Terlikowskiego O mowach ołintyjskich (Lwów, Gimn. Franciszka Józefa, 1881) - (ibidem, s. 155-156). Niezwykle urodzajny w mikrorecenzje prac polskich pióra W róbla był rok 1884 (R. 35). Odnajdujemy tu znów cały łańcuch omówienia prac: 5 Por. ibidem, także W. Madyda, Z dziejów filologii klasycznej w Uniwersytecie Jagiellońskim, [w:] W. Taszycki, A. Zaręba, W ydział Filologiczny UJ. Historia Katedr, Kraków 1964, s. 49-50. A rtura Jełowickiego O obecnym stanie krytyki tekstu pism Cezara (Brzezany 1882) - (s. 314-315); Juliana Dolnickiego Jak powstała mowa Demostenesa nr,pi zoô (Tiapávoi) i jaki jej stosunek do mowy Eschinesa ката KTtjoi(pcovvToę (Złoczów 1882) - (s. 315-316); Stanisława Bednarskiego Dualis u Sofoklesa (Wadowice 1887) - (s. 316-357); Franciszka Majchrowicza De Horatio et luvenale (Lwów, II Gimnazjum, 1882, s. 1-33) - (s. 317)®; Eugeniusza Zbarskicgo Die Slavenkriege zur Zeit Ottos III (Lwów, II Gimn., 1882 s. 34-74) - (s. 317-318) tym razem Wróbel wkroczył w historię polskoniemiecką średniowieczną. Po paru latach przerwy zrecenzował Wróbel nową pracę Bednarskiego, De infinitivi apud Catullum usurpatione (Tarnów 1886) - (1888 R. 39 s. 319-320), po nowej rocznej przerwie pracę Michał Jezienickiego Studia nad Platońskim ,,Sofistą" (cz. 1 Tarnopol 1889) - (1890 R. 41 s. 1052-1053). Dodać trzeba, że wspomniana praca Jezienickiego miała wcześniejszą, i obszerniejszą, wersję niemiecką, Über die Abfassungszeit der Platonischen Dialoge ,,Theaitet" und „Sophistes"... - (Lwów, II Gimn., 1887) tę zrecenzował Franz Lanczisky (1888 R. 39 s. 82-83). Po nowe trzyletniej przerwie zrecenzował Wróbel pracę wymienionego już Krystyniackiego O języku greckim pisarzy bizantyńskich w ogólności i o ich sposobie wyrażenia imion słowiańskich w szczególności (Lwów, IV Gimn., 1890) - (1893 R. 44 s. 1046-1048) i bezpośrednio potem przekład Jana Czubka Edypa króla Sofoklesa (Kraków, Gimn. Św. Anny, 1890) - (s. 1048). Tłumaczenie Czubkowe, dwukrotnie wydanej tragedii Sofoklesa stanowi su i generis klamrę na warsztacie recenzyjnym Wróbla. Maksymilian Iskrzycki zabierał głos na lamach „Zeitschrift ..." od 1876 począwszy, a więc nie jako nauczyciel gimnazjów w Samborze, w Rzeszowie i we Lwowie, lecz już jako profesor UJ. Opublikował cykl Zu den Scholien der „Odyssee" (1877 R. 28 s. 83-100; 1879 R. 30 s. 166-167; 1887 R. 38 s. 409-415); sześciokrotnie recenzował prace publikowane w galicyjskich sprawozdaniach gimnazjalnych. Bardzo pozytywnie zrecenzował rozprawę Zygmunta Urbanowicza Pisownia wyrazów obcych na ia (Brzeżany 1876) - (1876 R. 27 s. 945). Równocześnie zwrócił uwagę na rozprawkę Ignacego Znamirowskiego o pociągającym tytule O ile zaprawiał swoją łacinę na pismach Sallustego kronikarz bezimienny, Gallem pospolicie zwany! (Kraków, Św. Jacek, 1876) - (ibidem, s. 945-946). Łacińska praca Emiliana Paszkiewicza De Horatii et Augusti necessitudine quae ex carminibus lyricis intelligitur, wydana równocześnie z wymienionymi poprzednio (Sambor 1876, s. 3-19), otrzymała recenzję w roku następnym (1877 R. 28 s. 702). W tymże roku przypom niana została opublikowana nieco dawniej edycja opracowana 6 Pracę tę, napisaną po łacinie, om ówił w „Zeitschrift..." wcześniej Franz Hanna (z Krems) - (1883 R. 34 s. 869). Obaj recenzenci skarżyli się na złą korektę. przez wymienionego już Jana Krystyniackiego Sarbievii Carmina posthuma (Leopoli 1875) - (1877 R. 28 s. 774-778). W rok później uwagę Iskrzyckiego zwróciła rozprawa Bronisława Gutm ana O przypowieściach u Sofoklesa (Tarnów 1877/1878) - (1878 R. 29 s. 778-779) równocześnie z pracą Władysława Kosińskiego Porównawcze zestawienie niektórych właściwości (Wadowice 1877) - (iibidem, s. 781). Już jako profesor lwowskiej wszechnicy zabierał głos na łamach „Zeitschrift..." Ludwik Ćwikliński. Przypadkowo złożyło się tak, że udział jego był prawie równy udziałowi Iskrzyckiego: jeden przyczynek filologiczny, Beiträge zur Kritik und Erklärung des Thukydides (1878 R. 29 s. 161-166) i siedem recenzji, z tą jednak różnicą, że przedmiotem recenzji były niewyłącznie rozprawy ze sprawozdań galicyjskich. Zrecenzował niemieckie prace: Adolfa Bauera Die Entstehung des Herodotischen Geschichtswerdes. Eine kritische Untersuchung (Wien 1878) - (1878 R. 29 s. 273-289) i Heinricha W elzhofera Thukydides und sein Geschichtswerk. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Historiographie (München 1878) - (1880 R. 31 s. 101-112) i łacińską Ernesta Naum anna De Xenophontis libri qui AaKEÔaîovícov no)jxe.'ia inscribuntur (Berolini 1876) - (1878 R. 29 s. 461-462). Rzetelny badacz historiografii greckiej, autor licznych prac z tego zakresu, zrecenzował obszernie po latach dwujęzyczną edycję opracowaną przez Alfreda Croiseta Tukidydesa Historii wojny peloponeskiej (t. 1-2, Paris 1886) - (1887 R. 38 s. 518-529). Interesował się Ćwikliński nic tylko historiografią grecką. Omówił w piśmie przeznaczonym dla nauczycieli Austro-Węgier rzecz Antoniego Danysza De scriptorum imprimis po'étarum Romanorum studiis Catullianis. Dissertatio inauguralh Philologiae Vratislaviensis (Posnaniae 1876) - (ibidem, s. 269-270). Danysz, który później był profesorem pedagogiki i historii wychowania, dokoryzował się we Wrocławiu z zakresu filologii klasycznej. Należał jeszcze, jako jeden z ostatnich, do tego pokolenia polskich uczonych, którzy zaczynało się to w latach międzypowstaniowych doktoryzowali się w uniwersytetach niemieckich, przedstawiając dysertacje łacińskie. Entuzjastycznie powitał Ćwikliński Zygmunta Węclewskiego Wiadomość o życiu i pismach Gotfryda Ernesta Gródka (Kraków 1876) - (1876 R. 29 s. 461-462). Gdy narodził się we Lwowie wspomniany na początku pracy organ nauczycielstwa Polskiego „Muzeum", Ćwikliński zaprezentował rocznik 1 (1885) w dość obszernym omówieniu na łamach „Zeitschrift..." - (1885 R. 36 s. 108-112). Jedna z prac wybitnego uczonego była przedmiotem recenzji, Opis zarazy ateńskiej w dziele Tukidydesa (II 47, 2-54). Studium krytyczne (Kraków 1891, „Rozprawy AU w Krakowie" . Wydział Filologiczny, t. 16) - (1892 R. 43 s. 884-899). Autorem był Franz Lanczizky (Nikolsburg), niewątpliwie z pochodzenia Polak. O recenzjach z pierwszych dwu roczników „Eos" , będących w znacznej mierze dziełem Ćwiklińskiego, wspomniano już. Przyszła kolej na udział w „Zeitschrift..." prawdziwie wielkiego humanisty, jakim był Kazimierz Morawski. Opublikował trzy ważne przyczynki naukowe: Bemerkungen zu den attischen Rednern (1879 R. 30 s. 161-166, 401 408), Bemerkungen zu den sogenannten quintilianischen Declamationen (1881 R. 32 s. 1-12); Zur Rhetorik bei den römischen Historikern (Livius. Velleius. Curtius) - (1893 R. 44 s. 97-103). Stosunkowo rzadko przemawiał jako recenzent. Zrecenzował tylko, dość obszerną, edycję Cycerona Artis rhetoricae I. II, którą opracował Andreas Weidner (Berlin 1878) - (1880 R. 31 s. 435-440), z kolei dzieło Philippa Thielmanna Über Kritik des lateinischen Apolloniusromans (Spcier 1881) - (1881 R. 32 s. 430-433), wreszcie jedną pracę edytorską wykonaną w Polsce. Na zjeździe im. Jana Kochanowskiego w Krakowie w 1884 r. powołano do życia pod auspicjami Akademii Umiejętności w Krakowie serię Corpus antiquissimorum poetarum Poloniae Latinorum usque ad Ioannem Cochanovium. Kamieniem węgielnym serii stanowiącej chlubę nauki polskiej, co zostało poza granicami Polski uznane, był tom II7; Pauli Crosnensis Rutheni atque Ioannis Visliciensis Carmina, wydał Bronisław Kruczkiewicz (Cracoviae 1887). Ten tom zrecenzował Morawski (1887 R. 38 s. 859-860), na ogół pozytywnie, chociaż pewne zarzuty wysunął, sam wydał w roku następnym tom III, Andreae Cricii Carmina (Cracoviae 1888), i ten do dziś nie zastąpiony innym, chociaż niekiedy kontrowersyjnie oceniany otrzymał w „Zeitschrift..." recenzję pióra M arcina Sasa (1889 R. 40 s. 418^421). Gdy po latach ukazała się pierwsza z dwu istniejących ksiąg .jubileuszowych" ku czci uczonego, Stromata in Honorem Casimiri Morawski (Cracoviae 1908), recenzję napisał w „Zeitschrift..." Zachariasz Dembitzer, o którym będzie (1908 R. 59 s. 722-723) sumienny przegląd zawartości i piękne zakończenie: Zum Schluss bemerke ich dass der philologische Verein zu Lemberg den XIII. Band der Zeitschrift „Eos" (Lemberg 1907) Herrn v. Morawski 30-jährigen Jubiläum gewidmet und den Gelehrten zu seinem Ehrenmitgliede ernannt hat. M öge der Jubilar, mein hochverehrter Lehrer, noch lange Jahre zu Nutz und Frommen der Wissenschaft in frischer Geistesund Körperkraft wirken! Z chwilą pojawienia się w „Zeitschrift..." nazwisk: Iskrzycki, Ćwikliński, Morawski rozpoczęła się nowa epoka polskiej filologii klasycznej na łamach pisma. Wszelkie rekordy pobił Bronisław Kruczkiewicz, który na łamach „Zeitschrift..." wystąpił ponad 60 razy. Rozpoczął w 1879 r., gdy 1 Tom I, przeznaczony na poezję łacińską wieków średnich, nie ukazał się nigdy. był już od dwu lat po habilitacji, prowadził doccnckie zajęcia w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim, ale, wysyłając pierwszy artykuł, przedstawił się jako nauczyciel gimnazjum w Jaśle. Veniam legendi przeniósł zresztą Kruczkicwicz, właśnie w 1879 r., do UJ, gdyż posadę nauczycielską w Jaśle udało mu się zamienić na analogiczną w Krakowie. Profesurę objął we Lwowie w 1888 r.s, w „Zeitschrift..." pisywał do 1897 r. Wystąpił na łamach pisma niemiecko-języcznego z rozprawą Die alt lateinische und oskische Diphtong Ou (1879 R. 30 s. 1-18); po latach ogłosił przyczynek Zur Grundbedeutung des Conjunctivs im Lateinischen (1894 R. 45 s. 694 704). Od recenzji napisanych przez niego aż się roiło. W pierwszym roku współpracy wystąpił Kurczkicwicz z recenzją łacińskiej pracy Gustava Loevego Prodromus corporis glossariorum Latinorum Quaestiones de glossariorum Latinorum fontibus et usu (Lipsiac 1876) - (1879 R. 30 s. 629-634), napisaną także po łacinie. Po kilkuletniej przerwie zstąpił Kruczkicwicz „z hymnu [...] do prostej powieści" : stał się recenzentem prac ogłaszanych w galicyjskich sprawozdaniach. Zaczęło się od omówienia pracy dydaktycznej Józefa Barana O zakresie elementarnej stylistyki języka łacińskiego na kl. III i IV (Złoczów 1886, s. 1-39), mającej egzemplifikację, zgodnie z programem, z Neposa i z Cezara (1887 R. 38, s. 794-797). W tymże roczniku zrecenzował także Kruczkiewicz łacińską rozprawę Walentego Wróbla, Aristotelis de perturbationibus animi doctrina (Sanok 1886) - (ibidem, s. 792-794). W róbel kontynuował badania nad Arystotelesem jako autor rozprawy De Aristotelis de arte poetica libello recognoscendo (Sanok 1888). Recenzja Kruczkiewicza ukazała się w rok później (1889 R. 40 s. 952-953). Nowa praca Barana, O łacińskim szyku wyrazów (Złoczów 1887 s. 1-39) otrzymała recenzję w roczniku następnym (1888 R. 39 s. 665-666). Przekład Arystotelesa Poetyki pióra Stanisława Siedleckiego (Kraków, Św. Anna, 1887) powitał Kruczkiewicz recenzją w tymże roczniku (s. 840). Łacińska praca Stanisława Bednarskiego De inssnitivi apud Catullum usurpatione (Tarnów 1887) była przedmiotem dwu recenzji: oprócz Kruczkiewicza (1888 R. 39 s. 841-842) omówił ją, jak się już rzekło, Jan Wróbel (ibidem, s. 319-320). Ludwik Małecki, nauczyciel z Nowego Sącza, przełożył w sprawozdaniach swego gimnazjum mowy: Demostenesa O wieńcu czyli w obronie Ktezyfonta (1887 s. 3-83); Ajschynesa O wieńcu czyli przeciw Ktezyfontowi (1888 s. 3-83); Demostenesa O przeniewierczym poselstwie (1888 s. 3-93); Ajschynesa O przeniewierczym poselstwie (1890 s. 3-54). Wszystkie cztery przekłady recenzował Kruczkiewicz w „Zeitschrift..." - (1888 R. 39 s. 839-840); 1889 R. 40 s. 950-951; 1890 R. 41 s. 1049-1050; 1891 R. 42 s. 1041-1042). Zdarzało się, że autor dwu prac recenzowanych opublikował je w odstępach kilkuletnich, 8 Por. W. M adyda, L-с., s. 50-52. co nie osłabiło zainteresowań Kruczkiewicza. Rozprawę Andrzeja Czyczkicwicza Życie rodzinne Rzymian w starożytności (Tarnopol 1887) zrecenzował w roku następnym (1888 R. 39 s. 842-843), niemiecką pracę tego autora, Betrachtungen über Homers „Odyssee"', Untersuchen zur 2. Hälfte der „Odyssee", Buch 13, 17, 24 (Brody 1892/1893) również po roku (1894 R. 45 s. 851-853). Stanisława Schneidra, wybitnego filologa, wykładającego przez wiele lat w Przemyślu, próby przekładów zebrane pt. Ułamki rymowane starożytnych poetów (Przemyśl 1888), zrecenzował Kruczkiewicz w roku następnym (1884 R. 40 s. 954), zaś rozprawę tego autora Zagubiony biograf Peryklesa (ibidem, 1891) w dwa lata po ukazaniu się (1893 R. 44 s. 663-664). Franciszka Pawłowicza rozprawa O drugim stasimon w ,,Edypie królu" Sofoklesa (Jasło 1886 i 1887) otrzymała recenzję Kruczkiewicza (1888 R. 39 s. 664-665), jak również wydana równocześnie rozprawa Jana Strojka Tejrezjasz w poezji greckiej i jego znaczenie (Sanok 1887) - (ibidem, s. 842). W 1889 r. na warsztacie Kruczkiewicza powstało kilka recenzji. Poza wymienionymi już omówieniami prac Małeckiego, Schneidra i Walentego W róbla były to prezentacje rozpraw: M ariana Kossowskiego Kilka słów 0 literackiej działalności Horacego (Rzeszów 1888) - (1889 R. 40 s. 953), Tadeusza M andybura O śladach wpływu rzymskich satyryków na polską satyrę (Jarosław 1888) - (ibidem, s. 954-955), Franciszka Znamirowskiego Hermes w „Iliadzie" i w „Odysei" (Jasło 1888) - (ibidem, s. 950) i przekład dialogu Platona Menon dokonany przez Pawła Świderskiego (Stanisławów 1888) - (ibidem, s. 951-952). Z trójcy tragików greckich do szkolnej lektury należał przede wszystkim, 1 może w ciągu wielu lat wyłącznie, Sofokles. Nie jest dziwne, że był on najczęściej z trójcy przedmiotem prac nauczycieli gimnazjalnych. Rozprawę Osnowa i układ tragedii Sofoklesa „Ajas" (Złoczów 1889, s. 1-43) omówił Kruczkiewicz w roku następnym (1890 R. 41 s. 1047-1048), tuż obok zrecenzował rozprawkę Franciszka Majchrowicza Arystofanes w stosunku do współczesnych komediopisarzy (Stanisławów 1889) - (ibidem, s. 1048-1049)°. Recenzja rozprawy Adama Stanisława Jezierskiego o dialogu Platona Eutyfron albo o pobożności (Tarnopol 1890 s. 3-53) - (1891 R. 42 s. 1040 1041) wywołała polemikę autora (1892 R. 43 s. 381-382) i ta z kolei replikę Kruczkiewicza (ibidem, s. 382-383). Nie wywołała polemiki recenzja rozprawy Wincentego Szczepańskiego T. Maccius Plautus i jego spuścizna literacka (Stanisławów 1889/1890 s. 3-30) - (1891 R. 42 s. 1043-1044). Rozprawa Dymitra Czechowskiego Kilka uwag o zasadach, których przestrzegać należy przy czytaniu autorów klasycznych (Wadowice e Kruczkiewicz zrecenzował również tę pracę w „Kwartalniku Historycznym" (1890 R. 4 nr 4 s. 140-141). 1891) stała się przedmiotem recenzji Kruczkiewicza w dwa lata później (1893 R. 44 s. 857-858). Praca Eliasza Kokorudza Ablativus, locativus i instrumentalis u Homera pod względem formalnym i syntaktycznym (cz. 1-2, Stanisławów 1890/1891 s. 3-26, 1891/1892 s. 3-38) była przedmiotem dwu recenzji (1893 R. 44 s. 661-662; 1894 R. 45 s. 849-850). Zainteresował się Kruczkiewicz jednocześnie rozprawami Tadeusza M andybura Lukian z Samosaty Tymon czy Mizantrop (Jarosław 1891) - (1893 R. 44 s. 664), Sebastiana Polaka Pieśń Symonidesowa w Platońskim „Protagorasie", jej rekonstrukcja i związek z całością dialogu (Drohobycz 1891 s. 3-65) - ( ibidem , s. 662-663) i W. Zagórskiego Gaius Lucillus. Przyczynek do historii rzymskiej satyry (Tarnów 1891) - (ibidem, s. 664-665). Bardzo owocny na recenzenckim warsztacie Kruczkiewicza rok 1894 przyniósł omówienie rozpraw łacińskich: Franciszka Chowańca De enuntiatorum quae dicuntur subiecto carentium usu Thucydideo (Jarosław 1892) - (1894 R. 45 s. 855-856), L. Koczyńskiego De flexura Graecorum nominum propriorum apud Lucillum Varronem, Lucretium, Vergilium (Radowce na Bukowinie 1892) - (ibidem, s. 858-859)10, Onufrego Geciowa Quaestiones in Aristophanis ,,Vespas" (Rzeszów 1892) - (ibidem, s. 854-855), Aleksandra Radeckiego Quatenus ex epistulis Plinianis litterarum status iam senescentium cognosci possit, quaeritur (Przemyśl 1892) - (ibidem, s. 859 860), jak też polskich: M ikołaja Mazanowskiego O gościnności Greków homerowych (Bochnia 1892) - (ibidem, s. 853-854), Władysława Myślewicza O mowach pogrzebowych u starożytnych Greków (Kołomyja 1892, s. 3-30) - (ibidem, s. 856-857), Stanisława Zaremby O nauce filologii w szkołach począwszy od epoki odrodzenia aż do dni naszych (Nowy Sącz 1892) - (ibidem, s. 860), również przekładów: Jana Czubka Pierwszej pieśni Iliady (Kraków, Święta Anna, 1892) - (ibidem, s. 850-851); Bronisława Dobrzańskiego Listu do Pizonów (O sztuce poetyckiej) - (Złoczów 1892, s. 3-74) - (ibidem, s. 857-858). Podobnie owocny był rok 1895. Zrecenzował Kruczkiewicz rozprawy łacińskie: wspomnianego już Zachariasza Dembitzera De rationis mutuae apud Sallustium significatione (Kołomyja 1893) - (1895 R. 46 s. 851-852), Prokopa Rybczuka Quibus grammaticis formis Horatius agentium fines in suis operibus expressit (Tarnopol 1893 s. 3-12) - (ibidem, s. 852), jedną niemiecką, której autorem był Leonhard Hayder, Charakteristik der Paedagogen in der Sophokleischen „Elektra" (Sanok 1893) - (ibidem, s. 848), dwie polskie: Jana Guzdka O znaczeniu wychowawczym piśmiennictwa greckiego (Stryj 1893) - (ibidem, s. 852-853), Franciszka Bizonia Ideał wychowawczy Cycerona (Nowy Sącz 1893) - (ibidem, s. 850-851), dwa przekłady: Michała Kusionowicza mowy Demostenesa Przeciw Arystokratesowi (Kołomyja 10 Tę pracę zrecenzował też w „Zeitschrift..." Ernst Kalinka (1893 R. 44 s. 838). 1893) - (ibidem, s. 848 -849) Michała Konstantego Boguckiego, późniejszego profesora UJ, przekład Lukiana z Samosaty Powieść prawdziwa (Bochnia 1893 s. 1-33) - (ibidem, s. 850). Bogucki, dodajmy, ogłosił później przekład dzieła Ludiana Sen albo Kogut (Tarnów 1897/1898 s. III-IV , 1-19). W następnym roku zrecenzował Kruczkiewicz rozprawy: Witolda Barewicza O powstaniu mowy Demostenesa przeciw Midiaszowi i je j niedostatkach (Drohobycz 1894) - (1896 R. 47 s. 672), Jana Bystronia Disticha Catonis w przekładach polskich w. X V I Franciszka Mymera i Sebastiana Klonowica (Kraków, III Gimn., 1894) - (ibidem, s. 667-668), Tom asza Szafrana Wywody etymologiczne w dziele Cycerona „De rerum natura" zebrał i w świetle nowszej gramatyki porównawczej przedstawił... (Brzeżany 1894 s. 3-24) (ibidem, s. 668 669), Józefa Sanojcy Studia Herodota w dziedzinie poezji greckiej (Rzeszów 1894 s. 3-52) i tegoż Stosunek Herodota do Hekatajosa (Rzeszów 1895 s. 3-19) - (ibidem, s. 670-671), przekłady Arystotelesa Politei: Emila Paszkiewicza (Sambor 1894 i 1895) i Jana Wierzbickiego (Wadowice 1894) - (ibidem, s. 856-858), edycję z zakresu literatury polsko- -łacińskiej Benedicti a Cosmin quae supersunt Carmina... wydał Pawlikowski11 (Kraków, Święta Anna, 1894) - (ibidem, s. 669-670), Stanisława Rzepińskiego Komentarz do wybranych pieśni Horacego (Wiedeń-Praga 1896) - (ibidem, s. 848 849). W roku następnym Rzepiński wydał Przechadzki po starożytnym Carnutum (Wadowice 1896 s. 3-37), Kruczkiewicz zrecenzował pracę (1897 R. 48 s. 861). Rok 1897 był ostatnim działalności Kruczkiewicza-recenzenta w „Zeitschrift..." . Poza wspomnianą pracą Rzepińskiego zrecenzował Salomona Handla De troporum apud Horatium usu (I. Carmina) - (Brody 1896) (1897 R. 48 s. 858-859), Jana Tralki Socratis de diis eiusque daemonis opiniones quae fuerunt (Stryj 1896) - (ibidem, s. 860), i co najważniejsze: W iktora Hahna Żywoty Plutarcha wobec Arystotelesa 'AQr/vaíw nohxúa (Lwów, Gimn. im. Franciszka Józefa, 1896, s. 1-56) - (ibidem, s. 859-860). W arta zacytowania ocena jaką młody uczony, zresztą w dalszej działalności naukowej bardziej polonista niż filolog, otrzymał od Kruczkiewicza: Wie dem auch sein mag, verdient die Abhandlung des Verfassers volle Anerkennung. Er hat nicht nur gewissenshaft die betreffenden Parallelstellen verglichen, sondern auch die einschlägige Literatur übert die ganze Frage genau zurathe gezogen und eine schnellere Orientierung in diesem Problem wesentlich erleichtert. Po omówieniu udziału czterech profesorów uniwersytetu, w tym jednego niezmiernie aktywnego, wypadnie znów wrócić do pomniejszych. Józefa Ogórka rozprawę niemiecką Wann hat Cicero die beiden ersten Catilinarischen 11 Dra Jana Pawlikowskiego, filologa wykładającego w Krakowie, nie należy mylić z Janem Gwalbertem Pawlikowskim, o wiele sławniejszym. Edycję Benedykta z Koźmina zrecenzował też wymieniony już Z. Dembitzer w „M uzeum" (1894 R. 10 s. 845-846). Reden gehalten (Rudolfswert 1887/1888) zrecenzował J. Zycha (1880 R. 31 s. 307); po wielu latach inną pracę Ogórka, Quae ratio intercedat inter Ciceronis ,,Paradoxa Stoicorum" cum Horatii stoicismo Satiris Epistulisque eius contento („Jahresbericht des II. Obergymn. in Lemberg" 1901 s. 3-22, 1902 s. 3-33) Franz Hanna (1905 R. 56 s. 381). Praca łacińska Teodora Czuleńskiego Qua ratione temporibus nostris Cornelii Taciti ,,Annales" critica arte tractentur (Kołomyja 1880) była przedmiotem negatywnej recenzji Ignaza Prammera (1881 R. 32 s. 397). Równocześnie Adolf Juliusz Gawalewicz ogłosił niemiecką rozprawę Theodorichs des Grossen Beziehungen zu Byzanz und zu Odoaker (Brody 1880); recenzję ogłosił F. Bauer (1881 R. 32 s. 560). Niebawem pojawiły się na łamach „Zeitschrift..." nazwiska dwu znakomitych w najbliższej przyszłości uczonych. Adam Stefan Miodoński tu publikował swe iuvenilia: w wieku 24 lat ogłosił przyczynek Zu Propertius II 3.42 (1885 R. 36 s. 741-742); będąc, po zakończeniu studiów pod kierunkiem Kazimierza Morawskiego w UJ, na dodatkowych studiach w Monachium, u Eduarda Wölfflina12, nadesłał nowy: Negotium. Filius (1888 R. 39 s. 102-105); z Rzymu, gdzie bawił następnie dla badań bibliotecznych, przesłał trzeci, Zum Bellum Alexandrinum (1890 R. 41 s. 304-306). Wydanie krytyczne wraz z przekładem na język niemiecki dokonane przez Miodońskiego, Anonymus adversus aleatores und die Briefe an Cyprian, Lucian, Celarius und an den karthaginiensischen Clerus (Erlangen-Leipzig 1889) otrzym ało recenzję Franza W iehricha (1890 R. 41 s. 28-32). W latach późniejszych Miodoński nie współpracował z „Zeitschrift..." . Leon Sternbach jako doktorant w Uniwersytecie Wiedeńskim w wieku 22 lat ogłosił w „Zeitschrift..." recenzję dwu prac edytorskich dotyczących Arystofanesa, które Fred H. M. Blaydes wydał w Halle (1885 i 1886): Aristophanis deperditarum comoediarum fragmenta. Auxit, novo ordine digessit, recensuit et annotatione partim aliorum selecta instruxit...; Aristophanis comici quae supersint opera. Recensuit... (1886 R. 37 s. 495-503). Z kolei znakomite wydanie młodego jeszcze Sternabacha, Anthologiae Planudeae appendix. Barberino Vaticana (Lipsine 1890) zrecenzował, bardzo pozytywnie, Wilhelm Weinberger (1891 R. 42 s. 113-117), zaś następną pracę edytorską, poezje autora bizantyńskiego nazwiskiem Kallikles, Nicolai Calliclis Carmina (Kraków 1903, „Rozprawy AU" t. 26 s. 313-392), zrecenzował Konstantin Н о т а (1904 R. 55 s. 629-633), wytykając Sternbachowi pewne usterki. 12 W łacińskiej autobiografii jako profesor Uniwersytetu Fryburskiego (1891/1892) napisał M iodoński o Wölfilinie: „[...] cuius viri maxime de me meriti et singulärem humanitalem pia recolo mente et egregiam adhuc grato animo admiror doctrinam" . (Cyt. za: J. Starnawski, Z fryburskiego epizodu Adama Stefana Miodońskiego. Łacińska autohiorgrafia. „Meander" 1984 R. 39 nr 6 s. 295). Wymieniony już Emilian Paszkiewicz, którego jedną z prac zrecenzował M. Iskrzycki, był też autorem rozprawy łacińskiej De Horatio Homeri imitatore (Sambor 1888, s. 1-16) recenzję napisał tym razem Franz Hanna z Krems (1889 R. 40 s. 859). Ten sam Hanna, już z Wiednia, zrecenzował pracę Piotra Lewickiego De natura infinitivi atque usu apud Horatium praecipue lyrico (Lwów, III Gimn., 1891 s. 3-25) - (1893 R. 44 s. 569-570). J. Skobielski, wykładający w Czcrniowcach, ogłaszał prace po niemiecku. Jedną z nich, Der sapphische Vers bei den lateinischen Dichtern (Czerniowce 1888/1889) zrecenzował Isodor Hilberg (1890 R. 41 s. 183). Po latach jego przyczynek /м Ногат, ( arm. III 17, 21 (Czerniowce 1901) wraz z pracami paru innych kolegów czerniowieckich, prawdopodobnie nie mających nic wspólnego z Polską, zrecenzował Franc Lukas z Wiednia (1902 R 53 s. 1141-1142). Łacińską pracę Piotra Bieńkowskiego De fontibus et auctoritate scriptorum historiae Sertorianae (Kraków 1890, „Rozprawy A U " Wydział Filologiczny, t. 18) zrecenzował Franz Lanczizky (Nikolsburg) - (1892 R. 43 s. 438^*43); Łacińską rozprawę R. Ceglińskicgo De fontibus a Plutarcho in vitii Gracchorum adhibitis et de Tiberii Gracchi vita (Lwów, Gimn. akademickie, 1890) Adolf Bauer (1893 R. 44 s. 569570). M. Lityńskiego rozprawę Cesarz Tyberiusz w świetle nowoczesnych badań (Lwów 1893) zrecenzował wymieniony już Raimund Friedrich Kaindl (1895 R. 46 s. 1146). Andrzeja Czyczkiewicza Betrachtungen über Homers „Odyssee" (Brody 1893) J. Golling z Wiednia (1895 R. 46 s. 569). Juliusza Kobylańskiego rozprawę łacińską De enuntiatorum consecutivum apud tragicos Graecos usu ac ratione (Kołomyja 1894 s. 3-56) zrecenzował H. St. Seldmayer z Wiednia (1895 R. 46 s. 1145-1146). Po latach niemiecką pracę Kobylańskiego Über Bildung der ästhetischen Gefühle an Gymnasien (Czerniowce, II Gimn., 1902) zrecenzował R udolf Böck z Troppau (1903 R. 54 s. 958-959). Jako nauczyciel II Gimnazjum w Czerniowcach wydał też Kobylański w 1906 r. ćwiczenia gramatyczno-stylistyczne dla VIII klasy szkół z ukraińskim językiem wykładowym, według Tacyta. Recenzentem tej pracy był Jan Demiańczuk (Stanisławów) - (1911 R. 62 s. 1143-1144). Recenzja ukazała się po pięciu latach. Przyczynek dotyczący Ptaków Arystofanesa ogłosił L. Młynek z Wadowic, Zu Aristophanes (1895 R. 46 s. 488^489). Wymieniony już Z. Dembitzer z Kołomyji był recenzentem szeregu prac powstałych w Galicji, wkraczał nawet w literaturę polską. Recenzował: Franciszka Terlikowskiego edycję C. J. Caesaris Commentarii de bello Gallico (Lwów 1896) - (1896 R. 47 s. 847-848); Kornela Fischera i Henryka Kopii Preparację do „Iliady" Homera (Ks. I, III, IV, VIj - (Lwów 1897) - (1897 R. 48 s. 848-849); Franciszka Próchnickiego Ćwiczenia łacińskie na kl. I II (Lwów 1903) - (1903 R. 54 s. 952). Z recenzji Józefa Winkowskiego i Józefa Taborskiego Ćwiczeń greckich (Lwów 1899) - (1901 R. 52 s. 610-611) zasługuje na przytoczenie zdanie: „Den Herrn Verfassern gebürt für ihre Mühewaltung der beste Dank aller galizischen Lehrer des Griechischen; denn ihre Arbeit wird nicht verfehlen, auf den griechischen Unterricht an den einheimischen Gymnasien fördernd einzuwirken" . Wspomniany już Stanislaw Rzepiński był jako nauczyciel w Nowym Sączu recenzentem prac: Tadeusza M andybura Olympia (Lwów, 1 Gimn. ukraińskie, 1897) - (1899 R. 50 s. 93) i Dymitra Czechowskiego Die Hausgötter in Pompei (Przemyśl, II Państw. Gimn. ukraińskie, 1903) - (1904 R. 55 s. 1071). Karol Orszulik z Cieszyna publikował parokrotnie Beispiele zur griechischen Syntax aus Xenophon, Demosthenes und Platon gesammelt (Cieszyn 1898, 1902-1903, 1906). Owe „Beispiele" były przedmiotem recenzji. Recenzent pierwszych części nazywał się E. Sewera. Występował jako nauczyciel z Ried in Innkreis (1900 R. 51 s. 1045-1046), z kolei z Linzu (1905 R. 56 s. 382). Ostatnią część zrecenzował Johann Ochler z Wiednia (1909 R. 60 s. 1041). Praca wymienionego już Jana Tralki Metodyczno-retoryczny rozbiór pisma Platona pt. ,.Apologia Sokratesa" (Stryj 1901)13 była przedmiotem recenzji B. Prysaka z Jasła (1902 R. 53 s. 376). Bazylego Szczurata rozprawa łacińska De inssnitivi Homerici originc casuali (Brody 1902) stanowiła przedmiot recenzji Fr. Stolza z Innsbrucku (1903 R. 54 s. 561). Wspomniany Fr. Kunz zrecenzował edycję Tacyta De Germania libellus opracowaną przez Władysława Okęckicgo (Kraków 1903) (1904 R. 55 s. 38-42). Dwie nowe spośród licznych prac poświęconych Horacemu, obie łacińskie, z początku XX wieku, zostały zauważone w „Zeitschrift..." : Jana Kopacza De Horatii rectae praeceptis („Eos" 1901 R. 7 s. 154-179. Odb. Lwów 1902) omówił Franz Kunz z Wiednia (1904 R. 55 s. 374); L. Kierońskiego Quid Horatius de carminum et sermonum componendorum ratione praedicavisset (Buczacz 1902 s. 1-16) ocenił Franz Hanna z Prachnitz (1905 R. 56 s. 381) dość ostro: wskazała, że nie są to przemyślenia nowe. Antoniego Barańskiego rozprawa Die Urgeschichte Nordeuropas nach den ägyptischen Quellen (Lwów 1903) doznała negatywnej oceny Władimira Riedia z Wiednia (1904 R. 55 s. 424-425). Działalność wybitnego pedagoga Stefana Cybulskiego, mimo że prowadzona w Petersburgu, była zauważona w piśmie redagowanym w Wiedniu. Jego Tabulae quibus antiquitates Graecae et Romanae illustrantur wychodziły zresztą w Lipsku. Recenzował je Rudolf Böck ( 1902 R. 53 s. 927), następnie 13 Było to na warsztacie Tralki środkowe ogniwo cyklu. Po ogłoszeniu łacińskiej rozprawki Socratis de diis eiusque daemonio opiniones quae fuerint (Stryj 1896 s. 1-15) opracował Platoński tryptyk: Osnowa, układ i cel Platońskiego „Eutyfrona". Istota idei (ibidem, 1897 s. 1-25), a po studium o Apologii Sokratesa (1901) opublikował jeszcze M etodyczno-retoryczny rozbiór dialogu Platońskiego pt. ,,Kriton" (ibidem, 1906 s. 1-14). Wilhelm Kubitschek (1904 s. 134135) i Johann Ohler (ibidem, s. 640). Altas Cybulskiego, Die Kultur der Griechen und Römer (Leipzig 1905) Joseph Fritsch (1906 R. 57 s. 213-215); R. Locpera Das alte Athen (tckst do 14 i 15. tablic w atlasie) znów J. Ohler (1906 R. 57 s. 892-894; 1907 R. 58 s. 1093-1094). Dzieło Cybulskiego wydane po rosyjsku, Istorija isskustv v gimnazijach (Petersburg 1906) recenzował J. Demiańczuk (1909 R. 60 s. 928-929); dzieło Die griechischen Münzen (Leipzig 1913) W. Kubitschek (1914 R. 65 s. 899-951). Osłabła z początkiem XX w. strona informacyjna pisma, zmniejszyła się liczba recenzji. Sporadycznie zauważone były prace wielkich uczonych. Stanisław Bednarski, wymieniony już, zrecenzował Tadeusza Sinki Sententiae Platonicae de philosophis regnantibus fa ta quae fuerint (Kraków-Podgórze 1904 s. 3-56) - (1907 R. 58 s. 857-860). Był wtedy Sinko „wschodzącą gwiazdą". Znany już powszechnie Tadeusz Zieliński raz tylko był przedmiotem omówienia. Entuzjastyczną recenzję dzieła Das Klauselgesetz in Ciceros Reden (Leipzig 1904) ogłosił Alois K ornitzer z W iednia (1905 R. 56 s. 1073-1079). Znakomita edycja Stanisława Witkowskiego Epistulae privatae Graecae quae in papyris aetatis servantur ukazała się w drugim wydaniu (Leipzig 1911). Recenzował ją J. Mesie z Grazu (1912 R. 63 s. 397-398). Spośród recenzji dotyczących prac mniejszego kalibru wymienić trzeba omówienie pracy A. Chudzińskiego Staatseinrichtungen des römischen Kaisers... (autor: Edmund Groag, 1906 R. 57 s. 278), recenzję wymienionego już Fr. Kunza pracy łacińskiej Władysława Kryczyńskicgo Quonam die Marci Tullii Ciceronis oratio „In Catilinam" prima habita sit (Złoczów 1907) - (1908 R. 59 s. 859-860), recenzję aktywnego J. Demiańczuka rozprawy dydaktycznej Kornelego Juliusza Hecka O konieczności utworzenia nowego typu szkoły średniej (Kraków, III Gimn., 1907) - (1908 R. 59 s. 862-864), przepojoną troską o utrzymanie w dotychczasowym wymiarze łaciny i greki. Jako ostatnią pozycję wymienić trzeba w tym dziale recenzję z dużej pracy historycznej Alfreda Domaszewskiego Geschichte der römischen Kaiser (wyd. 2. Leipzig 1914) przez A. Premersteina z Pragi (1914 R. 65 s. 925-931). Pozostała na koniec filologia polska: gramatyka i literatura. Ze zrozumiałych względów prac z tego zakresu nie mogło być dużo w piśmie dla nauczycieli monarchii austro-węgierskiej. Jedna zjawiła się w początku istnienia pisma. Wymieniony już Euzebiusz Czerkawski zrecenzował Józefa Mrozińskiego Pierwsze zasady gramatyki języka polskiego (Lwów 1850)14 - (1850 R. 1 s. 358-367). W obszernej recenzji wykazał Czerkawski doskonałą orientację w „stanie badań" nad gramatyką polską. Stanowisko jego wobec Mrozińskiego nie było całkowicie pozytywne. W pierwszych latach istnienia pisma zrecenzowano na jego łamach niejedną pracę jeszcze z pierwszej 14 Książka wydana była po raz pierwszy w 1822 r. połowy XIX w. Niemiecki podręcznik W. Smitha Grammatik der polnischen Sprache (Berlin 1845) /recenzował A. Schlcicher z Pragi (1851 R. 2 s. 225-228), zajmujący się przede wszystkim gramatyką języka czeskiego. Ewgcnija (Dobromysła) Łada-Łazowskicgo Gramatykę języka polskiego (Kraków 1848) zrecenzował pionier językoznawstwa słowiańskiego porównawczego František Miklosič (1852 R. 3 s. 47-49). Zaszczyt recenzji Miklosiča przypadł też Norberta Bętkowskiego pracy niemieckiej Über die grammatischen Uneinigkeiten der polnischen Sprache (Brody 1856) - (1857 R. 8 s. 296 297). Nowe wydanie pracy Łada-Łazowskiego Gramatyka języka polskiego, dzieło konkursowe w skróceniu dla użytku niższych klas gimnazjalnych i realnych (Lwów 1861) zrecenzował bardzo pozytywnie Michał Osadca (1862 R. 13 s. 285-293). Franciszek Tomasz Bratranek zrecenzował niemiecką pracę Michała Huczyńskiego Über die Bildung und Bedeutung der iMute und die Verbindung derselben zur menschlichen Sprache (Nowy Sącz 1852) łącznie z polską pracą Bronisława Trzaskowskiego O deklamacji - (1853 R. 4 s. 346 347). Wymieniony Trzaskowski, nauczyciel w różnych miastach galicyjskich, jako nauczyciel z Drohobycza zrecenzował Henryka Sucheckiego Zwięzłą gramatykę polską, wydaną po raz trzeci (Lwów 1856) - (1858 R. 9 s. 872-886), znacznie później entuzjastycznie i obszernie Antoniego Małeckiego Gramatykę języka polskiego większą (Lwów 1863) - (1864 R. 15 s. 683-691). Ogłosił też Trzaskowski na łamach „Zeitschrift..." rozprawkę Über die Lautvermittelung im Polnischen (1860 R. 11 s. 840 842). Po latach milczenia w zakresie gramatyki polskiej, już w początku wieku XX, nie uszły uwadze recenzentów austriackich pewne prace z językoznawstwa ogólnego znakomitych uczonych. Rozprawę Franciszka Pohoreckiego Kilka uwag o powstaniu złożonej deklinacji przymiotników w języku polskim (Lwów, Wyższa szkoła realna, 1888) zrecenzował Jan Bystroń (1889 R. 40 s. 1152-1153), również Alojzego Steinera pracę Odmiana rzeczownika w języku staropolskim na podstawie kodeksu Floriańskiego ze stanowiska gramatyki porównawczej (Brzeżany 1888, s. 3-53) - (ibidem, s. 1151-1152). Przełomowa monografia Jana Rozwadowskiego Wortbildung und Wortbedeutung (Heidelberg 1904) została zreccnzowana przez J. Goldinga z Wiednia (1906 R. 57 s. 715-717), a W iktora Porzezińskiego Einleitung in die Sprachwissenschaft (przeł. z języka rosyjskiego przez Ericha Bochmego, Leipzig 1910) przez Fr. Stolza z Innsbrucká (1911 R. 62 s. 319-320). Przechodząc do spraw literatury polskiej, zaznaczyć należy na początku, iż wielokrotnie były już o nią potrącenia, zwłaszcza przy omawianiu prac z zakresu filologii klasycznej (literatura polsko-łacińska). Przypomnieć trzeba nazwiska: Anonima tzw. Galla, Pawła z Krosna, Jana z Wiślicy, Andrzeja Krzyckiego, Benedykta z Koźmina, Franciszka Myrnera, Sebastiana Klonowica, Macieja Kazimierza Sarbiewskiego, Gotfryda Ernesta Gródka, wreszcie pracę o wpływie satyry rzymskiej na polską. Pewne sprawy „polsko-łacińskie" wypłyną i tu jeszcze, więcej będzie się mówiło o pracach czysto polonistycznych, oczywiście nielicznych. W spomniany Bratranek wkroczył nic tylko w językoznawstwo polskie ale i w nauczanie szkolne naszego języka: zrecenzował Wypisy polskie dla klasy III (Lwów 1852) - (1852 R. 3 s. 631 -633). Eugeniusza Arnolda Janoty rozprawa Übersetzung von Psalmen Hymnen und Kirchengebeten aus dem X IV Jh. („Jahresbericht..." Krakow 1855) otrzymała bardzo pozytywną recenzję K. Weinholda (1856 R. 7 s. 283). Z przełomu XIX i XX w. wymienić trzeba kilka prac. Recenzję Jozefa Nogaja Rozbioru krytycznego „Sielanek" J. B. Zimorowicza (Lwów, IV Gimn., 1887) zrecenzował Roman Zawiliński (1889 R. 40 s. 91-92). Zawiliński zrecenzował również bardzo pozytywnie Kornelego J. Hecka Źródła do dziejów literatury i cywilizacji polskiej w X V I i X V II stuleciu, respective część I pracy kontynuowanej i doprowadzonej do wydania książkowego15, część zawierającą utwór Bazylego Rudomicza Leo Leopoliensis (Stryj 1889 s. 1-33) (1890 R. 41 s. 1145-1146), a więc rzecz w bliskim kręgu tematycznym wobcc pracy Nogaja. Wspomniany Iskrzycki, filolog klasyczny, zrecenzował polonistyczną pracę Władysława Kosińskiego, podówczas nauczyciela z W adowic, później w Krakowie, Porównawcze zestawienie niektórych właściwości języka ludowego zachodniej Galicji ze staropolskim językiem piśmiennictwa (Wadowice 1877) - (1878 R. 29 s. 781). Wracając do Za W ilińskiego, przypomnieć trzeba dwie jego recenzje prac o Kochanowskim: Stanisława Matwija Kilka słów o elegiach łacińskich Jana Kochanowskiego (Drohobycz 1889) - (1890 R. 41 s. 1145); Kazimierza Bronikowskiego O „Foricoeniach" Jana Kochanowskiego (Kraków , III Gimnazjum, 1888) - (1891 R. 40 s. 667-669). Powstał więc na warsztacie Zawilińskiego drugi z kolei cykl recenzyjny. Niebawem doszedł trzeci. Nie uszły jego uwagi prace z zakresu romantyzmu polskiego. Zrecenzował rozprawy: Antoniego Mazanowskiego Kornel Ujejski. Charakterystyka literacka (Stryj 1894) - (1896 R. 47 s. 666-667) bardzo pozytywnie; Mikołaja Mazanowskiego „Anna z Nadbrzezia" Seweryna Goszczyńskiego (Kraków, Gimn. Św. Jacka, 1894) - (ibidem, s. 665-666); W iktora Hahna Kilka słów o genezie „Mindowego" (Lwów, Gimn. im. Franciszka Józefa, 1894) - (ibidem, s. 666). Warto zacytować ocenę młodzieńczej pracy niezwykle płodnego przez dziesiątki lat uczonego: D ie Abhandlung ist sehr genau durchgeführt und correct geschrieben; der Titel scheint uns nicht genug passend gewählt zu sein, da die Abhandlung eher eine Analyse der Elemente in der Tragödie zu nennen wäre. 13 W dalszym ciągu ogłaszał Heck w Sprawozdaniach Gimn. w Stryju w cyklu Pomniejsze źródta do dziejów literatury i cywilizacji polskiej w X V I i XV II stuleciu: Lustracja starostwa Lwowskiego >v r. 1570 (1890 s. 43-66); Trzy dziełka J. B. Zimorowicza (1891 s. I-V1I1, 1-72). Wydanie książkowe ukazało się pt. M ateriały do biografii J. B. i S. Zimorowiczów (O zim ków ), Kraków 1895. Archiwum do Dziejów Literatury i Oświaty w Polsce, t. 8. Wymieniony już niejednokrotnie Kaindl był także recenzentem prac z zakresu historii literatury staropolskiej: Antoniego Maczugi Ostatnie lata w życiu Stanisława Orzechowskiego (Tarnów 1894/1895 s. 3-34) - (1897 R. 48 s. 944)ie; Jana Gawlikowskiego Beiträge zu einer Biographie des Nikolaus Rej von Nagłowice („Jahresbericht..." , Brody 1899) - (1901 R. 52 s. 1149); Władysława Kucharskiego Złota bulla z 1112 r. (Brzeżany 1900 s. 1-36) - (1902 R. 53 s. 850). Zasłużony na wielu polach i wymieniany jako rcccnzcnt prac germanistycznych Albert Zipper powitał na łamach „Zeitschrift..." pracę Michała Janika Najnowsza poezja polska. Studium literackie (Złoczów 1902) krótkim pozytywnym omówieniem (1905 R. 56 s. 282 - „schlichte, klare Darstellung"). Wymieniony był Zachariasz Dcmbitzer jako recenzent prac z zakresu filologii klasycznej. Monografię Kornelego Juliusza Песка Szymon Simonides (cz. 1-3. Kraków 1901-1903) recenzował on w dwu ratach (1902 R. 53 s. 762-763; 1904 R. 55 s. 236-238). Omawiając cz. 2-3 powołał się na wnikliwą recenzję W iktora H ahna („Pam iętnik L iteracki" 1903 R. 2 s. 299-313), ocenił bardzo pozytywnie. Ale już w recenzji części 1. napisał: Zum Schluss soll nicht geleugnet werden, dass Heck einige neue Beiträge zur Biographie und zur Würdigung der literarischen Wirksamkeit des polnischen Dichters und Philologen geliefert hat, wofür er des Dankes aller, die sich mit der Geschichte des Humanismus in Polen abgeben, sicher sein darf. Po kilku latach zrecenzował Dembitzcr przekład dzieła Kallimacha Życie i obyczaje Grzegorza z Sanoka..., dokonany przez Kółko filologiczne we Lwowie poprzedzony słynną przedmową Tadeusza Sinki Spór o Grzegorza z Sanoka (Lwów 1909) - (1911 R. 62 s. 839 841). Obok prac indywidualnych recenzowane były w „Zeitschrift..." zbiorowe przedsięwzięcia polskiej nauki. O niektórych wspomniano już (pierwsze roczniki „M uzeum", „Eos"). Wymienić należy nadto recenzje roczników 20. i 21. „M uzeum" (1904 i 1905), których autorem był wymieniony już jako recenzent „Eos" Karl Wotke (1904 R. 55 s. VI-VII, 1906 R. 57 s. V II-IX )17. Warto podać także anons o tworzeniu się Akademii Umiejętności w Krakowie (1871 R. 22 s. 394): Se. k. u. k. Apostolische Majestät haben folgendes Allerhöchste Handschriften zu Erlassen geruht: Lieber Minister Jireček! Es ist Mein Wunsch, dass eine Akademie der Wissenschaften mit dem Sitze in Krakau gegründet werde. Ich beauftrage Sie, zu diesem Ende mit der bestehenden Krakauer Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, deren erspriefsliche Wirksamkeit. Ich anerkenne, 16 Kaindl dał raczej streszczenie. Pracę Maczugi ocenił dość ostro Rom an Zawiliński („Przegląd Literacki" 1896 R. 1 nr 3 s. 7): nic nowego, „ćwiczenie autora w korzystaniu z danych materiałów". 17 W prowadzona została cyfra rzymska w „Zeitschrift..." we wstępnej partii tomu. wegen deren Umbildung in eine Solche Akademie zu Verhandeln und sohin die geeigneten Anträge Meiner Schlussfassung zu unterziehen. Wien, am 2 Mai 1871 Franz Joseph m.p. Jireček m.p. Ten sam rocznik 22. „Zeitschrift..." podal (s. 394) do wiadomości inne pismo cesarskie dotyczące polskiej nauki, z 4 VII 1871 r., wyrażające zgodę na język polski i ukraiński w Uniwersytecie Lwowskim i o powoływaniu na katedry profesorów wykładających w jednym z tych dwu języków. Na zakończenie rozważania ogólne. Pismo niemieckojęzyczne dla nauczycieli wydawane w stolicy Austrii (później Austro-Węgier) regularnie na przestrzeni blisko siedemdziesięciu lat stanowiło ze względu na ogromnie rozbudowany dział recenzji informatorium o tym, co się dzieje w nauce wszystkich krajów monarchii, a więc i „Królestwa Galicji" , jedynej dzielnicy Polski, cieszącej się w ciągu około pół wieku swobodą wypowiedzi i przemyśleń naukowych. Czy było to informatorium zawsze dokładne? Przedstawiony obraz wskazuje, że przynajmniej nie we wszystkich latach, że nie było to informatorium prowadzone stale, że pojawianie się lub niepojawianie recenzji o polskich pracach naukowych było raczej przypadkowe. Począwszy od 1875 r. był organ, także niemieckojęzyczny, który „Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien" jako informatorium zdecydowanie przewyższył: wydawane w Berlinie „Archiv für slawische Philologie" . Pismo założył Vatroslav Jagić. Było to w czasie, gdy w slawistyce dominował język niemiecki, Internationale Sprache der Slawen. Studiujący slawistykę uczyli się, zwłaszcza przedmiotów językoznawczych, z podręczników niemieckich. Najwybitniejsi filologowie słowiańscy przemawiali z katedr uniwersytetów niemieckojęzycznych: Miklośić, Jagić, Vondrak, Nehring, Brückner (dwaj Polacy), Pastrnek, po rewolucji bolszewickiej Trubieckoj. Obok działu recenzji (Anzeigen) istniał drugi, kilkuwersowych wzmianek (Kleine M itteilungen). Zdawano sobie sprawę, z tego, że pewne pozycje zasługują na omówienie obszerne, pewne wystarcza zasygnalizować. Z pismem współpracowali slawiści od Berlina po Petersburg i Zagrzeb, ze wszystkich krajów słowiańskich pozyskano świetnych informatorów. Polonica prowadził Brückner. W „Zeitschrift..." można zauważyć, choćby wziąwszy pod uwagę paginację poszczególnych recenzji, że jawiły się Kleine Mitteilungen, chociaż nazwy tej nie było. Ale nie było stałej myśli przewodniej wyczulonej na to, by informatorium było pełne, nie dało się zauważyć działalności uczonego polskiego, który by, jak Brückner w „Archiv..." , prowadził dział poloników. Ale ów przypadkowy dobór poloników stanowi sui generis kartę dziejów nauki polskiej i z tą myślą autor pracy przedstawia tę kartę czytającej Polsce. Jerzy Starnawski POLONICA IN DER „ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR DIE ÖSTERREICHISCHEN G YM NASIEN" ( 185(1-1918) Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit den zahlreichen Polonica in der bekannten Zeitschrift, die bis 1918 eine wichtige Rolle in Österreich auch für polnische Lehrer in Galizien gespielt hat. Einer Analyse wurden einzelne philologische Sparten wie polnsiche, klassische, germanische Philologien (mit Bezug auf polnische Elemente) unterzogen.

UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO CENTRO DE FILOSOFIA E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOSOFIA GRADUAÇÃO EM FILOSOFIA RODRIGO JOSÉ DE LIMA SOBRE O USO DA MATEMÁTICA NA FÍSICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO: possibilidades e limites de uma descrição matemática do mundo RECIFE 2015 RODRIGO JOSÉ DE LIMA SOBRE O USO DA MATEMÁTICA NA FÍSICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO: possibilidades e limites de uma descrição matemática do mundo Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial à obtenção do título de Mestre em Filosofia, pela Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Área do conhecimento: Ciências humanas Orientador: Prof. Dr. Marcos Roberto Nunes Costa RECIFE 2015 Catalogação na fonte Bibliotecária Maria do Carmo de Paiva, CRB4-1291 RODRIGO JOSÉ DE LIMA SOBRE O USO DA MATEMÁTICA NA FÍSICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO: possibilidades e limites de uma descrição matemática do mundo Dissertação de Mestrado em Filosofia aprovado, pela Comissão Examinadora formada pelos professores a seguir relacionados para obtenção do título de Mestre em Filosofia, pela Universidade Federal de Pernambuco. Aprovada em: 28/04/2015 BANCA EXAMINADORA __________________________________ Prof. Dr. Marcos Roberto Nunes Costa (ORIENTADOR) UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO ___________________________________ Prof. Dr. Alfredo de Oliveira Moraes (1o EXAMINADOR) UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO ___________________________________ Prof. Dr. José Francisco Preto Meirinhos (2o EXAMINADOR) UNIVERSIDADE DO PORTO (PORTUGAL) RECIFE/2015 RESUMO Uma das grandes conquistas da ciência moderna consistiu em investigar o mundo por seu aspecto quantitativo, ou seja, ela reduziu o mundo a expressões matemáticas. Porém, esta conquista apenas foi possível depois de várias tentativas ao longo da história, as quais foram marcadas por uma tensão existente entre uma investigação qualitativa ou quantitativa do mundo. Dentre os vários filósofos que investigaram o problema e deram consideráveis propostas de solução, destaca-se Tomás de Aquino, pelos desenvolvimentos pessoais que realizou. São várias as passagens onde menciona a relação entre a física e a matemática na investigação do mundo, porém nesses textos nos quais ele reconhece a possibilidade de se utilizar dos princípios da última sobre a primeira, isto não é desenvolvido. Sendo assim, parece-nos que, mesmo reconhecendo essa possibilidade, Tomás de Aquino não se preocupou em extrair dela maiores consequências. Pois, o tema apenas foi abordado na medida em que contribuía para esclarecer outros assuntos em questão. Palavraschave: Aristóteles. Ciência. Física, Matemática, Tomás de Aquino. ABSTRACT One of the great achievements of modern science is to investigate the world for its quantitative aspect, i.e., it reduced the world to mathematical expressions. However, this achievement was only possible after several attempts throughout history, which were marked by tension between a qualitative or quantitative research of the world. Among the many philosophers who investigated the problem and gave considerable proposed solutions, stands out Aquinas by personal developments he held. There are several passages where he mentions the relationship between physics and mathematics research in the world, but these texts where he recognizes the possibility of using the principles of the latter on the former, it is not developed. Thus, it seems that even he recognizes this possibility, did not bother to extract her major consequences. So the issue was addressed only to the extent that contributed to clarify other matters in question. Keywords: Aristotle. Mathematics. Physics. Science. Thomas Aquinas. AGRADECIMENTOS Dentre as inúmeras pessoas às quais gostaria de agradecer pela participação direta ou indireta neste trabalho, cito primeiramente a minha mãe, que acompanhou meus estudos desde a graduação até esta dissertação. Compreendeu meus esforços desde as primeiras horas do dia até altas horas da noite, buscando sempre possibilitar-me tempo livre para seguir nas leituras dos textos. Expresso meus sinceros agradecimentos ao Prof. Dr. Marcos Roberto Nunes Costa que, além de disponibilizar o ambiente de seu gabinete para que fossem realizados os estudos, também acompanhou a elaboração do texto e indicou as leituras a serem feitas, assim como as devidas correções que deveriam ser realizadas. Ao longo desta trajetória ele sempre ajudou e compreendeu as diversas dificuldades advindas da elaboração desta dissertação. Não possuo palavras para agradecer as contribuições do Dr. Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento, pois sem a sua inestimável ajuda este trabalho não teria sido realizado. Sua contribuição se estende em todos os âmbitos; desde a gentileza em orientar o modelo do trabalho a ser seguido, até gentilmente fornecer diversos de seus trabalhos, os quais foram fundamentais na estruturação do texto final. Por fim, foi notável sua prontidão em retirar várias dúvidas. Possuo ainda dívidas eternas com a Irmã Adélia Miranda, pois fui testemunha de sua imensa dedicação na minuciosa correção da gramática portuguesa, concedendo ao texto adequação às normas vigentes. Expresso ainda a gratidão a todos os meus amigos de curso e, particularmente, a Gardênia Viana e Roberta Nazário, as quais foram companheiras de vários debates e trabalhos realizados. Por fim, e não menos importante, a minha namorada Aline Oliveira e os meus amigos Emerson Silva, Rodrigues Pontes, Derwin Mandú Galdino, Hélio Olímpio Barreto, Graça Gouveia, os quais sempre me incentivaram nos momentos cansativos e difíceis deste trabalho. SUMÁRIO INTRODUÇÃO ................................................................................................................ 08 1. A RECEPÇÃO MEDIEVAL DA CONCEPÇÃO ARISTOTÉLICA DE CIÊNCIA .................................................................................................................... 13 2. DISTINÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO ....................................................... 37 2.1. O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AO LIVRO II DA FÍSICA DE ARISTÓTELES .................................................................................................... 51 3. A PROIBIÇÃO DA METÁBASE SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO ........................................................... 69 3.1. O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AOS SEGUNDOS ANALÍTICOS ............................................................................................................................... 82 4. A RELAÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES.. ...................................................................................................................................... 94 4.1. A RELAÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO..............................................................................................................102 CONCLUSÃO ................................................................................................................114 REFERÊNCIAS .............................................................................................................121 8 INTRODUÇÃO A história da ciência Ocidental é complexa, é o resultado de um itinerário de múltiplas tentativas que visavam solucionar determinados problemas, dentre os quais a questão referente ao instrumental metodológico capaz de expressar o mundo. O impasse polarizou-se em duas metodologias distintas, a saber: uma física, de natureza propriamente qualitativa, e uma investigação matemática, de caráter quantitativo. Pode-se verificar que esse impasse remonta à Grécia Antiga e foi objeto de análises tanto por parte de filósofos quanto de cientistas, quer de modo implícito ou explícito. Dada essa diversidade de autores e análises, faz-se necessário restringir nossa análise tanto a um momento histórico preciso quanto a autores específicos a serem estudados. Em nossa pesquisa investigaremos o problema da relação entre a física e a matemática segundo Tomás de Aquino, tendo por contexto a proposta de Aristóteles para esta questão. Esta estrutura foi escolhida por acreditarmos que ela possibilita compreendermos tanto a solução proposta pelo Estagirita como a percepção de que existe uma continuidade de crença entre Aristóteles e Tomás sobre a questão acima mencionada. Por meio desse primeiro aspecto conseguimos contextualizar a influência filosófica de Aristóteles sobre Tomás de Aquino, enquanto por meio do segundo, percebemos que esse problema emergiu no pensamento medieval como consequência do alargamento das fontes que lhe nutriram a vida intelectual, particularmente a redescoberta dos escritos de Filosofia natural e os Segundos Analíticos de Aristóteles; e justamente várias concepções dessa fonte original permaneceram na investigação empreendida por Tomás. Na estrutura desta dissertação iniciaremos com uma análise da recepção da noção aristotélica de ciência e conhecimento científico; assim, privilegiaremos o processo de transmissão e recepção tanto da Física quanto dos Segundos Analíticos, visto que é nessas obras que encontramos esta caracterização de forma mais notável, assim como uma reflexão em torno da física e da matemática. Nesse percurso iniciaremos pelo trabalho desenvolvido por Boécio, o qual tanto traduziu quanto escreveu alguns comentários sobre determinadas obras de Aristóteles. Esta atividade, apesar de não ter sido completada, foi determinante para a vida intelectual da Idade Média. Podemos, assim, falar de um projeto boeciano, que, mesmo incompleto, transmitiu textos e noções fundamentais que se constituíram em pontos fundamentais para os filósofos e teólogos posteriores. 9 Em seguida, acompanharemos o renascimento cultural do século XII e o seu aspecto mais marcante, ou seja, a onda de traduções que possibilitou o contato com obras médicas, científicas e filosóficas que eram anteriormente desconhecidas. No interior desse movimento será destacada a recepção das obras de filosofia natural, juntamente com os tratados de lógica, em especial a Física e os Segundos Analíticos. Buscaremos, assim, mostrar que foi por meio de novas fontes, particularmente as supracitadas, que novos problemas surgiram para os pensadores latinos medievais. Além do mais, foi a partir do contato com essas obras que eles se tornaram capazes de estruturar suas próprias reflexões em torno daqueles temas discutidos nesse período. Constataremos, ainda, como foi complexo e difícil o processo de recepção de alguns livros de Aristóteles. Apesar de várias dessas obras terem sido inicialmente proibidas, elas por fim se constituíram parte obrigatória do currículo da Faculdade de Artes, a qual era preparatória para os cursos superiores. Resumindo, a recepção de tais obras possibilitou a explicitação de diversas questões, tais como: a caracterização do conhecimento científico, a subalternação entre as ciências, a impossibilidade da transferência de demonstrações entre gêneros-sujeito distintos, a questão do conhecimento demonstrativo, a relação existente entre as ciências teóricas da matemática e da física, etc., Ora, uma vez que Aristóteles propôs respostas para estes problemas e seus livros se tornaram obrigatórios no currículo universitário, suas soluções, consequentemente, se constituíram passagem obrigatória no ensino acadêmico, cabendo aos filósofos concordar com as respostas do Estagirita e esforçarse por explicitá-las, ou afastar-se delas e propor soluções alternativas. Assim, este era o contexto acadêmico no qual um estudante de uma típica universidade medieval estava inserido. Delimitando o âmbito da recepção do corpus aristotelicum, o qual foi determinante para a vida intelectual da Idade Média, pretendemos apresentar, na primeira parte da dissertação, como o mundo medieval latino cristão recebeu a produção aristotélica e reestruturou a herança intelectual grega a partir do seu modo específico de civilização. No capítulo 2 abordaremos de início a crença aristotélica a respeito da diferença entre os entes físicos e os entes matemáticos. Para isso nos basearemos principalmente no livro II da Física e em algumas passagens da Metafísica. Perceberemos então que este tema sempre é debatido em função de outro assunto principal, em particular, do debate em torno da classificação das ciências teóricas. Daremos ênfase no texto aos princípios empregados pelo Estagirita para defender a crença na distinção entre os sujeitos da física e da matemática, a saber, os diferentes modos de considerarem e definirem os seus respectivos objetos de 10 investigação. Em seguida, analisaremos qual a crença de Tomás sobre os argumentos utilizados por Aristóteles. Recorreremos principalmente ao seu Comentário à Física e também a passagens do De Trinitate. Estes textos nos mostrarão que, mesmo tendo o Aquinate concordado com a resposta do Filósofo, não foi por isto impossibilitado de desenvolver a mesma ideia do texto comentado, levando em conta os mesmos argumentos já fornecidos. Além disto, ele também enveredou sua argumentação por um tópico que não estava presente no texto comentado, a saber, a relação epistêmica de prioridade e posteridade na intelecção humana. Reservamos o capítulo 3 para acompanhar, primeiramente, a doutrina aristotélica da ciência. Este ponto inclui tanto a concepção de conhecimento dedutivo como a sua teoria da demonstração científica e a doutrina da metábase. Analisaremos a concepção de ciência e seu procedimento demonstrativo como relacionado à sua forma estrutural. Veremos ainda que Aristóteles realizou uma distinção epistêmica notável entre o conhecimento de um fato e o conhecimento da razão deste fato, além de ter argumentado em favor de condições que caracterizariam o conhecimento demonstrativo nos Segundos Analíticos. Por fim, notaremos que existe uma tensão entre dois polos na obra de Aristóteles: de um lado, temos a sua proibição de que ocorra a transferência de demonstrações de um gênero a outro em um silogismo científico; por outro lado, é reconhecido que algumas ciências se comportam de modo a tornar este seu requerimento mais flexível, visto que elas aparentemente transgridem sua doutrina da metábase. Em seguida investigaremos em que medida Tomás concorda com as respostas fornecidas por Aristóteles aos tópicos anteriormente mencionados. Nesta parte do texto nos basearemos principalmente em seu Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos e nos trabalhos de alguns comentadores. Perceberemos que a tensão entre teoria e experiência existente no interior da doutrina aristotélica subsiste no sistema de Tomás, mas este se esforça por explicá-la especialmente a partir de sua doutrina da subalternação entre as ciências. Por fim, reservamos o capítulo 4 para investigar em que medida existe concordância entre Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino sobre o modo de conceber a relação entre a física e a matemática. Esta questão deve ser abordada no contexto em que ela está inserida, especialmente no âmbito da demonstração científica. Ora, na medida em que o Estagirita reconheceu a existência de um grupo formado por algumas ciências, dentre as quais se destacam a ótica, a mecânica, a astronomia e a harmônica, e que elas se apresentavam como exceção ao procedimento demonstrativo do conhecimento científico teorizado por ele, pois se utilizavam de princípios estranhos aos seus gêneros-sujeito, constata que, embora elas tratem 11 de aspectos físicos do mundo, utilizam-se de demonstrações matemáticas. Assim, nesse âmbito é reconhecido que a física e a matemática, apesar de possuírem sujeitos de investigação distintos, possuem um vínculo entre si. Ora, esse impasse, ao invés de modificar a teoria aristotélica reafirma-a, e na análise que empreende das referidas ciências o Estagirita não demonstra interesse unicamente em função delas mesmas, mas o seu tratamento que lhes dispensa decorre da necessidade de justamente reafirmar sua doutrina e resolver outros problemas em questão. Essa dificuldade no sistema aristotélico foi percebida pelos filósofos medievais e se constituiu tema de análise que, pouco a pouco, tornou-se objeto central de reflexão filosófica. Ao analisarmos a exposição de Tomás de Aquino sobre esse assunto, tomaremos em consideração principalmente textos gerais que abordem a questão, buscando em seguida sistematizá-los e retirar as devidas conclusões. Dentre os textos que remetem ao vínculo entre a física e a matemática, nos basearemos principalmente naqueles que mencionam a astronomia, e a perceptível hesitação de Tomás em aceitar um modelo astronômico definitivo. Perceber-se-á, ao longo do trabalho, que é possível encontrar em Tomás de Aquino uma reflexão mais extensa sobre essas questões, em comparação com sua fonte primária. Resumindo o esquema desta dissertação no que concerne a Tomás de Aquino, podemos afirmar que, embora ele aceite a resposta de Aristóteles para o modo de distinção entre o físico e o matemático, esforça-se por explicá-la por uma ordem distinta, a saber, a ordem de intelecção das coisas. No que diz respeito ao procedimento demonstrativo das ciências, podemos notar uma adesão às respostas fornecidas pelo Estagirita, mesmo que em caráter geral. Mas, não deixa de ser constatada uma formulação mais clara e sistemática destes tópicos por parte de Tomás, o que se deve em parte ao fato de ele ter ser herdeiro das diversas contribuições feitas por outros filósofos em torno desse problema, especialmente por Grosseteste, Alberto Magno, Temístio e Averróis. Pode-se ainda perceber que aquele grupo de ciências que ocupavam um lugar muito modesto no sistema aristotélico, recebe na obra de Tomás um lugar bem definido, no clássico modelo de divisão das ciências além de considerável clareza e uma maior quantidade de material do que a sua fonte original. Talvez isso decorra do seu interesse pela singularidade metodológica daquelas ciências denominadas por ele de "ciências intermediárias". É possível acompanhar o interesse epistemológico de Tomás pelo procedimento específico destas ciências, ao longo de sua obra. De fato, encontramo-lo desde o seu opúsculo juvenil De Trinitate até as obras da maturidade. O fato de Tomás nunca ter sido professor na Faculdade 12 de Artes e ainda assim ter produzido 12 comentários a obras aristotélicas e estar intensamente ocupado com elas durante os dez últimos anos de sua vida, ao que se acresce o fato de esses escritos se ocuparem especialmente de filosofia natural e lógica, corrobora em favor da tese da importância do aspecto metodológico do conhecimento científico para o Aquinate. Essa abordagem mais sistemática e completa que encontramos em torno dessas ciências que "aplicam os princípios matemáticos às coisas naturais", não deve ser vista como decorrendo apenas da genialidade de Tomás. Como mencionamos, ele é herdeiro de várias contribuições feitas por outros filósofos, o que não invalida a percepção de que ele contribuiu também decisivamente para a discussão a respeito do assunto. Tanto a caracterização do procedimento próprio das referidas ciências, quanto sua posição intermediária entre a física e a matemática e sua designação de Scientiae Mediae, provêm da obra de Santo Tomás. Encontramos, assim, investigando o seu pensamento, a caracterização do tipo de sujeito e o procedimento demonstrativo dessas ciências e, embora isto não tenha sido feito primariamente em função delas mesmas (tal como em Aristóteles), mas pelo fato de tais ciências se apresentarem como modelo epistêmico que lhe possibilitava atribuir o status de ciência à doutrina sagrada, suas reflexões se tornaram ponto de passagem obrigatório na história das ciências e se estabeleceram como ponto alto da tradição filosófica medieval em torno das supracitadas ciências. Por fim, reservamos um espaço para a conclusão advinda dos dados discutidos ao longo do trabalho. Buscaremos, nessa parte, esclarecer como devemos entender a relação entre Aristóteles e Tomás sobre a relação entre a física e a matemática. Tentaremos, assim, identificar uma relação de ruptura ou de continuidade de pensamento entre os referidos autores. 13 1 A RECEPÇÃO MEDIEVAL DA CONCEPÇÃO ARISTOTÉLICA DE CIÊNCIA O aristotelismo realizou no Ocidente Latino cristão durante a Idade Média um complexo itinerário, que implica a recepção e posterior formalização do corpus aristotelicum latinum. Segundo Alain De Libera, os componentes deste processo constituem um jogo complicado de fatores perturbadores, os quais incluem períodos de sucessivas traduções, incorporação de numerosos apócrifos e pseudoepígrafos e princípios de leitura que tendiam a neutralizar os efeitos de tais fatores 1 . Acompanhar minuciosamente este percurso escapa aos objetivos do presente trabalho 2 ; no entanto, acreditamos que, para melhor compreendermos a relação entre Tomás de Aquino e Aristóteles em torno do tema deste trabalho, é necessário que tenhamos uma compreensão, ainda que de forma geral, deste processo de recepção das obras do Estagirita no Ocidente Latino Cristão durante o medievo. Visto que o problema da relação entre a ciência natural e a matemática se encontra teorizado e discutido principalmente na obra Física, e também nos Segundos Analíticos, acreditamos que compreender o processo de recepção da noção de ciência presente nestas obras possibilita uma melhor contextualização do problema para Tomás de Aquino e o seu ambiente universitário 3 . Julgamos que o motivo pelo qual Tomás de Aquino recebeu e aceitou em grande medida a obra aristotélica não está suspenso em um vazio especulativo. Ainda que isto encontre justificação em questões de caráter histórico-social próprias daquele tipo de civilização, não se reduz a elas. Porquanto é justamente pelas traduções e o posterior estudo dessas obras, que a proposta aristotélica de conhecimento científico se tornará 1 LIBERA, Alain de. A filosofia medieval. Trad. de Nicolás Nymi Campanário e Yvone Maria de Campos Teixeira da Silva. São Paulo: Loyola, 1998. p. 359. 2 De fato, tentar acompanhar minuciosamente este processo além de escapar aos objetivos do presente trabalho, e desconfigurar o seu objetivo, terminaria por ofuscá-lo. Na verdade, devemos lembrar que este empreendimento ainda está por ser concluído pelos especialistas no assunto. No que diz respeito aos textos de Tomás de Aquino, a edição Leonina, que busca estabelecer o texto original a partir dos critérios modernos de crítica textual, ainda não se encontra terminada; e, ainda que os minuciosos dados advindos dos notáveis trabalhos de Lorenzo Minio-Paluello e da International Union of Academies que estão provendo o mercado com edições críticas de todas as traduções do grego para o latim, buscando justamente esclarecer toda a problemática que se encontra por trás das recepções e traduções das obras antigas, e, particularmente, das aristotélicas utilizadas durante o medievo, representam um esforço em constante construção. Os resultados destas pesquisas nos possibilitarão compreender até que ponto as diferentes interpretações e soluções que os filósofos medievais propuseram para vários problemas eram decorrentes do tipo de texto que eles tinham em mão que, implicavam em alguma leitura diferente daquela que o texto originalmente propunha. Essa situação possui como caso típico o comentário de Tomás ao livro II da Física, assunto que comentaremos no próximo capítulo. 3 Para uma descrição do processo de transmissão das obras gregas na Idade Média ver: DOD, Bernard G.Aristotle in the middle ages. In: KENNY, Anthony; PINBORG, Jan; KRETZMANN, Norman. The cambridge history of later medieval philosophy: from the rediscovery of aristotle to the disintegration of scholasticism I100-1600. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. p. 43-79 (obra doravante abreviada por CHLMP). 14 conhecida entre os filósofos da Idade Média. Com a posterior inclusão de seus escritos como componentes obrigatórios do currículo da Faculdade de Artes de Paris, os comentários àquelas passagens eram inevitáveis. São justamente esses comentários que nos possibilitam compreender as distintas atitudes que os estudiosos do medievo tiveram frente ao problema da relação existente entre a possibilidade de uma investigação física e/ou matemática do mundo. Visto terem sido diversas as compreensões em torno da questão supracitada, não pretendemos fazer uma enumeração delas, ao contrário, restringiremos nosso estudo apenas à obra de Tomás de Aquino e, mais especificamente, ao seu comentário às obras Física e Segundos Analíticos. C. H. Lohr propõe um modo de compreender a influência das obras e, consequentemente, das diversas ideias de Aristóteles sobre o Ocidente, em três sucessivos estágios 4 : o primeiro momento se encontra centralizado na figura de Boécio e o seu trabalho 4 DOD In: KENNY ; PINBORG ; KRETZMANN, 1982, p. 81-98. Estamos cientes de que qualquer modelo que busque apresentar a produção intelectual medieval e todos os seus componentes é um tanto arbitrário, porquanto prioriza alguns elementos em detrimento de outros. Além do mais, um modelo que busque representar um período tão extenso e complexo quanto à produção intelectual, qual seja o medievo, corre o sério risco de simplificação. Sendo assim, é necessário que tenhamos em mente a função desempenhada por um modelo, o qual deve ser visto como um recurso que facilita a compreensão de algum aspecto em questão, em nosso caso, a recepção das obras de Aristóteles, em especial os tratados da Física e os Segundos Analíticos. Tendo destacado este ponto, percebemos que poderíamos, da mesma forma utilizar-nos outra proposta de compreensão distinta da oferecida por C. H. Lohr. Sendo assim, poderíamos legitimamente servir-nos da proposta sugerida pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro. Segundo ele, a produção intelectual do período pode ser entendida através do instrumental disponibilizado em função do qual a teologia se estruturou, a saber: gramática (século IX), dialética (século XII), filosofia (século XIII) (cf. NASCIMENTO, Carlos Arthur R. O que é filosofia Medieval. Brasiliense, 1992, p. 18). De maneira semelhante, pode-se recorrer a outro modelo de expressar a produção intelectual, como aquele apresentado pelo prof. Ricardo da Costa, que se utiliza primariamente do conceito de ciência buscando, a partir dele, identificar a sua posterior mudança de significado ao longo da Idade Média, ou seja, procurando acompanhar historicamente as diversas acepções que o termo veio a possuir historicamente. No caso, Ricardo Costa termina por constatar uma progressiva dependência do significado daquela definição dada por Aristóteles, através deste procedimento que acompanha a mudança de um conceito de ciência, em que ele julga identificar 3 períodos, a saber: 1) época tardo-romana (séc. VI-IX), época em que o termo possuía uma orientação pedagógica; 2) apogeu do monacato ( X-XII), período que conheceu a proeminência da teologia sapiencial; 3) período escolástico ( XIII-XIV), no qual a definição corrente é subsidiária daquela dada por Aristóteles (cf. COSTA, Ricardo da. A ciência no pensamento especulativo medieval. SINAIS – Revista Eletrônica de Ciências Sociais. Vitória, v. 1, n. 5, 2009, p. 132-144). Devemos observar que este modelo, de fato, é proposto por Celina A. Lértora Mendonza, no entanto ele é utilizado como um recurso para compreender o problema da classificação das ciências ao longo da Idade Média (cf. LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. El concepto y la classificación de la ciencia en el medioevo. In: BONI, Luiz Alberto de. (org.) A ciência e a organização dos saberes na Idade Média. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2000. p. 57-83). Embora o professor Ricardo tenha retomado este modelo proposto inicialmente por Celina para investigar outro assunto, isto não impede que ele seja utilizado como instrumento para analisar o conceito de ciência. Outro modelo que poderia legitimamente ser utilizado ao longo de nossa exposição, é aquele oferecido por Joseph Ratzinger no qual a produção intelectual do período medieval é compreendida a partir de dois ambientes distintos onde elas ocorreram, ou seja, os mosteiros e as scholae. Pois, é a partir destes dois ambientes que teremos dois modelos diferentes de teologia, a teologia monástica e a teologia escolástica (cf. BENTO XVI. Os mestres medievais: de Hugo de São Vítor a João Duns Escoto. Trad. e notas L'Osservatore Romano. Campinas: São Paulo,Ecclesiae. 2013. p. 9-10. O que devemos ressaltar dessa discussão anterior é o fato de que, independentemente do modelo adotado, é possível relacioná-lo com outros temas em questão; no presente caso, com a entrada de Aristóteles na Idade Média 15 de traduzir para o latim diversas obras do Estagirita, em particular aquelas relacionadas à lógica e que formavam o Órganon; dessa forma, Boécio transmitiu ao Ocidente as bases da investigação lógica aristotélica. O segundo momento da entrada de Aristóteles no Ocidente tem por contexto geral o movimento de traduções do século XII, que abarcava inicialmente diversas áreas do conhecimento científico antigo, em especial aquelas diretamente relacionadas com ampla utilidade, tais como a astronomia, a medicina, etc. Embora não fosse um movimento de tradução primariamente filosófico, foi por meio dele que o corpus das obras de Aristóteles se tornou disponível. Por fim, o terceiro estágio da periodização oferecida por C. H. Lohr compreenderia o período referente ao século XV. Podemos generalizar aquilo que comentamos até o presente momento e afirmar que nos dois primeiros estágios a preocupação era primordialmente de cunho filosófico, enquanto no terceiro estágio a preocupação era mais em torno do texto, na medida em que novas edições do texto grego foram disponibilizadas. Para os objetivos deste trabalho nos ocuparemos apenas destes dois primeiros períodos, porquanto apenas eles se referem mais diretamente à recepção medieval da concepção aristotélica de ciência. A importância de Boécio para a formação do contexto intelectual da Idade Média é imensa. Sua influência está presente em diversas áreas e isto tanto pelas análises por ele realizadas de diversos problemas filosóficos quanto por seu trabalho de tradutor. De fato, ele foi o intermediário entre o mundo grego e a cultura latina. Além de ter cunhado diversas expressões latinas para várias palavras filosóficas gregas, também estabeleceu termos que predominariam no debate teológico dos séculos seguintes, e assim forneceu definições fundamentais para categorias que constituíam o debate presente em sua época tais como: eternidade, pessoa, etc. No entanto, foi no campo da lógica que sua influência se fez sentir mais fortemente 5 . Boécio teve contato com quatro das principais correntes de pensamento do seu tempo, a saber: o neoplatonismo grego, os escritos filosóficos latinos, a literatura cristã grega Latina. Sendo assim, no primeiro modelo acima discutido, poderíamos destacar que o instrumental filosófico em geral, e aristotélico em particular, disponibilizado para a teologia a partir do século XII em diante, incluiria a recepção das obras de Aristóteles. E, de maneira semelhante, tomando por base o segundo modelo, também se pode relacioná-lo com a recepção das obras do Filósofo, pois foi a partir do contato com elas que o conceito de ciência foi fortemente influenciado a ser entendido como conhecimento necessário. Sendo assim, esclarecemos que a escolha que fizemos neste trabalho por tomar a proposta de C.H. Lohr é apenas pelo fato de acreditarmos que ela seja de mais fácil compreensão. Esta mesma idéia é difundida no Brasil por meio do trabalho do Professor Luiz Alberto De Boni, (Cf. DE BONI, Carlos Alberto Luiz. A entrada de Aristóteles no Ocidente Medieval. Revista de Filosofia Dissertatio. UFPel, n. 19-20, p. 131-173). 5 GILSON, Etienne. A filosofia na Idade Média. Trad. de Eduardo Brandão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1995. p. 160. 16 e os escritos dos pais da Igreja latina. Desta maneira, sua formação na cultura latina clássica, em filosofia e literatura gregas, são identificáveis ao longo de sua obra, pontos que indicam que ele por certo conheceu as obras de Proclo, Porfírio e Amônio Sacas 6 , de forma que, embora muitos dos desenvolvimentos neoplatônicos gregos de seu próprio tempo com os quais ele teve contato, agora se encontrem perdidos 7 , pode-se destacar que, dentre os segmentos de escritos dos quais ele teve conhecimento, o neoplatonismo foi o mais importante na formação de seu pensamento 8 . John Marenbon divide a obra de Boécio em quatro grupos: livros-textos sobre assuntos matemáticos, chamados por ele de "quadrivium"; escritos relacionados à lógica, grupo que inclui as suas exposições, traduções e comentários; tratados teológicos; e a Consolação da Filosofia 9 . Devemos notar nessa classificação proposta que, desde muito cedo, as disciplinas astronomia e música estavam associadas à matemática, particularmente à aritmética e à geometria 10 , e esse aspecto continua a ser mantido na obra de Boécio. A partir de seu trabalho, constata-se a presença de uma divisão que aplica a cada uma das disciplinas do quadrivium um objeto próprio de consideração. Segundo ele, a aritmética estuda unidades discretas de quantidade; a música estuda as razões aritméticas da harmônica; a geometria investiga as quantidades contínuas e a astronomia estuda a magnitude em movimento 11 . Embora algumas dessas obras não tenham sobrevivido, servem para indicar-nos a inclinação de seus estudos para o âmbito das "matemáticas aplicadas", como se depreende do relato de Cassiodorus 12 . Nosso maior interesse neste momento reside nos escritos de Boécio de 6 MARENBON, John (org.). Routledge history of philosophy: medieval philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2004. vol. III, p. 11. 7 Boethius. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, (Col.) Great Medieval thinkers, p. 13. 8 Ibid., p. 11. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 De fato a relação entre estas disciplinas e a matemática remonta à Antiguidade. Mais tarde comentaremos um pouco dessa compreensão. Por ora basta mencionar que pode ser encontrada uma útil descrição do caso em HEATH, Thomas. A history of greek mathematics: from Tales to Euclid. London: Oxford University Press, 1921. vol. I, p. 1-25; 440-446. Para uma apresentação do problema, especificamente o que inclui o problema da subalternação das ciências para Aristóteles, ver: MC KIRAHAN JR, R. D. Aristotle subordinate sciences. British Journal for the History of Science, v. 1, 1978, 197-220. 11 MARENBON, 2003, p. 14. 12 É um equívoco julgar que a obra de Boécio se reduz à atividade de comentar determinadas obras. De fato, esta era sua atividade primária, porém de forma alguma exclusiva. Julgamos correta a opinião de Henry Chadwick de que a ênfase de Boécio sobre tópicos lógicos e o quarteto matemático composto pela aritmética, música, geometria e astronomia deve-se ao fato de que ele percebeu a fraqueza de material intelectual disponibilizado aos latinos nestas áreas, enquanto no campo retórico e gramatical eles possuíam bons representantes. Isto pode ser compreendido a partir de uma nota de sua "A Consolação da Filosofia": que Quintiliano ainda era lido em seu tempo, e o quarto século assistiu ao aparecimento do influente orador Mário Vitorino. Chadwick menciona ainda que um dos motivos pelos quais Boécio tinha os objetos matemáticos do Quadrivium em alta consideração era por considerá-los como quatro caminhos que conduziam à sublime sabedoria. Sua obra a respeito deles não foi legada à posteridade e desde cedo caiu no esquecimento. No período entre Boécio e Alcuíno, pouco da obra boeciana sobre o Quadrivium interessou a alguém; apenas a aritmética, da qual João 17 natureza lógica, em particular nas suas traduções e comentários às obras de Aristóteles que formavam o Órganon. Se, por um lado, a obra de Boécio não se reduz simplesmente ao trabalho produzido por um comentador, também é verdade que a originalidade não estava entre as suas preocupações. Daí que a natureza predominantemente expositiva de seus trabalhos se deve primariamente aos objetivos que tinha em mente, bem como ao seu compartilhamento da prática comum na Antiguidade, que consistia em comentar obras consideradas padrões ou referências em determinados assuntos. Sem dúvida, ele foi um filósofo de grande capacidade e ambição intelectual. Segundo Sten Ebbesen, o projeto de Boécio no que diz respeito à lógica era constituído pelos seguintes objetivos: a) Um conjunto completo de textos básicos, a saber, a Isagoge de Porfírio, a totalidade de Aristóteles, os Tópicos de Cícero (que naturalmente não necessitavam ser traduzidos), a totalidade de Platão; b) comentários elementares sobre cada um dos textos básicos; c) em alguns casos, no mínimo um comentário mais compreensivo; d) em ao menos um caso, também uma paráfrase; e) monografias suplementares, incluindo uma demonstrando a compatibilidade da filosofia aristotélica com a platônica 13 . Dentre esses vários pontos listados por Sten Ebbesen, destaca-se o último, pois o objetivo de mostrar a compatibilidade entre a filosofia de Platão e o aristotelismo pode ser visto como um empreendimento geral que orientou o seu trabalho de traduções e comentários. Embora sua tarefa tenha sido interrompida por sua morte prematura, ele não deixou de legar contribuições determinantes para a filosofia em geral e particularmente para o âmbito da lógica; além de ter traduzido 14 os Primeiros Analíticos, os Argumentos Sofísticos e os Escoto fez abundante uso, sobreviveu completamente. Ainda que essa situação possa ser um reflexo da simplificação da cultura que se seguiu à sua morte, ela permanece em forte contraste para o notável sucesso que alcançou seu trabalho com lógica (cf. CHADWICK, Henry. Boethius: the consolations of music, logic, theology, and philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. p. 70, 107). 13 "A complete set of basic texts, viz. Porphyry's Isagoge, the whole of Aristotle, Cicero's Topics (which, of course, need not be translated), the whole of Plato; (b) elementary commentaries on each of the basic texts; (c) in some cases, at least, also a more comprehensive commentary; (d) in at least one case, also a paraphrase; (e) supplementary monographs, including one demonstrating the compatibility of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy" (EBBESEN, Sten. Boethius as an aristotelian commentator. In: SORABJI, Richard. Aristotle Transformed: the ancient commentators and their influence. New York: Cornell University Press, 1990. p. 374). 14 Existe uma considerável divergência entre os pesquisadores em atribuir a tradução completa do corpus lógico de Aristóteles a Boécio. Em geral encontramos três possíveis posições entre os pesquisadores: em primeiro lugar, temos aqueles que acreditam de fato em uma tradução completa do Órganon: em segundo lugar, temos aqueles que acreditam que Boécio não chegou a realizar a tradução dos Segundos Analíticos; a terceira posição é de fato intermediária entre as duas anteriores: segundo aqueles que defendem esta opinião, Boécio de fato chegou a realizar a tradução dos Segundos Analíticos, porém essa tradução não foi transmitida à posteridade e desde cedo ela teria sido perdida. Representando o primeiro grupo, temos os trabalhos dos pioneiros no campo 18 Tópicos, e também as Categorias, o De Interpretatione e o Isagoge de Porfírio, para os três últimos ele ainda fez comentários 15 . Além disso, compôs tratados sobre música, aritmética, silogismos hipotéticos e categóricos. Foi por meio de suas traduções, comentários e escritos que Boécio proveu a base para a lógica medieval 16 , sendo por isso denominado de "o professor de lógica da Idade Média" 17 . Ainda que eruditos tais como William Kneale e Marta Kneale vejam na obra de Boécio a consumação de um processo de confusão gradual da lógica estóica e aristotélica no fim da Antiguidade Tardia 18 , transmitindo assim para a posteridade uma herança impura, isto não invalida sua importância na transmissão do legado de Aristóteles ao Ocidente, pois, mesmo a pesquisa de caráter mais antigo já havia constatado que a lógica de Boécio é um comentário à de Aristóteles, com o desejo de interpretá-la segundo a filosofia de Platão 19 . Acreditamos que se compreende melhor a situação quando lembramos que, dentre as correntes de pensamento com as quais Boécio teve contato, sem dúvida alguma foi o neoplatonismo aquela que exerceu maior influência sobre seu pensamento. Desse modo, é compreensível que ele compartilhasse alguns pontos da exegese vigente na tradição dos filósofos neoplatônicos, em cujas características destaca-se a crença de que a filosofia de da filosofia medieval, em particular os de Etienne Gilson (cf. GILSON, 1995, p.160). Como representante do terceiro grupo podemos citar Ellen Ashworth, pois, ainda que, segundo a autora, Boécio tenha realizado a tradução, esta não foi legada à posteridade (cf. ASHWORTH, E. J. Linguagem e lógica. In: MCGRADE, A. S. (Org.). Filosofia medieval. Trad. de André Oídes. São Paulo: Ideias e Letras: 2008. p. 99). A posição de John Marenbon pode, por sua vez, ser incluída no segundo grupo, porquanto, ainda que ele concorde com a opinião de Ellen e julgue que a tradução de Boécio se perdeu, isso é feito com ressalvas que possibilitam questionar se de fato ele pertenceria a esse grupo. É manifesta a sua dúvida quanto à possibilidade de tal tradução (cf. MARENBON, 2004, p. 12, 25). Talvez a sua indecisão seja decorrente de ele ter seguido a proposta de Barnes, que toma por base esta informação de um manuscrito do século XIII que menciona um comentário de Boécio aos Analíticos Posteriores. No entanto, Sten Ebbesen destaca que isto é um erro, pois o manuscrito que se encontra em Munique (MS, clm I 4246) é na verdade a tradução do comentário de Filopono (cf. EBBESEN, Sten. The aristotelian commentator. In: MARENBON. John. The Cambridge companion Boethius. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. p. 52). Além do mais, Lorenzo MinioPaluello, baseando-se em análises estilísticas, opõe-se a tal fato, pois a partir de seu trabalho ele chegou à conclusão de que as versões comuns dos Primeiros Analíticos, Tópicos, Elencos Sofísticos são reciprocamente consistentes em estilo e com as traduções de Boécio da 'Logica vetus', no entanto os Segundos Analíticos estão em estilo diferente (cf. apud CHLPM, 1982, p. 55). É provável que esta discussão seja totalmente esclarecida no futuro com o avanço das pesquisas e descobertas na área da manuscritologia, mas de toda ela, o que se deve impor à nossa mente é a grande importância que Boécio desempenhou na configuração e recepção da obra aristotélica no ocidente latino cristão durante a Idade Média. 15 John Marenbon acredita que, embora o projeto inicial de Boécio tenha sido o de traduzir tanto Aristóteles quanto Platão com o objetivo de mostrar a concordância entre eles, a prioridade que ele deu à lógica e o fato de que em vários casos realizou não apenas tradução, mas também monografias a respeito do assunto, e, em alguns casos, duas traduções de uma mesma obra, são pontos que indicam que ele foi além de seu projeto inicial (cf. MARENBON, 2003, p. 18). 16 MARENBON, 2004, p. 11. 17 GILSON, 1995, p. 160. 18 KNEALE, William; KNEALE, Marta. O desenvolvimento da lógica. Trad. de M. S. Lourenço. Lisboa: CalousteGulbekian, 1962. p. 181. 19 GILSON, 1995, p. 163. 19 Platão e Aristóteles não são contrárias entre si 20 , ou seja, que os comentários realizados por eles tinham por base uma perspectiva platônica de caráter conciliatório, e isto legou à posteridade uma imagem "deturpada" do aristotelismo. Percebemos, assim, a forte influência do neoplatonismo sobre o pensamento de Boécio. Alain De Libera chega a dizer que Boécio "importou a filosofia neoplatônica do Oriente ao Ocidente e aclimatou tanto suas doutrinas quanto a visão da filosofia sob o céu latino, particularmente sua exegese "platônica" de Aristóteles" 21 . Portanto, acreditamos que o veredicto de William Kneale e Marta Kneale é anacrônico e impreciso, por isso nos colocamos em favor da posição defendida por Sten Ebbesen, que ressalta a importância de Boécio como lógico, porquanto, até mesmo aquilo que ele não passou à posteridade determinou em grande parte a possibilidade dos trabalhos de seus sucessores, pois, "uma vez que ele não legou um comentário pitagoreano sobre as categorias, salvou os primeiros lógicos medievais de serem absorvidos em um esquema que os conduziria a âmbitos especulativos em geral improdutivos" 22 . Outro ponto a ser destacado é a opção de Boécio pela interpretação de Porfírio à lógica aristotélica, oposta àquela realizada pelos últimos platonistas gregos, o que revela que ele não tentava encontrar doutrinas platônicas nos textos lógicos, porque, ao seu ver, tratavam de assuntos distintos. Estes dois aspectos deixam transparecer as suas preferências intelectuais e nos fazem recusar a imagem que o apresenta como um simples compilador de ideias anteriores 23 . O valor de seu trabalho não deve ser julgado a partir da genialidade de criar um sistema filosófico que explicasse a realidade: "traduzir, comentar, conciliar e transmitir, era essa, em sua primeira intenção, a obra de Boécio" 24 . Esse trabalho determinou três características sobre o Aristóteles que a Idade Média conheceu: em primeiro lugar, temos um Aristóteles que possui aspecto neoplatônico, porquanto, como vimos, uma vez que Boécio compartilhou vários pontos comuns da exegese vigente nas escolas neoplatônicas, algumas ideias estranhas ao aristotelismo foram admitidas como derivadas dele; em segundo lugar, destaca-se a natureza 20 Edward Grant destaca que o neoplatônico Porfírio, além de ter sido o responsável pela introdução dos estudos das obras aristotélicas nas escolas Platônicas da Antiguidade como parte integrante do estudo de Platão, também argumentou em favor da harmonia entre Platão e Aristóteles nas doutrinas essenciais. E esta crença se tornou aceita, em maior ou menor grau, por todos os comentadores antigos, incluindo os cristãos (cf. GRANT, Edward. História da filosofia natural: do mundo antigo ao século XIX. Trad. de Tiago Attore. São Paulo: MADRAS, 2009. p.7585). No entanto, Marenbon percebeu claramente que, embora o projeto Boeciano de comentar tanto Aristóteles quanto Platão e mostrar que não há discordância entre eles, fosse uma prática das escolas neoplatônicas gregas, evidenciando assim a influência delas sobre Boécio, todavia, no resultado, o projeto de Boécio diferiu nitidamente das escolas neoplatônicas, dado o seu interesse desproporcional pela lógica. 21 DE LIBERA, 1998, p. 250. 22 EBBESEN, 1990, p. 391. 23 MARENBON, 2003, p. 19; p. 41-42. 24 Ibid., p. 175. 20 parcial do Aristóteles que é transmitida ao Ocidente, pois, como bem sabemos, as traduções não se estenderam a todas as obras do Estagirita. De fato, com a onda de traduções posteriores, percebemos que as ideias de Aristóteles alcançaram o Ocidente antes de suas obras; por fim, o terceiro aspecto que decorre diretamente do trabalho de Boécio é a natureza predominantemente lógica do Aristóteles que será legado à posteridade, e isto na medida em que apenas as obras do Órganon foram traduzidas. Devemos ressaltar, no entanto, que mesmo este "Aristóteles parcial" teve de ser redescoberto ao longo do período medieval 25 , ou seja, o contato com a obra de Aristóteles foi um lento e complexo processo, no qual mesmo diversas imprecisões no estabelecimento de ideias legitimamente aristotélicas foram necessárias para tal possibilidade. Boécio se encontrava em um ambiente que expressava dois aspectos: o de mudança e o de continuidade. E dessa maneira seu projeto ficou à mercê das condições socio-históricas vigentes em sua época, pois a filosofia latina em geral, e a de Boécio em particular, não sobreviveram ao desaparecimento do mundo político que as abrigou 26 . Steven P. Marrone descreve claramente a situação da filosofia no Ocidente no início da Idade Média: A partir do final do século VI, a metade ocidental do mundo mediterrâneo sofreu uma série de profundos choques econômicos e demográficos, os quais a apartaram cada vez mais, comercialmente, politicamente e, por fim, culturalmente, dos ainda vitais centros do Império Romano e da economia localizados no Oriente falante do grego. O que se seguiu não foi a extinção do aprendizado latino clássico, que havia nutrido a primeira fase da filosofia medieval, mas um estreitamento de foco e redirecionamento de interesse 27 . 25 O contato com este Aristóteles parcial foi antecedido ou condicionado pela redescoberta do trabalho de Boécio, pois durante grande parte do período medieval as únicas obras de Aristóteles conhecidas resumiam-se às Categorias e ao tratado De Interpretatione. De fato, a redescoberta da obra de Boécio foi uma condição determinante para as traduções do século XII. Este ponto é de suma importância para que possamos reconhecer a devida importância de Boécio, e, ainda que Kneale não lhe conceda maiores méritos, mesmo assim o menciona (cf. (KNEALE, 1962, p. 193); Bernard G. Dod nos fornece uma descrição mais coerente do fato (cf. CHLPM, 1982, p. 46). 26 De Libera acredita que o futuro da filosofia ocidental pós-Boécio não foi determinado em primeiro lugar pelas guerras em si, mas pela reconquista de Justiniano, o qual impôs ao Ocidente a política antifilosófica que ele estava implantando no Oriente; o caso clássico de tal política foi o fechamento da escola de Atenas em 529 d.C. (cf. LIBERA, 1998. p. 259260). Steven P. Marrone mostra dúvida em aceitar a posição de De Libera. Segundo ele, o fechamento da escola de Atenas além de poder nunca ter ocorrido, "não deve ser pensado como o golpe de misericórdia desferido sobre o pensamento filosófico greco-romano". Ele leva em conta o argumento de que "os filósofos pagãos continuaram a atrair estudantes a Atenas depois de Justiniano". Marrone aparentemente se baseia nos trabalhos de BLUMENTHAL, H. J. 529 and after: what happened to the academy? Byzantion, v. 48, 1978, 369-385 e CAMERON, A. The last days of the academy at Athens. Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society, v. 195, 1969, p. 7-29. 27 MARRONE, Steven P. A filosofia medieval em seu contexto. In: MCGRADE, A. S. (org.). Filosofia medieval. Trad. de André Oídes. São Paulo: Ideias e Letras, 2008, p. 34. 21 Peter Brown, por sua vez, descreve a situação como uma rápida simplificação da cultura, tornando-se tênue a distinção entre a cultura aristocrática e a popular que marcou a Antiguidade Tardia 28 , emergindo, assim, um ideal mais utilitário em substituição aos antigos padrões 29 ; desta forma, a educação clássica torna-se apanágio de uma oligarquia limitada 30 . Pierre Riché, após analisar a fusão social, as estruturas econômicas e o destino da cultura que se seguiu posteriormente às grandes invasões bárbaras no Ocidente, afirma que os Bárbaros não viram o interesse da cultura antiga a não ser nas suas manifestações utilitárias (agrimensura, arquitetura, medicina, direito). Deixaram desaparecer o sistema escolar romano – na Gália, no fim do século V; em Itália e em África, ao longo do século VI. Só a igreja salvou, adaptando-o a fins espirituais, uma parte do patrimônio grecolatino 31 . No período posterior à morte de Boécio, em especial nos séculos VII e VIII, percebe-se uma diminuta atividade educacional e literária, salvo em poucos monastérios, onde a educação elementar desenvolvida era quase que inteiramente pessoal 32 . Esta condição de instabilidade e fragilidade da cultura foi intensificada por meio da invasão muçulmana, que significou a quebra de contato com o reservatório de erudição grega e, mais especificamente falando, platônica. Assim, diante de uma total situação de isolamento intelectual a única tarefa que caberia seria a de preservar a coleção de fatos e interpretações já feitas pelos enciclopedistas 33 . O período que compreende a decadência do Império romano no Ocidente também conhece o surgimento de estruturas sociorreligiosas, em particular os monastérios, que vão desempenhar o papel fundamental de preservação e transmissão do saber disponível. Eles serviram como transmissores da alfabetização e contribuíram para a versão da tradição clássica. Em um período em que a alfabetização e a erudição estavam severamente ameaçadas, ainda era possível encontrar no interior e de alguns monastérios uma pequena versão da tradição clássica, sendo que esta era cultivada apenas na medida em que contribuía para fins religiosos 34 . Embora, a investigação tivesse caído em quantidade e qualidade, é um erro supor que ela se extinguira. David C. Lindberg sinalizou corretamente que a investigação continuou, porém adotando novas formas e com uma mudança de enfoque. A ênfase foi dada 28 BROWN, Peter. O fim do mundo clássico: de Marco Aurélio a Maomé. Trad. de Antônio Gonçalves Mattoso. Lisboa: Verbo, 1972, p. 185. 29 Ibid., p.186. 30 Cf. Ibid., p. 138. 31 RICHÉ, Pierre. As Invasões Bárbaras. Lisboa: Europa-América, 1979. p, 87. 32 KNOWLES, David. The evolution of medieval thought. 2. ed. Edinburgh: Longman publishing,1988, p. 68. 33 CROMBIE, Alistair Cameron. Augustine to Galileo: the history of science A.D. 400-1650. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953. p. 4. 34 LINDBERG, David C. Los inícios de la ciencia occidental: la tradición científica europea en el contexto filosófico, religioso e institucional (desde el 600 a. C. hasta 1450). Barcelona: Paidós, 2002, p. 207-208. 22 então ao âmbito religioso e eclesiástico. As mentes mais frutíferas lançaram-se ao campo da interpretação bíblica, à história religiosa, ao governo da Igreja e ao desenvolvimento da doutrina cristã 35 . Assim, o que se seguiu não foi a extinção do saber, mas a sua reorientação em função da vida religiosa. Será necessário esperar até fins do século XI, seguindo o século XII, para encontrarmos um retorno à investigação de caráter filosófico das obras de Aristóteles no Ocidente, tal como havia sido feito anteriormente por Boécio. Um impulso maior à atividade de investigação é dado durante o período Carolíngio e está associado à corte de Carlos Magno. Por meio de suas reformas educativas, ele importou eruditos do exterior, tais como Alcuíno, para organizar uma escola no Palácio, e ordenou o estabelecimento de Escolas monásticas e episcopais em todo o reino, as quais contribuíram para uma maior difusão da educação. A importância da reforma educacional empreendida por Carlos Magno pode ser mais bem compreendida quando lembramos quais foram os organismos através dos quais a educação medieval fluiu, a saber: o monastério, a escola catedral, os mestres individuais e as Universidades. Esses vários tipos de educação aconteciam e repercutiam nas classes sociais que as frequentavam 36 . Embora os frutos da reforma Carolíngia sejam colhidos apenas posteriormente à época de Carlos Magno, durante o reinado de seus sucessores imediatos foi a partir das escolas carolíngias que a vida intelectual da Idade Média se desenvolveu. Nesse florescimento intelectual a questão intrigante consistia 35 Percebemos esta mudança de ênfase ao constatarmos que os escritos de praticamente a totalidade dos autores de maior envergadura intelectual deste período se relacionam, de forma geral, com o âmbito eclesiástico. Lembremos que Isidoro de Sevilha (560-636), além de suas obras enciclopedistas tais como Etimologias e Acerca da Natureza das Coisas, também escreveu manuais para instruir o clero sobre materiais de história, teologia, interpretação bíblica e liturgia. Gregório de Tours escreveu uma História dos Francos na qual documenta a expansão do cristianismo em território Franco. Gregório o Grande (550-604) compôs um influente conjunto de sermões, dissertações, diálogos e comentários bíblicos. Beda, juntamente com seus livros sobre cronometria e calendário, escreveu livros sobre comentários bíblicos, sermões e hagiografias (vidas de santos). (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 237). Para uma defesa das obras e interesses filosóficos ainda predominantes no período que se seguiu à simplificação da cultura e sua conexão com a corte de Carlos Magno, recomendamos fortemente a leitura de MCKITTERICK, Rosamond; MARENBON, John. Philosophy and its background in the early medieval West. In: MARENBON, John. Routledge history of philosophy: medieval philosophy. London: Routledge, 2004, vol. III, p. 96-120. 36 Dentro da cronologia oferecida por David Knowles referente a cada uma dessas "instituições", temos que o monastério se mostrou como força educacional importante no período de 1000 a 1150. O caráter da instrução realizada no monastério era quase que inteiramente doméstico e de proveito particular dos monges; a escola catedral se distinguiu por assistir ao aumento do número de clérigos seculares em suas funções no período compreendido entre 1000 e 1200; os mestres individuais desenvolveram suas atividades principalmente entre os anos de 1050 e 1150; e, por fim, Universidades, de 1050 em diante na Itália e, a partir de 1200, na França (cf. KNOWLES, 1988, p. 74-75). Algo que percebemos nesta proposta de Knowles é que esses organismos não se seguiram cronologicamente. De fato, uma vez que essas instituições se desenvolveram e conviveram simultaneamente, os conflitos entre elas eram inevitáveis. C. H. Lohr percebeu corretamente que as diversas polêmicas que encontramos, tais como aquelas entre Pedro Damião e os dialéticos, a de Lanfranco contra Berengário, a de Bernardo de Claraval contra Abelardo, representam a reação de uma tradição mais antiga frente às mudanças que estavam ocorrendo, em outras palavras, a mais velha ideia monástica em oposição à nova concepção urbana do papel do professor (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 83). 23 em saber "por que a filosofia e a lógica se tornaram um foco de interesse erudito no início da Europa ocidental, especialmente à luz das preocupações acadêmicas vigentes com a teologia cristã e a exposição da Bíblia?" 37 Pois, embora saibamos pouco do currículo existente nas escolas carolíngias, está claro que as sete artes liberais estavam incluídas e que até mesmo a astronomia era ensinada em certo nível. Esse maior nível de ensino pode ser constatado na obra de Gerberto de Aurillac 38 . A retomada dos estudos filosóficos no Ocidente latino cristão foi também impulsionada e precedida pelo contato com aquele trabalho realizado anteriormente por Boécio e a consequente apropriação do seu conteúdo. Percebemos este ponto de maneira mais marcante na constituição do syllabus básico em lógica, porquanto este programa básico de estudos, constituído pelas Categorias e o De Interpretatione 39 , juntamente com a tradução da Isagoge de Porfírio, os Tópicos de Cícero e outros escritos seus (especialmente o De divisione e o De topicis differentiis), era ensinado por Gerberto de Aurillac na escola-catedral de Rheims, próximo ao fim do século X, como integrante de um currículo escolar. É bem verdade que tal currículo não possuía um caráter absoluto de rigidez, pois no século XII ocorrerá a adição do Liber sex principiorum, o qual foi chamado de "lógica velha", logica vetus 40 . Foi apenas por volta de 1120 que as traduções dos Primeiros Analíticos, dos Argumentos Sofísticos e dos Tópicos foram redescobertas, as quais, juntamente com uma tradução dos Segundos Analíticos, realizada por Tiago de Veneza a partir de uma fonte grega, 37 "Why should philosophy and logic have become a focus of scholarly interest within early medieval Western Europe, especially in light of the prevailing scholarly preoccupations with Christian theology and exposition of the Bible?" (MARENBON, 2004, p. 99). 38 De fato, percebe-se na obra de Gerberto de Aurillac um nível de erudição possibilitado pela Reforma Carolíngia. Além de ter contribuído para a recuperação e a difusão das artes liberais clássicas, especialmente daquela lógica associada a Boécio, ele também alcançou considerável nível nas ciências matemáticas. Depreende-se de sua obra este maior nível de erudição, instruções sobre a construção de um modelo astronômico e sobre o uso do Ábaco para multiplicar e dividir (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 241-243). 39 As Categorias foram conhecidas em primeiro lugar por meio de uma paráfrase latina, Categoriae decem. Essa obra, que erroneamente foi atribuída a Agostinho, gozou de tamanha popularidade que se tornou o texto de lógica mais lido desde a época de Alcuíno até o século X. A Categoriae decem é uma obra provavelmente do fim do século IV. Aparentemente é uma tradução adaptada de algum compendium grego das categorias de Aristóteles que provem do ambiente de Themístio (317-388). Porém, gradualmente ela foi substituída pela tradução de Boécio a tal ponto que, por volta do século XII, ela havia quase que desaparecido das escolas. De fato, a Idade Média teve de progressivamente redescobrir o trabalho de Boécio, porquanto a sua tradução da Isagoge é conhecida por volta do século IX e aquela referente ao De Interpretatione apenas um século mais tarde. Os dados anteriormente apresentados se apoiam fortemente naqueles fornecidos por MARENBON, 2003, p. 164-182. 40 O Liber sex principiorum foi erroneamente atribuído a Boécio, mas é na verdade uma obra do século XII. Os estudiosos do assunto estão propensos a atribuí-lo a Gilberto de Poitiers (cf. ASHWORT, 2008, p. 100). 24 receberam a denominação de "nova lógica" 41 . Embora posteriormente a ênfase sobre a obra de Boécio tenha diminuído, são inegáveis os desenvolvimentos estimulados por sua obra. A disponibilização do "corpus aristotélico" no Ocidente latino cristão nos leva à segunda etapa proposta por C. H. Lohr, que tem por contexto a onda de traduções do século XII. A retomada do estudo das obras de Aristóteles estava em consonância com mudanças determinantes no âmbito da sociedade, da economia, da política e da educação, que encontramos desde o final do século IX e que possibilitaram a emergência de uma "civilização complexa" 42 . O resultado desses desenvolvimentos foi o surgimento de uma nova Europa. Muito se debate entre os historiadores sobre a força motriz responsável pelas mudanças no interior daquele modo de civilização. Neste ponto encontramos opiniões muito divergentes, pois, enquanto alguns, como Knowles, julgam ser impossível identificar com precisão a causa responsável pelo florescimento ou o despertar do século XII 43 , outros, como Lindberg, recorrem a várias causas. De forma geral podemos dizer que ocorreu uma combinação de fatores, ou utilizando-nos da expressão de Joseph Ratzinger, ocorreu uma "série providencial de coincidências". Ele resume o contexto destas transformações: Nos países da Europa ocidental reinava, então, uma paz relativa, que garantia à sociedade o desenvolvimento econômico e a consolidação das estruturas políticas, e favorecia uma vivaz atividade cultural graças também aos contatos com o Oriente. No interior da Igreja sentiam-se os benefícios da vasta ação conhecida como 'reforma gregoriana', a qual, promovida vigorosamente no século precedente, tinha contribuído com uma maior pureza evangélica para a vida da comunidade eclesial, sobretudo no clero, e tinha instituído à Igreja e ao Papado uma autêntica liberdade de ação. Além disso, difundia-se uma vasta renovação espiritual, apoiada pelo vigoroso desenvolvimento da vida consagrada: nasciam e expandiam-se novas Ordens religiosas, enquanto que as que já existiam conheciam uma retomada prometedora. Refloresceu também a teologia, adquirindo maior consciência da própria natureza: apurou o método, enfrentou problemas novos, progrediu na contemplação dos Mistérios de Deus, 41 CHLPM, 1982, p. 46; Ver também: KNEALE; KENEALE, 1962, p. 193. Um típico manuscrito de lógica medieval era constituído pelas seguintes obras: Isagoge, Categorias, De Interpretatione, Refutações Sofísticas, os Primeiros Analíticos, os Tópicos, os Segundos Analíticos, o De divisione liber, o De topicis differentiis, e o Líber sex principiorum. Para uma exposição histórica da evolução sofrida pela lógica vetus durante a Idade Média recomendamos a leitura de TORRES, Moisés Romanazzi (org.). A evolução história da logica vetus. Mirabilia, v. 1, n. 16, 2013, p. 201-220. 42 Utilizo aqui esta expressão de Lynn White Jr., que a usou para se referir à emergência de uma sociedade totalmente distinta das antecedentes. Outras denominações como "período de renascimento" também são correntes. Essa última foi popularizada por Charles Haskins. Para uma breve e útil descrição das mudanças ocorridas na Europa que foram responsáveis por sua reestruturação (cf. GRANT, Edward. God and reason in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 17-30). 43 KNOWLES, 1988, p. 75. 25 produziu obras fundamentais, inspirou iniciativas importantes da cultura, da arte e da literatura, e preparou as obras-primas do século seguinte [...] 44 A proposta de Lindberg é interessante, pois, embora ele acredite em uma conjunção de causas, tais como: estabilidade política, inovações tecnológicas, reconfiguração da estrutura social, mudança de uma agricultura primariamente de subsistência, crescimento populacional, aparecimento de vilas e de algumas cidades, atividades de comércio e mercado, argumenta em favor de uma íntima relação entre educação e urbanização como fatores determinantes para o surgimento desta nova Europa posterior ao século X. Tomando por base essa relação, Lindberg analisa a escola prototípica da Idade Média, ou seja, a escola monástica, em oposição às escolas urbanas surgidas posteriormente. Enquanto a primeira era rural, afastada, isolada do mundo secular e dedicada a reduzidos objetivos educativos, as últimas, tendo por contexto o aumento e deslocamento populacional nos séculos XI e XII, saíram da sombra das escolas monásticas e se transformaram na principal força educativa. Talvez seja equívoco pensar em termos de ruptura entre essas duas instituições medievais, porém não devemos esquecer que os objetivos educacionais das novas escolas urbanas eram mais amplos e, ainda que a ênfase do programa docente variasse de uma escola para outra, de fato elas ampliaram e reorientaram o currículo para satisfazer as necessidades de uma variada clientela. Desta forma, os estudos em torno da lógica, as artes do quadrivium, bem como a teologia, o direito e a medicina foram levados a termos que não se coadunavam com a tradição monástica 45 . Independentemente dos fatores que foram responsáveis pelo florescimento da Europa, o que deve ser destacado antes de tudo é a relação existente entre o aparecimento dessa nova mentalidade e as fontes que a nutriram. Rémi Brague enfatiza a necessidade de modificar aquilo que ele chama de "representação hidráulica", ou seja, pensar que foi a disponibilização do "corpus aristotélico" que possibilitou seu estudo. A relação deve ser vista de modo inverso, em outras palavras, só se traduziu porque se sentiu que havia uma necessidade. É esta necessidade que deve ser explicada. Assim, a demanda precede a oferta 46 . 44 BENTO XVI, 2013, p. 9-10. 45 LINDBERG, 2002, p. 244-245. 46 BRAGUE, Rémi. Mediante a Idade Média: filosofias medievais na cristandade, no Judaísmo e no Islã. Trad. de Edson Bini. São Paulo: Loyola, 2010. p. 26. Bernard G. Dod concorda com De Rijk e acredita que não foi pelo fato de haverem sido traduzidos que os tratados aristotélicos foram utilizados, foi, sim, pelo fato de que se precisava usá-los que eles foram traduzidos (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p.83). 26 Esta necessidade se deve ao fato de que ocorreu um renascimento intelectual europeu, o qual é anterior às fontes que a inspiraram em seu empreendimento. A onda de traduções abrange aproximadamente o período que vai da metade do século XII (1150) até fins do século XIII (1295). De fato, o renascimento do século XII nutriu-se de duas instâncias particulares: em parte, do conhecimento e das ideias já existentes no Ocidente latino; por outro lado, do influxo de novo aprendizado e da literatura do Oriente 47 . No que diz respeito ao primeiro caso, já abordamos que o conhecimento de forma geral não foi extinto durante o período que antecedeu o Renascimento do século XII: o que ocorreu foi apenas o seu redirecionamento a outros aspectos da vida cultural. Por isso percebe-se que aquele modo de ciência, tal como conheceram os romanos, o qual tendia em geral a ser uma versão limitada e divulgativa daquilo que fora alcançado pelos gregos 48 , nunca foi por completo extirpado da cultura ocidental, e foi este tipo de conhecimento que os autores medievais herdaram inicialmente. Por isso é correto apontar que a ciência medieval foi um desenvolvimento da aprendizagem enciclopédica de Beda e seus continuadores. Quanto ao segundo caso, podemos perceber que mesmo este aspecto enciclopédico da ciência medieval, será mais tarde acrescido por tratados árabes e aristotélicos 49 , e será justamente esse material, somado àquele conhecimento enciclopédico presente ao longo do período, que estimulará o empreendimento investigativo do século XII. Edward Grant faz menção ao conteúdo desse grande espólio cultural que foi o movimento de traduções do século XII. Segundo ele, esse empreendimento possuía um conteúdo primariamente científico: O novo conhecimento foi quase exclusivamente dos domínios da ciência e da filosofia natural. As humanidades e a literatura não tiveram quase nenhum papel. Dentro dos domínios da ciência e filosofia natural, tornaram-se disponíveis tratados sobre lógica, matemática, astronomia, óptica, mecânica, filosofia natural e medicina assim como obras sobre astrologia, mágica e alquimia 50 . A partir do conteúdo predominante desse movimento de traduções pode-se distinguir esse renascimento do século XII, dos demais que ocorreram ao longo do período medieval e, particularmente, daquele do século XV. Levando em conta esse aspecto, a 47 HASKINS, Charles Homer. The renaissance of the twelfth century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927. p. 278. 48 LINDBERG, 2002, p. 183. 49 KNOWLES, 1988, p. 68. 50 "The new knowledge was almost exclusively from the domains of science and natural philosophy. The humanities and literature played almost no role. Within the domains of science and natural philosophy, treatises became available on logic, mathematics, astronomy, optics, mechanics, natural philosophy, and medicine, as well as works on astrology, magic, and alchemy"(GRANT, 2001, p. 86). 27 diferença consiste em que, enquanto este último preocupava-se antes de tudo com literatura e questões diretamente relacionadas com os textos, aquele, por sua vez, focou sua atenção na ciência e na filosofia. Knowles nos oferece uma proposta muito interessante para a compreensão da recepção de Aristóteles pelo Ocidente latino cristão no interior do movimento de traduções do século XII. Segundo ele, podem-se caracterizar três momentos distintos, os quais compreendem diferentes conjuntos de obras que, por sua vez, podem ser agrupadas por sua natureza interna, tendo cada uma delas um modo de aceitação distinto por conta das implicações decorrentes de sua aceitação, contrariamente às teses por elas postuladas. Segundo esse modelo, o primeiro momento envolveu as obras de lógica, as quais foram absorvidas fácil e avidamente, não ocorrendo assim oposição deliberada contra tais livros; pelo contrário, perceberam-se os aspectos promissores da utilização dos princípios lógicos em outros campos do saber. O segundo momento incluiu as obras propriamente filosóficas, em particular a ciência natural. Essas obras carregavam consigo problemas e foram menos rapidamente absorvidas. De fato, a discussão em torno da eternidade do mundo, da unidade do intelecto, da subsistência da alma etc., são apenas alguns dos temas que as referidas obras carregavam, e estavam em oposição à crença cristã. Por fim, temos a recepção das obras éticas e políticas. Apesar desta análise ser interessante, devemos perceber que ela é uma forma de olharmos a recepção de Aristóteles em suas unidades constitutivas. Se, porventura, analisarmos a recepção de Aristóteles a partir de seu resultado, perguntaremos em que consiste a importância desse período para a posteridade. Embora sejam possíveis diversas respostas relativas à interpretação do século XII, notamos uma polarização entre duas tendências, as quais se distinguem na medida em que enfatizam aspectos diferentes dos componentes desse processo. Assim, por um lado, temos o caráter da pesquisa mais antiga expressa por Haskins, que tende a compreender o trabalho do período como aspecto da mediação. Segundo ele, a tarefa do século XII era colocar o Ocidente uma vez mais em posse dos escritos científicos dos gregos, abrir o conhecimento de seus comentadores e expositores árabes e estimular a atividade científica em todo o campo 51 , o que possibilitou os filósofos do século seguinte desenvolverem o seu vigoroso empreendimento filosófico. Por outro lado, temos a pesquisa mais recente expressa por Marenbon, que tende a destacar as capacidades e conquistas do período que, no seu entender, teve o mérito de desenvolver um método 51 HASKINS, 1927, p. 308. 28 sistemático e argumentativo tanto em teologia quanto na elaboração de sofisticadas técnicas lógicas para análise semântica e estudo dos argumentos 52 . Seria esta estrutura que, juntamente com o novo material aristotélico e árabe disponibilizado, proveram a estrutura na qual se nutriu a filosofia do século seguinte. Independentemente da diferença entre as duas ênfases da pesquisa, acreditamos que o ponto central da discussão são as implicações ou consequências advindas ao pensamento filosófico, porquanto, se levarmos em conta o impacto resultante das traduções do século XII, foi através do contato com novas fontes que se presenciou à ascensão de novos problemas existentes nelas; ou seja, foi por meio do contato com obras desconhecidas, comentários explicativos e trabalhos individuais sobre diversos assuntos, que as fontes de referências do pensamento ocidental foram alargadas e, consequentemente, novas perspectivas foram exigidas. Grant destaca a possibilidade da construção de um sistema filosófico que fosse capaz de explicar a realidade: Tomadas como um todo as traduções de Aristóteles deram aos pensadores Ocidentais, pela primeira vez, assunto sobre o qual construir um sistema completo e maduro, porém a atmosfera, as pressuposições deste grande corpo de pensamento não eram nem medievais nem cristãs, mas do grego antigo e não religiosas, para não dizer racionalistas em caráter 53 . Uma das maiores consequências decorrentes do trabalho dos tradutores do século XII foi a progressiva percepção da insuficiência da estrutura das sete artes liberais clássicas como proposta suficiente para manter em equilíbrio todos os assuntos que podiam ser estudados em algum detalhe, naquele momento, diferentemente do período anterior 54 . Esse processo disponibilizou um corpo de literatura que formaria o currículo das emergentes 52 MARENBON, 1998, p. 179-180. 53 "Taken as a whole the translations of Aristotle gave Western thinkers, for the first time, matter on which to construct a full and mature system, but the atmosphere, the presuppositions of this great body of thought were not medieval and Christian, but ancient Greek and non-religious, not to say rationalistic in character" (KNOWLES, 1988, p. 174). Talvez possa parecer que existe uma exaltação indevida à realização do século XII, porém tal crítica se funda antes de tudo em aspectos que ressaltam ou pressupõem o modo de pensamento especificamente pautado em critérios posteriores estritamente racionalistas. Julgamos esta crítica indevida, pois acreditamos que a relevância de um sistema filosófico não deve ser medida pela sua capacidade em antecipar o pensamento moderno: pelo contrário, sua importância deve levar em conta a sua capacidade explicativa em oferecer respostas satisfatórias ou ao menos plausíveis para os problemas que são enfrentados pelas estruturas de pensamento vigentes em seu tempo. Não estamos defendendo que emergiu na Europa uma época de racionalismo exagerado capaz de ingenuamente confundir-se com o positivismo. Isto sempre esteve longe dos pesquisadores nesse campo. Ressaltamos apenas o grande vigor que surgiu nas mentes, despertando, direcionando e confiando mais em suas capacidades investigativas, fato para o qual mesmo a pesquisa pioneira de Haskins constatou e fez as devidas ressalvas: "nem mesmo em seu mais alto ponto o espírito da Europa cristã na Idade média se emancipou ele mesmo do respeito pela autoridade a qual foi característica da época. O sentido critico tem estado apenas parcialmente despertado, e não penetrou mais distante ou em todas as direções" (HASKINS, 1927, p. 336). 54 LUSCOMBE, David. A history of western philosophy: medieval thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, vol. II, p. 66-67. 29 Universidades e incorreu diretamente na adoção dos escritos de Aristóteles no currículo universitário medieval, fato de consequências muito vastas para a vida intelectual do período e para a civilização ocidental como um todo. Foi o renascimento cultural que possibilitou a existência do século XIII, como a época de ouro do pensamento escolástico. Seu legado esteve presente nos mais importantes desenvolvimentos intelectuais do período que, segundo Jan A. Aertesen, compreendem o aparecimento das Universidades, a recepção de Aristóteles e o conflito entre as Faculdades 55 . Quanto às traduções especificamente de Aristóteles, é necessário distinguir nesse processo as provenientes do árabe e as traduzidas diretamente do grego. Existem divergências entre os estudiosos sobre diversos pontos das traduções. Exemplo disto é a questão em torno do momento específico no qual as obras de Aristóteles sobre filosofia natural ocorreram: enquanto Brague expressa certa dúvida em especificar o momento específico no qual teve início o movimento de traduções, Grant afirma que as primeiras traduções de Aristóteles do árabe para o latim sobre filosofia natural parecem ter ocorrido na Espanha na última metade do século XII 56 . No entanto, nem tudo está envolto em obscuridade e os estudiosos concordam em vários pontos. Sabemos hoje que as primeiras traduções foram feitas por volta do fim do século X na Espanha e o conteúdo material desse empreendimento envolveu primeiramente textos científicos e não filosóficos: os objetivos eram, antes de tudo, textos de caráter prático, a saber: manuais de medicina, aritmética ou astronomia 57 . Duas figuras devem ser destacadas nesse processo de tradução: Gerardo de Cremona (1114-1187) e Miguel Escoto (1175-1232). O primeiro, de fato, foi o mais importante tradutor do árabe no século XII, pois é espantosa a quantidade de material que lhe 55 "The most important intellectual developments in this period – "the rise of the university, the reception of Aristotle, and the conflict between the faculties" (KRETZMANN, Norman; STUMP, Eleonore. The Cambridge companion to Aquinas. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. p. 14). 56 Devemos notar que as obras propriamente científicas foram traduzidas do árabe para o latim antes das obras de filosofia natural de Aristóteles. Conhecemos vários desses tradutores: Platão de Tívoli, Adelardo de Bath, Roberto de Chester, Guilherme de Caríntia, Domingo Gundisalvo, Pedro Alfonso, João de Sevilha, entre outros. Essas primeiras traduções realizadas na Espanha são justificadas em função de diversos fatores: a existência de uma notável cultura árabe que possuía ao seu dispor uma grande quantidade de livros escritos em árabe, a presença de comunidades dos moçarabes (árabes cristãos cuja língua nativa era o árabe, sendo-lhes permitido praticar sua religião); outros fatores foram reforçados com a retomada de Toledo pelos cristãos em 1085, durante as Guerras de Reconquista, que implicou na posse cristã dos centros culturais árabes e de suas bibliotecas. Os dados aqui expressos se apoiam fortemente naqueles encontrados em LINDBERG, 2002, p. 260. Ainda que não possamos ter certeza sobre a constituição de uma escola formal de tradução em Toledo, visto que as fontes contam pouco para nós, Haskins parece supor sua existência a partir da constatação de uma sucessão ininterrupta de tradutores por mais de um século (cf. HASKINS, Charles Homer. Studies in the history of mediaeval science. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1924. p. 12-13). 57 BRAGUE, 2010, p. 234. 30 é comumente atribuído, o que deu margem a suposições de que ele teria sido ajudado nessa tarefa por um grupo de estudantes. Independentemente disto ser ou não verdadeiro, sabemos que ele passou aproximadamente três ou quatro décadas em um constante trabalho de tradução que incluiu obras de astronomia, matemática, medicina e quatorze obras de lógica e filosofia natural, dentre as quais o De caelo, Meteorológicos (livro I-III), Sobre a Geração e a Corrupção, Física, os Segundos Analíticos e também uma paráfrase de Temístio sobre esta última obra 58 . As traduções do árabe para o latim foram continuadas no século XIII pelo trabalho de Miguel Escoto. A especificidade dessa série de traduções consiste em que ela envolveu tanto as obras aristotélicas sobre filosofia natural quanto os comentários de Averróis a Aristóteles 59 . Ele traduziu os grandes comentários sobre o De caelo, De anima, Física, os comentários médios sobre Geração e Corrupção, Parva naturalia, e outros mais. O trabalho empreendido pelos tradutores permitiu que "praticamente toda a filosofia natural de Aristóteles se tornasse disponível no Ocidente latino em torno de meados do século XIII" 60 . Por ter sido constatado um viés árabe da entrada de Aristóteles no Ocidente, alguns defendem que o Ocidente tenha aprendido Aristóteles por meio das traduções árabes. Bernard G. Dod acredita que isso não passa de uma lenda, porquanto essas traduções apenas ocorreram na medida em que faltavam traduções inteligíveis diretamente do grego. Além do mais, com exceção das obras De Caelo, Meteorologica I-III, De animalibus, Metaphysics, foram poucas as traduções provindas do árabe que obtiveram ampla circulação, e, mesmo nesse caso, elas foram em seguida rapidamente substituídas pelas versões de Guilherme de Moerbeke 61 . Portanto, não se deve exagerar a importância das traduções árabe-latinas de 58 Ao todo lhe são creditadas 71 traduções as quais cobrem um vasto campo científico (cf. GRANT, 2009, p. 177178). Lindberg nos oferece a seguinte listagem: uma dezena de textos astronômicos, dezessete obras de matemática e ótica, quatorze sobre lógica e filosofia natural, vinte quatro obras médicas (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 261). 59 Existe uma considerável discussão a respeito da tradução por Miguel Escoto de alguns dos longos comentários de Averróis a Aristóteles. Sem sombra de dúvida ele foi o mais prolífico nesta atividade, porém não foi o único estudioso a traduzir os comentários de Averróis para o latim. Sendo assim, reconhecemos apenas o caráter de plausibilidade da atribuição acima realizada. 60 GRANT, 2009, p. 181. 61 Não é de todo verdadeira a declaração de que Aristóteles alcançou os latinos por meio dos árabes. Tomada literalmente, ela é falsa, pois na maior parte ele chegou aos eruditos latinos por meio de traduções diretas do grego. Lembremos que a tradução do grego nunca cessou totalmente. Exemplos típicos de tradutores são Boécio, no século VI, e Erígena, no século IX. Além do mais, algumas regiões eram favorecidas pela presença de comunidades que falavam o grego, caso particularmente encontrado no sul da Itália, na Sicília, havendo também nessa região bibliotecas que continham livros em grego. É bem verdade que os benefícios advindos do contato entre a Itália e o Império Bizantino não são constatados da mesma forma em outros lugares, porém o que deve ser destacado é apenas a rapidez e a ênfase com as quais as traduções diretamente do grego são feitas a partir do século XII (CF. MARENBON, John. Bonaventure, the German Dominicans and the new translations. In: MARENBON, John (org.). Routledge history of philosophy: medieval philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2004. vol. III, p. 226). É compreensível o motivo pelo qual os estudiosos davam preferência às versões do grego para o latim, pois, embora os tradutores do árabe adotassem o mesmo método literal que os 31 Aristóteles 62 ; elas não são a causa do renascimento cultural, mas seu efeito 63 . Sendo assim, as traduções feitas diretamente do grego possuem uma importância que não pode ser relegada ou substituída por aquelas feitas a partir do árabe. O empreendimento cultural de tradução das obras de Aristóteles do grego para o latim não consistiu na constituição de escolas; foi, sim, fruto do trabalho de diversos personagens que, infelizmente, passaram como anônimos nessa atividade. Os únicos nomes de tradutores conhecidos do século XII são Tiago de Veneza, João e Henrique 64 . Levando em conta o movimento de tradução como um todo, destacam-se os nomes de Tiago de Veneza e Guilherme de Moerbeke (1215-1286). Tiago de Veneza foi o mais importante tradutor de Aristóteles diretamente do grego, no século XII, uma vez que lhe é creditado o mérito de ter traduzido a Física, o De anima, os Segundos Analíticos e alguns fragmentos de comentadores gregos sobre esta obra, a Parva naturalia, etc 65 . Guilherme de Moerbeke, por sua vez, além de ter revisado diversas traduções existentes, tanto pela primeira tradução latina da Política, Ética, De motu animalium e De progressu animalium; de ter feito novas traduções das Categorias, do De caelo, dos Meteorológicos, Retórica e De interpretatione, além do restante do De animalibus, realizou também revisões de diversas obras, dentre as quais destacamos os Segundos Analíticos, Física, De anima, Parva naturalia, Metafísica, Sobre a geração e corrupção, entre outras. Quanto à recepção de Aristóteles pelo Ocidente, podemos dizer que, "enquanto os seus tratados lógicos foram de interesse imediato e vital tanto para cada mestre quanto para toda escola, as suas obras filosóficas e científicas não foram de interesse direto nem para os lógicos nem para os teólogos" 66 . Bernard G. Dod afirma que, da evidência material do século seus conterrâneos, o resultado, era muito diferente, porquanto as traduções árabes elas mesmas não eram feitas diretamente do grego, mas através de versões siríacas intermediárias, e assim os tradutores para o latim estavam trabalhando em remover o original que se encontrava por trás da linguagem semítica que não os conduzia prontamente a traduções literais, seja do grego, seja do latim. Disto resultava que as traduções de Aristóteles do árabe para o latim são muito mais difíceis de ser lidas e entendidas do que as versões latinas traduzidas diretamente do grego, fato que explica por que elas mais tarde foram preferidas quando estavam disponíveis (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 68). 62 BRAGUE, 2010, p. 237. 63 Ibid., p. 247. 64 A Física e os Segundos Analíticos foram revisados a partir da versão de Tiago de Veneza (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 57-58). 65 Parva naturalia são os pequenos tratados físicos, dentre os quais: Da sensação e o Sensível; Da memória; Do Sono; Dos Sonhos; Da Adivinhação pelo Sono; Da Longevidade e Brevidade da Vida; Da Juventude, Senilidade, Vida e Morte, e Respiração. Estas obras encontram-se impressas na coleção publicada pela Cambridge: BARNES, Jonathan.The complete works of Aristotle: the revised Oxford translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, vol. I-II. 66 "but whereas the logical treatises of Aristotle were of immediate and vital interest to each and every master and school, the philosophical and scientific works were of no direct interest either to logicians or to theologians" (KNOWLES, 1988, p. 172). 32 XII, percebe-se que, embora a maioria das obras de Aristóteles tivessem sido traduzidas nesse século, seu estudo e circulação só ocorreu de forma significativa no século XIII e, ainda que a "lógica antiga" tivesse sido bastante estudada e os Segundos Analíticos fossem conhecidos por alguns escolásticos, esta obra foi pouco analisada 67 . Ao que tudo indica, o estudo de Aristóteles na Europa antes do século XIII era do interesse apenas de um punhado de mestres e estudantes, o que significa que ele não se tornou realmente importante no mundo acadêmico senão em meados do século XIII 68 , limitando-se no início o seu conhecimento apenas a poucos lugares. Assim, a emergência do Estagirita como uma figura proeminente no mundo acadêmico foi algo gradual e o processo de recepção e assimilação de Aristóteles no Ocidente Latino durante a Idade Média foi, na verdade, um processo lento, e isto vale inclusive para as obras que não foram alvo de proibições eclesiásticas. A partir dos dados fornecidos no século XII, podemos perceber que a ênfase dos estudos se concentrou sobre o âmbito da logica vetus, com predominância para os Elencos Sofísticos. Isto talvez se deva à novidade da obra, visto que ela não tinha sido conhecida anteriormente. Os Primeiros e Segundos Analíticos, juntamente com os Tópicos, apesar de serem conhecidos por alguns eruditos, não foram amplamente estudados 69 . O contato com o corpus aristotelicum, em especial com os tratados de filosofia natural e os Segundos Analíticos, suscitou ao pensamento medieval diversas questões presentes nestas obras, dentre as quais destacamos: a caracterização do conhecimento científico; a classificação das ciências e os seus respectivos objetos de investigação; o modo específico de proceder de cada uma das ciências, etc. Levando em conta que, após as traduções, um típico manuscrito do Órganon de Aristóteles incluiria diversas obras, dentre as quais destacamos os Segundos Analíticos, e, levando em conta que a Física fazia parte do "corpus vetustius 70 ", fica estabelecido que, tanto 67 "Although the majority of Aristotle's works had been translated in the twelfth century, the evidence of the manuscripts and other sources indicates that they were not much studied and circulated until the thirteenth century" (CHLMP, 1982, p. 50). 68 Ibid., p. 53. 69 No que diz respeito aos Segundos Analíticos a situação é um pouco mais complicada, e isto talvez se tenha dado pela própria dificuldade do texto, pois John de Salisbury queixa-se, em seu Metalogicon, de que os Segundos Analíticos possuem tantos obstáculos quantos capítulos, indicando assim que esta obra era de seu conhecimento, ao menos no que diz respeito à constatação de sua dificuldade por meio de algum contato com ela. Além do mais, no prólogo da versão que é comumente atribuída à misteriosa figura de Ioannes, é dito que o conhecimento dessa obra não é difundido entre os falantes latinos de sua geração. Menciona ainda o estado de incompletude do que seria uma possível tradução de Boécio que se encontraria obscurecida pela corrupção. Por fim, registra que, embora a versão de Tiago de Veneza fosse conhecida pelos mestres da França, o silêncio destes testemunha que ela estava envolta em obscuridade, resultando daí proveito quase nulo (CHLMP, 1982, p. 56). 70 As obras que formavam a coleção de obras lógicas são as seguintes: a Isagoge de Porfírio, Categorias, De Interpretatione, De divisione e De topicis differentiis de Boécio, o Liber sex principiorum, e os Primeiros Analíticos, Segundos Analíticos, Tópicos, Elencos Sofísticos de Aristóteles. 33 a coleção padrão lógica quanto aquela sobre filosofia natural que circularam, continham as duas obras (Física e Segundos Analíticos), nas quais a compreensão do Estagirita sobre a relação entre física e matemática são mais explícitas. É justamente este problema que será cada vez mais objeto de investigação dos filósofos e culminará na revolução científica durante a modernidade. Esse processo, porém, apenas foi possível pela inclusão dos escritos aristotélicos como base para a formação intelectual. Para apreciarmos corretamente a grande importância que as traduções de Aristóteles desempenharam no âmbito intelectual do Ocidente, devemos observar o lugar de destaque que foi reservado aos seus escritos, e, particularmente, àqueles sobre filosofia natural. O predomínio do aristotelismo é, de fato, um fenômeno tardio que a Idade Média conheceu depois de decorridos vários séculos. Esta primazia é evidenciada na inclusão de seus escritos como componentes curriculares das Universidades. A recepção das obras de Aristóteles foi um fato de imensa repercussão para o pensamento filosófico ocidental, que David Knowles designou como a "revolução filosófica" do século XIII. Talvez a maior implicação decorrente da adoção dos escritos de filosofia natural no currículo da Faculdade de Artes tenha sido a substituição e/ou o notável declínio no estudo das sete artes liberais, as quais foram relegadas ao status de estudo introdutório, enquanto a filosofia natural de Aristóteles passou a ocupar a posição de assunto primário na educação em artes. E, uma vez que o título de bacharel em artes era pré-requisito para a admissão nos cursos superiores de medicina, direito ou teologia, praticamente todos os estudantes na Universidade medieval tiveram contato com os escritos de Aristóteles sobre filosofia natural, segundo nos informa Edward Grant: Praticamente todos os estudantes em uma Universidade medieval recebiam o currículo em filosofia natural, a qual era primariamente a filosofia natural de Aristóteles. Era o currículo que todos eles compartilhavam. Uma vez que, a filosofia natural de Aristóteles era o currículo básico para todos os estudantes durante cinco séculos, é óbvio que a filosofia natural, com suas características racionalistas, foi institucionalizada nas Universidades. Indivíduos educados na sociedade medieval eram assim expostos a um currículo que Os editores do Aristoteles latinus reservaram a expressão "corpus vetustius" para se referirem à coleção padrão dos escritos de Aristóteles sobre filosofia natural, realizada por volta da metade no século XIII. Em geral o corpus vestustius continha as seguintes obras: Física (Tiago de Veneza); De caelo (Gerardo de Cremona); De generatione et corruptione (anônimo); De anima (Tiago de Veneza); De memoria (Tiago de Veneza); De sensu (anônimo ); De somno (anônimo); De longitudine (Tiago de Veneza); De differentia spiritus et animae (João de Sevilha ou anônimo); De plantis (Alfredo de Sareshel); Meteorologica (Gerardo de Cremona e Henrique); Metaphysics (Tiago revisou apenas o Livro I); Metaphysics (Miguel Escoto); De causis (Gerardo de Cremona); Nicolas de Amiens, De articulis fidei. A relação destes livros baseia-se na informação fornecida por Bernard G. Dod (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 50). 34 enfatizava uma abordagem racional de problemas sobre o mundo físico 71 . As obras de Aristóteles que constituíram o núcleo da filosofia natural eram usualmente referidas coletivamente como "livros naturais", os quais eram: Física, De caelo, De anima, Geração e corrupção e Meteorológicos 72 . A Faculdade de Artes na Universidade medieval possuía uma orientação de ensino bem específica, tal como afirma Grant. A natureza desse ensino era primariamente uma educação em lógica, filosofia natural e ciências exatas, onde a razão funcionou como a mais importante ferramenta de interpretação e análise. Na ausência de cursos em literatura e história e outros temas de humanidades, a Universidade medieval ofereceu uma educação que era esmagadoramente orientada em direção e temas analíticos: lógica, ciência, matemática e filosofia natural 73 . É bem verdade que, embora o currículo tivesse essa orientação específica, a distribuição entre as áreas era diferente: ainda que as matemáticas estivessem presentes por meio do quadrivium, nunca, porém, foram proeminentes. A aritmética e a geometria ocupavam talvez de oito a dez semanas no currículo de um típico estudante medieval. A astronomia chegou a ser cultivada em um nível mais alto, mas isto não se dava de forma unânime no tempo nem, simultaneamente, nos lugares. Enfim, as ciências matemáticas ocuparam um lugar discreto no currículo. Ainda que seja difícil mencionar o momento específico em que Tomás de Aquino teve seu contato inicial com a obra de Aristóteles, sabemos, que foi nos primeiros anos da formação desse contexto acadêmico que a influência do Estagirita se fez sentir de forma mais marcante sobre Tomás de Aquino 74 . 71"virtually all students at a medieval university took the natural philosophy curriculum, which was primarily Aristotle's natural philosophy. It was the curriculum they all shared. [..]Since Aristotelian natural philosophy was the basic curriculum for all students for some five centuries, it is obvious that natural philosophy, with its rationalistic characteristics, was institutionalized in the universities. Educated individuals in medieval society were thus exposed to a curriculum that emphasized a reasoned approach to problems about the physical world" (GRANT, 2001, p. 101). 72 GRANT, 2001, p. 152. 73 "A medieval university education in arts was primarily an education in logic, natural philosophy, and the exact sciences, where reason functioned as the most important tool of interpretation and analysis. In the absence of courses in literature and history and other humanities subjects, the medieval university offered an education that was overwhelmingly oriented toward analytical subjects: logic, science, mathematics, and natural philosophy" (Ibid., p. 102). 74 LINDBERG, 2002, p. 269. Dizer, de fato, quando Tomás de Aquino teve contato com a obra de Aristóteles é difícil. Tomás de Aquino nasceu em Roccaseca, na Itália meridional, por volta de 1224. Por ser o filho caçula, foi oferecido como oblato no mosteiro vizinho. Por conta da proximidade com Monte Cassino, ele, com aproximadamente 5 ou 6 anos foi enviado para lá. Em Monte Cassino deve ter recebido uma boa instrução básica, a qual incluía alguns rudimentos em letras, e foi iniciado na vida religiosa beneditina, fato que se tornou marcante em sua personalidade, visto que vários destes pontos são identificados em suas obras nos períodos posteriores de sua vida. As coisas se complicam mais um pouco quando se busca saber até que ponto se 35 Daquilo que temos discutido até o presente momento algumas implicações são determinantes para as análises subsequentes. Em primeiro lugar, pudemos perceber que o contato e a posterior assimilação de Aristóteles foi um processo complexo no qual os homens do medievo viveram "a perturbação, a resistência, o escândalo dos tradicionalistas, as hesitações da Igreja, primeiro condenando, depois tolerando e filtrando Aristóteles, antes de deixar, enfim, passar a torrente [Aristóteles] domada por seus doutores 75 ". Em segundo lugar, destacamos que o processo de recepção foi determinado a partir de aspectos subjacentes ao modo específico da civilização medieval. Em outras palavras, a obra de Aristóteles suscitou aos filósofos medievais problemas específicos que decorriam de várias instâncias sociais próprias ao mundo medieval, e.g., a ascensão da teologia ao nível acadêmico. Nesta mesma estendia essa educação elementar que ele recebeu em Monte Cassino. Quando Tomás foi enviado para Nápoles, provavelmente por instabilidade política, aos 14 ou 15 anos (1239-1244), afim de ali desenvolver estudos mais aprofundados, ele pôde se inscrever no studium generale que havia sido fundado por Frederico II. Dentre os vários intuitos com que isto foi feito, estava o de se contrapor à Universidade de Bolonha. Aí Tomás de Aquino devia começar seus estudos pelas artes e filosofia antes de poder se dedicar à teologia. O contexto no qual se encontrava Nápoles foi determinante em sua formação, pois, embora a Universidade aí fundada em 1220 fosse pequena "desde os seus primórdios ela expressava uma atitude não rígida e aberta aos novos ventos, ao direito romano e já a Aristóteles" (cf. AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma teológica. São Paulo: Loyola, 2001, vol. I, p. 23). Torrell também nos informa que nessa época havia intensa vida cultural no sul da Itália (Palermo, Salerno e Nápoles), onde eram florescentes a ciência aristotélica, a astronomia árabe e a medicina grega (TORRELL, Jean-Pierre. Iniciação a Santo Tomás de Aquino: sua pessoa e obra. Trad. de Luiz Paulo Rouanet. 3. ed. São Paulo: Loyola, 1999, p. 7.). Podemos assim destacar que a estada de Tomás de Aquino em Nápoles foi determinante em dois aspectos: em primeiro lugar, pela provável mediação do contato inicial com a obra de Aristóteles que estava em ascensão como figura proeminente no mundo intelectual de então algo para o qual ele mais tarde contribuiria decididamente. Sendo assim, é quase certo que ele conheceu em Nápoles aquele que se tornaria para ele o filósofo por excelência; em segundo lugar, temos o seu contato com a Ordem dos Frades Pregadores, a qual seria sempre para ele "o modelo da vida evangélica e apostólica, contemplativa e ativa, teologal e dedicada aos outros". Santo Tomás esteve sob a influência de Alberto Magno por um considerável período (1245-1252). Da época em que ficou em Paris podemos levar em conta aquilo que Torrell nos informa, a saber, dos três anos escolares em Paris, "Não se exclui que a primeira parte deles tenha sido o ano de noviciado, que Tomás ainda não pudera ter desde que assumira o hábito, em abril de 1244. Quanto aos dois anos seguintes, pôde estudar as artes, tanto na Faculdade como no convento, mas nada impede que tenha seguido em Saint-jacques, simultaneamente, certos cursos de teologia com Alberto Magno, do qual recopia o De caelesti hierarchia, num manuscrito que dá mostras de conhecimento do sistema parisiense de "peças". Em 1248, parte para Colônia em companhia de Alberto, com quem irá continuar seus estudos de teologia e seu trabalho assistente". Gauthier informa que neste período parisiense ele pode ter completado a formação recebida em Nápoles. Sendo assim, Tomás teria frequentado a faculdade de artes, isto talvez pelo fato de que os 4 ou 5 anos que ele passou em Nápoles não fossem suficientes para terminar o ciclo de estudos de artes (visto que geralmente eles consumiam 6 ou 7 anos de estudos). Durante sua estada em Paris, no convento de Saint-Jacques, ele teve contato com Alberto Magno, do qual "recebeu formação filosófica e conseqüentemente aristotélica. Desta forma Tomás pôde familiarizar-se desde cedo com a filosofia natural de Aristóteles e sua metafísica numa época em seu estudo ainda era oficialmente proibido em Paris" (TORRELL, 1999, p. 8). Quanto à sua posterior estada em Colônia (1248-1252), sabemos que ela se deveu ao fato de Alberto Magno ter sido incumbido de organizar um Studium generale em Colônia (1248-1252). Foi durante esses anos que a influência de Alberto Magno sobre Tomás se mostrou de maneira mais determinante. Depois de Colônia ele seguiu para os primeiros anos de ensino em Paris (1252-1256). Esses anos sob a influência de Alberto Magno devem ter sido notáveis, pois foi durante esse tempo que Tomás teve de fato um contato íntimo com a obra do Estagirita e com os seus comentadores árabes. Ratinzger também acredita que a decisão de Santo Tomás seguir Alberto Magnio indo para Colônia, onde este último tinha sido convidado por seus Superiores para fundar uma Casa de estudos teológicos, foi determinante, pois, era aí que Alberto ilustrava e explicava tanto Aristóteles quanto os seus comentadores árabes (cf. BENTO XVI, 2013, p. 120). 75 AQUINO, 2001, p. 24. 36 categoria devemos ainda incluir os problemas provenientes de leituras alternativas que foram obtidas como resultado do processo de traduções. Isto ficará mais claro no próximo capítulo quando mostraremos repercussões desse tipo na análise que Tomás de Aquino fez de uma passagem no livro II da Física. Em terceiro lugar, percebemos que o contato com os escritos aristotélicos implicaram na possibilidade de construir uma filosofia da natureza. Pois, anteriormente à redescoberta da ciência aristotélica e à metodologia científica do século XII, não havia uma forte tentativa em elaborar uma teoria física da natureza. Os teólogos, ao comentarem o Hexaemeron, se baseavam na cosmologia platônica utilizada por Agostinho 76 . Isso mudou drasticamente após o contato com as obras de filosofia natural, as quais implicaram uma explicação da realidade por princípios inerentes a ela mesma. Assim, dentre os vários problemas dos quais os teólogos e filósofos medievais tomaram conhecimento a partir do contato com a Física e os Segundos Analíticos, temos a distinção entre a física e a matemática. Dessa forma, devemos em seguida investigar em que medida foi possível a Tomás de Aquino, apoiando-se em Aristóteles, defender uma teoria física da natureza que explicava os múltiplos dados advindos da experiência. E isto paralelamente ao reconhecimento da autonomia da ciência matemática com os seus respectivos objetos e métodos de investigação. 76 WEISHEILP, James A. The development of physical theory in the middle ages. New York: [s.n.], 1959, p. 19. 37 2 A DISTINÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO A questão referente à catalogação dos saberes humanos é algo que se constituiu como tema de investigação de boa parte da tradição filosófica. A divergência, por sua vez, mostrou-se tanto no critério a ser utilizado na realização desta tarefa, como nos grupos propostos e, respectivamente, em relação às ciências que deveriam compor esses grupos. Dentre as clássicas propostas que foram feitas merece destaque aquela realizada por Aristóteles, que dividiu as ciências em produtivas, práticas e teóricas. As primeiras englobavam tudo aquilo relativo a fabricação de objetos úteis; as ciências práticas, por sua vez, tinham por objeto a conduta humana; por fim, as ciências teóricas ou especulativas tinham como fim apenas a verdade. Este último grupo era composto pela física 77 , a matemática e a metafísica. Na presente análise é justamente este grupo que será objeto de nossa investigação, em especial a distinção entre física e matemática. Esta classificação de Aristóteles não pareceu adequada a todos os filósofos que se dedicaram a investigar este assunto. Lembremos que foram propostas diferentes classificações daquela oferecida pelo Estagirita, dentre as quais merece destaque tanto a classificação da filosofia realizada pelos estóicos quanto a posterior distinção das sete artes liberais clássicas. Para os estóicos, a filosofia era dividida em lógica, física e ética; as sete artes liberais, por sua vez eram sistematizadas ou compreendidas em dois segmentos, formados, respectivamente, pelo trivium, que englobava a gramática, a retórica e a dialética, e pelo quadrivium, que era constituído pela música, astronomia, aritmética e geometria. Esta proposta teve grande destaque ao longo da história educacional no Ocidente Latino, a qual foi marcada por uma forte dependência filosófica deste modelo. Apesar disso, a proposta do Estagirita sempre foi tida em alta estima, apesar de ter alcançado o Ocidente apenas de forma indireta, porquanto foi somente por meio da exposição de Boécio, que de maneira geral seguia a mesma estrutura defendida por Aristóteles, que o Ocidente conheceu a referida classificação, inicialmente. Podemos, de fato, acompanhar o grande itinerário realizado pelo problema da classificação das ciências ao longo da história intelectual do Ocidente de forma geral e, mais especificamente, durante o período medieval. Pode-se perceber que, ao longo do percurso, o 77 Uma vez que durante o medievo as expressões ciência natural, e filosofia natural além de serem várias vezes utilizadas como sinônimas e incluírem aquele mesmo campo de estudos abarcados pela física aristotélica, no presente trabalho nos utilizaremos destas expressões de modo intercambiável. Sendo assim, usaremos ao longo deste trabalho as três expressões de forma indiscriminada. 38 referido problema mostrou feições de caráter aristotélico, as quais, somadas ao trabalho de diversos comentadores neoplatônicos da Antiguidade Tardia, em particular ao de Boécio 78 , alcançaram o mundo Medieval Latino e foram objeto de diversas abordagens. Devemos lembrar que o motivo pelo qual a questão da classificação das ciências se tornou um assunto muito debatido durante o Medievo está inicialmente diretamente relacionado com a ascensão da teologia ao nível de ensino. A tentativa de conceder a esta um lugar entre as disciplinas seculares é um empreendimento surgido posteriormente. O problema se tornará mais explícito com a recepção dos Segundos Analíticos, pois se discutirá em que medida a Teologia pode ser ciência, visto que ela não satisfaz às condições que Aristóteles estabelece para que alguma investigação receba legitimamente tal designação. Daí este tema ter sido objeto de diversas abordagens 79 . Constatemos inicialmente como Aristóteles procedeu na classificação das ciências. Embora sejam diversas as passagens às quais o Filósofo remete a sua crença na distinção entre física e matemática, este assunto é abordado de forma mais detalhada na Física e na Metafísica. A discussão em ambas as obras possui ênfases distintas, pois, enquanto na Metafísica a exposição inclui as três ciências teóricas, na Física a discussão é mais restrita e se concentra na oposição entre física e matemática. Devemos notar que, ao longo da argumentação do Estagirita, no livro VI da Metafísica o que está em foco são duas preocupações principais: em primeiro lugar ele busca restringir o número de ciências especulativas unicamente a três, porquanto tudo aquilo que pode ser objeto de investigação, tendo como fim unicamente a verdade, recai no âmbito de investigação da física, da matemática ou da ciência primeira. Sua segunda preocupação consiste em mostrar o que as distingue entre si, pois, havendo três ciências especulativas, é necessário saber aquilo que as diferencia enquanto tais. A resposta de Aristóteles na Metafísica busca encontrar um princípio responsável pela divisão entre as ciências. Desta forma, ele divide as ciências em função de seus objetos materiais e formais. Sua discussão se move no âmbito de demonstrar que de fato a ciência natural, a matemática e a filosofia primeira são verdadeiramente especulativas, tendo como fim unicamente a verdade 80 . Justifica isto entendendo-as como investigando propriamente as causas e os princípios das coisas. Em suas palavras "todas essas ciências distinguem e isolam 78 GRANT, 2009, p. 10. 79 Para uma exposição de diversas propostas de classificação das ciências no Ocidente ver: LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. El concepto y la classificación de la ciencia en el medioevo. In: BONI, Luiz Alberto de. (org.) A ciência e a organização dos saberes na Idade Média. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 2000, p. 57-83. 80 ARISTÓTELES. Metafísica, 2006, II, 1. 993b20. Quando houver ao longo do trabalho menção a outra versão, isto será indicado. 39 algum ser em particular ou gênero e dele se ocupam como objeto de investigação" 81 . O argumento aqui estabelecido remonta à ideia de que esta distinção estabelece-se a partir da própria estrutura ontológica das coisas, pois as ciências fazem justamente a delimitação daquilo que está dado no mundo com suas próprias determinações. Embora a exposição de Aristóteles nessa passagem não mencione explicitamente a física e a matemática, Enrico Berti infere que ambas as disciplinas estão em sua mente nestes textos. Seu argumento leva em conta que "a ciência que torna clara a essência de seu objeto por meio da sensação é a física, enquanto aquela que a põe como hipótese é a matemática 82 ". Outro ponto que aparentemente reforça a sugestão de Enrico Berti é o fato de que, logo em seguida, o Filósofo menciona explicitamente o campo de investigação da física, dando assim a ideia de continuidade argumentativa com a parte anterior. O estabelecimento da física como uma disciplina teorética se dá inicialmente não por afirmação, mas por consequência pois é pela compreensão de que ela não satisfaz às condições de ser nem uma ciência prática nem uma ciência produtiva que ela é compreendida como especulativa dentro do sistema aristotélico. Tendo estabelecido a ciência natural como uma disciplina teorética, uma questão que surge naturalmente nesse contexto é saber em que medida as disciplinas especulativas se distinguem entre si. É nesse âmbito que Aristóteles ressalta a importância de investigar a essência e sua forma, visto que, se isto não for levado em consideração, sua investigação será inútil 83 . Aristóteles, então, recorre a uma distinção no modo de definição das coisas; algumas são definidas como chato enquanto outras o são como côncavo. De fato, a distinção referida pelo Estagirita leva em conta o modo pelo qual as coisas definidas estão ligadas à matéria sensível, pois, chato é um nariz curvo. Dizemos assim que não se pode pronunciar e nem inteligir curvo sem que esteja compreendida a noção de algo material que possui a propriedade de ser curvo; percebemos assim uma relação de indissociabilidade da matéria sensível. Por sua vez, "a concavidade é independente da matéria sensível", sendo assim, não é necessário que pensemos a concavidade como ligada necessariamente à matéria, porquanto ela é justamente a propriedade que entidades materiais podem possuir. Resumindo, podemos dizer que o curvo sempre é definido como um sínolon, ou uma combinação de matéria e forma, e deste modo a matéria sensível é levada na sua definição, enquanto que a concavidade é vista simplesmente como uma forma, e deste modo independe da matéria em sua definição. 81 ARISTÓTELES. Metafísica, 2006, VI, 1, 1025b 1. 82 BERTI, Enrico. As razões de Aristóteles. Trad. de Dion Davi Macedo. São Paulo: Loyola, 1998, p. 48. 83 ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica, 2006, VI, 1. 1025b 25. 40 Aristóteles julga que a distinção entre o chato e o côncavo serve como modelo para explicitar a diferença entre os entes físicos e os matemáticos: enquanto todos os entes naturais são análogos ao chato em sua natureza, ou seja, incluem matéria e forma em sua definição e, consequentemente, não podem ser nomeados e inteligidos sem relação ao movimento, os matemáticos, por sua vez, se assemelham ao exemplo da concavidade, por isso eles podem ser referidos e inteligidos independentemente da matéria sensível. Ainda que não encontremos um questionamento direto de Aristóteles sobre o estatuto epistêmico da matemática, o mesmo não se pode dizer de seu estatuto ontológico. Podemos perceber logo no início da exposição do Filósofo sobre as entidades matemáticas que ele expressa certa dúvida sobre o estatuto ontológico delas, e isto é feito em oposição ao modo de compreensão, daí afirmar ele que [...] a matemática é também teorética, porém, se seus objetos são imóveis e separados da matéria não está claro no presente momento, está claro, contudo, que ela considera alguns objetos matemáticos enquanto imóveis e enquanto separáveis da matéria 84 . A dúvida repousa, pois, na oposição existente entre a existência e o modo de considerar os objetos matemáticos, pois ainda que não se saiba ao certo o estatuto ontológico que eles possuem, ou seja, se eles independem ou não da matéria para subsistir, o que se sabe ao certo é que a matemática, ao tomá-los em seu âmbito de estudo, os considera enquanto imóveis e separáveis da matéria. Percebemos nesta passagem uma renúncia em conceder aos números certa independência ontológica, tal como no platonismo; antes, é a maneira como são concebidos que lhes permite serem objeto de investigação. Poderíamos pensar assim que a matemática lida com as formas presentes na matéria, mas deixa de lado a concretude das coisas no seu modo de proceder. A dificuldade em extrair dados conclusivos da postura aristotélica quanto aos objetos matemáticos consiste em que o Estagirita nunca dedicou uma obra exclusivamente ao seu tratamento, mas sua postura encontra-se dispersa, e até mesmo quando temos um tratamento mais demorado sobre o assunto, isto é feito em consonância com outras questões existentes. Em outras palavras, o tratamento das entidades matemáticas é 84 "Mathematics also is theoretical; but whether its objects are immovable and separable from matter, is not at present clear; it is clear, however, that it considers some mathematical objects qua immovable and qua separable from matter" (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica,1025b 19 1026a 33. In: BARNES, Jonathan. The complete works of Aristotle: the revised oxford translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, v. 2. p. 85). 41 feito em primeiro lugar submetido a outros assuntos em questão fato para o qual vários comentadores têm chamado a atenção 85 . Por fim, o Filósofo insere a metafísica na discussão, destacando a sua natureza especulativa e o seu objeto de investigação, o qual consiste nas "coisas que são tanto dissociáveis da matéria quanto não submetidas ao movimento". Destas substâncias se ocupa a filosofia primeira, cujos objetos são imutáveis: é a ciência do ser enquanto ser. A classificação das ciências especulativas propostas por Aristóteles na Metafísica compreende, portanto, três disciplinas com seus respectivos objetos de investigação. Como ele mesmo afirma: A ciência natural lida com coisas que são inseparáveis da matéria, porém não são imóveis, e algumas partes da matemática lidam com coisas que são imóveis, porém provavelmente não são separáveis, mas presentes na matéria; enquanto a ciência primeira lida com coisas que são ao mesmo tempo separáveis e imóveis 86 . O poder de enquadramento das entidades nesta proposta de classificação é notório, pois as entidades que não estão compreendidas nas disciplinas práticas ou produtivas recaem por fim em uma das ciências especulativas. É bem verdade que em outras passagens Aristóteles retoma a distinção entre as disciplinas teóricas. Um lugar privilegiado para acompanharmos essa distinção é uma passagem do segundo livro da Física. Nos tópicos seguintes analisaremos em que medida a argumentação ali efetuada está em consonância com aquela do livro sexto da Metafísica. A relação existente entre a Física e os demais escritos de Aristóteles é um assunto muito debatido pelos estudiosos, porquanto estabelecer qual é a função ocupada pelos princípios e conclusões obtidos no âmbito da física aristotélica dentro de seu sistema filosófico é algo determinante para compreendermos melhor a estrutura de seu sistema de pensamento. Dentre as inúmeras vias pelas quais esta discussão pode ser encaminhada, destacaremos apenas três, a saber: a metodológica, a sistemática e a estrutural. Sendo assim, podemos em primeiro lugar comparar a metodologia presente na Física com aquela teorizada para a ciência nos Segundos Analíticos e discutirmos até que ponto ela satisfaz àquelas 85 OLIVEIRA, Érico Andrade Marques. O papel da abstração na instanciação da álgebra nas Regulae ad Directionem Ingennii. Revista de Filosofia Analytica. Rio de Janeiro, v. 15, p. 145-172. 2012. p. 149. 86 "For natural science deals with things which are inseparable from matter but not immovable, and some parts of mathematics deal with things which are immovable, but probably not separable, but embodied in matter; while the first science deals with things which are both separable and immovable" (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica, 1025b 191026a 33. In: BARNES, 1991, p.85). 42 exigências que o Estagirita faz para que uma determinada investigação possa ser considerada conhecimento científico. Em segundo lugar, podem-se levar em conta os demais escritos de filosofia natural e perguntar-se em que medida certos conceitos e concepções da estrutura constituinte do mundo sensível são transmitidos e determinantes para os livros que tratam dos fenômenos naturais em sua especificidade, visto que, tomado como um todo, a maior parte do corpus aristotelicum é dedicado ao estudo da natureza em geral e de vários fenômenos naturais específicos. E, por fim, pode-se também investigar a relação existente entre a física e a metafísica aristotélica, analisando assim a estrutura existente entre elas. Quanto ao primeiro ponto, os estudiosos da obra do Estagirita estão cientes da emergência do debate em torno da multiplicidade metodológica de Aristóteles 87 , debate que se deve em boa parte à constatação de que a teorização para o conhecimento científico encontrada nos Segundos Analíticos não é satisfeita em seus pormenores em diversas de suas obras, para não dizer em sua totalidade, tal como acredita John Cooper, o qual julga que nenhum dos escritos aristotélicos sobre filosofia natural e ciências em geral está em conformidade com o "ambicioso relato dos Segundos Analíticos, segundo o qual todas as ciências consistem de demonstrações em 'teoremas' partindo de concepções primitivas " 88 . Quanto ao segundo ponto, alguns estudiosos têm chamado atenção para o fato de que a Física tem por função explicar e defender certas análises específicas das concepções aristotélicas, as quais julga serem fundamentais para o estudo da natureza em absoluto e em seus diferentes ramos. A física, nesta perspectiva, tem por meta estabelecer versões claras e coerentes dos conceitos básicos aplicáveis aos objetos naturais, e são justamente esses conceitos que serão utilizados em uma série de estudos especializados sobre aspectos particulares do mundo físico 89 . Em outras palavras, os propósitos da física aristotélica são 87 Não entraremos no debate em torno deste ponto o qual possui um aspecto multifacetado. Empreender esta atividade neste trabalho encontraria duas dificuldades principais: em primeiro lugar ele escapa à nossa capacidade de acompanhá-lo pormenorizadamente, e, além do mais, esboçá-lo, ainda que de forma simples, escaparia aos objetivos do presente trabalho e terminaria por descaracterizá-lo. Uma breve e simples exposição do problema pode ser encontrada em (BERTI, 1998). Nesta obra há indicações de materiais para pesquisas de caráter mais aprofundado. Aqueles que se sentirem mais familiarizados com a questão obterão um ótimo guia do assunto em: MESQUITA, António Pedro. Aristóteles: introdução geral. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2005. Vol. 1. 88 "[...] Aristotle's ambitious account in the Posterior Analytics of all sciences as consisting of demonstrations of 'theorems' starting from primitive conceptions" (COOPER, John M. Aristotle. In: SEDLEY, David. The Cambridge companion to greek and roman philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. p. 137). 89 Ibid., p. 139. O sistema físico de Aristóteles mostrou-se muito eficaz, porquanto o autor, munido de uma artilharia conceitual espaço, tempo, movimento, a teoria das quatro causas, natureza, etc., conseguiu explicar o mundo físico em seus múltiplos aspectos, e conseguia também solucionar diversas aporias decorrentes de outras investigações, e.g. o eleatismo. Não por mero acaso sua influência foi sentida fortemente em três 43 delimitar as causas e os princípios pelos quais os entes naturais podem ser cientificamente conhecidos. Em último lugar, no que se refere ao terceiro ponto, pode-se tomar a Física e investigar qual a sua relação com a Metafísica. É bem verdade que, em geral, sempre houve opiniões que defendiam que aquela se encontrava em uma relação de subordinação a esta última. No entanto, devemos lembrar que a precedência da Física sobre a Metafísica é algo que remonta não apenas à organização das obras de Aristóteles realizada por Andrônico de Rodes no século I a. C., mas à própria estrutura do conhecimento que, se inicia com as coisas concretas e eleva-se até os princípios abstratos. Visto que nesta catalogação dos escritos aristotélicos as obras científicas estavam dispostas posteriormente às obras de lógica, as primeiras sendo encabeçadas pela Física, seguida pelos demais escritos científicos em diversos ramos, e somente depois dessa ordem vinha a Metafísica, alguns acreditaram que a precedência da Física sobre a Metafísica era apenas estrutural, na medida em que era levada em conta a organização realizada por Andrônico de Rodes. Concordamos com a resposta dada por Enrico Berti para esta questão e acreditamos ser um equívoco pensar a relação desta maneira, ou seja, que a Física possui primazia sobre a Metafísica apenas no âmbito estrutural. O contrário é que parece ser verdadeiro, pois, a própria ordem na qual as obras foram dispostas reconhecia um encadeamento interno entre os escritos. Sendo assim, a física é o que fundamenta ou legitima a ascensão de uma nova ciência, ou seja, a metafísica. Além do mais, é somente a partir da física que se reconhece a existência de uma realidade distinta daquela que se apresenta de início à nossa investigação. Por isso é correta a afirmação de que "a metafísica é justamente o êxito extremo da física 90 ". Levando em conta unicamente a Física, podemos perceber que o método adotado por Aristóteles nessa obra consiste tanto em partir das sensações, isto é, dos dados da experiência ou da observação, como da opinião de outros filósofos. Prossegue-se então de modo tipicamente dialético propondo aporias e resolvendo as suas consequências, isto é, excluindo as soluções que se deixam refutar, ou seja, reduzir a contradição 91 . A partir deste procedimento ele então analisa os seguintes temas: matéria e forma (livro I), o conceito de natureza e causalidade (livro II), movimento (livro III), lugar e tempo (livro IV), a multiplicidade dos movimentos (livros V-VI), e o motor imóvel (livros VII-VIII) 92 . Ao iniciar grandes civilizações, a saber, o mundo bizantino, o árabe e o ocidente latino. Lindberg, muito acertadamente, constatou que a supremacia de Aristóteles no Ocidente se deu por meio da força persuasiva de seu sistema e não por força coercitiva. Foi a capacidade explicativa que levou os eruditos a aceitarem o sistema aristotélico em várias instâncias (cf. LINDBERG, 2002, p. 101). 90 BERTI, 1998, p. 46. 91 Ibid., p. 56-58. 92 WEISHPEILP, 1959, p. 31. 44 o estudo da natureza, Aristóteles começa com a busca pelos princípios do ser da natureza. É notória sua preocupação em estabelecer o número de princípios responsáveis pelo dinamismo observado na natureza, manifestos no movimento e na multiplicidade. Assim, prevalece ao longo de sua investigação um esforço em refutar o eleatismo. Esta crítica transparece de modo perceptível nos princípios que ele postula para as mudanças na natureza: 1) o sujeito que muda, a matéria; 2) a caracterização que ele recebe, a forma; 3) a ausência prévia dessa caracterização, a privação 93 . Embora haja uma unidade argumentativa e íntima ligação entre os livros I e II da Física, este último possui um aspecto de considerável dificuldade. William D. Ross propõe que o segundo livro da Física seja constituído por três partes principais: o capítulo I, que tem por objetivo discutir e estabelecer a significação da palavra natureza; o capítulo II, que investiga a distinção entre a física e as matemáticas; e os capítulos III-IX, que estudam as causas que a física deve reconhecer 94 . Aristóteles inicia a sua análise levando em consideração aquilo que foi alcançado pela discussão do capítulo anterior. No referido capítulo ele havia estabelecido critérios para delimitar o domínio dos entes naturais. A partir disto, dois pontos principais são defendidos: em primeiro lugar, o estabelecimento de que a natureza deve ser entendida como princípio de movimento e/ou repouso. O outro aspecto destacado consiste em que a natureza se diz de dois modos, ou seja, matéria e forma, mas a primazia pertence à forma. Ambos são princípios internos de movimento dos entes naturais. De posse desta conclusão, são formulados dois problemas: primeiro investigar qual a diferença existente entre o estudioso da natureza, ou seja, o físico; e segundo, saber se a astronomia pode ser considerada como parte da ciência da natureza. A primeira questão que Aristóteles analisa encontra justificativa no fato de que aparentemente existe uma indeterminação dos objetos de investigação entre estas ciências, visto que "também os corpos naturais têm superfícies e sólidos, bem como comprimentos e pontos, a respeito dos quais o matemático faz seu estudo 95 ". A distinção é requerida para que não se tome por natural aquilo que é da esfera do matemático e vice-versa 96 . O problema desta indeterminação se daria no 93 GARDEIL. Iniciação à filosofia de Santo Tomás de Aquino. Trad. de Wanda de Figueiredo. São Paulo: Duas Cidades, 1967. Tomo II, p. 20. 94 ROSS, W. D. Aristóteles. 2. ed. Trad. de Diego F. Pró. Buenos Aires: Libera os Libros, [s.d.], p. 81-82. 95 ARISTÓTELES. Física, I-II, 193b 22. Prefácio, introd., trad. e comentários de Lucas Angioni. Campinas: Unicamp, 2009. p. 46. Remeter-nos-emos a esta versão ao longo do trabalho, salvo em algumas situações em que mencionaremos outras; neste caso, a versão utilizada será indicada ao longo da passagem. 96 Ingemar Düring acredita que o motivo pelo qual Aristóteles descreve nesta passagem da Física o objeto da filosofia natural indica que se trata de uma apologia. Esta distinção estabelecida devia ser considerada uma introdução ao assunto. Sendo assim, estaríamos diante de uma passagem que possui um aspecto polêmico que provavelmente teria os platônicos em foco (cf. DÜRING, Ingemar. Aristóteles: exposición e interpretación de su pensamiento. 2. ed. Trad.y edición de Bernabé Navarro. México: Universidad Nacional Autônoma de Mexico, 1990. p. 373). Este entendimento de Düring não é incompatível com a opinião de Ross, pois, segundo 45 âmbito demonstrativo do conhecimento científico, embora já tenhamos comentado anteriormente que a física não se encaixa naquele modelo de conhecimento científico teorizado nos Segundos Analíticos, estando muito mais próxima da argumentação dos Tópicos; somente assim, se alguém tomar os objetos físicos por matemáticos, incorrerá em erro, pois o objeto e o método de cada uma destas ciências não estarão em harmonia com as conclusões advindas da investigação. Quanto a saber se a astronomia pode ser considerada como parte da ciência da natureza, a legitimidade desta segunda questão provém da aparente contradição existente no fato da astronomia, apesar de tratar de entidades de natureza física, utilizar-se de meios matemáticos ou demonstrar através deles. Sendo assim, a questão consiste em saber se a astronomia pertence ao âmbito da ciência natural ou da matemática 97 . Ingemar Düring acredita que o que distingue os entes naturais dos entes matemáticos segundo Aristóteles são apenas três propriedades, todas elas peculiares aos primeiros: 1) possuem a faculdade de se mover; 2) possuem existência independente; 3) são forma na matéria. Percebemos uma coerência na argumentação do Estagirita com aquilo que já havia sido exposto anteriormente, pois possuir a faculdade de se mover é de fato apenas outra maneira de expor que o domínio dos entes naturais compreende justamente as entidades que possuem em si o princípio de movimento e/ou repouso. A segunda propriedade está em consonância com aquilo que ele já havia dito anteriormente, ou seja, "seria ridículo tentar provar que a natureza existe 98 ". Sendo assim, afirmar que eles existem independentemente da mente implica que não são instituídos a uma posição de objeto por meio de uma atividade do intelecto; pelo contrário, eles simplesmente existem e, pelo fato de possuírem um determinado estatuto ontológico, estão dados diretamente à percepção sensível. A terceira propriedade, por sua vez, destaca que eles são um sínolon, o composto de matéria e forma, e justamente por conta disso é que são estudados enquanto tais, por isso cabe ao filósofo natural estudar a este, Aristóteles define a física através de dois recursos: de início ele compara o objeto da ciência natural com o das matemáticas e em seguida considera se a física, distintamente da matemática, estuda a natureza como matéria, forma ou como o composto de ambos (cf. ROSS, [s.d.], p. 84). Dizemos que a opinião de Düring não é incompatível com a de D. Ross porquanto é possível perceber que as três propriedades destacadas por Düring são idênticas àquelas que D. Ross menciona, pois, na comparação entre os entes matemáticos e os naturais, percebe-se que de fato uns possuem o princípio de movimento em si, enquanto outros não o possuem; além do mais, enquanto os últimos são investigados enquanto sínolon, os primeiros são estudados apenas como forma. 97 Lucas Angioni é da opinião que Aristóteles busca legitimar a relevância da investigação em torno destas questões pelo fato de que as soluções propostas pelos platônicos lhe pareceriam inaceitáveis. Desta maneira, o foco da passagem seria uma crítica à separação platônica e, tal como ele afirma, "Aristóteles teria introduzido as questões concernentes à matemática e à astronomia no interesse de determinar o método adequado ao cientista da natureza – certamente por haver adversários, os platônicos, que negavam à ciência da natureza qualquer especificidade própria, propondo sua redução a certo tipo de conhecimento matemático" (ANGIONI, 2009, p. 221). 98 ARISTÓTELES, Física, II, 1, 139a 1. 46 natureza nos dois sentidos especificados pelo Estagirita, ou seja, matéria e forma. Reforçando estas características apontadas por Düring, devemos notar que elas pertencem apenas aos entes naturais, dessa forma acreditamos ser plausível tomá-las apenas enquanto propriedades dos entes naturais e não como aspectos primários de distinção entre o procedimento do filósofo natural e o do matemático, ainda que isso possa ser feito de modo secundário. Levando em conta os aspectos propriamente ditos da distinção entre o matemático e o estudioso da natureza, a resposta de Aristóteles, no livro II da Física, está estruturada segundo alguns pontos. Em primeiro lugar ele busca mostrar que a distinção entre ambos se funda no âmbito da consideração de seus objetos, ou seja, eles consideram de modo diferente o sujeito de sua investigação. Pois, tanto na ciência natural quanto na matemática as figuras dos corpos constituem parte da investigação, porém na ciência natural a figura e ou outros concomitantes que pertencem aos corpos sensíveis são estudados apenas na medida em que são responsáveis por diversos fenômenos físicos, no entanto tal estudo não é feito em função destes concomitantes que acompanham os corpos físicos, de forma que eles não podem ser deixados de lado na investigação do filósofo natural. De fato, ele inclusive destaca a incoerência que se seguiria se o estudioso da natureza tivesse por tarefa apenas investigar os objetos da realidade física e deixasse de lado os seus concomitantes 99 . Além do mais, o Estagirita ainda reivindica a efetividade da investigação natural. É justamente levando em consideração os concomitantes dos corpos naturais que "os que estudam a natureza manifestamente se pronunciam também sobre a figura da lua e do sol, e buscam saber se a Terra e o mundo são esféricos ou não" 100 . Distintamente do filósofo natural, o matemático toma aqueles concomitantes como objeto de investigação em função deles mesmos, ou seja, como objetos separados das coisas naturais às quais eles pertencem. Destaca-se, assim, que as propriedades essenciais de um determinado objeto são passíveis de investigação tanto na física quanto na matemática; a diferença consiste nas diferentes perspectivas em que elas são consideradas. Porém, isto apenas é possível porque esses concomitantes que ocorrem aos corpos físicos, na medida em que são físicos, são separáveis pelo pensamento. Assim, a argumentação inicial do Estagirita 99 A expressão que Lucas Angioni traduziu por "os concomitantes que se lhes atribuem em si mesmos", a versão espanhola traduziu por "sus atributos esenciales" (ARISTÓTELES, Física. Trad. y notas de Guillermo R. de Echandía. [S.l.]: Libera los Livros, 1995. p. 45). Enquanto a versão da complete works da Cambridge traz a expressão "to know any their essential attributes" (ARISTÓTELES, Física, 193b 26193b 31In:BARNES, Jonathan.The complete works of Aristotle: the revised oxford translation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, v. 1, p. 21). O que está em questão na passagem são as determinações próprias dos objetos enquanto eles são tomados como objeto de investigação, ou seja, aquilo que pertence a eles própria e primeiramente. 100 ARISTÓTELES, Física, II, 1, 193b 22. 47 no livro da Física tinha por base distinguir aquilo que advém ao sujeito da ciência em função dele próprio e aquilo que não ocupa primariamente esta posição, mas é nela instituído pelo intelecto. Ainda que aquilo que o matemático considera sejam sempre propriedades de uma realidade física, que não existem independentemente deste receptáculo material, essas propriedades são tomadas e estudadas "em função de si" pelo matemático através da atividade de separação do intelecto. Assim, os diferentes modos de consideração são apenas possíveis porque remetem a uma capacidade do intelecto humano, a qual seria responsável por possibilitar que as entidades possam ser consideradas de modos diferentes pelo indivíduo. Ele acredita que o intelecto é capaz de isolar dos corpos físicos as suas propriedades e estudá-las por si, e isto justamente sem o corpo ao qual elas pertencem primeiramente. Devemos notar que o apelo que Aristóteles faz à separação deve ser encarado de forma mais profunda, e não unicamente como decorrente apenas de uma capacidade do intelecto de representar para si um objeto de maneira abstrata, ainda que ele seja concreto. A separação, aparentemente, se enraíza de forma profunda e remete à natureza do objeto mesmo. Em outras palavras, podemos dizer que, para o Estagirita, os entes matemáticos são separáveis pelo pensamento, porquanto a matéria sensível e, consequentemente, o movimento, não fazem parte de sua essência, são apenas formas consideradas enquanto tais. Por seu turno, os entes naturais não são separáveis porque sua essência inclui tanto a forma como a matéria 101 . Esta interpretação recebe apoio da passagem seguinte, na qual Aristóteles defende que este modo de consideração próprio ao matemático não implica em erro; na verdade, os próprios platonistas fazem o mesmo. Assim, o procedimento de separação que distingue os objetos físicos dos matemáticos não é uma exclusividade sua; o erro deles consiste em agir separando as coisas naturais, as quais são menos separáveis do que as matemáticas. Ao fato de que os objetos são separáveis acrescenta-se o segundo ponto que distingue o filósofo natural e o matemático, a saber, os respectivos modos de definirem seus sujeitos e seus concomitantes 102 : 101 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Uma fonte aristotélica das reflexões medievais sobre a aplicação da matemática à física: física e matemática de acordo com uma passagem da Física de Aristóteles. In: SOUZA, José A. C. R. (Org.). Idade Média: tempo do mundo, tempo dos homens, tempo de Deus. Porto Alegre: Edições EST, 2006. p. 15 102 Enrico Berti julga também encontrarmos nos Analíticos Posteriores II 10 a crença de que Aristóteles admitia uma diferença entre os princípios próprios das matemáticas e os da física no que diz respeito ao modo de definirem os respectivos objetos. Ele acredita que, para Aristóteles, as matemáticas recorrem à causa formal na definição de seus objetos, ou seja, à essência, enquanto a física leva em conta os outros três tipos de causas e inclui todas elas em suas definições. Isto estaria teorizado em Analíticos Posteriores II 11. Outro ponto a ser destacado a respeito desse assunto leva em consideração não apenas o modo de definição de seus objetos, mas também a rigorosidade com que isto é feito e alcançado, porquanto Aristóteles fala na Metafísica 1025b 6-13 em "causas e princípios ou mais rigorosos ou mais simples" e, prosseguindo, afirma também que algumas 48 De fato, o par e o ímpar, o reto e o curvo, bem como o número, linha e figura, hão de ser definidos sem movimento, mas carne, osso e homem não mais poderiam ser definidos sem movimento – pelo contrário estes últimos se definem como o nariz adunco, mas não como o curvo 103 . Desta passagem podemos depreender que, ao definir alguma entidade, dever-se-á remeter a algumas determinações específicas a respeito da matéria e, consequentemente, do movimento. Essas determinações são próprias das entidades naturais e mostram de fato que elas são distintas e separáveis. Os objetos naturais, ao serem definidos, não podem deixar de lado a noção de matéria sensível, que lhes pertence propriamente na medida em que se encontram no gênero das entidades físicas; assim, as determinações decorrentes da matéria sensível que implicam na necessidade do movimento estão presentes em sua definição. Por outro lado, há entidades que podem ser definidas sem a noção de matéria sensível, não incorrendo assim na determinação de movimento que o conceito implica, por isso elas possuem um caráter de imobilidade e universalidade, e.g., os objetos matemáticos. Devemos perceber que a solução de Aristóteles não se funda apenas no âmbito da análise linguística, ou seja, a diferença entre o filósofo natural e o matemático não leva em conta simplesmente o uso diferente da linguagem no processo de definirem seus objetos, mas considera também as diferenças nas definições pois, em última instância os próprios objetos são distintos ontologicamente. A argumentação busca assim salvaguardar este aspecto, na medida em que, por meio da definição, esta distinção ontológica é levada em conta. O Estagirita julga ter esclarecido que as propriedades matemáticas não existem em si e por si, mas são sempre propriedades de entes naturais. Compreende-se assim que suas definições deixam de lado justamente o aspecto material que lhes é próprio, mantendo desta forma o aspecto da imutabilidade. Sendo assim, são levados em conta esses diferentes modos de definirem seus objetos de investigação, tornando possível estabelecer distinções entre o filósofo natural e o matemático. Depreende-se que "os entes matemáticos são definidos como formas, ao passo que os entes naturais o são como formas presentes numa matéria 104 ". Aristóteles nega a concessão de autonomia ontológica às entidades matemáticas, prevalecendo ciências "demonstram de modo mais necessário ou maleável" (BERTI, 1998, p.47). Este aspecto da rigorosidade também está expresso na versão portuguesa, a qual traz a expressão "aproximativamente exatos ou indeterminados" (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica. 2006, 1025b 10, p. 169) e na versão inglesa que traz a expressão "they then demonstrate, more or less cogently," (ARISTÓTELES, Metafísica, 1991, 1025b31025b 18, p. 84). Podemos resumir a discussão dizendo que, enquanto a física define a essência de seus objetos por meio da sensação, a matemática, por sua vez, os define como hipóteses. 103 ARISTÓTELES, Física, 2009, 193b 35. 104 NASCIMENTO, 2006, p.14. 49 assim o princípio da economia aristotélica; por outro lado, buscam-se critérios objetivos para fundamentar a distinção de procedimento entre ambos os estudiosos, o filósofo natural e o matemático. A passagem da Física 194a 7 busca corroborar a argumentação anterior 105 . Aristóteles recorre então às "mais naturais entre as disciplinas matemáticas, como a ótica, a harmônica e a astronomia". O que percebemos de início é a aparente crença em uma certa diversidade no âmbito das matemáticas. Poderíamos, assim, falar em matemáticas mais naturais e matemáticas menos naturais 106 . Percebe-se que esses grupos de disciplinas não são teorizados exclusivamente a partir deles próprios, ou seja, a menção a essas disciplinas na passagem não indica que isto tenha sido feito pelo fato dele ter percebido nelas um modelo 105 O fato de o texto buscar reforçar a argumentação anterior é destacada pela expressão mediante a qual começa a passagem: "Mostram isso também [o destaque é nosso] as mais naturais entre as disciplinas matemáticas [...]" (ANGIONI, 2009, p. 46). No entanto, uma pequena dúvida aparece no texto, pois, tomando por base a versão de Lucas Angioni, aparentemente existe a questão de saber se o exemplo reivindicado pelo Estagirita se relaciona com a distinção entre o filósofo natural e o matemático, e desta forma levaria em conta as passagens anteriores, e particularmente 193b 22-193b 35; ou se, de modo distinto, o texto tem em mente aquilo que foi discutido apenas em 193b 35, e se relacionaria desta maneira com os diferentes modos do físico e do matemático definirem seus sujeitos. Esta possibilidade de interpretação encontramos também na versão espanhola, a qual menciona: "Isto também é claro nas partes das matemáticas mais próximas a física, como a ótica, a harmônica e a astronomia" – Esto es también claro [o destaque em negrito é de nossa autoria]en las partes de las matemáticas más próximas a la física, como la óptica, la armónica y la astronomia" (ARISTÓTELES, Física, [s.d.] 194a 5, p. 45). De igual maneira, a versão inglesa da complete works conduz a semelhante possibilidade, porquanto ela que "Similar evidência é sustentada pelos ramos mais naturais das matemáticas, tais como a ótica, a harmônica e a astronomia" Similar evidence is supplied [o destaque em negrito é de nossa autoria] by the more natural of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy" (ARISTÓTELES, Física, 2001, 194a7-194a11). O professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro acredita que a passagem em questão se relaciona com o texto inteiro e seria uma ênfase da distinção entre o físico e o matemático, pois, segundo ele, este problema encarado por Aristóteles recebe uma tríplice resposta, a qual se funda em primeiro lugar na diferença no modo de proceder, em segundo lugar, na diferença existente no modo de definir e, por fim, na sua situação ou estado de "matemáticas mais naturais" (NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 14). Concordamos com esta última interpretação, pois devemos ter em mente que, embora a passagem em 193b 35 discuta a respeito dos diferentes modos de se definirem os seus sujeitos, o texto se funda antes de tudo em exemplos tirados do âmbito da aritmética e da geometria; ele menciona o par e o ímpar, o número, a linha e a figura, e isto em oposição aos objetos naturais carne, osso e homem, deixando transparecer assim um antagonismo entre os objetos naturais e os matemáticos. Alguém poderia então perguntar qual a relevância em determinar o âmbito do alcance da passagem em questão. Ora, se a passagem que estamos discutindo se relaciona apenas com o texto próximo, teríamos que conceber a distinção Aristotélica entre a física e a matemática fundamentada em apenas dois pontos, ou seja, a diferença no modo de proceder e na definição de seus objetos, sendo esta definição exemplificada pelas "mais naturais entre as disciplinas matemáticas", por outro lado, se ela se aplica à passagem como um todo, teríamos no caso três critérios para estabelecer a referida distinção. Desta forma, somando-se aos dois critérios anteriores, teríamos este grupo de ciências que mostram que tanto a física quanto a matemática são distintas. 106 Tomo as expressões "matemáticas mais naturais" e "matemáticas menos naturais" do trabalho do professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro. No entanto, acreditamos que a nomeação utilizada aqui independe, pois, tomando por base a referida passagem do texto aristotélico, acreditamos que se pode legitimamente falar em matemáticas mais altas e mais baixas, hierarquização matemática, etc., embora o autor das expressões citadas faça ressalvas ao uso delas, talvez devido ao fato de que elas implicariam um desenvolvimento ou teorização que não encontramos na obra do Estagirita. De fato, isso será fruto de desenvolvimentos posteriores. Ainda assim, julgamos que o ponto principal da passagem está em que a linguagem usada deixa transparecer que existem disciplinas ou ramos da matemática que mantêm uma íntima relação com o mundo sensível, enquanto outros não possuem esse mesmo vínculo (cf. NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 15). 50 epistêmico; elas são mencionadas apenas em oposição à geometria, mais especificamente, em relação aos diferentes modos de proceder entre a geometria e a ótica. Daí afirmar Aristóteles que "de certo modo elas se comportam de maneira inversa à geometria, pois a geometria estuda a linha natural, mas não enquanto natural, ao passo que a ótica estuda a linha matemática, não enquanto linha matemática, mas enquanto linha natural" 107 . Nota-se, na passagem, que Aristóteles não se preocupa em teorizar a respeito dessas disciplinas: a menção a elas parece ter sido feita apenas por julgar que ajudariam a esclarecer a diferença entre o físico e o matemático. Sem dúvida, Aristóteles tinha em mente a aritmética e a geometria como "matemáticas mais puras". A aritmética compreende, por seu objeto, a quantidade sem extensão, enquanto a geometria trata da quantidade contínua ou extensa. De fato, os objetos da matemática em geral, e particularmente no caso da geometria os objetos considerados enquanto tais, são detentores de matéria, no entanto esta não deve ser pensada como a matéria natural, sujeita às determinações físicas do movimento, mas sim como matéria inteligível, sendo desta forma uma primeira determinação que é condição de possibilidade da intelecção desses mesmos objetos, e é essa matéria que torna possível a pluralidade dos inteligíveis, enquanto a matéria natural torna possível a pluralidade dos sensíveis. Diante do que temos dissertado até o presente momento, podemos apresentar o seguinte esboço: embora Aristóteles não tenha dedicado um livro exclusivamente ao tratamento da matemática, tal como fez com a física e outras ciências, é possível encontrar, em diversos de seus textos, análises concernentes aos objetos matemáticos. Porém, deve-se ressaltar que isto não parece ser feito em função do tema em si mesmo, mas em consonância com diversas outras questões existentes. Em outras palavras, a emergência da investigação em torno de temas matemáticos no pensamento do Estagirita é compreendida como passo necessário para explicar diversos outros pontos, em especial a classificação das ciências especulativas 108 . 107 Um ponto de extrema importância que tem sido destacado pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro consiste no uso do vocabulário usado por Aristóteles nessa passagem. Não encontramos aqui nem o uso do substantivo aphaíresis (abstração) e nem do verbo aphairéo (abstrair). Isso se torna mais estranho na medida em que, levando-se em conta o livro III do De Anima, a expressão "separar pelo pensamento" poderia ser tomada como uma espécie de definição de abstração (cf. NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 15). 108 Aparentemente esta é também a opinião do Lucas Angioni, pois ele afirma que "no capítulo 2, Aristóteles dedica-se, de início, à distinção entre as ciências matemáticas e as ciências da natureza. O seu interesse é delimitar o método apropriado às explicações na ciência da natureza e, em suma, caracterizar o hilemorfismo. Por isso, Aristóteles retoma a distinção das duas naturezas e formula como problema central saber se a ciência da natureza deve considerar os dois princípios de movimento reconhecidos sob o título de "natureza" (a forma e a matéria)" (ANGIONI, 2009, p. 14). Sendo assim, o objetivo principal do texto que discutimos seria mostrar que as ciências, ainda que tenham por investigação objetos semelhantes, não se confundem e nem tão pouco se 51 Aristóteles discute em algumas passagens de suas obras, principalmente na Metafísica e na Física, a distinção entre a física e a matemática. O foco da discussão nas duas obras que discutimos possui aspectos um pouco diferentes, pois, enquanto na Metafísica o debate tem por centro a delimitação de três ciências especulativas, na Física a discussão não inclui a metafísica, e se preocupa também em destacar o aspecto metodológico. Esta distinção leva em conta tanto a diferença entre os objetos quanto os procedimentos utilizados pelo filósofo natural e o matemático nas suas respectivas investigações. Dessa forma, o Estagirita acredita que o modo de definir, de considerar, de demonstrar e a posição ocupada pelas "mais naturais dentre as ciências matemáticas", são aspectos que nos mostram que a física e a matemática são de fato ciências distintas com seus respectivos objetos e modos de investigação. Assim, ele pretende salvaguardar a autonomia das ciências, opondo-se assim a uma tendência a reduzir o conhecimento físico ao matemático. Devemos em seguida analisar se Tomás de Aquino, em seu Comentário à Física, segue esta mesma compreensão de Aristóteles, ou se porventura ele propõe uma compreensão distinta, enveredando sua argumentação por caminhos diferentes. 2.1 O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AO LIVRO II DA FÍSICA DE ARISTÓTELES A Antiguidade Tardia herdou essa tríplice divisão das ciências especulativas e a transmitiu ao mundo medieval por meio da obra de Boécio, especialmente através de seu opúsculo teológico sobre a Trindade 109 . Nesta obra reaparece a questão da classificação das ciências, porém sob outro ponto de vista, pois Boécio se encontra circunscrito num contexto teológico e viu a necessidade de esclarecer sobre a posição desse conteúdo na classificação do conhecimento. Para Boécio, há uma correspondência entre o número de entidades e o número de ciências. E, existindo três grupos de entes, ou seja, os naturais, os matemáticos e os inteligíveis, é necessário que lhes correspondam três ciências teóricas. É esclarecedor, neste ponto, o comentário de Celina Lertora Mendonza: Os entes naturais são os entes físicos e materiais de nossa experiência, e a eles corresponde o primeiro escalão da ciência, que é a ciência física, cujo objeto são os entes que existem na matéria. Os entes inteligíveis são os entes que, embora existam na matéria, seu conceito incluem. Busca-se desta forma esclarecer quais são os aspectos que permeiam a investigação científica e que mantêm a distinção entre os objetos de estudo de cada uma delas. 109 Esses opúsculos, cuja autenticidade foi questionada, tiveram solução com a descoberta por Holder, em 1877, de um fragmento de Cassiodoro que atribuía um desses opúsculos a Boécio. 52 não depende dela. Finalmente, os inteligíveis ou espirituais são os seres positivamente imateriais, como Deus e os anjos 110 . Enfim, o modelo de Boécio é de que a física "considera as formas dos corpos com a matéria", "a matemática considera as formas dos corpos sem a matéria" e a metafísica ou teologia trata do que é separado da matéria, não a imagem, mas sim a forma 111 . Boécio tem também a preocupação de ressaltar a especificidade metodológica de cada uma das ciências. Justamente por isso, após mencionar as disciplinas e seus respectivos objetos, logo em seguida define quais os três respectivos modos de procedimento delas em relação aos seus objetos. Na física deve-se proceder naturalmente (por via da experiência), disciplinativamente na matemática 112 , e, por fim, intelectualmente na teologia. Algo que nos chama a atenção na análise de Boécio sobre a divisão das ciências presente no De Trinitate é o perceptível tom aristotélico que ela possui. E, ainda que sua exposição guarde notável semelhança e, podemos de fato dizer, dependência daquela oferecida por Aristóteles ainda assim, ela é mais simples em seu aspecto geral. Isso é mais notável quando observamos que, da evidência material existente, as obras que abordam o assunto de forma mais direta, a Física e Metafísica, não foram objeto de seus comentários. Independentemente da maneira pela qual Boécio tomou conhecimento da divisão aristotélica, o que devemos perceber é o mérito e a verdadeira distinção em ambas as divisões. Sua contribuição consiste no fato de, ao tentar estabelecer um lugar para o pensamento teológico na antiga estrutura da classificação aristotélica, ele transmitiu à posteridade o problema da relação entre a Teologia filosófica e a Teologia da Sagrada Escritura. Foi justamente esse modelo proposto por Boécio que Tomás de Aquino buscou esclarecer em seu comentário ao De Trinitate, o qual levaremos em consideração juntamente com seu Comentário à Física. Embora não esteja de todo descartada a possibilidade de um comentário de Boécio à Física, da evidência material disponível até o presente momento não se tem notícia de uma tradução anterior ao século XII. Haskins, em seu trabalho pioneiro, já havia chamado a atenção para a problemática de estudos referentes à recepção dessa obra durante o medievo, porquanto, além de ser necessário determinar o período no qual a versão árabe foi convertida 110 LERTORA MENDOZA, 2000, p. 59. 111 A versão do texto aqui utilizada é aquela traduzida pelo professor Luiz Jean Lauand e disponível no site: www.ricardocosta.com 112 Celina Mendonza entende esta expressão como significando um processo axiomático (cf. LÉRTORA MENDONZA, 2000, p. 59). 53 ao latim, deve-se, além do mais, investigar a possibilidade de uma tradução feita bastante cedo, a partir do grego 113 . É em geral admitido que Tomás de Aquino produziu um dos melhores comentários à Física de Aristóteles, em seu gênero. De maneira geral, havia três modelos de comentários de Aristóteles utilizados pelos comentadores latinos medievais: 1) paráfrases; 2) questões; 3) comentários literais. No primeiro caso temos análises de caráter mais pessoal do conteúdo da obra. Desta forma, pouca atenção é concedida aos detalhes verbais do texto, caso bem exemplificado na obra de Avicena. No segundo caso temos uma série de problemas sugeridos pelo próprio texto. Percebe-se este gênero nos comentários de Roger Bacon. E, por fim, temos exposições do texto original, comentado frase por frase. O comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino se enquadra neste terceiro tipo. Tomás de Aquino segue a divisão em livros, e, usando o princípio analítico, divide o texto de forma bimembre 114 . Enquanto o comentário de Averróis é de caráter histórico-crítico, o de Tomás de Aquino é um comentário a serviço de um projeto filosófico próprio. Algo que nos chama a atenção é o fato de Tomás de Aquino não ter escrito um proêmio metodológico a esta obra, o que surpreende ainda mais, na medida em que ele fez isto para outros comentários. Iniciando diretamente o texto, o aspecto metodológico é comentado paralelamente à exposição do livro I 115 . Daí ser compreensível que, logo no início de sua exposição, seja anunciado que busca descobrir qual é a matéria e o sujeito da ciência da natureza. Segundo os filósofos medievais de maneira geral, e particularmente na interpretação de Tomás de Aquino, encontramos na Física uma análise sistemática do fenômeno mais comum observado na natureza: o movimento dos corpos físicos. E por movimento era compreendida a mudança física e natural de todos os tipos: vir a ser, perecer, aumento, diminuição, alteração e movimento local 116 . Sendo assim, o objeto de estudo da ciência natural consistiria, portanto, no ens mobile, o "corpo físico capaz de movimento" 113 HASKINS, 1924, p. 224. 114 LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. Averroes y Tomás de Aquino sobre el concepto de ciencia natural. Revista Veritas. Porto Alegre, v. 52, n. 3, set. 2007 p. 156. Uma ótima análise do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino do ponto de vista textual pode ser encontrada em: LÉRTORA MENDONZA, Celina A. El comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino a la Física: la división del texto aristotélico. Buenos Aires/Argentina: Edigraf, 2003. v. 62, p.393-440. 115 Celina Lértora Mendoza chama atenção para o fato de Santo Tomás de Aquino, no início de seu comentário, ter omitido qualquer referência inicial à intentio authoris. Isso não é não é casual, mas trata-se de uma opção, por não usar este critério (presente no comentário de Averróis ao livro da Física) de forma exclusiva, e talvez mesmo nem sequer prevalente. Essa separação, segundo ela, tem um efeito paradoxal, porquanto, embora conserve autoridade a Aristóteles, concede ao conteúdo do texto um maior valor objetivo, pois, a partir daí, a ciência natural é o que é, não porque teria sido essa a intenção do Estagirita, mas porque ela simplesmente é assim (cf. LÉRTORA MENDONZA, 2000, p. 155). 116 WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 31. 54 (movimento entendido nesse amplo sentido). Uma vez que os filósofos medievais viam os oito livros da Física expressando uma teoria geral e unificada de todas as ciências naturais, era então natural a delimitação de temas em cada um dos respectivos livros. Assim, para Tomás de Aquino, enquanto o livro I era visto como discutindo a possibilidade de alguma mudança tomar lugar no mundo, o livro II buscaria limitar a natureza como tema da ciência natural 117 . Visto que natureza é princípio de movimento ou descanso nas coisas às quais ela pertence por si, diz-se que natureza pode ser compreendida em dois sentidos: no primeiro caso, é entendida enquanto princípio formal ou simplesmente forma, daí dizer-se sentido ativo; no segundo caso, é entendida como princípio material ou apenas matéria, fala-se; portanto, em sentido passivo. Tomás de Aquino dedica a Lectio III à explicação do livro II da Física 118 . Ao longo de seu comentário, a principal preocupação é esclarecer a posição de Aristóteles a 117 CHLMP, 1982, p. 524. 118 Uma vez que Santo Tomás de Aquino não lia diretamente do grego, o seu comentário foi feito tendo por base uma versão latina. O problema consiste na identificação desta versão. De fato, esse texto ainda não tem sido identificado, e a versão da Física, que em geral está impressa juntamente com o comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino, é uma tradução tardia, da época do renascimento. Algo a ser notado é que, quando os primeiros editores renascentistas publicaram os comentários de Santo Tomás de Aquino sobre Aristóteles, estava ausente um texto padrão latino medieval de Aristóteles. O costume então era copiar as primeiras palavras de cada seção de Aristóteles como uma identificação do texto inteiro em discussão. Como consequência disto, esses editores obtiveram uma versão latina de Aristóteles; as impressões modernas do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino sobre a Física simplesmente reproduzem o texto renascentista de Aristóteles. Isto implica que nossos textos latinos de Aristóteles, tais como os temos agora impressos e acompanhados dos comentários de Santo Tomás de Aquino, não são nem a versão de Moerbeke nem a versão específica lida por Santo Tomás de Aquino. Os editores da versão inglesa do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino à Física identificam 5 versões e revisões delas anteriores à exposição de Santo Tomás de Aquino. Seriam as seguintes: 1) uma tradução do árabe para o latim, atribuída a Gerardo de Cremona, feita em Toledo antes de 1150; 2) uma tradução do grego para o latim, porém incompleta, possuindo apenas os dois primeiros livros, datando de aproximadamente o mesmo período da obra mencionada anteriormente; 3) uma versão completa do árabe para o latim, mencionada por volta de 1170 por alguns doutores médicos; 4) uma versão do árabe para o latim acompanhada do comentário de Averróis, que é atribuída a Miguel Escotto, datado do início do século XIII, provavelmente antes de 1235; 5) por fim, temos uma versão do grego para o latim produzida por William de Moerbeke. Essa obra foi produzida durante o tempo de vida de Santo Tomás de Aquino (o prefácio ao aristotelis latinus conclui que a revisão de Moerbeke não é inteiramente independente da versão greco-latina mais recente, embora ela contenha correções significativas). Ainda segundo os editores da referida versão inglesa, Santo Tomás de Aquino começou a usar a versão moerbekiana a partir da lectio2 do livro II. Anteriormente ele aparentemente se utilizou de uma versão pré-moerbekana semelhante. Provavelmente o texto usado era o resultado dos esforços dos copistas medievais para produzir um texto agradável de ler das várias versões disponíveis para eles. Daí por que, possivelmente, o texto do qual Santo Tomás de Aquino se utilizou contivesse uma mistura de várias traduções, sendo, portanto, um texto contaminado, como se diria hoje, segundo a crítica textual. O que importa disso tudo é o fato de que o texto que Santo Tomás de Aquino tinha em mão não era muito diferente de nossas atuais edições gregas. De fato, os eruditos medievais não tomavam as obras de Aristóteles tal como o faz hoje a investigação crítica textual hodierna, que leva em conta questões em torno da autenticidade das obras, pseudo-epígrafos, inserções póstumas ao texto, etc. Eles tomaram os 8 livros da Física como receberam tanto dos gregos quanto dos árabes: dos primeiros, a estrutura em capítulos, e dos segundos, a divisão do texto. A preocupação deles, no entanto, se voltou primariamente para o âmbito da disposição e conteúdo dos seus livros (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 523-524). Embora não haja uma data precisa do comentário de Santo Tomás de Aquino à Física, ele foi provavelmente escrito durante a década de 1260. Gauthier propõe preferencialmente os anos de 1268-1269, ou seja, o início 55 respeito do modo pelo qual a física e a matemática diferem na consideração do mesmo objeto. O texto está dividido em unidades que possuem como núcleo a questão principal de mostrar o que a ciência natural investiga. O texto compreende duas partes: em primeiro lugar, ele mostra como a ciência natural difere da matemática; em segundo lugar, ressalta aquilo para o qual a investigação da ciência natural se estende. A respeito do primeiro ponto, Tomás de Aquino identifica três etapas realizadas pelo Estagirita, a saber: primeiramente há o estabelecimento da questão; em seguida, temos as razões que mostram tratar-se de um problema; e, por fim, temos a resposta à questão formulada. Quanto ao primeiro ponto (a distinção entre a física e a matemática), Tomás de Aquino identifica ainda três etapas na argumentação de Aristóteles: primeiro ele formula a questão; em seguida, justifica o motivo pelo qual se trata de um problema; e, por fim, responde ao problema formulado. Quanto ao primeiro ponto, o problema consiste em saber qual a diferença entre a física e a matemática na consideração das mesmas coisas. A formulação do problema é a seguinte: quando ciências distintas consideram o mesmo sujeito, elas são a mesma ciência, ou uma é parte da outra. Cabe, assim, saber apenas qual é a relação que elas mantêm entre si. Visto que tanto o matemático quanto o filósofo natural consideram superfícies, volumes, linhas, etc., segue-se que elas ou são a mesma ciência ou uma é parte da outra. Na parte dedicada à solução do problema, Tomás de Aquino identifica novamente três etapas realizadas por Aristóteles: em primeiro lugar temos a solução em si; em seguida ele retira uma conclusão do exposto anteriormente; por fim, ele exclui um erro dos platônicos concernente ao assunto. É associada à questão da distinção entre esses dois campos de investigação que Tomás de Aquino insere a pergunta sobre a posição ocupada pela astronomia entre eles. Uma vez que a astronomia é considerada uma disciplina de caráter matemático, se porventura ela também for parte da filosofia natural segue-se que a matemática e a filosofia natural concordam ao menos neste segmento, ou seja, elas não estariam totalmente desvinculadas entre si. Poderíamos dizer então que haveria mediação entre elas ou um ponto de contato. Algo que nos chama a atenção no comentário de Tomás de Aquino é que em sua leitura da Física ele atribui ao Estagirita a crença de que a astronomia é "mais natural do que matemática", ao invés de uma das "matemáticas mais naturais". Comentaremos este problema do segundo período de ensino parisiense. A exposição dos dados apresentados anteriormente apoia-se fortemente naqueles fornecidos por Bourke na introdução da obra: AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Translated by Richard J. Blackwell; Richard J. Spath and W. Edmund Thirkel. New Haven: Yale University, 1963. Para uma breve discussão em torno de alguns problemas referentes ao texto latino da Física utilizado por Santo Tomás de Aquino, ver p.7-20, desta mesma obra. Utilizar-nos-emos dessa versão ao longo do trabalho; as traduções que dela forem feitas são de nossa responsabilidade e autoria. Servirnos-emos da numeração presente nessa versão inglesa, a qual remete a de Bekker, para facilitar o manuseio ou a consulta. 56 no final do presente capítulo. Por enquanto, é suficiente perceber que isto é reivindicado do seguinte modo: a quem pertence investigar as substâncias também compete considerar os seus acidentes por si, e.g., o filósofo natural, o qual investiga a substância do sol e da lua e também considera seus acidentes per se. Ele defende então que a astronomia e a ciência natural concordam em dois pontos: ambos consideram os mesmos acidentes e demonstram as mesmas conclusões, no entanto por meios diferentes. Assim, aparentemente a astronomia é uma parte da física e, como tal, a física não difere totalmente da matemática 119 . Levando em conta toda a exposição de Tomás de Aquino presente na Lectio 3, podemos perceber que ele adere à resposta de Aristóteles no que diz respeito à distinção entre o físico e o matemático; notamos também que ele dedica páginas significativas à explicação de diversos pontos que não foram abordados tão extensamente pelo Estagirita. Essa quantidade maior de material disponível deve-se, de fato, a dois motivos: 1) à própria natureza do comentário, que tem a função de explicar o texto para os leitores; 2) ao encaminhamento da questão em pontos que não foram primariamente apresentados por Aristóteles. Não nos ocuparemos do primeiro ponto. Sendo assim nossa atenção está voltada justamente para o encaminhamento da argumentação de Tomás de Aquino. Tomás de Aquino concorda com o Estagirita em que o matemático se distingue do filósofo natural por meio da consideração de seus objetos, abstraindo seu objeto da matéria sensível, mas, logo em seguida, segue-se uma justificação da legitimidade desse procedimento. Existem dois pontos dentro do aristotelismo concernentes aos objetos matemáticos que, podemos dizer, constituem o núcleo de seu entendimento sobre eles: 1) o seu estatuto epistêmico, ou seja, eles são obtidos por meio da capacidade de abstração do intelecto; 2) a dependência ontológica, isto é, eles não são concebidos como existindo independentemente dos entes materiais. Não resta dúvida de que Tomás de Aquino adere aos dois pontos. Podemos encontrar várias passagens nas quais este entendimento é defendido: em seu comentário à Física, ele menciona que, "enquanto a matemática trata daquelas coisas que dependem da matéria sensível para a sua existência, mas não para as suas definições, a ciência natural, por sua vez, a qual é chamada de física, trata daquelas coisas que dependem da matéria não só apenas para a sua existência, mas também para as suas definições120". 119 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 158 p 78. 120 "[...] Whereas mathematics deals with those things which depend upon sensible matter for their existence but not for their definitions. And natural science, which is called physics, deals with those things which depend upon matter not only for their existence, but also for their definition" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 1 Lec 1 Sct 3 p 3). Segundo Santo Tomás de Aquino, o caráter abstrato de consideração não pertence exclusivamente ao matemático, pois ele assemelha este modo com aquela abordagem realizada pelo lógico. Daí afirmar ele que "[...] muitas coisas não são equívocas segundo a 57 Esta crença é algo firmemente estabelecido no pensamento de Tomás de Aquino. De fato, são várias as passagens nas quais o caráter abstrato da matemática é mencionado em oposição ao modo de procedimento da física, isso é expresso com clareza no comentário ao De Caelo, onde se diz que "as coisas matemáticas são obtidas por abstração das coisas naturais, mas as coisas naturais são por oposição às coisas matemáticas – pois elas acrescentam aos objetos matemáticos uma natureza sensível e movimento, dos quais a matemática abstrai" 121 . Encontramos outras passagens onde ele contrapõe ou distingue ambas as ciências a partir de seu objeto, daí sua afirmação de que "a matemática lida com um abstrato e a física com um objeto mais concreto" 122 . Por fim, existem ainda textos que levam em conta a natureza dos entes matemáticos de modo isolado, pois, segundo Tomás de Aquino, "a ciência da matemática trata seu objeto como se fosse algo abstraído mentalmente, que não é abstrato na realidade 123 ". Retornando à discussão a partir do texto da Física, percebemos em Aristóteles a preocupação em salvaguardar o procedimento metodológico do matemático, no entanto, ele se limita a dizer "que não há erros para os que abstraem", e afirma ainda que de igual modo é o que "também fazem os platônicos, sem no entanto se darem conta de que abstraem aquilo que é menos separável". É bem verdade que a idéia da legitimidade desse procedimento de abstração realizado pelo matemático pode ser também pensada, ou melhor, entendida a partir de uma passagem da Suma Contra os Gentios, na qual Tomás de Aquino ressalta dois aspectos constituintes do processo cognitivo, neste caso, o objeto e o sujeito. Ora, se "o objeto da intelecção não recebe coisa alguma por ser apreendido, mas o sujeito inteligente que é consideração abstrata da lógica ou matemática" (cf. AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 7 Lec 7 Sct 937 p. 453). Encontramos também na Suma contra os gentios uma passagem em que Tomás enumera a lógica, a aritmética e a geometria como ciências que se igualam por tomarem as coisas a partir de seus princípios formais (cf. AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma contra os gentios. Trad. de Odilão Moura. Porto Alegre: EST/Edipucrs, 1996. vol. II. p. 201). 121 "[...] mathematical things are obtained by abstraction from natural things, but natural things are by apposition to mathematical things-for they add to mathematical objects a sensible nature and motion, from which mathematics abstracts" (AQUINAS, Saint Thomas. Exposition of Aristotle's treatise On the heavens. Translated by LARCHER, R. F.; CONWAY, Pierre H. College of St. Mary of the Springs Columbus 19, Ohio 1963-1964. Bk 3 Lec 3 Sct 560 p 3-7 /. p. 235). 122 "for mathematics deals with an abstract and physics with a more concrete object" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Exposition of Aristotle's treatise on the heavens. Lecture 3 (Aristotle's Text) Ari. De caelo 3 Ch 1 299a2299b14 / [412] p. 233). 123 cf. AQUINAS, Saint Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Folio VIP Eletronic Publishing,1993. First part. FP Q 44 A 1Rp 3 / Reply OBJ 3. É justamente por esse modo de considerar o seu objeto que "na matemática não há potência, nem movimento" (AQUINO, 1996, vol. II, p. 143). 58 aperfeiçoado" 124 , então o matemático não incorre em erro ao inteligir os seus objetos como sendo entes independente dos entes naturais aos quais eles pertencem propriamente. Embora esse entendimento não seja incompatível com a exposição da Física, Tomás de Aquino em seu comentário, envereda a argumentação por outros rumos, segundo ele afirma: Como prova desta razão nós precisamos perceber que muitas coisas estão reunidas em uma coisa, mas o entendimento de uma delas não é derivado do entendimento da outra. Dessa maneira branco e musical estão reunidos no mesmo objeto, todavia o entendimento de um deles não é derivado do entendimento do outro. E assim, um pode ser compreendido separadamente sem o outro. E este é compreendido como abstraído de outro. Está claro, contudo, que o posterior não é derivado do entendimento do anterior, mas inversamente. Portanto, o anterior pode ser compreendido sem o posterior, mas não inversamente. Assim está claro que animal é anterior a homem, e homem é anterior a este homem (homem é obtido por adição a animal, e este homem por adição a homem). E por causa disto nosso entendimento do homem não é derivado de nosso entendimento de animal, nem tão pouco nosso conhecimento de Sócrates, de nosso entendimento de homem. Portanto, animal pode ser compreendido sem homem, e homem sem Sócrates e outros indivíduos. E isto é abstrair o universal do particular 125 . Tomás de Aquino, semelhantemente a Aristóteles, ressalta que a abstração é um processo legítimo, não provindo daí erro algum. E destaca que isto não é uma exclusividade dele, porquanto os platônicos também se utilizam dela, no entanto ele se esforça ou sente uma 124 AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma contra os gentios Trad. de Odilão Moura. Porto Alegre: EST/SULINA/UCS, 1990. vol. I. p. 92. 125 "As evidence for this reason we must note that many things are joined in the thing, but the understanding of one of them is not derived from the understanding of another. Thus white and musical are joined in the same subject, nevertheless the understanding of one of these is not derived from an understanding of the other. And so one can be separately understood without the other. And this one is understood as abstracted from the other. It is clear, however, that the posterior is not derived from the understanding of the prior, but conversely. Hence the prior can be understood without the posterior, but not conversely. Thus it is clear that animal is prior to man, and man is prior to this man (for man is had by addition to animal, and this man by addition to man). And because of this our understanding of man is not derived from our understanding of animal, nor our understanding of Socrates from our understanding of man. Hence animal can be understood without man, and man without Socrates and other individuals. And this is to abstract the universal from the particular" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 161 p 78). Tomás também destaca a relação entre os acidentes reunidos em um objeto numa passagem da Suma contra os Gentios, porém a ênfase no texto recai sobre o âmbito da independência ontológica entre os qualificativos de um determinado objeto. Ele nos diz que "se duas coisas estão unidas por acidente em uma terceira, e uma pode ser encontrada sem a outra, é também provável que esta outra possa ser encontrada sem a primeira. Por exemplo: se os qualificativos branco e músico encontrarem-se em Sócrates, e se em Platão encontra-se o de músico sem o de branco, é possível que em uma terceira pessoa possa ser encontrado o de branco sem o de músico" (cf. AQUINO, 1990, vol. I, p. 40). Assim, enquanto no comentário a Física, Tomás destaca a relação entre os acidentes, e.g., o branco e o musical presentes em um ente, a partir de uma perspectiva epistêmica, buscando legitimar o processo de abstração. Por sua vez, na Suma contra gentios essa relação é pensada sob o âmbito da independência que essas qualificações possuem nos diversos entes, pois, ainda que em alguns seres elas se encontrem reunidos, isso não implica que em algum outro ente nenhum desses qualificativos possa ocorrer isolado, pois eles estão reunidos de forma acidental nos entes. 59 necessidade maior de mostrar como o procedimento matemático deve ser compreendido. Ao longo dessa passagem ele argumenta em prol da capacidade do intelecto de separar e compreender as diversas coisas que se encontram reunidas nas entidades. Sua argumentação segue, em primeiro lugar, a tentativa de mostrar que as coisas que reúnem em si diversas propriedades podem ser compreendidas sem que seja necessário a compreensão de todos os seus componentes. Ele destaca então que existe uma ordem de dependência na estrutura do conhecimento entre o anterior e o posterior. Devemos notar que esta relação à qual ele remete não se encontra no texto aristotélico da Física, embora não seja incompatível com a versão aristotélica do problema; ela consiste em um desenvolvimento pessoal. Ele então afirma que o posterior não é derivado do entendimento do anterior, mas inversamente, ou seja, o entendimento do anterior pode se dar sem o do posterior. Segundo a sua exposição, ainda que o branco e o musical estejam reunidos no mesmo objeto, a intelecção de um deles independe da compreensão do outro, e.g., levemos em conta um piano branco: não necessitamos entender a propriedade musical para entender a cor branca. De fato, a compreensão de um deles independe do outro. Tomás de Aquino chama esta capacidade de isolar determinada propriedade de um objeto e estudá-la enquanto tal de abstração. Pode-se, portanto, abstrair um do outro no entendimento, apesar de que eles estejam reunidos na mesma coisa concreta. Daí que a intelecção desta propriedade ou deste objeto abstraído pelo entendimento pode ocorrer independentemente dos concomitantes que o seguem, pois eles são capazes de ser abstraídos. Interessante é o fato de que Tomás de Aquino relaciona esta relação entre o anterior e o posterior na intelecção de algum objeto com a ordem dos acidentes que advêm às substâncias. Alguns podem ser compreendidos independentemente dos outros, tal como ele afirma: De igual maneira, dentre todos os acidentes os quais vêm à substância, a quantidade vem em primeiro lugar, e em seguida as qualidades sensíveis, e as ações e paixões, e os movimentos decorrentes de qualidades sensíveis. Portanto, a quantidade não abarca em sua inteligibilidade as qualidades sensíveis ou as paixões ou movimentos. No entanto, inclui substância em sua inteligibilidade. Portanto, quantidade pode ser compreendida sem matéria, a qual é sujeita a movimento, e sem qualidades sensíveis, porém não sem substância. E, assim, quantidades e essas coisas que pertencem a elas são compreendidas como abstraídas do movimento e matéria sensível, porém não da matéria inteligível, como é dito na metafísica 126 . 126 "In like manner, among all the accidents which come to substance, quantity comes first, and then the sensible qualities, and actions and passions, and the motions consequent upon sensible qualities. Therefore quantity does not embrace in its intelligibility the sensible qualities or the passions or the motions. Yet it does include 60 Ele defende assim que a quantidade possui uma ordem de anterioridade sobre os demais acidentes, sendo seguida, respectivamente, pelas qualidades sensíveis, as ações e as paixões e, por fim, pelos movimentos das qualidades sensíveis. Assim, "o primeiro acidente, efetivamente, que segue a matéria é a quantidade" 127 . Para Tomás de Aquino, a quantidade é uma propriedade comum às entidades naturais e, uma vez que a quantidade é uma determinação que antecede as demais, ela pode ser compreendida sem matéria, movimento, qualidades sensíveis etc., assim, não é necessário que a intelecção de um determinado objeto se reduza à sua efetividade concreta no mundo. Como ele mesmo afirma na Suma Teológica, "não é necessário que as coisas tenham na realidade o mesmo modo de existir que o intelecto tem em seu ato de conhecimento 128 ". Uma vez que a quantidade é anterior aos demais acidentes, ou seja, é o primeiro que ocorre à substância, ela não depende dos demais acidentes, em especial das qualidades sensíveis, para obter sua inteligibilidade. E é isto justamente o que o matemático faz, por isso o seu modo de consideração não implica em erro, pois ele não declara que os entes matemáticos, enquanto são pensados como destituídos de movimento, existem enquanto tais, o que implicaria em erro: ele apenas os estuda enquanto tais, e isto é legítimo, a partir da ordem de conhecimento entre o anterior e o posterior. Esta concepção, que compreende existir uma ordem na qual as determinações advêm à matéria em sua determinação, está presente ao longo do pensamento de Santo Tomás. De fato, podemos encontrá-la exposta já no seu opúsculo juvenil, De Trinitate, no qual Santo Tomás de Aquino explicava a ordem como constando dos seguintes acidentes: a substance in its intelligibility. Therefore quantity can be understood without matter, which is subject to motion, and without sensible qualities, but not without substance. And thus quantities and those things which belong to them are understood as abstracted from motion and sensible matter, but not from intelligible matter, as is said in Metaphysics, VII" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. (Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 161 p 79). 127 (cf. AQUINO, Tomás de. A natureza da matéria. In: AQUINO, Tomás de. Opúsculos filósoficos. Trad. de Paulo Faitanin. São Paulo: SitaBrasil, 2009, vol. I. cap. 9, nota, 3. Sempre que citarmos alguns dos opúsculos de Tomás de Aquino presentes nesse livro, está pressuposto por nós a autenticidade da obra mencionada. Daí, para deixamos de lado a questão em torno da autenticidade Tomista deste opúsculo, para os nossos objetivos basta constatar à ideia de que o primeiro acidente ou determinação que qualifica a matéria consiste na quantidade, é algo condizente com aquilo que conhecemos do sistema filosófico de Tomás, pois encontramos essa idéia repetida em vários lugares. Gardeil, nos informa que o peripatetismo retomou uma dupla distinção sobre a quantidade presente na antiga geometria e aritmética, a saber, a quantidade de extensão ou de grandeza dimensível e a quantidade discreta. Porém, esta diferença foi acentuada no peripatetismo pela diferença característica da continuidade. Enquanto a quantidade concreta é aquela na qual as partes são contínuas, a quantidade discreta é aquela que pode ser dividida em partes não contínuas (cf. GARDEIL, 1967, tomo II, p. 30-31). O padre Édouard Hugon, nos diz que o papel da quantidade é precisamente o de dar à substância, que é em si mesma indivisível, essas partes integrais, esta extensão e estas dimensões. Esta noção nos esclarece todas as propriedades da quantidade: a extensão das partes no lugar, a impenetrabilidade, a divisibilidade e a ordem das dimensões submetidas à medida (cf. HUGON, Édouard. Os princípios da filosofia de Santo Tomás de Aquino: as vinte e quatro teses fundamentais. Trad. de Odilão Moura. Porto Alegre: EDIPUCRS, 1998. p. 101). 128 AQUINO, Tomás de. Suma teológica. Questão 44. Art.3, p. 43. 61 quantidade, a qualidade, as afecções e o movimento 129 . Desta maneira, a quantidade pode ser compreendida sem a matéria sensível, mas conserva a inteligibilidade da substância, uma vez que a quantidade é sempre quantidade de algo. Daí a matemática considerar essas quantidades abstraídas da matéria sensível e do movimento, e aquilo que as acompanha enquanto tais, como outras determinações, e.g., as figuras. Assim, a oposição entre a física e a matemática é pensada como gêneros diferentes, pois enquanto a física considera o corpo no gênero da substância, a matemática o considera enquanto constituído por três dimensões, encontrando-se no gênero da quantidade 130 . Na argumentação que encontramos em sua lectio 3, a Física pode ainda ser explicada de outra forma. Consideremos um determinado objeto tomado em sua simplicidade conceitual X. Se tomarmos este X e acrescentarmos alguma determinação ou propriedade, constituir-se-á aquilo que podemos chamar de X 1. . Este objeto é a síntese de algo primário acrescido de alguma propriedade. Mas, se tomarmos este novo elemento X 1 e acrescentarmos outra determinação, obteremos aquilo que se pode chamar de X 2 ; este, por sua vez, é a síntese não apenas de X, mais também de X 1 . Dizemos, portanto, que X 2 é um objeto que é obtido ou resultante do acréscimo sucessivo de determinações ou propriedades. De fato, este processo pode seguir sucessivamente, e não se depreende que o conhecimento de X 1 independa do entendimento de X, porquanto X 1 é obtido justamente pelo acréscimo de determinadas propriedades a X; no entanto o conhecimento de X não implica o entendimento de X 1 , pois X não decorre de X 1 . É esta relação entre o anterior e o posterior no campo epistêmico que Tomás de Aquino busca legitimar. De fato, o intelecto é capaz de abstrair o universal do particular 131 . Embora o comentário à Física seja uma obra da fase madura de seu pensamento, os pontos nela expressos a respeito da referida distinção não são antagônicos àqueles expostos no De Trinitate. De fato, podemos apontar apenas uma preocupação distinta, pois, enquanto no comentário à Física o cerne da questão é a distinção entre a física e a matemática, no De 129 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário ao tratado da Trindade de Boécio: Questões 5 e 6.Trad. e introd. de Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento. São Paulo: UNESP, 1999. q. 5, a. 3.. 130 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3, ad 2m. 131 Percebemos ao longo da argumentação de Santo Tomás de Aquino que a tentativa em legitimar o processo de abstração realizado pelo matemático, tal como em Aristóteles, está em polêmica com o platonismo. Segundo a sua interpretação, a defesa pelos platônicos da teoria das ideias lhes adveio como hipótese necessária para responder ao problema da possibilidade do conhecimento científico da realidade. Visto que o conhecimento natural não se refere ao particular, mas ao universal, é necessário, que o universal esteja separado do singular; outro ponto que teria servido de apoio aos platônicos foi o errôneo raciocínio de que aquilo que é separável no entendimento é separável no ser. 62 Trinitate a questão primordial é a tríplice classificação das ciências especulativas, levando por isso em conta também a metafísica. Nesse opúsculo, Tomás de Aquino busca estabelecer a legitimidade da divisão em dois âmbitos: por um lado, na estrutura ontológica das coisas, e, por outro, no modo como concebemos distintamente cada uma delas. "É porque as coisas têm uma certa estrutura ontológica que elas fundamentam um tríplice saber – físico, matemático e metafísico" 132 . Quanto ao primeiro ponto, percebemos a discussão de Aquino movendo-se ao longo de todo o artigo 1 da questão 5 para mostrar que só pode haver três ciências teóricas, pelo simples fato de que é justamente em um desses modos que se encontra todo o objeto de estudo das ciências especulativas. Ele não estabelece a distinção a partir de qualquer diferença, mas unicamente a partir daquelas que competem por si aos objetos, ou seja, é pela "diferença dos especuláveis na medida em que são especuláveis" que a diferença é estabelecida e busca encontrar legitimidade, isto na medida em que não transgride o modo de ser do objeto. Desta forma, "as ciências especulativas se distinguem segundo a ordem de afastamento da matéria e do movimento 133 ". Da análise tomista, depreende-se que há coisas que dependem da matéria sensível quanto ao modo de ser e as incluem em sua consideração. Dessas entidades trata a ciência natural. Há, por outro lado, objetos que dependem da matéria quanto ao modo de ser, mas independem dela em sua consideração: destes tratam as matemáticas. E, por fim, existem entidades que são separadas da matéria segundo o ser, porém não pela consideração (pois isto exigiria que estivessem juntas); nesse sentido compete à filosofia primeira a tarefa investigativa. A divisão se encerra com estas distinções, pois não há no mundo um quarto gênero de entidades as quais dependem da matéria para serem inteligidas, porém independem dela quanto ao modo de ser. Por isso entende Tomás de Aquino que a divisão das ciências especulativas corresponde ao modo como as coisas são. No que diz respeito ao modo como são apreendidas as coisas, a divisão é estabelecida reivindicando o modo de apreensão destes objetos pelo intelecto. No modo de apreensão deve-se distinguir o que é por si do que é de acordo com o acidente. Tal como ele diz, "o que quer que seja pode ser considerado sem tudo o que não se refere a ele por si 134 ". E é justamente no modo de considerar principalmente, e não exclusivamente, que Tomás de Aquino distingue as diferentes maneiras pelas quais o intelecto trata seu objeto, tal como ele diz: 132 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Divisão e classificação das ciências segundo Santo Tomás de Aquino. Ágora Filosófica. Recife, ano 5, n.1, p. 23-29, jan./jun. 2005. p. 24. 133 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1. 134 Ibid., q. 5, a. 2. 63 Encontra-se, portanto, uma tríplice distinção na operação do intelecto: uma, de acordo com a operação do intelecto que compõe e divide, que é chamada propriamente de separação; esta compete à ciência divina ou metafísica; outra, de acordo com a operação pela qual são formadas as quididades das coisas, que é a abstração da forma da matéria sensível; esta compete à matemática; a terceira, de acordo com esta mesma operação, [que é a abstração] do universal do particular; esta compete à física e é comum a todas as ciências [...] 135 . Tomás de Aquino entendia, assim, que na ciência natural as formas são consideradas em si, e desta forma sem movimento, o intelecto abstrai o universal em relação ao particular. Na matemática ocorre a abstração da forma em relação à matéria sensível ou signata, pois, ainda que os entes matemáticos só existam na matéria quanto ao ser, não dependem dela para sua intelecção. Por isso no estudo empreendido pelos matemáticos são consideradas apenas as quantidades e o que as acompanha, tais como as figuras. De tal modo que a matéria sensível não é posta em suas definições. E, por fim, na ciência primeira não ocorre processo abstrativo, mas sim um processo de separação, na medida em que ao divino não é dado ser na matéria. Vemos, assim, que a argumentação se move no âmbito de uma ontologia das coisas existentes no mundo, bem como em uma epistemologia que busca reconhecer a atividade intelectiva das entidades. Para Tomás de Aquino, em última instância, a distinção entre as ciências especulativas em geral, e particularmente entre a física e a matemática, remonta ao próprio caráter ontológico de seus objetos. Assim, para cada ciência especulativa existe um determinado objeto próprio que lhe corresponde. Tomás de Aquino nos diz que o objeto próprio "é aquele por meio de cuja informação a potência exerce o seu ato" 136 . A atividade do intelecto na apreensão dos objetos próprios das ciências a partir de seu estatuto ontológico e epistêmico é ressaltado por ele anos mais tarde em seu comentário ao De Anima, no qual alude às distinções feitas por Aristóteles: E, para que não seja dito que a mente trabalha do mesmo modo na matemática e na ciência natural, ele [acrescenta] que a relação das coisas ao intelecto corresponde à sua separabilidade da matéria. O que é separado no ser da matéria sensível pode ser diferenciado apenas pelo intelecto. O que não é separado da matéria sensível no ser, mas apenas em pensamento, pode ser percebido em abstração da matéria sensível, mas não da matéria inteligível. Os objetos físicos, no entanto, embora sejam intelectualmente discernidos em abstração da matéria individual, não podem ser completamente abstraídos da material sensível. Pois, "homem" é compreendido como incluindo carne e ossos, porém em abstração desta carne e destes ossos. Mas o indivíduo 135 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3. 136 AQUINO, Tomás de. O princípio de individuação. In: AQUINO, Tomás de. Opúsculos filósoficos. Trad. de Paulo Faitanin. São Paulo: Sita-Brasil, 2009, vol. I. p. 245, nota 7. 64 singular não é diretamente conhecido pelo intelecto, mas pelos sentidos ou pela imaginação 137 . Levando em consideração a exposição de Tomás de Aquino à Física notamos que ele adere à resposta de Aristóteles de que um dos pontos que diferencia o filósofo natural do matemático consiste nos diferentes modos utilizados por ambos para definirem os seus respectivos sujeitos. Desde a Lectio 1 de seu comentário já encontramos sua afirmação de que "é necessário que as ciências se diversifiquem de acordo com o diferente modo de definição" 138 . Ao longo da Lectio 3, por sua vez, não há qualquer inserção de algum outro exemplo diferente daqueles propostos por Aristóteles para explicitar os referidos modos de definição. Tomás de Aquino apenas enumera alguns elementos do âmbito da aritmética e geometria em oposição aos elementos físicossangue, corpo e homeme menciona que tais casos se comportam semelhantemente ao já conhecido exemplo do curvo e do arrebitado. O fato de Tomás de Aquino não ter sentido a necessidade de desenvolver esse ponto em seus pormenores, tal como fez anteriormente, indica que ele julgava esse assunto esclarecido. É possível encontrarmos sua compreensão desse assunto desde o seu opúsculo juvenil De ente et essentia, onde menciona que "[...] a definição das substâncias naturais contém, não apenas a forma, mas também a matéria; pois, de outro modo, as definições naturais e matemáticas não difeririam" 139 . Uma exposição mais detalhada da diferença entre ambas as ciências a partir do modo de definição aparece no De Trinitate. Nesse comentário Tomás de Aquino mostra a relação entre o inteligir e a definição. Afirma o Aquinate: 137 "And lest it be said that the mind works in the same way in mathematics and in natural science, he adds that the relation of things to the intellect corresponds to their separability from matter. What is separate in being from sensible matter can be discerned only by the intellect. What is not separate from sensible matter in being, but only in thought, can be perceived in abstraction from sensible matter, but not from intelligible matter. Physical objects, however, though they are intellectually discerned in abstraction from individual matter, cannot be completely abstracted from sensible matter; for 'man' is understood as including flesh and bones; though in abstraction from this flesh and these bones. But the singular individual is not directly known by the intellect, but by the senses or imagination" (AQUINAS, Saint Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima. Translated by KenelmFoester and Silvester Humphries. London: Yale University Press, 1965. Bk 3 Lec 8 Sct 716 p 418, § 716. 138 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário à Física de Aristóteles. Lectio 1, 1. Trad. de Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento (obra inédita) Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 02.07.2014. 139 AQUINO, Tomás de Aquino de. O ente e a essência. Trad. Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento. 6. Ed. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 2010, capítulo II, 12. A passagem não menciona que a única diferença entre as duas ciências reside na forma de definirem seus sujeitos, diz apenas que, quanto aos modos de definirem seus sujeitos, a Física leva em conta o composto tomado como um todo, ou seja, o sínolon; a matemática, por seu turno, define os seus objetos a partir da forma, ou seja, a partir daquilo que eles são. A diferença entre as duas ciências repousa em outras instâncias, e.g., as causas utilizadas em suas demonstrações. Sobre este ponto Santo Tomás de Aquino possui um comentário muito esclarecedor a respeito das causas através das quais cada uma das ciências especulativas demonstram as suas conclusões; a matemática demonstra unicamente a partir da causa formal, e a Metafísica demonstra principalmente através das causas final e formal, mas também por meio da agente; a Física, por seu turno, demonstra através de todas as causas, cf. AQUINAS, Thomas.Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 1 Lec 1 Sct 5 p 5. 65 [...] alguns dependem da matéria no que se refere ao ser e ao inteligido como aquilo em cuja definição é posta a matéria sensível; donde não poder ser inteligido sem a matéria sensível, como na definição do ente humano é preciso incluir a carne e os ossos. Destes se ocupa a física ou ciência natural. Há, ainda, alguns que, apesar de dependerem da matéria no que se refere ao ser, não dependem no que se refere ao inteligido porque a matéria sensível não é posta em suas definições, como a linha e o número 140 . O inteligir leva em conta aquilo que está posto na definição do ente, e como o físico e o matemático definem seus sujeitos de forma distintas, ou melhor, não a partir dos mesmos elementos, então eles são distintos, pois o modo de definir não é compartilhado. Não devemos pensar que as definições sejam totalmente arbitrárias, algo delas remete à própria constituição da coisa, daí Tomás de Aquino afirmar que "o termo não pertence à natureza da coisa da qual é termo, mas tem alguma relação para com esta coisa, assim como o termo da linha não é a linha, mas tem para com ela alguma relação" 141 . Dessa forma, a distinção no modo de definir os respectivos objetos remete a uma distinção inerente ao próprio objeto. Tomás de Aquino também reconhece que as ciências se distinguem a partir do modo de demonstrar suas conclusões, pois, enquanto "a matemática não demonstra senão pela causa formal; a metafísica principalmente pela causa formal e final e também pela causa agente. A da natureza [ciência], no entanto, por todas as causas" 142 . Algo que percebemos no comentário é que esta adesão de Tomás de Aquino à proposta de Aristóteles sobre os diferentes modos das ciências definirem seus objetos não é seguida estritamente em seu comentário às ciências intermediárias. No início de sua exposição Tomás de Aquino enuncia uma definição destas ciências, que levam em conta seu procedimento metodológico: Aquelas ciências são chamadas intermediárias, as quais tomam os princípios abstraídos das ciências puramente matemáticas e os aplicam à matéria sensível. Por exemplo, a perspectiva aplica à linha visual aquelas coisas as quais são demonstradas pela geometria sobre a linha abstrata; e a harmônica, isto é, a música, aplica ao som aquelas coisas as quais a aritmética considera sobre as proporções dos números; e a 140 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1. 141 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 2. 142 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário à Física de Aristóteles. Lectio 1, 1, nota 12. Trad. de Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento (obra inédita). Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 02.07.2014. Esta concepção está clara em Tomás, e não se deve reivindicar o texto em De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1., onde apenas é dito que 'as demonstrações naturais partem dos efeitos sensíveis". Pois essa passagem não se propõe a diferenciar as ciências em função das diferentes causas tomadas no processo demonstrativo, mas sim apenas comparando a Metafísica e a Física a partir do alcance epistêmico, daí ele mencionar o âmbito da demonstração do quê e do porquê. 66 astronomia aplica à consideração da geometria e a aritmética aos céus e suas partes 143 . É notório que esta definição oferecida por ele leva em conta principalmente dois aspectos: de um lado, a posição ontológica ocupada por estas ciências que se encontram entre a ciência natural e a matemática; e, de outro lado, o seu modo específico de proceder, ou seja, elas tomam os princípios matemáticos e os aplicam à matéria. Após a definição, seguem-se imediatamente exemplos que buscam esclarecer justamente a metodologia utilizada por essas ciências. Destaca-se no texto a ênfase sobre a forma como elas procedem em oposição à aritmética e à geometria. A perspectiva leva em conta as demonstrações decorrentes da geometria sobre a linha abstrata e as utiliza na consideração da linha visual; já a harmônica se utiliza das proporções numéricas que pertencem ao campo de estudo da aritmética e as utiliza no escalonamento e proporção dos sons; por sua vez, a astronomia se utiliza tanto da aritmética quanto da geometria na descrição dos céus, astros, posições planetárias, etc. O que transparece ao longo da passagem é que estas ciências se utilizam de princípios que legitimamente pertencem a outro ramo de investigação; no caso em questão, especificamente à aritmética e à geometria. A passagem seguinte destaca que, embora essas ciências ocupem a posição de intermediárias entre a física e a matemática, Aristóteles lhes teria atribuído a pertença mais propriamente à ciência natural; causa-nos no mínimo espanto ler tal afirmação feita por Tomás de Aquino, porquanto, como já temos visto, o Estagirita fala dessas ciências como "as mais naturais dentre as matemáticas", indicando, assim, que elas pertencem primariamente ao campo das matemáticas. Esta contradição pode ser explicada caso Tomás de Aquino esteja comentando a Física com base na tradução realizada por Tiago de Veneza. De fato, essa tradução foi um quebra-cabeça para os doutores do século XIII, pois atribuía às ciências intermediárias o caráter de serem mais naturais do que matemáticas. De fato, Tomás de Aquino considera as ciências intermediárias como fazendo parte das matemáticas, matemáticas aplicadas, mais especificamente falando. Podemos perceber isto a partir de seu 143 "Those sciences are called intermediate sciences which take principles abstracted by the purely mathematical sciences and apply them to sensible matter. For example, perspective applies to the visual line those things which are demonstrated by geometry about the abstracted line; and harmony, that is music, applies to sound those things which arithmetic considers about the proportions of numbers; and astronomy applies the consideration of geometry and arithmetic to the heavens and its parts" (AQUINAS, Thomas.Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 164 p 80). Analisaremos mais detalhadamente o lugar ocupado pelas ciências intermediárias em um capítulo posterior; por ora, basta notarmos que a definição dessas ciências permaneceu constante ao longo de seu pensamento e que existe uma considerável desproporcionalidade de material referente a essas ciências tanto com o restante da passagem em discussão, quanto com o texto comentado. Isto indica, ao menos em princípio, que uma maior atenção foi dispensada a esse grupo de ciências. 67 comentário ao De Trinitate de Boécio (anterior ao comentário da Física) e na Ia IIae da Suma de Teologia (possivelmente posterior ao comentário da Física). Estamos provavelmente diante de um caso em que Tomás de Aquino, ao comentar a Física, procura salvar a afirmação de Aristóteles tal como ele lia na tradução de Tiago de Veneza 144 . Sendo assim, é compreensível o motivo pelo qual o Aquinate, após mencionar a pertença daquelas ciências à física, busca explicar isso argumentando que cada coisa é nomeada e toma sua espécie a partir de seu término 145 , ou seja, elas pertenceriam à física porquanto em última instância suas investigações se encerram em realidades de caráter natural ou físico. Isto parece ser feito com certa renúncia, porquanto, ainda que na mesma passagem seja mencionado que as referidas disciplinas sejam mais naturais do que matemáticas, contrariamente a isto é também destacado que elas se utilizam de princípios matemáticos para suas demonstrações. O estabelecimento dessas ciências é feito não exclusivamente a partir delas, mas sim levando-se em conta o seu relacionamento com as ciências puramente matemáticas, a aritmética e a geometria; pois, enquanto as ciências intermediárias tomam a linha abstrata que constitui objeto de estudo da geometria e a aplica à matéria sensível, a geometria, inversamente, toma a linha natural existente na matéria sensível e separa as propriedades naturais que acompanham a linha natural 146 . Tomás de Aquino relaciona a questão em torno da posição ocupada pela astronomia com a percepção de que o referido grupo de ciências não se encontra destituído de relações com as matemáticas puras; assim, embora a astronomia seja mais natural do que a matemática (apenas segundo o comentário à física), ela não está destituída de relações com esta, pois demonstra o mesmo que a física, a saber: a esfericidade da terra, no entanto, a partir da figura do eclipse lunar. De toda a nossa discussão ao longo do presente capítulo, nos parece seguro concluir, mesmo de forma geral, que Tomás de Aquino concorda com a resposta de Aristóteles, que a Física e a matemática são ciências distintas e possuem os seus respectivos objetos de investigação. Ainda assim, é possível apontar algumas particularidades entre ambos os filósofos. Enquanto Aristóteles tanto privilegia a distinção entre os objetos de investigação da física e da matemática a partir da maneira diferente delas definirem os sujeitos e os seus respectivos modos de considerá-los, quanto recorre ao estatuto ontológico 144 A resposta aqui adotada segue em sua totalidade aquela oferecida pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro. Para analisar sua resposta de forma completa, cf. NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. De Tomás de Aquino a Galileu. 2. ed. Campinas: UNICAMP/ IFCH, 1998. p. 66-71. 145 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 164 p 80. 146 "Therefore from this difference between intermediate sciences and the purely mathematical sciences, what was said above is clear. For if intermediate sciences of this sort apply the abstract to sensible matter, it is clear that mathematics conversely separates those things which are in sensible matter" (QUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 164 p 81). 68 dos entes, embora sobre este último ponto não se mostre tão exaustivo como nos anteriores, Tomás de Aquino, retoma essas distinções feitas por Aristóteles e lhes dá tanto uma ênfase quanto encaminha à solução da questão por vias um pouco distintas. Pois os pontos destacados por Tomás de Aquino, a saber: a relação cognoscitiva entre o posterior e o anterior, a fundamentação das ciências especulativas na estrutura ontológica das coisas e no modo de compreensão delas, as diferentes causas tomadas na demonstração e a posição das scientiae mediae, são pontos que, apesar de não estarem explicitamente formalizados em Aristóteles, não são incompatíveis com ele 147 . A diferença entre os referidos autores, expoentes do pensamento filosófico, seria mais perceptível no caso das scientiae mediae, principalmente no tocante à importância reservada a elas no interior dos respectivos sistemas. Notemos que Tomás de Aquino, utilizando-se de uma nomenclatura mais desenvolvida, julga que os aspectos mensuráveis daquelas realidades físicas constituem o objeto de investigação de ciências distintas da ciência natural, as quais, embora intermediárias entre a filosofia natural e as ciências matemáticas puras, são formalmente matemáticas e não naturais 148 . Por fim, cabe-nos concluir que dois pontos foram obtidos de nossa análise: a física e a matemática são distintas, uma não se reduz à outra, mas elas não estão destituídas de vínculos entre si, caso bem exemplificado nas scientiae mediae. De posse destas conclusões, devemos em seguida investigar em que medida esta distinção e o vínculo entre a física e a matemática são mantidos ou reelaborados, e isto na perspectiva dos requerimentos do conhecimento científico teorizado nos Segundos Analíticos, e particularmente à luz da doutrina aristotélica da metábase. 147 Assim, o comentário de Tomás leva em conta uma quantidade maior de reflexões em torno do problema que não se encontra na obra comentada, porém essas explanações não podem ser consideradas como rupturas entre os dois filósofos, até certo ponto elas podem ser vistas como decorrentes da própria natureza do comentário. 148 CHLMP, 1982, p. 525. No entanto, pode-se questionar isto porquanto, como vimos anteriormente, a argumentação de Santo Tomás de Aquino parece estar neste ponto muito mais preocupada em salvaguardar a leitura do texto que ele tinha em mãos a partir da versão de Tiago de Veneza. Não devemos, porém, deixar de notar que, ainda assim, sua exposição sobre as ciências médias é mais extensa no corpo do texto, e evidencia uma maior atenção dedicada ao grupo formado por essas ciências. 69 3 A PROIBIÇÃO DE METÁBASE SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES E O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO Tornar-se nota de rodapé da história intelectual do Ocidente significa, de fato, ocupar um lugar de privilégio e poucos possuíram os méritos intelectuais para alcançar tal condição. No entanto, ser responsável pelo próprio desenvolvimento deste pensamento é algo que exige não apenas genialidade, mas também criatividade. São justamente essas duas características que encontramos presentes na obra de Aristóteles. Sua genialidade é expressa tanto na capacidade que possuía de sistematizar dados advindos das investigações de filósofos que o antecederam em diversos campos quanto de oferecer teorias com maior poder explicativo em diversos aspectos. Sua genialidade é também expressa no âmbito da lógica. Isto não quer dizer, de forma alguma, que antes de seus estudos neste campo as pessoas não se utilizassem da lógica; no entanto, o trabalho de formular e explicitar as leis lógicas não foi empreendido por ninguém anteriormente a ele, por isso podemos afirmar ter sido ele o idealizador da lógica. Não é de relevância alguma para o presente estudo discutir se a lógica associada diretamente a Aristóteles é correta ou possui deficiências. O que está no cerne da questão é mostrar que foi seu espírito agudo e sistemático que forneceu, durante centenas de séculos, o instrumental de investigação que guiou diversos filósofos e cientistas. Se para o bem ou para o mal, não está em nossas mãos determiná-lo. Contudo, faríamos bem em não confundir validade e verdade das teorias científicas, lógicas, etc., e entender que a relação entre essas duas categorias é algo que em geral escapa à visão do homem que as vivencia em sua experiência diária. Remetemos, aqui, à opinião anteriormente expressa por Lindberg de que o sucesso de uma explicação científica (e, por implicação, também lógica) não deve ser sua concordância com a nossa crença vigente, mas sua capacidade epistêmica de oferecer respostas mais coerentes e adequadas do que as fornecidas pelas teorias rivais sobre os mesmos aspectos que elas tentam explicar. O Estagirita pode legitimamente ser apontado como o pai da lógica. Isto não implica em dizer que antes dele as pessoas não se utilizavam dos princípios lógicos em seus raciocínios. Ressaltamos apenas que foi ele o responsável por sistematizar os princípios do raciocínio de tal forma que, durante muitos séculos, tanto fazia falar de lógica quanto de lógica aristotélica, não havendo distinção entre ambas. Seu maior sucesso neste âmbito reside em sua teoria silogística, ou seja, na forma da correta inferência. Ainda hoje, muitas vezes 70 falamos simplesmente de lógica aristotélica, sem nos preocuparmos com uma especificação de suas partes. Segundo Ross, os tratados aristotélicos relacionados à lógica compreendem as seguintes partes: 1) os Primeiros Analíticos, que se debruçam sobre as diferentes formas de silogismo; 2) os Segundos Analíticos, que investigam particularmente o silogismo demonstrativo ou científico; 3) e, por fim, os Tópicos e os Elencos Sofísticos 149 . O que percebemos nesta proposta oferecida por Ross é que essas partes centrais são antecedidas pelas Categorias e pelo De interpretatione, que são considerados objetos de investigação preliminar, desempenhando assim uma função propedêutica ao estudo no âmbito da lógica. Independentemente da classificação de Ross ser aceita ou não, devemos perceber que ela reconhece diferentes preocupações ao longo dos escritos aristotélicos sobre lógica. Se levarmos em conta que o estudo da lógica era pensado enquanto preparatório, ou seja, que a lógica era investigada pelo fato de ser pensada como sendo o instrumento do qual o conhecimento científico deveria utilizar-se, se torna-se mais compreensível a diversidade de temas presentes nos escritos aristotélicos. A designação de Órganon para os diversos escritos do Estagirita sobre lógica é tanto o reconhecimento da diversidade de temas abordados nesse âmbito de estudo quanto a tentativa de conceder uma unidade aos escritos lógicos. Daí o nome dessa coleção indicar a crença de que a lógica se apresenta como um instrumento da filosofia. De modo geral, o conteúdo das obras que compõem o Órganon é o seguinte: as Categorias, que lidam com termos simples (sujeitos e predicados), os quais, quando combinados, passam a constituir declarações simples e caracterizam as substâncias primárias, como o sujeito último de predicação; em seguida, o De Interpretatione, no qual se discutem tanto as declarações que resultam da combinação de nomes e verbos, quanto um tratamento de várias relações modais entre as declarações; posteriormente, os Primeiros Analíticos, que analisam a teoria formal do raciocínio silogístico e mostram como as declarações se combinam para formar argumentos; depois, os Segundos Analíticos, cujas demonstrações são analisadas como silogismos explanatórios a partir dos primeiros princípios e do seu relacionamento com o conhecimento científico; seguem-se os Tópicos, que têm como principal característica a discussão do debate dialético; por fim, as Refutações Sofísticas, que tratam dos vários tipos de falácias em um 149 ROSS, W. D. Aristóteles. 2. ed. Trad. de Diego F. Pró. Buenos Aires: Libera os libros, [s.d.], p.30. 71 argumento dialético 150 . Para os interesses do presente trabalho, deter-nos-emos apenas nos Segundos Analíticos 151 e, particularmente, em duas das três seções deste livro, conforme proposta de Ross 152 . Segundo Aristóteles, a ciência é o hábito demonstrativo; nesta perspectiva, o conhecimento científico é passível de demonstração. No entanto, esta expressão poderia causar ao leitor moderno certo equívoco, podendo inclusive levá-lo a pensar a ciência como relacionada com as características quantitativas de controle experimental e laboratorial próprias da ciência contemporânea. Isto, porém, seria afastar-se grandemente da concepção aristotélica de ciência demonstrativa. Para evitar esse possível erro, é necessário compreendermos tanto a concepção aristotélica de ciência como o seu procedimento demonstrativo. De fato, aquilo que é comumente chamado de "o ideal aristotélico de ciência demonstrativa" encontra-se teorizado nos Segundos Analíticos. Nesta obra, encontramos a seguinte definição de ciência dada pelo Estagirita: julgamos dispor de conhecimento puro e simples e sem qualificação de tudo [...] quando acreditamos que sabemos [1] que a causa da qual o fato é originado é a causa do fato e [2] que o fato não pode ser de outra maneira 153 . Esta definição do conhecimento científico nos permite destacar duas características 154 : de um lado é necessário possuir o conhecimento das causas e, de outro, o 150 Sabe-se que o conteúdo de alguns livros do Órganon é tema de forte debate entre os estudiosos, e particularmente as Categorias, porém a exposição anterior sobre as obras e seus respectivos conteúdos apoiou-se fortemente nas informações oferecidas por CODE, Alan. Aristotle's logic and Metaphysics. In: FURLEY, David (Ed.). Routledge history of philosophy: from Aristotle to Augustine. New York: Routledge, 1999, vol. II, p. 40-41. Marenbon julga que as Categorias são uma tentativa de explorar o modo como a realidade, representada precisamente pela linguagem, pode ser dividida e categorizada, não estando assim preocupadas em estudar os argumentos e nem mesmo indiretamente os termos usados para expressar argumentos. Cf. MARENBON, John. Early medieval philosophy: 480-1150. 2. ed. London: Taylor & Francis e-library, 2002, p. 20. 151 Obra doravante abreviada por S.A. 152 Ross propõe que os Segundos Analíticos possam ser divididos em 5 partes principais: 1) (I, 1-6), que trata das condições que as proposições que vão formar as premissas devem satisfazer; 2) (I, 7-34) que mostra por que as propriedades pertencem a seus sujeitos; 3) (II, 1-10) onde ele estabelece os caracteres distintivos da demonstração; 4) esta seção compreenderia a retomada de diversos assuntos que já haviam sido tratados anteriormente, porém de forma breve; e, por fim, a seção ( II, 11-18), que explica o processo pelo qual chegamos a conhecer as proposições imediatas que têm servido como ponto de partida (II, 19). (ROSS, p. 54). 153 ARISTÓTELES, I 2, 71b 10. (cf. ARISTÓTELES. Analíticos Posteriores. In: Órganon. Trad., textos e notas adicionais de Edson Bini. 2.ed. Edipro, São Paulo, 2010). Ao longo do trabalho serão utilizadas outras versões desta obra. Quando isto ocorrer, haverá a devida referência. 154 A partir desta versão que utilizamos podemos perceber claramente duas propriedades do conhecimento científico. Berti defende também a mesma opinião (BERTI, 2002), no entanto Lucas Angioni (ANGIONI, 2007) entende que a definição aristotélica destaca três propriedades. Como devemos, então, entender esta questão? Acreditamos que, de fato, o que está em jogo são apenas duas propriedades, pois a terceira propriedade, que Angioni reivindica, a saber, a oposição entre o modo de conhecer sofístico e o modo de conhecer científico, não parece ser uma propriedade específica pertencente ao conhecimento científico 72 caráter de necessidade das conclusões 155 . Ter ciência significa conhecer tanto o "quê" como o "porquê" de certo estado de coisas. Em suma, conhecimento científico, tal como compreendido nos Segundos Analíticos, significa conhecer algo e saber que tal conhecimento decorre de uma verdadeira necessidade 156 . O conhecimento das causas toma por base o aspecto de explicação, que pode ser de um fato, de um comportamento ou mesmo de uma propriedade tomada como explicação de um determinado estado de coisas. Para entendermos melhor esta compreensão aristotélica, é necessário analisarmos a maior contribuição de Aristóteles no âmbito da lógica, a saber, a doutrina do silogismo. Um silogismo é um caso de argumento válido no qual a conclusão se segue da necessidade das premissas, e isso decorre do modo como os termos sujeito e predicado estão combinados. Sendo assim, um silogismo científico ou demonstrativo é um tipo de silogismo que demonstra sua conclusão por mostrar que ela se segue necessariamente de seus princípios explanatórios. Portanto, o conhecimento das causas e a necessidade da conclusão são ambas asseguradas por este tipo de silogismo, que é um raciocínio de caráter dedutivo, para ser mais específico. No silogismo científico, postas pelo menos duas premissas, a conclusão, ou seja, a relação entre o sujeito e o predicado, é deduzida necessariamente apenas do fato delas terem sido postas ou apreendidas. enquanto tal; esta menção apenas indica um modo de oposição direta entre os tipos de conhecimento, o científico e o sofistico. Por outro lado, não nos parece também de todo certo o modo como Angioni entende Porchat (2001, p 35-36), ou seja, compreendendo a terceira característica assumida por este como o corolário das duas anteriores; antes, a causalidade e a necessidade são as duas propriedades fundamentais que caracterizam a ciência enquanto tal. Porchat afirma que "o procedimento que se denuncia como sofístico seria, tão-somente, a pretensão de ser ou de fazer-se passar por ciência, por parte de conhecimento que não possua aquelas qualidades que a definem". Além disso, a crítica de Barnes no sentido de Aristóteles ter sido muito vago ao comentar a terceira característica talvez tenha se dado unicamente pelo fato de que não há terceira característica. A interpretação proposta por Angioni está aparentemente baseada em algo que não foi dito, ao invés de levar em conta aquilo que foi afirmado. De fato, Angioni afirma que o conhecimento será sofístico se não for satisfeito qualquer um dos requisitos para o conhecimento científico, mas não é claro se, entre tais requisitos, ele compreende apenas as duas características mencionadas em 71b 9-12, ou algo mais (como as seis propriedades das proposições demonstrativas, expostas em 71b 20-33). Por fim, ele acredita que Barnes se inclina para a terceira opção. Não é claro para nós o motivo pelo qual Angioni continua insistindo em três propriedades e, mesmo fazendo menção ao fato de haver divergência entre alguns intérpretes quanto ao número de características que estariam presentes a partir da definição de Aristóteles, menciona que o sentido de cada uma delas não é claro. Ver: ANGIONI, Lucas. O conhecimento científico no livro I dos Segundos Analíticos de Aristóteles. Revista de Filosofia Antiga. v.1, n. 2, p. 1-26, maio/out. 2007. ISNN 1981-9471p. 2. Entendemos que as propriedades que definem o conhecimento científico são a causalidade e a necessidade, características claramente expressas na versão inglesa da obra do Estagirita. "We think we understand a thing simpliciter (and not in the sophistic fashion accidentally) whenever we think we are aware both that the explanation because of which the object is its explanation, and that it is not possible for this to be otherwise". [Ver: ARISTÓTELES. Posterior Analytics. In: BARNES, Jonathan (ed.). The complete works of Aristotle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, vol, II. 70b9-70b16]. 155 BERTI, 2002, p. 4. 156 Cf. Ibid., p. 4. 73 Na estrutura do silogismo, há pelo menos duas premissas e uma conclusão. As premissas distinguem-se entre si em função da presença dos termos maior e menor, por isto elas se dividem em premissa maior e premissa menor. Esta designação leva em conta a presença do sujeito e do predicado da conclusão em cada uma delas, ou seja, a premissa maior é aquela que contém o predicado da conclusão (termo maior), e a premissa menor, aquela que possui o sujeito da conclusão (termo menor). Existe ainda outro elemento presente na estrutura do silogismo, o termo médio, o qual ocorre em ambas as premissas, porém não na conclusão; ele é entendido como sendo aquilo que é comum às premissas, em suma, é a causa explicativa 157 . A compreensão do termo médio é fundamental na teoria silogística aristotélica, pois, ainda que o termo médio ocorra em ambas as premissas, ele pode ocupar posições diferentes em relação aos extremos, a partir das quais as possíveis figuras de um silogismo são determinadas. Sendo assim, a noção de figura é caracterizada por especificar as relações entre os termos que ocorrem nas premissas e na conclusão. Daí o motivo pelo qual, segundo Aristóteles, existem três figuras do silogismo, pois o termo médio pode ocupar a posição de sujeito em uma premissa e de predicado em outra, constituindo assim a primeira figura. Ele pode formar a segunda figura ao ser posto como predicado em ambas as premissas; e, por fim, sendo colocado como sujeito em ambas as premissas, temos a constituição da terceira figura 158 . Podemos representar este esquema segundo o modelo abaixo: 157 O raciocínio pode ser estudado sob dois pontos de vistas, material e formal; enquanto o primeiro ponto está relacionado ao seu conteúdo, o segundo ponto se relaciona com sua disposição ou ordenamento lógico (aqui está compreendido o estudo do silogismo). "O silogismo é essencialmente a identificação dos dois extremos em virtude ou em razão de um têrmo médio. Quando eu declaro que 'Pedro é contemplativo porque ele é filósofo', eu estou afirmando que o predicado 'contemplativo' pertence ao sujeito 'Pedro' em razão do médio [termo] 'filósofo'. O termo médio constitui o elemento dinâmico efetivo do raciocínio; é ele que traz a luz: concluir é assentir sob a pressão do termo médio. O silogismo é antes de tudo uma operação de mediação causal pelo termo médio" (GARDEIL, 1967, tomo I, p. 124). Os significados dos termos maior e menor mudam ao longo do pensamento de Aristóteles. Além do mais, as expressões "termo maior" e "termo menor" são tomadas para expressar a relação de extensão entre os termos na primeira figura (cf. KNEALE, 1962, p. 71-73). De fato, as expressões termo maior e termo menor são apropriadas apenas no modo universal afirmativo da primeira figura (ROSS, [s.d.], p. 45). O termo médio pode também, de igual forma, ser chamado termo mediador. Ross assinala que a noção de termo médio se aplica mais facilmente à questão de saber (o porquê) se A é B (ROSS, [s.d.], p. 63). Smith também chama atenção para o fato de que na primeira figura os termos maiores e menores têm diferentes funções nas premissas que não podem ser aplicadas à segunda e terceira figura. Cf. (SMITH, 1995, p. 69). Ele destaca ainda que, para esta questão ser resolvida, devemos buscar na essência de A um elemento que mostre por que A possui a propriedade B. Um argumento está na primeira figura, se o termo maior é o predicado da premissa maior e o termo menor é o sujeito da premissa menor. Em tais casos o termo médio é o sujeito da premissa maior e o predicado da premissa menor (CODE, 2005, p.48). A partir de agora utilizaremos 'M' para referir-nos ao termo médio. 158 O silogismo se estrutura segundo o modo abaixo apresentado: O que é espiritual (M) é imortal (T) Ora, a alma humana (t) é espiritual(M) Logo, a alma humana (t) é imortal (T) 74 Primeira figura Segunda figura Terceira figura Sujeito-predicado Predicado-predicado Sujeito-sujeito M-T T-M M-T t-M t-M M-t t-T t-T t-T Os argumentos válidos dentro das três figuras podem ser especificados em função de seu modo. O modo de um silogismo é qualquer uma das formas válidas em que cada uma das figuras de um silogismo categórico pode ocorrer. Segundo Aristóteles, há 14 modos válidos de deduções válidas nas três figuras 159 . No presente trabalho, nosso interesse reside, T-termo maior, o predicado da conclusão t-termo menor, o sujeito da conclusão M-termo médio, o termo comum das premissas, é a causa explicativa enquanto tal (cf. GARDEIL, 1967, tomo I, p. 122). Ora, sendo o silogismo composto por termos e proposições, os diferentes ordenamentos dos termos serão responsáveis por determinar as diversas figuras de um silogismo. Por sua vez, os diferentes modos de um silogismo provêm das diferentes maneiras como as proposições podem ser dispostas. De fato, haverá quatro maneiras de dispor dois a dois os termos do silogismo, e assim quatro figuras possíveis do silogismo, caracterizadas pelo lugar do M em cada premissa. A quarta figura, chamada galênica, não se encontra em Aristóteles que não reconhece senão três figuras distintas do silogismo. Deve-se considerá-la como uma forma indireta da primeira figura, pois nesta figura o M estaria posto como sujeito e predicado. Esta figura é melhor designada pela denominação de primeira figura indireta. Verificando dois silogismos que reproduzem a primeira e a quarta figuras, notamos isso de maneira mais clara. Ex: 1o figura direta 1o figura indireta Todo homem é mortal Pedro é homem Ora, Pedro é homem Ora, todo homem é mortal Logo, Pedro é mortal Logo, algum mortal é Pedro Cf. (GARDEIL,1967, tomo I, p. 127-128). 159 Como dissemos anteriormente, os diferentes modos são decorrentes das diferentes disposições das proposições, e como para cada uma delas existem quatro possibilidadesuniversal afirmativa, universal negativa, particular afirmativa ou particular negativa-, cada uma das duas proposições terá quatro possibilidades distintas e, se multiplicarmos o número de possibilidades entre elas, obteremos 16 possiveis combinações, pois 4x4= 16. E, se multiplicarmos o número do total de possibilidades pelas 4 figuras, 16x4= 64. Porém, desse total apenas 14 são válidos, pois estão em acordo com os princípios e as leis do silogismo. Buscando facilitar o processo de aprendizagem dos modos de silogismos válidos, os lógicos posteriores se utilizaram de palavras para eles, as quais eram verdadeiramente recursos mnemônicos. As três primeiras vogais de cada palavra indicam a natureza das premissas e da conclusão, na seguinte ordem; maior-menor-conclusão. (Cf. GARDEIL, 1967, tomo I, p. 129). Em seguida colocamos as expressões mnemônicas para cada um dos modos válidos nas três figuras silogísticas abaixo delas colocamos uma estrutura simplificada a elas correspondente, onde a sequência de três letras correspondem ao esquema predicado-tipo de sentença-sujeito. Primeira figura: Barbara ( se todo M é L e todo S é M, então todo S é L) AaB, BaC; portanto AaC Celarent ( se nenhum M é L e todo o S é M, então nenhum S é L) AeB, BaC; portanto AeC Darii ( Se todo M é L, e algum S é M, então algum S é L) 75 primariamente, no silogismo científico, o qual é estritamente dedutivo, ou seja, tomando por base premissas universais, procede deduzindo conclusões particulares. Tendo uma forma fixa de concatenação lógica dos objetos e suas propriedades, ele expressa o caráter de necessidade da conclusão. Uma vez que Aristóteles vinculou o conhecimento científico a esta forma de AaB, BiC; portanto AiC Ferio (se nenhum M é L, e algum S é M, então algum S não é L) AeB, BiC; portanto AoC Quando se argumenta seguindo os moldes da primeira figura, demonstra-se a sua conclusão, mostrando que uma condição suficiente foi obtida. É a única figura na qual frases declarativas gerais de todos os quatro gêneros podem ser demonstradas. Aristóteles pensa que só silogismos da primeira figura são perfeitos ou completos. As regras especiais desta figura são: 1) a premissa maior tem que ser universal; 2) a premissa menor tem que ser afirmativa. "Apenas na primeira figura, quando os termos estão dispostos em ordem usual, é que a transitividade da conexão entre os termos é óbvia logo à primeira vista". Enfim, o silogismo em Barbara é o modo demonstrativo par excellence (cf. (KNEALE,1962, p. 75). Segunda figura: Cesare (se nenhum L é M, e todo o S é M, então nenhum S é L) MeN, MaX; portanto NeX Camestres ( se todo o L é M, e nenhum S é M, então nenhum S é L) MaN, MeX; portanto NeX Festino (se nenhum L é M, e algum S é M, então algum S não é L) MeN, MiX; portanto NoX Baroco (Se todo o L é M, e algum S não é M, então algum S não é L) MaN, MoX; portanto NoX Quem argumenta levando em conta a estrutura da segunda figura prova a sua conclusão, que tem que ser negativa, mostrando que uma condição necessária para a aplicação do predicado ao sujeito não foi obtida. As regras especiais para esta figura são: 1) a premissa maior tem que ser universal e 2) uma premissa tem que ser negativa. Neste caso (figura) todos os silogismos possuem como conclusão uma proposição negativa. Terceira figura Darapti (se todo o M é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S é L.) PaS, RaS; portanto PiR Felapton (se nenhum M é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S não é L) PeS, RaS; portanto PoR Disamis (Se algum M é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S é L) PiS, RaS; portanto PiR Datisi (se todo o M é L, e algum M é S, então algum S é L) PaS, RiS; portanto PiR Bocardo (Se algum M não é L, e todo o M é S, então algum S não é L) PoS, RaS; portanto PoR Ferison (se nenhum M é L, e algum M é S, então algum S não é L) PeS, RiS; portanto PoR Nesta figura, além da conclusão ter que ser particular, a única regra especial é a premissa menor ser afirmativa. Kneale nos diz que aquele que argumenta na terceira figura prova a sua conclusão, aduzindo casos. Isto é essencial, porque uma frase declarativa particular é uma afirmação de existência, e a existência não pode ser estabelecida sem referência a casos. Darapti e Felapton só são válidos se se admitir a implicação existencial para frases declarativas universais usadas como premissas. Deve-se notar que estes são os dois únicos modos na silogística de Aristóteles que dependem da suposição da implicação existencial. Se não for considerada a implicação existencial, há apenas quatro modos válidos em cada figura. Neste caso, todos os silogismos possuem como conclusão uma proposição particular (cf. (KNEALE, 1962, p. 76-77). 76 silogismo, sentiu a necessidade de caracterizar e, deste modo, de restringir as premissas que poderiam ser legitimamente utilizadas neste raciocínio. Para ocupar legitimamente o lugar em um silogismo científico Aristóteles supõe que as premissas devem satisfazer a algumas exigências: é preciso que elas sejam "verdadeiras, primárias, imediatas, mais bem conhecidas e anteriores à conclusão e que sejam causa desta 160 ". O sentido próprio dessas expressões explicita a natureza das premissas. Vejamos, portanto, o significado delas 161 . Quando é exigido que as premissas sejam verdadeiras, isso implica que elas têm de corresponder ao que as coisas são de fato, porquanto a ciência é um conhecimento de um certo estado de coisas que existe, não sendo possível haver conhecimento científico do não-existente. Logo, é requerido que as premissas sejam verdadeiras, ou seja, expressem realmente a situação à qual elas se referem. Segundo Enrico Berti, por premissas primárias e não-mediadas, devemos compreender o caráter de indemonstrabilidade ou sua derivação a partir de premissas indemonstráveis. Lucas Angioni, por sua vez, acredita que a imediaticidade das premissas consiste no fato delas "não poderem ser explicadas adequadamente por nenhuma causa anterior, e não no sentido meramente formal de não poderem ser deduzidas por nenhum argumento correto 162 ". Aristóteles aplica-se, igualmente, a refutar a crença de que todo conhecimento deve ser demonstrativo. Isto para ele é impossível. É bastante conhecida a sua crítica a respeito da possibilidade de uma demonstração retornar ad infinitum; porquanto, se as premissas devessem ser sempre demonstradas, nada seria demonstrável e, consequentemente, a ciência não seria possível. Por isto é necessário que o conhecimento das premissas imediatas não seja demonstrativo 163 . Aristóteles observa ainda que as premissas devem ser mais conhecidas do que a conclusão, e isso é óbvio, pois o conhecimento delas deve ser independente da conclusão. Deve-se destacar que a expressão "mais conhecidas" comporta dois sentidos, podendo-se levar em conta o sujeito cognoscente ou a própria coisa a ser conhecida. No primeiro caso, temos aquelas realidades próximas à sensação, que se 160 ARISTÓTELES, Segundos Analíticos I 2, 71b 20. 161 Existe certa discordância em torno do sentido exato das características que Aristóteles lista para as premissas de um silogismo científico. Este ponto é algo consciente nos estudiosos do assunto. O debate em torno das qualidades ou da natureza das premissas a serem usadas na constituição de um silogismo científico está diretamente relacionado à questão de saber se essas exigências implicam em uma compreensão axiomática do conhecimento científico ou não. Embora a descrição que seguiremos se apoie fortemente na análise realizada por Enrico Berti (cf. 2002, p. 5-6), não deixamos de consultar as exposições realizadas tanto pelo professor Lucas Angioni, (2012) como pelo professor Oswaldo (PORCHAT, 2000). 162 ANGIONI, 2012, p. 22. 163 ARISTÓTELES, I 2, 72b 20. 77 relacionam, assim, ao particular. No segundo caso, as coisas "mais conhecidas" por natureza são realidades distantes da sensação, ressaltando-se o aspecto de universalidade. Temos, pois, a clássica distinção aristotélica sobre o conhecimento das coisas quanto a nós e a partir delas próprias 164 . Por fim, é exigido que as premissas sejam anteriores e causas da conclusão. Enrico Berti acredita que estas duas características podem ser pensadas como decorrentes da estrutura formal do silogismo científico, uma vez que a anterioridade deve existir para que seja respeitada a ordem da dedução. Quanto à causa da conclusão, relaciona-se também com a estrutura formal do silogismo, porquanto a conclusão deve advir das premissas, sendo estas, por sua vez, causas da conclusão. Para Lucas Angioni, dizer que as premissas são causas da conclusão em um silogismo a partir de sua forma lógica é algo trivial. Daí ter proposto uma interpretação diferente daquela em que até o presentemente nos detivemos. É a seguinte: O requisito da causalidade deve ser tomado de modo mais específico: em uma demonstração científica, as premissas devem apresentar, como termo mediador, a causa apropriada que faz o sujeito C ter a propriedade A e, portanto, explica adequadamente o fato relatado na conclusão. A mera verdade das premissas, somada à forma lógica de um argumento válido, não é suficiente para explicar adequadamente a conclusão 165 . Segundo Robin Smith, a concepção de Aristóteles sobre a necessidade de as premissas serem anteriores à conclusão abrange os seguintes sentidos: o epistêmico (quando A é mais óbvio que B), o causalmente anterior (se A causou B) e, por fim, o sentido lógico (quando A é de maneira apropriada para servir de premissa da qual decorre B). Acreditamos que esta noção fornecida por Smith parece ser a mais adequada, pois, embora não se encontre em oposição nem com a explicação de Enrico Berti nem com a de Lucas Angioni, possui maior poder explicativo, na medida em que podemos entender que Enrico Berti e Lucas Angioni apenas focaram a atenção em algum dos sentidos presentes na noção aristotélica, deixando, porém, de perceber que, de fato, ela possui outros aspectos. Voltando ao nosso foco, se as premissas satisfizerem todas as exigências de que falamos, então elas podem legitimamente compor o silogismo científico. Podemos assim entender que as premissas que satisfazem todas aquelas exigências teorizadas por Aristóteles 164 Lucas Angioni se opõe ao fato de que a caracterização das premissas como mais conhecidas do que a conclusão implique em uma compreensão axiomática do conhecimento científico. Por entender que o contexto paradigmático para o conhecimento científico consiste em explicar pelas causas apropriadas por que é verdadeira uma conclusão que já era conhecida como tal, e não em estabelecer a verdade de uma conclusão antes desconhecida, Angioni entende esse requisito em termos de causalidade. Sendo assim, é por serem causas que as premissas devem ser descritas como mais conhecidas (cf. ANGIONI, 2012, p. 42). 165 ANGIONI, 2012, p. 24-25. 78 podem também ser chamadas de princípios próprios, porquanto é necessária a aquisição dos princípios para se obter o conhecimento científico. Devemos notar que a ênfase com a qual Aristóteles destaca a necessidade dos princípios próprios implica necessariamente no aspecto restritivo da demonstração, porquanto eles não podem ser inferidos de outras ciências, ou seja, a demonstração é sempre e exclusiva no âmbito de uma determinada ciência 166 . Embora no tocante às exigências que as premissas devem possuir para poderem ser legitimamente utilizadas em um silogismo científico Lucas Angioni tenha argumentado em prol de uma independência da noção de demonstração com sua forma silogística, porquanto, segundo ele, o traço mais importante do conhecimento científico não reside nessa estrutura, 167 julgamos existir uma íntima relação entre ambos os aspectos, porém nos eximimos de discutir, neste momento, os pontos que fundamentam nossa opinião. A imagem que emerge desta concepção aristotélica da ciência é expressa claramente nas seguintes palavras de Smith: Uma vez que o conhecimento científico é, por definição, um conhecimento de causas, e uma vez que esses primeiros princípios não têm causas, a fundação última do conhecimento científico tem de ser algo distinto do conhecimento científico. Para usar um termo moderno, a imagem aristotélica da ciência é fundacionista no sentido de que ele pensa que a demonstração só é possível se existem verdades primeiras conhecidas sem fazer apelo a demonstrações 168 . Se, porém, são tomadas como "princípios próprios" as premissas que satisfazem as exigências teorizadas pelo Estagirita, segue-se que tais princípios são aquilo a partir do qual se demonstra em um silogismo científico. Então poderá o leitor perguntar-se: O que, afinal, é demonstrado? Ora, o que é demonstrado são as propriedades universais e necessárias 166 Enrico Berti percebeu corretamente as implicações decorrentes desse fato: "isso implica na impossibilidade de uma ciência universal, a partir da qual se possam demonstrar os princípios próprios de todas as outras ciências, como também a impossibilidade de uma ciência capaz de demonstrar os princípios comuns a todas as outras. Nem os princípios próprios, com efeito, nem os comuns, enquanto princípios são demonstráveis".[BERTI, 1998, p. 8-9]. 167 Lucas Angioni deixa claro que não compreende a proposta de demonstração como uma axiomatização do conhecimento. De fato, ele manifesta que está propondo uma interpretação diferente, segundo a qual a "demonstração científica se define pela tarefa essencial de explicar adequadamente, pelas causas primeiras, por que são verdadeiras certas proposições que já sabemos que são verdadeiras (cf. ANGIONI, 2012 p. 4). 168 "Since scientific knowledge is by definition knowledge of causes, and since these first principles have no causes, the ultimate foundation of scientific knowledge must be something other than scientific knowledge. To use a modern term, Aristotle's picture of science is foundationalist in the sense that thinks demonstration is possible only if there are first truths known without demonstration". SMITH, Robin. Logic. In: BARNES, Jonathan (org.). The Cambridge companion to Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. p. 49. 79 dos objetos às quais os princípios próprios se referem 169 . Lucas Angioni entende que não cabe principalmente à demonstração estabelecer, por meio de premissas verdadeiras, a veracidade de uma conclusão cujo valor de verdade era antes dubitável, mas cabe-lhe principalmente, enquanto demonstração, explicar, por meio das causas apropriadas, por que é verdade uma conclusão que já era reconhecida como verdadeira 170 . Daí acreditar Lucas Angioni que a imposição de Aristóteles à demonstração segundo a estrutura silogística não pretendia, de forma alguma, um ideal de axiomatização; a escolha ter-se-ia dado, antes de tudo, por conta da capacidade inerente ao silogismo e, mais particularmente àquele da primeira figura, de captar as relações de causalidade 171 . Uma vez que o conhecimento científico é necessário, as premissas que o compõem devem também ser necessárias; em outras palavras, a relação estabelecida entre o sujeito e o predicado nas premissas de um silogismo científico deve ser necessária; assim, os predicados devem ser essenciais aos seus sujeitos. Para caracterizar esta necessidade Aristóteles afirma que o predicado deve convir ao sujeito de três maneiras: 1) de todo; 2) por si; 3) e universal. Segundo Aristóteles, a atribuição "de todo" é a inclusão ou exclusão de todo elemento a determinado grupo, não sendo, pois, permitido que essa atribuição seja ocasional. Essa ocasionalidade não pode se dar nem no âmbito do indivíduo, nem no da temporalidade. A atribuição, para ser legitimamente "de todo", além de incluir todos os membros da classe à qual se refere, deve fazer isto atemporalmente. Pois, na relação entre sujeito e predicado o que está em questão é que tanto a afirmação quanto a negação de propriedades que estão sendo expressas em relação ao objeto em questão, seja uma atribuição constante. Quanto à exigência de que a atribuição do predicado ao sujeito seja "por si", expressa o caráter de que daquilo que é atribuído deve constituir um elemento essencial na natureza do objeto da predicação 172 . Sendo assim, os predicados já devem estar compreendidos na definição do sujeito. Tanto a afirmação quanto a negação de um predicado a um determinado sujeito deve ser feita a partir da própria natureza do sujeito. Segundo Ross, é possível encontrarmos 4 sentidos contidos na expressão "por si": 1) O primeiro se dá quando um termo está implicado na essência de outro e em sua definição. Um exemplo típico é a noção de linha, que está implicada na essência e na definição do triângulo. Assim, quando dizemos que um predicado condiz "por si" com relação ao sujeito, 169 Cf. BERTI, 2002, p.7. 170 Cf. ANGIONI, 2012, p. 41. 171 Ibid., p. 56. 172 ARISTÓTELES, Segundos Analíticos, I 4, 73 a 35. 80 temos a definição, o gênero ou a diferença específica do sujeito. 2) Um segundo sentido ocorre quando um termo é atributo de outro e o inclui em sua definição. Entendemos melhor este caso quando lembramos que toda linha é reta ou curva, e os termos reto e curvo não podem ser definidos sem referência à linha. Neste segundo sentido, um predicado por si é uma propriedade ou uma disjunção que estabelece propriedades alternativas do sujeito. 3) O terceiro sentido pertence ao campo das proposições existenciais. Neste caso, algo é por si quando não é afirmado de outro sujeito, mas de si mesmo. Podemos constatar isto quando percebemos que os termos "branco" e "caminhando" implicam um sujeito distinto de si mesmo alguma coisa que seja branca ou caminhe. 4) Por fim, o quarto significado da expressão leva em conta a conexão entre uma causa e seu efeito, expressando a concomitância dos acontecimentos. Do exposto, pode-se afirmar que, enquanto os sentidos 1 e 2 estão compreendidos na formulação aristotélica do modo de conveniência entre o sujeito e o predicado, os sentidos 3 e 4 são utilizados apenas para dar uma explicação completa do significado de "por si" 173 . Por fim, quanto à exigência de que o predicado se relacione ao sujeito de forma universal, isto é necessário para demonstrar que "ele pertence a qualquer caso fortuito desse sujeito e que pertence a ele primariamente" 174 . Lucas Angioni explica que o universal é um atributo que se mostra verdadeiro a respeito de qualquer caso particular contido no sujeito de que se predica predicado 175 . Uma vez que no processo demonstrativo não basta que apenas o predicado seja necessariamente pertinente ao sujeito, mas que o seja também o termo médio, do qual depende a demonstração, torna-se claro que o termo médio também deverá ser necessário, devendo assim pertencer ao mesmo gênero dos termos extremos. Daí que, para haver demonstração, a relação estabelecida entre o gênero-sujeito e o predicado deve ser a mesma, ou seja, não se pode proceder demonstrativamente passando de um gênero-sujeito a outro. Esta transferência é, segundo Aristóteles, proibida e configura-se como a conhecida doutrina aristotélica da metábase. Percebemos, assim, que uma ciência demonstrativa universal é impossível segundo os moldes aristotélicos, pois cada ciência possui dois aspectos em comum: um 173 A exposição anterior sobre os significados compreendidos na expressão "por si" apoia-se fortemente nos dados oferecidos por Ross. Uma vez que a passagem é extensa, escolhemos apresentar apenas uma paráfrase. [Cf. ROSS, [s.d.], p. 57-58]. 174 Ibid., I 4, 73b 35. 175 ANGIONI, Lucas. O conhecimento científico no livro I dos Segundos Analíticos de Aristóteles. Revista de Filosofia Antiga. v.1, n. 2, p. 1-26, maio/out. 2007. p. 9. 81 termo-espécie que demarca o seu assunto e um conjunto de atributos que ela estuda 176 . A teoria do conhecimento científico em Aristóteles é um assunto em torno do qual diversos problemas estão relacionados. Alguns destacam a existência de uma assimetria entre o método científico proposto e a sua real utilização 177 . Jonathan Barnes chega a afirmar que não há em Aristóteles um único exemplo de demonstração; os exemplos reivindicados por ele são, antes, argumentos que chegam muito próximos à forma demonstrativa, porém não há exemplo perfeito 178 . Poderíamos ainda destacar o problema das ciências que constituem exceções à teoria aristotélica da demonstração científica, como é o caso das ciências subordinadas. Outro problema concerne ao modo preferível de entender a teoria aristotélica: devemos entendê-la como um sistema dedutivo axiomático compreendendo um conjunto finito de demonstrações, ou apenas como um modo de transmitir o conhecimento obtido? Independentemente do posicionamento a ser tomado, o que está muito explicito é a íntima relação existente entre a teoria do conhecimento científico e as matemáticas, particularmente a geometria 179 . Esta associação é expressa em quatro aspectos distintos: 1) grande parte dos números dos exemplos utilizados por Aristóteles são retirados do âmbito das matemáticas; 2) considerável parte de sua terminologia lógica pode ser derivada do vocabulário matemático em voga no seu tempo; 3) a matemática foi a única ciência na antiguidade que alcançou o status de procedimento rígido, o qual pode ter despertado em Aristóteles o interesse em axiomatizar a geometria; 4) desde Platão, no mínimo sempre houve uma íntima relação entre filosofia e matemática, sendo, pois, natural que um estudante nutrisse interesse por esta relação. Não seria, pois, de esperar que Aristóteles ignorasse essa tendência de havia muito existente 180 . 176 CODE, 2012, p. 51. 177 BARNES, Jonathan. Aristotle's theory of demonstration. Phronesis, v. 14, 1969. Extracted from PCI Full Text, published by Pro Quest Information and Learning Company. 178 BARNES, 1969, p. 124 Essa percepção foi algo marcante em sua interpretação, que constitui justamente uma tentativa de solucionar aquilo que ele julgou ser um impasse entre uma teoria altamente formalizada, de um lado, e uma prática muito inocente, de outro. 179 Esta relação entre a teoria da demonstração e a matemática torna-se mais perceptível ao levarmos em conta a tabela fornecida por Barnes a respeito dos exemplos utilizados por Aristóteles ao longo dos Segundos Analíticos. Temos os exemplos: Matemáticos Não-matemáticos Livro A 50 36 Livro B 19 46 Total 69 82. Apesar de ser ressaltada a proximidade entre a ciência demonstrativa e as matemáticas, Barnes adverte que essa relação não deve ser entendida de um modo tão radical que se configure como um isomorfismo (BARNES, 1969, p. 129). 180 BARNES, 1969, p. 128-129. Percebe-se claramente a extrema dependência de exemplos do âmbito da geometria nos Segundos Analíticos. Angioni, de fato, chega a dizer que Aristóteles "abusa das elipses", o que Ross já havia de antemão percebido. De fato, Ross argumenta em prol dessa relação através de uma 82 Retornando ao texto: Aristóteles deve ter-se apercebido das sérias exigências que fazia em relação ao conhecimento científico, pois, em seguida, comenta a respeito da dificuldade que encontrava em proceder demonstrativamente a partir de um sujeito, e isto de forma primária, por si mesma e universal. Mesmo tendo formalizado sua doutrina, Aristóteles faz menção a algumas ciências que procedem precisamente transferindo demonstrações de um gênero-sujeito a outro. A astronomia utiliza-se de demonstrações geométricas, a ótica demonstra por meio de teoremas geométricos; além disso, teoremas de proporção aritmética são aplicados aos sons. Mesmo frente a tais casos, ele não nega sua doutrina, mas reafirma-a, indicando que é precisamente pelo fato de serem mantidas relações entre os gêneros-sujeito destas ciências, que a transferência é possível. Ao expor a concepção aristotélica desta doutrina, Carlos Arthur Ribeiro Nascimento conclui que essas disciplinas constituíam um tipo de obstáculo para Aristóteles 181 e a menção a elas não era em função de si, ou seja, a passagem por elas era necessária a fim de esclarecer outro tema em questão, a saber, a ciência demonstrativa. Este grupo de ciências será mais adiante objeto de nosso estudo de forma mais detalhada, porém, no momento, limitamo-nos a investigar em que medida Tomás de Aquino adere à doutrina aristotélica. 3.1 O COMENTÁRIO DE TOMÁS DE AQUINO AOS SEGUNDOS ANALÍTICOS Uma vez que já abordamos algumas questões em torno da recepção dos Segundos Analíticos na Idade Média, devemos ter presente que a obra foi comentada e que, tanto a concepção de ciência como aqueles "casos inconvenientes de metábase" ali mencionados, foram objeto de análise por parte dos filósofos medievais e, especificamente, por Tomás de Aquino. O comentário de Tomás de Aquino aos Segundos Analíticos é uma exposição literal, portanto, "um comentário linha por linha, exaustivo, mas que não se afasta muito do texto original, já que o objetivo é mais didático do que filosófico, procura-se mais dar uma compreensão literal do texto do que discutir suas teses com alguma profundidade. comparação linguística e funcional entre os Elementos de Euclides e o modelo teorizado por Aristóteles. Julga que o verdadeiro mérito de Euclides não consiste em haver criado um sistema geométrico de dedução, mas em tê-lo sistematizado. A palavra axioma foi tomada do âmbito das matemáticas. Os axiomas de Aristóteles correspondem às noções comuns de Euclides e as hipóteses de Aristóteles assemelham-se aos postulados dos elementos (ROSS, [s.d.], p. 57-58). Opinião semelhante é defendida por Smith, segundo a qual a íntima relação existente entre o conhecimento demonstrativo e as matemáticas se dá pelo fato de que, tanto a aritmética quanto a geometria, no tempo de Aristóteles, já estarem sendo apresentadas como séries de deduções partindo de primeiros princípios básicos (cf. SMITH, 1995, p.81). 181 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Aristóteles e a metábase. Scintilla. Curitiba, v. 3, n. 2, p. 379-390, jul./dez. 2006. p. 389. 83 Diferentemente do seu comentário ao livro da Física, a obra possui um prefácio no qual encontramos uma reflexão em torno de alguns assuntos, dentre os quais se destacam os seguintes: 1) uma reflexão em torno da natureza da lógica 182 ; 2) uma proposta de divisão da lógica em várias partes; 3) a associação dos atos da razão com as operações naturais. Quanto à natureza da lógica, Tomás de Aquino destaca dois pontos: primeiro, que é uma arte racional, no sentido de ser orientada segundo a razão. No entanto este aspecto não é algo exclusivo da lógica, pois diz respeito a todas as artes humanas, ou seja, o ser orientada pela razão é uma propriedade comum e primária, e não exclusiva, de todas as artes. Mas, ao fato de a lógica ser orientada pela razão, tal como todas as artes humanas, deve-se acrescentar que ela tem o ato da razão como sua matéria própria, daí poder ser legitimamente chamada de "arte das artes". Tendo estabelecido esse primeiro ponto – que a lógica diz respeito aos atos da razão Tomás de Aquino infere um segundo, ou seja, que ela se divide segundo esses mesmos atos, os quais são, respectivamente: 1) a inteligência dos indivisíveis, ato responsável por inteligir o que a coisa é ; 2) a composição ou a divisão do intelecto, ato em que já ocorre o verdadeiro e o falso, distintamente do aspecto anterior, onde estava apenas em questão a essência da coisa; 3) o discorrer de um a outro / "raciocínio". Além disso, Tomás de Aquino interpreta que cada um desses atos é compreendido pela análise de Aristóteles nos seus escritos lógicos. Assim, na interpretação de Tomás de Aquino as Categorias se ordenam à inteligência dos indivisíveis, o De interpretatione referese à composição ou divisão do intelecto, e os demais escritos de lógica, ao ato de "discorrer de um a outro" 183 . Tomás de Aquino afirma também existir uma semelhança entre os atos da razão e os atos da natureza, porquanto a arte imita a natureza. E, reconhecendo três ações no 182 Embora o prólogo tome as expressões arte e ciência como sinônimas, a prioridade da lógica frente às demais ciências é ressaltada no mesmo prólogo, onde Tomás afirma ser ela "a arte das artes". 183 Apresentamos o texto de Tomás onde ele expõe sua tese: "Portanto, é preciso considerar as partes da lógica segundo a diversidade dos atos da razão. Ora, os atos da razão são três. Dos quais, os dois primeiros são atos da razão segundo esta é certo intelecto: uma ação do intelecto é, de fato, a inteligência dos indivisíveis ou incomplexos, segundo a qual se concebe o que é a coisa, e esta operação é chamada, por alguns, de informação do intelecto ou imaginação pelo intelecto; e a esta operação da razão se ordena a doutrina que Aristóteles trata no livro das Categorias. A segunda operação do intelecto é a composição ou divisão do inteligido, na qual já há verdadeiro e falso; e a este ato da razão se destina a doutrina que Aristóteles trata no livro Sobre a Interpretação (Pery Hermeneias). Ora, o terceiro ato da razão é segundo o que é próprio da razão, isto é discorrer de um a outro, tal que por aquilo que é conhecido se chegue ao conhecimento do que é ignorado; e a este ato se destinam os outros livros da lógica". A tradução aqui utilizada foi realizada pelo professor Anselmo Tadeu Ferreira, disponível em: FERREIRA, Anselmo Tadeu. A estrutura da Lógica segundo Tomás de Aquino. Educação e Filosofia Uberlândia, v. 25, n. 50, p. 445-474, jul./dez. 2011. p. 471-472. A proposta de que a lógica seja compreendida em lógica dos termos, das proposições e do raciocínio pretende relacionar cada uma destas partes com uma das operações do entendimento. Por meio da inteligência dos indivisíveis alcançamos um conceito ou termo; na composição e divisão, alcançamos uma proposição e no raciocínio alcançamos um argumento. 84 âmbito da natureza, que são, respectivamente, o necessário, o frequente e o erro ou a falha, identifica sua ocorrência também nos atos da razão. Daí afirmar que, com efeito, algum processo da razão conduz ao necessário, no qual não é possível haver falha quanto à verdade, e por esse tipo de processo da razão se adquire a certeza da ciência; mas há outro processo da razão no qual, no mais das vezes, se conclui o verdadeiro, contudo não há necessidade nisso; e há um terceiro processo da razão no qual a razão falha quanto ao verdadeiro, por causa de algum defeito do princípio que devia ser observado ao raciocinar 184 . Após essas identificações, Tomás de Aquino esclarece que seu comentário se deterá particularmente na parte judicativa da lógica, a qual se preocupa antes de tudo com o juízo propriamente dito. Em seguida, reconhece uma dupla divisão no livro: a primeira, trata da necessidade do silogismo demonstrativo, e a segunda, compreende um veredicto sobre o silogismo. A necessidade do silogismo científico aparece como uma resposta àqueles que defendem que o conhecimento se baseia sempre em conhecimento prévio. A posição de Aristóteles é oposta, pois defende que apenas parte de nosso conhecimento é obtido de outro já existente. A análise tomasiana começa reconhecendo um aspecto polêmico do posicionamento de Aristóteles em relação ao defendido na antiguidade por Platão. De fato, embora diversos postulados aristotélicos a respeito do conhecimento científico tenham provindo de Platão, alguns foram rejeitados pelo Estagirita, a exemplo da teoria das ideias 185 . Na discussão posterior Tomás de Aquino se aplica a explicar em que medida deve ser entendida a extensão do conhecimento prévio e, uma vez que o conhecimento científico é constituído por três componentes os princípios, o sujeito e o atributo próprio-, é a eles que se estende o conhecimento prévio. Porém, o conhecimento desses três componentes do conhecimento científico está diretamente relacionado com outras duas questões, a saber: se cada um é e o que cada um é. A partir disso, temos que de um princípio não conhecemos o que ele é, mas apenas se o fato é verdadeiro; quanto ao atributo próprio, é possível conhecermos o que é, sem, no entanto, conhecermos se ele existe; por fim, o sujeito pode ser conhecido tanto no que é, quanto em relação ao se ele é. A partir da lecture 4, Tomás de Aquino passa a comentar a natureza do silogismo demonstrativo, o qual pode ser entendido a partir do seu fim, o de produzir conhecimento científico, pois a demonstração é silogismo que produz ciência. Conhecer alguma coisa cientificamente é conhecê-la perfeitamente, o que implica tanto a ideia de completude, como 184 FERREIRA, 2011, p. 28. 185 DÜRING, Ingemar. Aristóteles: exposición e interpretación de su pensamiento. 2. ed. Coyoacán/ México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990. p. 156-157. 85 ressalta Tomás de Aquino, quanto o conhecimento da relação existente entre a causa e o efeito 186 . Assim, conhecer cientificamente é tanto o fim do silogismo demonstrativo quanto o seu resultado. O objeto procurado pelo conhecimento científico através da demonstração é uma conclusão na qual, um atributo próprio ao mesmo tempo, seja predicado de algum sujeito e a conclusão inferida a partir dos princípios 187 . Temos que as proposições de uma demonstração são a causa da conclusão, devendo por isso ser elas primeiro e mais bem conhecidas. Após destacar que podemos considerar as noções de "primeiro" e "mais bem conhecidas" de dois modos, a saber, tanto em referência a nós quanto à natureza, Tomás de Aquino procura explicar uma aparente contradição entre os Segundos Analíticos e os dados presentes na Física I: enquanto os Segundos Analíticos afirmam que os princípios dos quais a demonstração procede são primeiros em relação à natureza e posteriores quanto a nós, a Física deixa transparecer a ideia de que os universais são primeiros em relação a nós e posteriores em relação à natureza. Portanto, enquanto segundo os Segundos Analíticos universal é o que está mais distante dos sentidos, segundo a Física, universal é o que está mais próximo e se conhece primeiro. Tomás de Aquino chama a atenção para a necessidade de distinguir as diferentes perspectivas numa e noutra obra. Enquanto na primeira (os Segundos Analíticos) privilegia-se a ordem do singular para o universal pois esta é a ordem do próprio conhecimento sensível e intelectivo em nós (o conhecimento sensível é anterior ao intelectivo, mas guarda estreita relação com ele), na segunda perspectiva (a da Física), privilegia-se a ordem do universal, do mais universal para o menos universal, mas não de modo absoluto. Na Física, portanto, o mais universal é primeiro e mais bem conhecido em relação a nós, a exemplo de animal e homem. Ainda que ambos os textos estejam sob perspectivas distintas, eles podem ser compreendidos a partir de uma passagem da Suma Contra os Gentios, que leva em conta a necessidade "de se fazer a distinção entre o que é simplesmente evidente por si mesmo e o que é evidente quanto a nós. Com efeito, acontece ao nosso intelecto estar em relação às verdades evidentíssimas como a coruja, em relação ao sol" 188 . Em seguida, Tomás de Aquino reserva espaço para esclarecer que o princípio de uma demonstração é precisamente uma proposição imediata, aquela que não possui nenhuma anterior a ela. A proposição imediata 186 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Translated by Fabian. R. Larcher. With a Preface by James A. Weisheipl. Albany: MAGI BOOKS, 1970, Bk 1 Lec 4 p 15. 187 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle.Bk 1 Lec 2 p 7. 188 AQUINO, Tomás de. 1996. vol. II. p. 34-35. 86 não possui anterioridade, por estar o predicado incluído na noção do sujeito e por ser ela conhecida em função de si mesma. Distinguem-se dois tipos de proposições imediatas: o primeiro é a position [thesis] da qual se diz ser imediata por não poder ser demonstrada, devendo apenas ser aceita; o segundo tipo é a máxima, que deve ser compreendida como verdadeira por serem seus termos entendidos. Tomás de Aquino remete então à Metafísica, tomando como exemplo o princípio de não-contradição 189 . Quanto à position, distingue nela duas subdivisões: ela pode ser uma suposição ou uma definição. Enquanto a primeira (a suposição) simplesmente supõe uma certa condição para que algo seja ou não de determinado modo, a segunda não supõe, mas afirma que algo é. Temos em seguida a exclusão de dois erros, o problema do retorno ad infinitum e o da demonstração circular. Após haver discutido sobre o que é um silogismo demonstrativo, a partir da lecture 9, Tomás de Aquino dá uma explicação a respeito da natureza dos componentes que o constituem 190 . Ter ciência demonstrativa é orientar-se em função de uma demonstração; em outras palavras, nós a temos através de uma demonstração. Assim, a conclusão de uma demonstração não é apenas necessária, ela se faz conhecida em função de uma demonstração. A conclusão segue, pois, de coisas necessárias, mais especificamente, da relação entre os componentes do silogismo. Tomás de Aquino acredita que os requerimentos no modo de predicação de per se, de omni e universale entre o sujeito e o predicado são, de fato, cumulativos. É objetiva e esclarecedora a explicação da seguinte passagem por Anselmo Ferreira, o qual nos diz que tudo que se predica de algo per se também se predica de omni, mas não o inverso, e tudo o que se predica primo universale de algo também se predica per se, mas não o inverso. A diferença entre esses três modos é que o predicado de omni é o mais genérico, cabe a tudo o que esteja contido sob a denominação do sujeito; já o predicado per se se diz por comparação ao próprio sujeito ao qual inere e deve fazer parte de sua definição ou o sujeito fazer parte da sua. Já o predicado se atribui primo universaliter a um sujeito em comparação ao que é anterior ao sujeito e o contém. Nem todo predicado que se atribui universalmente, portanto, preenche todos os requisitos necessários de universalidade que será a característica das proposições do silogismo demonstrativo; tal universalidade liga-se ao fato de que o conhecimento científico deve ser necessário 191 . 189 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lec 5 p 21. 190 A lecture 9-25 do comentário está analisando os capítulos 4-13 dos Segundos Analíticos, e constitui uma unidade, tendo como objeto o silogismo demonstrativo. Anselmo Ferreira identifica nela três etapas; 1) uma breve retomada da definição do silogismo científico; 2) uma explicação sobre o sentido das palavras que expressam a forma de relação a ser mantida entre o sujeito e o predicado (per se, de omni e universale); 3) a natureza dos princípios a partir dos quais se dá o silogismo científico (Cf. FERREIRA, 2011, p. 107). 191 Cf. FERREIRA, 2008, p. 108-109. 87 Percebemos que a questão primordial na explicação dada por Tomás de Aquino é ressaltar tanto o caráter de necessidade quanto o de universalidade requerida na relação entre os termos que compõem um silogismo demonstrativo, para que se tenha legitimamente a demonstração. Pois, se a relação entre os termos for acidental, o conhecimento das causas também o será, invalidando desta forma o processo demonstrativo. Uma vez que se julga estabelecido como se devem compreender as três exigências do caráter predicacional realizadas por Aristóteles, Tomás de Aquino reserva, a partir da lecture 13, uma organização do texto que versará sobre os princípios do silogismo científico, ou seja, os itens a partir dos quais a demonstração procede. Essa divisão compreende um duplo aspecto, que remete à clássica distinção entre o conhecer, quia (o quê) e o propter quid (o por quê) do fato. De início, enfatiza-se que aquilo que é predicado per se de uma coisa, está nela de modo necessário. Isto é comprovado ao tomarmos em consideração um dos modos da predicação per se, aquele segundo o qual aquilo que é predicado está compreendido ou incluído na definição do sujeito; por isso, tudo que é predicado de alguma coisa e se encontra em sua definição, é predicado dela necessariamente 192 . Isto é evidente, pois, se tudo quanto é predicado de uma coisa, o é de modo necessário ou contingente, e a demonstração não se dá acidentalmente, pois neste caso não teríamos conhecimento da causa. Impõe-se então que a conclusão provenha de uma predicação necessária. De fato, na demonstração um atributo próprio é provado de um sujeito através de um meio (causa pela qual algo é o que é), que é justamente a sua definição. A definição desempenha um papel primordial, visto que ela tem por função manifestar-nos a essência ou a natureza de uma coisa, o que ela é. Sendo assim, o meio através do qual a demonstração ocorre deve ser necessário, porquanto ele é a causa explicativa da predicação que ocorre; por isso "não se pode demonstrar uma conclusão necessária a partir de um mediador contingente, pois, uma vez removida a causa pela qual (propter quid) algo é, deve cessar o efeito", e desta forma não estaremos mais em posse de uma demonstração 193 . A parte seguinte do texto está diretamente relacionada à proibição de metábase por Aristóteles. É a oportunidade de verificar em que medida a análise realizada por Tomás de Aquino realiza está em consonância com a posição expressa no texto por ele comentado. Eileen Serene tem destacado que, embora seja possível afirmar de maneira geral que o "ideal aristotélico de ciência demonstrativa" tem recebido veredicto favorável das maiores figuras da 192 AQUINAS, Thomas.Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lec 13 p. 43. 193 Cf. FERREIRA, 2008, p. 123. 88 filosofia medieval 194 , essa aceitação obscurece em grande parte os diversos relatos realizados a respeito desse assunto, tanto no que diz respeito aos fundamentos da ciência demonstrativa quanto ao seu alcance. Segundo Eileen, isso se deve a que, [...] na exposição da teoria de Aristóteles, os autores medievais tipicamente a interpretavam e criticavam à luz de suas próprias concepções e doutrinas; por exemplo, suas análises das exigências de que as premissas de um silogismo demonstrativo fossem verdadeiras, necessárias e certas, invocam várias concepções de verdade, necessidade e certeza 195 . A autora destaca ainda que a fidelidade de um filósofo medieval à doutrina aristotélica da ciência demonstrativa se dá nos seguintes tópicos: 1) a interpretação das exigências para um silogismo demonstrativo; 2) a relação entre ciência demonstrativa e outros tipos de conhecimento; 3) a possibilidade de alcançar uma ciência demonstrativa da natureza 196 . Foi precisamente o segundo tópico que levantou grandes questões, pois, embora a doutrina aristotélica gozasse de aceitação geral, ela requeria uma análise detalhada, visto que ocasionava um certo impasse na forma de se entender a teologia. Ora, se apenas o conhecimento estritamente dedutivo pode ser caracterizado como científico, a teologia, na medida em que tem por base a fé na revelação divina, não poderia ser entendida como ciência. Esse dilema, que foi objeto de investigação por parte de muitos filósofos medievais, mereceu também lugar especial na análise de Tomás de Aquino, tornando-se uma preocupação constante ao longo de seu pensamento, estando presente desde o seu opúsculo juvenil o De Trinitate, até as obras da maturidade e, particularmente, no seu Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos. O professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro descobre um avanço na teoria da metábase exposta por Tomás de Aquino, quando comparada à apresentada por Aristóteles. O avanço está em que, enquanto Aristóteles apenas constata os casos, Tomás de Aquino esforça-se por explicar como é possível a passagem de um gênero a outro. Desde o início, Tomás de Aquino 194 Diz-se que a expressão "ciência demonstrativa" é ambígua, designando, por um lado, o efeito que ocorre em um indivíduo que compreende os silogismos demonstrativos, estando assim relacionada a um aspecto psicológico em um indivíduo: por outro lado designa um sistema de silogismos que se encontram concatenados segundo uma determinada relação lógica, tal como expõe Aristóteles nos Segundos Analíticos. Para a exposição acima comentada (cf. CHLMP, 1982, p. 496-517). 195 CHLMP, 982, p. 496. "In expounding Aristotle's theory, medieval authors typically interpret and criticise it in the light of their own conceptions and doctrines; for example, their treatments of the requirements that premisses of demonstrative syllogisms be true, necessary, and certain invoke various views of truth, necessity and certainty". 196 Ibid., p. 497. "Thus the import of a philosopher's allegiance to the ideal of demonstrative science varies according to his position on at least three topics: (1) the interpretation of the requirements for a demonstrative syllogism; (2) the relationship between demonstrative science and other sorts of knowledge; and (3) the possibility of attaining a demonstrative science of nature". 89 mostra um interesse especial pela singularidade metodológica daquelas ciências que praticavam a metábase, as assim chamadas "ciências intermediárias" 197 . No seu opúsculo Sobre a Trindade, a resposta de Tomás de Aquino está diretamente relacionada à doutrina da subalternação das ciências. O Aquinate distingue duas formas pelas quais uma ciência está compreendida sob outra. A primeira se dá quando o sujeito de uma ciência específica é também parte de outra. Isso acontece porque a determinação pela qual o objeto é sujeito de determinada ciência pode não ser tomado em outra ciência, sendo ele, desta forma, compreendido por outra ciência. Para explicar isso, Tomás de Aquino recorre à relação entre a ciência natural e a botânica. Num segundo caso, uma ciência está sob uma outra numa relação de subalternação, quando "na ciência superior se determina o porquê daquilo de que na ciência inferior só se conhece o quê" 198 . Portanto, Tomás de Aquino propõe que uma ciência compreende uma outra mediante duas vias distintas: primeiro, recorrendo ao âmbito do sujeito, na medida em que a determinação própria do objeto a partir da qual este é classificado em certa ciência, pode ser tomada de diferentes maneiras; segundo, apelando para o âmbito da ciência em si, na medida em que o alcance epistêmico da ciência subalternada restringe-se ao âmbito do quê, enquanto o da subalternante concerne à determinação do porquê. Este modelo reaparece com uma pequena modificação no Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos 199 , onde é afirmado que 197 NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Boletim do CPA. Campinas, n.1, jan./jun. 1996. p. 31. 198 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1, ad 5m 199 Quando Tomás de Aquino escreveu o seu comentário aos Segundos Analíticos, por volta de 1270, havia 6 traduções da obra, sendo 4 a partir do grego e 2 a partir do árabe. O texto comum na Idade Média foi a versão de Tiago de Veneza, feita antes de 1259. Esta esteve em uso durante a segunda metade do século XII e início do século XIII. Outra versão muito influente deve-se a Michael Scott, juntamente com o comentário de Averróis. Essa obra foi escrita aproximadamente entre 1220 e 1240. Essas duas traduções eram familiares a Tomás, mas provavelmente este depende da versão de Moerbeke, da segunda metade do século XIII. Tomás se utiliza de comentários já existentes para a confecção de seu comentário dos Segundos Analíticos (no caso, os de Temístio, Averróis, Roberto Grosseteste e Alberto Magno). Gauthier afirma que Tomás comentou a tradução de Tiago de Veneza até o capítulo 26 do livro I e, daí em diante, utilizou a tradução de Guilherme de Moerbeke (cf. FERREIRA, Anselmo Tadeu. O conceito de ciência em Tomás de Aquino: uma apresentação da Expositio Libri Posteriorum (Comentário aos Segundos Analíticos). Campinas: UNICAMP, 2008. 286 f. Tese (doutorado em filosofia) Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, 2008. p. 38). Gerardo de Cremona traduziu tanto os Segundos Analíticos quanto uma paráfrase de Temístio sobre a referida obra. Outro comentário disponível na época em que Tomás escreve e que poderia ter sido conhecido e lido por ele é o comentário médio de Averróis, na tradução de Guilherme de Luna, de 1230. Segundo Anselmo, não era possível que Tomás tivesse conhecido e lido o comentário de Averróis e, embora ele não cite expressamente o bispo de Lincoln (Roberto Grosseteste), não se pode afirmar que ele não tenha utilizado o comentário deste, embora seja provável, uma vez que Grosseteste segue bem de perto o Temístio, que é retomado por Alberto Magno. A paráfrase de Alberto Magno aos Segundos Analíticos parece ter sido a grande fonte de Tomás de Aquino. Como fonte secundária, possivelmente tenham sido utilizados os Elementos de Euclides, segundo indicação de Gauthier. Embora os Elementos de Euclides sejam posteriores a Aristóteles, os inúmeros exemplos da teoria geométrica de que Tomás se utiliza nos Segundos Analíticos são naturalmente interpretados por Gauthier como tirados da geometria euclidiana. Trata-se, porém, de uma versão latina de Euclides, cuja 90 [...] uma ciência está sob uma outra de duas maneiras. De um primeiro modo, quando o sujeito de uma ciência é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, assim como o animal é uma espécie do corpo natural, e por isso a ciência dos animais está sob a ciência natural. De outro modo, quando o sujeito da ciência inferior não é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, mas o sujeito da ciência inferior se compara ao sujeito da superior como o material em relação ao formal 200 . A ideia que permeia este texto é a de estabelecer o tipo de relação existente entre as ciências no âmbito da subalternação porquanto o texto do De Trinitate não falava em termos de espécie, mas apenas em partes da ciência. No primeiro caso, tem-se uma relação de inclusão pela espécie; no segundo, uma relação de semelhança, na medida em que a ciência superior determina princípios sobre a inferior. Observa-se que há, no primeiro caso, uma relação de gênero-espécie e que se continua no mesmo gênero da ciência superior, enquanto, no segundo caso, se evidencia uma relação material-formal entre as ciências, e o gênero é o mesmo apenas "de uma certa maneira", pois ocorre uma descida a outro gênero. Tomás de Aquino dedica a lecture 15 do seu comentário aos Segundos Analíticos à explicação da proposta aristotélica de que não é possível, no processo de demonstração, proceder por meio da passagem de um gênero-sujeito a outro. Destaca, assim, que a demonstração não parte de princípios comuns ou estranhos ao gênero-sujeito, mas de princípios próprios, por si. Notemos que tanto Aristóteles quanto Tomás de Aquino compreendem a geometria como modelo de procedimento demonstrativo, razão pela qual, logo em seguida, observa o Aquinate: [...] visto que uma demonstração é a partir daquelas coisas que são por si, está claro que a demonstração não consiste na descida ou passagem de um gênero a outro, como a geometria, demonstrando a partir de seus próprios princípios, não desce a algo na aritmética 201 . Mesmo sendo a geometria e a aritmética ramos abstratos da matemática, é interditada a alternância de princípios de demonstração. A geometria demonstra a partir de seus próprios princípios, permanecendo desta forma no mesmo gênero-sujeito. Uma vez estabelecida a necessidade de permanecer no mesmo gênero para que ocorra a demonstração, história ainda não pôde ser rigorosamente contada. A redação da obra situa-se provavelmente entre 1272 e 1274. Para uma exposição geral sobre diversos aspectos textuais da obra (cf. FERREIRA, 2008, p.23-46). 200 A tradução acima foi realizada pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro Nascimento e encontra-se em NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 32. 201 AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lect 15 p. 50. "He says therefore first (75a38) that "inasmuch as demonstration is from things that are per se, it is plain that demonstration does not consist in descending or skipping from one genus to another, as geometry, demonstrating from its own principles, does not descend to something in arithmetic". 91 segue-se um comentário a respeito dos elementos presentes em uma demonstração, a saber: a conclusão, o axioma do qual a demonstração procede e, por fim, o gênero-sujeito cujos atributos próprios e acidentes a demonstração por si revela 202 . Tomás de Aquino realiza então uma distinção com respeito aos três elementos citados anteriormente. Destaca que pode acontecer que o axioma do qual a demonstração procede seja o mesmo em demonstrações diversas ou até em ciências diversas. Isso, no entanto, parece ser afirmado das ciências que estão no mesmo gênero, porquanto, em seguida, temos uma menção às ciências cujos gêneros-sujeito são distintos. Mais uma vez é negada a passagem de gêneros. O exemplo utilizado é novamente a relação entre a aritmética e a geometria. Faz-se, porém, uma observação sobre uma possível passagem entre gêneros: "a menos que por acaso o sujeito de uma ciência estivesse contido sob o sujeito de outra 203 ". Como isto é possível, não se diz de imediato, mas afirma-se que será dito depois. Em seguida, em relação aos gêneros, diz-se apenas que é preciso que eles sejam os mesmos de alguma maneira. É necessário esclarecer quando de fato permanecemos no mesmo gênero. É justamente a esta questão que a lição 15 pretende responder: Ora, é preciso saber que se admite que um mesmo gênero é pura e simplesmente o mesmo quando, da parte do sujeito, não é tomada alguma diferença determinante que seja estranha à natureza desse gênero; [...]. Mas, trata-se de um gênero sob um certo aspecto quando é tomada alguma diferença estranha à natureza desse gênero; assim como o visual é estranho ao gênero da linha e o som é estranho ao gênero do número. [...]. Donde ser patente que, quando se aplica à linha visual o que pertence à linha pura e simples, dá-se de certo modo uma descida a um outro gênero; não, porém, quando se aplica ao triângulo isósceles o que pertence ao triângulo 204 . Dessa argumentação temos que, quando uma ciência não é uma espécie de outra ciência, mas estão ambas em gêneros diferentes, é possível tomar alguma diferença extrínseca à natureza do gênero da ciência superior e aplicar sobre ele determinações, tornando-se possível "uma descida a outro gênero". Vemos assim que Tomás de Aquino tem uma caracterização mais positiva da metábase do que Aristóteles. Esta modificação do sistema era 202 Cf. Ibid., Bk 1 Lect. 15 p. 50. 203 Cf. AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle. Bk 1 Lect 15 p.57.[...] unless perchance the subject of one science should be contained under the subject of the other [...]. "a menos que por acaso o sujeito de uma ciência estivesse contido sob o sujeito de outra" 204 A tradução da passagem foi retirada de NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 33. 92 fundamental para Tomás de Aquino poder atribuir à teologia o caráter de ciência, o que já foi bem indicado por diversos autores 205 . Tomás de Aquino também reconhece que as ciências se distinguem a partir do modo de demonstrar suas conclusões, pois enquanto "a matemática não demonstra senão pela causa formal, a metafísica principalmente pela causa formal, final e também pela causa agente. A da natureza [ciência], no entanto, por todas as causas" 206 . Ora, a matemática lida com necessidade absoluta, enquanto que a Física lida com uma necessidade suposicional. A necessidade em ambas as disciplinas é compreendida distintamente: enquanto a primeira leva em consideração apenas as causas internas (matéria e forma), a última considera tanto as causas internas quanto as externas (agente e finalidade). Em outras palavras, enquanto a matemática demonstra propriamente a partir da essência ou causa formal do objeto, a ciência natural demonstra a partir das causas material, formal, eficiente e final. Willian Wallace julga que existe na matemática uma dupla necessidade; a necessidade de inferência ou consequência (necessitas consequentiae), e a necessidade de conclusão ou consequente (necessitas consequentis). Na física, por sua vez, não há uma necessidade consequente, pois o fim resultante de um processo natural nunca é automaticamente seguro. Lembremos que na natureza o fim é regularmente (não necessariamente) alcançado 207 . Enquanto Aristóteles 205 Este avanço percebido na teoria de Santo Tomás provém tanto de sua grande capacidade intelectual quanto de sua habilidade em sistematizar e se beneficiar das análises de outros filósofos. Exemplo típico disto é que, no Comentário de Grosseteste aos Segundos Analíticos, ele "introduz três elementos não constantes do texto de Aristóteles, que serão presentes na discussões posteriores. 1) a designação das ciências em questão por subalternante (superior) e subalternada (inferior). 2) A distinção e relacionamento entre o sujeito da ciência superior e inferior por meio da condição acrescentada; Grosseteste não se contenta, como Aristóteles, em dizer que as duas ciências têm o mesmo sujeito de um certo modo – o sujeito da subalternada é o mesmo da subalternante, com uma condição acrescentada. 3) Grosseteste precisa e esclarece por que a demonstração da ciência subalternada não é do por quê mas do quê: ela não fornece a causa (física) do que se passa na reflexão". Tomás se beneficiou destes e outros pontos presentes na obra de Grosseteste (cf. NASCIMENTO. Carlos A. R. Roberto Grosseteste: Física e matemática. Educação e filosofia. Uberlândia, v. 23, n. 45, p. 201-228, Jan./Jun. 2009. p. 211-212). O professor Dr. Carlos Arthur tem destacado este ponto em diversos trabalhos seus. É possível encontrar neles a indicação de que outros estudiosos também perceberam esta manobra de Tomás. Uma pequena lista com alguns desses trabalhos encontra-se na parte final da presente dissertação reservada às referências. 206 AQUINO, Tomás de. Comentário à Física de Aristóteles. Lectio I, 1, nota 12. Trad. de Carlos Arthur (obra inédita). Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 02.07.2014. Esta concepção está clara em Tomás de Aquino, e não se deve reivindicar o texto em De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 1., onde apenas é dito que 'as demonstração naturais partem dos efeitos sensíveis". Pois essa passagem não se propõe a diferenciar as ciências em função das diferentes causas tomadas no processo demonstrativo, mas apenas em comparar a Metafísica e a Física a partir do alcance epistêmico; daí mencionar ele o âmbito da demonstração do quê e do porquê. Tomás reconhece uma gradação no rigor com o qual a demonstração é realizada pelas diversas ciências. Elas possuem uma maneira de demonstrar específica (não exclusiva), pois "alguma maneira de demonstrar [destaque nosso] é encontrada em todas as artes, caso contrário elas não seriam ciências" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle.Bk 1 Lect 1 p. 6 | Then (71a3). Porém, a matemática sempre foi concebida como exemplo desse rigor inerente ao conhecimento científico. 207 WALLACE, Willian A. St Thomas's conception of natural philosophy and its method. Disponível em: <http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aversa/scholastic/>. Acesso em: 12.08.2013, p. 13. Wallace, nesse artigo, se opõe à 93 defendia que a demonstração no âmbito da ciência natural fosse feita ex hupotheseos, Tomás de Aquino apoiando-se em Alberto Magno, refina essa ideia e defende que nessa ciência a demonstração deve ser geralmente feita ex suppositione finis. Assim, deve ser aceito que o fim da natureza será, para a maior parte dos casos, regularmente alcançado, ainda que isso não ocorra com necessidade matemática que garanta a sua realização. Podemos resumir os dados advindos de nossa discussão ao longo do presente capítulo. A física e a matemática foram compreendidas por Tomás de Aquino como ciências distintas e cada uma delas privilegia causas distintas a partir das quais demonstram suas conclusões. Embora o Aquinate tenha mantido um tom geral de concordância com a doutrina aristotélica da proibição de transgressão da unidade entre o gênero-sujeito no procedimento demonstrativo (metábase), percebe-se um desenvolvimento desta doutrina em Tomás de Aquino. Pois ele não apenas reconheceu casos em que existe esta passagem de um gênero a outro, tal como fez o Estagirita, mas também argumentou em função de mostrar como isso era de fato possível. Além do mais, o vínculo ou ponto de intersecção entre a física e a matemática também é reconhecido no âmbito da doutrina do conhecimento demonstrativo, tal como o fora na classificação das ciências. De fato, o contato entre as duas ciências mencionadas anteriormente está marcado pelo alcance epistêmico de suas demonstrações. Assim, devemos em seguida investigar em que medida Tomás de Aquino teorizou e se era de fato compatível ou não com seu pensamento o uso da matemática na descrição do mundo físico. Isto será investigado levando em conta dois pontos alcançados até agora ao longo de nosso trabalho, a saber: por um lado, a crença tomista de que a física e a matemática são distintas, e, por outro, que elas possuem um ponto de intersecção, não estando assim totalmente destituídas de relações, particularmente no contexto das ciências intermediárias. idéia de que, não havendo uma necessidade absoluta no âmbito da física ela seja ciência apenas de modo hipotético. Assim, o fato de que as demonstrações da física estejam sob a perspectiva ex hupotheseos, não implica que ela não seja ciência, mas sim que um modo distinto de demonstrar lhe é próprio. 94 4 A RELAÇÃO ENTRE FÍSICA E MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO ARISTÓTELES Não há dúvida de que se deve atribuir à Aristóteles um lugar na história da ciência ocidental, e, mais particularmente falando, no longo processo de matematização da realidade física. Porém, existe uma considerável discussão em saber qual a forma correta de entendermos esse lugar ocupado por ele. De forma geral, existem duas possíveis interpretações; em primeiro lugar, encontramos alguns estudiosos que julgam ter sido a teoria aristotélica da metábase um grande obstáculo ao progresso das ciências físico-matemáticas; em segundo lugar, temos alguns estudiosos do assunto que não constatam um antagonismo entre a rígida noção de conhecimento científico defendida por Aristóteles e o incentivo do uso da matemática na ciência natural, o aparente tom de oposição seria apenas decorrente de uma compreensão errônea dos textos do Estagirita que abordam o assunto. A partir dessas duas opiniões, buscaremos de início determinar qual é, segundo o nosso entendimento, a melhor forma de interpretar a postura de Aristóteles quanto ao uso da matemática na realidade sensível. E, para alcançarmos tal objetivo, buscaremos entender a exposição do Estagirita sobre as ciências que já possuíam em seu tempo o caráter de ciências "físico-matemáticas" e tendo-as sempre no contexto da doutrina aristotélica do conhecimento científico e da metábase, expostas anteriormente. Nos Segundos Analíticos são três os principais capítulos em que Aristóteles menciona a relação entre as ciências físicas e o uso que elas fazem dos princípios matemáticos. O tema está presente nos capítulos VII, IX, XIII. Entre esses capítulos, o mais importante, onde se encontra a discussão aristotélica sobre o uso da matemática na física, é o capítulo VII dos Segundos Analíticos. Nele existe uma análise da demonstração científica. É justamente em uma passagem deste capítulo que encontramos a famosa proibição de Aristóteles. Ele afirma que "não é possível demonstrar uma coisa passando de um gênero a outro, digamos demonstrar uma proposição geométrica por meio da aritmética" 208 . Se, por um lado, ocorre essa forte negação de que sejam transpostos os princípios de uma ciência para outra no processo demonstrativo, também é verdade que Aristóteles reconhece que isto de fato acontece. Levando em conta todo o capítulo VII, alguns pontos se destacam ao longo de sua argumentação: 1) a proibição de transposição dos princípios de um gênero-sujeito para outro 208 ARISTÓTELES. Analíticos Posteriores. In: Aristóteles. Órganon. VII, 75a 40. 95 no processo demonstrativo; 2) o reconhecimento de que algumas disciplinas realizam esta transposição; 3) as condições específicas que possibilitam a algumas ciências essa passagem entre gênero-sujeito distintos (quando são subordinadas); 4) nem todas as ciências podem fazer essa passagem, apenas um grupo bem seleto 209 . Conhecemos a exigência de Aristóteles de que o gênero-sujeito entre as ciências seja o mesmo, isso também determina a unidade da ciência. De fato, este requerimento era muito importante, pois, mesmo no contexto da doutrina da metábase, se ocorre a transferência, está suposto que o gênero é o mesmo, de "algum modo". Interessante é o fato de que Aristóteles não se esforçou em explicitar as condições pelas quais deveria considerar que eles são um mesmo gênero de algum modo, isso apenas é suposto como certo. Assim, a ideia que permeia o texto consiste em que, se é possível transgredir, isso só ocorre porque o gênero é o mesmo de algum modo e, consequentemente, não estamos mais falando em uma transgressão de modo absoluto. Esse esquema geral encontrado pode ser complementado, ou melhor, compreendido levando em consideração o capítulo XIII da mesma obra, pois lá encontramos uma análise mais pormenorizada de como é possível ocorrer aquela "exceção à regra" do mesmo gênero-sujeito, por parte de algumas ciências. Nesse capítulo a exigência do Filósofo de que os gênero-sujeitos estejam associados um sob o outro será relacionado com o alcance epistêmico das ciências, ou seja, com o conhecimento do quê e do porquê. Logo no início do capítulo, Aristóteles faz uma distinção concernente ao conhecimento: de um lado, deve-se considerar o conhecimento de um fato e, de outro, deve-se considerar o conhecimento da razão desse fato. Assim, está explícita a famosa distinção entre conhecer o quê e conhecer o porquê de um determinado fato, evento, propriedade, relação, etc. Mais tarde os medievais fizeram essa distinção a partir dos seus termos latinos, quia e propter quid. Essas noções apresentadas por Aristóteles recebem ainda um acréscimo em dois contextos diferentes, pois ele nos diz que é necessário distinguir o conhecimento do quê e do conhecimento do porquê tanto na mesma ciência quanto em ciências diferentes. 209 Estes quatro aspectos que mencionamos encontram-se dispersos no texto, no entanto eles são estritamente próximos. De fato, Aristóteles menciona ao longo deste capítulo cada um desses dados. Quanto ao primeiro ponto, ele noz diz que "não é possível demonstrar uma coisa passando de um gênero a outro" (75a 35); o segundo aspecto encontra justificativa em sua afirmação de que, como esta transferência é possível, será explicado posteriormente no que toca a alguns casos" (75b 5). Encontramos o terceiro ponto na parte do texto onde é reconhecido que "As únicas exceções são as proposições da harmonia que são demonstradas pela aritmética" (76a 10); e, por fim, o quarto ponto está no reconhecimento de que apenas um número reduzido de ciências escapa à regra geral de sua teoria da demonstração científica, "Entretanto, a demonstração não é aplicável a um gênero distinto, exceto na condição que explicamos das demonstrações que se aplicam às proposições da mecânica ou da ótica e as demonstrações aritméticas às proposições da harmonia" (76a 20-25). 96 Em sua exposição Aristóteles começa por analisar esta distinção epistêmica no caso das mesmas ciências. São enumeradas duas situações: 1) quando a conclusão não é tirada de premissas imediatas; 2) quando a conclusão não é tirada da causa [própria]. Para exemplificar melhor estas condições ele mostra como isso ocorre em uma demonstração. No caso em questão, ele toma a demonstração de que os planetas estão próximos porque não cintilam. Tomando letras representativas de objetos e predicados, ele mostra como se poderia estabelecer uma relação de predicação entre eles. Em seu exemplo, adota o seguinte esquema representativo: Ccorresponde a planetas Bequivale a não cintilar Aindica estar próximos Tomando esse esquema representativo, Aristóteles nos diz que é correto predicar B de C, ou seja, os planetas não cintilam. Mas, também é correto predicar A de B: temos assim que aquilo que não cintila está próximo. Ora, independentemente disso ser suposto ou assumido quer por indução, quer por percepção sensorial, é possível construir um silogismo com a seguinte estrutura: Os planetas não cintilam O que não cintila está próximo Logo, os planetas estão próximos Devemos notar que esse silogismo, no entanto, possui a estrutura apenas do quê, pois ele nos diz apenas o fato que 'os planetas estão próximos', ele não demonstra a razão do fato enquanto tal. Daí, afirmar o Filósofo que não é porque os planetas não cintilam que estão próximos, mas porque estão próximos é que não cintilam. Se levarmos em conta a diferenciação por ele estabelecida no início do capítulo, também podemos construir um silogismo do porquê deste silogismo. Levemos em consideração o seguinte esquema representativo: Ccorresponde a planetas Bequivale a estar próximo Aindica não cintilar Podemos, então, relacionar B e C, o que nos dá a proposição "os planetas estão próximos". Por sua vez, A se aplica a B, o que está próximo não cintila. E, por fim, A se aplica a C, ou seja, os planetas não cintilam. Temos assim o seguinte silogismo: 97 Os planetas estão próximos Ora, o que está próximo não cintila Logo, os planetas não cintilam. A partir desta estrutura silogística podemos perceber que a razão do fato enquanto tal é demonstrada, e isto deve-se ao termo médio ter sido invertido com o termo maior, pois eles são recíprocos. Esse mesmo modelo pode ser tomado para mostrar a esfericidade da lua. Em seguida o Estagirita passa a analisar o segundo caso em que ocorre a distinção entre conhecer o quê e o porquê na mesma ciência. Esse caso ocorre quando aquilo que não é causa é mais conhecido do que a própria causa, e nesses casos, uma vez que a causa não é enunciada, a demonstração estabelece apenas o fato, e não a razão deste. Para deixar isso claro, Aristóteles toma o exemplo da demonstração de que a parede não respira. Semelhantemente ao exemplo anterior, podemos utilizar as seguintes letras representativas: Acorresponde a animal Bequivale a respiração Crepresenta parede. Se é verdadeiro que A se aplica a todo B (pois tudo que respira é animal), isso implica que A não se aplica a nenhum C ( a parede não é animal) e tampouco B se aplica a algum C (a parede não respira). O argumento fica exposto da seguinte maneira: Tudo que respira é animal Ora, a parede não é animal Logo, a parede não respira 210 . Estes dois exemplos mencionados pelo Filósofo ocorrem na mesma ciência e em função da posição ocupada pelo termo médio. Enquanto, no primeiro caso, este pode não ser tomado como a causa própria, sendo possível, no entanto, intercambiá-lo com o termo maior, no segundo caso, ele é enunciado de forma muito remota, longínqua. Em seguida Aristóteles mostrará como se distinguem o conhecimento de um fato e o conhecimento da razão deste fato em ciências distintas, onde uma está sob a outra. Essa parte possui para nós particular importância, pois é onde encontraremos uma discussão mais 210 Apesar de sua zoologia ser complicada, isso não obscurece a percepção de que as causas tomadas na explicação do exemplo por ele adotado são longínquas. O exemplo da parede que não respira porque não é animal é compreendido adequadamente apenas dentro da zoologia de Aristóteles onde somente os animais de sangue quente possuem sistemas respiratórios. Desta maneira, esta não é a causa de não respirar porque há, segundo Aristóteles, animais que não respiram (cf. NASCIMENTO, Carlos A. R. Aristóteles e a metábase. SCINTILLA. Curitiba, v. 3, n. 2, p. 378-390, jul./dez. 2006. p. 386). 98 pormenorizada daquelas ciências que transgridem a proibição de metábase. No final do capítulo, sua análise se voltará para as ciências que não estão uma sob a outra. De início, Aristóteles busca mostrar que aquela distinção por ele realizada entre conhecer o quê e o porquê, ocorre em ciências distintas pelo fato dos sujeitos dessas ciências manterem entre si uma determinada relação. Segundo o Filósofo, essa relação é de subordinação entre os seus sujeitos. Desta maneira, a diferença entre conhecer um fato e a razão desse fato em ciências distintas se fundamenta no princípio de que os sujeitos de algumas ciências estão subordinados aos sujeitos de outras ciências. Algo interessante que devemos perceber na formulação do Estagirita consiste em que não diz que os sujeitos são subordinados e por isso se relacionam, mas sim que eles estão a tal ponto relacionados que, em função disto se subordinam. Em seguida, ele lista os casos particulares das ciências nas quais ocorre subordinação entre os seus sujeitos. Afirma Aristóteles que Isso é exato no que concerne a todos os sujeitos que estão de tal modo relacionados que um se subordina a outro, como é a relação dos problemas óticos com a geometria plana, dos problemas mecânicos com a geometria dos sólidos, dos problemas harmônicos com a aritmética e do estudo dos fenômenos celestes com a astronomia 211 . Menciona-se que a íntima relação que os sujeitos dessas ciências mantêm entre si é destacada até mesmo pela designação que elas recebem, pois são praticamente sinônimos os seus respectivos nomes. Em seguida ele atribui o alcance epistêmico da distinção feita por ele anteriormente: "compete aos que reúnem dados sensoriais conhecer o fato e aos matemáticos determinar a razão" 212 . Levando em conta essa sua afirmação podemos perceber que as ciências que possuem os seus sujeitos subordinados aos de outras ciências ficam restritas ao conhecimento do quê, ao passo que as outras ciências, no caso em questão, a matemática, conhece o porquê do fato. Dois pontos se destacam; 1) o conhecimento do matemático pertence ao âmbito do porquê, em função dele ser capaz de demonstrar as causas; 2) não existe inclusão no âmbito do conhecimento, ou seja, ainda que o matemático conheça o porquê, isto não implica que ele também saiba o quê. Esta teorização de Aristóteles na qual os sujeitos de uma ciência estão subordinados aos de outras ciências levou em conta o objeto da matemática como subordinando os demais sujeitos daquelas ciências mencionadas por ele. Esta subordinação implica que a demonstração utilizada por estas ciências recorrem aos princípios matemáticos. Temos nesse momento uma singularidade, pois, ainda que as demonstrações matemáticas 211 ARISTÓTELES. Analíticos Posteriores. In: Aristóteles. Órganon. VII, 79a 1. 212 Ibid., VII, 79a 5. 99 independam de um ente concreto, pois elas lidam com as formas, as ciências que por sua vez possuem seus sujeitos subordinados aos sujeitos matemáticos levam em conta as formas matemáticas enquanto concretizadas na matéria sensível e, por conta de sua subordinação, tomam os princípios matemáticos para as suas demonstrações em questão, ou seja, elas circunscrevem suas demonstrações a um substrato particular. Esta mesma ideia é expressa pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro nos seguintes termos: "nas disciplinas que se colocam sob as disciplinas matemáticas e que, portanto, são as disciplinas matemáticas as que estão aptas a demonstrar as propriedades em questão" 213 . Por fim, Aristóteles comenta no texto casos em que as ciências são diferentes, não estando assim uma sob a outra. Toma como exemplo o conhecimento entre o médico e o geômetra. Ora, as feridas circulares cicatrizam mais lentamente do que as demais, o médico sabe disto por meio da experiência, ou seja, ele sabe apenas o quê, ao passo que a razão deste fato é dada pelo matemático, apenas ele sabe o porquê disto acontecer. O geômetra sabe que o círculo é uma figura geométrica que possui segmentos que não se aproximam, e, visto que a ferida circular é uma circunferência, logo neste tipo de ferida os segmentos não estão próximos, dificultando assim o processo de cicatrização. Podemos perceber que, dentre as quatro diferentes maneiras mencionadas pelo Estagirita entre conhecer o quê e o porquê apenas a terceira se relaciona diretamente com a questão das ciências físico-matemáticas. Daquilo que estudamos ao longo do capítulo XIII dos Segundos Analíticos, concluímos que Aristóteles reconhece que determinadas disciplinas guardam uma relação entre si, digamos, uma relação de subordinação entre os seus sujeitos, para sermos mais específicos. É justamente esse vínculo de subordinação entre elas que possibilita a distinção epistêmica realizada por ele. Sua argumentação tomou um caminho bem específico, pois ele argumenta que não é em função de sua subordinação que elas se relacionam, mas ao contrário, é em função de estarem relacionados que se subordinam. Ora, se a primeira opção estivesse presente no texto isto daria margem a pensar que a distinção entre eles ocorre em função apenas de uma perspectiva epistêmica. Porém, como encontramos a segunda opção, isto nos possibilita pensar a questão em aspectos propriamente ontológicos. Sendo assim, a divisão entre o quê e o porquê, em ciências distintas que estão uma sob a outra, particularmente aquelas que transgridem a metábase, decorreria da própria constituição ontológica desses entes, pois os seus princípios contêm um elemento comum 214 . 213 NASCIMENTO, 2006, p. 388. 214 É bem verdade que esta relação já havia sido anunciada no capítulo IX, porém ela não foi desenvolvida em seus pormenores; ali apenas é dito que "as proposições da harmonia que são demonstradas da mesma forma, 100 Reconhecemos que o tema que nos dedicamos a investigar nessa breve discussão possui dificuldades inerentes. Daí, ser compreensível a divergência entre vários estudiosos do pensamento aristotélico. Ora, enquanto de um lado temos eruditos como Aubenque e Solmsen defendendo que o predomínio da concepção aristotélica da demonstração científica pelos filósofos medievais se constituiu em um entrave à possibilidade de desenvolvimento do uso da matemática em solucionar problemas físicos, estudiosos como Oswaldo Porchat e Lucas Angioni acreditam que de forma alguma a postura de Aristóteles era incompatível com a utilização da física no âmbito da ciência natural. Essa falsa impressão decorreria apenas de uma compreensão errônea dos textos do Filósofo. Desta maneira, levando em consideração tanto alguns estudos dos autores acima mencionados como as nossas próprias leituras, acreditamos ser possível extrair as seguintes conclusões: Em primeiro lugar, está fora de questão que o Filósofo reconheceu a existência de disciplinas que possuíam uma posição específica dentro da estrutura geral das ciências. Elas mostravam que o âmbito físico e o natural não estavam totalmente desvinculados 215 . Em segundo lugar, temos a tentativa de Aristóteles em explicar o fato de que algumas ciências parecem contradizer sua teoria da demonstração e, consequentemente a proibição da metábase 216 . Em terceiro lugar, o modo pelo qual Aristóteles buscou explicar aqueles casos mas com esta diferença, a saber, que enquanto o fato demonstrado pertence a uma ciência distinta (uma vez que o gênero subjacente é diferente), os fundamentos do fato pertencem à ciência superior à qual os predicados pertencem per se" (76a 10). 215 É bem verdade que o próprio caráter destas ciências é matéria controversa entre os estudiosos. Alguns julgam que, apesar de serem elas físicas e tomarem princípios matemáticos em suas demonstrações, isso não invalida o caráter primariamente físico delas (cf. PEREIRA, Oswaldo Porchat. Ciência e dialética em Aristóteles. São Paulo: UNESP, 2001. p. 222). No entanto, preferimos complementar os dados com a exposição de Aristóteles na Física, onde elas são mencionadas pela designação "as mais naturais dentre as matemáticas", indicando assim a natureza primariamente matemática delas, ainda que se aproximem do âmbito natural. 216 Neste ponto as coisas se complicam um pouco mais quando levamos em conta a argumentação tanto de Porchat quando de Angioni. Ora, Porchat se esforça em mostrar que as ciências físico-matemáticas não se constituem em casos específicos de exceção à proibição feita pelo Filósofo. Além disso, ele busca reduzir o âmbito de aplicação da doutrina da metábase, tornando a passagem feita por aquelas determinadas ciências menos radical, pois em última instância o gênero seria o mesmo. Outro procedimento realizado por ele em seu texto consiste em extrair conclusões implícitas na obra comentada, os Segundos Analíticos. Por fim, propõe que é o caráter ontológico dos entes matemáticos que os permite serem usados em fenômenos naturais. Assim, a matemática poderia ser usada ao menos para explicar as propriedades quantitativas dos corpos naturais. Em uma bela passagem de sua obra ele afirma que "E se, desse modo, uma vez mais se delineia, com grande clareza, o estatuto das ciências físicas matemáticas dentro do sistema aristotélico das ciências, também se apontam os fundamentos da matematização do mundo físico: é a própria natureza dos mesmos seres matemáticos – tal como o filósofo os concebe – que explica a possibilidade de um estudo matemático dos fenômenos físicos. Com efeito, o mesmo fato de não terem os seres matemáticos uma realidade "separada", mas de, tão-somente, constituírem propriedades das coisas físicas que a "separação" matemática faz passar ao ato, permitindo, destarte, a constituição de uma ciência que, em si mesmos, os considera, torna também possível uma "extensão da aplicação matemática aos objetos físicos ou naturais na medida em que a quantidade os afeta". As partes matemáticas da física permitem-nos, então, reintegrar no mundo físico sua "verdade" matemática, que as matemáticas puras, isoladamente, conheceram" (PEREIRA, 2001, p. 222). De fato, não acreditamos que esta interpretação de Pereira contradiga o modo pelo qual entendemos todo o 101 específicos dá margens a interpretações opostas, daí encontrarmos entre os estudiosos leituras divergentes deste tópico. Em quarto lugar, devemos salientar que, mesmo sendo possível mostrar em Aristóteles uma posição favorável ao uso da matemática no âmbito natural, isso é feito por meio de um esforço exegético, ou seja, a leitura mais simples dos textos indica que ele proibiu a passagem para um gênero-sujeito diferente, mas reconheceu que algumas disciplinas fazem justamente isso. Suas breves referências àquelas ciências, portanto, consistiram em justificar aqueles casos por ele comentados em que uma ciência está sob outra, mostrando que elas não transgridem a sua regra absolutamente falando. Se existe passagem, é porque o gênero é o mesmo, de alguma maneira. Mas o modo como isso é formulado deixa transparecer uma incompletude na análise e não faz menção direta da possibilidade de passagem para outros casos além daqueles mencionados por ele. Sendo verdade que, tomando alguns pontos presentes na obra do Filósofo, é possível defender o uso da matemática na ciência natural (acreditamos que isso apenas é possível por meio de vários malabarismos hermenêuticos que forçam em demasiado a obra do autor), também não deixa de ser verdade que ele de forma alguma incentivou esta perspectiva. Não há sombra de dúvida de que Aristóteles nutriu um grande respeito à matemática; de fato, ele nunca negou a validade nem tão pouco a utilidade dela no estudo da natureza. Ele mesmo estava notoriamente consciente das discussões e desenvolvimentos que ela estava sofrendo em seus dias. Ele percebeu e notou que o uso da matemática, particularmente nos segmentos da astronomia, óptica, harmônica e mecânica, mostravam-se muito eficientes e proveitosos na compreensão de vários fenômenos naturais. Mas, investigar exaustivamente o motivo pelo qual isso acontecia nunca foi sua pretensão, o que nos exime de maiores explanações sobre o tópico. Sendo assim, concluímos que Aristóteles reconhece uma ligação entre as ciências físicas e as matemáticas, particularmente no âmbito da astronomia, harmônica, óptica e, no problema em questão. Mas, também é verdade que esta sutil interpretação não se encontra teorizada ou proposta de forma clara pelo próprio Aristóteles como uma forma de resolução da dificuldade que ele analisou. Lucas Angioni, por sua vez, ainda que concorde com a conclusão de Oswaldo Porchat, busca complementá-la por meio de outros argumentos. Ele propõe dividir o problema central do texto em unidades menores para que, em função disto, as respostas a serem extraídas da obra do Estagirita sejam direcionadas para cada um destes problemas em questão. Ele formula as três questões seguintes; 1) Se Aristóteles admitia a possibilidade de matematizar certos fenômenos naturais; 2) se porventura ele julgava possível o uso dos princípios matemáticos como causas auxiliares e condições necessárias nas explicações de certos fenômenos físicos; 3) se ele admitia a possibilidade de reduzir todo fenômeno natural a princípios matemáticos. A conclusão de Lucas Angioni é que apenas para o terceiro caso a resposta do Filósofo foi negativa. Não reconstruiremos toda a sua argumentação em seus detalhes, basta notarmos que seu procedimento para chegar a essa conclusão consistiu em conceder ênfase à noção de acréscimo e subtração dos objetos na consideração das ciências (cf. ANGIONI, Lucas. Aristóteles e o uso da Matemática nas Ciências da Natureza. In: WRIGLEY, M.; SMITH, P. (org.). O filósofo e sua história: uma homenagem a Oswaldo Porchat. Campinas: CLE/UNI CAMP, 2003, vol. 36, p. 207-237, p. 218). 102 mínimo,em alguns segmentos da mecânica, mas esta relação não se encontra totalmente desenvolvida 217 . Ele deixa margens a algumas interpretações divergentes, e percebe-se no texto uma tensão entre dois pólos: reconhecer aquelas ciências que procedem de forma singular ou reafirmar as condições que especificam o conhecimento científico enquanto tal, mais precisamente, sua doutrina do conhecimento e demonstração científica. 4.1 A RELAÇÃO ENTRE A FÍSICA E A MATEMÁTICA SEGUNDO TOMÁS DE AQUINO Os contextos intelectuais nos quais o pensamento do Estagirita e do Aquinate se desenvolveram não são os mesmos. Este último, vivendo vários séculos depois do primeiro, beneficiou-se dos diversos avanços das discussões científicas e filosóficas que ocorreram ao longo do tempo. Podemos tomar dois caminhos diferentes para investigar qual a compreensão de Tomás de Aquino sobre a relação entre a física e a matemática. Em primeiro lugar, poderíamos isolar os textos nos quais esta relação é mencionada. Neste particular, seria necessário distinguir os casos em que a relação é mencionada em função de si, daqueles casos em que o tema possui caráter secundário, pois o assunto em questão é outro, mas alguma menção sobre aquelas ciências está presente. Em segundo lugar, poderíamos tomar a obra de Tomás de Aquino em seu aspecto mais amplo e inserir a compreensão da relação entre as ciências nesse contexto. Acreditamos que nenhum desses dois modos se mostram exaustivos se tomados isoladamente. Portanto, entendemos que a melhor forma de investigar o tema seria tomá-los mutuamente complementares. Buscamos isto em função de responder às 3 seguintes perguntas formuladas por Weisheilp sobre o Aristotelismo de Alberto Magno e Tomás de Aquino: 1) Que lugar a matemática ocupou nos ramos do pensamento?; 2) Que tipo de assistência poderia a matemática dar para a solução de problemas físicos?; 3) Que tipo de explicação científica pensavam esses filósofos que a matemática poderia oferecer para os fenômenos naturais? 218 217 Mesmo na época de Aristóteles já eram notáveis os avanços que a matemática conseguiu realizar. De fato, ela se constituiu como um sistema organizado no qual a certeza era obtida tomando em consideração apenas alguns princípios não demonstráveis. Exemplo típico disto é a sistematização da geometria por Euclides. Além do mais, não parece coerente supor que o sucesso explicativo alcançado pela descoberta de várias leis hidrostáticas por Arquimedes e o desenvolvimento da óptica por Ptolomeu foram fatos que simplesmente não chamaram a atenção de vários filósofos. Esses eram fatos conhecidos do Estagirita, mas, ao que tudo indica, parece que esses avanços não extasiaram a ponto de dedicar-se inteiramente a teorizar sobre eles. 218 WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 58. 103 Em uma passagem do De Trinitate, Tomás de Aquino argumenta em prol de dois aspectos que permitem que as ciências guardem relação entre si. No primeiro caso, as ciências guardam relações entre si na medida em que o sujeito de uma delas é também parte de outra ciência. No segundo caso, as ciências guardam uma relação entre si no âmbito da teoria da subalternação. Devemos estar atentos e perceber que a subalternação envolve a ideia de dependência, subordinação e aplicação de uma ciência a outra. Assim, se levarmos em conta apenas um desses aspectos, ele não exprime a subalternação em sua totalidade, ou seja, nem todo caso de subordinação entre as ciências implica que elas sejam subordinadas. Cabe ainda mencionar que a subalternação das ciências pode ocorrer em função de dois modos: em função de seus princípios ou em função de seus objetos 219 . É possível argumentar em favor de um vínculo entre a física e a matemática se levarmos em consideração os dois modos mencionados por Tomás de Aquino pelos quais as ciências guardam vínculo entre si? De fato, ao afirmar que as ciências possuem uma relação entre si na medida em que o sujeito de uma delas é também parte do sujeito de uma outra, transparece a crença de que as ciências gerais, que tomam o seu sujeito com poucas determinações, incluem as particulares (ao menos em alguns casos, pois o Aquinate reivindica o exemplo entre a planta e a física). O modo desta inclusão parece ser pela maneira como seus sujeitos são tomados, pois, no exemplo acima mencionado, o que distingue a ciência da planta da ciência da natureza é o modo de consideração: enquanto na primeira ciência o objeto é considerado de modo mais restrito, na segunda ciência prevalece uma análise geral sobre os princípios determinantes do mesmo sujeito. Sendo assim, poderíamos pensar que a física e a matemática guardam um vínculo a partir dessa compreensão Tomista? Interpretando o texto, acreditamos que a resposta é negativa, pois, antes de tudo, devemos perceber que a relação reivindicada por Tomás de Aquino nessa primeira parte, ou seja, que o sujeito de uma ciência, sendo parte também de uma outra, remete ao mesmo tipo de ciência teórica, ou seja, a física, ele não reivindica em prol dessa relação a totalidade das ciências especulativas da física, matemática e metafísica, pelo contrário, ele se restringe em específico a apenas um dos âmbitos desse grupo, o natural, e destaca essa relação de inclusão no interior desse âmbito. Além do mais, a expressão da qual ele se utiliza está no singular: "quando seu sujeito é uma 219 MULLAHY, Bernard I. Thomism and Mathematical Physics. Dissertation presented to the faculty of philosophy of Laval university to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.1946, p.133. Weisheilp diz que, para o homem medieval, uma ciência subalternada é aquela que tem um campo especial de investigação, porém precisa dos dados de uma ciência mais alta para solucionar seus problemas básicos. (Cf.WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 25). 104 parte do sujeito desta 220 ". Isso indica que as relações de inclusão não são pensadas aqui como sendo amplas o suficiente a ponto de incluírem ou transporem os limites de divisão entre as ciências teóricas. Sendo assim, ao menos no que diz respeito ao âmbito de inclusão das ciências como sendo parte de outra, a relação não permite pensar no uso da matemática na física segundo os moldes expostos nessa passagem do De Trinitate. Alguém não satisfeito com essa constatação poderia levar a discussão para outro ponto, a saber, a unidade entre os sujeitos da física e da matemática. Ora, é bem conhecida a postura de Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino em negar autonomia ontológica aos entes matemáticos. Estes são obtidos por meio do modo de consideração do intelecto que separa as propriedades que pertencem a eles. A partir disso, pode-se argumentar que, em última instância, temos apenas um objeto, o natural, e os objetos matemáticos surgem pelo modo de consideração específico com o qual o intelecto institui o seu objeto, a saber, por meio da abstração. Argumentar segundo esses moldes, nos parece razoável e até mesmo interessante, porém, tomando por base a nossa leitura, parece ser infundado atribuir semelhante interpretação a Tomás. O máximo que se pode dizer é que ela não se encontra em oposição à postura dele quanto aos objetos matemáticos 221 . Retornemos ao segundo modo de inclusão das ciências, mencionado por Tomás de Aquino, ou seja, a doutrina de subalternação, Tomás de Aquino afirma: Uma ciência está compreendida sob uma outra como subalternada a ela, isto é, quando na ciência superior determina-se o porquê daquilo que na ciência inferior só se conhece o quê, assim como a música está colocada sob a aritmética. Podemos perceber que Tomás de Aquino se valeu do nível ou alcance epistêmico de uma ciência para teorizar sobre o modo de relação entre elas. Da passagem acima, depreende-se dois pontos: 1) nem todas as ciências possuem o mesmo conhecimento das propriedades e relações causais, pois, enquanto algumas ciências conhecem o quê, outras, por sua vez, conhecem o porquê do fato a ser explicado; 2) algumas ciências são subordinadas, daí a recorrência da relação entre a música e a aritmética. Podemos perceber que Tomás de Aquino não retira maiores conclusões disso ao longo da passagem, nem tão pouco dedica partes significativas do texto para explicar o fato em questão, e nem ainda explana em maiores detalhes o exemplo por ele utilizado. 220 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, p. 107 221 Esta foi a interpretação exegética da doutrina da metábase proposta por Porchat. Ele buscava com isso mostrar que a passagem para outro gênero-sujeito, no caso, da física e da matemática, consistia em última instância em um modo de considerar distintamente os mesmos objetos (Cf. PEREIRA, 2000, p.221-222). Deixando de lado os pormenores de sua análise, parece-nos ser possível defender este ponto, mas com a ressalva de que não o encontramos explicitamente em Aristóteles. Sendo assim, ele é muito mais uma reflexão nossa do que propriamente alguma sugestão do Filósofo presente no texto. 105 Dentre os vários âmbitos nos quais a matemática poderia ser aplicada a questões físicas temos o do movimento. De fato, Tomás de Aquino apenas teorizou, ou melhor, se mostrou favorável à possibilidade do uso da matemática para a descrição do movimento, porém não retirou daí maiores implicações. Isso, segundo ele, seria possível pelo de 'o movimento participar de algo da natureza da quantidade'. Essa participação do movimento no gênero da quantidade ocorre no sentido de que a divisão do movimento pode ser tomada tanto do meio onde ele ocorre, ou seja, o espaço, quanto do objeto que o realiza, ou seja, o móvel. Independentemente de qual desses modo seja tomado, observamos que a análise do movimento dentro desse esquema se familiariza com os seus aspectos físicos. Daí, afirmar Tomás que, "não cabe ao matemático considerar o movimento, mas os princípios matemáticos podem ser aplicados ao movimento 222 ". Percebemos assim, que embora ele tenha se mostrado favorável nesse ponto, não retirou dele maiores conclusões, não encontramos nenhuma teorização mais demorada sobre esta possibilidade. Talvez isto lhe parecesse uma tarefa intelectual não viável, pois ele compartilhava de uma física que priorizava os aspectos qualitativos dos entes, ao invés dos quantitativos. No texto seguinte, Tomás de Aquino mais uma vez se mostra favorável ao uso da matemática na ciência natural. O ponto que fundamenta sua crença nesta possibilidade leva em consideração um princípio por ele aceito: "o que é mais geral engloba o mais simples". Afirma o Aquinate: [...] o que é simples e suas propriedades se salva nos compostos, embora de outro modo, assim como as qualidades próprias dos elementos e os movimentos próprios deles se encontrem no misto; mas o que é próprio dos compostos não se encontra no que é simples. Daí procede que, quanto mais alguma ciência é abstrata e considera algo mais simples, tanto mais seus princípios são aplicáveis às outras ciências. Donde, os princípios da matemática serem aplicáveis às coisas naturais, não porém o inverso; pelo que a física pressupõe a matemática, mas não o inverso [...] 223 . Prevalece assim a argumentação guiada por este postulado inicial de Tomás de Aquino que ele não se preocupou em deduzi-lo e nem tão pouco justificá-lo. O caráter metafísico dele está patente, talvez este princípio pressuposto por ele possibilite pensar a relação entre as duas ciências no seguinte modo; uma vez que a matemática é mais simples que a física, as propriedades inerentes À matemática, a saber, as relações numéricas e dimensionais, se salvam, ou, em outras palavras, se conserva nos entes concretos. Esse modo 222 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, Ad. 5. p. 125. 223 Ibid., Ad. p. 126 106 faz sentido, pois se a matemática trata como vimos anteriormente, de qualidades dos entes físicos que são isoladas pelo intelecto por meio da abstração, indicando assim que ela lida com formas (simples), podemos então pensar que os objetos físicos, na medida em que são compostos, decorrem do resultado da combinação de matéria e forma. Assim, os entes naturais são formas acrescidas de matéria, mas a forma mesma é simples; daí a forma (simples) é acrescida de matéria e constitui o sínolon, o qual é composto. Portanto, aquilo que é simples (a forma) se salva no composto (os entes concretos); em outras palavras, as propriedades matemáticas de relações numéricas e dimensionais se salva, ou são conservadas nos entes físicos. Por isso é possível utilizar esses princípios matemáticos nos entes naturais; é possível porquanto eles já estão lá, porém acrescidos de matéria, mas ainda assim conservando aquelas mesmas propriedades. De fato, na mesma passagem após reconhecer a legitimidade da tríplice divisão das ciências especulativas Tomás menciona a característica das ciências intermediárias, elas 'aplicam os princípios matemáticos às coisas naturais'. Devemos notar algo interessante ainda no contexto da tríplice divisão da ciência especulativa: ele parece restringir os entes concretos que são capazes de serem descritos matematicamente. Afirma Tomás de Aquino que, "os entes móveis e incorruptíveis, por causa de sua uniformidade e regularidade, podem ser determinados no que se refere a seus movimentos, pelos princípios matemáticos, o que não se pode dizer dos móveis e corruptíveis 224 ". Ora, sendo levado em consideração este texto, isso implicaria que a descrição matemática alcançaria ao menos os entes da região supralunar, segundo a clássica cosmologia aristotélica. É notório, na passagem exposta acima, que Tomás de Aquino está ressalvando a legitimidade da descrição matemática no âmbito das ciências intermediárias, pois o que está em foco é a discussão no âmbito da astronomia. A possibilidade de uso é aqui pensada em função da uniformidade com que os corpos celestes realizam seus movimentos e, embora não esteja expresso no texto alguma ideia referente à lei de regularidade do movimento dos astros, esta não é incompatível com ele. Porquanto o movimento desses corpos implica no fato de que eles se dão segundo uma determinada periodicidade capaz de ser expressa em termos matemáticos. Poderíamos então perguntar: e os entes físicos e corruptíveis não são capazes de serem expressos em relações matemáticas ou segundo leis regulares de movimento? Levando em conta apenas a passagem do texto em questão, aparentemente ele nega isso por alguns motivos, dentre os quais mencionamos: 1) o que está em questão é o caráter próprio da 224 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, p. 127, nota 8. 107 astronomia, daí o texto focar sobre o seu objeto específico de estudo, os corpos celestes; 2) o texto tem como foco a regularidade, e o fato de negar uma descrição matemática aos entes corruptíveis parece se dar porque eles não possuem aquela regularidades dos corpos celestes; enfim, não é dito que eles não podem ser descritos matematicamente, o que se diz é que o movimento deles (não regular) não pode ser descrito segundo tais parâmetros; 3) ele não se expressa em termos de quaisquer movimentos tais como; lançamento de projéteis ou velocidades de corpos em determinados espaços de tempo; ele se refere apenas aos movimentos regulares. Desta forma, os entes físicos de nossa experiência cotidiana que estão sujeitos aos processos de geração e corrupção não seriam capazes de ser descritos matematicamente. Devemos lembrar que isso não invalida a percepção de que as ciências intermediárias fazem uso da matemática e, de fato, o seu uso se expressa em aspectos rígidos de leis, e.g., a lei da proporção dos sons. Mas, não encontramos menção ao uso indiscriminado dos princípios matemáticos por outras ciências além daquelas em que já estamos familiarizados ao longo dos textos de Tomás de Aquino. Assim, está fora de questão discutir se Tomás de Aquino compreendia que a física e a matemática possuíam um ponto de contato entre si, pois "algo de matemático é assumido nas [ciências] naturais 225 ". A partir dos textos apresentados anteriormente está claro que ele reconhece tanto no âmbito sublunar quanto no supralunar o emprego da matemática nessas duas esferas de entes distintos. Apenas não está exposto o motivo pelo qual esta simultaneidade no uso dos princípios existe em ambas as regiões. Em geral esta relação é pensada segundo o modo matéria e forma, "o que é físico é como que material e o que é matemático é como que formal". Essas considerações anteriores nos permitem contextualizar melhor aquelas questões anteriormente formuladas por Weisheilp. Para responder ao questionamento inicial que consistia em saber que lugar a matemática ocupou nos ramos do pensamento filosófico de Tomás de Aquino, seria bom retomarmos um pouco aquilo que discutimos no capítulo 2 deste trabalho. Embora nunca tenha sido dedicado um livro ao tratamento exclusivo das entidades matemáticas, ela ocupa um lugar de destaque ao longo de suas discussões sobre outros temas. Nos textos em que a menção à matemática ocorre, predomina uma consideração a seu respeito enquanto modelo de rigorosidade demonstrativa; ela é vista enquanto ciência de rigor. Além do mais, ela também é pensada como uma ciência superior a partir de sua dignidade, pois, sendo uma das ciências 225 AQUINO, Tomás de. De Trinitate, 1999, p. 134. 108 especulativas, é uma ciência nobre que não se subordina a algum fim externo a ela. Sua dignidade não remete a determinada funcionalidade. Por fim, é reservada para ela certa autonomia no interior do sistema do Aquinate, isto na medida em que lhe é atribuída tanto uma metodologia específica quanto determinados objetos de investigação, ainda que estes últimos não sejam compreendidos como autônomos no aspecto ontológico. A partir disto podemos então buscar uma resposta ao segundo problema levantado por Weisheilp: que tipo de assistência poderia a matemática dar para a solução de problemas físicos? Responder a este tópico é difícil, pois, como vimos, o pensamento do Aquinate expressa certo antagonismo; se, por um lado, acredita-se que as entidades matemáticas guardam autonomia entre si, por outro lado, também se reconhece que elas possuem um ponto de conexão expresso nas ciências intermediárias. Lembramos que esse impasse, que é perceptível ao longo das obras de Tomás de Aquino, provém de sua principal fonte filosófica, pois os próprios textos de Aristóteles carregam essa tensão. Weisheilp identifica que parte desse impasse derivou do fato de os Segundos Analíticos serem tomados como uma base lógica para uma teoria física geral da natureza durante a Idade Média 226 . De forma geral, podemos dizer que as passagens que encontramos mencionando essa relação não expressam uma reflexão de Tomás de Aquino sobre uma complementaridade da matemática, e mais particularmente a astronomia à física, mas sim formas distintas de demonstrar as suas conclusões. Para tentar responder a essa questão poderíamos nos apoiar nas citações de Tomás de Aquino quanto à astronomia (considerada enquanto disciplina matemática) e à física. Ora, a astronomia ao tomar em consideração o céu e suas partes, reconhece na matemática o instrumental capaz de investigá-lo. Mas esta investigação, por sua vez, possui dois pontos característicos; o modo diferente pelo qual o físico e o astrônomo demonstram as mesmas conclusões; e a natureza hipotética dos sistemas astronômicos conhecidos até então. Afirma Tomás de Aquino: O físico prova a Terra ser redonda por um meio, o astrônomo por outro: o último prova isto por meio da matemática, e.g., pela forma dos eclipses ou alguma coisa do tipo, enquanto o primeiro o prova por meio da física, e.g., pelo movimento dos corpos pesados em direção ao centro, e assim por diante 227 . 226 WEISHEILP, 1959, p. 26. 227 "The physicist proves the earth to be round by one means, the astronomer by another: for the latter proves this by means of mathematics, e.g. by the shapes of eclipses, or something of the sort; while the former proves it by means of physics, e.g, by the movement of heavy bodies towards the center, and so forth". (AQUINO, Tomás de. Summa theologica. Q 54 A 2 Rp 2 / Reply OBJ 2: Ia-IIae). Esta mesma ideia já havia sido exposta na mesma obra, de forma mais simples. "Pois, o astrônomo e o físico ambos podem provar a mesma conclusão: 109 Dentre as inúmeras vezes que encontramos este exemplo, em nenhuma delas está expressa alguma ideia de complementaridade entre as ciências; o que recebe ênfase é apenas a diversidade dos meios através dos quais elas demonstram o mesmo fato. O segundo aspecto marcante na relação entre a física e a astronomia, segundo a crença de Tomás de Aquino, é expresso no caráter hipotético desta última. O professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro assim resume a questão: São Tomás encontrava-se diante de dois sistemas: o de EudóxioCalipo-Aristóteles e o de Hiparco-Ptolomeu. Que se faça a tentativa de explicar as irregularidades dos movimentos planetários por meio das esferas concêntricas à Terra (primeiro sistema) ou recorrendo aos excêntricos (segundo sistema), isto de modo algum quer dizer que os movimentos reais dos planetas se produzem conforme essas suposições. Com efeito, estas são apenas um artifício que nos permite reencontrar a regularidade e fazer os cálculos astronômicos 228 . que a Terra, por exemplo, é redonda, o astrônomo por meio da matemática (i.e., abstraindo da matéria), porém o físico por meio da própria matéria". "For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself" (AQUINO, Tomás de. Summa theologica Ia, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2m. (FP Q 1, A 1, Rp 2/ reply obj 2). De fato, este entendimento de Santo Tomás perpassa todas as suas obras. É possível encontrar já em seu comentário às Sentenças a defesa de que "o astrônomo e o estudioso da natureza mostram a redondeza da terra através de termos médios diversos" (AQUINO, Tomás de. In II sententiarum, dist. Q. 2, a. 2., ad 5m). A mesma argumentação é encontrada em um escrito do período maduro do seu pensamento. Diz-nos Tomás no Comentário à Física: "Pois os filósofos naturais tratavam da forma do sol e da lua e da terra e de todo o mundo. E estes são tópicos que chamaram a atenção dos astrônomos. Portanto, a astronomia e a ciência natural concordam não apenas em ter os mesmos sujeitos, mas também na consideração dos mesmos acidentes, e em demonstrar as mesmas conclusões" "For natural philosophers are found to have treated the shape of the sun and of the moon and of the earth and of the whole world. And these are topics which claim the attention of the astronomers. Therefore astronomy and natural science agree not only in [having] the same subjects but also in the consideration of the same accidents, and in demonstrating the same conclusions" (AQUINAS, Thomas. Commentary on Aristotle's Physics.Bk 2 Lec 3 Sct 158 p 78). 228 NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 77. Estes dois diferentes sistemas astronômicos mencionados pelo professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro foram constituídos por trabalhos individuais que foram somados aos modelos originais propostos. Vejamos rapidamente cada uma das contribuições desses indivíduos na estruturação dos respectivos sistemas astronômicos. Eudóxio de Cnido (408-305 a.C.) foi um astrônomo e matemático grego. Ele tentou explicar o movimento dos planetas em termos de esferas concêntricas girando em torno de seus eixos. Para a questão sobre o movimento dos astros no céu ele propôs aquilo que ficou conhecido como "esferas homocêntricas". De acordo com Eudóxio, Sol e Lua estariam presos cada um a três esferas concêntricas interligadas, de forma que o movimento combinado dessas estruturas ao redor de eixos com diferentes inclinações teria como resultado o movimento observado no céu. Os cinco planetas estariam ligados a quatro esferas cada um, a fim de explicar seus trajetos errantes, como a retrogradação. A esfera onde as estrelas estavam dispostas seria uma só, ela se moveria de oeste para leste. O sistema de Eudoxo compreendeu um total de 27 esferas, uma dentro da outra. Calipo de Cízico foi um discípulo de Eudóxio, ele criou o chamado ciclo calíptico (ciclo de setenta e seis anos) buscando harmonizar o ano trópico com o mês sinódico. Assim, ele foi responsável por tornar o sistema de Eudóxio mais sofisticado e aumentar o número de esferas. Aristóteles adotou aquele modelo inicial de esferas proposto por Eudóxio, mas percebemos cada vez mais um aumento considerável no número de esferas propostas para fazer com que os dados se coadunassem à experiência. Na constituição do segundo modelo astronômico temos Hiparco (190-120 a.C.). Ele foi um considerável astrônomo grego que definiu uma rede de paralelos e meridianos do globo terrestre. Destacou-se pelo rigor de suas observações e segurança das conclusões a que chegou. Ele conseguiu prever vários eclipses, elaborou o primeiro catálogo estelar baseado no brilho das estrelas. Ptolomeu (90-168 a.C.) apresentou um 110 O impasse se mostra da seguinte forma: dados dois sistemas alternativos que possuem estruturas, elementos, conceitos distintos na explicação de uma mesma realidade, e ambos conseguindo "explicar os fatos satisfatoriamente", qual o critério de escolha entre eles? De fato, quem propuser oferecer critérios de escolha entre sistemas antagônicos deve reconhecer que será necessário se debruçar sobre outras questões, tais como: os elementos postulados nos diferentes sistemas explicativos possuem existência de fato? Os sistemas explicativos para possuírem validade devem obrigatoriamente remeter a entidades reais? Enfim, o processo é extremamente exaustivo e isto pode ser constatado na obra de Tomás de Aquino, pois sua hesitação na escolha de um daqueles sistemas astronômicos decorre da complexidade da questão. Esta indecisão por parte de Tomás de Aquino é expressa em uma passagem onde ele afirma: Aduz-se uma razão para alguma coisa de dois modos. De um modo, para provar suficientemente algum fundamento, assim como na ciência da natureza aduz-se uma razão suficiente para provar que o movimento do céu é sempre de velocidade uniforme. De outro modo, aduz-se uma razão, não que prove suficientemente o fundamento, mas que mostre que os efeitos consequentes concordam com o fundamento já estabelecido, assim como na astronomia estabelece-se a razão dos excêntricos e dos epiciclos pelo fato de que, estabelecido isto, podem ser salvas as aparências sensíveis acerca dos movimentos celestes. No entanto, esta razão não é suficientemente probante, porque talvez estabelecido também algo diferente, poderiam ser salvas 229 . Ora, a passagem acima destaca os dois modos pelos quais a ciência pode aduzir uma razão para explicar algo. É possível que a razão aduzida seja suficiente no âmbito de sua explicação. Sendo assim, ela é capaz de explicar o fenômeno em questão em função de sua concordância com um fundamento já firmemente estabelecido. Mas também é possível que uma ciência aduza uma razão não de forma suficiente, mas sim probante, visto que ela levará em conta a compatibilidade com os efeitos resultantes, mas isso poderia ser também modelo geométrico do sistema solar; era um sistema geocêntrico que, tendo a terra como centro, colocava os demais planetas e estrelas realizando órbitas ao seu redor. Essas trajetórias são esquemas complicados, pois são na verdade resultantes de um sistema de ciclos e epiciclos, ou seja, círculos com centros em outros círculos. O objetivo de Ptolomeu era produzir um modelo que permitisse prever a posição dos planetas de forma correta e, nesse ponto, ele foi razoavelmente bem sucedido. Por essa razão, esse modelo continuou sendo usado sem mudança substancial por cerca de 1300 anos. 229 O texto de Tomás citado acima encontra-se traduzido em (NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 75). De fato, o texto original encontra-se na Summa theologiae, Ia, q. 32, a. 1, ad 2m. O recurso ao uso do epiciclo foi proposto inicialmente por Apolônio de Pérgamo e usado amplamente em astronomia por Hiparco. Mais tarde Ptolomeu se serviu do mesmo esquema para construir seu sistema geométrico do sistema solar. No modelo de epiciclos se considerava que um planeta P se move uniformemente ao longo de um pequeno círculo (epiciclo) cujo centro C se move uniformemente ao longo de um circulo maior (deferente com centro na Terra. No modelo excêntrico considerava-se que o Planeta P se movia ao longo de um círculo grande, cujo centro C se movia uniformemente num círculo pequeno de Centro específico. 111 alcançado pelo estabelecimento de um outro fundamento. Ele então mostra como este segundo caso é bem exemplificado na astronomia, pois a aceitação dos excêntricos e epiciclos não concluem de modo suficientemente probante. Tomás de Aquino está ciente das disputas astronômicas ao longo da história e do fato delas divergirem em postular modelos astronômicos distintos para os astros e ainda assim conseguirem considerável grau de sucesso em suas descrições. Daí afirmar Tomás que Não é, porém, necessário que as suposições que eles descobriram sejam verdadeiras; com efeito, embora sendo feitas estas suposições, salvem-se as aparências, não é preciso dizer que estas suposições são verdadeiras, pois talvez de acordo com algum modo, ainda não percebido pelos homens, salvem-se as aparências a respeito dos astros 230 . A passagem deixa transparecer dois pontos de considerável importância: 1) a hesitação de Tomás de Aquino em escolher um sistema astronômico em definitivo; 2) reconhece a possibilidade do progresso científico no âmbito científico em geral, e particularmente no caso da astronomia. Assim, a tensão metodológica existente consistia não apenas em conceder a prioridade da investigação do mundo em termos de uma física que remetia à própria natureza das coisas em contraposição a uma análise matemática do cosmos; essa tensão se diversificava no interior do próprio sistema matemático adotado pelos astrônomos, permanecendo assim em aberto o problema da escolha entre sistemas que se mostravam satisfatórios em explicar os fenômenos propostos. Levando em conta a passagem acima, podemos perceber que a indecisão de Tomás de Aquino quanto ao modelo astronômico a ser adotado implica na possibilidade de progresso científico nessa ciência 231 . Ele menciona que os desenvolvimentos que ocorreram nas teorias astronômicas determinaram cada vez mais a sofisticação delas, e de forma alguma deve ser julgado que elas se desenvolveram ao limite. Mas, é provável que no futuro elas se desenvolvam a tal ponto que 230 A tradução do texto citado acima é da autoria do professor Dr. Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento e encontra-se em (NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 78). 231 Embora tenha sido objeto de acalorados debates entre os historiadores da ciência se existiu uma noção de progresso científico anterior a ciência moderna, acreditamos por razões não completamente expressas neste trabalho que, tanto na Antiguidade quanto na Idade Média encontramos em vários autores a noção de progresso científico. Na Grécia Antiga havia uma noção de progresso, ao menos no campo da matemática e da matemática aplicada. Arquimedes (287-212 a.C.) mencionou que alguns de seus contemporâneos ou sucessores seriam capazes de descobrir outros teoremas além daqueles que ele havia proposto (cf. PRIORESCHI, Plínio. The idea of scientific progress in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, Vesalius, VIII, 1, 34-45, 2002. p. 35). Acreditamos que, não devemos buscar encontrar nos textos antigos a expressão que julgamos ser correta de progresso científico; ela existia em forma rudimentar. Essa noção presente entre alguns dos antigos matemáticos, astrônomos e filósofos continuou ao longo da Idade Média, mas ela não foi compartilhada por todos os eruditos. Apenas uns poucos aceitavam essa crença, tais como: Roger Bacon, Alberto Magno, e Bernardo de Chatres (implicitamente). 112 proponham um modelo astronômico distinto dos anteriores e que consigam do mesmo modo explicar o cosmos. Do que temos comentado até agora, é possível afirmar que Tomás de Aquino não julgava que a matemática poderia solucionar problemas no âmbito físico. Encontramos, sim, sua hesitação diante de ciências que já haviam feito notáveis progressos, particularmente no caso da astronomia, mas não encontramos passagens onde ele mencione que elas venham a contribuir na explicação de fenômenos naturais. O que é encontrado nos textos é referente à autonomia que elas possuem. E aquelas passagens onde encontramos menções claras da possibilidade de princípios matemáticos serem usados nas ciências naturais estão em geral fundamentadas em postulados de caráter metafísico que remetem ao platonismo. Estes princípios podem ser resumidos nas palavras do professor Carlos Arthur Ribeiro do Nascimento, o qual afirma: tal aplicação [dos princípios matemáticos à ciência natural] é tornada possível pelo próprio fato de que a matemática é mais abstrata que as ciências físicas e por considerar objetos mais simples que estas últimas. Dessa maneira ainda mais geral, pode-se vincular esta concepção das relações entre a matemática e física a uma visão hierarquizada da realidade, segundo a qual aquilo que é simples se reencontra com suas propriedades, embora sob outra modalidade, naquilo que é composto, enquanto aquilo que pertence propriamente ao composto não se encontra naquilo que é simples 232 . Podemos perceber que um dos aspectos que é reivindicado como fundamento da relação entre a física e a matemática consiste no modo de consideração delas, ou seja, enquanto a matemática possui uma consideração mais universal, na medida em que não recorre à matéria sensível e nem às determinações que a seguem enquanto tal, a física, por sua vez, retoma esses aspectos e consequentemente possui uma abordagem que não se encontra nos mesmos moldes de simplicidade. E, como o que é mais simples está salvo no composto, mas não o inverso, então elas asseguram esta possibilidade de aplicação no âmbito de suas respectivas considerações. Porém, a consideração do objeto enquanto tal deve remeter à própria estrutura da coisa. Sendo assim, é necessário que ambas as ciências guardem uma relação no âmbito ontológico. Neste ponto transparece o platonismo na obra de Tomás de Aquino, pois ele compreende a realidade estruturada segundo uma hierarquia, e também por esta via ele busca salvaguardar a relação de vínculo entre as ciências. Assim, a obra de Tomás de Aquino oscila entre investigar o mundo por seu caráter quantitativo ou por seu aspecto qualitativo, e se é verdade que em vários lugares ele acena e 232 NASCIMENTO, 1998, p. 28. 113 reconhece que o primeiro aspecto é possível, de fato, é ao segundo aspecto que ele dedica mais atenção. Isto nunca chegou a ser suplantado e nem mesmo há alguma indicação dessa possibilidade no conjunto da obra do Aquinate. As passagens onde encontramos uma reflexão em torno da relação entre a física e a matemática são esporádicas e apenas indicam percepções sem qualquer comprometimento de desenvolver tal projeto. Mas devemos estar cientes de que, mesmo essas passagens, não se mostram contrárias ao projeto futuro que mais tarde seria um dos pontos de glória da ciência Ocidental, a saber, a matematização da natureza. Assim, mesmo que Tomás de Aquino não tenha incentivado esse projeto conscientemente e sua obra não apresente indícios de que ele estivesse preocupado com ele, isso talvez decorra da tensão existente entre o próprio instrumental físico do qual ele fazia uso e a sua compreensão do caráter ontológico dos objetos matemáticos. Cabe, assim, salientar que é possível, a partir de seus escritos, defender tal possibilidade, porém isso quer apenas mostrar a compatibilidade de sua compreensão com os desenvolvimentos posteriores. Atribuir a Tomás de Aquino este projeto é enveredar pelos caminhos do anacronismo. 114 CONCLUSÃO Diante de tudo quanto tivemos oportunidade de estudar ao longo do presente trabalho parece-nos seguro extrair algumas conclusões. Em primeiro lugar, devemos destacar que o problema da relação entre a física e a matemática, em outras palavras, o uso delas na investigação do mundo, é um problema tipicamente grego. De fato, a matemática foi utilizada para descrições naturais em diversas culturas antigas, tais como entre os: Caldeus, Assírios, Egípcios, etc., porém somente com os gregos podemos dizer que o assunto foi pensado em termos rigorosamente epistêmicos. É apenas com o pensamento especulativo grego que vemos a matemática ser pensada como fundamento último de compreensão da realidade 233 . Isto deve ser visto como uma conquista intelectual, pois, mesmo entre os gregos, só paulatinamente a relação entre a física e a matemática foi pensada em modos antagônicos de explicação. Algo a ser destacado consiste em que aparentemente, tanto para Aristóteles quanto para Tomás, o problema surge no sistema filosófico de ambos pelo caráter de herança. Porém, existe uma diferença entre eles, pois, enquanto a abordagem que o Aquinate realiza deste problema provém diretamente de sua maior fonte de influência no campo filosófico, no caso, a obra de Aristóteles, no que diz respeito ao Estagirita depreende-se de sua argumentação que ele toma como exemplo conhecido das pessoas o fato de que existem determinadas ciências que tomam os princípios matemáticos e os aplicam à realidade física. Neste caso, a tradição filosófica apenas constatou esses casos e se esforçou por explicá-los por meio de diferentes teorias. No entanto, o problema não pode ser pensado em termos unicamente de herança, mas decorre também da própria estrutura interna do sistema filosófico de Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino. Ora, uma vez que no sistema aristotélico as ciências são classificadas a partir de seu sujeito e modo de procederem, ocorre um impasse, na medida em que é reconhecida a existência de algumas ciências que não pertencem propriamente a algum dos grupos específicos, estando assim em uma posição intermediária entre eles. Desta maneira, o problema da relação entre a física e a matemática no sistema filosófico de ambos os pensadores provém por um lado da recepção ou constatação do fato em outros segmentos do saber e, de outro lado, da própria estrutura interna de pensamento. 233 WEISHEIPL, 1959, p.17. 115 Tendo compreendido este esquema, podemos visualizar o esboço geral desta dissertação. Havendo uma multiplicidade de ciências, é necessário esclarecer em que consiste a diferença entre elas. Ora, no esquema geral elas foram divididas em ciências práticas, produtivas e teóricas, e, justamente nesse último grupo, encontramos, além da metafísica, a física e a matemática. Mas esta divisão deve se basear ou remeter a aspectos que a legitimem enquanto tal e, no que diz respeito à diferença entre a física e a matemática, os princípios requeridos foram: o diferente modo delas definirem os seus sujeitos, o modo distinto delas considerarem os seus objetos, além de demonstrarem por termos médios diferentes. Quando levamos em conta a compreensão de Tomás de Aquino sobre a diferença entre as duas ciências podemos notar que ele concorda com os mesmos pontos ressaltados pelo Estagirita para diferenciá-las. Mas, enquanto Aristóteles reforça seu argumento por meio de um quarto argumento que recorre ao estatuto ontológico daquele ramo das "mais naturais dentre as matemáticas", Tomás, por sua vez, além de destacar a relação epistêmica de anterioridade e posteridade na intelecção de alguma coisa, aplica esta relação no campo metafísico, pois destaca que ela ocorre também entre os acidentes que advêm à substância. Devemos ainda ressaltar que a fundamentação das ciências especulativas segundo a estrutura ontológica das coisas não é incompatível com o sistema aristotélico, todavia não é enfatizada por ele. Por sua vez, em Tomás de Aquino encontramos este tópico fortemente acentuado, particularmente em seu comentário ao De Trinitate. Assim, o esquema geral da relação entre Aristóteles e Tomás de Aquino é que a física e a matemática são distintas. E, como temos visto, um desses pontos está baseado no modo diferente de elas demonstrarem, ou seja, os termos médios que elas utilizam são distintos. Enquanto a matemática recorre a causas explicativas de natureza matemática, a física, por sua vez, leva em consideração princípios naturais para suas demonstrações. Aristóteles relaciona o conhecimento científico com a forma silogística dedutiva, onde o procedimento demonstrativo parte de princípios próprios a este sujeito. Todavia, isto não impossibilitou que ele mencionasse ou reconhecesse que algumas ciências procedem precisamente transferindo demonstrações de um gênero-sujeito a outro, e.g., a astronomia utiliza de demonstrações geométricas. Assim, também no âmbito da teoria da demonstração científica mais uma vez está presente o impasse; a física e a matemática são distintas (pois possuem modos diferentes de demonstrar), mas elas possuem um ponto de contato (visto que algumas ciências se utilizam de princípios matemáticos e os utilizam em suas demonstrações). No que diz respeito à posição de Tomás de Aquino nesta questão podemos afirmar que, mesmo ele aceitando o esquema proposto pelo Filósofo, ainda assim podemos notar uma 116 ênfase diferente em alguns aspectos. O Aquinate não apenas constata que aquelas ciências que aplicam os princípios matemáticos aos objetos físicos não se enquadram com facilidade na teoria do conhecimento e demonstração científica (como fez Aristóteles), mas também se esforça em explicar como isso era possível, particularmente no âmbito das ciências intermediárias. Assim, ele buscou salvaguardar a unidade da ciência esclarecendo o vínculo que os diferentes sujeitos guardam entre si. Primeiramente, os sujeitos expressam esse vínculo quando o sujeito de uma ciência é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, assim como o animal é uma espécie do corpo natural, e por isso a ciência dos animais está sob a ciência natural. De outro modo, quando o sujeito da ciência inferior não é uma espécie do sujeito da ciência superior, mas o sujeito da ciência inferior se compara ao sujeito da superior como o material em relação ao formal. Neste segundo caso, Tomás julga a relação existente como sendo do tipo material-formal. O que ele pretende é estabelecer o tipo de relação entre as ciências no âmbito da subalternação. No primeiro caso tem-se uma relação de inclusão pela espécie; no segundo, uma relação de semelhança, na medida em que na ciência superior ocorre determinação dos princípios sobre a inferior. Assim, no primeiro caso há uma relação de gênero-espécie e continua-se no mesmo gênero da ciência superior, enquanto no segundo caso, tem-se uma relação material-formal entre as ciências e o gênero é o mesmo apenas "de uma certa maneira", pois ocorre uma descida a outro gênero. Desta argumentação temos que, quando uma ciência não é uma espécie da outra, estando desta forma em gêneros diferentes, é possível tomar alguma diferença extrínseca à natureza do gênero da ciência superior e aplicar sobre ele. Isto torna possível "uma descida a outro gênero". Desta maneira, Tomás argumenta em favor da subalternação das ciências intermediárias à matemática e desta relação é constituído um gênero secundum quid (de certo modo). Assim, os sujeitos das duas ciências possuem vínculos entre si. Com isto Tomás pretende salvaguardar a unidade de gênero-sujeito no interior das ciências, flexibilizando assim ao mesmo tempo a doutrina da metábase. Vimos, portanto, que Tomás tem uma caracterização mais positiva da metábase do que Aristóteles. Esta modificação do sistema era fundamental para Tomás poder atribuir à teologia o caráter de ciência, a qual será pensada como ciência subalternada, pois aceita os teoremas de uma ciência superior. Pode-se perceber um amadurecimento da formulação deste assunto por Tomás, pois, apesar de seu Comentário à obra de Boécio mostrar um grande interesse na questão metodológica das ciências, ele encontra dificuldades para explicitá-la segundo a estrutura interna de qualquer uma delas nos moldes do aristotelismo. Diante disto, 117 ele recorre a uma concepção de natureza metafísica da realidade, na qual transparece o tom do neoplatonismo da antiguidade tardia com uma visão hierarquizada da realidade. É possível encontrarmos na obra de Tomás desenvolvimentos que se mostraram mais elaborados do que aqueles fornecidos primeiramente pelo Filósofo. Contudo, a relação entre a física e a matemática continuou encontrando dificuldades para ser teorizada, mas Tomás ao menos teve a vantagem de ter mostrado maior consciência da questão. Podemos então concluir que a física e a matemática não estão desprovidas de relações segundo o sistema filosófico de Aristóteles. Mas o modo de formalizar esta relação não é totalmente claro, pois seus textos dão margem a interpretações diferentes, algo bem perceptível ao estudarmos as opiniões divergentes entre os estudiosos. De fato, a primeira percepção que encontramos nos textos de Aristóteles é que ele, mesmo proibindo a passagem para um gênero-sujeito diferente, reconheceu que algumas ciências fazem isto. Assim, se não podemos falar em posição desfavorável ao uso da matemática no mundo da experiência sensível; também não é verdade dizer que este ponto recebeu por parte do Estagirita algum incentivo. De fato, a matemática sempre ocupou um lugar de considerável importância, e ele nunca negou a sua validade no estudo da natureza, particularmente nas disciplinas que conheceram um notável desenvolvimento e.g., a astronomia e a harmônica. Mas, ela permaneceu restrita ao âmbito epistêmico, sendo considerada como modelo de conhecimento científico e não foi teorizada como fundamento ao qual a realidade sensível pudesse ser reduzida. Quanto a Tomás de Aquino, mesmo sendo verdade que encontramos passagens onde ele tanto justifica quanto reconhece a possibilidade de uma investigação do mundo a partir de sua natureza quantitativa, este ponto nunca chegou a suplantar a sua crença de que a prioridade pertencia ao aspecto qualitativo. As passagens que encontramos apenas mencionam casos em que a matemática é utilizada por algumas ciências no campo dos entes naturais, mas de forma alguma é encontrado algum texto que nos informe que isto é possível na totalidade do mundo natural. Ainda que ele afirme que "os princípios matemáticos podem ser aplicados ao movimento", isto deve ser compreendido de forma restrita, pois estão em foco apenas as ciências intermediárias. Deste modo, é negada uma simples transposição de gêneros essencialmente diferentes e distantes entre si, tais como entre a matemática e a ciência natural. Além do mais, a teorização da relação entre as duas ciências é muito abstrata. Ora, o princípio de que "o que é simples e suas propriedades se salva nos compostos" não é um princípio que seja deduzido, mas é algo apenas pressuposto; da mesma forma a crença de que, "quanto mais alguma ciência é abstrata e considera algo mais simples, tanto mais seus 118 princípios são aplicáveis a outras ciências. Donde os princípios da matemática serem aplicáveis às coisas naturais, porém não o inverso" ser também é um princípio pressuposto, que se baseia apenas em que a matemática é mais abstrata do que a física e de certa forma a inclui. Embora a preocupação primordial do Aquinate não estivesse relacionada com um projeto de matematização do mundo, independentemente do modo como ele teoriza essa possibilidade podemos perceber certo progresso no assunto, visto que ele busca explicar como as ciências intermediárias procedem. Mas, esta teorização se encontra dentro de determinados limites, o que talvez se dê por sua aderência ao sistema aristotélico de conhecimento científico. O interesse de Tomás nessas questões decorria de sua pretensão de atribuir à teologia o caráter de ciência. Daí, ter ele retomado o sistema aristotélico e tê-lo reestruturado segundo outros moldes. Encontramos em Tomás o exemplo de como a Idade Média deu sua contribuição ao uso da matemática na ciência natural, oscilando entre uma metodologia qualitativa e outra quantitativa. "Este problema do uso da matemática para explicar o mundo físico manteve-se, na verdade, um dos problemas metodológicos centrais, e foi, em muitos aspectos, o problema central das ciências naturais até o século 17 234 ". A história da ciência ocidental a partir do século 12 até a revolução científica moderna pode ser considerada como uma penetração gradual da matemática (combinada com o método experimental) em campos previamente considerados da competência exclusiva da "física" 235 . Devemos ter sempre cautela para não cairmos em um anacronismo. Não podemos por isso procurar nos textos medievais a questão da possibilidade de uma descrição matemática do mundo tal como no projeto científico moderno. Se por acaso intentarmos isso, por certo não encontraremos a explicitação do problema, pois devemos acompanhar o problema na medida em que ele se encontra teorizado em seus determinados moldes. E a configuração que o problema possuía nesta época consistia de certo modo no caráter secundário, ou seja, ele nunca foi posto em função de si, nem por Aristóteles nem por Tomás. 234 "This problem of the use of mathematics in explaining the physical world remained, in fact, one of the central methodological problems, and was in many ways the central problem, of natural science down to the 17th century". CROMBIE, Alistair Cameron. Science, Art and Nature: in medieval and modern thought. London: Hambledon Press, 1996, p. 51. 235 Ibid., p.52. 119 Temos, portanto, que a recorrência ao tema era decorrente de outras discussões que ocupavam lugares primordiais. Ele se encontrava desta forma subordinado a outros problemas. Assim, não havia interesse em desenvolver a matemática em função de si mesma. Medições precisas foram feitas quando elas eram requeridas por necessidade prática, como na astronomia 236 . Os aspectos que constituíram a ciência moderna, a saber, a observação metódica e cuidadosa, os experimentos controlados e a aplicação sistemática da matemática aos problemas físicos estiveram ausentes na ciência medieval. Mesmo os significativos exemplos desta atividade que podem ser encontrados no final da Idade Média eram esporádicos e episódicos, nunca rotineiros e sistemáticos 237 . A Idade Média nunca esteve destituída de textos que mencionavam a relação entre a física e a matemática. De fato, as doutrinas pitagóricas, platônicas e alguns textos de Aristóteles mencionam a crença na teoria da harmonia celeste. Caso típico é o famoso Sonho de Cipião, onde encontramos a bela passagem que nos diz que Cipião ainda observava atônito a estrutura do universo quando sua atenção se voltou para um doce e agradável som que ele ouvia. Ao questionar seu avô, Públio Cornélio Cipião, chamado de Africano ao longo do texto, sobre a origem daquele som, recebe como resposta que aquele som era ocasionado pelo movimento das esferas celestes, o qual ocorre segundo uma certa proporção que fora determinada por uma razão 238 . Transparece, assim, a crença de que o escalonamento musical de fundamenta em princípios matemáticos de proporção, os quais, por sua vez, apenas reproduzem ou buscam se aproximar de uma musicalidade própria do universo que é produzida pelo movimento das esferas celestes. Daí dizer ele que "o número é o laço do universo" 239 . Mesmo sendo verdade que o texto que foi muito difundido no período medieval não foi o Sonho de Cipião (livro VI da República), mas sim o comentário escrito por Macróbio, no século V, ao referido texto, ainda assim, a filosofia presente nesse comentário é de inspiração platônica e inclui partes substanciais sobre aritmética, astronomia e cosmologia. Além do mais, podemos perceber na obra "O casamento de Filologia e Mercúrio", de Marciano Capella, onde são abordados vários temas referentes às matemáticas aplicadas, em 236 CROMBIE, 1996, P 472. 237 GRANT, 2001, p. 97. 238 De fato, percebe-se na passagem uma forte influência pitagórica por meio de sua doutrina dos intervalos. Esta, por sua vez, é fruto da junção entre geometria, física e música. 239 CÍCERO, Marco Túlio. O Sonho de Cipião. Apresentação, tradução e notas Prof. Dr. Ricardo da Costa. Notandum. Porto, v. 22, 2010, p. 37-50. 120 especial à astronomia 240 , uma exposição sobre mais alto nível de ensino que as artes matemáticas possuíram nas escolas do império romano tardio. Lembramos ainda que tanto a "Aritmética" quanto "Os princípios de música", ambos textos de Boécio, foram amplamente lidos desde o século IX até o renascimento, e neles também encontramos o uso de razões e proporções no escalonamento musical. Na primeira metade do século XII, as matemáticas se empregavam não para quantificar as leis naturais ou para proporcionar uma representação geométrica dos fenômenos naturais, mas para responder a perguntas que nós consideraríamos metafísicas ou teológicas. Neste mesmo século as matemáticas também serviam como um modelo do método axiomático de demonstração. 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** Penultimate draft. Final version is forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology Mark Rowlands Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010 249 pages, ISBN: 9780262014557 (hbk); $35.00 The New Science of the Mind is a systematic and highly original defense of the claim that external processes "can, in part, literally constitute [some] cognitive processes" (p. 22, italics added). This one-line summary of the book requires a fair amount of unpacking. • Rowlands does not define the term process. Still, one can surmise that for the purposes of the book, a process is that which, at least in part, manipulates, exploits, or transforms structures. But this preliminary definition only invites further questions. A particularly pressing one is, what is a structure? Rowlands provides examples: the retina, Gibson's optic array, parts of telescopes or computers, and parts of the body. Structures are items that, for the most part, either bear or are capable of bearing information. • A process is external if the structures that it manipulates, exploits, or transforms lie outside the boundaries of the brain. • External structures can but do not have to be parts of cognitive processes: the latter are not necessarily composed of the former. • External processes only partly constitute some (but not all) cognitive processes. "There is always an irreducible internal-neural and, sometimes, also wider bodily-contribution to the constitution of any mental process" (p. 59). The resulting conception of the mind is characterized by a rejection of the claim that cognitive processes "are either identical with brain processes or exclusively realized by brain processes" (p. 2). Bodily and worldly structures can also be literal parts of cognitive processes. (Unless otherwise specified, I use the term cognitive broadly, so as to include perceptual processes as well.) Rowlands calls this view the non-Cartesian conception of the mind. The New Science of the Mind consists of eight chapters. In the first two, Rowlands respectively articulates the general contours of the non-Cartesian view and argues that such a view of the mind "is motivated by empirical work in a variety of cognate disciplines" (p. 25). In chapter 3, Rowlands delineates the theses of embodied, extended, embedded, and enacted mind; makes explicit their relationship to the non-Cartesian view; and concludes that "at the heart of a non-Cartesian cognitive science, we find [only] the mind embodied and the mind extended" (p. 83). Rowlands calls the combination of these two views "the amalgamated mind" (ibid.). In chapter 4, Rowlands considers four influential objections to the amalgamated mind and argues that they all reduce to the objection that the extended and embodied theses are "incompatible with any plausible mark of the cognitive" (p. 86). Rowlands offers a mark of the cognitive that purports to vindicate the extended and embodied theses in chapter 5. There, he argues that any process P which satisfies the following conditions is a cognitive process: 1. P involves information processing-the manipulation and transformation of informationbearing structures. 2. This information processing has the proper function of making available either to the subject or to subsequent processing operations information that was, prior to this processing, unavailable. 2 3. This information is made available by way of the production, in the subject of P, of a representational state. 4. P is a process that belongs to the subject of that representational state (pp. 110-111). As Rowlands admits, conditions (1)–(3) are too permissive (pp. 137-138). Most of the work is done by (4). But in what sense does a process that already meets conditions (1)–(3) need to belong to a subject in order to count as cognitive? This is what Rowlands calls "the problem of ownership" (p. 136). Chapters 6–8 provide Rowlands' solution to this problem. Chapter 6 embodies the following dialectic. Given the distinction between personal-level and subpersonal-level cognitive processes, the problem of ownership arises for both types of cognitive processes. The ownership of the latter type of processes should be understood in terms of the idea of integration. Specifically, a subpersonal process Psub belongs to a subject only if Psub is "appropriately integrated into the subject" (p. 151), i.e., only if "it makes some contribution to the personal-level cognitive life of the subject" (p. 147). Thus, the ownership of subpersonal processes turns out to be "derivative upon the ownership of personal cognitive processes" (p. 151). To solve the problem of ownership for personal-level processes, Rowlands suggests that we should first think of such processes as activities that can be subsumed under a "general activity-type" and, then look for an answer to the question, in what sense can we own this sort of general activity-type (p. 152)? Rowlands argues that we own a personal-level process when we have epistemic authority over it. Although epistemic authority should not be taken as "a criterion of ownership of personal-level cognitive processes" (p. 157), it is a "tolerably reliable indicator" of such ownership nonetheless (p. 156). Rowlands attempts to explicate the notion of epistemic authority via the following example (pp. 152-154). In building a house one has epistemic authority over the activity of laying the bricks insofar as one is "acquainted with the bricks in all relevant and necessary ways" and insofar as one recognizes "the characteristics of good mortar" (p. 153). But it is rather unclear to me how exactly the epistemic authority that one has over laying bricks relates to the epistemic authority that one has over personal-level cognitive processes, for example, remembering. Is it knowledge of certain characteristics of the products of such a process, i.e., memories? Or is it the ability to recreate in imagination (aspects of) my memories? Neither suffices to make memories mine. I can know plenty about the memories of someone else; I can even imaginatively recreate aspects of someone else's memories. Or consider thinking. In the case of bricks or mortar, epistemic authority amounts to knowledge about characteristics of bricks and mortar. But in the case of thinking, knowing whether a reasoning pattern is valid or invalid, for instance, does not make that pattern of reasoning mine. Perhaps epistemic authority over the processes of remembering or thinking amounts to knowledge that either the processes themselves, or the products of such processes, are mine. This characterization of epistemic authority still does not help Rowlands. Epistemic authority over a process Pper cannot just be knowledge of the fact that Pper belongs to me, nor can it be knowledge of the fact that the products of Pper belong to me. The claim that a process Pper is mine if I know that Pper (or a product of Pper) is mine, does not solve the problem of ownership. It merely postpones it. Later on, Rowlands does say that an understanding of ownership in terms of authority is ultimately derivative of an understanding of ownership in terms of disclosure. But to say that such understanding of authority is derivative neither vitiates the previous claim that epistemic authority is a "tolerably reliable indicator" of ownership, nor does it solve the problems to which the notion of epistemic authority gives rise (p. 156). In the last two chapters, Rowlands undertakes an intriguing examination of intentionality. His goal is to show that "the ideas that cognitive processes should be embodied and extended are utterly quotidian-practically banal implications of a proper understanding of intentionality" (p. 164). But what exactly, according to Rowlands, is this proper understanding of intentionality? Take 3 experiences first. "Experiences," Rowlands tells us, "are not just items of which we are aware," but "also items in virtue of which we are aware" (p. 169). Yet the features of experiences in virtue of which we become aware of objects cannot themselves be experienced-otherwise, we would have an infinite regress. Thus, there is more to experience than the objects of which we are aware. Rowlands shows that a structurally similar argument applies to modes of presentation: a mode of presentation can be understood both as that of which we are aware and as that in virtue of which we are aware (p. 183ff.). Out of these two ways of understanding modes of presentation, it is the latter that captures the essence of intentionality: intentionality is best understood as that in virtue of which we are made aware of objects or, in Rowlands' Heideggerian-inspired terminology, as a type of revelation or disclosure. Insofar as experiences and cognition are intentional, they are types of revelation or disclosure; but insofar as "disclosing is, in general, indifferent to its location," cognitive and perceptual processes are extended (p. 187). Suppose that we grant that the transcendental conditions of cognition are not items of which we are aware. Suppose that we also identify these conditions with a form of disclosing and that we accept that theoretically and abstractly speaking, disclosing is location-independent insofar as its vehicles are location-independent. Having assumed all that, have we shown that cognition extends? Yes, but in a sense which will be granted by a good deal of opponents of the non-Cartesian view. What we have shown is the possibility of extended cognition. Yet, the debate surrounding the nonCartesian conception of the mind is primarily concerned with whether cognition is actually extended or embodied. Thus, Rowlands needs to show something more. Specifically, he needs to show that some of the aspects of intentionality in virtue of which things are disclosed to us are located (at least, partly) outside the boundaries of the brain. Or since the kind of disclosure relevant to the vehicles of cognition is causal and not constitutive (pp. 191-196), Rowlands needs to show that the "causal disclosure of the world does not take place purely inside the head of a subject" (p. 195). Only then will the non-Cartesian view be vindicated. Rowlands does provide examples of what he takes to be extended vehicles of cognition: the cane of a blind person (pp. 196-198), saccadic eye movements (pp. 202-203), the activities involved in the identification of sensorimotor contingencies (pp. 204-205), and the manipulation of the optic array (pp. 205-206). The aforesaid examples count as extended vehicles of cognition, Rowlands tells us, because they are external and causally disclose the world to the subject. I suspect that skeptics of the non-Cartesian view will find the notion of causal disclosure in need of further explication. If by causal disclosure, we mean all things that causally contribute to the disclosure of a personal-level state, then causal disclosure seems to be too permissive. If, however, we restrict causal disclosure to those things that meet a certain list of conditions, then we are back in a search for an adequate mark of the cognitive. But the crucial condition of Rowlands' mark of the cognitive, i.e., condition (4), does not seem to be of help: either ownership is understood derivatively in terms of epistemic authority, or it is understood as a feature of disclosure (pp. 214-217). If the former, then, as I pointed out, it is unclear to what epistemic authority over personal-level processes amounts. If the latter, then the notion of ownership is unhelpful in demarcating the relevant causal contributions from the irrelevant, for ownership is itself given in terms of causal disclosure. As Rowlands himself states, "At the personal level, a cognitive process is mine when it causally discloses the world to me" (p. 216). The notion of ownership, if understood in terms of causal disclosure, cannot be used to explicate causal disclosure. Thus, neither of the two solutions to the problem of ownership that Rowlands provides seem to do the work that he needs them to do. This review cannot do justice to the wealth of material that lies within the covers of Rowlands' book. The critical remarks that I have raised above are simply a testament to the great extent to which I was engaged with the book. In addition to being meticulously argued, The New Science of the Mind shows in a refreshing and convincing manner the relevance of the history of philosophy to contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind. 4 Andreas Elpidorou Department of Philosophy Boston University Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA. Email: [email protected]

Biography I have studied logic, mathematics, physics, and philosophy. My academic interests are in the cross section between mathematics, physics and philosophy. A future project is to investigate the relationship between the probability concept proposed here and the logic of Quantum Mechanics in more detail. Acknowledgements I want to thank the unnamed referee of the Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics for many helpful suggestions. I also want to thank Zea Miller for proofreading my text. Publication Details Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics (ISSN: 2166-5087). March, 2014. Volume 2, Issue 1. Citation Ergodos, Nick. 2014. "The Enigma Of Probability." Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 2 (1): 37–71. The Enigma Of Probability Nick Ergodos Journal of Cognition andNeuroethics 38 I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. - Oscar Wilde Abstract Using "brute reason" I will show why there can be only one valid interpretation of probability. The valid interpretation turns out to be a further refinement of Popper's Propensity interpretation of probability. Via some famous probability puzzles and new thought experiments I will show how all other interpretations of probability fail, in particular the Bayesian interpretations, while these puzzles do not present any difficulties for the interpretation proposed here. In addition, the new interpretation casts doubt on some concepts often taken as basic and unproblematic, like rationality, utility and expectation. This in turn has implications for decision theory, economic theory and the philosophy of physics. Keywords Bayesianism, decision theory, expectation, expected utility, expected value, fair game, measurement problem, probability interpretation, St Petersburg paradox, two-envelope problem Historical Introduction Today we have a whole zoo of probability interpretations. We have propensity interpretations, frequency interpretations, objective Bayesian interpretations, subjective Bayesian interpretations, logical interpretations, personalistic interpretations, classical interpretations, formalist interpretations and so on, almost without end. These interpretations claim that the ontology of probability is either physical, psychological, epistemic, logical or mathematical. Some of them view probability as objective, others as subjective. Some even go to the extreme and say that probability is merely an empty word that we are allowed to interpret in any way we want, as long as we do not violate the axioms of probability. To understand why we have this wild bouquet of philosophical interpretations it is necessary to study history. The cause of the confusion is an old gambling problem called the St. Petersburg paradox. As this problem is still unsolved, it continues to infuse The Enigma Of Probability Nick Ergodos Ergodos 39 confusion. The various ways that have been proposed to escape this problem have led to the scattered philosophical situation we have today for the probability concept. It is easy to state the St. Petersburg problem. Let us say we play a very simple game where you toss an ordinary coin until heads comes up. If heads comes up in the first toss you will get one dollar from me. If it comes up at the second toss you will receive two dollars from me and so on. We double the amount for each tails-toss you manage to get before you get heads and the game ends. The question now is what you would be willing to pay to play this game. The smallest amount you can win is one dollar so the game should at least be worth one dollar. But exactly how much more than one dollar? The classical answer to these questions is to calculate the expected value of the game and make sure you do not pay more than that. The problem with this approach is that the expected value of this game is infinite. This means that whatever I demand you to pay for the privilege to play this game you should accept the offer. This is because any amount, no matter how big, is smaller than infinity. But this advice is just crazy. No one in her right mind would pay even a modest sum for this game. Something must be seriously wrong here, but what? This is the St. Petersburg problem. There has been three main ways to attack this problem (Dutka 1988; Jorland 1987). (a) The advice to pay infinitely much for the game is actually correct in theory but in practice it is not. If you are lucky you could win more money than I could possibly pay you, and even more money than all the money in the world. Likewise, there is a possibility that heads never comes up and we run out of time, because none of us have unlimited time at our disposal. As there are limited resources of time and money in the world the game as stated cannot actually be played in the real world. There is no need to modify the theory-we only have to keep in mind the actual circumstances when it is used. The theory in combination with the actual physical constraints at hand will produce a correct, finite, result. I will call this the Finite World argument. (b) The advice is mathematically correct but human beings do not value money linearly as the mathematical theory implicitly assumes. What we need is a new theory that complement the mathematical theory whenever humans and money is involved. I will call this the Human Value argument. (c) The advice is not correct and the mathematical theory therefore needs to be changed or re-interpreted. A re-interpreted theory usually does not give any advice for actions at all. At least not for single cases. The theory might give some Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 40 advices for action if a large number of repetitions of a game is considered. Very few attempts have been made to change the mathematical theory itself. I am only aware of one attempt, which we will study separately. I will therefore call this the Reinterpretation argument. That a simple game like this can lead to such a big discussion was disturbing. And it got even more disturbing as the years, decades and centuries passed without no one being able to solve it. Early on people drew the conclusion that the concept of expected values does not seem to be as natural and unproblematic as was first assumed. The concept of probability, however, is confined to have a value between zero and one, and can never be infinite. This makes this concept immune from ending up in infinity-paradoxes like this. It must therefore be safer to have at the core of the theory. Consequently, soon after the discovery of the St. Petersburg problem the concept of expected value was replaced by the concept of probability as the central concept of the theory. The theory that up to now had been called many things, but never something including "probability," started to be called the Theory of Probability by everyone. The earlier focus in the theory on how to bet on different games of chance was gradually replaced by a focus on pure probability problems. This was a smart move. However, the concept of probability and the concept of expected value are mathematically very close to each other. If one of these two concepts has philosophical problems connected to it, the other one will have philosophical problems as well. Not exactly the same, as we will see, but similar. The different proposals on how to get rid of the St. Petersburg problem is the direct cause of why we have the probability interpretations that we have, and why they are designed as they are. The Finite World and Human Value arguments are connected to the subjective, personalistic and Bayesian interpretations of probability. The Reinterpretation arguments led to the frequentist, propensity and formalist views of probability. Incidentally, in recent decades the Human Value argument has also played a crucial role in the development of economic theory, game theory, decision theory, and rational choice theory (Samuelson 1977). The contemporary way to view the St. Petersburg paradox is that it is a very important historical problem that has led to a number of important theories. The fact that the problem is still unsolved does not seem to bother anyone anymore. In fact, the common understanding today is that the problem really is solved, only that it is not possible to say which solution is the correct one... We are told that we are free to pick any of the proposed solutions and let it be the solution of our choice. Notice that the three solution strategies above contradict each other. They cannot all be correct at the same Ergodos 41 time. Being a simple mathematical problem this is really an odd situation. In no other area of mathematics are we free to choose the solution to a problem ourselves, and whichever solution in a set of mutually contradicting solutions we pick, we will have picked a correct one. Incidentally, the solution we pick also, to a large extent, determines the probability interpretation of our choice, and vice versa. However, it is relatively easy to see that the Emperor is naked, i.e., that none of the proposed solutions is a valid solution. By doing this all the theories, concepts and probability interpretations that rely upon these false solutions will quickly have to find new and fresh justifications. Or else they will die. The Finite World Argument To ban everything that contains an unlimited number of entities from the realm of the possible, as this argument does, is both too drastic and too feeble at the same time. It is too drastic because if implemented universally all of mathematics as we know it would break down. Even the ancient Greek mathematicians knew that every finite entity could be expressed as an infinite sum of entities as well. For example, if I go from point A to point B this can be described as either a finite number of steps or as an infinite number of steps. A finite description would be to simply count the steps I need to take to go from A to B. This adds up to the total distance between A and B. An infinite description could be this: I first go half the distance to B. From there I go half the distance of what is left. From there half the distance from what is remaining, and so on. The entire walk is then described by the infinite series half the distance + one quarter of the distance + one eighth of the distance and so on ad infinitum. This infinite sum of course equals the full distance. The point is that whichever way my walk from A to B is described, the total sum must always be the same. Obviously, the real physical distance cannot be dependent on how it is described. However, if we obey the Finite World argument we need to say that some descriptions, the infinite ones, are unrealistic. For these a finite cap has to be imposed for the number of steps that actually can be performed in reality. No matter how big a number we choose as the finite cap, the capped sum of steps will never equal the full distance between A and B. So according to some descriptions I walk the full distance between A and B, but according to others I cannot make the full distance. The Finite World argument thus makes the distance between A and B dependent on how it is described, which is absurd. It is easy to see that this example is not isolated but can be multiplied to every area of mathematics. If the Finite World argument is taken seriously, mathematics as we know it would break down. This is drastic. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 42 The feeble thing is that the Finite World argument does not solve the problem it was set out to solve. We can easily construct a situation where no actual physical entities are infinitely many-and yet the St. Petersburg paradox is still present. Imagine a situation where we have a gambling hall with a number of different games. Some of the games are classical lotteries of various types. Others are variants of the St. Petersburg game with different payoff functions and fees for playing them. A set of players is invited to the gambling hall to try their luck at the different games and lotteries. The contestants are given an equal large amount of playing chips that can be used to pay the fees for the games in the hall. Each contestant is free to play as much or as little she wants at each lottery or game. If she decide to not play anything at all, that is fine too. If she wins any of the lotteries or games she will get her reward in 'winning chips' that can only be collected; they cannot be used for playing. The goal for each contestant is to have as many chips at the end of the day as possible. All playing chips that might remain, together with all the winning chips each contestant have won, are counted. The contestant who has the largest total collection of chips will get a nice prize-a car, say. In this situation the Finite World argument is useless. The only physical prize present is a car, which is not infinite. The chips can be multiplied indefinitely and do not need to be physical, so no cap can be imposed on any of the payoff functions for any of the St. Petersburg games. This means that the expected value for each of the St. Petersburg games is exactly the same, i.e., infinite. But, obviously, it is better to play a St. Petersburg game with payoff function 1,000 chips, 2,000 chips, 4,000 chips, 8,000 chips, and so on instead of the original game with payoff function 1 chip, 2 chips, 4 chips, 8 chips, and so on, assuming the fee for the games are the same. However, the theory does not make any distinction between these games at all. This means that you are still stuck with the original St. Petersburg problem and the Finite World argument is of no use at all. This is feeble. We have now showed that the Finite World argument can never lead to a real solution to the St. Petersburg problem. All solutions in this category are thus false. The Human Value Argument The idea here is that ordinary humans do not think like mathematicians. In particular, ordinary men do not value large amounts of money in the way mathematicians do. For this reason ordinary humans do not have to obey the mathematical rules the theory produces. The theory of expected value is certainly correct mathematically, but it is simply not correct as a model for how ordinary men actually behave. Ergodos 43 Ordinary men are driven by how happy they can get, not directly by how much money they can get. Sure, more money will probably make you more happy, but will twice the money you already have make you exactly twice as happy as you already are? Probably not. Twice as much money does not mean you will become twice as happy, and this psychological effect becomes even truer if your fortune is multiplied even more times. It seems to be some kind of law that the human appreciation of more money increases more slowly than what the actual amount of money possessed would indicate. A mathematical function that describes the decreasing additional happiness, or utility, you might get for increasing amounts of money is today called an utility curve. If the utility, as described by a suitable utility curve, is inserted instead of the actual amounts of money you could win in the St. Petersburg game, the expected value, or rather the expected utility, becomes finite. This explains, according to this argument, why ordinary humans are not willing to pay what the mathematical theory demands in this case, but only a small finite amount. This approach raises a number of new questions. Which mathematical function describes best the human utility of money? Should it be a universal curve for all men (except, perhaps, for mathematicians) or should it be different curves for different individuals? Can these curves be determined empirically? If so, how? Interestingly, these questions have, over the years, not only been investigated thoroughly-the very idea of expected utility as a guide for human action has been hugely influential as a foundational concept. Almost all modern economic theory, decision theory and theory of rational choice rely on this concept. For example, in economic theory it has a prominent place in the "Law of diminishing marginal utility" and in decision theory in the "Expected utility hypothesis." The concept of expected utility is also a vital part of the Bayesian interpretation of probability. Despite its fame, the concept of expected utility never solved the St. Petersburg problem that it was originally designed to solve. This is easily seen by the following example. In the original St. Petersburg game, instead of winning one dollar, two dollars, and so on, let the payoff function be in "utility units" instead of in money. Instead of winning two dollars you win the amount of money that exactly makes you twice as happy as you would be if you won one dollar, and so on. The expected utility will in this case be infinite, and the utility argument is of no use anymore as all payoffs already are utilities. Hardcore believers in expected utility theory, when confronted with this example, usually resort to some arbitrary Finite World argument to escape the embarrassment. However, the very reason utility curves were invented in the first place was to construct a solution to the St. Petersburg problem that did not have to resort to silly Finite World arguments. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 44 Others, critical to the concept of expected utility, try to solve the St. Petersburg problem using a concept of risk. It is because we are afraid to risk too much of our money that we are reluctant to pay a lot for playing the St. Petersburg game, even if the theory tells us that we should. This is another Human Value argument. Only our imagination sets the limits on how many different Human Value arguments we can invent to solve the St. Petersburg problem. However, there is a simple way to show that all Human Value arguments must be wrong, even those not invented yet. If it was the case that the St. Petersburg problem could be solved by a theory of human valuation of money, be it expressed in utilities or risk or whatever, it would be impossible to give an account of the St. Petersburg problem when neither humans nor money are involved. But this is indeed possible. Consider a membrane which during one second transmits one hydrogen molecule with probability one half, two hydrogen molecules with probability one quarter, four hydrogen molecules with probability one eighth, and so on. How much hydrogen gas can we expect to be transmitted through the membrane during one second? This is exactly the original St. Petersburg problem but now without any reference to neither humans nor money. This means that all solutions that rely on how humans value money are indeed useless in solving the St. Petersburg problem. This simple thought experiment shows that the Human Value argument can never lead to a real solution of the St. Petersburg problem. All solutions in this category are thus false. The Reinterpretation Argument Almost all aspects of the original theory have been reinterpreted just to avoid the St. Petersburg problem. The simplest one is merely a linguistic trick. Mathematicians do not talk about infinite expectations anymore. That way of talking is abandoned. What they say, instead, is simply that the expected value in that case does not exist. Something that does not exist cannot give you any advice, can it? Only expectations that do exist, i.e., is finite, can give you any advice. This trick resolves the St. Petersburg problem because the theory does not give you any advice at all as the expected value simply does not exist. The problem with this escape route is that the distinction between when the theory will give you advice and not becomes arbitrary. This is because the difference between a situation where the expected value "exists" or "does not exist" can always be made arbitrary small. Consider for example the St. Petersburg game played with a real coin. It is an empirical fact that one of the sides of a real coin is always slightly more probable than the other side. The difference can be very small, but still there is always a difference. If we Ergodos 45 happen to choose the side which is slightly less probable than 1/2, as the side we repeat until the other side shows up and the game ends, we will end up with an expected value for the game that is finite and "exists." If we happen to choose the other side as the one that we repeat, we will end up with an expected value that "does not exist." Usually we do not know which side of a real coin that is the slightly more probable one-we just pick one of the sides at random as the one to repeat. So in half of the cases when we play this game the theory does have some advice to give us, while in the other half it does not. It is thus totally arbitrary when the theory can give us some advice and when it cannot. To avoid this arbitrariness some reinterpret the theory even further so that the theory never gives any advice at all, whether or not the expected value exists. This does not lead to the same arbitrariness as before, but a theory that does not give any advice at all, in any case, is a little strange. Why do we have a theory in the first place if it does not have any practical applications? Some other thinkers in this category say something really interesting. They claim that the expected value gets its entire meaning from the Law of Large Numbers, which is the name of the observation that the average gain will approach the expected value, or 1 2 3 4 5 6 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 m ea n va lu e trials average dice value against number of rolls average y=3.5 Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 46 mean, after a large number of repetitions of a game. The only thing we mean when we say that a game is fair is that in the long run we will win as much as we will lose. Say that we play the game where we get one dollar for each dot that shows up when throwing an ordinary die. The expected value for this game is 3.5 dollars. The Law of Large Numbers will guarantee that we will approximately break even in the long run when playing this game over and over for a 3.5 dollars fee. In the limit when we play an infinite number of games we will break even exactly. See the graph above. Expected values so defined do not say anything about single cases. Expected values for single cases are viewed as unreliable or even meaningless. This makes the very question what one should pay for the St. Petersburg game a meaningless question. Only if we play the game over and over is it possible to know what we should pay. And indeed, if we play the St. Petersburg game an infinite number of times we should actually expect to win an infinite amount of money, exactly as the expected value shows. Adopting this statistical viewpoint resolves the paradox, according to this view. This idea is very clever. The Law of Large Numbers will actually guarantee that the expected value reinterpreted in this way will always keep what it promises. A gambler paying the expected value for any game will with probability one gain as much money as she loses in fees when the number of games goes to infinity. This resolution of the St. Petersburg problem does not lead to inconsistencies or arbitrariness. But it still has major drawbacks why it cannot be viewed as a correct solution to the problem. It totally misses the original question, which is to answer what a single game is worth. In particular, we still have no clue what to pay for the St. Petersburg game if it is offered only once. This reinterpreted expected value can only answer a restated St. Petersburg problem: What is the fair fee for each round if we play an infinite number of St. Petersburg games? In addition, we have no clue how many times we need to play any given game in order to have permission to use the expected value as a fair fee. If this problem is avoided by saying that one should always play infinitely many rounds to have permission to view the expected value as a fair fee, well then suddenly all games imaginable are dealing with infinities. The problems originally attached to games with infinite, sorry "not existing," expected values are now affecting all games, also those that never caused any problems before. This is hardly an improvement of the situation. Even if this solution of the St. Petersburg problem is the best so far, it is still very far from a correct solution. As mentioned at the beginning, there is also one additional proposal in this category that we need to treat separately as it is not merely a reinterpretation but actually a bold idea by William Feller to change the very definition Ergodos 47 of expected values (Feller 1945; 1950). Even for him the Law of Large Numbers is what ultimately gives expected values their meaning. He slightly restates the mathematical expression for the Law of Large Numbers. His new expression is a true generalization of the classical Law of Large Numbers because, whenever the expected value is finite, his generalized expression becomes the ordinary expression. But whenever the ordinary expected value is infinite, or "does not exist," his formula produces a series of variable fees. This idea is truly innovative. Never before did anyone call into question the implicit assumption that the fair fee for a game must be a constant. According to Feller, the fair prize for the St. Petersburg game is where t is the number of times the game is played and log is the logarithm to base two. See the graph below. Let us say we decide to play the game 256 times. We should then be willing to pay 4 dollars per game according to Feller, as log 256 is 8. If we plan to play 4096 times the fee we should be willing to accept is 6. By this we immediately see that when the number of games goes to infinity the fair prize also goes to infinity, which is exactly what the statistical reinterpretation of expected value says. But now, with Feller, we suddenly know a lot more what the game is worth even if we do not play infinitely many times. This solution to the St. Petersburg problem is by far the best presented by anyone. But, unfortunately, it raises more questions than it answers. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 48 First of all, is it his intention to replace the old concept of expected value with this new concept everywhere? It does not seem so. Instead, this concept seems to be tailormade for games of the St. Petersburg type, i.e., for which the ordinary expected value is infinite, or "does not exist." In that case his new concept falls into the same trap as the first reinterpretation idea we considered; it will be totally arbitrary when this concept and the old one should be used. The example with the St. Petersburg game using a real coin will apply equally well in this case. Secondly, his concept is not applicable for one or even a few repetitions of a game. It is obviously not correct for a single game as 1/2 log 1 is 0 dollar, and we know by the construction of the game that it is at least worth one dollar, not nothing. This means that we know for sure that it is false for small t. He even admits this explicitly himself. But when, at what number t, is his formula beginning to be trustworthy? He does not say a thing about that. If we try to avoid this difficulty by simply say that t needs to be infinitely large for the formula to start to be trustworthy, then we have gained nothing by using a new concept that allows for variable fees. Thirdly, we might ask ourselves why it should be, in any sense, fair to pay any of the finite fees suggested by his formula. It is, after all, only in the limit when t goes to infinity that his new concept obeys the Law of Large Numbers and the fees becomes "fair in the classical sense," as Feller puts it. For no finite value of t is his concept fair in any sense. This means that even Feller falls into the same trap as the statistical reinterpretation; we have to play an infinite number of rounds in order to know that the suggested fee is a fair fee. Despite his innovative and radical approach, we see that even Feller fails to solve the St. Petersburg problem. This concludes the task of showing that there still does not exist a single acceptable solution to the St. Petersburg problem. We can safely establish that the St. Petersburg problem is an open problem. Probability Interpretations Initially, it was a good move to replace the central concept of the theory-expected value-with the concept of probability. Probabilities seemed to be totally unproblematic, which was not exactly the case with expected values, as we have seen. However, after a while, it became evident that the concept of probability is problematic as well. Classically, the probability of an event is defined as the number of favorable cases divided by the total number of cases. For this to work we need to find atomic cases which are equally likely. For example, the probability of getting an even number when throwing an ordinary die is three over six, because there are three favorable cases (2, 4 or 6) and six equally Ergodos 49 likely cases. But what does it really mean to be "equally likely"? It must mean that they are equally probable. But "probability" is the concept we try to define here and is of course forbidden to use before it is defined, or else the definition becomes circular. To save the classical definition a new principle is introduced-the Principle of Insufficient Reason. It states that if you do not have sufficient reason to believe that one possible case is more likely than any other you are entitled to assign the same probability to each case. This formally removes the circularity in the definition of probability. However, this principle leads in itself to problems that are even worse-contradictions. Depending on the way we describe a situation, we will end up with different probability assignments for the same event. In addition, the principle cannot handle events where we have a continuum of outcomes. Even in these cases the principle leads to contradictions, as was first noted by Joseph Bertrand. We cannot have a principle at the core of our theory that leads to contradictions. It is evident that we need to give up this initial definition of probability entirely. It cannot be rescued. This is no good news at all. The concept of probability replaced the central concept of expectation just in order to give the theory a solid conceptual foundation. And now this solid core has evaporated into thin air, leaving a big conceptual hole at the heart of the theory. We are left with a mathematical theory that we have no clue what it is all about. This situation needs to be solved in some way. But how? Very much as in the case with the St. Petersburg problem, a set of very different solutions to the problem emerges. In fact, it is because of the St. Petersburg problem people start to run in different directions when trying to find a solution to this problem. Depending on which strategy you settled for regarding the St. Petersburg problem, you will have different needs regarding the probability concept, and hence will end up advocating different definitions of probability. If you believe in the Reinterpretation argument where expected values only are given a statistical interpretation as an average in a long run of games, you will end up with a frequentist interpretation of probability. According to this interpretation probabilities have no meaning for single cases, only a long-infinitely long-sequence of events from repeatedly perform an experiment can be attributed a probability. The probability is then defined as the relative frequency with which the outcome you want to measure occur in the sequence. Notice how close this definition of probability is to the corresponding proposed solution of the St. Petersburg problem. In both cases it demands that we repeat the event we are interested in infinitely many times, no matter what event it is. Both concepts get their ultimate meaning from the Law of Large Numbers. Another interesting thing to note is that this definition turns the classical relationship between probability theory and Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 50 statistics upside down. Probability theory is now ultimately based on statistics and not the other way around. If you are of a more radical type and go for the non-interpretation alternative where expected values have no moral implication at all, you will end up having the same view on the probability concept as well. Anything that fulfills the standard axioms of probability will be an admissible probability to you. If you believe in one of the Human Value arguments you will end up being a Bayesian or adhere to a logical or epistemic interpretation of probability. In these cases the concept of probability does not derive its meaning from the Law of Large Numbers, but from another theorem in probability theory-Bayes' theorem. As it stands, Bayes' theorem is totally uncontroversial. It only becomes controversial when placed as the foundation for every application of the concept of probability, even in cases when the prerequisites of the theorem are not fulfilled. The idea is to try to rescue the Principle of Insufficient Reason in a way that does not lead to contradictions. This is accomplished via an ingenious idea. The subjectivity of the utility concept is here transferred to the probability concept itself. You are thus free to assign any probability you want to any event, and it does not have to be in accordance with anyone else's assessment of the same event. Instead of trying to create a theory that in itself is free from contradictions, the burden of consistency is placed on each individual. It is up to you to make sure that none of your probability assignments lead to contra-dictions! This is where the extended version of Bayes' theorem enters the stage. If you feed the theorem with your initial beliefs, what the theorem produces will always keep you safe from causing any internal inconsistencies. Your probabilities will of course still contradict other person's probabilities, but that does not matter. The only important thing is that your internal sets of beliefs are not contradictory. Note how this definition puts the relationship between probability theory and its users upside down. Instead of giving advice to its users on how to play games, the users now, so to speak, give advice to the theory or feed the theory. The individuals hold the ultimate truth themselves and the theory of probability merely functions as a set of traffic rules for how the individuals should think so that they do not end up having two different thoughts that collide. What happens if you do not follow the traffic rules is obvious-you become irrational. And who wants to be irrational? This idea of absolutely rational agents is the basis for rational choice theory as well as for most of modern economic theory. In a free market the agents are assumed to act in an absolutely rational manner, i.e., according to exactly the same concept of rationality as used in Bayesianism. While the Principle of Insufficient Reason only could handle situations where all cases were equally likely, Bayesian theory does not have this limitation. Your personal estimates Ergodos 51 of probabilities for different events can have any values whatsoever-they do not have to be the same for each case. Mathematically, this is expressed with a prior probability distribution, as the Bayesians denotes a subjective valuation function. This function can have any shape you like; it does not have to be a constant function with the same value everywhere. For example, if you have a die in front of you that you suspect is loaded, you will naturally assign probabilities to the sides that are not 1/6 for each side. This brings us to another basic principle of the Bayesian philosophy. If you suspect that the die in front of you is loaded, you have to take this into account when you set up your prior probability distribution. If you do not, you will easily contradict yourself. In fact, you have to include exactly everything you know at every instant when you make assessments regarding probabilities. It is not that easy to be a Bayesian. There are many variants of Bayesian probability, where some are called logical, epistemic, or objective Bayesian probability. However, the basic idea is the same but emphasis on what is important is placed at different places in respective philosophy. Objective Bayesians, for example, believe that there are objective ways to construct the prior distribution function, which removes the subjectivity from the theory. Logical interpretations stress the idea that probability, with the help of Bayes theorem, should be viewed as an extension of ordinary logic, namely the logic extended to uncertain statements. Epistemic probability stresses the importance of evidence as the basic force behind probability assignments. What they all have in common is a desire to be able to assign probabilities to also single cases, something the frequency and statistical interpretations fail to do. Attempts to extend the frequency approach to account for single cases as well are usually called Propensity interpretations of probability. Physicists have always been happy with the statistical concept of probability for their needs-until Quantum Mechanics entered the scene. Now, suddenly, a physical theory made probability statements about single events, which the old statistical concept of probability never can give an account for. Karl Popper started the movement of creating a propensity probability concept. One central goal is to extend the statistical theory of probability so that it becomes compatible with how probabilities are used within Quantum Mechanics. Moving Forward As we have seen, we have a strong historical and conceptual connection between the attempts to solve the St. Petersburg problem and all the current probability interpretations. We have also seen that the St. Petersburg problem is an open problem. But showing that Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 52 the St. Petersburg problem is still unsolved does not, by itself, prove that all probability interpretations are incorrect. It could be that one of the interpretations, while failing to solve the St. Petersburg problem, still has some justification as a probability interpretation. What we need is another example that explicitly shows how all current interpretations fail. Luckily, we have such an example. In recent decades another thought experiment has been discussed intensely, resulting in an even more confused debate than for the St. Petersburg problem. Also in this case, people are not able to agree upon what type of problem it is. Is it a problem within mathematics, logic, economics, psychology, or something else? Like the St. Petersburg problem it is a very easy problem to state, and yet no one has been able to solve it. However, the reason for this is very simple. None of the existing probability interpretations can be used to solve this problem, as we will see. The Two-Envelope Problem Imagine that you have two sealed envelopes in front of you containing money. One contains twice as much money as the other. You are free to choose one of the envelopes and receive the money it contains. You pick one of them at random, by tossing a coin, but before you open it you are given the option to switch to the other envelope instead. Do you want to switch? Obviously, the situation is symmetric, so it cannot make any difference whatsoever if you stick or switch. And yet, there is a clever argument that shows that you should switch. Assume that the envelope you picked contains A dollars. The other envelope must either contain 2A or A/2 dollars depending on if A is the larger or smaller amount. You tossed a coin, so you know for sure that it is a 50/50 chance for either case. There is a 50% chance that you get 2A and a 50% chance you get A/2 by switching. The expected value of switching is therefore 1/2 × 2A + 1/2 × A/2 which is 5A/4, or 1.25A. This is more than A, what you already have, so you should indeed switch to the other envelope. But this clearly cannot be the case as the situation is symmetric. If you had selected the other envelope instead the same argument would have told you that you should have taken the envelope you now hold in your hand. The Two-Envelope problem is to spot and explain the flaw in this argument. The frequentist or statistical concept of probability cannot even begin to solve this problem because it is evident from the setup that this is a single case. Propensity theories are of no help either. Those who think they can solve this problem are the Bayesians. The first Bayesian response is usually that the problem as stated is impossible to set up, as an infinite uniform prior distribution of money is implicitly required, and that is not Ergodos 53 permissible according to Bayesian theory. Already this is a bit strange as many Bayesians have, in other contexts, argued that improper priors, as this is called, should indeed be allowed. To see why we end up with this improper prior, think about how the two envelopes could have been filled with money in the first place. If you pick an envelope that contains A and it is equally likely that the other envelope contains 2A or A/2 it must mean that there were initially, before your were offered to pick an envelope, two envelope pairs {A/2, A} and {A, 2A} where both of them were equally likely to be picked as the pair you got in front of you. Only in this case is it equally probable that the other envelope contains 2A as it is that it contains A/2. But this must be the case for each of the possible amounts in all envelopes, in each possible envelope pair, so there must have been an infinity of envelope pairs for the person setting up the game to choose from: ... , {A/8, A/4}, {A/4, A/2}, {A/2, A}, {A, 2A}, {2A, 4A}, {4A, 8A}, ... . Each of the pairs must have had an equal probability to be chosen as the pair you got in front of you. This produces the improper distribution we talked about, as every envelope pair will have probability zero and yet when summing them all they must add up to one. However, this solution can be escaped by changing the Two-Envelope problem slightly, by introducing an explicit prior probability distribution for envelope pairs that is not an improper distribution, but a proper one. Such a distribution cannot be a uniform distribution why adjacent envelope pairs will have slightly different probabilities. However, when carrying out the calculations we will still get the conclusion that we should switch to the other envelope whatever we find in the first envelope. But as we know that this will always happen we do not have to open the first envelope we pick. We already know in advance that the other envelope is slightly better. This is truly paradoxical. And yet, the situation is as symmetric as before so any calculation leading to a difference between the envelopes must be false. In this case the Bayesians cannot blame us for implicitly assuming improper prior distributions anymore. The prior probability distribution here is explicit and proper. To escape this trap the Bayesians usually still blame it all on the prior distribution. But not for being improper but for having an expected value that is infinite, or an expected value that does not exist if you will. This is a quite strange argument. The question if improper priors should be allowed or not has been discussed among Bayesians as long as Bayesianism has existed, but now suddenly it is not possible to use probability distributions within Bayesian theory which lack expectation. There exist whole families of standard probability distributions that are used every day by statisticians all over the world that lack expected value and variance. The Cauchy distributions, for example, is one such family of distributions. Bayesians are usually proud of being able to extend the Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 54 application of probability from the narrow set of applications the statistical or frequentist interpretation can offer. Here we see an example of the opposite trend. Important probability distributions that are totally unproblematic for frequentists to use are banned by Bayesians. Most Bayesians are nevertheless happy with this explanation of the Two-Envelope problem. They are confident that new even more evil versions of the paradox will not appear. This is because a theorem shows that in order to produce the paradox the prior distributions need to have an infinite expectation. But a version of the paradox was already published early on by Raymond Smullyan where we cannot blame a prior probability distribution for being the culprit (Smullyan 1992). In fact, this version does not need any probabilities at all, so no probability distributions whatsoever, prior or otherwise, enters the scene. Consider the same setup as in the original problem where you are given the option to pick one of two envelopes where one contains twice as much as the other. The following two plainly logical arguments lead to conflicting conclusions: 1. Let the amount in the envelope you chose be A. Then by switching, if you gain you gain A but if you lose you lose A/2. So the amount you might gain is strictly greater than the amount you might lose. 2. Let the amounts in the envelopes be Y and 2Y. Now by switching, if you gain you gain Y but if you lose you also lose Y. So the amount you might gain is equal to the amount you might lose. The usual Bayesian response to this version is that this is another problem than the original because it does not include probabilities. This is a strange argument. If we can preserve the paradox while removing one concept that we initially thought was vital from the account, we have indeed learnt something. In this case, the Two-Envelope paradox is not dependent on the concept of probability, at least not a Bayesian concept of probability. Incidentally, it is indeed possible to construct a probabilistic variant of the TwoEnvelope problem that neither include improper priors nor priors with infinite expectations. Jailhouse Clock Imagine that you find yourself in death row in a prison in Texas for a crime you did not commit. You do not know when you are going to be executed. On the wall there is a Ergodos 55 A prison guard enters your cell and tells you that the time for your execution and another fellow prisoner has been determined. He hands over two letters with the execution orders containing the time of execution. You are free to pick any of the letters and the one you pick will determine when you will be executed. You pick one that says that you will be executed at 4 o'clock some day, but the actual day is not specified. Then suddenly the prison guard has a big grin over his face. He says that he is in a good mood today and want to give you an offer. If you want you are free to take the other execution order instead. It is a really good offer because the probability is exactly 1/2 that your time left in life will be doubled, and with probability 1/2 that it will be cut in half. The guard is ignorant of what is stated in the letters. He only knows the procedure for how to pick times for execution from the clock on the wall. Each hour has an equal chance of being selected for an execution. Execution orders are always created in pairs where one time left to live for a prisoner is twice as long as the other. This is possible to do via the clock on the wall in a cyclical manner, due to its odd feature. On that clock, twice of 1 is 2, twice of 2 is 4, twice of 4 is 8, twice of 8 is 3, twice of 3 is 6, twice of 6 is 12, twice of 12 is 11, twice of 11 is 9, twice of 9 is 5, twice of 5 is 10, twice of 10 is 7 and twice of 7 is 1. The pairs of letters presented to the prisoners are thus either {1, 2} or {2, 4} or {4, 8} or {8, 3} or {3, 6} or {6, 12} or {12, 11} or {11, 9} or {9, 5} or {5, 10} or {10, clock that you have noticed is a bit odd. It works properly except when the small hand is between noon and 1 PM, and between midnight and 1 AM. What should take one hour here always takes exactly two hours. Apart from this the clock works as normal. This means that the clock needs 13 hours to complete a full cycle. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 56 7} or {7, 1}. Twelve different pairs are possible in total. The prior probability for each pair of letters to be selected is 1/12. Because of this construction, when one letter in a pair is opened it is exactly as probable that the other envelope contains twice as much time left alive as it is half as much. In your case seeing the time stamp "4 o'clock" reveals that the only possible pairs of letters are {2, 4} and {4, 8}, and they are exactly equally likely to have been picked. The guard can therefore be absolutely certain that what he just told you is correct. You are a Bayesian and know how probability theory can help you here. You have absolutely no reason to doubt that the other letter has either the time stamp "2 o'clock" or "8 o'clock" with probability 1/2 each. By switching letter you will double your time left or cut it in half. What you can gain is thus twice of what you can lose, with an exact 50/50 chance for each outcome. Selecting the other letter will increase your chances of being released much more than it will decrease it. You know your lawyer needs every extra day she can get to reopen and win your case, before it is too late. So you would really need some extra time alive. On the other hand, of course, the situation is completely symmetric between the two letters you are given. No matter which one you would have opened first the other one would seem the more attractive. In particular, your fellow prisoner who got the other execution letter is also a Bayesian and reasons in the same way as you do. Both of you think it is a great opportunity to take the other letter so you end up swapping your execution letters. None of the existing probability interpretations can solve this paradox. Two Old Problems In the early 1650's, four gentlemen went on a three-day trip from Paris to Poitou, in the mid-west of France (Todhunter 1865). During the trip they discussed interesting philosophical topics such as the ontological nature of infinity, the existence of the infinitely small, the nature of the number zero and the existence of absolutely empty space. Above all, they discussed the nature of mathematics in general and its connection to reality. It was during these discussions that one of the gentlemen, Antoine Gombaud, alias chevalier de Méré, brought up two gambling problems that he thought strengthened his philosophical position. His stance was that mathematics is a very beautiful art on its own but cannot, in general, be trusted when applied to the real world. In particular when mathematical reasoning tries to embrace the mysterious concept of infinity. To show that mathematics can lead to paradoxes even when no infinities are involved, he reveals a curious fact that he had discovered himself. Gamblers are interested Ergodos 57 in calculating the so called critical number of a game. It is the number of times a game needs to be repeated in order to shift the odds from the gambling house to the player. For example, if you are offered to bet on a specified side of an ordinary die, you should only accept the bet if you are guaranteed to throw the die at least four times. Then you have more than a fifty-fifty chance to win the bet. The critical number for this game is thus four. The strange thing Gombaud had discovered was that when playing this game with two dice the critical number is not what you would expect. As the number of possible outcomes increases by a factor six when playing with two dice instead of one, the critical number ought to be increased by a factor six as well. Six times four is twenty-four, but strangely enough the critical number when using two dice is not twenty-four but twentyfive. How could this be? According to Monsieur Gombaud this fact was nothing less than a scandal, as ordinary arithmetic apparently contradicts itself. One of the other gentlemen on the journey, Blaise Pascal, got upset by Monsieur Gombaud's view of mathematics as something beautiful but poorly connected to reality, and sometimes even contradicting itself. He decided to prove Monsieur Gombaud wrong as soon as he was back at home. Monsieur Gombaud's problem is interesting. Ideally, the critical number really should increase by a factor six for every new die we add, for the reasons Gombaud devised. However, due to the discrete nature of a die the rule is not correct for the first few dice we add. As we add more and more dice the factor does indeed approach six. See the graph below. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 58 For this particular game it is easy to calculate the critical number exactly for any number of dice. In general, however, this is not the case. Usually it quickly becomes an impossible task due to the vexing number of combinations of outcomes that need to be calculated and ordered. The ideal property of Monsieur Gombaud proves to be a handy tool for calculating the approximate critical number for games that need to be repeated many times to break even. Unfortunately, Pascal never solved this problem, as he did not view it as interesting. In fact, he did not even understand the question. Instead he focused on the other gambling problem Monsieur Gombaud brought up during the trip. It was an old puzzle already then but new to Pascal, known as the Problem of points. Two persons agree to put some money at stake and the goal of the game is to collect a specified number of points, say ten, alternatingly throwing a die. If they decide to quit playing for some reason after they have started to collect points, how should the stake be divided in a fair way? If they have collected an equal amount of points the stake is simply divided in half, but what to do if one of them is in the lead? This problem had puzzled mathematicians and philosophers for over a century with no consensus on how to solve it. Pascal started to discuss this problem with his father's friend Pierre de Fermat via a series of letters. Initially Pascal was not sure at all that his solution to the problem was correct. However, when Pascal learnt that Fermat independently had arrived at the same division, albeit using other mathematical arguments, it made a huge impact on him. He quickly became convinced not only that their new principle was correct, but also that it could be applied to any type of decision problem. For instance, he devised a novel argument based on this principle for why one ought to believe in a god, today known as Pascal's Wager. In modern terminology, their solution to the Problem of points amounts to the idea that each player should get a share of the stake that is proportional to their probability to win the game, had the game not ended. This share became known as the expectation or the expected value. Ever since its inception, this concept has been hugely influential in a number of different human inquiries. Fair Values Why did Pascal and Fermat view the expected value as the fair division of the stake? Fermat apparently did not see the need for an independent justification at all. He seemed to think that it is mathematically obvious that his solution is the correct one. Pascal, however, tried to justify his solution by using a mathematical reasoning where each Ergodos 59 player's fair share of the stake in the end can be reduced to a fair coin flip. To flip a fair coin to win your fair amount is seen as the quintessential fair game, and anything that can be reduced to this game ought to be fair as well. But to be reduced to a fair coin flip and be a fair coin flip are two different things. This is Pascal's mistake, which eventually led to the St. Petersburg problem and the messy philosophical situation we have today. However, no one at the time spotted this flaw in his argument. On the contrary, mathematicians all over Europe instead began to be interested in this new branch of mathematics, founded on the concept of expected value. The same year the St. Petersburg problem was discovered the first version of the Law of Large Numbers was proved, giving the concept of expected value a much-needed theoretical support. It states that the expected value can be viewed as the average value for a game that is played an infinite number of times. Hence, if we play a game infinitely many times, we are mathematically justified to use the expected value as the fair prize. But if we do not happen to play a game infinitely many times, how can we justify to use the expected value? After a large number of iterations of a game, the average value begins to fluctuate around the theoretical mean value, i.e., the expected value. Half of the time the average is above the mean and half of the time it is below the mean. This implies that if we play long enough, the probability is one half that we will end up as net winners and the other half that we will end up as net losers-if we pay the expected value each time we play the game. Just by iterating, any game will, in this sense, end up being equivalent to tossing a fair coin, which is the quintessential fair game. So, even if for a given game the expected value is not in any sense fair for a single or a few rounds, when repeated sufficiently many times, the series of rounds viewed as a whole will always be a quintessential fair game. We see by this that even if the expected value from the outset is not a fair prize in any reasonable sense-just by repeating the game over and over we will arrive at a situation that models the quintessential fair game, i.e., tossing a fair coin once. That is, if the expected value is finite. If the expected value is infinite, as in the case of the St. Petersburg game, we will still come closer and closer to the "fair" value, which is infinity, but of course only from finite values. That is, only from 'below.' We will never reach a state where the accumulated gain will fluctuate around infinity, half of the time above infinity and half of the time below infinity. This is why the expected value is so strongly felt as being an unfair prize for the St. Petersburg game. It is not the infinite prize per se that is the problem, but the fact that the game cannot model the quintessential fair game no matter how many times we play the game. We can now define what a fair game is in the classical sense. Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 60 Definition A game is fair in the classical sense if and only if the probability is equally big for a net gain as for a net loss for all large number of rounds of the game. Every game with a finite expected value can be turned into a fair game in the classical sense by assigning the expected value as the prize for the game. Note that no significance at all is put on how much we win or lose in the long run, only that the probability for a net profit is equal to the probability of a net loss. A net profit of one dollar is considered a 'win' as much as a net profit of millions of dollars. If we have a fair game in the classical sense we can guarantee that we will win or lose with equal probability in the long run, but we cannot, in general, say anything about how large the net gain or net loss will be. A closer analysis of the game at hand is needed for that. Hence, for the definition of fairness in the classical sense the size of the possible gain or loss is irrelevant. However, we always need to perform a deeper analysis of the game at hand to know how many times we need to iterate the game in order to have reached the state when the game is fair in the classical sense. For some games the expected value is fair in the classical sense from start while for others we need to play an astronomical number of rounds. This is the meaning of the 'large numbers' in the Law of Large Numbers. But if this fifty-fifty chance for loss or gain in the end is the basic intuition behind the concept of fairness, why not use this upfront as the definition of a fair game? Definition A game is fair if and only if the probability is equally big for a net gain as it is for a net loss. From these definitions, we see that a game is fair in the classical sense only if a long sequence of games taken as a whole eventually becomes fair. But if a game is fair, it is automatically also fair in the classical sense. In the language of mathematical logic, 'fair' is a conservative extension of the old concept 'fair in the classical sense.' Hence, we have nothing to lose in adopting this new more general concept of fairness. In mathematical language, an equal probability for gain or loss is called the median. The expected value is not a median but a probability weighted mean. What we noted above is that after a sufficiently large number of rounds played, the mean behaves exactly like a median-it actually becomes a median. This means that the median will approach the mean more and more the more the game at hand is repeated. It is in fact this medianlike property of the expected value in the long run that is the only valid justification for calling the expected value a fair prize. Ergodos 61 Solving the St. Petersburg Problem If the approach to the median is the only reasonable reason to stick to the expected value-why not use the median upfront? The median is a fair prize by definition. For any game with a uniform distribution, the median and the mean will coincide. For a game with a non-uniform distribution, the mean and the median will not coincide in general. For example, the St. Petersburg game has an infinite mean (expected value) while the median (fair prize) is only 1.5 dollars. If we play the St. Petersburg game twice, the worst-case scenario is that we win only one dollar each time, that is, two dollars in total. This will happen with probability 1/4, because first we have to win one dollar with probability 1/2 and then another with probability 1/2, and 1/2×1/2 is 1/4. If we have a little more luck we win one dollar the first round and two dollars the second round, in total three dollars, which has probability 1/8, as 1/2×1/4 is 1/8. Or, we win two dollars the first round and one dollar the next round, which also totals three dollars with probability 1/8. Adding the probabilities for all these three worst case scenarios we get 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/8 = 1/2. So, with probability 1/2 we will win 3 dollars or less. Hence, with probability 1/2 we will win 4 dollars or more. The median for playing the St. Petersburg game twice is thus 3.5 dollars. The fair prize per game is therefore in this case 1.75 dollars, which is slightly more than the fair prize for playing the game only once. That the fair value increases is what we can expect as we know that the median must approach the mean, i.e., the expected value, the more rounds we play of the game. In this case we know that the expected value is infinite. The fair prize must therefore increase without bound for larger and larger sequences of repeated rounds of the game. In practice, this means that the more we are guaranteed to play the St. Petersburg game the more should we be willing to pay for the privilege to play the game. That a fair prize must, in general, vary depending on how many times we plan to play a specific game was realized already by William Feller, as we have seen. In the graph on the next page we see how the fair prize per game increases as we are guaranteed to play longer and longer sequences of St. Petersburg games. As already mentioned, we know that this curve must increase without bound. But can we find an expression that approximates this curve? This is in fact possible using the same idea as Monsieur Gombaud used. The more we play the game the more certain we are that we will win the most common prizes in proportion to how likely they are. If we play four times we can be somewhat sure that we will win the one dollar prize half of the time, that is in two of the four cases. This will give us two dollars. Ideally, we would expect to win two dollars in one Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 62 of the two remaining cases, four dollars in half a case, eight dollars in one fourth of a case and so on. However, this is clearly impossible, but the previous sentence describes exactly twice the St. Petersburg game played twice. The exact fair value for playing the standard game twice is 3.5 dollars as we already know. Therefore, the remaining two of the four cases contributes exactly 2×3.5 dollars. In total we have an approximate fair value of 2 dollars + 2×3.5 dollars for playing four times, or 1/2 + 1.75 dollars per game. If we play eight rounds, we will ideally win one dollar in four cases, two dollars in two cases and the last two cases is exactly like playing four times the St. Petersburg game twice. The approximate fair value is therefore 4 dollars + 2×2 dollars + 4×3.5 dollars, or 1 + 1.75 dollars per game. If we double once more and play sixteen times, we will arrive at an approximate fair prize of 3/2 + 1.75 dollars per game. In general, the approximate fair prize per game when we play t times is 1/2 log(t/2) + 1.75 dollars, where the logarithm is to base two. This can be rewritten as For large values of t, this expression gives an almost exact approximation of the true curve of fair prizes. In the graph on the next page this curve is shown in black. Thus, for large values of t we can use the convenient formula above instead of calculating the exact fair value, which quickly becomes very complicated because of the vexing number of Ergodos 63 = cases to consider. Note how the 'ideal' black curve here plays the same role as the 'ideal' increasing factor of six in Monsieur Gombaud's gambling problem about the critical number. If we solve the expression above for t, we get the relation where we have replaced t with time to make the formula easier to remember. Whenever you are offered the opportunity to play the St. Petersburg game, try to remember this formula. Depending on the fee you have to pay to play the game you should not play unless you are guaranteed to, and have time to, play at least the number of times given by this formula. For example, if you are offered to play the game for a five dollars fee, you should not play unless you are guaranteed to play at least 182 times. If the fee is 20 dollars you will probably not have time to play the game even if you are given the opportunity to play the required amount of times. This kind of advice sounds familiar. What is denoted 'time' in the formula above is exactly the same concept as the 'critical number' in Monsieur Gombaud's own gambling problem. We can thus conclude that this idea is far from new. In fact, it comes natural to most people. In clinical studies where people have been asked what they are willing to put at stake for playing different games, the concept which best fits the empirical data is the fair prize, that is, the median (Hayden and Platt 2009). Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 64 Solving the Two-Envelope Problem Unfortunately, the solution of the St. Petersburg problem does not solve the TwoEnvelope problem. If we replace all expected values by fair values, the latter problem remains, as is seen in the Jailhouse Clock scenario. Incidentally, this proves that these two problems are totally unrelated. The opposite stance, that they are closely related or even just variants of the same problem, is quite common among the commentators to the Two-Envelope problem. According to this view, the true solution of the St. Petersburg problem would automatically resolve the Two-Envelope problem. Now we see that this is not the case. The Two-Envelope problem is superficially similar to the paradoxes invented by Joseph Bertrand in the nineteenth century that helped to kill the classical interpretation of probability. However, the Two-Envelope problem goes deeper as it also shows that the Bayesian interpretations are wrong. According to Bayesian philosophy 'uncertainty' or 'lack of knowledge' can always be modeled by a probability distribution in a way that does not lead to contradictions. But we can construct an explicit probability distribution describing a certain state of 'uncertainty' for the Two-Envelope problem that does indeed lead to a contradiction (Broome 1995). This shows that the Bayesian philosophy is false. The underlying world view motivating the Bayesian philosophy is determinism. If the world is deterministic only our 'lack of knowledge' can be the reason for why we are uncertain about what will happen. It is always, however, possible to learn more about the situation at hand and reduce our uncertainty. For example, if we flip a coin and we have no clue which side will come up, we say that chances are fifty-fifty for either side. But if we know more about the actual coin or learn the physical details on how it is flipped, it is always possible to make a better guess. If we have total knowledge of the physical situation at hand we can predict with certainty which side will come up. Hence, for determinists it is natural to equate probability with lack of knowledge. Total lack of knowledge leads to a uniform probability distribution among the possible outcomes. Partial knowledge leads to some other probability distribution, which completely describes the state of knowledge. If we have total knowledge everything is certain and we have no need for probabilities. Or equivalently, all probabilities are either zero or one. We know for certain if something will happen or not. To use probabilities as an irreducible entity in a fundamental physical theory is thus unthinkable for a determinist. If the theory really is fundamental it cannot rely upon a concept that is synonymous to 'lack of knowledge.' That is just another way to say that the fundamental theory really is not fundamental at all. There must exist some even more fundamental theory that explains the apparent randomness. This was exactly the Ergodos 65 view Albert Einstein held regarding the new physical theory describing the very small, Quantum Mechanics. It is held to be a fundamental theory that nevertheless relies upon irreducible probabilities. As a determinist, it was evident for Einstein that Quantum Mechanics cannot be a fundamental theory. To convince even non-determinists he developed, together with two coworkers, a philosophical argument that is now known as the EPR argument (Einstein et al. 1935). The argument uses two spatially separated particles that are connected in a special "spooky" way that Quantum Mechanics permits. Einstein viewed the connection as spooky because the particles seem to keep track of each other through space and time in an inexplicable way. For example, if a property like spin is measured in a particular direction for one of the particles the other particle always has a spin in the opposite direction. This would not be strange at all if their spin directions were predetermined and simply set in different directions from the beginning. But that is not how it is according to the theory. According to Quantum Mechanics, the outcome of the first measurement is completely random and not predetermined at all. How the other particle can know the outcome of a completely random event far away and adapt its properties accordingly is what is called "spooky action at a distance" in the EPR paper. As soon as one of the particles has been measured, we know for certain the outcome of the corresponding measurement of the other particle. A property that can be predicted with certainty must imply that the property is real and exists objectively, even before we measure it. But the theory explicitly denies that this property could be real and existing before the measurement. According to Einstein, this clearly shows the incompleteness of Quantum Mechanics. A complete theory has something corresponding to every element of reality. Any property in the natural world that can be predicted with certainty, i.e., with probability equal to one, is an element of reality. This is how 'an element of reality' is defined in the EPR paper. As Quantum Mechanics cannot account for some quantum properties, which clearly are elements of reality according to this definition, the theory must be incomplete. This is the EPR argument. The EPR argument is flawed because the reasoning is circular. If the world is deterministic we already know that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, so the EPR argument cannot assume that. But the interpretation of probability used in the definition of "an element of reality" is Bayesian-probability as a measure of how complete our knowledge of a situation is. And, as we know, this interpretation only makes sense in a deterministic world where every particle has well determined properties all the time. So instead of giving a definite proof of the incompleteness of Quantum Mechanics, as was the intention, the EPR argument only shows that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete if Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 66 we assume that Quantum Mechanics is incomplete. In fact, what the EPR thought experiment really shows is quite the contrary. It shows that irreducible true randomness indeed exists. There is a well-known theorem, called the no-communication theorem, which says that the coupled particles in the EPR setup cannot be used to send information faster than light. The reason we cannot utilize the "spooky action at a distance" for actual communication is because the first measurement we perform is totally random. If it were not completely random we would actually be able to send information faster than light. Indeed instantaneously. Not only is superluminal communication forbidden in the theory of relativity, but the very concept of 'instantaneity' is totally alien to it. So, in order to comply with Einstein's own theory of relativity, the EPR experiment shows that the world actually is indeterministic and not deterministic, which Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen implicitly had assumed. Knowing that probability must have to do with randomness and that our physical world is in fact indeterministic, does this by itself solve the Two-Envelope problem? It is an interesting fact that it does not. In the Jailhouse Clock scenario, for example, we can specify explicitly how to randomly select the pair of execution orders to be presented to you. The guards can simply use a twelve-sided die as the random generator and select one of the twelve possible pairs depending on what the die shows. Then you flip a coin to decide which of the two execution orders to choose. The Jailhouse Clock problem, however, prevails. This is why the Two-Envelope problem is deeper than the paradoxes presented by Joseph Bertrand. They all disappear when a random procedure like this is specified explicitly. Which additional idea is needed to solve the problem? We know that the world is indeterministic because there are genuinely random events. But what does "random" really mean? In a deterministic world when repeating an experiment the outcome must always be the same. If it is not the same, we have not repeated exactly the same experiment. This is not the case in an indeterministic world. Here we can repeat exactly the same experiment and the outcome can still be different from one performance to the next. This is what we mean by fundamentally random events. So, every experiment in an indeterministic world leads to a set of random events. But is the opposite implication true? Does a set of random events imply an experiment? Let us investigate this question in the context of the Jailhouse Clock scenario. You look at the letter with the execution order you have picked that says that you will be executed at 4 o'clock some day. Then, suddenly, you are given the opportunity by the prison guard to choose the other letter instead. This event is a random event where we do not know what the experiment is. Either the time stamp "4 o'clock" is essential to Ergodos 67 why you got the opportunity to switch letter by the prison guard, or it is not. As this situation will only happen once in your life you have no way of knowing what would have happened if some other time stamp would have shown up in the letter you first picked. There are two options. Either you are given the opportunity to switch to the other letter whatever timestamp you got first, or you are not. In other words, either the timestamp "4 o'clock" is part of the description of the experiment, or it is not. If it is part of the description of the experiment you are only given the opportunity to switch in case you found the execution order with timestamp "4 o'clock." In this case it is advantageous to switch as the fair value of your time left alive is increased using the other execution order. If "4 o'clock" is not part of the description of the experiment it must instead be one of the twelve possible outcomes of the experiment and you are given the opportunity to switch whatever time is stated in the first letter. If this is the case, there is nothing to gain by switching to the other execution order. By this we see that a set of random events by itself does not imply a unique experiment. Sometimes a set of events is compatible with more than one experiment. Moreover, this also shows that attaching probabilities to events when the experiment is not defined leads to contradictions. 'Experiment' is thus a more fundamental concept than randomness. Definition An experiment is a complete set of instructions on how to properly repeat something. Note that this definition does not make any distinction between real experiments and thought experiments. It does not matter if the experiment is actually performed or not. It can occur many times, only once, or never. The set of instructions is always the same. If no experiment is defined, it is impossible to talk about probabilities. It leads to contradictions as we have seen. The experiment is thus the important concept here and not the random event itself. Random events cannot be attributed probabilities without a reference to an experiment. This is the key observation to understand the concept of probability. Definition A probability is a measure of the relative occurrence of an outcome of an experiment, would the experiment be repeated indefinitely. Note how this concept does not make any distinction between theoretical probabilities and actual measurable probabilities. This is because it relies upon the Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 68 concept of experiment above which does not distinguish between actual experiments and thought experiments. This concept solves all probabilistic versions of the Two-Envelope problem. Obviously, Smullyan's non-probabilistic version of the Two-Envelope problem cannot be solved by a new concept of probability, as no probabilities enter that problem. Smullyan's paradox instead shows something very interesting about the logical structure of the world. We cannot use our probability concept to solve Smullyan's problem but we can use the concept which is the logical basis for it, our concept of experiment. The two conclusions derived in the problem, that the amount we might gain is greater than what we might lose, and that the amount we might gain is equal to what we might lose, respectively, are only possible because different experiments are used to derive the conclusions. In the first case, the amount A is part of the experiment while in the second case neither Y nor 2Y are part of the experiment. In the first case, the outcomes of the experiment are 2A and A/2 while in the second case the outcomes are Y and 2Y. This is the reason we get different conclusions. Our concept of experiment thus solves Smullyan's non-probabilistic version of the Two-Envelope problem. Consequences for the Measurement Problem We have shown that in order to avoid contradictions we always need to explicitly specify what our experiment is and clearly distinguish that from the results we get from performing the experiment. Not only when probabilities and random events are involved, but always. This has interesting consequences for understanding the so-called Measurement problem in Quantum Mechanics. The Measurement problem is how to explain why measurements play such a peculiar role in Quantum Mechanics. As long as we do not measure a quantum system, the system evolves in a deterministic fashion. But as soon as we do a measurement the deterministic progression collapses and we get a random result that is in accordance with what the theory predicts. The problem is that this "collapse" of the deterministic evolution is not explained or motivated in the theory at all. Moreover, no one knows for sure what a "measurement" really is. No definition whatsoever is given by the theory. It is a mystery how this concept, which is in no way a part of the theory, can nevertheless be totally crucial for the application and therefore success of the theory. To explain this is called the Measurement problem. If we try to understand Quantum Mechanics using a deterministic ontology, we will fail, as we have seen. In a deterministic world every object has exact positions Ergodos 69 and properties all the time. But the world is indeterministic as we have shown, so we need to adopt an indeterministic ontology instead. In an indeterministic world, there are genuinely random events that cannot be reduced to more basic underlying random events. But the only way a genuinely random event can exist is because it is the result of an experiment. If we do not have an experiment, we cannot have a random event. This is true on a basic logical level of reality for which the physical reality has to comply. Nature has solved this problem by letting quantum systems evolve in a deterministic but unreal manner when no experiment is defined. Or rather, between the start of an experiment and the end of the experiment. As soon as the experiment ends, which is usually called a measurement, a random event will occur that is compatible with the experiment. If an experiment is changed, the possible random outcomes are changed as well. To investigate the state of a particle in the middle of a genuinely random experiment is impossible, simply for the reason that such a measurement changes the original experiment. An experiment cannot have two different starting points at the same time. This follows from the definition of an experiment. As soon as the particle is interrupted, it marks the end of an experiment and a new experiment begins where the previous starting point is completely forgotten. As the change of an experiment happens at a logical level of reality, the change has to be instant. This explains the instant change in the EPR setup. Nature's detection of which experiment is at hand is always instant. If it was not instant, it would be possible to arrange a situation where two experiments were defined at the same time for the same set of particles, which would easily lead to a logical contradiction. The new probability concept, which we can call the experimental interpretation of probability, also explains why a "certain" prediction of an outcome, as in the EPR argument, still does not mean that the particle is in that state prior to the measurement. A measurement is a physical interaction which either has occurred or has not occurred. If it has not occurred, the particle is still in its unreal but deterministic state. As soon as the measurement happens the particle's property that is measured becomes real. The fact that we can with certainty predict the outcome of an experiment does not change this fact. Conclusions At first, it might seem like a good thing that we allow for many different interpretations of the probability concept. But if that is the case, it must logically be a good thing to have many different interpretations of any scientific concept like force, distance, time, electric Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 70 current and so on. It is easy to see that if we had that, science would hardly be possible. There is no legitimate reason to claim that probability is special, in any sense, from any other scientific concept. Either it is good for all concepts to have many contradicting interpretations or it is good for none. It is clearly the latter case. Allowing for only one interpretation of probability will have a major impact on both natural science and the human sciences. There will be no reason to use totally different types of mathematics in economics and physics, for example, as is currently the case. As this paper shows, both can instead start to use the same concept of probability. If adopted, this will have a great unifying effect across different disciplines. Ergodos 71 References Broome, John. 1995. "The Two-Envelope Paradox." Analysis 55 (1): 6–11. Dutka, Jacques. 1988. "On the St. Petersburg paradox." Archive for History of Exact Sciences 39 (1): 13–39. Einstein, Albert, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. 1935. "Can quantum-mechanical description of physical reality be considered complete?" Physical Review 47 (10): 777–780. Feller, William. 1945. "Note on the Law of Large Numbers and "Fair" Games." The Annals of Mathematical Statistics 16 (3): 301–304. -. 1950. An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications, Volume I. New York: Wiley. Hayden, Benjamin and Michael Platt. 2009. "The mean, the median, and the St. Petersburg Paradox." Judgment and Decision Making 4 (4): 256–272. Jorland, Gérard. 1987. "The Saint Petersburg Paradox 1713–1937." The Probabilistic Revolution, Volume 1: Ideas in History, ed. by L Kruger, L J Daston, and M Heidelberger, 157–190. Cambridge: MIT Press. Samuelson, Paul. 1977. "St. Petersburg Paradoxes: Defanged, Dissected, and Historically Described." Journal of Economic Literature 15 (1): 24–55. Smullyan, Raymond. 1992. Satan, Cantor, and infinity, and other mind-boggling puzzles. New York: Alfred A Knopf. Todhunter, Isaac. 1865. A history of the mathematical theory of probability from the time of Pascal to that of Lagrange. Cambridge and London: Macmillan and Co.

Fichte en el laberinto del idealismo Mariano L. Gaudio María Jimena Solé editores RAGIF ediciones Fichte en el laberinto del idealismo Fichte no labirinto do idealismo Fichte im labyrinth des idealismus Fichte in the labyrinth of idealism Fichte dans le labyrinthe de l'idéalisme MARIANO L. GAUDIO y MARÍA JIMENA SOLÉ (editores) ragif ediciones 2019 © de los textos, sus autores. © de la edición, Ragif ediciones. Maquetación y puesta en página, Jairo Fiorotto. RAGIF ediciones http://ragif.com.ar/ Reservados todos los derechos. No se permite la reproducción total o parcial de esta obra, ni su incorporación a un sistema informático, ni su transmisión en cualquier forma o por cualquier medio (electrónico, mecánico, fotocopia, grabación u otros) sin autorización previa y por escrito de los titulares del copyright. La infracción de dichos derechos puede constituir un delito contra la propiedad intelectual. Fichte en el laberinto del idealismo / Isabelle Thomas-Fogiel... [et al.] ; compilado por Mariano Gaudio ; María Jimena Solé ; editado por Mariano Gaudio ; María Jimena Solé.1a ed.- Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires : RAGIF Ediciones, 2019. Libro digital, PDF Archivo Digital: descarga ISBN 978-987-47425-1-3 1. Filosofía Moderna. I. Thomas-Fogiel, Isabelle. II. Gaudio, Mariano, comp. III. Solé, María Jimena, comp. CDD 193 DETERMINACIÓN RECÍPROCA VS. AUTODETERMINACIÓN La crítica de Hegel a la tesis fichteana del obstáculo (Anstoss) Héctor Ferreiro Una de las tesis más controvertidas del Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia de Fichte es la tesis del obstáculo (Anstoss). En efecto, desde la publicación de esta obra entre 1794 y 1795 ha habido interpretaciones divergentes sobre el significado preciso de dicha tesis;1 pocas interpretaciones han logrado ganar tantos partidarios a lo largo del tiempo como la que propuso Hegel en el Escrito de la Diferencia de 1 Para un análisis y exposición de la teoría del obstáculo en la filosofía de Fichte véanse especialmente los textos al respecto de Daniel Breazeale: "Check or Checkmate? On the Finitude of the Fichtean Self" en Ameriks, Karl y Sturma, Dieter (eds.), The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 87-114; "Fichte's Abstract Realism" en Baur, Michael and Dahlstrom, Daniel O., From Transcendental Philosophy to Metaphysics: The Emergence of German Idealism, Washington DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1999, pp. 99-115; Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte's Early Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 156-196. Pueden consultarse asimismo Druet, Pierre-Philippe, "L''Anstoss' fichtéen: Essai d'élucidation d'une métaphore", en Revue philosophique de Louvain, N° 70 (7), 1972, pp. 384-392; Soller, Alois K., "Fichtes Lehre vom Anstoss, Nicht-Ich und Ding an sich in der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre: Eine kritische Erörterung", en Fichte-Studien, N° 10, 1997, pp. 175-189. 666 | Héctor Ferreiro 1801 y repitió, en esencia, hasta el final de su vida. Según la lectura de Hegel, la tesis del obstáculo sería una variante de la tesis kantiana de la cosa en sí y, en esta medida, la filosofía temprana de Fichte sería un idealismo trascendental próximo al de Kant.2 El objetivo del presente artículo es reconstruir las ideas fundamentales de la crítica de Hegel a la tesis fichteana del obstáculo; en este contexto llamaremos la atención sobre dos tesis de la filosofía de Hegel que juzgamos centrales para poder comprender qué es lo que a sus ojos resulta deficiente en la doctrina del obstáculo y qué es lo que considera una alternativa exitosa para resolver el problema al que Fichte intenta dar solución con dicha doctrina. La primera de estas tesis de la filosofía de Hegel es que la dificultad que plantea el hecho que el sujeto conozca un objeto, es decir, en otros términos, la dificultad que plantea la unidad del yo con aquello que en principio no sería en cuanto tal yo, porque es su objeto, sólo puede ser explicada en el marco teórico de la idealidad absoluta, esto es, en la medida en que el yo toma conciencia de que su objeto no es jamás, bajo ningún respecto, una cosa (o un hecho), sino, en rigor, un concepto que se identifica con la cosa, y de que, por ende, debe abandonar como modelo para concebir su relación con el 2 Variantes del modo de interpretar la tesis fichteana del obstáculo propuesto por Hegel han sido defendidas en las últimas décadas, por ejemplo, por Frederick Beiser (cf. Beiser, Frederick, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002, esp. pp. 3-4, 271-272, 311-319; Beiser, Frederick, "Maimon and Fichte," en Freudenthal, Gideon (ed.), Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic. Critical Assessments, Boston, Kluwer, 2003, p. 241) y Dieter Henrich (cf. Henrich, Dieter, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1967, pp. 41-44). 667 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación objeto toda variante del paradigma general de la coseidad.3 La segunda tesis, íntimamente vinculada con la primera, es que si se parte de la premisa general de la unidad del sujeto con el objeto el contenido determinado presente en la actividad de conocimiento no puede surgir más que mediante un proceso de autonegación, es decir, como una autodeterminación de esa unidad primigenia, dado que por principio no hay absolutamente nada que pueda diferenciarse y contraponerse a ella y, a partir de esa diferencia y contraposición, determinarla ni tampoco provocar la actividad de su propia autodeterminación.4 1. El obstáculo en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia Fichte introduce la tesis del obstáculo cerca del final de la parte teórica del Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia, 3 Es decir, para expresarlo en la terminología de Hegel, debe abandonar la perspectiva de la lógica objetiva. 4 Fichte no atribuye la determinación del contenido particular de la representación al no-yo, sino tan sólo al yo; en este sentido, puede decirse que también Fichte suscribe la tesis de que la determinación es el resultado de la autodeterminación del yo. Sin embargo, para Fichte es el encuentro con un obstáculo fuera del yo lo que provoca (bewirkt), mueve (bewegt) o determina (bestimmt) que el yo asuma la tarea de su autodeterminación; en este preciso sentido, el obstáculo podría ser caracterizado en la filosofía temprana de Fichte como un principio de determinación de la representación. Véase, en este respecto, GWL, GA I/2 386, FSW I 248: "Die Art und Weise des Vorstellens überhaupt ist allerdings durch das Ich; dass aber überhaupt das Ich vorstellend sey, ist nicht durch das Ich, sondern durch etwas ausser dem Ich bestimmt". GWL, GA I/2 388, FSW I 251: "Die Vorstellung überhaupt (nicht etwa die besonderen Bestimmungen derselben) ist unwidersprechlich ein bewirktes des Nicht-Ich". GWL, 668 | Héctor Ferreiro poco antes del inicio de la sección dedicada a la "Deducción de la Representación";5 el contexto próximo en el que aparece la noción del obstáculo es la discusión sobre las condiciones de posibilidad de la representación. La posición que suscribe Fichte es que el fenómeno de la conciencia empírica puede ser explicado sólo como el producto de la reciprocación (Wechsel) entre el yo y el no-yo y que esta reciprocación presupone la presencia del obstáculo,6 esto es, para expresarlo desde otra perspectiva, dicho fenómeno presupone el estar-determinado el yo por un objeto en general (Object überhaupt)7; en efecto, el objeto –tomado en un sentido máximamente abstracto– debe estar ya presente en el yo para que el yo pueda poner un límite entre sí mismo y eso otro de sí, GA I/2 409-410, FSW I 277: "Geht die Reflexion auf diesen Anstoss, und betrachtet das Ich demnach sein Herausgehen als beschränkt; so entsteht dadurch eine ganz andere Reihe, die des Wirklichen, die noch durch etwas anderes bestimmt wird, als durch das blosse Ich". 5 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 355-357, 361; FSW I 210, 212-213, 218. La doctrina del obstáculo es ulteriormente desarrollada por Fichte en la GWL en el contexto de la "Deducción de la representación" (GA I/2 369-370, 372, 378; FSW I 228-229, 231, 239) y en el de la exposición del segundo teorema (§ 5) de la parte práctica (GA I/2 387-389, 400, 408-411, FSW I 248-251, 265, 275-279). Fichte se refiere también de forma expresa a la tesis del obstáculo –aunque en forma ostensiblemente más breve que en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia– en el Grundriss des Eigenthümlichen der Wissenschaftslehre in Rücksicht auf das theoretische Vermögen (GEWL, GA I/3 143, 155, 158; FSW I 331, 344, 347) y en el Fundamento del Derecho natural según los principios de la Doctrina de la Ciencia (GNR, GA I/3 343, FSW III 33). Véase asimismo EE, GA I/4 197, FSW I 437. 6 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 354, FSW I 209-210. 7 Cf. en este sentido SSL, GA I/5 183, FSW IV 199: "Die Natur als solche, als Nicht-Ich und Object überhaupt, hat nur Ruhe, nur Seyn: sie ist, was sie ist, und insofern ist ihr gar keine thätige Kraft zuzuschreiben". SSL, GA I/5 204, FSW IV 224: "Durch das Object überhaupt wird unser Seyn beschränkt; oder besser: von der Beschränkung unseres Seyns wird auf ein Object überhaupt geschlossen". 669 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación un otro abstracto e indeterminado que deviene más tarde el contenido determinado de los objetos particulares de la representación.8 El obstáculo no es, pues, un objeto concreto presente en el yo, sino una condición de posibilidad del conocimiento de los objetos concretos del mundo real. La presencia de lo subjetivo se deja explicar por la posición del yo por sí mismo; la presencia de los objetos, en cambio, no es explicada por la actividad como tal del yo, dado que el yo se pone por principio sólo a sí mismo.9 De este modo, el obstáculo no puede ser deducido (ableiten) del concepto o esencia del yo; es como tal inexplicable; su presencia debe ser postulada (postulirt) para poder explicar el hecho de la conciencia efectiva de lo real diferente al yo.10 En efecto, el yo es igual a sí mismo –esta tesis está contenida en el primer principio fundamental o axioma (Grundsatz) de la Doctrina de la Ciencia–11; en esta medida, que el yo conozca algo que 8 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 357, FSW I 213. 9 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 358, FSW I 214. 10 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 400, 407-408; FSW I 265, 275. Para la tesis del obstáculo como presupuesto para poder explicar el hecho de la representación véase además GWL, GA I/2 354-355, 361-362, 386-388, 411-412; FSW I 210, 218-219, 248, 250 y 280. 11 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 257-261, FSW I 94-98. Para vertir los términos alemanes "Grundsatz" y "Lehrsatz" al español en el contexto de la filosofía de Fichte se han propuesto, basándose en la traducción que en su momento hiciera Christian Wolff de la terminología latina al alemán, los términos "axioma" y "teorema", respectivamente (cf. Acosta, Emiliano, "La transformación de la tabla kantiana de las categorías en el Fundamento de toda la doctrina de la ciencia de J. G. Fichte de 1794/95", en Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Vol. 33, N° 1, 2016, p. 113, n. 47 y, ulteriormente, Class, Wolfgang y Soller, Alois K., Kommentar zu Fichtes Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte-Studien Supplementa 19, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2004, p. 23). En el presente artículo adoptamos estas variantes de traducción. 670 | Héctor Ferreiro no es él presupone que eso que no es el yo tenga su origen último en algo con lo que se encuentra la actividad pura del yo. Fichte apela en este contexto a la imagen de una fuerza de dirección centrífuga –la actividad del yo absoluto– cuyo avance es de pronto impedido (gehemmt) por la acción de algo que la contrarresta;12 el obstáculo es precisamente este mero algo que devuelve hacia su punto de origen a la acción como tal centrífuga y en continua expansión del yo absoluto, convirtiéndola con ello en actividad teórica de dirección centrípeta y al yo absoluto en un yo que ahora, en cuanto conoce algo que no es él, deviene un yo inteligente, inteligencia.13 Pero el obstáculo no puede actuar sobre el yo si no es a través de la propia participación activa (Zuthun) del yo.14 En efecto, todo lo que es conocido por el yo tiene que estar puesto en el yo para el yo, pues aunque el yo conoce algo que no es él mismo, este algo, sin embargo, no puede serle extrínseco; de lo contrario, no podría conocerlo. Fichte sostiene así que el obstáculo, que como tal no es propiamente puesto por el yo, le sucede al yo en cuanto el yo es activo, dado que el obstáculo es obstáculo no en sí mismo como tal, sino sólo en la medida en que lo es para la actividad del yo. Si no hubiera actividad del yo, no habría, pues, obstáculo, pero no menos correcto es decir que si no hubiera un obstáculo para la actividad del yo no habría para él nada objetivo.15 Un ejemplo que puede servir para ilustrar lo que Fichte 12 Cf. GWL, GA I/2, 400-401, FSW I 265-266. Cf. también GEWL, GA I/3 157158, FSW I 347-348 y GNR, GA I/3 342, FSW III 32. 13 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 408, FSW I 275-276. 14 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 356, FSW I 212. 15 Ibídem. 671 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación tiene en mente con la tesis de la participación activa del yo respecto del obstáculo es la fuerza que ejerce una cosa contra otras cosas: la fuerza es ejercida tanto si aquello sobre lo cual se ejerce es una cosa inanimada como si se trata del cuerpo de una persona consciente, pero sólo en este último caso la acción de esa fuerza provoca una sensación de resistencia y, con ella, el conocimiento de esa acción. Para que la acción de la fuerza sea conocida se requiere, pues, no sólo de esa acción, sino además de la propia acción de la conciencia que la conoce –justamente esto es lo que no sucede en el caso de las cosas inanimadas sobre las cuales la fuerza está ejerciendo la misma acción. El obstáculo actúa así sobre el yo, pero es conocido por el yo sólo en la medida en que es el yo mismo quien lo pone como su no-yo, como su objeto. Por esta razón, Fichte considera que hay dos poner del yo, que hay una repetición del poner: en el primer caso, se trata del poner del yo que se pone sin más o absolutamente (schlechthin); en el segundo, de su poner lo otro de sí mismo en cuanto (als) lo otro de sí, esto es, en otros términos, del ponerse el yo, pero esta vez en cuanto limitado. Este último poner es sólo parcialmente provocado por el propio yo, pues se necesita también de la acción recíproca de su otro, del obstáculo; del mismo modo, la acción del obstáculo sobre el yo no resulta como tal suficiente para explicar su conocimiento por el yo; para ello se necesita que ese no-yo sea a su vez puesto por el yo como un no-yo.16 La acción del yo y la acción del no-yo 16 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 409, FSW I 276: "Das Ich setzt sich selbst schlechthin, und dadurch ist es in sich selbst vollkommen, und allem äusseren Eindrucke verschlossen. Aber es muss auch, wenn es ein Ich seyn soll, sich setzen, als durch sich selbst gesetzt; und durch dieses neue, auf ein ursprüngliches Setzen sich beziehende Setzen öffnet es sich, dass ich so sage, der 672 | Héctor Ferreiro se encuentran pues, por así decirlo, a medio camino; Fichte habla en este contexto de un "encontrarse" (Zusammentreffen) de ambos.17 Desde estas premisas, la limitación del yo puede ser así descrita por Fichte como una autolimitación (Selbstbegrenzung) del yo;18 el obstáculo, en efecto, no limita activamente al yo, sino más bien le da la tarea (Aufgabe) de que el yo se limite a sí mismo con ocasión de su presencia ante el yo.19 El obstáculo no proviene, pues, de algo externo al yo. Esto no significa, sin embargo, que Fichte niegue que haya un mundo externo al sujeto; la tesis del obstáculo es sólo la consecuencia radical que Fichte extrae del hecho que el mundo distinto del yo se le da al yo en su propio acto de conocimiento. Pero este algo tampoco es, según Fichte, construido libre o arbitrariamente por el yo que lo conoce, tal como sostiene el idealismo dogmático. Con la doctrina del obstáculo, Fichte propone una solución al problema del conocimiento que, a sus ojos, es una estrategia argumentativa intermedia entre el realismo dogmático que sostiene que las representaciones del yo son efectos del no-yo y convierte con ello al yo en un no-yo, es Einwirkung von aussen; es setzt lediglich durch diese Wiederholung des Setzens die Möglichkeit, dass auch etwas in ihm seyn könne, was nicht durch dasselbe selbst gesetzt sey. Beide Arten des Setzens sind die Bedingung einer Einwirkung des Nicht-Ich; ohne die erstere würde keine Thätigkeit des Ich vorhanden seyn, welche eingeschränkt werden könnte; ohne die zweite würde diese Thätigkeit nicht für das Ich eingeschränkt seyn; das Ich würde sich nicht setzen können, als eingeschränkt. So steht das Ich, als Ich, ursprünglich in Wechselwirkung mit sich selbst, und dadurch erst wird ein Einfluss von aussen in dasselbe möglich". 17 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 354, 356-357; FSW I 210, 212-213. 18 GWL, GA I/2 356, FSW I 212. 19 GWL, GA I/2 355-356, FSW I 210-212. 673 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación decir, en algo inerte y no en un sujeto para el que existen objetos,20 y del idealismo dogmático que, a la inversa, considera a las representaciones como una suerte de accidentes del yo y trata esta vez al no-yo como si no tuviera realidad alguna, como si fuera solamente una modificación del yo. Fichte considera que el estar afectado el yo por lo que no es él es una actividad del mismo yo, dado que si no fuera así, según se adelantó, el yo no podría conocerlo; en este preciso sentido, el yo se limita y se determina siempre sólo a sí mismo. El obstáculo no puede, pues, ser entendido como una cosa en sí independiente del sujeto; es, en rigor, tan sólo aquello que provoca que el yo absoluto se autodetermine al contraponer al interior de sí mismo a un yo y a un no-yo. 2. La crítica de Hegel a la doctrina del obstáculo 2.1. Una lectura epistémica Hegel conoció sólo el pensamiento temprano de Fichte; su posición respecto de la filosofía fichteana se basa casi exclusivamente en la lectura de los escritos sistemáticos de Fichte de la época de Jena, fundamentalmente en la lectura de Sobre el concepto de la Doctrina de la Ciencia, el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia, el Esbozo de lo propio de la Doctrina de la Ciencia en lo concerniente a la facultad teórica, el Fundamento del derecho natural según los principios de la Doctrina de la Ciencia 20 Cf. GWL, GA I/2 355, FSW I 211. 674 | Héctor Ferreiro y la Ética o Sistema de la doctrina de las costumbres según los principios de la Doctrina de la Ciencia; asimismo también, aunque en menor medida, en la lectura de las dos Introducciones a la Doctrina de la Ciencia y del Ensayo de una nueva exposición de la Doctrina de la Ciencia. Hay además menciones menores en la obra de Hegel a los escritos así llamados "populares" de Fichte, sobre todo a El destino del hombre,21 pero también, en menor medida, a Algunas lecciones sobre el destino del sabio y a la Exposición clara como el sol dirigida al gran público sobre el carácter propio de la nueva filosofía.22 Por último, Hegel conoció –se refiere a ella expresamente, por ejemplo, en las Lecciones sobre la Historia de la Filosofía–23 la disputa sobre el ateísmo que acabó con la carrera académica de Fichte en la Universidad de Jena poco antes de que el propio Hegel llegara a esa universidad.24 En cuanto a la doctrina del obstáculo propiamente dicha, Hegel se ocupa explícitamente de ella ya desde su estancia en Jena en el Escrito de la diferencia25 y en la 21 Hegel, G. W. F., Werke in 20 Bänden. Auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832-1845 neu edierte Ausgabe, E. Moldenhauer y K. M. Michel (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1970. En adelante: W, seguido del número de tomo. Cf. W2 403, 417-422; W18 66-67; W20 518. 22 Cf. W20 413; W8 263 [§ 131, Zus.]. 23 Cf. W20, 387. 24 Hegel no parece, sin embargo, haber tenido conocimiento del opúsculo de Fichte publicado en Berlín en 1810 Die Wissenschaftslehre, in ihrem allgemeinen Umrisse dargestellt, ni haber tenido conocimiento de manuscritos y/o apuntes de los cursos de Fichte sobre la Doctrina de la Ciencia más allá de lo que había sido publicado al respecto fundamentalmente en la época en que Fichte estaba en Jena. 25 Cf. W2 63, 69. 675 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación Fenomenología del Espíritu;26 más tarde en la época de Nuremberg, en la Ciencia de la Lógica;27 y en Berlín, en la Enciclopedia de las Ciencias Filosóficas28 y en las Lecciones sobre la Historia de la Filosofía.29 Desde el momento que a lo largo de estas obras vincula en repetidas ocasiones la tesis del obstáculo a la de la cosa en sí,30 a primera vista parecería que Hegel concibe el obstáculo de Fichte como algo producido en el yo por una cosa externa al mismo. Si esto fuera correcto, la posición de Hegel podría ser caracterizada, por analogía con las dos formas de entender la tesis de la cosa en sí en la filosofía de Kant, como una interpretación "metafísica" u "ontológica" del obstáculo. En efecto, respecto de la tesis de la cosa en sí han ido delimitándose con el tiempo una lectura "metafísica" u "ontológi ca" y una lectura "epistémica (epistemológica)" o "metodológica".31 La interpretación metafísica –cuyos representantes principales son Erich Adickes, Merold Westphal, Rae Langton y, más recientemente, Lucy Allais–32 considera 26 Cf. W3 184-185. 27 Cf. W5 45, 181, 270; W6 21. 28 Cf. W8 147 [§ 60 Zus. 2]; W9 249 [§ 320 Zus.]; W10 202-203 [§ 415 Anm.]. 29 Cf. W18 174; W20 398-40, 404-408, 421, 430-431. 30 Cf. W2 162; W3 185; W5 45, 181; W8 147 [§ 60, Zus. 2]; W10 201-202 [§ 415 Anm.]; W20 401, 404-405, 407. 31 Para una reconstrucción general del debate entre estas dos lecturas véase Allais, Lucy, "Kant's one world: Interpreting Transcendental Idealism", en British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 12, N° 4, 2004, pp. 655684; Beade, Ileana, "Acerca de la articulación de la lectura epistémica del Idealismo Trascendental y una interpretación realista del concepto crítico de cosa en sí", en Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Vol. 18, 2013, pp. 265-283. 32 Adickes, Erich, Kant und das Ding an Sich, Berlin, Pan Verlag, 1924; Westphal, Merold, "In Defense of the Thing in Itself", en Kant-Studien, N° 59, 1968, pp. 118-141; Langton, Rae, Kantian Humility, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 676 | Héctor Ferreiro que en la filosofía de Kant las categorías del fenómeno y la cosa en sí remiten a dos esferas ontológicas, a dos "mundos" diferentes ("interpretación de los dos mundos" es de hecho otra de las formas como ha sido denominada esta escuela de lectura de la cosa en sí en la filosofía de Kant). La interpretación epistémica, por el contrario –sus representantes más destacados son Graham Bird, Gerold Prauss y Henry Allison–33 sostiene que para Kant la distinción entre fenómeno y cosa en sí remite, en rigor, a dos modos diferentes de considerar un objeto único, a saber: el objeto empírico dado en la experiencia (este tipo de lectura de la cosa en sí ha sido denominada también "interpretación de los dos aspectos"). Por analogía con la distinción entre interpretación ontológica e interpretación epistémica de la cosa en sí no resulta ilegítimo afirmar que, si bien en ciertos pasajes de la obra de Hegel el modo de comprender el obstáculo parecería poder ser caracterizado como una interpretación ontológica del mismo,34 si uno toma en cuenta la totalidad de las referencias 1998; Allais, Lucy, "Kant on Intrinsic Natures: A Critique of Langton", en Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, N° 73, 2006, pp. 143-169. 33 Bird, Graham, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962; Prauss, Gerold, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich, Bonn, Grundmann, 1974; Allison, Henry, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983; Allison, Henry, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, edición rev. y aum., New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004. 34 Cf. por ejemplo, W5 45: "Die kritische Philosophie machte zwar bereits die Metaphysik zur Logik, aber sie wie der spätere Idealismus gab, wie vorhin erinnert worden, aus Angst vor dem Objekt den logischen Bestimmungen eine wesentliche subjektive Bedeutung; dadurch blieben sie zugleich mit dem Objekte, das sie flohen, behaftet, und ein Ding-an-sich, ein unendlicher Anstoss, blieb als ein Jenseits an ihnen übrig". W8 147 [§ 60, Zus. 2]: "Nun aber erscheint das Ich hier nicht wahrhaft als freie, spontane Tätigkeit, da dasselbe als erst durch einen Anstoss von aussen erregt betrachtet wird; gegen diesen Anstoss soll dann das Ich reagieren, und erst 677 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación de Hegel a esa doctrina su modo de entenderla debería, sin embargo, ser caracterizado más bien como una variante de interpretación epistémica. En efecto, a pesar de que Hegel, según se dijo, asocia en numerosas ocasiones el obstáculo de Fichte a la cosa en sí de Kant y a pesar de alguna caracterización aislada del idealismo de Fichte como un idealismo meramente subjetivo,35 una base textual más amplia permite la reconstrucción de una lectura de tipo epistémico sobre la tesis del obstáculo. Así, por ejemplo, a) Hegel sostiene que "bien puede ser que el infinito obstáculo inicial del idealismo fichteano no tenga a la base ninguna cosa-en-sí, sino que sea puramente una determinidad en el yo (rein eine Bestimmtheit im Ich)"36 e insiste en que para Fichte el obstáculo se da en el yo como una pura relación a éste, como un mero "ser para" (nur ein Für-dasselbe).37 En este contexto, Hegel matiza su vinculación de la doctrina del obstáculo con la de la cosa en sí caracterizando a aquél como una versión más abstracta de ésta.38 b) Hegel valora además la filosofía de Fichte en forma positiva respecto de la de Kant; afirma que aunque fue Kant quien propuso el principio de que el pensar debe determinarse a partir de sí mismo, en la filosofía del propio Kant durch diese Reaktion soll es zum Bewusstsein über sich selbst gelangen. Die Natur des Anstosses bleibt hierbei ein unerkanntes Draussen, und das Ich ist immer ein Bedingtes, welches ein Anderes sich gegenüber hat. Sonach bleibt also auch Fichte bei dem Resultat der Kantischen Philosophie stehen, dass nur das Endliche zu erkennen sei, während das Unendliche über das Denken hinausgehe". 35 Cf. W20 405. 36 W6 21. 37 W5 181. 38 Cf. W20 405-406. 678 | Héctor Ferreiro ese principio permanece puramente formal, dado que Kant –según Hegel– no demuestra ni cómo ni en qué medida (das Wie und Inwiefern) tiene lugar esa autodeterminación;39 Hegel sostiene que es justamente Fichte quien identificó esta deficiencia de la filosofía kantiana y quien se propuso subsanarla mediante el proyecto de una deducción no sólo formal, sino también material de las determinaciones del pensamiento;40 en este respecto, Hegel afirma ulteriormente que nadie desde Aristóteles había intentado algo similar y que el proyecto de Fichte es "el primer intento racional en el mundo" (der erste vernünftige Versuch in der Welt) en este sentido.41 g) Por último, Hegel sostiene que Fichte provocó una revolución (Revolution) en Alemania al introducir un corte en el modo como se presenta externamente la filosofía: hasta Kant, el estudio de la filosofía pertenecía, según Hegel, a la formación general de todo hombre educado; con Fichte, por el contrario, en la exacta medida en que en su pensamiento se pone finalmente de manifiesto lo "especulativo" (Spekulative), es decir, el principio de la unidad primordial del sujeto y el objeto, la filosofía pasó a convertirse en una ocupación de pocas personas especializadas;42 Hegel valora positivamente este desarrollo en el mismo espíritu de Fichte de que la filosofía debe dejar de ser un mero "amor a la sabiduría" para convertirse en "ciencia". 39 W8 147 [§ 60, Zus, 2]. 40 Ibídem. 41 W20 401. 42 Cf. W20 414. 679 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación 2.2. La propuesta de solución de Hegel a la problemática del obstáculo Hegel parece comprender bien, pues, el objetivo teórico que Fichte persigue con su proyecto general de una Doctrina de la Ciencia; su crítica a este proyecto se dirige más bien al método concreto que Fichte adopta para llevarlo a cabo en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia; más precisamente, son algunos de los recursos conceptuales de los que se vale allí Fichte –entre éstos, de forma especial, el del obstáculo– los que Hegel juzga improcedentes con el objetivo del proyecto filosófico fichteano. Más en general, Hegel considera que la dificultad de fondo que afecta a la filosofía de Fichte –la tesis del obstáculo es su ejemplo tal vez más paradigmático– es la persistencia del modelo reflexivo de enfocar el fenómeno de la autoconciencia y de la relación entre el sujeto y el objeto en el acto de conocimiento.43 Para Hegel, la actividad de conocimiento que se concibe a sí misma como contrapuesta al objeto sobre el cual ella entonces reflexiona no logra reasumir al objeto como una instancia de sí misma; en esta medida, no logra idealizar exhaustivamente los dos extremos de la identidad sujeto-objeto y comprenderlos como operaciones estrictamente conceptuales de la teoría misma que los incluye en sí como momentos inmanentes, es decir, para expresarlo en el lenguaje del Hegel del Escrito de la Diferencia, como "factores ideales" (ideelle Faktoren).44 Si no es entendido como un procedimiento explícitamente lógico, el proceso de determinación del objeto por 43 Cf. W2, 69-71. 44 Cf. W2, 57-60. 680 | Héctor Ferreiro el sujeto no puede entonces, según Hegel, ser concebido – como de hecho lo hace Fichte– más que como un proceso real de actividades (Tätigkeiten).45 A ojos de Hegel, en actividades como, por ejemplo, la contraposición (Entgegensetzen), la determinación recíproca (Wechselbestimmung) y la acción recíproca (Wechselwirkung) persiste tal como las entiende Fichte un carácter realista que deriva de una idealización parcial que no llega a reconocerlas como procedimientos internos de la teoría que las formula.46 Este residuo realista 45 En este sentido véase lo que Fichte afirma, por ejemplo, en GWL, GA I/2 388, FSW I, 250: "Das Ich, als Intelligenz, stand mit dem Nicht-Ich, dem der postulirte Anstoss zuzuschreiben ist, im Causal-Verhältnisse; es war bewirktes vom Nicht-Ich, als seiner Ursache. Denn das CausalVerhältniss besteht darin, dass vermöge der Einschränkung der Thätigkeit in dem Einen (oder vermöge einer Quantität Leiden in ihm) eine der aufgehobenen Thätigkeit gleiche Quantität der Thätigkeit in sein Entgegengesetztes, nach dem Gesetze der Wechselbestimmung, gesetzt werde. Soll aber das Ich Intelligenz seyn, so muss ein Theil seiner in das unendliche hinausgehenden Thätigkeit aufgehoben werden, die dann, nach dem angeführten Gesetze, in das Nicht-Ich gesetzt wird. Weil aber das absolute Ich gar keines Leidens fähig, sondern absolute Thätigkeit und gar nichts als Thätigkeit seyn soll; so musste, wie soeben dargethan, angenommen werden, dass auch jenes postulirte Nicht-Ich bestimmt, also leidend sey, und die diesem Leiden entgegengesetzte Thätigkeit musste in das ihm entgegengesetzte, in das Ich, und zwar nicht in das intelligente, weil dieses selbst durch jenes Nicht-Ich bestimmt ist, sondern in das absolute gesetzt werden". 46 Véase en este sentido GWL, GA I/2 355, FSW I 210-211: "Diese Erklärungsart ist, wie sogleich in die Augen fällt, realistisch; nur liegt ihr ein weit abstracterer Realismus zum Grunde, als alle die vorher aufgestellten". Véase asimismo GWL, GA I/2 411, FSW I 279-280: "Die Wissenschaftslehre ist demnach realistisch. Sie zeigt, dass das Bewusstseyn endlicher Naturen sich schlechterdings nicht erklären lasse, wenn man nicht eine unabhängig von denselben vorhandene, ihnen völlig entgegengesetzte Kraft annimmt, von der dieselben ihrem empirischen Daseyn nach selbst abhängig sind". Y también GEWL, GA I/3 158, FSW I 348: "Ferner ist klar, dass diese ganze Unterscheidung aus dem Gegensetzen entspringe: sollte nicht reale Thätigkeit gesetzt werden, so wäre keine ideale gesetzt, als 681 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación es precisamente lo que, según Hegel, debe ser superado para que con ello quede finalmente superado el paradigma general de la coseidad, esto es, el paradigma según el cual la mente humana se relaciona con cosas concibiéndose a sí misma como una cosa más entre ellas. Hegel reconoce que el objetivo que persigue Fichte en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia es dar cuenta de la unidad primordial que forma el sujeto con el objeto, el yo con el no-yo; sin embargo, una teoría que ubica al sujeto de un lado y a su objeto del otro lado de un límite, aun cuando este límite sea retroactivamente declarado como inmanente a una instancia superior –para Fichte, el yo absoluto–47 que lo "pone", es para Hegel una teoideale; denn sie wäre nicht zu unterscheiden: wäre keine ideale gesetzt, so könnte auch keine reale gesetzt werden. Beides steht im Verhältnisse der Wechselbestimmung, und wir haben hier, nur durch die Anwendung etwas klarer, abermals den Satz: Idealität und Realität sind synthetisch vereinigt. Kein Ideales, kein Reales, und umgekehrt". 47 Véase en este sentido GWL, GA I/2 361, FSW I 217-218: "Ohne Unendlichkeit des Ich ohne ein absolutes, in das unbegrenzte und unbegrenzbare hinaus gehendes Productions-Vermögen desselben ist auch nicht einmal die Möglichkeit der Vorstellung zu erklären. Aus dem Postulate, dass eine Vorstellung seyn solle, welches enthalten ist in dem Satze: das Ich setzt sich, als bestimmt durch das Nicht-Ich, ist nunmehr dieses absolute Productionsvermögen synthetisch abgeleitet und erwiesen". Véase asimismo GWL, GA I/2 387-388, FSW I 249-250: "Das Ich aber soll allen seinen Bestimmungen nach schlechthin durch sich selbst gesetzt, und demnach völlig unabhängig von irgend einem möglichen Nicht-Ich seyn. Mithin ist das absolute Ich, und das intelligente (wenn es erlaubt ist, sich auszudrücken, als ob sie zwei Ich ausmachten, da sie doch nur Eins ausmachen sollen) nicht Eins und ebendasselbe, sondern sie sind einander entgegengesetzt; welches der absoluten Identität des Ich widerspricht. Dieser Widerspruch muss gehoben werden, und er lässt sich nur auf folgende Art heben: die Intelligenz des Ich überhaupt, welche den Widerspruch verursacht, kann nicht aufgehoben werden, ohne dass das Ich abermals in einen neuen Widerspruch mit sich selbst versetzt werde. [...] Aber die Abhängigkeit des Ich, als Intelligenz, soll aufgehoben werden, und dies ist nur unter der Bedingung denkbar, dass das Ich 682 | Héctor Ferreiro ría que no termina de advertir del todo el carácter exhaustivamente ideal de su propio proceder, puesto que el trazado de ese límite es él mismo una más de las tesis que constituyen dicha teoría. Actividades como contraposición, determinación recíproca y acción recíproca son para Hegel, pues, operaciones específicamente conceptuales internas a la teoría de la que forman parte, y no procesos reales que ocurren en torno al impacto o acción de un obstáculo,48 como si con este algo se tratara, después de todo, de un hecho primigenio dado a la conciencia.49 Para Hegel, el yo de Fichte es en sí la unidad del pensar con el ser, del yo con su otro; el yo de Fichte es ya, pues, jenes bis jetzt unbekannte Nicht-Ich, dem der Anstoss beigemessen ist, durch welchen das Ich zur Intelligenz wird, durch sich selbst bestimme. Auf diese Art würde das vorzustellende Nicht-Ich unmittelbar, das vorstellende Ich aber mittelbar, vermittelst jener Bestimmung, durch das absolute Ich bestimmt; das Ich würde lediglich von sich selbst abhängig, d.i. es würde durchgängig durch sich selbst bestimmt". 48 Fichte se refiere ulteriormente a la acción del obstáculo sobre el yo –o al obstáculo mismo– con términos tales como "Einwirkung" (acción en o sobre [algo]) (GWL, GA I/2 409, FSW I 276), "Einfluss" (influjo o influencia) (GWL, GA I/2 408-409, FSW I 276) y "Eindruck" (impresión) (GEWL, GA I/3 155, FSW I 344). 49 Fichte mismo es quien caracteriza al obstáculo como un hecho (Faktum) que no puede ser propiamente deducido de los axiomas de la Doctrina de la Ciencia (GWL, GA I/2 408, FSW I 275; GEWL, GA I/3 143-144, FSW I 331-332). Véase en este sentido la llamativa reflexión de Daniel Breazeale ("Fichte's Abstract Realism", op. cit., p. 101): "In reply to the charge, first raised by Dieter Henrich and reiterated by Manfred Frank, that Fichte, even though he was the first to successfully challenge the dyadic, reflective model of selfconsciousness, failed to remain true to this insight and again and again fell back into the discredited position that separates the subject and object of consciousness, the act of self-positing from the consciousness of this act, and is therefore guilty of reifying the I as a quasi-substantial 'ego', one might reply that it is not Fichte who is guilty of this dualism and reification so much as it is the conscious I itself!". [NB.: Las cursivas, así como el signo de exclamación final, son del texto original, H. F.]. 683 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación el "concepto absoluto" (der absolute Begriff).50 No obstante, a ojos de Hegel este principio sólo puede ser consistentemente fundamentado en el marco teórico de una idealidad expresamente concebida como absoluta; el yo fichteano, sin embargo, determina al no-yo mediante su actividad. Desde el momento que no comprende al no-yo como un momento de una teoría devenida explícitamente consciente de sí misma en cuanto teoría, es decir, desde el momento que el proceso de determinación de los contenidos que el sujeto conoce no se automanifiesta como un procedimiento de la propia teoría del mundo –teoría que es para Hegel siempre el mundo mismo, puesto que el mundo jamás es conocido por el sujeto sino en la teoría del mundo que en cada caso él tiene (o, en rigor, que él mismo es)– y continúa siendo concebido como una actividad real, ambos polos, yo y no-yo, sujeto y objeto, retienen una opacidad irreflexa por la que permanecen en última instancia extrínsecos el uno respecto del otro; por esta razón es que su relación puede ser plausiblemente caracterizada por Fichte como una actividad de determinación y acción recíprocas y su unidad como un encontrarse y un tocarse (Sichberühren).51 Hegel describe esta forma de relacionarse y unificarse el sujeto y el objeto, como un "mero progresar extrínseco del uno al otro" (ein blosses äusserliches Fortgehen von einem zum anderen).52 Para Hegel, el yo de Fichte que se encuentra con el obstáculo no es todavía él mismo como tal la unidad con eso que encuentra, es decir, no es lo 50 W20 408. 51 GWL, GA I/2 354, FSW I 210. 52 W20 412. Véase asimismo W5 99. 684 | Héctor Ferreiro que el propio Hegel define como "espíritu" (Geist), sino una forma residual –la última y más abstracta de todas– de la "conciencia" (Bewusstsein), esto es, de la subjetividad que se concibe a sí misma como diferente del objeto que conoce.53 Al no comprenderlo como un procedimiento expresamente ideal, Fichte concibe el surgimiento del contenido determinado de la actividad cognitiva del sujeto como el resultado de un proceso de "oposición" (Gegensatz). A esta estrategia para explicar el hecho del conocimiento de objetos determinados por parte del sujeto Hegel contrapone el principio de que toda determinación surge por vía negativa, más precisamente, por la autonegación de la originaria unidad simple e inmediata del sujeto y el objeto. Así, mientras en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia Fichte suscribe la tesis de que "toda limitación acontece por oposición" (alle Begrenzung aber geschieht durch Gegensatz)54, Hegel, por el contrario, sostiene que "toda determinación es negación" (omnis determinatio est negatio).55 Hegel caracteriza al concepto de obstáculo como "lo abstracto de lo otro del yo" (dieses 53 Cf. W20 414: "Diese Philosophie enthält nichts Spekulatives, aber sie fordert das Spekulative. Wie die Kantische Philosophie in ihrer Idee des höchsten Gutes, worin die Gegensätze sich vereinigen sollen, so fordert die Fichtesche Philosophie die Vereinigung im Ich und in dem Ansich des Glaubens, in welchem das Selbstbewusstsein in seinem Handeln von der Überzeugung ausgeht, dass an sich sein Handeln den höchsten Zweck hervorbringe und das Gute sich realisiere. Es ist in der Fichteschen Philosophie nichts zu sehen als das Moment des Selbstbewusstseins, des selbstbewussten Insichseins, wie in der englischen Philosophie ebenso einseitig das Moment des Sein-für-Anderes oder des Bewusstseins nicht als Moment, sondern als das Prinzip des Wahren ausgesprochen ist, in keiner von beiden die Einheit beider, der Geist". 54 GWL, GA I/2 355, FSW I 210. 55 W5 121; W8 196 [§ 91, Zus.]. 685 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación Abstraktum eines Anderen als Ich)56 y como "lo absolutamente otro" (ein absolut Anderes).57 Toda vez que el yo es, en rigor, él mismo como tal la unidad de sí –yo, sujeto– y lo otro –no-yo, objeto–, Hegel caracteriza ulteriormente al obstáculo, precisamente en cuanto es lo otro de esa unidad que lo abarca todo, como "lo negativo en general" (des Negativen überhaupt) ,58 y, en esta medida, como el resultado de una "abstracción absoluta",59 cuyo contenido es entonces "completamente indeterminado" (durchaus unbestimmt).60 Es Fichte mismo quien describe al obstáculo como "aquello que resta después de haber abstraído del no-yo todas las formas demostrables de la representación".61 En esta línea, Hegel asocia el conte56 W8 147 [§ 60, Zus. 2]. 57 W5 270. 58 W8 147 [§ 60, Zus. 2]. 59 W2 69. 60 W2 63. Cf. asimismo W20 399, 404. 61 GWL, GA I/2 389, FSW I 251: "Das absolute Ich soll demnach seyn Ursache des Nicht-Ich an und für sich, d.i. nur desjenigen im Nicht-Ich was übrig bleibt, wenn man von allen erweisbaren Formen der Vorstellung abstrahirt; desjenigen, welchem der Anstoss auf die ins unendliche hinausgehende Thätigkeit des Ich zugeschrieben wird: denn dass von den besonderen Bestimmungen des vorgestellten, als eines solchen, das intelligente Ich nach den nothwendigen Gesetzen des Vorstellens Ursache sey, wird in der theoretischen Wissenschaftslehre dargethan". [El resaltado es nuestro, H. F.]. Véase asimismo GWL, GA I/2 386-387, FSW I 248: "Wir konnten nemlich die Vorstellung überhaupt auf keine Art möglich denken, als durch die Voraussetzung, dass auf die ins unbestimmte und unendliche hinausgehende Thätigkeit des Ich ein Anstoss geschehe. Demnach ist das Ich, als Intelligenz überhaupt, abhängig von einem unbestimmten und bis jetzt völlig unbestimmbaren Nicht-Ich". GWL, GA I/2 411, FSW I 279: "Der letzte Grund aller Wirklichkeit für das Ich ist demnach nach der Wissenschaftslehre eine ursprüngliche Wechselwirkung zwischen dem Ich und irgend einem Etwas ausser demselben, von welchem sich weiter nichts sagen lässt, als dass es dem Ich völlig entgegengesetzt 686 | Héctor Ferreiro nido completamente indeterminado del concepto de obstáculo a la noción de "puro ser" (reines Sein).62 Aunque en el inicio de su Lógica Hegel no menciona al obstáculo de Fichte, sí vincula allí en forma expresa el concepto de puro ser con el de cosa en sí de Kant, concepto con el que a su vez Hegel identifica en otros pasajes el concepto fichteano de obstáculo.63 Así, en la medida en que es el resultado de una abstracción absoluta y su contenido es, por tanto, completamente indeterminado, el concepto de obstáculo es para Hegel, en último análisis, el mismo que el concepto de puro ser.64 Ahora bien, precisamente por su total indeterminación, el concepto de puro ser se identifica para Hegel con el de puro no-ser, es decir, con el concepto de la nada.65 Hegel caracteriza al obstáculo de Fichte como "no-ser inmediato" (ein unmittelbares Nichtsein),66 esto es, como el no-ser (o lo otro) de la unidad ser-pensar en cuanto que no está mediado en esta unidad sino hipostasiado en su referencia negativa (o alteridad) a la misma. Para Hegel, sin embargo, los conceptos de ser y no-ser son como tales contradictorios, puesto que el contenido de cada uno de ellos es idéntico al del otro, dado que ambos se constituyen por diferenciación respecto de aquello que es o no es –es decir, respecto de algo (Etwas): seyn muss. [...] Sie behauptet aber auch nichts weiter, als eine solche entgegengesetzte Kraft, die von dem endlichen Wesen bloss gefühlt, aber nicht erkannt wird". 62 Cf. W5 82-83; W8 182-186 [§ 86]. 63 Cf. W5 129-130; W16 311-312; W8 186 [§ 87, Anm.]. 64 Cf. W5 98-99. 65 Cf. W5 83; W8 186-188 [§ 87]. 66 W6 21. 687 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación el ser, en efecto, es ser de algo que es y el no-ser, no-ser de algo que no es–, pero al mismo tiempo cada uno debe ser lo contrario del otro, a saber: en un caso, ser y, en el otro, no-ser. Cuando se consideran a las nociones de ser y no-ser sólo "como tales", no se las remite al "algo" que es el horizonte desde el que han sido constituidas en cuanto su afirmación y negación, respectivamente, sino que se hace completa abstracción de esa referencia constitutiva y se las absolutiza una respecto de la otra así como también respecto de aquello que es o, según el caso, no es. Como tales o en sí mismos, sin embargo, los conceptos de ser y no-ser son para Hegel meros constructos mentales (leeren Gedankendinge),67 cuyos sendos contenidos transitan por su propia semántica al otro respectivo y, al hacerlo, son reconducidos a aquello que es o no es, puesto que, según se adelantó, lo que es o no es es el punto de partida desde donde han sido constituidos, toda vez que es siempre algo lo que en cada caso está siendo o no siendo –y no el ser y no-ser mismos.68 De este modo, aquello que es 67 W5 86. 68 Cf. W5 104: "In der reinen Reflexion des Anfangs, wie er in dieser Logik mit dem Sein als solchem gemacht wird, ist der Übergang noch verborgen; weil das Sein nur als unmittelbar gesetzt ist, bricht das Nichts an ihm nur unmittelbar hervor. Aber alle folgenden Bestimmungen, wie gleich das Dasein, sind konkreter; es ist an diesem das schon gesetzt, was den Widerspruch jener Abstraktionen und daher ihr Übergehen enthält und hervorbringt." Véase asimismo en este sentido W5, 84: "Den einfachen Gedanken des reinen Seins haben die Eleaten zuerst, vorzüglich Parmenides als das Absolute und als einzige Wahrheit, und, in den übergebliebenen Fragmenten von ihm, mit der reinen Begeisterung des Denkens, das zum ersten Male sich in seiner absoluten Abstraktion erfasst, ausgesprochen: nur das Sein ist, und das Nichts ist gar nicht. In orientalischen Systemen, wesentlich im Buddhismus, ist bekanntlich das Nichts, das Leere, das absolute Prinzip. Der tiefsinnige Heraklit hob gegen jene einfache und einseitige Abstraktion den höheren totalen 688 | Héctor Ferreiro o que no es es como tal el resultado de la mediación recíproca del ser y el no-ser. En efecto, el algo es la unidad ahora explícita –el algo es justamente el ser explícita esa unidad– del (antes mero o puro) ser con el (antes mero o puro) no-ser, es decir, el algo es ente (Daseiendes), o, en otros términos, ser-finito o ser determinado.69 En este preciso contexto, Hegel sostiene que "la determinidad no se ha desprendido aún del ser; por cierto, tampoco se desprenderá más de él, pues (denn) lo verdadero que a partir de ahora está a la base como fundamento es la unidad del no-ser con el ser; sobre ella en cuanto fundamento resultan todas las determinaciones ulteriores".70 La unidad del no-ser con el ser es el ser en sí mismo determinado, es el ser en el que ha quedado de una buena vez explicitado que ser es siempre ser de lo que es, ser del ente, y nunca ser sin más, ser como tal, puro ser –así como también, correlativamente, que el no-ser no es nunca puro no-ser, nada absoluta, sino siempre no-ser de aquello que no es. Lo que es o no es, es decir, lo determinado, es así para Hegel lo que el yo siempre conoce y ha conocido, dado que no hay jamás una conciencia del puro yo ni del ser y la nada puras –éstas son sólo abstracciones máximas del propio yo–; fácticamente, por el contrario, el yo es siempre actividad autoconsciente de representación de lo determinado. No hay, pues, diferencia ni separación entre la Begriff des Werdens hervor und sagte: das Sein ist sowenig als das Nichts". 69 Cf. W5 115-124; W8 193-198 [§§ 89-92]. 70 W5 117-118: "Die Bestimmtheit hat sich noch nicht vom Sein abgelöst; zwar wird sie sich auch nicht mehr von ihm ablösen, denn das nunmehr zum Grunde liegende Wahre ist die Einheit des Nichtseins mit dem Sein; auf ihr als dem Grunde ergeben sich alle ferneren Bestimmungen". [El resaltado es nuestro, H. F.]. 689 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación autoconciencia, el ser y la determinación. Partir, como hace Fichte, de un yo sólo igual a sí mismo –"yo = yo"– para explicar a partir de esta premisa el hecho del yo que es consciente del mundo es así para Hegel un planteo erróneo: la intrínseca contradicción –y consecuente falsedad– de la identidad completamente abstracta de ese punto de partida es justamente lo que Hegel pretende demostrar en el inicio de su Lógica: toda determinación surge al interior de esa identidad supuestamente abstracta como su "verdad" (Wahrheit), es decir, como aquello que ella ya siempre había sido.71 Desde otra perspectiva, esto significa que el yo es a ojos de Hegel él mismo –qua yo– la unidad con la determinación. A partir de esta unidad primigenia –el estar (Dasein) en cuanto determinidad en general– es desde donde como desde su fundamento último resultan luego por negación hacia su interior, es decir, mediante sucesivas negaciones determinadas, todas las determinaciones particulares.72 Con el análisis de las relaciones entre las categorías de ser, no-ser, devenir, estar y ente (o algo), en el comienzo 71 Cf. W5 83, 86-87, 97, 111; W8 188 [§ 88], 191 [§ 88, Anm. 4], 192 [§ 88, Zus.]. 72 Cf. W5 49: "Indem das Resultierende, die Negation, bestimmte Negation ist, hat sie einen Inhalt. Sie ist ein neuer Begriff, aber der höhere, reichere Begriff als der vorhergehende; denn sie ist um dessen Negation oder Entgegengesetztes reicher geworden, enthält ihn also, aber auch mehr als ihn, und ist die Einheit seiner und seines Entgegengesetzten. In diesem Wege hat sich das System der Begriffe überhaupt zu bilden und in unaufhaltsamem, reinem, von aussen nichts hereinnehmendem Gange sich zu vollenden". Véase asimismo W3 74: "Sie ist nämlich der Skeptizismus, der in dem Resultate nur immer das reine Nichts sieht und davon abstrahiert, dass Nichts bestimmt das Nichts dessen ist, woraus es resultiert. Das Nichts ist aber nur, genommen als das Nichts dessen, woraus es herkommt, in der Tat das wahrhafte Resultat; es ist hiermit selbst ein bestimmtes und hat einen Inhalt. [...] Indem dagegen das Resultat, wie es in Wahrheit ist, aufgefasst wird, als bestimmte Negation, 690 | Héctor Ferreiro de su Lógica Hegel busca así ofrecer una teoría sobre el problema del origen de la presencia de la determinación –y, en este contexto, de la relación entre el pensar y el ser, entre el sujeto y el objeto– alternativa a la que propone Fichte en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia con su doctrina de los tres axiomas, sus diferentes teoremas y la doctrina del so ist damit unmittelbar eine neue Form entsprungen und in der Negation der Übergang gemacht, wodurch sich der Fortgang durch die vollständige Reihe der Gestalten von selbst ergibt". Véase a su vez, a modo de contraste, W5 98-99: "Parmenides hielt das Sein fest und war am konsequentesten, indem er zugleich vom Nichts sagte, dass es gar nicht ist; nur das Sein ist. Das Sein so ganz für sich ist das Unbestimmte, hat also keine Beziehung auf Anderes; es scheint daher, dass von diesem Anfang aus nicht weiter fortgegangen werden könne, nämlich aus ihm selbst, und ein Fortgang nur dadurch geschehen könne, dass von Aussen etwas Fremdes daran geknüpft würde. Der Fortgang, dass das Sein dasselbe ist als das Nichts, erscheint somit als ein zweiter, absoluter Anfang, ein Übergehen, das für sich ist und äusserlich zu dem Sein hinzutrete. Sein wäre überhaupt nicht der absolute Anfang, wenn es eine Bestimmtheit hätte; alsdann hinge es von einem Anderen ab und wäre nicht unmittelbar, nicht der Anfang. Ist es aber unbestimmt und damit wahrer Anfang, so hat es auch nichts, wodurch es sich zu einem Anderen überleitet, es ist zugleich das Ende. Es kann ebensowenig etwas aus demselben hervorbrechen, als etwas in dasselbe einbrechen kann; bei Parmenides wie bei Spinoza soll von dem Sein oder der absoluten Substanz nicht fortgegangen werden zu dem Negativen, Endlichen. Wird nun dennoch fortgegangen, was, wie bemerkt, von dem beziehungs-, hiermit fortgangslosen Sein aus nur auf äusserliche Weise geschehen kann, so ist dieser Fortgang ein zweiter, neuer Anfang. So ist Fichtes absolutester, unbedingter Grundsatz: A = A Setzen; der zweite ist Entgegensetzen; dieser soll zum Teil bedingt, zum Teil unbedingt (somit der Widerspruch in sich) sein. Es ist dies ein Fortgehen der äusseren Reflexion, welches ebensowohl das, womit es als einem Absoluten anfängt, wieder verneint das Entgegensetzen ist die Negation der ersten Identität -, als es sein zweites Unbedingtes sogleich ausdrücklich zugleich zu einem Bedingten macht. Wenn aber überhaupt eine Berechtigung wäre fortzugehen, d. i. den ersten Anfang aufzuheben, so müsste es in diesem Ersten selbst liegen, dass ein Anderes sich darauf beziehen könnte; es müsste also ein Bestimmtes sein. Allein für ein solches gibt sich das Sein oder auch die absolute Substanz nicht aus; im Gegenteil. Es ist das Unmittelbare, das noch schlechthin Unbestimmte". 691 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación obstáculo para explicar el hecho de la representación de contenidos determinados.73 Para Hegel, es la unidad misma del pensar y el ser-determinado, esto es, en otros términos, es la unidad inmediata del yo con el no-yo la que mediante el análisis de su propio pensamiento de sí va autodeterminándose en el entero universo real de las cosas de las que el yo es consciente. Inspirándose en el diagnóstico de Hegel, Dieter Henrich sostiene que a pesar de haber sido el primero en rechazar el modelo diádico y reflexivo de la autoconciencia y de haber buscado ofrecer, en contrapartida, un modelo teórico específicamente diferente de los precedentes, en la Fundamentación de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia Fichte no logra permanecer, a pesar de todo, fiel a su "intelección originaria" (ursprüngliche Einsicht) y reproduce el punto de vista que 73 En este contexto resulta sugerente recordar que en las lecciones sobre Idealismo Alemán de 1929 Heidegger asocia la actividad objetiva del yo de Fichte al ente (das Seiende) y su actividad pura, es decir, la actividad que se topa con el obstáculo, al ser del ente (das Sein des Seienden) – Heidegger, Martin, Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart, en Gesamtausgabe, t. 28, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1997, pp. 182, 248 y, sobre todo, p. 324: "So wird also die Problematik rückläufig und formuliert sich folgendermassen: Wie unterscheiden sich die Setzungsweisen als solche, ganz abgesehen davon, was gesetzt ist? Und wir sehen schon durch diese Kennzeichnung, dass es sich um zwei Arten des objektiven Setzens handelt. Wenn wir diese Fichtesche Formel des Problems noch deutlicher fassen und in den geschichtlichen Zusammenhang bringen, so können wir sagen: Was in dieser Zweideutigkeit der objektiven Tätigkeit zutage kommt, ist es, was Fichte als zwei disparate Glieder zusammenbringen will, und zwar einmal den Bezug des Ich auf das Seiende, und das andere Mal bei der reinen Tätigkeit des Ich handelt es sich um den Bezug des Ich auf das Sein des Seienden. In diesen ganzen Bemühungen Fichtes liegt also das Problem der Frage nach dem Unterschied des Seienden und des Seins oder der ontologischen Differenz". 692 | Héctor Ferreiro separa al sujeto del objeto, separación de la que resulta la cuasi-reificación del yo y de aquello que él conoce criticada por Hegel.74 Henrich sostiene que esta falencia, sin embargo, es propia sólo del Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia y que Fichte la supera a partir de la Doctrina de la Ciencia nova methodo al afirmar la unidad inmediata del ser y el pensar.75 La crítica general de Hegel al pensamiento teórico de Fichte está dirigida ante todo contra la particular exposición del mismo en el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia; en este sentido, las modificaciones introducidas por las versiones posteriores de la Doctrina de la Ciencia –entre ellas, el abandono de la doctrina del obstáculo– parecieran avalar la hipótesis de que la deficiencia vislumbrada por Hegel de algunos de los instrumentos conceptuales y expositivos de esa obra temprana de Fichte ya había sido –aunque Hegel 74 Cf. Henrich, Dieter, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, op. cit., pp. 41-44. 75 Ibíd. p. 41: "Von da an [= 1797, H. F.] hat Fichte den Akt des absoluten Setzens geradezu von dem her definiert, was aus ihm folgt. Sich Setzen heisst ohne weitere Vermittlung Objekt und Subjekt zugleich sein. In diesem Sinn kann es heissen, Setzen oder Subjekt-Objekt, ein Terminus, der von Fichte zuerst im Jahre 1795 gebraucht worden ist. Ausdruck für eine vermittlungslose Einheit im Ich ist er wohl erst ein wenig später geworden. Es lässt sich zeigen, dass Fichte selbst die Unklarheiten der ,Grundlage' gerade in dieser Sache sehr wohl erkannte. 1802 liess er einen Neudruck seines ersten Hauptwerkes herauskommen, der nur durch wenige Zusätze und Fussnoten erweitert ist. Die wichtigste von ihnen ist der Ziffer 10 des ersten Paragraphen beigegeben. Dort hatte Fichte über das wesentliche Fürsichsein des Ich gehandelt. Im weiteren Gang der Wissenschaftslehre war freilich deutlich geworden, dass dieses Fürsichsein, genetisch betrachtet, keineswegs unmittelbar ist. Die Tätigkeit des Setzens bringt es nur vermittels eines ihr Entgegengesetzten zustande. Die Anmerkung abstrahiert davon und kommentiert, das Ich sei vermittlungslos Subjekt-Objekt". [El resaltado es nuestro, H. F.]. Véase también, en el mismo sentido, Frank, Manfred, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1986, p. 34. 693 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación mismo jamás llegó a saberlo– detectada y al menos parcialmente corregida por el propio Fichte.76 76 Henrich considera que la desaparición (verschwunden) de la doctrina del obstáculo en las obras posteriores al Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia debe ser entendida en el sentido de una corrección –cf. Henrich, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, op. cit., p. 41: "Das System von 1794 erklärt vielmehr das Für-sich-sein des Ich, das doch eine direkte Folge seines Sich-Setzens ist, aus einem Dualismus: dem Widerspiel einer ins Unendliche gehenden Tätigkeit und einer anderen Tätigkeit, die ihr entgegengesetzt ist. Diese Theorie ist das Opfer von Hegels unermüdlicher Polemik geworden. Sie war aber das Vergänglichste in Fichtes Selbstverständigung. Schon in der Darstellung von 1797 ist sie verschwunden". Por el contrario, Daniel Breazeale sostiene que el rol de la doctrina del obstáculo es esencial a la filosofía de Fichte y que el núcleo de la misma perdura tras el Fundamento de toda la Doctrina de la Ciencia en las figuras del "sentimiento" (Gefühl) y la "exhortación" (Aufforderung) –cf. Breazeale, D., "Fichte s Abstract Realism", op. cit., pp. 95, 100-105, 108-112; Breazeale, D., Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre, op. cit., pp. 167-186, 190, 408, 414; Breazeale, D., "The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796–99 (nova methodo)", en James, David y Zöller, Günter (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 123. En esta línea de interpretación defendida por Breazeale se ubica también Christian Klotz –cf. Klotz, Ch., "Fichte's Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794–95 Wissenschaftslehre", en James, David y Zöller, Günter (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 90. 694 | Héctor Ferreiro Bibliografía - Acosta, Emiliano, "La transformación de la tabla kantiana de las categorías en el Fundamento de toda la doctrina de la ciencia de J. G. Fichte de 1794/95", en Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofía, Vol. 33, N° 1, 2016, pp. 103-135. - Adickes, Erich, Kant und das Ding an Sich, Berlin, Pan Verlag, 1924. - Allais, Lucy, "Kant on Intrinsic Natures: A Critique of Langton", en Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, N° 73, 2006, pp. 143-169. - –––––––––, "Kant s one world: Interpreting Transcendental Idealism", en British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 12, N° 4, 2004, pp. 655-684. - Allison, Henry, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1983. - –––––––––, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, edición rev. y aum., New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004. - Beade, Ileana, "Acerca de la articulación de la lectura epistémica del Idealismo Trascendental y una interpretación realista del concepto crítico de cosa en sí", en Contrastes: Revista Internacional de Filosofía, Vol. 18, 2013, pp. 265-283. - Beiser, Frederick, "Maimon and Fichte," en Freudenthal, Gideon (ed.), Salomon Maimon: Rational Dogmatist, Empirical Skeptic. Critical Assessments, Boston, Kluwer, 2003, pp. 233-248. 695 | Determinación recíproca vs. autodeterminación - –––––––––, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism, 1781-1801, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2002. - Bird, Graham, Kant's Theory of Knowledge, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. - Breazeale, Daniel, "Check or Checkmate? On the Finitude of the Fichtean Self" en Ameriks Karl y Sturma, Dieter (eds.), The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 87-114. - Breazeale, Daniel, "Fichte's Abstract Realism" en Baur, Michael and Dahlstrom, Daniel O., From Transcendental Philosophy to Metaphysics: The Emergence of German Idealism, Washington DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1999, pp. 99-115. - –––––––––, "The Wissenschaftslehre of 1796–99 (nova methodo)", en James, David y Zöller, Günter (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 65-92. - –––––––––, Thinking Through the Wissenschaftslehre: Themes from Fichte's Early Philosophy, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013. - Class, Wolfgang y Soller, Alois K., Kommentar zu Fichtes Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Fichte-Studien Supplementa 19, Amsterdam/New York, Rodopi, 2004. - Druet, Pierre-Philippe, "L' 'Anstoss' fichtéen: Essai d'élucidation d'une métaphore", en Revue philosophique de Louvain, N° 70 (7), 1972, pp. 384-392. 696 | Héctor Ferreiro - Frank, Manfred, Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1986. - Heidegger, Martin, Der deutsche Idealismus (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) und die philosophische Problemlage der Gegenwart, en Gesamtausgabe, t. 28, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1997. - Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, Werke in 20 Bänden. Auf der Grundlage der Werke von 1832-1845 neu edierte Ausgabe, E. Moldenhauer y K. M. Michel (eds.), Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp, 1970. - Henrich, Dieter, Fichtes ursprüngliche Einsicht, Frankfurt am Main, Klostermann, 1967. - Klotz, Christian, "Fichte's Explanation of the Dynamic Structure of Consciousness in the 1794–95 Wissenschaftslehre", en James, David y Zöller, Günter (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Fichte, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 38-64. - Langton, Rae, Kantian Humility, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998. - Prauss, Gerold, Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich, Bonn, Grundmann, 1974. - Soller, Alois K., "Fichtes Lehre vom Anstoss, Nicht-Ich und Ding an sich in der Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre: Eine kritische Erörterung", en FichteStudien, N° 10, 1997, pp. 175-189. - Westphal, Merold, "In Defense of the Thing in Itself", en Kant-Studien, N° 59, 1968, pp. 118-141.

Eugenio Ripepe, I conti col marxismo, Franco Angeli, Milano 1982, pagine 296, lire 15.000 Si tratta di una raccolta di saggi apparsi tutti su varie riviste italiane negli ultimi anni Settanta, rivolti ad affrontare quella che allora da noi si usava chiamare «crisi del marxismo» (e che poi è stata una crisi di uno e di alcuni marxismi, giunta diversi decenni dopo altre crisi). Il motivo di interesse di questi saggi è l'atteggiamento assunto dall'autore, che non voleva essere né quello dei transfughi dal marxismo, che parlano d'altro, né quello di coloro che continuano «a dirsi marxisti ignorando le mille ragioni di dubbio». Il proposito dell'autore era quindi quello di «veder chiaro», guardando dentro alcuni punti dolenti delle teorie marxiste. Partiamo dal fondo: da una delle due appendici, dal titolo «La crisi del marxismo», che traccia un quadro delle posizioni dei filosofi italiani marxisti o ex tali della fine degli anni Settanta. Con qualche pesantezza polemica e qualche sfottò di troppo (legati, certamente alla destinazione originale del saggio, che doveva apparire su una rivista) il quadro disegnato è ancora oggi utile e rivelativo. Un po' poco argomentata è però la netta chiusura nei confronti delle versioni utopiche del neomarxismo, e molto sbrigativa la scelta di chiedere «alla scienza e non alla fede il sostegno delle proprie opinioni. Se per credere al socialismo occorresse la fede continua l'autore che bisogno ci sarebbe della teoria (scientifica) marxista?». Più che ad alcuni secoli di filosofia, si sarebbe tentati di rimandare l'autore alla lettera dell'apostolo Giacomo per quanto riguarda il terzo elemento fra scienza e fede: la prassi. Ma facciamo un passo indietro nel corpo del libro, a quello che ne costituisce il contributo migliore, cioè al capitolo 3: «Un lascito dell'ideologia borghese alla critica dell' economia politica borghese: la nozione di lavoro produttivo». Con una accurata analisi di storia delle idee, l'autore illustra il carattere «datato» della distinzione tracciata da Adam Smith fra il lavoro che produce mezzi materiali, qualificato come produttivo, e lavoro che produce servizi, qualificato come improduttivo. Si tratta di una distinzione provvista di un suo senso nel contesto storico del Settecento, in vista del progetto di favorire lo sviluppo capitalistico contro i modi di vita nobiliari. La distinzione è però indebitamente assolutizzata da Smith. Marx, che da un lato vede bene il carattere di produttività «capitalistica» del lavoro produttivo smithiano, dall'altro, poco comprensibilmente, finisce per difendere la distinzione smithiana contro le critiche degli stessi successori di Smith. Tutto il marxismo dopo Marx ha fatto propria la difesa del lavoro produttivo inteso come un valore di per sé. Ne è disceso a livello teorico il produttivismo da cui tutta la tradizione di pensiero marxista è stata afflitta. A livello teorico-pratico le conseguenze sono state svariate e dolorose: dallo sviluppo industriale a tappe forzate dell'Unione Sovietica sotto Stalin fino oserei aggiungere alla irresistibile debolezza di certi partiti comunisti e sindacati per il cemento (anche abusivo) e le centrali nucleari o a carbone. Un altro contributo riguarda Stato e rivoluzione di Lenin e le teorie marx-engelsiane sullo Stato. Il saggio è meritevole per l'assenza di pietas con cui va a mettere in luce le contraddizioni, e qualche volta le spregiudicatezze teoriche, giustificate da esigenze polemiche contingenti, non solo di Lenin ma anche dei padri del marxismo. Vanno ricordati infine i due altri capitoli (meno stimolanti) sulla dialettica e su «Storicismo, scienza della storia e rottura antropologica». Per concludere: materiali un po' datati, legati agli ultimi anni Settanta, e molto discontinui, ma che hanno un loro interesse per la spregiudicatezza con cui analizzano i testi classici del marxismo alla luce di problemi nuovi, problemi che mantengono il loro interesse al di là dei dibattiti del periodo della crisi del l'interno, anziché rifiutare dall' esterno, la zavorra cartesiana. Entrambe le critiche precorrevano troppo i tempi per poter essere comprese dall'auditorio originale, ma entrambe fanno pensare che, ogni volta che si tenta una via d'uscita dall' alternativa secca, e plurisecolare, fra «scientismo» e «controilluminismo», ritornino ogni volta in questione alcuni grossi nodi della nostra storia intellettuale (l'ultimo libro di Bernstein, non a caso, parte proprio dalla critica al cartesianismo ). Un secondo paragrafo spia può essere quello in cui si tratta del problema della plurivocità e imprecisione del linguaggio scientifico. Il famoso dibattito sui protocolli fra Neurath e Carnap, rivisitato risalendo alle fonti, rivela un interesse ben maggiore di quello che poteva avere la sua versione canonica tramandata finora fra i filosofi della scienza. Si scopre infatti un Neurath già consapevole dei limiti delle possibilità di formalizzazione del linguaggio scientifico, limiti che hanno rappresentato un oggetto di dibattito centrale per l'epistemologia più recente, da Kuhn alla Hesse. Va infine segnalato al lettore il capitolo 7, rivolto a mettere in luce aspetti importanti della riflessione sociale e politica di Neurath, aspetti che fanno risaltare il legame, tradizionalmente lasciato nelle nebbie dell'imbarazzo, fra il Neurath uomo politico, esponente importante della socialdemocrazia austriaca nonché della Repubblica consiliare di Baviera sorta dalla insurrezione del 1919, e il Neurath filosofo, sociologo, economista. Ne risulta restituito il profilo di un marxista sui generis, lontanissimo dalla cultura della Terza Internazionale ma anche dal marxismo storicista. Per concludere, una domanda: potrebbe, alla riproposizione di questa figura, essere dato anche il significato di un intervento nel dibattito ideologico italiano, un intervento che voglia gettare nel calderone di questo dibattito un ingrediente «freddo» come quelli che piacciono ai «miglioristi» di casa nostra? In realtà lo spessore di Neurath è ben diverso da quello di Rawls e dei suoi nipotini, che sembrano essere il non plus ultra per l'opinione pubblica colta e neooccidentalizzata di casa nostra. Sergio Cremaschi

I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 CHAPTER 8 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation Susanne Bobzien The Stoics extensively discussed logical paradoxes and fallacies, both of which they would call sophisms ( oocp{op.aTO:). They wrote numerous books on the paradoxes of the Liar and the Sorites, which today again are the subject of extensive research; they investigated a number of paradoxes and fallacies that are based on puzzles connected with demonstratives, identity, presuppositions and ambiguities, and there are still many questions unanswered about their treatment of each of these. In this paper I take up the Stoic treatment of sophisms or fallacies which contain ambiguities, more precisely which contain an ambiguous word which is responsible for there being a fallacy. In modern terms, these are lexical, as opposed to grammatical or structural, ambiguities, and this kind of fallacy is often called 'fallacy of equivocation', 1 although we cannot assume that the Stoic understanding of such ambiguities fully coincides with any modern ones. The Peripatetics called such fallacies fallacies of homonymy, and the Stoics are likely to have called them fallacies of homonymy in single words. 2 The Stoic discussion of this type of fallacies has been written upon with fruitful results by several scholars, but the precise nature of the Stoic view is still a matter of debate. In this paper, I try to sort out the difficulties for an interpretation of the Stoic treatment of such fallacies based on lexical ambiguities, compare it with Aristotle's treatment of this type of sophisms, and explore what we can learn from it about Stoic theory of logic and language. I THE EVIDENCE The central text for the Stoic treatment of fallacies of homonymy is a passage from Simplicius' Commentary on Aristotle's Categories. As there are 1 Contrasted with 'fallacy of amphiboly' as a name for fallacies of syntactic ambiguity. Hence the tide of this paper. The modern names ultimately go back to Aristotle's distinction in the Sophistical Refutations between napal\oyt<YilOS napa Ti)v OllWVVIliav and napal\oytcrllOS napa Ti)v allcptj3ol\iav. ' Cf. Simp!. Cat. 24.5-6; Galen, De Soph. 13.4-6 (ev Tois anl\ois), see also Arise. SE ch. 19. 239 I PI:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 240 S. BOBZIEN several ways of translating the text which correspond to several different interpretations, and since to find the best interpretation of the text is one of the goals of this paper, I will refrain from giving a translation here, but rather present the Greek text together with an English paraphrase which leaves open most of the interpretative problems. AB the ambiguous word on which the fallacy turns ( av8peios) has no ambiguous equivalent in English,3 in order to preserve the ambiguity, I will list its two meanings thus: {for men/ manly}. The reader is then asked to imagine that this is one word which has those two meanings. (I) oto Kal ev Tois Trap' 6~õc.vvv~õiav crvt.t.oytcr~õois T]crvxãetv oi otaf.eKTtKol 1TapaKEAEVOVTat, (2) EC.VS av en' &At.o O'T]IJa!VOIJEVOV 6 epc.vTc7:>V IJETay6:yn TO ovõõa. (3) oTov, el TIS epc.vT<;i ei 6 XITWV O:vopeios, ei TVXOI O:vopeios wv, crvyxc.vpT]O'OIJEea. (4) Kav epc.vTi)crn ei 6 O:vopeios EVI.j)VXOS, Kal TO(ho crvyxc.vpT]O'OIJEea, CxAT]Ses yap. (5) ei OE crvvay6:yn C>TI 6 xnwv &pa EVI.j)VXOS, (6) eVTavea TTJV 6~õc.vvv~õiav TOV O:vopeiov OtaO'TEJAacrSat (?) Kal oei~al [TTJV O:vopeiav f]yovv TTJV EVI.j)Vxiav] ClTI &t.t.c.vs IJEV err\ TOV xnwvos, &At.c.vs OE err\ ToO TTJV O:vopeiav exoVTos f.EyETat. (Simp!. Cat. 24.9-2I) (I) This is why the logicians advise <us> to be silent in the case of syllogisms based on a homonymy. (2) In such syllogisms, at some point the questioner transfers the ambiguous word to another signification. (3) For example, if someone asks whether the garment is {manly/for men}, if it happens to be {manly/for men}, we will concede this. (4) And if he asks whether being {manly/for men} is being courageous, we will concede this, too, for it is true. (5) But if he infers that the garment is therefore courageous, (6) <they advise us> to separate the homonymy of the word' {manly/for men}' (7) and show [manliness, that is courage] that it is said or intended in one way in the case of the garment, in another in the case of the one who has manliness. This passage has given rise not only to a number of different interpretations, but also to some puzzlement. In order to be able to produce a fully satisfactory interpretation and dissolve the difficulties, I start with a brief set of comments on the text, before looking at the philosophical issues it involves. The context of the passage is Simplicius' commentary on Aristotle's definition of homonymy at Categories rar-2. The problem Simplicius discusses is why, if the topic of the Categories is meaningful speech, not things, Aristotle talks about things which share a name (homonyms) rather l Common devices to get around this difficulty are substituting the Greek example by a suitable English ambiguous word with a different meaning, or choosing for each occurrence the meaning that is {most likely to be) intended by speaker or listener. Either practice prevents us from an adequate analysis of the text, hence I introduce my admittedly awkward nomenclature. (Atherton 1993: 42o-1, leaves the word av5peios untranslated; Long and Sedley 1987: I, 228-9, translate 6:v5peios by 'manly' throughout, presumably in the hope that it is close enough to its second meaning 'for men'.) I PI:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation than, as one would expect, expressions with a multiplicity of significations (homonymies). The 'logicians' are somehow invoked to testify that it is primarily things, and not words, that generate homonymies.4 Of course we have no reason to assume that this was the original purpose of the Stoic argumentation reported by Simplicius.5 (1) ev Tois Tiap' 6!-IC.UVVI-Iiav ovf..f..oytcr1-1ois i)crvxãetv oi 5taAEKTtKoi 1TapaKEAEVOVTat: • oi 5taAEKT!Koi: 'the logicians', 'the dialecticians': Simplicius simply calls the philosophers at issue logicians (or dialecticians). However, there can be little doubt that these logicians were Stoics.6 The terminology is Stoic, the method suggested for dealing with the fallacy seems to be Stoic, and most importantly, the example of a simple homonymy we get, that 6:v5peios can be said of a shirt and of a man in different meanings, is exactly the one we obtain in Galen's list of Stoic ambiguities. • 0!-IC.UVVI-Iia: 'homonymy': homonomies are the second and third types of ambiguities in Galen's list of Stoic types of ambiguities (Gal. De Soph. 13.4-7 Gabler, 22 Ebbesen). At issue in our passage is 'homonomy in single words', 7 a class in which fall terms that are homonymous in isolation. • crvAAoytcrl-loi: 'syllogisms': it is odd that Simplicius (or his source) calls these fallacies syllogisms. For syllogisms are, for Aristotle and the Peripatetics as well as for the Stoics, valid arguments, whereas validity should at least be doubtful in the case of fallacies. There is of course the possibility that the Stoics considered fallacies of equivocation as valid but unsound syllogisms.8 More likely, crvAAoytcrl-loi is not part of the excerpt from the Stoics, but Simplicius' doing. Perhaps this is just carelessness on the part of Simplicius, writing 'syllogism' instead of 'sophism' .9 4 Simplicius may here confound, to his advantage, the common Stoic use of 1Tpayl!crra for things signified (roughly meanings) with the Aristotelian and early Peripatetic use of 1TpCxyllaTa for things. 5 As rightly pointed out by Atherton 1993: 420 n.14. 6 So also shown by Atherton 1993: 421-2. 7 For the Stoic distinction between homonymy in single words (or 'in simples', OI!WVVI!ia ev Tois cm;\ois) and homonymy in compounds (61-'WVVI'ia ev Tois crvv6hms} see Galen, De Soph. 13.4-6 and Atherton 1993: 273-7. 8 There is a Stoic classification that allows for fallacies that are in fact valid (D.L. 7.44, cf. also S.E. P.H. 2.229); but I doubt that the one at issue here belongs in that class. 9 It is possible thatwhen disregarding the possibility of ambiguitythe Peripatetics considered the linguistic form of the fallacy as a valid form of syllogistic (in a wider sense). Alternatively, 'syllogism' could have been used in the sense of apparent syllogism by Simplicius. For Aristotle writes, at SE 171b18-19: &crre 8 Te 1Tepi Twvoe <pa1V611evos crv;\;\oytcr116s eptcrrtK6s ;\oyos. I Pr:GQZ 052184I8rXco8.xml CUr987B-Frede December 9, 2004 14:4 S. BOBZIEN • TIO:pCXKEAevovTa:l: 'they recommend', 'they prescribe' 'they advise': this choice of term, that the logicians recommend a particular strategy, shows that we are in the context of dialectical discourse. Advice is given how to 'play' the dialectical 'game'. So, strictly, this passage does not tell us how the Stoics produce a solution (AVO'l$) in the case offallacies of homonymy, although from their recommendation we will be able to venture a good guess what such a solution would have looked like. • ijO"vxal;etv: 'keep quiet', 'fall silent': what exactly is meant by this expression in this sentence and what its scope is, are matters of controversy. I discuss these questions below in section 7* (2) EGOS &v en &AAo O''llJ..Ia:tv6J..1evov 6 epGOT&'w J..IETa:yayn To ovoJ..Ia: • EGOS: There are three ways of reading this conjunctive expression, and they each lead to different kinds of interpretation of the text: we can either read it as meaning 'until', or as 'while' I 'at the point when', or as 'as long as'. More is said on this in section 7* • O''llJ..IO:lVOJ..IEVov: 'that which is signified', 'signification', 'meaning': this could be Stoic terminology, in which case it refers to what they called 'sayables' (AEKTa), in this case a predicate, which is an incomplete sayable (D.L. 7.63). Alternatively, O''llJ..IO:lVOJ..IEVOV simply refers to 'that which is signified', in a philosophically neutral sense, as used by logicians in the second century AD and later, including Peripatetics. (There is an ongoing debate in particular regarding Aristotelian philosophy, whether words like O''llJ..IO:lVOJ..IEVov may ever be translated as meaning. Since it is natural in the context of ambiguity of expressions to talk about the several meanings of a term, and since the Stoic sayables can in a wide sense be considered as meanings, I will talk about the two meanings of an expression, etc. No particular technical slant should be attached to my use of the word 'meaning', though.) • 6 EpGOTWV: 'the questioner': this expression again shows that a dialectical discourse is at issue. It involves a questioner and an answerer; the former tries to make the latter contradict himself, or get him into logical trouble otherwise.10 • J..IETa:yayn: 'transfers': some manuscripts have J..IETayn instead of J..IETa:yayn. Which reading is preferable depends on the overall interpretation of the passage one chooses. (See below section 7.) Kv has eTia:yayn, which makes less sense. 10 See e.g. Smith 1997, the introduction, for a good discussion of dialectical discourse and dialectical games. I P1:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml CU1987B-Frede December 9• 2004 14:4 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 243 • The exact meaning of the whole clause (2) can only be given later. But a translation such as 'the questioner transfers the word to a different meaning' will prove adequate. In any event, we can infer from (2) that the Stoics held that one word can have more than one signification or meaning, and that users of the word can somehowtransfer such a word from one of its meanings to another. (3) oTov, e'i TIS epc.vT<?; ei 6 xnwv 6:v8peios, ei TVXOl 6:v8peios wv, avyxc.vpT)<YOJ.Ieea • oTov: 'for example': this phrase introduces an example of a fallacy of homonymy, and how the Stoics advise us to deal with it. • Et TIS epc.vT9;: 'if someone asks': again, this shows the dialectical context . • 6 xnwv 6:v8peios: this is the first premiss of the fallacy, if in question form, though there is in this case in fact no difference in the Greek. We also obtain the first meaning of the ambiguous word 6:v8peios, namely 'for men', 'of a man', as used e.g. of clothes. • avyxc.vpT)<YOJ.IE6a: 'we will agree', 'we will assent', 'we will concede': the person questioned is asked to 'concede' the premiss. avyxc.vpeiv is commonly used to describe public, verbal, explicit, assent to a premiss or conclusion, in a dialectical discourse, and more generally. II I believe that is the meaning it has in this passage. (4) Kav epC.VTtlO'TI Ei 6 6:v8peios e(/l.pvxos, Kai To(ho avyxc.vpT)<YOJ.IE6a, 6:f..T)61:s yc'xp. • Kav: 'and if': this conjunction introduces the 'asking' of the second premiss. • EpC.VTtlO'T): 'he asks': again, the terminology is that of the dialectical game. • 6 6:v8peios EV\j-'vxos: this is the second premiss of the fallacy, and also brings in the second meaning of the ambiguous word 6:v8peios, viz. 'manly', as in 'brave'. (5) Ei 81: avvayc'xyn chi 6 xnwv &pa EV\j-'VXOS • ei 81:: 'but if': this phrase introduces the conclusion, and its being drawn by the questioner. • avvayc'xyn: 'he infers': avvc'xye1v is a common Stoic term for drawing the conclusion of an argument, 12 but is also used quite generally in ancient logic. 13 11 For passages see below note 62. 12 E.g. S.E. P.H. 2.228, 229; D.L. 7.78. 'J Alex. AnPr. 2.1, 19.8, 21.28, 22.6, etc.; cf. Arist. Rhet. 1357a8, 1395b25, Met. 1042a3. I PI:GQZ 052184I8iXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN • 6 XITWV &pa EV'f'vxos: This is the conclusion of the fallacy, &pa being the particle used by the Stoics, and again by ancient philosophers generally, to indicate that a sentence or a proposition is the conclusion of an argument. (6) eVTcx06a TTJV OJ.!.C.VVVJ.J.iav TOV 6:v8pEiov 8tacneit.acr6at • evTcx06a: we can assume either a temporal meaning here, 'at the very time', 'at this point', 'then', indicating the time at which the fallacious character and elements of theapparentargument are meant to be uncovered; or something like 'at this point in the argument'. • TTJV OJ.!.C.VVVJ.J.iav TOV 6:v8pEiov 8tacneif.acr6at: 'one must separate the homonymy of" {manly/for men}'" (i.e. distinguish the two meanings of the word): 8taCJTEiAacr6at is used elsewhere to indicate the revealing of the ambiguity of a term. 14 (?) Kai 8eisat [TTJV 6:v8peiav flyovv TTJV EVIf.IVXiav] em OAAC.VS J.!.EV E1Ti TOV X!Twvos, &t.t.ws 81: eTii ToO TTJV 6:v8peiav EXOVTOS MyETat. • Kai 8eisat: I assume this here simply means show (as opposed to prove in a strict sense); the respondent is meant to show up the double meaning at this point. • [Ti]v 6:v8pEiav flyovv TTJV EVIf.IVXiav]: '[manliness, that is, courage]': this has been excised by some editors, and indeed it seems somewhat superfluous and out of place; it could have been a marginal note that found its way into the text. Possibly the author of the phrase thought he had better point out that manliness is the same as (or implies) courage, in case this wasn't clear from the fact that being manly implies being courageous. • em &t.t.c.vs J.!.EV eTii ToO XITWVOS, &t.t.ws 81: ETii ToO TTJV 6:v8peiav EXOVTOS AEYETat: 'that it is said/intended in one way in the case of the garment, in another in the case of the one who has manliness': this clause can be taken in two ways, at two levels of generality; see below, section 4* 2 THE FALLACY Theor someStoics defined ambiguity (6:J.J.q>tl3of.ia) as 'an expression that signifies two or more things in its common linguistic use and in its proper senses and in the same linguistic idiom, so that the several things are '4 Cf. S.E. P.H. 2.256-57 hrl TfiS Btao-ro/.fis Twv 6:!lqnJ3o!.t&v; Btao-reAAavllevovs 6:1lcptJ3o!.ias; i) Btao-ro/.1') ... Note also that Btao-reAAoo was used for the separation of words by punctuation. Such separation is essential for solving structural ambiguities, such as those the Stoics called homonomy of compounds. I Pr:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 245 understood simultaneously in this expression'. 15 Homonymy ( OIJWVV!Jicx) is a species of ambiguity, and homonymy in single words (ev Tois cmi\ois) is one of two kinds of homonymy. 16 Ideally, the ambiguous expression on which the fallacious character of a fallacy of equivocation is grounded should satisfy the Stoic definition of ambiguity. In our fallacy, the Greek word av8peio<;, with its two meanings 'for men' and 'manly' appears to do so at least when it is considered in isolation. The word has both meanings in its common linguistic use, i.e. neither is a technical or otherwise unusual expression; in its proper senses, i.e. not metaphorically; and in the same linguistic idiom; and it has the meanings at the same time. Moreover, Galen presents it as paradigm for Stoics ambiguities in single words. 17 The Simplicius text allows us to reconstruct the fallacy with some certainty: (1) 6 XJTwv 6:v6pelos. 6 '0 6:v6pelos, EV\jlvxos. 6 XJTWV &pa EV\jJVXOS. This fallacy (as the majority of Greek fallacies) cannot be straightforwardly translated into English without losing its sophistic character. In order to retain it, instead of translating the ambiguous expressions, I will list their two meanings, as indicated in section I, thus: {for men/ manly}, and invite the reader to imagine that this is one word which has those two meanings. The garment is {for men/manly}. But {what/who} is {for men/manly} is courageous. Therefore, the garment is courageous. This triplet of sentences is indeed a fallacy, since what seem to be the premisses appear to be true and to entail the conclusion, which in turn is clearly false. The fallacy does not have the form of a Stoic syllogism. I here speak of the linguistic form of the fallacy, i.e. the three grammatical sentences, and disregard any ambiguities in expressions. 18 We would get a fallacy with a linguistic form the Stoics may have accepted as that of a valid argument by making slight changes:19 ll D.L. 7.62, AE~IS SUo i\ Kai 1TAe!ova 1TpayllaTa 0'111-laivovcra AEKTIKOOS Kai KVpiws Kal Ka-ra -ro aV-ro E6os, oocr6' cXIlO TCx 1TAEiova Mie~acr6m KaTa Talhf)V -rf)v AE~IV. For an in-depth discussion of this definition see Atherton 1993: 135-72. My understanding of the definition owes much to Atherton. 16 Galen, De Soph. 13.4-7, see above, note 6. 17 Gal. De Soph. 13.4-5 Gabler, 22 Ebbesen. 18 Although in the Stoic view syllogisms are not linguistic items (see section 3), we recognise their form in the way they are expressed in language; for this to be possible, the Stoics introduced various kinds of language regulations. '9 See Atherton 1993: 420, n.15 for a different suggestion. I P1:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN (2a) 6 XITWV av8peios. el Ti av8peiov, EKEivo EV'f'VXOV. 6 XJTWV &pa EV'f'vxos. The garment is {for men/manly}. If something is {for men/ manly}, it is courageous. Therefore, the garment is courageous. or (2b) 6 XJTWV av8peios. e'i Tis av8peios, EKEivos EV'f'VXOS. 6 XJTWV &pa EV'f'VXOS. The garment is {for men/manly}. If someone is {for men/ manly}, that one is courageous Therefore, the garment is courageous. Or, with the more common order of the sentences that express the premisses:20 el Ti O:v8peiov, eKeivo EV'f'VXOV. or 6 8e XJTWV av8peios. 6 XJTWV &pa EV'f'vxos. If something is {for men/ manly}, it is courageous. The garment is {for men/manly}. Therefore, the garment is courageous. El TiS av8peios, EKEivos EV'f'VXOS. 6 8e XITWV av8peios. 6 XJTWV &pa EV'f'vxos. If someone is {for men/ manly}, that one is courageous. The garment is {for men/manly}. Therefore, the garment is courageous. This still does not have the exact form of a Stoic indemonstrable argument, 21 but there is some evidence that arguments of this form (not fallacies, of course) were accepted by the Stoics as valid.22 The fallacy can be seen as an abbreviating reformulation of this argument which would retain the validity. 23 We can see why the fallacy was presented as (1) rather than any of the versions of (2). For in the case of (2), a decision has to be made whether to use (2a) 'something' (Tl), etc., or (2b) 'someone' (Tis), etc. But (2b) would be understood by a Greek speaker as being clearly about persons, and thus the lack of connection with the first (simple) premiss would be too obvious; 2° For the Stoics, the order of the premisses did not matter for whether something is a syllogism, and presumably a valid argument, see Bobzien 1996: 181 (premiss permutation) together with 136 and 152. Nonetheless, customarily the simple premiss would not be placed first in a syllogism. 21 For the Stoic indemonstrables see D.L. 7.79-81, S.E. P.H. 2.157-8, and Bobzien 1996: 134-41. 22 Cf. Augustine Dial. m.84-6 (Pinborg) for an example; see also Cic. Fat. n-15. For Stoic indefinite conditionals see S.E. M. n.8, ro, n; D.L. 7*75 and Bobzien 1999: 155-6. 23 See Alex. Top. 8.2o-2 for a Stoic example formulated as '{What/who} is F, is G' (6 ava1Tvewv l;ii). With manipulation in one direction, the fallacy thus rakes on the form of a Stoic valid argument; with slight modification in another direction, it takes on a form considered valid by the Peripatetics: This garment is {for men/manly}. This garment is {for men/manly}. What is {for men/manly} is courageous. All things {for men/manly} are courageous. Therefore, this garment is courageous. Therefore, this garment is courageous. This fact is $RGorostiA!f,insofar as it shows that the fallacy could have been used and been of interest to both philosophical schools, see also section 6 below. (Interestingly, Alexander in the .Topics passage just quoted distinguishes between 6 CxV01TVEWV /;1\ and the Peripatetic 1TOS 6 avanvewv /;1\.) I Pr:GQZ 052184r8rXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 247 whereas in the case (2a), the sentence would sound somewhat funny, since e(hpvxos and av5pelos, which would then have the neuter form e(h.Jlvxov and av5pelov (in the required meaning of'manly'), really make sense only for persons. By contrast, the formulation in the text, i.e. (I), '{What/who} is {for men/manly} is courageous' (6 av5pelos, EV\flvxos) is on the one hand a generally accepted 'synonymous' linguistic variant of the sense-making 'If someone is {for men/manly}, that one is courageous' (e! TiS av5pelos, EKeivos EV\flvxos); and on the other, on superficial reading, seems to pick up the 6 ('the') from 6 xnwv ('the garment') in the first premiss, so that there is at least an apparent connection between the premisses. It becomes clear here that it is essential for the fallacy to work smoothly that the word for a garment chosen is masculine. In this way the whole argument goes through with the masculine forms, and its deceptive nature is harder to pin down. Of course, the main element which makes the argument fallacious is the ambiguous word '{for men/manly}'. But as most good fallacies, this one, too, employs more than one device to trick the listener. Sometimes they are cooperative in producing the illusion of soundness or validity, as in this case; sometimes they seem to be introduced into the sophism to distract us from the main fallacious element; and the function of some elements of deception can be interpreted either way. 3 WHAT SORT OF THING THE STOICS THOUGHT A FALLACY OF HOMONYMY IS For the Stoics, an argument is a compound of premisses and conclusion. Premisses and conclusion are assertibles or propositions (ãtW!JaTa), and as such incorporeal entities.24 They are things signified (or significations, <YT]!JaiVOIJEVa). Premisses and conclusion are expressed in meaningful sentences. Thus, we may assume that the three sentences 'If it is day, it is light', 'It is day' and 'It is light' express the three assertibles or propositions IF IT IS DAY, IT IS LIGHT, IT IS DAY and IT IS LIGHT. When such sentences are meant to express an argument (a compound of premisses and conclusion) the Stoics usually indicate this further by particles as follows 24 They have, however, in principle the ability to change their truth-value and modal properties over time. See Bobzien 1999: 93-6, II7. I PI:GQZ 05218418iXco8.xml CU1987B-Frede December 9• 2004 14:4 248 S. BOBZIEN 'If it is day, it is light', 'But it is day', 'Therefore, it is light.ifThese sentences, taken together, express a Stoic first indemonstrable sy ogism. What then is the relation between arguments and fallacies, and what is a fallacy in the Stoic view? The Stoics classifY the discussion of fallacies under logic, i.e. that part of dialectics (5laAEKTlKi]) that deals with the things signified. On the other hand, ambiguities are discussed in that part of dialectics that is concerned with language, utterances or speech (<pc.vvi]). From this fact alone, we can surmise that the Stoic treatment of fallacies of ambiguity draws on both these parts of dialectics. fu Atherton rightly emphasises, 2 5 a fallacy of homonymy cannot be (just) an argument, as an argument on its own cannot be fallacious for reasons of ambiguity. For arguments, being at the level of sayables and assertibles, cannot contain ambiguities, whereas the fallacies we are interested in here are fallacies based on ambiguity. So the fallacy must comprise both elements from the level of meanings or things signified and linguistic elements. It arises as a result of incongruities between the two, which are made use of in a cunning way by the designer or proponent of the fallacy. Our fallacy, for instance, comprises at least the assertibles that THE GARMENT IS FOR MEN, that WHAT 26 IS MANLY IS COURAGEOUS, that THE GARMENT IS MANLY, that THE GARMENT IS COURAGEOUS, and the argument THE GARMENT IS MANLY, BUT WHAT IS MANLY IS COURAGEOUS, THEREFORE THE GARMENT IS COURAGEOUS. It comprises the sentences 'the garment is {for men/manly}', '<but> {who/what} is {for men/ manly} is courageous', and '<therefore> the garment is courageous', and it comprises them in that order, so that they have the appearance of expressing an argument. This complex of meaning items and linguistic items is a fallacy, because it gives, at least at superficial perusal, the impression of being a bit of language expressing a valid and sound argument, but in fact is not. (Naturally, one can discuss sayables and arguments only when they are clad in language; there is no other option. Hence, in principle, ambiguities are always a possibility, and consequently, so are fallacies.) From a Stoic perspective, fallacies of homonymy thus straddle the realm of meaning and the realm oflinguistic expression; however, they also involve the realm of pragmatics. They are the result of an interplay between the first two, based on contingent facts about language (ambiguities), and the intentional use27 oflinguistic items to express meaning items in such a way 15 Atherton 1993: 413. 16 Or 'who', see previous section. 17 Possibly, initially the use is unintentional. I Pt:GQZ 052184t8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 249 that they appear to represent validity and soundness, but in fact do not. 28 Hence they also essentially involve a pragmatic component: a fallacy will only exist if someone has actually formulated and entertained it. (Unlike Stoic propositions, which, at least in the prevalent interpretation, are there even when not in use, 29 for the Stoics, linguistic items only exist when they are actually used by speakers or writers or thinkers.) Moreover, without the potential to deceive, they are not fallacies (cro<picrllCXTa).30 But being (able to be) deceived is a psychological disposition that can be reduced neither to language nor to 'meaning'. It does not follow that, for the Stoics, fallacies are 'tokens', fleeting occurrences in time, temporary complexes of significations (meanings) and linguistic items. For, the Stoics talk about many fallacies as 'the so-and-so argument' Y Thus, as in the case of arguments, there are tokens of them, performances of them, if you want, but the fallacies themselves are not just such tokens, and are not reducible to such tokens or performances. We can identify the fallacy with its type. But note that this type is an abstraction, in the same way in which concepts (evvorwCXTa), for instance, are abstractions for the Stoics, and are not something that has the status of a subsisting entity, as Stoic sayables and assertibles, but are only quasi-somethings.32 4 THE STOIC ADVICE AND CONTEXTUAL DISAMBIGUATION Simplicius' Stoics advise that the answerer concede both premisses, and each time they give a reason why and when they should be conceded. The justifications why we should concede the premisses are most interesting. In the case of the first premiss, we are told to consent to the proposition expressed 28 The Stoics seem also to have allowed for sophisms\..ad co sa; d:ac liii••!!''"'"AS io a fallae~ that are valid, but do not appear to be, cf. S.E. RH. 2.229, but our fallacy does not belong to this special group. 29 The mode of being there of Stoic propositions (assertibles) is that they subsist (v<pia-racr6a1}; they resemble Frege's thoughts or Carnap's propositions in that respect. For the prevalent interpretation see e.g. Frede 199¥* Schubert 1994: ch. I, Barnes 1999: 2n, Bobzien 1998: 21-6. 3° I use 'fallacy' as translation of the Greek o-6<pJo-lla; the meaning of the latter does not entirely coincide with the meaning of 'fallacy' as used in contemporary English. J' Thus the Stoics calk about the Idle argument (apyos A6yos, Origen Gels. 342.62-3), the Master argument (Kvptevwv ;>.6yos, Epict. Diss. 2.19.1), the Liar arguments (\f'evliollEVOJ A6yot, D.L. 7*196), the Litcle-by-liccleargument (6 1rapa lltKpov A6yos, D.L. 7.197) or Sorites, all of which they consider sophisms, and they calk generally about intractable arguments (cmopot ;\6yot, D.L. 7.82). There is a problem here, as strictly speaking, for the Stoics even ;>.6yos, i.e. argument, would be an incorrect description, as a fallacy is not occurring at the level of arguments, but at the level of the relation between linguistic expressions and propositions. Still, they may have called the fallacies so-and-so arguments because they were known under those names before the Stoics cried their hands at them; or alternatively, 'argument' is used in the loose sense of 'apparent argument'. * J> Cf. Stob. I.I36.2I-137*6* H I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN in the sentence 'the garment is {manly/for men}', if the garment happens to be {manly/for men}. From this we learn the following: the expression 'the garment' is used demonstratively in the argument; the assumption is that the premiss is true if 'the garment' (together with an act of pointing) is used to 'demonstrate', or refer to, a garment that is {manly/for men}. At first sight, this is just an application of the Stoic truth-criterion for definite propositions as we find it in Sextus Empiricus.33 But there is more to it. The assumption that the premiss is true if the garment is {manly/for men} allows us to infer that the Stoics understand the meaning of the expression ' {manly/for men}' in this premiss to be FOR MEN. (For the proposition that THE GARMENT IS MANLY would never be true, and at the level of truth, which is the level of sayables and propositions, there is no room for ambiguity.)34 Thus there is, at the time when the first premiss is requested, only one proposition expressed by the sentence 'the garment is {manly/for men}', and that is that THE GARMENT WHICH IS DEMONSTRATED IS FOR MEN .35 Possibly, the Stoics also thought that only this one proposition was intended by speaker and listener; however, this is a different point. Which proposition or propositions are expressed by a sentence appears to be in principle independent of speaker and listener intention. The case of the second premiss is even more straightforward. We are advised to concede the second premiss 'because it is true'. Now the sentence ' {who/what} is {manly/for men} is courageous' can be used to express a truth only if the expression'{ manly/for men}' has the meaning MANLY. Thus the Stoics assume at least for the purpose of treating the fallacy that the sentence, when asked, is not ambiguous,36 and hence that the word ' {manly/for men}' qua being used in the sentence is not ambiguous)? We can take it that the premiss would count as a true Stoic conditional,38 and thus that unlike in the case of the first premiss its truth-value is not JJ context / or time-dependent. Again, speaker and listener intention were .; { ll S.E. M. 8.100, on wpur~Jeva ã!W~JaTa. 34 See previous section. 35 This is worth noting on its own, but also because Aristocle's position on chis point is different, see below section 6. 36 I am not sure whether the Stoics would call a whole sentence 'ambiguous' {ãJ<pi~oAos), ifit contains an ambiguous expression that is not disambiguated by its linguistic context (for examples see section 8 below), or whether they would reserve the term 'ambiguity' forrhe largest phrase in such a sentence that can be taken in more than one way. If the latter, a more careful formulation, such as 'the sentence, when and as being asked, does not contain an ambiguity', may be preferable. 37 The word ' {manly/for men}' as used in the sentence is not such that 'several things are understood simultaneously in this' word, and thus does nor satisfY the Stoic definition of ambiguity preserved at D.L. 7.62, for which see section 2 above. 38 It would be what the Stoics called an indefinite conditional, see above note 22. For their truthconditions see Bobzien 1999: II2-IJ. I Pr:GQZ 052184I8iXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation likely to be taken to coincide, this time in their both intending the meaning MANLY; again, it does not follow that for the Stoics it depends on the speaker or listener intention what proposition is expressed by the premiss sentence. This treatment of the two premisses by the Stoics suggests that they endorsed an interesting theory of ambiguity. One way of describing it would be that they assume that context disambiguates. In order not to misinterpret the Stoics here, it is useful to make the following distinction. When I say 'the context disambiguates' I mean by this an entirely non-psychological, non-mental fact: whereas an expression or phrase considered on its own, out of context or without a context, linguistic or otherwise, may be ambiguous in the Stoic understanding, when it is used in a certain kind of context (e.g. a context in which one of two meanings clearly produces a truth, the other clearly a falsehood, and the context ensures that a true statement is intended), it is no longer ambiguous in that sense. It is no longer the case that 'several things are understood simultaneously in this' expression or phrase. From this 'disambiguation by context' I wish to distinguish 'the mental process of disambiguation by speaker and/ or listener'. Such a process involves that the person at issue runs in their mind (whether they are fully aware of it or not) through two or more meanings of an expression or clause, and, e.g. as a result of assessing the context, discards all but one of them; eliminates all the irrelevant meanings and retains only the relevant one. These two notions of disambiguation, although they each tend to involve context, are very different things. It seems to me born out by our text that the abstract observation that context disambiguates was part of the Stoic theory. Thus in Stoic philosophy of language a distinction is required between (i) an ambiguous expression, which is considered on its own to always have simultaneous semantic multiplicity, and (ii) a sentence uttered at a time twhich contains an ambiguous expression, but which at t may express only one proposition, and thus involve only one meaning of the expression despite the fact that even at t the expression considered on its own has its two meanings. I assume that the Stoics took most such sentences to express at most times only one proposition (the same one each time).39 In fact, Augustine, in his work On Dialectic, provides a distinction similar to this one, which may well go back to the Stoics:4° 39 Neither (i) nor (ii) require reference to speaker's intentions. 4o Cf. Ebbesen 1981: 1, 32, Atherton 1993: 289-90; Catherine Atherton has confirmed in conversation that on page 290, lines 8-IO, in the sentence 'the second <argument> could also be Stoic' she refers to the argument I quote. I P~:GQZ 05218fr8IXco8 .xml j ~us.t \--l \NHe. to SAy \-[ the. ~ ft,.e December 9• 2004 S. BOBZIEN (r) For when it is said that every word is ambiguous, this is said about single (separate, individual) words .... (2) And yet, while every word is ambiguous, nobody explains the ambiguity of the words with anything but words ~ already eomeiaee aae ll.i'e EtaQS,. H8t liFHBigQB\,1\ (3) F<?.!f as, if I F-t'every soldier is two-footed', it wouldn't follow from this that a cohort of two-footed soldiers was therefore ~o-footed, s~ when I say that every word is ambiguous, I don't say that~ sentence or/\discourse <is ambiguous>, despite the fact that they are compounded from):10ras.4' (Dial. ch. 9) As context for the argument in sentences (2) and (3) we have to imagine an opponent of the Stoic view that every word is ambiguous arguing somewhat as follows: if every word is ambiguous, then you can never disambiguate; for you disambiguate with words; but they are by assumption all ambiguous. The explicitly stated defence of the Stoic view in sentence (2) is that disambiguation of a word w is done not by providing a single word for each meaning of w, but by using a plurality of words compounded into a phrase or sentence. Underlying this response is the assumption that whole phrases or sentences, although consisting of nothing butambiguous -words, are themselves not ambiguous, or at least need not be. Sentence (3) uses the soldier analogy to make the logical point that from the fact that something is truly predicated of each of a group of individuals it does not follow that one can truly predicate it of the group as a wholeY Thus, if one can truly predicate of each word in a phrase or sentence that it is ambiguous, it does not follow that the group of words as a whole (the phrase or sentence or discourse) is ambiguous. Pertinent to my argument is the underlying assumption in this passage that from the fact that an individual word is ambiguous (has more than one meaning) it does not follow that a whole sentence or phrase which contains this word is ambiguous (has more than one meaning). This is similar to what the Simplicius passage implies about sentences which contain ambiguous words. However, it follows neither from the Simplicius nor from the Augustine passage that whenever an ambiguous word or phrase is embedded in a sentence, it is thereby disambiguated by context. Some linguistic contexts retain the ambiguity (see also section 8 below). Moreover, presumably for most sentences a non-linguistic context could be imagined in which the disambiguation by linguistic context is countered or undone, as it were. In 4' Quod enim dictum est omne verbum esse ambiguum de verbis singulis dictum est . ... (2) Et tamen cum omne verbum ambiguum sit, nemo verborum ambiguitatem nisi sed iam coniunctis quae ambigua non erunt explicabit. (3) Ut enim, si dicerem 'omnis miles bipes est: non ex eo sequeretur ut cohors ex militibus utique bipedibus ita comtaret, ita, cum dico ambiguum esse omne verbum, non dico sententiam, non H \t/lruc.\n o 11\.CE!co""''P\vvw .. o.. .. e. Vtol (J..IM\p~~'"'-lll"-S disputationem, quamvis verba ista texantur. Jt s f JJ * 4'1-' poim rhe s,eies .... lone .. u to lraoe ffiQQO ia a elilfefeRt eeRtel<!, sec"""' H "10 r "1"\11.! 'l<l l'cs CIA ,-~ ~~11\.~S tlf\J\V\'c\u._o..\i ~ lv\c(u.ot~lf\J Qlf'IM\e~j c..f. SIII\A<f\. (a.t, '2.tlf-IS"" 3 S.E Y\ ~:-:t~'< i-,lo2.., J I I PI:GQZ 052I84I8IXco8.xml CU1987B-Frede December 9, 2004 14:4 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 253 such cases a mental process of disambiguation would be likely to occur in the listener. However, I am doubtful whether the Stoics thought that there occurred in cases like our fallacy mental processes in which an elimination of the irrelevant meanings of the expression at issue takes place. Our evidence is certainly compatible with the assumption that the Stoics took it that, as long as there is no strong contextual pressure to the contrary, no such elimination process takes place, and thus no process of disambiguation, simply because no more than one meaning ever presents itself to (or is called up by) the mind. They may have thought that when someone utters the sentence 'the garment is {manly/for men}', in any ordinary circumstances it just means that the garment is for men, and hence nothing else is considered by either speaker or listener. Of course this does not rule out that in the course of an analysis of the sentence out of context, or at some later time, the other meaning is called up in the mind, and a mental disambiguation process does occur. Let us finally look at the Stoic advice concerning the concluding sentence of the fallacy. At the point when the questioner draws the conclusion and tries to get the respondent to concede it, too, the respondent is to jib: (5) But if he infers that the garment is therefore courageous, (6) <they advise us> to separate the homonymy of the word ' {manly/for men}' (7) and show that it is said/intended in one way in the case of the garment, in another in the case of the one who has manliness. It is not expressly stated, but we can take it for granted that the Stoics do not want the respondent to concede the conclusion. Rather, at this point, the respondent is to state that the word ' {manly/for men}' is used differently in each premiss. The that-clause (cht clause) in (7) can be taken in two ways, at two levels of generality; a point which may be of philosophical interest. Either, this clause is short for: (i) 'that" {manly/for men}" had been taken in one way in the first premiss, and in another in the second premiss'and that hence the conclusion does not follow. Or, it could be taken more generally: (ii) 'that " {manly/for men}", when said of a garment, generally means one thing (i.e. for men), and when said of someone who has courage or manliness, generally means another thing (i.e. manly)'. In that case, (i) is taken to be implied by this, and thus again, the conclusion has been shown not to follow. The way the truth of the premisses is meant to be taken for granted (see above) suggests to me that the second reading is more likely. It tallies with a theory of ambiguity in which context disambiguates, but in which I PI:GQZ 05Z18418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 254 S. BOBZIEN no mental process of disambiguation occurs in ordinary circumstances if the linguistic context suggests clearly only one meaning. 5 HOW THE STOICS WOULD HAVE SOLVED THE FALLACY We still need to integrate into our interpretation phrase (2) from the Simplicius passage: 'the questioner transfers the word to another meaning'. Here we are clearly dealing with mental phenomena. The transfer at issue is a mental process. In order for it to be possible that such a transfer occurs, there needs first to be a connection the speaker holds between the word and one of its meanings, then such a connection between the word and its other meaning. This connection could be thought of as speaker intention, in which case what is expressed here is a change of speaker intention. There are two possibilities as to when this transfer may be thought to take place. The first is: at the time of the drawing of the conclusion, 43 the second: at the time of the asking of the second premiss.44 I opt for the first. The main disadvantage of the second possibility seems to me that interpreted thus, the phrase does not really contribute anything germane to the way the Stoics want the fallacy to be dealt with. (For a full discussion of this point see below section 7.) If we assume that the transfer of the word to another meaning happens at the point when the questioner draws the conclusion, we can now make sense of it easily, even though this way of looking at things is decidedly different from modern philosophy of language. There are in fact two parallelpossibilities here:45 (i) At the point when he draws the conclusion, the questioner transfers the word' {manly/for men}' in the first premiss from the meaning or predicate FOR MEN to the meaning or predicate MANLY. Why would he do that? Because in this way, there comes to be a valid argument (not formally, but still valid, see above section 2). And a conclusion can only be drawn, if the argument is valid. We need to distinguish here between the linguistic expression consisting of the three sentences, and the argument expressed, or the three propositions expressed. The linguistic expression appears valid (or more precisely, appears to express a valid argument) all the time as long as we look at it 43 Adopted by Ebbesen 1981: 1, 31 ('keep calm until'); Long and Sedley 1987: 1, 37S (' "become quiescent" until'); FDS IV, frg. 1257 ('in dem Moment zu schweigen ... in dem'). But note rhat Ebbesen and Long and Sedley on the one hand, and Hiilser on rhe other, differ in rheir interpretation of the meaning of 1']crV)(Cx~ElV, see below, section 7* 44 Adopted by Atherton 1993: 419-20. 45 This fact is not mentioned by Ebbesen and Arherton, perhaps because it is of no great relevance. I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 255 without considering the possibility of ambiguity of any of its expressions. However, for the Stoics the bearers of validity are the arguments, not the linguistic expressions thereof, and this point becomes relevant precisely when there is an ambiguity in the linguistic expression. At the point when the conclusion is drawn, the first premiss has become a different proposition (a fourth one), since the word ' {manly/for men}' has been transferred to a different predicate. We now have the newand falseproposition that THE GARMENT IS MANLY. (ii) Alternatively, at the point when he draws the conclusion, the questioner transfers the word '{manly/for men}' in the second premiss from the meaning MANLY to the meaning FOR MEN. Again, there comes to be a valid argument. Again, for the Stoics, it is not the linguistic expression, but what it expresses, that is valid. This argument, evidently, is a different one than in case (i). For now the second premiss has been replaced by a different proposition (a fifth one).46 This is thefalseproposition that WHAT IS FOR MEN IS COURAGEOUs.47 We cannot say which of the premisses the Stoics assumed the questioner would change. Perhaps they left it open, as it is in the end irrelevant for the solution of the fallacy. Psychologically, it is more likely to be the first. For it is further away, temporally, from the drawing of the conclusion, and hence will be less clear in the listener's mind.48 Whether (i) or (ii) was what the Stoics had in mind, or whether they thought it did not matter which, in any event, at the very moment when the word is transferred to the other meaning, the respective premiss of the fallacy becomes a false one. Hence, the conclusion cannot be detached from the premisses, although the argument under consideration has at that point become a valid one. The questioner's hope is of course that the respondent will not be able to figure this out. Thus the Stoic theory fits well with the reasonable assumption that in cases of fallacies, while one concentrates on the premisses, the focus is on the truth of the premisses, while when one draws the conclusion, the focus switches to the validity of the argument. 49 More importantly for the Stoics, rightly, fallacies based on ambiguity consist not just in the artful choice and manipulation of words or linguistic expressions. Such fallacies work at 46 The individuation of arguments occurs at the level of propositions {ãu:ill.l<rr<X); and on that level there is no ambiguity. 47 Or that WHOEVER IS FOR MEN IS COURAGEOUS. 48 Of course, we could switch the premiss sentences round. But as it stands, the fallacy is more likely to confuse the listener (see above, section 2), hence this order of the premiss sentences is presumably not a matter of chance. 49 See Tappenden 1993. I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN the level of interaction of meaning and expressions. As long as one looks at the words only, one cannot solve them. As long as one considers solely the level of meaning, they cannot even occur. 5° We now have all the information we need to see how the Stoics wouldpresumably have solved the fallacy. We know that for the Stoics it would not be sufficient, if the respondent just pointed out that the word '{manly/for men}' in the fallacy is ambiguous; for they, or at least Chrysippus, held that all words are ambiguousY The explanation that would serve as solution (f..vcrts) needs to comprise more than that. Catherine Atherton has given the following account of it: 52 Suppose that a homonym figures in both of the sentences used to signify the premisses of an argument and the contents of the remainders of each sentence ensure that each of the signified propositions will be true if and only if the homonym has a different sense in each, that appropriate to its context .... The signified argument can be declared false either on the grounds that at least one premiss of this argument is false, although the argument is concludent, or else on the grounds that the premisses of this argument are both true, but, thanks to linguistic expression, (only) appear to have something in common. In the jargon of Stoic logic, this argument is invalid because it is incoherent: the premisses have nothing to do with one another ... But in each case it is a different argument which is being assessed. This description of what is going on in fallacies ofhomonomy of the kind the Stoics discussed, including our example in Simplicius, seems to me basically accurate. However, it is what I will call a 'static' analysis of the fallacy, an analysis that looks at the fallacy without considering the factor of time. In order to capture fully what the Stoics think is going on when the fallacy is used in a dialectical context, I believe, a 'dynamic' analysis is more helpful. (I will explicate this presently.) For that, we need to expand the above picture. In some sense at least, Atherton is clearly correct with her claim that there are two different arguments underlying the sophism.53 In the sense that from the various propositions entertained at one time or other by one 5° If no distinction is made between premisses and sentences that express premisses; between a level oflanguage at which there is ambiguity, and a level that concerns meaning (whether also linguistic, as Aristotle does, or incorporeal, as the Stoics think), then it becomes difficult to solve the fallacy; i.e. to give a satisfactory explanation of what goes wrong in it. It is possible that the Stoics used this fallacy for more than teaching students to recognise such faulty ways of arguing; they could have used it to show the necessity to distinguish between such levels. 5' Gellius Noct. Att. u.12.I (LS 37N}; also pointed out by Ebbesen 1981: 1, 31. 51 Atherton 1993: 414. 53 Or rather, three, depending on which premiss is taken to be false (see above}; but the two arguments with a false premiss would function logically in the same way. I PI:GQZ 052I8418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 257 or the other of the interlocutors two such arguments can be constructed. However, in the Simplicius passage, the argument is developed over a period of time, in an interplay between questioner and answerer, and it repays our effort to investigate when and by whom each argument is entertained. Let me explain: • At time t1, when the first premiss sentence is proposed and accepted, nothing more than the true proposition THE GARMENT IS FOR MEN is part of the dialectical game. This is the proposition both questioner and answerer appear to intend. • At time t2 , when the second premiss sentence is proposed and accepted, either only the true proposition WHOEVER IS MANLY IS COURAGEOUS is at issue, and seems intended by both questioner and answerer, or this one together with the proposition proposed at tl> i.e. the pair of propositions. • Sometime between t2 and t3, when the conclusion THEREFORE THE GARMENT IS COURAGEous is drawn and offered up for approval, the word '{manly/for men}' is transferred by the questioner to a different meaning, i.e. the questioner moves from the proposition THE GARMENT IS FOR MEN to the proposition THE GARMENT IS MANLY.54 As a result, at time t3 this new proposition is in the game, as only in this way the conclusion can be drawn. And, as the meaning has been transferred, we can assume the old proposition is now no longer entertained by the questioner. As one can only draw a conclusion if one has its premisses present (in some sense), at this point, I assume, the questioner entertains a whole argument, an argument that is valid, but has one false premiss, viz. THE GARMENT IS MANLY. • What is going on on the side of the respondent between t2 and t3 and at t3? If he is taken in, which is unlikely in the case of so simple a fallacy as ours, he also moves to the other meaning, but without being aware of it. If he is not taken in, we can assume him to resist the move; and in line with the Stoics' advice to point out that ' {manly/for men}' is used in two different meanings in the two propositions that make up the premisses. This suggests that the answerer would not follow the questioner in his transference of meaning, but would insist on taking the premisses to be those propositions that have been agreed upon. And in the two propositions that have been agreed upon, the word ' {manly/for men}' has different meanings. Thus, for the answerer, the argument assumed to be under discussion is: THE GARMENT IS FOR MEN. BuT 54 Or [he quesdoner does me same wim me second premiss, see above. I PI:GQZ 052184181Xco8.xml December 9, 2004 14:4 S. BOBZIEN WHOEVER IS MANLY IS COURAGEOUS. THEREFORE THE GARMENT IS COURAGEous. This is an argument with two true premisses and a false conclusion which is invalid for reasons of disconnectedness or incoherence (OlCxPTTJO'lS, cf. S.E. M. 8.430) of the premisses. Thus the following picture arises: the questioner, when drawing the conclusion, switches one of the premisses for another which has the same linguistic form, and entertains a valid argument with one false premiss. At the same time his hope must be that the respondent does not notice the transference, sticks to his belief that the premisses are both true, as they certainly were when he agreed to them, and, being befuddled by the appearance of validity of the fallacy, which it has when the possibility of ambiguity is disregarded, feels he has to agree to the conclusion, and thus has lost the game, having had to agree to an obvious falsehood. An answerer trained in Stoic logic, however, will not have been taken in. He knows that linguistically identical sentences can express different propositions. He will not follow the questioner in transferring the meaning of one of the premisses halfway through the argument. He will stick to the propositions he actually agreed to and will reveal that the argument presented is in fact invalid owing to disconnectedness of the premisses. Thus the valid but unsound argument comes in only as a result of the questioner's illicit procedure of transferring meaning within the course of argumentation. The argument that is in fact part of the game, in the sense that its premisses have in fact been agreed upon by both parties, has true premisses and a false conclusion and is invalid. 6 COMPARISON BETWEEN ARISTOTLE's AND THE STOICS' TREATMENT OF FALLACIES OF HOMONYMY Aristotle, too, discussed fallacies of equivocation or homonymy, and a comparison between his and the Stoic view is instructive. For Aristotle, truthbearers, at least those relevant to sophistic discourse, are linguistic items (Arist. Int. 16a9-II, I6b33-17a3). Thus, declarative sentences, and in particular affirmations and negations, are the entities that are either true or false. In the context of dialectics, these declarative sentences are the answers to dialectical questions. For example, if the question is 'Is animal the genus of human?', the possible answers are the affirmative statement Mimal is the genus of human' and the negative statement Mimal is not the genus of human'. 'Yes' and 'no' are abbreviations for the affirmative and negative answer respectively. 55 Aristotle also sometimes says that what is said 55 Cf. e.g. Whittaker 1996: 101. I Pr:GQZ 05218418rXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 259 in a dialectical question is 'true' or 'false' .56 We can assume that what is (in this sense) said in a question could be expressed by the corresponding affirmative statement. In his Sophistical RefUtations, in chapter 17, Aristotle has this to say about fallacies of homonymy: If nobody ever made two questions into one question, the fallacy based on homonymy and ambiguity would not have come about, but either a refutation or no refutation. For how does asking whether Callias and Themistocles are musical differ from <what one might ask> if both, though being different people, shared a single name? For if the name signified more than one thing, <the questioner> had asked more than one question. Now, if it is not right to ask to be given without qualification one answer to two questions, it is clear that it is not proper to answer without qualification any homonymous <questions>. (Arist. SE 175b39-176a5, my italics) Thus, according to Aristotle, if, as in the case of fallacies of homonymy, we have as a premiss or as conclusion a question sentence that contains an ambiguous term, the questioner has asked more than one question: two questions if the term has two significations, three questions if the term has three significations, etcY In Aristotle's De lnterpretatione, chapter 8, we find a parallel passage, in which the focus is on statements rather than on questions: But if one name is given to two things which do not make up one thing, there is not a single affirmation. Suppose, for example, that one gave the name cloak to horse and to human being; then 'a cloak is white' would not be a single affirmation. For to say this is no different from saying a horse and a human being is white, and this is no different from saying a horse is white and a human being is white. So if these last signifY more than one thing and are more than one <affirmation>, clearly the first also signifies either more than one thing or else nothing (for there is nothing like a horse-human-being). (Arist. Int. 18a18-26, my italics) As C. W. A. Whittaker has shown nicely, in the De lnterpretatione Aristotle discusses affirmations and negations insofar as they are relevant for dialectics.58 In the passage quoted, Aristotle discusses cases (which in the Sophistical Refutations he would classify as cases) of homonymy as they would occur in dialectics, i.e. in fallacies of homonymy. 59 This time, as throughout in De lnterpretatione, Aristotle focuses on statements rather than on questions, but his point is basically the same: in dialectics, in the 56 E.g. Arise. Top. r6oa25. 57 There can be absolutely no doubt that in this passage Aristotle has homonyms in mindhe mentions them three times the third time at the end of the section, at 176a15. 58 Whittaker 1996 passim. 59 See the passage from SE just quoted. I P1:GQZ 052184181Xco8.xml December 9, 2004 14:4 260 S. BOBZIEN case of declarative sentences that contain what he classifies as homonymies in the Sophistical RefUtations there will be more than one affirmation in the sentence. 60 (This, if the relevant sentence is in the affirmative, otherwise more than one negation.) Thus for Aristotle, in dialectics, (i) someone using a homonymous expression in a question sentence asks two questions, (ii) there are two things said with that question, 61 and (iii) someone using an expression that signifies two things in a declarative sentence makes two statements (two affirmations or two negations).62 Returning to our fallacy in Simplicius, in Aristotle's view, the declarative sentence 'the garment is {manly/for men}' would hence be more than one affirmation. The two affirmations can be separated in English as (i) 'the garment is for men' and (ii) 'the garment is manly'. The sentence would signifY more than one thing (perhaps manliness and for-men-ness; or a garment that is manly and a garment that is for men). 63 The same holds for questions: the question sentence 'is the garment {manly/for men}?' would be more than one question; they could be separated in English as 'is the garment for men?' and 'is the garment manly?'. Thus, for Aristotle, one declarative sentence is more than one affirmation, one question sentence more than one question. How can this be? Sentences as well as affirmations and questions are linguistic items, but evidently they must be of different kinds, as they are individuated differently. We could say that by uttering one question sentence the speaker asks two questions; and by uttering one declarative sentence the speaker makes two affirmations or affirms two things. (We can think of the sentences as grammatical items, the affirmations and negations as statements, the questions as questions asked.) So we can expect that whenever the questioner offers 60 Whittaker, following Ackrill, believes tbat tbe passage quoted does not cover homonyms. But in tbe light of (i) tbe close parallel to tbe passage quoted from SE (175b39-176a5), which explicitly deals with homonyms, and (ii) the fact tbat Int. deals with dialectics, I have no doubts that in Int. 8 Aristotle intended to cover what in SE he regards to be homonyms as tbey occur in dialectics. (I argue tbis point in more detail elsewhere.) For readers who are wedded to Ackrill's view, I mention tbat for my argument it is sufficient to rely on tbe passages from SE and Top. 61 Cf. also Top. 160a23-9, quoted below. 61 We can imagine a fallacy put in declarative sentences ratber tban questions for instance when someone tries to solve it by himself, at his leisure, without being subjected to questions. Aristotle mentions tbis possibility e.g. at Sd177a6-8. 63 Unlike Shields 1999: 8o-1, n. 8, I ~ake it tbat in Int. 8 Aristotle uses the verb 'to signifY' (18a24, 25) as follows: tbat which signifies are affirmations (aOTat allows only KaT6:<pacrts as antecedent), and that which is signified by tbe affirmations are the tbings referred to by the subject expression in tbe affirmation a horse and a human being, or perhaps a white horse and a white human being. The sentence 'a cloak is white' is then said to either both signifY horse and signifY human being or to signifY a horse-human-being, which is notbing; and in tbe first case the sentence contains two affirmations, in the second no affirmation. I Pr:GQZ 052184r8rXco8.xml December 9• 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation up for consent the premiss-questions of a fallacy of homonymy which have the same ambiguous expression in either premiss, each time he asks two questions; and if he stated the argument in non-question form, he would each time make two affirmations. Aristotle discusses ways of responding to fallacies of homonymy in his Sophistical Refutations, chapters 17 and 19. In chapter 19 he begins with some general remarks about such fallacies: (1) Now, of the refutations that depend upon homonymy and ambiguity some have one of the premiss-questions with more than one signified thing ... e.g .... in the <argument> that the one who knows does not understand <what he knows> one of the premiss-questions is ambiguous. (2) And that which is said/meant in two ways is in one case <true> and in the other isn't; and that which is said/meant in two ways signifies something that is and something that is not . . . (Arist. SE 177a9-15) I take it from (1) that for Aristotle a premiss-question is ambiguous if it is or contains an expression that signifies more than one thing. In (2), Aristotle seems to pick up on what he said at SE 175b39-q6ar8 (quoted above), i.e. that the questioner asks two questions in one, and that the ambiguous expression has two 'signified things' at the same time.64 If we apply Aristotle's point to the Simplicius fallacy, the piece of speech 'the garment is {manly/for men}' would be said in two ways, even though one way is rather non-sensical. It would be true in one case ('the garment is for men'), but not true in the other ('the garment is manly'). It would signify something that is (perhaps a garment that is for men) and something that is not (perhaps a garment that is manly).65 Here are then some passages from chapters I7 and 19 of the Sophistical RefUtations and from Topics 8. 7, in which Aristotle gives advice how to deal with fallacies of homonymy. They also further corroborate the point that 64 The first clause of (2) makes sense only if we assume that with the phrase 'is in one case <true> and in the other isn't' (aTE J.lEV ... aTE 5' ... ) Aristotle intends the two ways in which the thing is said, more precisely, these two ways as they are both signified when the premiss-question is u~tered. For only then is it reasonable to say that one is (true}, the other isn't. If Aristotle had meant to use aTE !lEV ••• aTE 5' ... temporally, to be translated as 'at one time ... at another rime .. .' or similarly, then we would have expected him to say that both are <true>: i.e. at one time, in one context, one of the two things said in the question sentence is (true}, at another time, in another context, the other is (true}; that is, that Aristotle would have alerted us to the fact that ambiguous expressions have different meanings in different contexts. Bur Aristotle does not say that. Thus OTE JlEV ... aTE 5' ... must here be used non-temporally to pick out the two things said by the two questions; only then does what Aristotle says make sense, fir the context, and is true. (Aristotle makes a similar point at Top. r6oa26, using e1Ti Ti J.lEV ... e1Ti Ti 5' ... ; cf. also Arist. SE 177a21-2; both passages are quoted below.} 65 Or alternatively, maybe, the garment's being for men and the garment's being manly? I Pr:GQZ 052184I8rXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN he believes that the questioner asks two questions at the same time, and that with the question sentence two things are said at the same time: ... since if someone does not distinguish the <different meanings in the> ambiguity, it is unclear whether he has been refuted or has not been refuted, and since, in the context of arguments, it is granted that he may draw distinctions, it is evident that if he grants the question without drawing distinctions and without qualification, this is a mistake. (Arist. SE 175b28-31) Now, if it is not right to ask to be given without qualification one answer to two questions, it is clear that it is not proper to answer without qualification any homonymous <questions>. (Arist. SE 176a3-5) Now, if one should not give a single answer to two questions, it is evident that in the case of homonyms one should not say 'yes' or 'no' either; for the one who says <that> has not given an answer, he just spoke. (Arist. SE I76a14-16) [continuing the quotation ftom chapter 19 above] ... (3) Whenever <that which is said in several ways> lies in the premiss-questions, it is not necessary to begin by denying that which is said/meant in two ways; for argument is not for the sake of this, but through this. (4) At the beginning one should reply concerning that which is said in two ways, whether it is a word or a phrase, in this way, that in one sense it is so, and in another not so, (5) for example that speaking of the silent is possible in one sense but not in another; and that in one sense one should do what must be done, but not in another; for what must be done is said/meant in several ways. (Arist. SE 177a18-24) If <the answerer> understands the question, but it is said in several ways, 66 then ... if what is said/ meant is in one case false and in the other true, he should indicate that it is said in several ways, and that in one it is false, in the other true. For if he makes the distinction only later, it is unclear whether he saw the ambiguity at the beginning. (Arist. Top. 16oa23-~ These quotes taken together give us some idea about Aristotle's view how one should respond to fallacies based on homonymy. At least one of the question sentences (premiss-questions and conclusions-question) contains an ambiguous expression, and is hence two questions. Answering those two questions with one word ('yes' /'no') or one statement (the affirmative/ negative corresponding to the question) without any qualification and without drawing any distinctions is a mistake (SE 175b28-3r), is not proper (SE 176a3-5), is no answer at all (SE I76ai4-r6), leaves it unclear whether the answerer noticed the ambiguity (Top. r6oa23-9), and leaves it indeterminate which of the two questions the answerer intends to answer. Aristotle reports that according to the rules of dialectics, in addition to saying 'yes' and 'no', 66 I.e. has several meanings or significations. I P1:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation the answerer is allowed to point out ambiguities or to ask for clarification (Top. ch. 8.7 and SE 175b3o). Hence the answerer should disambiguate, i.e. should (i) distinguish the two things said in the two questions, and (ii) state which one is true, and which one is false. It is implied, I presume, that (iii) the answerer accepts the true statement and does not accept the false one (cf. e.g. Top. 16oa24-8).67 Aristotle seems to advise the respondent to expose the ambiguity of a term or phrase immediately when the premiss containing it is 'asked' (see sentence (4) and Top. 16oa23-9).68 We can understand this as a preemptive move. The answerer explicitly disambiguates the expression, i.e. points out the two or more things signified by the question, including those that would be unusual readings of the sentence and false. 69 (Naturally, this presupposes a mental process of disambiguation.) Aristotle assumes that in the premiss question asked the ambiguous expression has both meanings, even if the respondent intends only one meaning, and even if one meaning makes the premiss false or absurd. For this reason, Aristotle wishes the ambiguity to be made explicit as soon as it occurs. As a result, when the questioner attempts to draw the conclusion, the answerer can fall back on the disambiguation he proffered earlier and refuse to accept the conclusion e.g. by accusing the questioner of a Fallacy of Homonymy or perhaps of a Fallacy of Many Questions.7° 67 Can the facts (i) that at SE 166a{-5 Aristotle uses aTe ~ev ... aTe 6' ... to explain double meaning, and (ii) rhat at SE 166a2o-1 he uses i\ ... i\ ... when saying that an expression signifies two things, be used to rebut my claim that for Aristotle in dialectical contexts question sentences and declarative sentences containing ambiguous expressions have two significations at the same time? I believe not. In note 64 I have shown that Aristotle uses aTE ~ev ... aTe 6' ... non-temporally for double meaning. At 166a{-5 he may do just rhe same. And as in English the two sentences '"bank" means both "verge of river" and "financial institution", and' "bank" means either "verge of rivee' or "financial institution" ' do not usually allow any inference as to wherher rhe speaker assumes rhat rhe word has borh meanings at the same time, so for Greek sentence wirh i\ ... i\ ... (Cf. also in the same passage on ambiguity the use of Ked •.. Kai ... at 166a8 and of Kai at 166ar4 in sentences stating double meaning.) Alternatively, one has to assume that what Aristotle says about homonymy in chapter 4 of SE does not tally with what he says in chapters 17 and 19. 68 If rhe answerer didn't spot rhe ambiguity immediately, all is not lost. He can still disambiguate at rhe end. Cf. 'However, if <that which is said in two ways> escapes one, one must correct it at the end adding somerhing to the question: "Is speaking of rhe silent possible?" "No, but it is possible to speak of rhis person who is being silent".' (Arist. SE 177a24-6) and 'But if he doesn't foresee rhe ambiguity, but concedes rhe question having in view rhe one signification of the words, then, if the questioner takes it with rhe other signification, he should say: "that was not what I had in view when I conceded it, but rather the other signification"' (Arist. Top. 16oa.29-32). 69 Cf. e.g. Arist. SE 166a12-14: 'speaking of the silent' has as one of its meanings that the one who is speaking is silent; and 166ar8-21: 'knowing letters' has as one of its meanings that rhe letters have knowledge. 7° In SE chapter 17 Aristotle classifies rhe fallacy of homonymy as a kind of rhe fallacy of double question; in chapter 19 he discusses fallacies of homonymy and amphiboly on their own. I PI:GQZ 052I84I8IXco8.xml CU1987B-Frede December 9, 2004 14:4 S. BOBZIEN If we compare Aristotle and the Stoics, we see that they differ both in their philosophico-linguistic analysis of fallacies of homonymy and consequently in the strategies they recommend how to tackle them. Aristotle assumes that in the fallacy the question sentences that contain the homonymous expression, when uttered, have two significations, say two things, and have two statements corresponding to them. Usually, but not necessarily, one will be true, the other false. The two significations appear to be independent of speaker intention: for Aristotle considers the case that one can try to solve a fallacy at one's leisure without anybody actually asking the questions (SE 177a6-8), and thus without any questioner having any intentions. The Stoics, on the other hand, assume that the premiss questions of the fallacy, when uttered, have only one signification: the one which rational speakers and listeners in ordinary circumstances would assume them to have, i.e. usually the meaning that makes them true. Concerning strategy, in line with his assumption of a double question, Aristotle recommends that the respondent expressly disambiguate the question sentence as soon as it is asked, and to state which question says something true, which not, and presumably which one he accepts. This presupposes a process of mental disambiguation on the side of the respondent. The Stoics, by contrast, do not require an explicit disambiguation, since they assume that at the time of utterance there is in fact nothing to disambiguate. Accordingly, no process of mental disambiguation is required either. The exception would be special situations such as those in which one is trying to list ambiguous sentences, or intends to 'play on' the ambiguity (but not to deceive). For the Stoics, fallacies do not provide such special situations. 7 THE QUESTION OF BEING SILENT (i)crvxasEtV) We now have a viable interpretation of what the Stoics of the Simplicius passage considered the nature of the fallacy to be, what philosophical and linguistic assumptions underlie their understanding of the fallacy, and how they recommended the answerer to escape being caught in it. What remains is to give an interpretation of what those Stoics mean when they say the answerer should fall silent or keep quiet (i)crvx6:setv). In her masterful book The Stoics on Ambiguity, Catherine Atherton has suggested the following interpretation: She translates: '(r') And that is why, in syllogisms due to homonymy, the dialecticians recommend keeping quiet I Pr:GQZ 052I8418rXco8.xml The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation [i)o-vx6:~Etv], (2') so long as the questioner transfers the word to another signification.'71 She comments: 'the transfer to another meaning must occur when the second premiss is posed, not at the conclusion, whereas we "keep quiet" (see the main text) until then, that is, so long as the questioner continues to change his meaning. This is not possible reading "IJ.ETay6:yn" at 24.14 (i.e., with an aorist subjunctive). I thus read "IJ.ET6:yn" with two of the MSS.'72 After having mentioned the Sorites, Atherton writes further: 'According to Simplicius, respondents are explicitly told to assent to the premisses The tunic is male attire and The brave is courageous. What he failed to note is that they will not make their assent public, and that they will make no contribution to the proceedings, either openly agreeing or openly objecting, until the fraudulent attempt to draw a conclusion. "Keeping quiet" covers, and must cover, silent assent even in the case of the Soritic arguments, since it would be absurd and wrong to withhold assent from the obvious truths leading up to the unclear premisses. As with Soritic arguments, a further assumption is at work: that questioning by the interlocutor will continue until an explicit response, positive or negative, is won.'73 This view leads her to the following assessment ofS.E. P.H. 2.253: 'Sextus' interpretation of "falling silent" as Skeptical EnoxiJ, P.H. n.253, is malicious and polemical.'74 There are some drawbacks to this interpretation: (i) The occurrence of conceding (o-vyxc.vpEiv) in either premiss has to be -:.1_ n. understood as silent assent (ovyKaT6:6wts)J5 This seems to me a very Uct.t unlikely meaning. The term 'to concede' is standardly used for the public action of admitting a premiss or sentence as true, and I believe this is what it means in our passage, too.76 (ii) The transfer of the ambiguous word to another meaning is taken to occur when the second premiss is posed. This, too, strikes me as unlikely. First, in this way what Simplicius says seems not to be very relevant to the rest of the passage. He could just as well have said: 'the dialecticians recommend keeping quiet until the conclusion has been drawn'. Moreover, in Atherton's view, the transference is completed after the second premiss has been asked; but, according to her, the silence is only to be broken after the conclusion has been asked. 7' Atherton 1993: 419-20. 7> Atherton 1993: 420, n. 14. 73 Atherton 1993: 422. 74 Atherton 1993: 422 n. 19. 75 Atherton 1993: 422. 76 See e.g. S.E. P.H. 2.232; M. 8.303; Alex. Apr 17.3• 17.23 (of conclusion); r8.26-7 in a dialectical syllogism, i.e. within dialectical discourse. I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 266 S. BOBZIEN (iii) The assumption is that the questioning by the interlocutor continues even when the respondent remains silent.77 There is no evidence that this is how the dialectical discourse went; it seems much more likely that as soon as the respondent refuses to respond 'yes' or 'no' and chooses to keep silent, the 'game' (as conducted on the object level) is over.78 (iv) Simplicius has to be interpreted as having left out some essential information (i.e. that keeping quiet covers the case of someone withholding public assent but giving silent assent). Every interpretation that has to state that the author of the passage left out something or got something wrong is weak in that respect, if there are alternative interpretations that do not require this, so that without that requirement the text makes sense and has an equally or more natural reading of the expressions used. (v) Similarly, an interpretation that does not have to disregard a passage as polemical or malicious is preferable to one that does, if there are no specific requirements to assume that polemics or malice are at work. The cases I have in mind are those where the only reasons for claiming that an author is distorting Stoic doctrine where he reports it (besides the fact that he is a polemical author) is that it vindicates a particular modern interpretation of a bit of Stoic theory, and where there are viable alternative interpretations available for that bit of theory that do not require such a claim of distortion. This is, in my view, the case for Sextus' use of 'to stop and hold back' ('i<naa6at Kai ETIEXElV) in the context of the Sorites at P.H. 2.253.79 * 77 Long and Sedley's translation of and comments on the Simplicius passage imply the same assumption {Long and Sedley 1987: 1, 228-9; II, 232). 7 8 Carneades' response to the Stoic strategy for Sorites arguments at Cic. Acad.Pr. 93 is a case in point that the questioning did not just continue. He suggests that when the Stoic falls silent at the question 'are n many' someone may come and ask 'and when I add one to the number at which you fell silent, is the result then many?' Hence the assumption is not that the questioning simply continues; rather, Carneades' fictitious questioner switches to a different type of question. The Stoic would of course simply be silent again, and therewith this type of questioning would have come to an end, too. In the case of Sorites series asked with conditionals or negated conjunctions (as in D.L. 7.82) there is another reason why in the Sorites the questioning would not have continued: even if only one of the complex premisses has not been assented to, no conclusion can be drawn. 79 I am in no way denying that Sextus is frequently polemical and malicious in his interpretation or explication of Stoic doctrine. At the same time he is often a very reliable source where he reports or presents Stoic theoryhe is one of our best sources for Stoic logic. Wilful misinterpretation is then one thing, wilful misreporting another. In P.H. 2.253, in the sceptical context in which the report of Chrysippus' view is embedded, Sextus uses 'to hold back' {hrexetv) twice; each time the context requires that by holding back is intended not answering 'yes' or 'no' to a dialectical question. Nothing is implied about internal suspension of belief, although I believe it likely that explicit and internal holding back were taken to go hand in hand. Thus the most natural reading of 'holding back' in I PI: GQZ 052184I8iXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation Atherton accepts these drawbacks in her interpretation,80 because she believes that her interpretation is required in order to overcome the following interpretational difficulties: (r) There is first her assumption 'That in the Sorites "keeping quiet" covers and must cover, silent assent since it would be absurd and wrong to withhold assent from the obvious truths leading up to the unclear premisses.' This difficulty can be solved however. As I have shown elsewhere, 81 in the Sorites 'keeping quiet' can (and should) be interpreted as openly and publicly ceasing to respond to the questioner's question, with the additional assumption that the answerer does not silently assent either, but is also inwardly quiet. This allows us to interpret Sextus at P.H. 2.253 as not being malicious, but using 'to stop and hold back' (Ycncx<r6at Kcxi ElTEXElV) for falling silent outwardly and simultaneously withholding assent inwardly. 82 (2) Second, there is Atherton's assumption that, if the Sorites required silent assent, this silent assent was taken to be the required response in all cases in which being silent (i)o-vxãEtv) was recommended. But for example in Gellius (Noct. Att. 16.2) we find cases of fallacious questions in which falling silent is recommended but internal assent as response is clearly neither required nor desired. (r) They say that in the art of dialectics there is the following rule: if there is an inquiry and discussion about some thing, and in that context you are asked to answer a question, then you should say nothing more than solely this which is asked, either affirming it or denying it. And those who do not follow this rule and answer either more or something different from what they were asked are regarded as being uneducated and as not observing the customary practice and principle of <dialectical> discourse. (2) In fact, what they say without doubt ought to happen in most debates .... (4) But there seem to be some cases in which you are caught <in a fallacy>, if you answer what you have been asked briefly and to the point .... [there follow examples of fallacies in which one would have to say more than yes' or 'no' if one wanted not to be caught in them] ... (12) But such an answer <in which more is said than was asked> is not given in accordance with the above-mentioned rule; for more than what has been asked is answered. (13) For this reason the following the clause that purports to report Chrysippus is that by it, too, is intended not answering 'yes' or 'no' to a dialectical question. For this clause is used to justify the sceptics' not answering dialectical questions. Internal suspension of belief is secondary for the entire passage P.H. 2.253. Thus there is no need for Sextus to misreport Chrysippus' view here. Note also that Plutarch, at Adv. Colotem II2fA, appears to use holding back (errexe1v} and falling silent (i)ovxal;elv} to describe the same strategy. 80 I don't wish to imply that Catherine Atherton considered all of (i}-(v} as drawbacks. 8' Bobzien 2002: sections 4-6. 8> It would also bring Sextus in line with Plutarch Adv. Colotem II24A. I PI:GQZ 052I84r8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 268 S. BOBZIEN addition is usually also made to that rule, that one need not answer fallacious questions.83 (Gell. Noct. Att. 16.2)84 The fact that silent assent would be the wrong reaction in the cases of the Gellius passage seems to me to confirm that it was never part of the strategy of falling silent. (3) Third, there is Atherton's assumption that in the Simplicius passage 'being silent' is used in the same semi-technical way as in the passages we have about the Sorites (and in my view in Gellius).85 This assumption is reasonable, but not certain, as Tjcrvxal;etv is a very common word that is used in Greek in ordinary discourse without any technical overtones. I will now present two interpretations of the Simplicius passage that do not share the drawbacks Atherton accepts in her interpretation, but at the same time also do not raise the problems she assumes other interpretations will automatically face. Both interpretations assume that the transfer of the word to a different meaning happens when the questioner draws the conclusion (see above section 5). In the first interpretation eoos is taken to mean 'until'. iJcrvxal;etv is understood as 'keeping quiet' in the sense that when the premisses are asked, the respondent openly accepts them, taking them to be true as the text indicates, and keeps quiet about the ambiguity of the term O:vopeTos in them, and the difficulties this could lead to. The emphasis on Tjcrvxal;etv can here be understood as meant to alert one to the contrast with Aristotle, who, as we have seen, asks the answerer to point out any ambiguities immediately when the premisses are asked.86 It could have been either the Stoics themselves, or Simplicius, who used the phrasing 'to be silent' to delimit the Stoic position from Aristotle's. 83 (r) Legem esse aiunt disciplinae dialecticae, si de quapiam re quaeratur disputeturque atque ibi quid rogere, ut respondeas, tum ne amplius quid dicas, quam id solum, quod es rogatus, aut aias aut neges; eamque legem qui non servent et aut plus aut aliter, quam sunt rogati respondeant, existumantur indoctique esse disputandique morem atque rationem non tenere. (2) Hoc quidem, quod dicunt, in plerisque disputationibus procul dubio fieri oportet ... (4) Sed enim esse quaedam videntur, in quibus, si breviter et ad id, quod rogatus fueris, respondeas, capiare ... (12) Sed huiuscemodi respondisio non fit ex ea lege, quam diximus; plus enim, quam quod rogatus est, responder. (13) §!. propterea id quoque ad cam legem addi solet non esse captiosis interrogationibus respondendum. 84 The respondent is meant to fall silent when confronted widr the Horn Fallacy: 'If you haven't lost somedring, you have it. But you haven't lost horns. Therefore you have horns.' I discuss the derails of this case in another paper. 85 The meaning of i)ovxat.;etv is not technical in the passages on dre Sorites, it just means what it usually means: being silent. The use as adrird -legitimate response in dialectical discourse could perhaps be regarded as technical. 86 This interpretation, I believe, squares with the reading of the text giving by Ebbesen 1981: I, 31-2; however, Ebbesen does not note drat dre reason why Simplicius' Stoics (or Simplicius), put the advice dre way they do may have been drat drey wished to distinguish dreir (dre Stoic) position from Aristode's. all i.kllcs: ( ~ \t,.II\.G\_~;c\\"'e..cA) I Pr:GQZ 052184J8rXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on follacies of equivocation A translation-cum-explication of the passage would then go like this: In the case of syllogisms based on a homonymy the logicians advise us to be silent <with respect to pointing out the possibility of fallaciousness> until the questioner transfers the <ambiguous> word to another meaning; e.g. if someone asked whether the garment is {manly/for men}, if it happens to be for men, we will concede this. <And we are silent about the fact that ' {manly/for men}' is ambiguous, and can also mean manly.> And if he asks whether that which is {manly/for men} is courageous, we will concede this, too, for it is true. <Again, we are silent about the fact that ' {manly/for men}' is ambiguous, and can also mean for men.> But when he infers that the garment is therefore courageous, <they advise us> <to cease to be silent about the ambiguity and> to separate the homonymy of the word ' {manly/for men}' and show that it is said/intended in one way in the case of the garment, in another in the case of the one who has manliness. In this interpretation Tjcrvxal;elv is regarded as being used in an entirely non-technical way. It does not mean what it means in the case of the Sorites (and in the above cited passages in Sextus, Plutarch and Gellius), i.e. not answering the questioner, and thus ending the game on the object level, in order to climb onto a meta-level to explain the fallacy. Rather it is intended to mean keeping quiet with respect to the homonymy, in contrast with Aristotle's advice to mention ambiguities as soon as they occur. f}crvxal;ew is a common enough Greek word for this to be possible;87 and there are many cases in which the Stoics use one and the same word sometimes in a technical or semi-technical way, sometimes in its ordinary, common usage.88 My second interpretation takes TjcrvxaseJv to mean literally 'be silent' and to refer to the respondent's not answering the questioner when he asks approval for the conclusion, and thus at that point stepping out of the game. 89 The contrast is not with Aristotle, but with playing the dialectical yes/no game, as it is exemplified in the Gellius passage quoted above. The strategy is the same that Gellius describes as one to be used in the case of fallacious questions. Thus TjcrvxaseJv is used in the same way it is used in the Gellius, Sextus and Plutarch passages mentioned.9° In order to make 87 The Stoics use l')avxãetv in a different way than for the Sorites strategy for instance also at SVF 2.500 (Simp!. Cat). 88 Examples are e.g. 1Tp&y>ta, i\6yos, 5uvaT6v, 5vvarr6at, CxVCxyK'I), avayKaios, apxiJ, Tei\os, allToTei\ijs, cpvrrts, i\eyetv, ><axerrem, >tCxXfl, 1rpãts, Tp61ros, 6:6pt<JTos, SeiKvu>tt. 89 & I said above, I do not think the dialectical game continued once the respondent fell silent instead of answering 'yes' or 'no' to a question. 9o If l')rruxãetv was to be understood in this way, it is clear that the being silent was meant to happen at the point of the conclusion. For in the Stoic view the premisses asked are not fallacious, but true; cf. section 4* I PI:GQZ 05218418IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN sense of the passage, one has to read IJET6:yn instead of [JETcxy6:yn, and ews needs to be translated as 'while' ,91 In this case, a translation-cum-explication of the passage would rather be as follows: In the case of syllogisms based on a homonymy the logicians advise us to be silent <i.e. not answer the questioner any more> while the questioner transfers the word onto another meaning; e.g. if someone asks whether the garment is {manly/for men}, if it happens to be manly, we will concede this <and thus not be silent>. And if he asks whether that which is {manly/for men} is courageous, we will concede this, too, for it is true <and again will thus not be silent>. But if he infers that the garment is therefore courageous, <they advise us> <to be silent, i.e. not answer anymore, and instead expressly> to separate the homonymy of the word ' {manly/for men}' and show that it is said/intended in one way in the case of the garment, in another in the case of the one who has manliness. Can we decide between these two interpretations? I believe not. The first may be seen as having the disadvantage of requiring i)crvx6:~e1v to be used in a different way than in the Sorites. But then it is entirely plausible that the Stoics used it in that way in our particular context.92 Moreover, it provides a good contrast to Aristotle. So, someone who favours this interpretation may be more inclined to think that Simplicius presents the view of some later Stoics, Stoics who are acquainted with Aristotle's logic (like those mentioned in Simplicius' Categories who discussed Aristotle's seabattle example).93 The second interpretation will make us more inclined to consider this passage as in line with early Stoic or Chrysippean logic, as it works in parallel with what we know about the Stoic treatment of the Sorites. It has the advantage of uniformity of use of i)crvx6:~elv; and it would confirm that the Stoics followed one method in dealing with fallacies which have in common that answering 'yes' or 'no' would get the respondent into trouble. What are the difficulties the respondent would get into in the case of the fallacy of homonymy? Well, having simply agreed to the premisses when they were propounded, if the answerer responded with 'yes' when the conclusion is asked, he would concede something clearly false and thus would have lost the game. On the other hand, if the respondent were to reply 'no' when the conclusion is asked, the questioner would probably 9l Alternatively; for this interpretation, one might want to emend ecus to ws, to be rendered as 'when' or 'as soon as'. Hiilser's translation ofEcus as 'in dem Moment ... in dem' (Hiilser 1987-8: IV, frg. 1257) fits this emendation tows. 9> Or, of course, it may have been Simplicius who used that particular word for describing the Stoic method. 93 Simp!. Cat. 406.34-407.5* I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 27I point out to him that the argument is valid (see section 2 above) and that, having conceded the premisses, the answerer is hence forced to concede the conclusion.94 At this point the respondent would need to be able to say: 'yes, the conclusion follows, if you assume that the meaning of" {manly/for men}" was the same in both premisses, but in fact this is not what we agreed upon earlier'. By responding neither 'yes' nor 'no', but being silent, and then separating the homonymy expressly, the respondent does not agree to an obvious falsehood and provides reasons that will prevent the questioner from scoring points by adducing theapparentvalidity of the argument at this point. As I cannot give decisive reasons for choosing one interpretation over the other, I leave you with both, for you to select one at your convenience. 8 THE SCOPE OF THE STOIC METHOD FOR FALLACIES OF HOMONYMY Aristotle gives two-fold advice to the respondents as to how to proceed in cases of fallacies of homonymy. If they are aware of an ambiguity in a premiss, they are meant to lay it bare as soon as the premiss has been asked. However, in case the ambiguity escapes them and only occurs to them when the conclusion is drawn, they are meant to uncover the ambiguity then. The Stoic advice is not two-fold; it does not need to be. Their method works with all fallacies of homonymy in single words, as can be shown. First we can state a general requirement for fallacies of homonymy in single words: for such a fallacy to work, it is necessary that in each premiss there is only one reading of the relevant ambiguous word that makes the premiss true, and in at least one premiss the meaning must be different than in the other or others. This can be shown by elimination of all the other possible cases. If in one of the two sentences proposed as expressing a premiss both meanings of the word led to true propositions,95 then no fallacy would ensue. Take an argument with the Greek ambiguous word Kvc.vv, 1.e. ' { dog/seadog}' in my nomenclature: If something is a { dog/seadog}, it is an animal. This is a { dog/seadog} (pointing at the German shepherd Fido). Therefore this is an animal (again pointing at the German shepherd Fido). 94 This could again be done in the form of questions. 95 If we imagine fallacies with more chan two premisses, we have to say 'in all but one premiss'. I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 S. BOBZIEN Here the first sentence expresses a true premiss with either reading of {dog/ seadog}. 96 The respondent hence cannot go wrong by agreeing, even though it is not quite clear what he would be agreeing to, if he says just 'yes' .97 More importantly, he would go wrong if he said 'no'. The conclusion of the 'argument' is true, harmless, unobjectionable; hence we should not assume the respondent to want to deny it. Can we imagine the respondent (following the Stoic method) to balk at the drawing of the conclusion and to say 'no, the conclusion does not followthe premisses are unconnected'? If we generalise the Stoic approach slightly, then the answer is 'no'. (Of course there is no evidence that the Stoics considered arguments like the one under discussion.) All we have to do is to take as context of { dog/seadog} not just each premiss individually, but the two premisses together. Thus by agreeing to the first question, the interlocutor knows he has not made a mistake, whichever way he might take it. At the point when the second premiss is introduced, the context would almost automatically be regarded to be the two premisses taken together, and at that point a mental process of disambiguating in favour of 'dog' takes place, as this is the only reading that is promising for a proper (valid and sound) argument.98 Thus the assumption here is no longer only that obvious truth serves as guidance, but also that obvious connectedness of the premisses serves eqmilly as a guide. (We can again imagine some sort of theory of implicature at work here; e.g. something like: 'if you are asked questions, base your answer on the assumption that the argument is valid'.) If this is so, the answerer cannot reasonably deny the conclusion. What if the two possible readings are true in both sentences that purport to express a premiss?99 . If {dogs/ seadogs} are animals, then {dogs/ seadogs} are living beings. But { dogs/seadogs} are animals. Therefore {dogs/ seadogs} are living beings. Here we have no context that allows disambiguation, but again the sentence that expresses what is concluded is harmless, and there is no reason for the interlocutor to hold back consent at any time. 100 96 KVc.>V has actually a third and a fourth meaning in Greek, the dogstar (if that is a separate meaning), and the fetlock-joint of a horse, both of which I will ignore here for reasons of simplification of the examples. 97 How many questions would the Stoics think the questioner asks? To how many questions would they think the answerer responds? Would this depend on the intention of speaker or listener? Would they say this is so in the case of utterances, tokens of (what looks like) a question? What if intention of speaker and listener differ? A host of problems opens up here, not surprisingly. 98 A further question suggests itself here: can one temporarily leave open which meaning is intended? 99 Or all, if we consider fallacies with more than two premisses. 100 All the questions of note 78 recur here and remain unanswered. I PI:GQZ 052184I8IXco8.xml December 9, 2004 The Stoics on fallacies of equivocation 273 What, finally, if there are no readings which make all premisses true? If something is a { dog/seadog}, then it is a plant. This is a { dog/seadog} (pointing at Fido or at some seadog). Therefore, this is a plant (again pointing at Fido or at some seadog). In this case the answerer is not going to agree to the sentence purported to express the first premiss (no matter what reading). Hence the complex of sentences purported to express an 'argument', whether fallacious or not, does not get off the ground to start with. Thus the above-mentioned requirement holds: a fallacy of homonymy proper presupposes that in either premiss sentence there is exactly one reading of the ambiguous word that makes the sentence express a true proposition; and that these are two different readings. 101 And as this kind of fallacy is covered by the Stoic method or advice, it follows, that the Stoic method or advice that Simplicius reports works in all cases. 102 101 The same holds mutatis mutandis for multiple premiss 'arguments'. 102 I wish to thank Myles Burnyeat and Catherine Atherton for most helpful comments on a draft of the paper and the editors for their patience and generosity.

HAL Id: hal-00206261 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00206261 Submitted on 20 Apr 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. "Core Knowledge of geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group" Stanislas Dehaene, Veronique Izard, Pierre Pica, Elizabeth Spelke To cite this version: Stanislas Dehaene, Veronique Izard, Pierre Pica, Elizabeth Spelke. "Core Knowledge of geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group". Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2006, 311 (5759), pp.381-4. ￿10.1126/science.1102085￿. ￿hal-00206261￿ fectious virus in siRNA-transfected cells (Fig. 4, D and E). Thus, F11L-mediated inhibition of RhoA signaling is required for both vaccinia morphogenesis and infection-induced cell motility. Our observations may also explain, at least in part, why MVA, which lacks functional F11L, is unable to replicate in most cell types in culture (7–9). They also offer molecular insights into the mechanism by which vaccinia induces cell migration (5, 6). One can envisage that migration of an infected cell will increase the efficiency of virus spread because extracellular virus particles associated with the plasma membrane, which are responsible for direct cell to cell spread, will come into contact with more neighboring noninfected cells than they would if the infected cell were static. References and Notes 1. A. J. Ridley et al., Science 302, 1704 (2003). 2. P. Martin, S. M. Parkhurst, Development 131, 3021 (2004). 3. P. Friedl, K. Wolf, Nat. Rev. Cancer 3, 362 (2003). 4. N. O. Carragher, M. C. Frame, Trends Cell Biol. 14, 241 (2004). 5. C. M. Sanderson, G. L. Smith, J. Virol. 72, 9924 (1998). 6. C. M. Sanderson, M. Way, G. L. Smith, J. Virol. 72, 1235 (1998). 7. M. W. Carroll, B. Moss, Virology 238, 198 (1997). 8. I. Drexler, K. Heller, B. Wahren, V. Erfle, G. Sutter, J. Gen. Virol. 79, 347 (1998). 9. L. S. Wyatt et al., Virology 251, 334 (1998). 10. See supporting data on Science Online. 11. R. Dvorsky, L. Blumenstein, I. R. Vetter, M. R. Ahmadian, J. Biol. Chem. 279, 7098 (2004). 12. E. Sahai, A. S. Alberts, R. Treisman, EMBO J. 17, 1350 (1998). 13. R. A. Worthylake, S. Lemoine, J. M. Watson, K. Burridge, J. Cell Biol. 154, 147 (2001). 14. R. A. Worthylake, K. Burridge, J. Biol. Chem. 278, 13578 (2003). 15. A. Smith, M. Bracke, B. Leitinger, J. C. Porter, N. Hogg, J. Cell Sci. 116, 3123 (2003). 16. K. Riento, A. J. Ridley, Nat. Rev. Mol. Cell Biol. 4, 446 (2003). 17. S. E. Kato, F. A. Greco, C. R. Damaso, R. C. Condit, N. Moussatche, J. Virol. Methods 115, 31 (2004). 18. M. C. Sancho, S. Schleich, G. Griffiths, J. Krijnse-Locker, J. Virol. 76, 8318 (2002). 19. J. C. Gallego-Gomez et al., J. Virol. 77, 10606 (2003). 20. We thank J. Krijnse-Locker (European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany) and A. Alberts (Van Andel Research Institute, Grand Rapids, MI) for providing antibodies. We also thank B. Moss (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Bethesda, MD) for providing MVA recombinants, E. Sahai (Cancer Research UK, London) for the RhoV14E40L clone, and P. Traktman (Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, WI) for discussions about siRNA in infected cells. We thank the Way lab, E. Sahai, N. Hogg, and R. Treisman (Cancer Research UK, London) for helpful comments on the manuscript. F.V. was supported by a European Community Marie Curie Fellowship (Number HPMF-CT-2000-01021). Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5759/377/DC1 Materials and Methods Figs. S1 to S6 Movies S1 to S4 References 9 November 2005; accepted 20 December 2005 10.1126/science.1122411 Core Knowledge of Geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group Stanislas Dehaene,1,2* Véronique Izard,1 Pierre Pica,3 Elizabeth Spelke4 Does geometry constitute a core set of intuitions present in all humans, regardless of their language or schooling? We used two nonverbal tests to probe the conceptual primitives of geometry in the Mundurukú, an isolated Amazonian indigene group. Mundurukú children and adults spontaneously made use of basic geometric concepts such as points, lines, parallelism, or right angles to detect intruders in simple pictures, and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to locate hidden objects. Our results provide evidence for geometrical intuitions in the absence of schooling, experience with graphic symbols or maps, or a rich language of geometrical terms. Through natural selection, our mind has adapted to the conditions of the external world, EÎ it has adopted the geometry most advantageous to our species; or, in other words, the most convenient. –Henri Poincar2, La Science et l_Hypothèse E uclidean geometry is one of the deepest and oldest products of human reason, but its foundations remain elusive. Many of its propositions-that two points determine a line, or that three orthogonal axes localize a point-are judged to be self-evident (1, 2) and yet have been questioned on the basis of logical argument, physical theory, or experiment E(3–5); for a historical review, see (6)^. Here we ask whether the conceptual principles of geometry are inherent in the human mind, by studying the spontaneous geometrical knowledge of the MundurukU, an Amazonian indigene group (7). The present data were collected by one of us (P.P.) during a field trip in 2004–2005 to remote sites along the Cururu river. Most of the children and adults who took part in our experiments inhabit scattered, isolated villages and have little or no schooling, rulers, compasses, or maps. Furthermore, the MundurukU language has few words dedicated to arithmetical, geometrical, or spatial concepts, although a variety of metaphors are spontaneously used (see Supporting Online Material for a list). Our first test Einspired from (8)^ was designed to probe the MundurukU_s intuitive comprehension of the basic concepts of geometry, including points, lines, parallelism, figures, congruence, and symmetry (9). For each such concept, we designed an array of six images, five of which instantiated the desired concept while the remaining one violated it (Fig. 1). The participants were asked, in their language, to point to the Bweird[ or Bugly[ one. Care was taken to minimize cues other than the desired conceptual relation that could be used to identify the target. For instance, if the desired concept was Btrapezoid,[ the target was a nontrapezoidal quadrilateral whose size and orientation fell within the range of variation of the other five trapezoids. There are many ways in which the participants could have selected an odd picture out of the six, including size, orientation, or personal preference. If the MundurukU share with us the conceptual primitives of geometry, however, they should infer the intended geometrical concept behind each array and therefore select the discrepant image. All participants, even those aged 6, performed well above the chance level of 16.6% (average 66.8% correct, minimum 44.2% correct, P G 0.001). Performance was higher than chance in all but 6 of the 45 slides (P¡ 0.001) and was indistinguishable for MundurukU adults and children. There was no significant influence of the bilingualism or schooling exhibited by some of the participants (9). As shown in Fig. 1, the MundurukU succeeded remarkably well with the core concepts of topology (e.g., connectedness), Euclidan geometry (e.g., line, point, parallelism, and right angle), and basic geometrical figures (e.g., square, triangle, and circle). They experienced more difficulty, but still achieved higher-thanchance performance, in detecting symmetries and metric properties (e.g., equidistance of points). They performed poorly only in two domains: a series of slides assessing geometrical transformations, for instance, by depicting two triangles in a mirror-symmetry relation; and another two slides in which the intruder shape was a randomly oriented mirror image of the other shapes. Interestingly, both types of slides require a mental transformation of one shape into another, followed by a second-order judgment about the nature of this transformation. It is possible that geometrical transformations are inherently more difficult mathematical 1INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique, 91401 Orsay Cedex, France. 2Collège de France, 11, place Marcelin Berthelot, 75231 Paris Cedex 05, France. 3Unité Mixte de Recherche 7023 ''Formal Structure of Language,'' CNRS and Paris VIII University, Paris, France. 4Psychology Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: [email protected] REPORTS www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 311 20 JANUARY 2006 381 concepts. Alternatively, such transformations may be more difficult to detect in static images. To assess the generality of the patterns of difficulty of our images, we also tested American children and adults. An analysis of variance with factors of age (children or adults) and culture (MundurukU or American) revealed effects of age (P G 10j6), culture (P G 10j5), and their interaction (P 0 0.0002). As shown in Fig. 3A, the performance of MundurukU children and adults was identical to that of American children, whereas the performance of American adults was significantly higher. Indeed, we observed a well-defined profile of difficulty common to both cultures. Across the 45 slides, the mean performance of the MundurukU children correlated closely with that of the American children (r2 0 61.8%, P G 10j9). In this regression, the intercept and the slope were nonsignificantly different from 0 and 1, respectively, confirming that performance was highly similar in both cultures (Fig. 3B). Furthermore, despite their vastly different cultures and levels of schooling, MundurukU and American adults also showed a shared profile of difficulty (r2 0 49.4%, P G 10j7), although American adults performed at a higher overall level (Fig. 3C). This reproducible ordering of error rates does not support Piaget_s hypothesis of a developmental and cultural progression from topology to projective and Euclidian geometry (10), but rather suggests that geometrical intuition cuts across all of Fig. 1. Performance of Mundurukú participants in a multiple-choice test of the core concepts of geometry, rearranged in hierarchical order. In each slide, five images instantiate a specific concept indicated below, whereas the sixth (surrounded in red) violates it. The percentage of participants choosing the correct intruder is shown on top of each slide. Chance level is 16.6% correct; 28% correct corresponds to P G 0.05, and 35% correct to P G 0.001. Mean response times (in seconds) are also indicated. For each category of concept, the averaged percentage of correct answers is shown along with a color symbol used to refer to individual test items in Fig. 3. REPORTS 20 JANUARY 2006 VOL 311 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org382 these domains. In summary, uneducated adults from an isolated culture, as well as young children from the same culture or from a Western culture, exhibit a shared competence for basic geometrical concepts. Although the multiple-choice test was designed so that the target picture could only be identified once the relevant geometrical property had been grasped, it could be argued that the test requires solely a visual judgment of dissimilarity among closely similar images. We argue, however, that judgments of visual similarity do not merely result from superficial sensory computations, but reflect deep properties of cognitive architecture (11). Geometrical intuitions, in the final analysis, may rest on a spontaneous imposition of stable conceptual relations onto variable and imperfect sensory data, a process well captured by the multiplechoice test. Nevertheless, we sought to replicate and extend our findings in a second task that would demonstrate more directly the use of abstract geometrical knowledge and its transfer across widely different contexts. Etymologically, Bgeo-metry[ is the science of measuring the Earth. Geometrical concepts first were used to measure and chart the length, area, and shape of land surfaces. To investigate whether the MundurukU spontaneously understand and use geometry in this sense, we designed an abstract map test. Three boxes or cans were arranged in a right-angled or isosceles triangle, and an object was hidden in one of them (9) (Fig. 2). With his or her back to this array, each participant was presented with a sheet of paper in which square and circular symbols represented the three containers, and a star on one of the forms marked the location of the hidden object. This Bmap[ preserved the two-dimensional geometrical relationships between the objects, as viewed from above, except for scale. The orientation of the map relative to the array varied across trials, so that only the geometrical relationships among the forms specified the hidden object_s location. By recording where each participant first searched for the object, we evaluated whether participants could relate the geometrical information on the map to the geometrical relations in the environment, over changes in orientation, an È10-fold change in size, and a change from two dimensions to three. The map test is likely to be entirely novel to the MundurukU. Although they live in widely dispersed villages between which they navigate by boat or foot, and although they also manipulate tools, build baskets, craft necklaces and bracelets, sculpt symbolic miniatures, and are renowned for their elaborate traditional faceand body-painting schemes, the MundurukU do not typically possess maps or spontaneously draw pictures of their houses, villages, or environment. Across several trips to the MundurukU territory, we occasionally observed spontaneous activities such as the drawing of circles on the ground to represent villages. These drawings were coarse, however, and failed to preserve metric information about the angles and distances between the referents. Our map test, by contrast, could not be accomplished without attending tometric information. Overall, the participants_ success rate averaged 71%,whichwaswell above the chance level of 33.3% (across subjects, P G 0.0001). Performance did not differ between children (73.3% correct) and adults (70.4% correct; both P G 0.0001 relative to chance). There was also no effect of map orientation (Fig. 2B): Performance with allocentric, egocentric, and rotated maps did not differ (F G 1) and was always significantly above chance, suggesting that participants either extracted the geometrical relationships directly or performed a mental rotation so as to align the map with the environment. An interesting insight into the cues used by the participants came from an analysis of the evolution of their performance. During training, and in the first half of testing, one of the hiding locations was a red box quite distinct from the other hiding locations (white cans) and depicted as a red square on the map. Although performance did not differ overall as a function of presence or absence of this landmark (F G 1), there was a significant landmark by object location interaction (P G 0.0001), as well as a triple interaction with age (P 0 0.003), indicating that the effect of the landmark on search patterns was more pronounced in adults. During the first two experimental blocks in which the red box was present, participants performed well when the object was placed at this landmark location (87.1% correct) but less well when the object was placed in one of the other two unmarked locations (54.3% correct). An analysis of errors indicated that, in the latter case, they avoided the landmark location (only 9.1% of responses) but tended frequently to select the wrong nonmarked location (36.6% of responses). Still, participants chose the incorrect, unmarked location less frequently than the correct one (P G 0.003 on a t test comparing the two nonmarked locations), thus providing evidence for sensitivity to purely geometrical information. Fig. 2. Performance of Mundurukú participants in the map test. (A) Schematic representation of the spatial layout of the experiment. On each trial, the participant was shown a ''map'' representing the location of three boxes, one of which contained a cue symbolizing a hidden object. Then he or she turned around and searched for the hidden object (distance d , 1.5 m). (B) Performance in the three map orientations. The map and the environment could be aligned as seen from the top (allocentric condition), aligned relative to the participant before and after turning (egocentric condition), or nonaligned (90rotation condition). (C) Performance at each location in the four successive blocks of the experiment. The symbols in (B) and the colors in (C) are used to refer to individual test items in Fig. 3. REPORTS www.sciencemag.org SCIENCE VOL 311 20 JANUARY 2006 383 Geometrically driven behavior becamemuch more evident in the trials in which the landmark was absent, such that only the geometrical relationships between the circles and cans specified the position of the hidden object. In this situation, performance was high on average (72.0% correct) and far exceeded chance level at all locations and with both triangular configurations (all P values G 0.0003). In the final block with an isosceles configuration, performance was good even at the two symmetrical locations of the isosceles triangle (67.7% correct). The MundurukU therefore were able to use sense relationships, as well as distance or angle, to relate the map to the environment. For direct comparison, we also tested educated American children and adults in this map task (Fig. 3D). All of the above effects were replicated. An analysis of variance revealed effects of age (P 0 0.043), culture (P G 10j4), and their interaction (P 0 0.013). As in the multiple-choice test, the MundurukU children and adults performed at a level indistinguishable from that of American children, whereas the American adults performed significantly better. Nevertheless, even the latter group made some errors, and we observed high correlations between the performance profiles of American and MundurukU participants across the test items, both within children and within adults (Fig. 3, E and F). Those results again point to a shared pattern of core geometrical knowledge despite increases in absolute performance levels in the educated American adults. Studies of the universality of human geometrical knowledge have a long history. As chronicled by Plato in the Meno (È380 B.C.), Socrates probed the geometrical intuitions of an uneducated slave in a Greek household, leading him, through a series of questions, to discover relations between the areas of squares drawn in the sand. He concluded of the slave that Bhis soul must have always possessed this knowledge[ (12). Nevertheless, the slave shared a language with educated Greeks, likely was familiar with pictures and other products of Greek culture, and revealed his intuitions by engaging in a conversation about lines, areas, and number. Our experiments, in contrast, provide evidence that geometrical knowledge arises in humans independently of instruction, experience with maps or measurement devices, or mastery of a sophisticated geometrical language. This conclusion is consistent with paleoanthropological evidence (13) and with previous demonstrations of a right-hemisphere competence for nonverbal tests of geometry in split-brain patients (8). Further research is needed to establish to what extent this core knowledge is shared with other animal species (14, 15) and whether it is available even in infancy or is acquired progressively during the first years of life (4, 10, 16–18). There is little doubt that geometrical knowledge can be substantially enriched by cultural inventions such as maps (19), mathematical tools (3, 4, 6), or the geometrical terms of language (18, 20–25). Beneath this fringe of cultural variability, however, the spontaneous understanding of geometrical concepts and maps by this remote human community provides evidence that core geometrical knowledge, like basic arithmetic (7, 26), is a universal constituent of the human mind (11). References and Notes 1. Euclid, Elements (Green Lion, Santa Fe, NM, 2002). 2. I. Kant, A Critique of Pure Reason (Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1781, 1920). 3. B. Riemann, Nature 8, 183 (1873). 4. H. Poincaré, La Science et l'Hypothèse (Flammarion, Paris, 1902). 5. A. Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (Henry Holt, New York, 1920). 6. L. Boi, Le problème mathématique de l'espace. Une quête de l'intelligible (Springer, Berlin, 1995). 7. P. Pica, C. Lemer, V. Izard, S. Dehaene, Science 306, 499 (2004). 8. L. Franco, R. W. Sperry, Neuropsychologia 15, 107 (1977). 9. Materials and methods are available as supporting material on Science Online. 10. J. Piaget, Child's Conception of Geometry (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1948, 1960). 11. R. N. Shepard, Behav. Brain Sci. 24, 581 (2001). 12. Plato, Meno (È380 B.C.), available online at classics.mit.edu. 13. O. Keller, Aux origines de la géométrie. Le paléolithique, le monde des chasseurs-cueilleurs (Vuibert, Paris, 2004). 14. C. R. Gallistel, The Organization of Learning (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1990). 15. K. Cheng, N. S. Newcombe, Psychon. Bull. Rev. 12, 1 (2005). 16. N. S. Newcombe, J. Huttenlocher, Making Space (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000). 17. A. Berthoz, The Brain's Sense of Movement (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000). 18. J. S. DeLoache, Science 238, 1556 (1987). 19. D. P. Marzolf, J. S. DeLoache, Child Dev. 65, 1 (1994). 20. S. J. Hespos, E. S. Spelke, Nature 430, 453 (2004). 21. L. Hermer, E. Spelke, Cognition 61, 195 (1996). 22. A. Majid, M. Bowerman, S. Kita, D. B. Haun, S. C. Levinson, Trends Cogn. Sci. 8, 108 (2004). 23. S. C. Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003). 24. S. C. Levinson, S. Meira, Language 79, 485 (2003). 25. P. Li, L. Gleitman, Cognition 83, 265 (2002). 26. S. Dehaene, The Number Sense (Oxford Univ. Press, New York, 1997). 27. Authors are listed in alphabetical order. This work would not have been possible without the help of A. Arnor, V. Poxõ, A. Ramos, C. Tawé, F. Tawé, and A. Tawé, and of the Department of Studies and Research of Funai. It is based on data collected by P.P. within a larger project on the nature of quantification and functional categories developed jointly by the linguistic section of the Department of Anthropology of the National Museum of Rio and the Unité Mixte de Recherche 7023 of the CNRS, with the agreement of Funai and the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientıfico e Technológico (CNPq). We thank M. Crofts for helpful comments, P. Mesureur for video transfer, and A. Grace, L. Hegg, and K. La Mont for help with data collection in Boston. Supported by INSERM, the Département de Sciences Humaines et Sociales of CNRS (P.P.), NIH (E.S.), and a McDonnell Foundation Centennial Fellowship (S.D.). Supporting Online Material www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/311/5759/381/DC1 Materials and Methods SOM Text References 24 October 2005; accepted 29 November 2005 10.1126/science.1121739 Fig. 3. Comparison of the geometrical performance of Mundurukú and American participants. (A to C) Multiple-choice test; (D to F) map test. (A) and (D) show the percent success averaged across participants and test items, as a function of age and culture (horizontal line 0 chance level; vertical bar 0 standard error). (B), (C), (E), and (F) show the correlation of performance level across test items, separately for children and adults. Each symbol represents average performance in response to a given test item. In (B) and (C), the symbol shapes and colors refer to the categories of slides defined in Fig. 1. In (E) and (F), symbol shapes refer to map orientation and color to map layout, as defined in Fig. 2. In both cases, r2 and P values indicate the significance of the observed linear correlation in performance across the two cultures. REPORTS 20 JANUARY 2006 VOL 311 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org

Contingent A Priori Knowledge John Turri University of Waterloo Abstract: I argue that you can have a priori knowledge of propositions that neither are nor appear necessarily true. You can know a priori contingent propositions that you recognize as such. This overturns a standard view in contemporary epistemology and the traditional view of the a priori, which restrict a priori knowledge to necessary truths, or at least to truths that appear necessary. 1. An Intriguing Possibility The possibility of contingent a priori knowledge intrigues philosophers partly because it promises to help solve difficult philosophical problems and partly because it is intrinsically fascinating. One notorious epistemological problem concerns whether we could know that sense perception is reliable.1 Even if sense perception is reliable, it is not necessarily reliable. It could have been unreliable. So we have to gather information to know whether sense perception is actually reliable. Gathering such information requires us to use sense perception. But using it presupposes its reliability. Many think this creates a serious problem.2 Can we really come to know that sense perception is reliable by proceeding in a way that 1 Alston 1993 treats the topic extensively. 2 E.g. Fumerton 1995, Vogel 2000 and Cohen 2002. 2 presupposes its reliability? Arguably this renders our inquiry hopelessly circular.3 But then it becomes difficult to see how we ever could come to know that sense perception is reliable, and a deep and troubling form of skepticism looms. The possibility of contingent a priori knowledge exposes a weakness in this reasoning. Sense perception could have been unreliable, but this doesn't entail that we must use sense perception to learn that it is reliable. We might know this contingent truth a priori. If I am right, skeptics cannot foreclose this possibility by claiming that a priori knowledge is restricted to necessary truths. Aside from promising to help solve stubborn philosophical problems, the possibility of contingent a priori knowledge is interesting and important in its own right. It would reveal something deep and important about the relationship between mind and world if we could, just by thinking hard and without relying on any sensory information about what is happening around us or within our own minds, come to know that some contingent claim is actually true. (Notice that this differs from innate knowledge of contingent truths, should there be any. Innate knowledge does not require even thinking hard-the mind simply comes furnished with it.) I find such a possibility fascinating, as have many of philosophy's greatest minds. And while some may not share my fascination, hopefully we all recognize this topic's enduring importance in modern philosophy Once we establish that such knowledge is possible, we will sure- 3 Bergmann 2004 argues that that this type of circularity is not necessarily bad. 3 ly then want to trace its boundaries as best we can. This latter project does not occupy me here. My goal is to establish that it is possible in the first place. 2. Kripke's Argument Some philosophers express surprise that the standard view is still standard. They suppose that several decades ago Saul Kripke proved that contingent a priori knowledge is possible. Whereas Kant showed that a priori knowledge extends beyond analytic truths to encompass some synthetic truths, Kripke showed that it extends beyond necessary truths to encompass some contingent truths. Kripke suggested that you could know a priori that a particular stick s is one meter long at a certain time t, despite the fact that it is obviously only contingently true that s is one meter long at t.4 You could know this a priori if you were, at that very time, using s to fix the reference of the term 'meter'. This example fails because it trades on a subtle confusion.5 We 4 Kripke 1980: 56. 5 The following criticism may resemble Casullo's 1977: 155 ff, but it is actually importantly different. Casullo's criticism (p. 155 ff.) involves distinguishing 'S is one meter long at t0' from 'The length of S at t0 is one meter', and implementing Keith Donellan's 1966 distinction between attributive and referential use of definite descriptions. My criticism does not presuppose Donellan's distinction, and thus is not held hostage to developments in the philosophy of language. (Note: neither does my criticism presuppose that Donellan's distinction is inapt.) Donellan 1977 offers his own criticism of Kripke's examples. Also compare BonJour 1998: 12–13, whose criticism of Kripke 4 must distinguish two relevant truths. First, it is true that a stick used to fix the reference of a unit of measurement will measure exactly one such unit at the instant the reference is fixed.6 Doubtless you can know this a priori; but the truth in question is also necessary. Second, it is true that s is one meter long at t. Doubtless this truth is contingent; but it is not something you could know a priori. The appearance of contingent a priori knowledge is generated only if we fail to distinguish these two salient truths, mistakenly running together the apriority of the first and the contingency of the second. You could of course know that s is one meter long at time t, by virtue of knowing (a) that any stick used to fix the reference of a unit of measurement will measure exactly one such unit at the instant the reference is fixed, and (b) that s is being used at t to fix the reference of 'meter'. But knowledge of (b) depends essentially on sense experience, so it is obviously not a priori. Consequently the knowledge that s is one meter long at t is not a priori either. Kripke's example never persuaded me, for the reason just given. Those who are persuaded by Kripke's example will find in my argument further, independent evidence for the possibility of contin- both essentially resembles mine and predates it by several years. 6 Actually this is not quite true, for one might fix the referent of 'schmeter' by saying, 'Let "schmeter" designate that length equivalent to one-tenth the present length of this stick' while holding up a stick. The stick in this example would have been used to fix the reference of 'schmeter', yet would not thereby measure one schmeter, but rather exactly ten. We could get around this problem by stipulating that we are concerned with only standard reference-fixing rituals, wherein a unit of measurement is fixed as equal to the entire length of an object. For ease of exposition, I ignore these details in the text. 5 gent a priori knowledge. *** The remainder of this paper divides into three sections. First I present a version of the standard view (BonJour's). Then I present my argument. The argument demonstrates how my alternative view emerges from some very plausible claims about knowledge. Finally I respond to several objections. Along the way we'll see how another important challenge to the standard view, suggested by John Hawthorne and even considered by BonJour, fails. Before proceeding, let me briefly address an issue that may be on some readers' minds. In addition to restricting a priori knowledge to necessary truths, many proponents of the standard view also say that a priori justification is infallible and rationally unrevisable (by experience, at least). These claims are implausible, as several theorists have persuasively argued.7 I won't rehearse their arguments, but the following line of reasoning persuades me. Other things being equal we ought to prefer a more unified treatment of a priori and empirical justification. So since empirical justification is neither infallible nor rationally unrevisable, other things being equal we ought to prefer a theory of a priori justification that says it is likewise neither infallible nor rationally unrevisable. Moreover establishing the possibility of contingent a priori knowledge will provide further evidence that fallible and rationally revisable a priori justification is possible. If you can be a priori justi- 7 See Jeshion 2000, BonJour 1998: Ch. 4.4, BonJour 2001, Plantinga 1993: 110–113, and Casullo1988. 6 fied in believing something that is possibly false, then you might be a priori justified in believing something that actually is false. And if you might be a priori justified in believing something that actually is false, then of course you might later discover evidence that what you believe is false, whereupon you would no longer be (as) justified in believing it, and so might rightly revise your opinion. 3. The Standard View, BonJour Style8 On BonJour's view, you a priori know that Q only if you are a priori justified in believing Q. Justification is the source of apriority. So 8 Representing the standard contemporary view: Chisholm 1977: 46 tells us, "whatever is a priori is necessarily true." According to Chisholm 1977: 43, S knows p a priori only if p is axiomatic for S; p is axiomatic for S only if p is an axiom; and p is an axiom only if it is necessarily true. BonJour 1998: 107 tells us that the a priori concerns "the way that reality must be." Plantinga 1993: 106 tells us, "all of what we know a priori is necessarily true." Bealer 1999: 30 tells us that we can have a priori knowledge of p only if it "presents itself as necessary." Huemer 2007: 37 says, "I am inclined to agree that all apparent rational insights seem necessary," but compare p. 43. Representing the traditional view: Kant 1996: 44 tells us that "a priori cognitions" are "universal cognitions . . . characterized by intrinsic necessity." Hume 1993: section IV tells us that propositions knowable a priori (or, as Hume puts it, knowable "by the mere operation of thought, without dependence on what is any where existent in the universe") are such that their denial "implies a contradiction," which of course indicates that truths known a priori are necessary. Leibniz 1973: 98 takes a slightly more nuanced view, though the difference matters not for human knowledge. He tells us that, for all cognizers except God, truths knowable a priori are necessary: "existential or contingent propositions differ entirely from [necessary propositions]. Their truth is understood a priori by the infinite mind alone." 7 let's examine BonJour's theory of a priori justification.9 You are justified in believing Q just in case you have a reason10 that makes it sufficiently likely that the belief is true. ('Sufficiently' will be left vague.) You are a priori justified in believing Q just in case you are justified in believing Q and your reason for believing Q does not depend on any positive appeal to experience of contingent features of the actual world, but rather depends upon "pure thought alone."11 BonJour writes, the relevant notion of experience should be understood to include any sort of process that is perceptual in the broad sense of (a) being a causally conditioned response to particular features of the world and (b) yielding doxastic states that have as their content putative information concerning such particular, contingent features of the actual world as contrasted with other possible worlds.12 Put simply, your belief that Q is a priori justified just in case it is justified and based solely on intuition.13 Any experience required 9 BonJour 1998: Chapters 1 and 4, esp. pp. 8–11, 100–13. 10 Some might prefer 'evidence' to 'reason'. It matters not for present purposes which we choose. 11 BonJour 1998: 7. BonJour (1998: 114) also places procedural conditions on the manner in which one considers the proposition, e.g., with care, and with due consideration to the fact that it appears necessary. I ignore these for present purposes. 12 BonJour 1998: 8. 13 Here I overlook an important distinction between propositional and doxastic justification, which may be safely ignored for present purposes. I also overlook one other important matter. BonJour's ultimate 8 to acquire the concepts needed to understand Q doesn't undermine the apriority of justification. A proposition apt to be intuited is "rationally self-evident," which means that "its very content provides, for one who grasps it properly, an immediate accessible reason for thinking that it is true."14 Simple arithmetical, logical, and conceptual truths are the clearest examples of self-evident propositions: that 2 + 2 = 4, that <Q & (Q only if P)> entails <P>, that scarlet is not a shade of blue, etc. Note two crucial features of this view. First, BonJour's admirable explanation of the concept of a priori justification does not state or even suggest that the proposition in question must be, or seem to be, necessarily true. This is evident from my presentation in this official characterization of intuition (or as he sometimes refers to it, "rational insight" or "a priori insight") builds in reference to the apparent necessity of the intuited proposition. Intuitions provide "direct or immediate insight into the truth, indeed the necessary truth, of the relevant claim . . . . They are thus putative insights into the essential nature of things or situations of the relevant kind, into the way that reality in the respect in question must be." See BonJour 2005: 99. But notice that BonJour can adequately articulate the concept of a priori justification without mentioning necessity. Moreover, from the present perspective it would simply beg the question to insist on the apparent necessity. One final caveat. BonJour often uses a mere 'if' when characterizing the nature of a priori justification. If he genuinely intends to establish only a sufficient condition-i.e. if there are other ways to achieve a priori justification-then insisting on apparent necessity would not beg the question. However, as the proposed analysis quoted just below in the main text indicates, BonJour intends to provide jointly sufficient and necessary conditions. So I do not think he can properly insist upon the condition in question, at least in the present context. 14 BonJour 1998: 102. 9 section up till now. As further evidence, consider also these passages from early in BonJour's seminal book on the topic: Historically, most epistemologists have distinguished two main sources from which the epistemic justification of a belief might arise. It has seemed obvious to all but a very few that many beliefs are justified by appeal to one's sensory (and introspective) experience of the world. But it has seemed equally obvious to most that there are other beliefs, including many of the most important ones that we have, that are justified in a way that does not depend at all on such an appeal to experience, justified, as it is usually put, by reason or pure thought alone. Beliefs justified entirely in the latter way are said to be justified a priori, while beliefs justified at least partially in the former way are said to be justified empirically or a posteriori.15 In summation, I propose to count a proposition p as being justified a priori (for a particular person, at a particular time) if and only if that person has a reason for thinking p to be true that does not depend on any positive appeal to experience or other causally mediated, quasi-perceptual contact with contingent features of the world, but only on pure thought or reason, even if the person's ability to understand p . . . derives, 15 BonJour 1998: 2. 10 in whole or in part, from experience.16 These passages do not specify the modal status of the proposition in question.17 Second, the definition of self-evidence does not restrict selfevident propositions to necessary truths. Its content need only provide a reason for thinking that it is true, and clearly one can have a reason for thinking that a claim is true without also having a reason for thinking that it is necessarily true.18 These two points merit special emphasis. They indicate that we should not be the least bit surprised if some contingent propositions turn out to be viable candidates for a priori knowledge. Nothing in the intuitive conception of a priori justification suggests otherwise. BonJour is often treated as representative of the standard view,19 as I have treated him here. But I should note that at one point he says something suggesting that he might accept a priori justification for some contingent truths.20 Yet this comes only very 16 BonJour 1998: 11. 17 Of course, one might argue that the formulations imply that the proposition appears to be possibly true. The important point is that they imply neither that the proposition is nor appears to be both possibly and necessarily true. (All necessarily true propositions are possibly true, but not vice versa.) They do leave open the possibility that the proposition is, and appears, both possibly true and possibly false. 18 Compare Audi 1999: 211–212. 19 E.g. Casullo 2002: 101, 104. Unlike other proponents of the standard view, BonJour doesn't think a priori justification must be infallible and rationally unrevisable. 20 BonJour 1998: 208–209. It isn't exactly clear which proposition he thinks is a priori justified: that it is highly probable that in the actual 11 late in BonJour's discussion, is subject to interpretive difficulty, and contradicts what he says elsewhere in the chapters and articles dedicated to explaining and defending his view. He says, "a priori justification occurs when the mind directly or intuitively sees or grasps or apprehends a necessary fact about the nature or structure of reality."21 Perhaps most pointedly, he says that a suitable intuition "must involve a genuine awareness by the person in question of the necessity or apparent necessity of the proposition in something like the strong logical or metaphysical sense."22 We will return to this issue below. 4. My Argument Here is my argument: 1. If you have a non-accidentally justified true belief that Q, then you know that Q. (Premise) 2. If you know that Q and your justification for believing Q is a priori, then you a priori know that Q. (Premise)23 world there is a non-chance explanation for the truth of a standard inductive premise, or, that there actually is a non-chance explanation for the truth of a standard inductive premise. (A standard inductive premise states that m/n observed As are Bs.) If the former, then BonJour has not conceded that there could be a priori justification for contingent truths, because he says the truth in question is necessary. If the latter, then BonJour has conceded the point. But as I will explain below, even if BonJour is genuinely conceding the point, the example he uses arguably shouldn't convince us that his concession is advisable. 21 BonJour 1998: 15 16. 22 BonJour 1998: 114. See also BonJour 2005. 23 Present purposes require only a sufficient condition. If you want a 12 3. Therefore if you have a non-accidentally justified true belief that Q and your justification is a priori, then you a priori know that Q. (From 1, 2) 4. If your justified belief that Q is based solely on an intuition that Q, then your justification is a priori. (Premise) 5. It is possible for you to be non-accidentally justified in believing some contingent proposition solely on the basis of an intuition. (Premise) 6. Therefore it is possible for you to have contingent a priori knowledge. (From 3–5) Line 2 is a straightforward and intuitive sufficient condition for a priori knowledge, which my opponents and I can share. Line 4 merely states a sufficient condition for a priori justification, and is assumed in much of the literature. Again my opponents and I can both accept line 4. (Please note that since line 4 merely states a sufficient condition for a priori justification, it doesn't assume that all a priori justification derives from intuition or self-evidence.) Before looking more closely at lines 1 and 5, let me caution against a potential error. I have been asked whether line 5 alone constitutes a repudiation of the standard view, and hence whether the rest of the argument is superfluous. Short answer: no. A mo- definition, then I propose: You a priori know that Q =def You know that Q and your justification for believing Q is a priori. (We'll need to add a wrinkle to handle cases of epistemic overdetermination, along with a specification of how the belief is based, which I leave to your ingenuity.) Compare Kitcher's 1980: 9–10 analysis. Kitcher speaks of warrant, whereas I speak of justification. In Casullo's (2002: Section 2) terminology, mine is a reductive and purely epistemic analysis of a priori knowledge. 13 ment's reflection reveals that line 5 by itself does not generate a conflict with the traditional view. To do that, we must supplement it with further assumptions regarding knowledge. The argument provides this. Regarding line 1, some epistemologists might argue that nonaccidentally justified true belief is sufficient and necessary for knowledge.24 They might be correct, but my purposes require only sufficiency. I will not offer an exhaustive account of the difference between epistemically relevant and irrelevant luck (accidentality).25 But I must say enough so that we can all agree that the protagonist in my example below does not suffer from the epistemically relevant variety, which I will do now.26 Some accidents are epistemically relevant, but many are not. We usually distinguish them effortlessly. For example, Sid believes that one of pockets is torn because he happened to glance in the mirror at just the right angle. Otherwise he wouldn't have had the visual evidence that his pocket is torn. There is obviously something accidental about Sid's coming to have the visual evidence that he does. It needn't have turned out that Sid glanced in the mirror when he did, at the angle he did. The same can be said for the justification 24 Compare Unger 1968. Unger gives a full-blown analysis. But he leaves out justification, speaking instead of it not being an accident that the subject gets things right. 25 For an extensive discussion, see Pritchard 2005: Part II. For a promising solution to the problem of epistemic, as well as moral, luck, see Greco 2006. 26 Section 5 addresses residual worries about probabilistic grounds, which are closely related to epistemic luck. 14 for nearly every empirical belief.27 But the mere fact that Sid needn't have had the experience doesn't spoil his knowledge. Otherwise only necessary experiences-whatever that is supposed to mean- could ground knowledge. The original Gettier cases and Carl Ginet's barn-façade case provide examples of epistemically relevant accidents.28 We focus here on Ginet's barn-façade case because it involves a noninferential belief. This puts us in a position to see that pernicious epistemic luck of this sort does not afflict the protagonist in my example below, forestalling a potential objection to my defense of line 5. Here is Ginet's case. Henry is driving through the countryside. At a certain point, a roadside barn catches his attention. Optimal viewing conditions obtain. On the basis of the barn-look, he forms the justified true belief that there is a barn along the roadside. But Henry is in Fake Barn Country, where numerous barn façades populate the land. There are many, many façades but only a handful of 27 It is controversial whether cogito beliefs (e.g., the belief you would express by uttering 'I exist', or the one you would express by uttering 'I am thinking') count as empirical. Even if they are, there still is something accidental about your having evidence for them-after all, you might not have been thinking at the moment-indeed, you might not even have existed. We could argue about these special cases, but the outcome won't adversely affect the discussion in the main text, precisely because these special exceptions prove the rule regarding "the justification for nearly every empirical belief." 28 Gettier 1963. We learn of Ginet's barn-façade case through Goldman 1976: 772 ff. I myself think Ginet's case differs crucially from Gettier's, but I'll bypass that controversial point here. For an argument that the subject in Ginet's example does know that there is a roadside barn, see Turri forthcoming. See also Lycan 2006 and Sosa 2007. 15 real barns in the area. If a façade had caught Henry's attention, he would have falsely believed it was a roadside barn. Many philosophers intuit that Henry doesn't know that there is a barn along the roadside. What explains the intuition? One plausible explanation is that the connection is extremely tenuous between Henry's reason (the barn-look) and his belief's truth. In Fake Barn Country the barn-look does not make it likely that Henry is looking at a barn. The right example should convince us of 5. John Hawthorne provides examples that he thinks suffice.29 His example of The Explainer is the most plausible, so we'll focus on it. The Explainer is a disembodied being who, prior to having any sensory experience, engages in a priori reflection about which microphysical theories would best explain various possible "experiential life histories." For one of the possible life histories, L, The Explainer comes to justifiedly believe that theory T would best explain it. The Explainer's belief that T best explains L, Hawthorne suggests, is a priori justified because he forms it just by thinking hard, uninformed by sensory experience. Let's grant that The Explainer can know a priori that T best explains L. The Explainer then contemplates his impending embodiment. Based on his a priori knowledge that T best explains L, he infers the material conditional 'If I undergo experiential life history L, then T is true'. If true, this conditional will be only contingently true, because it is possible for the best explanation to be false. Hawthorne judges it plausible that 29 Hawthorne 2002. 16 if the conditional turns out to be true, then The Explainer knows that it is. We might object on the grounds that we lack good reason to believe that the best explanation is more likely true than not. Take the set of possible worlds where L occurs (the 'L-worlds'). Suppose T explains L at a plurality of them (call these 'T»L-worlds'). This makes T the most likely and so best explanation of L. But T»L is still unlikely given L (in the same sense of likelihood). A plurality of Lworlds are T»L-worlds, but most L-worlds are not T»Lworlds. (It might even turn out that most L-worlds are not Tworlds.30) Knowledge clearly requires a stronger truth-connection than this, or so you might reasonably maintain. Similar reasoning suggests that The Explainer's belief is not non-accidentally justified. The truth connection here is just too tenuous. Most L-worlds are not T»L-worlds, even though The Explainer's world happens to be a T»L-world. This is relevantly similar to inhabiting an area where most things that look like barns are not barns, yet you happen to be looking at the one barn in the entire county.31 30 Call a world where T and L are both true a 'T&L-world'. The T»Lworlds form a proper subset of the T&L-worlds. Not all T&L-worlds are T»L-worlds. Consider an analogy. Divine command ethicists say that God's commanding us to not steal (T) explains why stealing is wrong (L). But divine command ethics could be false (not T»L) even though stealing is wrong and God does command us to not steal (T&L). You can consistently maintain that stealing is wrong, that God commands us to not steal, and that stealing's wrongness is explained by its bad consequences, not by God's commands. 31 Many externalists might reject this reasoning. Suppose that even though most L-worlds are not T»L-worlds, the actual world and all 17 Properly addressing these concerns requires providing a suitable account of explanation, and what it is for a hypothesis to best explain some data-a monumental undertaking, to say the least. I have a further concern about the example. Many parties to the debate care about the possibility of human contingent a priori knowledge. Hawthorne's bizarre case is irrelevant to this. Leibniz conceded that God had a priori knowledge of contingent truths. Others might well concede the possibility of superhuman or divine contingent a priori knowledge, yet deny it is humanly possible. Even granting everything Hawthorne says about The Explainer, this issue remains unsettled. (My example below establishes that it is humanly possible.) BonJour at one point makes a suggestion similar to Hawthorne's. The example forms part of BonJour's ambitious attempt to solve the problem of induction by explaining how we could be a priori justified in accepting the following principle: If m/n of observed cases of A have been cases of B, given suitable variation of the collateral circumstances and the absence of any further relevant information, then it is likely or probable that, within some reasonable measure of approximation, m/n of all cases of A nearby worlds are T»L-worlds. Thus not easily would T fail to explain L. This might suffice for knowledge on many externalist views. Internalists, such as BonJour or Chisholm, would of course object. To the greatest extent possible, I aim to bypass the internalist/externalist controversy here, so I want to avoid relying on assumptions or examples that only externalists would accept. In any event, examples much simpler than Hawthorne's would suffice from an externalist perspective. 18 are cases of B.32 The intuitive thought behind this suggestion, BonJour explains, "is that an objective regularity of a sort that would make the conclusion of a standard inductive argument true provides the best explanation for the truth of the premise of such an argument."33 But we have already seen a potential problem with this. If we suppose, along with BonJour and most other epistemologists, that a good epistemic reason for believing Q must at least make Q more likely than not, then we shouldn't conclude that the mere fact that a hypothesis best explains the data constitutes a good epistemic reason for believing the hypothesis. Accordingly we shouldn't accept that it could, by itself, provide a priori justification or knowledge. So a proponent of the standard view will likely mistrust examples featuring explanatory reasoning. Fortunately we needn't rely on such examples to validate 5. Consider this most unlikely case: (MOST UNLIKELY): Sam considers whether the most unlikely possible event is not presently occurring. By 'the most unlikely possible event', Sam intends to designate whatever was, at the immediately preceding instant, t 1, the possible event most unlikely to occur at the next instant, t, which is the mo- 32 BonJour 1998: 206. 33 BonJour 1998: 207. BonJour emphasizes 'explanation' but not 'best'. I suspect this is a mere typographical error (if it weren't the best, then why would it matter?). In any event, the italics for 'best' are mine. 19 ment at which her deliberation occurs.34 Sam understands the proposition in question. Solely in virtue of that understanding, it seems to her - i.e. she intuits - that the proposition is true, though not necessarily so. On the basis of this intuition, she believes that the most unlikely possible event is not presently occurring. Her belief is true. Note that Sam does not reason her way to the belief that the most unlikely possible event is not occurring. Her belief is noninferential, based on the intuition, not other beliefs. The example features a proposition that is overwhelmingly likely to be true as a matter of conceptual necessity. This crucial feature makes it relevantly similar to standard examples of a priori knowledge of necessary truths. It explains why Sam can be nonaccidentally justified in believing that it is not occurring, just by considering it and without relying on sensory or introspective experience. It is doubtful that sensory or introspective experience even could bolster Sam's justification here. What sort of experience could be relevant? Experience could not provide any evidence for thinking that the event is somehow more unlikely to occur. Sam already understands it to be the most unlikely possible event. Granted experience can give us evidence that certain events are impossible. For example experience informs us that Hesperus and Phosphorus are 34 Perhaps this is best described in terms of an event type. But I'll ignore this because it doesn't seem to affect the basic line of thought. 20 one and the same heavenly body, from which we infer that Hesperus could not possibly collide with Phosphorus. But experience cannot do this in the present case because you could never acquire any evidence, experiential or otherwise, for thinking that the the most unlikely possible event (when picked out under that very description) is impossible. The present case does not relevantly resemble Gettier or Ginet cases. Sam inhabits a perfectly ordinary environment, leisurely reflecting on matters of personal interest. (For any extension or modification you might conceivably propose that would turn it into a Gettier or Ginet case, I will explicitly enter the proposal's negation into the case's description.) Whereas we could rig an environment so that the barn-look is a counter-indication of real barns, it is impossible to rig an environment so that an event's being the most unlikely possible event is a counter-indication of its not occurring.35 Before turning to objections, let me clarify one point. It could turn out that if Sam were to pick out the event satisfying the description 'the most unlikely possible event' under some other description, then she wouldn't be a priori justified in believing that it is not occurring. Suppose that the most unlikely possible event is for the most massive object in the universe to quantum tunnel. Such an event is improbable to an unfathomable degree. But to be justified in believing that it is not occurring, you would have to know something about the actual physical laws and how massive the most massive object is. Had the physical laws been different, the 35 I imagine one objection to this, which I consider below. A minor adjustment completely avoids any worries. 21 most massive object might have been quite likely to quantum tunnel at any moment. Likewise, even holding the actual physical laws constant, if the most massive object was a quark, it would not be very unlikely for it to quantum tunnel. We need experience and observation to learn such things.36 5. Objections Answered One might object that there is no such thing as the most unlikely possible event. For any contingent event of probability n, there is always another possible event of probability n m (where 0 < m < n < 1). Take any compossible contingent events e and e', and the event that is their co-occurrence, e''. The probability of e'' will be less than that of either e or e'. Since there are indefinitely many compossible events, there will be no end to the process. Thus there will never be a possible event than which no other event is more unlikely. I meet this objection by stipulating that Sam is concerned with nonconjunctive or atomic events, such as e and e'. Another objection is that it might turn out that there is, as a contingent matter of fact, no most unlikely possible event. This is a problem of uniqueness. There might be two or more events that share the title 'event than which no other event is more unlikely', 36 You might disagree, claiming that we can indeed know such things without the aid of sensory experience, but only when entertained under a certain sense. Perhaps I have just described such a case. Granting this would not hinder my cause, so I will let it pass without further remark. In any event, a responsible treatment of the nature of belief and its objects falls beyond this paper's scope. 22 but none that is the most unlikely. And we cannot plausibly adjust the example so that Sam believes no event, than which no other event is more unlikely, is occurring. For if there are enough events satisfying this description, it might be very likely that at least one such event is occurring. And it is not plausible that Sam could be a priori justified in believing that only a relatively few events satisfy that description. I meet this objection by adjusting the example through conditionalizing Sam's belief. And by that I mean she believes: IF there is a unique most unlikely possible event, THEN it is not occurring. This material conditional will be true just in case either (a) there is no such unique event, or (b) there is but it is not occurring. Either way, it is only contingently true. Sam could be nonaccidentally justified in believing this conditional simply in virtue of understanding it. A further objection questions whether the most unlikely possible event must be unlikely. Recall that 'the most unlikely possible event' designates whatever was, at the instant immediately preceding, t 1, the possible event most unlikely to occur at the next instant. Suppose for the sake of argument that at t – 1 the entire future state of the world at t was determined, except for whether a single electron will veer left or right at a certain juncture. Suppose further that the likelihood of its veering left is .49 and of its veering right .51. Now the electron's veering left is the most unlikely possible event. But an event whose probability of occurring is .49 is not unlikely. (It's not likely either, but that's beside the point.) So Sam's belief is at best only accidentally justified. In response we can simp- 23 ly modify the example. Let Sam believe that if there is a unique most unlikely possible event whose probability of occurring is at most one in a quintillion, then that event is not presently occurring. Some will object to the case on the following grounds. Knowledge is the norm of assertion. So if it is out of line for Sam to assert the proposition in question, then Sam does not know that proposition. And it would be out of line for Sam to assert that proposition. Therefore Sam does not know. My response is twofold. First, we must specify the content of the knowledge account of assertion (KA). The argument is invalid if we take Timothy Williamson's official formulation, "one must: assert p only if one knows p,"37 which states only a necessary condition. There could be other necessary conditions for appropriate assertion that one fails to meet. And this is no artifact of Williamson's formulation: KA incorporates only a necessary condition as standardly formulated.38 Perhaps my opponent would be willing to upgrade the necessary condition into a biconditional, and then run the argument.39 That would make the argument valid, but still not sound. This brings me to my second response. Sam would not be out of line to assert the proposition in question. So long as it does not turn out that the most unlikely possible event was then occurring - as is stipulated in the case - we have no grounds for reproaching her. 37 Williamson 2000: 243. 38 E.g. Weiner 2005 states the essence of the view as follows: "we should assert only what we know." 39 DeRose 2002: 180 says, "one is well-enough positioned to assert that P iff one knows that P." 24 Some philosophers will disagree, notably V.H. Dudman.40 Dudman contends, "what is needed for assertibility" is the "absence of possibility to the contrary." Anything short of that and "assertibility goes out of the window."41 But the present case is a devastating counterexample to that thesis. If asked whether the most unlikely possible event is occurring, Sam needn't hedge and assert that it is almost certainly not occurring. She may assert that the most unlikely event is not presently occurring. The flat-out assertion is entirely appropriate.42 If Dudman reproached Sam, "Pardon me, Miss, but you of course meant that it is almost certainly not occurring," she could rightly respond, "Oh, come on! It's not occurring, and we all know it." A related objection focuses on the statistical or probabilistic nature of Sam's grounds for judgment. Some might argue that manifestly statistical grounds cannot suffice for knowledge.43 They might offer this as an explanation for why you cannot know that you will lose (or have lost) a fair lottery, when all you have to go on is the long odds. If they are right, then one would suspect that the manifestly statistical nature of Sam's grounds prevent her from knowing that the most unlikely possible event will not occur. 40 Dudman 1992. 41 Dudman 1992. See also Williamson 2000: 246 – 7. 42 See also DeRose 1996: esp. 577 – 8. A gentle reminder to the reader: nothing said here commits me to any specific theory of assertability. I merely record what is obviously true in the present case. 43 Cohen, 1988: esp. 106 ff. Cohen does not say that this is necessarily true. He says only that when the grounds are merely statistical, we are "reluctant to attribute knowledge" (106). Strictly speaking, then, Cohen need not disagree with anything said here. 25 I respond that manifestly statistical grounds can suffice for knowledge. At least sometimes we know that we have lost (will lose) the lottery, despite the statistical nature of our grounds. Here I can do no better than to quote Hawthorne on the matter: [M]any philosophers . . . [seem] to have lost sight of certain features of our ordinary practice. Try raising the possibility of lottery success to people who are planning out their lives. Very often, they will respond with 'You know that's not going to happen' or 'I know full well that I'm not going to get that lucky'. Similarly, when someone is deliberating about whether to buy a lottery ticket, ordinary people will often say 'You know you are wasting your money'. Granted we sometimes make knowledge claims using a tone indicating that we are not to be taken literally. But I see no good evidence that this is always going on in these cases.44 Keith DeRose presents another relevant case.45 Suppose someone points out that newspapers sometimes transpose a game's score, though this is very, very rare. He then asks me whether the Bulls won last night. Newspaper in hand, I consult the sports section, and see that it says 'Knicks 83, at Bulls 87'. I then reason as follows: The paper says they won, and the paper almost certainly did not make a mistake, so the Bulls won. I thereby come to know that the Bulls won, and this despite the fact that my grounds are merely probabil- 44 Hawthorne 2004: 18. 45 DeRose 1996. 26 istic. Everyone knows that newspapers are not perfect, that they sometimes make mistakes. And yet we can learn who won last night's game just by checking the paper. Many of us do this quite often.46 We rarely explicitly consider the fact that newspapers sometimes make mistakes, even as we form beliefs based on what we read in them. And it is implausible that being careful enough to consider this automatically robs us of our knowledge. *** None of the objections canvassed here withstands scrutiny. I conclude that we can have contingent a priori knowledge. The question facing us now is not whether such knowledge is possible, but its extent.47 46 DeRose's case is over a decade old by now. Most people reading this paper would probably now get the results by checking a website. An exactly analogous case could be constructed for a website. 47 For helpful conversation and feedback that helped improve this paper, I thank Albert Casullo, Juan Comesaña, Allan Hazlett, Mark Huston, Chris Kane, Dan Korman, Sharifa Mohamed, Bruce Russell, Joe Shieber, and this journal's Editor. 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AESTHETIC SUPEREROGATION1 Alfred Archer & Lauren Ware ABSTRACT: A number of moral philosophers have accepted the need to make room for acts of supererogation, those that go beyond the call of duty. In this paper, we argue that there is also good reason to make room for acts of aesthetic supererogation. Many aestheticians and ethicists are interested in the similarities and connections between aesthetics and ethics.2 One way in which some have suggested the two domains are different is that in ethics there exist obligations while in aesthetics there do not.3 However, Marcia Muelder Eaton has argued that there is good reason to think that aesthetic obligations do exist.4 We will explore the nature of these obligations by asking whether acts of aesthetic supererogation (acts that go beyond the call of our aesthetic obligations) are possible. In this paper, we defend the thesis that there is good reason to think such acts exist. 1 We would like to dedicate this paper to the memory of Fabian Dorsch. We are incredibly grateful for Fabian's support in spotting the relevance of our paper to the theme of this special issue and encouraging us to submit. Our paper was also greatly improved by his incredibly detailed and helpful comments. We would also like to thank the audience at the 2016 European Society for Aesthetics Conference in Barcelona for helpful feedback, particularly Damian Cox, Marguerite La Caze, Karen Simecek, Connell Vaughan, and Ken Wilder for extended discussion. Finally, we are grateful to the Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science for a visiting fellowship that made this collaboration possible. We consider ourselves to have contributed equally to the writing of this paper. 2 Martha C. Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Berys Gaut, Art, Emotion and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Philippa Foot, Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002); Alfred Archer, 'Aesthetic Judgements and Motivation', Inquiry (forthcoming). 3 Stuart Hampshire, 'Logic and Appreciation', in Aesthetics and Language, ed. William Elton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1954): 161-69. 4 Marcia Muelder Eaton, 'Aesthetic Obligations', Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2008): 1-9. I. SUPEREROGATION IN MORAL THEORY Ruqia Hassan was a thirty-year-old journalist who wrote about daily life in occupied Raqqa, the Syrian stronghold of Islamic State (ISIS). Through a series of posts on social media, Hassan courageously criticized the violent actions of ISIS, the Assad regime, and the airstrikes from coalition forces. As her posts became increasingly critical, the ISIS police force decided to arrest her. She was arrested in July 2015 and executed two months later.5 Hassan's decision to risk her life in order to expose the horror of life in Raqqa seems to have clear moral value, her actions are admirable and praiseworthy, and there was good moral reason to act as she did. However, despite the fact that Hassan's act is one of obvious moral value, it does not seem plausible to think that she was morally required to act in this way. It is a commonly accepted feature of commonsense morality that there are some acts, like Hassan's, that are supererogatory or beyond the call of duty. What is it about acts like Hassan's that make us reluctant to categorize these acts as obligatory? In J. O. Urmson's paper 'Saints and Heroes', he argued that there are some morally good actions that no one could decently demand that people perform or could fairly blame people who fail to perform them.6 This makes it problematic to class these acts as morally required, for two reasons. First, moral requirements are often thought to be conceptually tied to demands. According to this thought, if an act is morally required for an agent then people can legitimately demand that she perform it. John Stuart Mill outlines this link between obligation and demand in the following way: 'It is part of the notion of duty in every one of its forms that a person 5 Aisha Gani and Kareem Shaheen, 'Journalist Ruqia Hassan Murdered by Isis after Writing on Life in Raqqa', Guardian, 6 January 2016: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/05/journalist-ruqia-hassan-killed-isis-raqqa-syria. 6 J. O. Urmson, 'Saints and Heroes', in Moral Concepts, ed. Joel Feinberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969): 60-73. may rightfully be compelled to fulfill it.'7 If we accept that obligations can be legitimately demanded of people but that no one could legitimately demand that Hassan act as she did, then we must also accept that Hassan's act was not morally required. Second, moral requirements are also thought to be conceptually tied to blame. According to this line of thought, someone who violates a moral requirement and lacks a good excuse, is blameworthy for her action. Stephen Darwall, for example, claims: 'It is a conceptual truth that an act is morally wrong, if, and only if, it is blameworthy if done without an excuse.'8 Again, if we accept this link between moral requirements and blameworthiness, and we think that it would have been inappropriate to blame Hassan had she acted otherwise (even if she lacked an excuse), then we must also accept that Hassan's act was not morally required. These conceptual links between obligation and demands and blame, together with the plausible claim that demands or blame would have been inappropriate for Hassan's act, give us reason to accept the existence of acts of supererogation. But how should we characterize these acts? Since Urmson's article, a number of moral philosophers have attempted to make sense of the supererogatory. While there is no general consensus on exactly how to define the concept, there is a general agreement that supererogation involves the following necessary and sufficient conditions: An act is supererogatory if and only if: (i) It is morally optional (neither morally required nor morally forbidden). (ii) It is morally better than the minimum that morality demands.9 7 John Stewart Mill, On Liberty and Utilitarianism (New York: Bantam Books, 1993): 193. 8 Stephen Darwall, 'Bipolar Obligation', in Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 21. 9 Dale Dorsey, 'The Supererogatory, and How to Accommodate It', Utilitas 25 (2013): 371; Michael Ferry, 'Does Morality Demand Our Very Best? Moral Prescriptions and the Line of Duty', Philosophical Studies 165 (2013): 574; David Heyd, Supererogation (Cambridge: Cambridge University If we accept this way of understanding supererogation then we are able to stipulate two conditions that are necessary for the existence of supererogatory acts in any given normative domain: (a) That normative domain must generate requirements. (b) It must be possible to perform acts that are both permissible (according to the given normative domain) and better (according to the given normative domain) than the acts that are required by that domain.10 In the next two sections we will argue that there is good reason to think that the domain of aesthetics satisfies both criteria. II. ARE THERE AESTHETIC OBLIGATIONS? Marcia Muelder Eaton defends two arguments for the existence of aesthetic obligations.11 First, if there are aesthetic dilemmas, then there must be aesthetic obligations from which such dilemmas originate. An aesthetic dilemma could involve a classic 'burning-museum' case in which one has to make a choice between saving one of two paintings, both alike in their ability to enlighten, please, educate, and Press, 1982): 5. Some authors argue that there is a need to add a further necessary condition, that the act be praiseworthy to perform. See Paul McNamara, 'Supererogation, Inside and Out: Toward an Adequate Scheme for Common-Sense Morality', in Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, ed. Mark Timmons, vol. 1, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011): 203; Gregory Mellema, Beyond the Call of Duty: Supererogation, Obligation and Offence (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991): 17; and Phillip Montague, 'Acts, Agents, and Supererogation', American Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1989): 102. For an argument against including this additional necessary condition, see Alfred Archer, 'Are Acts of Supererogation Always Praiseworthy?' Theoria 82 (2016): 238-55. 10 These criteria are similar to those given by McElwee for the conditions that need to be met in order for acts of supererogation to exist in a given normative domain. See Brian McElwee, 'Supererogation across Normative Domains', Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming). 11 Eaton, 'Aesthetic Obligations', ibid. provoke wonder, but the second being more beautiful.12 Eaton notes that those working in art restoration often face precisely these kinds of aesthetic dilemmas in their practice. She concludes that the 'great pains' restorers take in recording exactly what alterations were made, and the 'sense of real loss' experienced when restoration requires removal of the artist's work-such as when one painting has been done atop a first-are indicative of a genuinely felt obligation.13 What demands consideration by the decision-maker in these cases are the aesthetic properties of the object – and it is this realm of properties that makes the dilemma an aesthetic one, rather than an economic, moral, or any other kind of dilemma. If moral dilemmas emerge out of a conflict of moral obligations, then the existence of genuine aesthetic dilemmas indicates a conflict between aesthetic obligations. Second, we can recognize an obligation to tell good stories about others when we are in a position to do so (such as in delivering a eulogy or writing an obituary). One fictional example Eaton gives is from William Maxwell's novel So Long, See You Tomorrow in which the narrator labours to 'fulfil the obligation to give someone else a 12 We might wonder whether it would be possible for two paintings to be alike in their ability to promote pleasure, but for one to be more beautiful than the other. After all, according to the two dominant views, beauty is to be understood as the ability to promote pleasure in the right sort of spectator. Hume is usually understood as holding the view that facts about what is beautiful are to be determined by what brings pleasure to ideal critics, though this interpretation of Hume is disputed by Ross. See David Hume, 'Of the Standard of Taste', in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, 1875): 266-84, and Stephanie Ross, 'Humean Critics: Real or Ideal?' British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 20-28. Kant, on the other hand, claims that beauty should be understood in terms of the ability to bring pleasure to disinterested observers. If we accept that beauty is to be understood in terms of the ability to cause pleasure then it does not seem possible to say that two paintings could be equal in their ability to cause pleasure but that one could be more beautiful than the other. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgement, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). However, it is important to note that for both Hume and Kant, beauty is not to be understood in terms of the ability to cause pleasure in general but rather in the ability to cause pleasure in certain kinds of observers. Both views, then, leave room for the possibility that two paintings could be equal in their ability to cause pleasure amongst people in general without being equal in their ability to cause pleasure in the right kind of observer. This means that both views are compatible with the possibility that two paintings could be equal in their capacity to cause pleasure (amongst people in general) without being equally beautiful. We thank the editors of this journal for asking for clarification here. 13 Eaton, 'Aesthetic Obligations', 4-5. story-authentic, appropriate, plausible, subtle, in short, a good story'.14 The fact that the narrator is concerned not only with the truth of the story but the style in which it is told, renders this obligation aesthetic.15 The form of the obligation it takes is an extension of the ethical obligation between rights and duties: we, plausibly, have an ethical obligation to accord due respect to others. When this respect involves telling a story about another person, which requires a certain style, we are-as Eaton argues-entering squarely into the aesthetic domain. Howard Press offers another reason to think that aesthetic obligations exist: they are derived from the principle 'One ought to appreciate what is beautiful'.16 Appreciation could involve a number of commitments: putting oneself in, or not removing oneself from, a position to appreciate what is beautiful; being duly sensitive to consider what is beautiful; or making an attempt to develop one's aesthetic talents. When we are subject to maxims or principles the content of which is aesthetic, we can reasonably call it an aesthetic obligation. And perhaps then we can recognize that there are special obligations for the exceptionally gifted. Where the average person might find an aesthetic obligation to pay attention in music class and see if she finds playing an instrument enjoyable (and if she doesn't then she will not be blameworthy if she decides take up some other hobby), another person who demonstrates exceptional skill in a particular area might have an obligation to take lessons, and so forth. Even if we do not accept that such effort is required of the exceptionally gifted, this sense of obligation is at least reflected in the language we often use in relation to such cases. If we meet someone who demonstrates great artistic promise, and we find out later they never pursued it, both the language we use and the feeling we experience often indicate we think they ought to have tried to develop those talents. We can see this as well in the public outcry of fans when a 14 Ibid., 5. 15 Of course, this is assuming that a work's narrative is an aesthetic property. We are grateful to an anonymous referee for requesting clarification here. 16 Howard Press, 'Aesthetic Obligation', Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 525. band breaks up-it is not uncommon to hear complaints such as the band 'owes it to the fans' to put aside their differences, get back together, and make more music. Similar language is employed when an artist's farewell album is comparatively horrible to their earlier work: it is felt that they owe it to the fans, to the music, or even to themselves to have ended with something better. These three different kinds of cases seem to be plausible examples of aesthetic obligation.17 Before we proceed with our argument it is worth flagging up an objection that we will return to later in our paper. Someone confronted with the examples of aesthetic obligation which we have provided may claim that the obligations here are not distinctively aesthetic. Instead, it might be argued that these are moral obligations with aesthetic content. We might think that we have moral obligations to promote what is valuable and that the promotion of aesthetic value is included in this. If this were the case, then it could legitimately be argued that all of the examples we have given are really cases of moral obligation, rather than aesthetic obligation. We will respond to this objection later in the paper however, we must first examine whether the obligations we have investigated in this section can be surpassed. III. CAN AESTHETIC OBLIGATIONS BE SURPASSED? Let's take the burning-museum case we just considered. If we can recognize that there is an aesthetic obligation to save the more beautiful work of art, all other things being equal, we are beholden to make the decision in that dilemma to save it. But imagine now that the more beautiful artwork is located in the next room of the museum-the flames are rising, and to get into that room will be considerably more dangerous and risky. Whilst endeavouring to save this work merits praise, not doing 17 One form of aesthetic obligation we haven't considered here concerns obligations to works of art themselves. For an insightful contribution to this debate, see Anthony Cross, 'Obligations to Artworks as Duties of Love', in this issue of Estetika. so hardly seems blameworthy. By acting in this way I've certainly fulfilled the general aesthetic obligation to save the more beautiful painting-but I've also done more than required, in the act of putting my life in danger to do so (possibly demonstrating courageousness in facing that danger). With reference to the second case-that of telling good stories about others-we can identify cases of surpassing any aesthetic obligations that are in place. Eaton refers to how, following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, a team of reporters at the New York Times created bespoke pieces about each person who lost his or her life. These 'Portraits of Grief', as they were called, went beyond the newspaper's standard obituary format to become, essentially, short narratives akin to what is crafted in the genre of flash fiction. One portrait began: 'When Oscar F. Nesbit went to work, he was always impeccably dressed in a suit and tie, with a newspaper in his hands and a greeting on his lips. He used the newspaper to satisfy his interest in crossword puzzles and stock tables.' While this project was overall much loved and appreciated as a beautiful thing for the newspaper to have done, it does seem odd to suggest that the reporters were under an obligation to tell the stories in that way. It is precisely the poetic and impressionistic features of these stories that strike the reader as going beyond any existing obligations-and these features are aesthetic in nature. Eaton builds her obligation to tell good stories about others from the fundamental right we as individuals have to tell our own story-to be the authors of our own lives. This kind of autonomy may indeed function as a kind of obligation we have to ourselves, and can reasonably be considered aesthetic. A further plausible case of going beyond this obligation might be making one's (entire) life into a beautiful story. Simone de Beauvoir, in her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, wrote about how as an adolescent, she dreamed of making her life into a grand story that would inspire others [...]'There was no longer any God to love me, but I should have the undying love of millions of hearts. By writing a work based on my own experience I would re-create myself and justify my existence. At the same time I would be serving humanity. What more beautiful gift could I make it than the books I would write?'18 Here, de Beauvoir is talking about re-creating her life in novels, telling stories that could inspire others. But it's hardly surprising to see this reflected in her actual life. One of her biographers notes this exactly: It's impossible to read about Beauvoir's life without thinking about your own. You find yourself wanting to live more courageously, with more commitment and passion. She makes you want to read more books, travel across the world, fall in love again, take stronger political stands, write more, work harder, play more intensely and look more tenderly at the beauty of the natural world. That is indeed a beautiful gift.19 While possessing autonomy over one's own life and life story can be considered an obligation one has to herself as an individual agent, perhaps structuring one's whole life as a beautiful story that can inspire others exceeds this. The contrast here would be between telling a story that is somewhat (or sufficiently) beautiful, and telling a story that is exceptionally beautiful or grand. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche paints a portrait of what might be involved here: One thing is needful. – To 'give style' to one's character – a rare and great art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. Here a large part of second nature has been added; there a piece of original nature has been removed – both times through long practice and daily work at it. Here the ugly that could not be removed is concealed; there it has been reinterpreted and made sublime. Much that is vague and 18 Hazel Rowley, 'Going Private: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Then and Now', The Monthly, December 2008: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2008/december/1277356198/hazel-rowley/going-private. 19 Ibid. resisted shaping has been saved and exploited for distant views; it is meant to beckon toward the far and immeasurable. In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small.20 It does indeed seem plausible that organizing one's life in this way, for the purpose of giving it 'style', is beyond the aesthetic obligation we have to tell a good story about ourselves. We have a third possible case of aesthetic supererogation-acting on the maxim of something like 'appreciate what is beautiful', 'seek out what is beautiful', or 'develop your aesthetic talents'. Consider the music lover who acts on the imperative to appreciate or seek out beauty by every now and then going into town to catch a performance by the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra: they play a style of music she enjoys and she'd like to learn more about by taking in the occasional live performance. Very broadly, we can imagine that for some individuals, attending a performance could be one way of acting on the appropriate maxim, thereby satisfying her aesthetic obligation. Now, imagine that she loyally follows the Scottish National Jazz Orchestra on their year-long world tour, attending each and every gig. Assuming our music lover is still getting something out of each performance, still learning and appreciating, it seems there is nothing blameworthy about this activity (at least not in the aesthetic domain), and we might be right to praise her commitment to, love for, or appreciation of the music. But for the average jazz enthusiast, this kind of commitment can hardly seem to be required, and so functions as aesthetic supererogation worthy of praise. When it comes to developing one's aesthetic talents, it is natural to think of practitioners as well as patrons. Consider Van Gogh's letters to his brother Theo, in which the artist writes that he paints 'not only with color, but with self-denial and 20 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 2010): 232. self-renunciation, and with a broken heart'.21 Eric Michaud comments on these letters regarding the extent to which the artist went to develop his talents that 'All Van Gogh's "madness" is connected to this extreme and painful knowledge that his very existence as a painter requires not only separation from others, but also the sacrifice of others, and above all of those closest to himself.'22 Acting on the maxim to develop one's aesthetic talents very likely does not 'require' one to separate herself from others, nor sacrifice others. Yet if this was what the artist went through to develop his talents and bring into being his work, we cannot seem to blame it aesthetically, and in fact a sacrifice of this kind may also be praiseworthy. In all three cases, then, it looks as though whatever aesthetic obligations exist have been surpassed. We can then say that acts of aesthetic supererogation exist. These acts must meet the following necessary and sufficient conditions: An act is aesthetically supererogatory if and only if (i*) It is aesthetically optional (neither required nor forbidden from the aesthetic point of view). (ii*) It is aesthetically better than the minimum that is required from the aesthetic point of view. IV. OBJECTIONS AND RESPONSE Before we conclude, it is worth discussing two objections that might be raised against our argument. The first objection is the one we flagged up earlier in this paper. It might be argued that the source of the obligation in all of the cases we have presented as examples of aesthetic obligation is an underlying moral obligation. These cases then may be seen simply as moral obligations that have aesthetic 21 Quoted in Eric Michaud, 'Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency of Sacrifice', October, no. 49 (1989): 33. 22 Ibid. content. If, for example, we think that we have a moral obligation to promote what is valuable, then it seems reasonable to think that the promotion of aesthetic value should be included within this. This allows us to account for the feeling of obligation to save the more aesthetically valuable painting in the burning-museum case. Rather than appealing to the category of the aesthetically required to make sense of this feeling of obligation, we can simply say that this is an example of a moral obligation. Similar explanations may be given for our other two cases. It seems plausible to think that we have moral obligations to give due respect to others. It does not seem unreasonable to think that fulfilling this obligation may in some situations require us to tell good stories about other people. Again, we can explain why this may seem required without making any appeal to a distinctively aesthetic form of obligation. Lastly, the obligation to develop one's aesthetic talents might be thought to follow straightforwardly from the moral obligation to develop one's talents in general. In all three cases it does not seem unreasonable to think that such moral obligations exist. Moreover, explaining the feeling of obligation by appealing to the existence of a moral obligation may be thought to provide a simpler explanation for the phenomena than by appealing to the existence of aesthetic obligations. However, two responses can be given to this worry. First, even if we accept that there is a moral obligation in these cases, we are not prevented from saying that there is also an aesthetic obligation. It may be that our sense of obligation in these cases is over-determined and is being generated by both a moral obligation and an aesthetic obligation. The second response is that appealing to the existence of a moral obligation with aesthetic content in these cases cannot account for all of the negative reactions we experience. Consider the following example. On 22 June 2014, the police in Deeside, Scotland, were contacted after a local rural beauty spot on top of Scolty Hill near Banchory had been vandalized. Local councillor Karen Clark had this to say about the incident: 'It is a horrendous mess and people should be ashamed of themselves for spoiling our beautiful landscape in this selfish way. Scolty Hill is valued by the local community. I am sure they will be upset to see this kind of antisocial behaviour which has such a detrimental impact on the environment.'23 This example clearly involves the violation of a moral prohibition. The vandalism was not only damaging to the local environment but can also be considered to be an assault on a shared local resource. Most importantly for our purposes, the vandalism harms those people who take pleasure in experiencing the hill's beauty. It is tempting to think then that our negative reactions to this can be explained by appealing to the clear moral obligation that has been violated in this case.24 However, our negative reactions to this example do not seem to be exhausted by our ordinary negative moral responses. Those who vandalized Scolty Hill do not only seem to be criticizable from the moral point of view but also from the aesthetic point of view. Of course we would blame those responsible and perhaps also feel moral outrage or resentment towards them. However, we also feel a distinct kind of revulsion at those who could engage in such wilful attacks on beauty. This kind of revulsion seems to be expressed by the chairman of the Banchory Paths Association when he claimed: 'Those who cause such ugliness have very ugly minds.'25 This comment does not simply express moral outrage. There is a severe aesthetic criticism being levelled at the vandals here, which we might call aesthetic disapproval or aesthetic blameworthiness. A similar form of disapproval seems to be present when we consider the three examples of aesthetic obligation considered in Section 2. While we would be unlikely to experience the same force of revulsion in these cases, there does nevertheless appear to be a distinctly aesthetic form of disapproval that we would feel towards those who violate their obligation to protect or appreciate what is 23 'Councillors Outraged after Vandals Target Beauty Spot', Deeside and Piper Herald, 26 June 2014: http://www.deesidepiper.co.uk/news/environment/councillors-outraged-after-vandals-targetbeauty-spot-1-3457684. 24 We thank Alan Millar for helpful discussion about the destrcution of areas of natural beauty. 25 'Councillors', (2014). beautiful, who show no interest in developing their aesthetic talents, and who refuse to tell good stories about people when the situation arises. Concerning someone who refuses to protect or appreciate what is beautiful, we might think that the term 'philistine' could be used to express this form of aesthetic disapproval (though this term is also used by some as an expression of class prejudice). This form of aesthetic disapproval gives a reason to think that a distinctively aesthetic wrong has been committed. This means that even if we accept that many cases of aesthetic obligation will also be morally obligatory, we still have good reason to think of the aesthetically obligatory as a distinct normative category. The second objection that might be raised against our view is that these obligations are only surpassed from the moral standpoint. We might think for example, that if the obligation to tell good stories about others or ourselves is a moral obligation, then the act of going beyond this duty could be an act of moral supererogation. Of course, the obligation is also being surpassed from the aesthetic point of view, so this objection does not show that there are no cases of aesthetic supererogation. Nevertheless, if it were the case that all instances of aesthetic supererogation were also instances of moral supererogation, then the category of the aesthetically supererogatory would appear to be of less philosophical interest. In fact, however,, not all cases of aesthetic supererogation are also cases of moral supererogation. Take, for example, Van Gogh's painful sacrifices of himself and those close to him for the sake of his art. These sacrifices, particularly of those close to him, do not seem especially praiseworthy from the moral point of view. In fact, we might, morally, think that they are even wrong and blameworthy.26 Nevertheless, Van Gogh's sacrifices in pursuit of his artistic goals are aesthetically valuable. They 26 In response to the above example, it might be objected that if the act is morally wrong then it cannot be aesthetically optional, at least if we assume that morality overrides aesthetics. However, accepting this overridingness claim only commits us to claiming that this act is not optional from the all things considered normative point of view. This does not prevent the act from being optional from the point of view of aesthetics. We are grateful to the editors of this journal for pushing for clarification here. also surpassed his duty to develop his artistic talents. This is a case of aesthetic supererogation that does not seem plausible to think of as also being an instance of moral supererogation. The category of the aesthetically supererogatory, then, is not merely a subset of the morally supererogatory. V. CONCLUSION In this paper, we have argued that if aesthetic obligations exist, then we have good reason to think that aesthetic supererogation exists as well. We started by examining the conditions that are needed for the existence of acts of supererogation in a given normative domain. In order for there to be cases of supererogation in a given normative domain, that domain must generate requirements and it must be possible to perform acts that are better (according to the normative domain) than the acts required by that domain. We then argued that there is good reason to think that the domain of aesthetics satisfies both of these conditions. The first reason why this conclusion is philosophically significant is that it adds to our understanding of the nature of aesthetic obligations. Like moral obligations, the act that is best from the aesthetic point of view need not be the act that we are aesthetically required to perform. By pointing out this similarity between moral and aesthetic obligation, our paper also contributes to the study of the similarities and differences between morality and aesthetics. Our conclusion is also significant because of the interesting new research possibilities that it opens up. First, our claim that acts of aesthetic supererogation are possible raises the question of how the problem of the 'good-ought tie-up' might be solved in the aesthetic realm. This is the problem of explaining what the connection between moral reasons and moral requirements might be once we have accepted that acts of moral supererogation exist.27 On the most straightforward way of spelling out this connection, the act that is most strongly supported by moral reasons will be the act that is morally required. This view, however, is incompatible with the existence of acts of moral supererogation, since these will be better supported by moral reasons than the moral requirement that they surpass. The challenge raised by this problem is to find an alternative connection that is capable of make space for supererogation. A potentially fruitful area of research in aesthetics would be to investigate what a plausible solution to this problem might look like in the aesthetic realm.28 The next set of questions raised by our conclusion concerns the agent-based concepts that are often thought to be closely connected to supererogation. Urmson's paper on supererogation sought not only to highlight the need to make room for this category in moral theory but also to provide accounts of moral sainthood and moral heroism. These have also been influential in moral theory, leading to an investigation into the nature of moral sainthood in particular.29 Once we accept the existence of acts of aesthetic supererogation, then a natural next question is whether similar agent-based categories could be developed in the aesthetic realm. Can interesting accounts of aesthetic sainthood and aesthetic heroism be developed? If so, what would such people be like? Would they be the kind of people it would be rational to aspire to be? 27 This name is given in Heyd, Supererogation, 4. For a statement of the problem, see Alfred Archer, 'The Supererogatory and How Not to Accommodate It', Utilitas 28 (2016): 179-188. 28 In a discussion of a different problem, Strandberg suggests that aesthetic reasons may be non-requiring justifying reasons. See Caj Strandberg, 'Aesthetic Internalism and Two Normative Puzzles', Studi di Estetica 44, no. 4 (2016): 23-70. This could perhaps offer a solution to the problem of the 'good-ought tie-up' in aesthetics that mirrors the solution that Horgan and Timmons offer for moral supererogation. See Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons, 'Untying a Knot from the Inside Out: Reflections on the "Paradox" of Supererogation', Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2010): 29-63. 29 See Alfred Archer, 'Saints, Heroes and Moral Necessity', Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77 (2015): 105-24; Archer and Michael Ridge, 'The Heroism Paradox: Another Paradox of Supererogation', Philosophical Studies 172 (2015): 1575-1592; Vanessa Carbonnell, 'What Moral Saints Look Like', Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2009): 371-398; and Susan Wolf, 'Moral Saints', Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 419-439. To our minds, the most significant consequence of our conclusion is that it opens the door for a new line of research into the limits of aesthetic demands. Urmson's paper that highlighted the existence of acts of supererogation generated an extensive and fruitful investigation into the limits of moral demandingness.30 We propose that a similar investigation has the potential to deepen our understanding of aesthetic reasons and aesthetic normativity. Our hope, then, is that our work in this paper serves as groundwork for future research into aesthetic demandingness. Alfred Archer Tilburg Center for Logic, Ethics, and Philosophy of Science, University of Tilburg, PO Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands [email protected] Lauren Ware Division of Law and Philosophy, University of Stirling, A80 Pathfoot Building, Stirling FK9 4LA, United Kingdom [email protected] 30 For some recent contributions to this discussion, see Vanessa Carbonnell, 'Differential Demands', in The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can, ed. Marcel van Ackeren and Michael Kühler (London: Routledge, 2016): 36-51, and Brian McElwee, 'Demandingness Objections in Ethics', Philosophical Quarterly 67 (2017): 84-105. BIBLIOGRAPHY Archer, Alfred. 'Aesthetic Judgements and Motivation.' Inquiry, forthcoming. ––––––. 'Are Acts of Supererogation Always Praiseworthy?' Theoria 82 (2016): 238- 255. ––––––. 'Saints, Heroes and Moral Necessity.' Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 77 (2015): 105-124. ––––––. 'The Supererogatory and How Not to Accommodate It.' Utilitas 28 (2016): 179-188. ––––––, and Michael Ridge. 'The Heroism Paradox: Another Paradox of Supererogation.' Philosophical Studies 172 (2015): 1575-1592. Carbonell, Vanessa. 'Differential Demands.' In The Limits of Moral Obligation: Moral Demandingness and Ought Implies Can, edited by Marcel van Ackeren and Michael Kühler, 36-51. London: Routledge, 2016. ––––––. 'What Moral Saints Look Like.' Canadian Journal of Philosophy 39 (2009): 371- 398. 'Councillors Outraged after Vandals Target Beauty Spot.' Deeside and Piper Herald. 26 June 2014: http://www.deesidepiper.co.uk/news/environment/councillorsoutraged-after-vandals-target-beauty-spot-1-3457684. Darwall, Stephen. 'Bipolar Obligation.' In Morality, Authority, and Law: Essays in Second-Personal Ethics I, 20-39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Dorsey, Dale. 'The Supererogatory, and How to Accommodate It.' Utilitas 25 (2013): 355-382. Eaton, Marcia Muelder. 'Aesthetic Obligations.' Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (2008): 1-9. Ferry, Michael. 'Does Morality Demand Our Very Best? Moral Prescriptions and the Line of Duty.' Philosophical Studies 165 (2013): 573-589. Foot, Philippa. Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics in Moral Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Gani, Aisha, and Kareem Shaheen. 'Journalist Ruqia Hassan Murdered by Isis after Writing on Life in Raqqa.' Guardian. 6 January 2016: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/05/journalist-ruqia-hassankilled-isis-raqqa-syria. Gaut, Berys. Art, Emotion and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Hampshire, Stuart. 'Logic and Appreciation.' In Aesthetics and Language, edited by William Elton, 161-169. Oxford: Blackwell, 1954. Heyd, David. Supererogation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Horgan, Terry, and Mark Timmons. 'Untying a Knot from the Inside Out: Reflections on the "Paradox" of Supererogation.' Social Philosophy and Policy 27 (2010): 29-63. Hume, David. 'Of the Standard of Taste.' In Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, vol. 1, 266-284. London: Longmans, 1875. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgement. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. McNamara, Paul. 'Supererogation, Inside and Out: Toward an Adequate Scheme for Common-Sense Morality.' In Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics, edited by Mark Timmons, vol. 1, 202-235. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. McElwee, Brian. 'Demandingness Objections in Ethics.' Philosophical Quarterly 67 (2017): 84-105. ––––––. 'Supererogation across Normative Domains.' Australasian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming. Mellema, Gregory. Beyond the Call of Duty: Supererogation, Obligation and Offence. New York: State University of New York Press, 1991. Michaud, Eric. 'Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency of Sacrifice.' October, no. 49 (1989): 25-39. Mill, John Stewart. On Liberty and Utilitarianism. New York: Bantam Books, 1993. Montague, Phillip. 'Acts, Agents, and Supererogation.' American Philosophical Quarterly 26 (1989): 100-111. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Press, Howard. 'Aesthetic Obligation.' Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 522-530. Ross, Stephanie. 'Humean Critics: Real or Ideal?' British Journal of Aesthetics 48 (2008): 20-28. Rowley, Hazel. 'Going Private: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Then and Now.' The Monthly, December 2008: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2008/december/1277356198/hazelrowley/going-private. Strandberg, Caj. 'Aesthetic Internalism and Two Normative Puzzles.' Studi di Estetica 44, no. 4 (2016): 23-70. Urmson, J. O. 'Saints and Heroes.' In Moral Concepts, edited by Joel Feinberg, 60-73. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969. Wolf, Susan. 'Moral Saints.' Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 419-439.

Sobre a Alteridade e a Exclusão no Trabalho Marcio Luiz Miotto ∗ "E eu para ser coerente Estou preso à incoerência que à vida está latente" Victor Tartas A alteridade entre a exterioridade, o reconhecimento e o perigo. [p. 160] O "Homem" moderno, conforme desenvolve Michel Foucault em As Palavras e as Coisas (1966/1992), congura-se como uma forma precária na qual, para garantir sua existência, constitui sua nitude sempre em relação com uma alteridade que serve ao mesmo tempo como fundamento e limite exterior. Por exemplo, o homem é um ser que vive segundo a Biologia, trabalha segundo a Economia e fala segundo as teorias da linguagem, mas ao mesmo tempo ele não é sujeito de sua vida biológica, de suas formas linguísticas e dos modos de produção que se desenvolvem independentemente de um fundamento antropológico. Em outras palavras, na época moderna as ciências empíricas colocam o homem diante de uma exterioridade irredutível, isto é, sob um modo que não o garante como centro da existência ou detentor de regras que poderiam garantir acesso ao Ser. Ou ainda: se na modernidade o Homem arroga para si o papel de sujeito do conhecimento, ele o faz numa época na qual ele também se dispôs ao estatuto de estar diante do conhecimento e ser objeto. As Ciências Humanas são, nisso, exemplares, pois o Homem, dado como fundamento, encontra-se sempre igualmente fundado em meio às determinações das coisas empíricas. ∗MIOTTO, M. Sobre a alteridade e a exclusão no trabalho. Acheronta  Revista de Psicoanálisis y Cultura, no 18, Diciembre 2003 (p. 160-163). https://www.acheronta.org/ . A presente versão foi revisada pelo autor e modicada com alguns acréscimos. 1 2 Eis, em linhas bem gerais, as reduplicações antropológicas da época moderna, segundo Foucault. Se ele é sujeito, a possibilidade de seu Cogito permanece assombrada pela exterioridade de um impensado, sob o perpétuo desao de uma consciência sintética a explicitar conteúdos implícitos; quando recua de um nível empírico em busca de um nível originário mais fundamental, o saber depara-se novamente com a necessidade de um novo recuo ainda mais originário, que prometerá por sua vez um outro alcance originário e assim por diante; nalmente, os saberes antropológicos atribuem a certas empiricidades um valor transcendental, nessa contraditória dimensão de ser empírico-transcendental. O saber humano retira suas potências do que circunda os direitos do próprio saber humano como num limite exterior. Foucault desenvolve de vários modos diferentes as implicações precárias da forma moderna frente às guras de alteridade, formação histórica que surge a partir do nal do século XVIII e torna possível um saber sobre o Homem. Já no primeiro prefácio à História da Loucura (1961/1999), o autor armava que seguir rumo a essa dimensão da alteridade faria a razão ocidental medir-se em sua própria desmedida. No gesto de isolarmos nosso vizinho, esforçamo-nos por nos convencer de nosso próprio bom senso, eis a fórmula que Foucault adianta desde a epígrafe retirada de Dostoievski. Isso signica dizer que o gesto detectável historicamente de afastar o que será considerado desmedida acaba também por nos denir, mostrando nisso que a interrogação sobre os limites de uma cultura pode ser mais importante do que as costumeiras investigações sobre sua identidade: Poder-se-ia fazer uma história dos limites desses gestos obscuros, necessariamente esquecidos logo que concluídos, pelos quais uma cultura rejeita alguma coisa que será para ela o Exterior; e, ao longo de sua história, esse vazio escavado, esse espaço branco pelo qual ela se isola a designa tanto quanto seus valores. (1961/1999: 142) Isto é, medindo-se em sua desmedida e elegendo o que lhe será exterior (congurando nesses gestos sua própria interioridade), reitera-se a idéia esboçada acima, segundo a qual a modernidade é uma curiosa época na qual o Homem adquire existência e estatuto por meio da constituição de alteridades e exterioridades1. Exterioridades essas que serão tudo aquilo 1 Não mais sendo denido como nito em relação ao Innito, como no século XVII, agora o homem passará a uma nitude constituinte: conforme mencionado, ao mesmo tempo em que é sujeito de conhecimento, o homem também está exposto ao acontecimento. 3 que circunda o homem e que o dene, como num giro: a loucura, o inconsciente, sua vida, seu trabalho, sua linguagem, sua história, sua cultura... Tais exterioridades permitem múltiplas modulações conceituais e uma oscilação constante entre o estatuto de sujeito e objeto, tornando comuns inúmeros pares tais como: a consciência e a alienação, a liberdade e o determinismo, a animalidade e a humanidade, o naturalismo e o humanismo, a ignorância e o desvelamento de verdades terminais etc., inúmeras guras do caráter dúbio do homem, simultaneamente sujeito e objeto. Além desse tema da alteridade como jogo histórico de exterioridade, despontam outros. Por exemplo, Foucault desenvolve no último capítulo de História da Loucura (1961/1995) e na segunda parte de Doença Mental e Psicologia (1962/1984) o tema do reconhecimento: isto é, se uma cultura acaba por se designar a partir do que ela relega ao papel de Outro ou Exterior, também faz parte de tais operações considerar isso que se colocou à distância o louco que recuso, o oriental que não sou, o Outro enm como algo que não pode ser reconhecido, ou ainda, como algo que apenas poderia ser considerado da ordem da negatividade ou do desvio. Ignora-se o reconhecimento de que o gesto de afastar historicamente delimitável tem suas dimensões positivas e reais. Tudo se passa como se o gesto de distanciamento se zesse pelo outro: o outro foge à norma, não é como os outros. Ele detém os prexos do afastamento e da negação: o a (como em anormal), o dis (disfuncional) etc.. São igualmente exemplares, aí, os casos da Psiquiatria e da Psicologia. O que elas seriam incapazes de reconhecer? Tratar-se-ia de uma "familiaridade insidiosa" de uma "verdade comum" (1961/1995:512). Isto é, quando as decisões históricas de uma cultura conduzem a escolhas sobre o que será doravante considerado como o outro, uma cultura acaba, por esse mesmo gesto de distanciamento, denindo a si própria. Denindo-se, ela por assim dizer não pode reconhecer a verdade comum que compartilha com essa alteridade no momento instaurador do gesto de afastamento. Ela não pode reconhecer a verdade de que uma cultura por assim dizer dene a si própria na instauração de seus limites, por via do que acusará como sendo doravante o outro. Mantendo-nos ainda no exemplo das relações entre a razão e a loucura, na fórmula de Foucault a razão seria como espécie de luz que dissipa as sombras da loucura. Mas sob essa fórmula, a luz da razão que ilumina a loucura só se torna possível a partir de determinadas escolhas históricas que conduziram à própria constituição e separação entre o que veio a ser considerado luz e sombra. Escolhas nas quais os dois termos aparecem, apenas num segundo momento, como constituídos, antagônicos e exteriores. É totalmente diversa a relação entre razão e loucura caso se 4 considerem dois momentos diferentes de épocas com compromissos diversos -, tais como a posição de Descartes ou o elogio de Hegel a Pinel, por exemplo. São regimes diversos de recusa, instaurando relações diversas entre luz e sombras, razão e loucura, Mesmo e Outro. Em suma, a razão, ao denir a loucura, acaba denindo a si própria. Ou, em outros termos, a luz apenas se dene como luz propriamente dita e como luminosa a partir do momento em que estabelece e afasta o que será a escuridão que, daí por diante, caberá a ela dissipar. Finalmente, além dos dois temas acima (o da exterioridade e o do não-reconhecimento), poderia-se caracterizar os modos modernos de instaurar o Outro, a alteridade, como uma espécie de estranheza detentora de perigos insidiosos, que deveria ser de algum modo desarmada enquanto alteridade e apaziguada, subsumida sob categorias familiares à cultura. Voltando à imagem empregada na epígrafe de Foucault sobre Dostoievski, afastando meu vizinho convenço-me de meu próprio bom senso; ao mesmo tempo, o vizinho afastado permanece ali, diante de mim, mas ele não pode permanecer incólume. Essa fórmula da alteridade como perigo insidioso poderia ser encontrada, por exemplo, em textos como o de Peter Pal Pelbart (2002), que ilustram a grande presença de nômades no centro imperial chinês durante a construção da Muralha da China. De um lado a forticação contra a presença de possíveis ameaças exteriores; de outro, a presença insistente, e difícil de denir, de nômades junto à muralha, permanecendo ali sem maiores exigências de troca. Tais nômades não demonstravam a intenção de tomar o palácio imperial ou fazer qualquer invasão; em seu silêncio, enquanto estavam próximos à cidade, não tinham nenhum esforço de conhecer os costumes dos chineses, ao mesmo tempo em que tinham ummodo de vida totalmente outro, irredutível. Modo de vida que se imprime numa estranheza, numa esquisitice frente ao Império chinês, precisamente por essa presença insistir e não se oferecer a qualquer redução ou 'interação'. A Muralha não serviria para evitar a presença de bárbaros? Como, então, admitir diante de sua própria construção a existência de bárbaros que insistem em permanecer ali sem qualquer troca, permanecendo como Outros à presença imperial? Enm, tudo se passa como se, frente ao território efetivo do Império, aparecesse não apenas divisões materiais. Na presença do nômade, aparece como que um território subjetivo totalmente estranho às territorialidades costumeiras. Utilizando esse exemplo para ilustrar as relações modernas, Pelbart pretende comparar esse Império com a própria atualidade do Capitalismo em geral especialmente sob as novas tecnologias industriais e informáticas e a constituição do homem atual em seus territórios subjetivos, de modo que pergunta: 5 [p. 161] Como pode o Império lidar com um território subjetivo de tal natureza? Mas como pode ele deixar de lidar precisamente com isso? Por mais que um Imperador tenha muralhas concretas a construir, Império algum pode car indiferente a essa dimensão subjetiva sobre a qual ele se assenta primordialmente, sob pena de esfacelar-se o que é ainda mais verdadeiro nas condições de hoje. (PELBART, 2002) Agrupando os três fatores realçados acima, vê-se a questão: mais do que muralhas materiais, frente às formas exteriores e insidiosas de alteridade ainda mais se estiverem presentes e próximas -, um Império deve agir. Isso que se oferece como Outro não pode permanecer incólume, deixado por si só, sem alguma subsunção ao Mesmo com seus aparatos de captura. O outro que, no gesto de apontar o dedo não reconheço ser, não pode permanecer assim, enquanto outro e nessa presença sobranceira. No caso, o exemplo de Pelbart pretende mostrar que, sob determinadas formas culturais (como a nossa), não estão em jogo apenas divisões ou capturas materiais, mas sim questões compatíveis com uma verdadeira captura de modos imateriais e subjetivos, tais como o desejo ou os modos de ver e sentir. Em suma: em jogo está, por assim dizer, a captura das próprias formas de vida. Vê-se bem como o tema da estranheza irredutível e sua necessidade de captura ou cooptação se reuniria, assim, com os dois outros temas acima sobre o homem moderno. Do mesmo modo que para Foucault é preciso que o homem ocidental, para se constituir, eleja uma alteridade que precisa ser afastada e não reconhecida, o exemplo de Pelbart mostra que essa alteridade também precisa ser de algum modo igualmente reduzida, dominada, anexada, subsumida, para não oferecer perigo ou não se prestar sob suas qualidades de estranheza. Tudo se passa como se o Homem moderno estivesse encravado nessa ambiguidade, congurando a si próprio entre o afastamento do que lhe será o outro e a anexação apaziguadora de qualquer coisa que se ofereça como alteridade. O ponto a chamar a atenção no presente trabalho é que tais mecanismos inclusive se complexicaram, ultrapassando as usuais formas modernas e suas clássicas separações entre a consciência e o inconsciente, a liberdade e o determinismo, a opressão e a libertação e tantas outras. As divisões modernas tratavam, por exemplo, de separar os temas da alienação opressora e, diante dela, a importância da tomada de consciência que se transformaria em ação. Para Pelbart, mais do que se situar nessas simples categorias de divisão, nosso Império atual, o Capital, "não só penetra nas esferas as mais innitesimais da existência, mas também as mobiliza, ele as põe para trabalhar, ele as explora e amplia" (Pelbart, 2002). O capitalismo, 6 mais do que manipular ou criar diferenças de classes, ou por exemplo sob as categorias modernas da Consciência e da Alienação, produz subjetividade, modos de vida, disposições possíveis de sujeito para além do clássico tema de um Sujeito que, liberando-se de suas determinações, poderia se considerar livre dos grilhões da alienação. Para além desse jogo de cena entre oposições modernas, especialmente nos últimos tempos seria importante delimitar as questões de fundo condicionantes dessas próprias oposições. Eis a questão: para além de libertar a consciência contra a alienação, colocaria-se o próprio problema do diagnóstico de como esses dois pares se dispuseram uns diante dos outros. Jogando com o termo Império, Pelbart pretende mostrar que em nossa condição o próprio Império, por assim dizer, não opera mais segundo certa rigidez moderna, pois ele próprio se nomadizou. Nossas sociedades em rede implicariam não mais muralhas duras, mas uma mobilidade constante, uma espécie de mecanismo de captura no qual todo e qualquer indivíduo, não importando sua diferença, precisa ser de algum modo integrado e ter seus padrões subjetivos não mais relegados à estranheza, mesmo que, sob certo sentido, permaneçam considerados estranhos. Ou, em outras palavras, dizer que o capitalismo se nomadizou signica dizer que ele trouxe o nômade para dentro das cercas do Império, mantendo-o em certo sentido como nômade, não porque reconheceu uma diferença, mas porque alargou o campo normativo para lidar com a própria diferença (tornada então uma espécie de falsa diferença). O trabalho Sob esse contexto, um dos objetos mais privilegiados nas mudanças das últimas décadas nesse jogo entre o Mesmo e o Outro, em nossa cultura, é a questão do trabalho. Sob formas mais antigas, imagens como as do chão de fábrica, das divisórias e divisões do trabalho, da observação pelo mestre de obras ou do treinamento serial para o ofício nos são ainda familiares. Mas muita coisa mudou. As formas atuais do trabalho não requerem mais apenas o corpo de um trabalhador disciplinado. Em jogo gura, há vários anos, também sua própria alma, isto é, sua subjetividade inteira, mobilizada e posta em ação para além da simples ordenação dos espaços para docilizar e adestrar os corpos. Tornaram-se famosas as imagens empregadas por Foucault em Vigiar e Punir, nas quais o homem moderno se tornava disciplinado por via do adestramento dos corpos dóceis em instituições como as escolas, os quartéis e as fábricas. Mas, conforme declaravou depois Deleuze (1992), nas sociedades contemporâneas ao invés da disciplina é o controle que 7 entra em voga. No caso do trabalho, por exemplo, ao invés do perito formado numa rígida educação e pronto para os projetos invariáveis de toda uma vida, exige-se agora a formação continuada e pessoas questionadoras e críticas, num mundo de inúmeras utuações. Toda uma nova linguagem, nos últimos anos, desenvolveu-se a respeito de como deve ser o trabalhador. Termos como criatividade, dinamismo, competência interpessoal, inovação, treinamento e qualicação se tornam cada vez mais corriqueiros, mostrando nos últimos anos uma passagem terminológica cuja importância não é menor: nas últimas décadas o homem deixou de ser um recurso humano  velho jargão dos departamentos de pessoal, mas repetindo precisamente as divisões modernas, entre a humanidade e o recurso para tornar-se uma pessoa que deve ser gerida em todos os aspectos  especialmente subjetivos de sua vida. Mais do que um recurso ao mesmo tempo objeticado (pois fruto de relações de trabalho) e humano (pois livre), tem-se daqui por diante, no termo Gestão de Pessoas, uma pessoa que deve ser  para além da separação entre corpo e alma, entre o que ela é e o que faz  integralmente comprometida com o trabalho. Mais ainda: para além de trabalhadores ou empregados, deve-se produzir colaboradores. Nota-se como essa gestão da própria vida, para além do simples recurso humano, caminha passo a passo com aquilo que Pelbart chamava de nomadização do Império, pois o Império não permanece mais sob a rigidez de uma muralha  como nas velhas analogias das repartições xas dos escritórios e das linhas de montagem junto ao maquinário pesado do chão de fábrica -, mas sim num movimento constante de captura imaterial de qualquer diferença colaborável. Colaborar não é apenas agir apenas em conformidade a ns, mas é adotar por princípio de conduta os mesmos da empresa, imperativo de ação muito mais além do que o simples empréstimo da força de trabalho ao patrão. Diante do exposto acima, a novidade é a conguração de um movimento de por assim dizer - captura, que busca absorver constantemente as esferas da exterioridade, do reconhecimento e da estranheza. Mais do que perigo insidioso, a alteridade se torna cada vez mais moeda de troca. Ser outro pode signicar a possibilidade de uma contribuição inusitada ao trabalho. Ou ao menos, ocorrem inúmeras injunções para transformar toda e qualquer produção singular numa espécie de "exotismo ético de consumo descartável" (PELBART, 2002), numa proliferação de exotismos que, se algumas décadas atrás pertencia ao que deveria ser afastado em nome do normal mundo do trabalho, agora deve constituí-lo. No trabalho das sociedades de controle, essa gura da alteridade passa a ter um papel especial. Se há pouco importava ainda a estabilidade nas 8 relações, doravante, nas empresas, são o diferencial e a instabilidade os principais: o trabalhador massicado dá lugar ao indivíduo inovador. Ao invés de uma estrutura rígida, buscar-se-á o perl maleável. Em lugar de decisões heterônomas vindas de uma estrutura piramidal e burocrática, cada vez mais se favorece a autonomia horizontal de decisões. Enm, em lugar do trabalhador ser alguém separado das decisões da empresa, coisicado ou tornado estranho a si  isto é, dos três modos, alienado2, buscar-se-á o indivíduo que é sociável, integrável aos demais, maleável, dinâmico, espontâneo e livre. Curiosa mutação: do indivíduo alienado ao trabalho que o divide entre o que tem de recurso e de humano, o novo mundo do trabalho instaurou um indivíduo chamado de livre porque se tornou uma pessoa integralmente gerida, a conformidade transitória a ns transformada numa delidade permanente a princípios heterônomos. Dado que daqui por diante não se considera como produto apenas o que é material, mas também as imaterialidades da subjetividade e da informação, nessa nova economia de produtos subjetivos vale notar como os bolsões eventuais das populações excluídas também adquirem uma curiosa faceta. No mesmo movimento em que o dito capitalismo pós-industrial das tecnologias informáticas busca capturar e massicar toda e qualquer diferença, ele também não deixa de produzir a existência de numerosos bolsões de minorias, isto é, de pessoas que não tem acesso pleno (ou não desejam possuir, ou oscilam entre o acesso e sua ausência) aos modos de subjetividade massicados. Além disso, em certo sentido essas minorias podem se congurar facilmente  e com frequência se conguram  em maiorias, de certo modo alheias ao movimento do Império. A ocorrência de inúmeros guetos de pobres nos capitalismos de periferia, acessando o consumo de forma modular ou intermitente e mantidos como tais como reserva de mercado, é apenas o exemplo mais visível dessa dubiedade entre capturar, de um lado, e excluir de outro. Essa dubiedade seria fundamental, como arma Guattari (1986:26)3, pois uma vez que 'minorias' podem se tornar facilmente maiorias, isso envolve questões de territorialidades subjetivas capazes de interferir em verdadeiras mudanças sociais. Em consonância com esse fator das minorias alheias e irredutíveis ao Império, mas que não obstante permanecem como uma espécie de reserva de diferença e correm o risco de ser capturadas por ele, constam outros 2 Como exemplica, por ex., Guerreiro Ramos (1983:56), explicando os vários signicados do tema da alienação 3 "(...) uma mudança social a nível macropolítico, macrossocial, diz respeito também à questão da produção da subjetividade, o que deverá ser levado em conta pelos movimentos de emancipação. Essas questões, que pareciam ser marginais (...), com o nascimento de imensas minorias que, juntas, constituem a maioria da população do planeta, tornam-se questões fundamentais" 9 exemplos correlatos às mudanças no mundo do trabalho. Vimos acima que noções que poderiam ser encaradas como transformadoras ou anunciadoras de outros modo de vida  tais como liberdade, criatividade, espontaneidade, inovação  foram reconguradas e perfeitamente enquadradas no novo mundo do trabalho do capitalismo pós-industrial. Do mesmo modo, é importante notar como os movimentos emancipatórios dos guetos também foram recongurados. Por exemplo, da mesma forma que um conjunto de rap de um presídio pode encarnar a voz e a bandeira de determinados setores marginalizados, isto é, congurar uma voz outra para motivar uma transformação social, esse mesmo modo de expressão pode facilmente ser capturado como mero artefato exótico de apreciação popular, perfeitamente inserido no que se chamava de indústria cultural. Tudo se passa como se, conceitos ou motivos anteriormente existentes para propósitos emancipatórios, precisassem de uma transformação para continuarem existindo enquanto tais, mas tornados então capturados e sem perigo. Regulados por novos campos valorativos, tais conceitos seriam agora delimitados de um modo que não contestem mais as atribuições do capital. Em suma: do mesmo modo que no campo da exclusão as minorias podem ser capturadas sob os territórios subjetivos do Império, conceitos considerados inicialmente emancipadores podem também, no mundo do trabalho, ser utilizados sob propósitos totalmente diferentes dos iniciais. [p. 162] Têm-se, portanto, um duplo movimento: 1) o de uma produção de subjetividade que se depara cada vez mais com grandes minorias não capturadas, e 2) o movimento de captura a buscar uma inclusão da alteridade, porém num certo movimento de reterritorialização dessa alteridade destituindo-a de qualquer caráter de diferença. Tudo aquilo que é Outro passa, por um processo de adequação, a ser incluído no "sistema de signicação dominante", conforme declarava Guattari (1986: 27). Se em outros tempos noções como a de diferencial e criatividade poderiam ser condenáveis, doravante elas se tornam valorizadas e aceitas, porém sob limites bastante estreitos que não ocasionem maior mudança do que a desejavelmente ditada. Trata-se de um procedimento quimérico, no qual signicações que poderiam "se estender (...) numa sociedade de outro tipo" acabam dando numa sociedade de mesmo tipo. Tais signicações, anteriormente ligadas à emancipação dos homens, acabam se subjugando à reintegração de todo signicado numa poderosa fábrica de subjetividade serializada, produtora destes homens que somos, reduzidos à condição de suporte de valor e isso até (e sobretudo) quando ocupamos os lugares mais pres10 tigiados na hierarquia dos valores. (GUATTARI & ROLNIK, 1986:12) Acompanhando determinada série de reexões de Deleuze sobre Foucault4, poderia-se comentar sobre várias mutações recentes que implicam no advento do chamado Império (palavra de Pelbart remontada às considerações de Antonio Negri). Sob tais mutações, tem-se um novo tipo de Trabalho, no qual a fábrica cede lugar à empresa, a heteronomia à autonomia, as estruturas hierárquicas piramidais às estruturas horizontalizadas etc.. A questão da alteridade excluída, tão cara ao século XX, de repente se torna imperativa para um movimento de inclusão, no qual a diferença seria valorizada de um outro modo: ao invés de os modos de subjetividade marginais pertencerem a um âmbito de exterioridade, de ausência de reconhecimento e de estranheza, cada vez mais eles são conduzidos a seus opostos a inclusão, o reconhecimento e a familiaridade. Assim postos, modos diversos de subjetividade não ocasionam mais ameaça alguma. Ameaça no sentido dado por Guattari, segundo o qual os territórios subjetivos do louco, da criança, do marginal e da sociedade arcaica poderiam signicar em outros tempos por seu perigo ou insidiosidade carregados um curto-circuito, uma captura impossível. A alteridade trazia consigo os riscos da criação de uma sociedade de outro tipo, de um outro mundo, novo e inacessível ao antigo, como faziam ver os nômades citados por Pelbart. Trocando em miúdos, a partir dos termos acima, talvez seria possível dizer: por sob a contituição da forma-homem do mundo moderno, e por sob sua complexicação dentro das novas capturas subjetivas instauradas nos últimos anos, está sempre em jogo o cultivo de novos territórios subjetivos, irredutíveis às capturas habituais. A questão sobre esses novos territórios ou a luta sobre eles poderia dizer respeito não mais ao velho tema das utopias impossíveis, mas no problema da constituição de outros espaços de digamos autonomia e constituição efetiva. Bibliograa DELEUZE, G. Sobre a Morte do Homem e o Super-Homem In Foucault. São Paulo, Brasiliense, 1988. DELEUZE, G. Post-scriptum Sobre as Sociedades de Controle In Conversações: 1972-1990 . Rio de Janeiro: Ed. 34, 1992. 4 Já vimos o exemplo no qual a sociedade disciplinar cede lugar a uma sociedade de controle, em Sobre as Sociedades de Controle (Deleuze, 1988); há, também, o argumento do saber moderno deparado com a questão da morte do Homem, em Sobre a Morte do Homem e o Super-homem (ibid.). 11 FOUCAULT, M. História da Loucura (1961/1972). São Paulo, Perspectiva, 1995. FOUCAULT, M. Doença Mental e Psicologia(1962). RJ, Tempo Universitário, 1984. FOUCAULT, M. As Palavras e as Coisas (1966). São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 1992. FOUCAULT, M. Prefácio (Folie et Déraison) (1961) In Michel Foucault Problematização do Sujeito: Psicologia, Psiquiatria e Psicanálise (Ditos e Escritos I). Rio de Janeiro, Forense Universitária, 1999. [p. 163] GUATTARI, F.; ROLNIK, S. Micropolítica cartograas do desejo. Petrópolis, Vozes, 1986. PELBART, Peter Paul. Trópico Poder sobre a vida, potência da vida. Artigo publicado em 2002 pela revista francesa 'Multitudes' no 9 e reproduzido no arquivo da 'lista de discussão O Estrangeiro' http://br.groups.yahoo.com/group/estrangeiro/ RAMOS, Guerreiro. Administração e Contexto Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro, ed. FGV, 1983.

TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXVIII / 2016 / 4 ////// studie / article /////////////////////////////////////////// ANDREAS OSIANDER V DĚJINÁCH FILOSOFIE, VĚDY A FILOSOFII VĚDY Abstrakt: Článek pojednává o roli luteránského teologa Andrease Osiandera st. v dějinách fi losofi e, vědy a ve fi losofi i vědy. V chronologickém sledu je v tomto kontextu věnována pozornost několika tématům. Nejprve se článek zabývá humanistickými základy Osianderova myšlení a jeho zpracováním tradice prisca sapientia v teologii, především vlivem křesťanské kabaly v návaznosti na Giovanniho Pika della Mirandolu, konkrétně v biblické exegesi. Pozornost je dále věnována především Osianderově edici knihy O obězích nebeských sfér Mikuláše Koperníka. V kontextu fi losofi e vědy je pak rozebírána Osianderova předmluva ke Koperníkovi, posuzována jeho role ve sporu mezi instrumentalismem a realismem ve vědě a zdůvodněn anachronismus této extrapolace. Je zmíněna také Osianderova edice matematického díla Girolama Cardana. Následně je analyzována role novoplatonismu v Osianderově teologii, která se blíží paracelsiánskému přístupu, i když vliv jak paracelsismu tak novoplatonismu je zhodnocen jako velmi obecný. Klíčová slova: Andreas Osiander; renesanční fi losofi e; Girolamo Cardano; Mikuláš Koperník; heliocentrismus; instrumentalismus Andreas Osiander in the History of Philosophy, Science, and Philosophy of Science Abstract: Th e article deals with the position of Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander sen. in the history of philosophy, history of science and philosophy of science. It works on humanistic foundation of Osiander's thought and his elaboration of the tradition of the antient wisdom and Christian cabbala of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola in particular in the biblical exegesis. Th e article deals with Osiander's edition of Nicolaus Copernicus' book De revolutionibus orbium caelestium as well and with his edition of the mathematical work of Girolamo Cardano. In the context of philosophy of science Osiander's foreword to Copernicus is analyzed and its role in the controversy between instrumentalism and realism is assessed. Osiander's instrumentalism is viewed as an anachronism. Finally, the infl uence of Neoplatonism and Paracelsism in Osiander's theology is analyzed and judged as too general. Keywords: Andreas Osiander; Renaissance philosophy; Girolamo Cardano; Nicolaus Copernicus; Helicentrism; Instrumentalism TOMÁŠ NEJESCHLEBA Katedra fi losofi e, Centrum pro práci s renesančními texty, Filosofi cká fakulta UP Olomouc, Křížkovského 12, 771 81 Olomouc email / [email protected] 406 Tomáš Nejeschleba Andreas Osiander nepatří mezi známé postavy dějin fi losofi e, a pokud je v nich zmíněn, tak pouze v souvislosti s dějinami vědy, přičemž jeho hodnocení je často spíše negativní. Vždyť on byl tím „nevědomým a drzým oslem", který napsal předmluvu k dílu Mikuláše Koperníka O obězích nebeských sfér a vpašoval ji do prvního vydání bez vědomí autora s cílem, „aby v této knize i ostatní oslové našli svůj plevel a bodláčí a nemuseli se postit."1 Takto nevybíravě častuje Osiandera ve svém dialogu Večeře na Popeleční středu Giordano Bruno, který ještě neznal pravou identitu anonymního autora dané předmluvy, jež byla odhalena až Johannesem Keplerem. I díky Brunovi se pak jako červená nit táhne dějinami vědy a dějinami fi losofi e dehonestace Andrease Osiandera jako nepřítele moderní vědy a vědecké revoluce. Ve dvacátém století se však objevily interpretace, které z pozice dějin vědy a fi losofi e vědy Osianderův přístup rehabilitují.2 Zároveň jsou vydávány jeho teologické spisy spolu s korespondencí,3 což umožňuje vytvořit plastický obraz odsuzovaného autora.4 Cílem tohoto článku je v návaznosti na moderní literaturu a prameny představit Andrease Osiandera jako svébytného myslitele poloviny šestnáctého století, jehož význam nelze redukovat pouze na autorství krátké předmluvy ke Koperníkovu dílu. I tak však v centru této studie bude stát právě jeho přístup ke Koperníkovi. Je jím totiž naznačen spor mezi realismem a instrumentalismem, jenž patří mezi klíčová témata fi losofi e vědy ve dvacátém století. Osiander je přitom považován za předsta1 Giordano BRUNO, Dialogy. Praha: Academia 2008, s. 66–67. 2 Mark GRAUBARD, „Andreas Osiander: Lover of Science or Appeaser of Its Enemies." Science Education, roč. 48, 1964, č. 2, s. 168–187. 3 Deset svazků Andreas OSIANDER d. Ä., Gesamtausgabe, ed. Gerhard Müller – Gottfried Seebass, vol. 1–10. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn 1975–1997. 4 Stručné biografi cké informace včetně výběrové bibliografi e srv. Wilhelm KÜHLMANN et al., Die Deutschen Humanisten. Dokumente zur Überlieferung der Antiken und Mittelalterlichen Literatur in der Frühen Neuzeit. Abteilung I: Die Kurpfalz; Bd. III: Jacob Micyllus, Johannes Posthius, Johannes Opsopoeus und Abraham Scultetus. Turnhout: Brepols 2010, s. 451–452. Podrobné monografi e, zabývající se Osianderem především jako teologem, vytvořili Emanuel HIRSCH, Die Th eologie des Andreas Osiander und ihre Geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1919; Gottfried SEEBASS, Das Reformatorische Werk des Andreas Osiander. Norimberk: Verein für Bayerische Kirchengeschichte 1967. Soupis Osianderových tisků viz Gottfried SEEBASS, Bibliographia Osiandrica. Bibliographie der Gedruckten Schrift en Andreas Osianders d. Ä. (1496–1552). Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf 1971. Tato studie je výsledkem badatelské činnosti podporované Grantovou agenturou České republiky v rámci grantu GA ČR 14-37038G „Mezi renesancí a barokem: Filosofi e a vědění v českých zemích a jejich širší evropský kontext". 407 Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy vitele či dokonce zakladatele instrumentalismu,5 ať již je tento haněn (např. pozdní Karl Raymund Popper)6 nebo vychvalován (např. Paul Feyerabend).7 Humanistické základy O mládí Andrease Osiandera,8 narozeného v bavorském Gunzenhausenu (19. prosince 1498) nemáme žádných zpráv. Známo je až datum 9. června 1515, kdy se nechal zapsat na univerzitu v Ingostadtu jako klerik eichstättské diecéze. Na bavorské univerzitě, založené v roce 1472, se vyučovalo podle tradičního scholastického curricula, zároveň se však škola mohla pochlubit slavnými jmény z okruhu německých humanistů. Svou stopu zde zanechal humanistický básník Conrad Celtis (1459–1508), který v Ingolstadtu působil mezi lety 1492–1497 a jehož ingolstadtská inaugurační řeč patří mezi klíčové texty humanismu v Německu.9 Na Andrease Osiandera, který přišel na univerzitu až téměř dvě desetiletí let po Celtisově odchodu do Vídně, měli však přímý vliv až tzv. bibličtí humanisté, kteří transformovali humanistický princip ad fontes na biblická studia. Byl to jednak Johannes Böschenstein (1472–1540), profesor hebrejštiny a matematiky, a později snad také slavný německý hebraista Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522). Z dochované korespondence vyplývá, že Böschenstein na mladého Andrease zapůsobil nejvíce. Osiander se po jeho vzoru velmi záhy nadchl pro studium matematiky a biblických jazyků a osvojil si principy humanistické exegeze klasických textů. Na tradičně uspořádané curriculum artistické fakulty však postupně rezignoval a svá univerzitní studia nedokončil, respektive nebyl na univerzitě promován, nejenže zřejmě nedokončil studia teologie, ale dokonce ani 5 K Osianderovi jako historickému zdroji instrumentalismu srv. Gad FREUDENTAL, „,Instrumentalism' and ,Realism' as Categories in the History of Astronomy: Duhem vs. Popper, Maimonides vs. Gersonides." In: HEIDELBERGER, M. – SCHIEMANN, G. (eds.), Th e Signifi cance of the Hypothetical in the Natural Sciences. Berlín – New York: De Gruyter 2009, s. 269–294. 6 Karl R. POPPER, „Th ree Views Concerning Human Knowledge." In: POPPER, K. R., Conjectures and Refutations: Th e Growth of Scientifi c Knowledge. Londýn: Routledge 1965, s. 97–119. Kritiku instrumentalismu představuje Ernest NAGEL, Th e Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientifi c Explanation. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World 1961. 7 Paul K. FEYERABEND, „On the Limited Validity of Methodological Rules." In: FEYERABEND, P. K., Knowledge, Science and Relativism. Cambridge – New York: Cambridge University Press 1999, s. 137–180. 8 Moderní genealogická bádání ukázala, že jméno Osiander nevzniklo jako humanistická odvozenina od původního německého „Hossmann", srv. Georg LENCKNER, „Name Und Herkunft Andreas Osianders." Württembergisch Franken, roč. 46, 1962, s. 55–62. 9 Oratio in Gymnasio Ingolstadio publice recitata, Augsburg 1492. 408 studium na artistické fakultě. Humanistické vzdělání, které získal v Ingolstadtu, tedy důraz na humanistické principy exegeze textů, primárně bible, však v každém případě tvoří základní rys Osianderova myšlení, který se promítá do všech oblastí jeho činnosti.10 Jeho oblibu v humanistickém hnutí dokumentuje i chvála Erasma Rotterdamského, kterého nazývá vysoce učeným a milovaným autorem,11 přičemž je třeba poznamenat, že Osiander je ve svých spisech na chválu svých současníků nebo předchůdců spíše skoupý. Prostřednictvím svého učitele Böschensteina se Osiander již v Ingolstadtu také seznámil s renesančním platonismem, konkrétněji s křesťanskou kabalou a s koncepcí prisca sapientia v podání Giovanniho Pika della Mirandoly.12 Osianderův zájem o křesťanskou kabalu mohl povzbudit i zmiňovaný Reuchlin, se kterým se Andreas snad setkal již v roce 1519, kdy slavný humanista do Ingolstadtu přišel, kde pak rok nato získal místo univerzitě.13 Vliv Böschensteina na Osiandera se však zdá být mnohem silnější než Reuchlinův. Klíčovou roli pro formování myšlení Andrease Osiandera v době jeho univerzitních studií následně sehrála německá reformace, jejíž požadavky souzněly se zájmy biblického humanismu. I v tomto případě mohl Andreas sledovat příklad svého ingolstadtského učitele hebrejštiny. Böschenstein se zkontaktoval s Martinem Lutherem již v roce 1518 a rok nato usiloval o místo učitele hebrejštiny ve Wittenberku, které Philipp Melanchthon neúspěšně nabízel právě Reuchlinovi. Zatímco Reuchlin setrval na katolických pozicích, Böschenstein se plně dal do služeb reformace, učil hebrejštinu i Ulricha Zwingliho, a zcela se odklonil od svého někdejšího kolegy a ingolstadtského spolubydlícího Johannese Ecka, jenž se již jako rektor univerzity profi loval jako jeden z klíčových a nesmiřitelných odpůrců Lutherovy reformace. 10 Siegfried WOLLGAST, Philosophie in Deutschladn zwischen Reformation und Aufk lärung 1550–1650. Berlín: Akademie Verlag 1993, s. 667. 11 HIRSCH, Die Th eologie des Andreas Osiander, s. 6. Ve svém snad nejvýznamnějším díle Harmonia evangelica píše: „Doctissimus et idem diligentissimus vir Erasmus Rotterdamus". Andreas OSIANDER d. Ä., Harmoniae libri 4 Graece et Latine. In: OSIANDER, A., Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn 1985, s. 379 (229–396). 12 K Pikově křesťanské kabale srv. Chaim WIRSZUBSKI, Pico Della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1989; Jan HERŮFEK, „Křesťanská kabala ve fi losofi i Giovanni Pica della Mirandoly." Studia Comeniana et Historica, roč. 39, 2009, č. 81–82, s. 284–300. 13 Srv. SEEBASS, Das Reformatorische Werk des Andreas Osiander, s. 72. K Reuchlinově křesťanské kabale srv. Jan HERŮFEK, „Reuchlinovo a Picovo pojetí křesťanské kabaly: malé přiblížení." Listy Filologické / Folia Philologica, roč. 134, 2011, č. 1/2, s. 81–93. Tomáš Nejeschleba 409 Böschenstein také později dlouho pobýval v Norimberku (1525–1533), který se stal Andreasi Osianderovi druhým domovem. Luterská teologie a křesťanská kabala Do Norimberku přišel Andreas Osiander v roce 1519, když získal místo učitele hebrejštiny v tamějším augustiniánském klášteře. V roce 1522 se pak stal vlivným kazatelem v kostele u sv. Vavřince, v jednom z nejvýznamnějších center norimberské reformace. Jako břitký kritik římské církve s ostrým antipapežským postojem začal rychle zastupovat luterskou reformaci na zasedáních norimberské rady i na celoněmeckých teologických jednáních. Pro svou nezávislost v teologických názorech se však dostával do konfl iktů nejen s katolickou stranou, nýbrž i se zwingliány, s Janem Kalvínem a posléze dokonce i s hlavami německé reformace Martinem Lutherem a Philippem Melanchthonem. Není cílem tohoto článku podat přehled Osianderových teologických názorů a polemik.14 Zaměříme se pouze na fi losofi cké momenty jeho teologie. Mezi klíčová témata, spjatá s dobovým fi losofi ckým diskursem, která se zásadně promítají do Osianderova myšlení, patří jeho zájem o kabalu. Badatelé se zabývají otázkou, zda v tomto ohledu měl na Osiandera vliv přímo Johannes Reuchlin,15 jehož knihy De verbo mirifi co (1494) a De arte cabalistica (1517) vzbudily velkou pozornost a staly se základním zdrojem pro následné rozvíjení koncepce křesťanské kabaly,16 nebo spíše zmiňovaný Johannes Böschenstein.17 V každém případě se vliv kabaly objevuje v Osianderově korespondenci a v jeho dílech až od roku 1529.18 Explicitní odkaz na kabalu se (mimo předchozí korespondence) nachází v Osianderově významném teologickém díle Harmonia evangelica z roku 1537, vydaném ve Frobeniově tiskárně v Basilei.19 Cílem knihy je ukázat jednotnost čtyř evangelií, přičemž 14 K Osianderově teologii srv. HIRSCH, Die Th eologie des Andreas Osiander; SEEBASS, Das Reformatorische Werk des Andreas Osiander. 15 Takto se vyjadřuje již HIRSCH, Die Th eologie des Andreas Osiander, s. 32–46. 16 Srv. Wilhelm SCHMIDT-BIGGEMANN, Geschichte der Christlichen Kabbala. Stuttgart- -Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog 2012. 17 Srv. Anselm SCHUBERT, „Andreas Osiander als Kabbalist."Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte – Archive for Reformation History, roč. 105, 2014, č. 1, s. 30–54, který na základě detailního srovnání Böschensteinovy, Reuchlinovy a Osianderovy koncepce křesťanské kabaly polemizuje se staršími interpretacemi, které zdůrazňovaly Reuchlinův vliv. 18 Ibid., s. 38. 19 Celým titulem Andreas OSIANDER, Harmoniae libri 4 Graece et Latine, in quibus evangelica historia ex quatuor evangelistis ita in unum est contexta, ut nullius verbum illum omisAndreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 410 Osiander jako první používá v tomto kontextu pojem z hudební teorie, tedy jednotlivá evangelia považuje za čtyři hlasy, které když znějí současně, vytvářejí harmonický souzvuk. Osiander se zde u dílčího problému nechává inspirovat kabalistickou naukou o nevyslovitelném jménu Božím a využívá kabalistickou interpretaci tetragramatonu, přičemž zjevně znal kabalistické techniky gematrie a notarikonu, tedy práce s numerickými hodnotami hebrejských písmen a variace s prefi xy a sufi xy hebrejských slov.20 Ukazuje se, že Osiander v Harmonia evangelica navazuje spíše přímo na Giovanniho Pika della Mirandolu než na Reuchlinovy výklady.21 Mirandolovy spisy skutečně Osiander často využívá, a dokonce italského renesančního platonika přímo cituje, jako jednoho z mála svých předchůdců. Mirandolu chválí jako podivuhodného a vysoce učeného muže ve všech uměních, fi losofi i a teologii, a jako znalce hebrejských a chaldejských mysterií. K Mirandolovi se pak Osiander přímo hlásí ve spise Coniecturae, konkrétně k Pikovým slavným Conclusiones. Nenavazuje však na italského fi losofa v projektu hledání synkretické fi losofi e, jež byla cílem tohoto Mirandolova díla, v němž se pokoušel ukázat, že veškeré myšlenkové tradice usilují o stejnou věc a lze je považovat za různé způsoby vyjádření téhož.22 Osianderův zájem o Mirandolu se zde omezuje právě na kabalu. Norimberský reformátor uvádí jednu z tezí, které Mirandola věnoval kabalistické tradici a v níž tvrdil, že při hledání konjektur budoucnosti je možné se obrátit ke kabale, která stanovila konec světa na 1. ledna 2000.23 sum, nihil alienum immixtum, nullius ordo turbatus, nihil non suo loco positum, omnia vero literis et notis ita distincta sint, ut quid cuiusque evangelistae proprium, quid cum aliis et cum quibus commune sit, primo statim aspectu deprehendere queas. Item annotationum liber unus, elenchus harmoniae. 20 SCHUBERT, „Andreas Osiander Als Kabbalist," s. 39. 21 WIRSZUBSKI, Pico Della Mirandola's Encounter with Jewish Mysticism; srv. SCHUBERT, „Andreas Osiander als Kabbalist," s. 40. 22 K Mirandolovi srv. Tomáš NEJESCHLEBA, „,Kníže svornosti' Giovanni Pico della Mirandola a jeho fi losofi cké úsilí." In: PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, G. O důstojnosti člověka = De dignitate hominis. Praha: OIKOYMENH 2005, s. 7–50. 23 Andreas OSIANDER, „Coniecturae de ultimis temporibus ac de fi ne Mundi." In: OSIANDER, A., Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn 1990, s. 174 (150–271): „His coniecturis etiam usus est Iohannes Picus Mirandulanus, cum Anno Domini 1486 currente inter noningentas suas disputationes Conclusiones etiam hanc possuit: „Si qua est de novissimis temporibus humana conienctura, investigare possumus per secretissimam viam cabbalae futuram esse consumationem seculi, hinc ad annos quingentos quatuordecim et dies viginti quinque." Jedná se o tezi 9 z kabalistických tezí. Srv. Stephen A. FARMER, Syncretism in the West: Pico's 900 Th eses (1486); the Evolution of Traditional, Tomáš Nejeschleba 411 V souvislosti s vlivem Giovanniho Pika della Mirandoly se někdy uvažuje i o působení díla Mikuláše Kusánského na Osianderovo myšlení, čímž by se ještě pevněji potvrdil jeho vztah k renesanční, novoplatónsky orientované fi losofi i. Osiander totiž mohl název svého spisu Coniecturae de ultimis temporibus ac de fi ne mundi odvodit z výše uvedeného Mirandolova citátu nebo mohl v tomto navázat na Kusánův spis Coniectura de novissimis diebus.24 Na Mikuláše Kusánského Osiander ve svých Konjekturách dokonce odkazuje, nicméně ve zcela jiné souvislosti,25 a tak proklamovaný vliv nelze uspokojivě potvrdit. Na ještě více spekulativní rovině je postavena údajná návaznost Osiandera na princip splývání protikladů (coincidentia oppositorum) odvozovaný od Kusánského. Osiander prý využil tento „relativistický princip" ve svém christocentrickém pojetí univerza, v němž lze nalézt jeden jediný bod s absolutní hodnotou, a to na časové ose. Je jím vtělení logu v osobě Ježíše Krista, které vytváří „temporální centrum", podle kterého je třeba vše poměřovat, a Osiander tak interpretuje Kusánovu fi losofi i historicko-eschatologicky.26 Z uvedeného by snad bylo možné usuzovat na vliv Augustinovy koncepce dějinnosti, který by nebyl u luteránského myslitele překvapivý; naznačená provázanost Osianderova myšlení s Kusánovým by vyžadovala důkladnější zpracování a zdokumentování. Osiander a Koperníkovo dílo Nesmazatelné místo v dějinách vědy a fi losofi e si Andreas Osiander ještě za norimberského pobytu vysloužil v souvislosti s prvním vydáním knihy O obězích nebeských sfér Mikuláše Koperníka, když se v letech 1542–1543 chopil editorské práce na tomto spisu pro norimberského nakladatele Johanna Petreia.27 Podnět pro vydání vzešel od Koperníkova jediného znáReligious, and Philosophical Systems: With Text, Translation, and Commentary. Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies 1998, s. 524. 24 Srv. OSIANDER, Coniecturae de ultimis temporibus, s. 152. 25 Osiander uvádí Kusána jako myslitele, které spolu Lorencem Vallou dokázal nepravost tzv. Konstantinovy Donace, jíž byla papeži svěřena světská vláda, srv. ibid., s. 268. Jedná se zároveň o jediný explicitní odkaz na Mikuláše Kusánského v celém Osianderově díle, včetně známé korespondence. 26 Bruce WRIGHTSMAN, „Andreas Osiander's Contribution to the Copernican Achievement." In: WESTMAN, R. S. (ed.), Th e Copernican Achievement. Berkeley: University of California Press 1975, s. 227 (213–243). 27 Noel M. SWERDLOW, „Annals of Scientifi c Publishing: Johannes Petreius's Letter to Rheticus." Isis, roč. 83, 1992, č. 2, s. 270–274. K historii přípravy a vydání knihy srv. Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 412 mého žáka Georga Joachima Rhetika (1514–1574), který od roku 1536 působil jako profesor matematiky na wittenberské univerzitě. Rheticus se v roce 1539 na doporučení německého astronoma Johannese Schönera (1477–1547) vydal do pruského Frauenburgu, aby zde navštívil Koperníka, o kterém se proslýchalo, že vytváří nové astronomické teorie. Po více než dvou letech pobytu u něj se Rheticus vrátil do Wittenberku a následně v Gdaňsku vydal první zprávu shrnující Koperníkovu teorii, tzv. Narratio prima, a to ve formě dopisu právě Schönerovi.28 Zároveň také přesvědčil Koperníka, aby svou knihu publikoval a jako místo vydání navrhl Norimberk, kde působil jeho učitel Schöner. Rheticus však byl příliš vytížen na to, aby knihu do tisku připravil sám, proto předal tento úkol právě Andreasi Osianderovi, který se osobně znal i s Schönerem a díky svým studiím matematiky byl pro práci dostatečně kompetentní. Proč vlastně Osiander usiloval o účast na vydání Koperníkovy knihy? Dříve se usuzovalo, že De revolutionibus souznělo s Osianderovými údajnými astrologickými zájmy, respektive že jeho zájem o astrologii vedl k zájmu o matematickou astronomii.29 Spíše se však ukazuje, že Osiander sám astrologii aktivně nepěstoval. V již zmiňovaném spise Coniecturae (1544), který je výkladem biblických apokalyptických pasáží, sice hovoří o nebeských jevech jako znameních, ale chápe je jako doprovod historických událostí a nikoli jako jejich determinující faktor.30 Přesto jeho kopernikovské angažmá do jisté míry souvisí s pozitivním přístupem k astrologii, který razil reformátor Philipp Melanchthon prostřednictvím propojení astrologie jako studia nebeských jevů a reformační teologie.31 Přesnější astronomické znalosti totiž mohou podle Osiandera zdokonalit znalost historických udáGRAUBARD, „Andreas Osiander: Lover of Science"; Owen GINGERICH, „From Copernicus to Kepler: Heliocentrism as Model and as Reality." Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, roč. 117, 1973, č. 6, s. 513–522; Nienke W. J. ROELANTS, „Th e Physical Status of Astronomical Models Before the 1570s: Th e Curious Case of Lutheran Astronomer Georg Joachim Rheticus." Th eology and Science, roč. 10, 2012, č. 4, s. 367–390. 28 Srv. Edward ROSEN, Th ree Copernican Treatises: Th e Commentariolus of Copernicus, the Letter Against Werner, the Narratio Prima of Rheticus. New York: Dover Publications 1959, nejnovější kritická edice Heribert NOBIS – Anna Maria PASTORI (eds.), Receptio Copernicana. Texte Zur Aufnahme Der Copernicanischen Th eorie, vol. VIII/1. Berlín – Boston: De Gruyter 2009. 29 HIRSCH, Die Th eologie des Andreas Osiander, s. 122. 30 WRIGHTSMAN, „Andreas Osiander's Contribution," s. 222. 31 Tomáš NEJESCHLEBA, „Lutheránský aristotelismus – Philipp Melanchthon." Studia Neoaristotelica, roč. 2, 2005, č. 1, s. 67–82. K Melanchthonovu propojení astrologie (astronomie) a teologie srv. Sachiko KUSUKAWA, Th e Transformation of Natural Philosophy: Th e Case of Philip Melanchton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1995. Tomáš Nejeschleba 413 lostí a tím i apokalyptický výklad bible včetně určení „konjektur" v budoucnosti.32 A tak to byl zájem o matematiku, jejíž součástí byla i matematická astronomie, a přesvědčení o jejím využití v teologii, co přivedlo Andrease Osiandera k tomuto slavnému vydavatelskému počinu. Osianderovo vydání šesti Koperníkových knih O obězích nebeských sfér spatřilo světlo světa v roce 1543 se svolením Koperníka i Rhetika, druhého jmenovaného nicméně pobouřil fakt, že tisk byl doprovozen anonymní předmluvou, samozřejmě z pera našeho luteránského kazatele. V obou exemplářích edice, které Rheticus vlastnil, totiž její majitel onu předmluvu přeškrtl červeným inkoustem.33 V čem spočívá problematičnost onoho krátkého Ad lectorem, že tak rozčilovalo nejen Rhetika, později Giordana Bruna, ale i mnoho dalších? Andreas Osiander zde totiž stanovuje způsob, jakým má být Koperníkova teorie interpretována. Koperníkova kniha má být podle něj chápána jako umně vytvořená hypotéza: „Astronomovi totiž přísluší pilným a dokonalým pozorováním zachycovat průběh nebeských pohybů a dále vytvářet a vymýšlet libovolné příčiny čili hypotézy (protože skutečných příčin se žádným způsobem nelze dopídit), ze kterých, jestliže jsou předpokládány, mohou být tyto pohyby na základě geometrických principů správně vypočteny jak do budoucnosti, tak do minulosti."34 V žádném případě není možné Koperníkově teorii přisuzovat fyzikální platnost a považovat ji za kosmologický obraz světa. „Připusťme tedy," píše Osiander, „ať tyto nové hypotézy jsou vzaty v počet spolu se starými, o nic více pravděpodobnějšími, a to především proto, že jsou zároveň obdivuhodné i snadné a přinášejí s sebou nesmírný poklad velmi učených pozorování. Ale ať nikdo, pokud jde o hypotézy, nečeká od astronomie nic určitého, když ona sama se po ničem takovém nepídí, aby tím, že by přijímal za pravdivé to, co bylo vymyšleno k jinému účelu, neodcházel od této disciplíny hloupější, než k ní přistupoval."35 Jak Koperník, tak Rheticus znali Osianderův přístup k De revolutionibus ještě před tím, než se luteránský kazatel chopil práce na vydání knihy. 32 WRIGHTSMAN, „Andreas Osiander's Contribution," s. 229. Wrightsman na tomto místě kritizuje Hirschovu „astrologickou" interpretaci a obviňuje jej z toho, že zaměnil astrologickou prognostiku s apokalyptickou profétikou, která je Osianderovi vlastní. 33 GINGERICH, „From Copernicus to Kepler," s. 514. 34 Mikuláš KOPERNÍK, De revolutionibus, Ad lektorem, citováno dle Zdeněk HORSKÝ, Koperník a české země. Soubor studií o renesanční kosmologii a nové vědě. Kostelec: Pavel Mervart 2011, s. 115. Kapitola „Koperník a historické předmluvy k dílu O obězích nebeských sfér," s. 109–120. Srv. Mikuláš KOPERNÍK, O obězích nebeských sfér. První kniha. Praha – Červený Kostelec: Pavel Mervart, 2016, s. 87–88. 35 Ibid. Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 414 Johannes Kepler o půl století později ve svém nevydaném spisu proti Ursovi totiž cituje ze dvou Osiandrových listů, jež byly odpovědí na dnes ztracený dopis Koperníka, v němž snad toruňský astronom pověřoval norimberského teologa vydáním knihy.36 Oba dopisy jsou datovány 20. dubna 1541 a Osiander v nich doporučuje doprovodit Koperníkovu knihu vysvětlením, že se jedná o matematickou hypotézu, aby se tím předešlo zbytečné kritice ze strany teologů a zastánců ptolemaiovsko-aristotelské kosmologie.37 V těchto intencích pak v předmluvě Ad lectorem klade Osiander Ptolemaiovu astronomii na stejnou rovinu jako Koperníkovu, ani jedna z nich si nemůže činit právo na to, že by byla popisem skutečnosti, neboť o to astronomie neusiluje. Jejím cílem je pouze „zachránit jevy", vytvořit matematický model, který by nebeské jevy deskriboval a umožnil jejich predikci do budoucnosti. Model má pouze hypotetický charakter, u kterého je třeba zůstat a neklást na něj další explikační nároky, proto je možné si modely vytvářet libovolně, přičemž ovšem model Koperníkův se zdá být pro účely deskripce a predikce vhodnější než Ptolemaiova astronomie. Toto chápání Koperníkova systému a vlastně celé astronomie později získalo označení instrumentalismus (či fi kcionalismus),38 a v návaznosti na něj Alexandre Koyré charakterizuje Osianderovu předmluvu jako „krátký traktát pozitivistické a pragmatické epistemologie".39 Termín „instrumentalismus" zřejmě poprvé použil Josiah Royce (1855–1916) v souvislosti s pragmatismem Johna Deweye, a do fi losofi e vědy jej uvedl Hans Reichenbach (1891–1953). Avšak pojem (nikoli termín) pochází již od Pierra Duhema, který především ve svém slavném díle Sozein ta phainomena (Zachránit jevy) z roku 1908 rozlišuje v astronomii „instrumentalistickou" a realistickou tradici, tedy na straně jedné realismus popisující skutečnost a na straně druhé „instrumentalismus", podle kterého teorie slouží pouze jako prostředek pro predikci.40 Přesněji řečeno, Duhem táhne pro pozdní antiku i pro navazující období dělící linii mezi astronomií matematickou, vytvářející matematické modely pro „záchranu jevů", a astronomií fyzikální, 36 Johannes KEPLER, Apologia pro Tychone contra Ursum, srv. text a anglický překlad Nicholas JARDINE, Th e Birth of History and Philosophy of Science: Kepler's A Defence of Tycho against Ursus with Essays on Its Provenance and Signifi cance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988, s. 96–98. 37 Andreas OSIANDER, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn 1988, s. 333–338. 38 Srv. Zeljko LOPARIC, „O Ficcionalismo De Osiander." Cadernos de História e Filosofi a da Ciência, roč. 18, 2008, č. 1, s. 227–251. 39 Alexandre KOYRÉ, Th e Astronomical Revolution. Copernicus – Kepler – Borelli. Paris: Hermann 1973, s. 37. 40 Srv. FREUDENTAL, „,Instrumentalism' and ,Realism'," s. 170. Tomáš Nejeschleba 415 jejímž cílem je uchopení skutečnosti prostřednictvím kosmologické teorie.41 V Osianderově době instrumentalistická epistemologie matematické astronomie době převážila (Duhem odkazuje na tradici počínající od Gemina, přes Ptolemaia a Prokla, Posidonia a Simplikia, až k Maimonidovi, Tomáši Akvinskému, Bonaventurovi, Janu z Jandunu a Lefèvru d Etaples),42 výjimkou prý byl spíše Rhetikův realistický přístup, který akceptoval heliocentrický model jako model kosmologický. Gingerich proto hovoří o tzv. osianderiánském pohledu.43 který vévodil výkladu heliocentrického modelu až do poslední čtvrtiny 16. století, kdy začal být vytlačován tzv. Kopernikanismem.44 Citovaná korespondence, která se zachovala u Keplera, sice může vést k úvaze, že Osiander sám byl kopernikanistou, přesvědčeným o pravdivosti nauky, kterou se pouze prostřednictvím své předmluvy snažil uchránit před odsouzením, jak naznačuje již Duhem.45 Na druhou stranu i Duhem ukazuje, že Osiander svou předmluvou ke Koperníkovu dílu vytvořil metodologický přístup, jenž v jeho době využívali nejen autoři, kteří se jako astronomové – matematikové hlásili ke Koperníkovi, ale také zastánci ptolemaiovské astronomie. I jim paradoxně umožnilo Osianderovo chápání hypotézy jako fi ktivní matematické konstrukce, které ostatně nebylo nijak nové, obhajovat Ptolemaia proti námitkám ze strany realistů, kteří požadovali korespondenci matematického modelu s fyzikální skutečností. Osianderova předmluva tak mohla být přijímána pozitivně napříč konfesemi.46 Přesto genuinně Osianderův přístup by mohl být ztotožňován s určitou konfesí, a Westman jej tak označuje šířeji jako wittenberskou, luteránskou interpretaci Koperníka, jež se rozvíjela v okruhu kolem Melanchthona, z níž se vymykal pouze řečený Rheticus.47 Podle Gingeriche rozdíl mezi Osian41 K rozlišení mezi fyzikálním a matematickým výkladem u Ptolemaia srv. Daniel ŠPELDA, Astronomie v antice. Ostrava: Montanex 2006, s. 228–230. 42 Pierre Maurice Marie DUHEM, To Save the Phenomena, an Essay on the Idea of Physical Th eory from Plato to Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1969, s. 67. Výčet, který uvádí Duhem, pochází od Nicolase Müllera, editora třetího vydání Koperníkových Oběhů z roku 1617. 43 GINGERICH, „From Copernicus to Kepler," s. 520. 44 Výčet zastánců kopernikanismu přinášejí Peter BARKER – Katherine A. TREDWELL, „Copernicus' First Friends: Physical Copernicanism from 1543 to 1610." Filozofski Vestnik, roč. 25, 2004, č. 2, s. 143–166. 45 DUHEM, To Save the Phenomena, s. 69. 46 Duhem, aniž by však zmiňoval konfesionální příslušnost, uvádí kromě luteránů Frisia, Reihnolda, a dalších, navazujících na Melanchthona, také Alessandra Piccolominiho a Andrease Cesalpina, ibid., s. 81–83. 47 Robert S. WESTMAN, „Th e Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Th eory," Isis, roč. 66, 1975, č. 2, s. 165–193. Srv. Peter BARKER, „Lutheran Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 416 derem a Rhetikem spočívá v odlišném chápání hypotézy. Zatímco podle Osiandera astronomické hypotézy nepřekračují matematické výpočty jevů, u Rhetika geometrická hypotéza umožňuje určit relevanci heliocentrického systému.48 Novější bádání nicméně ukazují, že i Rheticus byl Osianderovi a wittenberské melanchthonovské škole překvapivě blízký, neboť jakkoli se heliocentrismus zdá být pravdivou hypotézou, principiální nedostačivost lidského rozumu neumožňuje ani podle Rhetica jej prohlásit za pravdu absolutní a ontologickou. Dokonalá znalost příčin je totiž člověku nepřístupná. Přesvědčení o epistemologických limitech má svůj původ v teologické nauce o pádu člověka, která v německém prostředí byla součástí antropologických východisek luteránské teologie.49 Osianderův úvod lze tedy číst jako teologickou instrukci, jako návod pro teology, jak nakládat s Koperníkovým textem.50 Autor vytváří hierarchii přístupů k pravdě, na jejímž nejnižším stupni leží matematika – astronomie, poskytující výpočty, na stupni středním pak přírodní fi losofi e – fyzika, vytvářející obraz světa, ovšem nedokonalý, a na stupni nejvyšším teologie, opírající se o zjevení a disponující nezpochybnitelnou pravdou.51 Jen teologické pravdy jsou pravdami absolutními a toto přesvědčení sdílel s Osianderem i Rheticus. Důkladná analýza jednotlivých postojů ke Koperníkovu heliocentrismu v druhé polovině 16. století zároveň ukazuje, že není možné krajní pozice, jež reprezentuje na straně jedné Osiander a na straně druhé Rheticus, interpretovat prostřednictvím dichotomie instrumentalismus versus realismus, jež pochází až ze 20. století. Protikladnost těchto extrémních pozic protiřečí rozmanitosti jednotlivých postojů ke Koperníkovu dílu, které byly formuContributions to the Astronomical Revolution." In: BROOKE, J. – IHSANOGLU, E. (eds.), Religious Values and the Rise of Science in Europe. Istanbul: Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture 2005, s. 31–62. 48 GINGERICH, „From Copernicus to Kepler," s. 514. 49 ROELANTS, „Th e Physical Status of Astronomical Models," s. 369. Roelant se opírá mimo jiné o analýzy vědy a náboženství Petera Harrisona, srv. Peter HARRISON, Th e Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007. Konfesionální vliv na „luteránské astronomy" zpochybňuje naopak Gábor ALMÁSI, „Rethinking SixteenthCentury ,Lutheran Astronomy'." Intellectual History Review, roč. 24, 2014, č. 1, s. 5–20. 50 V Osianderově předmluvě se ozývá Lutherova kritika Koperníka, srv. André GODDU, Copernicus and the Aristotelian Tradition: Education, Reading, and Philosophy in Copernicus's Path to Heliocentrism. Leiden – Boston: Brill 2010, s. 276. 51 Srv. Pietro Daniel OMODEO, Copernicus in the Cultural Debates of the Renaissance. Reception, Legacy, Transformation. Leiden – Boston: Brill 2014, s. 85–87. Tomáš Nejeschleba 417 lovány v 16. století.52 Kontextuální čtení odhalující výše zmíněný poukaz na hranice poznání vede navíc nejen k teologickému pozadí, nýbrž také k aristotelsko-scholastickému rozlišování dvou typů důkazů, aposteriornímu důkazu z účinků (quia) a apriornímu důkazu z příčin (proper quid), které za tehdejší diskusí stálo. Astronomie byla chápána jako vědění, jež pracuje s prvním typem důkazů, který nemůže překročit a přenést se k druhému typu, jenž pracuje s dokonalým poznáním příčin. Poznání kauzality prostřednictvím důkazu propter quid zůstávalo nenaplněným ideálem, jenž nebyl v kompetenci matematické astronomie.53 Kritika nahlížení astronomie poloviny 16. století prizmatem dichotomie instrumentalismus-realismus je komplementární s přehodnocením Duhemova slavného eseje. I jeho ostré rozlišování matematické astronomie, zachraňující jevy, a fyzikální astronomie, uchopující skutečnost, se stalo, přinejmenším pro období pozdní antiky, předmětem kritiky jako příliš zjednodušující.54 Nelze však popřít, že fyzikální interpretace heliocentrismu se postupně ujímala a vyvrcholila v díle Johannese Keplera,55 který ostatně identifi koval Osiandera jako autora oné předmluvy Ad lectorem ke Koperníkovu dílu. Kepler sám se podivuje, jak to že Osiander nepřikládá astronomii žádnou roli při poznání univerza,56 tedy že nepřisuzuje astronomii žádný význam pro fyziku. Kepler seznámil svět s identitou autora předmluvy ve svém slavném díle Astronomia nova (nejprve Kepler Osiandera „odhalil" již ve své Apologii Tychona Brahe proti Ursovi, která však nebyla dokončena a vyšla tiskem až v polovině 19. století),57 přesto ještě ve vydání z roku 1617 je Ad lectorem otištěno jako anonymní úvod. Postupně však od doby Keplerovy začal být Osiander považován za nepřítele heliocentrismu a vědy vůbec a tento odsudek vrcholí ve vlivném díle Ludwika Birkenmajera.58 I Zdeněk Horský považuje 52 Srv. JARDINE, Th e Birth of History and Philosophy of Science; Peter BARKER – Bernard R. GOLDSTEIN, „Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal." Perspectives on Science, roč. 6, 1998, č. 3, s. 232–258. 53 Ibid., s. 252. I Duhem nicméně aristotelské rozlišování mezi dvěma typy důkazů, které stojí za rozdílem mezi matematickou a fyzikální astronomií, zmiňuje, srv. DUHEM, To Save the Phenomena, s. 78. 54 Srv. Geoff rey E. R. LLOYD, „Saving the Appearances." Th e Classical Quarterly, roč. 28, 1978, č. 1, s. 202–222. 55 Srv. BARKER – TREDWELL, „Copernicus' First Friends." 56 JARDINE, Th e Birth of History and Philosophy of Science, s. 151. 57 Frischova edice z roku 1858, která je součástí jeho vydání Keplerových Opera omnia, srv. ibid., s. 2. 58 Ludwik Antoni BIRKENMAJER, Mikołaj Kopernik. Cz. 1.: Studya Nad Pracami Kopernika Oraz Materyały Biografi czne. Krakow: Skład Główny w Księgarni Spółki Wydawniczej Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 418 Osianderovu předmluvu spolu s dalšími změnami oproti původnímu textu, které jdou na Osianderův vrub, za „neblahý zásah" a za podvrh.59 Nicméně tento náhled se opět začal měnit ve 20. století. Již Pierre Duhem uzavírá svůj slavný esej Zachránit jevy z roku 1908 konstatováním, že „dnes věříme s Osianderem, že fyzikální hypotézy jsou pouhé matematické prostředky vytvořené s cílem zachránit jevy."60 Owen Gingerich, jeden z největších znalců Koperníkova díla, podobně píše, že Osianderovo chápání heliocentrismu souzní s moderním pojetím hypotézy, jak se prý používá nejen v astronomii a fyzice, ale i ve vědách biologických.61 Osiander se tak stává součástí fi losofi e vědy. Podle Karla Raymunda Poppera se instrumentalismus, jehož „otce zakladatele" rakouský fi losof spatřuje právě v Osianderovi, dále kardinálu Robertu Bellarminovi, známému z Galileova případu, a v empirikovi Georgi Berkeleym, stal ve vědě dogmatem, které nekriticky přijímají mnozí vědci počínaje Ernstem Machem, Henrim Poincarém a konče Nielsem Bohrem, vyjma Alberta Einsteina a Erwina Schrödingera.62 Toto hodnocení naopak ostře napadá Paul Feyerabend, sarkasticky označuje Popperovu stať za bombastickou a sentimentální a poukazuje na to, že Osiander měl pro odmítnutí realističnosti Koperníkovy teorie fyzikální důvody: teorii odporovala fakPolskiej 1990. 59 HORSKÝ, Koperník a České Země, s. 122–123. Kapitola „Koperníkovo astronomické dílo ve vývoji vědy", s. 121–142. Podle Horského anonymně vydaná předmluva podvodně svedla mnohé k tomu, že za jejího autora považovali Koperníka samotného. Jako jediný doklad tohoto svedení uvádí Horský skutečnost, že i třetí vydání Koperníkova díla z roku 1617 obsahovalo předmluvu Ad lectorem bez uvedení jejího pravého autora, ačkoli již v roce 1609 Kepler autorství jednoznačně určil. To však může svědčit pouze o tom, že vydavatel předmluvu ke Keplerově Astronomia nova, kde se informace vyskytuje, neznal, nebo informaci nepokládal za důležitou, navíc v Osianderově Ad lectorem se píše o Koperníkovi ve třetí osobě. Skutečnost, že anonymní předmluva již dříve nebyla považována za dílo Koperníkovo, dokládá i Giordano Bruno, viz výše. 60 DUHEM, To Save the Phenomena, s. 117. 61 Srv. např. GINGERICH, „From Copernicus to Kepler," s. 520. Toto konstatování se dotklo i interpretace Giordana Bruna, srv. Paul R. BLUM, Giordano Bruno. Mnichov: C. H. Beck 1999, s. 47–48. 62 Srv. POPPER, „Th ree Views Concerning Human Knowledge," s. 98. Srv. Jerzy GIEDYMIN, Science and Convention: Essays on Henri Poincaré's Philosophy of Science and the Conventionalist Tradition. Oxford – New York: Pergamon Press 1982, s. 99. Tomáš Nejeschleba 419 ta.63 Je vidno, že spor, který je stále živý a proniká i do oblasti sociální věd,64 často odkazuje právě na Osianderův případ.65 Od promítání Osianderovy pozice do fi losofi e vědy dvacátého století a do sporů mezi realismem a instrumentalismem, které se vystavují možné kritice z důvodu anachronického přístupu,66 se vraťme k Osianderovi samotnému. Nezdá se, že by se jeho kopernikánské angažmá setkalo za jeho života s odporem, který by se ho nějak existenciálně dotkl. Jinak tomu však bylo s jeho názory teologickými, jež vyvolaly na sklonku jeho života bouřlivou diskusi. Problematika, na první pohled ryze teologická, částečně souvisí s recepcí paracelsismu a jeho novoplatónského pozadí, proto jí budeme věnovat pozornost v následujícím oddíle. Dříve než k tomu přistoupíme, obraťme se k Osianderovu dalšímu vydavatelskému počinu, který je dnes téměř pozapomenut, avšak v jeho době byl považován za stejně tak velkého významu. Osiander a Girolamo Cardano Krátce po vydání Koperníkova díla požádal italský fi losof, matematik a lékař Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) Osiandera, aby připravil pro vydání jeho nejvýznamnější matematické dílo Ars magna. Jedná se o matematickou encyklopedii, zaměřenou speciálně na algebru, která Cardana velmi proslavila, i když zároveň vedla k nepříjemné polemice s poněkud tajemným matematikem Niccolou Tartagliou. Cardano zde totiž popsal třináct základních forem kubických rovnic, tedy rovnic třetího řádu, přičemž základní vzorec na jejich řešení převzal právě od Tartaglia, který však tvrdil, že mu Cardano slíbil, že pravidlo udrží v tajnosti. Podle Cardana však vzorec objevil již třicet let před Tartagliou matematik Scipio Ferra, od kterého se o něm dozvěděl Tartaglia a sdělil jej Cardanovi, který vypracoval jeho formální 63 Srv. FEYERABEND, „On the Limited Validity of Methodological Rules," s. 156. 64 Srv. např. John T. CACIOPPO – Gün R. SEMIN – Gary BERNTSON, „Realism, Instrumentalism, and Scientifi c Symbiosis: Psychological Th eory as a Search for Truth and the Discovery of Solutions." American Psychologist, roč. 59, 2004, č. 4, s. 214–223. 65 Brian CAMPBELL, „Realism versus Constructivism: Which Is a More Appropriate Th eory for Addressing the Nature of Science in Science Education?" EJSE Electronic Journal of Science Education, roč. 3, 1998, č. 1. Dostupené z: <http://ejse.southwestern.edu/article/ view/7597/5364> [cit. 17. 10. 2016]. 66 K námitce tohoto typu tendují BARKER – GOLDSTEIN, „Realism and Instrumentalism in Sixteenth Century Astronomy: A Reappraisal." Podobně Matjaž VESEL, „Osiandrova Epistemologija Astronomije." Filozofski Vestnik, roč. 26, 2005, č. 3, s. 39–58. Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 420 důkaz.67 Cardano pověřil nepříjemnou polemikou svého žáka Ludovica Ferrariho, který byl údajně také rozhovorům s Tartagliou přítomen, a svého učitele proto mohl obhajovat.68 Vraťme se však zpět k Osianderově roli na vydání Cardanova algebraického díla. Již v roce 1541 vydal Cardano v Norimberku u Petreia matematický spis Practica arithmetica.69 Je možné, že i na tomto vydání se Osiander edičně podílel, neboť spolu s tiskařem do kontaktu s Cardanem vstoupil již kolem roku 1540. Když Cardano následně usiloval o vytištění své zásadní knihy, zvolil právě Norimberk a Osiandera jako editora. Cardano zjevně znal luteránského kazatele jako navýsost kompetentního autora ve věcech matematiky a v tomto smyslu jej také chválí ve své předmluvě k Ars magna, které Osiander připravil do tisku v roce 1545 u téhož norimberského vydavatele Johana Petreia. Cardano vyzdvihuje Osiandera jako znalce hebrejské, řecké a latinské literatury a zvláště si cení jeho editorských schopností a matematického vzdělání, které umožnilo, aby v jeho rukopise opravil chyby a nedostatky. Z textu Cardanova úvodu nelze vyvodit, do jaké míry se svými editorskými zásahy Osiander podílel i na formulaci zmíněného pravidla, v každém případě však Cardanova chvála Osiandera, který prý emendoval jeho matematický text pro dobro věci, kontrastuje s odsudkem Osianderovy editorské činnosti a zásahů, které údajně provedl v textu Koperníkovu.70 Na rozdíl od Rhetika Cardano na Osiandera, poté co uviděl vydání své knihy, nezanevřel, o čemž svědčí Italovo ocenění Osiandera, které se vyskytuje i v jeho dalších spisech. Ve své slavné encyklopedické práci De subtilitate z roku 1550 (vydáno také v Norimberku) se k norimberskému teologovi hlásí jako 67 Ke Cardanovým kubickým rovnicím srv. Lucye GUILBEAU, „Th e History of the Solution of the Cubic Equation." Mathematics News Letter, roč. 5, 1930, č. 4, s. 8–12; R. W. D. NICKALLS, „A New Approach to Solving the Cubic: Cardan's Solution Revealed." Th e Mathematical Gazette, roč. 77, 1993, č. 480, s. 354–359. 68 Markus FIERZ, Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576): Physician, Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, Astrologer, and Interpreter of Dreams. Boston: Birkhäuser 1983, s. 6–8. 69 První vydání bylo v Miláně (1539) a obsahovalo seznam dalších nevydaných matematických spisů. 70 Osiander údajně spolu s vydavatelem Petreiem a matematikem Schönerem změnili poznámky i celé věty oproti originálu, srv. GRAUBARD, „Andreas Osiander: Lover of Science," s. 171, který cituje Aleksandra Birkenmajera. Podobně o Osianderových zásazích do Koperníkova textu píše Zdeněk Horský, srv. KOPERNÍK, O obězích nebeských sfér. První kniha, s. 180–181. Tomáš Nejeschleba 421 ke svému příteli a vyzdvihuje jeho jazykové znalosti.71 Podobně se o něm vyjadřuje i v knize De libris propriis z roku 1562. Osiander snad udržoval s Cardanem kontakt i po vydání Ars magna. Philipp Melanchthon ve svém listu ze srpna 1546 adresovaném Osianderovi totiž norimberského reformátora nabádá, aby italského myslitele poučil o znameních, a rozlišoval mezi pravými věštbami a věšteckými „anaitiologéta", což byl technický termín z ptolemaiovské astronomie označující předpověď nezaloženou na pevných základech.72 Melanchthon tak předpokládal nejen trvající přátelské vztahy mezi norimberským reformátorem a italským myslitelem, ale snad také doufal v získání Cardana prostřednictvím Osiandera. Melanchthon totiž sám využíval znamení a předpovědi jako podporu věci luterské reformace. Absence dokumentů však nedovoluje ani posoudit, jestli Osiander v tomto vůbec něco podnikl. V literatuře se také uvádí, že Osiander si s Cardanem vyměňoval horoskopy,73 což je však opět problematické potvrdit. Vyjma uvedené pasáže z De subtilitate, v níž Cardano referuje o Osianderovu listu, v němž kazatel podává zprávu o své vlastní nemoci z dětství, se žádná další korespondence nedochovala. Zdá se, že vztah Osiander – Cardano je třeba z velké části opravdu redukovat na matematickou problematiku. Paracelsiánská alchymistická teologie V posledních letech svého norimberského pobytu se Osiander stále více dostával kvůli svým heterodoxním teologickým názorům do konfl iktu s Lutherem i s jinak mírným Philippem Melanchthonem. Jádro roztržky je spatřováno v Osianderovu odporu vůči tzv. augšpurskému Interimu, který byl císařským pokusem o smír mezi katolíky a luterány, ale i v jeho přílišném zájmu o kabalu a v údajném příklonu k paracelsismu. Spor vedl k odchodu Osiandera z Norimberku. Nekonformní teolog nalezl útočiště nejprve ve Vratislavi a nakonec v Pruském Královci, kam přišel v roce 154974 a kde se názorové polemiky rozhořely nanovo, právě v souvislosti s neorthodoxní teologií vykazující vliv Paracelsa. 71 Girolamo CARDANO, Th e De Subtilitate of Girolamo Cardano. vol. 2. Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2013, s. 943. 72 Andreas OSIANDER, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8., s. 464–465. 73 Dimistris DIALETIS, „Osiander, Andreas." In: TRIMBLE, V. et al. (eds.), Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, New York: Springer 2007, s. 862–863. 74 Martin STUPPERICH, Osiander in Preussen: 1549–1552. Berlín – New York: De Gruyter 1973. Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 422 Není vyloučeno, že Osiander se s Paracelsem setkal v Norimberku, i když to nelze ani uspokojivě potvrdit. Th eofrastus Bombastus z Hohenheimu přišel do říšského města v roce 1529 a s Osianderem jej pojily, kromě příklonu k reformaci obecně, i specifi cké zájmy, jako např. o tzv. norimberské prorocké obrazy, které byly objeveny ve zdejším kartuziánském klášteře. Osiander i Paracelsus publikovali jejich výklady, které se nicméně poměrně liší, takže z nich nelze usuzovat na existenci ani vzájemného ani jednostranného vlivu. Oba se také zajímali o proroctví Hildegardy z Bingen: Osiander je sám vydal tiskem a Paracelsus později v jejich kontextu odkazuje na jistého doktora Andrease, což ovšem také nemusí být dokladem pro užší kontakt obou autorů.75 Paracelsus navíc opouštěl Norimberk po ostrých konfl iktech s luterskou ortodoxií,76 ke které by se Osiander tehdy také mohl počítat. Nicméně existují texty, které svědčí o užší provázanosti Osianderovy teologie a paracelsismu. Z paracelsiánské strany je možné hovořit od dvou rukopisech, které obsahují výklad deseti přikázání (Liber primus expositionum decem praceptorum Th eophrasti Hohenheimi) a zřejmě se opírají o ztracený původní Paracelsův text. Jejich kopista – autor, údajný Lambertus Wacker, jehož pravá identita není známa, prozrazuje silné luterské zázemí, když se odklání od Paracelsovy nauky o lidském rozumu a světle přírody (lumen naturae) a interpretuje ji pod vlivem luterské nauky o milosti spíše skepticky v mnohem větší míře, než tomu bylo u Paracelsa obvyklé. U světla přírody, píše autor, není možné setrvat, ale je třeba z něj vyjít a přírodu překonat.77 Explicitně se Wacker také hlásí k jistému luteránskému teologovi, jehož kázání navštěvoval, a se kterým mnohokrát diskutoval. Bližší charakteristika onoho kazatele pak odpovídá právě Andreasi Osianderovi, jehož teologie tak vytváří pozadí pro Wackerovu luteranizaci Paracelsa.78 Rukopisy tak ukazují, že přinejmenším ze strany paracelsiánů byl Osiander vnímán jako spřízněný myslitel. I vzhledem k Osianderovu myšlení lze identifi kovat mnohé podobnosti s paracelsismem, a to především v jeho pozdním díle, které, jak již bylo zaznačeno, se postupně od roku 1546 začíná odklánět od Luthera. Osiander 75 Kurt GOLDAMMER, „Paracelsus, Osiander and Th eological Paracelsism in the Middle of the 16th Century." In: DEBUS, E. (ed.), Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance. Essays to Honor Walter Pagel. Londýn: Heinemann 1972, s. 105–120. 76 Walter PAGEL, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance. Basel – New York: Karger 1982, s. 23–25. 77 „Nicht im Licht der Natur verharren, sondern daraus kommen und die Natur überwinden," citováno dle GOLDAMMER, „Paracelsus, Osiander and Th eological Paracelsism," s. 110. 78 Ibid. Tomáš Nejeschleba 423 vášnivě hájí osobní přístup k vyznání a především obhajuje nauku o tzv. „účinném" ospravedlnění oproti „forenznímu". Ospravedlnění hříšníka není podle něj aktem Božím, který člověka ospravedlňuje, ale jedná se o reálné ospravedlnění, které je způsobeno tím, že Ježíš Kristus, Slovo Boží, je reálně přítomné v člověku. Cílem člověka je připodobnění se oslavenému tělu Kristovu v tělesnosti.79 I když mystické aspekty Osianderovy teologie by mohly být s Lutherem v souladu,80 jeho pojetí existence božské přirozenosti v člověku bylo a je shledáváno jako neortodoxní. Osianderovi současníci jej obvinili ze závislosti na univerzalismu Raymunda Lulla, konkrétně na jeho alchymistickém Pojednání o Páté esenci, neboli o tajemstvích přírody81 v tom smyslu, že ztotožňuje boží moc s boží spravedlností, podobně jako prý Paracelsus. A tak Justus Menius v roce 1552 označil Osianderovo myšlení za „novou alchymistickou teologii".82 A později luteránský teolog Nicolaus Hunnius zařadil Osiandera spolu s Paracelsem a s Schenckfeldem do linie weigeliánské hereze. I když Osiander nezaložil žádnou školu, jeho příznivci pokračovali v polemikách i po reformátorově smrti 17. října 1552.83 Lze usuzovat na novoplatónské zázemí nauky o mystickém sjednocení s Kristem a o přebývání božské přirozenosti Krista v člověku, nicméně přesnější určení zdrojů a tím návaznosti Osiandera na renesanční platonismus, vyjma zmiňovaného Giovanniho Pika a jeho prostřednictvím hermetické tradice prisca sapientia, je diskutabilní. Novoplatónský rámec Osianderovy teologie se považuje za samozřejmý, avšak jeho detailnější rozbor stále chybí. Závěrem: patří Osiander do dějin fi losofi e, vědy a fi losofi e vědy? Zasadit dílo Andrease Osiandera do dějin fi losofi e je sice možné, ovšem pouze za předpokladu, že autor bude považován primárně za jednoho z teologů německé reformace. V této oblasti vskutku spočívá centrum jeho myšlení. Až pak je možné uvažovat jednak o jeho humanistickém pozadí, přede79 Ibid., s. 111. 80 Srv. Martin ŽEMLA – Martin WERNISCH, Mystika a reformace / Th eologia Deutsch – text a dějinný kontext. Praha: Vyšehrad 2007. 81 Raymundus LULLUS, Pojednání o Páté esenci neboli O tajemstvích přírody. Praha: Volvox Globator 1995. 82 HIRSCH, Die Th eologie des Andreas Osiander, s. 123; GOLDAMMER, „Paracelsus, Osiander and Th eological Paracelsism," s. 116. 83 Timothy J. WENGERT, Defending Faith: Lutheran Responses to Andreas Osiander's Doctrine of Justifi cation, 1551–1559. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2012. Andreas Osiander v dějinách filosofie, vědy a filosofii vědy 424 vším v souvislosti s biblickým humanismem, a jednak rámcově o zakotvení v tradici renesančního platonismu, jehož součástí byla i obnova hermetické tradice a zapracování motivů z kabalistické intepretace Písma. V tomto kontextu lze s jistotou potvrdit Osianderovu dílčí návaznost na spisy renesančního fi losofa Giovanniho Pika della Mirandoly (zúženou na téma křesťanské kabaly). Další, často proklamované souvislosti s fi losofi í Raymunda Lulla, Mikuláše Kusánského, Johannese Reuchlina, či Paracelsa, jsou spíše spekulativního charakteru, zatím bez jednoznačné textové evidence. V dějinách vědy se badatel, zabývající se dílem Andrease Osiandera, dostává již na jistější půdu. Z tohoto hlediska nelze totiž přehlédnout zásadní Osianderovy vydavatelské počiny, a to jednak editio princeps díla O obězích nebeských sfér Mikuláše Koperníka a jednak také editio princeps matematického díla Girolama Cardana Ars magna. I toto Osianderovo dědictví je možné představit v kontextu jeho teologických zájmů. Matematika (a to i v případě díla Koperníkova, které je považováno za ryze matematické) je postavena do služeb reformace, napomáhá přesnějšímu stanovení kalendáře a tím i predikcí, jež byly součástí teologického diskursu. Osianderovy edice (z dnešního hlediska vědeckých děl) tak úzce souvisejí i s jeho příklonem ke kabalistickým technikám, které jsou svého druhu matematickým nástrojem výkladu Písma. Do tohoto teologického kontextu je nutné zasadit i Osianderův přínos pro fi losofi i vědy. Instrumentalistická pozice, jejíž má být Osiander strůjcem ve své předmluvě ke Koperníkovým Oběhům, má v jeho době neopomenutelné teologické pozadí. Heliocentrický model slouží jako matematický nástroj pro predikci jevů za předpokladu, že je to pouze teologie, která umožňuje dospět k jistému poznání. Pokud se tedy s Osianderovým jménem operuje v současné fi losofi i vědy, mělo by tak být činěno pouze pro pedagogické účely (představení pozice na historickém textu), není-li zároveň fi losofi í vědy akceptována teologická premisa o nedostačivosti lidského poznání v komparaci s pravdami teologickými. Jinak je chápání Andrease Osiandera jako instrumentalisty, se kterým se můžeme setkat nejen v dílech Karla Raymunda Poppera nebo Paula Feyerabenda, anachronismem. Tomáš Nejeschleba

The proposed existence of relative time and the curvature of space – both combined into the concept of spacetime – influences the search for an adequate theoretical model that can describe the structure of space in an accurate way. The aim of building space is to develop a quantum theory of gravitation. This paper investigate the theoretical problems that have their origin in the concepts that are at the basis of phenomenological physics. Introduction "Building up" the properties of space itself from scratch isn't just fantasy. In the search for a theory of quantum gravity there are several approaches to transform the space time continuum into a discrete continuum. Well known approaches to "do the trick" are the Causal set[1] and the Causal Dynamical Triangulations approach.[2] In this paper the focus is on the Causal Dynamical Triangulations approach to simplify the explanation. There is still no breakthrough in the field of quantum gravity despite the research during several decades. This questions the cause behind the problems to create a workable model that can describe both the curvature of space and the quantization of space. If I examine these attempts to describe space in an accurate way it shows that increasing the accuracy of the discrete properties of curved space results in a decrease of the accuracy of the law of conservation of energy and universal constants like the speed of light. At least if we are convinced that the basic properties of the universe are not separated of each other by some kind of domain walls. Of course, it is possible to implement hypothesised properties that compensate for the problem, like the present framework of quantum chromodynamics. Nevertheless, these problems question the reliability of the theory of relativity too. Because it is the concept of spacetime that forces theoretical physicists to develop a very demanding model. There is a clear explanation of the basic ideas behind the Causal Dynamical Triangulations approach by Renate Loll, "Rethinking spacetime".[3] The lecture was presented during the IAS symposium "The road to reality" and describes some theoretical properties of discrete space and the rising problems that are natural to this type of research. References: 1. Sumati Surya (2019). "The causal set approach to quantum gravity". Living Reviews in Relativity (2019) 22:5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41114-019-0023-1 2. J. Ambjørn, J. Jurkiewicz and R. Loll (2006). "Quantum Gravity, or The Art of Building Spacetime". Cambridge University press. https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0604212v1 3. Renate Loll (22-01-2019), "Rethinking spacetime". Symposium "The road to reality", IAS, University of Amsterdam. Video of the presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRyo_ee2r0U * City of Amersfoort, the Netherlands email: s [email protected] Orcid: 0000-0002-2882-420X Discrete space If we try to construct spacetime from scratch we need some kind of a basic idea about the structure of space. Figure 1 shows a schematic representation of a 3D metrical space. The notation λe indicates that the size of the metric is related to the minimal length scale,[4] because lambda (λ) is frequently used as a symbol for the wavelength of the figure 1 page 1 of 15 On the construction of the properties of discrete space Sydney Ernest Grimm* Conceptual FrameWorks Research papers electromagnetic waves. That means that the elements that fill the volume of our universe have a linear size (λe) that is directly related to the basic size of the proposed minimal length scale. Conclusion: the quantity of the volume of every element – the schematic small cubes – is invariant. The properties of space itself seems to be homogeneous and isotropic. That means that we never pass a region in space where everything that's entering suddenly swells up like a balloon and return to its normal proportions when it leaves the region behind. Or swelling up if we change the direction of our motion. The consequence is that discrete space must be composed by elements that have the same basic properties (see the schematic figure 1). Nevertheless, the idea that observable reality is created by the basic properties of elements that fill up the volume of our universe has consequences. Because this concept is violating our conviction that empirical evidence is the corner stone of modern science. The schematic image below shows the problem (figure 2). figure 2 Suppose I fill a volume with 100% transparent light tubes. There is an electric power source and at the bottom all the electric contacts are connected. At the top of the light tubes there is a free movable slider. So if I move the slider it seems that a column of light is moving inside the volume with the invisible light tubes. The analogy with figure 1 is clear. The invisible light tubes are the elements. The power source and the slider represent the dynamical properties of discrete space – the elements – and the column of light is the creation of a phenomenon within observable reality. Actually a local dynamical difference in relation to the other invisible light tubes around. Unfortunately the properties of the column of light are the result of the properties of the structure of the invisible light tubes and the dynamical properties of the power source, inclusive the selection of the direction of the change by the free movable conductive slider. The column of light represents only a local difference like the observable phenomena we have explored in physics. In other words, the phenomenon is undetermined by itself. But that is not what the textbooks in physics have told us. The measured and observed relations between the phenomena in the universe are thought to be the tangible facts of reality, acquired with the help of empirical research, the scientific method. There is only one conclusion possible, the known properties of the observed phenomena represent the mutual relations between the phenomena and not the basic properties of discrete space. Therefore it has no sense trying to hypothesize the properties of space in such a way that the model itself mimics the mutual relations between the observable phenomena. Mutual relations that are described with the help of the theory of Special and General relativity and the Standard model of elementary particles and forces. The conclusion doesn't mean that empiric research is useless if we want to construct space from scratch. Because there are not only the discovered atoms, nuclei, planets, stars, galaxies, etc. There are also conservation laws, universal constants and universal principles. Universal properties of our universe that are directly related to the basic properties of the elements of quantized space because these universal properties exist everywhere in space. References: 4. Sabine Hossenfelder (2013). "Minimal length scale scenarios for quantum gravity." Page 5, A minimal history Living Reviews in Relativity, January 2013. DOI: 10.12942/Irr-2013-2. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1203.6169.pdf Phenomenological and absolute reality The schematic structure of the properties of discrete space (figure 1 and 2) shows that there are 2 kinds of reality in theoretical physics. The first one is well known because it is phenomenological reality. A conceptual reference frame that is created by the observed mutual differences between corresponding properties of the local phenomena. The theory of relativity is a clear example of a theory that describes phenomenological reality.[5] That cannot be a surprise because Albert Einstein was a phenomenological physicist, influenced by the Austrian physicist and philopage 2 of 15 sopher Ernst Mach.[6] Like so many physicists at that time. Einstein created his theory of relativity with the help of gedanken experiments to analyse the interactions between phenomena like observers, trains, elevators, rockets, etc. Phenomenological physics describes reality – the observable phenomena – with the help of the mutual relations between the phenomena. So I can relate the mass of a neutron to the mass of a proton and the outcome is a relation, a certain proportion. Actually phenomenological physics describes a simplified version of reality in relation to absolute reality. It doesn't describe the creating structure that is responsible for the emerging of phenomenological reality. Absolute reality is incorporated in the theoretical frame work in physics in the form of physic laws, universal constants and universal principles. Because these spatial properties exists everywhere in the universe. Although the grand theories don't represent absolute reality. Quantum field theory is a mixture of parts of special relativity, quantum mechanics and gauge theories. But none of these theoretical models represent absolute reality. Nevertheless, the accepted general concept of quantum field theory is the idea that phenomenological reality is created by an underlying structure of basic quantum fields.[7] Describing observable reality with the help of the underlying reality – discrete space – cannot focus entirely on one or more phenomena. Because the observable phenomena are the result of spatial transformations that are generated by the mathematical properties of the underlying geometrical structure. That means that the relations that we know from phenomenological physics are created by the basic properties of the elements of the structure of space itself. An underlying structure that is not similar to the frequently used term "spacetime".[8] References: 5. Francesca Vidotto (2013). "Atomism and relationalism as guiding principles for quantum gravity." Notes for the "Seminar on the foundations of quantum gravity", Chicago, 27-29 September 2013. see 5. The relational structure of quantum gravity https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1403 6. Ernst Mach (1838-1916). https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernst-Mach 7. Art Hobson (2013). "There are no particles, there are only fields". American journal of physics 81, 211. DOI: 10.1119/1.4789885. https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1204/1204.4616.pd 8. Albert Einstein: transcription of a lecture at Leiden University (1920). https://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Einstein_ether.html The Planck scale In modern physics the Planck units are thought to represent the lowest level of reality. Unfortunately, the Planck units are derived with the help of phenomenological physics.[9] In other words, the Planck units represent mutual relations between measurable phenomena, just phenomenological reality. The Planck units cannot have a direct relation with constructing a model that describes the structure of space in an accurate way, directly related to absolute reality. The size of the Planck length – lPl ≈ 1.62×10−35 m – is too small in relation to the size of the metric of the minimal length scale – λe ≈ 0,5×10-15 m – to be considered as a realistic "building block" of absolute reality. Because the proposed existence of a gap of ≈ 1020 between the Planck length and the minimal length scale lacks a logical and empirical justification. The minimal length scale isn't just a hypothesized metric, it was conjectured because of the observed minimal length of electromagnetic waves and the size of sub-atomic particles.[4] Arguments in favour of an existing pre-quark metrical structure of space are not realistic because the theoretical framework of the elementary particles originates from the measured mutual relations.[10] There is no evidence for a smaller underlying metric structure. However, the opposite – the Planck length shows the reliability of the concept of the minimal length scale – is a more significant proposition that can explain the strange gap of ≈ 1020 in magnitude between the Planck length and the smallest phenomena. If the volume of space has a structure – that means that the whole volume of space is build up by basic volumes – every change of local properties in our universe is a geometrical change. Mutual interactions between these spatial units – "elements" in mathematics – are only possible if there is a fluent change of properties. The consequence is that the interactions between the elements – what we call energy – are determined by geometrical transformations with the help of a flux of infinite small amounts of volume. The gap of ≈ 1020 in magnitude between the Planck length and the minimal length scale is a realistic ratio if the Planck length is directly related to the flux of infinite small amounts of volume that represent the fluently topological changes between the elements (homeomorphism). page 3 of 15 References: 9. M. Planck. "Naturlische Masseinheiten". Der Koniglich Preussischen Akademie Der Wissenschaften, p. 479, 1899 10. K. Nakamura (2010). "Review of particle physics" Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics, Volume 37, 075021. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/ 10.1088/0954-3899/37/7A/075021/pdf Relative time The theory of Special relativity[11] describes the observation of simultaneity between moving phenomena whereas the intermediating medium, visible light, has a constant velocity of ≈ 300.000.000 m in vacuum. In discrete space the velocity of light is a constant too and the velocity of the light is related to the basic properties of the elements. Figure 3 shows a cross section of the metric in the schematic figure 1, the minimal length scale (λe). The grey coloured element transforms in such a way that its geometrical properties are transferred to the adjacent element at the right side. The transfer is a flux of infinite small amounts of change so I can conclude that there is a delay of time between the start and the end of the transfer of the geometrical properties of the grey coloured element. figure 3 The transferred geometrical properties represent an amount of local change and the smallest observable local change that we know is the quantum, a fixed amount of energy. That is why I can state that the linear transfer of 1 quantum over a distance of λe has a fixed duration because the velocity of the quantum is a constant (c) and the metric of the minimal length scale is a constant (λe). Therefore quantum time (te) is a constant too. Conclusion: the proposed relativity of time in Einstein's theory of Spacial relativity cannot be correct and must be caused by a misinterpretation of the nature of phenomenological reality. The transfer of the geometrical properties of the grey element in the schematic figure 3 is a simplified representation of quantum reality because all the other elements around the grey coloured element transfer 1 quantum too at exactly the same time. Because it is impossible to change the geometrical properties of only 1 element if all the elements together tessellate space. Tessellation of space by smaller volumes that can change their geometrical properties is only possible if every element has an identical quantity of invariant volume. Our universe shows to be a dynamical universe so we have to conclude that the identical quantity of invariant volume of every element is deformable. The consequence is that every element of discrete space is a topological object. Observable reality shows the existence of local concentrations of energy, matter. Concentrations of energy are created by the continuous redistribution of geometrical properties between the elements. Because of the tessellation of the volume of the universe by all the elements every transfer of a fixed amount of geometrical properties between the elements has the same duration and velocity. Therefore the velocity of a concentration of energy as an "independent phenomenon" must be directly related to the amount of transferred topological deformation by the involved local elements. Rest mass carrying particles – matter – isn't entirely build up by linear transferred energy like the described situation in the schematic figure 3. Because a rest mass carrying particle has a spin of itself, a rotational transfer of energy. Figure 4 shows in a schematic way a hypothetical concentration of energy – a rest mass carrying particle – and the metric is the minimal length scale (λe). figure 4 To pass on the concentration of energy to the right every involved element "within the boundary of the particle" has to transfer a certain amount of energy. But the total amount page 4 of 15 of energy every element can transfer within 1 te (the constant of time) is 1 quantum of topological deformation, a fixed amount of volume. The energy of 1 quantum – notation he – is the linear pass on of the amount of geometrical change over a distance of 1 λe during 1 te. All the elements together tessellate space thus every element "transfers" synchronously 1 he to one or more adjacent elements during 1 te. That is why the internal geometrical transformations of the rest mass carrying particle – like spin – will "slow down" if the velocity of the particle as a whole increases. In other words, if I exchange the rest mass carrying particle by a macroscopic clock, the clock will slow down its internal rate of change if I increase the velocity of the clock. But the internal rate of change of the clock – the velocity of the clock hands – doesn't represent the nature of time within absolute reality. Einstein's relative time is about the rate of the mutual changes between phenomena. The underlying rate of change of all these phenomena is the constant of time (te). Conclusion: the theory of Special relativity isn't about the nature of time itself. Time is quantum time and it is a universal constant like the constant speed of light. References: 20. A. Einstein (1905). "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper". Annalen der Physik, Eingangen 30, Juni 1905, Bern. The curvature of space Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity[12] predicts that the existence of matter in space creates gravity. That means that without matter, there is no force of gravity. This simple fact raises a question about the true nature of gravity because curved space cannot emerge by magic. The consequence is that without the existence of matter in our universe the mechanism that causes the curvature of space must still be present. Einstein's famous equation E = m c2 shows that mass and energy are equivalent. To transform the mass (m) into "free" quanta we have to redistribute the concentrated energy of the mass to the vacuum space around the mass, adding topological deformation to the elements around. Actually, an increase of surface area (c2). After the distribution of the energy to the elements around, the energy of the mass exists in the form: n he [n = integer; he = energy 1 quantum transferred over a distance of 1 λe]. figure 5 If I transfer 1 quantum to an adjacent element (from a to b) that has a surplus of 1 he in relation to the source element (a) – see figure 5 – the adjacent element b represents a local concentration of energy (2 he). Actually, it is about an increase of the local topological deformation of element b. Theoretically this local increase of topological deformation creates Einstein's curved spacetime. But the increase of topological deformation doesn't show an emerging gravitational force because the topological deformation is limited to the electric part of the electromagnetic field. One can argue that there is a fundamental difference between mass and matter. Matter has rest mass because the energy that creates the rest mass is supplied to the concentrated energy within the electric field if the energy of the mass exceeds a certain threshold that forces one or more local scalars of the Higgs field to decrease their magnitude. This shows that the energy of the rest mass becomes part of the local electric field. The transfer of the energy of a local decreased scalar of the Higgs field to the electric field is called the Higgs mechanism.[13][14] But if Einstein's curved spacetime describes the topological deformation of the electromagnetic field around objects (matter), how is it possible that the theory of general relativity can predict the local gravitational field in an accurate way, confirmed by experiments? The only reasonable clarification is that not only the gravitational field concentrate energy in space, but the electric field concentrate energy too. And both fields concentrate energy to the same local position in space. Therefore, if I implement the gravitational constant in the equations that describe the topological transformations of the electric field the calculations will mimic the gravitational field. Anyway, how do I know for sure that Einstein's theory of general relativity isn't about Newtonian gravitation at all? page 5 of 15 References: 12. Albert Einstein (1916). "Relativity: The special and the general theory". Berlin, ISBN 978-3-528-06059-6 13. Giovanni Organtini (2012). "Unveiling the Higgs mechanism to students". European Journal of physics 5, Jul. p. 1397-1406 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0143-0807/33/5/1397 14. Jeremy Bernstein (2011). "A question of mass" American Journal of Physics 79, 25 (2011) https://doi.org/10.1119/1.3487939 The basic quantum fields The basic quantum fields exist everywhere in the universe and are related to each other. That is obvious because the law of conservation of energy exclude the existence of independent fields. The consequence is that the basic quantum fields have a structure because the redistribution of properties under conservation laws is impossible without a joint structure. Not a structure like the pattern of a fabric but an underlying structure that is responsible for the way basic quantum fields are displaying themselves to the observer. Basic quantum fields are thought to create the observable phenomena so the underlying structure is the subject of this paper: the properties of discrete space. The fact that we cannot observe the underlying structure at the lowest level of reality indicates that the properties of discrete space can only be determined by reasoning. And the result of the reasoning is a mathematical description of the structure.[15] Figure 1 shows a schematic representation of the structure of space. The figure shows that every change of a basic property of an element is impossible without the change of all the other elements in the universe because all the elements have an identical amount of volume and tessellate the volume of our universe. The mathematical consequence of the synchronous change of all the elements in the universe is: • The conservation of (observable) change. • The universal velocity of (observable) change. • The non-locality of (observable) change. Actually, the list shows the 3 cornerstones of modern physics. The law of conservation of energy, the linear universal velocity of energy (c) and the consequence of entanglement[16], the existence of non-locality. In other words, there is no doubt about whether the concept of figure 1 is a reliable schematic representation of absolute and phenomenological reality or not. It is. Nevertheless, the theory of general relativity predicts that space itself is curved by the existence of matter in space and the influence of the curvature of space on matter is what we observe and have called "gravitational force". However, is there any mathematical proof that the elements in figure 1 can deform in such a way that local configurations of elements can create a local collective curvature? Suppose that the elements can reconfigure their shape in such a way that it shows like the curvature of space. If this is possible every element must have the same dynamical property that is responsible for the creation of the joint curvature. But the basic properties of the elements are very limited. The amount of volume of every element is invariant, the shape of every element is deformable and there must be a dynamical property to "drive" the deformation of the shape of the element. Quantum field theory has a limited number of basis fields too. The Higgs field (scalar field), the electric field (topological field) and the magnetic field (vector field). The gravitational field cannot be a basic quantum field because it emerges at the moment matter is created.[17] It is obvious that only basic quantum fields exist everywhere in the universe and during the whole history of the universe. So I have to conclude that an element has a scalar property, a topological property (the deformation of the shape of the element) and a vector property. The scalar property is easy to insert into the model of the schematic figure 1 because to create a real scalar within the volume of an element it must have an internal mechanism that creates the geometrical shape of a sphere. Figure 6 shows one cube of the schematic figure 1 with a scalar inside. The presence of the scalar divides the volume of the element in 2 parts: the scalar itself and the deformable volume around. figure 6 page 6 of 15 In quantum field theory no basic quantum field has an invariant magnitude. That means that the properties of the scalar inside the element (figure 6) is not independent from the properties of the deformable volume around the scalar. Both parts of the volume of the element must have a mutual property otherwise there cannot exist any mutual influence. All the elements in the universe tessellate space therefore it is reasonable to conclude that the volume around the scalar is just what it shows to be: the deformed part of the same scalar mechanism that is responsible for the existence of the scalar. In other words, the scalar in figure 6 is the inscribed sphere of the volume of the element and represents a different spatial configuration than the deformed part of the volume of the element. Suppose I blow op the volume of the scalar till the whole volume of the element has the shape of a true scalar. All the elements around has to adapt their shape to this element with the shape of a sphere. Now all these elements around are forced to decease the size of their scalars to transform into some kind of a local curved space. Unfortunately, every element within discrete space has the same basic properties. So how is it possible that 1 element can force a large number of elements around to decrease their scalars? That's impossible. The consequence is that discrete space (figure 1) and curved spacetime cannot be mixed into one model, like the Causal Dynamical Triangulations approach[2][18] is trying. figure 7 In the causal dynamical triangulations approach there is no enveloping concept about the properties of the scalars and "space around". The model with the help of the Ricci scalar curvature in Riemannian geometry describes the curvature of space with the help of the relation between the metric d and d (see figure 7).[3][19] The use of the Ricci scalar curvature is caused by the conviction that space itself is curved. But the theory of general relativity isn't about the underlying structure of space itself. The theory is about the mutual relations between the observable phenomena. Phenomenological reality is the moving column of light in figure 2 at page 2. Therefore, without the misinterpretation that space itself is curved discrete space is just Euclidean space. That means that I can replace the schematic figure 6 with the schematic figure 8, a discrete Euclidean space where the scalars have an identical magnitude in vacuum space. Actually, the schematic figure 8 is the cross section of the element with enclosed scalar in figure 6. figure 8 The schematic figure 8 shows 2 basic quantum fields. The scalar field (the Higgs field) and the topological field (the electric field).[20] There is missing one basic field and that is the vector field, the magnetic field. However, vectors don't represent the transfer of energy. That means that a vector field occupies no volume in an element. Vectors influence the direction of the transfer of energy. In other words: how do elements change their shape? References: 15. Max Tegmark (2007), "The mathematical universe". DOI: 10.1007/s10701-007-9186-9 https://arxiv.org/abs/0704.0646 16. Yin, Juan et all (2013). "Bounding the speed of 'spooky action at a distance". Physical Review Letters. 110 (26): 260407. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.260407 https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.0614 17. E. Verlinde (2011). "On the origin of gravity and the laws of Newton". Journal of High Engery Physics 4, april 2011. DOI: 10.1007/jhep04(2011)029 https://arxiv.org/abs/1001.0785 18. J. Ambjørn, J. Jurkiewicz and R. Loll (2006). "The universe from scratch" DOI: 10.1080/00107510600603344 https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0509010 19. Marques, Fernando Codá (2012), "Deforming threemanifolds with positive scalar curvature", Annals of Mathematics, 176: 815–63, DOI: 10.4007/annals.2012.176.2.3, MR 2950765 https://annals.math.princeton.edu/2012/176-2/p03 page 7 of 15 20. Saša Harkai, Bryce S. Murray, Charles Rosenblatt and Samo Kralj (2019). "Electric field driven reconfigurable multi-stable topological defect patterns" Physical Review Research 2, 013176 (2020). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.2.013176 https://https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1 103/PhysRevResearch.2.013176 The scalar mechanism The hypothesis that an element is a deformed scalar with an invariant volume can be translated into a geometrical model of the element. And the geometrical model of the element makes it possible to describe an amount of elements that tessellates space. Figure 9 shows a diagram of the scalar mechanism of an element. The centre of the scalar is m, the radius of the scalar is ris (inscribed sphere) and Sm is the resistance against deforming of the scalar mechanism. In vacuum space every scalar of the scalar field has the same magnitude. Nearly everywhere in the universe local space is vacuum space so it is reasonable to chose ris = 1,0 for the radius of the scalars in vacuum space. The hypothetical element that is a full sphere has a radius ris = 1,105. figure 9 The diagram shows that increasing the deformation of an element will increase the resistance against the deforming by the scalar mechanism. The deformation of the scalar mechanism of an element is only possible with the help of a transfer of volume within the boundary of the element. Change is energy so we have to conclude that the energy of every element is infinite. I can simulate the scalar mechanism in a drawing of the cross section of an element with the help of concentric circles (figure 10). If element M1 transfers 1 quantum to the joint plane with element M2 it can only influence element M2 at the point of contact between both scalars. A deformation of the joint plane at A or B isn't reasonable because the concentric circles at the point of contact between both scalars are the first shell that can increase the radius ris of element M1. The consequence is that elements transform their shape – actually the shape of the deformed part of the element – at the points of contact with the scalars of the other elements around. figure 10 The dynamical power of the scalar mechanism of every element in the universe is identical otherwise our universe cannot change continuously its internal configuration. That means that the cause behind the invariant volume of every element is the equality of the dynamical power of the scalar mechanism. The consequence is that the undistorted parts of the scalar mechanism – the inscribed spheres – are responsible for the configuration of the elements in space. A mathematical configuration that is similar to Kepler's conjecture. [21] Figure 11 shows the configuration of the scalars in vacuum space by a number of identical spheres. The volume of a scalar in vacuum space is about 74% of the volume of the whole element.[22] The scalars in figure 11 have their maximum radius in relation to the lattice "around". Nevertheless, the scalar mechanism of every element tries to transform into a full sphere. figure 11 page 8 of 15 Every scalar is limited by the 12 points of contact with the 12 scalars of the elements around so we have to conclude that figure 11 shows a configuration under pressure. An internal pressure of the undistorted scalar mechanism that is restricted to the 12 points of contact of every scalar. It is possible to visualize the pressure of a scalar of an element that is part of the lattice of scalars in figure 11. figure 12 The points of contact between the scalars in vacuum space results in point-like pressures inside the sphere of the scalar. Because of the shape of a sphere the point-like pressures within a scalar act like vectors. The scalar in figure 12 is drawn partly transparent to show the structure of the 12 vectors inside the scalar.[21] The consequence is that the identical scalars within vacuum space are forming together a primary vector field. However, every scalar has an identical radius thus there are no local resulting vectors in figure 11. The situation changes if I incorporate the influence of the quanta transfer within the topological part of the volume of the elements on the existing primary scalar vectors in vacuum space. An influence that is explained with the help of figure 10. figure 13 To determine the average shape of an element I can construct a static symmetrical element with the help of Kepler's conjecture. The result is a rhombic dodecahedron (see figure 13). Therefore, the transfer of 1 quantum of an element to one of more adjacent elements is the transfer of a fixed amount of volume within the boundary of the element to the joint plane(s) with the adjacent element(s). Actually, a topological transformation of the shape of the element. However, the volume of an element – the scalar mechanism – is invariant. Therefore, there must be a compensating volume transfer to one or more planes of the element. The transfer of the quantum to adjacent elements is Voutput. The transfer of 1 quantum to the element is Vinput, so Vinput = Voutput. Figure 19 shows the schematic distribution. Figure 14 shows the cross section of 2 adjacent elements, inclusive the deformed rhombic face of the element at the right side. The dark blue part of the deformed volumes is in all probability involved in the transfer of the quanta. The cross section shows that the element at the right side has pushed away volume of the adjacent element. Now the transferred quanta by the element at the right side are pushing against the scalar of the adjacent element. The push is super positioned on the primary scalar vector of the scalar. figure 14 The transfer of quanta within the electric field – the topological part of the elements – results in the creation of differences in the magnitudes of the primary scalar vectors. The created differences between the scalar vectors is similar to the amount of quanta transfer. Now it is without doubt that the changed magnitudes of the scalar vectors within vacuum space are similar to the magnetic field in physics. In other words, the transfer of a quantum generates corresponding scalar vectors. But the scalar vectors generate the distribution of the volume transfer within the boundaries of the elements. Because the Voutput of an element will be created in the adjacent planes where the scalar vectors have a larger magnitude than the entering scalar vectors from the scalars of the elements around. So I have to conclude that, without the use of the proposed curvature of space itself in the theory of general relativity, the construction of discrete space leads to the confirmation of the existence of the basic quantum fields. Basic fields page 9 of 15 that emerge from the geometrical properties of discrete space, visualized in the schematic figure 1. References: 21. Kepler, Johannes (1611), "Strena seu de nive sexangula" (The six-cornered snowflake), ISBN 978-1-58988-053-5, MR 0927925 22. Hales, Thomas C.; Ferguson, Samuel P. (2006), "A formulation of the Kepler conjecture", Discrete & Computational Geometry, 36 (1): 21–69, https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9811078 Gravitation Newtonian gravity is thought to be an attracting force. But shielding the force of gravity with the help of a sheet of light shows that Newtonian gravity is a push force. That means that the gravitational field pushes matter in the direction of other objects.[23][24] This in accordance with the properties of the scalar mechanism of every element. Every element is a deformed scalar thus every element tries to restore the shape of a sphere by "pushing" the adjacent elements around. If there is no matter in the universe, there is no Newtonian gravity. Einstein's gravitational force is caused by the curvature of space but – like Newtonian gravity – if there is no matter in the universe spacetime is also flat.[8] In other words, we cannot understand the force of gravitation if we don't examine the creation of matter. Figure 15 shows the concentration of energy in space. I have added the schematic structure of discrete space to underscore the tessellation of space by the elements. Matter and energy are equivalent (E = m c2) so we have to conclude that the concentration of energy is a concentration of quanta. Every element in the universe transfers 1 quantum synchronous with all the other elements in the universe. Therefore it is impossible to understand the concentration of quanta if we compare the elements with a group of persons where every person throws a ball at exactly the same moment. The deformation of the topological part of an element is always a number of quanta (n he). That's the consequence of tessellation. Moreover, every element tries constantly to restore the shape of a sphere by "pushing" the adjacent elements around. That is why deformation will accumulate itself because a couple of elements cannot force a large number of elements to increase their amount of deformation. The only exception is the synchronous pass on of the whole configuration of the concentrated quanta in relation to the structure of space. figure 15 If an element has a surplus of deformation – 100 quanta – it will take 100 te (constant of quantum time) to transfer the deformation to the adjacent elements. That is why the velocity of a local concentration of quanta cannot have the speed of light. Nevertheless, the concentration of quanta – just fixed amounts of topological deformation – is a redistribution of topological deformation. So if there is a concentration of deformation somewhere in vacuum space there is also a large volume with elements that has a deficit of topological deformation. figure 16 Suppose I take a pair of tweezers to pick up the deformation at the centre of the configuration. Now the situation is fundamentally changed because everywhere around the elements with a deficit of deformation are elements with an average amount of deformation. The latter represent the majority thus both volumes will immediately mix together. Without my pair of tweezers the elements within the concentration have to transfer the quanta in a circular way because of the lower velocity of the centre of the concentration. But if the deformation of an elements becomes part of a loop there is hardly any transfer of quanta to the outside of the centre of the concentration. The result is that the elepage 10 of 15 ments around can continue to transfer quanta to the centre. Figure 15 shows the described process of concentration, inclusive the resultant vectors of the magnetic field (the drawn arrows). Resultant vectors we are familiar with because of the resultant vectors of the electromagnetic field. Figure 16 shows a number of scalars within vacuum space and the well known resultant vectors of the magnetic field. The accumulation of more and more deformation by the centre of the configuration of concentration will force one or more scalars of the Higgs field to decrease their magnitude. The released volume of the scalar becomes part of the electric field and the result is an increase of the topological deformation at the centre of the configuration. The cause behind the further increase of deformation is geometrical. If a scalar decreases its radius the resistance against deforming by the topological part of the adjacent elements changes in relation to the situation before the radius of the scalar decreased. It is less than 1% but the effect is that the centre of the concentration becomes a stable spatial configuration. figure 17 The diagram above (17) shows the supply of quanta to a joint plane between 2 elements, like the 2 elements in figure 14. A flat joint plane between both elements has the value 0,0. The topological deformation in figure 14 corresponds with the vertical dotted line (I). It is not for certain that the supply of more volume to the joint plane at point I will result in the decrease of the radius of the scalar. But if the scalar decreases its radius and the transferred volume increases further the surface area of the increasing amount of transferred volume is decreasing. The green line between point I and point II isn't horizontal; point II represents a slightly lower amount of surface area than point I. The decrease of a scalar by a local concentration of energy is called the Higgs mechanism.[13][14] Rest mass is the mass that remains if the energy of the velocity is subtracted of the whole energy of the mass. Actually, rest mass is another term for stable mass so I can to conclude that rest mass originates from the decrease of one or more scalars within vacuum space. And last but not least, Newtonian gravity only affects the rest mass of an object. figure 18 If Newtonian gravity emerges at the moment that one or more scalars within vacuum space decrease their radius we can conclude that Newtonian gravity represents the vectorisation of the primary scalar vectors within vacuum space (the vectors in figure 12 without the influence of the transfer of quanta by the magnetic field). A decreased scalar within vacuum space is like a hole in the network of primary scalar vectors (figure 18). The result of the created unbalance within the network of primary scalar vectors is the creation of resultant vectors that are pointing to the decreased scalar(s). References: 23. Chungpin Hovering Liao (2019), "Microwave-caused influence on gravitational constant G in Newton's gravitational law". DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.15509.37600 24. Louis Rancourt and Philip J. Tattersall (2015), "Further Experiments Demonstrating the Effect of Light on Gravitation". Applied Physics Research; Vol. 7, No. 4; 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/apr.v7n4p4 Free fall and manipulating Newtonian gravity The conclusion that Newtonian gravity is the "one and only" gravity in our universe isn't really convincing without an explanation that the unbalance of the primary scalar vectors by the decrease of local scalars of the Higgs field can explain the well known phenomenon free fall.[25] Moreover, if the force of gravity can be shielded by a sheet of light – electromagnetic waves – the hypothesis must page 11 of 15 also explain the relation between Newtonian gravity and the electric and magnetic field.[24] In practise free fall is the synchronous velocity of 2 objects with different amounts of rest mass by the gravitational force of a celestial body – a homogeneous field of gravitation – without an atmosphere (vacuum space). Both objects – e.g. a hammer and a feather – represent rest mass and the nuclei of the atoms envelope decreased scalars: holes within vacuum space that interrupt scalar vectors (figure 18). Therefore, the hammer and the feather block scalar vectors created by the rest mass of e.g. the moon. figure 19 The number of interrupted scalar vectors of the moon is determined by the number of decreased scalars of each object. But the number of decreased scalars of both objects determines also the amount of rest mass of each object. If an object with 10 times the mass of another object is moved in vacuum space by a force that is 10 times the force on the other object both objects will have the same velocity. In accordance with Newton's equation F = m a. Experiments have showed that light can influence the strength of the force of gravitation. Figure 19 shows the principle. The schematic element (see figure 6) shows the distribution of the deformation of 1 quantum at the planes of the element at a certain moment. figure 20 figure 21 The topological deformation from 2 adjacent elements (green arrows) is identical to the deformation to 4 adjacent elements (red arrows). Topological deformation is the transfer of volume within the boundary of the elements, thus: Vinput = Voutput. The number of planes that will deform at a certain moment is variable with a minimum of 2. If the description of quantum gravity is correct, the model must clarify how light can influence the induced scalar vectors by the existence of matter. Figure 20 shows not only the deformation (1 quantum = he) but also the vectors of Newtonian gravity, the black arrows. The element in figure 20 deforms because the vector of Newtonian gravity (G) is the dominant vector at the moment. In other words, only the 2 blue planes are involved in the transfer of the deformation of 1 quantum: Vinput = Voutput. figure 22 But if I manipulate the free fall of the hammer and the feather with a shield of light – see figure 21 – I disrupt the scalar vectors of Newtonian gravity. Not with the help of an interruption by reducing the magnitude of the scalars but with the help of a stream of quanta within the electromagnetic field. Figure 22 shows the principle. The stream of quanta from the right side – created by the laser – influences the magnitudes of the scalar vectors within the page 12 of 15 involved scalars. In other words, from time to time the gravitational scalar vector G is not the dominant vector thus the topological transformation of the unit is caused by a quantum of an electromagnetic wave (n he). The result is an interruption of the gravitational acceleration if the element is – at that moment – involved in the propagation of an amount of deformation we call matter. Actually the hammer and the feather. References: 25. James Geach (2018). "Free-falling dead stars show that a cornerstone of physics holds up". https://theconversation.com/free-falling-dead-starsshow-that-a-cornerstone-of-physics-holds-up-99168 General relativity If a scalar decreases its radius within vacuum space the scalar itself is in the centre of a large concentration of energy, a local topological deformation of the electric field (the deformable part of the volume of each element). Our universe is non-local. Not only because the volume of all the elements in the universe tessellates space but also because of the instantaneous influence of all the scalar vectors within vacuum space (the vectors of the magnetic field and the field of Newtonian gravitation). The main law of physics – the law of conservation of energy – is about the conservation of change. Actually, it is about the amount of change within the electric field. But every transfer of a quantum generates a corresponding scalar vector (magnetic field and the field of Newtonian gravity). In other words, there is a law of conservation of scalar vectors – the direction of redistribution energy – too. The consequence is that the concentration of topological deformation doesn't stop with the creation of rest mass carrying particles. Everywhere in space elements are pushing quanta to concentrate topological deformation. The existing observable concentrations of macroscopic topological deformation in space – celestial objects and celestial bodies – are created by the same mechanism of concentration by the electric field. In other words, if I implement the gravitational constant in the equations of the theory of general relativity there is no difference between the gravitation of matter and the local concentrations of energy (mass within vacuum space). To calculate the influence of the mass within vacuum space I have to describe the geometrical properties of these accumulations of topological deformation. But that's nearly impossible because we cannot observe these local concentrations of mass within vacuum space in a direct and accurate way (Dark matter).[26] In the theory of general relativity the total mass of matter is translated into amounts of energy of the electric field. This is correct because the volume of the decreased scalars of the Higgs field become part of the volume of the electric field (Higgs mechanism). In other words, there is only one problem with the theory of general relativity, the theory isn't about the field of Newtonian gravity. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity is about the curvature of the scalar vectors within the electromagnetic field. And because of the implementation of the gravitational constant the theory of general relativity mimics the field of Newtonian gravitation. Documentation/Information: 26. Freeman, K.C. (June 1970). "On the Disks of Spiral and S0 Galaxies". The Astrophysical Journal 160: 811–830. DOI:10.1086/150474 Beyond the force of gravitation Imagine a local region of vacuum space. The only disturbances within the volume are the fluctuations within the corresponding electric field (topological deformation) and magnetic field (scalar vectors that affect the direction of the topological deformation). At the moment that all the involved elements start to minimize the deformation of each scalar mechanism the average velocity of the transfer of topological deformation will increase, except for the small volume that is forced to accumulate the transferred deformation. Actually, it is the situation in the schematic figure 15. However, figure 15 shows an evolution, a transformation of spatial properties during an amount of time in between the start of the concentration of energy and the end result. The aim of the drawing is to show how particles are created by the properties of the structure of the basic quantum fields. The duration of the evolution of the local concentration of deformation is nearly instantaneous because sub atomic particles are really small and the velocity of the page 13 of 15 transfer of quanta (c) is extremely high in relation to the size of an element (λe ≈ 0,5×10 -15 m). But what about the creation of a local concentration of topological deformation within a volume with the size of a galaxy? At the scale of our solar system the planets that are orbiting the sun show a direct relation between the mean orbital velocity and the mean distance from the sun (figure 23). A relation that is described by Kepler's third law.[27] The red line in the graph of figure 23 shows to be equal to the trajectory of the scalar mechanism in figure 9. That cannot be by accident. figure 23 The graph in figure 9 is calculated with the help of concentric circles that vary in a regular way (ris = 1,0; 0,9; 0,8; 0,7; etc.). The resistance against deformation between 2 adjacent concentric shells is related to their respective surface areas. The volume of our solar system is constantly disrupted by the emission of solar radiation of electromagnetic waves and high energy particles. Therefore it is not reasonable to expect that the inner volume of our solar system can concentrate considerable amounts of mass within vacuum space – Dark matter – nearby our sun. In other words, it is reasonable to conclude – like Isaac Newton did in the past – that the orbits of the planets of our solar system are caused by the force of gravitation alone. But this obvious conclusion cannot explain the strange relation between the scalar mechanism in figure 9 and figure 23. figure 15 I have copied figure 15 to underscore the importance of the use of the right concept to understand the relation between the orbital velocity and the mean distance from the sun by the orbiting planets. The left image of figure 15 shows the start of the rotational transfer of energy within a certain volume of vacuum space. The right image shows a high concentration of energy and it is clear that the main amount of topological deformation of the involved elements represents a closed loop of topological deformation. The only cause behind the whole transformation seems to be the synchronous transfer of quanta and the velocity of the transferred quanta (c). But at the level of the individual involved elements every element has a position and a shape that is directly related to its capacity – at that moment – to resist the Vinput of the adjacent elements around and to manage the Voutput too. The result is that all the elements together represent a spatial configuration with a rotational structure. Every planet is the centre of a spatial configuration with a rotational structure and all these spatial configurations are enclosed by the spatial configuration with a rotational structure of the sun itself. Suppose that the emission of electromagnetic radiation and high energy particles of our sun decreases. The result is the increase of the "infiltration" of the outer region of our solar system with mass (Dark matter). But increasing the amount of mass within the volume of our solar system results in an increase of the rotational transfer of the quanta within the solar system. But that's not equal to an increase of the magnitudes of the scalar vectors of Newtonian gravity because the rest mass of the planets is unaffected. In other words, the proposed causality between the force of gravitation and the orbits of the planets of our solar system is a misinterpretation of the observations within phenomenological reality. page 14 of 15 figure 24 The velocity of the stars within the Milky Way should be equal to the distribution of the velocity and orbital distance of the planets in figure 23 if the local properties of discrete space that envelope the Milky Way aren't influenced by the existence of Dark matter within the volume of the galaxy. However, the density of Dark matter is higher if the emissions of the radiation of the stars is lower because of a less dense population of stars further away from the bulge of the Milky Way.[28] Exactly what the graph in figure 24 shows because the existence of concentrated energy – mass within vacuum space – forces the involved elements to increase the rotational transfer of quanta within the volume of the Milky Way. Actually, the rotation of particles (spin), planets and galaxies rely on the same principle. References: 27. Johannes Kepler (1619). "The harmony of the world" (English translation). Kepler's third law (page 411). https://books.google.nl/books? id=rEkLAAAAIAAJ&pg 28. Bosma, A. (1978). "The distribution and kinematics of neutral hydrogen in spiral galaxies of various morphological types" (PhD Thesis). Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Conclusion The conviction that the properties of discrete space can be constructed with the help of the concepts of one or more models of the grand theories is not really helpful. The Standard model of particle physics, Einstein's theory of relativity and the Standard cosmological model are all founded with the help of the phenomenological point of view. Nevertheless, phenomenological physics is not restricted to the description of models. Conservation laws, universal constants and universal principles are also part of the conceptual framework. These universal patterns show the mathematical properties of discrete space in a direct way. page 15 of

Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador * Docente de Filosofía de la Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial y de la Universidad de las Américas. Licenciado en Filosofía por la Universidad del Salvador, de Buenos Aires. Magíster en Filosofía y Magíster en Tecnologías Aplicadas a la Práctica y Gestión Docente, por la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador. Forma sugerida de citar: BALLADARES, Jorge, 2013. "Una racionalidad emergente en la educación". En: Revista Sophia: Colección de Filosofía de la Educación. No 14. Quito: Editorial Universitaria Abya-Yala. Jorge Balladares Burgos [email protected] / Universidad Tecnológica Equinoccial / Quito Abstract Is it possible to think about an education that responds to contemporary needs? Is there a new way to think for an emerging education? This paper invites the reader to reflect philosophically about the educational challenges from a new emerging rationality. Besides the logic and instrumental reason of Modernity, the emerging rationality appears in education as an inclusive, colloquial and integrative new way to think. Keywords Rationality, emerging, inclusive, discernment, education. Resumen ¿Se puede pensar en una educación que responda a las necesidades contemporáneas? ¿Es posible un nuevo modo de pensar para una educación emergente? El presente artículo invita al lector a reflexionar filosóficamente los desafíos educativos a partir de una nueva racionalidad emergente. Frente a la lógica y razón instrumental de los procesos de modernización, una racionalidad emergente irrumpe en el escenario educativo como un nuevo modo de pensar inclusivo, participativo, dialógico e integrador. Palabras clave Racionalidad, emergente, inclusivo, discernimiento, educación una racionalidad EmErgEntE En la Educación Emerging rationality in education * 142 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación Introducción Hoy en día nuestro país experimenta una serie de cambios en la educación. Pasar de un modelo educativo centrado en los contenidos y en la memoria hacia un modelo de educación basado en la crítica, reflexión autónoma, trabajo colectivo y desarrollo de destrezas con criterio de desempeño se convierte en un verdadero reto. En este sentido, la reflexión filosófica nos invita a pensar lo que pasa en la educación y qué es la educación en sí. En este contexto, se ha venido hablando de una crisis de la educación. Parecería que nuestros modelos educativos no han respondido a las necesidades laborales de nuestra sociedad, con la consecuente migración de varios compatriotas a otros países. Un cierto enciclopedismo mal entendido sumado a la acumulación de conocimientos a través de la memorización ha marcado un estilo educativo poco fructífero en las últimas décadas. Se cuestiona la falta de preparación de los docentes debido a las bajas remuneraciones, lo que ha forzado al maestro a ser un mero repetidor de conocimientos y a acumular horas-clase antes que dedicar su tiempo a ser un pedagogo e investigador. En los últimos años la diferencia de oportunidades entre la educación privada y fiscal ha abierto la brecha educativa entre los que más tienen (y tienen más oportunidades de acceso al conocimiento) y los que tienen menores posibilidades de acceso. Una carencia de calidad educativa en todos los niveles también ha sido cuestionada en los últimos años, situando a nuestro país en categorías por debajo de la media según los estándares de calidad internacional. En esta perspectiva, el presente artículo quiere brindar una respuesta al contexto educativo actual desde la filosofía, proponiendo una racionalidad emergente que permita superar aquella racionalidad instrumental y formal, propia de la modernidad, y situarnos ante una nueva racionalidad inclusiva, comunitaria, dialógica y propositiva. Pensar de una nueva manera o buscar otro modo posible de pensar en función de la educación, nos sitúa ante un nuevo punto de partida en la filosofía de la educación. Una breve retrospectiva de la educación en el Ecuador Desde los tiempos antiguos, en Occidente, la humanidad ha estado preocupada por la educación de las nuevas generaciones. El mundo clásico se dedicó a formar ciudadanos y guerreros al servicio del Estado; las civilizaciones antiguas se centraron en transmitir y conservar sus tradiciones en torno a las clases o divisiones sociales que había en aquellos tiempos. En la Edad Media la formación del ser humano se basó en la 143 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos dimensión espiritual como camino para llegar al más alto conocimiento humano. Durante el Renacimiento se da un giro en torno a la visión de la educación, donde se considera a la persona como su eje central, a través del conocimiento científico; aquí se establece la necesidad de la educación del ser humano de acuerdo a las leyes de la naturaleza. A partir del siglo XIX, la educación va adquiriendo un sentido más liberal, en contraposición a la religión, hasta llegar a fines del siglo XX, cuando el hecho educativo gira en torno a las nuevas tecnologías y las sociedades informáticas y del conocimiento. En nuestro país debemos recordar que el modelo de educación en tiempos de la Colonia venía de Europa y era impuesto. Ya en la República las posiciones encontradas entre educación religiosa y educación laica llevaron a la toma de posturas radicales entre ambos estilos educativos. Una educación religiosa tuvo a las órdenes confesionales en el Ecuador (jesuitas, dominicos, franciscanos, salesianos, entre otros) como sus principales baluartes. Mientras que la educación laica tuvo su sustento en un Estado liberal que promovía las igualdades entre hombres y mujeres, buscaba el desarrollo integral del ser humano y se declaraba como no confesional. A mediados del siglo XX la educación laica se configuró en torno a una educación pública sustentada por el Estado y una educación privada fue promovida por determinados círculos sociales o iniciativas particulares.1 Asimismo, la pobreza extrema en nuestro país motivó a una serie de organizaciones sin fines de lucro y al Estado nacional a implementar programas de alfabetización y educación popular. Hoy en día, las nuevas tecnologías de la educación e información insertan a la educación en una cultura digital y es parte de esa gran aldea global de la información y del conocimiento. El modelo educativo con el que contamos hoy ha sido producto de un proceso histórico que ha ido a la par de los cambios políticos, económicos, sociales y culturales del Ecuador. En esta perspectiva históricocultural, una forma de pensar a través de una racionalidad determinada no ha sido ajena a este acaecer de la educación en el país y está inserta en una línea de continuidad con la tradición de Occidente. Si nuestro país ha experimentado los procesos de la Modernidad, de alguna u otra manera, hemos asumido sus diferentes formas de racionalidad. A continuación se planteará lo que implicó el proceso de modernización y sus diferentes formas de racionalidad. 144 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación Las formas de racionalidad en la Modernidad y su crisis Juan Carlos Scannone menciona que la sociedad moderna generó sus respectivas formas de racionalidad. En el siglo XVII aparece una sociedad ilustrada con una lógica de racionalidad analítica, instrumental, abstracta, lineal y formal (Scannone, 1996: 145-192). Todo esto favoreció a las ciencias, matemáticas y técnicas, al comercio desarrollado en el mercantilismo y al derecho natural universal-abstracto. Con el mito del progreso indefinido aparece un hombre ilustrado, enciclopédico, cuyo horizonte de comprensión se basa en el entendimiento abstracto. Con esta forma de racionalidad, la educación no estuvo exenta de la influencia del enciclopedismo de Voltaire, D'Alambert y Diderot, que buscó en el educando una acumulación de conocimientos para poder llegar a un sujeto "perfectamente" educado. Las sociedades modernas inician una segunda etapa en los siglos XIX y XX, en la que se sistematiza la lógica cultural, según Scannone. La racionalidad pasa a ser funcional y dialéctica: se supera lo analítico, pero no lo formal; la libertad se vuelve menos abstracta, pero se enmarca en un sistema. La libertad del hombre se realiza en la mediación de la libertad de todos y de un "todo". Esta racionalidad funcional y dialéctica desemboca en una praxis total, que busca cambios de la realidad circundante y que lleva a momentos de liberación del ser humano. La educación, especialmente en América Latina, asumió esta racionalidad funcional y dialéctica a través de propuestas de educación liberadoras que buscaban el cambio social, consideraban al oprimido como sujeto protagónico de su educación, que aspiraba la transformación de los modelos educativos tradicionales. Para Abel Jeannière, la Modernidad, como movimiento históricocultural, tiene cuatro revoluciones, que son la científica, la política, la cultural y la técnica (Jeannière, 1990: 499-510). La revolución científica rompe con la comprensión mediadora-simbólica del mundo, ya que lo considera autorregulado con leyes y acciones que lo gobiernan y lo regulan. La política rompe con los privilegios de la sociedad estamentalmente jerarquizada y entra con una concepción funcional de la sociedad y de la democracia. La Ilustración será la que dará pie a la revolución cultural con la autonomía de la razón y la libertad sin la tutela de las autoridades externas. Por último, la revolución técnica permitirá al ser humano pasar del trabajo agrario-artesanal al trabajo industrial y posindustrial. La Modernidad desarrolla la idea antropológica de un hombre autocentrado en su capacidad racional, dominador de la naturaleza por medio del conocimiento científico. Se puede decir que surge un superhombre (al mejor estilo de Nietzsche) que se instala para dominar el mundo, 145 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos la naturaleza, la imaginación y el destino de los seres humanos. Pablo Cifelli afirma que en la Modernidad "se desarrolla una concepción sustancialista que postula lo humano como una esencia que se da de hecho y al que le corresponden determinadas características como la asociación de la novedad con lo valioso, el postulado voluntarista del cambio social y la inflación ideológica y los sueños utópicos" (Cifelli, 1994). Por su parte, Bolívar Echeverría caracteriza la Modernidad a través de cuatro procesos: 1. "Sujetización", que consiste en el deseo del sujeto por constituirse como independiente y como fundamento de su propia naturaleza. 2. "Progresismo", que considera la historicidad como parte del cambio en la vida humana, en procesos de innovación y renovación. 3. "Urbanicismo", propio de las sociedades modernas que constituyen su mundo de la vida desde el orden y no desde el caos, desde la civilización y no desde la barbarie. 4. "Capitalización", que lleva al desarrollo de las naciones a través de la acumulación del capital, donde la dimensión económica predomina sobre la dimensión política en la sociedad civil (Echeverría, 2000). Ante estas cuatro características mencionadas por Echeverría, se puede inferir que la racionalidad en la Modernidad plantea la autonomía racional del ser humano desde la sujetación y tiene una linealidad del tiempo desde el progresismo. A su vez, tiene un carácter universal y civilizatorio desde el urbanismo, y cuenta con la acumulación de la riqueza como modo de vida, desde la capitalización. No obstante, en los últimos tiempos se ha pregonado una crisis de la Modernidad que nos lleva a plantear un fin de la historia o final de las ideologías. En este sentido, la racionalidad moderna también está mediada por esta crisis o tiempo de cambio, y que nos invita a pensar en una nueva forma de racionalidad. A partir de la segunda mitad del siglo XX empieza a hablarse de la "crisis de la Modernidad". La crisis de los paradigmas científicos, el fracaso de los sistemas filosóficos totalizantes y de los sistemas políticos totalitarios, la derrota de las ideologías, las dos guerras mundiales y sus consecuencias, la limitación del desarrollo y el progreso con su consecuente deterioro ecológico y humano, etc. Todos estos hechos ponen en situación de cambio a este movimiento histórico-cultural y se inicia el 146 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación debate (Scannone, 1992: 1023-1033). Esta crisis afecta la manera de comprender y de vivir la Modernidad: De ahí que, usando una expresión abstracta y general, podamos afirmar que hoy está en crisis la modernidad, entendida como un tal ethos histórico-cultural. Este nació en Europa con el surgimiento de los tiempos modernos y la emergencia de la burguesía como clase. Incluye un determinado proyecto de hombre y sociedad [...]. Dicho proyecto antropológico y cultural implicó un determinado tipo de racionalidad que a la vez lo justificaba y lo posibilitaba: la racionalidad cuantitativa y técnico instrumental. Esta, de hecho, tendió a erigirse como exclusiva y excluyente, es decir, tendió a unidimensionalizar la existencia humana y a erigirse como única razón humana y como razón universal (Scannone, 1990: 19). Alain Touraine hará una nueva reinterpretación de la Modernidad a partir de una forma de concebir a los individuos desde sus universos. Para este autor, en la Modernidad se relacionan dos universos: el universo técnico-económico de los empresarios y el universo sociocultural de la marginalidad, la exclusión y los grupos étnicos. Dichos universos conviven en la Modernidad y aunque parece que el universo técnico-económico triunfase con su razón instrumental y la colonización a través del dinero y el poder, el universo socio-cultural se vuelve resistencia contra dicha instrumentalización de la sociedad ejercida por el universo técnicoeconómico. De esta manera, las identidades se vuelven mecanismos de defensa contra la exclusión y la marginalización y además nos sitúan ante la búsqueda de nuevas formas de vida y mundos de la vida cotidiana de la gente (Touraine, 2006: 67). Dentro de las salidas de la Modernidad, Touraine reconoce cambios de concepción: la idea de estrategia sustituye a la de gestión; el cambio social reemplaza al de sistema social. Ya el sujeto deja de ser histórico para pasar a ser un sujeto individual que se descompone en la sucesión de presentaciones. Este nuevo sujeto vive su vida en simulacros, por una serie de códigos sin referente alguno, si describiésemos el imaginario social del hombre actual massmediatizado, diríamos que a este lo constituye el programa de tv, la web 2.0, la llamada a celular, el cd de música, el archivo en la computadora, etc. La posmodernidad, en sus diferentes acepciones, puede constituirse en un peligro para el pensamiento social al aniquilar lo que tiene que ver con la historicidad. Frente a una crisis de la Modernidad surge la pregunta: ¿se han completado procesos de modernización en América Latina? ¿Qué problemas han causado los procesos de modernización incompletos en nuestro país? Una crisis de la Modernidad en América Latina, a partir de procesos 147 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos no completos, ha originado una serie de problemas de orden económico y social, afectando muchas veces la estabilidad política, educativa y cultural de los países. Pobreza, subdesarrollo, analfabetismo, inflación, migración, delincuencia, narcotráfico, entre otros, son algunos de los problemas que acarrea nuestro continente. Ante esta realidad, la educación debe recuperar su papel crítico de los procesos dominantes y alienantes, que nos permita situarnos en nuevos puntos de partida para la búsqueda de soluciones. Desde las consecuencias de los procesos incompletos de modernización en América Latina, a Enrique Dussel le preocupa y repudia el clamor de los pobres que son excluidos de los sistemas establecidos. A partir de una irrupción del pobre en el horizonte filosófico, lo establecido y oficial se vuelve una totalidad que margina a una exterioridad constituida por pobres y excluidos de los sistemas. De esta manera, Dussel reconocerá las estructuras de la injusticia: si una persona domina estable o históricamente a otra persona, se encuentra en una praxis de dominación institucional y social. Cuando un individuo nace, entra desde siempre dentro de esta trama institucional que lo antecede y lo determina. Esto es lo que Dussel reconoce como estructuras del mal (Dussel, 1986). Desde este planteamiento dusseliano pueden identificarse los procesos de la Modernidad como pertenecientes a lo que él propone como proyecto vigente. Dicho proyecto oficial justifica la exclusión, dominación y muerte del pobre. Por otro lado, abre las puertas para plantear el "proyecto de liberación", que es el objetivo utópico de la finalización de la dominación y que comporta el "principio de esperanza". El proyecto vigente tiene una moral de lo enseñado, de lo establecido y dominante, mientras que el proyecto de liberación plantea una ética en la praxis –acción y relación– hacia el otro como otro. En el diálogo que realiza con Karl Otto Apel, la propuesta de Dussel refleja la misma preocupación que recoge el filósofo alemán en cuanto al avance de la Modernidad (Dussel, 1994: 97). Mientras la ética del discurso de la comunidad de comunicación de Apel se queda en una crítica, la filosofía de la liberación de Dussel plantea una praxis que terminará en opciones concretas. La ética del discurso reconstruye con sus argumentos una moral de la justicia universal. En cambio, Dussel incorpora la compasión y la solidaridad frente a los excluidos. Por eso, desde una perspectiva latinoamericana, además de la crítica y la deconstrucción a nivel del pensamiento, se incluye la praxis, el acto relacional a favor de los excluidos y necesitados. Además de realizar reflexiones sobre las causas y consecuencias de los procesos de modernización, implica una acción y respuestas concretas frente a la problemática que origina la Modernidad: pobreza, exclusión, marginalidad, migración, dominación, entre otros. 148 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación Luego de este análisis surge las siguientes inquietudes: ¿es posible hablar de un nuevo tipo de racionalidad? ¿Se puede proponer una racionalidad que considere nuestras categorías y formas de ser latinoamericanos? ¿Será factible proponer una racionalidad desde la emergencia de los procesos histórico-sociales-culturales-éticos de nuestros pueblos como una forma de superación de la racionalidad lógica e instrumental de la Modernidad? Estas preguntas inspirarán nuestra reflexión filosófica a continuación. Una nueva racionalidad emergente Para una comprensión crítica de la Modernidad en América Latina, para saber aceptar lo positivo de los procesos de modernización y a su vez rechazar lo negativo, se hace necesario partir de la concepción de Dussel del "otro". Desde el encuentro "cara a cara" se comprenden las demandas del otro desde el propio mundo de la vida: el mundo del otro puede hacerse "mi mundo". Al abrirse al otro, se rompe con el universo personal (Dussel, 1986). Para Juan Carlos Scannone el "yo" que aparece en la estructura del lenguaje en forma nominativa, pasa a ser un "heme aquí" en acusativo, lo que abre la posibilidad de pasar de un "yo individual" a un "nosotros" ético-histórico (Scannone, 1986: 367-386). Este nuevo colectivo que parte de la experiencia latinoamericana se vuelve ético en sus relaciones internas: el yo, tú, él/ella y ellos/as se armonizan y respetan sus diferencias, acogiéndose mutuamente en el seno del "nosotros". Por otro lado, este nuevo colectivo es histórico porque se vuelve protagonista de la historia, a través de sus actores, de sus decisiones, de sus crisis afrontadas y superadas. Y esta perspectiva del "nosotros" da pie para indagar sobre una racionalidad emergente. Para conceptualizar lo que es una racionalidad emergente, parto de la definición de Josef Estermann, quien considera a la racionalidad como un paradigma o modelo característico de un cierto grupo, dentro del cual las múltiples expresiones de la vida tienen una explicación coherente y significativa. En este caso, el mismo grupo con su respectiva racionalidad no tematiza los presupuestos o los "mitos fundantes", sino que los vive (Estermann, 1998: 64). Juan Carlos Scannone menciona un nuevo tipo de racionalidad que promueve comunidades vivas fundadas en el diálogo y dialogando con otras comunidades vivas, en las que se da tanto la unidad como la diferencia al mismo tiempo. Esta racionalidad emergente abre un espacio compartido e interdialógico, donde se reconocen las diferentes 149 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos particularidades dentro de una comunidad. La razón humana no considera a esta comunidad como la sumatoria de singularidades de manera abstracta, sino que la comunidad se vuelve protagonista de un proceso histórico de mutuo enriquecimiento. De aquel modo de ser meros emisores de nuestra identidad y receptores de otras particularidades, pasamos a formar parte de un verdadero proceso de universalización (Scannone, 1996: 83). Frente a la crisis, la racionalidad emergente nos debe llevar a una visión creativa y solidaria. Cuando citamos la creatividad, ella nos introduce hacia nuevas alternativas y posibilidades de generar recursos. Esta creatividad se enmarca en una lógica del "¿por qué no?" –si siempre se ha hecho de esta manera, ¿por qué no intentar otra forma?, ¿por qué no buscar otra alternativa?–; en cuanto a una racionalidad emergente solidaria, esta debe llevar a los sujetos a sentirse copartícipes de la lucha contra el desempleo, a tener una mentalidad solidaria hacia aquellos –que por la falta de empleo– se encuentran peleando por sobrevivir. Así, una racionalidad emergente creativa y solidaria frente al desempleo y la inestabilidad laboral nos permite insertarnos en una "lógica de gratuidad" (Scannone et al., 1995), que muchas veces contrasta con las lógicas de los sistemas formales establecidos. La racionalidad emergente también implica una praxis emergente, de vital importancia tanto para la cultura como para la sociedad. El trabajo, como praxis emergente, será la muestra en forma concreta de las contradicciones y posibilidades reales de síntesis entre los procesos de modernización y la herencia cultural de Latinoamérica. Además de estar en juego la producción objetiva de bienes y servicios, el trabajo será fuente de autorrealización del hombre emergente en creatividad y solidaridad. En este sentido, el trabajo debe ser dignificante, humanizador y creador de cultura, sin dejar de ser económicamente eficaz y rentable. Esto será posible en la medida que se constituyan sujetos interactuantes, sujetos creadores de riqueza y de cultura, sujetos solidarios con su comunidad, sujetos que se valoren a sí mismos (Balladares y Avilés, 2008). De igual forma, se puede reconocer una racionalidad políticoemergente que motive un nuevo tipo de unidad cultural y política en el mundo. Desde una perspectiva de comunicación y comunión, una racionalidad político-emergente nos lleva a replantear la democracia como forma de gobierno "de todos" y "para todos", y no solamente una delegación de poder. En este sentido, la razón humana no es solamente una abstracción, sino que se convierte en protagonista y partícipe de un proceso histórico en aras al bien común. Finalmente, esta racionalidad emergente participativa y solidaria – que nos permite insertarnos en la mencionada lógica de gratuidad– apli150 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación cada al ámbito educativo, permite percibir que el arte de enseñar no vale por su materialidad, sino por la posibilidad de transmitir una rica herencia cultural y de conocimientos que vaya de generación en generación. De ahí que la gratuidad nos permite, además, fundamentar los aprendizajes colaborativos y cooperativos en la idea de que el saber se comparte y pero no se mezquina, se gestiona y no se limita. Luego de este análisis, es posible hablar de una nueva racionalidad emergente, que incorpore otra lógica desde la gratuidad, la solidaridad, la participación y el diálogo desde nuestra experiencia del "nosotros" latinoamericano. Y esta nueva racionalidad plantea desafíos a la educación como ámbito privilegiado de la formación de mentes y voluntades, y por qué no, configurada de nuestra racionalidad. Desafíos de una racionalidad emergente para la educación Desde esta perspectiva de la racionalidad emergente se plantean nuevos desafíos para los procesos de enseñanza-aprendizaje en el Ecuador. A continuación mencionamos algunos de ellos: 1. Una síntesis vital entre la herencia humana y cultural con lo válido de los procesos de modernización: una racionalidad emergente debe lograr síntesis transformadoras entre lo tradicional y lo nuevo, entre lo propio de nuestra idiosincrasia cultural y los nuevos conocimientos; entre los contenidos y las destrezas, entre la competencia y la solidaridad. 2. Recuperar la originalidad: volver a tener un modo de pensar auténtico, creativo e innovador se presenta como desafío para la educación. La copia o las malas imitaciones de modelos extranjeros han venido fracasando desde hace muchos años. La educación tiene el desafío de proponer proyectos innovadores que tengan una incidencia en la sociedad ecuatoriana y que no sean la copia de proyectos de otros países que poco o nada han respondido a nuestra realidad. 3. Educación incluyente: brindar oportunidad a todos por igual, sobre las diferencias sociales, económicas, étnicas, culturales, ideológicas y religiosas. Una racionalidad emergente propone la tolerancia de la diversidad de ideas, puntos de vista y experiencias de vida. 4. Dialogismo: esta racionalidad emergente busca el diálogo como mediación eficaz para la convivencia en comunidad y la comunicación. En un diálogo todos los interlocutores deben estar en 151 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos igualdad de condiciones y no puede haber interlocutores que sometan o estén por encima de otros imponiendo sus ideas. Todos los interlocutores dialogan entre sí en una relación disenso-consenso. Habrá ocasiones que las ideas sean yuxtapuestas, contrarias o contradictorias, pero una racionalidad emergente debe llevar a consensos. 5. Discernimiento: una racionalidad emergente nos propone como desafío un continuo discernimiento entre lo positivo y lo negativo de la realidad. Ser críticos ante situaciones adversas, pero comprensivos ante el mundo real. Se adopta lo bueno, se resiste lo dañino y se transforma en todos los niveles desde lo propositivo. Este discernimiento emergente lleva al ser humano a revalorar la integración, la gratuidad, la creatividad, la participación y el consenso. Desde una racionalidad emergente, el currículo educativo, instrumento orientador de la actividad académica de la escuela, debe ser flexible, integrador de conocimientos actuales como tradicionales, que fomente la creatividad y originalidad de los educando. Asimismo debe procurar el diálogo continuo entre los diferentes actores de la comunidad educativa, proponiendo espacios de diálogo y continua reflexión a través de la crítica y el discernimiento que conduzca a la toma de decisiones. Además, una racionalidad emergente debe mediar el desarrollo de pensamiento de los educandos, considerándola como un eje transversal dentro del proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje. Si desde la filosofía se puede plantear un nuevo tipo de racionalidad, ¿por qué no pensar en una educación emergente más propia y auténtica para nuestra forma de ser latinoamericanos? Conclusión La educación en Ecuador tiene como desafío actualizar y fortalecer su currículo, y responder a las necesidades del país desde un perfil de egreso del estudiante competente más acorde a la realidad. Para ello, este trabajo busca recuperar una racionalidad emergente propia de nuestra forma de "ser" y "estar" en América Latina, que permita integrar tanto la sabiduría de la tradición como los desafíos de los cambios contemporáneos. Una racionalidad emergente permite ampliar la perspectiva de la simple racionalidad instrumental y técnica, e integrar las diferentes dimensiones humanas como respuesta al contexto de la educación actual 152 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Una racionalidad emergente en la educación desde la filosofía. Esta nueva forma de pensar nos sitúa ante una nueva racionalidad inclusiva, participativa, dialógica, comunitaria y propositiva, que busca en la comunión de la diferencia una vía de realización y de alcanzar el bien común. El ser educable se constituye como fascinante para el quehacer filosófico y nos invita a preguntarnos sobre la educación y el porqué de ella. La educación ha sido una preocupación continua de la humanidad, a través de la historia y las diferentes culturas, cambiando y adaptándose a las necesidades de los diferentes colectivos a través del tiempo y los espacios. El desafío, hoy, consiste en la búsqueda de una educación emergente que surja desde una nueva racionalidad como otra forma de ser educable-educado. Notas 1 Tomado de Filosofar Educativo: http://filosofareducativo.blogspot.com Bibliografía BALLADARES, Jorge 2006 Lo político: una revalorización para la política en América Latina. Quito: Educom. 2011 Módulo de filosofía y sociología I. Quito: SED-UTE. BALLADARES, Jorge y AVILÉS, Mauro 2008 "Aportes para una antropología filosófica desde la perspectiva del trabajo en América Latina". Intercambio 2006-2007. Jahrbuch Stipendienwerkes Lateinamerika-Deutschland. Berlin: Lit Verlag. CIFELLI, Pablo 1994 La encrucijada cultural contemporánea. Buenos Aires: La Crujia. DUSSEL, Enrique 1986 Ética comunitaria. Madrid: Paulinas. 1994 (comp.) Debate en torno a la ética del discurso de Apel. México: Siglo XXI. ECHEVERRÍA, Bolívar 2000 Las ilusiones de la Modernidad. Quito: Tramasocial. ESTERMANN, Josef 1998 Filosofía andina. Quito: Abya-Yala. JEANNIÈRE, Abel 1990 "Qu'est-ce la modernité?". En: Études. No 373, París, pp. 499-510. SCANNONE, Juan Carlos 1986 "Filosofía primera e intersubjetividad. El a priori de la comuni dad de comuni ca ción y el nosotros ético-histórico". En: Stromata. No 42. San Miguel, pp. 367-386. 153 Sophia 14: 2013. © Universidad Politécnica Salesiana del Ecuador Jorge Balladares Burgos SCANNONE, Juan Carlos 1990 "Hacia una pastoral de la cultura". En: Evangelización, cultura y teología. Buenos Aires: Guadalupe. 1992 "El debate sobre la modernidad en el mundo nor-atlántico y en el tercer mundo". En: Concilium. No 244. Madrid: Verbo Divino, pp. 1023-1033. 1996 "Nueva modernidad adveniente y cultura emergente en América Latina". En: Argentina, tiempos de cambio. Buenos Aires: San Pablo. SCANNONE, Juan Carlos et al. (eds.) 1995 Hombre y sociedad . Reflexiones filosóficas desde América Latina. Bogotá: Indo-American Press Service. TOURAINE, Alain 2006 Crítica de la Modernidad. México: FCE. Fecha de recepción del documento: 8 de enero de 2013 Fecha de aprobación del documento: 15 de abril de

Swiss Philosophical Preprint Series # 23 Maksymilian Del Mar Creativity and Imagination in the Practice of Philosophy added 20/11/2008 ISSN 1662-937X © Maksymilian Del Mar 1 Creativity and Imagination in the Practice of Philosophy Maksymilian Del Mar• Abstract This paper argues that the exercise of the imagination requires us 1) to attempt to describe features of a certain practice that appear, at first blush, natural and obvious; 2) to understand that that which appears natural and obvious could be otherwise; and 3) to be open to the introduction of changes to that which appears natural and obvious. Imagination, in this sense, is quite different to creativity. The latter works on the basis of the introduction of variations to settled phenomena. This exercise of creativity is important, but ultimately, it contributes principally to the stability and identity of a community and reinforces its most firmly established features. Imagination, on the other hand, is more difficult, for it strikes at the very heart of that which is settled. Changes to that which is settled may not only be resisted, but may also be violently opposed. And yet, it is precisely the very ability and willingness to be open to such changes that may be of the most ethical and political significance. These differences between creativity and imagination are illustrated in the context of the practice of philosophy. Introduction In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt occasionally refers to the thoughtlessness of Eichmann as "the lack of imagination." 1 In subsequent work, Arendt returned again and again to the ethical and political significance of thoughtfulness – as she does, for example, in her paper, "Thinking and Moral Considerations" 2 and in the first volume of The Life of the Mind. 3 In the former, Arendt explores the character of Socrates as a paradigmatic example of thoughtfulness. Putting to one side exegetical issues concerning Arendt's understanding of thoughtfulness, 4 her discussion raises the following question: how thoughtful, how imaginative, is the practice of philosophy? The aim of this paper is to offer an answer to that question, but in doing so, not to attempt to offer an accurate picture of the practice of • School of Law, University of Edinburgh and Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lausanne. A version of this paper was presented to the Edinburgh Legal Theory Research Group, 17 October 2008. Particular thanks to Haris Psarras and Zenon Bankowski. Email: [email protected]. 1 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, London: Penguin, 1964, at 287-288. 2 Arendt, Hannah, "Thinking and Moral Considerations" (1971) 38(3) Social Research 417-446. 3 Arendt, Hannah, The Life of the Mind, New York: Harvest, 1981. 4 For a helpful overview, see Bernstein, Richard, "Arendt on Thinking" in Villa, Dana (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Arendt, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 277-292. 2 philosophy, 5 but rather, to use the context of the practice of philosophy in order to explore what we may expect from the exercise of the imagination. As we shall see, such an exploration may also help us to understand the differences between the exercise of imagination and creativity. The paper proceeds in five brief parts. The first four parts introduce what is called here the four layers of the practice of philosophy: first, the outer-outer layer; second, the neo-outer layer; third, the neo-inner layer; and fourth, the inner-inner layer. The outer-outer layer refers to the environments and tools thanks to which and in the context of which persons are emotionally involved in certain common or joint objects. The neo-outer layer is characterised by a repertoire of gestures developed at least partly in the environments and tools of the outerouter layer. The focus of the third layer, the neo-inner, is on four elements of philosophical thinking: first, the reliance on intuition-contexts; second, the transcendental ambition; third, ideal-dialectical dynamics; and fourth, the exercise and camouflage of hindsight. The fourth layer, the inner-inner, is comprised of the substance and content of arguments and problems. Such is the program for the first four parts of the paper. Space constraints mean that the paper but sketches each of the layers and their respective components. The fifth and final part argues that although there is both a need and an opportunity for creativity in the inner-inner layer of philosophical practice, the exercise of the imagination is characterised by the ability and willingness to 1) to attempt to describe that which, at first blush, appears natural and obvious; 2) to understand that that which appears natural and obvious could be otherwise; and 3) to be open to the introduction of changes to that which appears natural and obvious. In other words, exclusive reliance on the creativity needed and produced in the inner-inner layer will not, by itself, allow us to consider the practice of philosophy as imaginative. In order to be imaginative, the practice of philosophy must at the 5 This is also the reason why the paper does not offer any discussion as to the differences in the practice of philosophy in different cultures and at different times. 3 very least offer the possibility for changes to the first three layers. If we expect anything less from the exercise of the imagination, we run the risk of the practice of philosophy becoming ever more incapable of seeing the limitations of any one form in which it is practiced, and becoming ever more defensive and perhaps aggressive in response to changes that challenge the form in which it is practiced. Put more generally, what was missing from Eichmann, and what seeks to be countered by the exercise of the imagination (as presented here), is precisely openness to an awareness of one's own limitations – to a great extent influenced by the environments, tools, embodiments and habits of thinking within which one acts and develops – and thus also an ability and willingness to confront the often unintended consequences of one's actions and change one's own ways of life. Creativity, at least as presented here, turns out to operate under a contrary dynamic, i.e., in offering variations on familiar themes, creativity reinforces the identity of persons, and increases the barriers that outsiders need to cross in order to become insiders. Although such reinforcement of identity, and such stabilisation of relations and expectations amongst persons is sometimes needed, there is an ever-present danger, particularly when such groups become powerful, that those outside it will be seen as, and treated as, unwelcome threats to the status quo. I. The Outer-Outer Layer Consider the following environments: a pub showing a football game and a philosophy seminar. In both scenarios, participants are emotionally involved in a joint or common object. In the case of the pub, the eyes and ears of most, if not all, persons are on the many screens scattered throughout the pub (a common object), or, perhaps, on one big screen (a joint object), listening to and watching the game. In the case of the philosophy seminar, the eyes and ears of most, if not all, persons are on the person giving the seminar. 4 There is emotional involvement in two different ways. First, there is the obvious emotional involvement in the result of the game or in the argument. That is not the kind of emotional involvement of interest here. The second kind, relevant for present purposes, is that of emotional involvement in the common or joint object such that, were there to be any interference in the capacity of persons to see and hear the game, or see and hear the argument, one could expect an expression, sometimes violent, of emotional disapprobation. It is easy to forget that human beings are not born with the capacity for joint attention, i.e., the capacity to pay attention to a joint object. 6 But it not the physiological or developmental level that is of relevance presently. Rather, what is significant here is how the environment itself is structured to facilitate the exercise of our capacity for joint attention. In the case of the pub, reference has already been made to the scattering of television screens, or the prominent positioning of one big screen. In the case of the seminar, it is pertinent to notice the arrangement of the table and the seats, and the positioning of the speaker at a spot of maximum visibility and audibility for all. Joint attention is facilitated even more obviously in the case of a lecture theatre, sometimes to the extent that the mass of students sits in the dark, while the lecturer is bathed in the glory of a spotlight. And, of course, we could hardly conceive of a more dramatic ritualisation of joint attention than the football stadium. Of course, we can speak of many other kinds of philosophical spaces. At one extreme, one can consider the effects of the differences between university campuses collected or scattered within the city, and those on the outskirts of a major city or those forming their own little university village. At the other, one can look at the design of office spaces, and ask oneself, for example, why it is that it is very rare, if it has ever occurred at all, for a philosophy department to have an open office environment. Somewhere in between these two extremes, one can look to see if those with offices closer together, and thus those more likely 6 For a recent overview of the relevant literature, see Eilan, Naomi et al (eds), Joint Attention, Communication and Other Minds: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, Oxford University Press, 2005. 5 to interact more frequently, are already grouped in terms of research areas, or, if not, whether new research areas emerge from those more frequent interactions. One can look, further, at the design of any one individual office, lined with books (rather than, say, paintings), quiet, overlooking rooftops, and containing a computer screen and keyboard fighting for space with various half-open books and papers. The important point to make here is that environments tend to be, on the whole, largely invisible to philosophers, and yet, simultaneously, and perhaps precisely because of this, highly influential. Their causal efficacy is notoriously difficult to convey, but their influence may be glimpsed when alternatives are considered. In other words, the successful functioning of these environments is dependent on their being taken for granted; on not yet even being recognised as obvious and natural; such that the possibility of them being different does not even arise as a question, let alone one in which the participants might take an active interest. Reference has already been made to the lack of open office space in philosophy departments, but one can consider other alternatives that would, potentially, facilitate different kinds of interaction and expression. Further examples shall feature in the fifth part of the paper. The outer-outer layer is comprised not only of environments, but also tools. Again, one can be more or less telescopic in one's observations here. In the case of the seminar, for example, one can notice obvious material instruments, such as a blackboard, or a laptop and projector. But one can also pay attention to other forms, e.g., the form of a handout to be distributed prior to or during a presentation; or the form of a PowerPoint presentation – indeed, as for the latter, it may be pertinent to ask why, for example, some philosophers may feel their ideas are more easily presentable in the form of bullet points than others, or why those philosophers who do use PowerPoint nevertheless rarely use diagrams or images. One can also look at other forms, outside of the environment of the seminar, such as the forms of 6 articles (to be of a certain length, written in a certain tone, appropriately supported by references), the forms of books, the forms of reviews – all of which one can characterise as tools of expression – as well as tools of composition, such as the use of a computer and keyboard and their effects on philosophical expression. 7 As with environments, philosophers may get so used to the tools they use that they do not ever come to consider how these tools might be affecting their philosophical output, or what would happen should they use alternative tools for either composition or expression. Once again, some alternatives will be considered in the fifth part of the paper. One common thread that runs throughout the various different kinds of environments and tools used in philosophy departments is the facilitation and endorsement of solitude. Although some philosophy departments offer more opportunities for interaction than others, the typical and not wholly inaccurate image of philosophical practice is of the lonely philosopher, wrestling with, say, the never-ending perplexities of language. Indeed, it is not uncontroversial to suggest that it is likely that the greatest part of a contemporary philosopher's life will be spent alone before a computer. In previous times, papers stacked up on a simple table illuminated by candlelight replaced the contemporary computer. In short, whether looking back with grief and remorse, 8 peering into oneself for the source of one's knowledge of wax burning, 9 or waking up each day to face oneself in the mirror of nature, 10 solitude is a staple diet for the philosopher. Indeed, so protected, so highly prised, is this time filled with one's own self that one may speculate whether or not it is linked with the longstanding interest, if not obsession, of philosophy with self-consciousness, self-knowledge, identity, deliberation, reason, and decision-making. What else could seem more insightful for 7 The bulk of the contemporary practice of philosophy is remarkably uniform in terms of tools of expression. One has to go back some centuries or decades to the works of, e.g., Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Benjamin and Wittgenstein for innovations in philosophical expression. 8 See, Saint Augustine's Confessions. 9 See, Descartes' Meditations. 10 See, Thoreau's Walden. 7 a philosopher than more reflection on reflection? And what else could seem more valuable than the life examined, i.e., the life already led by philosophers? As noted above, alleging causal relations between environments and tools and philosophical output is difficult and highly speculative. The point, in any event, of this part of the paper is not to point to any such causal relations, or even to raise the likelihood of a link between the environments and tools of the philosophical life and the tendency to focus on certain problems and look for certain insights. Rather, it is to point those environments and tools, and thereby also suggest that there are alternatives to them. If such an exercise is seen to be as uninteresting, or worse, offensive, by the philosopher, then that response may in itself tell us something about the tenacity of these environments and tools. II. The Neo-Outer Layer Attending a recent seminar given by a philosopher to other philosophers, an observer who focuses on the speaker's facial expressions and gestures may very well notice the following: when thinking, the speaker looks up into the air, sometimes also narrowing his eyes (squinting as if to signify that he is thinking something difficult). Should such an observer attend many seminars given by philosophers to other philosophers, she may very well notice a good many incidents of such a gesture. Indeed, such an observer may notice a whole repertoire of gestures and facial expressions, and she may not take long to consider the possibility that these gestures and facial expressions are recognisably philosophical, common to communities of philosophers. The suggestion of this part of the paper is that these gestures and expressions are equally part of philosophical practice, and are equally as important as, say, environments and tools, or, as we shall see in a moment, features of philosophical thinking or the content of arguments. 8 The neo-outer layer, however, should not be restricted to hand gestures and facial expressions. In a similar way to the case of environments and tools, it is precisely those things that we have not yet thought of as gestures that may be the most influential, and most difficult to shake off. An example from football may help bring out this notion of a heretofore invisible gesture. Return, for a moment, to the pub showing the football match. Imagine that a player in the match misses an excellent opportunity for scoring. He gets down on his knees. His hands clasp his head. He tilts his head back and rolls his eyes. He swears. These are all gestures we expect from players who miss such chances. Not only do we ourselves often fail to see these as gestures, i.e., as identifiable entities capable of being separated from the whole incident of a missed opportunity in football, but they also seem natural to us, and perhaps even more so the footballer. How is that there is so much uniformity in the comportment of a missed opportunity in football? Could there be, by analogy, a comportment of doubt, a comportment of thinking, a comportment of philosophising? Consider, too, the possibility that language is, at bottom, not something abstract – a tool of communication – but primarily a performance of one's body. If there is a technical philosophical language, might one also say there is a technical philosophical body? Much has, of course, been written about the body as a neglected locus of knowledge, and equally, about the questionable primacy given to certain senses in the expression and transmission of knowledge, such as the dominance of the sense of sight as a philosophical metaphor. 11 Rarely, it seems, has this been traced to the practice of philosophy. 12 Even Dewey, who spoke of his astonishment at not being able to sit down when instructed to do so 11 For the latter, see Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 12 A recent exception may be Shusterman, Richard, Body Consciousness: a Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, though Shusterman appeals to, or at least tends to write in the register of, philosophical self-improvement. Of course, there is a long-standing tradition, more ancient and medieval than modern, of philosophy as a way of life (for a discussion, see, for example, the work of Pierre Hadot), but only rarely is this presented in corporeal terms, or when it is, as with the Stoics, the body tends to be thought of as a source of danger to be controlled by the mind. 9 in a particular way, 13 did not consider how bodily habits might affect philosophical practice. The importance of the body figures not only in, though may be most dramatic in, the case of the exercise of philosophical practice, i.e., in how we communicate philosophical ideas, e.g., the fact that we do so by writing and speaking, rather than say, miming or passing pictures to each other or sculpting. Its importance also lies in the lack, in most philosophers, of any kind of bodily flexibility of the kind that Dewey did speak of. 14 Indeed, this silencing of the many potentialities of the body may itself be as much as a source of the long-standing philosophical celebration of the cerebral, and the correlative primacy given to the deliberative in explanations of behaviour (e.g., by granting causal power to reasons), as the persuasiveness of any argument. In this respect, one could speculate that the silencing of the body and the alleged bias in favour of the cerebral, is analogous to the causal relation speculated on above between the facilitation and encouragement of solitude in the environments and tools of the philosophical life and the tendency to celebrate the importance of self-reliance, or self-control (e.g., rational control over one's emotions or desires), and the so-called rational liberation of the individual from the traditionality of a society. Once again, the causal relations between forms of the philosophical body and philosophical pictures, arguments or biases are not easily drawn; nor is that the focus here. What is more important here is the very process of identifying features or characteristics of the philosophical body and thereby opening up the possibility for changing them. We can gain the most powerful insights into the philosophical body when we consider alternatives; when we widen, in short, the realm of possible philosophical bodies. Consider, for example, the possibility of philosophical ideas being communicated by way of miming or passing pictures or sculpting. What does the consideration of such a possibility tell us about the philosophical 13 See, Dewey, John, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology, New York: Henry and Holt, 1922. 14 For a striking example of a sociologist to the contrary, see Wacquant, Loic, "Pugs at Work: Bodily Capital and Bodily Labour Among Professional Boxers" (1995) 1 Body & Society 65-94. 10 body? How do philosophers respond to such a suggestion? What does that reveal about the tenacity, the pull of gravity, of bodily habits? III. The Neo-Inner Layer The focus of the neo-inner layer is on philosophical thinking. The four features of philosophical thinking, to be discussed below in this order, are: first, the reliance on intuitioncontexts; second, the transcendental ambition; third, ideal-dialectical dynamics; and fourth, the exercise and camouflage of hindsight. All of these features are closely related and only artificially divided. Again, given space restrictions, each of them can only be sketched very briefly. Further, no evidence will be offered for asserting them as features of philosophical thinking. Rather, they are offered as observations not for their own sakes, but for the sake of understanding what we may expect of the imagination in the practice of philosophy. IIIA. Intuition-Contexts Intuition-contexts are stocks of common examples often used to illustrate, buttress, or motivate intuitions. These can be thought of as mini-stories, or typical narrative images, in which the intuitions at play in certain communities of arguments or problems feel at home. To illustrate this feature of philosophical thinking, a good deal of exegetical work would need to be done. One way in which this could be done would be to take some of the most often cited or most often taught texts of, say, the contemporary analytical philosophy of action and to point to the alleged common features of typical examples. These, it might be thought, would involve ex-ante, first-person, short-term action, rather than ex-post, thirdperson, long-term activities. 15 Another way to approach the task would be to take the concept 15 Recall, for example, the light-switcher in Davidson, or the lever-puller in Anscombe. The typical examples are not, by contrast, the actions of rugby teams, or the activity of gardening. Of course, one can see, in light of this, how changes to the examples also result in the emergence of new fields and problems, e.g., the problem of collective intentionality, and thus the-sub field of the analytical philosophy of group actions. 11 or problem of intentionality and to show how this concept or problem has emerged from the repetition of certain examples, e.g., examples in which there are already articulated rules about how someone ought to proceed, with the only question left over being whether they are following them, or why they should follow them. Yet another strategy would be to take a debate, e.g., the debate over the extent to which, and in what circumstances, intentional action is accompanied by awareness or consciousness, and to situate this debate within, once again, the recurring examples, e.g., games (e.g., chess) where some set of rules is said to be constitutive, and where the debate oscillates between the example of the beginner and the expert (the former's intentionality said to be accompanied by awareness or consciousness, and the other's not). 16 A final strategy would be to consider the effect of new examples on some philosophical debate, the most dramatic of which, in recent times, was the tremor felt among epistemologists confronted by the Gettier cases. The important point in all of this is to suggest the primacy of recurring images, from which various kinds of arguments, problems, concepts, positions or debates emerge and around which they oscillate. Recognising this feature, in other words, is recognising that images are not mere illustrations of abstract principles (i.e., that they are not 'mere' examples, even if we call them that), but that abstract principles emerge from recurring images, as supplemented, perhaps, by one's own experiences. In short, and counter-intuitively, it may be more accurate to say that it is the abstract principles that are the examples for the recurring images. IIIB. The Transcendental Ambition The transcendental ambition consists in the construction of philosophical pictures out of conditions thanks to which the author of those conditions hopes to be able to evaluate the 16 The work of Hubert Dreyfus is exemplary here. 12 rightness or wrongness (whether from a political, ethical, epistemic, social, legal, or any other perspective) of an action or proposition. It has sometimes been thought that some philosophical thinking is characterised by the search for a definition. 17 But, at least in light of the present feature, this does not get at the core of the issue, which is that the search for a definition is but one way of attempting to find a ground from which an evaluation of some action or proposition can proceed. Take any philosophical picture. Take, for instance, the debate over legal validity or moral objectivity, and consider whether any of the proposed answers to this problem do not proceed in such a fashion as to enable the author of the alleged criteria of validity or objectivity to evaluate whether this or that norm is valid or objective. Take the problem of political obligation: is this problem not seen to be resolved when the author is able to show that we can use his or her picture to evaluate whether, in these or those circumstances, a person is obliged to obey a directive of the government or not? Of course, in the context of the problem of political obligation, the answers will differ; some may place more or less reliance on, say, the circumstances in which authority is exercised, others on the content of the directive, or any number of other factors – indeed, in light of the first feature noted above, we could say that the relative reliance on any one of those is likely to be influenced by the typical images assumed or focused on by the author. More pertinently for present purposes, it is significant that, sooner or later, the 'success' of some proposed stack of conditions is revealed to have been mistaken, i.e., there are always counter-examples that are, eventually, offered, such as to reveal some circumstances in which the conditions do not pick out some relevant difference. Finally, it is noteworthy to acknowledge that the transcendental ambition might appear too obvious to be worthy of being stated. For what other ambition can one discern from, say, a 17 See, for example, Hart, HLA, Definition and Theory in Jurisprudence: An Inaugural Lecture, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953. 13 theory of truth, except that it is designed to help us distinguish between true and false statements? In answer, it is worth repeating that, as with many of the features of the first three layers of philosophical practice, they all appear too obvious to be worth stating until and unless one proposes an alternative; until and unless, that is, one sees such features as contingent rather than necessary components of philosophical thinking. IIIC. Ideal-Dialectical Dynamics The ideal-dialectical dynamics of philosophical thinking – and also the third feature of the neo-inner layer – consists in the observation that philosophical work typically proceeds in the shadow of the horizon of a concept that is always receding and always being approached in the form of examples that fall short of reaching their destination. Put differently, one could assert that every philosophical thought is the pursuit of an ideal, and that this pursuit is neverending, for these are ideals, like all ideals, that are difficult, if not impossible, to think in themselves, and can be, perhaps only, or at least are typically, approached from the perspective of examples of that which they are not. The idea that philosophical thinking needs ideals it can never satisfy ought not to be thought of as determined for all time. There is, in other words, no set list of ideals. The idea, rather, is that in any one case of philosophical thinking there is always some ideal (often grammatically positive, such as truth, beauty, goodness, validity, and so on) that is functioning in a way that cannot be exhausted, with the effect that philosophical thinking can, at best, amass examples of situations in which it is absent. It would be unclear, then, to say that philosophical thinking proceeds by dividing, distinguishing, classifying, and so on – in the same way that, as mentioned with respect to the previous feature, it is unclear to say that (some) philosophical thinking proceeds by way of definition. Rather, at any one time, an ideal is pursued; its explanation is sought; its pursuance 14 emerges from an attempt to make sense of some typical recurring example or some experience assumed or taken to be paradigmatic; but its actual capture is impossible. To take but one example from this paper, the figure of the imagination could be understood to be treated as an ideal – the concept is being pursued and examples are being amassed of what imagination is not. One can think, if pressed, of this feature of philosophical thinking as the reverse of the previous one, i.e., that the impossibility to capture the ideal pursued by philosophical thinking is revealed in the always-available possibility of constructing counter-examples that show the transcendental ambition to have failed. Further, if one imagines the possibility of a philosophy of falsity, ugliness, invalidity and the bad, then one sees the importance of certain recurring examples in not only making intuitions feel at home, but also, with reference to this feature, driving the pursuit of that which is impossible to capture. IIID. The Exercise and Camouflage of Hindsight One way of illustrating the exercise and camouflage of hindsight – the fourth and final feature of philosophical thinking to be discussed here – is to consider the idea of there being an implicit order composed of implicit rules being observed in some activity, with the possibly self-serving consequence that a philosopher (and, typically, according to the philosopher, only a philosopher) is required to make the implicit rule(s) explicit. 18 What tends to be forgotten in such cases is that what can now be understood, in hindsight, as having led to the articulation of a rule, could not have been so understood prior 18 This is a very common feature in normative and social philosophy. An obvious and proud example is Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994, but the same idea also appears in less likely places, such as Pierre Bourdieu's assertion in Pascalian Meditations, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000, that he can (and only others who adopt his various methodological tools can) make explicit the implicit rules governing scholasticism. For an example from legal theory, see Neil MacCormick's discussion of informal normative orders in Institutions of Law, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 15 to the circumstances that led to that articulation. When that is forgotten, it becomes possible to offer an explanation – typically a causal story, whether comprised of reasons or emotions that moved the agent or some mechanisms that determined the agent's behaviour – that takes advantage of the assumption that the rule was there all along. Such an explanation conveniently ignores our lack of attention to the alleged prior order, i.e., our not yet having even conceived it as an order. Indeed, one can state this feature more strongly: all stories, whether they tend to prioritise the involvement of the will of the agent or not (whether they do tends to depend, once again, on the typical examples from which such stories emerge), are constructed with the benefit of hindsight. Further, the appeal to an implicit order, or a set of rules said to have been implicitly followed, may also be understood as a move aimed at legitimating the practice of evaluating the action or proposition the rule addresses – otherwise the imposition of a new rule places stress on a justification for the exercise of the power to evaluate. It is notoriously difficult to offer examples of this fourth feature of philosophical thinking, for any example of a rule being alleged to be implicit is already one that has benefited from the first instance of a 'break' from the 'usual' run of things to which persons have reacted with disapprobation. 19 One can approach this feature by contrasting the commentary that one hears live in a football game with the commentary one hears in the break at half-time when the game is subject to an analysis consisting not only of events already understood in light of the entire half, but also thanks to various kinds of arrows and other technical gimmicks that 'reveal' patterns in the play of the two sides – those being 'patterns' visible only in hindsight. A similar illustration is provided by the contrast between live and ex-post commentary to chess games. 19 Some examples, though in the context of a different argument, are provided in 'Making Room for the Silence of Social Normativity', currently under review. 16 An illustration at a different level might help here. There is a peculiar kind of chess puzzle known as the retrograde puzzle. 20 One solves it not by attempting to find the best move from the current position, but rather, by reconstructing the last few moves that led to the current position. Typically, there is only one such reconstruction possible. The exercise and camouflage of hindsight may be analogous in the sense that it is as if all philosophical thinking expressed itself in the form of solutions to retrograde puzzles, and, in doing so, avoided the difficulties associated with explaining what goes on when a solution is sought to be found from the current position. Indeed, the point can be put even more strongly, for in a real chess game, a player not only must find the best move to continue, but he or she also does not know, and cannot know, whether the position is like that of a problem that can be solved, or more like a situation where there are numerous equally good moves. The above, then, are but quick sketches of four features of philosophical thinking. There are others one could mention, e.g., the tendency to rely on the excess of meaning (the excess of ambiguity) in terms such as necessity, possibility, is, ought, can, and others; 21 or the tendency to create philosophical pictures by finding a middle point between what one understands or characterises as excesses in the relevant literature; or the tendency to see as an insight only that which confirms that which one already finds insightful; 22 and others. Indeed, there are no doubt an infinite number of features that could be 'identified.' In any event, the point of the above four features, to reiterate, is not to accurately describe or, worse, attempt to exhaust, the characteristics of philosophical thinking. The point, instead, is to offer some no doubt inadequate and speculative observations – from a distance somewhat removed from the detail of philosophical work – such as to open up the very possibility of change. 20 A recent discussion of these puzzles appears in Graeffrath, Bernd, "To Know the Past One Must First Know the Future: Raymond Smullyan and the Mysteries of Retrograde Analysis" in Hale, Benjamin (ed), Philosophy Looks at Chess, Chicago: Open Court, 2008, 1-12. 21 This point is made by Wittgenstein in Culture and Value, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980, at 15e. 22 See, De Man, Paul, Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2 nd ed, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. 17 IV. The Inner-Inner Layer The fourth and final layer of philosophical practice is that of the content or substance of philosophical problems and arguments. It is introduced last because it tends to be projected, typically by philosophers, as not only the most important, but indeed as philosophy itself. In other words, philosophy itself, it is typically thought, is the realm of philosophical beliefs or systems of beliefs, such as cognitivism in meta-ethics, or reliabilism in epistemology, or positivism in legal theory, or idealism in metaphysics. This very mode of self-identification by philosophers is of interest, though it shall not be dwelt on here. The point is that the innerinner layer tends to be overemphasised by philosophers themselves – hence the motivation in this paper to begin with and emphasise the first three layers. Another observation in relation to the ordering of the layers needs to be made. Although at various times throughout the paper, speculations have been offered as to the possible causal relations between the first three layers and the fourth layer – e.g., the possible link between individual offices and, say, the focus on self-conscious knowledge by epistemologists – it is no part of the argument that the first three layers determine the content of the last layer. Nor is it part of the argument to suggest that the causal relation, if there is one, is always one way, i.e., that it cannot proceed from the fourth layer and go on to affect the other three layers. Nevertheless, it is the case that the inner-inner layer is offered last in order to suggest that it may be worthwhile for philosophers to consider what influence the features of the first three layers have on the tendency to focus on certain kinds of problems and offer certain kinds of insights in response to those problems. Even more provocatively, it is hoped that positioning the inner-inner layer last may spark consideration of the possibility that when philosophers speak of, say, rationality as the distinguishing feature of human beings, they are not speaking of all human beings, but that, instead, thay are speaking 18 primarily of philosophers. In other words, philosophers ought to consider the possibility that what they find problematic, interesting, insightful, worthy of consideration, debate and exploration is something that is limited by the characteristics of the first three layers, i.e., that it is, in effect, a form of reflection on the philosophical life, i.e., on a life composed of the kinds of environments and tools and corporeal and cerebral habits sketched in the first three parts. Of course, even if the last observation was accurate – and it is not presented here in that tone – then it would not mean that the inner-inner layer is not important, or without its own kinds of effects on philosophers and the wider pool of citizens. Certainly, one can find instances of the inner-inner layer influencing the decisions of individuals, communities and governments. However, even here one must have the courage to be sceptical, for it is likely that philosophers themselves – and perhaps also many historians (depending on their methodologies) – will emphasise, possibly without realising it, the causal importance of ideas, thereby also confirming and reconfirming not only their self-conceptions, but also the importance of those self-conceptions. Two further observations can be made with respect to this inner-inner layer. First, recall that when introducing the first layer, two kinds of emotional involvement were identified. The indirect was of interest in the case of the first layer – it invoked that sense of the frame that, when broken or disrupted, becomes visible and results in emotional disapprobation. In this layer, it is the more direct emotional involvement that is of interest. This latter kind of emotional involvement appears in reactions of approval or disapproval to certain ways of presenting recognisable, substantive, arguments or positions in philosophy. Some may feel, on any one occasion, that some positions are represented inadequately; important details skirted over; important distinctions not made; inaccurate citations selected; or that any other kinds of mistakes are made. The mutual disciplining that goes on in this 19 layer is visible and audible – indeed, the layer is permeated with overt and highly dramatic mutual evaluation. Secondly and finally, it needs to be pointed out that change is not only possible, but also, in some respects, necessary in this inner-inner layer. Most usually, change will come in the form of slight shifts in variation in an argument, which, if one accepts the first feature of philosophical thinking presented above, will themselves emerge from modest tweaking of the examples or counter-examples. Without such changes, or where such changes become difficult to introduce, because, say, of the highly developed stage of the argument – comprised of a thicket of variations on recurring images or examples, and brimming with conditions of increasing complexity and abstractness (e.g., the cognitivism versus noncognitivism debate in metaethics, or the positivism verses natural law debate in legal theory) – then the debate or area might begin to lose its standing as a so-called 'hot issue' or 'cutting edge debate' in philosophy, and simply die a kind of philosophical death. One can perhaps best see glimpses of these kinds of variations, as well as, these kinds of deaths, when perusing the debates of philosophical journals in the recent past (say, twenty to thirty years ago). In this way, then, creativity, or the introduction of variations into settled themes, will raise the costs of entry into the relevant debate or field, thereby also contributing to the reinforcement of the community of persons that already participate in it. V. Exercising the Imagination In the parts above, there have been moments when certain alternatives were offered to those features that were identified as characteristic of the relevant layer of philosophical practice. Thus, in the case of the outer-outer layer, the possibility of an open-office philosophy department was suggested. In the case of the neo-outer layer, the possibility of philosophy being communicated by way of mimes, or images, or even sculptures was mooted. The 20 purpose of this part of the paper is to offer more such alternatives. Before going on to do so, however, a few preliminary observations can be made. The first of these, and also one that has been reiterated throughout the paper, is that it is pertinent to notice that the moment something is described as being in a certain way, or the moment that something is identified or revealed or said to exist, is also the moment in which it becomes possible to recognise that it need not always be so. In other words, and somewhat paradoxically, the moment we put our finger on an 'is' is also the moment in which we open the possibility that we will recognise it as an 'ought to be' or an 'ought not to be' – we describe or reveal or identify it in a certain way, and, thereafter, create the possibility that we will consider whether it ought to be so, or whether it could be changed. For example, if we agree that such and such kinds of environments and tools characterise philosophical practice, or that this or that kind of body is a philosophical one, or that such and such are features of philosophical thinking, then it becomes possible for us to consider the possibility of them not being so, i.e., for them not being characteristics of the practice of philosophy in the future. Of course, there is always the possibility that we shall not agree on any one description; on any one 'identification.' But if we do, suddenly, the possibility of change opens itself up. The second and related observation is that even if we do agree on a description or identification of a feature, all we do is open up the possibility of change – we still need to consider, for example, by whom such a change is likely to be considered seriously and respectfully. In the context of the practice of philosophy, then, we could ask: are changes – and, in particular, changes to the first three layers – likely to be considered, let alone introduced, by those who have had successful careers as philosophers, climbing their way up the ladders of academia, attracting grants, prizes and admiration from their fellow philosophers and those aspiring to become like them? And if not by them, then by whom are such changes likely to be considered or entertained, and perhaps introduced? To what extent 21 can these most difficult changes to entertain and make (changes in the environments and tools, and in the corporeal and cerebral habits) come from those who are most familiar with them and successful in their use – and, if not to a great extent, then might the entertaining and making of those changes be exactly that which we expect from the exercise of the imagination? The third and final observation is to become aware of how reluctant a philosophical community might be to changes to the first three layers, and how energetically it may attempt to keep out those who suggest or even accidentally introduce such changes, or, even worse, stigmatise or persecute them. To recognise this is to realise how invisible such denunciations may be to members within those communities, and how natural and obvious it may be for them to regard those who do not conform as dangerously foreign. Once again, this is likely to be the case for those who have lived, and lived successfully, in a certain community. To think, suddenly, that what one has considered to be the expressions of one's most honest and hardworking efforts of philosophical work have been contingent on certain features one has, up to now, never seen before, never even recognised as usual or normal, and to say, 'here is an opportunity for change that I ought to consider seriously and be open to the possibility of taking up' is very difficult indeed. The difficulty of so doing may be the impulse behind violent responses to and persecutions of those who threaten that which one has not yet even considered be natural and obvious, and thus that which one has not even raised as potentially subject to change. Having said this, consider now the following changes to the forms of the components of the first three layers. In the case of the first, outer-outer, layer, imagine that or consider the possibility that 22 philosophers were not members of any one university department, but scattered throughout other departments, only meeting together occasionally to present papers; philosophers worked in glass cubes in the middle of a busy square, where they and the results of their inquiries could be observed at will by any passerby; philosophical work was always required to be produced by at least two, and preferably more, persons; philosophical work was published only in the form of works exhibited in a gallery for a brief period of time; or reviews of philosophical work were required to be done by persons outside the literature to which that work was responding. In the case of the neo-outer layer, imagine that or consider the possibility that philosophers were allowed to philosophise only while moving; philosophers were required to produce works that had to be presented, and could only be presented, by persons from other disciplines; philosophical work was not allowed to focus on any one or more elements that the philosopher asserted distinguished human beings from animals, but, rather, on all the elements that the philosopher asserted human beings have in common with animals; or philosophers were required to write their works as if they were plays, and to perform them in different characters (different voices, different gestures). In the case of the neo-inner layer, imagine that or consider the possibility that philosophical work was required to be composed only in one image after another; 23 philosophical work was praised for its ability to provoke change in corporeal habits; philosophical work could only be so called when it showed what could not exist and what could not be known; philosophical work had to be composed in the form of questions only; or philosophical work was celebrated for its ability to show the infinite richness of expression. It should be stressed here that these alternatives are not being suggested as beneficial or appropriate changes. To treat them in this manner would be to miss the point of offering them. The point in offering them is to illustrate the kinds of changes that arise as possible changes, having gone through the process of 'identifying' features of philosophical practice. It is part of the exercise of the imagination to proceed through such a process, but it is even more, and much more importantly, an exercise of the imagination to be open to such possibilities – to be able and willing to consider them seriously; to be able and willing, in other words, to change, and especially to change in those features that one might not yet even had the chance to consider as natural and obvious. Conclusion The exercise of the imagination, then, requires us 1) to attempt to describe that which, at first blush, appears natural and obvious; 2) to understand that that which appears natural and obvious could be otherwise; and 3) to be open to the introduction of changes to that which appears natural and obvious. Imagination, in this sense, is quite different to creativity. The latter works on the basis of variations of settled phenomena, e.g., existing ideas or components or arguments or positions are grouped together differently; what is a problem in 24 one area is introduced as a problem in another; examples or arguments are tweaked at the edges. This exercise of creativity is important: for one, it helps sustain life in a certain philosophical community. Ultimately, however, it contributes mainly to the stability and identity of a philosophical community and reinforces its most firmly established features. Imagination, on the other hand, is more difficult, for it strikes at the very heart of that which is settled. Changes to that which is settled may not only be resisted, but may also be violently opposed. And yet, it is precisely the very ability and willingness to be open to such changes that may be of the most ethical and political significance. Already, in the comments above, it is easy to see how the account here, applied to the practice of philosophy, might be generalisable, and how this defence of the exercise of the imagination as releasing that which is not even yet recognised as natural and obvious, widening the realm of possibility, and being open to such changes as are made possible, might have broader ethical and political significance. Without the exercise of the imagination as argued for here, communities of all kinds may be much more likely to adopt attitudes with little time or tolerance for those who do not conform to their ways of life, or to come to condemning judgements of practices they cannot understand much more quickly and to execute those judgements more persistently and violently. Arendt was right to speak of the ethical and political significance of thoughtfulness, and, correlatively, of the dangers of thoughtless. We ought never to underestimate the power of all the things we learn, often with great effort, in order to become successful members of the many communities that we are simultaneously members of. Nor should we underestimate the power of all those things that we have not yet even thought of as natural and obvious, and thus all those things that we have not yet granted the chance to become contingent. If we remain alert, then we will also not confine the exercise of the imagination to the realm of creativity, for that realm, at least as presented here, is one better characterised by variation25 making in ways that reinforce, rather than question, the stability of relations and expectations. Having said that, it is important to acknowledge that there is nothing inherently good about the exercise of the imagination, and certainly nothing inherently bad about creativity. Ultimately, a balance will have to be struck between the stabilising tendencies of creativity and the de-stabilising tendencies of the imagination. However, if we are to err on the side of caution, we ought also to recognise that there are already a great many strategies, techniques and opportunities for reinforcing the familiar, for repeating that which we have always found problematic and insightful, for surrounding ourselves with mirrors that make us feel good and for avoiding or persecuting that which we see as threats to our conception of ourselves and our ways of life. In that respect, exercising the imagination may well be more important.

Fr ee in g M ys tic ism 75 JOHN COONEY FREEING MYSTICISM: EPISTEMIC STANDARDS IN THEORY AND PRACTICE ABSTRACT With the growth of epistemology, an important debate in philosophy of religion has arisen: can mystical encounters-purported feelings of intense unity with the divine-serve as epistemic warrants? In this paper, I examine two of the most prominent and promising standards by which to determine the veridicality of such encounters-those of William Alston and Richard Swinburne-and demonstrate their respective strengths and shortcomings. Considering these shortcomings, I compose and defend my own set of criteria to use in evaluating the veridicality of putative mystical experiences which draws upon the subject's religious tradition, rationality, and affectivity. INTRODUCTION Ever since William James published his seminal book The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902, mysticism has taken hold of the discussions of theologians and philosophers alike, mainly in the debate over its status as an epistemic warrant.1 This debate asks whether a subject is justified in forming beliefs about God based on a mystical experience. In this paper, I seek to contribute to this epistemological discussion by determining the grounds on which we can deem a putative mystical encounter veridical.2 Amongst scholars who have argued for mysticism as a source of epistemic justification, many possible solutions have been posited. Unfortunately, not one has contained a truly compelling standard for determining the authenticity of mystical experiences. I thus attempt to remedy the shortcomings of the standards proposed by William Alston and Richard Swinburne by offering a standard which draws on the subject's religious tradition, rationality, and affectivity in considering the veridicality of a purported mystical experience.3 I. SUMMARY AND ANALYSIS OF CURRENT THEORIES Those who argue that mystical practices can serve as epistemic warrants fall on a spectrum concerning standards of veridicality. On one end are theories that seek a vantage point external to mystical practices themselves from which to judge the veridicality of mystical 1 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Penguin Group, 1982). 2 Several of the scholars referenced below use "authentic" and "genuine" synonymously with "veridical." While recognizing their nuances, I will keep with this pattern and use all three words interchangeably. 3 Unless otherwise stated, I will operate within the Christian mystical tradition throughout this paper. I do this both because it is the context in which the above authors write and because it is the tradition with which I am most familiar. St an ce V ol um e 12 / Ap ril 20 19 76 Fr ee in g M ys tic ism 77 experiences. On the other end, there are the less popular selfauthentication theories.4 These theories allege that mystical experiences are, by their very nature, veridical. In this section, I will expose the shortcomings of the two most promising approaches-William Alston's and Richard Swinburne's-before showing how my suggested epistemic standard can avoid them. In Perceiving God, William Alston defends the ability of mystical practices to serve as epistemic warrants by demonstrating them to be socially established doxastic practices. Any doxastic practice is "the exercise of a family of belief-forming mechanisms" and requires what Alston terms an "overrider system," i.e. a system-to determine whether an experience is genuine by comparing it to background beliefs and other doxastic practices.5 "Attached to each practice," he writes, "is an 'overrider system' of beliefs and procedures that the subject can use in subjecting prima facie justified beliefs to further tests when that is called for."6 To take an everyday example, consider the overriders we place on sense perception; whenever we perceive something through the senses, we scrutinize it through the lens of reason, memory, the testimonies of others, etc., to determine the likelihood that our perception is accurate. Such consultation with overriders can either be subconscious (e.g. when something seen is typical) or conscious (e.g. when something seen is atypical). In instances where a perception is not countered by the overrider system, we are justified in taking it to be veridical. Regarding Christian mystical practices (CMP) specifically, Alston lists "the Bible, the ecumenical councils of the undivided church, Christian experience through the ages, Christian thought, and more generally the Christian tradition as normative sources of its overrider system."7 In other words, Christian mysticism cross-references the content and phenomenological characteristics of an experience with the Bible, ecclesial authority, and Christian tradition to determine whether it is veridical. Alston exhibits sound philosophical work in his book, and his overrider system has several benefits. Its concrete standard operates as a rigorous vetting system, preventing the undesirable and untenable conclusion that any putative mystical experience is veridical.8 Additionally, the fact that it has a corollary in other doxastic practices 4 Robert A. Oakes, "Mysticism, Veridicality, and Modality," Faith and Philosophy 2, no. 3 (1985): 217-24. To my knowledge, Robert Oakes- with whom I will not here contend-is the only serious proponent of selfauthentication. 5 William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 165. 6 Alston, Perceiving God, 159. 7 Alston, Perceiving God, 193. 8 This is to say that he disallows self-authentication theories. serves to increase its credibility. Yet, despite these valuable elements, Alston's system suffers from several difficulties. Jerome Gellman notes the first shortcoming in his article, "A Problem for the Christian Mystical Doxastic Practice." Gellman argues that Alston's proposed overrider system for Christian mystical practices has been compromised by mistaken physiological theories, the historical marginalization of women, and "the Church's need to impose ecclesiastical order on uncontrolled spirituality."9 If the standard being used in determining an experience's genuineness is compromised-in this case, through ignorance and historical struggles for power-then it cannot be counted on to produce accurate evaluations. Notice that Gellman's critique does not attack the idea of an overrider system itself but rather what Alston chooses to include in CMP's specific overrider system. The problem lies in the fact that the content of CMP's overrider is rooted in history and doctrine, both of which are, at least in part, products of chance and not divine revelation. The second difficulty with Alston's overrider system also stems from his emphasis on doctrine.10 In The Theology of the Spiritual Life, Father Joseph de Guibert discusses the discernment of spirits in mysticism. He composes a long list-quoted partially by Alston- of the respective effects of godly and satanic spirit-fueled mystical experiences. He then issues the following note of caution: "because a thought contains nothing contrary to Church doctrine or because an impulse has nothing incompatible with the law of God in it, it does not thereby follow that either should be immediately regarded as an inspiration of a good spirit."11 Assuming that a demonic force could create a pseudo-mystical experience without contradicting Church doctrine, de Guibert concludes that the standard of veridicality must not rely solely on the intellectual content of an experience but take into account the affective content as well, for an evil spirit cannot replicate both the intellectual and emotive dimensions of a mystical experience. It is the evil spirit's inability to bring about peace which prevents a fall into a Cartesian universal skepticism regarding mystical experiences. In light of de Guibert's concerns, clearly, Alston fails to consider the affective component of mysticism seriously enough. The third problem plaguing Alston is one that he himself points out-the question of religious pluralism. Terrence Tilley formulates the 9 Jerome Gellman, "A Problem for the Christian Mystical Doxastic Practice," Philo: The Journal of the Society of Humanist Philosophers 13, no. 1 (2010): 26. 10 I use the word "emphasis" because, while Alston does include other elements in the content of his overrider system for CMP, the focus is heavily doctrinal and ecclesial. 11 Joseph de Guibert, The Theology of the Spiritual Life, trans. Paul Barrett (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 139. St an ce V ol um e 12 / Ap ril 20 19 78 Fr ee in g M ys tic ism 79 problem in this way: "Because mystical practices in different religious traditions have different background beliefs and overrider systems, they are irreducibly different, not a single practice with multiple variations."12 Under Alston's framework, no unified mystical doxastic practice can exist but rather only a multiplicity of practices equal to the number of diverse religious beliefs. Even within one religious tradition there can exist hundreds of different practices. Alston's response to religious diversity is less than satisfying: "In the absence of any external support for supposing that one of the competing practices is more accurate than my own, the only rational course for me is to sit tight."13 Indeed, he even concedes later that "diversity reduces somewhat the maximal degree of epistemic justification derivable from CMP" and "reduces the rationality of engaging in CMP."14 Any standard of veridicality tethered to specific religious traditions and beliefs will inevitably run into this problem of religious pluralism, but it is worth asking whether a more persuasive response than "sit tight" can be had. The final critique of Alston's overrider system is one that no other author has, to my knowledge, noted. Alston's system includes a qualifier: mysticism seldom yields new beliefs. This restriction is the natural consequence of his judging veridicality by doctrine and previously held beliefs, for a person's mystical experience must necessarily conform to the belief system they held prior to the experience, or else it cannot be considered veridical. I quote Alston at length: In MP [mystical practices] God may appear to me in an experience as supremely loving, but I already firmly believed that. There isn't even any significant updating to be derived here.... The experience can add to my total sum of justification for believing that God is loving, even if it doesn't add to the firmness of the belief...it must be acknowledged that CMP does not typically alter the major outlines of a person's faith. Ordinarily the subject already has a more or less firm Christian faith, which is left largely unchanged by mystical experience. What the experience does yield, cognitively, is: (a) information about God's particular relations to the subject; (b) additional grounds for beliefs already held, particularly the belief that God does exist; (c) additional "insights" into facets of the scheme.15 Alston's view is internally consistent but problematic. A true mystical experience ought to be the pinnacle of spirituality and epistemology, yet under Alston's model, belief-altering mystical experiences are likely to jeopardize the experience's veridical status.16 Consider that many 12 Terrence Tilley, "Religious Pluralism as a Problem for 'Practical' Religious Epistemology," Religious Studies 30, no. 2 (1994): 162. 13 Alston, Perceiving God, 274. 14 Alston, Perceiving God, 275; 279. 15 Alston, Perceiving God, 207. 16 Perhaps the best example of this is Paul's conversion on the road to mystical experiences catalyze religious conversion. Insofar as conversion involves not "insights" into a doxastic practice but rather challenges to it, Alston's overrider system may skew too conservative in ruling such experiences unveridical. It is at least worth seeing whether we can come to an improved standard, since Alston's approach sits uneasily with the oft-accepted notion that mysticism is authoritative for the individual. As James writes, "the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe."17 Alston, it would seem, attempts to win mysticism's veridicality by sacrificing its potency. Richard Swinburne posits a more promising view than Alston's. Swinburne's "Principle of Credulity" (POC) states that granted the absence of particular counter-considerations, a subject (S) is justified in taking their perception to be genuine. Swinburne enumerates four such "special considerations": (1) the conditions of the perception or the subject are unreliable, (2) claims made under similar circumstances have proved false, (3) it is very improbable on background evidence that X was present, and (4) X was probably not the cause of the perception.18 Presuming the absence of these considerations, Swinburne argues that S is justified in taking their perception of X to be veridical.19 Swinburne's standard for veridicality has its benefits. Most prominently, it maximizes the number of mystical experiences considered veridical without doing so indiscriminately, which is an improvement on Alston's more circumscribed view. The POC also has the benefit of being independent of doctrinally and historically based criteria. Finally, Swinburne outmaneuvers the issue of religious pluralism by not basing his criteria in the specific content of the experience but rather the circumstances surrounding it. The POC faces two major challenges, though. The first is causal convolution. On account of Swinburne's first counter-consideration, all causally overdetermined mystical experiences-such as those which occur under the influence of psychotropic drugs-are ruled unveridical. The converse side of this issue is the impossibility of verifying the ultimate cause of an experience. Without including an additional criterion, Swinburne cannot escape the evil-spirit dilemma, for it is possible for an evil spirit to contrive a pseudo-mystical experience that does not violate any of the above considerations. In other words, his standard does not allow for the subject to accurately Damascus. We should be wary of excluding one of the most quintessential mystical experiences from our veridical canon. 17 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 427. 18 Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 311-14. 19 This does not mean that the experience is necessarily veridical, only that S is justified in believing it to be so. St an ce V ol um e 12 / Ap ril 20 19 80 Fr ee in g M ys tic ism 81 determine the principal source of a mystical experience, whether it be God or something more nefarious. The second challenge of the POC is that it does not hold mysticism to an appropriately high standard. Swinburne certainly raises the bar for mystical experience candidates, yet, as the evilspirit dilemma shows, the POC cannot weed out all counterfeit experiences-say nothing about natural experiences mistaken as mystical. These problems demonstrate that the POC is incomplete (as opposed to inherently misguided), making it no more ideal a standard for veridicality than Alston's. II. RECONSTRUCTING A STANDARD OF VERIDICALITY Following the analysis of Alston and Swinburne, we can articulate demands of an improved standard of veridicality. First, our standard needs to allow for new beliefs. The subject must be justified in accepting beliefs that are both consistent with their religious tradition and those which potentially expand or overturn it. Second, it must have the ability to weed out false and counterfeit mystical experiences or, at the very least, be able to make distinctions between experiences that have a higher probability of being veridical and those with a lower probability. Third, without disregarding them, it cannot be too dependent on doctrine and precedent. While these are the three essential requirements, an ideal standard should also allow for causally overdetermined experiences, avoid the problem of religious pluralism, and demonstrate a basic consistency with historically accepted accounts of mystical experiences. To meet these demands, I propose the following criteria. They are divided into two categories: nonnegotiable and ancillary. The former must be met in order for an experience to be deemed veridical; concurrently, there is nothing conclusively (non)confirmative about the latter criteria, but they can serve to reinforce the confidence of the subject. A. NONNEGOTIABLE: 1) The doctrinal/intellectual element of the experience must conform to previously held beliefs or those of an established religious tradition to the degree that a subject can rationally accept its content. If mysticism is to be considered seriously as an epistemic warrant, we must be able to evaluate instances of it on rational grounds, not just moral and affective ones. Some critics may be dissatisfied with the lack of a strict rule by which to judge the issue of doctrine, but having an indefinite threshold is useful for several reasons. It first allows for the openness to newness that is present but limited in Alston's framework. Where Alston limits verification to the subject's religious tradition, this criterion allows him to seek verification through other established traditions. For instance, we can now allow Paul's mystical experience to remain veridical without tripping over his transition from Judaism to Christianity. Second, it comes closer to solving the problem of religious diversity and solves it on the intra-denominational level. By using the subject's rational purview as the measure of an experience's intellectual content, the standard avoids being constrained to a single tradition. Religious lines become malleable, and intra-denominational division becomes virtually irrelevant. By way of illustration, a Muslim can perceive God as Trinitarian and need not dismiss his encounter as unveridical (although he also need not accept it). That is to say, if he can reasonably assent to the idea of a triune God, he is not required to consider the experience unveridical simply because it is incompatible with Islamic belief. Finally, this criterion circumvents Gellman's objection that the Christian mystical tradition has been compromised by historically contingent sources but still functions as a restraint on putative mystical experiences, since the measure is not a specific tradition but the limits of the subject's own rationality. 2) The experience must be free from Swinburne's four special considerations, with minor alteration. Swinburne's considerations do well in setting a minimum bar for vetting mystical experiences. The one caveat regarding this criterion is that if an experience meets the other criteria in my proposed standard to an extraordinary degree but does not pass all of the considerations, then the subject may be justified in taking the experience to be overdetermined. For instance, if a subject had taken a psychotropic drug prior to a mystical experience, but the experience met all of the remaining requirements of the standard-including the ancillary criteria-then he could reasonably take the drug to be the proximate cause of a genuine mystical experience. This qualifier is an improvement in that it permits overdetermination while still rejecting experiences that fail to pass the fundamental conditions of any doxastic practice. Ultimately, this criterion serves a twofold purpose: it functions as a preliminary vetting mechanism and also helps diagnose overdetermination. In the latter case, if overdetermination is proven, this criterion is not overridden, for it is a nonnegotiable, but takes on its secondary function. 3) There ought to be an engaging or arresting of all of the subject's faculties. This criterion differentiates between true and false experiences. During a true experience, discursive reasoning is suspended-although situational-awareness will still occur-the will is concordant with St an ce V ol um e 12 / Ap ril 20 19 82 Fr ee in g M ys tic ism 83 God's, bodily needs and desires are mitigated, and various physical reactions sometimes take place (among these accessory phenomena, Albert Farges lists stigmatization, levitation, luminous effluvia, odoriferous effluvia, mystical abstinence, inedia, and power over nature).20 A false experience-one caused by psychotropic drugs, for instance-will likely only employ one or two faculties. This criterion also differentiates between mystical and other forms of religious experience. For example, a Marian apparition would not be considered a mystical experience in the truest sense of the word, for God is not the direct object of the experience, even if it is religious in nature. There are two lines of justification for this criterion. First, it tracks the experiences of many mystics who describe their encounters with the divine as including the entire person.21 Second, it respects a mystical experience as a unitive event. Mystics in most of the world's main religious traditions are careful to use non-dualistic language. If a mystical experience brings a person into (comm)union with God- and perhaps the rest of the natural world-then it follows that the subject should be personally unified as well. Hence, this criterion is an important factor in the discernment of varieties of religious experiences and of veridical mystical experiences. This criterion sharply departs from both Alston and Swinburne's systems. Each author heavily emphasizes the state of the subject prior to a mystical experience (e.g., background beliefs or levels of intoxication), but this criterion focuses primarily on the actual experience rather than its external context. 4) The experience ought to be transformative, catalyzing effects in the subject that last beyond the experience itself. We should expect a direct encounter with God to be a life-changing event. In the ordinary course of life, far less spectacular occurrences spark such about-faces: near death experiences, stints in prison, a cannonball to the leg, happening upon scripture, etc. If these events-which are hardly pedestrian but still less marvelous than an instance of mysticism-are sources of transformation, then mysticism most surely would be as well. Consider for instance, the change of trajectory in Gautama Buddha's life following his mystical enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, or Henry David Thoreau's mystical union in the woods. Mystical experiences of all varieties are transformative for the subject whether in the formation of new beliefs, the reassurance of previous beliefs, the persistence of the 20 Albert Farges, Mystical Phenomena Compared with Their Human and Diabolical Counterfeits, 2nd ed., trans. S.P. Jacques (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1926), 514. 21 Teresa of Ávila, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, trans. J.M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Group, 1957), 107-44. Saint Teresa, for instance, describes how during her mystical experiences she was able to read Latin and understand divine mysteries (intellect), levitate (body), and set aside all earthly desires (will). affective dimension present during the experience itself, a permanent physical brand (e.g., stigmatization), or a will that is more closely aligned with God's. Unlike Alston's overrider system, this criterion prevents the standard from being too dependent on the doctrinally based criteria, which are not reliable. B. ANCILLARY: Before exploring the ancillary criteria, a few notes about their use. While an experience can be deemed nonveridical, not all experiences that we can justifiably call veridical are necessarily so, meaning that a spectrum of certainty accompanies each "veridical" mystical experience. If a subject meets all nonnegotiable criteria, they have sufficient epistemic warrant (just as sense perception may be relied on as accurate even if it is not infallible). Hence, the role of ancillary criteria. They do not determine whether an experience has warrant, but they serve to increase the subject's certainty in the experience's veracity. Ancillary criteria, then, are dissimilar from the overriders and counter-considerations in that they are unable to render an experience unveridical but only add to a subject's confidence. 1) The subject is reasonably predisposed to a mystical experience. By "reasonably predisposed," I simply mean practiced in introspective awareness and the discernment of emotional and spiritual states- especially through prayer, mediation, self-examination, etc. While mystical encounters require no preparation on the part of the subject, a contemplative or other individual so practiced will be able to judge the experience's veridicality with greater accuracy. In some ways, this is an extrapolation of Swinburne's first consideration: veridicality is, in part, proportionately correlated with the reliability of the subject. However, this criterion is more nuanced in that it also judges the degree of veridicality. 2) The experience is accompanied by a sense of indubitability concerning the veridicality of the experience and the accuracy of its content. A person who doubts their experience little-to-none can enjoy a higher degree of confidence in its veridicality than a person plagued by intense doubt. This is a thin criterion, but it can be useful to the subject all the same-particularly if mystical experiences bear any internal mark of veridicality. Again, the subject's certainty has no role in Alston or Swinburne's standards. 3) The experience is consistent with those of others. No plausible reason exists to believe that God appears to every person in the same manner or discloses the same content. If, however, a subject can cross-check their experience with the experience of another, then they naturally stand on firmer epistemic grounds, in just the same way we trust St an ce V ol um e 12 / Ap ril 20 19 84 Fr ee in g M ys tic ism 85 scientific trials that are replicable. Simply, if two experiences are phenomenologically similar but dissimilar in content and cause, we cannot issue differing verdicts on the question of veridicality. The implication of this principle-sometimes referred to as the principle of causal indifference-is that if an experience coincides with other accounts, then the subject can demonstrate more confidence in the genuineness of their experience. Of course, a mystical encounter unlike any before it may be veridical nonetheless.22 CONCLUSION If we make the assertion that mystical experiences possess epistemic warrant, we must also admit that the beliefs derived from these experiences are of the highest kind. How could knowledge acquired via a direct encounter with the transcendent God be otherwise? This being said, they are also the most dangerous, especially if wholly authoritative for the subject. Accordingly, we must find a way to preserve the power and authority of mystical practices while simultaneously ensuring their authenticity. In attempting to meet this challenge, I believe I have moved the present conversation forward by determining the qualities that ought to be incorporated into an effective veridicality standard. Nevertheless, many questions are left to be answered. Even if proved veridical, is mysticism authoritative for others or only the subject? Wholly or partially? Can better knowledge of mysticism as a doxastic practice make it as useful as sense perception? To conclude with the famous words of the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner, "In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all."23 22 To further distinguish this criterion from the second nonnegotiable, consider them in terms of form versus content. A Christian can have a mystical experience that is doctrinally sound yet be wholly unprecedented in the way it is perceived (i.e. similar in content but not form). This does nothing to decrease the veridicality of the experience. Nonetheless, a person who has an experience that is doctrinally sound and parallels the perceptive characteristics of another's experience (i.e. similar in content and form) can exhibit greater confidence in the veridicality of their experience. 23 Many thanks to Dr. Edward Glowienka, whose insights greatly informed this paper. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Cooney, a junior at Carroll College in Montana, is a theology and philosophy doublemajor with a political science minor. His primary philosophic interests include epistemology, Neoplatonic metaphysics, and medieval scholasticism. Outside of academics, John is a member of Carroll's cross-country team and enjoys general outdoor recreation.

João Flávio de Almeida PARA UMA EPISTEMOLOGIA DA ERRÂNCIA: ERRO, HIÂNCIA E CIÊNCIA EM MICHEL PÊCHEUX São Carlos Dezembro/2018 2 UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE SÃO CARLOS CENTRO DE EDUCAÇÃO E CIÊNCIAS HUMANAS PROGRAMA DE PÓS-GRADUAÇÃO EM CIÊNCIA, TECNOLOGIA E SOCIEDADE PARA UMA EPISTEMOLOGIA DA ERRÂNCIA: ERRO, HIÂNCIA E CIÊNCIA EM MICHEL PÊCHEUX Tese de Doutorado apresentada à Banca de Defesa do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências, Tecnologia e Sociedade, da Universidade Federal de São Carlos, como parte dos requisitos para a obtenção do título de Doutor em Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade. Área de concentração: Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade. Linha de pesquisa: Linguagens, Comunicação e Ciência. Orientadora: Profa Dra. Lucília Maria Abrahão e Sousa São Carlos Dezembro/2018 3 Ficha catalográfica elaborada pelo DePT da Biblioteca Comunitária/UFSCar 4 FOLHA DE APROVAÇÃO Assinaturas dos membros da comissão examinadora que avaliou e aprovou a Defesa de Tese de Doutorado do candidato João Flávio de Almeida, realizada em 07/12/2018. BANCA EXAMINADORA Profa. Dra. Lucília Maria Abrahão e Sousa _________________________________________________ Profa. Dra. Ane Ribeiro Patti _________________________________________________ Profa. Dra. Dantielli Assumpção Garcia _________________________________________________ Profa. Dra. Soraya Maria Romano Pacífico _________________________________________________ Prof. Dr. Eduardo Néspoli _________________________________________________ 5 DEDICATÓRIA Para: Tanyse Galon 6 DEDICATÓRIA Para: Maria do Carmo Almeida Benedito Almeida Lucelí Galon Francisco Galon 7 AGRADECIMENTOS Aos meus irmãos: Marco Aurélio de Almeida (inspiração) Eduardo Almeida Neto Jéssica Galon Francisco Galon Neto Aruan Henri 8 AGRADECIMENTOS Aos amigos: Aline Coscrato Cleiton Frazon Danilo Paziani Eliton Almeida Fernando Emboaba Henrique Dutra Joseane Balthazar Juliana Damaris Lucas Galon Luiz Frazon Mariana Galon Pedro Dutra Precyane Gabriel Sara Cesca Suzana Stefanini Weder Gabriel 9 AGRADECIMENTOS Aos e-l@dianos: Adonai Aline Bia Bruno Daiana Elaine Gustavo Jonathan Karen Ludmila Maria Eduarda Matheus Melissa Paulo Rodrigo Stefanie Taísa 10 AGRADECIMENTOS - - - - Agradeço ao Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência, Tecnologia e Sociedade do Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas da Universidade Federal de São Carlos, pela oportunidade de realização deste doutorado. Agradeço à CAPES, instituição que financiou a minha pesquisa de doutorado. Agradeço à generosa banca de defesa, Profa. Dra. Ane Ribeiro Patti, Profa. Dra. Dantielli Assumpção Garcia, Profa. Dra. Soraya Maria Romano Pacífico, Profo. Dr. Eduardo Néspoli . Agradeço à Beatriz Prandi, por toda ajuda com a tese. Agradeço ao Paulo, secretário do PPGCTS, pela amizade. 11 AGRADECIMENTOS Agradeço à minha orientadora, Lucília, que com inspiração, carinho, paciência e dedicação me guiou neste caminho prazeroso e enriquecedor. Quiçá, só no silêncio encontraria sentidos tão vastos para te agradecer, minha amiga e orientadora, Lú. 12 RESUMO Sob a égide da Análise do Discurso de matriz francesa, mais especificamente em Michel Pêcheux, o objetivo desta tese é lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância: uma teoria do conhecimento fundamentada no não-logicamente-estabilizado que possa fundamentar a escuta, a produção e a circulação de saberes "outros", e com isso, produzir movências no sentido e no sujeito. Nossa proposta se situa nas regiões de toque entre semântica, filosofia e sociologia do conhecimento, e por isso se limitará a analisar apenas as condições de produção e circulação de saberes "científicos" na contemporaneidade. Para tanto nos colocaremos na escuta dos sentidos que oscilam entre errar (vagar sem rumo) e errar (falhar), e a partir deles propor um itinerário teórico que lance luz sobre a sedentarização (estabilização, diminuição, administração e lucro) da significação a partir da instrumentalização ideológico-política das noções de erro e acerto, trabalhada pelo discurso dito "científico". Percorreremos, página a página, duas das principais obras do autor: "Semântica e discurso. Uma crítica à afirmação do óbvio" (2009), e "Discurso. Estrutura ou acontecimento?" (2008), seguindo a tênue linha da errância que perpassa essas obras e transita por discussões a respeito do "erro" na língua, das hiâncias que separam e produzem movências nas partes que constituem a base linguística e os processos discursivos, e sobre a estabilização lógico-retórica dos sentidos pelo método científico e pelo axioma computacional da tecnociência. Palavras-chave: Epistemologia. Ciência. Erro. Errância. Michel Pêcheux. 13 ABSTRACT Guided by the theory of French Discourse Analysis, more specifically in Michel Pêcheux, the aim of this thesis is to lay the foundations for an epistemology of wandering: a theory of knowledge based on non-stabilized senses that can support listening, production and circulation of "other" knowledges, and with that, produce movements in the sense and in the subject. Our proposal lies in the touching regions between semantics, philosophy and the sociology of knowledge, and for that reason it will limit itself to analyzing only the conditions of production and circulation of "scientific" knowledge in the contemporary world. In order to do so, we will listen to the senses that oscillate between wandering (wandering aimlessly) and making mistakes, and from them proposing a theoretical itinerary that sheds light on the sedentarization (stabilization, diminution, administration and profit) of meaning from of the ideological-political instrumentalization of the notions of error and correctness, manipulated by the so-called "scientific" discourse. We will turn, page by page, two of the author's main works: "Semantics and discourse. A Critique of the Assertion of the Obvious "(2009), and" Discourse. Structure or event?" (2008), following the tenuous line of the wandering that runs through these works and passes through discussions about the "error" in the language, the discontinuities that separate and produce movements in the parts that constitute the linguistic base and the discursive processes, and on the logical-rhetorical stabilization of the senses by the scientific method and the computational axiom of technoscience. Keywords: Epistemology. Science. Error. Wandering. Michel Pêcheux. 14 LISTA DE FIGURAS Figura 1 – Silêncio. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 93 Figura 2 – Eixo Sy e Sx. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 166 Figura 3 – Eixo Sy e Sx: aplicação. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 241 LISTA DE ILUSTRAÇÕES O início de uma jornada rumo a lugar algum. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 17 O moinho nunca erra. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 62 Memórias inventadas são mais bonitas. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 196 Estranha alegria em derrubar muros. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida – p. 224 15 SUMÁRIO 1 INTRODUÇÃO ERRO, HIÂNCIA, ERRÂNCIA ......................................................... 17 1.1 MEMÓRIAS SOBRE ERRO E ERRÂNCIA .......................................................................... 26 1.1.1 A instrumentalização ideológica do erro .................................................................. 31 1.1.2 Errância, nomadismo e sedentarismo ....................................................................... 49 2 ERRO E ERRÂNCIA E(M) SEMÂNTICA E DISCURSO ................................................ 63 2.1 ASSEPSSIA E SEDENTARIZAÇÃO DA LÍNGUA ............................................................... 64 2.1.1 Lógica e retórica contra o erro .................................................................................. 72 2.1.2 Leibniz e a língua perfeita perdida ............................................................................ 75 2.1.3 Kant, Husserl e Frege: corrigir é necessário .............................................................. 80 2.1.4 O paradoxo da hiância: errância incorrigível ............................................................ 83 2.1.5 Da errância à ilusão de sedentarização ................................................................... 109 2.2 DA LÍNGUA AO DISCURSO: ANDANÇAS ...................................................................... 128 2.2.1 Ideologia e sedentarização ...................................................................................... 143 2.2.2 A sedentarização do sujeito pela ideologia ............................................................. 150 2.2.3 O sujeito é uma ilusão, ou: o personagem que consumiu o ator............................. 155 2.2.4 A errância do sujeito: só há causa daquilo que erra ................................................ 175 2.3 A MATEMÁTICA DA SEDENTARIZAÇÃO ..................................................................... 184 3 ERRÂNCIA NA ESTRUTURA E NO ACONTECIMENTO .......................................... 197 3.1 A ERRÂNCIA DA HISTÓRIA .......................................................................................... 198 3.1.1 A sedentarização teleológica da história ................................................................ 213 3.1.2 A errância da ciência: lógica versus interpretação .................................................. 217 4 EPISTEMOLOGIA DA ERRÂNCIA: O QUE ERRA E FAZ ERRAR.............................. 225 4.1 O ERRO SECRETO DO ACERTO .................................................................................... 226 4.1.1 A velha cidade da língua: periferias esquecidas ...................................................... 227 4.1.2 Ciência: descrição ou interpretação? ...................................................................... 235 4.1.3 Escutar os restos e os erros: depor os muros .......................................................... 245 REFERÊNCIAS ............................................................................................................. 260 16 O início de uma jornada rumo a lugar algum 17 1 INTRODUÇÃO ERRO, HIÂNCIA, ERRÂNCIA ERRAR: verbo transit ivo 1 . Enganar-se em. 2. Não acertar com. 3. Não dar em. 4. Não dar com. verbo intransit ivo 5. Vaguear. 6. Perder-se. 7. Esgarrar. 8. F lutuar. Algo sempre erra, vaga e falha, no conhecimento humano. Curiosamente, na língua portuguesa a palavra "errar" possui dois sentidos distintos, distantes um do outro: falhar não é o mesmo que vagar sem rumo. Enquanto verbo transitivo, que necessita de complementos, "errar" indica a presença de um objeto no qual/com o qual o sujeito pode falhar. Mas na forma de verbo intransitivo, que prescinde de complementos, "errar" indica uma ação do sujeito sobre si mesmo: perambular. A esta tese importam os dois sentidos dessa palavra, erro e errância (não como simetrias, mas como discrepâncias), nas teias discursivas que fundamentam a construção do conhecimento epistemológico. A epistemologia, assim como outros campos de conhecimento, erra e vaga na imensidão dos sentidos, logo, não se pode falar em epistemologia, mas em epistemologias, plurais, contraditórias, difusas e inconclusas. A epistemologia é um tipo de saber de segundo nível, ou seja, seu objeto de estudo são outros saberes; mais especificamente, ela se ocupa com a forma com que são produzidos e difundidos os saberes científicos. Segundo Mário Bunge (2002), a epistemologia é um campo de estudos que se refere à prática científica em suas mais diferentes esferas, e por isso se ocupa de problemas filosóficos que se apresentam no curso da investigação científica, quer sejam de cunho teórico, metodológico, ético, social, estético etc. Bunge defende ainda que este campo deve se ocupar principalmente em propor soluções para tais problemas, de forma que se possa distinguir a ciência autêntica das pseudociências, além de criticar programas e resultados errôneos. Para o autor, a epistemologia, ou filosofia do conhecimento, deve trazer à tona os pressupostos filosóficos sobretudo semânticos, gnosiológicos e ontológicos de planos, métodos e resultados de investigação científicas, o que implica elucidar e sistematizar filosoficamente a prática 18 científica de forma metodológica. Essa definição não é nova. Desde Platão a noção de "episteme" tem que ver com conhecimento verdadeiro, de natureza científica, em contraposição à doxa, que é a opinião infundada ou irrefletida do senso comum (FRANKLIN, 2004). Essa definição clássica de epistemologia nos parece aqui, se não ingênua, enviesada político-ideologicamente. Mas é possível que esta visão crítica, comum à uma parcela das ciências humanas, seja uma exceção em franco declínio; estamos na geração que vê na tecnociência1 um caminho sem volta, e por isso só cabe à epistemologia e à filosofia/sociologia da ciência analisar e propor melhores formas de aplicação e distribuição de patentes. Questionar a ciência, qualquer que seja a via, produz hoje sentidos de retrocesso ou conservadorismo. Ora, esse movimento de autoproteção e autorregulação dos saberes, através de um efeito que já converte em erro qualquer gesto crítico, não se distingue muito da prática religiosa que o Iluminismo ajudou a descontruir nos séculos XVI e XVII. Na contemporaneidade, fora dos muros das universidades circulam muitos sentidos que atestam a infalibilidade da ciência. O físico e matemático Alan Sokal, pesquisador e professor da Universidade de Nova York, concedeu ao jornal El Pais uma entrevista que corrobora com as hipóteses que sustentamos nesta tese. Este professor combate, há décadas, os acadêmicos que negam o conhecimento científico como algo verdadeiro, exterior aos próprios investigadores, e que afirmam que os conhecimentos científicos são, na verdade, construções sociais e linguísticas. O autor do texto no El Pais afirma que Sokal ainda hoje viaja o mundo combatendo aqueles que não respeitam os fatos científicos; mas agora, no entanto, "ele mudou suas prioridades e tem deixado em paz os professores de Humanas, que têm pouca influência fora das universidades" (MEDIAVILLA, 2017). Na entrevista, ele segue afirmando que os acadêmicos das "humanas" são, na verdade, a ameaça mais inofensiva às verdades científicas; os verdadeiros problemas são as pseudociências, como as terapias alternativas, a homeopatia, e as religiões que negam o Big Bang e a evolução. E ele termina afirmando que, como só a ciência produz fatos, só ela pode produzir enunciados legítimos sobre ética. 1 Para alguns epistemólogos contemporâneos, como Galimberti (2009, p. 7), toda ciência se tornou tecnociência, pois já não há como pensar em ciência sem um viés técnico-tecnológico. Nestes termos, a ciência moderna não é um tipo de saber dado apenas para a contemplação da verdade, tal como a ciência grega antiga. Toda ciência (tecnociência) é, sobretudo, saber para dominação/alteração da realidade, utilitarista. 19 Esta tese se insere, portanto, no rol dos dizeres "inofensivos às verdades científicas", diria Sokal. É possível que ele tem razão. Diante da potência discursiva da tecnociência, com suas "evidências" tão essenciais e atemporais, nosso gesto epistemológico de olhar o saber de forma histórica e discursiva parece não ter força de confrontamento na contemporaneidade. É patente que esta tese não tem competência para discutir Big Bang e evolução com Sokal; não podemos competir com o chuveiro elétrico, com a bomba Atômica e a cura do câncer. Partindo da Análise do Discurso, só o que podemos fazer é analisar os gestos e os efeitos político-ideológicos desse discurso chamado científico, lançar luz sobre suas condições de produção e indagar os sentidos que irradiam deste trabalho sustentado sobre uma suposta estabilização lógica da significação. Nossa principal hipótese enuncia que, de um ponto de vista discursivo, existe um calcanhar de Aquiles na teia discursiva científica, a saber, o princípio do axioma: uma premissa lógica considerada "necessariamente verdadeira e evidente", que se constitui através da prática de seleção e instituição de um sentido único para determinado significante. Nestes termos, produzir "verdades" científicas é trabalhar escolhas ao mesmo tempo em que se apaga o próprio gesto de discriminação e determinação. Nesta tese procuraremos apontar, a partir de Pêcheux, que o discurso científico2 funciona através de escolhas políticas, apagamentos ideológicos e interpretações discursivas; por isso a linguagem científica é histórica, e não "essência atemporal" como pretendem epistemologia, lógica e tecnociência. Um dos objetivos desta tese é lançar luz sobre a prática política e ideológica da epistemologia enquanto campo regulador e administrador da produção de saberes constituídos sobre axiomas, um gesto discursivo que apaga sentidos outros enquanto fornece "evidências" ilusoriamente singulares e absolutas. Pretendemos também analisar os efeitos dessa redução da amplitude dos sentidos, realizada pelo discurso científico e demarcada a partir das noções flutuantes de "erro" e "acerto". A história da humanidade é, de alguma forma, a história da própria criação e acúmulo de conhecimentos e saberes; supostamente é o que distingue a raça humana dos demais seres vivos deste planeta (HUME, 2004). Incontáveis empreendimentos teóricos tentaram dar conta das motivações humanas pela busca do saber, de sua natureza ontológica, política ou religiosa, e as respostas são múltiplas, heterogêneas e contraditórias. Para alguns o conhecimento deriva do medo e da angústia em relação à dúvida e ao absurdo caótico que o real impõe à 2 Como veremos a partir de Pêcheux (2009), não existe discurso científico puro. 20 consciência (SARTRE, 1997); há aqueles que acreditam que todo conhecimento deriva de uma força extra-humana, quer seja divina (AGOSTINHO, 1973), quer seja puramente ideal (PLATÃO, 1991); outros creem que o ser humano é naturalmente um animal político, pensante, acumulador de conhecimentos (ARISTÓTELES, 1997); para outros o conhecimento é uma reduplicação do mundo que nada tem a ver com o real (NIETZSCHE, 2003); ainda outros creem que o conhecimento é apenas um funcionamento social, político e ideológico (ALTHUSSER, 1985); e ainda outros creem que o conhecimento é uma questão biológica, conflitos entre genes que lutam para sobreviver (DAWKINS, 2008) Se se permitir imergir, qualquer uma dessas premissas poderia ser usada para "interpretar" o mundo em sua inteireza, e não sem grande coesão. Mas um breve recuo já bastaria para se entrever a contradição universal que constitui o pensamento humano: a existência de incontáveis teorias, todas "verdadeiras" para si mesmas, radicalmente contraditórias entre si, gladiando por sectários no decorrer dos séculos. A premissa de Richard Dawkins (2008), por exemplo, poderia muito bem explicar esse conflito entre saberes: tal como os genes egoístas, que lutam apenas pela perpetuação e propagação da sequência de suas duplas hélices, as diferentes correntes de saberes lutam, de forma aparentemente autônoma, pela perpetuação de suas "verdades", haja vista que mesmo na contemporaneidade Aristóteles é usado, com grande frequência, para tecer teorias a respeito da realidade. Mas Dawkins não seria o único a tentar explicar a própria miríade contraditória de saberes; a maioria das teorias possui, secretamente ou não, respostas próprias para a pluralidade dos saberes que, enquanto explicam, doutrinam. Algo sempre erra, vaga e falha, no conhecimento humano. Esta movência claudicante, no entanto, por mais que persista e insista, raramente é tomada como fundante do saber calcado na língua. Para grande parte da filosofia, essa errância não passa de erro a ser solucionado por aqueles que se dispuserem a corrigir a língua e o saber. Descartes (1992) sintetiza bem este espírito: para ele a diversidade de opiniões e saberes, além de desencorajar, atravanca o progresso do conhecimento. Para que se possa chegar à "verdade", diz ele, é preciso chegar à unidade firme, lógica e absoluta (SILVA, 1993). Para ele, a verdade absoluta só pode advir de métodos calcados na matemática, o único saber que possui fundamentos sólidos o suficiente para guiar a produção de outros tipos de saberes que pretendam alcançar a verdade. O corte epistemológico proposto por Descartes se funda em quatro regras: clareza e distinção inequívoca; análise matemática das partes subdividas; 21 ordenação dos saberes em níveis de complexidade; e finalmente, enumeração e categorização matemática dos resultados (SILVA, 1993, p.31). Com estes quatro princípios este filósofo revolucionou e transformou drasticamente toda forma de produção de saberes, inaugurando aquilo que a filosofia nomeia como Modernidade. Depois deste corte epistemológico, todo saber que se pretendesse "verdadeiro" deveria ser submetido aos crivos metodológicos da matemática, ou melhor, todos os sentidos, e com eles língua e linguagem, deveriam ser matematizados. Importa ressaltar que para Descartes a matemática não é a própria ciência, mas uma ferramenta de organização lógica dos saberes. Sua "vantagem" residiria na premissa de que na linguagem matemática, cada significante possui apenas um único significado, o que permitiria construir enunciados estabilizados, sólidos e verdadeiros. E para que se transforme um significante repleto de significados plurais e moventes em um signo inequívoco e matematizado, a epistemologia (através do método) se coloca então a estabelecer axiomas para os signos linguísticos cotidianos, cobrindo-lhes com um verniz matemático, supostamente necessário e essencial. A língua do discurso científico, portanto, é a língua instrumentalizada a partir da escolha de um único sentido para determinado significante, apagando e silenciando os demais. Dito de outra forma, o projeto de Descartes pretendia que, assim como "um" é igual a 1, todos os signos da língua cotidiana tivessem também um único sentido supostamente natural e inequívoco. Decorrente do corte epistemológico cartesiano, na Modernidade o sentido dominante a respeito do saber humano é o sentido da verdade inequívoca e única, que, como vimos, diminui a potência da significação em nome de um suposto progresso linear. Este encurtamento no horizonte da potência de significação é balizado, principalmente, por noções dicotômicas como verdadeiro-falso, bom-mal e válido-inválido – dicotomias que são, afinal, derivações de uma dicotomia mais fundamental: a de certo-errado (FREGE, 2009). Isso nos impele inquirir: qual é o lugar político do erro e do acerto no discurso científico ocidental? Na ciência, na filosofia, na religião e em outros domínios do saber, os sentidos de erro comumente deslizam para falha, pecado, defeito, falência, imperfeição, irregularidade e inexatidão, e por isso o erro aparece apenas como algo que impele e inspira a busca pelo acerto, pela perfeição e pelo sucesso. Em termos científicos, o erro é um motor por falta: é ele que aparece primeiro; logo, o acerto não seria, senão, a expulsão do erro. Por isso o erro emerge frequentemente como aquilo que deve ser expurgado, corrigido, afastado, 22 ultrapassado3. A temática do erro se mostra assaz desafiadora. O objeto de estudo do pensamento ocidental foi mormente o acerto, o verdadeiro; o erro é verificado muito mais por exclusão, e por isso poucas vezes foi tomado como objeto principal de estudo (SCHULZ, 2011). O que não quer dizer que existam poucos dizeres a seu respeito: de alguma forma, quase sempre que se toma o acerto e o verdadeiro como tema de reflexão, o erro é abordado por oposição. Isso faz do erro um dos temas mais tangenciados da história da filosofia ocidental, principalmente pela epistemologia, pela lógica, pela filosofia do conhecimento e pela filosofia da linguagem. À primeira vista, o erro pode parecer ideologicamente ingênuo, apenas uma força motriz que impulsiona o pensamento humano rumo ao progresso. Contudo alguns questionamentos se avistam diante desta temática: se há erro, erro para quem? A quem interessa que algo seja compreendido como erro? É realmente possível ultrapassar e expurgar o erro em direção ao "aperfeiçoamento"? De que forma a instrumentalização do erro poderia ser usada para direcionar os rumos do "progresso"? O erro existe, de fato, na língua e no mundo material? Se o erro é causa de movimento, haveria algo que pudesse ser causa do erro? E se não for o erro a causa primeira dos movimentos: o que seria então? De partida, tais questionamentos já colocam em suspeição o ideário de uma epistemologia pura, livre de influências ideológicas e contingentes. A principal hipótese desta tese é que ao iniciarmos uma fundamentação epistemológica pelo erro podemos chegar a novas premissas a respeito do próprio saber, que nestes termos, se mostraria efeito de uma epistemologia (lógica, filosofia da linguagem etc.) histórica, política e movente, incapaz de fornecer fundamentos estáveis, coesos e imparciais à construção de continentes de conhecimento. O percurso dessa tese se inicia pela busca de alguns dizeres e efeitos discursivos a respeito do erro na história do pensamento ocidental não nos proporemos a fazer uma revisão bibliográfica exaustiva sobre o assunto, haja vista que sua extensão é inalcançável. Nesta revisão procuraremos localizar apenas as condições específicas pelas quais algo pode significar como "falha". Procuraremos sustentar, a partir de Kant, que o erro não existe na coisa-em-si, mas no juízo que se faz sobre ela (KANT, 2001), a posteriori, por atribuição. 3 Certos pensadores como Kierkegaard (1991), Freud (1974), Camus (2018) e outros, não tiveram, diante da noção de erro, um posicionamento de rejeição. Todavia, não nos deteremos em analisar suas teorias, pois o que realmente nos importa aqui é a rejeição tecnocientífica em relação aos efeitos do erro. 23 Contudo nos centraremos, a partir de Pêcheux (2009) na premissa de que não existe erro na língua ou no discurso, e que a própria emergência disso que se chama "erro" é, na verdade, um gesto político de dominação. Mas se não há erro na língua e no discurso, qual é a origem dos deslizes de sentidos, dos equívocos de interpretação e das ilusões na língua? Nossa proposta é lançar as bases teóricas para uma construção epistemológica da noção de "errância" como aquilo que se move contingentemente na significação e impossibilita à língua a totalidade (e unidade) de tudo dizer, tudo significar e tudo comunicar. A linguagem supõe, pois, a transformação da matéria significante por excelência (silêncio) em significados apreensíveis, verbalizáveis. Matéria e formas. A significação é movimento. Errância do sujeito, errância dos sentidos. [...] Ao tornar visível a significação, a fala transforma a própria natureza da significação. (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 33). Nestes termos, propomos lançar também a noção de "sedentarização" como gesto discursivo que visa, ilusoriamente, minorar e administrar a movência errante e fundamental da significação através da instrumentalização discursiva do "erro". Quando o homem, em sua história, percebeu o silêncio como significação, criou a linguagem para retê-lo. O ato de falar é o de separar, distinguir e, paradoxalmente, vislumbrar o silêncio e evitá-lo. Esse gesto disciplina o significar, pois já é um projeto de sedentarização dos sentidos (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 27). Partindo dos escritos de Pêcheux, nosso objetivo é analisar de forma sistemática a estrutura da base linguística e dos processos discursivos na intenção de lançar luz sobre a errância fundamental que está nos alicerces da significação errância que inunda os poros da língua e do sujeito. Por outro lado, propomos chamar de sedentarização todo processo ideológico de estancamento da movência, de instauração ilusória de completudes e unidades administráveis por isso, toda vez que falamos em sedentarização, nesta tese, falamos em termos de ilusão de estancamento, completude e permanência, a ilusão do logicamenteestabilizado. Como veremos, errância e sedentarização ocorrem naquilo que Althusser chamou "materialismo do encontro", ou seja, na pega, na relação. Uma relação errante é aquela que coloca partes distintas em algum tipo de vínculo movente, efêmero, fugaz. Nestes termos, veremos que há uma errância latente em todos os vínculos, vista na incapacidade de qualquer relação em constituir unidade e apagar as hiâncias que separam as partes deste "não- 24 todo". Já a sedentarização é a tentativa de criar laços de propriedade, submissão e diluição de uma parte na outra, dissimulando as hiâncias que as separam. Assim, a partir de Michel Pêcheux (2008; 2009), o objetivo desta tese é analisar a relação que se pode estabelecer entre os conceitos de errância (movência da significação), sedentarização (tentativa de naturalização do sentido dominante) e erro (para os lógicos, imperfeição corrigível) na língua e no sujeito, para então colocar em consideração duas posições epistemológicas: 1) a sedentária, que trata a emergência do erro como algo a ser corrigido, ou 2), uma via errante, que acolhe o erro como aquilo que reconduz à errância, o estado linguageiro onde não existe erro nem acerto. Para falarmos em termos de epistemologia a partir de Pêcheux, nos assentamos na premissa de que este autor foi, antes de tudo, bacharel em filosofia, tendo sua primeira obra publicada com o título "Sobre a história das ciências" (PÊCHEUX; FICHANT, 1971). Baseamonos também nos indícios de que "Semântica e Discurso" (2009), e "Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (2008) se tratam, em grande medida, de obras que abordam a lógica e a teoria do conhecimento. Partindo destes pressupostos, buscaremos mostrar que tais premissas sobre erro, sedentarização, relação e errância emergem e se sustentam na própria teoria de Pêcheux. Assim, buscaremos em sua obra analisar e questionar a assepsia lógica proposta pelos filósofos da linguagem, que pretendem separar o contingente (língua das massas, verdades de fato, históricas, subjetivas e errôneas) da necessidade (língua da ciência, verdades de razão, essências eternas, objetivas, corretas). Posteriormente, ainda fundamentados no mesmo autor, buscaremos por traços teóricos que nos permitam sustentar a ideia de que o erro não está na língua, mas no juízo a posteriori que se faz a respeito dela. Procuraremos, então, analisar se esta realocação do ponto de partida do "erro" pode ajudar a desvelar o caráter ideológico-político da apropriação do par antinômico erro/acerto por parte das ideologias dominantes, o que por sua vez pode desvelar o caráter ideológico-político da própria epistemologia, que trabalha dissimulando a errância movente e fundamental. As perguntas que norteiam esta pesquisa são: o que será que perdemos diante de uma sedentarização epistemológica da ciência que, à medida em que promete expandir o conhecimento humano, diminui a extensão e a potência da significação? Em que medida o aprofundamento vertical do conhecimento implica em um apoucamento horizontal da 25 superfície do sentido e do sujeito? E de que forma o erro e o acerto não constituem meros efeitos de dominação discursiva e administração da significação? O objetivo principal dessa tese é lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância a partir de Michel Pêcheux, um procedimento epistemológico que possa ser usado não só pelo campo da Análise do Discurso, mas também pela filosofia. A epistemologia da errância, como veremos, tem por objetivo "denunciar" a sedentarização (estabilização, posse, administração e lucro) da significação por parte da tecnociência e, com isso, produzir movências para além do par antinômico erro/acerto. Isso significa desestabilizar o lógico e alargar as divisas do sentido e do sujeito lá onde a movência é fluida e franqueada para construir conhecimentos outros, por mais efêmeros e frágeis que não-durem. Importa, finalmente, ressaltar que esta pesquisa é de cunho estritamente teórico, e para tanto nos limitaremos a procurar nas obras pecheutianas "Semântica e discurso. Uma crítica à afirmação do óbvio" (2009) e "Discurso. Estrutura ou acontecimento?" noções e conceitos que possam nos ajudar a lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância. Nos primeiros capítulos passaremos por um processo de delimitação teórica, pela qual contornaremos os principais conceitos que serão postos em diálogo com a teoria pecheutiana, a saber, as noções de erro, errância e sedentarização. Quem nos acompanhará nessas andanças teóricas será Dom Quixote, o errante mais famoso da literatura moderna. Alonso Quijano era um fidalgo colecionador e leitor fascinado por histórias de cavalaria; depois de muitas leituras, os sentidos da ficção passaram a se confundir com os sentidos de sua própria vida. Para muitos, delírio, para ele, uma nova vida cheia de possibilidades e amplitudes. Até seu nome desliza a outro: Dom Quixote de La Mancha que, de fidalgo sedentário, passa a cavaleiro, herói e errante. Por quê? Simplesmente porque quer, porque pode. Seu mundo também se expande: sua nobre residência é deixada para traz, ela dá lugar a novos caminhos desconhecidos que também são deixados para trás. Errante, ele não planeja rotas, apenas perambula sem rumo, sempre montado no pangaré Rocinante. Com ele vai Sancho Pança, não menos descomprometido com a razão que seu senhor. Dom Quixote erra pelo mundo: vaga e falha, brinca e se machuca, sorri e chora; mas sobretudo, ama a vida. Muitos querem pôr juízo e racionalidade neste errante aventureiro, querem que volte aos muros de seu castelo, que volte às responsabilidades e administrações cotidianas. Mas será este seu destino? 26 1.1 MEMÓRIAS SOBRE ERRO E ERRÂNCIA DOM QUIXOTE PARTE 2, CAPÍTULO 4 "Cada um é como Deus o fez e ainda pior muitas vezes" O "erro" já levou muitos aos tribunais, forcas e fogueiras. O "erro" já custou muito dinheiro aos cofres públicos; já retardou, por séculos ou milênios, a caminhada humana rumo ao "progresso". No entanto, os sentidos de "erro" não são unívocos: deslizam de um palanque a outro, entre normas e prescrições, entre crenças, esperanças, gerências e regências diferentes. De toda forma, o erro emerge como aquilo que recorta, bordeia e limita a significação, que veta e orienta o conhecimento humano e a própria práxis do sujeito no discurso. O "erro", portanto, é ferramenta de sedentarização, o avesso da errância que é movência contingente. Contudo, das diversas formas de se significar o erro, a que nos importa inicialmente é aquela apontada por Pêcheux nos capítulos iniciais de Semântica e Discurso (2009): aquilo que a epistemologia, a lógica e a filosofia da linguagem chamam de "ilusões lógicas na língua" (FREGE, 2009). Nestes termos, a epistemologia moderna, embora derive de uma profunda revolução intelectual, ainda está fundada nos mesmos pilares que, desde Platão, animam a empresa intelectual do Ocidente: "a tentativa de livrar o pensamento das contingências da história, a busca de ideias cuja validade independa de contexto, o desejo aparentemente incurável de atingir uma perspectiva fora de qualquer perspectiva" (TEIXEIRA, 2011). Neste projeto lógicoepistemológico estão implicados a busca por verdades essenciais, a-históricas e universais. A estas supostas verdades essenciais cabem uma contraparte igualmente "essencial": a do erro a-histórico, universal aquilo que supostamente seria errado a despeito do contexto histórico e social no qual é efeito. Mas o que poderia estar por trás desta ideação universal de erro e acerto? Quais são os efeitos discursivos desta concepção de erro que ilusoriamente prescinde das noções de história, língua e sujeito? Por outro lado, o que decorreria de uma concepção discursiva deste conceito que levasse em conta as condições históricas e sociais de produção de sentido? Um dos objetivos desta tese é observar e discutir os efeitos discursivos e ideológicos que decorrem da rejeição (e instrumentalização discursiva) da noção de erro e consequentemente, da ávida 27 busca pelo acerto -, propondo um novo fundamento para o funcionamento epistemológico e discursivo do conhecimento humano: a errância. Destas premissas iniciais, que passam pela história da filosofia e da ciência, observamos que a noção de errância e erro recebem significações que clamam por interpretação e análise. Ao se estruturar enquanto constructo lógico-racional, o "erro4" tem implicações nas mais diferentes formas de circulação do discurso: na filosofia, na ciência, na tecnologia, na religião, no direito, na pedagogia e no cotidiano das mais diferentes culturas ao redor do mundo. Diante disso, irrompe certa necessidade de se pensar o erro sob os prismas político e ideológico, fazendo uso da história e da materialidade da língua. A noção de erro recebeu incontáveis significações discursivas no decorrer da história da filosofia, da ciência, da religião etc. Contudo, nossa hipótese é que certos valores para este termo subsistiram em diferentes condições de produção de sentido: ao erro sempre coube valores de nocividade, inconveniência e fracasso. O erro é comumente compreendido como aquilo que pode frustrar planos nas mais diferentes esferas e práticas humanas. Ele aparece no pênalti perdido pelo jogador de futebol, na perda de dinheiro na bolsa de valores, no diagnóstico equivocado que culmina na perda de um paciente; mas o erro pode ainda emergir na frustração de uma opinião emitida sobre política ou religião, na suposição que se faz a respeito da competência de um colega de trabalho, ou em uma aposta sobre a autoria de uma canção. Como veremos adiante, historicamente o discurso sobre o erro aparece principalmente de duas formas: na forma de "dar errado", mas também na forma de "estar errado", onde uma diz respeito a um estado material de ações humanas (acidentes e falhas de consequências materiais) e a outra a um estado discursivo (equívocos linguísticos, de convicções ou concepções). O que chama atenção aqui, sobretudo, é o poder de balizamento que a instrumentalização do erro fornece àqueles que detém o poder de definir e fixar o que é errado e correto. Neste aspecto, diversos termos tangenciam o valor da palavra erro como se fossem sinônimos: falha, defeito, imperfeição, imprecisão, inexatidão, incerteza, incorreção, incompletude, engano, escorregadela, deslize, lapso, desvio, confusão, descuido, equívoco, 4 Para evitar repetições e ressalvas excessivas, doravante entenda-se "erro" como significante que recebeu significados distintos no decorrer da história, e que por isso estão sendo colocados em suspeição nesta tese. Não se trata, portanto, de uma defesa epistemológica dessa noção, mas sim de uma crítica à instrumentalização política de seus sentidos. 28 desacerto, pecado, mau comportamento, desregramento, crime, falta, discrepância, discordância, desigualdade. Esta série de quase-sinônimos nos permite antever o caráter político e ideológico por traz do domínio da noção de erro. Outras tangenciam sua antinomia, o acerto: precisão, exatidão, justeza, certeza, correção, atino, acertamento, perfeição, ajustamento, convenção, contrato, combinação, acordo, adaptação, sensatez, bom senso, cabimento, adequação, discernimento, tino, reflexão, sabedoria, oportunidade, juízo, propriedade, prudência, ponderação, glória, sucesso, sorte, ventura, fortuna, felicidade, regulação, totalidade. Assim valorado, a manifestação do erro é mais comum do que muitos gostariam nas sociedades contemporâneas. Como contraparte do acerto, o erro é aquilo que se evita fitar, que surge apenas nos cantos dos olhos para logo se desviar. O erro é aquilo que se tenta apagar, silenciar, mascarar. O erro é tido como desagradável, feio, fétido, amargo, frustrante. Por um lado, o erro pode ser determinante na sobrevivência de um grupo de nômades afegãos, de uma nação inteira, e até de toda uma espécie por que não, de todo um planeta. Individual e coletivamente, a própria existência depende da capacidade de se chegar a conclusões precisas sobre o mundo. Ou seja, a experiência de estar certo é imperativo para a manutenção da sobrevivência, e talvez por isso mesmo seja uma das satisfações mais baratas e profundas. Mas por outro lado, o erro pode sofrer determinações discursivas com implicações bem menos vitais. Um sujeito pode cometer uma gafe em um jantar, ou falar algo impróprio em uma dada circunstância e nem por isso correr risco de vida ou pode? Mas algo sempre erra, insistentemente, na ideologia e em seus discursos. A quebra da bolsa de valores é o erro do sistema capitalista, bem como o mendigo que dorme na rua. Uma nova descoberta científica aponta os erros da anterior. Uma corrente filosófica sempre se contrapõe a outra, e mutuamente apontam seus erros. A profecia não cumprida coloca em xeque os enunciados religiosos, e as guerras, corrupções e populismos atestam os erros dos governantes de diversas nações. Uma contradição se avizinha: algo insiste em errar, em não se permitir acertar, não cabalmente, mas o suficiente para desestabilizar qualquer projeto de totalização. Mas apesar do perene "falhamento" que inunda teorias, planos e práticas, ainda assim muitos supõem estar corretos o tempo todo, sobre basicamente tudo: sobre convicções políticas e intelectuais, religiosas e morais, na avaliação que se faz a respeito de outras pessoas, sobre memórias e compreensões dos fatos. Por mais paradoxal que pareça, o espírito absoluto hegeliano 29 (HEGEL, 2003) se evidencia como estado inconsciente que parece lançar o ser humano próximo à onisciência. Seria tal contradição uma aporia moderna, derivada do imperativo filosóficocientífico-capitalista do progresso, ou seria ela um nó muito mais antigo e com variações diferentes? Platão se tornou um erro diante de Aristóteles, e ambos diante de Descartes, que por sua vez foi corrigido por Kant, que foi atualizado por Heidegger. Newton foi desmentido por Einstein, que foi corrigido por Hawkins: uma lista interminável de reparações. Não haveria, no imperativo do acerto, a necessidade secreta de um erro? E o que dizer a respeito do efeito discursivo do erro? Não derivaria ele de uma memória impregnada de vergonha, ignorância e degeneração moral? O que significa errar, em nossos tempos? Será que os sentidos desta palavra passaram por grandes transformações no decorrer da história? Se o projeto da filosofia e da ciência é estabelecer o que é verdadeiro, correto e acertado, quer seja por questões de sobrevivência, ética, ou progresso, fica implícito em tal projeto sua contraparte fundamental: o erro, o fracasso, a falha. Contudo, frequentemente negligencia-se um tipo específico de erro, a saber, o metaerro, ou seja, o erro sobre a definição e significação a respeito do próprio erro. Neste aspecto, é possível que no gesto discursivo de silenciamento do erro esteja implícito um movimento de manutenção do "mesmo", do "repetível", da definição supostamente correta do erro. Como o erro aparece apenas como negatividade do acerto, ele não consta como objeto direto de estudo na filosofia, na linguística e outros campos de conhecimento, mantendo-se obscuro. Assim, se para a epistemologia lógica (e porque não, capitalista) o erro desponta como motor do progresso, ele só pode assim o ser na medida em que continua inexplorado, obscuro, repugnante e rejeitável: o erro impulsiona na medida em que é recusado. Não é incomum o paradoxo discursivo que, enquanto refuta o erro, o acolhe como sendo característica intrínseca do ser humano, o mesmo paradoxo que fundamenta o metadiscurso científico sobre a verdade e o acerto, que quando falha, verte-se em progresso, ultrapassagem do erro pelo novo acerto. Em outras palavras, a assunção da falibilidade humana não impede o delírio de perfeição. O mesmo se dá na religião, que ao mesmo tempo em que assume a natureza pecaminosa e falha do ser humano exige dele uma vida virtuosa e obediente à vontade perfeita de Deus. Nada diferente do que comumente pratica-se na pedagogia, no direito ou na política. 30 Mil e duzentos anos antes de Descartes (1973) enunciar o famoso "cogito ergo sum" (penso, logo, existo), Agostinho escreveu "fallor ergo sum" (errei, logo, existo). No pensamento deste filósofo da idade média, o erro não é apenas uma parte da existência, mas a própria prova dela. Dentre algumas outras características, o erro é o que faz humano o humano. Assim, morte e erro aparecem ao ser humano como características fundamentais de sua natureza mas nem por isso acolhidos. Quando erra, o ser humano nega o erro de diversas formas: relutância, ocultamento, dissimulação, arrependimento, minimização, transferência e correção. Os políticos dizem "erros foram cometidos", não se sabe por quem, menos por eles; o religioso sempre coloca um "mas", depois do "errei"; o empresário coloca a culpa no mercado de ações e o professor no sistema de ensino. E se não houver maneira de se esquivar do epíteto do erro, é possível ao sujeito do erro algum ritual de penitência ou a contratação dispendiosa de um advogado. Se se tratar de um cientista, ele pode se retratar e escrever um artigo corrigindo o erro; ao aluno resta a próxima prova, e ao motorista o pagamento da multa. Sempre é possível arrepender-se, corrigir e ultrapassar o erro, não importa onde, nem quando. Depois de décadas de certezas, é possível que se passe a entender como erro antigas convicções religiosas, políticas, profissionais, científicas e até mesmo afetivas. Certo desagrado decorre da sensação de perda de tempo e de esforços, o que talvez explique certo prazer quando se vê e aponta o erro do outro para alguns, um prazer viciante. No entanto o erro pode emergir de formas mais sutis. Não é incomum dois governantes crerem estar certos a respeito de suas convicções e decisões ao ponto de levar à guerra e à morte um incontável número de cidadãos. Onde está o erro quando dois acertos se contrapõem? Pois são essas convicções que fundamentam ética, justiça e leis de um povo. Convicções que, não raramente, se mostram equivocadas se comparadas com outras certezas, quer sejam separadas no espaço ou no tempo. O caso Eichmann (ARENDT, 1999) é prova disso5. A história da ciência está repleta de teorias tidas como errôneas, ultrapassadas. Algumas dessas teorias estão entre os erros mais dramáticos da humanidade: a terra plana, o universo geocêntrico, a existência do éter, a constante cosmológica, a fusão a frio. A despeito 5 Nesta obra, a filósofa descreve o julgamento de Eichmann, um nazista responsável pelo transporte de judeus para campos de extermínio. Em sua defesa ele argumentou que agia segundo a ética corrente em seu país naquele momento. Segundo a autora, o julgamento também foi regido por certo sentimento de vingança, culminando na sentença de morte do réu. 31 disso, a ciência prossegue percebendo e corrigindo esses erros, ainda que ao longo do tempo diversas correções se mostraram tão erradas como as anteriores. Consequentemente a epistemologia admite que muitas das teorias que hoje são tidas como acertos, em algum momento serão dadas como erradas. Em nossos tempos, até mesmo a morte começa a receber sentidos de erro, uma falha na cadeia genética que poderia-deveria ser corrigida. O autor Gennady Stolyarov II (2015) traduz este sentimento de boa parte da comunidade científica, de que a morte é uma inimiga de todos e por isso deve ser combatida com ciência, medicina e tecnologia. Neste âmbito, começam a circular dizeres e movimentos na intenção de prolongar radicalmente o tempo da vida humana até que a humanidade possa corrigir e ultrapassar o erro da morte. Estes questionamentos prévios evidenciam que o erro é um gesto humano que figura tanto no plano coletivo como no individual. O erro exige uma compreensão que perpassa ideologia, língua, história, sujeito e, mais árduo de se sustentar no interior da A.D., o erro também é da ordem do humano de carne e osso, daquilo que é impossível significar no sujeito. Diante de inúmeros conflitos e derivas de sentido a respeito da própria noção de realidade e verdade, as relações que se estabelecem como corretas ou equivocadas aparecem também de distintas formas. Assim, qualquer definição de erro deve ser suficientemente flexível para acomodar todas as formas de equívocos e falhas mesmo quando não existem referências diretas e absolutas sobre o correto. Neste sentido, esta tese pode ser vista como um trabalho que examina o funcionamento da linguagem não somente em uma perspectiva histórica, mas também lógica. Trata-se, portanto, de uma questão epistemológica fundamental: "por que existem erros na linguagem?". Uma tese sobre erro e errância impõe algumas definições: o que é o erro? O que é que pode errar? Para quem um determinado erro é erro? Quem é o "proprietário" discursivo do erro? Essas perguntas já nos permitem antecipar a hipótese dessa tese de que erro e acerto não são essências ou causas, mas efeitos. 1.1.1 A INSTRUMENTALIZAÇÃO IDEOLÓGICA DO ERRO DOM QUIXOTE PARTE 1, CAPÍTULO 8 "Andar por terras distantes e conversar com diversas pessoas torna os homens ponderados." 32 Narciso morreu afogado no rio quando desejou sobremaneira a própria perfeição espelhada na água. Perfeição ou ruína? Sabedoria ou imbecilidade? Loucura ou lucidez? A vergonha da loucura versus o esplendor da lucidez assim pregaram os sábios no decorrer da história, uma constante busca por clareza, sabedoria, inteligência, razão, precisão, conhecimento, progresso: perfeição. Erro. Acaso não haveria na sabedoria uma loucura secreta? Não seria a perfeição mera extravagância? Afinal, naturalizou-se (ou não) que se sinta vergonha da loucura e orgulho da lucidez. Mas e o que dizer da vergonha do esplendor e da loucura da lucidez? Do esplendor da vergonha e da lucidez da loucura? Da lucidez da vergonha e do esplendor da loucura? Da vergonha da lucidez e da loucura do esplendor? A problemática do erro pode parecer um questionamento pueril, mas talvez seja justamente dela que emanem reflexões e análises importantes à nossa proposta de epistemologia da errância. Buscaremos, inicialmente, pelas relações possíveis entre os dessemelhantes "errar" (enquanto falha) e "errar" (como errância), aproximações que, inicialmente, não parecem mostrar traços de harmonia. Iniciemos com alguns questionamentos: seria possível falar em "erro", no singular? Seria possível instrumentalizar politicamente a noção de erro? Quem foram, no decorrer da história, aqueles que tentaram se tornar "proprietários" do erro? Esta subseção da tese não tem por objetivo uma arqueologia exaustiva daquilo a que chamaram "erro6" no decorrer da história da humanidade. Isso é da ordem do impossível. Objetivamos, sim, ancorados na AD de Michel Pêcheux, a partir da noção de memória discursiva como base do dizível, lançar luz sobre alguns sentidos discursivos a respeito da noção de erro, e de como tal concepção nunca esteve alheia à ideologia e aos jogos políticos. A memória discursiva, segundo o autor, se materializa nas práticas sociais e históricas que apontam para as condições ideológicas de produção que circunscrevem língua e sujeito, logo, a própria noção de erro. Falamos, portanto, de uma memória discursiva, social, que não diz respeito à memória individual e psicológica, mas sim àquela que encontra sua materialidade no funcionamento da linguagem. A noção de memória discursiva, em Pêcheux, tem ainda como característica fundamental a impossibilidade de tudo registrar, de tudo dizer. Ou seja, nem tudo vira memória discursiva; e muito do que entra em algum momento, pode ser esquecido ou silenciado em outro (ROMÃO, 2011). 6 Ainda não estamos falando em errância, que é movência. O erro é da ordem da sedentarização, a tentativa ideológica de minorar e controlar a significação. Como veremos, na errância não há erro. 33 Tocamos aqui um dos pontos de encontro com a questão da memória como estruturação de materialidade discursiva complexa, estendida em uma dialética da repetição e da regularização: a memória discursiva seria aquilo que, face a um texto que surge como acontecimento a ler, vem restabelecer os 'implícitos' (quer dizer, mais tecnicamente, os pré-construídos, elementos citados e relatados, discursos-transversos, etc.) de que sua leitura necessita: a condição do legível em relação ao próprio legível (PÊCHEUX, 1999, p. 52). A memória discursiva é aquilo que fundamenta as condições de funcionamento do discurso, de sua produção e interpretação. Pêcheux esclarece que são as redes de memória que proporcionam a retomada de discursos já-ditos, atualizando-os. Nestes termos, o funcionamento do discurso é, em grande medida, a materialização de uma memória social na língua, guiando o a-dizer através do já-dito. A memória se mostra como espaço de retomadas de discursos anteriores, além de funcionar como elemento balizador dos embates entre diferentes forças ideológicas que almejam fundamentar a rede de implícitos. Haveria, assim, um eterno embate de forças na memória, balizado pelo choque do acontecimento. De um lado estão as forças de manutenção do implícito, uma estabilização parafrástica que sempre visa a integração do novo ao "mesmo", até que ele seja absorvido e dissolvido no caldo da memória dominante. De outro lado, no entanto, atua uma força de "desregulação" que tenciona perturbar a rede dos "implícitos", um efeito polissêmico que fratura o "mesmo" e muda o curso do discurso. Neste embate entre o "mesmo" e o "novo" funcionam a ideologia e o sujeito, este último como efeito do primeiro. Isso importa na medida em que os embates entre as distintas memórias de "erro" se mostram como condições materiais específicas que assujeitam o indivíduo em um terreno movediço fundamentado por diferentes formações ideológicas e discursivas. Essa desmedida teia de memórias, justamente por que é esburacada e costurada de forma imprecisa, produz sujeitos igualmente fendidos e equívocos. Assim, o sentido nunca é totalmente controlado pelo sujeito, podendo sempre ser outro e, assim, escapar de maneira imprevisível para um lugar diferente. Esse terreno do novo apresenta-se propício para que a teoria sempre se abra a cada estudo, reestruture seus postulados à medida que outras análises surjam e, por fim, não se constitua como um bloco monolítico de conceitos a serem somente reproduzidos e aplicados. Também vale destacar que as bordas e as sobras dos dizeres, as falhas e as faltas da linguagem, os equívocos do sujeito se enovelam como indícios imprescindíveis para compreender o funcionamento da linguagem, ou seja, o que nas teorias da comunicação era conhecido como ruído, falta de exatidão 34 da mensagem, imprecisão do emissor, erro do código, é justamente o lugar em que a ideologia e o inconsciente cavam sua espessura mais significativa, reclamando significação. Como um caçador de pistas e vestígios, o analista deve se colocar nessa banda larga em que a falha, a opacidade, a incompletude e o silêncio significam, e significam muito (ROMÃO, 2007). Se a memória discursiva é como um tecido despedaçado, assim o é a memória discursiva sobre o erro. Para tratarmos o erro de um ponto de vista discursivo, na intenção de buscarmos minimamente pelos efeitos que tal concepção produz no dizer contemporâneo, vamos buscar na grande teia ocidental de memórias discursivas por evidências históricas que fundamentaram dizeres a respeito desta noção em diferentes condições de produção de sentido. A intenção das páginas que se seguem não é proporcionar uma arqueologia da noção de erro, tampouco elencar, uma a uma, todas as teorias que tocaram de alguma forma esta temática. O objetivo é tentar captar minimamente alguns dos incontáveis sentidos que este termo recebeu no decorrer da história, para então verificarmos, discursivamente, alguns dos efeitos de sentido que ainda perduram e interferem nos dizeres contemporâneos sobre as noções de verdade, erro e progresso7. Esta tentativa de examinar as memórias de erro necessitam, de pronto, descartar certa separação entre o erro do tipo material, como o acidente de trânsito, de outro tipo de erro, aquele que supostamente se aproxima mais da pura linguagem, como o erro político, religioso, judiciário ou artístico. O primeiro tipo de erro parece ser facilmente demonstrado, ao passo que o segundo tipo sugere erros que não permitem demarcação definitiva. Ora, tal distinção se coagula facilmente diante de um questionamento discursivo muito simples: "erro para quem"? Tomar o erro em termos discursivos parece ser uma tarefa fadada a incontáveis contradições, e por isso mesmo tentar forjar uma teoria unificada sobre o erro no/do discurso já seria, por si só, um erro. Mas diferente de outras teorias, nesta tese o erro deve ser acolhido como parte fundamental da construção do próprio conhecimento sobre o erro. A memória de "erro" aparece comumente no discurso filosófico e científico ocidental de forma negativa (apenas como oposição ao correto) desde seus primórdios. A construção de memórias sobre o erro se inscreve em um projeto ininterrupto de tentar definir a natureza essencial da verdade e do conhecimento correto, um projeto que nasce na filosofia présocrática e perdura até nossos dias. Pelo menos nos dois primeiros milênios de sua existência, 7 Importa ressaltar que esta tese é, acima de tudo, um tratado anti-positivista. Trata-se, na verdade, de uma crítica às noções de verdade e progresso, instrumentalizadas ideologicamente. 35 a filosofia se dedicou prioritariamente ao projeto de examinar se determinados conhecimentos poderiam ser tidos como verdadeiros, corretos e adequados. Tal projeto surgiu inicialmente na intenção de compreender e evitar as ameaças à espécie humana, mas depois para explicar a própria relação entre humanos, que se tornava cada vez mais complexa. Este foi o projeto que orientou "A república", de Platão (2006), passando pela "Política", de Aristóteles (1997), e depois pela filosofia medieval (KIRCHOF, 2003), até culminar no "Discurso do método", de Descartes (1973) e na "Crítica da razão pura", de Kant (2001). Em todo este trajeto, a teorização sobre o correto dependia, de forma negativa, de uma teorização sobre o erro. E assim, o campo da filosofia responsável pela distinção entre acerto e erro, ou seja, o estudo do conhecimento, tornou-se conhecido como epistemologia. Importa ressaltar que no mesmo período outras fontes de conhecimento produziram discursos sobre o erro de formas distintas. O texto filosófico-científico era restrito a poucos na idade média, e por isso imperava o sentido de pecado para a noção de erro (AGOSTINHO, 1991). É precisamente esta memória de erro como "pecado" que conduziu a origem da filosofia ocidental em seus primeiros séculos. Tanto na Grécia quanto em Roma, os grandes mitos atribuem a origem do mal físico e do sofrimento, e até da morte, a um erro primordial, um pecado, uma transgressão moral. Nestes mitos, o erro aparecia sempre seguido de castigo. Prometeu praticou um erro moral quando roubou o fogo dos deuses para entregar aos homens, e por isso Zeus o prendeu a uma pedra no Cáucaso onde uma grande águia comia diariamente suas vísceras. Narrativa semelhante aparece no Gênesis, com Adão e Eva, enganados por uma serpente e condenados por Deus a viverem uma vida de angústia com intermináveis consequências. Em ambas narrativas o erro aparece como origem de todo sofrimento, dor e morte (PRADEAU, 2010). A filosofia europeia, em seus primeiros séculos, se debruçou com afinco sobre o conceito de pecado original. Em Santo Agostinho todos pecaram em Adão, através de Adão, e por isso ocorre uma transmissão hereditária do pecado, ou seja, todos nascem maus e pecadores por causa do erro primordial de Adão. Outra forma de pensar o erro como pecado se dava na forma de negação de virtudes. Nesta linha discursiva, o pecado não passa de uma privação do bem, e o erro não é mais do que a falta que destotaliza a perfeição. Logo, quando nasce, o humano herda a maldade decorrente do erro, o que significa que ele nasce privado daquilo que deveria ter, mas não tem: a graça, a justeza, a perfeição (AGOSTINHO, 1991). 36 A construção desta memória de erro como origem das mazelas humanas perdura até nossos tempos, bem como certas significações subjacentes como transgressão, culpabilidade, condenação e sequela. Não seria possível contar quantas pessoas não foram conduzidas à prisão, à forca, à fogueira ou à cadeira elétrica por cometerem erros de diferentes gravidades. Em alguns casos, no entanto, a pena pelo pecado lançava luz sobre a condição de produção de sua significação: enquanto errava perante o Deus católico, Galileu corrigia a questão do heliocentrismo. Eu, Galileu, filho do falecido Vincenzo Galilei, florentino, de setenta anos de idade, intimado pessoalmente à presença deste tribunal e ajoelhado diante de vós, Eminentíssimos e Reverendíssimos Senhores Cardeais InquisidoresGerais contra a gravidade herética em toda a comunidade cristã, tendo diante dos olhos e tocando com as mãos os Santos Evangelhos, juro que sempre acreditei, que acredito, e, mercê de Deus, acreditarei no futuro, em tudo quanto é defendido, pregado e ensinado pela Santa Igreja Católica e Apostólica. Mas, considerando que [...] escrevi e imprimi um livro no qual discuto a nova doutrina (o heliocentrismo) já condenada e aduzo argumentos de grande força em seu favor, sem apresentar nenhuma solução para eles, fui, pelo Santo Oficio, acusado de veemente heresia, isto é, de haver sustentado e acreditado que o Sol está no centro do mundo e imóvel, e que a Terra não está no centro, mas se move; desejando eliminar do espírito de Vossas Eminências e de todos os cristãos fiéis essa veemente suspeita concebida mui justamente contra mim, com sinceridade e fé verdadeira, abjuro, amaldiçoo e detesto os citados erros e heresias, e em geral qualquer outro erro, heresia e seita contrários à Santa Igreja, e juro que no futuro nunca mais direi nem afirmarei, verbalmente nem por escrito, nada que proporcione motivo para tal suspeita a meu respeito (DONATO, 1971). Nestes termos, sua carta de retratação se evidencia como grande aporia epistemológica, pois enquanto era corrigido pela igreja, Galileu corrigia a ciência, que depois o corrigiria novamente através de Newton, Kepler e outros. Uma memória de erro era posta em conflito com outra, uma ruptura, uma nova memória científica, que tempos depois seria sobreposta por novas memórias que fundamentariam outros dizeres. A igreja Católica, no entanto, só assumiu o heliocentrismo em 1922 (BYNUM, 2014). Essas memórias discursivas sobre o erro, como visto, não são apenas elucubrações gratuitas, meramente teóricas. Elas fundamentaram dizeres durante muitos séculos, justificando muitas sentenças de morte e enunciados de repúdio. O discurso sobre o erro também sofreu diversas variações dentro da filosofia, e no decorrer da história da epistemologia diferentes sentidos para erro foram estabelecidos, muitas vezes contraditórios. Contudo, de Platão (1991) em diante uma linha tênue parece ter 37 estabelecido um consenso mínimo sobre sua definição. Para o filósofo grego, e para muitos que vieram depois dele, estar errado é assentir que algo é verdadeiro quando é falso ou, ao contrário, acreditar que algo é falso quando é verdadeiro. Mas como se pode chegar de forma segura à verdade, em Platão, para que se possa saber quando o verdadeiro foi tomado por falso ou o contrário, configurando um erro? Para entender esta posição discursiva de Platão, é preciso voltar aos eleastas, que apresentaram uma concepção de negação radical do erro: "o ser é", já o "não-ser" não pode ser pensado nem enunciado; logo, tudo o que puder ser dito diz o que "é", assim, é verdadeiro e não há nele erro algum (CARVALHO, 2012). Não é preciso apontar os problemas que essa assertiva causaria à filosofia. Platão logo tratou de corrigir esta definição de erro e acerto: quem emite um juízo errôneo não enuncia um "não-ser", mas sim algo diferente do "ser", do que "é". E para ele o ser é a ideia, a possibilidade de ser. A memória de erro construída a partir de Aristóteles causou profundas marcas discursivas no decorrer da história, principalmente na idade média. Para ele o erro aparece em um enunciado muito semelhante ao de Platão: "erro é a negação do que é ou a afirmação do que não é" (ARISTÓTELES, 2002). Contudo o ser, para Aristóteles, é diferente do ser ideal platônico, é substância, ou melhor, é realidade necessária (ARISTÓTELES, 2006). Contudo, a característica mais imprescindível que Aristóteles atribui ao erro (e ao acerto) é a de que estes só são possíveis onde há relação (síntese) de elementos diferentes. Onde se percebe substâncias indivisíveis, ou seja, no um, não há possibilidade de erro ou acerto. O erro e a acerto só podem aparecer quando se articula, pelas vias do intelecto, percepções, ideias e enunciados heterogêneos. O erro e o acerto, portanto, são da ordem da relação, do juízo, e não das singularidades (das coisas, dos enunciados, dos signos etc.). Para Aristóteles, se o intelecto humano fizer sínteses que se harmonizam com as relações naturais, ele está emitindo um juízo sintético verdadeiro, correto, e nele não há erros. O erro aparece realizando sínteses ou divisões que não são guiadas pela essência necessária da substância em questão (ARISTÓTELES, 2002). Com isso Aristóteles restringe o erro à esfera das intelecções, mais especificamente, à esfera do juízo. Somente quando se avalia a relação sintética é que se pode julgar se houve ou não um erro. Esta primeira parte de sua definição do acerto (e do erro, como contraparte), pode ser separada da segunda, que estabelece os critérios para avaliar as relações. E o parâmetro aristotélico para mensurar as relações é a referência à estrutura substancial do ser: 38 se a relação sintética respeitar a estrutura substancial do ser (ou dos seres envolvidos), esta é uma relação adequada, correta e verdadeira. Quando um intelecto percebe um odor qualquer, tal percepção é uma intelecção de algo indivisível, e por isso não há nela erro nem acerto. Mas quando a fonte daquele odor é apreendida com os olhos, e uma relação sintética entre percepções é estabelecida, a possibilidade do erro e do acerto emergem. Para Aristóteles, se tal relação for condizente com a estrutura substancial e essencial do ser daquela fonte de percepções, então trata-se de uma relação correta. Aristóteles está tratando, afinal, de lógica, e a lógica se enuncia através da linguagem (ANGIONI, 2012). É de discurso que ele está tratando. O juízo estabelecido sobre uma ou mais relações sintéticas se dá na língua, ou melhor, no discurso, na língua em curso. No entanto as definições aristotélicas sobre o erro começam a impor problemas ao pensamento epistemológico deste ponto em diante. A partir de tais critérios estabelecidos para julgar as relações, o erro fica circunscrito à esfera das afirmações acidentais, que para ele não têm lugar na ciência. Isso implica afirmar, afinal, que os enunciados necessários8 não estão sujeitos ao erro, apenas os contingentes9. Mas ainda assim, mesmo às afirmações acidentais é possível, dentro de sua filosofia, aplicar a necessidade da ciência silogística, que regularia também o conhecimento contingente e eliminaria as possibilidades de erros. Em outras palavras, na lógica aristotélica, a ciência não produz erros. E onde houver erros na linguagem do senso comum, a lógica silogística pode repará-los. Em Santo Agostinho (1973) o erro aparece com definições cristãs que mesclam as teorias platônicas às aristotélicas, priorizando a primeira. Na filosofia cristã o erro aparece como contraparte da perfeição divina, ainda que a definição de erro como efeito do juízo sintético permaneça: O erro provém dos juízos que se fazem sobre as sensações e não delas próprias. A sensação enquanto tal jamais é falsa. Falso é querer ver nela a expressão de uma verdade externa ao próprio sujeito. Assim, nenhum cético pode refutar alguém que afirme simplesmente: 'Eu sei que isto me parece branco; limito-me à minha percepção e encontro nela uma verdade que não me pode ser negada'. Muito diferente seria afirmar somente: 'Isto é branco'. Neste caso o erro torna-se possível, no primeiro não. Assim, existiria pelo 8 Necessidade: desde Aristóteles, entendeu-se por necessário aquilo que não pode ser de outro modo, aquilo que, por conseguinte, só existe de um modo. Pode entender-se esta noção de duas maneiras: a) como necessidade ideal, que expressa o encadeamento das ideias, e b) como necessidade real, que expressa o encadeamento de causas e efeitos (FERRATER MORA, 2000). 9 Contingência: o contingente opõese ao necessário. É aquilo que se deu de uma forma mas poderia ter se dado de outra, ou não ter se dado de forma alguma (FERRATER MORA, 2000). 39 menos uma verdade absoluta, que estaria implicada no próprio ato de perceber (PESSANHA, 1980, p. 18). Entre Platão, Aristóteles e Agostinho existe um fio condutor que define o erro como uma faculdade distinta do intelecto, mas que ocasiona efeitos sobre ele, desviando-o de seu funcionamento correto. Em outras palavras, o próprio intelecto tem um funcionamento tido como correto, onde o erro não passa de uma sombra negativa da adequação perfeita e correta de seu funcionamento essencial. Para estes filósofos, o erro é o conhecimento de um nãoconhecimento, tal como ouvir o silêncio. Neste aspecto, o erro volta a aparecer como um nãoser: o erro não existe, é apenas uma falta (negatividade) do correto (AGOSTINHO, 1973). Em Spinoza encontramos uma definição semelhante. A ideia incorreta é a ideia falsa, e falsidade é a privação de consciência decorrente de ideias inadequadas, falhas, imaginativas ou confusas (SPINOZA, 1979). Leibniz (1992) percorre o mesmo caminho, delineando o erro como uma deficiência que vem destotalizar a perfeição do intelecto humano. Descartes (1973), enquanto busca pela verdade absoluta e fundamental, acaba por associar o erro à certa falha na vontade que orientaria o intelecto à falsidade. Se a vontade é maior que a intelecção, seria necessário duvidar de todas as verdades provenientes da percepção até que se chegasse a uma assertiva irrefutável, fundamento de todas as outras: o "cogito ergo sum". Em Descartes, portanto, o erro é meramente uma ilusão que se origina na "vontade" humana. Além disso, o entendimento aplica-se apenas aos raros objetos que se lhe apresentam e o seu conhecimento é sempre muito limitado; embora a vontade possa parecer infinita, só apreendemos o que possa ser objeto de outra vontade, mesmo dessa vontade imensa que está em Deus, se a nossa vontade também o abarcar. Daí que geralmente a estendamos para lá do que conhecemos clara e distintamente. E quando abusamos dela desta forma não causa admiração que nos enganemos. (DESCARTES, 1992, p. 39). Algo se avista neste horizonte epistemológico: o discurso sobre o erro e o acerto recebeu grandes condicionamentos discursivos da filosofia. Foi a partir de Descartes que se instaurou métodos para chegar às verdades, evitando os erros e as falsidades dele decorrentes. Ainda que viesse de Kepler, Newton, Galileu e outros cientistas as principais transformações das "verdades universais", apontando e ultrapassando erros milenares, ainda era Descartes (1992), Bacon (2000) e outros filósofos que definiam, epistemologicamente, a noção de erro. 40 As antigas verdades começavam a ruir, e quanto mais castelos teóricos erram derrubados, mais a noção de erro se tornava execrada (DURÃO, 2010). No entanto, coube a Kant (2001) estabelecer parâmetros supostamente seguros que garantissem a correta produção de conhecimento. O erro, para ele, se dá quando a falsidade é tomada por verdade. Se falsidade é o contrário da verdade, falsidade deixa de se tornar sinônimo de erro, e passa ser efeito deste. Mas onde está, então, o erro? Porque a verdade ou a aparência não estão no objeto, na medida em que é intuído, mas no juízo sobre ele, na medida em que é pensado. Pode-se, pois, dizer que os sentidos não erram, não porque o seu juízo seja sempre certo, mas porque não ajuízam de modo algum. Eis porque só no juízo, ou seja, na relação do objeto com o nosso entendimento, se encontram tanto a verdade como o erro e, portanto, também a aparência, enquanto induz a este último (KANT, 2001, p. 321). Um juízo pode ser verdadeiro ou falso sem que ele seja, necessariamente, um juízo errôneo. Na lógica kantiana, é só na medida em que o falso é tomado como verdadeiro, ou o contrário, é que surge o erro. O valor de verdade recai apenas sobre a relação que liga um "sujeito" a um "predicado". Assim, se tal relação ligar de forma adequada e conveniente um predicado (conhecimento) a um sujeito (objeto-mundo), pode-se afirmar que se trata de um juízo verdadeiro. Se tal juízo não for adequado, ele será falso, mas é possível que tal falsidade não decorra de um erro. O erro emerge, portanto, quando se toma um juízo verdadeiro por falso, bem como o contrário. Uma relação predicativa tem lugar somente no juízo, logo, verdade e acerto, bem como falsidade e erro são da esfera do juízo. Esta relação, na medida em que liga um objeto com o entendimento, "é um juízo que, enquanto conhecimento, é mais que mero pensar, é um pensar que liga, numa consciência, representações intuídas" (VARGAS, 2015). Em Kant, erro e acerto não são meros produtos da ação isolada do entendimento: derivam da soma de outras faculdades para seu estabelecimento. Para ser verdadeiro, um enunciado tem que ser coerente consigo mesmo, não pode se autocontradizer sob pena de se autodestruir. É isto que Kant chama de princípio de não contradição, o que permite reconhecer a justeza de um enunciado e sua verdade. No entanto, o efeito discursivo mais significante sobre o erro, partindo de Kant, atesta que a principal virtude do "princípio de não contradição é a possibilidade de banir o erro e a falsidade na medida em se assentam na contradição (KANT, 2001). 41 Dessa forma, Kant salva o raciocínio científico do ceticismo de Hume (2004). Para ele, quando se percebe um objeto e se considera sobre ele de acordo com as leis essenciais e necessárias da lógica e do entendimento, extingue-se a possibilidade de erro. No entanto, quando a contingência da sensibilidade interfere na racionalidade necessária do entendimento, surge uma percepção que gera uma aparência tomada por verdade. Tem-se, então, um erro (KANT, 2001). Importa ressaltar que erro e acerto não são intuídos na sensibilidade de um dado fenômeno, nem no enunciado que se emite a respeito dele: erro e verdade são da esfera do juízo. Logo, a fonte do erro é a contingência da sensibilidade atuando sobre a necessidade do entendimento, fazendo parecer que juízos falsos são verdadeiros, ou o oposto. É a contingência da aparência tomada por verdade que torna o erro possível. "É como se o entendimento se se distraísse deixando a sensibilidade desempenhar um papel que não é seu" (VARGAS, 2015). O discurso, ou melhor, a memória discursiva produzida a partir de Kant atesta que a natureza do erro encerra, além da falsidade, a noção de aparência de verdade. Assim, diante do objetivo de se evitar erros, faz-se necessário procurar pela fonte dos mesmos, a saber, a contingência da aparência. A verdade e a perfeição se alcançam, por sua vez, mediante raciocínio lógico, que mais do que um cânone do pensamento, aparece em Kant como órganon, condição necessária e suficiente para a verdade. A definição Kantiana de erro, ou melhor, o lugar teórico onde o filósofo o coloca, permite afirmar que fundamentalmente a experiência de estar errado em questões morais não se distingue da experiência de estar errado materialmente o erro prático, embora pareçam diferentes no conteúdo e na dimensão das consequências. A forma do erro, bem como do acerto, só se evidencia no momento do juízo sobre a coisa ou o evento. Kant, como um dos pais do iluminismo, propôs sentidos para a noção de erro que se entranharam profundamente na sociedade moderna, trabalhando efeitos discursivos que converteram as condições de produção de sentidos em termos de racionalidade e técnica. O idealismo romântico continuou na mesma direção: o erro é o finito, o negativo, o acidental, o contingente, o que já está no passado e destina-se a ser ultrapassado e eliminado. O correto é o verdadeiro, aquilo que se encontra no infinito, no necessário, na positividade da autoconsciência absoluta (HEGEL, 2003). Assim, no limite, não existe erro. O erro é o ultrapassado, aquilo que, diante de um conceito correto e atual, é seu não-ser dissolvido no 42 passado. Esta é a solução dialética que Hegel e seus seguidores legaram ao erro: a mera contraparte (não existente) daquilo que é, daquilo que caminha em direção ao absoluto. Nietzsche (2005) foi uma das poucas vozes que saiu em defesa do erro. Suas principais críticas se direcionavam à avidez ocidental pela verdade, que ele nomeou de vontade de verdade. Mais do que questionar a veracidade de uma proposição, como fazem os lógicos, Nietzsche coloca em questão o próprio valor da verdade e do acerto: por que motivo a exatidão valeria mais do que o erro? Sua voz subversiva questionava: "O problema do valor da verdade apresentou-se à nossa frente, ou fomos nós a nos apresentar diante dele?" (NIETZSCHE, 2005, p. 12). Suas marteladas em direção aos metafísicos apontavam para uma inversão dos valores entre erro e acerto, entre verdade e falsidade, mas principalmente entre o essencial e o sensível. Nesta inversão ele afirma que o principal erro dos filósofos que procuram a verdade é pressupor que as verdades do mundo sensível são menos importantes que as verdades do mundo ideal, meramente racional. A negação da contingência e da fugacidade da sensibilidade lança os pensadores ocidentais em uma busca insaciável pela origem absoluta da verdade e da exatidão, como se existisse um ponto último que lhes servisse de fundamento, um ser-em-si fundamental, primeiro, um deus oculto (NIETZSCHE, 2005, p. 13). Esta busca, no entanto, esconde um erro: ela pressupõe que aquilo que se avalia como acerto, exatidão e perfeição já existisse desde sempre, e só pudesse ser alcançado pelo filósofo (CAMARGO, 2008). Tal arrogância, segundo Nietzsche, não passa de demagogia, uma vez que tal fundamento essencial e necessário não passa de uma invenção, não é mais do que uma crença. A possibilidade de uma verdade essencial e necessária serve de justificativa para a arrogância filosófica. É justamente por que o erro vale menos que o acerto, e por que a correção pode conduzir à perfeição essencial e necessária, é que o filósofo merece seu lugar de destaque nas mais diferentes sociedades. A evidência desta ilusão, no entanto, faria desmoronar este castelo que é batizado solenemente de 'verdade' (NIETZSCHE, 2005, p.44). 'Verdade': em minha maneira de pensar, a verdade não significa necessariamente o contrário de um erro, mas somente, e em todos os casos mais decisivos, a posição ocupada por diferentes erros uns em relação aos outros: um é, por exemplo, mais antigo, mais profundo que outro; talvez mesmo inextirpável, se um ser orgânico de nossa espécie não puder dele prescindir para viver (NIETZSCHE, 2008, p.46). 43 Se o fundamento necessário da verdade é uma ilusão, então ela mesma é uma espécie de erro. Logo, a verdade não passa de um erro com maior aceitação, fruto muito mais de um movimento humano de autopreservação do que de uma racionalidade infalível. Para Nietzsche a linguagem e a lógica também não passam de criações fictícias que reduplicam o mundo segundo a vontade daqueles que detêm maior poder. Ele chama de "aberração da filosofia" o fato de que, ao invés de ver na linguagem e na lógica meros meios de acomodar o mundo a certos fins utilitários, vê-se aí o critério da verdade ou da exatidão. "A inocência seria de tomar a idiossincrasia antropocêntrica por medida de todas as coisas, por linha divisória entre o 'real' e o 'irreal'" (CAMARGO, 2008). Somos nós apenas que criamos as causas, a sucessão, a reciprocidade, a relatividade, a coação, o número, a lei, a liberdade, o motivo, a finalidade; e ao introduzir e entremesclar nas coisas esse mundo de signos, como algo 'em si', agimos como sempre fizemos, ou seja, mitologicamente (NIETZSCHE, 2005, p.51). A inversão subversiva de Nietzsche deixou profundas sequelas no projeto ocidental de estabelecer uma verdade absoluta. No século XX outra importante definição de erro emerge através do princípio de incerteza, de Heisenberg (1930). Segundo o físico alemão, não existe a experiência de "estar errado", há, sim, uma experiência de se perceber que está errado. Segundo este princípio, o erro literalmente não existe no tempo presente da primeira pessoa do singular: o enunciado "estou errado" descreve uma lógica não-possível. Assim que se sabe que está errado, já não se está mais errado, uma vez que o reconhecimento de uma crença errônea implica o abandono daquela crença enquanto crença, implica ultrapassá-la e deixa-la no passado. Assim, o único enunciado lógico aceito é "eu estava errado": ou se está errado, sem saber, ou se sabe que estava errado, no passado, no entanto, não se pode aceder aos dois estados ao mesmo tempo (PRICE; CHISSICK; HEISENBERG, 1977). Por isso o erro, no princípio de incerteza de Heisenberg, é também chamado de "cegueira de erros", o que evidencia a dificuldade de um sujeito ou de toda uma formação discursiva reconhecer seus erros. Na cegueira de erros, o sujeito vive em uma "falta de erros", pois os erros atuais permanecem imperceptíveis, o que poderia explicar a surpresa quando se descobre errado, mesmo que se reconheça a falibilidade como fenômeno universal. Tal noção fundamenta a hipótese de Heisenberg de que a crença atual é sempre idêntica à crença verdadeira, o que reforça todo senso generalizado de justiça, por mais perigoso que isso seja. 44 Este princípio se alinha, como veremos mais adiante, com a noção de que o erro não está na ideia, no enunciado, nem no mundo: o erro só se evidencia a partir do juízo que se faz a respeito das relações. O erro, portanto, é de ordem discursiva. E enquanto efeito discursivo, o erro decorre sempre de uma hiância, uma ruptura que se manifesta de diferentes formas em distintas teorias, separando: o particular do geral (erro de adequação), a palavra e a coisa (erro de referenciação), o presente e o primordial (erro diacrônico), o mortal e o divino (pecado religioso), a lei e a prática (erro moral), a hipótese e o verificável (erro científico), e mais fundamentalmente, o intelecto e o mundo (PRICE; CHISSICK; HEISENBERG, 1977). Contemporâneo de Heisenberg, Karl Popper (2006) propôs uma profunda revisão na significação da noção de erro. O antigo imperativo para os intelectuais, é: sê uma autoridade! Sabe tudo no teu domínio! Quando um dia a tua autoridade for reconhecida, será defendida pelos teus colegas e, naturalmente, terás de proteger também a autoridade dos teus colegas. A antiga ética, que descrevi, proíbe que se cometam erros. O erro é absolutamente interdito. Assim, os erros não podem ser confessados. Não preciso de assinalar que a antiga ética profissional é intolerante. E era também intelectualmente desonesta: leva ao encobrimento dos erros por amor da autoridade (POPPER, 2006, p. 134). Popper então se propõe a lançar as bases para uma nova ética profissional para a prática científica, fundamentada em princípios que assumem a impossibilidade de se desvelar e corrigir todos os erros. É impossível evitar todos os erros ou sequer todos os erros em si mesmo são evitáveis. São constantemente cometidos erros por todos os cientistas. A antiga noção de que é possível evitar o erro, e que, portanto, é obrigatório evitá-lo, deve ser revista: ela própria está errada (POPPER, 2006, p. 134). Apesar de sugerir uma atitude mais humilde diante do erro, Popper afirma que se deve aprender através dos erros para que o progresso do conhecimento não seja interrompido. "O que não podemos é negligenciar a nossa vigilância. Não obstante, é humanamente inevitável continuar a cometer erros" (POPPER, 2006, p. 134). O problema do erro começa a aparecer nas teorias da linguagem mediante aproximação da filosofia da linguagem com a lógica. Isso se deu com o renascimento da geometria euclidiana no séc. XVI, embora persista até nossos dias. Este movimento teórico volta a colocar em questão o ''rigor" euclidiano que trata do problema de fixar as estruturas 45 discursivas que constituem a certeza e a exatidão que podem fundamentar a linguagem científica do progresso. Neste aspecto, a noção de erro aparece como aquilo que oferece obstáculo para o progresso lógico e sistemático do conhecimento (PRADEAU, 2010). Deste momento em diante os lógicos começaram a ultrapassar os limites do campo do raciocínio lógico, indo buscar na filosofia da linguagem o terreno onde o raciocínio deveria caminhar. Logo, para que o conhecimento racional alcançasse êxito, era preciso buscar por regras metodológicas e formais de uma linguagem perfeita, sem erros e ilusões. A linguagem e o pensamento se tornaram dispositivos regulados por "cálculos lógicos", combinações e transformações de símbolos segundo regras que deveriam ser bem estruturadas a partir de novas convenções (convencionalismo). Assim, a linguagem lógica, entendida como solo seguro para o funcionamento e propagação das verdades científicas, deveria se afastar dos erros da contingência e da história: deveria ser essencial, universal e atemporal (STÖRIG, 2008). Esse foi o projeto que guiou pensadores como Leibniz (1992), Peirce e Martens (1975), Frege (2009), Wittgenstein (2009), Carnap (1975) e outros. Estas ideias se evidenciam de forma mais clara no projeto do Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, de Wittgenstein (2008). Para ele, os problemas da filosofia derivam dos erros da linguagem, de seus mal-entendidos e pontos de ilusões. Logo, a própria busca por respostas como existência, conhecimento, verdade, valor etc., são erros filosóficos decorrentes do erro fundamental, o erro da língua. Por isso, a tarefa mais importante da filosofia é tornar clara a natureza da linguagem e do pensamento, compreender a origem dos erros e os caminhos adequados de correção. Se a língua for corrigida, afirma Wittgenstein, os mais complexos problemas filosóficos se resolverão sozinhos e desaparecerão (GRAYLING, 1996). A tarefa da filosofia, portanto, é dizer somente o necessário para que se corrija a língua usada pelas ciências naturais, revelando a natureza da linguagem e sua relação com o mundo. Pêcheux dedica várias páginas a esta discussão em Semântica e Discurso (PÊCHEUX, 2009), e por isso tal temática será analisada mais adiante com mais profundidade. Alguns estudos sobre o erro e suas consequências apareceram na filosofia contemporânea. O filósofo português Miguel Real, em seu livro "Nova teoria do mal" (REAL, 2012), produz interessantes deslocamentos de sentido para a noção de erro. Para ele, o erro e o mal só são colocados em questão por causa do imperativo do progresso e da evolução social. Nesta linha argumentativa, muito do que seria natural ao ser humano é posto como erro por obstruir o caminho do caminho do desenvolvimento. A noção mais subversiva deste autor 46 atesta o primado do erro e do mal sobre o acerto e a virtude. O mal é o real, substancial. É o erro, e não o acerto, o natural e essencial. O acerto e a virtude sequer derivam do erro e do mal: são justaposições arquitetônicas e artificiais que tentam mascarar aquilo que é a essência primeira do humano, na intenção de justificar e possibilitar o imperativo do progresso e da evolução. Para o autor, o acerto e a virtude não passam de equilíbrios frágeis no seio de uma ininterrupta instabilidade. Para o projeto capitalista de progresso, iniciado na modernidade, a instabilidade deve ser detida, o erro deve ser corrigido e o mal deve ser vertido em virtude. No entanto, contesta o autor, o acerto não passa de acidente instrumentalizado, construído para parecer correto, para ocultar o erro essencial. Para ele, a racionalidade científica/filosófica não passa de um barco que vaga sem leme em meio a uma tempestade que nunca cessa. O autor analisa as consequências desta construção artificial de acerto e virtude trazendo como exemplo o papel do político na contemporaneidade. Enquanto este detentor de poder zela pela segurança econômica, em detrimento de verbas para saúde e educação, suas decisões são valoradas, no máximo, como erros administrativos, ainda que as consequências de seus atos custem vidas. "Hoje, sempre que vos apareça no ecrã da televisão um economista com funções governamentais não duvideis: eis a face explícita do mal, aquele que levou a Europa à decadência e se prepara para, alegremente, destruir o planeta" (REAL, 2012, p. 84). Algumas evidências emergem das análises dos filósofos supracitados: o mundo e seus fenômenos não erram, tampouco os animais, as plantas e o clima. A rigor, o ser humano consciente também não erra, por três motivos: 1) o erro não pertence à esfera das proposições ou dos enunciados, mas à do juízo, ou seja, das atitudes valorativas que qualificam, à posteriori, algo como erro ou acerto (argumento de Kant); 2) o erro está sempre no passado, ultrapassado, logo o erro só existe enquanto atribuição à posteriori (argumento de Hegel); 3) o erro só pode existir na ausência de consciência de erro, por isso a tomada de consciência do erro é a própria aniquilação do erro (argumento de Heisenberg). Assim, certo vestígio se avulta diante dos demais: se o erro é uma atribuição à posteriori, da ordem do juízo valorativo, o erro nada mais é do que um efeito discursivo, ideológico, político e histórico: "erro para quem?" Um erro pode custar a vida de muitos no momento da aterrisagem de um avião, ou pode custar apenas o leite derramado. Um erro moral pode resultar em uma pequena gafe que se soluciona com um breve pedido de desculpas, ou pode emergir como justificativas para a escravidão, o arianismo e o 47 patriarcalismo. O erro pode aparecer diante de um descuido, mas pode derivar de incontáveis estudos científicos. Pode ser totalmente irracional, bem como consequência de uma profunda racionalidade. No entanto, o questionamento que se sobressai coloca em xeque a universalidade e a atemporalidade do erro, ou seja, a essência material do erro. Enquanto atribuição discursiva, o erro pode vir a ser outro em diferentes condições de produção de sentidos. O erro, enquanto resultado de um juízo valorativo, se dá apenas no campo da linguagem. Um acidente entre automóveis não é um erro em si, só emerge enquanto erro à posteriori, depois de um juízo valorativo, depois que a língua lhe comprometa e lhe circunde. Antes disso ele é apenas colisão entre objetos. Um assassinato, em si mesmo, não pode se tratar de um erro. Ele só aparece assim diante de um juízo valorativo que o categoriza como crime premeditado, autodefesa, pena de morte etc. Hannah Arendt já problematizou esse efeito há mais de seis décadas: por um lado os assassinatos em Auschwitz não pareciam erros para Adolf Eichmann, mas sim acertos, eficiência; mas por outro lado, para a corte de Jerusalém que o julgava, sua condenação à morte também não soava como erro, mas como justiça, correção (ARENDT, 1999). O mesmo ato, tirar a vida de outrem, pode ser visto como assassinato ou como efeito de justiça, pode ser erro ou correção a depender do lugar discursivo que ocupa o sujeito do discurso. No entanto a noção de erro, enquanto efeito discursivo, sofre transformações de outro efeito discursivo. Além de se inquirir "erro para quem?", pode-se questionar: por que o erro é ruim? A quem interessa que a noção de erro seja significada de forma negativa? Se esta noção é da ordem da linguagem, ele está sujeito a sofrer efeitos da mesma ordem: o próprio substantivo "erro" pode receber adjetivações que o valoram. Quais foram os valores discursivos que o erro recebeu no decorrer da história? Do ponto de vista discursivo, importa ressaltar que na história da filosofia ocidental o acerto e a correção do erro sempre estiveram ligados à própria noção de progresso: científico, filosófico, social, religioso e cultural. O erro sempre foi obstáculo para o intelecto, para a sabedoria, para o avanço das teorias físicas, químicas, políticas etc. O erro é obstáculo para o cientista, para o religioso, para o político, para o economista e para o educador. O discurso sobre o erro, diante do imperativo do progresso, parece ser melhor definido e orientado por Hegel. Para ele, a razão governou e governa o mundo, logo, o erro emerge como importante força motriz do progresso racional ocidental. A despeito das verdades 48 múltiplas a que se pode chegar, o erro, como aquilo que é deixado para trás, impulsiona o progresso humano em direção ao espírito absoluto (WERLE, 2004). Neste aspecto, mais importante do que o acerto é a ultrapassagem progressiva do erro. Esta premissa parece valorar discursivamente a noção de erro em suas mais diferentes formas de uso. No cristianismo a santidade e a perfeição se alcança na comunhão com Cristo, que afasta o erro (pecado) do coração contrito. Na ciência, este efeito de sentido aparece na forma de diligência e esforço de superação do erro. Quando Thomaz Edson tentou encontrar o filamento ideal para a lâmpada, testou e errou mais de seis mil materiais diferentes, e por isso se tornou famoso. É por isso que os sujeitos se regozijam quando acertam, e se envergonham quando erram. Acertar é progredir, avançar materialmente e intelectualmente. Errar é retroceder, é perder tempo para consertar. Quando se vê uma criança desnutrida do sul do Sudão, vítima de um clima árido e avassalador, as noções de erro e acerto se tornam vestígios abissais. Seres humanos podem passar toda vida em grandes dificuldades, lutando contra a natureza em favor da própria vida. Neste caso, o acerto se inscreve na esfera do progresso, na diminuição das adversidades, na segurança e na melhor qualidade de vida, e o erro pode vir em forma de dificuldades, miséria, dor, sofrimento e morte. Em outras palavras, o erro se inscreve primeiro na relação do humano em relação à natureza que o cerca, um humano de carne e osso, sujeito a doenças, animais que podem oferecer toda sorte de risco à vida, intempéries climáticas etc. Por causa desse temor a humanidade cria a cultura, nega a natureza e se protege dela em uma sociedade cada vez mais artificial e técnica. Sistemas e códigos inundam toda produção e relação humana tentando afastar o erro e o retrocesso à natureza (FLUSSER, 2007). Mas não é só nestes termos que o erro pode aparecer de forma negativa. Se o progresso se tornou o imperativo humanista capitalista na modernidade10, o erro ganha novos caracteres execrados diante de um discurso que condiciona a moral contemporânea em termos de poder de consumo (BAUMAN, 2008). Nestes termos, o erro se torna o obstáculo para o progresso econômico e social de todas as sociedades capitalistas. Um erro de planejamento pode custar a um país vários anos de recessão, diminuição de vagas de emprego, a diminuição dos lucros e até o fechamento de empresas. Um erro pode custar o retrocesso financeiro de um sujeito, de uma família, de uma empresa, de uma cidade inteira. Salvos da natureza, a sociedade 10 Modernidade: período que se inicia com a revolução artística, cultural e científica no século XVI, marcado pela liberdade progressiva em relação ao domínio do clero (FOUCAULT, 2009). 49 aparentemente pode se permitir ter novos temores diante do erro: os temores financeiros agora assustam mais que as temporadas anuais de tornados no sul dos Estados Unidos. Por hora estes questionamentos bastam para colocar em questão os principais problemas sobre o "erro" que interessam a esta tese, a saber: a) o erro emerge do discurso, além de ser valorado por ele; b) o erro é da ordem do juízo valorativo sintético, e aparece como hiância entre relações; c) erro (e acerto) são efeitos discursivos que dependem de vínculos estabelecidos por projetos discursivos. O que interessa a esta tese, agora, é estabelecer as condições de tais vínculos. Ao vínculo tido como "sólido11" chamaremos de sedentarismo; ao intermediário, nomadismo; e ao vínculo frágil chamaremos de errância na errância, como veremos, não há erro ou acerto. 1.1.2 ERRÂNCIA, NOMADISMO E SEDENTARISMO DOM QUIXOTE, PARTE 1, CAPÍTULO 38 "Eu sei quem sou, e quem posso ser se eu desejar " O viço e o desejo pelo par antinômico errância-sedentarização surgiu da leitura de "As formas do silêncio", de Eni Orlandi (2007). Embora tais noções apareçam separadas nas tramas deste texto e de forma marginal e passageira -, foi dali que emergiu certo fascínio e expectação pelo aprofundamento desses princípios: pela errância como movência desobrigada da significação, e pela sedentarização como gesto regulador e disciplinar do sentido e do sujeito: A linguagem supõe, pois, a transformação da matéria significante por excelência (silêncio) em significados apreensíveis, verbalizáveis. Matéria e formas. A significação é movimento. Errância do sujeito, errância dos sentidos (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 33, grifo nosso). Quando o homem, em sua história, percebeu o silêncio como significação, criou a linguagem para retê-lo. O ato de falar é o de separar, distinguir e, paradoxalmente, vislumbrar o silêncio e evitá-lo. Esse gesto disciplina o significar, pois já é um projeto de sedentarização dos sentidos (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 27, grifo nosso). 11 Como veremos mais adiante, tanto a errância como a sedentarização plena são da ordem do impossível. 50 De igual forma a noção de "valor do signo", em Saussure (2006), também faz despertar questionamentos a respeito da amplitude da significação em um sistema de valores regido pela oposição e que, por isso mesmo, se afasta, se franqueia e se pluraliza mais do que unifica. Silêncio e valor são conceitos caros a esta tese, e por isso serão averiguados adiante com cuidado. Por hora, importam apenas como pretextos para o desejo de aprender mais sobre errância e sua associação à noção de "erro". Na filosofia a noção de "errância" já foi colocada em questão por diferentes autores. A saber, ela apareceu em Heidegger (2002), ainda que perifericamente em seu pensamento, como uma condição da consciência, um pensar que se coloca em movimento. Para ele a consciência é errante, uma busca que aceita seu próprio exílio na medida em que este se configura, paradoxalmente, como um abrigo: o fluir que pensa o ser naquilo que vem a ser (devir). Aparece também em Foucault (2002), em uma relação que passa por literatura, ficção, loucura e errância, mas que na modernidade se sucumbe diante do discurso pacificador da racionalidade científica. Por vezes a noção de errância foi associada diretamente com a noção de nomadismo, como acontece com Maffesoli (2001), o único teórico desta lista que colocou a errância no centro de seu pensamento. A errância nômade se dá, em sua teoria, através da síntese do par antinômico nomadismo-sedentarismo na forma de enraizamento dinâmico, resultando em uma vagabundagem pós-moderna. Assim, nomadismo e errância aparecem em Maffesoli na forma de movimento social ininterrupto, o que na pós-modernidade aparece como aquele desprendimento em relação à família, emprego, amigos, lugares etc.; trata-se de uma "sede do infinito" que põe em movimento os valores e instaura um estado de constante aventura, mas que religa a humanidade à sua principal essência: o não-ser. De alguma forma, essa concepção se aproxima das propostas de Bauman (2001) e Lyotard (1993), a respeito da pósmodernidade. A liquidez da competição social, em Bauman, é o imperativo da mudança perene, da não estabilização do indivíduo e de todos os signos sociais. E a fragmentação das grandes narrativas, em Lyotard, aponta para um fenômeno que parece lançar a humanidade num mar turbulento e imprevisível que arremessa o sujeito de um lugar para outro, e nunca cessa seu movimento. Ainda que sem a noção de errância, Deleuze (1988) teorizou acerca do nomadismo como uma multiplicidade pura e sem medida, irrupção do efêmero e potência da metamorfose. Uma máquina de guerra, enfim, contra os efeitos de dominação dos detentores do poder. 51 Não nos deteremos em cartografar as diversas teorias que de alguma forma se aproximaram da noção de errância. Ainda que sem desconsiderar o que já foi evidenciado a respeito deste conceito, o objetivo desta tese é, a partir de Pêcheux, propor uma nova prática teórica sobre esta formulação para depois considerar o funcionamento discursivo (errante) que fornece sentidos, interpela sujeitos e fornece realidades. No entanto algumas rubricas precisam ser feitas sobre a constituição da errância pelos autores apontados anteriormente: 1) para eles a errância aparece como efeito, e não como causa de movimentos afinal, para eles a errância e o nomadismo são meramente fenômenos da pós-modernidade12; 2) errância e nomadismo aparecem algumas vezes em sinonímia, ocultando certos caracteres que singularizam cada termo; 3) errar (caminhar sem direção) aparentemente não tem relação direta e necessária com errar (falhar). Destes três apontamentos prévios, alguns questionamentos emergem de forma efusiva: o que é a errância? Como ela pode ser compreendida como fundamento e causa primeira do movimento do discurso (sentido, história, sujeito e língua)? Quais as relações possíveis entre errância e erro? Comecemos este itinerário teórico pela distinção entre os termos errância, nomadismo e sedentarismo. A principal diferença que estabelecemos é, evidentemente, entre errância e sedentarismo. Contudo, as nuances sutis que diferem errância de nomadismo são também imprescindíveis para esta definição inicial dos conceitos. A revista National Geographic Brasil (FINKEL, 2013) publicou uma extensa matéria sobre os quirguizes nômades que há dois mil anos vivem caminhando em uma grande região deserta que hoje faz parte do Afeganistão. Vida de nômade é mudança, e os quirguizes o fazem de duas a quatro vezes por ano, dependendo do tempo e da disponibilidade de pasto para seus animais. Adquirir conhecimento sobre os pontos de estadia temporária é vital. É preciso saber onde cresce um determinado tipo de vegetação na estação correta para garantir pastagem para os animais, e com isso, leite, queijo, carne, couro, lã etc. É preciso saber onde encontrar água, o que geralmente implica longas caminhadas por caminhos nevados e traiçoeiros. No inverno não basta saber se aquecer, é preciso conhecer os melhores pontos, a depender da direção do vento, onde estabelecer o abrigo provisório como cavernas e encostas podem ser eficazes em uma temporada e fatais em outra. 12 Alguns autores usam outros nomes para pós-modernidade, outros a negam. No entanto, apontamos para o caráter contemporâneo da aparição e funcionamento da noção de errância e nomadismo para estes autores. 52 Para os quirguizes, nômades reais, nomadismo não significa apenas perambular. Um caminho errado, uma escolha equivocada ou uma previsão mal calculada pode custar a vida de toda família. A matéria da National Geographic conta que alguns dos mais influentes quirguizes nômades lutam por estradas pavimentadas na região, o que possibilitaria que suas mudanças frequentes pudessem ser feitas com veículos automotores, além de facilitar o acesso a médicos e escolas. Contudo, outros acreditam que no lastro destas mudanças viriam o exército, os turistas e a obliteração de um estilo de vida que perdura orgulhoso por mais de dois milênios. A maioria dos quirguizes nômades do Afeganistão rejeitam a ideia de serem controlados por um governo ou por um rei, sentem-se indomáveis. Além disso, as paisagens apresentadas pela revista são exuberantes, belos caminhos que, de alguma forma, nunca se repetem para estes nômades. Mas longe das conceituações romantizadas, o nomadismo vivido por este povo é implacável: para sobreviver é necessário conhecimento e planejamento. O nomadismo dos quirguizes afegãos está no limiar dos outros dois conceitos que interessam muito a esta tese, a saber, a errância e o sedentarismo, noções que marcam, na história da humanidade, o caminho do progresso percorrido desde nossos antepassados primatas, passando pelo Homo Sapiens, culminando no período da escrita, no acúmulo de alimentos e no surgimento das primeiras cidades e sociedades. Evidentemente não seria possível resgatar mais de dois milhões de anos em poucas páginas, e tal superficialidade poderia comprometer a coerência desta tese. Contudo importa ressaltar que este não é um texto que se inscreve na ciência historicista, logo, interessa apenas, a título de analogia, elencar estes conceitos na intenção de propor modos de compreensão para o funcionamento do discurso. O que propomos, portanto, é olhar o funcionamento do discurso enquanto batimento (pulsação) entre errância e sedentarismo do sentido e do sujeito. O nomadismo não foi o primeiro modo de existência dos seres humanos. Antes da história e da escrita, quando a consciência de si e do mundo tomavam a forma do que hoje conhecemos como Homo Sapiens, haviam os sapiens que apenas perambulavam pelo mundo, sem rumos nem planejamentos (RIGHI, 2017). O nomadismo já era um funcionamento social um pouco mais avançado. Na pré-história certos sapiens viviam em pequenos grupos nômades onde a preocupação com a sobrevivência num ambiente natural e hostil era crucial. Caçar, pescar, procurar frutas e raízes, fugir de animais perigosos e abrigar-se das variações climáticas faziam parte do cotidiano. O humano dessa época tinha que se adaptar à alternância frequente de quase tudo ao seu redor, desde paisagens, fontes de água e alimentos 53 e mudanças dramáticas do clima a cada estação. Logo, era de suma importância conhecer os melhores pontos onde sanar cada uma dessas necessidades, bem como os períodos certos. Era preciso relacionar e organizar corretamente espaço, tempo e necessidades específicas. Para eles, um erro assim poderia ser fatal para todo o bando. Conforme crescia os conhecimentos sobre espaço, tempo e necessidades, os nômades puderam diminuir o ritmo e as distancias de suas mudanças, transformando o movimento incessante em sedentarismo. Segundo Harari (2017), foi principalmente o conhecimento sobre o trigo que provocou a segunda grande mudança no estilo de vida dos humanos. Onde o trigo se tornava particularmente abundante, e a carne de caça e outras fontes de alimento também eram abundantes, os bandos humanos puderam, pouco a pouco, abandonar seu estilo de vida errante e nômade para se assentar em acampamentos onde se estabeleciam por uma estação inteira, ou mesmo em caráter permanente (HARARI, 2017). A segurança da revolução agrícola implicou diversas transformações sobre o estilo de vida e até mesmo sobre o corpo humano. No entanto, aquilo que por muito tempo foi estritamente descrito como evolução, hoje é apresentado, por vezes, de forma controversa e menos otimista. Paradoxalmente, "a vida de um camponês era menos segura que a de um caçador-coletor" (HARARI, 2017, p. 91), ou seja, a quantidade de dificuldades adquiridas pelo sedentário era maior que a pura movência do errante. O sedentarismo, longe de significar uma nova era de vida tranquila, promoveu uma vida em geral mais difícil e menos gratificante que a dos errantes caçadores-coletores. Segundo o autor, os errantes e os nômades passavam o tempo com atividades mais variadas e estimulantes, e supostamente estavam menos expostos à ameaça de fome e doenças. A revolução agrícola aumentou a provisão total de alimentos à disposição da humanidade, mas a estabilização domiciliar bem como os alimentos extras -, não se traduziu em melhor qualidade de vida; ao contrário, se traduziram em explosões populacionais, em aumento de doenças, acúmulo de alimentos e origem da divisão de trabalhos e classes. Em média, um agricultor sedentário trabalhava mais que um nômade caçador-coletor e obtinha em troca uma qualidade de vida inferior. O sedentarismo agrícola, nesta perspectiva, se mostrou como uma armadilha que inicialmente proporcionou facilidades, mas que impulsionou o aumento populacional e obrigou o homo sapiens a trabalhar mais e a caminhar mais agora ao redor de um cenário repetível, uma colheita. O sedentarismo também impôs o acumulo de conhecimento, o estabelecimento de regras sociais e uma nova dinâmica familiar: era a origem das pequenas cidades e da sociedade de classes. 54 O nômade é definido como aquele que caminha entre pontos específicos, em momentos específicos, para garantir sua sobrevivência. Ele vai e volta por caminhos seguros, pois se falhar em alimentar seus animais e familiares na estação certa, no pasto correto, todo seu bando pode morrer. O sedentário também caminha, mas em volta de um mesmo ponto: sua colheita e seu vilarejo. Ele acumula conhecimento: não pode errar a época do plantio e da colheita, e tem que criar e manter toda uma estrutura social que garanta a posse permanente de um pedaço de terra e de tudo o que foi construído ali. Toda essa estrutura social permitiu ao sedentário um crescimento populacional exponencial, além de um vasto domínio sobre as mais diversas espécies de seres vivos. Todavia, a irradiação desse movimento de sedentarização é tido hoje por muitos historiadores como uma grande armadilha, nas palavras de Harari (2017, p. 93), "a maior fraude da história". A ascensão da agricultura sedentária ocorreu de forma lenta e gradativa ao longo de milênios (HARARI, 2017, p. 96). Tal transformação ocorreu de forma lenta, em etapas que envolviam pequenas e sedutoras mudanças cotidianas que faziam parecer que o modo anterior de vida era insuportável, mais intolerável até do que as novas complicações decorrentes da aglomeração incontrolável de pessoas. Os novos vilarejos sedentários, onde viviam cada vez mais indivíduos em condição de grande proximidade, eram verdadeiras incubadoras de doenças infecciosas. Outro problema é que pragas e secas afetam plantas diferentes de formas diferentes; quando os sedentários se tornaram dependentes de uma variedade muito menor de alimentos, eles se tornaram ainda mais frágeis às pragas e às secas. Se nada de ruim com o clima acontecesse, o celeiro cheio poderia atrair ladrões que poderiam roubar suas plantações ou até expulsá-los de suas terras. No final das contas, a busca por uma vida mais fácil resultou em incontáveis dificuldades. Pensaram que estavam economizando tempo e esforço, mas na verdade apenas colocaram a roda da vida para girar mais rápido, tornando os dias mais ansiosos e agitados. Pensaram que estavam criando estruturas de segurança, mas criaram concomitantemente fragilidades até então desconhecidas, muitas vezes insuperáveis. Uma série de mudanças triviais foram, aos poucos, enlaçando os Homo Sapiens até que grandes vilarejos e cidades começaram a tomar forma. Nestes termos, na sedentarização havia uma outra sedentarização secreta, um aliciamento oculto que fazia com que os hábitos anteriores parecessem cada vez mais intoleráveis. Todavia, antes do nômade e do sedentário, havia o errante. O errante tinha por característica fundamental o movimento despreocupado: o ato de caminhar sem rumo. Mas 55 diferente do nômade, ele não se detém em um ponto mais do que o tempo necessário para descansar, comer e satisfazer outras necessidades fisiológicas. Os caminhos não são planejados, são caminhados. Cada ponto existe apenas para ser desfrutado e abandonado, e não importa que se adquira conhecimentos sobre onde esteve, onde está, tampouco onde estará. Na errância apenas se caminha. Os indivíduos errantes pré-históricos "eram animais insignificantes, cujo impacto sobre o ambiente não era maior que o de gorilas, vaga-lumes ou águas-vivas" (HARARI, 2017, p. 12). Os seres vivos da categoria Homo (diferentes categorias) estavam mais em baixo na cadeia alimentar, e caminhavam errantes pelo mundo tentando sanar suas necessidades, tal como qualquer outro animal. Assim, durante milhões de anos, estes Homo Sapiens viveram de pequenas caças e coletas de alimentos encontrados pelo caminho. Eles não se distinguiam do mundo em que viviam, não o submetiam às suas necessidades e não transformavam o cenário mais do que qualquer outra espécie de animal: apenas caminhavam. Os antigos errantes caçadores-coletores geralmente viviam em territórios com muitas dezenas e até centenas de quilômetros quadrados. "Lar" era o território inteiro, até onde se dispusessem a caminhar; suas moradas eram os caminhos, vales, colinas, rios, florestas e céu aberto. Os camponeses, por sua vez, passavam a maior parte de seus dias trabalhando um pequeno campo ou pomar, e sua vida doméstica se centrava em uma estrutura apertada de madeira, pedra ou barro, medindo não mais do que algumas dezenas de metros: a casa (RIGHI, 2017). Os errantes eram predominantemente coletores (eventualmente, caçadores) que abdicavam do conhecimento de um determinado espaço em relação ao tempo. Dispunham de pouquíssimos artefatos justamente por que não se atinavam em transformar o espaço para estender sua relação com o tempo. O tempo, aliás, era o tempo de uma geração: sem a escrita, o errante não perdia tempo pensando no dia nem no mês seguinte, ao passo que o sedentário se colocava a antever e planejar anos e décadas no futuro. As ferramentas exerciam um papel modesto no cotidiano do errante, ao passo que na vida dos sedentários quase todas as relações com o mundo eram/são intermediadas por algum objeto construído artificialmente. Foi dessa forma que o Home Sapiens, quando saiu da errância plena e se tornou nômade milênios antes do primeiro vilarejo sedentário -, já dispunha de ferramentas e conhecimentos que o fizeram sair da base da cadeia alimentar para ocupar posições elevadas no topo da lista dos caçadores mais eficientes da natureza. Com tais ferramentas em mãos, e com milênios de caça pela frente até a diminuição da mesma no 56 sedentarismo, os nômades já foram capazes de levar diversas espécies animais à extinção. Historiadores afirmam que os nômades caçadores foram responsáveis pela extinção de até noventa por cento da megafauna australiana quarenta e cinco mil anos atrás, evento que se repetiu na América do Norte, dez mil anos atrás, quando lá chegaram os primeiros nômades. Lanças, flechas, pedras afiadas e outros artefatos artificiais colocavam um bando de Homo Sapiens em pé de igualdade com mamutes, búfalos e até mesmo outros caçadores de grande porte. E para cada artefato construído, uma gama incontável de conhecimentos era elaborada, arquivada e aprimorada para que novos artefatos pudessem alcançar ainda maior eficiência. E como salienta Marx, a construção de ferramentas transforma o mundo e a própria humanidade, e da soma de ambos surge um conhecimento que proporciona novas transformações para ambos (LESSA; TONET, 2011, p. 29). Ora, foi justamente dessa rede de transformações que surgiu a noção de posse não do objeto, mas da força de trabalho usada para transformar aquele objeto. Ou seja, a força e o conhecimento para somar e transformar objetos instaurava a ilusão de que uma ferramenta criada por um indivíduo era de sua posse, pois sem ele (sua força e conhecimento), aquele artefato não viria à existência (RIGHI, 2017). Esta é a mesma noção que fundamentou as primeiras propriedades territoriais, ou seja, a noção de transformação (força e conhecimento). Foi dessa forma que nos espaços sedentários de maior êxito começaram a surgir governantes e elites que viviam do excedente dos camponeses, deixando-os com o mínimo para a sobrevivência. Era a origem do poder, da administração, da exploração e dos impostos; eram os primórdios da riqueza de poucos e da pobreza de muitos, do ócio de uns e do trabalho árduo de outros, do trabalho intelectual de alguns administradores do conhecimento às custas do trabalho braçal de milhares. "A história é o que algumas poucas pessoas fizeram enquanto todas as outras estavam arando campos e carregando baldes de água" (HARARI, 2017, p. 111). No entanto uma contradição emergia: a propriedade, ao circunscrever uma divisa, fazia do sedentário um estrangeiro daquilo que estava para fora de suas fronteiras: se ele era proprietário de uma fração da terra, não o era de todo o restante. A propriedade instaura, também, se não uma negligência com o restante, uma exclusão do "fora"; sedentarização implica criação de um excedente apagável, resto descartável. Para fora de seus vilarejos e casas, todas as belas pradarias, florestas e rios não foram apenas esquecidos, foram também enjeitados, recusados e desprezados. Na psicanálise lacaniana (LACAN, 2002) o termo 57 foraclusão13 tem um funcionamento semelhante a este gesto sedentário que, ao mesmo tempo em que exclui, apaga sentidos, realidades e, no caso do sedentário, o restante do mundo. Importa sublinhar que este conceito lacaniano possui nuances mais complexas que estas, e seu funcionamento na psicanálise é mais extenso que o que acabamos de apresentar, contudo noções como banir, excluir, privar, expulsar, impedir, omitir, cortar etc., também são sentidos úteis à descrição do conceito de sedentarização como propõe a historiografia. Sedentarizar é estabelecer morada fixa, mas é também recortar um determinado espaço através de muros que prendem o resto e o outro do lado de fora, ou seja, fecha-os no exterior; este gesto não é apenas irredutível, é também o gesto de jogar fora. De forma análoga à foraclusão lacaniana, sedentarização é "expulsar alguém ou alguma coisa para fora dos limites de um reino" (RABINOVITCH, 2001, p. 17). A foraclusão da sedentarização implica, também, que o local do qual se é interditado seja fechado perenemente. Também se faz assaz pertinente para esta discussão, além do conceito de foraclusão, a noção de denegação, que tem que ver com o (auto) apagamento do conhecimento a respeito de algo. Na psicanálise (LACAN, 2002), a denegação é parte consituinte da religião, da política e de diversos outros preconceitos da psicopatologia da vida cotidiana. A denegação é vista, por exemplo, nas situações corriqueiras onde um dado sujeito simula a crença em algo que realmente não acredita, como quando se insiste em chamar o ilusionista de mágico, ou quando se empenha em defender a boa índole de um político conhecidamente corrupto. Na propaganda, no jornalismo, no mercado das artes e em diversos espaços simbólicos cotidianos, a denegação aparece na forma de "eu sei..., mas mesmo assim...". Outra característica da denegação é seu funcionamento como mecanismo de defesa em que o sujeito se recusa a reconhecer como seu um pensamento ou um desejo expresso anteriormente. Essa negação da realidade constitui uma proteção contra dores e sofrimentos. A denegação é, assim, a reação perversa14 de ver e ao mesmo tempo fazer não ver; é ouvir, mas não escutar; é entender sem compreender. Denegar, enfim, é recusar um saber e colocar em seu lugar um substituto que nega a realidade. Nos termos propostos por esta tese, a denegação trabalhada 13 Importa demarcar que não temos nenhuma pretensão psicanalítica neste texto. Foraclusão, denegação e perversão aparecem, aqui, de forma rápida, apenas como analogia teórica para os funcionamentos daquilo que aqui chamamos de sedentarização discursiva. Portanto, não nos deteremos em delinear tais conceitos com maior profundidade teórica, tampouco clínica. 14 O perverso é regido pelo imperativo categórico do gozo, na tentativa de apoderar-se dele. Na perversão o desejo não tem que ver com o gozo do Outro (como na neurose), funciona apenas como resposta inflexível à própria ânsia de gozo (RABINOVITCH, 2001). 58 pelo sedentário pode ser vista em diversos gestos perversos de apagamento e substituição de saberes, como veremos adiante. A sedentarização era um gesto de dupla produção: era o apoucamento da potência de ser tanto do "indivíduo" humano quanto do espaço (terra) que tomava posse. Nos primórdios da humanidade, a sedentarização apagava do universo significante do camponês tudo aquilo que estava para fora de seus muros. O problema é que os territórios dos sedentários não eram apenas menores que os dos antigos errantes: eram repetíveis e enfadonhos. Enquanto o errante caminhava por cenários distintos que não se repetiam, o agricultor sedentário caminhava muitos quilômetros por dia ao redor de sua colheita, plantando, colhendo, afastando pragas e vigiando de invasores humanos. Contudo, se a colheita garantia o provimento diário de alimentos, ela impunha um cardápio extremamente limitado, afinal, cuidar da colheita demandava todo o tempo do agricultor sedentário, não lhe sobrando tempo para coletar frutos de outras espécies. A carne também era sempre da mesma espécie, fruto da domesticação de animais específicos. Assim, enquanto a indeterminação espacial e temporal do errante lhe proporcionava uma multiplicidade incontável de experiências e sensações, o nômade e o sedentário minoravam e extinguiam suas possibilidades. Em prol de uma segurança maior, se dispunham a uma existência menor (HARARI, 2017, p. 91). O estabelecimento de uma posição fixa para sobreviver trazia diversas responsabilidades para todos os integrantes de um grupo, momento no qual o sedentário camponês se viu obrigado a estabelecer um vínculo muito forte com essa estrutura. Mas ele não era impelido a este vínculo a despeito de outros indivíduos, mas contra outros indivíduos, ou seja, a própria relação de apego com a casa e a colheita comprometia o proprietário a instaurar sistemas que garantissem o sedentarismo: a propriedade instaurava a submissão à propriedade. Foi dessa forma que a "minha casa" inaugurou a separação dos vizinhos, os outros, e fortaleceu as diferenças autocentradas. Alguns acordos tácitos poderiam garantir certa convivência com a vizinhança, mas grupos provenientes de outros lugares poderiam tentar se apoderar daquilo que se construiu com muito trabalho, logo, era preciso vigiar, cuidar, submeter-se a responsabilidades e se preparar para a guerra (HARARI, 2017, p. 93). Nada disso fazia parte do modo de vida dos errantes. Não foi fácil. O trigo demandou muito deles. O trigo não gostava de rochas nem pedregulhos, e por isso os sapiens trabalharam muito para limpar os campos. O trigo não gostava de dividir espaço, água e nutrientes com outras plantas, e assim homens e mulheres 59 trabalharam longas jornadas sob o sol abrasador eliminando ervas daninhas. O trigo ficava doente, e por isso os sapiens tinham de ficar de olho em vermes e pragas. O trigo era atacado por coelhos e nuvens de gafanhotos, então os agricultores construíram cercas e passaram a vigiar os campos. O trigo tinha sede, então os humanos cavaram canais de irrigação ou passaram a carregar baldes pesados de poços para regá-lo. Os sapiens até mesmo passaram a coletar fezes de animais para nutrir o solo em que ele crescia (HARARI, 2017, p. 94). Além de menores, os espaços dos sedentários eram também mais artificiais. Se os errantes não causavam praticamente nenhuma mudança nas terras por onde perambulavam, os nômades já faziam uso de queimadas estratégicas, erguiam algumas construções para serem abandonadas e levavam em cativeiro alguns animais vivos, para servirem de alimento na hora certa. Por outro lado, os sedentários construíam ilhas humanas artificiais transformando radicalmente a natureza. Derrubavam árvores, cavavam canais, limpavam campos, sulcavam a terra e plantavam alimentos de forma ordenada, tudo isto dentro de marcos territoriais assegurados por cercas, casas e pontos de vigia. Essa transformação do mundo fazia com que os sedentários agricultores tivessem a ilusão de que aquele espaço lhes pertencia: eram "suas" plantas, "seus" animais, "suas" casas; transformações do espaço. Se não fosse o trabalho duro daquelas mãos, aquele espaço não ofereceria a possibilidade de sedentarização. O intangível das ideias era materializado através do trabalho e instaurava a ilusão da posse. Ilusão frágil, convém ressaltar: grupos maiores e mais fortes frequentemente expulsavam dali os primeiros sedentários construtores (HARARI, 2017, p. 96). Em outras palavras, o medo das intempéries da natureza foi substituído pelo medo da perda, pela inquietação incessante do iminente desmoronamento de tudo que foi construído. Uma intempérie qualquer poderia arruinar a colheita de um ano todo; um grupo rival poderia furtar ou destruir plantações inteiras; uma doença tinha capacidade muito maior de se proliferar entre os membros de um grupo que vivia sempre no mesmo espaço. Estas e muitas outras contingências faziam da vida sedentária um abrigo muito árduo de ser mantido em pé, onde errar ou acertar tornavam-se, então, o limiar de uma nova forma de sobrevivência. Quanto maiores e mais sólidas fossem as estruturas físicas, sociais e institucionais, maiores seriam as chances de se garantir a posse e a estabilização sedentária de um povo (RIGHI, 2017). Depois de milênios, o projeto final do sedentário era tornar-se "um" com sua propriedade. Assim, as diferenças entre errância, nomadismo e sedentarismo começam a tomar forma, e uma característica parece atravessar as três formas de existência do ser humano no 60 mundo, a saber, o estabelecimento de projetos. Ora, o nômade precisa conhecer os melhores pontos onde buscar determinadas soluções, e para tanto estabelece planos e projetos para cada estação do ano. Tempo e espaço precisam estar bem relacionados, e um erro simples pode custar a vida de muitos. O sedentário também estabelece planos de organização social, projetos de plantio e colheita, esquemas de estocagem e troca etc. A ele também um simples erro pode custar muito caro. Logo, tanto ao nômade quanto ao sedentário, o erro e o acerto aparecem como possibilidades materiais, pois ambos partem do estabelecimento de projetos que podem triunfar ou falhar. O errante, por outro lado, enquanto erra (caminha errante) não erra (falha), pois caminha alheio ao estabelecimento de um projeto. Em outras palavras, no mundo antigo errância, nomadismo e sedentarismo se diferiam pela intensidade de imersão e complexidade de um projeto que alinhasse e organizasse as condições totais de produção e transformação do mundo. O errante era o menos implicado em um projeto de organização da vida: quando podia, apenas desfrutava das benesses do mundo e fugia das agruras. O nômade já se mostrava em uma posição superior de envolvimento com certos projetos que visavam a sobrevivência do grupo, como conhecer e contornar dificuldades do espaço (perigos com animais, fontes de água e alimento etc.) e do tempo (estações do ano). E o sedentário, por sua vez, era aquele que não só se criava como se prendia em projetos de organização a longo prazo, transformando o espaço em virtude de um prolongamento e previsão do tempo, instaurando toda sorte de regulamentações sociais que permitissem a manutenção daquele complexo material e social chamado 'cidade'. Na contemporaneidade, sedentarismo é sinônimo de estabilidade econômica, é aquele que tem um bom emprego e não precisa se mudar; nomadismo tem a ver com versatilidade pós-moderna e com o imperativo pela atualização constante; e a errância, contudo, se tornou sinônimo de miséria e marginalidade15. Errante é aquele que não tem posses, emprego ou família: é o andarilho. O errante é aquele que não se insere na sociedade de consumo, não produz, não paga impostos e não acumula os conhecimentos imprescindíveis à sobrevivência na sociedade de consumo: o errante é o inútil. Ele vive fora dos procedimentos disciplinadores da sociedade contemporânea que obriga o sujeito a se adequar e a se alienar constantemente 15 Importa ressaltar que os errrantes diferenciam-se dos trecheiros, que andam por caminhos recorrentes e conhecidos; dos mendigos, que perambulam pelas ruas conhecidas das cidades; e dos itinerantes, que transitam ou migram de uma cidade a outra em busca de melhores condições de estabilização. 61 em busca da obrigatória/desejável inclusão e aceitação social. É que o errante vive o espaço em detrimento do tempo: ontem, hoje e amanhã estão fundidos em um eterno agora. É como se eles não tivessem história: seu passado não está no seu presente, e o futuro perde sua importância. Não há uma linearidade, o passado desconectado do futuro gera uma ruptura que o lança em uma espécie de vácuo temporal e social (JUSTO; NASCIMENTO, 2005). Nesse contexto, a errância se apresenta como um fenômeno radical dessa normalização, pois, conjugada com a migração, desemprego, pobreza e desqualificação profissional, ela se caracteriza por uma movimentação a pé, contínua e inexorável do sujeito pelas rodovias do país, sem rumo certo, sem destino e objetivos definidos. A errância se caracteriza, ainda, pela solidão, desamparo, miséria extrema, e por uma ruptura do sujeito com os nichos de fixação social aos quais pertencia como família, trabalho, casa, bairro, etc. (NASCIMENTO; JUSTO; FRANÇA, 2009). Na contemporaneidade, o errante é aquele que não tem direito à sedentarização. Sem conhecimentos nem documentos, o errante não tem direito ao emprego. Sem um "comprovante de endereço", sem referências nem conta bancária, ele não está nem minimamente apto a fixar morada, estabelecer família e inserir-se no mercado produtivo capitalista. Logo, se por um lado vê-se na errância certa evidência de erro no projeto capitalista de sedentarizar e interpelar indivíduos em sujeitos produtores/consumidores, por outro vê-se na errância certo impedimento de sedentarização: por não ter onde estabelecer morada, por estar impedido de fixar-se, ele caminha sem rumo. A errância, embora tenha sido o estado primeiro do Homo Sapiens aparece, no capitalismo ocidental, como um erro no projeto de sedentarização social, um erro a ser corrigido pelas instituições. Essa transformação conceitual não é sem importância: a errância pré-histórica não era valorada nem categorizada, diferente da errância contemporânea que, de alguma forma, é normatizada, hierarquizada e regulamentada socialmente. Se o nomadismo social é aceito, e talvez até imposto (vide teorias da pós-modernidade16), a errância indeterminada e insubmissa é compreendida como problema social a ser solucionado, como um erro no sistema que precisa ser estancado. Mesmo na filosofia e na maioria das teorias da linguagem, aqueles que de alguma forma acolhem a errância como fundamento primeiro do conhecimento, e o destotalizam, são qualificados como "niilistas", "anti- 16 Modernidade Líquida (BAUMAN, 2012); Condição pós-moderna (LYOTARD, 2010). 62 intelectualistas", "relativistas", "céticos", "caricaturistas" (TEIXEIRA, 2011), justamente pelo fato de que a errância e o erro se colocam como obstáculos ao progresso do conhecimento humano, construído sobre o discurso humanista que supostamente visa melhorar a qualidade de vida dos humanos. Será este realmente seu objetivo? O que poderia estar por trás deste discurso desenvolvimentista? Estas breves inquietações e distinções nos fornecem certo substrato teórico para fundamentarmos, nesta tese, um itinerário conceitual para a concepção de uma teoria (discursiva) da errância. Em "Semântica e Discurso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009) o autor faz severas denúncias a determinado projeto ideológico de estabilização lógica dos sentidos, visto desde Sócrates, passando pela idade média, pelo renascimento e chegando aos lógicos contemporâneos. Propomos, assim, lançar mão da noção de "sedentarização" como alegoria em torno da qual se possa arranjar não só os procedimentos ideológicos de estabilização, mas também os de apoucamento, administração, domínio, causalidade, seleção, exclusão e economia (mais-valia) dos sentidos17. A errância, por outro lado, será proposta como contraparte (não-excludente) da sedentarização: ela é movência contingente, larga, desorganizada, promíscua e inclusiva. Veremos também que na sedentarização o erro é inserido no próprio funcionamento da língua como justificativa para o trabalho de reparação. Já na errância não há erro, tampouco acerto. Finalmente, importa sublinhar que este texto não pretende o demérito da sedentarização do conhecimento, tampouco fazer funcionar a errância dos sentidos em todos os espaços discursivos. Afinal, vida e morte podem depender de pequenos acertos e erros a própria língua existe no espaço contraditório entre a estabilização e a movência. Não se trata disso. Nosso objetivo é outro: é lançar luz sobre os efeitos do projeto tecnocientífico de sedentarização, cada vez mais intensa, dos sentidos na contemporaneidade; é desnudar as contradições advindas do apoucamento da potência do sentido vista na especialização verticalizada; é ponderar sobre o prejuízo secreto do "aperfeiçoamento" e do "progresso". Propomos, assim, junto com Pêcheux, denunciar a armadilha da sedentarização desmedida dos sentidos a partir do método científico e dos axiomas computacionais, procedimentos lógico-retóricos que instrumentalizam as posições discursivas de erro e acerto, de progresso, fracasso, eficácia e produtividade em uma realidade discursiva cada vez menor e controlada. 17 Neste aspecto, as noções sobre sedentarização advindas do senso comum, que tangenciam sentidos de "falta de atividade física", "falta de condicionamento físico" etc., também são noções utilizáveis. 63 2 ERRO E ERRÂNCIA E(M) SEMÂNTICA E DISCURSO O moinho nunca erra 64 2.1 ASSEPSSIA E SEDENTARIZAÇÃO DA LÍNGUA DOM QUIXOTE, PARTE 2, CAPÍTULO 10 "Esse meu mestre, por mi l sinais, foi visto como um lunático, e também eu não fiquei para trás, pois sou mais pateta que ele, já que o sigo e o si rvo, se é verdadeiro o refrão que diz: 'diga -me com quem anda e te dire i quem és' e o outro de 'não com quem nasce, mas com quem passa ' ." Já de saída, importa ressaltar o método usado para a estruturação desta seção, bem como das subsequentes. Ao invés de passarmos pelas obras de Pêcheux tentando captar o funcionamento teórico de cada conceito, partiremos, ao contrário, de duas problemáticas, a saber, o conjunto de questões que tangem "erro" e "errância", que serão investigadas no decorrer das páginas de diferentes obras do autor. Por isso as seções teóricas desta tese estão divididas e organizadas a partir dos títulos das obras pecheutianas. No primeiro capítulo, em Semântica e Discurso, procura-se pela errância na oposição entre "base linguística" e "processo discursivo" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 81); no segundo, investiga-se "Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento?", onde buscaremos pela errância na história, no discurso e no sujeito. A escolha e o encerramento em tais obras justificam-se pela própria amplitude das mesmas, quer seja pela quantidade de páginas, quer seja pela quantidade de temáticas e conceitos abordados. Assim, importa sublinhar com maior insistência o objetivo e o percurso proposto por esta tese: buscar pelas noções de erro e errância na obra de Pêcheux e analisar, à luz de tais considerações, o funcionamento da língua, do discurso, da história e do sujeito. Iniciaremos tal percurso por Semântica e Discurso assinalando uma importante distinção feita pelo autor, a saber, uma oposição complementar entre "base linguística" e "processo discursivo". Ao opor base linguística e processo discursivo, inicialmente estamos pretendendo destacar que [...] todo sistema linguístico [...] é dotado de uma autonomia relativa que o submete a leis internas, as quais constituem, precisamente, o objeto da linguística. É, pois, sobre a base dessas leis internas que se desenvolvem os processos discursivos, e não enquanto expressão de um puro pensamento, de uma pura atividade cognitiva etc., que utilizaria acidentalmente os sistemas linguísticos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 81). Tal distinção guiará a investigação da primeira seção desta tese. Importa sublinhar que, em um primeiro momento discutiremos o efeito da hiância, do erro e da errância no 65 próprio funcionamento da língua, passando por autores propostos por Pêcheux, como Leibniz, Hume, Frege, Carnap, Saussure e outros, tentando compreender o efeito da errância principalmente no interior e no exterior do signo. De nossa parte, não nos caberia discutir tais problemáticas com tantos autores, por isso o faremos apenas na medida em que o próprio fundador da AD nos sugerir. Mais adiante, na mesma seção, passaremos por autores como Henry, Althusser e outros, na tentativa de lançar luz sobre a errância no seio do funcionamento discursivo. O título deste primeiro capítulo da seção 1, "Assepsia e sedentarização da língua", justifica-se por um fio teórico quase imperceptível em Semântica e Discurso, onde queremos lançar luz. Este tímido fio condutor se inicia pela problematização do erro fundamental, defendido por diversos teóricos da linguagem e rechaçado por Pêcheux. Seu argumento pode ser sintetizado da seguinte forma: por descartar a possibilidade histórica de uma língua primeira, inteiriça e absoluta, não se faz necessário projetar um erro primordial que a tenha destotalizado. É neste ponto onde se situa seu principal ataque aos gramáticos e filósofos da linguagem: é justamente por que se concebe uma língua primordial absoluta, mas fraturada por um erro primário, é que se pode justificar as políticas de assepsia e sedentarização da língua. É por que houve a profanação da língua perfeita é que se justifica a própria existência dos teóricos preocupados em corrigi-la e aperfeiçoa-la. Mas se não é assim, perfeição > erro > perfeição, como se pode, então, conceber a origem e o funcionamento da língua e do discurso? Iniciamos esta seção apontando sua hipótese final: a de que o erro não está na língua, mas no juízo que se estabelece sobre a língua, na metacrítica que a língua executa sobre si mesma. Esta hipótese se fundamenta em outra, que atesta que língua, discurso e sujeito possuem elementos constitutivos que apresentam uma hiância que os separa irremediavelmente, logo, são descontínuos possuem funcionamentos distintos, de natureza ímpar. Cada elemento, em sua forma mais fundamental, portanto, possui modos de ser independentes e errantes, e é só pelas vias da ideologia que eles são costurados, amarrados e sedentarizados para então constituírem língua, discurso e sujeito. Para chegarmos à noção de descontinuidade (hiância), esteio da noção de errância, seguiremos o percurso pecheutiano começando por "Semântica e Discurso, uma crítica à afirmação do óbvio" doravante, SD (PÊCHEUX, 2009), começando pela introdução e pelos dois primeiros capítulos, os quais ele mesmo chamou de desvio necessário (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 27). 66 Nestes primeiros capítulos, Pêcheux estabelece um diálogo teórico com Adam Schaff, filósofo polonês que tinha como projeto inserir a Semântica no seio das teorias marxistas; por extensão, o analista do discurso dialoga também com os neopositivistas, especialmente Frege e Carnap, mas também com alguns filósofos que pensaram a linguagem e seus usos científicos, como Leibniz e Kant. Ele inicia suas argumentações a partir das discussões científico-teóricas dos marxistas da década de 1950, sublinhando o fato de que diversos teóricos não se deram conta de que lançavam luz sobre os efeitos dos problemas instaurados por Stalin, e não se atinavam para as causas reais do desvio stalinista que poderia, afinal, ainda estar à espreita e se encarnar novamente. Somente na década de 1960 é que o filósofo marxista Adam Schaff parece ter compreendido parte da causa de tal desvio do marxismo (stalinista) em direção ao imperialismo ditatorial, a saber, a exclusão da semântica do campo da linguística, mas também da lógica, da teoria do conhecimento e outros campos. Assistimos agora a sua (da Semântica) reabilitação. Não só na linguística, onde o desenvolvimento das pesquisas semânticas nunca encontrou dificuldades maiores, mas também na lógica. Pois acabou acontecendo que o estudo da sintaxe lógica e da metalinguagem encontra aplicações muito práticas na construção de máquinas de traduzir, aparelhos mecânicos de memória, etc. (SCHAFF, 1968, p. 355). Depois que Schaff apontou a luz do progresso teórico do socialismo marxista para a semântica, diversos teóricos multiplicaram seus estudos em tal direção. Pêcheux, no início do primeiro capítulo de SD, aponta que seu trabalho, embora perpasse questões semelhantes, não se trata meramente de fazer funcionar uma teoria semântica nos moldes marxistas/leninistas, mas sim de criticar a afirmação do óbvio praticada pelos teóricos de sua época, oportunistas que reincidiam sobre velhas problemáticas e faziam ajustar o parafuso da teoria marxista a porcas que nitidamente não foram feitas para se encaixar ali (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 8). Estamos, pois, reivindicando a liberdade de questionar o oportunismo filosófico de que se autoriza a atual coexistência 'marxista' do pavlovismo, da cibernética, da semiótica, das aplicações lógica formal à teoria da linguagem e à semântica, e também a liberdade de lutar contra uma concepção stalinista voluntarista da ciência em que o marxismo ditaria, previamente, a uma ciência, seus princípios e seus resultados em nome do Materialismo Dialético ou das Leis da História (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 15). 67 Pêcheux parece ter detectado, neste movimento liderado por Schaff, uma amalgama inconsistente que tentava forçosamente costurar/submeter a semântica ao marxismo, mesmo que para isso fosse necessário usar liames como linguística, lógica, teoria científica da propaganda, política e retórica. "Como tudo isso pode se unir para formar a Semântica, como ramo da linguística?" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 16). Pelas vias do idealismo, aponta Pêcheux, seria fácil, mas Schaff é marxista, e precisa resolver este impasse pelas vias do materialismo histórico dialético. A solução encontrada pelo filósofo polonês é a noção de "função comunicativa da linguagem", que dentre outras coisas, tenta evidenciar elementos de base linguística que sustentem uma semântica da intencionalidade comunicativa. (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 17). Partindo desta problemática, Pêcheux aponta o propósito primeiro desta crítica da afirmação do óbvio: "questionar as evidências fundadoras da 'Semântica', tentando elaborar, na medida dos meios de que dispomos, as bases de uma teoria materialista" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 18). O ponto de partida, aponta o filósofo francês, é duplo: 1. Mostrar que a semântica, como parte da linguística, é o ponto nodal das contradições que a atravessam e a organizam cientificamente; teorias que, concomitantemente, manifestam e encobrem tais contradições. 2. Evidenciar que a constituição da Semântica como ponto nodal da Linguística se dá pelas vias da filosofia, mais especificamente no que diz respeito ao materialismo histórico. Isto implica fazer um desvio para que a linguística e a filosofia se habitem e comunguem de certos termos e conformações enunciativas. Essa relação entre linguística e filosofia marxista, no entanto, já tinha renomados representantes e teses consolidadas. Pêcheux teria que se inserir nos espaços de contradição resultantes da tese formalista-logicista, da escola chomskyana; da Linguística Histórica (sociolinguística), de Brunot e Meillet; e de uma Linguística da Enunciação e da Mensagem, cujos representantes eram principalmente Jakobson, Benveniste, Ducrot, Barthes, Greimas e Kristeva (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 19). Pêcheux aponta que não pretende fundar uma "quarta via", e sim desenvolver a contradição que emerge das teorizações que tentam amarrar Língua enquanto mero sistema com história e sujeitos falantes para formarem, então, a ciência da semântica. Pata tanto, ele precisará elencar as teses fundamentais erigidas por estes autores para então colocar em evidência as contradições resultantes. 68 Pêcheux começa pelas teses da posição formalista chomskyana, resumida em dois pontos: a) se a língua é apenas um sistema, ela não pode ser histórica; na verdade, como mero sistema, ela resistiria à história justamente por que as regras do sistema são a-históricas; b) é somente enquanto sistema que a língua tem se constituído como objeto de estudos da linguística. Em outras palavras, a linguística, que teria por objeto de estudos um sistema ahistórico, não seria capaz, sem a filosofia, de fazer funcionar a tão tencionada relação com a História marxista. Sem a filosofia do Materialismo Histórico, a relação linguística/história estaria fadada a tão-somente evidenciar as influências dos fatores sociais na língua (sociolinguística), uma vez o explicável do sistema (em forma de gramática) tem prioridade sobre as condições históricas que o instituem como explicável (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 21). Emerge desta compreensão de língua enquanto sistema uma primeira contradição, e talvez a mais cara à hipótese proposta por este texto, que se enuncia da seguinte forma: Trata-se, no presente trabalho, de compreender como aquilo que hoje é tendencialmente 'a mesma língua', no sentido linguístico desse termo, autoriza funcionamentos de 'vocabulário-sintaxe' e de 'raciocínios' antagonistas; em suma, trata-se de pôr em movimento a contradição que atravessa a tendência formalista-logicista sob as evidências que constituem a sua fachada (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 24). Se à linguística toca a língua apenas como um sistema (para os sociolinguistas, um sistema que sofre influências sociais), o caráter sistêmico da língua permitiria, assim, falar em termos de "unidade da língua", ou, "a mesma língua". Contudo, questiona Pêcheux, como essa língua unificada por um sistema poderia permitir antagonismos ainda em seu nível estrutural? Afinal, este antagonismo não aparece apenas no nível da influência social na língua na forma de luta de classes como motor da história -, mas aparece também no nível estrutural da língua, no nível da "unidade da língua" enquanto sistema. "A unidade tendencial daquilo que a linguística atual define como língua constitui a base de processos antagonistas no nível do 'vocabulário-sintaxe' e no dos 'raciocínios'" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 24). E se a língua admite extremos como antagonismos, ou seja, a emergência de sentidos diametralmente opostos, não parece demasiado supor que neste entremeio existam outros níveis de variações de significação como deslizes de sentidos, mal compreendidos ou mesmo incompreendidos. Todos estes desvios de significação podem, para muitos, ser fonte de obstáculos e embaraços; mas de fato, o antagonismo aparece já no funcionamento mais fundamental da língua: ainda 69 que o sistema possua regras mais ou menos claras, e que um enunciado esteja ajustado adequadamente às suas diretrizes, todo enunciado parece estar sujeito a erros. No entanto uma contradição se manifesta quando associamos antagonismo, deslizes, mal compreendidos e incompreendidos com a noção de erro. Quando se assume que se trata de erros assume-se também a possibilidade epistemológica da noção de acerto, ou mais, assume-se a possibilidade de correção e aperfeiçoamento. Mas não é disto que Pêcheux está falando. A relação entre erro (e acerto) e língua parece mais complexa do que a afirmação do óbvio de que a língua é um sistema imperfeito. Mas antes de abandonar a noção de erro fundamental, Pêcheux estende mais um pouco a análise desta suposta imperfeição, não sem motivo: desta análise, outras noções vão emergir. Se tal "erro fundamental" da língua a causa de sua imperfeição for concebido como "divisão da unidade", assume-se então a possibilidade de que exista uma re-conformação da unidade perdida. Essa fratura da unidade, aponta Pêcheux, se fundamentaria na oposição comunicação/não-comunicação, que toma a aparência do par (apartado) lógica/retórica. Esta divisão, como veremos, apresenta-se conveniente para os lógicos e filósofos da linguagem. Ela parece sugerir certo movimento de uma parte (da unidade rasgada) em direção à outra, como se se complementassem mutuamente até uma unidade. Os lógicos encontram, assim, um conveniente "erro fundamental" que, por vias de uma boa prática, poderia culminar numa correção plena e acabada da língua. É assim que a existência do par "lógica/retórica" se torna justificável: imputando (a posteriori) na língua um "erro fundamental" que lhes impõe o desafio e a obrigação da correção em nome de um suposto progresso. Certa incongruência começa a emergir e a instrumentalização do erro ganha contornos de ferramenta de dominação discursiva. No capitalismo, aponta Pêcheux, o par lógica/retórica é notado em todo lugar: a) na base econômica, onde a lógica fornece uma espécie de clareza axiomática das instruções e diretivas, e a retórica fornece o "comando" eficiente que separa os trabalhadores da organização da produção; b) na forma jurídica das divisões nas relações de produções, onde a lógica serve para expurgar os equívocos dos contratos (trabalhistas, comerciais etc.), e a retórica se encarrega de persuadir de que "todos os homens são iguais, mas alguns são mais iguais que os outros"; c) nas relações sociais políticas, onde a lógica e a retórica fornecem argumentos que, afinal, instauram certa ilusão de coerência entre dominantes e dominados (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 25). 70 Para diversos campos de conhecimento a amalgama contraditória "lógica/retórica" se mostra uma expressiva ferramenta de apagamento estrutural. No realismo concreto, por exemplo, a lógica supostamente oferece elementos simples e indestrutíveis para a constituição de verdades essenciais que afastam qualquer adjunção estranha; a retórica, por sua vez, diz respeito àquilo que narra o mundo função determinativa e alça o indivíduo (mais adiante, sujeito) até o essencial fornecido pela lógica, até aquilo que é indispensável saber. No racionalismo idealista, por outro lado, onde pensamento e realidade não se distinguem, a lógica fornece diretrizes para a aquisição de novas incisas, adjunções e outros suplementos através dos quais o espírito representa para si a realidade; e a retórica idealista cumpre a função de justificar o mundo função explicativa (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 26). Portanto, a unidade dividida, evidenciada pelos antagonismos, pelos deslizes, pelas incompreensões, pelas falhas etc., aparecem para os lógicos como defeitos, imperfeições passivas de serem corrigidas pela lógica sistêmica (gramática) e pela retórica (política da boa fala), que se sustentam mutuamente na linguística. E à soma de todas estas imperfeições chamamos, nesta tese, de erro. Somente quanto algo falha é que pode surgir a possibilidade e a necessidade de reparo. Assim, o antagonismo, a falta, a imprecisão, o equívoco, o lapso, o deslize, o desvio, o mal-entendido, o controverso etc., tem em comum o fato de que se aproximam, de alguma forma, à noção de erro, onde todos estes conceitos se subsomem diante do projeto de sistema unívoco proposto pela epistemologia moderna (salvo exceções). Este projeto, segundo Pêcheux, sustenta-se na relação entre lógica e retórica, restos significantes da relação entre Realismo Concreto (função determinativa) e Racionalismo Idealista (função explicativa). No entanto, este percurso teórico ainda evidencia outro par antinômico: Em termos aristotélicos, a oposição entre explicação e determinação recorta a distinção entre os dois tipos de ligações que podem unir um acidente e uma substância: no caso em que um certo acidente está preso por uma ligação essencial a uma substância, essa substância não pode faltar. [...] Mas há acidentes que podem ser subtraídos a um ser sem que sua existência seja atingida (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 27). Pêcheux está conduzindo a discussão, neste momento, à relação antinômica entre necessidade e contingência. Ele mostra que na determinação narrativa de eventos lógicocientíficos identifica-se uma relação de necessidade causal (obrigatória, do ponto de vista lógico) entre um dado acidente e uma substância qualquer. Pêcheux dá um exemplo através do enunciado "homem racional", um enunciado que supostamente atesta a relação necessária 71 (causal) entre "ser humano" e "racionalidade" (em Aristóteles, um ser humano desprovido de razão não é mais um ser humano). Por outro lado, do racionalismo explicativo despontam acidentes que possuem relações contingentes com uma dada substância: tais relações se dão de uma única forma, mas poderiam se dar de outras (ou não ocorrer). É o que se vê no enunciado "ser humano vestido com roupas brancas", onde o acidente (vestir uma roupa de determinada cor) é contingente, uma relação não necessária que autoriza outras possibilidades sem que despontem problemas lógicos tampouco se destrua a existência das substâncias envolvidas (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 28). Este novo par antinômico é relevante à lógica e à filosofia da linguagem, que assumem a língua como um sistema imperfeito, mas corrigível. É neste nível, das necessidades e das contingências, que Adam Schaff coloca questões como a necessidade comunicativa das palavras, ou a divisão lógica obrigatória entre pessoas e coisas, subjetividade e objetividade, emocional e cognitivo etc. (PÊCHEUX, 2009). Em outras palavras, é neste nível que aparece a lógica como aquilo que é necessário na constituição da língua, e a retórica como aquilo que se encarrega das contingências. A língua enquanto sistema unívoco é o projeto de fazer subsumir todas as contingências casuais nas necessidades causais da lógica, pelas vias da retórica. É neste projeto (idealista) de "totalização da língua" que se ampara o projeto Lógico-Formalista: quando compreendem a língua como um sistema necessário, as repetições aparecem em maior número que os acidentes contingentes, o que justificaria (ilusoriamente) o maquinário classificatório de Chomsky (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 29). No entanto, questiona Pêcheux: a história e o sujeito são classificáveis? (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 31). Ou mais: história e sujeito são categorias possíveis de serem separadas em dicotomias? Se forem decompostas, o serão apenas para serem refundidas, na aparência, através do par lógica/retórica uma sedentarização das possibilidades contingentes pelas verdades necessárias da lógica. Instaura-se, assim, uma instrumentalização política do erro no interior da língua: é por que se cinde a língua que ela pode ser costurada, é por que erra que pode ser concertada, é por que emergem contingências que se pode ser perfilada em necessidades. É o que Horkheimer (2002) chamava de paranoia da razão: quando alguém possui os meios de fazer algo se tornar realidade, ele possui também os meios de administrar suas provas. Assim se configura o aparelhamento ideológico do par erro/acerto pelo discurso da tecnociência capitalista: se a língua for imperfeita, pode ser corrigida e aperfeiçoada. Somente 72 quando se concebe a existência de um erro fundamental é que se justifica a existência de teorias que buscam a construção lógica da exatidão. É a respeito deste fenômeno que Pêcheux usa pela primeira vez o termo "efeito Münchhausen", como o personagem que se sustenta no ar puxando-se a si mesmo pelo cabelo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 32), ou seja, é o efeito que instaura justificativas para a existência de um campo teórico a partir do problema que ele mesmo instaura. A língua imperfeita é "perfeita" para quem sobrevive de corrigi-la, ou melhor, a existência do erro na língua é assaz conveniente para quem se coloca a repará-la. Em resumo, a noção de língua enquanto sistema imperfeito, passível de ser corrigido, se sustenta na linguística mediante outra hipótese, a de que a lógica (gramatical) necessita da retórica (política da boa fala) para reconduzir o sujeito falante até uma suposta exatidão onde se possa extinguir a possibilidade de antagonismos. Nesse modelo é possível fundamentar a ideia de "erro fundamental", mas apenas na medida em que seu aparecimento deve ser apagado pelo funcionamento do par Lógica/Retórica. Se assim o for, o erro aparece como causa do antagonismo, e o antagonismo emerge como vestígio de erro no sistema. A hipótese que queremos sustentar nesta tese, no entanto, atesta o contrário: o erro (que deixa de ser fundamental) não é causa, mas efeito do antagonismo, do deslize, da falta, do mal compreendido etc.; tal hipótese se sustenta na noção de descontinuidade, como veremos adiante. 2.1.1 LÓGICA E RETÓRICA CONTRA O ERRO Importa ressaltar que o objetivo de pesquisa que guia nossa leitura em Pêcheux é o conceito de errância, na relação mais imediata possível com a noção de erro. O primeiro capítulo de SD traça uma linha teórica que passa pela lógica (em Hume, Kant, Frege, Carnap e outros) e pelo materialismo histórico (conforme o enuncia Althusser e Lacan). Contudo o fio condutor desta análise continua sendo o papel da lógica e da retórica na constituição de uma língua pretensamente coerente e una, argumentação fundada em uma análise mais demorada da constituição de orações relativas. Por motivos que ficarão mais claros no decorrer do capítulo, Pêcheux inicia o capítulo primeiro de SD a partir das definições que a lógica de Port-Royal e a Gramática Gerativa trabalham a respeito das orações relativas (determinativas e explicativas). Ambas relativas se sustentam em duas noções prévias: a compreensão diz respeito aos atributos que uma ideia 73 traz em si, aquilo que não se lhe pode tirar sem destruí-la; ao passo que a extensão tem que ver com a quantidade e variedade de sujeitos a que uma relação convém. Na lógica, determinação diz respeito àquilo que deve ser determinado (definido) ou indeterminado (indefinido) nos conceitos universais. Neste aspecto, a determinação, quando delimita a quantidade, a qualidade e outros atributos de um substantivo, determina o que entra e o que não entra em tal definição (FREGE, 2009, p. 148). Visto de outro modo, pode-se afirmar que a função determinativa diminui e controla as possibilidades de um termo/conceito e o transforma em um axioma. O funcionamento do axioma é, portanto, um trabalho discursivo dissimulado em trabalho lógico. Para que um enunciado funcione corretamente aos olhos da lógica, cada termo da frase deve ser axiomático, ou seja, deve passar por determinações que apartem e selecionem sentidos que devem ser determinados/indeterminados até que reste apenas "um", o sentido que será "colado" em um dado significante. As orações relativas explicativas, por sua vez, fornecem informações complementares sobre o sujeito da oração de forma que o axioma determinado ganhe características ainda mais delimitadas no interior mesmo do enunciado. Na frase a seguir: "Terrence Malick, professor de filosofia, dirigiu oito filmes", a frase explicativa entre vírgulas professor de filosofia é uma marca linguística que apresenta mais informações sobre o sujeito da oração, o diretor de cinema Terrence Malick. Se a oração relativa explicativa fosse removida da oração, a mesma ainda permaneceria gramaticalmente correta, e seu sentido não seria radicalmente alterado, ainda que perca alguns detalhes. No entanto, se o enunciado fosse reduzido a "professor de filosofia", ele já não mais se referiria a um sujeito específico, mas a uma classe de profissionais que se dedicam a ensinar a referida disciplina. Assim, as orações relativas explicativas são compostas por um pronome relativo, um verbo e outros elementos opcionais, como o sujeito ou objeto do verbo. Vírgulas (ou parênteses) são sempre utilizados para separar as orações relativas explicativas do restante da oração. Pêcheux levanta tais questões para clarificar como gramática e lógica, tanto na gramática de Port-Royal quanto na gramática gerativa de Chomsky, são homogêneas em seus princípios (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 38). Quando tais pensadores buscam argumentos para explicar a união de vários termos no sujeito ou no atributo, é na lógica que eles encontram a solução. A saída encontrada, no entanto, resulta no princípio da relação de determinação, a saber, aquele que agrupa uma classe de seres a uma classe de características e determina espécies no 74 interior de gêneros (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 39). Nestes termos tem-se, portanto, uma série de relações (até mesmo de relações entre relações) que se instauram de forma determinativa e axiomática, ou seja, inauguram um sistema cujo funcionamento das regras faz parecer que as próprias regras são a origem do sistema, proporcionando a ilusão de que se tratam de essências (ex.: Ser humano Reino: Animalia; Filo: Chordata; Classe: Mammalia; Ordem: Primata; Família: Hominidae; Gênero: Homo; Espécie: Homo sapiens). Levando adiante o funcionamento deste sistema, chega-se ao país de nascimento, região e estado, data de nascimento, filiação, nome e número de identificação do documento oficial, ou seja, o sujeito aparece apenas como efeito de uma regra. Se as relativas determinativas concedem ao sistema lógico da língua certo vestígio de essência, as relativas explicativas são as incidências secundárias sobre a ordem das essências. Seguindo no encalço da fundamentação da gramática gerativa, Pêcheux aponta que novamente é na lógica (neste caso, também na teoria do conhecimento) que tais linguistas procuram argumentos. Contudo, certos indícios começam a tomar opacidade neste processo: se nas relativas determinativas qualquer caráter ideológico de determinação das essências pode ser dissimulado no interior do sistema, nas relativas explicativas certo caráter político começa a ficar mais claro. Nas relativas explicativas, afirma Pêcheux, os gramáticos necessitam buscar recursos teóricos também na retórica (PÊCHEUX, 2009, 39). Assim, no interior do funcionamento das relativas explicativas surge a retórica, aquilo que reconduz o sujeito falante ao sentido claro e ao bom uso da língua. A retórica, enquanto arte de bem falar, conforma a língua "às regras de acordo com as quais é realmente necessário que uma língua se ordene para poder existir" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, 40). Nessa perspectiva, o bom uso da palavra é o de reconduzir o sujeito às verdades do mundo das essências, a 'arte de falar' é constitutivamente uma pedagogia: a explicação torna-se, assim, aquilo pelo que se reabsorve o desencontro entre meu pensamento e os seres aos quais meu discurso se refere, isto é, ao nível da gramática, entre [...] língua materna e [...] língua a aprender (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 41). Na relação que se estabelece entre as relativas (determinativas e explicativas) começa a ficar mais claro um procedimento político de dissimulação da unidade perdida/resgatada no seio da linguística: apenas quando existe um erro primordial na língua é que a mesma pode ser corrigida. É por que uma fissura nasce em seu âmago é que se torna necessário uma linguística (gramática, lógica e retórica) da reabsorção da unidade. As relativas explicativas 75 franqueiam essa dissimulação na medida em que a explicação aparece como aquilo que remete as regras ao seu próprio funcionamento. Logo, pode-se dizer que a boa retórica está a serviço de uma pedagogia da verdade e das essências, de onde a retórica das figuras (figuras de linguagem) aparece como sistema de erros pedagogicamente necessários para se atingir a "verdade", ao mesmo tempo em que permanece como ameaça constante de deslize para fora da "verdade" (PÊCHEUX, 2009). Assim a língua, compreendida meramente como sistema, é posta em prática pelo par lógica/retórica juntamente com as regras que lhe dão forma e a permitem existir, tal como as regras de um jogo de xadrez que se materializam no movimento das peças pelo tabuleiro. Dessa forma, teríamos uma língua a-histórica, que funcionaria sempre da mesma forma independente do momento histórico e das condições sociais em que se inserem. O sujeito, neste sistema, aparece apenas como efeito de um conjunto de regras e que, por isso mesmo, se reabsorve logicamente. Dessa forma, a gramática/lógica está salva, bem como todos os processos retóricos de recondução do sujeito falante a tais regras fundamentais. Pêcheux recusa veemente tal procedimento idealista instaurado pelos lógicos, onde todos os erros (deslizes de sentidos, contradições, equívocos, antagonismos, mal-entendidos, incompreendidos etc.) se tornam passíveis de serem homogeneizados, via retórica, em uma gramática lógica, coerente e unívoca. Esse movimento de retroalimentação não passa de um dispositivo de instrumentalização do erro e da língua: efeitos de dominação que se sustentam na premissa antinômica contingência/necessidade, onde o erro é causal e necessário à reparação e à exatidão. Em outras palavras, efeito Münchhausen: se o erro é necessário à reparação, a própria reparação se torna necessária à língua correta uma cadeia lógica de necessidades causais que se sustenta sobre o problema que ela mesma instaura. 2.1.2 LEIBNIZ E A LÍNGUA PERFEITA PERDIDA Pêcheux dá um passo mais adiante nesta análise, ainda que isso implique voltar no tempo, mais exatamente ao empirismo do século XVIII, na teoria da linguagem de Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. O polímata alemão tornou-se célebre por lançar as bases para o projeto moderno de assepsia da língua, ou seja, uma operação de separação entre uma língua construída logicamente de outra que é usada cotidianamente, passível de erro. Tal separação em Leibniz se sustenta em duas noções: a propriedade essencial e a propriedade contingente, 76 noções que se manifestam em outro par antinômico, a saber, as verdades de razão e as verdades de fato. O projeto filosófico de Leibniz era construir uma via segura para a prática da ciência que se despontava nos séculos XVI e XVII e XVIII. Essas novas práticas de aquisição de conhecimento, provenientes de métodos e experimentações, demandavam formas mais seguras de propagação daquilo que entendiam como verdade: era preciso uma nova forma de usar a língua para que esta não contaminasse a divulgação das descobertas ou dificultasse replicações e testes de tais experimentos por cientistas de outras línguas. Diante de novos tipos de verdades, emergia a demanda por um profundo estudo sobre a própria noção de verdade bem como sobre sua divulgação, a que se deteve Leibniz. Ele se referia aos pensadores de sua época por meio de uma metáfora: "eles são como um rico negociante que tem grande quantidade de mercadorias na sua loja, mas que carece de um inventário delas" (MOLINA; HOFFMANN, 2007). Para Leibniz, a verdade é algo intrínseco à relação que se estabelece entre uma palavra e uma coisa: se tal relação for possível, ela é uma relação verdadeira, pois nas relações impossíveis não há verdade. Assim, quando uma proposição carrega uma contradição ela é logicamente impossível, logo, falsa. Tal mecanismo lógico prometia a possibilidade de se constatar uma verdade absoluta através de cálculos analíticos. Leibniz sabia, no entanto, que a língua cotidiana apresentaria diversos problemas para o grande projeto da ciência moderna. Em tempos de crendices e fé religiosa, os sujeitos falantes aceitavam e replicavam juízos tidos como verdadeiros, mas que em muitos casos pareciam se contradizer ou gerar malentendidos. A solução de Leibniz foi apresentar dois tipos de verdades e dois tipos de linguagens que pudessem, cada qual, fundamentar essas diferentes verdades: as necessárias (Verdades de Razão) e as contingentes (Verdades de Fato). Ele sabia que não era possível, naquele momento, lançar toda a sociedade em uma linguagem inteiramente calculável, e por isso propôs tal divisão na intenção de garantir uma via segura de tráfego para as verdades necessárias, essenciais e eternas que supostamente valeriam para todos os mundos possíveis -, colocando em outra via a linguagem que permite verdades contingentes que abrangem apenas a realidade pontual de um determinado espaço, em um determinado momento. As verdades de razão são aquelas que emergem do plano das essências lógicas, ou seja, derivam de cálculos e verificações científicas que permitem aceder a verdades universais. "Verdadeira é uma afirmação cujo predicado está incluído no sujeito" (LEIBNIZ, 1980, p. 124). 77 Para Leibniz, uma verdade de razão é uma proposição logicamente necessária que aponta para uma essência demonstrável pela análise de seus termos, e por ser logicamente estável, seu oposto implica uma contradição, ou seja, um juízo falso. Neste aspecto, todas as verdades se sustentam nas essências primeiras daquilo a que se referem, o que Leibniz chamou de Princípio de Identidade. Como exemplo, tem-se a fórmula física de equivalência entre matéria e energia (E=mc2): verdades lógicas que supostamente atuam no universo desde sua origem, em todas as possibilidades físicas concebíveis; e em termos científicos, é provável que dure até o final dele. Assim, é necessário (verdade necessária) que a quantidade de energia seja igual à da massa multiplicada pela velocidade da luz ao quadrado, e seu oposto, ou mais, qualquer outra possibilidade, é impossível (e para aquilo que é impossível não há verdades). A estrutura gramatical das verdades de razão é, portanto, composta por relativas determinativas, que colocam termos em relações (encontros, pegas) que determinam suas funções no interior de um dado sistema (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 42). Esta estrutura lógica 'razão/determinação' é o fundamento do método dedutivo, que parte do geral para o individual, das essências para os fenômenos. Já as verdades de fato, segundo Leibniz, são aquelas que derivam da observação e percepção do mundo temporal, daquilo que se restringe no espaço e no tempo. Elas são contingentes por que podem acontecer de uma maneira ou de outras, ou seja, o oposto a um dado acontecimento factual é possível. Tomemos como exemplo um dado acidente de trânsito numa determinada rua de uma cidade específica. Aquele acidente será único, e as condições exatas em que se dará nunca mais se repetirão (hora, local, veículos envolvidos etc.). Contudo, neste caso é fácil conceber a possibilidade de que tal acidente pudesse ter sido evitado, ou que outro acidente tivesse ocorrido naquele lugar e momento, e para isso não há fórmulas nem equações. Assim, as verdades relativas àquele fato são restritas àquele fato, não podendo se estender nem temporalmente nem espacialmente, ao contrário das verdades de razão (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 42). Para Leibniz, as verdades de fato não demonstram o Princípio de Identidade por não se constituírem verdades simples: ao contrário, são complexas, formadas por relações de diversas naturezas. A solução, no caso das verdades de fato, é instaurar o que ele chama de Princípio de Razão Suficiente, um princípio capaz de abarcar a causalidade dos enunciados que não são logicamente necessários, mas que, apesar disso, possuem alguma razão de ser, como a moral, a fé, a política etc. Por serem verdades contingentes são concernentes às existências das coisas verdadeiras em um tempo determinado, para uma 78 sociedade determinada. A estrutura gramatical das verdades de fato são as relativas explicativas, uma vez que é do fenômeno simples que se parte para chegar a verdades mais complexas, como no método indutivo. Até aqui a motivação desta volta a Leibniz, diante do objetivo de relacionar erro e errância no funcionamento da língua, pode não parecer muito clara. Todavia, existe certa dificuldade no projeto do filósofo alemão que justifica esta aproximação teórica, destacada por Pêcheux (2009, p.42): Mas a "razão suficiente" deve ser encontrada também nas verdades contingentes ou de fato, isto é, na sequência de coisas espalhadas pelo universo das criaturas; onde a resolução em razões particulares poderia ir a um detalhe sem limites, por causa da variedade imensa das coisas da natureza e da divisão dos corpos ao infinito. Há uma infinidade de figuras e de movimentos presentes e passados que entram na causa eficiente de minha escrita presente, e há uma infinidade de pequenas inclinações e disposições de minha alma, presentes e passadas, que entram na causa final (LEIBNIZ, 1992, p. 78). O projeto de Leibniz lança nova luz sobre a contradição do erro na língua. Para ele é possível subordinar todas as verdades de fato às verdades de razão, ou seja, é possível, via lógica e gramática, fazer subsumir a relativa explicativa na relativa determinativa (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 43). Em outras palavras, o que Leibniz está propondo é o estabelecimento de uma língua lógica o suficiente para abarcar todos os eventos do mundo, por mais contingentes que eles possam parecer, o que culminaria em um sistema capaz de cooptar todos os erros eventuais e os ordenar de forma determinada. Para Leibniz, só há contingência quando o espírito humano não é capaz de reconhecer todas as determinações que caracterizam um fenômeno. A contingência teria, assim, uma necessidade secreta que remeteria a uma origem singular para todos os fenômenos de uma dada categoria, o que só seria alcançado mediante a análise da sequência infinita dos eventos. O que Leibniz quer dizer é que se fosse possível observar todos os acidentes automobilísticos ocorridos no mundo, a contingência que recobre estes fenômenos seria esvanecida, desvelando uma lógica causal e necessária que determina todos os acidentes. Por mais absurdo que isso possa parecer a alguns, este princípio é amplamente usado no meio científico: quanto maior for o cálculo, maior a probabilidade de se chegar a médias determinantes (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 42). 79 Ainda que o cálculo total seja impossível, tal possibilidade moveu diversos linguistas à difícil tarefa de observar a maior quantidade de variações possíveis na intenção de encontrar a origem das línguas e assim poder chegar ao fator determinante comum a todas elas. No caso de Leibniz, a origem é o mito adâmico da língua divinamente instituída. Nela a ordem natural determinaria seu uso tanto pelos anjos quanto pelos seres humanos, da qual as línguas atuais só conservam frágeis traços deturpados através da gramática e da lógica, afinal, a língua de Deus não poderia errar (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 43). Assim, o quadro proposto até agora ganha contornos mais minuciosos. Para que a gramática, a lógica e a retórica sejam justificadas, é preciso conceber a língua como um sistema imperfeito que só se corrige mediante a lógica (gramática) e as políticas de aliciamento à fala correta (retórica). Contudo, para que a língua apareça como sistema imperfeito, ela deve ser concebida como unidade perdida, como singularidade violada por um erro primordial. Mas isso não é tudo: para que se conceba a ideia de erro primordial, faz-se necessário encontrar o elo perdido da língua, ou seja, sua singularidade primeira, seu estágio adâmico, para que então se possa compreender a necessidade secreta de todas as contingências que a profanam. Esse desvio proposto por Leibniz instaura um problema de grande complexidade para os gramáticos contemporâneos: como poderiam eles justificar o gesto de "corrigir", se o "erro" não tiver uma origem singular e inequívoca? Nestes termos, os gramáticos e os lógicos se colocariam a corrigir a língua sem saber exatamente por onde começar. Em outros termos, para que a gramática exista enquanto sistema de reparação da língua, é necessário que exista uma língua singular primordial. Mas se Pêcheux tiver razão, tudo isso não passa de efeito de retroalimentação (efeito Münchhausen), e neste caso a origem do erro estará no próprio gesto do lógico e do gramático. A principal hipótese desta tese atesta justamente o avesso da lógica e da gramática: o erro não está na língua, o que nos liberta da tarefa de encontrar uma língua adâmica e confere outra roupagem à necessidade lógica da gramática. Não obstante, Pêcheux ainda apresenta mais algumas evidências que apontam para este "imenso trajeto, desde a filosofia de Aristóteles até a disciplina 'científica' que leva hoje o nome de Semântica [...] um trajeto que, em seu próprio desenvolvimento, parece condenado a voltar indefinidamente sobre seus próprios passos". (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 59). 80 2.1.3 KANT, HUSSERL E FREGE: CORRIGIR É NECESSÁRIO A principal preocupação de Pêcheux, neste momento da obra SD, é que diante de uma língua lógica e sistêmica, o sujeito só irrompe subordinado à verdade de seu discurso, e no decorrer da história da filosofia da linguagem, ele passa contraditoriamente a ser fonte e objeto de determinação do discurso, um nó de necessidades que ata e freia o desenvolvimento da semântica, do discurso e da própria noção de sujeito. Uma das variações desta ficção linguística se manifesta sob a alcunha da subjetividade, uma reelaboração das noções Aristotélicas de contingência e necessidade, passando por Kant e seus seguidores e culminando na ciência da semântica do início do século XX. Tal conceito desponta como possível forma de desatar o nó de necessidades que impedia a entrada da semântica e do sujeito na relação que até então se restringia à lógica e à retórica. Tal acesso parecia ser possível mediante a concepção kantiana de inerência do predicado no sujeito, a noção que fundamenta o juízo analítico e o juízo sintético na Crítica da Razão Pura (KANT, 2001), o que se enuncia da seguinte forma: a) Se o predicado pertence ao sujeito, ou seja, se está em relação de inerência necessária, impossível de se dar de outra forma, trata-se de um Juízo Analítico. Neste caso, o juízo emerge apenas na forma de constatação, de análise, pois o predicado está inscrito essencialmente no sujeito. Logo, esta é uma verdade de natureza universal, essencial e redutível, por cálculos lógicos, a uma identidade simples e determinada. Ex.: João é mortal. b) Se o predicado não está em relação de pertencimento inerente ao sujeito tal relação é fruto de um encontro contingente, cujo oposto é possível. Trata-se, portanto, de um Juízo Sintético, ou seja, é através de uma síntese entre dois diferentes, de forma ativa, que tal juízo pode ser enunciado. Neste caso, afirma Kant, trata-se de um ato do sujeito que liga o conceito a algo fora dele, fazendo com que todos os juízos de experiência se tornem Juízos Sintéticos. Ex.: João é professor. Pêcheux lança luz sobre o fato de que, novamente, quando o imprevisto contingente aparece, ele surge como defeito a ser corrigido, e desta vez o caminho é o da subjetividade do Juízo Sintético, um ato do sujeito que impede a reintegração da língua completa. É conhecido o fato de que o projeto de Kant era salvar a ciência do ceticismo que a assolava no século XVII (EVANS, 1984). Este projeto se deu, em grande medida, através da instituição de uma 81 linguagem científica que fosse capaz de enunciar verdades universais e essenciais. Assim, a noção de Juízo Analítico permitiria à ciência emitir juízos lógicos, resguardando-a dos erros através de seu par antinômico, o Juízo Sintético, que por ser um ato do sujeito, estaria passível de relações imprecisas, falsas, equivocadas etc. Diante deste argumento, se a ciência se circunscrever a emitir apenas Juízos Analíticos, ela estará salva da subjetividade do sujeito e dos erros que dele derivam (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 48). Tal noção de subjetividade como ato do sujeito, inaugurada por Kant, tornou-se base comum para diversos teóricos que tentaram viabilizar um método lógico e seguro, localizando fontes de erros e afastando-os. Gottlob Frege, por exemplo, famoso matemático e filósofo alemão do final do século XIX e início do século XX, distingue propriedades essenciais e inessenciais a partir desta mesma separação, ou seja, entre o enunciado lógico e universal (essencial) contraposto ao enunciado emitido por um dado sujeito (inessencial). Edmund Husserl, filósofo checo contemporâneo de Frege, é autor de uma teoria muito divergente da elaborada pelo alemão, menos neste ponto: o necessário e universal independe do sujeito, da história e das condições de produção de um enunciado, ao passo que o contingente e factual é datado, limitado, e passível de erros justamente por que depende do sujeito que o enuncia (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 49). Todavia em Husserl esse percurso teórico ganha novas propriedades. A clássica oposição entre contingência e necessidade é superposta por uma nova oposição, a saber, a que opõe objetividade e subjetividade. Assim, para o pensador checo uma expressão objetiva é aquela cuja significação depende simplesmente de sua realidade fônica, ou seja, pode ser compreendida sem que se tenha que levar em consideração o enunciador nem as circunstâncias da enunciação. Tais expressões objetivas podem ser exemplificadas através de juízos matemáticos, teoremas, demonstrações científicas etc. Já a expressão subjetiva, ao contrário, é ocasional e institui, no momento da fala, uma unidade conceitual que será atualizada e localizada pelo sujeito em um determinado contexto de enunciação (PÊCHEUX, 2009). Husserl argumenta que não se compreende o enunciado "há pedaços de bolos" da mesma forma que se compreende a proposição matemática "há corpos regulares", ou seja, para ele existe uma separação entre o que se enuncia a partir do vivido historicamente e o que se enuncia a partir de essências atemporais. Esta separação, conclui, evita as armadilhas do relativismo cético nas ciências e na matemática (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 50). 82 Mas se Husserl e Frege compartilham das noções de objetividade e subjetividade, eles se opõem quando suas teorias se aproximam das relações que os sujeitos estabelecem com suas representações. Na fenomenologia de Husserl a consciência é uma singularidade: o si e o mundo são uma só coisa, o que conduz assumir que a consciência é o ponto zero de significação das representações. Já em Frege as representações estão meramente ligadas ao sujeito, o que torna o sujeito não mais um criador das próprias representações, mas apenas portador de representações que estão no mundo a despeito do sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 52). Pêcheux aponta que a ideia de Husserl predomina desde Kant, a saber, esta que coloca no sujeito a origem do discurso e das ideias. Tal noção perpassou toda estética romântica, quando se afirmava a prioridade do sujeito criador, o "eu" único que se exprime, a subjetividade que fala a outras subjetividades. Uma consequência já é possível ser vislumbrada: se a subjetividade é causa da contingência, tanto em Kant quanto em Husserl a contingência aparece como necessidade à subjetividade. Em outras palavras, a contingência se torna a necessidade da subjetividade, ou seja, uma causa da sua própria causa, uma nova versão do efeito contraditório de dissimulação das origens, meios e fins (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 53). Assim, o par antinômico objetividade/subjetividade aparece como uma nova roupagem para a velha operação asséptica que separa experiência vivida de conceitos. Nesta versão da separação, o subjetivo aparece como lócus exonerado para as expressões ocasionais, subjetivas, contingentes, imprecisas. Já a subjetividade é o modo de ser de uma consciência que contamina o enunciado com suas próprias impressões e vivências datadas, limitadas e não-objetivas. O erro, portanto, pode ser afastado simplesmente afastando o sujeito: mais uma vez a ciência e sua língua lógica estariam supostamente salvas dos antagonismos justamente por que o antagonismo separa a língua necessária (lógica matemática) da língua contingente (sujeitos históricos). Mas até onde se estende o horizonte que permite entrever este modelo de assepsia da língua? Pêcheux aponta para alguns indícios de que tal sistema mobiliza a linguística contemporânea em grande medida. Ainda no século XX a espinha dorsal da linguística é a separação entre aquilo que é lógico e estável daquilo que é contingente e imprevisível. Em Saussure, por exemplo, o corte estabelecido entre língua e linguagem, separando língua de fala, determina paradoxalmente um reforço das ilusões que fundamentam a divisão entre objetividade e subjetividade. No domínio da semântica isso se dá através de outro par 83 antinômico: criatividade/sistema (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 55). Assim, na linguística saussuriana tal oposição aparece na forma de subjetividade criadora da fala em contraposição à objetividade sistemática da língua. A criatividade subjetiva pressupõe um sistema lógico a ser extrapolado uma sobrecarga do sistema pela fala ainda que o sistema de um dado momento seja fruto de uma força criativa anterior. Logo, o sistema e a criatividade se complementam de forma necessária no sistema língua/fala (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 56). Não nos demoraremos em demonstrar de forma minuciosa de que forma tal oposição aparece também como ponto comum entre semântica estrutural e semântica gerativa: em ambos os casos é supostamente possível aceder a cálculos que permitam determinar o sentido de um enunciado (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 57). Mais do que isso, tanto em Harris (1952) quanto em Chomsky e Mcgilvray (2012), o sujeito falante surge como uma entidade competente a acessar os cálculos do sentido no momento da enunciação. Ou seja, a lógica e a enunciação, embora se separem, podem ser reabsorvidas no momento da fala pelas vias de um cálculo direcionador da boa fala. Assim, identifica-se na linguística contemporânea o mesmo percurso inaugurado por Aristóteles, a saber, o que trata de separar o campo da linguagem científica (um sistema instrumentalizado, objetivo e logicamente estabilizado, além de necessariamente universal), daquela linguagem da conversação cotidiana (datada, subjetiva, contingente e passível de erros), separação esta, aliás, conveniente àqueles que sobrevivem de reparar a língua. A dupla ferramenta de correção aparece através do par lógica/retórica, um recobrimento da fratura que emerge como extremos de uma continuidade, como se lógica e retórica fossem pontas diferentes do mesmo fio condutor (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 59). Dito de outra forma, a história da filosofia da linguagem e, mais contemporaneamente da linguística, embora apresentem em seu bojo pressupostos distintos, se sustentam em um ponto de apoio comum: a oposição asséptica que separa a língua do erro (contingente) da língua do acerto (necessária). 2.1.4 O PARADOXO DA HIÂNCIA: ERRÂNCIA INCORRIGÍVEL Importa ressaltar que a noção de descontinuidade (hiância) aqui abordada não pretende, neste momento, tocar a continuidade (ou não) da linearidade histórica da ciência18. 18 Tal como preconiza Thomas Kuhn (1997). 84 Importa mais trazer à tona a contradição que emerge do confronto de dois diferentes problemas a partir da mesma matriz teórica. A saber, a mesma descontinuidade que fundamenta, para a ciência, a separação da língua científica da cotidiana uma descontinuidade que importa ideologicamente aos produtores de conhecimento científico -, é a mesma que fundamenta a descontinuidade entre causa e efeito, que como visto, coagula a primeira. É que a hiância (descontinuidade) entre linguagem científica e linguagem cotidiana se ampara no continuísmo entre causa e efeito, ou mais especificamente, no continuísmo superposto entre retórica e lógica, que é consistentemente refutado a partir de Hume e Lacan. As doutrinas filosóficas que tangenciam as noções de continuidade e hiância são diversas, distintas, e em grande medida, contraditórias. Diferentes conceitos foram cunhados na tentativa de demonstrar certos funcionamentos que se dão de forma contínua ou, ao contrário, de maneira descontínua. Este par antinômico é muito oportuno quando se pensa errância, nomadismo e sedentarismo, uma vez que a permanência/impermanência em um dado espaço é medida pela potência dos vínculos que se estabelece. Enquanto o errante prescinde totalmente de relações de conexão com um determinado espaço, o nômade constrói vínculos efêmeros e mais ou menos delimitados, ao passo que o sedentário se lança na feitura de laços cada vez mais sólidos com uma porção de espaço cada vez mais determinada. Dito de outra forma, entre o errante e o mundo existe uma intermitência, uma descontinuidade, uma hiância que os separa estruturalmente, condicionando suas relações à contingência efêmera e indeterminada. No entanto, importa detalhar com mais precisão tais noções na intenção de verificar suas possibilidades teóricas na constituição da noção de errância na língua. A saber, a noção de contiguidade (continuidade) parece ter sido a primeira a emergir enquanto conceito. Ela aparece em Aristóteles como um tipo de relação que se estabelece entre diferentes cujos limites se tocam, de onde emerge uma espécie de unidade (ARISTÓTELES, 2002). Tal noção voltou a figurar na filosofia apenas muitos séculos depois, em Leibniz, que cunhou a "lei de continuidade". Nela, a igualdade é uma desigualdade que se desvanece (LEIBNIZ, 1992). Neste caso, a lei de continuidade admite que todas as substâncias do universo possuem, entre si, uma relação de continuidade, ainda que em graus diferentes de continuação em suas séries de operações. De igual forma, a lei da continuidade vale também para os diferentes sistemas de representações. Passando por Kant (2001), Dedekind (2005) e outros matemáticos, a noção de continuidade aparece novamente em Russell (1919, p. 111) da seguinte maneira: 85 O intervalo entre dois instantes quaisquer ou duas posições quaisquer é sempre finito, mas a continuidade do movimento nasce do fato de que, por mais próximas que estejam as duas posições consideradas, ou os dois instantes, há uma infinidade de posições ainda mais próximas, ocupadas por instantes que são igualmente mais próximos. Tais noções geraram debates acalorados entre matemáticos e filósofos, pois delas emerge um caráter paradoxal para a noção de continuidade: a inferência do contínuo no descontínuo. Dito de outra forma, os pensadores continuístas buscaram fundamentar o contínuo no âmago do descontínuo, tentando estabelecer uma relação de igualdade entre diferentes, uma conexão que apaga as diferenças fazendo-os parecer um (ELIAS, 2012). Segundo o filósofo Mach, este procedimento não se limitaria às materialidades, mas também às representações. Se um intelecto investigante se habituou a reunir no pensamento dois fatos, a e b, procurará, no que for possível, manter firme esse hábito mesmo em circunstâncias diferentes: em geral, sempre que a se apresentar, b também será pensado. Esse princípio, que tem raiz na tendência à economia e que se se mostra bastante claro aos grandes pensadores, nós chamamos de princípio da continuidade (MACH, 1976, p. 71). O princípio da continuidade de Mach se fundamenta no princípio de hábito, um movimento ilusoriamente espontâneo que apaga toda dificuldade que impede a passagem de um ponto a outro. A noção de continuidade é usada também por diversos pensadores para pensar a passagem histórica de um momento a outro (HEGEL, 2003). Neste caso, o elo que une os diferentes é a noção de "permanência", que seria tudo aquilo que permanece e se repete no novo, fundamentando uma evolução contínua que parece conectar mesmo as grandes rupturas. Já John Dewey postula o oposto. Para ele, a continuidade [...] significa exclusão da ruptura completa, por um lado, e da simples repetição ou identidade, por outro; nega a redutibilidade do 'mais alto' ao 'mais baixo', como nega as separações e os cortes nítidos. O crescimento e o desenvolvimento de uma natureza viva, que vai da semente à maturidade, ilustra bem o significado dessa palavra (DEWEY, 1959, p. 59). Dessa forma, o problema da continuidade parece ter se fundamentado sobre sua própria contradição: a continuidade não parece fornecer sustentação teórica para justificar a 86 conexão estrutural entre diferentes, afinal a continuidade só pode aparecer no interior do um, do mesmo, da passagem de uma parte do todo para outra que ainda é una/uma com a primeira. Assim, para ligar dois diferentes, é preciso, como apontou Dewey, excluir a divisão fundamental que distingue os distintos no interior de um sistema. O problema da continuidade/hiância, portanto, parece habitar o âmago de todas as relações, o que evoca a própria noção de "relação". O dicionário de filosofia Abbagnano inicia a definição deste termo da seguinte forma: (Relação) - "Modo de ser ou de comportar-se dos objetos entre si" (ABBAGNANO, 2007). Ou seja, sempre que se fala em relação, se fala do modo de ser de uma coisa em relação a outra, distinta da primeira. Logo, quando se coloca dois diferentes em relação, já não se pode falar em continuidade. Este é o ponto de vista desenvolvido por Pêcheux no segundo capítulo da primeira parte de SD (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 61), onde o autor problematiza o surgimento da noção de continuidade no interior da filosofia da linguagem e da linguística. De origem idealista, a noção de continuidade (continuísmo) emerge como aio justificativo que salvaguarda as diferentes relações que se instauram na língua e no discurso, conferindo-lhes uma necessidade lógica supostamente suficiente para apagar a contingência. Tal continuísmo, afirma Pêcheux, se fundamenta principalmente na afirmativa de que o dado da experiência está em relação contigua com a intelecção dedutiva, como se uma fosse causa da outra. A posição filosófica segundo o qual o pensamento e a linguagem provêm primeiramente da experiência e depois da dedução não se limita aos efeitos espontâneos que ela produz na prática do linguista: ela existe sob uma forma filosófica autônoma que traz por sua própria conta sua 'solução ao problema' da relação entre 'teoria do conhecimento' e 'retórica'. O continuísmo espontâneo da Linguística em matéria de epistemologia se apoia, pois, sobre um continuísmo filosófico que vai do 'dado' ao 'deduzido', com o fato preciso de que se pode bem ou mal apreender o dado, e que se pode bem ou mal deduzir (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 61). No campo da epistemologia, o embate entre continuísmo e descontinuísmo aparece na forma de separação ou não entre o conhecimento proveniente da ciência e o resultante do senso comum. Diversos filósofos ainda se lançam na longa discussão que trata de apartar ou interligar os conhecimentos humanos. Trata-se, afinal, de determinar se a natureza dos novos conhecimentos é a mesma que fundamentou os conhecimentos anteriores (o que garantiria uma continuidade necessária entre o saber cotidiano e o científico), ou se, ao contrário, existem conhecimentos que rompem com os anteriores de forma a exigir perspectivas e 87 metodologias tão radicalmente diferentes que se instaura uma descontinuidade irreversível entre os modos de produção de conhecimento (PÊCHEUX; FICHANT, 1971). O continuísmo epistemológico crê que a ciência se desenvolve de modo linear (sempre na mesma direção, "para a frente", o que parece sugerir que não existe possibilidade de retornos) e acumulativo (processos de acumulação onde os novos conhecimentos se somam aos anteriores, o que pode sugestionar que os anteriores não precisam mais ser colocados em questão). Já os descontinuístas, por exemplo Bachelard (1971) e Popper (1982), acreditam na ruptura da linearidade e também na separação entre os diferentes tipos de saber. Para eles o desenvolvimento da ciência apresenta ocasiões de ruptura que apartam de forma irremediável uma fase da outra, quando não as antagoniza. Pareceu-nos sempre cada vez mais evidente, no decorrer de nossos estudos, que o espírito científico contemporâneo não podia ser colocado em continuidade com o simples bom senso, que este novo espírito científico representava um jogo mais arriscado, que ele formulava teses que, inicialmente, podem chocar o senso comum. Nós acreditamos, com efeito, que o progresso científico manifesta sempre uma ruptura, perpétuas rupturas, entre conhecimento comum e conhecimento cientifico, desde que se aborde uma ciência evoluída, uma ciência que, pelo fato mesmo de suas rupturas, traga a marca da modernidade (BACHELARD, 1972, p. 27). Segundo Pêcheux, na perspectiva deste embate se coloca em questão apenas a ordem de recobrimento entre Lógica e Retórica se a primeira se submete à segunda, ou se ocorre o contrário. Enquanto o realismo e o racionalismo instauram descontinuidades nos conhecimentos, o empirismo e o subjetivismo tentam apontar a linearidade que une senso comum e ciência. No entanto, para o autor as duas perspectivas não passam de soluções idealistas para o problema das relações: processos distintos que fundamentalmente tratam apenas da subordinação do contingente ao necessário (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 62). E neste aspecto, todas as teorias de reparação e assepsia da língua fazem uso de um continuísmo mais fundamental, a saber, a continuidade entre causa e efeito. A temática da continuidade abordada por Pêcheux diz respeito, em grande medida, à milenar matéria da causalidade, perscrutada pelo menos desde Aristóteles. Para o filósofo grego, a continuidade da causalidade permite afirmar que todo evento resulta de diversos eventos precedentes, uma grande cadeia ordenada de eventos procedentes da energia criativa do "todo" (ARISTÓTELES, 2002). Assim, há uma continuidade entre os acontecimentos 88 precedentes, consequentes e subsequentes. Há uma relação entre tudo o que veio antes, tudo o que se dá no agora e o que virá a acontecer no futuro, uma grande cadeia contínua de causas. Para o analista do discurso, a continuidade da causalidade foi a solução idealista encontrada pelo realismo e pelo empirismo para tamponar o espaço (hiato) que separa a lógica (teoria do conhecimento, gramática etc.) da retórica (efeito ideológico de condução à língua corrigida), ainda que em cada um dos campos os objetivos e as consequências teóricas tenham aparecido de formas distintas. "Parece que esses dois ramos do idealismo filosófico foram constantemente empregados para fornecer soluções que permitiram impor uma unidade a esses dois espaços heterogêneos, anulando a separação entre eles". (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 62). Dentro dessa causalidade idealista, aponta Pêcheux, a retórica apareceria como consequência da lógica, como se fossem continuidades. Contudo, importa lançar luz sobre uma dificuldade que se desponta diante deste projeto de assepsia: para instaurar uma continuidade entre lógica e retórica, o idealismo precisa apagar o fato de que a natureza da causa é sempre diferente da natureza do efeito, problema que foi detectado por Hume (1998, p. 57), para quem "o efeito é totalmente diferente da causa e não pode, consequentemente, revelar-se nela" e adotado por Lacan (1979). Tal salvaguarda no continuísmo postura mais ideológica do que científica, segundo Pêcheux (2009, p. 62), foi discutida por Hume no século XVIII. O filósofo escocês mostrou que a união contígua de diferentes apresenta uma contradição interna no âmago da relação causa/efeito, ou seja, no âmago da continuidade. Para chegar a esta problemática, Hume desenvolve seu raciocínio afirmando que a investigação humana se dá a partir de dois tipos distintos de relações, a saber, relações entre ideias e relações entre fatos da experiência. Nas relações que se estabelece estritamente entre ideias, as dicotomias ainda aparecem resguardadas. A separação ideia/experiência parece refugiar outras como objetividade/subjetividade, essência/histórico e necessidade/contingência. Assim, as relações entre ideias são aquelas que permitem verdades matemáticas como 2 + 2 = 4, proposições que prescindem de dados empíricos, pois o puro raciocínio supostamente desvela tais verdades essenciais das quais se pode ter absoluta certeza. No entanto, quando Hume aborda as relações entre diferentes fatos da experiência, ou fatos empíricos, ele percebe que tais relações proporcionam proposições que dependem do assentimento de outra relação ideal que recobre as relações empíricas, a saber, a relação de causa e efeito. As verdades científicas estão firmemente fundamentadas nesta metodologia: 89 ciências como matemática, física, química, biologia, engenharias etc., formulam seus conhecimentos usando as relações entre ideias (causa e efeito são apenas ideias) para recobrir as relações empíricas derivadas da experiência. Este recobrimento, no entanto, não se dá na forma de anulação de um no outro, mas de sustentação mútua: Arrisco-me a afirmar, a título de uma proposta geral que não admite exceções, que o conhecimento dessa relação não e, em nenhum caso, alcançado por meio de raciocínios a priori, mas provem inteiramente da experiência, ao descobrirmos que certos objetos particulares se acham constantemente conjugados uns aos outros. Apresente-se um objeto a um homem dotado das mais poderosas capacidades naturais de raciocínio e percepção -se esse objeto for alga de inteiramente novo para ele, mesmo o exame mais minucioso de suas qualidades sensíveis não lhe permitiria descobrir quaisquer de suas causas ou efeitos. Adão, ainda que supuséssemos que suas faculdades racionais fossem inteiramente perfeitas desde o início, não poderia ter inferido da fluidez e transparência da agua que ela o sufocaria, nem da luminosidade e calor do fogo que este poderia consumi-lo. Nenhum objeto jamais revela, pelas qualidades que aparecem aos sentidos, nem as causas que o produziram, nem os efeitos que dele provirão; e tampouco nossa razão é capaz de extrair, sem auxílio da experiência, qualquer conclusão referente a existência efetiva de coisas ou questões de fato (HUME, 1998; 2004, p. 56). Para Hume, usando-se apenas a razão não se pode concluir que certo acontecimento seja causa de outro. Tal inferência só pode ser desenvolvida na medida em que se observa regularidades que fazem supor que um deve ser a causa do outro. Mas qual é a natureza desta crença de que um evento pode ser causa de um efeito? Se um objeto nos fosse apresentado e fossemos solicitados a nos pronunciar, sem consulta a observação passada, sabre o efeito que dele resultara, de que maneira, eu pergunto, deveria a mente proceder nessa operação? Ela deve inventar ou imaginar algum resultado para atribuir ao objeto como seu efeito, e é óbvio que essa invenção tem de ser inteiramente arbitrária. O mais atento exame e escrutínio não permite à mente encontrar o efeito na suposta causa, pois o efeito é totalmente diferente da causa e não pode, consequentemente, revelar-se nela. O movimento da segunda bola de bilhar é um acontecimento completamente distinto do movimento da primeira, e não há nada em um deles que possa fornecer a menor pista acerca do outro (HUME, 1998; 2004, p. 57). Pêcheux aponta que o problema que Hume detectou no âmago da ciência e da ilusão de linguagem pura (separada da linguagem corrompida do senso comum), aparece de forma análoga no movimento conhecido como continuísmo filosófico, que sugere que todo dado empírico pode ser colocado em relação de contiguidade com ideias lógicas (PÊCHEUX, 2009, 90 p. 61). Esta é a salvaguarda que a ciência precisava para unificar (fazer um) os experimentos empíricos e a linguagem científica, como se a passagem de um para o outro fosse orgânica, natural: duas pontas de um mesmo fio condutor. A esta tentativa de unificar os diferentes, apagando sua hiância constitutiva em forma de continuísmo, Pêcheux chama de filosofia espontânea da linguística. Em outras palavras, quando a Lógica (gramática, teoria do conhecimento, filosofia da linguagem etc.) tenta estabelecer uma teoria universal das ideias, ela o faz a partir de operações que se baseiam no continuísmo espontâneo e natural entre diferentes (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 62). Evidentemente, dois não fazem um, e assim as afirmações científicas acerca dos fatos da experiência se tornam fundamentalmente frágeis. Se são as relações ideais de causa e efeito que permitem à experiência encontrar regularidades empíricas, Hume mostra que não há uma relação de necessidade lógica que seja forte o suficiente para tamponar a descontinuidade que reside o âmago da relação entre causa e efeito. Em outras palavras, a pretensão ideológica de expurgar do interior da língua científica os erros que geram tantos embaraços trata-se de uma assepsia fadada ao fracasso. [...] Hume acaba por mostrar que a função da causa implica em um colapso das propriedades usuais de tempo e espaço pelas quais apreendemos algo. Como rotura do tempo, ela impede a síntese entre o antes e o depois (para sempre outro). Como alternância entre o semelhante e o dessemelhante, a causação é um corte que limita a extensão; produzindo uma experiência da presença como fugacidade, sem duração possível, como perda (COSTAMOURA, 2006). Hume soluciona este problema de forma problemática, colocando o fundamento para a passagem da causa para o efeito no hábito derivado das experiências; contudo, importa menos a solução cética do que o questionamento que Hume deixou para a filosofia. Lacan, no seminário XI (LACAN, 1979), voltou ao problema deixado pelo empirista britânico sobre a questão da descontinuidade que reside o âmago da relação causa/efeito. Para o psicanalista francês, só há continuidade em uma cadeia de fenômenos onde a passagem de um ao outro é natural, o que na filosofia do conhecimento é conhecido como Lei. Já a relação causa/efeito é diferente: esta implica a passagem de uma coisa a outra, diferente, o que pressupõe uma hiância que talha a continuidade. A hiância que habita a relação causa/efeito, afinal, é uma pura negatividade indefinível que cessa a continuidade do definível. A relação causa/efeito distingue-se da lei (científica) por não conter em sua passagem uma homogeneidade, mas sim 91 uma heterogeneidade (LACAN, 1979, p. 27). Na Lei não há hiância ou descontinuidade, mas sim uma regularidade que faz parecer que todos os corpos obedecem às leis físicas, diferente da relação causa/efeito: [...] cada vez que falamos de causa há sempre algo de anti-conceitual, de indefinido. As fases da Lua são a causa das marés quanto a isto, é claro, sabemos que neste momento a palavra causa está bem empregada. [...] Isso não quer dizer nada, há um buraco e algo que vem oscilar no intervalo. Em suma, só existe causa para o que manca/claudica (LACAN, 1979, p. 27). Em outras palavras, para aplicar a noção clássica de causa e efeito à uma relação qualquer é necessário, segundo Hume e Lacan, apreendê-la a partir da hiância que reside o núcleo desta relação. Trata-se de uma separação fundamental entre a causa e o efeito, um corte que faz o efeito "para sempre outro" em relação àquilo que o causa. Em outras palavras, para falar em continuidade é preciso falar, em termos epistemológicos, de Leis, e não em causa e efeito: só há causa para aquilo que claudica, para aquilo que apresenta uma falha em seu âmago, logo, não há causa para aquilo que é contínuo, inteiriço e indivisível. A noção de relação implica ao menos dois eventos, não pode haver relação no um. E se há mais de um, dois não podem fazer um: serão para sempre outros, diferentes, condição primeira para que continuem sendo causa e efeito um do outro. Assim, se Leibniz apontou para a necessidade secreta da contingência, a partir de Hume e Lacan podemos falar de uma contingência secreta na necessidade. Se a natureza da causa é diferente da natureza do efeito, a descontinuidade fundamental que habita o âmago da necessidade coagula a própria noção de necessidade, uma vez que sendo "para sempre outro", um determinado efeito poderia ter se dado de outra forma, ou ainda, não ter se dado de forma alguma: contingência. No célebre exemplo de Hume, existe uma hiância no âmago da relação que se estabelece entre os diferentes movimentos de duas bolas de bilhar que se chocam. Só se pode falar em continuidade quando se trata de uma única bola de bilhar com seu movimento contínuo. . Justamente por se tratarem de duas bolas de bilhar, em que uma causa o movimento da outra, é que se faz necessário detectar a diferença intransponível dos movimentos. Há uma falha na continuidade do movimento, uma descontinuidade que faz mancar o movimento que passa de uma bola para outra. É justamente nesse ponto, onde a etiologia não se fecha, que Pêcheux situa o ponto de origem para uma língua histórica, quer seja ela científica ou não. É aí, nesse não fechamento, 92 nessa incompletude incontornável na cadeia contínua, é que a língua perde seu caráter ahistórico, aquela pretensa continuidade necessária que permite a ilusão de uma língua estável em que os sentidos perduram estanques durante séculos: a ficção científica. Pêcheux aponta que Leibniz, Russel, Frege, Husserl e os demais filósofos lógicos tentaram ocultar a presença problemática da descontinuidade no âmago da relação causa/efeito que fundamenta as relações necessárias. Aliás, eles fizeram uso da noção de descontinuidade de outra forma, uma mais conveniente: ao categorizarem as diferentes relações necessárias de um lado, e as diferentes relações contingentes de outro, eles retiram da necessidade qualquer possibilidade de contingência, colocando a descontinuidade para fora da língua lógica. Esta relação contigua entre causa e efeito fundamenta outra relação contigua, a saber, entre lógica e retórica, que por sua vez fornece um método aparentemente seguro para separar ciência e senso comum, além de proporcionar um método que separa, através do exame de marcas internas, se um modo de uso da língua é adequado ou não à produção de conhecimento científico (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 64). Sendo necessária, nãocontingente, a língua científica supostamente pode ser estável, a-histórica, universal, essencial. A língua cotidiana da arte, da religião, da moral e dos costumes, ao contrário, é repleta de contingências que a tornam imperfeita. Diversas soluções lógicas para tal impasse apareceram de diferentes formas na história da filosofia, embora o fio condutor tenha sido sempre o mesmo: a subordinação da contingência à necessidade. Esse movimento possibilitaria, aparentemente, tratar todos os seres e eventos de forma lógico-matemática, aplicando sobre eventos e seres morais, políticos, artísticos e religiosos as mesmas operações que se realiza sobre a linguagem "científica" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 63). Idealmente falando, toda expressão subjetiva, mantendo-se idêntica à intenção de significação que lhe cabe em um momento dado, pode ser substituída por expressões objetivas, tudo o que é pode ser conhecido 'em si' e seu ser é um ser determinado quando ao seu conteúdo, um que se apoia sobre estas ou aquelas 'verdades em si'. Ao ser-em-si correspondem as verdades em si e a estas, por sua vez, correspondem enunciados fixos e unívocos (HUSSERL, 1967, p. 105). Pêcheux então lança luz sobre os entraves que impedem que cada um dos projetos de reparação e assepsia da língua alcancem seus objetivos. Nem a reparação pela gramática, nem a esterilização da língua lógica, tampouco o encobrimento da natureza dos vínculos pode 93 ultrapassar tais obstáculos. De fato, embora culminem em soluções diferentes, as três vias têm como denominador comum o movimento de recobrimento do contingente pelo necessário, um movimento ideológico que busca apagar a oposição entre ciência (conhecimento seguro), de um lado, e senso-comum (ignorância, superstição e mito), de outro. Uma neutralidade oportuna: ainda que pareça conveniente à ciência que exista tal cisão, importa dissimular sua origem, importa fazer parecer que tal divisão/conformidade tenha sua gênese na própria essência da língua (língua original, perdida, fendida, mas corrigida), e não na filosofia lógica da linguagem: é preciso corrigir dissimulando o próprio efeito corretor. No entanto, afirma Pêcheux (2009, p. 65), na semântica do século XX essa suposta neutralidade assume caracteres ainda mais cínicos: ela continua apagando a origem da separação/conciliação através do par lógica/retórica, no entanto ela inverte a importância e instaura a subordinação da lógica em virtude da retórica. Na relação de causa e efeito, dois não fazem um: só há causa para aquilo que claudica, falha. Só há causa para aquilo que é descontínuo, para a relação que manca. E se não existe continuidade entre causa e efeito, mas sim uma descontinuidade fundamental, não só o recobrimento da lógica sobre a retórica está ameaçado, mas também a própria linguagem lógica: esta não poderia chegar a lugar algum sem os dados fornecidos historicamente pela experiência. A hiância, portanto, marca a separação incontornável entre as partes que compõem qualquer relação. Tal separação entre as partes, sendo irreparável, aponta para o caráter contingente das relações, uma contingência secreta no seio do necessário. E a contingência das relações, por sua vez, evidencia o acaso, a casualidade, a possibilidade, a vicissitude e a imprevisibilidade das relações, ou seja, a contingência das relações aponta para o caráter errante que fundamenta o modo de ser de cada uma das partes envolvidas nas relações. As relações de continuidade e necessidade só podem se instaurar na medida em que dissimulam o fundamento errante de cada um dos entes fundadores de uma dada relação. Mas de que forma pode-se ver o funcionamento da hiância na língua? Quais são seus efeitos? No próximo subtópico será apresentada uma prova material da errância contingente que habita o processo de significação, a saber, a prova do silêncio. 2.1.4.1 SILÊNCIO E HIÂNCIA 94 Falar sobre Silêncio ecoa incoerência, empreitada fadada ao colapso. Mais um palavrório? E palavrório a respeito do silêncio? Assemelha-se a lançar luz em um quarto escuro na tentativa de observar a própria escuridão. Figura 1: Silêncio. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida A primeira distinção necessária diz respeito à dimensão do silêncio que será abordada nesta pesquisa, a saber, um silêncio concebido não pela negatividade e passividade em relação à fala, mas sim pela atividade positiva de sua presença, evidência de uma relação fundamental entre o dito e o não-dito. Isso implica afirmar que há silêncio em cada palavra dita, que o silêncio atravessa toda a linguagem e, paradoxalmente, fala. "Quando o homem, em sua história, percebeu o silêncio como significação, criou a linguagem para retê-lo" (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 27). Faz-se necessário salvaguardar tal concepção de silêncio de certo misticismo reprovado por diversos filósofos (NASSIM, 2000), patente nas tentativas de se tomar como ponto de partida outro silêncio, o que supostamente existia antes da humanidade (nem negativo nem positivo), ou seja, antes que o silêncio pudesse ser apreendido em sua relação com a significação. De outro modo, a relação de coexistência entre silêncio e linguagem impossibilita considerarmos linguagem sem silêncio, e da mesma forma, o contrário. Orlandi (2007, p. 23) já resguardava: "Fundador não significa 'originário', nem o lugar do sentido absoluto. Nem tampouco que haveria, no silêncio, um sentido independente, autossuficiente, 95 preexistente". Essa aproximação entre linguagem e silêncio, contudo, nos permite observar suas formas de funcionamento: enquanto no silêncio o sentido, o sujeito e a história se movem errantes, na linguagem impera a sedentarização (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 25). A língua (falada e escrita) é o espaço que imaginariamente é endereçado à sedentarização, onde supostamente ocorre a domesticação da contingência que erra no silêncio. Isso quer dizer que no silêncio os sentidos são livres como as ondas do mar: contingentes, plenas, disformes, inapreensíveis. Quando o silêncio é percebido como significação, o que ele significa não é um 'nada', uma falta, mas sim um 'todo' indefinível, uma pluralidade incontável e indizível de sentidos que emanam da mais plena possibilidade contingente. Quando o silêncio é colocado em questão e potencializado como um possível vira-ser, ele significa 'tudo' não a plenitude na linguagem, mas sim no silêncio. "[...] se pode perceber o silêncio como o estado primeiro, aparecendo a palavra já como movimento em torno. Na perspectiva que assumimos, o silêncio não fala. O silêncio é. Ele significa. Ou melhor: no silêncio, o sentido é" (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 31). Neste aspecto, o momento da fala é a interdição da significação do silêncio: 'tudo' parece ser demais (TFOUNI, 2008). Quando o silêncio é reconhecido como significação é como se a humanidade fosse colocada diante da plenitude do universo, de uma quantidade incalculável de sentidos. Paradoxalmente, a tranquilidade do silêncio se mostra inquietante demais, abrangente demais, indefinível demais. A fala surge, então, como aquilo que visa interromper essa plenitude de sentidos e interditar essa passagem do todo pela significação. A fala é o estabelecimento de vínculos linguísticos e discursivos, no entanto, quando se estabelece um vínculo, deixa-se de estabelecer todos os outros possíveis. Todavia, uma complexa teia de possíveis e impossíveis entram em jogo neste momento. Tomemos, como Tfouni (2008) e Milner (1987), a metáfora dos dados. Antes do interdito, ou seja, antes da fala, o dizer é da ordem do possível e do impossível, concomitantemente. Possível, por que os dados ainda não foram jogados e os números finais são desconhecidos, logo pode ser qualquer um, ou mais: é possível que os dados não sejam jogados. Essa metáfora nos ajuda a entender que, antes do lançamento das palavras, nada foi dito, e tudo pode vir-a-ser-dito. Todos os dizeres estão em forma de potência, aguardando a atualização (materialização) de um; ou mais, é possível que nenhum dizer seja atualizado e trazido para o campo (jogo) das palavras. Por outro lado, antes do interdito o dizer é também da ordem do impossível: impossível significar. Como nenhum corte ainda foi feito no silêncio significante, nenhum sentido ainda foi levado 96 para o campo verbal. De igual forma, a significação no silêncio é também possível e impossível. No silêncio, como já vimos, ela é pura possibilidade contingente, já que nada foi dito. Mas também é impossível, por que se os dados não forem jogados (se a palavra não for tomada), o dizer será um possível eternamente aguardando seu devir, ou seja, impossível de ser atualizado. O possível e o impossível coexistem também o processo de significação pós-interdito. Agora que a palavra foi tomada (dita, escrita, cantada, pintada etc.) e um enunciado foi emitido na tentativa de significar, é impossível esta palavra não-ser ou vir-a-ser-outra: ela se atualizou, se materializou. Já a significação é da ordem do possível, justamente por que pela hiância algum silêncio escorreu para o interior do verbal. Ou seja, apesar da tentativa de se estabelecer um único sentido para aquele enunciado, é sempre possível ao sentido não-ser, vir-a-ser-outro, ou vir-a-não-ser. Em outras palavras, não é por que se disse que se significou. E se significou, não é necessariamente impossível que os sentidos não venham a ser outros, ou incompletos, ou equivocados. Por isso, o corte do interdito pode ser interpretado como o lançador (ou o lançamento) dos dados na metáfora acima: trata-se de uma necessidade estrutural e lógica da linguagem, ou seja, é preciso que algo faça com que o silêncio deixe de ser apenas a possibilidade de significar (apenas o vir-a-ser do discurso, sempre em suspenso), colocando-o em movimento e fazendo com que a significação se instaure. Nossa proposta é que é o corte do interdito que põe a linguagem em movimento e faz com que a significação se instale (TFOUNI, 2008, p.358). O momento da tomada da palavra é, portanto, o interdito que Pêcheux e Gadet (2004) apontaram como sendo a interrupção da passagem plena e contínua da significação total: "o campo do interdito na linguagem é, assim, estruturalmente produzido pela língua, do interior dela mesma" (GADET; PÊCHEUX, 2004, p. 30). Quando os dados são lançados, já não há mais como um resultado não vir-a-ser, e de todos os resultados contingentes um emergirá necessariamente. Dito de outra forma, quando os dados são lançados, a contingência vira necessidade, e a multidão de possibilidades torna-se uma única realidade. Quando a fala surge, toda potência incontrolável do silêncio é cortada e fracionada numa tentativa de ordenar, compreender e sedentarizar os sentidos. Deste momento em diante a totalidade da significação passa a ser interditada pela fala para então se tornar calculável (ORLANDI, 2007), logo, menos intimidante e aterradora. 97 O ato de falar é o de separar, distinguir e, paradoxalmente, vislumbrar o silêncio e evita-lo. Este gesto disciplina o significar, pois já é um projeto de sedentarização do sentido. A linguagem estabiliza o movimento dos sentidos. No silêncio, ao contrário, sentido e sujeito se movem largamente (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 27). O átimo da fala (o momento da tomada da palavra) é, portanto, o evento de interdição da plenitude da significação do silêncio. É a fala que coloca em movimento a significação e interdita a passagem da totalidade dos sentidos para dentro do dito, ou seja, é a fala que coloca em movimento também o silêncio quando diz uma coisa e silencia uma infinidade de outras possibilidades que não cabem no já-dito. Se no silêncio a significação é pura possibilidade contingente (um pleno vir-a-ser, uma perfeita potência de significação, uma suspensão perene dos sentidos), o momento da fala é o esforço feito para que a significação se instale, pouse e tente fazer morada (TFOUNI, 2012). A língua tomada em sua prática é, portanto, o processo de realizar sucessivos cortes no silêncio na tentativa de que a significação fique cada vez menor, fragmentada, particularizada, e consequentemente, mais clara, eficiente e sedentarizada. Para que a linguagem diga algo (para que se instaurem sentidos linguisticamente), é preciso considerar que esta necessita de um lugar 'outro'. Esse lugar 'outro' ou 'diferente' é o silêncio. Ora, para que a linguagem signifique, ela precisa atualizar sentidos desse silêncio, e ao mesmo tempo, precisa recusar alguns sentidos, pois não é possível dizer dois ou mais enunciados ao mesmo tempo. É assim que lemos a definição do silêncio como espaço diferencial da linguagem (TFOUNI, 2008, p.357). Este lugar outro para onde escorre a significação é evidência da existência de uma hiância (separação) entre silêncio e linguagem. Tal separação se dá nos seguintes temos: ao mesmo tempo em que algo é enunciado, algo é silenciado. Neste caso, o signo falado se distingue e se opõe radicalmente ao signo silenciado. Fica patente que Orlandi está tratando de três momentos do silêncio: um antes, um durante e outro depois do dito. No silêncio anterior ao dito, todos os sentidos são passíveis de serem postos em relação e vir a ser dito. No momento da tomada da palavra, o silêncio se mostra como a contraparte do enunciado falado, uma oposição positiva, que fundamenta o dizer. Logo depois do enunciado dito, o silêncio aparece como tudo aquilo que não foi dito, silenciado. O produto de tal equação se mostra no final: depois do dito, o sentido no silêncio é igual à totalidade da significação menos 98 um (o enunciado dito). O dito, portanto, só significa na medida em que destotaliza a significação plena do silêncio, fazendo-lhe um corte, uma hiância que separa irremediavelmente o sentido. A noção de interdito pode ainda ser expandida. A saber, não apenas o momento da fala interrompe a contingência e instaura a necessidade, mas também o estabelecimento de uma língua qualquer produz efeito semelhante. É natural da língua tentar estabelecer vínculos sedentários entre significantes e significados e se organizar através uma gramática, de uma sintaxe, de uma semântica etc., afastando e opondo-se a uma incontável possibilidade de processos outros de significação. Neste movimento de interdição da plenitude dos sentidos, a língua revela sua faceta mais contraditória. Por ser o recurso usado para reter a totalidade dos sentidos, a língua não pode, ela mesma, carregar em si essa totalidade de sentidos. Ela também é um mero corte no silêncio, apenas um processo de interdição; logo, a língua é a aparência (o visível) de algo maior e muito mais profundo, como as ondas que dão forma e limite às profundezas do mar e interditam sua aparência total: servem de muro, divisa. Ora, se a onda dá contornos ao mar, a onda não pode conter a magnitude e a profundeza do mar: apenas o envolve. Ou seja, a língua, justamente por interditar a significação plena, se defronta com certa impossibilidade: ela é impossível de "tudo dizer" (GADET; PÊCHEUX, 2004, p. 32). "A linguagem supõe, pois, a transformação da matéria significante por excelência (silêncio) em significados apreensíveis, verbalizáveis. [...] Ao tornar visível a significação, a fala transforma a própria natureza da significação" (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 33). A língua, quando interdita as possibilidades e determina o resultado do lançamento dos dados, se depara com uma verdade fundamental: a impossibilidade de fazer passar a totalidade do sentido (que residia no silêncio) para o recorte cerzido pelo dizer. O real da língua, ou seja, sua condição incontornável, é sua impossibilidade de tudo significar (GADET; PÊCHEUX, 2004, p. 7). Se mal interpretada, esta afirmação pode parecer desproporcional. De fato, o corte operado pela língua na significação do silêncio diz respeito a uma pequena parcela dos sentidos: a língua, enquanto corte, significa muito pouco diante da imensidão de significados que habitam o silêncio. No silêncio, portanto, não existem vínculos que sedentarizam os sentidos, ao passo que a fala se dá justamente atando (ilusoriamente) significantes e significados, bem como relacionando signos opostos. Uma contradição se evidencia nesta passagem do silêncio para o dito: o interdito corta atando, separa instituindo supostas uniões. Em outras palavras, a 99 sedentarização da palavra se dá justamente através de um corte no silêncio que "costura" um significante a um significado, diminuindo a dimensão e as possibilidades do sentido. O interdito, enquanto corte, separa e opõe silêncio/dito, uma hiância que aparta irremediavelmente o lugar da possibilidade errante em oposição ao lugar do dizer sedentarizado. No entanto, o lugar da sedentarização também é marcado por espaços lacunares por onde emana silêncio para dentro da língua. Esta hiância inexorável revela o fracasso do projeto de significação plena através da linguagem (TFOUNI, 2008). Assim: "o silêncio, mediando as relações entre linguagens, mundo e pensamento, resiste à pressão de controle exercida pela urgência da linguagem e significa de outras e muitas maneiras" (ORLANDI, 2007, p. 37). Esse escoamento de silêncio para o interior da língua, através da hiância que separa e opõe língua/silêncio, bem como significante/significado e signo/signos, é a presença do impossível na palavra, da não-estabilização plena dos sentidos, ou seja, é a cissura por onde a contingência e o possível emanam do silêncio e se instalam no interior da palavra e da língua. Assim, por mais que se façam cortes no silêncio em sucessivas e intermináveis tomadas de palavra, explicações, aulas, sermões, comícios, palestras e discussões, o silêncio que emana pela hiância traz consigo o impossível para o interior da linguagem: é a impossibilidade de tudo comunicar, a impossibilidade da clareza plena e da estabilização completa. Percebemos que o silêncio [...] não pode se atualizar como um todo: tem que sobrar algo não atravessado pela linguagem (um resto). E, para haver dizer, é preciso que não se diga tudo, é preciso o interdito. O silêncio é o espaço do múltiplo, é a condição de vir-a-ser do discurso (TFOUNI, 2008, p.361). No silêncio a significação é plena errância contingente, o lugar-outro onde os vínculos ainda não foram estabelecidos. O silêncio é o lugar do não-conhecimento, do non-sense, e por isso mesmo fora da história. Evidentemente, para que haja linguagem faz-se necessário sedentarizar a errância do sentido no silêncio, pois no silêncio o sentido simplesmente "é", sem laços, amorfo (SAUSSURE, 1995). Para que o sentido se materialize na linguagem, o interdito realiza um corte na plenitude do sentido no silêncio, e a significação ata, tão forte quanto puder, um significante a um significado, sedentarizando-os, diminuindo suas possibilidades contingentes e lançando-os na história. Por isso, importa neste momento analisar de forma mais demorada a forma com que a língua se lança no projeto de construção de vínculos entre significante e significado, bem como entre signos e outros signos, numa 100 tentativa de estabilizar e domesticar a contingência errante do silêncio. Estes vínculos serão buscados na teoria do arbitrário e do valor do signo, em Saussure. 2.1.4.2 A HIÂNCIA NO/DO SIGNO EM SAUSSURE Desde Aristóteles a causalidade, e mais especificamente a "causa primeira", constitui o princípio da dedução de todos os efeitos possíveis. Esse conceito persistiu desde então chegando até a filosofia moderna, fundamentando tanto doutrinas idealistas quanto materialistas e mecanicistas. Tal noção de causalidade parece forçar a linguística a inquirir sobre a origem da língua, daquilo que a causou. Evidentemente não existem registros que narram a origem das línguas, levando historiadores e pensadores da linguagem a exaustivas investidas idealistas muito mais parecidas com mitos que fatos. Saussure, de outra forma, ao invés de buscar a causa da língua no passado, o faz olhando para a própria materialidade da língua, para seu próprio funcionamento: na linguística saussuriana as causas da formação dos signos são o arbitrário e o valor. Este abandono do projeto de buscar a origem das línguas olhando para o passado foi um importante passo que tornou possível avançar nos fundamentos dessa ciência (BARRETO, 2010). Este movimento saussuriano de colocar a causa da língua no arbitrário e no valor se mostra de grande importância para esta tese. A partir de tal corte se pode chegar à seguinte articulação: se entre a causa e o efeito da língua existe uma hiância, por serem de naturezas distintas (dois não fazem um), a contingência secreta da causalidade se torna ainda mais patente diante de uma origem arbitrária que vale pela diferença. Torna-se latente, por outro lado, que o movimento de colocar a origem da língua em seu próprio funcionamento permite a Saussure atribuir-lhe um caráter sistemático, "minuciosamente e, poderíamos dizer, matematicamente delineado, de modo que conceitos como significante e significado cheguem a um considerável nível de abstração" (SANTOS; CHISHMAN, 2015). Não obstante, a tese de que uma hiância (descontinuidade) reside no âmago da língua é atestada pelo próprio Saussure, quando ele indica que os elementos que constituem o signo são marcados pela "oposição que os separa, quer entre si, quer do total de que fazem parte" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 81). O pensador genebrino está apontando para o fato de que existe uma separação (e oposição) fundamental entre significante e significado, mas também entre um 101 signo e outro, uma hiância atestada pela noção de arbitrariedade do signo bem como pelo valor do signo. Inicialmente a filosofia de Saussure se dá de forma negativa (ou não empírica), ou seja, a língua como um sistema isolado de signos é apreendida muito mais pelo que ela não é. Essa possibilidade de apreensão, ainda que negativa, só cabe ao conceito de língua, uma vez que sua causa (origem) está na própria língua, no próprio sistema: na arbitrariedade do signo. Esta estrutura origem de si mesma faz da língua um sistema homogêneo e minimamente apreensível, diferente da linguagem, cuja complexidade faz com que não se possa determinar sua causa. A língua, para Saussure, é passível de ser delineada como um sistema: como implica validação social, ela é um sistema que circunscreve o que é comum a totalidade dos falantes de um dado grupo; assim, o sistema da língua como instituição social está propenso a ser compreendido, corrigido e instrumentalizado. E o caminho Saussuriano para salvaguardar a instrumentalização e o bom uso da língua se dá através de uma nova separação, a saber, uma descontinuidade entre langue (língua) e parole (fala). Esta última é vista como uma parte acessória e "mais ou menos acidental" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 22), o que permite conceber a língua como lado estrutural da linguagem, isolável, analisável, instrumentalizável. "Vale frisar que tal sistema linguístico é considerado autônomo, ou seja, independente do uso individual, já que, para o teórico genebrino, língua é aquilo que o falante utiliza de forma passiva, sem que reflita ou intervenha sobre tal estrutura" (SANTOS; CHISHMAN, 2015). Seguindo o fio condutor que nos guiou até aqui, a saber, a correção e a assepsia da língua, chegamos em um Saussure que compreende a língua como sistema que, por não ter causalidade externa, mas interna, concebe a língua como um sistema linguístico cuidadosamente delimitado, fechado e cabal em si mesmo, como se o mito de Babel jamais tivesse corrompido seu próprio mito Adâmico. Este sistema é como um [...] tesouro depositado pela prática da fala em todos os indivíduos pertencentes à mesma comunidade, um sistema gramatical que existe virtualmente em cada cérebro ou, mais exatamente, nos cérebros dum conjunto de indivíduos, pois a língua não está completa em nenhum, e só na massa ela existe de modo completo (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 21). Este sistema é constituído por signos, estruturas mentais tangíveis que podem ser registradas por meio da escrita, ou compartilhada através da fala (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 32). Os termos significante e significado indicam "a oposição que os separa, quer entre si, quer do 102 total de que fazem parte" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 81). A definição de significante, segundo Saussure, é a de uma imagem acústica que "pode traduzir-se numa imagem visual constante. [...] cada imagem acústica não passa [...] da soma dum número limitado de elementos ou fonemas, suscetíveis, por sua vez, de serem evocados por um número correspondente de signos na escrita" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 23). Logo, a língua é como "o depósito das imagens acústicas, e a escrita a forma tangível dessas imagens" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 23). A língua, enquanto sistema de signos, permite identificar os elementos fundamentais da função significante da língua, ou seja, os elementos que são funcionais dentro de um sistema que cria signos distintos, separados ainda em seu berço psíquico. Em Saussure, o fundamento psíquico das imagens acústicas se evidencia pela possibilidade da construção de enunciados estritamente mentais, que fazem uso do significante psíquico que pode (ou não) ser materializado em palavras escritas ou faladas (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 80). Logo, como não é necessário materializar essa impressão para fazer uso da língua, o significante é delineado como uma "imagem interior no discurso", sendo a fala e a escrita apenas formas de manifestação da imagem acústica. A manifestação do significante se dá sempre de forma linear. O significante "[...] desenvolve-se no tempo, unicamente, e tem as características que toma do tempo: a) representa uma extensão, e b) essa extensão é mensurável numa só dimensão: é uma linha" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 84). Em outras palavras, o significante é a contraparte do signo que se refere a uma imagem acústica em um contexto psíquico, sendo realizável sonoramente e também registrável pela escrita. Já o significado é a outra face do signo, que inicialmente aparece definido como "conceito". Esta noção aparece também, em Saussure, como "fato de consciência", sendo responsável por suscitar a imagem acústica (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 19). O significado é considerado a parte mais abstrata do signo, o que justifica Saussure caracterizar o significante como "material". Diante do projeto de sistematização da língua, fica patente o motivo pelo qual o autor confere realce ao significante, que é mais sistematizável e descritível que o significado. Em Saussure o significado tem que ver com a noção de "ideia", de conceito que define e explica o referente a partir do significante. Assim, o significante "elefante" teria como significado algo como "grande mamífero terrestre, paquiderme da família dos proboscídeos, de pele rugosa, com grande tromba flexível e defesas de marfim que chegam a pesar mais de 103 setenta quilos". Mais adiante, em sua obra, a noção de significado aparecerá na forma de significação: Tomemos, inicialmente, a significação tal como se costuma representá-la e tal como nós a representamos [...] Ela não é [...] mais que a contraparte da imagem auditiva. Tudo se passa entre a imagem auditiva e o conceito, nos limites da palavra considerada como um domínio fechado existente por si próprio. (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 133). No entanto, como já observado anteriormente, a característica do signo mais cara a esta tese é a da diferença, da descontinuidade entre as partes que o constituem e que se apresentam na forma de arbitrariedade e valor. Por ser a junção do conceito com a imagem acústica, o signo foge "à vontade individual ou social, estando nisso seu caráter essencial" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 25). No signo, a relação que se estabelece entre significante e significado é designada principalmente pela "oposição que os separa, quer entre si, quer do total de que fazem parte" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 81). Assim, é preciso que socialmente exista um consentimento, uma convenção social, para que a o significante "cadeira" possa estar ligado à ideia de "assento de costas para uma só pessoa". Tal convenção social impede, por exemplo, que um indivíduo passe a colar o significante "cadeira" à ideia de "grande mamífero terrestre, paquiderme da família dos proboscídeos, de pele rugosa". Eis a contradição do signo: embora a força de tais convenções não possa ser desfeita com facilidade, nada assegura que tais relações sejam continuidades, extensões de um no outro. Embora o signo seja compreendido como moeda de duas faces, onde significante não existe sem significado, nada justifica que um determinado significante tenha relação de contiguidade com um dado significado. Como a relação entre significante e significado é arbitrária, imotivada, conclui-se que não há nenhuma relação natural entre as duas partes da relação, e por isso mesmo são independentes e interdependentes ao mesmo tempo. Não há um significante verdadeiro, qualquer um pode ser válido, a depender do contexto e do grupo social que toma aquela palavra. A noção de arbitrariedade impele a assumir que um significante não está "atado" a um significado equivalente, o que por sua vez induz a outra assunção: a de que um signo pode descosturar sua relação e se reconstituir de outra forma. Apesar da complexidade do movimento, um significante pode enlaçar-se a outro significado em um dado momento. Logo, a união que resulta de um signo não é imutável, um significante não está atado de forma necessária a um significado, o que permite que uma língua ganhe vida e se transforme. Em 104 Saussure significante e significado jamais se equivalem. A hiância que separa a ideia da forma não indica proporcionalidade, ao contrário: indica separação, descontinuidade. Um não corresponde ao outro, são dois "entes" distintos atuando na significação. Segundo Bouquet (1997), o arbitrário aparece em dois níveis. O primeiro diz respeito à arbitrariedade interna do signo, manifesto na descontinuidade existente entre o que o significante e o significado, imotivados um em relação ao outro (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 83). O segundo nível concerne ao arbitrário sistêmico, concernente ao corte realizado pelo signo a partir da noção de massas amorfas, ou seja, entre um signo e suas materializações. Este nível atesta a arbitrariedade da relação que se estabelece entre o conceito de um determinado signo e as diferentes formas possíveis de manifestação significante que lhe podem ser atribuídas. A noção de descontinuidade, portanto, aparece de forma notória na constituição interna do signo, em sua arbitrariedade contingente. No entanto, tal hiância contingente aparece também na exterioridade do signo, ou melhor, na relação que um signo estabelece em relação a outros, relações de diferenças relativas, ou seja, só existem como efeitos da união de diferenças já negativas em si mesmas. Nesse ponto surge, a partir de Saussure, a necessidade de se particularizar a arbitrariedade do signo da noção de valor, a medida que reveste um signo na presença de outros. Foi só no último dos três cursos que Saussure expôs a Teoria do Valor. Essa concepção teórica fundamenta o funcionamento da língua enquanto sistema, juntamente com as noções de arbitrariedade do signo, linearidade do significante, a delimitação do significado e do significante como parte fundamental do signo linguístico e a separação/oposição entre "língua", "linguagem" e "fala". O signo não existe sozinho, ele só existe como parte de um sistema e nas relações construídas a partir dele. Sozinho, um signo jamais poderá ser tomado em relação direta, de contiguidade, entre coisa e palavra. Não há nada no signo que permita essa ligação direta entre as coisas do mundo sensível e seus respectivos nomes. Assim, quando se observa tanto o conceito da palavra quanto seu aspecto material, "jamais um fragmento de língua poderá basear-se, em última análise, noutra coisa que não seja sua não-coincidência com o resto" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 137). a "teoria do valor" foi exposta por Saussure principalmente durante o último dos três cursos que ele ministrou no início do século XX, na Universidade de Genebra. Essa elaboração teórica saussuriana consiste em um princípio fundamental para o funcionamento da língua enquanto sistema, e só pôde ser desenvolvida por Saussure a partir da delimitação de todos os 105 outros aspectos e princípios linguísticos por ele expostos nos cursos, tais como a arbitrariedade do signo, a linearidade do significante, a definição do significado e do significante como constituintes do signo linguístico e a distinção entre língua, linguagem e fala. O conceito de valor concerne tanto à noção de significação quanto à de sentido, aparecendo ora como sinônimos ora como contrapartes. Neste texto não nos deteremos em discutir se tais noções devem ou não serem tomadas como sinônimos, tampouco quando elas deveriam se aproximar ou se distanciar. Ressalta-se apenas que no CLG valor e significação são termos aparentemente distintos, onde o primeiro aparece como um processo do segundo. No processo de significação, o sentido de uma palavra é constituído pelo "concurso do que existe fora dela", ou seja, a palavra "está revestida de uma significação e de um valor e isso é coisa muito diferente" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 134). [...] a língua, como outros tipos de signos, é, antes de tudo, um sistema de valores, e é isso que estabelece seu lugar no fenômeno. Com efeito, toda espécie de valor, mesmo usando elementos muito diferentes, só se baseia no meio social e na força social. É a coletividade que cria o valor, o que significa que ele não existe antes e fora dela, nem em seus elementos decompostos e nem nos indivíduos (SAUSSURE, 2002). Enquanto sistema, os termos de uma língua são de alguma forma solidários entre si, constituindo uma interdependência negativa: um signo é a contraparte dessemelhante de outros signos. Isso implica dizer que a significação de um signo depende da diferença que ele estabelece em relação aos demais, afinal, o sentido de uma palavra só irrompe em presença antagonista de outras palavras. Logo, o valor de um signo pode passar por viragem, a despeito da salvaguarda de sua significação, apenas deslocando-se o sentido de outro signo com o qual o primeiro tivesse relação. Na relação que se estabelece entre valor e significação, o valor aparece como materialização da significação através da relação que os signos mantém entre si, pela situação de interdependência negativa entre os termos (BASÍLIO, 2013). A língua é "um sistema em que todos os termos são solidários e [que] o valor de um resulta tão somente da presença simultânea de outros" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 135). Os valores são "definidos não positivamente por seu conteúdo, mas negativamente por suas relações com os outros termos do sistema. Sua característica mais exata é ser o que os outros não são" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 136). 106 Se tomarmos o signo como termo isolado, podemos dizer que há nele um conceito (significado/significação) que é a contrapartida de uma imagem acústica. Por outro lado, se pensarmos no sistema, veremos que os signos, relacionados uns aos outros, produzem um valor que seria a contrapartida dos termos coexistentes na língua. Portanto, Saussure faz a diferença entre sentido (significação), como pertencendo à ideia de signo, isolado do sistema; e valor, enquanto dependente do sistema (NÓBREGA, 2004, p.103). O valor é um componente do sentido, contudo, ao mesmo tempo em que o sentido depende do valor, permanece distinto dele. Em outras palavras, na significação o valor de um signo procede da presença e da ausência de signos, na intersecção dos eixos sintagmático e paradigmático. O valor in absentia19 do signo, se divide inicialmente em valor interno valor sistêmico. O valor interno se desenvolve em três tipos de valores: o significado como valor do significante, o significante como valor do significado e, finalmente, significado e significante um como valor do outro (NÓBREGA, 2004). A noção que coloca o significado como valor do significante é a que comumente se compreende como valor, mas este seria apenas um dos aspectos do valor. No segundo caso há uma inversão: coloca-se o significante como valor do significado; Bouquet (1997) afirma que isso é possível em certos casos analíticos, ainda que se exija um exercício de reflexão mais profundo. O terceiro caso, quando ambos servem de valor para ambos, funcionaria dentro da lógica de que significante e significado são imanentes quando a língua está em movimento. Já o valor sistêmico se divide em dois: valor fonológico e valor semântico. Tais divisões são meramente metodológicas, uma vez que tais valores aparecem de forma amalgamada no momento da fala. Por outro lado, o valor in presentia20 diz respeito à oposição entre as unidades no eixo sintagmático que se evidenciam no interior de uma frase ou de um texto. Neste caso, cada unidade adquire seu valor em oposição às unidades que a circundam. Dito de outra forma, uma determinada palavra é aquilo que as outras não são, e por isso significa o que as outras não significam. O valor de uma palavra subordina-se à relação com os signos que se situam ao redor dela. A significação, na constituição interna do signo, aparece inicialmente como contraparte da imagem acústica, mas depois emerge como contraparte de outros signos coexistentes, ou seja, na constituição externa do signo. Esta valoração externa do signo se dá sobre um 19 Do latim, "em ausência". 20 Do latim, "em presença de". 107 princípio paradoxal: ao mesmo tempo em que o valor aparece como algo que pode ser trocado por outra coisa (como uma moeda de um real pode ser trocada por um pão), ele pode também ser comparado com outras coisas semelhantes (moedas de cinquenta centavos, vinte e cinco centavos etc.). Neste aspecto, a noção de valor como contraparte se dá concomitantemente nas duas relações: existe uma hiância (descontinuidade) que separa um signo do outro, contudo, uma separação que confere interdependência às partes, que as liga por semelhanças comparáveis ou por diferenças trocáveis (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 162). Dito de outra forma, na significação o valor in presentia do signo não é imputado por uma simples diferença, mas por dois tipos distintos de diferenças. Logo, para delinearmos o valor de uma palavra é preciso levar em consideração as demais palavras pelas quais ela poderia ser trocada bem como trazer à tona as palavras mais ou menos semelhantes com as quais ela possa ser comparada. No enunciado "Minha solidão se alegra com essa elegante esperança" (BORGES, 2007), o termo solidão vale pela diferença que emerge da possibilidade de trocas (por exemplo, por termos como companhia, amizade, casa, performance etc.), mas também pela diferença que se estabelece por comparações (por exemplo, isolamento, exílio, misantropia etc.). Assim, a noção de valor linguístico decorre de três tipos de relações: uma interna (entre significante e significado), uma relação em ausência e outra em presença de outros signos. Esta dupla contrapartida do signo implica o processo de significação em duas linhas de orientação: uma horizontal, sintagmática, e outra vertical, paradigmática. Segundo Godel (1969, p. 72), em Saussure as duas formas de diferenciação do signo aparecem ao mesmo tempo na significação: o valor de uma palavra decorre de certa possibilidade de troca ou comparação (eixo paradigmático) e de uma relação linear estabelecida no interior de uma frase (eixo sintagmático). Em ambos os eixos, o signo tem seu valor imputado pela diferença estabelecida com outros signos, estejam eles presentes ou não no enunciado. É na hiância entre eles que se sustenta a relação negativa que condiciona seus valores. Quando se estabelece algum tipo de vínculo entre eles, quando são colocados um na presença do outro, os signos assumem concomitantemente dois tipos de agrupamentos: "cada unidade não vale e não realiza sua função senão pela combinação que lhe é dada [...] cada elemento não dispõe livremente do seu sentido, mas somente por combinação" (GODEL, 1969, p. 232, tradução nossa). 108 Até agora vimos a negatividade do sistema linguístico, ou seja, a pura diferença que faz parecer que a língua seja desprovida de substância: "Quer se considere o significado, quer o significante, a língua não comporta nem ideias nem sons preexistentes ao sistema linguístico, mas somente diferenças conceituais e diferenças fônicas resultantes deste sistema" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 139). Mas isso não é tudo o que Saussure atesta sobre o signo e o processo de significação. Logo depois Saussure alerta que o signo, tomado em sua totalidade, é um fato positivo: "dizer que na língua tudo é negativo só é verdade em relação ao significante e ao significado tomados separadamente: desde que consideramos o signo em sua totalidade, achamo-nos perante uma coisa positiva em sua ordem" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 139). É somente enquanto algo positivo que o signo pode adquirir caráter material, afinal, ele é também composto por um significante, uma materialidade positiva que, quando posta em relação em relação com os demais, não apresenta apenas uma diferença, mas também uma oposição. Em outras palavras, em um primeiro momento a relação entre os signos é caracterizada pela diferença, mas posteriormente a noção de diferença se condensa, se torna mais radical e definitiva: se torna oposição. Os diferentes não necessariamente se opõem, podem, aliás, conviverem pacificamente em um dado espaço. Já a noção de oposição acentua a distância que se estabelece entre diferentes signos. Na oposição está implícita certa rejeição, certa força ativa que repele um signo do outro, e os afasta. Assim, diferença e oposição constituem o signo, mas a primeira noção se sustenta na negatividade, enquanto a segunda se estabelece na positividade do signo (SILVA et al., 2016). "[...] limitado no total de ideias positivas que ele é no mesmo momento, chamado a concentrar em si mesmo. Ele só é limitado negativamente pela presença simultânea de outros signos, e é, portanto, inútil procurar qual é o total de significações de uma palavra" (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 72). Das reflexões decorrentes do pensamento saussuriano, a mais cara a esta tese é a que atesta que o sistema, por ser constituído por diferença e oposição, é um sistema aberto. Um signo não se apoia no outro, um se distingue do outro, se opõe e se afasta do outro, logo, sempre podem entrar outros signos no sistema. Ademais, é preciso assumir que é muito maior o que não está no sistema (o impossível) do que o que lá está: ele se organiza para fora, abrindo, e não para dentro, fechando. A oposição positiva entre os signos atesta, afinal, a materialidade positiva da hiância que separa um signo de outro, ao mesmo tempo em que assegura o caráter errante do signo em relação aos demais signos. 109 A ausência de vínculos que reside o valor do signo é percebida no caráter contingente das relações que se estabelecem. Os valores continuam a ser inteiramente relativos justamente por que o vínculo que liga ideia e som, significante e significado, e um signo e a outros signos, é radicalmente arbitrário. Se assim não o fosse, o valor apareceria como força absoluta, necessária e encerrada sobre si mesma. Mas é justamente porque o contrato social que estabelece o sistema é arbitrário é que os valores são fundamentalmente contingentes e relativos. Do ponto de vista da causalidade, em Saussure tem-se que assumir que a causa do signo é a arbitrariedade e a diferença opositiva: há uma hiância fundamental que separa referente, significante e significado, a mesma descontinuidade que separa e opõe um signo de outro signo. No dizer, essa hiância que separa e opõe cada parte do signo é estrutural e instransponível; nestes termos, a noção de hiância se torna mais pertinente que as noções de corte e descontinuidade, pois a primeira diz respeito a um estado estrutural de distância, e as outras duas se referem a gestos secundários de fratura de algo que antes foi inteiro. A língua nunca foi inteira, como uma plenitude adâmica estilhaçada pelo erro. Só no silêncio o sentido é pleno, na língua ele emerge separado do significante e do referente uma separação entre partes que jamais foram "um". É nesta separação entre as partes, e na movência mais ou menos contingente entre elas, que sustentamos a hipótese da errância: na impossibilidade de unidade, ou melhor, nas andanças do significado em relação ao significante e ao referente. No entanto uma contradição surge no horizonte do signo e da significação: se por um lado é a língua que coloca a significação em movimento, ela o faz estabelecendo vínculos que em alguma medida sedentarizam os movimentos e as possibilidades do vir-a-ser dos sentidos. 2.1.5 DA ERRÂNCIA À ILUSÃO DE SEDENTARIZAÇÃO Fundamentados nas noções anteriormente elencadas, passamos, neste subtópico, a falar em termos de errância, nomadismo e sedentarismo em relação ao uso que se faz da língua em diferentes campos do conhecimento. Neste texto, tal designação será sustentada pelo fio condutor que Pêcheux estabeleceu nos primeiros capítulos de Semântica e Discurso, que se sintetiza na compreensão do efeito Münchhausen em relação à problemática da instrumentalização ideológica e discursiva do erro. Esta noção pode ser formulada da seguinte forma: somente quando se concebe uma língua perfeita perdida, maculada pelo erro, é que se 110 pode conceber a possibilidade e a necessidade do aperfeiçoamento corretivo da língua de que se dispõe para fazer ciência, religião, pedagogia, política, direito etc. Este fenômeno é nomeado como efeito Münchhausen21, por Pêcheux, por causa do personagem que se sustenta no ar puxando-se a si mesmo pelo cabelo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 32). Em outras palavras, é o efeito que instaura justificativas para a existência de um campo teórico a partir do problema que ele mesmo inaugura. A língua imperfeita é muito conveniente para quem sobrevive de corrigi-la. A principal hipótese desta tese, fundamentada na Análise do Discurso pecheutiana, parte de um princípio diferente. A noção de língua perfeita, uma espécie de língua adâmica original, é substituída por uma língua fundamentada na errância, na pura movência. O fundamento errante da língua, atestado pela hiância que separa cada ente do signo, não comporta a ideia de língua perfeita, tampouco a ideia de erro fundamental, por que na ausência de vínculos não existem erro e acerto, perfeição e imperfeição a língua apenas "é". Como visto nas seções anteriores, são os vínculos que possibilitam o juízo (analítico ou sintético), e somente no juízo a posteriori é que se pode aplicar erro e acerto, correto e incorreto, bom e mal. Nestes termos, pode-se acrescer a Nietzsche (2005), quando o filósofo alemão instiga seu leitor a ir "para além do bem e do mal22", um novo convite errante: um retorno "para aquém do bem e do mal". Evidentemente nem errância, tampouco sedentarismo, podem ser concebidos em plenitude. A errância, antes de mais nada, é puro movimento sem vínculos duradouros, sem pontos duradouros de parada. Mas se fosse possível conceber os elementos constitutivos fundamentais da língua (significante, significado e referente) despidos de toda e qualquer relação, estaríamos falando de uma não-língua desprovida, inclusive, de movência. O significante é a contraparte necessária do significado, no âmago do signo. No entanto é a significação que retira um dado significante de sua inércia e o correlaciona com um significado que também estava despido de movimentos, estabelecendo um sistema de valor que vigora pela oposição entre os signos. A significação é um processo, só se dá no movimento, na relação em fluxo entre língua e história (ORLANDI, 2007). Logo, a própria língua é o processo de 21 Mais adiante, na mesma obra, o efeito Münchhausen aparecerá novamente como modelo teórico para outro funcionamento discursivo, a saber, o efeito ideológico de interpelação. 22 Nesta obra, Nietzsche faz uma apologia à ultrapassagem dos valores morais e éticos, em direção a uma vontade de potência que está além do bem e do mal. 111 colocar o signo em movimento, conferindo-lhe relações arbitrárias que constituem um sistema de valor. Sentido é "relação a", daí sua opacidade, daí sua força motriz (ORLANDI, 2005, p. 25). Seguindo o mesmo fio condutor conclui-se que a sedentarização plena da língua também é da ordem do impossível, uma ilusão. A significação não suporta a possibilidade de uma relação acabada, final e estanque. A arbitrariedade do signo atesta justamente este princípio: o da contingência, o da relação estabelecida enquanto algo que pode, a qualquer momento, deixar de vir a ser. Isto implica que a língua, em sua constituição fundamental, não comporte a possibilidade de uma perfeição perdida por um erro primordial tal como propôs Leibniz e os lógicos. A errância é o puro movimento que se dá através de encontros exíguos. O errante caminha sobre o mundo encontrando, atando e desatando laços com seu caminho e tudo mais que o bordeja. Diferente do nomadismo, na errância cada ponto existe apenas para ser desfrutado e abandonado, e por isso não importa que se adquira conhecimentos sobre onde esteve, onde está, tampouco onde estará. Neste aspecto, os caminhos não são planejados, são caminhados, deixados para trás, e por isso na errância não há erro nem acerto, há encontros, relações contingentes que duram o tempo da contingência. Diferente do errante, o nômade tenta estabelecer vínculos imanentes com seu caminho, projetos que podem culminar em sucessos ou fracassos. E ainda mais distante do errante está o sedentário, aquele que tenta estabelecer relações cabais e totais com o espaço, diminuindo as possibilidades do sujeito e do próprio mundo que ele supostamente instrumentaliza. Como vimos, a errância fundamental é evidenciada pelo nonsense que emerge no seio do sentido, pelo silêncio que escorre pelos poros da palavra, pela contingência secreta que destotaliza a necessidade causal. Ela é vista na impossibilidade de tudo dizer, de tudo registrar, nos furos que fazem errar (falhar e vagar) história e sujeito: tal movência se materializa em tênues encontros que propiciam sentidos quebradiços. A errância da língua se justifica pela descontinuidade da relação, pela hiância que se estabelece entre os elementos constitutivos da língua, e como veremos adiante, na lacuna que separa os elementos constitutivos do discurso. Por hora importa ressaltar que significante, significado e referente23 23 Saussure privilegiou a relação entre significante e significado em detrimento do referente (BOUQUET, 1997). Logo, o uso desta noção impõe certos cuidados para que ela não ultrapasse os limites da materialidade linguística e discursiva. 112 são colocados em movimento por uma relação contingente que pode, a qualquer momento, se desfazer. A rigor, a língua nunca erra, nem pode ser considerada uma "ferramenta imperfeita", a menos que ela seja posta em relação a um dado projeto de vinculação e estabilização (HENRY, 2013). Pêcheux discorre sobre esta construção de vínculos e projetos arquitetados pela filosofia em seus mais diversos subcampos, bem como nas ciências das linguagens. Estes vínculos aparecem, segundo o autor, principalmente na forma de apagamento do contingente por intermédio do necessário. Dito de outra forma, a sedentarização (a tentativa de cristalização e naturalização dos sentidos) emerge como movimento de apagamento da errância através de procedimentos de estabilização lógica. "O resultado dessa subordinação é a possibilidade aparente de tratar todos os seres (incluindo os que pertencem ao domínio da moral, da religião, da política etc.) como análogos a seres lógico-matemáticos e aplicar a seu respeito as mesmas operações" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 63). Este processo de sedentarização da língua, através da lógica e da retórica (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 64), pode ser visto com certa clareza no projeto de assepsia inaugurado por Gottlob Frege, ou seja, o projeto de sedentarização das possibilidades inerentes à contingência através de uma determinação causal necessária. Neste procedimento de instrumentalização da língua, a necessidade deveria recobrir até mesmo a língua cotidiana, contingente. Seu projeto permite antever algumas consequências: "Haveria ciência que não fosse uma ciência histórica? Toda teoria do dever, toda ciência do direito, não ficariam abaladas? O que restaria da religião? As ciências da natureza seriam taxadas de poesia, da mesma forma que a astrologia ou a alquimia" (FREGE, 1971 apud PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 63). Como visto, o ataque científico à contingência da língua coloca também como alvo a história, além da própria noção de sujeito e do efeito de interpretação que tange sua relação com a língua. O projeto Fregeano, ou mais, o projeto da lógica e da filosofia da linguagem, é o projeto de estabelecimento de vínculos que perdurem no tempo, que prescindam da história, que se inscrevam de forma universal e atemporal no universo das essências necessárias e causais. Trata-se, portanto, de um projeto de sedentarização das relações estabelecidas entre significante e significado no interior de um sistema de valores igualmente estanque. Trata-se, ainda, de apagar a hiância da errância através da construção de vínculos perfeitos, imperturbáveis, universais e a-históricos. 113 Sedentarização é manipulação que dissimula a história, é seu apagamento enquanto efeito transformador. Este gesto se funda sobre o estabelecimento de vínculos que desejam trapacear a história, apagando a contingência e instaurando uma suposta necessidade de que aquilo que "é" assim o foi e assim será. A sedentarização é a obliteração da movência, é o embotamento das possibilidades, é o estancamento do vir-a-ser. A história, no pensamento fregeano, é a letra escarlate, o emblema que atesta o fracasso da língua usada por um determinado campo de conhecimento. A história é sua fenda fundamental, a origem da imprecisão e da ilusão: é a marca da contingência e deve, para Frege, ser expurgada. Logo, para a lógica a assepsia da língua científica deve começar pela depuração da contingência e da história. Mas tal assepsia seria possível? Pêcheux se dedica a analisar alguns enunciados morais considerando os efeitos de correção e subordinação do contingente ao necessário (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 63), o que nos importa sobremaneira na medida em que pretendemos observar o processo de estancamento das possibilidades da errância através da sedentarização dos vínculos. Seja a frase: 'Os homens que fogem são covardes'. Vemos que as dificuldades suscitadas pela interpretação dessa frase incidem: 1) sobre a relação entre extensão e compreensão a propósito da noção de 'homem que foge'; 2) sobre a distinção entre propriedades essenciais e propriedades contingentes; 3) sobre a natureza do vínculo que une as propriedades 'fugir' e 'ser covarde'. (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 64). Estas três dificuldades apontadas por Pêcheux são suficientes, segundo ele, para mostrar o quanto a linguagem científica está distante do ideal de Teoria Universal das Ideias, concebido pela lógica de Port-Royal, de forma que o projeto idealista de chegar a um universo de enunciados supostamente fixos e unívocos que recubram a contingência não tem mais densidade que um sonho (PÊCHEUX, 2009). Seus ataques ao projeto idealista de uma língua a-histórica não se findam por aí. Para Pêcheux, não somente a língua cotidiana é impossível de ser recoberta pela necessidade, mas também as noções aritméticas e matemáticas. Para ele, tais vínculos irretocáveis pertencem a um mundo imaginário que sugerem essências universais, 'ideias primeiras' que se assemelham à ideia de Deus para os cristãos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 65). A malícia, afirma Pêcheux, está no apagamento do funcionamento dos vínculos: 114 o que vem primeiro não é o vínculo, mas a hiância. O vínculo, portanto, não pode ser essência justamente por é criação à posteriori. A noção de triângulo, exemplo dado por Pêcheux, é um protótipo perfeito do projeto científico/matemático de conceber e aplicar ao mundo essências que partem do sujeito, e não da natureza. "Creio que o triângulo, se fosse dotado de palavra, diria também que Deus é eminentemente triangular, e o círculo, que a natureza de Deus é eminentemente circular" (SPINOZA apud PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 65). Pêcheux afirma que tal ilusão antropomórfica do mundo é construída por um idealismo "calcado no modo do 'como se' (fazer como se as operações designadas fossem definidas em qualquer parte)" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 65). Esta expressão, "como se", usada pelo autor, por mais ingênua que pareça, é o perfeito protótipo da ilusão cínica e pragmático-cética do sonho realista-metafísico que separa e corrige a língua científica e a língua cotidiana. Trata-se do jogo ordinário de palavras usado para explicar algo material a partir de uma ideia (idealismo). Tomemos o seguinte enunciado como exemplo: "este triângulo é 'como se' fosse a materialização da essência do triângulo". Neste caso, o único vínculo que existe entre um determinado triângulo material e a ideia supostamente essencial de triangulo é da ordem do "como se", ou seja, não passa de efeito de linguagem que não tem relação alguma com o mundo material. A "essência" não existe fora da língua. Não existe um triângulo essencial que prescinda de alguma língua para se materializar. E se ele é da ordem da língua, está sujeito às contingências da história. Pois é justamente esse o projeto de Frege e seus seguidores: apagar da língua seu caráter histórico, movente, contingente errante. A ciência, segundo os lógicos e filósofos da linguagem, precisa de uma língua que não sofra derivas de sentido, que proporcione essências atemporais e universais (FREGE, 2009). O próprio empiocriticismo24, afirma Pêcheux, não deixa de ter relação com a filosofia espontânea da linguística, mas através de mesclas, combinações engenhosas de empirismo, nominalismo, pragmatismo e criticismo: idealismo, afinal (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 65). Esta análise se torna importante na medida em que o conhecimento da realidade objetiva, justamente por se fundamentar na lógica e na retórica, desvanece a própria realidade objetiva. "A convicção subjetiva, e não a certeza objetiva, é o único fim acessível a toda ciência" (KLEINPETER, 1905 apud PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 66). 24 Empiocriticismo R. Avenarius chamou sua "filosofia da experiência pura", que ele concebeu como ciência rigorosa, análoga às ciências naturais positivas, portanto excludente de qualquer metafísica (ABBAGNANO, 2007). 115 As ciências se tornam assim 'instrumentos cômodos', 'modos de falar' pragmática e retoricamente eficazes, não sendo essa eficácia senão o reflexo da eficácia dedutiva e classificatória do que podemos, então, chamar a retórica lógico-matemática. A 'ciência' se reduziria, pois, enquanto tal, aos procedimentos do raciocínio lógico e se confundiria, assim, com o sistema de operações (eventualmente muito complexas e logicamente muito abstratas) que pode ser aplicado a qualquer catálogo de fatos, objetos ou acontecimentos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 67). Dito de outra forma, o fazer científico não passa de um conjunto de procedimentos administrativos eficazes, uma "grande máquina de classificar" (PÊCHEUX, 2009) que ordena o mundo. Trata-se, portanto, de sedentarização do mundo através da sedentarização da língua. Nomear, classificar e organizar são procedimentos que, quanto mais se especializam e se aprofundam, mais diminuem a possibilidade errante do objeto, do acontecimento, do sujeito, enfim. A ciência, com sua pretensa língua perfeita, corrigida pelos nobres defensores da lógica e da retórica, se torna então uma grande máquina de sedentarização do mundo. Quando a ciência categoriza em gênero e espécies, ou quando estabelece leis físicas ou regras de biologia molecular, ela está apagando toda distinção entre o que é ciência e o que não é, uma vez que a totalidade das coisas e dos eventos do mundo podem ser submetidos aos procedimentos lógico-administrativos. As ciências "humanas" não escapam de tal projeto. Quando a sociologia pensa em classes sociais, ou quando a linguística estabelece regras gramaticais, estamos falando de sedentarização. Compreender o mundo é meramente aplicar procedimentos administrativos e lógicos sobre ele, é sedentarizá-lo, recobri-lo de uma necessidade lógica que apaga sua errância contingente. Esta necessidade lógica, no entanto, não passa de coerção discursiva (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 68), pois é na língua que residem todas as essências, é na língua que habitam as classificações, catalogações e ordenações. Este percurso teórico proposto por Pêcheux implica uma importante inversão de paradigma em relação às filosofias da ciência (lógica, filosofia da linguagem, epistemologia etc.): o olhar do analista do discurso vê a necessidade lógica não como fundamento e causa da ciência, mas sim como efeito do projeto de estabelecimento de uma língua perfeita onde se possa calcar as verdades científicas. Em outros termos, primeiro vem a ciência, depois a demanda por uma língua corrigida. O que está em jogo, nas palavras de Pêcheux, é que as essências se tornam efeitos da linguagem científica, inscritas e submissas à história, a 116 posteriori; as essências, portanto, não são ideias universais e atemporais a priori. Logo, a ciência não descobre essências, ela concebe e aplica essências através de jogos discursivos que tornam certos enunciados "inabaláveis". Podemos resumir nossa investigação pela seguinte constatação: as teorias empiristas do conhecimento, tanto quanto as teorias realistas, parecem ter interesse em esquecer a existência das disciplinas científicas historicamente constituídas, em proveito de uma teoria universal das ideias, quer tome ela a forma realista de uma rede universal e, a priori, de essências, quer tome a forma empirista de um procedimento administrativo aplicável ao universo pensado como conjunto de fatos, objetos, acontecimentos ou atos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 69). O caráter ideológico do Efeito Munchhausen se evidencia aqui, novamente: ambos os percursos teóricos apontados por Pêcheux exploram a existência das disciplinas científicas mascarando os traços fundamentais dessa existência, apagando qualquer distinção entre ciência e não ciência. Husserl é o protótipo perfeito dessa estranha circularidade que parece conduzir toda filosofia da linguagem desde Aristóteles, "em que se descobre que pela matematização geométrica, talhamos para o mundo vital uma vestimenta de ideias bem ajustadas" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 69). Inicialmente, mas não apenas isso, podemos dizer que a sedentarização se dá através da matematização da linguagem, conferindo-lhe uma roupagem aparentemente compreensível, corrigível, instrumentalizável. A errância, enquanto estado efêmero de relação, se dá sempre na história, em um dado momento, segundo certas condições de produção de sentido. A sedentarização teórico-matemática, ao contrário, acoberta os conhecimentos científicos produzidos e disponibilizados em um dado momento histórico. À sedentarização interessam as essências ditas universais e atemporais, lógicas e necessárias. O efeito dessa necessidade sedentária não se limita à natureza e às suas leis, ela envolve também as condições pelas quais o ser humano, como parte da natureza, se aparta da própria natureza para então poder entrar/ser colocado em relação com ela (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 70). Essas relações do ser humano com a natureza, conhecidas em Marx como "forças produtivas" e "relações de produção", que fundamentam a história e a luta de classe, também são sedentarizadas pela linguagem lógico-matemática da ciência. E é justamente por isso que se pode falar em sedentarização ideológica da língua, da história e do sujeito através das materialidades que lhes coloca em relação. 117 A sedentarização, enquanto efeito ideológico de estabilização do sentido e de controle do sujeito, funciona nos moldes de uma representação imaginária, fictícia. Não se pretende, nesta tese, medir o grau de sua força ou fragilidade, mas não se pode evitar tangenciar sua natureza inacabada e imprecisa. Inacabado, aqui, não quer dizer que em algum momento o conhecimento humano tenda a alcançar o espírito absoluto (Hegel, 2003), mas sim que o caráter fundamental do conhecimento humano, justamente por que se dá na língua, é a impossibilidade de tudo dizer, a mesma impossibilidade que impede o total recobrimento do mundo através de uma realidade sustentada por uma língua lógico-matemática. Tais verdades essenciais e atemporais obliteram os saberes historicamente constituídos, mesmo aqueles produzidos pelas disciplinas científicas que se ancoram, de alguma forma, na história. Para Pêcheux, este apagamento não é ingênuo, ainda que se deva negar certa instrumentalização totalmente deliberada. Para o autor, tais máquinas de classificação universal e atemporal atuam sob o efeito material de uma "necessidade cega", conceito que ele toma emprestado de Engels para explicar o estado do conhecimento científico que se tem num dado momento histórico, mas que se supõe a-histórico. Essa necessidade cega fica patente quando se toma um dado conhecimento "essencial" que foi ultrapassado. No decorrer da história da ciência, incontáveis "verdades" foram "descobertas" e tornadas essências universais e atemporais para serem descartadas posteriormente. Como, inquire Pêcheux, um estado atual de conhecimento pode comportar a possibilidade de se transformar um conhecimento histórico em essência atemporal? Somente através de uma ilusão que se instaura através dessa necessidade cega que dissimula o impensado no cerne do pensado, ou seja, um movimento lógico-retórico de dissimulação do desconhecido da natureza e das relações humanas no interior de sistemas complexos que "explicam" e sedentarizam a natureza e as relações do ser humano com ela, isto é, suas forças produtivas imersas em conflitos de classes (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 70). A ciência lógico-retórica tenta levar seu rolo compressor até os confins do pensamento humano, categorizando, sedentarizando e instrumentalizando natureza, sociedade e discurso. E a força que "ata" as relações de forma atemporal e universal é a ideologia, que embora se dê como representação imaginária, se materializa nas relações que se dão entre homem, natureza e sociedade. Dito de outra forma, a ideologia é aquilo que sedentariza através de recursos históricos justamente enquanto apaga o caráter histórico de tal mecanismo. A ideologia, nesses termos, se dá na forma de extensão do materialismo à história, um gesto científico de 118 domesticação da própria história. O materialismo histórico de Marx, no entanto, atesta que a) o mundo exterior material existe independente do sujeito; e b) o conhecimento objetivo deste mundo é produzido no desenvolvimento histórico da produção de saberes25. Logo, para Pêcheux, fundamentado no materialismo, o próprio desenvolvimento (não-acabamento, nãoestagnação) do conhecimento é uma prova da transitoriedade das essências ditas atemporais e universais, uma efemeridade obliterada pela necessidade cega que dissimula o desconhecido no interior do conhecido, como se as condições reais de existência fossem equivalentes às relações imaginárias que os indivíduos estabelecem com o conhecimento que possuem em um dado momento histórico. 'Se o conhecimento nasce da ignorância' (Lênin), é exatamente por que, em cada momento histórico dado, as formas ideológicas não se equivalem, e o efeito simulação-recalque que elas engendram não é homogêneo: as formas que a 'relação imaginária dos indivíduos com suas condições reais de existência' toma não são homogêneas precisamente por tais 'condições reais de existência' são distribuídas pelas relações de produção econômicas, com diferentes tipos de contradições políticas e ideológicas resultantes dessas relações. Em um momento histórico dado, as 'formas ideológicas' em 25 Existe uma terceira definição, que será omitida nesta tese. Justificando: neste momento de "Semântica e Discurso" Pêcheux parece se lançar em um paradoxo que ele mesmo apontará na retificação do anexo III (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 269). O autor, ao buscar as definições de materialismo, traz uma terceira definição, fundamentada em uma tese contraditória de Lênin que atesta que o "conhecimento objetivo é independente do sujeito". Pêcheux corrige este posicionamento, no anexo III, afirmando, a partir de Althusser, que o sujeito "funciona sozinho", justamente por que é sujeito, indivíduo interpelado em sujeito pela ideologia. Isso é de vital importância para esta discussão. Ora, das páginas inaugurais deste livro até pelo menos a página 70, ele está tratando do pensamento erigido por pensadores que transformaram o universo científico; a hipótese leninista de "conhecimento independente do sujeito", no entanto, dá margem para se atestar que o conhecimento erigido por Frege tenha se dado a despeito de Frege. No entanto, a contradição maior se dá pelo fato de que o autor dedicou quase uma centena de páginas criticando o projeto científico de estabelecimento de essências universais e atemporais para depois incorrer na mesma tentação, a de aderir a uma concepção de ideologia que existe a despeito do ser humano, tão essencial, universal e atemporal quanto as verdades necessárias que ele atacou de forma contundente até então. Importa ressaltar que esta concepção não aparece em Marx: "O Conhecimento, na concepção marxista, é propriamente uma produção do pensamento, resultado de operações mentais com que se representa - e não repete, reproduz ou reflete - a Realidade objetiva, suas feições e situações" (PRADO JUNIOR, 1973). Pêcheux lança mão desta possibilidade de "conhecimento independente do sujeito" para fundamentar sua concepção de sujeito interpelado pela ideologia, apontando uma inversão no primado da ideologia em detrimento do sujeito, que nasce mergulhado em dizeres que já existiam antes dele, e por isso mesmo o assujeitam. Esta noção foi retificada no anexo III, de Semântica e Discurso. O contato com Lacan, no entanto, o levou a assumir que "algo manca" no sujeito, algo fura e destotaliza o próprio efeito da ideologia sobre o sujeito: "ficava contornado, com toda a obstinação filosófica possível, o fato de que o non-sense do inconsciente, em que a interpelação encontra onde se agarrar, nunca é inteiramente recoberto nem obstruído pela evidência do sujeito-centro-sentido" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276). É por isso que omitimos a terceira definição de "materialismo" da página 71 do mesmo livro. 119 presença cumprem, de maneira necessariamente desigual, seu papel dialético de matéria-prima e de obstáculo com relação à produção dos conhecimentos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 74). O conhecimento ocidental capitalista se emoldurou de essências universais e atemporais. Tabela periódica, física quântica e mecânica, períodos geológicos, algoritmos digitais, judicialização do cotidiano etc., estas são apenas alguns dos indícios do triunfo do projeto de sedentarização lógica através da língua. A gramática e a sintaxe se tornaram essências atemporais e universais necessárias, normalizando e normatizando a tomada da palavra nos mais diferentes campos de conhecimento. Diante de tal projeto, as disciplinas de ensino e correção da língua se tornaram, então, indispensáveis, presentes em todos os níveis escolares, servindo de critério de exclusão em universidades, empregos, palanques e púlpitos. A língua essencial deve descartar sotaques, jogos de linguagem, regionalismos e usos descompromissados da língua. A língua atemporal exige engajamento, um certo senso de dívida e gratidão com a exatidão da "boa fala", tornando-se crivo ideológico que separa classes e autoriza a fala. A ilusão de estabelecimento de vínculos atemporais e universais sedentariza a significação através de um empreendimento de catalogação que busca adequar perfeitamente o mundo em essências necessárias, compreensíveis e instrumentalizáveis. O conhecimento ocidental moderno se torna, portanto, uma máquina de sedentarização (controle dos sentidos) que apaga a errância e sobrescreve-a com necessidades que ilusoriamente apagam o erro e instauram uma língua correta, ajustada e eficiente. Como já visto, este apagamento da errância estrutural da língua decorre de uma instrumentalização que supostamente, e ilusoriamente, consegue atar as partes da língua de forma definitiva. É justamente este o projeto da filosofia da linguagem de Husserl, Frege, Carnap e outros: proporcionar uma língua sólida o bastante para que se possa fundar, de forma segura e definitiva, as verdades da ciência. Dessa forma, para o par filosófico lógica/retórica importa sedentarizar veementemente as relações entre significante, significado e referente apagando a errância que constitui tais vínculos. Fica manifesta, portanto, a importância da noção de relação, para esta tese. A respeito disso Althusser propôs importantes reflexões que podem auxiliar-nos a defender a errância da língua. Em seu texto sobre o materialismo do encontro (ALTHUSSER, 2005), o autor fala da natureza dos encontros (relações) que sustentam a língua. Importa, de saída, destacar que em sua tese também é imprescindível a noção de descontinuidade (hiância), elemento negativo 120 que separa as partes de uma relação. A noção de relação implica partes distintas colocadas em encontro; mas para continuar sendo relação, tais partes precisam continuar separadas, distintas, "não-um". Se fosse possível o "um", já não falaríamos em termos de relação, mas de continuidade. E justamente por que algo ainda continua a separar é que tais encontros podem ser desfeitos. Assim, causa e efeito são atributos do "não-um", daquilo que se coloca em relação: uma coisa não pode ser causa de si mesma, só pode ser causa daquilo que é distinto. No "um", como vimos, não há causalidade, logo, não há movimento: o "um" é o objeto de desejo da sedentarização. A respeito da problemática da relação, Althusser remonta à antiga concepção filosófica de materialismo do encontro. Neste percurso uma corrente subterrânea do materialismo do encontro emergiu trazendo contribuições importantes ao campo de estudo da linguagem e da sociedade. Esta noção aponta para o caráter contingente das relações, e vem subverter inclusive certas concepções materialistas ainda vigentes: Para simplificar as coisas, digamos por ora: um materialismo do encontro, portanto, do aleatório e da contingência, que se opõe, como pensamento totalmente outro, aos diferentes materialismos recenseados, inclusive o materialismo correntemente atribuído a Marx, Engels e Lenin, o qual, como todo materialismo da tradição racionalista, é um materialismo da necessidade e da teleologia, isto é, uma forma transformada e disfarçada de idealismo (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 9). Althusser então retoma a metáfora do Clinamen, o nome latino que Lucrécio atribuiu ao desvio imprevisível de átomos na doutrina atomista de Epicuro. O clinamen é um desvio infinitesimal, 'tão pequeno quanto possível', que acontece 'não se sabe onde, nem quando, nem como', e que faz um átomo 'desviar' de sua queda a pique no vazio e, quebrando de maneira quase nula o paralelismo em um ponto, provoca um encontro com o átomo vizinho e, de encontro em encontro, uma carambola [carambolage] e o nascimento de um mundo, ou seja, de um agregado de átomos que provoca, em cadeia, o primeiro desvio e o primeiro encontro (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 10). Althusser está falando em termos de materialismo das relações, e para isso estabelece interlocuções com diversos filósofos que perpassaram tal temática. Não nos ateremos em esquadrinhar todos estes diálogos, que passam por Epicuro, Heidegger, Maquiavel, Espinosa, Hobbes e Rousseau. Importa, antes, analisar a concepção althusseriana de relação, ou seja, o materialismo do encontro, da "pega". Nesta metáfora, antes do encontro não há só o nada, há 121 sim uma chuva de átomos separados por um nada. Antes do encontro, portanto, as materialidades são disformes, átomos dispersos que nada constituem. "Antes da formação do mundo, não existia nenhum sentido, nem causa, nem fim, nem razão, nem desrazão" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 10). Nesta perspectiva, a origem do mundo e das realidades possíveis devem-se a desvios infinitesimais: são os desvios, e não a razão ou a causalidade, que estão na origem dos encontros26. O desvio, segundo Epicuro, é contingente antes e depois do encontro. Ora, antes do encontro, o desvio é da ordem daquilo que pode ou não acontecer. Se o encontro ocorre, o desvio então dá lugar à pega, que pode ou não durar. Se durar, tal encontro então se torna a base de qualquer realidade que se construa sobre ele. É só então que a realidade, a necessidade e o sentido podem ser erigidos. Porém o encontro pode não ocorrer, e então toda uma série de realidades deixa de ocorrer e se perde no vazio. E se ocorrer, o encontro pode ser efêmero, e então uma série de realidades vem à existência para logo depois se perder, igualmente, no vazio. O encontro não cria nada na realidade, apenas permite que a mesma exista. O mundo pode ser chamado o fato consumado, no qual, uma vez consumado o fato, se instaura o reino da Razão, do Sentido, da Necessidade e da Finalidade. Mas esta consumação do fato é somente um puro efeito da contingência, dado que depende do encontro aleatório dos átomos como consequência do desvio, do clinamen. Antes da consumação do fato, antes do mundo, há somente não-consumação do fato, o não-mundo, que é somente existência irreal dos átomos (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 11). Colocados nestes termos, os problemas filosóficos deixam de ser enunciados da razão e da origem das coisas e se tornam a própria teoria da contingência, da submissão da necessidade à contingência. A filosofia deixa de ser análise e passa apenas a ser constatação: houve encontro e pega de elementos que permitiram determinadas realidades, ou não houve, ou houve brevemente. Qualquer questão de origem, essência e causalidade necessária seria, então, descartada. Althusser então constata um movimento de pensamento semelhante em Heidegger (2002). Assim, o mundo é, para nós, um 'dom', um 'fato de fato', que não escolhemos, e que se 'abre' na nossa frente na facticidade de sua contingência, e para além 26 Neste aspecto, é preciso estabelecer com mais clareza que a "relação" é um tipo de encontro. Ainda que não se possa afirmar que toda relação seja contingente, como o é a "pega", não se pode negar que o "nada" que separa o átomo no encontro seja da mesma natureza que o "nada" que separa as partes de uma relação (ALTHUSSER, 2005; ABBAGNANO, 2007). 122 mesmo dessa facticidade, no sentido de que não é só uma constatação, mas um 'ser-no-mundo' que comanda qualquer Sentido possível. (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 12). No entanto um questionamento atravessa a argumentação de Althusser: seria possível instrumentalizar a queda dos átomos, gerando, propositalmente, um desvio que culmine em um encontro previsto? Esta discussão o autor estabelece a partir das noções propostas por Maquiavel (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 12). O filósofo italiano se preocupava com o atomismo que separava a Itália em incontáveis regiões independentes e conflitantes, propondo um encontro que pudesse dar forma ao estado italiano, uma unidade que imitasse Espanha e França. "Em suma, um país atomizado, do qual cada átomo cai em queda livre sem encontrar seu vizinho. É necessário criar as condições de um desvio e, portanto, de um encontro, para que 'pegue' a unidade italiana" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 12). O "Príncipe", de Maquiavel, é justamente uma tentativa de estabelecer as condições necessárias para se instrumentalizar o encontro entre os átomos italianos, conferindo-lhes uma existência dotada de sentidos unificados. Pode parecer que Maquiavel está apenas tratando de filosofia política, mas nas entrelinhas existe ali também uma filosofia do encontro e das relações, pensado a partir da política. Este viés político revela uma faceta importante da "pega": ela atesta a possibilidade positiva de instrumentalização dos desvios, ou seja, assume a possibilidade de intervenção política na contingência dos encontros, causando certa ilusão de domesticação da casualidade pela causalidade. Neste aspecto, Althusser é categórico: Jamais um encontro bem-sucedido e que não seja breve mas dure garantirá sua duração ainda no dia seguinte em lugar de desaparecer. Do mesmo modo que poderia não ter acontecido, pode não acontecer mais: 'a fortuna passa e muda'. [...] Em outras palavras, nada garantirá jamais que a realidade do fato consumado seja a garantia de sua perenidade: bem pelo contrário, todo fato consumado, mesmo eleitoral, e mesmo tudo aquilo que dele possa se tirar de necessidade e de razão, não é mais do que encontro provisório, porque, dado que qualquer encontro é provisório, mesmo quando dura, não há nenhuma eternidade nas 'leis' de nenhum mundo, nem de nenhum Estado (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 14). Por mais que se possa admitir certa operacionalização dos desvios, esperando encontros que podem ou não se consumar, Althusser descarta o apagamento da contingência pela necessidade ou pela instrumentalização. 123 A história não é mais do que a revogação permanente do fato consumado por um outro fato indecifrável a consumar-se, sem que se saiba antecipadamente nem onde, nem como o acontecimento de sua revogação se produzirá. Simplesmente chegará um dia em que as cartas serão redistribuídas e os dados serão lançados novamente sobre a mesa vazia (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 14). Trata-se, acima de tudo, de uma filosofia do vazio. O vazio que serve de pano de fundo para a queda dos átomos e que continua perenemente separando-os para que não se tornem "um". Evidentemente diferenças políticas fizeram com que Althusser não assumisse, neste artigo, o diálogo mais que patente com Sartre (1997), o filósofo que tratou de forma mais demorada da temática do nada e do vazio, no século XX. Mas não nos ateremos a isso, afinal tal discussão se sustenta de forma sólida em Epicuro. Mais adiante, no mesmo artigo, ele estabelece um diálogo com Espinosa (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 17), tratando ainda do vazio que fundamenta as relações e os encontros, passando, depois, por Hobbes (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 18), onde sustenta a importância de se pensar os indivíduos como átomos separados pelo vazio, que se encontram e geram ora pegas, ora guerras. O próximo filósofo com quem ele estabelece interlocução é Rousseau, partindo da metáfora da floresta primitiva, "em cujas florestas erram indivíduos isolados, sem relação entre eles, indivíduos sem encontro" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 22). Embora dois possam se encontrar, "eles se separam e cada um segue seu caminho no vazio infinito da floresta" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 22). A floresta de Rousseau se equivale ao vazio de Epicuro, onde os indivíduos se encontram brevemente em um "nada" de sociedade. Em outras palavras, a sociedade se dá sobre um plano de fundo vazio, um "nada" de sociedade que impossibilita a estabilização das relações. Diante de uma floresta imensurável, o normal é que os encontros não aconteçam, logo, o normal é a "não-sociedade". Para que exista uma sociedade efetivamente, o que é necessário? É preciso que o estado de encontro seja imposto aos homens, que o infinito da floresta, como condição de possibilidade do não-encontro, se reduza ao finito por razões externas, que catástrofes naturais a dividam em espaços reduzidos, em ilhas, por exemplo, onde os homens sejam forçados a se encontrar, e forçados a um encontro que dure: forçados por uma força maior do que eles (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 17). Estes indivíduos são, portanto, forçados ao encontro, coagidos a relações duráveis e forçadas, inicialmente rudimentares, mas que depois são redobradas pelos efeitos produzidos por estes encontros sobre a própria natureza humana. 124 Toda uma longa e lenta dialética intervém, então, onde, por força do acúmulo de tempo, os contatos forçados produzem a linguagem, as paixões e o comércio amoroso ou a luta entre os homens, até chegar ao estado de guerra. A sociedade nasceu, o estado de natureza nasceu, e a guerra também, e com eles se desenvolve um processo de acumulação e de mudança que literalmente cria a natureza humana socializada (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 23). Estas noções apresentadas por Althusser, em diálogo com Rousseau, apontam para os efeitos catastróficos da tentativa extrema de instrumentalização da contingência dos encontros. Permitindo-nos falar em termos de "sedentarização" e "errância" dentro da tese de Althusser, podemos dizer que no início havia o nada, antes de qualquer encontro (duradouro ou efêmero). Não há suporte para a ideia de uma "origem" plena, profanada por um primeiro erro fundamental. Ao contrário: não há nada originário além do próprio nada, portanto, não há um começo obrigatório para a filosofia, tampouco para a linguística. No outro extremo, o fim de um encontro não é nada mais do que o fim de uma pega, e não a cessação de encontros. "Portanto, não há fim nem do mundo, nem da história, nem da filosofia, nem da moral, nem da arte ou da política etc." (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 25). No 'nada' do desvio tem lugar o encontro entre um átomo e um outro, e este evento (événement) se torna advento (avènement) sob a condição do paralelismo dos átomos, porque é este paralelismo que, uma vez violado uma única vez, provoca a gigantesca carambola e enganche de átomos em número infinito, a partir do que nasce um mundo (um ou um outro: daí a pluralidade de mundos possíveis e o enraizamento deste conceito de possibilidade no conceito de desordem original) (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 27). Ora, o que está em confronto, neste momento, é o movimento de sedentarização da língua (e da realidade discursiva) pela ideologia através do apagamento da errância contingente das relações históricas. É a tentativa ideológica de apagar o caráter histórico dos encontros através de essências necessárias, universais e atemporais. Continuamos, portanto, apontando para o fio condutor pecheutiano que se enuncia da seguinte forma: jamais existiu uma língua perfeita profanada por um erro primordial (língua adâmica perdida em Babel) que justifique sua correção e seus inquisidores; existe, sim, uma língua errante que se dá em encontros exíguos através de materialidades históricas incapazes de transpor a hiância fundamental que separa significante, significado e referente. E a força que tenta sedentarizar o movimento da significação é a ideologia, um processo de instrumentalização da história que 125 tenta apagar justamente o caráter histórico do sentido através de uma roupagem lógica/retórica. O materialismo do encontro, portanto, nos ajuda a delimitar a natureza das relações que se estabelecem na base linguística e nos processos discursivos, de onde pretende-se, nesta tese, afirmar o caráter errante que perpassa toda extensão da linguagem. Assim, o materialismo do encontro impõe novas formas de se pensar a noção de erro e acerto, de correção e totalização das linguagens e das línguas, ao menos no que diz respeito a uma origem perfeita perdida, ou a um "acabamento final" da língua: À velha pergunta: 'Qual é a origem do mundo?', esta filosofia materialista responde: 'o nada' - 'coisa alguma' -, 'eu começo por nada' - 'não há começo, porque não existiu nunca nada, antes de qualquer coisa que seja'; portanto, 'não há um começo obrigatório para a filosofia' - 'a filosofia não começa por um começo que seja sua origem'; ao contrário, ela 'pega o trem andando', e pela força do braço 'sobe no comboio' que passa desde toda a eternidade, como a água de Heráclito, [na] sua [frente]. Portanto, não há fim nem do mundo, nem da história, nem da filosofia, nem da moral, nem da arte ou da política etc. (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 25). O materialismo do encontro alcança sua maturidade em Marx e Engels (2007), onde tal funcionamento está estreitamente relacionado com a noção de "modo de produção". Em "O capital" (MARX, 1976), o modo de produção capitalista é compreendido como efeito que nasceu do encontro entre o "indivíduo que possui dinheiro" e o "proletário destituído de tudo", exceto de sua força de trabalho. "Acontece que esse encontro ocorreu e 'pegou', o que significa que não foi desfeito tão logo realizado, senão que durou e se tornou um fato consumado" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 32). O modo de produção capitalista se tornou, então, uma pega persistente, duradoura e regular. Seu funcionamento enquanto "pega" é dissimulado por leis e fatos de mercado, como se não se tratassem de partes distintas e separadas, mas unidades essenciais e coesas que se originaram tal como são. "Dito de outra maneira: o todo que resulta da 'pega' do encontro não é anterior à 'pega' dos elementos, mas posterior, e por isso poderia não ter 'pegado' e, com mais razão ainda, 'o encontro poderia não ter acontecido'" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 32). O que Althusser está apontando é que a Formação Ideológica capitalista é composta por partes distintas, separadas e opostas, mas que foram colocadas em relação uma juntura que "pegou". Contudo, o fato de que este encontro entre discrepâncias tenha perdurado ao ponto de dissimular seu funcionamento não quer dizer que este encontro não poderia ter se dado de forma diferente, 126 que sequer tivesse ocorrido, ou que não possa vir-a-ser diferente. Althusser fornece como exemplo o encontro que se deu nos Estados italianos do vale do rio Pó, nos séculos XIII e XIV: nestas condições específicas, o encontro entre burguesia e proletariado não "pegou". Para Marx, a própria noção de modo de produção é uma relação, uma combinação particular entre elementos. Neste caso, o modo de produção é a relação entre elementos distintos como a acumulação financeira, a acumulação dos meios técnicos de produção, a acumulação de matéria-prima, a acumulação de produtores etc. A noção de acumulação, por sua vez, também deriva de uma relação, de uma "pega" entre elementos ainda mais fundamentais tidos como semelhantes, homogêneos e coesos. Isso implica assumir que cada elemento possui existência autônoma antes da pega: Esses elementos não existem na história, para que exista um modo de produção, eles existem em estado 'flutuante' antes de sua 'acumulação' e 'combinação', sendo cada um o produto de sua própria história e não o produto teleológico dos outros ou da história deles (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 32). Ora, tais concepções são muito caras a esta tese. É através delas que sustentamos a importância da noção de "relação" (encontro, pega) no interior do continente teórico do materialismo histórico, uma vez que qualquer modo de produção é fruto de uma relação, ou melhor, é "constituído de elementos independentes uns em relação aos outros, sendo cada um resultado de sua própria história, sem que exista qualquer relação orgânica ou teleológica entre essas diversas histórias" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 33). A partir dessas concepções, de que certos encontros podem durar mais que outros, sustentamos a premissa de que uma relação pode ser medida pela força que possui em atrair, capturar e costurar partes distintas. Essa proposição se coaduna com a ideia de que uma relação se trata de um encontro contingente passível de ser instrumentalizado (esse é o trabalho da ideologia: a tentativa de ordenar e fornecer sentidos estabilizados), ainda que tal operação não seja capaz de apagar a contingência inerente da própria relação. Logo, é esta análise althusseriana que nos fundamenta quando propomos que uma relação pode ser sedentarizada, ou seja, ter sua movência minorada ou quase apagada. Todavia, há em Marx outra forma de se pensar a noção de relação e encontro: Com efeito, há em Marx por onde cair neste erro, quando ele cede à outra concepção do modo de produção capitalista: uma concepção totalitária, teleológica e filosófica. Nesse caso, também temos todos os elementos 127 distintos de que já falamos, mas eles são pensados e dispostos como se estivessem, desde toda a eternidade, destinados a entrar em combinação, a se agrupar entre si, a se produzir mutuamente como seus próprios fins e/ou complementos. Nessa hipótese, Marx deixa deliberadamente de lado o caráter aleatório do 'encontro' e de sua 'pega' para pensar somente no fato consumado da 'pega' e, portanto, na sua predestinação (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 33). Althusser faz, aqui, uma severa crítica não só à materialidade "teleológica" do encontro, mas também a uma grande parte de toda teoria marxista. Nesta segunda concepção de modo de produção, Marx entende que os elementos constitutivos não possuem histórias independentes, mas sim "uma" história que leva a um único fim; cada história apenas se adapta a outras histórias formando um todo que reproduz, incessantemente, os próprios elementos constitutivos. Trata-se do primado da história em detrimento dos elementos, ou seja, trata-se de pensar o proletariado como mero produto da grande indústria, de tomar o trabalhador por mera produção da exploração capitalista, como se o modo de produção capitalista existisse desde a eternidade e preexistisse a todos os elementos que o constitui. "Aqui, as histórias próprias não flutuam mais na história, como tantos átomos no vazio, graças a um 'encontro' que poderia não se dar. Tudo está consumado por antecipação, a estrutura precede seus elementos e os reproduz para reproduzir a estrutura" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 34). Este texto incompleto de Althusser, escrito em 1982 e publicado somente em 1994, atesta, no final, o primado da contingência do encontro em detrimento da necessidade da unidade. Nele, a própria noção de estrutura é posta em termos de relação: "Um modo de produção é uma combinação porque é uma estrutura que impõe sua unidade a uma série de elementos" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 36). E será a partir dessa retificação althusseriana que vamos nos posicionar quando abordarmos as noções de Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado e Aparelhos Repressores de Estado, ou seja, como processos heterogêneos que carregam uma contingência secreta, inerente e incorrigível que impossibilita o pleno e assujeitamento do indivíduo em sujeito do discurso. O materialismo do encontro é de grande importância para esta tese na medida em que nos ajuda a sustentar a hipótese de que existe hiância entre as partes que compõem o signo; e que os encontros entre significante e significado, embora estejam sujeitos a certa instrumentalização, são essencialmente contingentes e moventes. Errância tem que ver com relação, encontros efêmeros e fortuitos. Sedentarização também: é a tentativa de fazer das pegas uma unidade estável o suficiente para apagar a hiância fundamental. 128 2.2 DA LÍNGUA AO DISCURSO: ANDANÇAS Importa sublinhar, neste momento, que a segunda parte desta seção se fundamenta novamente na separação que o próprio Pêcheux fez entre "base linguística" e "processo discursivo", sendo que nesta subseção nos deteremos em procurar pela errância (e pelo erro) no funcionamento do processo discursivo. Ao opor base linguística e processo discursivo, inicialmente estamos pretendendo destacar que [...] todo sistema linguístico [...] é dotado de uma autonomia relativa que o submete a leis internas, as quais constituem, precisamente, o objeto da linguística. É, pois, sobre a base dessas leis internas que se desenvolvem os processos discursivos, e não enquanto expressão de um puro pensamento, de uma pura atividade cognitiva etc., que utilizaria acidentalmente os sistemas linguísticos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 81). Pêcheux nomeia a segunda parte de Semântica e Discurso com o título "Da filosofia da linguagem à teoria do discurso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 75). Esta designação também fornece pistas sobre a passagem da análise de uma base linguística para os processos discursivos, mas não na forma de apagamento da primeira em detrimento da segunda, mas sim na forma de relação de sustentação da segunda sobre a primeira: o processo discursivo se assenta sobre a base linguística. Tal balizamento se mostra demasiado importante para os objetivos desta tese. Como já fora apontado anteriormente, só há relação entre diferentes que não se fazem "um", só há causa para aquilo que claudica. Logo, a hiância que separa a base linguística dos processos discursivos atesta o caráter errante da relação que se estabelece entre ambos, ou melhor, lança luz sobre o impossível de que a base linguística e os processos discursivos se façam "um", um contínuo que sedentarizaria a relação entre diferentes ao ponto de apagar suas diferenças. Tal movência, em relativa autonomia27, indica o oposto: a hiância que separa e opõe irremediavelmente significante e significado também separa a base linguística e os processos discursivos, alicerçando, afinal, todo o funcionamento do discurso sobre o vazio (nada) que habita a hiância. A sedentarização, portanto, só pode aparecer na forma de ilusão ideológica; 27 Esta autonomia é só relativa justamente por que é a língua que coloca o signo e todo o sistema em movimento; no entanto, não se pode afirmar que a gramática, a sintaxe e a semântica de uma língua possa apagar a distinção e a separação das partes que a compõe. 129 e a errância, por outro lado, é o impossível de ser interrompido, é puro movimento. A errância é o impossível de se fazer "um" que garante à significação seu caráter contingente, movente, inconcluso, transitório: é o impossível que faz o possível, é o não-um que salvaguarda a inquietação dos sentidos. Essa hiância errante, uma fina e sutil linha vermelha que perpassa Semântica e Discurso, pode ser seguida também pelo interior dos capítulos que abordam os processos discursivos. Neste aspecto, nossa hipótese é a de que a hiância fundamental também separa as partes que constituem o processo discursivo, impossibilitando ao discurso qualquer inteireza que lhe pudesse fazer "um". O sistema da língua é, de fato, o mesmo para o materialista e para o idealista, para o revolucionário e para o reacionário, para aquele que dispõe de um conhecimento dado e para aquele que não dispõe desse conhecimento. Entretanto, não pode concluir, a partir disso, que esses diversos personagens tenham o mesmo discurso: a língua se apresenta, assim, como a base comum de processos discursivos diferenciados (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 81). A base linguística, que possui uma autonomia relativa enquanto sistema linguístico, até pode ser vista como indiferente à divisão de classes, mas isso não quer dizer que as classes sejam indiferentes em relação ao uso da língua. Logo, a palavra colocada em curso, discurso, se dá no campo do antagonismo, das contradições e das interpretações. Assim, é justamente por que a língua não é una, enquanto base linguística fechada e acabada, que o discurso também não pode ser singular e indivisível. No entanto, no caso do processo discursivo, a errância constitutiva se evidencia mais rapidamente que na base linguística: "todo processo discursivo se inscreve numa relação ideológica de classes" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 82). Se a natureza sistêmica do signo linguístico pode mascarar sua errância fundamental, o discurso já aparece no âmago de um conflito de classes que impossibilita a plena sedentarização dos sentidos. Por isso, é só pelas vias da ideologia que se pode instaurar certa ilusão de apagamento da errância na significação. Pode parecer óbvio que a sedentarização (cristalização) da língua e do discurso sejam da ordem do impossível, mas diferentes teorias, de direita e de esquerda, já se encantaram com esta possibilidade. Neste sentido, Pêcheux aponta para o projeto Stalinista/Marxista passando por N. Marr -, que pressupunha "uma língua do povo todo, única para a sociedade e comum a todos os membros" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 83); teoria fundamentada na ideia de língua como meio de comunicação entre os homens, tal como prescreveu Marx e Engels em "A 130 Ideologia Alemã" (ENGELS; MARX, 2007). O contra-argumento pecheutiano se fundamenta na premissa de que algo sempre fura a língua e a lacera; ou seja, no âmago da língua existe também uma divisão escamoteada sob certa aparência de unidade. Se a língua e os processos discursivos são separados por hiâncias fundamentais, não será de forma harmoniosa que a ideologia conseguirá manter a ilusão de totalização e continuidade, mas sim mediante constante enfrentamento contraditório e político. "Diremos que as contradições ideológicas que se desenvolvem através da unidade da língua são constituídas pelas relações contraditórias que mantém, necessariamente, entre si os "processos discursivos", na medida em que se inscrevem em relações ideológicas de classes" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 83). Pêcheux passa então a observar diferentes processos discursivos para buscar neles uma base comum sobre a qual se possa apoiar uma teoria materialista do discurso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 84). Começando pelos processos nocionais-científicos, Pêcheux volta a dialogar com Gottlob Frege para compreender os processos discursivos e então propor uma teoria analítica do discurso. Para Pêcheux, o projeto da Filosofia da Linguagem de reparar a língua para que se possa calcar sobre ela uma ciência irrefutável demanda, necessariamente, passar também por uma reparação dos processos discursivos. Novamente a noção de erro aparece nas discussões pecheutianas. Pêcheux lança luz sobre a sugestão de Frege de que as ilusões na linguagem se dão por que a "linguagem natural é mal feita e contém armadilhas e ambiguidades que podem desaparecer numa língua artificial bem feita" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). O projeto lógicomatemático da linguagem científica implica, portanto, em processos discursivos que apaguem as oposições ideológicas e as contradições resultantes do conflito de classes. Para a filosofia da linguagem de Frege, no processo discursivo científico a significação precisa estar acima dos meros conflitos ideológicos: ela deve ser essencial, universal e atemporal. Importa assinalar que tal procedimento repete a solução fregeana conferida à base linguística: a da correção. A correção, contudo, implica uma perfeição perdida, no passado, e/ou um aperfeiçoamento pleno, no futuro. De toda forma, a correção da língua e dos processos discursivos pressupõe certa inteireza que impõe, ao mesmo tempo, o estabelecimento do "erro" justamente para que ele possa ser corrigido. O erro aparece, assim, como efeito (a posteriori) do projeto lógico-científico, e não como causa (a priori). O erro emerge na medida em que se pressupõe uma perfeição que pode ser alcançada expurgando-se 131 as falhas da língua e as contradições do discurso, ainda que se tenha que recorrer a uma língua artificial, com processos discursivos igualmente artificiais. Quisemos fazer este esclarecimento prévio para nos prevenirmos contra a concepção logicista segundo a qual as oposições ideológicas resultariam de imperfeições da linguagem, o que significa reduzi-las a quiproquós, a 'problemas sem pé nem cabeça' dos quais todo o mundo poderia escapar se se desse a um tal trabalho. Procuraremos mostrar que não se trata disso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). Não se trata disso, afirma Pêcheux: a língua não é imperfeita, nem os processos discursivos são ilusórios e falhos. Se o erro estivesse na língua, qualquer um que se dispusesse a corrigi-la poderia alcançar logro. Mas a diligência de Frege (2009) persiste sem resposta: de onde originam-se as ilusões linguísticas e as oposições discursivas que tanto desarranjam o progresso da ciência? Seguindo o percurso teórico pecheutiano que fundamentou os capítulos anteriores, uma resposta negativa parece se consolidar: o erro não está a priori na língua, mas no juízo a posteriori que se faz sobre ela. A ferramenta imperfeita (HENRY, 2013) só pode ser imperfeita na medida em que é tomada como ferramenta. A língua só acomoda a noção de erro quando vinculada a determinado projeto, como por exemplo, o de "bem-comunicar". O que leva a pensar que a expressão 'instrumento de comunicação' deve ser tomada em sentido figurado e não em sentido próprio, na medida em que este instrumento permite, ao mesmo tempo, a comunicação e a não-comunicação, isto é, autoriza a divisão sob a aparência da unidade (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 83). Logo adiante o analista do discurso transcreve a solução proposta por Frege (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87): "A ilusão provém de uma imperfeição da linguagem, da qual o simbolismo da análise matemática não está totalmente livre" (FREGE, 1971). A ilusão, segundo o lógico alemão, é a presença do erro na língua. Frege sugere que "se é possível aparecerem ilusões na linguagem, é por que a linguagem natural é malfeita e contém armadilhas e ambiguidades que podem desaparecer numa língua artificial bem-feita" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). Eis a solução final do projeto fregeano: uma língua artificial, criada de forma que os erros, as ilusões e as contradições jamais tomassem parte dela. Pêcheux, ao contrário, aponta que a ilusão sugerida por Gottlob Frege emerge de um ponto cego oriundo do próprio questionamento fregeano. É que ao indagar sobre a origem do erro na língua, supõe-se que um erro primordial tenha profanado uma língua perfeita, esquecida em algum momento 132 perdido na história. O erro, dessa forma, teria corrompido a perfeição da linguagem, tornando-se parte dela, mas justamente por isso, corrigível. Por outro lado, se não existe erro a priori na língua, não existe nada a ser corrigido. Para que o erro apareça na língua será necessário atá-la a um projeto, a posteriori, para que o sucesso ou o fracasso de tal projeto determine o aparecimento do acerto e do erro. Ora, diante da afirmação de que as ilusões não decorrem do erro, e de que o erro mesmo também é efeito, e não causa, de onde emanam ilusões, contradições ideológicas, contingências discursivas e falhas comunicacionais? Advoguemos em prol da errância. Seguindo o percurso teórico até aqui apresentado, sustentamos que a errância é a pura movência, é aquilo que permite novos encontros (relações, vínculos), mas é responsável também por desfazê-los. A errância é a expressão do "não-um", do descontínuo oriundo da hiância fundamental que faz impossível a sedentarização da base linguística e dos processos discursivos. Em diversos estudos pecheutianos encontram-se sentenças que apontam para a incompletude movente do sentido, da língua, da história e do sujeito; não há novidade alguma nas noções de deslize e deriva de sentidos na obra de Pêcheux. Contudo, a proposta desta tese se assenta no projeto de lançar luz sobre a materialidade da movência, que chamamos aqui de errância: o movimento que se dá pelos vazios que separam cada parte da base linguística e do processo discursivo. Nossa hipótese, portanto, é que o próprio da língua é a errância, movimentos de perturbação que proporcionam encontros e desvinculam designações. Em vista disso, a causa da ilusão sublinhada por Frege não seria o erro, mas a errância. Pêcheux, rebatendo a tentativa de estabilização dos sentidos (sedentarização) proposta pelos lógicos, argumenta em prol de uma movência percebida antes e depois dos encontros que proporcionam língua e discurso. Para isso ele faz uso dos mesmos recursos propostos por Frege para lançar luz sobre essa movência (errância) que desloca a significação e gera derivas de sentidos. O autor toma dois enunciados, um proposto por Frege, e outro por ele. O primeiro: "Aquele que descobriu a forma elíptica das órbitas planetárias morreu na miséria" (FREGE, 1971, p. 115); e o segundo: "Aquele que salvou o mundo morrendo na cruz nunca existiu" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 88). Segundo a análise de Frege, deve-se distinguir dois elementos em um enunciado: a designação de algo (sujeito) e a afirmação sobre esse "algo" (predicado). Na primeira frase, o designado seria Kepler, e na segunda, Jesus. No entanto, a afirmação estabelecida a respeito dos designados, em cada enunciado, traz problemas diferentes, se olhados pelo viés da lógica. Seguindo o percurso lógico fregeano, 133 em tais enunciados estão em jogo não as relações de sentido que se estabelecem entre sujeito e predicado, mas sim a relação formal existente entre a totalidade da proposição (o pensamento) e as subordinadas que nela se inscrevem como objetos de pensamento. Este ponto requer maiores esclarecimentos. A proposição, para Frege, é um pensamento composto por unidades menores de objetos de pensamento, a saber, uma designação e uma definição a respeito do designado (relativas subordinadas explicativas, e relativas subordinadas determinativas). Para o filósofo da lógica, deve predominar a relação formal entre estes elementos em detrimento das relações de sentido que se possa estabelecer entre sujeito e predicado. É a isso que se chama de Lógica Formal, onde a verdade de uma proposição supostamente pode ser encontrada mediante análise formal, e a forma é a própria ordem dos elementos da proposição disposta em forma de algoritmo, o que possibilita uma geometria do enunciado. Segundo Frege, a ilusão surge quando os objetos do pensamento (o sujeito e/ou o predicado) induzem necessariamente28, no pensamento total da proposição, a existência de um sujeito absolutamente único: Kepler e Jesus, nos dois exemplos dados anteriormente. Dentro da lógica fregeana, onde objetos do pensamento compõem um pensamento maior, realmente é possível pensar que a necessidade dessa ilusão provenha de uma imperfeição na linguagem. A ilusão, segundo o autor, se evidencia quando um objeto de pensamento pressupõe a existência real de um objeto designado, ou seja, quando se faz uma afirmação e se pressupõe que os nomes empregados carregam, necessariamente, uma designação. Ora, aponta Pêcheux, se esse fosse o problema da linguagem, poder-se-ia dizer que o primeiro enunciado "aquele que descobriu a forma elíptica das órbitas planetárias morreu na miséria" realmente possui uma ilusão decorrente de uma imperfeição na linguagem. No entanto, seguindo o mesmo fio condutor, o segundo enunciado "aquele que salvou o mundo morrendo na cruz nunca existiu" se implodiria, e não faria sentido algum quando, decerto, faz. Já na segunda proposição o primeiro objeto de pensamento é anulado pelo segundo, ou seja, a relativa subordinada explicativa, que traz informações extras a respeito do sujeito designado, aniquila a existência do próprio designado, deixando um lugar vazio no lugar do sujeito, que por sua vez inviabiliza a enunciação do predicado. Dentro da lógica fregeana, portanto, não se poderia falar algo a respeito de uma não-coisa. 28 Causa e efeito necessários, impossível de ser de outra forma. Não contingente. 134 No primeiro enunciado, "aquele que" é uma oração subordinada (relativa) determinativa, ou seja, restringe o significado do antecedente (substantivo ou pronome que as precedem) e por isso se tornam imprescindíveis ao sentido da frase. Mas "aquele que", enquanto relativa determinativa, não poderia ocupar este lugar sem trazer uma informação que determine claramente o sujeito da oração, uma vez que "aquele que" não é um sujeito gramatical dedutível no interior da própria oração. A função da relativa determinativa seria estabelecer uma relação restritiva com predicado "morreu na miséria". Este lugar vazio, a ilusão apontada por Frege, lança luz para o fato de que o nome "Kepler" só pode ocupar o lugar da relativa determinativa por uma pressuposição. Mas isso não é tudo. Ainda que o enunciado fosse posto de outra forma, como "Kepler morreu na miséria", não há nada que determine cabalmente o sujeito único e histórico "Kepler" como sujeito desta proposição específica, não há efeito algum de sentido que possa determinar o indivíduo específico que um nome faça supor. Logo, para Frege, todo nome próprio é uma ilusão, assim como todos os conceitos ou proposições que apresentam lugares vazios na relativa determinativa. Este é um defeito fundamental da língua que, para o filósofo da lógica, só se soluciona com uma língua artificial complexa e completa o suficiente para não permitir estes lugares vazios (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). Todavia, tal ilusão não se trata de erro: o erro não é da ordem do enunciado, mas do juízo (KANT, 2001). A ilusão e o erro não estão no enunciado, mas nas relações que se estabelecem entre enunciados, ou melhor, no juízo analítico ou sintético que atravessa o primeiro enunciado. Assim, nem a verdade nem a falsidade estão no enunciado, nos objetos, tampouco no mundo material. A verdade e a falsidade, ou mais, o acerto e o erro, são atribuições imputadas a posteriori pelo trabalho da ideologia, são efeitos discursivos e não essências a serem encontradas, corrigidas ou enaltecidas. Ao contrário: a língua, o enunciado e o discurso são, a priori, errantes. E na errância não há erro, tampouco acerto. Para Pêcheux, no entanto, existe outra forma de se abordar este problema: não se trata de erro. Sobre o percurso lógico fregeano, e a instauração da ilusão como imperfeição na linguagem, Pêcheux afirma: "Não deveríamos, ao invés disso, considerar que há separação, distância ou discrepância na frase entre o que é pensado antes, em outro lugar ou independentemente, e o que está contido na afirmação global da frase?" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 88). A ilusão da significação que tanto incomodava Frege, portanto, deriva de uma hiância (separação, distância) que instaura uma contradição entre o já-dito que sustenta o dizer, ou 135 seja, o "pensado antes", e o texto atualizado no momento da tomada da palavra. É nesta tensão que o sentido emerge, em meio a um turbilhão profícuo de pressupostos que aparecem em forma de paráfrase ou de polissemia, como veremos adiante. Por hora importa delinear que o recobrimento do dizer pelo já-dito também é separado por uma hiância irremediável, onde cada parte se move guiada por uma relativa autonomia. É essa errância que ocasiona os movimentos que deslocam a base linguística em relação aos processos discursivos. É assim que trabalha a língua e o discurso na produção de sentidos: em movência errante. Nessa perspectiva, a 'ilusão' de que fala Frege não é o puro e simples efeito de um fenômeno sintático que constitui uma 'imperfeição da linguagem': o fenômeno sintático da relativa determinativa é, ao contrário, a condição formal de um efeito de sentido cuja causa material se assenta, de fato, na relação dissimétrica por discrepância entre dois 'domínios do pensamento', de modo que um elemento de um domínio irrompe num elemento do outro sob a forma do que chamamos 'pré-construído', isto é, como se esse elemento já se encontrasse aí (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 89). É por isso que não existe erro na linguagem, existe, sim, um processo discursivo errante, sustentado por uma base linguística igualmente errante, que impõe processos de significação que fazem perpassar o "fora-texto" sobre o "intra-texto", um processo nomeado por Paul Henry como "pré-construído" (HENRY, 2013). Neste momento do percurso pecheutiano, a base linguística se mostra insuficiente para explicar o processo de significação. Enquanto dialoga à distância com a lógica de Frege, Pêcheux está mostrando que algo de anterior atravessa o enunciado presente, algo exterior a ele, uma pressuposição pensada antes, em outro lugar e independente do dizer realizado em uma dada ocasião. O préconstruído, portanto, é um discurso-outro que diz respeito aos elementos da significação que estão fora do enunciado, mas que o atravessam e o condicionam. Assim, no enunciado "aquele que descobriu a forma elíptica das órbitas planetárias morreu na miséria", a ilusão da designação não se dá por uma imperfeição na linguagem, mas sim por que algo de anterior, pré-construído, recobre o enunciado e lhe confere significação juntamente com a base linguística. Contudo, uma pista se sobressai neste diálogo entre Pêcheux e Henry: justamente por que "há separação, distância ou discrepância na frase entre o que é pensado antes, em outro lugar ou independentemente, e o que está contido na afirmação global da frase" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 88) é que os sentidos se movem errantes no momento da tomada da palavra. O pré- 136 construído foi proposto para "designar o que remete a uma construção anterior, exterior, mas sempre independente, em oposição ao que é "construído" pelo enunciado. Trata-se, em suma, do efeito discursivo ligado ao efeito sintático" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 89). Esta citação é sobremaneira importante a esta tese. Importa-nos, nela, realçar o atributo "independente", que caracteriza a separação entre o já-dito e o dito. Tal movência independente, inaugurada pela hiância discrepante entre o já-dito e o dito, é o que chamamos, nesta tese, de errância do discurso. Esta separação entre o já-dito e o enunciado atual se caracteriza como um movimento de recobrimento entre opostos discrepantes que não fazem "um". Este deslizamento é estrutural no processo de significação, uma movência errante sustentada pelo vazio que separa e opõe o pensado antes e o dizer atual. A ilusão fregeana, portanto, tem que ver com o lugar onde o vazio aparece no momento da formulação do questionamento: a ilusão não está no "espaço vazio" da relativa determinativa, mas sim no vazio que separa as partes do discurso e instaura uma movência errante no todo da significação. Afinal, base linguística e processo discursivo estão separados, de igual forma, por uma hiância fundamental que estabelece uma relação dissimétrica entre diferentes domínios do pensamento. Estes domínios de pensamento aparecem, em Henry (2013), através do par antinômico "Objeto Real" (OR) e "Objeto de Conhecimento" (OC). Na filosofia do conhecimento (BACHELARD, 1972), OR compreende o ser na sua mais inesgotável totalidade, ou seja, é o que ele é realmente, totalmente e atualmente, e não uma mera fração dele. Por outro lado, OC é a parte do objeto a que se pode ter acesso pelas vias do conhecimento. Embora o OC seja apenas uma parte do OR, o todo do OC não deixa de ter uma realidade própria capaz de transformar o conhecimento. No entanto, afirma Henry (2013, p. 22), "a contradição objeto real/objeto de conhecimento em uma ciência não é pontual", ou seja, a relação que se estabelece entre OR e OC é a de contradição dissimétrica por discrepância entre estes dois domínios do pensamento (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 89). Essa discussão tem origem na discussão sobre a referência (o referente) no seio da semântica, contrastando a semântica "referencialista" da "não-referencialista". Essa problemática diz respeito à posição que diferentes teorias assumem em relação à premissa de que a língua fala de alguma coisa exterior à própria estrutura do sistema linguístico. Ducrot (1977), interlocutor à distância de Henry (2013), é considerado um autor "referencialista fraco" (MORAES, 2009). Para ele o referente, tal como em Frege, é um objeto em si, exterior à 137 linguagem, e por isso indizível e inalcançável ao significante e ao significado. Logo, quando se fala a respeito de um objeto, confere-se a ele um estatuto de existência que, embora não negue o real, se mostra insuficiente para contorná-lo com a linguagem. O estatuto do referente, neste caso, é considerado interno ao próprio discurso: fala-se do mundo, mas de um mundo construído pelo discurso; em Ducrot, portanto, a existência daquilo a respeito do que se pode contornar com a língua não é uma existência física, mas discursiva. Já em Pêcheux (2009, p. 98) e Paul Henry, a pressuposição da existência de um dado referente se caracteriza por um efeito de pré-construído que representaria sua existência em um discurso anterior. "Aquele que salvou o mundo morrendo na cruz nunca existiu" é um exemplo de enunciado que retoma pressupostos anteriores sobre a existência de Cristo. Isso confere a Cristo uma existência pressuposta nesse discurso anterior, que não precisa coincidir com a existência real de seu referente (um Cristo de carne e osso). Nestes termos, a Análise do Discurso é um exemplo de teoria não-referencialista: a realidade do referente é construída a partir das condições de produção em que ele aparece (MORAES, 2009, p. 262). O pré-construído identifica-se, portanto, com o objeto de conhecimento (OC) que ilusoriamente "cria" o objeto real (OR) com um conhecimento anterior e pressuposto que irrompe no momento da tomada da palavra, produzindo efeitos de sentido sobre o objeto real. Dito de outra forma, se o real é indizível, isso não quer dizer que a ideologia não possa simular para ele uma roupagem simbólica acessível ao conhecimento. E nestes termos, o objeto real da língua é a língua antes dos linguistas, o todo deste objeto não absorvido pelo conhecimento (HENRY, 2013). Assim o OC alcança, pelas vias da ideologia, certa ilusão de totalidade e sedentarização da infinitude amorfa do OR. O pré-construído se configura como evidência jádita que recobre o dizer atual, mas que se opõe a ele. O pré-construído é o conhecimento prévio que fundamenta a significação no ato da linguagem. É "o saber discursivo que torna possível todo dizer e que retorna sob a forma do pré-construído, o já-dito que está na base do dizível, sustentando cada tomada da palavra" (ORLANDI, 2005, p. 31). O pré-construído, portanto, torna-se um dos pontos fundamentais da articulação da base linguística com a teoria dos discursos. E uma das características essenciais do pré-construído é a "separação fundamental entre o pensamento e o objeto do pensamento, com a pré-existência deste último, marcada pelo que chamamos uma discrepância entre dois domínios de pensamento" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 93). O pré-construído, como veremos, trabalha no processo discursivo 138 fornecendo realidades provenientes de discursos anteriores que, sob trabalho da ideologia, é incorporado ao dizer atual (o fio-do-discurso) como evidência. Contudo, importa ressaltar que a hiância que separa a base linguística do processo discursivo aparece novamente separando os objetos do pensamento (o designado e o predicado) do pensamento (o enunciado, como um todo). Isso importa sobremaneira a esta tese na medida em que tal separação é fonte de errância na significação, pois até mesmo ao pré-construído é impossível ser atado cabalmente ao dizer. Pêcheux exemplifica tal questão a partir do problema da perífrase29 e do nome próprio (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 90). Na frase "aquele que morreu na cruz nunca existiu", o demonstrativo "aquele que" só pode ocupar o lugar do nome próprio "Jesus" se houver, para aquele que toma a palavra, um pressuposto anterior relativo à narrativa bíblica, trabalhando o efeito de perífrase que recobre, por pressuposição, o atual pelo anterior. Neste aspecto, os domínios lógicos da ciência moderna alcançam grande logro em criar ilusões de identificações entre objetos do conhecimento (OC) com os objetos reais (OR), pois quando se "descobre" um novo composto químico, por exemplo, o cientista se coloca também na condição de "artífice" de uma definição, de fundador de uma relação específica entre um OC singular e um suposto OR singular. A criação de um nome próprio, de um conceito, enfim, instaura uma dupla tautologia: vejo o que vejo/sabe-se o que se sabe (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 91), fundamentada na "evidência" do que se vê em relação ao que se sabe. Tal evidência também está na origem do nome próprio humano: "'eu', fulano de tal, sou o único que posso dizer 'eu' ao falar de mim mesmo" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 92). Em outras palavras, o ato de nomear e usar nomes para as coisas e para as pessoas é o ato de trazer o préconstruído para o interior do enunciado em forma de uma evidência que, quanto mais incontestável for, maior será seu efeito de perífrase. Evidentemente que a construção de um pressuposto não se dá de forma célere e repentina, ela demanda esforços jurídicos, políticos, pedagógicos e outros de natureza ideológica. Quanto mais eficientes forem tais aparelhos de costura e estabilização dos sentidos, maior será o efeito perífrastico e, consequentemente, também o parafrástico30, ou 29 Figura de estilo que consiste na substituição de uma palavra por uma expressão mais longa e com mesmo significado (DUBOIS et al., 2006). 30 A paráfrase origina-se do grego "para-phrasis" (repetição de uma sentença). Parafrasear: recriar um enunciado com outras palavras tentando manter a essência de sua significação (DUBOIS et al., 2006). 139 seja, o da repetição. Contudo, importa ressaltar sobremaneira que a questão do pré-construído tem por característica essencial: [...] a separação fundamental entre o pensamento e o objeto de pensamento, com a pré-existência deste último, marcada pelo que chamamos uma discrepância entre dois domínios de pensamento, de tal modo que o sujeito encontra um desses domínios como o impensado de seu pensamento, impensado este que, necessariamente, pré-existe ao sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 93). O pressuposto, portanto, é o objeto de pensamento/conhecimento (OC) que preexiste ao pensamento do enunciado atual, e que justamente por ter sido formulado anteriormente aparece como o impensado do pensamento. Contudo, afirma Pêcheux, existe uma "separação fundamental entre o pensamento e o objeto de pensamento" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 93), de modo que a relação de discrepância que se estabelece entre eles impossibilita que dois façam "um", ou seja, a natureza dessa relação não permite que o pressuposto se dissolva no dizer, ou mesmo o contrário. Dito de outra forma, o já-dito não é capaz de realizar a dissolução do dizer em seu interior, ou seja, o pressuposto não é capaz de se impor totalmente ao dizer ao ponto de fazer subsumir totalmente os sentidos atuais nos anteriores, tampouco os sentidos correntes do enunciado podem existir sem os condicionamentos do pressuposto. "Essa separação é, ao mesmo tempo, e paradoxalmente, o motor do processo pelo qual se pensa o objeto de pensamento, isto é, o processo pelo qual o pensamento funciona segundo a modalidade de conceito" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 93). É a separação (hiância), portanto, e não a continuidade, que fundamenta também a natureza do pré-construído, o objeto de pensamento/conhecimento. Tais noções contribuem demasiadamente para o argumento desta tese na medida em que as hiâncias que separam e opõem cada parte da base linguística (significante X significado, arbitrário e valor) separam e opõem também a base linguística do processo discursivo, e finalmente, separam e opõem cada elemento deste último, a saber, o objeto do pensamento (pré-construído) do pensamento (enunciado atual). Dessa forma, cada fração de todo este complexo de significação possui, em alguma medida, uma autonomia relativa que lhes impõe uma movência errante em relação às demais partes. Assim, a sedentarização plena, ou seja, a união cabal das partes que constituem o tecido língua/discurso, é da ordem do impossível. Ainda que seja possível entrelaçar as partes, instaurando relações e encontros, a costura não faz um, só ata diferentes e instaura certa ilusão de unidade. Contudo, justamente por se tratar de relação entre diferentes é que não 140 podem fazer "um": a unidade é da ordem da continuidade e não da relação, o que apagaria o próprio caráter de vínculo, encontro, oposição etc. Que o francês, como qualquer outra língua, não se deixa pegar assim, que é primeiro uma diversidade tanto temporal quanto espacial e que é preciso pelo menos um conceito de língua, e não apenas um conceito simplesmente, para poder pensar uma unidade dessa diversidade (HENRY, 2013). Frege, a propósito do pressuposto, tenta contornar o problema da exterioridade através da noção de saturação do pensamento. Pêcheux dedica várias páginas à explicação deste modelo fregeano (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 100), que consiste, grosso modo, em estabelecer um "processo de sustentação" do dizer através de uma articulação interna de asserções. Neste caso, um objeto de pensamento pode ser saturado se houver nele uma correspondência com uma ideia, ou não-saturado se dentro dele houver um lugar vazio, ou seja, uma correspondência ilusória. Este modelo fregeano consiste, na prática, em mover as partes do enunciado em diferentes direções, em diferentes substituições, na intenção de descobrir, no interior mesmo da proposição, sua verdade. Frege parece acreditar que o pressuposto pode ser encontrado no cerne do próprio enunciado, e neste caso, o objeto e o objeto de pensamento (ou mais, o objeto real e o objeto de conhecimento) aparecem como continuidades necessárias, onde dois, na verdade, são faces distintas do "um". "Frege parece estar supondo que, todo 'pensamento' é 'completo e saturado' por natureza" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 106). O ponto cego fregeano, aponta Pêcheux, é simples de detectar. No enunciado "a França entrou em guerra com a Alemanha em 1939", para que este pensamento seja completo e saturado é necessário que a totalidade dos franceses tenha entrado em guerra com a totalidade dos alemães, para que assim os termos França e Alemanha tenham seus pensamentos saturados. Mas o que é a França? E o que é a Alemanha? Não são somente seus cidadãos, mas também seus territórios, suas cachoeiras, pradarias e montanhas, que evidentemente não pelejaram entre si na segunda guerra mundial. Logo, aponta Pêcheux, o pensamento França, ou melhor, todas as expressões políticas, jamais poderão ser saturadas por conter nelas "um indício de irrealidade que impossibilita a estabilidade referencial do objeto e as torna questões de apreciação individual" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 110). No entanto, o projeto de Frege é "conferir à ciência histórica e ao direito [...] o caráter de objetividade científica [...]. Não seria esse, ainda, o sentido da observação final, instando a acabar, de uma vez por todas, com a fonte desses erros?" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 111). Mas para 141 isso, seria necessário retirar do pensamento o impensado exterior e anterior, e colocar o pressuposto no interior mesmo do enunciado, como continuidade interna e não relações externas. Assim, a solução fregeana, presente também no realismo metafísico e no empirismo lógico (que não passam de faces diferentes do idealismo), é a fantasia de diluição da luta política no puro funcionamento do sistema da língua (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 112). Essa reabsorção, ou seja, o apagamento das diferenças e das oposições, tenta instaurar a fantasia de continuidade entre enunciado e pressuposto, como se não houvesse nada impensado no âmago do pensamento, como se a evidência da verdade pudesse ser encontrada de forma objetiva e científica. Assim, se não se pode falar em termos de absorção de uma parte na outra, deve-se manter a relação entre base linguística e processo discursivo em termos de encontro e oposição. Todavia, há de se enfocar, doravante, nas descontinuidades (hiâncias) que separam também os elementos constitutivos do processo discursivo. A transição da análise da base linguística para a análise dos processos discursivos é inserida por Pêcheux da seguinte forma: "O fato de que a língua [...] seja indiferente à divisão de classes não quer dizer que as classes sejam indiferentes à língua. Ao contrário, elas a utilizam, de modo determinado, no campo de seu antagonismo, especialmente de sua luta política" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 82). Isso quer dizer que nos entremeios dos processos discursivos constata-se uma primeira hiância: aquela que separa e opõe classes. A língua pode ser indiferente ao discurso, afinal, não existe divisões de classes na língua: fonologia de classes, gramática de classes, sintaxe de classes. Mas as classes, em conflito, se preocupam com a fonologia, a gramática e a sintaxe para instrumentalizarem diferentes sentidos. O discurso se inscreve politicamente e ideologicamente, logo, diferentes classes sociais, inscritas em distintas formações discursivas, fazem uso da língua de forma diferente. Tais distinções são apagadas pelo efeito ideológico de "apropriação de contradição", como se a contradição pudesse ser usada, em sua totalidade, como ferramenta ativa de neutralidade e indiferença política no seio da língua. Assim, no âmago do conflito de classes a língua instrumentalizada cientificamente poderia aparecer como neutralidade balizadora do conflito. Assim, a especialização da língua é a tentativa de sedentarizar a errância contingente dos sentidos apagando os próprios rastros de sedentarização, como se a saturação dos pensamentos fosse natural. Ou seja, a língua correta e aperfeiçoada é a construção do mito da neutralidade através de processos politicamente demarcados (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 114). É a 142 incorporação da contradição, ou melhor, é o uso da própria contradição como força de sedentarização. Neste caso, a suposta neutralidade do discurso científico é instaurada justamente sobre o apagamento das descontinuidades da língua e do discurso. Assim, a contingência, o erro e a ilusão só podem ser apagados da língua se for apagada a descontinuidade (hiância) que separa a base linguística do processo discursivo, e a hiância que opõe o pensamento do objeto de pensamento (o dizer do já-dito no pré-construído). Chega-se assim inevitavelmente à ideia de uma 'ciência de todo e qualquer objeto', para a qual somente existiriam relações pensadas, esvaziadas de todo 'ser': trata-se dessa língua 'logicamente perfeita', ou ideografia, da qual diz Frege se exigirá 'que toda expressão construída como nome próprio, a partir de sinais previamente introduzidos, e de maneira gramaticalmente correta, designe, de fato, um objeto, e que nenhum sinal novo seja introduzido como nome próprio sem que lhe seja assegurada uma referência (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 116). A lógica, assim, torna-se a o núcleo da ciência, seu fundamento necessário, funcionamento calcado no apagamento das descontinuidades (hiâncias). O resultado são pensamentos essenciais, atemporais e universais, que prescindem da história e do ser, ou melhor, pensamentos que constroem a história e os seres, uma espécie de ficção lógica (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 116) que produz armadilhas lógicas nas ciências humanas, como "o povo", "as massas", "a classe operária", bem como causa ilusões conceituais nas ciências ditas exatas, como os seres metafísicos cunhados pela linguagem matemática e tidos como verdadeiros, à despeito da experiência. Este suposto apagamento das hiâncias instaura a ilusão de que o complexo de significação se trata de uma unidade contínua, um tipo de relação que apaga a própria natureza relacional entre "dois" e faz parecer "um". A estabilização da língua científica, portanto, funda-se na sedentarização das movências presentes nas relações, nos vínculos e nos encontros que fundam a base linguística (o encontro arbitrário entre significante e significado, e a relação de oposição entre os signos no valor sistêmico), bem como na sedentarização das relações presentes no processo discursivo (a relação contraditória entre o pré-construído e o dizer). Contudo, a sedentarização da errância contingente se dá, como visto anteriormente, como incorporação de uma contradição, ou seja, a sedentarização costura as 143 partes do todo enquanto apaga as marcas da costura, fazendo a soma das partes parecer "um", indivisível, contínuo, necessário e estável. É só nessas circunstâncias que a língua pode aparecer como ferramenta, e somente enquanto ferramenta é que ela pode ser imperfeita (HENRY, 2013). Ferramenta por que se presta a algo: a própria língua é alinhavada no tecido por que é posta a servir a um projeto, submetida a propósitos (encontros, vínculos e relações) que, apesar de não serem naturais, são produzidos-reproduzidos como "evidências naturais", como se a sedentarização dos sentidos não derivasse de uma soma de instrumentalizações ideológicas, mas sim de uma "essência evidente". Contudo, o processo ideológico de sedentarização das movências fracassa perenemente, afinal, o pressuposto não provém do interior do enunciado, mas sim de algo anterior, impensado, que destotaliza o pensamento e exige interpretação. Desde Saussure a própria língua se mostra [...] como um tesouro depositado pela prática da fala nos sujeitos pertencentes a uma mesma comunidade, um sistema gramatical existindo virtualmente em cada cérebro, ou mais exatamente nos cérebros de um conjunto de indivíduos, já que a língua não está completa em nenhum deles (SAUSSURE, 2006, p. 26). Falamos, portanto, da presença de opostos que se contradizem no seio das línguas e dos discursos: sedentarização e errância. A sedentarização, enquanto processo de costura que tenta imprimir certa ilusão de continuidade e unidade, se vê às voltas, perenemente, com o esgarçamento das linhas que costuram as partes do discurso e da língua, permitindo, nestes momentos, entrever o caráter contingente, transitório e frágil daquilo que a ciência acredita ser universal, atemporal e essencial. O erro só pode aparecer por intermédio do procedimento lógico de sedentarização, ou melhor, no juízo que se estabelece sobre a base linguística e o processo discursivo. Assim, antes do juízo recobrir a linguagem com projetos de sedentarização, a errância apenas é, nem erro, nem acerto. Dito de outra forma, aquilo que erra não erra, ou melhor, aquilo que vaga não falha. 2.2.1 IDEOLOGIA E SEDENTARIZAÇÃO O erro não está na língua, como já visto: o erro é da ordem do juízo, a posteriori. 144 Quisemos fazer este esclarecimento prévio para nos prevenirmos contra a concepção logicista segundo a qual as oposições ideológicas resultariam de imperfeições da linguagem, o que significa reduzi-las a quiproquós, a 'problemas sem pé nem cabeça' dos quais todo o mundo poderia escapar se se desse a um tal trabalho. Procuraremos mostrar que não se trata disso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). Não é o erro a causa das ilusões, derivas, mal-entendidos e confusões que se acumulam no uso da língua o erro só aparece depois, a depender das condições de produção do sentido. É a errância que as causa a movência irremediável que faz deslizar, umas sobre as outras, as partes que compõem a base linguística. Todavia um questionamento persiste: diante da errância da língua, seria possível a algum domínio das práticas humanas a aplicação de uma força na intenção de sedentarizar o processo de significação e produção de conhecimento? Sim, responderia Pêcheux. E o nome dessa força é Ideologia. Depois de trilharmos de forma nômade, página a página, pelos primeiros capítulos de Semântica e Discurso (2009), buscando por pilares nos quais fundamentar uma teoria discursiva da errância, passando pelas pradarias primordiais da base discursiva e pelas cordilheiras do processo discursivo e do pré-construído, chegou a hora de continuarmos nossa jornada através dessa densa obra à procura da errância na Ideologia, no Discurso e no Sujeito. Mas importa, sobremaneira, salientar que o objetivo desta seção e das próximas não é meramente descrever os "misteriosos" processos de significação e de constituição do sujeito. O objetivo aqui é lançar luz sobre tais noções a partir do prisma da errância e do sedentarismo. O primeiro capítulo da terceira parte é um pequeno tópico intitulado "Sobre as condições ideológicas da reprodução/transformação das relações de produção" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 129) dedicado a trazer, para o interior da teoria discursiva, as noções de Ideologia e Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado, necessárias para fundamentar uma teoria materialista do discurso. Nosso objetivo, nesta tese, é demonstrar que a Ideologia é o agente da sedentarização dos sentidos, ou melhor, de sujeição da errância fundamental da significação através de uma instrumentalização discursiva. Se assumirmos a ideologia como força motriz da sedentarização dos sentidos, o projeto da filosofia lógica, investigado na subseção anterior desta tese, traz contribuições para a compreensão do próprio funcionamento da ideologia, cujas características basais passam também por uma tentativa de estabilização e estancamento da movência errante dos sentidos, ou seja, uma sedentarização das relações que constituem língua, história, sujeito e discurso. 145 Todo esforço fregeano de instrumentalizar a língua na intenção de saturar os espaços vazios e depurar as ilusões e erros projeto frustrado, como visto anteriormente, no problema das relativas determinativas e explicativas não se difere, essencialmente, do funcionamento ideológico no que diz respeito à sutura dos sentidos. Ancoramos essa argumentação em uma pista deixada por Pêcheux quando ele afirma que "é preciso [...] especificar alguns pontos de alcance mais geral, relacionados à teoria das ideologias, à prática de produção de conhecimentos e à prática política, sem os quais tudo o que vai se seguir estaria inteiramente deslocado" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 129). Nos parágrafos seguintes o autor estabelece um diálogo com Althusser (1985) sobre a estrutura dos Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado (doravante, AIEs), mas antes de prosseguirmos importa salientar que tais "pontos de alcance mais geral" são relacionados não só à caracterização das ideologias, mas também à prática de produção de conhecimentos e à prática política. Tal aproximação teórica entre ideologia, epistemologia (lógica) e política nos ajudam a estabelecer um esteio para a ponte que liga as duas primeiras partes de Semântica e Discurso e a terceira parte, que trata mais claramente de ideologia, discurso e sujeito. Na bagagem das duas primeiras partes da referida obra vieram, principalmente, discussões a respeito A) do projeto científico de apagamento das contingências da significação através da necessidade lógica da significação; B) da tentativa de detectar e expurgar os erros (ilusões, espaços vazios) da língua e dos discursos; C) do empreendimento lógico de apagar as descontinuidades e implantar, no lugar, continuidades que formam unidades e invalidam a movência errante da linguagem científica e cotidiana; D) da errância estrutural, decorrente da hiância que separa as partes daquilo que Pêcheux chama de Base Linguística. Ora, tais projetos de sedentarização da significação se identificam, em grande medida, com aquilo que Pêcheux empresta da teoria althusseriana sobre ideologias, que atesta que: A) os AIE trabalham "determinações econômicas" e "condições ideológicas" que instrumentalizam as relações de produção, ou seja, sedentarizam suas possibilidades e regulam a reprodução e a transformação das relações de produção; B) reprodução e transformação são duas faces de uma contradição intrínseca a todo modo de produção que se baseia em uma luta de classes, ou seja, toda relação de produção se dá reproduzindo e transformando, concomitantemente (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 130). 146 Sobre os AIE, importa ressaltar: A) que Ideologia31 não equivale a "mentalidade da época", nem se impõe de forma homogênea sobre a sociedade como algo anterior à luta de classes, logo, os AIE não são meras ferramentas da Ideologia; B) os AIE não são a realização incontestável da ideologia da classe dominante, ou seja, não há luta de classes sem lutas, não há domínio sem resistência; C) justamente por ser o palco de um conflito é que os AIE não são apenas da ordem da reprodução, são também da ordem da transformação; D) os AIE não são, eles mesmos, homogêneos; são, na verdade, um "conjunto complexo de aparelhos ideológicos de estado" que comporta também relações de contradição, desigualdade e insubordinação entre seus elementos. Na verdade, seria absurdo pensar que, numa conjuntura dada, todos os aparelhos ideológicos de estado contribuem de maneira igual para a reprodução das relações de produção e para sua transformação. De fato, suas propriedades 'regionais' sua especialização evidente na religião, no conhecimento, na política etc. condicionam sua importância relativa (a desigualdade de suas relações) no interior do conjunto dos aparelhos ideológicos de Estado, e isso em função do estado da luta de classes na formação social considerada (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 131). Neste aspecto, importa delimitar com mais cuidado as diferentes definições de ideologia que aparecem na obra pecheutiana. A primeira noção, mais abrangente, traz a palavra com inicial maiúscula: Ideologia. Ela diz respeito à Ideologia em geral, ou seja, à noção mais essencial de Ideologia. A Ideologia, diz Pêcheux, é aquilo que permite pensar o humano como "animal ideológico", ou seja, não o opõe à natureza, mas faz dele um animal histórico. "A história é um imenso sistema natural-humano em movimento, cujo motor é a luta de classes" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 138). A história, no interior do marxismo-leninismo, é a história da luta de classes, e por isso a Ideologia é eterna. Hora, não se trata de esquecer a brevidade da existência de humanos no universo, nem de que houveram incontáveis eventos antes da história. Tampouco trata-se de encontrar na história e na Ideologia noções universais, essenciais e atemporais (Ideologia e história fora da história?), mas trata-se sim de pensar que no interior desse processo "natural-humano" da história, a Ideologia é eterna. Dito de outra forma, desde os primórdios da escrita humana e da história linear temos uma Ideologia 31 Ideologia (I maiúsculo), equivale a Ideologia em Geral, será distinguido de ideologia (i minúsculo) e ideologias (no plural), como veremos mais adiante. 147 funcionando de forma geral, abrangente e com caracteres infraestruturas (econômicos) e superestruturais (jurídico-político e ideológicos)32. Com extensão menor que a Ideologia em geral, as Formações Ideológicas (FIs) são historicamente circunscritas e funcionam através dos processos ideológicos instaurados pelos Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado (AIEs). Assim, as FIs são um conjunto complexo de objetos ideológicos, bem como de formas de representações e relações com os mesmos, que não são individuais nem universais, mas inserem o sujeito no âmago do conflito de classes. Assim, as FIs são a materialização da própria luta de classes, ou ainda, a manifestação material e histórica do conflito. No interior de uma dada FI existem ideologias distintas, das quais se destaca a ideologia dominante. Seu par antinômico, evidentemente, é a ideologia dominada. É neste nível da ideologia que se vê de forma mais latente o conflito de classes (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 139). Ora, tais bordas são importantes quando se pensa em semântica, pois é no interior desse conflito de classes que se dão os processos de significação. Importa, contudo, ressaltar que a própria ideia de "conflito de classes" implica, irremediavelmente, uma separação/oposição entre classes de forma que uma não se subsome na outra: duas não fazem uma. Dessa forma, a própria noção de AIE não pode também ser compreendida de forma linear, contínua e inteiriça, o que desautoriza a concepção de ideologia única, completa e acabada. Enquanto palco de um conflito perene, os AIEs são descontínuos, repletos de hiâncias que instauram movências errantes. Em outras palavras, se se pensa a Ideologia em termos de sedentarização da significação, deve-se assumir que a própria Ideologia é constituída por relações errantes, por encontros contingentes. E justamente por ser palco de um conflito perene é que os AIE são a própria materialização da tentativa de instrumentalização da significação. Ou seja, a Ideologia é, nestes termos, uma força de sedentarização dos sentidos que oculta, de seu próprio funcionamento, a errância contingente que a fundamenta. Tais proposições se sustentam nas palavras de Pêcheux quando o autor afirma que não se pode falar em Ideologia sem falar em Formações Ideológicas (doravante, FIs), que são modos heterogêneos de fornecer objetos ideológicos e, ao mesmo tempo, maneiras de se servir deles (seus sentidos, suas orientações e os interesses da classe a que servem). Contudo, não 32 Não nos compete aqui pensar se a origem da escrita coincide com a origem da economia e da política. 148 se pode afirmar que tais FIs sejam "modos abstratos de ideologia" que são aplicados aos "objetos ideológicos", como se houvesse uma cronologia teleológica que orientasse temporalmente as diferentes partes do funcionamento ideológico. Não existe uma anterioridade ideológica recaindo sobre os objetos ideológicos atuais, existe, sim, um processo ideológico que, no exato momento de sua prática, instaura os modos heterogêneos de fornecimento de objetos ideológicos bem como suas maneiras de consumo. Assim, é justamente nas relações entre diferentes classes (relações de desigualdade-subordinação), ou seja, na hiância que separa e instaura relações discrepantes entre FIs, que se constitui o palco da luta ideológica de classes (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 132). Ora, a relação (a pega, o encontro) é ao mesmo tempo aquilo que aproxima, mas também é o que mantém afastado o suficiente para não fazer "um". Fundamentadas em relações de oposições discrepantes, as FIs são separadas por descontinuidades que são, elas mesmas, motivo de embate ideológico. Dito de outra forma, é a relação entre as FIs que importa ao domínio ideológico, é o espaço entremeio entre elas que se torna objeto de disputa e controle. Segundo Pêcheux, existem duas formas de dominar o entremeio da relação. A primeira delas desloca o lugar da relação, da borda para um centro ilusório, trabalhando uma manutenção/sedentarização do idêntico no "interior" de cada região ideológica, como se fosse no âmago delas (moral, leis, família, política, pedagogia etc.) que habitasse o problema da movência dos sentidos. Esse deslocamento coloca a hiância no interior da FI como um corte a ser costurado, como um problema interno a ser solucionado. Segundo Pêcheux, as relações de desigualdade-subordinação habitam, de fato, nas hiâncias que separam essas regiões que constituem a cena da luta ideológica de classes. Compreende-se melhor [...] a maneira pela qual as relações de desigualdadesubordinação entre os diferentes aparelhos ideológicos de Estado (e as regiões, objetos e práticas lhes correspondem) constituem, como dizíamos, a cena da luta ideológica de classes. O aspecto ideológico da luta para a transformação das relações de produção se localiza, pois, antes de mais nada, na luta para impor, no interior do complexo dos aparelhos ideológicos de Estado, novas relações de desigualdade-subordinação (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 133). Não é no interior das regiões ideológicas onde se assenta o palco dos conflitos de classes, mas sim nas relações entre tais regiões relações de desigualdade e subordinação que, justamente por serem relações, não fazem "um". É neste tipo de relação entre as classes que 149 se instaura a manutenção da desigualdade, da diferença, do "não-um", e é justamente por que são desiguais é que se pode instaurar a relação de subordinação. Contudo, a subordinação do proletariado pela burguesia não se dá em termos de diluição de uma classe na outra: importa, ao contrário, que o proletariado continue não sendo burguesia, importa que a hiância que as separa em diferentes classes continue mantendo-as "não-um". Logo, o objeto de instrumentalização e sedentarização da classe dominante não é a classe dominada, mas sim as relações de desigualdade-subordinação que separam e opõem as classes. E o ferramental de sedentarização de tais relações são os AIEs (aparelhos ideológicos de Estado). Isso implica assumir, segundo Pêcheux, que não basta à classe dominante ocupar os principais cargos na política, por exemplo, mas faz-se imprescindível "colocar a política no posto de comando" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 133), assegurando a sedentarização das relações que habitam as hiâncias entre diferentes classes33. Logo, ao processo de sedentarização do conflito de classes importa mais a instrumentalização das relações entre as classes e menos as classes particulares. O segundo recobrimento ideológico de sedentarização das relações entre classes se dá forma de apagamento do próprio funcionamento. "[...] a relação de classes é dissimulada no funcionamento do aparelho de estado pelo próprio mecanismo que a realiza, de modo que a sociedade, o Estado e os sujeitos de direito [...] são produzidos-reproduzidos como 'evidências naturais'" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 134). Neste recobrimento ideológico de sedentarização (estabilização e administração dos sentidos) está em jogo a contradição entre reprodução e transformação das relações de produção. Ora, é manifesto que à classe dominante importa que tais relações sejam reproduzidas temporalmente e geograficamente, ou seja, importam as relações de manutenção do poder. Contudo, para que tais relações de reprodução subjuguem as relações de transformação faz-se necessário apagar das relações o próprio caráter de "relação", pois enquanto mera relação, o conflito de classes adquire caracteres de arbitrariedade, contingência, historicidade, valor e sistema. Convém à classe dominante "reproduzir" apagando os vestígios do processo de reprodução, instaurando a ilusão de que a reprodução se trata de uma continuidade teleológica natural, uma evidência essencial, enfim, 33 Como se poderá observar no decorrer dessa tese, a noção de "conflito de classes" será colocada sempre em termos de miríade de classes, e não apenas duas, coadunando com as visões mais contemporâneas do marxismo (ALTHUSSER, 1985). 150 que subjuga apagando o próprio procedimento de dominação e a existência da possibilidade de transformação. O estabelecimento da reprodução/submissão como "evidência" é o auge da sedentarização do processo de significação. Todavia, convém lembrar, diante do que vimos nas subseções anteriores, que o processo de sedentarização carrega em seu âmago uma movência errante que impossibilita a plena instrumentalização dos sentidos. Algo sempre erra (falha, vaga) no interior do processo ideológico de sedentarização, fazendo desmoronar o castelo de evidências, ou melhor, fazendo furo e descosturando o tecido que instituía certo delírio de completude. Algo sempre erra na ciência, algo sempre se move errante na religião, algo sempre desliza na política. A Ideologia acabada e estanque é uma ilusão que o erro pode desmascarar. 2.2.2 A SEDENTARIZAÇÃO DO SUJEITO PELA IDEOLOGIA O principal argumento desta tese se sustenta sobre a inferência pecheutiana de que não é o erro a causa das inexatidões e ilusões na língua, "dos quais todo mundo poderia escapar se se desse a um tal trabalho. Procuraremos mostrar que não se trata disso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). Tentaremos, portanto, demonstrar que tais irregularidades derivam da errância, onde não há falha. A errância é apenas puro movimento: aquilo que erra, não erra, ou seja, aquilo que vaga não falha. O erro só pode aparecer a posteriori, determinado pela prática ideológica da linguagem que estabelece projetos e tenta controlar a significação. A sedentarização, nesta tese, é a antinomia da errância: é o procedimento ideológico (fadado ao fracasso) de mitigação e administração do sentido e do sujeito através de ilusões de evidências. Quando aborda a noção de sujeito, Pêcheux inicia sua teorização reforçando o conceito proposto por Althusser: Como todas as evidências, inclusive aquelas que fazem com que uma palavra 'designe uma coisa', ou 'possua um significado' (portanto, inclusas as evidências da 'transparência' da linguagem), a evidência de que vocês e eu somos sujeitos e que isto não constitua um problema é um efeito ideológico, o efeito ideológico elementar (ALTHUSSER, 1985, p. 95). O objetivo de Pêcheux, neste momento, é mostrar que a "constituição do sentido se junta à da constituição do sujeito" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 140) através da figura da interpelação. 151 E o objetivo desta tese, neste ponto, é mostrar que assim como no processo de significação, o processo de constituição do sujeito também é marcado por hiâncias que separam e opõem as partes que o constitui, dotando-o de uma movência errante relativamente autônoma. Esta errância, como veremos, possui um duplo efeito: por um lado, impede a plenitude da sedentarização do sujeito, ou seja, impossibilita a interpelação-identificação cabal do indivíduo em sujeito do discurso pela ideologia; mas por outro lado, impede que o sujeito reconheça o próprio processo que lhe subjuga e permite que a Ideologia instale uma evidência imaginária para sentido e sujeito. Defenderemos, portanto, que a errância na "base linguística" fornece ao "processo discursivo" uma língua porosa e movente que, afinal, impõe procedimentos errantes que impedem o assujeitamento cabal do indivíduo ao mesmo tempo que impedem ao sujeito descortinar e ver claramente aquilo que lhe subjuga. Em outras palavras, nesta tese não buscaremos apenas abordar e delinear a noção de sujeito, bem conhecida dos analistas do discurso. O propósito desta subseção é, de outro modo, analisar os efeitos da errância na constituição discursiva do sujeito, e nossa hipótese é a de que o assujeitamento se dá em meio a uma tensão estabelecida entre a subjugação e a persistência da falha. Tomamos como ponto de partida uma importante definição que Pêcheux faz a respeito da formulação de interpelação: Dizemos a 'figura' da interpelação para designar o fato de que se trata, como indica Althusser, de uma ilustração, de um exemplo submetido a uma forma de exposição particular, concreta o suficiente para que possa ser reconhecida e abstrata o suficiente para que possa ser pensável e pensada, dando origem ao conhecimento (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 140). Como veremos, Pêcheux está às voltas de solucionar o problema idealista que instaura a ilusão de que o "eu" coincide com o indivíduo que diz "eu", mas é preciso tomar o cuidado para que tal procedimento não recaia no outro extremo, igualmente idealista, de prescindir da noção de indivíduo na própria constituição do sujeito. Sobre isso Pêcheux afirma que a relação entre indivíduo e sujeito é uma relação de discrepância, paradoxal (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 141). O fato de que o autor tenha colocado "indivíduo" e "sujeito" em termos de "relação" já nos leva a assumir, diante das subseções anteriores, que existe uma hiância que separa indivíduo e sujeito de forma irremediável. Logo, nem o projeto idealista de salvaguardar a autonomia do indivíduo nem o projeto ideológico de assujeitamento pleno podem, nestes 152 termos, fazer "um", não podem fazer subsumir (indivíduo e sujeito) um no outro. Mas Pêcheux não define o par indivíduo/sujeito apenas como "relação", leva mais adiante e define este par em termos de "relação discrepante", ou seja, divergente, oposta, conflitante: "não-um". Ora, uma relação pode ser do tipo simétrica, relacionando dois "semelhantes" que podem, afinal, serem atados a ponto de se confundirem. Mas não é este o caso. Pêcheux atesta que a relação entre indivíduo e sujeito é uma relação discrepante, entre duas instâncias incompatíveis e discordantes. Logo, a interpelação é um procedimento que não se conclui de forma simétrica e coesa. Tal "relação discrepante" foi usada por Pêcheux para desvelar o mito da simetria idealista que atesta a liberdade plena do indivíduo no uso da palavra (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 141), contudo, ela serve também para que se evite o impulso teórico de assumir que o sujeito pode ser subjugado de forma cabal pela ideologia. Vejamos isso com mais cuidado. Pêcheux inicia sua abordagem da noção de sujeito pelas vias da interpelação, que é aquilo que, no interior do funcionamento da Ideologia, torna tangível a relação entre os Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado (AIEs) e os Aparelhos Repressivos de Estado (AREs). O papel dos AREs (através do estado, do judiciário, da polícia) é distribuir, verificar e controlar as identidades, os números e os nomes dos "sujeitos", instaurando certa ilusão de que o sujeito é um indivíduo singular, ou seja, de que o sujeito é uma evidência inequívoca no interior do indivíduo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 140). Constituídos assim, os sujeitos (ilusoriamente individualizados) têm garantidos seus direitos e se submetem aos seus deveres, que são relações contratuais reguladas e instrumentalizadas pelos AREs. Dito de outra forma, a ideologia, através dos AREs, interpela (no duplo sentido da palavra: interrompe e demanda) o sujeito dentro de um enorme complexo de signos que condicionam, sobremaneira, o papel, o sentido e a existência do sujeito no interior de uma dada Formação Ideológica e Social. Mas esta não é a única "mágica" da Ideologia na constituição do sujeito. Ela resolve também um problema ainda mais grave e intrínseco: o da des-identificação do sujeito consigo mesmo. Tal problemática fica a encargo dos AIEs, que através da família, da religião, da escola etc., instauram aquilo que Pêcheux chamou de "pequeno teatro da consciência". Esta encenação ideológica se dá na forma do enunciado: "eu sou o único que pode dizer 'sou eu' quando se fala de mim mesmo" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 140). Assim, o sujeito ideológico é aquele que diz "eu vejo", "eu falo", "eu te vejo", "eu te falo". Há, aí, uma espécie de identificação supostamente evidente que instaura a ilusão de que aquele que diz "eu" é uma singularidade com o "eu" fornecido pelos AREs. É assim que o indivíduo é interpelado-identificado como 153 sujeito pelo discurso, quando ele passa a acreditar, no palco da consciência, que o si coincide com o sujeito fornecido pelo estado. No entanto, recorda Pêcheux, estas são instancias diferentes. O problema da des-identificação não é novo. Embora não seja possível precisar sua origem, e talvez não seja necessário, o problema da des-identificação da consciência pode ser observado ao menos desde Kierkegaard (1991), passando por diversos outros pensadores. Neste autor, a des-identificação da consciência se apreende de forma mais clara no momento da autorreflexão: neste momento, a consciência olha para si mesma como se olha para um outro, igual a si mesmo, mas separado por um nada, instransponível, nas palavras de Pêcheux, "estranhamente familiar" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 142). Em Kierkegaard, esta separação gera um estranhamento entre a consciência e este outro "eu", instaurando um estado de independência e angústia entre as duas instâncias: a consciência parece ser livre até de si mesma. Ora, Lacan era leitor de Kierkegaard (LACAN, 2005), e explicitamente Pêcheux era leitor de Lacan. Assim, a partir do analista do discurso, apontamos que o trabalho ideológico de constituição do sujeito só pode instaurar a evidência do sujeito quando apaga a hiância que separa e des-identifica a consciência daquilo que ela chama de "eu". A interpelação ideológica do indivíduo em sujeito é isso: o apagamento da hiância que reside o âmago da relação discrepante indivíduo/sujeito, interpelando (demandando ao indivíduo) uma identidade que faz o sujeito se diluir no indivíduo como se este fosse "único, insubstituível e idêntico a si mesmo" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 141). Assim, e somente assim, é que um sujeito pode responder "sou eu" quando se pergunta "quem é?", como se fosse evidente que que "eu" sou a única pessoa que poderia dizer "eu" ao falar de mim mesmo. É a isto que Pêcheux chama de "pequeno teatro da consciência", onde a consciência parece interpretar um personagem de forma tão magistral que passa a acreditar que aquele personagem é ela mesma. O "eu", portanto, não passa de um personagem criado pelos Aparelhos Repressivos de Estado, ao passo que essa suposta diluição do personagem no ator é feita pelos Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado. Mas essa pega entre personagem e ator, separada irremediavelmente por uma hiância fundamental, é movente e inconclusa: errante. Já mostramos as vias teóricas pelas quais se pode assegurar a noção de errância entre indivíduo e sujeito, falta-nos observar a movência errante do sujeito em relação à Ideologia tarefa mais densa e complexa. Se é patente que não existe sujeito sem Ideologia, seria possível 154 pensar uma hiância que separa e imprime certa movência errante ao sujeito em relação à Ideologia? Voltemos a Pêcheux: Essa mistura surpreendente de absurdo e de evidência, e esse retorno do estranho no familiar, já foram encontrados por nós a propósito da noção de pré-construído. [...] Na ocasião, devíamos nos limitar a constatar que esse efeito de pré-construído consistiria numa discrepância pelo qual um elemento irrompe no enunciado como se tivesse sido pensado 'antes, em outro lugar, independentemente'. Podemos, de agora em diante, tendo em conta o que acabamos de expor, considerar o efeito de pré-construído como a modalidade discursiva da discrepância pela qual o indivíduo é interpelado em sujeito... ao mesmo tempo em que é 'sempre-já sujeito' (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 142). Nesta tese falamos de assujeitamento em termos de sedentarização, ou seja, de um tipo de relação que sutura, diminui e administra as possibilidades contingentes do sentido e do sujeito, estreitando o horizonte de suas movências. A citação acima proporciona diversas pistas a respeito da tensão errância/sedentarização do sujeito. Ela se inicia atestando uma relação paradoxal entre absurdo e evidência, de retorno do estranho no familiar. O absurdo é aquilo que é contrário à razão, à sensatez e ao bom senso; é, enfim, nonsense, desconhecido e inesperado. A evidência é seu oposto: clara, esperada, conhecida, manifesta, verificável, incontestável. Poucas relações poderiam se dar de forma tão antagônica quanto esta que coloca lado a lado absurdo e evidência. Mas Pêcheux está dizendo que, a propósito do préconstruído no discurso, algo de absurdo sempre escoa e ecoa no interior do "evidente", algo de estranho sempre irrompe no seio do familiar. O próprio pré-construído é, ele mesmo, discrepante. Ao mesmo tempo em que é absurdo, exterior e anterior, sempre surpreendendo o sujeito com novos "conhecimentos" a respeito de sua prática social, ele é também aquilo que há de mais familiar ao sujeito, afinal, o pré-construído sempre esteve ali, antes mesmo do nascimento do indivíduo/sujeito. Ele é, por isso mesmo, paradoxal: é o anterior infindamente presente, é uma intimidade coletiva, um nativo colonizador um "sempre já-aí" que persiste em tomar o sujeito de sobressalto. Ora, é essa mesma discrepância entre absurdo e evidência que também fundamenta o próprio processo de interpelação do indivíduo em sujeito pela Ideologia. "Essa discrepância (a estranheza familiar desse fora, situado antes, que dá conta de seus atos) funciona por contradição" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 142). Se o pré-construído é uma discrepância que se relaciona também por discrepância com o dizer atual, o sujeito é aquilo que, constituído antes 155 pela Ideologia, é aquilo que irrompe no indivíduo na forma de absurdo-familiar. A outra parte dessa relação discrepante é o indivíduo, aquilo que, regulado pelos AREs, é sempre atual basta que um "indivíduo" mude de endereço para que todo um ferramental repressivo lhe imponha imediatamente designações burocráticas e por isso mesmo é familiar, inequívoco, "óbvio e evidente" (o Fulano de Tal, nascido na data X, residente do endereço Y no ano Z, é "único"). Importa ressaltar, portanto, que a interpelação do indivíduo em sujeito pela Ideologia trata-se de um processo que relaciona discrepâncias, ou seja, o assujeitamento não implica a diluição de um no outro; implica, sim, na instituição de certa relação discrepante (inconciliável) entre o atual e o anterior, entre o "evidente" e o absurdo, entre o familiar e o estranho. Assim, a interpelação funciona por contradição: existência conjunta de opostos que se repelem, mas que são colocados em movimento imanente34. Trata-se, afinal, de uma interdependência independente: contradição. Mas isso não é tudo. A noção de interpelação não aparece sozinha, ela é postulada por Pêcheux, a propósito da noção de assujeitamento, na forma de par antinômico: interpelação-identificação. Se interpelar é interromper e demandar, identificar é tornar idêntico, confundir sem fundir, fazer dois parecerem "um". A relação discrepante indivíduo/sujeito configura-se, portanto, como um processo que demanda e que impõe (via AREs) uma identificação/confusão entre indivíduo e sujeito (pelas vias dos AIEs). Neste processo "os 'objetos' que nele se manifestam se desdobram, se dividem para atuar sobre si enquanto outro si" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 143), para logo depois, simularem uma fusão em um único si. O resultado deste processo é um sujeito aparentemente "causa de si"; ou novamente resgatando a metáfora do barão alemão do século XVIII, Münchhausen: elevar-se nos ares puxando-se pelos próprios cabelos. Contudo, importa ainda delinear com mais atenção o procedimento ideológico que instaura a "identificação" do sujeito consigo mesmo e com o outro, sobretudo à luz da tensão entre sedentarização e errância na língua e no discurso. 2.2.3 O SUJEITO É UMA ILUSÃO, OU: O PERSONAGEM QUE CONSUMIU O ATOR 34 Imanência: existência da causa na própria causa. Par antitético de "transcendência": aquilo que tem uma causa exterior (KANT, 2001). 156 Errância e sedentarização continuam, neste tópico, figurando como fios condutores de nossa análise da obra Semântica e Discurso, de Pêcheux (2009). Já sabemos, a partir dos capítulos anteriores, que sentido e sujeito são constituídos simultaneamente; sabemos também que o pré-construído se mostra como aquilo que é estranho no seio do familiar. Logo, tanto sentido quanto sujeito são constituídos mediante processo contraditório que coloca em relação discrepante o absurdo e o familiar. Estas noções são caras a esta tese na medida em que evocam a hiância que mantém descontínuas as partes que constituem sentido e sujeito. A sutura ideológica, instrumentalizada pelos AIEs e pelos AREs, não é capaz de constituir sentidos plenos, nem sujeitos acabados: pode apenas constituir contradições. Seguindo o curso das proposições pecheutianas, chegamos então ao famoso capítulo "A forma-sujeito do discurso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 145), uma importante seção do livro onde são delineados de forma mais sólida os conceitos de interdiscurso, intradiscurso e, obviamente, a noção de forma-sujeito35. Para abordá-lo, importa retomar a noção de assujeitamento do capítulo anterior, onde se vê que o indivíduo é constituído em sujeito mediante processo contraditório de interpelação-identificação. O que veremos, doravante, são os mecanismos ideológicos que sustentam a interpelação e a identificação no âmago do funcionamento discursivo. Pêcheux inicia o capítulo assim: Podemos resumir o que precede dizendo que, sob a evidencia de que 'eu sou realmente eu' (com meu nome, minha família, meus amigos, minhas lembranças, minhas 'ideias' minhas intenções e meus compromissos), há o processo da interpelação-identificação que produz o sujeito no lugar deixado vazio: 'aquele que...', isto é, X, o qüidam que se achará aí; e isso sob diversas formas, impostas pelas 'relações sociais jurídico-ideológicas' (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 145). O termo mais notório dessa citação é a palavra "evidência". Evidência é aquilo sobre o qual não se tem suspeitas, mas certezas manifestas, à vista de todos. A evidência da significação, portanto, seria sua movência errante decorrente de uma base linguística que não faz "um" harmônico, mas coloca em relação opostos discrepantes. É isso que a base linguística evidencia a todo momento através de mal-entendidos, falhas, deslizes de sentido e 35 O leitor experiente em Análise do Discurso sentirá falta, aqui, do diálogo teórico com a noção de "posição-sujeito". Optamos por não trazer esta discussão pelo fato de que em Semântica e Discurso (2009) essa noção ainda não havia sido desenvolvida. E por conta da extensão de tal noção, nos preocupamos em manter o foco na interpelação pelo encaixe/identificação do sujeito com a formasujeito de uma dada FD. Em trabalhos futuros a noção de posição-sujeito deverá aparecer. 157 contingências enunciativas: essa é a verdade da língua, mas não é essa a verdade que interessa à Ideologia. Para a Ideologia, materializada nos processos discursivos da Formação Ideológica dominante, o sentido precisa se evidenciar de outra forma, não fragmentada, não errante: língua, sentido e sujeito precisam ser "evidentes" neles mesmos. Ou seja, para a Ideologia, a evidência que recobre sentido e sujeito precisa ser uma "certeza" manifesta de que sentido e sujeito são o que são, que sempre foram assim e que não há maneiras de ser diferente. Assim, a evidência instalada pela Ideologia mascara a evidência primeira da significação, ou melhor, a ficção de evidência de continuidade dissimula a evidência da descontinuidade contraditória da base linguística em relação ao processo discursivo. Assim, importa-nos distinguir, nesta tese, dois tipos de evidências: 1) a evidência do caráter material do sentido como processo que coloca em relação partes discrepantes, separadas por hiâncias instransponíveis -; e 2) a evidência sentido-sujeito "prontos", evidência constituída pela Ideologia mediante apagamento da evidência material do sentido. A primeira evidência é material, a segunda idealista. Mas de que forma a Ideologia consegue instaurar uma evidência calcada na ilusão, mas ainda assim capaz de obliterar a evidência da materialidade contraditória do sentido? Este questionamento é demasiado importante para a teoria Pecheutiana e por isso demanda reflexões mais delongadas. Nossa primeira hipótese, fundamentada no que vimos até agora em Pêcheux, atesta que a evidência sentido-sujeito se dá mediante a construção de uma ilusão de continuidade que sutura sentido, indivíduo e sujeito e fornece a ficção do "um" (AREs + AIEs). Essa ilusão trabalha costurando fragmentos e instaurando certa aparência de unidade. Ou seja, queremos desenvolver a ideia de que a evidência do sujeito e do sentido "prontos" se instaura por intermédio de um apagamento das descontinuidades que separam sentido, indivíduo e sujeito. Esse apagamento das hiâncias constitutivas faz parecer que aquilo que é fundamentalmente discrepante é, de outro modo, uma continuidade singular, homogênea e coesa. É nesse efeito imaginário de continuidade que o sujeito se "encaixa" na palavra e no discurso; é calcada neste delírio discursivo que a ideologia desenvolve relações "evidentes" e inequívocas entre significante e significado, apagando o efeito do pré-construído e fazendo parecer que um enunciado quer dizer exatamente o que diz. Dessa forma a linguagem 158 supostamente alcança caracteres de transparência que obliteram seu funcionamento ideológico e evidenciam de forma translúcida o irrefutável do sentido. É a ideologia que fornece as evidencias pelas quais 'todo mundo sabe' o que é um soldado, um operário, um patrão, uma fábrica, uma greve etc., evidencias que fazem com que uma palavra ou um enunciado 'queiram dizer o que realmente dizem' e que mascaram, assim, sob a 'transparência da linguagem', aquilo que chamaremos o caráter material do sentido das palavras e dos enunciados (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 146). É a Ideologia, através do hábito e do uso, que conecta palavras e costura sentidos e sujeitos como se fossem evidências prontas que não demandam análise. É a Ideologia que constitui esse imaginário de unidade, 'um" sempre já-sentido, já-sujeito, já-pronto. Pêcheux (2016, p. 27), em "O enunciado: encaixe, articulação e (des)ligação" nos fornece exemplos contundentes. Vejamos um deles através dos enunciados abaixo: a) João come maçãs. b) João nunca chama o médico. Segundo o autor, aparentemente os dois enunciados não possuem relação de continuidade entre si. Contudo, é possível que certos conhecimentos pré-construídos atravessem os dois enunciados e simulem uma ponte, instaurando uma suposta unidade entre eles. Assim, se determinado sujeito for atravessado pelo pré-construído "maçãs fazem bem para a saúde e evitam doenças", os dois enunciados acima podem aparecer em forma de continuidade singular. Esse conhecimento pré-construído emerge, assim, como aquilo que "todo mundo sabe", como evidência que sutura e sedentariza as possibilidades significativas de ambos enunciados na forma de "é evidente que quem come maçãs não precisa chamar o médico". Assim, um enunciado A e um enunciado B são atravessados por um enunciado C, este último, um pré-construído, anterior, exterior e "evidente", que aparentemente confere unidade e coesão a AB. Como veremos mais adiante em virtude dos processos de articulação e encaixe, o pré-construído aparece como meta-texto dentro do texto, que se torna referência "evidente" sobre si mesma a partir de si mesma. É assim que nasce a ficção de unidade, de apagamento das hiâncias. E se a evidência é um meta-discurso (efeito Münchhausen), toda a realidade humana enquanto realidade fornecida discursivamente pelo pré-construído ideológico – é um meta-discurso. Ora, é essa mesma evidência imaginária de "unidade" que aparece no momento em que a lei (jurídica, religiosa, partidária) enuncia "aquele que cometer 159 determinado erro..." deverá ser punido. Nesse caso, o lugar vazio "aquele que..." novamente sugere unicidade (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 145). Contudo não podemos nos esquecer que só o que a Ideologia consegue colocar no lugar vazio é uma amálgama discrepante encontro de opostos -, e por isso mesmo instável e errante. Afinal, o enunciado C, fornecido pelo pré-construído, também é construído sobre uma base linguística porosa, claudicante e errante, e por isso mesmo incapaz de atravessar AB de forma plena e fornecer-lhes unidade homogênea. A evidência não é construída por outra coisa que não seja língua, errante e movente, e por isso mesmo ela é incapaz de fornecer uma evidência ilusória capaz de mascarar de forma plena a evidência da significação enquanto processo contraditório e assimétrico. O sujeito, portanto, é resultado de um processo sempre inacabado e imperfeito; nas palavras de Pêcheux, é "o qüidam36 que se achará aí" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 145). Isso é o que Pêcheux (2009, p. 146) chama de "caráter material do sentido", uma evidência que é mascarada pela ilusão de evidência do sentido (e do sujeito) em si mesmo. Mas para abordarmos essa noção, faz-se importante um pequeno desvio para calcar de forma mais prudente a noção de materialismo, ou melhor, o conceito de materialismo dialético. Materialismo é, antes de mais nada, uma corrente de pensamento milenar desde os estoicos suas principais noções já tinham significativa força. Segundo essa corrente, a matéria precede o espírito (ou a mente), partindo da premissa de que havia matéria no mundo bilhões de anos antes do surgimento da consciência humana. Assim, desde Aristóteles (2002) são as coisas materiais que proporcionam possibilidade de existência às culturas e sociedades. O oposto mais direto ao materialismo é o idealismo, que desde Platão (1991) afirma que é a consciência humana que fundamenta a realidade das coisas materiais. Foi só no século XIX que Marx e Engels propuseram o Materialismo Dialético, que ainda mantém a premissa de que a matéria precede a consciência, mas além disso afirma que a consciência e a sociedade também podem transformar a matéria, um movimento dialético de mútua transformação (LESSA; TONET, 2011). Esse desvio teórico se faz importante para evitar que se tome de forma equivocada e frívola a noção de materialidade do sentido e do sujeito. Há de se destacar, por exemplo, que na premissa do Materialismo Dialético a mútua transformação (entre consciência e matéria) 36 Sem importância, insignificante. 160 não implica absorção de um no outro. Dito de outra forma, o materialismo só pode ser dialético se mantiver a hiância que separa as partes colocadas em relação, caso contrário estaríamos falando em materialismo sintético. A materialidade dialética do sentido e do sujeito pressupõe, portanto, movência errante de uma parte em relação à outra. Pêcheux deixa ainda outras pegadas que apontam que o caráter material do sentido possui um funcionamento discursivo heterogêneo, "não-um": "Diremos que o caráter material do sentido mascarado por sua evidência transparente para o sujeito consiste na sua dependência constitutiva daquilo que chamamos 'o todo complexo das formações ideológicas'" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 146). O que Pêcheux está propondo neste momento é um reposicionamento do alcance do sentido. Se até então as escolas linguísticas e a filosofia da linguagem pensavam a produção de sentidos de forma gramatical, sintática e lógica, o analista do discurso agora propõe um olhar que amplia exponencialmente a esfera do sentido e do sujeito. Esta expansão das fronteiras do sentido fica manifesta quando Pêcheux aponta que o caráter material do sentido está em relação de dependência ao "todo complexo das formações ideológicas" (FIs). Esta vastidão heterogênea e contraditória do território do sentido se mostra através de duas teses: Tese um: "A primeira consiste em colocar que o sentido de uma palavra, de uma expressão, de uma proposição etc., não existe 'em si mesmo'" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 146), ou seja, o sentido não existe fora da relação contraditória do significante na história e da história na língua, e por isso mesmo ele não poderia ser "descoberto" como pura evidência. E se o sentido não existe em si mesmo, sua "manifestação" torna-se condicionada por um jogo de tensão entre diferentes posições ideológicas. As "palavras, expressões, proposições etc., mudam de sentido segundo as posições sustentadas por aqueles que as empregam" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 147), ou seja, a "pega" (relação, vinculação, costura) entre significante e sentido é cerzida e sedentarizada de forma distinta por diferentes Formações Discursivas37 (FDs). E se sentido e sujeito são constituídos mutuamente, é também no interior de uma FD específica que o sujeito é interpelado-identificado aos sentidos que lhe corresponde. 37 É neste momento da obra que aparece a clássica definição de FD: "Aquilo que, numa formação ideológica dada [...] determina o que pode e deve ser dito (articulado em forma de uma arenga, de um sermão, de um panfleto, [...] etc)". (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 147). 161 Segundo o autor, até a relação discrepante e errante estabelecida entre base linguística e processo discursivo ganha novas peculiaridades: se em cada FD são produzidas evidências diferentes para sentido/palavra/sujeito, o que se se notabiliza é que, de fato, cada FD instaura relações diferentes entre a base linguística e processo discursivo: "uma palavra, uma expressão ou uma proposição não tem 'um' sentido que lhe seja 'próprio', vinculado a sua literalidade" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 147). A movência dos sentidos entre uma FD e outra se sustenta justamente no fato de que a noção de 'relação' impõe a existência de dois, de distintos que não fazem "um", o que impossibilita a diluição do significado na literalidade do significante. É por isso que uma mesma "palavra, uma mesma expressão e uma mesma proposição podem receber sentidos diferentes todos igualmente 'evidentes' conforme se refiram a esta ou aquela formação discursiva" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 147). Assim, a relação contraditória entre base linguística e processo discursivo, relação entre opostos que não fazem "um", legitima a hipótese de que a sedentarização ideológica não pode suturar sentido e significante de forma definitiva, ao ponto de apagar a hiância e a errância que caracteriza fundamentalmente tal relação. Mas se assumirmos que uma mesma palavra pode receber sentidos distintos a depender da FD em que ela é usada, devemos também assumir que palavras diferentes podem receber sentidos semelhantes neste jogo contraditório de FDs, o que representa, afinal, o papel do funcionamento discursivo no processo de significação que é diferente e interdependente da base linguística: "A partir de então a expressão processo discursivo passará a designar o sistema de relações de substituições [...] que funcionam entre elementos linguísticos significantes em uma formação discursiva dada" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 148). Este processo será chamado, mais adiante, de processo de articulação. Ora, se a descontinuidade é a marca da relação entre significante e significado na base linguística, reencontramos no processo discursivo uma hiância fundamental que se manifesta através de um sistema de relações (não-um) de substituições. É em meio a esta errância fundamental que a ideologia instala pontos efêmeros de estabilização (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 148), que produzem o sujeito e, simultaneamente, aquilo que lhe é dado compreender do mundo. É nestes pontos de estabilização que se encontram as condições para que o sujeito se "reconheça", ilusoriamente, em si mesmo e nos outros sujeitos. Este processo Pêcheux retomará, mais adiante, com o nome de processo de identificação. 162 Tese dois: "Toda Formação Discursiva dissimula, pela transparência do sentido que nela se constitui, sua dependência com respeito ao 'todo complexo com dominante' das formações discursivas, intrincado no complexo das formações ideológicas" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 148), isto é, cada FD dissimula (apaga) sua interdependência em relação às demais FDs, fazendo parecer que seu trabalho é capaz de instaurar certa singularidade em seu "interior". Ora, se a uma dada FD fosse possível existir de forma independente, ela poderia, em seu funcionamento, fazer "um" sentido estável que sequer necessitaria ser chamado de dominante, já que o "um" é o apagamento das diferenças. Trata-se, na verdade, do contrário: "propomos chamar interdiscurso a esse 'todo complexo com dominante' das formações discursivas, esclarecendo que também ele é submetido à lei de desigualdade-contradição-subordinação que caracteriza o complexo das formações ideológicas" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 149). O "todo complexo de FDs" trata-se, evidentemente, de FDs distintas postas em relação pelas Formações Ideológicas. O interdiscurso, portanto, é aquilo que está "fora" de uma dada FD de todas as FDs, pois situase, sim, na relação entre elas, no lugar discursivo de toque, de contestação e de confusão entre distintas FDs. A relação entre FDs é relação de contradição: "Diremos, nessas condições, que o próprio de toda formação discursiva é dissimular, na transparência do sentido que nela se forma, a objetividade material contraditória do interdiscurso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 149). Dito de outra forma, a objetividade material do interdiscurso é contraditória, o que significa, nesta tese, que falamos de partes distintas e opostas colocadas em relação. A própria constituição do interdiscurso é da ordem da discrepância, relação errante entre opostos. O interdiscurso é aquilo que, em seu funcionamento complexo e discrepante, impede que cada FD possa se constituir de forma absoluta, fechada e singular: "Descobrimos, assim, que os dois tipos de discrepância, respectivamente, o efeito de encadeamento do pré-construído e o efeito que chamamos articulação [...], são determinados materialmente na própria estrutura do interdiscurso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 149). Embora não esteja manifesto de forma patente, a errância movente da base linguística também constitui o processo discursivo. Afinal, através dessas duas teses pode-se deduzir que sentido e sujeito são constituídos por relações discrepantes (descontinuidades) em um processo Ideológico que dissimula suas hiâncias constitutivas e simulam "um". Na primeira 163 tese a Ideologia desponta como processo que oblitera a relação entre os opostos significantesignificado, instalando certo delírio de sentido evidente que existe em si mesmo. Na segunda tese, a Ideologia apaga a relação discrepante entre as FDs e instaura certa alucinação de inteireza e unicidade no "interior" de cada FD. Com isso queremos dizer que em ambos os casos a Ideologia trabalha tentando apagar o fato de que a base linguística e o processo discursivo são constituídos por partes distintas, separadas irremediavelmente por hiâncias que impõem movimentos errantes a cada uma dessas partes. E se não há erro na língua, falar não é produzir equívocos, mas sim movências errantes mais ou menos sedentarizadas. O dizer A, posto em relação com B através de C (préconstruído) pode, no interior de uma dada FD, constituir ficções de falsidade ou verdade, de estabilidade ou de efemeridades. É por isso que o pré-construído é motivo de disputa por seu domínio. No entanto o pré-construído não se encaixa adequadamente no dizer: são dessemelhantes que a costura Ideológica não pode fazer "um". Afinal, A, B e C são constituídos discursivamente sobre bases linguísticas errantes, assimétricas e discrepantes, e é por isso que a evidência fictícia que apresenta uma juntura simétrica do sentido ao sujeito só pode emergir na forma de dissimulação, de mascaramento da hiância e da errância. Mas de que forma se dá, discursivamente, essa dissimulação? E mais: pode, uma mera dissimulação, constituir uma evidência idealista forte o suficiente para apagar a evidência material da significação? Se estamos de acordo que sentido e sujeito emergem de dissimulações ideológicas, podemos assumir que ambos são constituídos através de uma farsa quebradiça. Esse teatro dissimula a hiância através de uma inteireza imperfeita, débil, claudicante e por isso mesmo há nela causa (só há causa para aquilo que falha) de manter-se operante ininterruptamente através dos AREs e dos AIEs. Diante do projeto de sedentarização do sentido e do sujeito, fazse necessário à Ideologia manter perenemente uma ilusão idealista de evidência para que sentido e sujeito possam ser mantidos como unidades imaginárias. O funcionamento da Ideologia em geral como interpelação dos indivíduos em sujeitos (e, especificamente, em sujeitos de seu discurso) se realiza através do complexo das formações ideológicas (e, especificamente, através do interdiscurso intrincado nesse complexo) e fornece 'a cada sujeito' sua 'realidade', enquanto sistema de evidências e de significações percebidas aceitas experimentadas (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 149). 164 Se sentido e sujeito são ilusões frágeis, só resta à Ideologia instaurar um poderoso maquinário ideológico que forneça, ininterruptamente, a cada sujeito (ilusoriamente único), uma realidade "evidente" (ilusoriamente única). A realidade, nestes termos, é realidade discursiva, uma fina camada simbólica fornecida pelos pressupostos, que recobre o mundo sensível e lhe confere significados a partir de uma determinada condição de produção de sentidos. Este pujante processo ideológico de sedentarização das possibilidades de sentido e sujeito é construído sobre dissimulações, sobre esquecimentos que passaremos agora a explicitar de forma mais cuidadosa. Os conceitos que até agora emergiram neste capítulo pareciam deixar certas pontas soltas, inconclusas e discrepantes. Ainda não está claro a forma pela qual a evidência material do sentido pode ser apagada pela evidência idealista do sentido-em-si-mesmo; também não parece crível que um sujeito possa se submeter cegamente ao "todo mundo sabe que..." do pré-construído; tampouco parece verosímil que se possa instalar uma ilusão de que o sentido esteja contido em si mesmo, ou que uma dada FD possa trabalhar sentidos independente das demais. Todas estas "partes" do discurso se evidenciam materialmente tão discrepantes e errantes que a evidência idealista de inteireza do sentido e do sujeito (sedentarização) parece improvável. A resposta a tais lacunas teóricas é a noção de forma-sujeito. "Já observamos que o sujeito se constitui pelo "esquecimento" daquilo que o determina" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 150). Quando é interpelado-identificado como sujeito do discurso o exato momento em que tal sujeito faz uso da língua a ilusão de evidência é instituída mediante uma série de esquecimentos, e à soma dessas obliterações Pêcheux chama de forma-sujeito, um conceito emprestado de Althusser: "todo individuo humano, isto é, social, só pode ser agente de uma prática se se revestir da forma de sujeito. A 'forma-sujeito' é a forma de existência histórica de qualquer indivíduo, agente das práticas sociais" (ALTHUSSER, 1978, p. 67). A forma-sujeito é o processo de assujeitamento fundamentado na interpelaçãoidentificação do sujeito com a FD que o domina. Assim, a forma-sujeito se manifesta na forma de Ego imaginário, ou melhor, em forma de unidade do si consigo mesmo processo que remete àquele descrito na subseção anterior, sobre a des-identificação/identificação como apagamento da hiância que separa o indivíduo do sujeito (do discurso) e faz parecer que são "um" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 141). 165 As partes do processo discursivo e sua relação discrepante com a base linguística encontram, na forma-discurso, um ponto paradoxal de encontro que desvela certos funcionamentos ideológicos da língua, do discurso e do sujeito. Ora, a própria noção de identificação nos revela novas pistas sobre a dissimulação instaurada pela evidência ideológica. Identificação/identidade tem que ver com paridade absoluta, logo, não existe identidade sem um outro com quem se possa estabelecer uma relação de identidade. Mas no caso da forma-sujeito, a identificação se dá (imaginariamente) "consigo mesmo" e com o outro ("o" minúsculo). É como se o indivíduo se fundisse àquilo que se diz sobre ele, àquele sempre-já-aí, àquele sempre-já-sujeito, formando uma unidade imaginária. A forma-sujeito, portanto, é a forma "evidente" e indiscutível do sujeito, cujo mérito é trazer à existência o próprio sujeito. Seu mérito é também o de mostrar esse vínculo de uma maneira tal que o teatro da consciência (eu vejo, eu penso, eu falo, eu te vejo, eu te falo etc.) é observado dos bastidores, lá de onde se pode captar que se fala do sujeito, que se fala ao sujeito, antes de que o sujeito possa dizer: 'Eu falo' (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 140). É assim que o sujeito é levado a pensar que possui uma autonomia de pensamento e de uso da linguagem: através de uma identificação do sujeito consigo mesmo que lhe fornece uma emancipação em relação aos demais sujeitos, sustentada pelo efeito "interpelaçãoidentificação" instaurado pela soma dos AREs com os AIEs. Assujeitado, o Ego-imaginário passa a acreditar que ele é ele, que só ele pode dizer "eu" quando se fala dele, e que ele é ele mesmo justamente por que não é mais ninguém embora se assemelhe, em alguma medida, aos demais que o circundam (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 150). Contudo, a própria noção de identificação é também salvaguarda das noções de hiância e errância. Se "identidade" tem que ver com paridade (par), isso implica a manutenção de "dois" que não fazem "um". Só é possível a uma coisa ser idêntica a uma outra coisa ou a outras coisas. Uma coisa só pode ser idêntica se houver ali uma segunda, separada dela, descontínua, posta em relação. Logo, quer falemos de uma identificação do sujeito "consigo mesmo", ou com o Outro, falamos, afinal, de "não-um", de descontinuidades e hiâncias que mantém, estruturalmente, a movência errante de um sujeito em relação ao outro. Ora, essa identificação do sujeito consigo mesmo é, simultaneamente, uma identificação com o outro (com o minúsculo) enquanto outro 'ego', origem 166 discrepante etc.: o efeito-sujeito e o efeito de 'intersubjetividade' são, assim, rigorosamente contemporâneos e coextensivos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 155). Essa dupla identificação se dá, afinal, por que o sujeito se identifica, antes de mais nada, com a FD que o assujeita. Pêcheux explica que essa identificação fundadora da ilusão de unidade sujeito-FD se dá através de um processo de re-inscrição do Interdiscurso no Intradiscurso, ou melhor, de incorporação (inversa, dissimulada) do pré-construído (e do efeito de articulação) no "interior" do fio do discurso do sujeito. Podemos agora precisar que a interpelação do indivíduo em sujeito de seu discurso se efetua pela identificação (do sujeito) com a formação discursiva que o domina (isto é, na qual ele é constituído como sujeito): essa identificação, fundadora da unidade (imaginaria) do sujeito, apoia-se no fato de que os elementos do interdiscurso (sob sua dupla forma, descrita mais acima, enquanto 'pré-construído' e 'processo de sustentação') que constituem, no discurso do sujeito, os traços daquilo que o determina, são reinscritos no discurso do próprio sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 150). Mas de que forma se dá essa reinscrição do interdiscurso no intradiscurso? E qual sua importância no processo de interpelação-identificação do sujeito? Ora, só uma ilusão dissimuladora poderia fazer caber o maior no menor, ou seja, fazer caber o interdiscurso no intradiscurso. O interdiscurso, como já visto, é constituído por dois processos discursivos que são discrepantes em suas próprias estruturas, mas o são também em relação um com o outro: 1) o processo discrepante de encaixe do pré-construído com o dizer, e 2) o processo de articulação (encadeamento e sustentação). Pois é justamente através destes funcionamentos discrepantes do interdiscurso que a Ideologia instaura uma inversão dissimulada que faz parecer que é o intradiscurso (fio do discurso do sujeito) que executa tais procedimentos discursivos. Vejamos esses efeitos com mais calma. Para o autor, as relações de articulação e substituição podem tomar duas formas: a de equivalência simétrica e a de implicação orientada. Sobre a relação de equivalência simétrica o autor declara: "Vê-se que a relação entre os substituíveis é uma relação de identidade nãoorientada, uma vez que os substituíveis só podem ser sintagmatizados por uma meta-relação de identidade" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 151). E sobre a relação de implicação orientada ele afirma: Vê-se aqui que a relação entre os substituíveis resulta, ao contrário, de um encadeamento (ou de uma conexão) que não é uma relação de identidade: tudo se passa como se uma sequência Sy (vertical) viesse atravessar 167 perpendicularmente a sequência Sx (horizontal) que contêm os substituíveis, unindo-as por um encadeamento necessário (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 152). Essas definições demandam maiores explicações. O eixo Sx, horizontal, é o eixo sintagmático que coloca palavras distintas (não idênticas) em relação de encadeamento linear, formando um enunciado, proposição ou frase. Esta é uma relação de implicação orientada, pois os sentidos não possuem relação alguma antes de sua orientação sintagmática na linha do discurso. Por sua vez, o eixo Sy, vertical, é o que atravessa o eixo Sx como "discursotransverso", fornecendo termos que podem substituir, por equivalência mais ou menos simétrica, um termo do enunciado. Abaixo, segue-se um exemplo de tal funcionamento: Figura 2: Eixo Sx e Sy. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida O discurso transverso é o eixo Sy, ou seja, àquilo que atravessa o enunciado e propõe substituições metonímicas; e o processo de encadeamento é o que se vê no eixo Sx, sintagmático. Neste funcionamento, o Interdiscurso articula o pré-construído do discursotransverso na linearidade do eixo sintagmático, o fio do discurso designado por Pêcheux como Intradiscurso, constituindo enunciados a partir de um imenso jogo de substituições e articulações. Vemos, ao mesmo tempo, que o que chamamos anteriormente 'articulação' (ou 'processo de sustentação') está em relação direta com o que acabamos agora de caracterizar sob o nome de discurso-transverso, uma vez que se pode dizer que a articulação (o efeito de incidência 'explicativa' que a ele corresponde) provém da linearização (ou sintagmatização) do discursotransverso no eixo do que designaremos pela expressão intradiscurso, isto é, o funcionamento do discurso com relação a si mesmo (o que eu digo agora, 168 com relação ao que eu disse antes e ao que eu direi depois; portanto, o conjunto dos fenômenos de 'co-referência' que garantem aquilo que se pode chamar o 'fio do discurso', enquanto discurso de um sujeito). (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 151) Ora, articulação, conexão, encadeamento e identificação são, antes de tudo, tipos de relações. E como já visto, uma relação só é possível entre dois distintos, descontínuos, "nãoum": a relação se extingue quando dois formam "um". Logo, o próprio processo de articulação, enquanto relação discrepante entre distintos, atesta que a hiância que separa os termos do eixo sintagmático (discrepantes entre si) dos termos do discurso-transverso (igualmente discrepantes, segundo a teoria do valor do signo em Saussure) não pode ser ultrapassada. Isso nos leva a assumir que 1) o processo de articulação-sustentação do intradiscurso é "um efeito do interdiscurso sobre si mesmo, uma 'interioridade' inteiramente determinada como tal 'do exterior'" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 154), pois é o interdiscurso que fornece todo o préconstruído (tanto o do eixo sintagmático quanto o do discurso-transverso) que será articulado no fio do discurso (intradiscurso) do sujeito falante; 2) que tal articulação entre o já-dito e o dizer é um processo que coloca em relação termos distintos (e discrepantes) que se movem de forma errante no processo de significação justamente por que podem, no interior de uma dada FD, ser articulados de forma distinta em relação a outra FD, todas em forma de "evidências". Materialmente falando, novamente o processo discursivo impõe um funcionamento errante à significação e ao assujeitamento. Mas como, então, o processo de articulaçãosustentação pode emergir como força de sedentarização (interpelação-identificação) do indivíduo em sujeito do discurso? Através da forma-sujeito. Ora, a forma-sujeito se mostra como processo instrumentalizado pela Ideologia que dissimula e inverte a relação interdiscursointradiscurso, o que faz parecer que não se trata de um encaixe entre distintos discrepantes, mas continuidades entre semelhantes que "sempre estiveram" no intradiscurso: O caráter da forma-discurso com o idealismo espontâneo que ela encerra, consistirá precisamente em reverter a determinação: diremos que a formasujeito (pela qual o 'sujeito do discurso' se identifica com a formação discursiva que o constitui) tende a absorver-esquecer o interdiscurso no intradiscurso, isto é, ela simula o interdiscurso no intradiscurso, de modo que o interdiscurso aparece como o puro 'já-dito' do intradiscurso, no qual ele se articula por 'co-referência'. Parece-nos, nessas condições, que se pode caracterizar a forma-sujeito como realizando a incorporação-dissimulação dos elementos do interdiscurso: a unidade (imaginária) do sujeito, sua identidade presente-passada-futura encontra aqui um de seus fundamentos (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 154). 169 A forma-sujeito, afirma Pêcheux, carrega um idealismo espontâneo, ou seja, um funcionamento idealista intrínseco obliterado pelo próprio funcionamento. Chegamos, assim, ao funcionamento mais elementar do processo discursivo, justamente onde a ilusão de evidência inteiriça tem origem: a inversão dissimulada da relação interdiscurso-intradiscurso. É aqui que o sujeito e o sentido têm origem no seio de uma dada FD, quando ideologicamente os AREs e os AIEs fornecem meios pelos quais o indivíduo entrega-se à ilusão de que o intradiscurso sempre esteve dentro de seu intradiscurso, o fio-do-discurso que lhe "pertence". Assim, a forma-sujeito é o próprio procedimento pela qual a Ideologia mascara os elementos do interdiscurso (o processo de articulação e encaixe do pré-construído pelo todo complexo com dominante de FDs) e instaura uma ficção de que o intradiscurso não passa de puro já-dito inerente ao fio-do-discurso do sujeito, como se o intradiscurso já estivesse sempre lá, dentro do intradiscurso, como "evidência". Assim, todo a relação entre base linguística e processo discursivo, com todas suas variáveis, hiâncias e errâncias, são dissimuladas e subsumidas no funcionamento do intradiscurso como uma unidade imaginária, fornecendo ao sujeito uma ilusão de que ele está na origem das palavras e dos sentidos. É só assim, de forma idealista, que se pode fazer funcionar o imaginário de que o sujeito, no momento do dizer, é o único responsável pelo dizer, que ele o faz de forma autônoma e que a palavra é de sua posse. É por intermédio de uma dissimulação que o sujeito acredita sedentarizar o sentido, como se lhe fosse possível domesticar e se apropriar dele, se fazer "um" com ele. É só assim, ilusoriamente, que o discurso do sujeito pode se desenvolver e se sustentar sobre si mesmo no intradiscurso: como co-referência que se sustenta sobre si mesma. Isso implica afirmar que, afinal, o processo de dissimulação-inversão da forma-sujeito consiste em apagar o funcionamento do pré-construído, como se este fosse uma evidência por co-referência no seio de "seu" intradiscurso sempre presente e atual -, e não uma memória discursiva já-dita, anterior e exterior ao seu fio-do-discurso e que, ao contrário, condiciona o dizer do intradiscurso. E assim "a unidade (imaginária) do sujeito, sua identidade presentepassada-futura, encontra aqui um de seus fundamentos" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 155). Nestes termos, a instrumentalização ideológica do "erro" emerge novamente nesta tese como importante ferramenta de dissimulação-inversão do interdiscurso no intradiscurso. Através das noções de pecado, crime, fracasso etc., os AIEs e os AREs instauram "evidências" 170 que apontam "inequivocamente" o caminho para a salvação, para a justiça e para o sucesso. Esse procedimento instaura politicamente efeitos de "erro" nos limites de uma dada FD ao mesmo tempo em que faz parecer que foi o sujeito quem assim o determinou. Contudo, um importante questionamento, já feito nesta tese, ganha contornos mais complexos neste momento: seria possível à Ideologia fornecer uma evidência idealista forte o suficiente para apagar a evidência material e contraditória do sentido e do sujeito? Ora, é neste momento que se pode, por exemplo, ceder-se à tentação teórica de se fazer outra inversão e tomar a farsa por verdade. A farsa da evidência idealista pode, assim, ser tomada como funcionamento perfeito do processo de assujeitamento e levar o analista do discurso à fatalidade da "morte do homem" (FOUCAULT, 2002), quando a hiância e sua errância irreversível é substituída por uma continuidade sedentária irreversível. Nesta prática teórica, a forma-sujeito se submete "perfeitamente" à ilusão fornecida pela Ideologia. Ora, isso pode nos levar a pensar que ao sujeito cabe apenas reproduzir, em paráfrases eternas, os sentidos fornecidos pelo interdiscurso. Ora, essa conclusão coloca em graves apuros a poesia, a literatura, o cinema, a música e as artes de maneira geral. Mais do que isso, coloca em risco a própria possibilidade de resistência e luta necessárias à ideia de conflito de classes, afinal, uma subjugação plena, sem resistência, sequer se configura como conflito. Ou seja, parece que às vezes a ilusão de sedentarização do sentido pelo sujeito (inversão dissimuladora) parece submeter o sujeito de forma plena à sedentarização da Ideologia em geral, como se o fato de que o sujeito não possa ser dono do sentido faz da Ideologia dona do sujeito. Há, no entanto, uma ressalva importante feita pelo próprio autor a respeito do processo de interpelação-identificação, que nos traz contornos importantes a respeito da tensão entre sedentarização e errância na conformação do sentido e do sujeito38: Ora, essa identificação do sujeito consigo mesmo é como dissemos -, simultaneamente, uma identificação com o outro (com o minúsculo) enquanto outro 'ego', origem discrepante etc.: o efeito-sujeito e o efeito de 'intersubjetividade' são, assim, rigorosamente contemporâneos e coextensivos. Nessa perspectiva, o autocomentário pelo qual o discurso do sujeito se desenvolve e se sustenta sobre si mesmo (ao se articular por 'incidentes' que como acabamos de ver sintagmatizam elementos substituíveis) é um caso particular dos fenômenos de paráfrase e de reformulação (como forma geral de relação entre substituíveis) constitutivos de uma formação discursiva dada, na qual os sujeitos por ela dominados se 38 Pedimos desculpa pela citação longa, mas ela traz uma série de noções caras a esta tese. 171 reconhecem entre si como espelhos uns dos outros: o que significa dizer que a coincidência (que é também conivência e mesmo, cumplicidade) do sujeito consigo mesmo se estabelece pelo mesmo movimento entre os sujeitos, segundo a modalidade do 'como se' (como se eu que falo estivesse no lugar onde alguém me escuta), modalidade na qual a 'incorporação' dos elementos do interdiscurso (pre-construído e articulação-sustentação) pode dar-se até o ponto de confundi-los, de modo a não haver mais demarcação entre o que é dito e aquilo a propósito do que isso e dito. Essa modalidade, que é a da ficção, representa, por assim dizer, a forma idealista pura da forma-sujeito sob suas diversas formas (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 155). Analisemos esta citação com mais atenção. Queremos destacar, inicialmente, que a forma-sujeito se dá na forma de "autocomentário pelo qual o discurso do sujeito se desenvolve e se sustenta sobre si mesmo" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 156). É nesse processo de autocomentário que o sujeito se identifica "consigo mesmo" e com os outros sujeitos, como espelhos, dentro de uma dada FD o que se evidência na semelhança de dizeres e efeitos de sentidos produzidos por sujeitos filiados a uma mesma FD. Isso quer dizer que a identificação-sustentação se dá concomitantemente entre indivíduo e sujeito, e entre sujeito e outros sujeitos. Contudo, Pêcheux nos adverte que essa coincidência é, também, "conivência e mesmo, cumplicidade" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 156). Essa cumplicidade se manifesta através da modalidade do "como se", ou seja, é como se o intradiscurso pudesse incorporar o interdiscurso até o ponto de confundi-los, até o ponto de "não-haver mais demarcação entre o que é dito e aquilo a propósito do que isso é dito" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 156). Essa ficção de unidade discursiva é, portanto, da ordem da conivência e da cumplicidade. Essa primeira pista se mostra demasiado importante: já vimos anteriormente que a forma-sujeito não é capaz de reconhecer sua subordinação justamente por que a própria forma-sujeito se realiza "sob a forma de autonomia" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 149). Todavia, agora vimos que a subordinação do sujeito ao discurso se dá precisamente mediante um processo de simulação de autonomia. Ou seja, o sujeito é enlaçado e costurado (sedentarizado) justamente quando crê que é a origem do sentido e de si mesmo, tornando-se, assim, cúmplice do processo interpelação-identificação. A prática social da forma-sujeito, enquanto professor, enfermeiro, lixeiro etc., é também da ordem da conivência: trata-se de um assujeitamento consentido e permitido, "como se..." aquilo que ele é e deve fazer não pudesse ser descrito de outra forma. Assim, quando crê que é a origem do sentido e de si mesmo, o sujeito cai, convenientemente, na armadilha da forma-sujeito. É assim que o pensamento adquire caracteres autônomos e criadores dentro do próprio processo de submissão do sujeito à FD 172 que lhe subjuga. O pensamento como atividade criadora é, segundo o autor, um prolongamento espontâneo do idealismo espontâneo da forma-sujeito, e manifesta através de dois esquecimentos, apresentados de forma inversa: O esquecimento número dois, que é da ordem da enunciação: ao falarmos, o fazemos de uma maneira e não de outra, e ao longo de nosso dizer, formamse famílias parafrásticas que indicam que o dizer sempre podia ser outro. Este 'esquecimento' produz em nós a impressão da realidade do pensamento. Essa impressão, que é denominada ilusão referencial, nos faz acreditar que há uma relação direta entre o pensamento, a linguagem e o mundo, de tal modo que pensamos que o que dizemos só pode ser dito com aquelas palavras e não outras, que só pode ser assim. [...] Mas este é um esquecimento parcial (ORLANDI, 2005, p. 35). Assim, o pensamento como atividade criadora só pode ser assegurado se o sujeito se esquecer de que existem outras formas de dizer o que diz, ou seja, a atividade criadora só pode ser sustentada por ilusão referencial que instaura a ficção de que um sentido só pode ser expresso daquela forma e não de outra. Mas este esquecimento, aponta Orlandi, é parcial, e isto quer dizer muita coisa. O outro esquecimento é o esquecimento número um, também chamado de esquecimento ideológico: ele é da instância do inconsciente e resulta do modo pelo qual somos afetados pela ideologia. Por esse esquecimento temos a ilusão de ser a origem do que dizemos quando, na realidade, retomamos sentidos pré-existentes. Esse esquecimento reflete o sonho adâmico: o de estar na inicial absoluta da linguagem, ser o primeiro homem, dizendo as primeiras palavras que significariam apenas e exatamente o que queremos. Na realidade [...] os sentidos são determinados pela maneira como nos inscrevemos na língua e na história e é por isso que significam e não pela nossa vontade (ORLANDI, 2005, p. 35). Esse é o paradoxo perfeito da forma-sujeito: crendo que é autônomo, o sujeito se torna cúmplice de sua perda de autonomia. Ora, assim concebida, a forma-sujeito se torna uma prática social (e discursiva) possível de ser rompida, furada, ao menos resistida. Logo, a formasujeito é uma farsa inacabada que dissimula o próprio funcionamento, mas que, no entanto, não é capaz de produzir uma unidade a não ser em forma de ficção: sentido e sujeito continuam separados, irremediavelmente, por uma hiância que faz movência e errância. Essa não-unidade, que impõe certa movência errante às partes do discurso, se elucida da seguinte forma: a forma-sujeito enquanto "autocomentário pelo qual o discurso do sujeito se desenvolve e se sustenta sobre si mesmo" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 155) -, trata-se de 173 um efeito de dissimulação fundado exatamente sobre uma base linguística heterogênea, discrepante, inconclusa e movente: errante. Ou seja, o autocomentário do discurso do sujeito sobre si mesmo, que fornece a ilusão de evidência do sujeito (e do sentido) sobre si mesmo, é um autocomentário assentado não sobre uma língua unívoca, perfeita e estanque, mas sobre uma língua esburacada, plural e movente: "uma língua, como qualquer outra língua, não se deixa pegar assim, que é primeiro uma diversidade tanto temporal quanto espacial e que é preciso pelo menos um conceito de língua para poder pensar uma unidade dessa diversidade" (HENRY, 2013, p. 18). Logo, o mascaramento oferecido pela língua para dissimular o caráter material da língua não pode ser um tipo de mascaramento perfeito justamente por que a língua é, neste caso, uma ferramenta imperfeita. Assim, o autocomentário da interpelação-identificação, constituído sobre a língua, é autocomentário errante. E é justamente por que a inversão-dissimulação ideológica da formasujeito não é regular e fixa que o "pequeno teatro da consciência" funciona também por conivência e cumplicidade (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 155), pois a língua não é capaz de fornecer uma evidência idealista e imaginária plena. Assim, a forma-sujeito funciona mediante farsas inacabadas, dissimulações imperfeitas, identificações claudicantes. Todo o complexo do interdiscurso é composto por relações discrepantes e moventes que impossibilitam aos AREs e aos AIEs assujeitarem, de forma conclusiva, o sujeito e com ele o sentido. O interdiscurso, como aquilo que fornece externamente o pré-construído ao fio do discurso (intradiscurso) do sujeito no momento do dizer, não é uma "estrutura" plena capaz de preencher todos os espaços do discurso: o interdiscurso é atravessado por incontáveis hiâncias e espaços vazios que colocam sentido e sujeito em perene movência errante, esse é o caráter material do sentido, essa é a verdade incontornável do funcionamento da língua. Importa lembrar que este caráter material do sentido se explica através de duas teses: 1) a de que o sentido não existe em si mesmo, ou seja, não faz "um" com a palavra, mas constitui-se de formas diferentes no jogo de tensão em distintas FDs; e 2) toda FD está submetida à uma relação com o todo complexo de FDs, o interdiscurso. Este é o caráter material do sentido: sua obliteração pela forma-sujeito não possa de mascaramento, de esquecimento, de idealismo espontâneo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 148). Logo, o efeito que impede que o sujeito reconheça sua subordinação é o mesmo que impede sua subordinação plena. E este efeito, a saber, é a própria relação paradoxal entre a base linguística (contraditória) e o processo discursivo (discrepante). O sujeito, assim, não 174 pode reconhecer plenamente sua subordinação por que a trama da linguagem é toda porosa e suas relações são errantes e escorregadias, o que lhe oblitera a visão e lhe impede ver plenamente a materialidade do sentido. Por outro lado, o caráter material do sentido não pode ser recoberto pelo discurso poroso e errante de forma plena, ao ponto de fazer esquecer totalmente que o sentido e o sujeito não são como a ideologia dominante diz ser. E é por isso que o sujeito precisa ser conivente e cúmplice da encenação de identificação instrumentalizada pelos AREs e pelos AIEs. O sujeito é, nas palavras de Pêcheux, uma quimera, um qüidam (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 145). O sujeito é um espetáculo, uma encenação, efeito teatral. Dependendo do lugar em que é interpelado, pode ser tragédia, comédia, drama, suspense etc. O diretor dessa peça são os AIEs, o roteirista são os AREs: o palco é o discurso. O sujeito é o personagem, que juntamente com os demais personagens, simulam e dissimulam o caráter material de suas existências: dissimulam a origem de suas determinações, mas simulam a coincidência do ator (indivíduo) com o personagem (sujeito). Este personagem, afinal, é uma ficção contraditória: forte o suficiente para dissimular as hiâncias que separam sentido, indivíduo e sujeito, mas frágil a ponto de se desmanchar tudo pode vir a baixo diante de um novo acontecimento no palco do discurso. Antes do teatro discursivo, cada elemento da peça existe e se move de forma independente. Mas quando o espetáculo começa, cada parte passa a existir em relação de interdependência discrepante uma em relação à outra. É a Ideologia que faz mover sentido e sujeito através da sutura material da língua, e eis aqui seu paradoxo: a língua não passa de um liame que se esgarça facilmente, que desfia e abre brechas na costura da significação. É assim que as relações erram (falham e vagam), como se vê na relação arbitrária significante-significado, na relação de oposição no valor do signo, na relação discrepante entre base linguística e processos discursivos, e finalmente na relação de articulação e sustentação do discurso transverso (pré-construído) com o fio-do-discurso sintagmático (intradiscurso). É a Ideologia que instaura cada uma dessas relações e que coloca cada parte (e o todo) em movimento, sedentarizando suas possibilidades através da materialidade da língua. Mas é aí que a sedentarização plena encontra seu duplo impedimento: a impossibilidade de unidade na relação, e a vicissitude quebradiça da sutura (língua). O leitor atento de Pêcheux percebeu que neste subtópico não nos referimos às noções de inconsciente, real e discurso do Outro (O maiúsculo), usadas por Pêcheux no capítulo 3 da 175 terceira parte, sobre a forma-sujeito do discurso. Estas noções serão resgatadas com maior cuidado e destaque na próxima subseção, quando abordaremos o anexo III do mesmo livro - "Só há causa daquilo que falha" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 269). 2.2.4 A ERRÂNCIA DO SUJEITO: SÓ HÁ CAUSA DAQUILO QUE ERRA Algo insiste em errar no conhecimento humano de forma geral, nos termos do interdiscurso, bem como de forma gregária, nos termos do conhecimento de uma dada Formação Discursiva (FD), mas também de forma "particular", no nível do intradiscurso de um sujeito. Algo sempre erra, falha e vaga, em toda prática humana calcada na linguagem. O que já não nos surpreende: base linguística e processos discursivos são, ambos, repletos de hiâncias e errâncias que não permitem o estabelecimento de bases sólidas e inequívocas para a construção de nenhuma fortaleza intelectual. Ora, não poderia ser diferente com a construção paradoxal da Tríplice Aliança fundada sobre certos continentes do conhecimento que são, eles mesmos, discrepâncias errantes: Marxismo, Psicanálise e Linguística. Cada termo desta aliança não se encerra de forma sintética, ao contrário: se abre infinitamente de forma analítica. O projeto estruturalista francês das décadas de 60 e 70 teria, assim, que lidar desde o início com uma movência teórica incapaz de constituir unidade a não ser em forma de ilusões teóricas com desfechos paradoxais e insólitos. É isso que Pêcheux aponta no anexo III de Semântica e Discurso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 269-281): que a articulação supostamente aperfeiçoada entre materialismo histórico dialético, signo linguístico e inconsciente resultou, afinal, em uma amálgama hostil ao próprio projeto humanístico latente nessa aliança intelectual. Depois de tudo, o que restou foi uma forma-sujeito sedentarizada cabalmente pela ideologia, de forma que qualquer resistência e ruptura tornaram-se mera ilusão instrumentalizada pela ideologia dominante: "Levar demasiadamente a sério a ilusão de um ego-sujeito-pleno em que nada falha, eis precisamente algo que falha em Les Vérités de La Palice" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276). Em algum momento, quer seja por vias canônicas, quer seja por comentaristas e estudiosos de AD, parece que este campo de conhecimento se sucumbiu diante da tentação idealista de totalização, que assolou o programa estruturalista francês das décadas de 60 e 70. Não nos deteremos em detalhar o processo teórico que culminou na ilusão pessimista e 176 derrotista de "sujeito-pleno" do discurso, "absoluto-perfeito" da ideologia, impossível de resistir. Nos importa, ao contrário, buscar por aquilo que erra (falha e vaga) no interior da Análise do Discurso pecheutiana e que aponta, por último, para a errância incontornável do sentido e do sujeito: aquilo que barra, enquanto hiância, a totalização ambicionada pela ideologia dominante. Comecemos pelo fim, ou seja, pela retratação pecheutiana: Gostaria de apresentar aqui para os leitores um esboço fragmentário dessa tentativa de ajustamento lançando mão de um ponto preciso, ao qual me restringirei. Na conclusão do texto redigido em 1975, encontramos a seguinte formulação resumida: 'A forma-sujeito do discurso, na qual coexistem, indissociavelmente, interpelação, identificação e produção de sentido, realiza o non-sens da produção do sujeito como causa de si sob a forma da evidência primeira' (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 279). Ora, parece que os apontamentos que fizemos no final da subseção anterior desta tese ganham agora novas proporções. Lá lançamos luz, a partir das próprias definições de Pêcheux, sobre a incapacidade da subversão ideológica em fornecer uma ilusão de evidência sólida o suficiente para mascarar plenamente o caráter material do sentido. Objetivamos, assim, mostrar que o projeto ideológico de sedentarização plena do sentido e do sujeito é frustrado por uma errância fundamental e incorrigível que reside na base linguística e nos processos discursivos. Ora, nosso objetivo nas subseções anteriores foi justamente mostrar que a própria relação discrepante entre base linguística e processos discursivos não permite, enquanto relação, construir uma unidade capaz de sedentarizar cabalmente os movimentos errantes do sentido e do sujeito. Logo, antes mesmo de trazermos a psicanálise para a discussão, já não podíamos falar em termos de sujeito e sentido inteiros, plenamente sedentarizados pela Ideologia. Mas antes, retomemos o problema da forma-sujeito plena, para depois passarmos pela solução psicanalítica proposta por Pêcheux. Comecemos: Os marxistas já tinham, há muito, reconhecido e expressado especificamente esse ponto [...], dizendo que as condições materiais de existência dos homens determinam as formas de sua consciência, sem que as duas jamais coincidam: ou ainda, dizendo que os homens fazem a história, mas não a história que eles querem ou acreditam fazer. Tudo isso exprimia muito bem que 'os homens' estão determinados, na História, a pensar e a fazer livremente o que não podem deixar de fazer e pensar, e sempre através da eterna repetição de uma evidência descritiva que ameaça, em definitivo, enclausurar a política do 177 proletariado no dilema do quietismo [...] e do salto voluntarista [...] (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 271). A forma-sujeito determinada cabalmente pela ideologia apresenta(va)-se, assim, como "um emperramento teórico e prático..." (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 272). Pêcheux não foi o único a ver e assumir esta fragilidade da Tríplice Aliança. O próprio Althusser tentou revolver as estruturas teóricas marxistas através de uma aproximação conceitual mais efetiva com a psicanálise, trazendo conceitos como ego, inconsciente, imaginário e outros (PÊCHEUX, 2009). Não sem reveses: sua crítica, que também era autocrítica, o levou a ser visto como "inimigo de classe que leva a luta de classes sob as formas do silêncio ou da denegação, em nome da Eternidade!" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 272). Procurando responder a ataques, principalmente a respeito do poderio totalizador dos Aparelhos Ideológicos de Estado, Pêcheux assume que ele mesmo se entregou a subterfúgios teóricos enviesados: Fui mais longe investigando de que modo [...] o 'sujeito é produzido' como historicamente capaz [...] de se voltar contra causas que o determinam, [...] cheguei, assim, no fim de Les Vérités de La Palice a delinear o fantasma de um estranho sujeito materialista que efetua a 'apropriação subjetiva da política do proletariado'. E apesar de todas as precauções teóricas de que eu me cercava (em particular com a noção de 'desidentificação'), cheguei finalmente a um paradoxal sujeito da prática política do proletariado cuja simetria tendencial com o sujeito da prática política burguesa não era questionada! (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 274). Este "fantasma de um estranho sujeito materialista" tornava-se capaz, através de uma retórica reduplicada, de fazer encaixar na teoria pecheutiana uma ideologia às avessas cujo papel era assujeitar o indivíduo em sujeito de um outro discurso: o discurso do proletariado. Ou seja, apesar dos furos e dos deslizes materiais que se opunham veemente à forma-sujeito plena, Pêcheux não foi capaz, neste primeiro momento, de abrir mão do funcionamento discursivo da interpelação-identificação. Assim, a noção de sujeito plenamente interpeladoidentificado pela Ideologia como forma-sujeito acabou por impor a Pêcheux certas emendas teóricas ainda mais insólitas: a contraidentificação, a desidentificação e a superidentificação. É que, frente ao sujeito pleno identificado na interpelação da Ideologia dominante burguesa, portador da evidência que faz com que cada um diga 'sou eu!', eu me apoiava em uma exterioridade radical da teoria marxistaleninista para desvendar o ponto em que o absurdo reaparece sob a evidência, determinando, assim, a possibilidade de uma espécie de pedagogia da ruptura 178 das identificações imaginárias em que o sujeito se encontra, logo, a possibilidade de uma 'interpelação às avessas', atuando na prática política do proletariado (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 275). Nestes termos, a contraidentificação e a desidentificação se mostram apenas como variáveis do processo de interpelação-identificação que, no anexo III, são declinadas a mera pedagogia da ruptura. Isso significa dizer que Pêcheux, em virtude da manutenção da noção de forma-sujeito, foi levado a costurar conceitos que até permitiam certa movência em relação a uma dada FD, mas nunca em relação a uma FI. Da forma com que foi apresentada, toda transgressão e resistência aparecem apenas como rupturas instrumentalizadas pela Ideologia, ainda nos moldes da forma-sujeito, mas agora na forma de uma "pedagogia da autonomia" (nenhuma referência a Paulo Freire). Estas variáveis da identificação são assim descritas pelo autor: A primeira modalidade consiste numa superposição (um recobrimento) entre o sujeito da enunciação e o sujeito universal, de modo que a 'tomada de posição' do sujeito realiza seu assujeitamento sob a forma do 'livre consentimento': essa superposição caracteriza o discurso do 'bom sujeito' que reflete espontaneamente o Sujeito. A segunda modalidade caracteriza o discurso do 'mau sujeito', o discurso no qual o sujeito da enunciação 'se volta' contra o sujeito universal por meio de uma 'tomada de posição' que consiste, desta vez, em uma separação (distanciamento, dúvida, questionamento, contestação revolta...) com respeito ao que o 'sujeito universal' lhe 'dá a pensar': luta contra a evidência ideológica, sobre o terreno dessa evidência, evidência afetada pela negação, revertida a seu próprio terreno (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 199). Somando-se às duas primeiras, aparece também uma terceira modalidade: "caracterizada pelo fato de que ela integra o efeito das ciências e da prática política do proletariado sobre a forma-sujeito, efeito que toma a forma de uma desidentificação, isto é, tomada de posição não-subjetiva" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 201). Ora, foi a partir desse ponto, sob muitos aspectos insuportável, que Pêcheux procurou transformar sua teoria no que tange à totalidade da forma-sujeito. Por motivos que não nos cabe aqui analisar, não é difícil encontrar defesas àquilo que o próprio autor renegou: "diante do exposto, pergunto se o próprio Pêcheux não foi muito radical na sua autocrítica?" (GRIGOLETTO, 2005). Por algum motivo, a plenitude do sujeito acabado emerge ainda como tentação teórica no seio da AD. Pêcheux então assume que a contraidenficação e a desidentificação não passam de efeitos instrumentalizados de deslocamento de submissão para outra FD (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 179 275), haja vista que não existe espaço discursivo fora da Ideologia (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 166). E este é o verdadeiro problema da forma-sujeito fundamento-de-si: o interdiscurso de uma dada Formação Ideológica, se for compreendido também como espaço pleno de discurso, não permite desidentificações (no fundo do mar não existem espaços "não-água"), mas apenas contraidentificações instrumentalizadas. Logo, só é possível ao sentido (e ao sujeito) passar de uma forma-sujeito a outra, de uma FD a outra, mas nunca se colocar fora do interdiscurso que por sua vez remete inevitavelmente a uma dada FI. Logo, contraidentificação e desidentificação se tornam noções contraditórias às que o próprio autor desenvolve em fases posteriores. Havia muitas consequências teóricas inconvenientes a este modelo totalizante, que o autor chama de "retorno idealista de um primado da teoria sobre a prática" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276). Algumas dessas consequências são levantadas pelo próprio autor no anexo III. Pêcheux teria que assumir, por exemplo, que no interior mesmo da Formação Ideológica Capitalista pudesse surgir uma Formação Discursiva contrária ao capitalismo, mas nos termos de uma oposição pedagogicamente instrumentalizada (pelo próprio capitalismo?). Outro problema é que, nestes moldes, língua, discurso e sujeito não poderiam possuir funcionamento ideológico previsto fora do sistema capitalista globalizado contemporâneo, calcado na premissa (muitas vezes insustentável) de que existe apenas uma classe dominante hegemônica e apenas um proletariado uniforme e coeso. Mas não só isso: o próprio diálogo com a psicanálise estava ameaçado: Ao mesmo tempo, alguma coisa está falhando também do lado da Psicanálise, na referência feita a seus conceitos, e se concentra sobre a relação entre o ego e o sujeito. Tudo se passa, em Les Vérités de La Palice, como se o que foi dito do sujeito se confundisse tendencialmente com o que foi posto relativamente ao ego como 'forma-sujeito" da ideologia jurídica, a ponto de que o funcionalismo, expulso politicamente pela porta, pudesse, apesar de todas as denegações, ter voltado a tamborilar pela janela psicanalítica, sob a forma de uma espécie de gênese do ego; à força de levar exageradamente a sério as ilusões do poder unificador da consciência (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276). "Permitir a instalação de um tal jacobinismo da consciência, enclausurada na evidência de seu próprio império sobre seus atos, palavras e pensamentos, sem que nada falhe" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276), era tornar-se prisioneiro da teoria que idealmente pode ser perfeita, em detrimento da prática. É neste momento que Pêcheux recorre ao famoso enunciado lacaniano "só há causa daquilo que falha", para salvar a relação da Análise do 180 Discurso com a Psicanálise, mas sobretudo, para se resguardar do platonismo que rondava sua teoria através de plenitudes, unidades, necessidades e sedentarizações que, por sua vez, ameaçavam o projeto marxista de revolução. A reparação pecheutiana então se volta às noções de inconsciente e real, ambas em estreita relação com a noção de non-sens (não-sentido, sem sentido). O autor começa distinguindo a noção de esquecimento (ou apagamento), da noção psicanalítica de recalque que juntamente coma noção de real, são mais próximas da noção de "impossível". Isso implica afirmar, por exemplo, que o sujeito não se constitui apenas por um apagamento daquilo que lhe determina, na forma-sujeito, mas sim que o sujeito é constituído por um non-sens impossível de emergir, impossível de simbolizar. Algo fura, falha e vaga perenemente no sujeito. Nas palavras de Lacan: No sonho, no ato falho, no chiste, chama atenção o modo de tropeço pelo qual eles aparecem [...]. Ali alguma outra coisa quer se realizar algo que aparece como intencional, certamente, mas de uma estranha temporalidade. O que se produz nessa hiância, no sentido pleno do termo produzir-se, se apresenta como um achado [...] e, mais ainda, sempre está prestes a escapar de novo, instaurando a dimensão da perda (LACAN, 1979, p. 29). Ora, se o próprio inconsciente se dá como pura perda, a relação da ideologia com o inconsciente não poderia jamais se dar na forma de uma totalidade. De um ponto de vista teórico, o inconsciente lacaniano é o privilégio da hiância, da falta e da incompletude, em detrimento da unidade e da continuidade. O inconsciente "se situa nesse ponto em que, entre a causa e o que ela afeta, há sempre claudicação" (LACAN, 1979, p. 27). Ou seja, o inconsciente enquanto non-sens, é a própria função de descontinuidade, de barramento, que reside justamente entre a causa e o efeito, na hiância irreparável que impede a totalidade (COSTAMOURA, 2006). Assim, se o ego da forma-sujeito é atravessado por um inconsciente que é hiância e descontinuidade, ideologia e sujeito não podem constituir "um" justamente por estarem irreparavelmente separados por uma pura falta. Este modelo lacaniano coaduna com o que apresentamos durante toda a tese sobre a hiância da relação, ainda que a partir de outros autores como Kant (2001) e Hume (2004). "Assim, ficava contornado, com toda a obstinação filosófica possível, o fato de que o non-sens do inconsciente, em que a interpelação encontra onde se agarrar, nunca é inteiramente recoberto nem obstruído pela evidência do sujeitocentro-sentido que é seu produto" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276). 181 Novamente a ideia de "evidência" aparece na teoria pecheutiana, mas dessa vez ela não é capaz de recobrir ou obstruir plenamente o caráter material do sentido. O que não quer dizer que a ideologia, através dos AIEs e dos AREs, não tente impor tal evidência de sentido e realidade. Ou seja, o produto "sujeito-centro-sentido" ainda opera ideologicamente, mas não mais em termos de continuidade, mas de pulsação: "[...] o tempo da produção e o do produto não são sucessivos como para o mito platônico, mas estão inscritos na simultaneidade de um batimento, de uma pulsação pela qual o non-sens inconsciente não para de voltar no sujeito e no sentido que nele pretende se instalar" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 276). Se antes a ideologia trabalhava a interpelação-identificação a partir de um esquecimento daquilo que determina o sujeito, apagando o caráter material do sentido e fornecendo uma evidência autorreferente (com causa em si mesma), agora Pêcheux coloca a causa fora do sujeito e do sentido, e essa causa é a erro, o lapso, o ato falho, "pois os traços inconscientes do significante não são jamais 'apagados' ou 'esquecidos', mas trabalham, sem se deslocar, na pulsação sentido/non-sens do sujeito dividido" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 277). Diversas recolocações teóricas se evidenciam nesta citação. Relida com atenção e calma, esta proposição pecheutiana afirma que há, no significante, traços inconscientes sempre latentes. Isso implica assumir que na relação significante-significado (quer seja pelas vias saussurianas de arbitrário do signo e valor do signo, ou pelas vias da cadeia de significantes, de Lacan) a pulsação sentido/non-sense insiste em fazer falhar perenemente, na forma de batimento de um sujeito dividido. E se já na base linguística a errância persiste insolúvel, ela emerge ainda mais irresolúvel nos processos discursivos. A própria noção de ritual ideológico de assujeitamento se torna o "não-todo" do ritual, pleno de hiâncias, falhas e movências. Não há ritual sem falhas, diz Pêcheux; atravessado pelo inconsciente, o ritual se estilhaça no lapso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 277). Contudo, para que o ritual falhe, é preciso que o ritual venha à existência pelas vias da forma-sujeito. O que queremos sustentar, aqui, é que Pêcheux corrige sua teoria no que diz respeito à plenitude do assujeitamento pela forma-sujeito de uma dada FD, o que não quer dizer que este funcionamento de interpelação-identificação não ocorra. Sustentamos, aqui, a hipótese de que ele ocorre sim, como realidade material que impõe de incontáveis maneiras. Mas certo erro "infecta constantemente a ideologia dominante, do próprio interior das suas práticas" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 278). É essa imperfeição que permite às classes dominadas (heterogêneas, incoerentes e discrepantes) qualquer medida de resistência, qualquer vitória 182 ínfima aparições fugidias, "que no tempo do relâmpago, colocam em xeque a ideologia dominante tirando partido de seu desequilíbrio" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 278). Pêcheux fala em termos de desequilíbrio da ideologia dominante, de falhas no ritual, de revolta e resistência, e não em termos de inexistência da forma-sujeito (e das Formações Discursivas). Pensar a relação de incompletude da ideologia com o non-sens não implica, por outro lado, pensar o inconsciente sem a ideologia, mas sim que o non-sens emerge como um erro que estilhaça a plenitude do tecido discursivo em incontáveis retalhos. Retraçar a vitória do lapso e do ato falho nas falhas da interpelação ideológica não supõe que se faça agora do inconsciente a fonte da ideologia dominada [...]: a ordem do inconsciente não coincide com a da ideologia, o recalque não se identifica nem com o assujeitamento nem com a repressão, mas isso não significa que a ideologia deva ser pensada sem referência ao registro inconsciente (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 278). A partir deste prisma, sentido e sujeito não derivam mais de uma continuidade teleológica que faz encaixar de forma homogênea as partes desse "todo". Agora sentido e sujeito emergem de uma pulsação sentido/não-sentido, como um erro perene que aponta para uma movência contingente de cada fragmento do não-todo. Ora, é a partir dessa hiância que separa significante e significado, base linguística e processos discursivos, articulação e sustentação, FDs de outras FDs (no interior do intradiscurso) que sustentamos nossa hipótese de errância na significação: "há um buraco e algo que vem oscilar no intervalo. Em suma, só existe causa para o que manca/claudica" (LACAN, 1979, p. 27). Propomos, assim, a noção de errância não como aquilo que oscila no intervalo da hiância que é o inconsciente; não faz sentido algum renomearmos uma noção tão bem desenvolvida. Não se trata disso. A errância é a movência intrínseca a cada parte que compõe o não-todo complexo discursivo, uma movência que se instaura justamente por que cada fragmento do sistema discursivo é separado por hiâncias que o projeto ideológico não é capaz de apagar, tampouco de dissimular de forma plena. É a hiância que confere ao todo complexo discursivo um caráter de "não-todo", de "não-um", costurado ideologicamente de forma inconsistente, flácida e movediça. Se na subseção anterior concluímos que a própria relação contraditória entre a base linguística (desigual e arbitrária), em contato com os processos discursivos (discrepantes), impõe uma movência errante a cada fragmento do não-todo complexo discursivo, agora a noção de inconsciente (non-sense) emerge afetando significante e sujeito ainda de forma mais 183 contundente. O ritual não é capaz de costurar o tecido da significação de forma plena: o liame ideológico é falho, se esgarça, e a movência errante de cada fragmento insiste em se impor. É assim que o ritual falha lançando luz sobre o projeto de sedentarização da ideologia dominante. É pelas vias da errância que sentido e sujeito deslizam um sobre o outro em uma movência que não se dissuade facilmente. É assim que os AIEs e os AREs falham em construir uma estrutura sólida, é assim que as revoltas aparecem e são esquecidas. Algo sempre erra, falha e vaga, na construção da realidade humana. 184 2.3 A MATEMÁTICA DA SEDENTARIZAÇÃO Nos primeiros capítulos de Semântica e Discurso Pêcheux trava um debate filosófico com Kant, Leibniz, Husserl e principalmente com Frege a respeito do uso da linguagem como ferramenta a serviço da verdade científica. Para a maioria dos filósofos da linguagem, lógicos, epistemólogos e filósofos da ciência, a construção de conceitos científicos carece principalmente de uma boa estrutura de argumentos válidos e verdadeiros. Esse aperfeiçoamento da língua inicialmente passou por processos de expurgação dos erros e das ilusões na linguagem (em Kant, Leibniz e outros), e por fim entendeu que a ciência pode ser melhor fundamentada sobre uma língua artificial e formal (em Husserl e Frege) que possa articular sempre argumentos válidos e chegar à verdade mais facilmente. De uma forma ou de outra, à ciência tenta revestir-se de uma roupagem linguística que lhe forneça coesão e estabilidade suficiente para que possa enunciar proposições rigorosamente claras, replicáveis e, sobretudo, lógicas e necessárias. Ora, o que está por trás deste projeto não é nada menos que uma matemática da linguagem, materializada em uma língua artificial, tal como propôs Leibniz, Frege, Peirce, Carnap etc. (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 278). Nesta língua lógica, a contingência deve ser expurgada e as ilusões devem ser suprimidas. De forma prática, o projeto científico de construção e provisão de verdades através da língua passa por processos de sedentarização das possibilidades de significação; isto é, ainda que seja através de operadores lógicos importados da matemática, a língua deve ser revestida de um caráter lógico capaz de desalojar o erro de seu funcionamento intrínseco. Sobre o erro na língua, Pêcheux se opõe à concepção logicista segundo a qual as oposições ideológicas resultariam de imperfeições da linguagem, o que significa reduzi-las a quiproquós, a 'problemas sem pé nem cabeça' dos quais todo o mundo poderia escapar se se desse a um tal trabalho. Procuraremos mostrar que não se trata disso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). O erro não está na língua, mas no juízo que se faz sobre ela. Essa concepção esclarece, por exemplo, o motivo pelo qual o enunciado 'tem um trem no meu olho esquerdo" é uma proposição válida e verdadeira em diversas regiões brasileiras em seu uso cotidiano, ao passo 185 que o enunciado físico "a energia e a massa total num sistema fechado ou isolado são sempre constantes, tal como em E=mc2" não é valido, tampouco verdadeiro, para uma grande parcela da população brasileira. O projeto dos filósofos lógicos pode ser visto facilmente neste jogo de enunciados. Enquanto Leibniz propunha afastar a contingência interpretativa dos enunciados científicos, chegando até mesmo a propor a correção de toda linguagem cotidiana, Frege propôs uma serie de operadores lógicos em uma língua artificial que poderia ser usada para recobrir a linguagem científica e expurgar, de vez, os erros, as ilusões e os deslizes de interpretação. Para que tais projetos pudessem ter lugar, os lógicos precisavam imputar na língua um erro estrutural para que se justificasse o trabalho de expurgar e erradicar os erros de seu funcionamento. Mas o erro não está na língua: "não se trata disso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). O erro, como vimos, decorre do fracasso da Ideologia em impor um funcionamento discursivo perfeito que possa sedentarizar plenamente o sentido e interpelar-identificar cabalmente o sujeito na forma-sujeito através de evidências ilusórias. E é justamente por que o funcionamento ideológico é da ordem do juízo, ou seja, funciona através de projetos materiais de fornecimento de realidades, é que o erro pode emergir no âmago do funcionamento do aparato ideológico de sedentarização do sentido e do sujeito (AIEs + AREs). Nossa hipótese, portanto, é a de que todo erro só pode emergir na língua (cotidiana, científica, artística, pedagógica etc.) a posteriori, quando determinado projeto ideológico, materializado no funcionamento de uma dada FD, se mostra incapaz de fornecer uma evidência plena para o sentido e o sujeito ali inscritos. Se o erro é da ordem do juízo, ele não pode ser evidenciado, pode apenas ser atribuído. E é no interior deste jogo complexo e errante de FDs que as falhas e as ilusões são instrumentalizadas como fracassos. Ou seja, a própria noção de erro é uma noção política e ideológica: no interior de uma FD, o erro se torna uma poderosa ferramenta de sedentarização e assujeitamento do indivíduo pela forma-sujeito. A quem serve a noção de erro? Para o padre e para o pastor, para o professor, para o médico, para o político, para o juiz e para o "cientista": o erro é aquilo que, imaginária e discursivamente, deve ser evitado, e por isso mesmo aponta para aquilo que deve ser almejado no interior de uma FD. O erro, portanto, é uma importante ferramenta de condicionamento no processo de determinação da realidade e da prática do sujeito na sociedade, afinal a falha e sua correção na forma de "progresso" -, mostra-se como poderosa metodologia de sedentarização ideológica. No entanto, o erro erra: falha e vaga. O próprio trabalho de 186 assujeitamento falha pela língua, pelo inconsciente e pelo processo discursivo. E se o erro é a causa do movimento ideológico perene, a errância é a causa que produz o erro. Dito de outra forma, o motivo da falha e das falhas, segundo nossa hipótese, é a errância movente que impede a estabilização plena do sentido e do sujeito, o que impossibilita a construção de enunciados e proposições absolutos, e com isso coagula o projeto ideológico de constituição de castelos inabaláveis de conhecimentos. Ora, é a partir do prisma da errância que continuaremos nossa perambulação teórica e que vamos olhar para o capítulo um da quarta parte de Semântica e Discurso: "Ruptura epistemológica e forma-sujeito do discurso: não há 'discurso científico' puro" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 171). Pêcheux inicia essa discussão ressaltando a impossibilidade de um discurso "não-ideológico", uma vez que não existe lugar fora da ideologia justamente por que a ideologia é a própria exterioridade. Essa noção implica diretamente no projeto lógicoepistemológico da ciência de fornecer verdades válidas que sejam universais e atemporais, haja vista que o "reconhecimento" de uma essência implica que a mesma não seja enviesada ideologicamente, sobretudo historicamente. O projeto de Leibniz, de expulsar a contingência da linguagem cotidiana e científica é um exemplo perfeito da concepção de "língua fora da ideologia". Da mesma forma, a linguagem lógica fregeana, sustentada por operadores formais, também se mostra como tentativa de fornecer um funcionamento linguístico sólido e inequívoco para as "verdades" científicas, onde se pode expurgar o erro e o risco da interpretação politicamente enviesada. A título hipotético de exemplo, façamos o seguinte exercício lógico sobre uma mesma árvore: • Uma criança: "Que árvore gigante! Vou subir e brincar nela". • Um adulto: "Está árvore não cresceu o suficiente. Vai dar pouca lenha". • Uma cientista: "Esta árvore tem 5,48 metros de altura". Supostamente não há erro nem interpretação no valor exato, em metros, da altura da árvore. Ou seja, 5,48 m não é alto nem baixo, é 5,48 m. É assim que a experiência humana é convertida em dados matemáticos "fora da ideologia", e por isso mesmo se tornam supostamente imunes a erros na transmissão das verdades. É assim que uma fórmula química pode, em diferentes regiões do globo, em séculos diferentes, produzir a mesma penicilina que cura doenças igualmente "a-ideológicas". A linguagem perfeita, destituída do perigo da 187 interpretação política, é a linguagem das fórmulas, dos códigos, dos algoritmos: a linguagem lógica. Ora, o próprio acolhimento do erro na língua como funcionamento que precisa ser corrigido é, por si mesmo, um gesto ideológico. O erro não está na língua, mas no juízo que se faz sobre ela, a posteriori. O erro não emerge na língua, de dentro pra fora: o erro é instalado na língua, de fora para dentro. Corrigir a língua é, por isso mesmo, um gesto ideológico por excelência, ou seja, a própria concepção de uma língua "fora da ideologia" já se configura como inscrição ideológica. Diante dessas premissas, em Pêcheux podemos afirmar que o trabalho lógico da linguagem científica consiste em expulsar a ideologia (fonte de erros e interpretações) de seu funcionamento, justamente enquanto marca, politicamente, sua própria inscrição ideológica; melhor dito, a ciência dissimula ideologicamente a própria ideologia que lhe determina. Isso quer dizer que "a história da produção dos conhecimentos não está acima ou separada da história da luta de classes" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 172); ao contrário: a história de um dado conhecimento científico não passa de efeito de um processo muito maior, historicamente condicionado e ideologicamente circunscrito. Um efeito que não é trabalho de um gênio criador que inova a partir do nada, nem mesmo de uma equipe de pesquisadores competentes de uma dada universidade, muito menos resulta de procedimentos meramente metodológicos replicáveis universalmente: a ciência é efeito de um interdiscurso, de um todo complexo com dominante de FDs. Ainda que possa resultar em fórmulas químicas, algoritmos e códigos supostamente "fora da ideologia", o não-todo da linguagem científica (bem como de sua prática) não se distingue da própria luta de classes, ou seja, não se separa do discurso dominante e de suas demandas ideológicas e políticas. A língua artificial fornecida pelos operadores lógicos, ao contrário do que propôs Gottlob Frege, não existe fora do discurso e da ideologia. Todavia, importa lembrar que a ideologia falha em seus rituais: Em outras palavras, as 'ideias científicas', as concepções gerais e particulares [...] não estão separadas da história (da luta de classes): elas constituem 'compartimentos' especializados das ideologias práticas sobre o terreno da produção dos conhecimentos, com discrepâncias e autonomizações variáveis (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 173). O terreno da produção dos conhecimentos é errante, repleto de discrepâncias, de compartimentos especializados que se movem com autonomizações variáveis. 188 Isso significa que as contradições que constituem o que chamamos condições ideológicas da reprodução/transformação das relações de produção se repercutem, com deslizamentos, deslocamentos etc., no todo complexo das ideologias teóricas sob a forma de relações de desigualdade-subordinação que determinam os interesses teóricas em luta numa conjuntura dada (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 173). Talvez um dos indícios mais patentes da prática científica é seu movimento supostamente linear, para frente, rumo ao progresso. Ora, o próprio movimento tem como causa a falha (só há causa para aquilo que claudica), de onde emana a contradição reproduçãotransformação das relações de produção do conhecimento. Contudo, nas palavras de Pêcheux, a reprodução-transformação se dá na forma de deslizamentos e deslocamentos entre relações desiguais, relações de luta, enfim. Com isso queremos afirmar que o movimento da ciência não se trata de uma teleologia linear: o sentido nasce do non-sens em uma pulsação descompassada, em deslizamentos e movências errantes, incoerentes e conflitantes. A ciência não é "uma" ciência, uniforme, homogênea e inteiriça: ciência é contradição e conflito. Assim, a epistemologia é, ela mesma, uma meta-ciência errante, repleta de hiâncias e movências que impossibilitam a sedentarização plena das relações de produção de conhecimento: [...] diremos que a objetividade material específica do complexo das ideologias teóricas que constituem um campo epistemológico dado se encontra precisamente nas relações de desigualdade/subordinação que atribuem a cada elemento [...] desse campo um papel determinado, no qual se combinam sob formas específicas o caráter de obstáculo epistemológico e o de matéria-prima ou de instrumento, segundo dosagens variáveis, de modo que certos elementos constituem, em um momento dado, puros obstáculos, e em outros constituem os pontos de apoio de uma transformação do campo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 174). Assim, um mesmo ponto epistemológico pode ser, hoje, o lugar onde as coisas andam, e logo se tornar o local onde elas emperram. Ora, seria ingenuidade (ou astúcia?) crer que um enunciado lógico-matemático científico pode ser sólido e imutável o suficiente para fundamentar de forma perfeita um dado campo epistemológico. A quem interessa o erro e a perfeição? Quem se beneficia da estabilidade ilusória da linguagem científica e de suas "verdades"? Afinal, "a objetividade material específica do complexo das ideologias teóricas que constituem um campo epistemológico dado", ou seja, a própria materialidade da ciência, 189 se dá justamente sobre uma relação de desigualdade e subordinação no interior do interdiscurso. A prática científica circunscrita na materialidade histórica e discursiva do interdiscurso é, portanto, essa suposta verdade advinda dos conhecimentos empíricos e descritivos. Dessa maneira, todo conhecimento está inscrito na própria forma-sujeito de uma dada FD, constituindo os sentidos "evidentes", consistentes e harmônicos que supostamente homogeneízam os sujeitos ali inscritos. Mas isso não é tão simples. A ciência se vê sempre às voltas com certos cortes epistemológicos, rupturas e transformações de paradigmas. E o próprio momento do corte epistemológico deriva também de processos históricos e ideológicos que clamam por novas formas de ordenação do conhecimento. Isso se vê na própria cronologia do conhecimento ocidental: inicialmente o conhecimento se dividia apenas entre senso comum, religioso e filosófico. Esse paradigma epistemológico perdurou desde a Grécia antiga até pelos menos o renascimento iluminista. Foi só nessa época que certos cortes epistemológicos surgiram instaurando modelos específicos de ordenação do conhecimento. Tais rupturas no paradigma fragmentaram as grandes narrativas antigas até culminar, na contemporaneidade, em uma especialização fragmentada por incontáveis cortes (dentro da psicologia existem diversos cortes e especializações, bem como dentro da linguística, da matemática etc.). E se o conhecimento de uma FD está inscrito na forma-sujeito como evidência para o sentido e para o sujeito, como pensar, então, o processo histórico de corte epistemológico? O processo histórico que inaugura a conjuntura de corte pode, então, ser caracterizado como a formação progressiva de um 'bloqueio' no interior do todo complexo das ideologias teóricas, de tal modo que o estado das relações de desigualdade-subordinação que atravessam este último não pode mais 'trabalhar' e é compelido a se repetir circularmente através de diferentes demarcações, ajustamentos etc., de modo que a própria estrutura da formasujeito se torna o limite visível do processo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 175). Aqui tomaremos o cuidado para não incorrermos no erro que Pêcheux mesmo retificou no anexo III. Não podemos cair na tentação de assumir que a revolução manifesta no corte epistemológico tenha sua origem em uma identificação às avessas, como se o modelo epistemológico da forma-sujeito fosse pleno, sem furos, e por isso toda transformação viria sempre em termos de uma pedagogia da revolução. Não se trata disso. O momento do corte é caracterizado por um bloqueio no interior do interdiscurso, de uma contenção do 190 funcionamento discursivo que se torna inoperante e é compelido, finalmente, a se transformar. E Pêcheux especifica a maneira pela qual essa transformação ocorre: através de uma "repetição circular", de novas demarcações e ajustamentos. Ou seja, o corte epistemológico se dá na forma de deslizamentos, de movências e ajustes na própria formasujeito. "Isso significa dizer que o momento histórico do corte que inaugura uma ciência dada é acompanhado necessariamente de um questionamento da forma-sujeito e da evidência de sentido que nela se acha incluída" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 175). Esta citação também exige cautela. Nestes termos, se se incorre na tentação teórica da evidência ilusória do sentido e do assujeitamento pleno, estamos falando de uma relação direta entre o pensamento e o real, entre a forma-sujeito e a coisa-em-si: uma relação que prescinde do sujeito, "de tal modo que o que é pensado não seja, como tal, sustentado por um sujeito" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 175). Ora, nada pode ser mais platônico que isso: um "mundo das ideias", um idealismo imaterial que se sustenta em si mesmo através de um meta-discurso originado em si mesmo, sem sujeito, sem autor. E se o sujeito fica fora do jogo, o mesmo se dá com o próprio sentido, que se torna ausente; o que resiste ali é uma mera função em um processo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 176). Esse é o mesmo idealismo que está na origem da ficção científica de linguagem "fora da ideologia", criticada algumas páginas atrás. A propósito do exemplo dado anteriormente, quando a cientista diz "a árvore tem 5,48 metros de altura", o que está em funcionamento é uma proposição que prescinde do sujeito, da interpretação e da experiência com o mundo. Aqui um breve desvio se impõe. A contradição que se manifesta pujante em toda essa tese diz respeito, essencialmente, à relação entre sedentarização e errância. O que queremos dizer com isso é que embora devamos nos esquivar da tentação teórica da plenitude e unidade da forma-sujeito, isso não quer dizer que no funcionamento discursivo de uma dada FD não existam diversos sujeitos que se submetem/são submetidos aos efeitos ideológicos dessa mesma ilusão a ponto de acreditar nas evidências fornecidas pela forma-discurso. Ou seja, enquanto analistas do discurso devemos nos colocar como teóricos que, conscientes da materialidade contraditória, incompleta e errante do discurso, analisam os processos pelos quais certos indivíduos são sujeitados e sedentarizados por determinadas FDs. Logo, as falhas nos rituais, o nonsense do inconsciente, a errância da base linguística e a movência dos processos discursivos devem ser levados em consideração no momento da análise. Afinal, o 191 processo interpelação-identificação é, ele mesmo, contradição: é pulsação sentido nãosentido, é subjugação conivente, evidência turva e sujeito dividido. O que nos leva a assumir que falamos, nesta tese, em termos de rituais de assujeitamento que são, eles mesmos, errantes (claudicantes e moventes). Ou melhor: os procedimentos de sedentarização da movência do sentido e do sujeito não podem fazer "um" e estancar as relações, o que não quer dizer que o sujeito sedentarizado não possa se tornar conivente com a ilusão de evidência que lhe é apresentada. Quando se idêntica ao conhecimento "evidente" fornecido pela forma-sujeito, o próprio sujeito se torna cúmplice de um processo que apaga sentido e sujeito. Será então a partir dessa contradição errânciasedentarização que nos colocaremos a pensar o problema do discurso científico "sem sujeito". De um lado temos uma posição idealista que toma o indivíduo como origem dos sentidos e conhecimentos científicos, e de outro, uma segunda posição igualmente idealista que retira o sujeito plenamente do processo discursivo até sobrar um mundo platônico das ideias que tem origem em si mesmo, e se mantém através de si e por si mesmo. Ora, Pêcheux mesmo atesta que o discurso sem sujeito se dá na forma de um paradoxo só não é paradoxo para o idealista (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 175). Contradição que instaura concomitantemente uma evidência e um ponto cego. O discurso e os dispositivos experimentais "sem sujeito" derivam de um paradoxo que: [...] chega a conceber que, no processo conceptual do conhecimento, a determinação do real ('exterior') e de sua necessidade independente do pensamento se materializa sob a forma de um corpo articulado de conceitos que, a um só tempo exibe e deixa em suspenso o efeito 'cego' dessa mesma determinação enquanto efeito-sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 176). Dito de outra forma, o discurso científico, compreendido ideologicamente como "veículo de comunicação de essências", fornece ficções que se materializam como um "corpo articulado de conceitos evidentes", que prescindem do sujeito. Quando a cientista de nosso exemplo anterior atestou cientificamente que a árvore tinha 5,48 metros de altura, ela estava se submetendo a uma suposta relação direta entre os conhecimentos fornecidos pela formasujeito científica (medidas em metros, botânica, geografia etc.) e o objeto real (a árvore), uma relação que supostamente prescinde do sujeito e se sustenta em si mesma. É assim que a ciência fornece conhecimentos "verdadeiros e incontestáveis": apagando o próprio procedimento discursivo que lhe conforma. Quando um sujeito de uma 192 dada FD recorre a argumentos científicos para validar uma proposição, ele acolhe e incorpora a ilusão do discurso sem sujeito e a evidência do conceito sem sentido que funciona como função em um processo (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 176). Se o sentido é contraditório, errante e exige interpretação, o discurso científico coloca, no lugar do sentido, uma função em um processo, um apanhado de códigos e algoritmos que sedentarizam a relação entre forma-sujeito e objeto real. Dizer que o discurso científico sedentariza sentido e sujeito significa dizer que suas movências são imobilizadas justamente subtraindo-se sentido e sujeito do processo, apagando a descontinuidade que lhes separa através de uma evidência que costura as extremidades e faz "um". Sentido e sujeito são problemáticos demais para quem se propõe a fornecer verdades. A relação direta entre forma-sujeito e objeto real, por outro lado, pode oferecer efeitos para um discurso supostamente mais sólido, essencial, necessário, estanque, homogêneo e sedentarizado. Mas esta unidade possui, nas palavras de Pêcheux, um ponto cego, um erro na evidência. É que nos termos da forma-sujeito, o discurso "sem sujeito" da ciência aparece como interioridade sem exterioridade no fio-do-discurso do cientista. Logo, justamente quando o sujeito se faz mais presente é quando ele acredita estar ausente, invertendodissimulando o funcionamento do discurso-sem-sujeito no interior do intradiscurso. E novamente somos levados a assumir que tal procedimento não poderia funcionar sem a conivência e a cumplicidade do sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 155). O funcionamento fictício de reversão do interdiscurso dentro do intradiscurso não apaga o absurdo que atravessa a evidência, e por isso resulta, ao contrário do que propõe a sedentarização científica, em uma movência incontrolável na prática científica. Estamos designando aqui o trabalho do impensado no pensamento, por meio do qual os próprios termos de uma questão, com a resposta que ela pressupõe, desaparecem, de modo que a questão perde literalmente seu sentido, ao passo que vão se formando ''respostas' novas a questões que não haviam sido colocadas processo no qual nomes e expressões se apagam, com a referência 'evidente' a seus objetos, enquanto outros nomes e expressões aparecem sob o efeito de certos deslocamentos do campo, de certas intrusões 'incongruentes' de elementos 'lançados', desligados-caídos de outros lugares, deslocamentos e intrusões que constituem propriamente o trabalho do filosófico (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 176). Em Pêcheux, a verdade material do processo discursivo é essa: a exterioridade da ideologia, através do discurso transverso do interdiscurso (enquanto conflito de classes), é o 193 que fornece o pré-construído ao intradiscurso na forma de impensado (contingente) no pensamento (necessário). E como já visto anteriormente, a língua (arbitrária e movente) não é capaz de oferecer uma ilusão de evidência que dissimule plenamente este funcionamento na forma-sujeito; a inversão que retira o ideológico (sentido e sujeito) do discurso científico só poderia funcionar ficcionalmente. Ora, essa relação discrepante e errante que separa base linguística e processo discursivo é o que impede a constituição de um discurso científico coeso e hegemônico. Nestes termos, nenhuma política de assepsia da língua poderia salvaguardar a ciência das heresias da política, da contingência e da errância. As fórmulas matemáticas, os algoritmos e os códigos artificiais não fariam sentido algum fora da ideologia; aliás, é pela ideologia, mais especificamente por/para uma ideologia dominante, que eles são produzidos. Não há solução fora da ideologia, ou seja, não é possível salvar a ciência dos vieses políticos nem da errância do sentido e do sujeito. É isso que se avulta na citação pecheutiana acima: um jogo caótico de termos em deslizes, deslocamentos, embates, lapsos, desligamentos, esquecimentos, intrusões, incongruências... Segundo o autor, a ideologia enquanto "exterioridade intransponível" se patenteia sobremaneira no momento do nascimento de um continente do conhecimento. No momento de um corte epistemológico, um complexo de conhecimentos prévios emerge como ponto de contradição em que a reprodução-transformação desvela as escolhas, as tomadas de posição e as demandas da classe dominante. Era essa a temática do primeiro livro de Pêcheux escrito em parceria com Michel Fichant, chamado "Sobre a história das ciências" (PÊCHEUX; FICHANT, 1971). O analista do discurso se debruça sobre os efeitos da ruptura epistemológica originada em Galileu Galilei para mostrar de que forma os conceitos e as práticas de diferentes continentes do conhecimento incidiram historicamente e materialmente na ocasião deste corte epistemológico. Mas por que "corte" epistemológico? O autor mostra, através das consequências na física e na biologia, que as propostas de Galileu interromperam diversos fluxos de conhecimento, causando "bloqueios" que impunham concentrações (acúmulos) de perguntas e respostas que forçaram novos caminhos teóricos (PÊCHEUX; FICHANT, 1971, p. 21). Tomemos o curso de um rio como metáfora. Em um dado momento, novas articulações de conhecimentos impedem que certos cursos do conhecimento continuem tal como eram, interrompendo momentaneamente o fluxo através de "bloqueios". Esses obstáculos, como barragens em rios, forçam novas brechas e escoamentos de perguntas e respostas. Contudo, 194 afirma Pêcheux, as "descobertas" de Galileu cortaram diversos rios de conhecimento, e causaram grande perturbação no conhecimento ocidental. O "bloqueio" que precede o corte funciona na forma de acúmulo de termos e conceitos, de pré-construídos em turbulência, e por isso resulta em alianças complexas entre novas ilhas de conhecimento com continentes maiores, supostamente estabilizados, que fornecem "um apoio e uma garantia ao materialismo da nova disciplina (por intermédio de articulações e de sustentações intracientíficas)" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 177). Ora, tais alianças atestam a nãoingenuidade ideológica da prática científica; ou melhor: denunciam sua inscrição em jogos políticos que implicam até mesmo seus preciosos códigos lógicos (fórmulas químicas e físicas, algoritmos matemáticos, dados estatísticos etc.) em funcionamentos discursivos que interferem e maculam qualquer ideário de coesão e pureza. Dito de outra forma, não há conhecimento científico desvinculado de uma forma-sujeito ideologicamente circunscrita em uma dada FD, e não há ruptura epistemológica sem ruptura na própria forma-sujeito. Destacaremos o fato de que toda ruptura epistemológica é a ocasião de um 'desarranjo', de uma redistribuição específica das relações entre materialismo e idealismo, na medida em que [...] toda ruptura exibe e põe em discussão, em seu próprio campo, os efeitos da forma-sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 178). O efeito idealista de identificação do indivíduo com a FD que o assujeita tem que ver diretamente com um reconhecimento (como em um espelho) com os conhecimentos que a forma-sujeito fornece. Assim, no momento de um corte epistemológico, é a própria formasujeito que é colocada em questão. Um corte epistemológico, portanto, não é mais que um corte discursivo. Para Pêcheux, esse momento de movências pujantes nas estruturas de uma FD se dá em duas vias: por um lado, na repetição idealista vista na coincidência do sujeito consigo mesmo através do espelho da forma-sujeito -, que condiciona a forma com que um sujeito se coloque diante de uma determinada experiência empírica ou de uma abstração especulativa através de rituais de assujeitamento; por outro lado, no funcionamento materialista da produção-reprodução do conhecimento, que funciona por omissão do sujeito como se a forma-sujeito pudesse se relacionar materialmente com o objeto real, prescindindo do sujeito (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 179). Quando Leibniz, Frege, Husserl e outros atestam a necessidade de uma linguagem depurada das contingências políticas que possa permitir o desenvolvimento empírico e dedutivo das propriedades dos objetos -, tem-se por objetivo instaurar uma relação contínua 195 e necessária entre ciência e lógica (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 180), como se só o conhecimento pautado pela lógica tivesse validade. Ademais, novamente estão em jogo as noções de "relação, hiância, continuidade e continuidade", e com elas, os conceitos de "errância e sedentarização" das relações enquanto efeitos de "erro e acerto, verdadeiro e falso". E nestes termos, colocar a lógica em relação de continuidade com a ciência é conceber "inelutavelmente a prática científica como uma atividade de triagem entre enunciados verdadeiros e enunciados falsos, repelindo tudo o que diz respeito às condições de aparição desses enunciados" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 180). Por isso não há ingenuidade ideológica alguma na epistemologia fundada na lógica e na assepsia da língua científica. A lógica colocada como fundamento contínuo da ciência trabalha através do apagamento da errância constitutiva da língua e do discurso, colocando no lugar uma solução idealista que assume a existência de erros e acertos em uma linguagem "fora da ideologia", "sem sujeito", puro "procedimento lógico", simples "triagem de enunciados verdadeiros ou falsos". Esse funcionamento só pode se dar sobre rituais de apagamento das condições históricas de aparição desses enunciados (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 181), instaurando sobre eles certas evidências universais e atemporais que colocam em relação de continuidade a formasujeito e o objeto real, prescindindo do sujeito. Essa linguagem lógica de formulação, que seria a linguagem científica, exclui "por seu fechamento, qualquer referência a 'situações', pressupostos e tomadas de posição" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 181). Na raiz dessa confusão está, finalmente, a ideia de que existe um discurso da ciência, isto é, um discurso do sujeito da ciência, cuja característica seria a de que esse sujeito está apagado nela, isto, 'presente por sua ausência', exatamente como Deus sobre esta terra no discurso religioso (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 181). A hipótese fundamental dessa tese é que o suposto "discurso da ciência", com todas suas práticas lógico-linguísticas de estabelecimento de "verdades", é fruto de um ritual ideológico de deslocamento de hiâncias que se descortina em três estágios concomitantes: 1) sutura e apagamento da descontinuidade entre ciência e lógica fazendo crer que só é possível fazer ciência de forma lógica; 2) dissimulação da continuidade existente entre linguagem científica e ideologia infundindo ali uma hiância que supostamente salvaguardaria a ciência das contingências políticas do sentido e do sujeito; e finalmente, 3) apagamento das 196 descontinuidades que separam as partes contraditórias da base linguística e das discrepâncias do processo discursivo sedentarização que lhe conferiria coesão estável e cabal. Essa é a verdade que o discurso científico instrumentaliza justamente enquanto apaga seus próprios rastros. No entanto, a verdade material do discurso resiste, e insiste: "O único meio de esclarecer essa confusão é reconhecer que não há "discurso da ciência" (nem mesmo, a rigor, "discurso de uma ciência"), por que todo discurso é discurso de um sujeito" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 182). Não existe enunciado científico puro fórmula, algoritmo ou proposição lógica -, fora da ideologia, descontaminados da errância contingente. Não há discurso científico puro, assim como não há discurso político, artístico, religioso etc. puros, desconectados do "todo complexo com dominante de FDs". Essa é a materialidade contraditória do discurso: por um lado, o interdiscurso é a própria exterioridade ideológica: não há discurso sem sujeito, e não há sujeito sem ideologia. Mas por outro, não há ritual sem falhas, só há causa daquilo que erra. Se o sujeito é uma ilusão conivente, sujeito dividido, é por que o ritual é igualmente repleto de hiâncias. Logo, a forma-sujeito do "discurso científico" só pode fornecer verdades por intermédio de evidências fictícias e rotas que exigem certa cumplicidade do sujeito. 197 3 ERRÂNCIA NA ESTRUTURA E NO ACONTECIMENTO Memórias inventadas são mais bonitas 198 3.1 A ERRÂNCIA DA HISTÓRIA DOM QUIXOTE, PARTE 1, CAPÍTULO 22 "Embora eu saiba que não exista magia no mundo que possa mover e forçar a vontade como alguns simplesmente acreditam -, é l ivre a nossa vontade, e não existe erva nem encanto que a force." Já vimos que ideologia, língua e sujeito são elementos constitutivos do processo de significação no discurso que inexoravelmente constituem também o conhecimento produzido pela ciência. Estes funcionamentos discrepantes e contraditórios já satisfariam nosso propósito de detectar a movência errante que revira e revolve as estruturas do discurso e da epistemologia moderna, contudo, ainda nos falta um componente significativo: a história. O objetivo desta subseção é inserir a noção de errância enquanto movimento contingente (na base linguística e nos processos discursivos) situado para além da controvérsia erro/acerto nas problemáticas pecheutianas que envolvem história, acontecimento e memória discursiva no cerne do estabelecimento de uma epistemologia da errância. Estas noções serão discutidas a partir das obras "Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (PÊCHEUX, 2008), e "O papel da memória" (PÊCHEUX, 1999). Nos termos propostos por esta tese, a contraparte da errância é a sedentarização. Uma vez inserida em uma teoria discursiva, a noção de sedentarização tem que ver com o empreendimento (ainda que frustrado) do discurso dominante em se tornar proprietário do sentido, domesticando seu funcionamento e minorando sua amplitude. Assim disposto, a instrumentalização das noções de "erro" e "acerto" e seus deslizamentos significantes que assujeitam em direção ao "progresso", à "inovação" e ao "aperfeiçoamento" do conhecimento científico aparece como efeito discursivo de controle e arbítrio sobre sentido e sujeito. Essa nomenclatura se justifica na medida em que o trabalho da ideologia se dá justamente nos moldes de uma minoração da amplitude errante da significação projeto que produz efeitos através do fornecimento de "evidências" que supostamente instauram certa unidade entre as partes que constituem o sentido, apagando as hiâncias e as errâncias através de ilusões de naturalização e cristalização do sentido: a ilusão da sedentarização. Pêcheux inicia a obra "Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (2008) abordando problemáticas dessa ordem. Tomando como exemplo o acontecimento das eleições francesas 199 de 1981, ele toma como objeto de análise o enunciado "on a gagné" (ganhamos) para lançar luz sobre os jogos de significação que, em conflito, trabalham os pressupostos fornecidos pela memória discursiva em relação a um dado acontecimento atual. A partir desse cenário, Pêcheux fundamenta que a movência dos sentidos é imensurável: os sentidos da vitória política são invadidos por acepções advindas de diversos "universos" discursivos, como o futebol, o das guerras e muitos outros. No entanto, ao mesmo tempo em que emerge de uma miríade intangível, esses sentidos errantes que se movem de forma contingente e indefinível -, recebem tratamentos lógicos, legitimados socio-politicamente, que instauram certa ilusão de evidência transparente: "o veredito das cifras, a evidência das tabelas" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 20). Trata-se, segundo o autor, de um confronto discursivo que teve início muito antes das eleições de 10 de maio... [...] por um imenso trabalho de formulações (retomadas, deslocadas, invertidas, de um lado a outro do campo político) tendendo a prefigurar discursivamente o acontecimento, a dar-lhe forma e figura, na esperança de apressar sua vinda... ou de impedi-la; todo esse processo vai continuar, marcado pela novidade do dia 10 de maio. Mas esta novidade não tira a opacidade do acontecimento, inscrita no jogo oblíquo de suas denominações (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 20). Ainda que se coloque materialmente diante dos olhos de muitos, o acontecimento recebe significações tão heterogêneas que se torna impossível captar a totalidade e a unidade do sentido da "eleição": trata-se, ao contrário, de incontáveis "eleições" que não tiveram início e fim determinados, mas estendem-se pela história de forma contingente e plural errante . "Ora, entre esses gritos de vitória, há um que vai 'pegar' com uma intensidade particular: é o enunciado 'On a gagné' ['Ganhamos!'] repetido sem fim como um eco inesgotável, apegado ao acontecimento" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 21). Entre encontros e relações incalculáveis, algumas "pegas" nos termos propostos por Althusser (2005), se efetivaram mais que outras. A contingência errante dessa movência dos sentidos gera colisões que, "de encontro em encontro, uma carambola e o nascimento de um mundo" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 10), ou seja, de relações em relações, sentidos inapreensíveis podem ser costurados de forma mais duradoura que outros. Algumas "pegas" são instrumentalizadas pelos discursos dominantes (conflitos de FDs) através de enunciados lógicos que supostamente afastariam o problema da interpretação: "o candidato A recebeu X votos, que equivalem a Y% do total, e por isso é o vencedor das eleições presidenciais de 1981 200 na França". Estas supostas "evidências" inequívocas emergem na forma de enunciados matematizáveis, necessários e contínuos, como se um derivasse do outro de forma homogênea e coesa. Trata-se, nos termos propostos por esta tese, de uma tentativa de sedentarização da significação através de recursos lógico-retóricos que visam reter a movência descontrolada e errante da significação. Contudo a errância, por que é fundamento, persiste e faz errar (no duplo sentido da palavra) o projeto de sedentarização pelo discurso dominante. No exemplo lógico anterior, "o candidato A recebeu X votos, que equivalem a Y% do total, e por isso é o vencedor das eleições presidenciais de 1981 na França", persistem diversas hiâncias através das quais a errância pode fazer movência. Uma das mais perceptíveis se vê no uso da palavra "vencedor" (on a gagné), uma brecha por onde outros sentidos podem irromper de forma contingente: "este grito marca o momento em que a participação passiva do espectador-torcedor se converte em atividade coletiva gestual e vocal, materializando a festa da vitória da equipe, tanto mais intensamente quanto ela era mais improvável" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 21). Sustentados nas proposições teóricas elencadas nos capítulos anteriores, propomos aqui lançar luz sobre a hiância que separa as partes que constituem a significação da palavra "vencedor". Na base linguística, o arbitrário e o valor do signo nos impedem de assumir "um" sentido coeso para esta palavra; já nos processos discursivos, este termo tem sua significação constituída de forma discrepante e paradoxal, de forma que a estabilidade de tal signo só poderia emergir na forma de ficção de evidência. Assim, é no nível discursivo que as ambiguidades e equivocidades são sublinhadas, pois é a partir da arbitrariedade do signo que a palavra pode emergir entre jogos conflituosos de significação: "sempre há outros jogos no horizonte" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 22). Ora, é justamente dessa miríade de sentidos e pegas errantes que emerge o gesto imperativo da interpretação: o momento em que se coloca em relação a memória discursiva (pressupostos) e o acontecimento atual. Como visto anteriormente, trata-se de uma relação entre discrepantes que não podem fazer "um": o já-dito atravessa e invade o dizer como um absurdo no seio do familiar (ou como um familiar no seio do absurdo), de forma que o encaixe entre eles só pode se dar de forma imperfeita e claudicante. O encontro do já-dito com o dizer é, portanto, dotado de certa movência instável e inapreensível: trata-se da errância da interpretação. 201 Todavia, continua Pêcheux, no acontecimento das eleições francesas de 1981 diversos comentaristas, especialistas e influenciadores se dispuseram (gentilmente?) a interpretar aquela miríade de sentidos para a população francesa. É neste gesto que tencionamos captar o trabalho de sedentarização da significação por parte do discurso dominante, o trabalho de recortar, medir, alinhar, alinhavar e costurar sentidos através de fios "lógicos" que supostamente estabilizam (estancam a movência) da significação. É através da linguagem lógica, aquela que se autoproclama capaz de expurgar os erros e a necessidade de interpretação, que o discurso dominante fornece "evidências" que instauram a ilusão de que o acontecimento pode ser descrito em sua inteireza pela língua inequívoca da ciência. Tomados pelo ângulo em que aparecem através da mídia, os resultados eleitorais apresentam a mesma univocidade lógica. O universo das porcentagens de resultados, munidos de regras para determinar o vencedor é ele próprio um espaço de predicados, de argumentos e relações logicamente estabilizado: desse ponto de vista, dir-se-á que no dia 10 de maio, depois de 20 horas, a proposição 'F. Mitterand foi eleito presidente da República' tornou-se uma proposição verdadeira; ponto final (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 23). Em termos lógicos, poderíamos escrever este enunciado da seguinte forma: A ∧ B tal que A = F. Miterrand e B = eleito presidente da República. Dito de outra forma, a proposição A ∧ B é verdadeira se A e B forem ambos verdadeiros; senão é falsa. Esses recursos lógicos são amparados por outros: números absolutos, gráficos, tabelas e equações. No final da série de "interpretações" lógicas, os comentaristas podem enunciar proposições supostamente consistentes e coesas, logicamente estabilizadas. Ora, é esta estabilização lógica que opera e diminui a amplitude da significação, tolhe suas movências e interrompe suas andanças. É através de tais recursos que uma dada FD pode fazer funcionar o ideário de "proprietária da verdade", defensora de sentidos e reguladora de proposições. Ao sujeito cabe, assim, identificar-se à forma-sujeito e submeter-se à interpretação do acontecimento fornecida pela FD. Mas esse efeito de sedentarização é incompleto, como já visto. Sua plenitude é da ordem do impossível. Estes sentidos logicamente estabilizados são logo desarranjados e confundidos pela errância fundamental que reside a base linguística e os processos discursivos, uma movência atestada por "paráfrases, implicações, comentários, alusões, etc. isto é, em uma série heterogênea de enunciados, funcionando sob diferentes registros discursivos, e com uma estabilidade lógica variável" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 23). 202 O enunciado "On a gagné" só pode ser verdadeiro se cada fragmento do sintagma corresponder às proposições logicamente estabilizadas fornecidas por uma dada FD. Pêcheux aponta que o "ganhamos" pode deslizar através de uma série discursiva que pode significar "ganhar em uma competição, ser o vencedor; ganhar em um jogo de azar, ser o vencedor do grande prêmio; ganhar terreno, espaço, tempo (sobre o adversário); ganhar galardões; ganhar um lugar, um posto; ganhar a simpatia de alguém etc." (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 25), e assim cada FD pode fornecer sentidos diferentes para o "on a gagné": uma pluralidade de sentidos "logicamente estabilizados" e "verdadeiros". Que parte, cada um desses funcionamentos léxicosintáticos subjacentes, tomou na unidade equívoca desse grito coletivo que repercutiu? 'On a gagné' ['Ganhamos']... A alegria da vitória se enuncia sem complemento, mas os complementos não estão longe: ganhamos o jogo, a partida, a primeira rodada (antes das legislativas); mas também (em função do que precede) ganhamos por sorte, como se ganha o grande prêmio quando nem se acredita; e, claro, ganhamos terreno sobre o adversário, já com a promessa de ocupar posições neste terreno e, antes de tudo, ocupar com toda legitimidade o lugar do qual se governa a França, o lugar do poder governamental e do poder do Estado; 'A esquerda toma o poder na França' é uma paráfrase plausível do enunciado-fórmula 'on a gagné' ['ganhamos'], no prolongamento do acontecimento (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 26). O gesto de fornecer interpretações afeta diferentes FDs de diferentes formas. Os padres interpretam a bíblia para os fiéis, o advogado interpreta a lei para os cidadãos, e os jornalistas e especialistas interpretam os acontecimentos para os ávidos consumidores de informações: "não faltam boas almas se dando como missão livrar o discurso de suas ambiguidades, por um tipo de 'terapêutica da linguagem' que fixaria enfim o sentido legítimo das palavras, das expressões e dos enunciados" (PÊCHEUX, 1997, p. 60). Nestes termos, quando especialistas se oferecem a ceder "gentilmente" suas interpretações, entra em funcionamento um complexo jogo discursivo que instrumentaliza e recorta os sentidos ao mesmo tempo em que se apaga as marcas dessa instrumentalização e seleção de sentidos. Quando o especialista fala, "não há que se duvidar". Seus enunciados lógicos apagam os restos: eis tudo o que se pode e precisa saber a respeito de um dado acontecimento. Ora, nós já vimos isso antes: trata-se da mesma inversão idealista superposta pela forma-sujeito a ilusão que faz parecer que o interdiscurso é mero efeito do intradiscurso, ou melhor, que é o fio do discurso do especialista que está na origem dos sentidos trabalhados por "seu" discurso. O sujeito especialista habita a língua de forma lógica: sua língua é 203 "asséptica", ilusoriamente livre de falhas e errâncias. É "estabilizada" pela lógica, sedentarizada pela ilusão de continuidade e totalidade. A língua do especialista recai no delírio de que não possui costuras justamente por que é traída pela miragem de totalidade unívoca: um devaneio que dissimula sua materialidade errante, composta de partes, de pluralidades incapazes de fazer "um". Nestes termos, a instrumentalização do erro se torna um método aparentemente eficaz na construção imaginária de um saber pleno que, por sua vez, pode ser fornecido somente por poucos especialistas. O trabalho do especialista consiste, sobretudo, em engendrar o erro no discurso enquanto ele mesmo emerge como paladino da verdade, do acerto e do progresso. Enquanto "intérprete", o especialista se coloca na posição de oráculo do conhecimento coerente e respaldado: discordar dele, portanto, é um erro. Dito de outra forma, antes da intervenção dos especialistas os sentidos de "on a gagné" eram plurais, desorientados, errantes. Mas através da instrumentalização do erro os sentidos são assentados, estabilizados, administrados, sedentarizados. A incomensurabilidade plural da errância dá lugar a uma unidade (ilusória), recortada pela sedentarização: eis tudo. Assim, o discurso "científico" do especialista importa lembrar que "não há discurso científico puro" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 189) -, parte da premissa de que é possível tudo dizer, tudo explicar; acolhe a ilusão de que é possível abarcar a plenitude do acontecimento em suas interpretações e explicações. Neste momento de "O discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 29) o autor serve-se do termo "real", de origem lacaniana, para investigar tal pretensão lógico-científica em sedentarizar a pluralidade errante dos sentidos através de "unidades plenas" de sentido. Não nos deteremos em delinear este termo (o real) sequer minimamente, ficaremos apenas com aquilo que o analista do discurso coloca em questão e que coaduna com aquilo que já retomamos a partir de Paul Henry (2013), a saber, que o objeto real é diferente do objeto do conhecimento, ou melhor, que o real é aquele resto que escapa e persiste foracluído, expulso dos limites da linguagem e impossível de ser alcançado pela simbolização, pela explicação e pelo conhecimento. O trabalho do especialista, através de técnicas lógico-retóricas, consiste justamente em dissimular os restos e apagar os resíduos da significação para então impor o delírio da unidade conclusa: "eis tudo". Um grande número de técnicas materiais (todas as que visam produzir transformações físicas ou biofísicas) por oposição às técnicas de adivinhação e de interpretação de que falaremos mais adiante, têm que ver com o real: 204 trata-se de encontrar, com ou sem a ajuda das ciências da natureza, os meios de obter um resultado que tire partido da forma a mais eficaz possível (isto é, levando em conta a esgotabilidade da natureza) dos processos naturais, para instrumentalizá-los, dirigi-los em direção aos efeitos procurados (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 30). Ora, sedentarizar é instrumentalizar, se apropriar, controlar e restringir. Nestes termos, a sedentarização (ilusória) alinhavada pelo especialista passa justamente pela administração do dito e do não-dito, ou melhor, daquilo que "existe" e/ou "não-existe" no campo da significação. A linguagem científica do especialista, amparada pela retórica, dissimula os restos do sentido e instaura o imaginário de que sua interpretação sobre dado acontecimento é tudo o que há para se dizer a respeito. Sedentarizar é foracluir a diferença, a heterogeneidade e a divisão do sentido; é traçar divisas e desprezar (jogar fora) o que está para além desses limites, no exílio asilo. À exclusão corresponde certa reclusão, que localiza aquilo que é "familiar" e fixa sua movência. Os primeiros sapiens sedentários transformaram o mundo dessa maneira (HARARI, 2017). Quando encontravam uma porção de terra apta ao plantio, faziam cercas e delimitações, retiravam vegetações inúteis e plantavam trigo; construíam casas e colocavam vigias nas entradas. A transformação de um dado espaço fornecia a ilusão de propriedade, ou melhor, instaurava certa fantasia de continuísmo "humano-terra", como se a separação entre eles fosse apagada por uma singularidade. Essa unidade sedentária implicava, ainda, na obliteração de tudo mais que não estivesse dentro dos limites da propriedade. Esse duplo pertencimento (da terra ao humano, e do humano à terra) restringia, assim, a movência do sedentário a um pequeno espaço previamente delimitado. O errante, ao contrário, não se apropriava de nada, apenas caminhava sem rumo pelos restos imensuráveis que o sedentário ignorava. A linguagem lógica do especialista é ferramenta (imperfeita) de sedentarização. Quando fornece interpretações e explicações para um dado acontecimento, trabalha recortando (ilusoriamente) o certo do errado e o verdadeiro do falso, apartando o que é "logicamente" valido do que é invalido, e rotulando o que é eficaz e o que deve ser descartado. Assim, afirma Pêcheux (2008, p. 30), o especialista se implica com o real na medida em que silencia os restos da significação, instaurando a ilusão de que seu dizer é tudo o que precisa ser dito, de que a realidade que ele fornece é toda a realidade de que se precisa ter ciência. Ao mesmo tempo em que opera uma foraclusão e uma denegação ou melhor, uma dissimulação 205 dos restos da significação -, opera também um enclausuramento administrado: "eis tudo". O eco que aponta para o impossível, neste caso, se torna supostamente instrumentalizado pela lógica: "é impossível que um candidato tenha ganhado e perdido ao mesmo tempo", ao mesmo tempo em que o impossível de ser simbolizado do "on a gagné" seus restos exilados -, é (ilusoriamente) apagado. A esta série vem se juntar a multiplicabilidade das 'técnicas' de gestão social dos indivíduos: marcá-los, identifica-los, classificá-los, compará-los, colocálos em ordem, em colunas, em tabelas, reuni-los e separá-los segundo critérios definidos, a fim de colocá-los no trabalho, a fim de instruí-los, de fazê-los sonhar ou delirar, de protegê-los e de vigiá-los, de levá-los à guerra e de lhes fazer filhos... Este espaço administrativo (jurídico, econômico e político) apresenta ele também as aparências da coerção lógica disjuntiva: é 'impossível' que tal pessoa seja solteira e casada, que tenha diploma e que não o tenha, que esteja trabalhando e que esteja desempregado, que ganhe menos de tanto por mês e que ganhe mais, que seja civil e que seja militar, que tenha sido eleito para tal função e que não o tenha sido, etc... (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 30). Assim, o discurso do cientista se estabelece a partir de um duplo recobrimento: o especialista se torna agente desses espaços ao mesmo tempo em que opera como garantia desses dizeres. Dito de outra forma, ao mesmo tempo em que o cientista fornece interpretações "logicamente estabilizadas" a respeito de tudo, desautoriza e veta as demais interpretações. "Esses espaços [...] repousam, em seu funcionamento discursivo interno, sobre uma proibição de interpretação, implicando o uso regulado de proposições lógicas" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 30-31). Contudo, vimos também em Pêcheux que a lógica não opera sozinha, mas em par com a retórica (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 26). O estudo do funcionamento da retórica como amparo à lógica pode fornecer importantes pistas a respeito do processo de legitimação e respaldo de um dado discurso "logicamente estabilizado". O dicionário de linguística de Dubois et al. (2006, p. 522) define retórica da seguinte forma: A retórica comporta, em particular, o estudo dos três componentes essenciais do discurso: a inventio (temas e argumentos), a dispositio (arranjo das partes) e, sobretudo, a elocutio (escolha e disposição das palavras); acrescenta-se, seguidamente, a pronuntiatio (modo de enunciação) e a memória (ou memorização). A elocutio, objeto principal da retórica, se define essencialmente pelo estudo das figuras ou tropos. Os tipos de discurso definidos pela retórica são o deliberativo (discurso sustentado a fim de 206 persuadir ou aconselhar), o judiciário (discurso sustentado a fim de acusar ou defender) e o epidíctico (discurso sustentado para elogiar ou censurar). Já vimos nesta tese, a partir de Pêcheux, que retórica tem que ver com "forma" do discurso (arte de bem falar, estilística) que, aparelhada e operacionalizada pelo discurso dominante, e em par com a lógica, trabalha a legitimação e a estabilização de determinados sentidos. Assim o especialista, que habita a linguagem de forma lógica, precisa também da retórica como ferramental de instrumentalização; caso contrário, poderia ele recair em um espaço de incompreensão e isolamento discursivo. A retórica é aquilo que opera uma pedagogia da "verdade" e das "essências". Se a lógica fornece a "estabilização" do sentido, a retórica por sua vez é uma ferramenta de recondução a tais verdades que pode vaguear, divagar e girar por caminhos diferentes, desde que reconduza às verdades instrumentalizadas. A retórica do especialista faz uso de determinados "erros" linguísticos na forma de "sistema de erros pedagogicamente necessários" para se atingir uma verdade fornecida por uma determinada FD (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 41). Dessa forma, cabe ao especialista não só o domínio da linguagem lógica, mas também o bom uso da retórica. Como "intérprete", supõe-se que o especialista deva ser didático e convincente, o que justifica recorrer a narrativas alheias ao contexto argumentativo. É assim que os sentidos de "on a gagné" são trabalhados a partir de deslizes metafóricos provenientes do esporte, da guerra, da religião etc. Trata-se, portanto, de um duplo recobrimento fundamentado na sedentarização (ilusória) da hiância e do erro: o discurso do especialista dissimula a errância fundamental, que é incontornável, ao mesmo tempo em que fornece um determinado "erro", que supostamente pode ser reparado somente por ele. Essa operação científica trabalha como jogo discursivo que engendra e administra os sentidos: a lógica aparece como aquilo que expulsa o erro da linguagem científica do especialista, e a retórica emerge como ferramenta (de qualificação dos discursos) que trabalha persuadindo, aconselhando, acusando, defendendo, elogiando e censurando através de argumentos "infalíveis", aparentemente bem colocados, atraentes, sedutores, claros, convincentes e bem enunciados. Diante da miríade imensurável e incontrolável de sentidos errantes que um dado acontecimento pode desfechar, o discurso dominante, através de especialistas, manifesta-se como força ordenadora e pacificadora de sentidos indômitos, revoltos e desgovernados, ou melhor, "perigosos". Através da retórica o especialista faz crer que a errância dos sentidos é uma ameaça danosa, prejuízo do progresso, e que por isso deve ser sedentarizada. E por 207 intermédio da lógica, ele fornece essências, necessidades e continuidades que afastam o erro de sua linguagem ao mesmo tempo em que o atribui aos demais discursos. Dissimular a errância é transformar a língua em pura comunicação, mas porque erra (vagueia), erra (falha), e nem sempre comunica. Nas palavras de Pêcheux, o especialista é aquele que fornece determinados pressupostos enquanto silencia outros, ao mesmo tempo que faz parecer, através do par lógica/retórica, que seu enunciado é "tudo" o que há para se dizer a respeito daquele assunto: "não há restos". No final da equação, a linguagem lógica do especialista se mostra supostamente asséptica, perfeita e coerente, mas ainda dependente de uma retórica errante que possa legitimar o discurso dominante. E seus efeitos discursivos fornecem a uma dada FD o que chamamos anteriormente a partir de Pêcheux (2009, p. 213) de forma-sujeito39, aquilo que fornece realidades e "evidências" transparentes que instaura a ilusão de que o sujeito é quem está na origem do sentido. Nesses espaços discursivos (que mais acima designamos como 'logicamente estabilizados') supõe-se que todo sujeito falante sabe do que se fala, porque todo enunciado produzido nesses espaços reflete propriedades estruturais independentes de sua enunciação: essas propriedades se inscrevem, transparentemente, em uma descrição adequada do universo (tal que este universo é tomado discursivamente nesses espaços). (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 31). Essas considerações nos fornecem pistas importantes a respeito da epistemologia moderna e contemporânea, e permite-nos entrever como esse modelo de produção e comunicação de conhecimentos se estende para outras esferas discursivas. Se partirmos da premissa de que não há erro na língua, mas somente no juízo que se faz a respeito dela (KANT, 2001), ou mais, de que não é de erro que estamos falando de meros quiproquós corrigíveis (PÊCHEUX, 2009), somos levados à premissa de que erro e acerto não são estruturas a priori, mas imputações a posteriori, e por isso manipuláveis. Logo, quando o especialista confere erro e acerto ao discurso, ele dissimula a errância contingente e incontrolável do sentido e do sujeito. 39 Em "O discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (2008), Pêcheux não usa estes termos, "formação discursiva" e "forma-sujeito". A propósito das discussões sobre a manutenção ou não de tais noções, tomamos partido pela pertinência e atualidade de tais funcionamentos discursivos, mas acreditando na pluralidade aberta e diluída das FDs e na porosidade da forma-sujeito (incapaz de assujeitar de forma plena o sujeito do discurso). 208 Contudo, algo insiste em errar no projeto de sedentarização (estabilização lógica dos sentidos) do especialista fornecido pelo discurso dominante. A errância, por ser estrutural, é incontornável. Logo, mesmo quando fornece (ilusoriamente) verdades, acertos e coerências, o especialista se vê irremediavelmente envolto por equívocos, ambiguidades, mal-entendidos, incompreensões e objeções. Quando fornece "evidências inequívocas", o especialista não dá voz aos restos da significação, trabalha erros e acertos e, sobretudo, desconsidera a errância contingente que estrutura a língua. Isso se dá por que na errância não há erro e acerto, há movência. Dito de outra forma, somente quando o especialista acredita apagar a errância é que ele pode instaurar erro e acerto na significação, mas é justamente por que a errância é incontornável que seus "acertos" insistem em falhar. Ora, esta homogeneidade lógica, que condiciona o logicamente representável como conjunto de proposições suscetíveis de serem verdadeiras ou falsas, é atravessado por uma série de equívocos, em particular termos como lei, rigor, ordem, princípio, etc. que 'cobrem' ao mesmo tempo, como um patchwork heteróclito, o domínio das ciências exatas, o das tecnologias e os das administrações (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 32). O próprio recobrimento fornecido pela administração dos sentidos é, nas palavras de Pêcheux, um patchwork heteróclito, irregular, composto por partes discrepantes e contraditórias: costuras impossíveis de fazer "um". Assim, a sedentarização (a estabilização lógico-retórica do sentido), não passa de uma roupagem sistematizadora, trajes discursivos que ocultam o "censurável" do caos (desde que se acredite que o caos é censurável). Trata-se, afinal, de simples cobertura ordenadora, de fantasia ortodoxa e heteróclita, repleta de falhas, descosturas, pontas soltas, fendas e ranhuras: o velado insiste em se desvelar. Essa "cobertura" lógico-retórica, por outro lado, é também o projeto de estabelecimento daquilo que deve ficar dentro e fora dos limites permitidos pela costura de uma dada FD. Mas esta vestimenta, por mais ornamentada que possa parecer, é cerzida com um tecido rudimentar e mutilado, suturado por linhas frágeis e flácidas, e por isso incapaz de impedir que sentidos outros caminhem errantes através das hiâncias. Logo, falar em termos de "dentro" e "fora" é, no mínimo, recair na ilusão idealista de transparência evidente da língua. Isso não quer dizer, contudo, que a noção de FD (e com ela, a noção de forma-sujeito) não faça mais sentido; a sedentarização discursiva, embora imperfeita e incompleta, é uma noção que se impõe materialmente. No contexto sócio histórico do Brasil de 2018, sentidos de "vida" e "morte", por exemplo, são trabalhados de forma dicotômica em embates discursivos 209 ditos "de esquerda" e "de direita", de forma que seria também ingenuidade não perceber que FDs distintas trabalham sim sentidos e sujeitos em termos de "interioridade" e "exterioridade" discursiva que, se existem ou não na teoria, se impõem tão materialmente como balas de revólver ou pílulas de aborto. Importa-nos agora ponderar de forma mais demorada sobre o alcance da sedentarização discursiva pelo par lógica-retórica. A ideia de que os espaços estabilizados seriam impostos do exterior, como coerções, a este sujeito pragmático, apenas pelo poder dos cientistas, dos especialistas e responsáveis administrativos, se mostra insustentável desde que se a considere um pouco mais seriamente (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 33). Neste momento Pêcheux parece apontar, ainda que de forma breve e tangente, outros funcionamentos do efeito de sedentarização. "O sujeito pragmático isto é, cada um de nós, os 'simples particulares' face às diversas urgências de sua vida tem por si mesmo uma imperiosa necessidade de homogeneidade lógica" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 33). Esta estabilização lógico-retórica dos sentidos é sustentada não somente pelo discurso do especialista, difundido nos jornais, revistas e programas televisivos. Ela é trabalhada também nas minúcias do cotidiano através de todo um complexo aparato tecnocientífico. Esta necessidade de homogeneidade lógica... se marca pela multiplicidade de pequenos sistemas lógicos portáteis que vão da gestão cotidiana da existência (por exemplo, em nossa civilização, o portanotas, as chaves, a agenda, os papéis, etc.) até as 'grandes decisões' da vida social e afetiva (eu decido fazer isto e não aquilo, de responder a X e não a Y, etc...) passando por todo o contexto sócio técnico dos 'aparelhos domésticos' (isto é, a série dos objetos que adquirimos e que aprendemos a fazer funcionar, que jogamos e que perdemos, que quebramos, que consertamos e que substituímos...) (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 33). Os efeitos da sedentarização dos sentidos adquirem caracteres estéticos, pedagógicos e políticos que afetam o cotidiano mais imediato do sujeito ocidental contemporâneo. Praticamente tudo ao seu redor é atravessado por uma linguagem logicamente estabilizada: o piso de cerâmica onde pisa é projetado, fabricado, vendido e assentado a partir de cálculos, controles e gerenciamentos de cada mínimo sentido produzido. O televisor de última geração carrega em sua estrutura incontáveis enunciados tecnológicos propostos por incontáveis engenheiros de diferentes áreas e por isso acompanha um extenso manual de instruções. 210 Nas escolas impõem-se certos saberes "científicos" enquanto silencia-se outros, e com isso regula o aprendizado através de testes e incentivos profissionais. A sedentarização dos sentidos está também nas minucias menos importantes: a chave abre apenas uma porta, a agenda organiza os compromissos, a revista de moda avisa qual é o corte de cabelo a ser adotado: e assim a linguagem logicamente estabilizada invade cada poro da sociedade contemporânea. O alcance da epistemologia moderna, que regula e organiza saberes, parece transcender os limites da ciência ao mesmo tempo em que legitima a exclusividade de tal modelo. Contudo, a sedentarização dos sentidos (ou a estabilização lógica da movência na significação), tem ainda contornos mais complexos a ganhar. Pêcheux se ocupa, neste momento de sua obra, em suscitar um gesto teórico poucas vezes trabalhado em sua teoria, a saber, o acolhimento do "humano de carne e osso", esse que sente fome, dor, medo e prazer, no seio da AD. O autor passa a usar seguidamente o marcador semântico "de nada serve negar..." para se referir a esta problemática: De nada serve negar essa necessidade (desejo) de aparência, veículo de disjunções e categorizações lógicas: essa necessidade universal de um 'mundo semanticamente normal', isto é, normatizado, começa com a relação de cada um com seu próprio corpo e seus arredores imediatos (e antes de tudo com a distribuição de bons e maus objetos, arcaicamente figurados pela disjunção entre alimento e excremento). (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 34). Esse movimento teórico marca que o humano (pragmático, material, objetivo, real) que suporta o sujeito, tem também importância para a AD. E neste aspecto, a estabilização lógica do sentido (sua sedentarização) passa a ser discutida à luz de necessidades e desejos que alcançam até mesmo âmbitos fisiológicos. Este movimento afasta qualquer impressão de que o sujeito, na AD, é um autômato que não sente medo, não tem esperanças nem necessidades, e que tais eventos cotidianos não afetam, em alguma medida, a forma com que a significação é trabalhada. Sedentarizar é estabelecer divisas: estabilizar e foracluir. Contudo, afirma o autor, de nada serve negar que o estabelecimento lógico-retórico de fronteiras ao conhecimento coincide com a necessidade de se organizar as múltiplas coisas-a-saber: o melhor tratamento para uma determinada doença, a forma mais segura de se aterrissar um avião, a planificação mais eficaz do trânsito e de suas leis etc. "As 'coisas-a-saber' representam assim tudo o que arrisca faltar à felicidade (e no limite à simples sobrevida biológica) do 'sujeito pragmático'" 211 (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 34). De nada serve negar que a sedentarização do sentido corresponde, também, às demandas de um sujeito de carne e osso que se vê obrigado a confrontar problemas cotidianos "associados às ameaças multiformes de um real do qual 'ninguém pode ignorar a lei' porque esse real é impiedoso" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 34). Esta guinada teórica de Pêcheux nos impõe, portanto, certa cautela teórica: não se trata de romantizar a errância, tampouco de execrar a sedentarização. O real é impiedoso e muitas vezes vindica respostas rápidas, assertivas e coerentes; no humano de carne e osso há desejos, necessidades, medos e esperanças: de nada serve negar. Sobreviver é o maior acerto, junto à paz, saúde e fartura de alimentos; falhar, consequentemente, é cessar. Às coisas-asaber interessa, afinal, que sejam sólidas, assertivas, preventivas: de nada serve negar a materialidade das ameaças à vida. Neste cenário, a sedentarização lógica dos sentidos pelas ciências (no plural: jurídicas, médicas, sociais etc.) adquire pujança tal que qualquer crítica às suas práticas se torna insensatez, mesmo quando a prática científica extrapola os limites da necessidade e se transfigura em ferramenta de poder. A retórica salvacionista promovida pela ciência a luz que ilumina (iluminismo) o caminho em direção às coisas-a-saber (KANT, 2010) -, amparada por uma linguagem lógica que supostamente afasta o erro de seu funcionamento, desvela justamente uma amálgama contraditória entre necessidade e poder, tal que suas divisas parecem subsumir-se em funcionamentos "evidentes" e inquestionáveis. Segundo Pêcheux o real, justamente por que é inalcançável em sua plenitude, é fonte de uma miríade heteróclita (irregular) de sentidos que, tomados em sua vastidão insubmissa e impenetrável, constituem eles mesmos, ameaças multiformes (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 35). É dessa necessidade fundamentalmente humana de organizar os saberes (para sobreviver, minimizar os sofrimentos e otimizar os prazeres) que a filosofia, a ciência e o capitalismo se servem para fornecer conhecimentos ilusoriamente estabilizados, seguros e sedentarizados, mas não despidos de caracteres políticos e ideológicos. O projeto de um saber que unificaria esta multiplicidade heteróclita das coisas-a-saber em uma estrutura representável homogênea, a ideia de uma possível ciência da estrutura desse real, capaz de explicitá-lo fora de toda falsa-aparência e de lhe assegurar o controle sem risco de interpretação (logo uma autoleitura científica, sem falha, do real) responde, com toda evidência, a uma urgência tão viva, tão universalmente 'humana', ele amarra tão bem, em torno do mesmo jogo dominação/resistência, os interesses dos sucessivos mestres desse mundo e de todos os condenados da terra... que o fantasma 212 desse saber, eficaz, administrável e transmissível, não podia deixar de tender historicamente a se materializar por todos os meios (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 35). Diante de tais vestígios, propomos colocar a questão da sedentarização dos sentidos (estabilização lógica, organização, instrumentalização e administração da significação) como parcela significativa da problemática da epistemologia ocidental, fundada pelo corte epistemológico feito pela filosofia grega clássica: um gesto ideológico fundamentado na operacionalização discursiva do par erro/acerto e na dissimulação da errância fundamental. Bem se sabe que antes de Sócrates, Platão e Aristóteles a poesia mitológica era a prática discursiva predominante na maioria das culturas ocidentais no que dizia respeito à produção de saberes e práticas sociais. Foram estes filósofos que pleitearam pelo advento e manutenção de um modelo de produção de conhecimento calcado na racionalidade lógica em detrimento da poesia polissêmica (PRADEAU, 2010). A partir do corte epistemológico fundado por Sócrates, o gesto de produzir conhecimentos científicos se tornou o ato de separar, distinguir, organizar, se apossar e administrar sentidos de forma lógica. "Na verdade, a inteligência grega era indisciplinada e caótica até que as fórmulas implacáveis de Aristóteles proporcionaram um método rápido para o teste e a correção do pensamento" (DURANT, 1996). Nos termos propostos pela filosofia grega clássica, era justamente a poesia o gesto indisciplinado de criação de saberes e práticas sociais que precisava ser corrigido pelos métodos lógicos; tudo em nome de uma ciência régia que pudesse salvaguardar a humanidade da contingência caótica. "A promessa de uma ciência régia conceptualmente tão rigorosa quanto as matemáticas, concretamente tão eficaz quanto as tecnologias materiais, e tão onipresente quanto a filosofia e a política!... como a humanidade poderia ter resistido a semelhante pechincha?" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 35). Pêcheux aponta que este modelo epistemológico de estabilização lógica (sedentarização) dos sentidos no pensamento ocidental se deu a partir de diferentes escolas de pensamento: "houve o momento da escolástica40 aristotélica, procurando desenvolver as categorias que estruturam a linguagem e o pensamento para fazer delas o modelo e o organon de toda a sistematização" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 35). Há também o período do rigor positivo, marcado por uma matematização da linguagem e da natureza (através da física, da química e 40 Período que se estendeu do século IX até início do século XVI, marcado por pensadores como Tomás de Aquino, Guilherme de Ockaham, Pedro Abelardo e outros, sempre guiados pela Bíblia e pelos escritos aristotélicos (STÖRIG, 2008). 213 da biologia): "um novo organon, construído contra o aristotelismo e apoiado na referência às 'ciências exatas', procura por sua vez homogeneizar o real, desde a lógica matemática até os espaços administrativos e sociais" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 36). E não menos importante, houve (há) também o gesto de sedentarização dos sentidos proposto a partir de Marx, sobre o qual nos deteremos um pouco mais justamente por que é do marxismo que emana a noção de história, tão cara à Análise do Discurso. 3.1.1 A SEDENTARIZAÇÃO TELEOLÓGICA DA HISTÓRIA Partimos de uma contradição específica que, nesta tese, se impõe sobre as demais: a errância, por que é fundamental e estrutural, não pode ser contornada. E é assim que a necessidade humana de organizar o saber urgência instrumentalizada pelos sábios administradores do progresso do conhecimento falha. Por mais que se operacionalize o par erro/acerto, o conhecimento erra, a administração falha, o progresso manca; precisamente por que língua, discurso e sujeito erram, ou melhor, vagam na contingência incorrigível da significação. Evocando este curso, culminamos na problemática da noção de "história", de sua importância para a AD e para a conceituação de errância como apresentada por esta tese. A pluralidade de sentidos atribuídos a tal conceito nos alerta para o cuidado que devemos tomar ao fazer uso de suas aplicações. Nos dicionários de filosofia, o termo história demanda muitas páginas, mas de forma introdutória podemos dizer que este termo designa: 1 uma disciplina, também chamada de historiografia (constituída de relatos, análises, pesquisas de documentos etc.), com métodos e teorias diversos, cujos artífices são os historiadores; e 2 o objeto de estudo dessa disciplina, ou seja, a sequência de acontecimentos realizados ou sofridos pela humanidade no passado (JAPIASSÚ; MARCONDES, 2001). Essa dupla definição, embora apareça aqui de forma incompleta, abarca uma grande diversidade de desdobramentos e consequências teóricas muito importantes ao nosso objetivo de delinear minimamente a errância do sentido. Esta divisão do conceito de história em "disciplina" e "acontecimento" tem nesta última concepção ainda outras quatro grandes divisões que concebem a histórica como sucessão de acontecimentos: 1passado; 2tradição; 3mundo histórico; 4objeto da historiografia (VEYNE, 1987). 214 A saber, a noção de história como concebida por Marx aparece dentro da terceira acepção (mundo histórico) que, aliás, é a mais relevante filosoficamente. Tal concepção aceita a história como a totalidade dos modos de ser e das criações humanas no mundo, ou a totalidade das culturas. Nesse sentido, história se opõe a natureza, que é independente da cultura e que por isso mesmo não pode ser considerada produto de sua criação. Tal concepção de história como 'mundo histórico', no entanto, se divide ainda em outras cinco interpretações: a) história como decadência; b) história como ciclo; c) história como reino do acaso; d) história como progresso; e) história como ordem providencial (CERTEAU, 1982). E foi dentro desta última concepção que Hegel, e depois Marx, conceberam a noção de história como dialética material, uma concepção de história que acolhe certa inevitabilidade do progresso como um movimento que passa pela necessidade causal, rejeitando a contingência. Nestes termos, a história emerge unívoca, una, integral: mera passagem total do tempo sobre o mundo através de transformações e produções. Diversas doutrinas fizeram uso deste delineamento teórico da história que pressupõe uma ideia de desenvolvimento necessário dos feitos humanos até a consecução de um estado definitivo de perfeição. Neste aspecto, Marx pressupõe a história como um mundo histórico que é regido por uma ordem providencial, causal. Em Marx a história é tida como processo unilinear e progressivo que, por meio da luta de classes, necessariamente desembocará na sociedade sem classes, que é a sociedade acabada e sem erros. Marx atesta, a propósito, que a passagem para a sociedade sem classes ocorrerá com a mesma fatalidade com que a causalidade preside os fenômenos da natureza. Ora, fatalidade tem que ver ao mesmo tempo com contingência e necessidade (acidentes inevitáveis que poderiam, ou não, se suceder de outra forma), mas em Marx a história é da ordem da necessidade providencial porque dela advirá o modo de vida definitivo e perfeito do gênero humano (VEYNE, 1987). A história, em Marx, se dá em movimentos dialéticos de ultrapassagem (substituição) de uma classe social por outra, uma definição que sugere a presença do passado no caminho do futuro: o vir-a-ser, portanto, é sempre determinado pelo passado (NASCIMENTO JÚNIOR, 2000). Embora seja um risco apresentar o conceito de história em Marx apenas a partir da citação abaixo, ela se faz importante para pensarmos este movimento de determinação de uma instância temporal em outra: 215 Os homens fazem sua própria história, mas não a fazem como querem; não a fazem sob circunstâncias de sua escolha e sim sob aquelas com que se defrontam diretamente, ligadas e transmitidas pelo passado. A tradição de todas as gerações mortas oprime como um pesadelo o cérebro dos vivos. E justamente quando parecem empenhados em revolucionar-se a si e às coisas, em criar algo que jamais existiu, precisamente nesses períodos de crise revolucionária, os homens conjuram ansiosamente em seu auxílio os espíritos do passado, tomando-lhes emprestado os nomes, os gritos de guerra, as roupagens, a fim de apresentar a nova cena da história do mundo nesse disfarce tradicional e nessa linguagem emprestada (MARX, 1968, p. 203). A tradição marxista se desenvolveu, predominantemente, dentro dessa concepção de um passado no futuro, onde o "a ocorrer" já se encontra totalmente delineado no já-ocorrido, o que colocaria até mesmo as grandes revoluções históricas dentro de uma linearidade teleológica perfeitamente apreensível e previsível o eterno efeito parafrástico sobre os acontecimentos. Essa determinação fatalista do passado sobre o futuro é atestada pelo próprio filósofo alemão em diversos textos, coincidindo em um conceito de história que é comparado, por ele mesmo, com a causalidade e exatidão das ciências da natureza, a saber, o lugar teórico onde não há espaço para a contingência: A apropriação capitalista, de acordo com o modo de produção capitalista, constitui a primeira negação dessa propriedade privada que nada mais é do que o corolário do trabalho independente e individual. Mas a própria produção capitalista gera sua própria negação com a fatalidade das metamorfoses da natureza (MARX, 1976, p. 646, tradução nossa). A história é, em Marx, a síntese de um movimento dialético não só previsível, mas também determinado. Essa irreversibilidade da história imputaria sérias complicações teóricas às noções de ideologia, língua e sujeito, na AD. Se a história for mero fluxo sobre rotas muito bem apreensíveis (história teleológica), o futuro já estaria necessariamente determinado pelo passado, logo o passado já estaria no futuro. Nestes termos, o passado é o futuro e o futuro é o passado, ou seja, não há história: o próprio fluxo histórico torna-se inconcebível se a história é necessária e cada momento dela é tudo o que deve ser (VEYNE, 1987). Ora, se o futuro for todo determinado pelo passado, irrompe aí uma brecha conceitual para se admitir não só o registro da totalidade dos acontecimentos históricos pela ciência histórica, mas também, no limite, torna desnecessário esse registro da história na memória: não há o que se aprender com a história se o futuro é inevitável. Neste cenário hipotético 216 estaríamos diante da totalização (e da banalização) da significação plena no dizer, e não no silêncio. Não haveria restos mas é de restos que vive a interpretação. Essa concepção teleológica de história paradoxalmente se coloca para além do erro e do acerto justamente por que é inevitável; assim, tudo o que acontece, acontece por que tinha que acontecer inevitavelmente daquela forma, e assim todo movimento da significação se daria de forma linear, encaixada, causal e inevitável. Mas ainda que para Marx não haja na história erro ou acerto, não se poderia dizer sobre ela que é errante e contingente, apenas que é causal, linear e necessária. Pêcheux, por outro lado, se lança em um gesto de denúncia deste movimento teórico de estabilização lógica dos sentidos (sedentarização) latente nos escritos do filósofo/sociólogo alemão: [...] há o momento da ontologia marxista, que pretende de seu lado produzir as 'leis dialéticas' da história e da matéria, outro organon parcialmente semelhante aos dois precedentes41, partilhando de qualquer modo com eles o desejo de onipotência - 'a teoria de Marx é todo poderosa porque é verdadeira' (Lenin). No seu conjunto, os movimentos operários não puderam visivelmente resistir a este presente extraordinário de uma nova filosofia unificada, capaz de se institucionalizar eficazmente, enquanto componente crítico/organizador do Estado (o Estado existente/o Estado futuro): o dispositivo de base da ontologia dialética marxista (com O Capital como arma absoluta, 'o míssil mais poderoso lançado na cabeça da burguesia') se mostrou também capaz do mesmo modo que todos os saberes de aparência unificada e homogênea de justificar tudo, em nome da urgência (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 36). É patente o projeto de sedentarização e gerenciamento do par erro/acerto, em Marx. Para Lênin, "a teoria de Marx é todo poderosa porque é verdadeira". Para o proletariado, um presente extraordinário, onipotente, unificado, perfeito. Para o continente marxista, uma teoria unificada e homogênea, capaz de tudo justificar. Pêcheux, contudo, não economiza em suas críticas à teleologia da história em Marx: "a constatação da 'crise do marxismo' é hoje suficientemente admitida para que eu seja direto, dizendo: tudo leva a pensar que a descontinuidade epistemológica associada à descoberta de Marx se mostre extremamente precária e problemática" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 39). Quem poderia resistir uma filosofia tão homogênea, unificadora, perfeita, promissora e esperançosa? Seu poder de aliciamento, afirma Pêcheux (2008, p. 40), ultrapassa os efeitos 41 O Organum (ARISTÓTELES, 2005) e o Novum Organum (BACON, 2000). Estas obras são tentativas de constituir regras máximas à prática filosófica e científica de seus tempos. 217 escolásticos de desdobramentos exotéricos (externos), e até mesmo esotéricos (místicos), de forma que os marxistas "pensavam poder construir tudo por si mesmos: a economia, a filosofia, a psicologia, a linguística, a literatura, a sociologia, a arte" (2008, p. 15), como se esta teoria fosse um parafuso no qual qualquer rosca pudesse se encaixar até formar uma construção perfeita, capaz de tudo abarcar. Nestes termos, "o impossível próprio à estrutura do real histórico isto é, o real visado especificamente pela teoria marxista seria literalmente inapreensível nas 'aplicações' da dita teoria" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 40). Se havia restos na teoria marxista não era por falta de zelo em tentar abarcá-los. Se ainda havia o imperativo da interpretação, não era por falta de especialistas totalizadores: Vamos parar de proteger Marx e de nos proteger nele. Vamos parar de supor que 'as coisas-a-saber' que concernem o real sócio histórico formam um sistema estrutural, análogo à coerência conceptual-experimental galileana. E procuremos medir o que este fantasma sistêmico implica, o tipo de ligação face aos 'especialistas' de todas as espécies e instituições e aparelhos de Estado que os empregam, não para se colocar a si mesmo fora do jogo ou fora do Estado, mas para tentar pensar os problemas fora da negação marxista da interpretação: isto é, encarando o fato de que a história é uma disciplina de interpretação e não uma física de tipo novo (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 42). A história em Marx é constituída, portanto, de outro tipo de assepsia: nela não há erro, nem mesmo a ser instrumentalizado: há apenas o inevitável. Mas se a história é teleológica, linear e necessária, não há nela restos; e se não há restos, não há interpretação. Contudo, não é este o caso, afirma Pêcheux. Nossa proposta é que não só as relações que constituem a base linguística e os processos discursivos são errantes, mas também o plano de fundo (fundador) fornecido pela história ela mesmo errante, e por isso reclamante por interpretação. 3.1.2 A ERRÂNCIA DA CIÊNCIA: LÓGICA VERSUS INTERPRETAÇÃO O objetivo desta tese é lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância, fundada principalmente na premissa da movência contingente do sentido no discurso, na língua e no sujeito. Convém, no entanto, apontar que sustentamos o pressuposto de que errância não tem que ver somente com polissemia, metáfora e deslizes, mas também com relações, hiâncias e descontinuidades nas materialidades linguísticas e discursivas. Já visitamos os espaços teóricos da base linguística e dos processos discursivos, onde pudemos observar que as relações estabelecidas ali são separadas por hiâncias (separações, fissuras, disjunções) que 218 impedem qualquer unidade coesa capaz de interromper as andanças dos sentidos pelos poros da língua e do discurso. O trabalho da ideologia, por outro lado, é a tentativa (frustrada) de costurar essas partes contraditórias, opostas e discrepantes usando linhas de "evidências" de sentido, na intenção de coser uma singularidade harmônica que estanque, estabilize e sedentarize a movência contingente da significação. Como já visto, não há erro na língua, mas sim uma errância que se situa aquém do erro e do acerto. Errância é movência ao acaso, contingente, indomável, incompreensível e indomesticável. Sedentarização é ilusão de administração causal, controle e posse: é economia de sentidos, delírio de aperfeiçoamento e progresso. É nestes termos que emerge a instrumentalização ideológica do erro (e do acerto) enquanto mecanismo de gestão da língua e do discurso, mas principalmente do sentido e do sujeito. A ideologia, através de cientistas especialistas, trabalha a tentativa de dissimular a errância fundamental, instalando (a posteriori) o erro na língua e no discurso de modo que se justifique a prática daqueles que se oferecem, "sábios e virtuosos", a corrigir e estancar a movência incontrolável da errância na significação. Pêcheux se ocupa, neste momento de "Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (2008, p. 43), com a problemática da estabilização lógica e retórica dos sentidos, o que chamamos aqui de sedentarização. Importa-nos lembrar o ponto de partida dessa discussão, a saber, "a promessa de uma ciência régia conceptualmente tão rigorosa quanto as matemáticas, concretamente tão eficaz quanto as tecnologias materiais, e tão onipresente quanto a filosofia e a política!..." (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 35). É dessa forma que se contrapõem as noções de erro e errância na epistemologia ocidental, através de um jogo de tensões entre o logicamenteestável e o impossível de se estabilizar, errante. "Interrogar-se sobre a existência de um real próprio às disciplinas de interpretação exige que o não-logicamente-estável não seja considerado a priori como um defeito, um simples furo no real" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 43). Pode parecer que Pêcheux não se aplica, neste momento, à epistemologia, mas apenas à semântica e à interpretação; contudo no final do capítulo anterior da mesma obra, sua problematização girava em torno da estabilização lógica do sentido através de três epistemologias: a escolástica-aristotélica, a pragmática e a marxista, e nas páginas seguintes ele se ocupará da epistemologia estruturalista, ou seja, de seus modos de produzir e fazer circular conhecimentos. Assim, o problema posto pelo autor agora é a relação entre ciência e interpretação. Ora, é justamente disso que se ocupam, mas por outras vias, a lógica e a 219 epistemologia ocidental moderna: em apagar a interpretação da linguagem dita "científica". A lógica, em toda sua pluralidade (HAACK, 2002), não é apenas a disciplina que se dedica a estabilizar a movência da significação, é também o paradigma do pensamento capitalista ocidental que se consolidou desde o iluminismo e que se intensificou nas últimas décadas, em decorrência principalmente dos algoritmos (lógica de programação) que invadiram praticamente todas as formas de produção e consumo de conhecimento. O imperativo capitalista do "progresso" (que pressupõe a ultrapassagem do "erro"), tornou-se a força motriz por excelência de um projeto que amarrou, nas palavras de Pêcheux, "em torno do mesmo jogo dominação/resistência, os interesses dos sucessivos mestres desse mundo e de todos os condenados da terra" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 35). Nestes termos, parece que a antiga discussão escolástica a respeito do papel da lógica na filosofia caiu em desuso: se a lógica era apenas um instrumento nas mãos dos filósofos, agora predomina o ideário de que não se pode produzir sem ela nenhuma espécie de conhecimento. Na (ilusão) lógica, o real é mero referente que corresponde, termo a termo, com a linguagem matemática da ciência; e as coisas-a-saber, diante da plenitude lógica do conhecimento, são meras faltas, "erros" a serem corrigidos. Seria possível, interroga Pêcheux, uma epistemologia com fundamentos outros? Para isso seria necessário: [...] supor que entendendo-se o 'real' em vários sentidos possam existir um outro tipo de real diferente dos que acabam de ser evocados, e também um outro tipo de saber, que não se reduz à ordem das 'coisas-a-saber' ou a um tecido de tais coisas. Logo: um real constitutivamente estranho à univocidade lógica, e um saber que não se transmite, não se aprende, não se ensina, e que, no entanto, existe produzindo efeitos (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 43). O autor aponta que este era precisamente o projeto fundamental do campo conhecido como estruturalismo, "uma tentativa antipositivista visando a levar em conta este tipo de real, sobre o qual o pensamento vem dar, no entrecruzamento da linguagem e da história" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 44). No início as abordagens estruturalistas até manifestavam certo repúdio pela ideia de constituir uma "ciência régia" do real, mas não demorou muito até "puderam ceder por sua vez a este fantasma e acabar por aparentar uma nova 'ciência régia'" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 44). De toda forma, Pêcheux estava às voltas com uma base teórica nova, "uma construção crítica que abalava as evidências literárias da autenticidade do 'vivido', assim como as certezas 'científicas' do funcionalismo positivista" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 45). 220 Inicialmente essa epistemologia era delineada mais por uma negatividade, uma nãoidentificação com o logicamente estabilizado da ciência pragmática e empirista contemporânea. Foi só gradualmente que ela ganhou traços próprios, sendo o principal deles a interpretação. Nestes termos, importa ressaltar que este projeto pecheutiano se sustenta a despeito do estruturalismo que segundo Pêcheux, recaiu também em um narcisismo teórico, este ainda mais pretencioso: o narcisismo da estrutura. No final, parece que o estruturalismo inventou um tipo de narcisismo próprio que, no entanto, reincidiu no mesmo movimento, a suspensão da interpretação um embargo ancorado em uma metalinguagem que colocava a teoria como bastião irrevogável do sentido. A suspensão da interpretação (associada aos gestos descritivos da leitura das montagens textuais) oscila assim em uma espécie de sobre-interpretação estrutural da montagem como efeito de conjunto: esta sobre-interpretação faz valer o 'teórico' como uma espécie de metalíngua, organizada ao modo de uma rede de paradigmas. A sobre-interpretação estruturalista funciona a partir de então como um dispositivo de tradução, transpondo 'enunciados empíricos vulgares' em 'enunciados estruturais conceptuais'; esse funcionamento das análises estruturais (e em particular do que poderíamos chamar o materialismo estrutural ou o estruturalismo político) permanece assim secretamente regido pelo modelo geral da equivalência interpretativa (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 46). Essa condescendência do estruturalismo com a tentação de forçar toda interpretação unicamente pelos caminhos teóricos da estrutura não se diferencia, afinal, da prática do especialista, que enquanto fornece interpretações dissimula a própria prática interpretativa através de supostas evidências: "eis tudo". Era esta a face narcisista do estruturalismo, "ares de discurso sem sujeito, simulando os processos matemáticos, que conferiu às abordagens estruturais esta aparência de nova 'ciência régia', negando como de hábito sua própria posição de interpretação" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 47). O projeto pecheutiano para uma nova base teórica-epistemológica é menos pretensioso. Trata-se, ao contrário do estruturalismo, de olhar para baixo, para o "ordinário das massas" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 48). Isso representa uma significativa guinada teórica para a AD. Pêcheux agora nos convida a ouvir mais as ruas que os meios de comunicação, mais os saberes dos leigos que o dos especialistas. É uma volta ao sujeito de carne e osso, sujeito do discurso, sim, mas sujeito que sente, sofre e sorri, que luta por mecanismos de sobrevivência. Trata-se "de se pôr na escuta das circulações cotidianas, tomadas no ordinário do sentido" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 49). O analista do discurso experiente, especialista, poderia afirmar que 221 o discurso das massas é o mesmo do capitalismo científico justamente por que o sujeitado reproduz o discurso dominante. Ora, essa ilusão idealista que invadiu o estruturalismo é precisamente aquilo que Pêcheux parece agora denegar. Por que fura, desliza, erra e vaga, o discurso das massas é sempre outro; é plural, movente e indomesticável em sua completude: errante. Contudo Pêcheux nos adverte: uma base teórica constituída a partir do nãoestabilizado (errante), deve se cuidar em não recair nos antigos narcisismos. Logo, deve-se evitar o risco de se "conceber esse registro do ordinário do sentido como um fato de natureza psico-biológica, inscrito em uma discursividade logicamente estabilizada. Logo, o risco de um retorno fantástico para os positivismos e filosofias da consciência" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 49). Assim, a epistemologia do não-estabilizado (errância) é o projeto de engajar concretamente as materialidades discursivas trabalhadas em rituais ideológicos provenientes das mais diferentes práticas discursivas: da filosofia, da política, das formas culturais e das estéticas, desde que sua premissa fundadora seja a interpretação e suas relações com o cotidiano, com o ordinário do sentido. Assim, importa que esse projeto deva "permanecer prudentemente distanciado de qualquer ciência régia presente ou futura (que se trate de positivismos ou de ontologias marxistas)" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 49). Pêcheux propõe, então, três problematizações42 a respeito dessa nova base teórica não-estabilizada, não-sedentarizada. 1 Pêcheux nos orienta iniciar esse novo procedimento epistemológico sempre pelas materialidades discursivas (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 50), assumindo o caráter interpretativo (em que toda descrição já é interpretação) e o real da língua sua impossibilidade de tudo dizer, de tudo descrever. Esse gesto implica sobremaneira a epistemologia na língua, uma vez que a própria materialidade discursiva que sustenta determinado acontecimento ou conhecimento se torna a única porta de entrada viável. Ao contrário da prática linguística sedentarizada logicamente, essa "entrada" epistemológica no acontecimento se dá não pelas vias do acerto, mas sim do erro, do fracasso, do equívoco, da elipse, da falta; das diferenças, enfim. Nos termos propostos por esta tese, trata-se do acolhimento do erro mais que sua recusa; é fazer dele matéria discursiva, porta de acesso que culmina na própria errância. 42 Pêcheux fala em "exigências", o que evitaremos por parecer a nós uma contradição, já que estamos às voltas com uma nova base teórica errante, calcada no não-estabilizado-logicamente. Impor exigências nos parece uma forma controversa de se iniciar tal projeto. 222 Isto obriga a pesquisa linguística a se construir procedimentos (modos de interrogação de dados e formas de raciocínio) capazes de abordar explicitamente o fato linguístico do equívoco como fato estrutural implicado pela ordem do simbólico. Isto é, a necessidade de trabalhar no ponto em que cessa a consistência da representação lógica inscrita no espaço dos 'mundos normais' (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 51). Em oposição à estabilização lógica do sentido sua sedentarização -, a epistemologia da errância é o espaço de "transformações do sentido, escapando a qualquer norma estabelecida a priori, de um trabalho do sentido sobre o sentido, tomados no relançar indefinido das interpretações" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 51). Todavia, a fronteira entre sedentarização e errância não é evidente43, nas palavras de Pêcheux, existe toda uma região intermediária que oscila entre a estabilização e o "relançar indefinido das interpretações". É nesta "zona cinza" onde habitam aquilo que o autor chamou anteriormente de necessidade de estabilização nas lógicas do cotidiano: "no limite, os proletários, as massas e o povo teriam tal necessidade vital de universos logicamente estabilizados que os jogos de ordem simbólica não os concerniram!" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 53). Assim, abordar um acontecimento pelas vias de uma epistemologia não-logicamente-estabilizada (errante) implica também acolher a contradição da própria estabilização (sedentarização): o desejo e a necessidade do humano de carne e osso pelo ordenamento lógico das coisas-a-saber. 2 Toda descrição (de objetos, acontecimentos ou arranjos discursivos-textuais) é por essência uma interpretação, e por isso "está intrinsecamente exposta ao equívoco da língua: todo enunciado é intrinsecamente suscetível de tornar-se outro, diferente de si mesmo, se deslocar discursivamente de seu sentido para derivar para um outro" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 53). Contudo, vimos anteriormente, a partir de Kant (2001) e Pêcheux (2009), que não há erro na língua, mas apenas no juízo que se estabelece sobre ela. Dito de outra forma, o erro (e o acerto) só aparece a posteriori mediante um projeto de sedentarização dos sentidos. Essa premissa - "não há erro na língua" não implode a outra, que declara que toda descrição interpretativa está "intrinsicamente exposta ao equívoco da língua", afinal, o gesto de interpretar deriva, sobretudo, de um projeto heterogêneo que erra: falha e vaga sem rumo, oscilando entre o mesmo e o outro. 43 Quase nada é evidente; a única evidência aceitável é a evidência de que quase nada é evidente e por isso não chega a ser, de todo, uma evidência. 223 E é neste ponto que se encontra a questão das disciplinas de interpretação: é porque há o outro nas sociedades e na história, correspondente a esse outro próprio ao linguajeiro discursivo, que aí pode haver ligação, identificação ou transferência, isto é, existência de uma relação abrindo a possibilidade de interpretar. E é porque há essa ligação que as filiações históricas podem-se organizar em memórias, e as relações sociais em redes de significantes (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 54). A noção de redes de significantes altera, assim, a compreensão das práticas epistemológicas em relação às coisas-a-saber. A proposta pecheutiana vê o conhecimento como uma rede de memórias por onde os sentidos circulam com alguma contingência. Neste aspecto, importa muito mais escutar o discurso-outro que pulsa nas hiâncias, nos lugares vazios, nos atos falhos, nos equívocos, negações e interrogações. Esse "discurso-outro" marca o espaço fundamental de resistência ao logicamente-estabilizado; é nele que se materializa a errância dos sentidos que caminham contingentemente pela rede de significantes. É neste espaço também onde convivem as coisas-a-saber e as coisas a respeito das quais ninguém pode estar seguro de "saber do que se fala", o batimento entre aquilo que é bordeado pela língua e aquilo que fica fora dela, restos que não são "produtos de uma aprendizagem" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 55). A diferença entre a errância e a estabilização lógica está no fato de que a errância assume as contradições "saber/não-saber" e "descrever/interpretar", ao passo que a sedentarização lógica nega a movência, os restos e os erros, "dando a ilusão que sempre se pode saber do que fala, [...] negando o ato de interpretação no próprio momento em que ele aparece" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 55). 3 O desenvolvimento dos dois tópicos anteriores incide diretamente sobre a questão central da referida obra, a saber, sobre o funcionamento do discurso como estrutura ou como acontecimento. O operador "ou", do título "O discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento", pode deixar dúvidas em relação à funcionalidade do discurso enquanto contradição ou enquanto paradoxo. Aparentemente o próprio autor já fez esta escolha nas páginas anteriores. Segundo ele, quando se permite inscrever o discurso em uma série, sempre se corre o risco... [...] de absorver o acontecimento desse discurso na estrutura da série na medida em que esta tende a funcionar como transcendental histórico, grade de leitura ou memória antecipadora do discurso em questão. A noção de 'formação discursiva' emprestada a Foucault pela análise de discurso derivou muitas vezes para a ideia de uma máquina discursiva de assujeitamento dotada de uma estrutura semiótica interna e por isso mesmo voltada à repetição: no limite, esta concepção estrutural da discursividade 224 desembocaria em um apagamento do acontecimento, através de sua absorção em uma sobre-interpretação antecipadora (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 56). Nossa hipótese é que o discurso, quando compreendido como estrutura, tende à ilusão de absorção e apagamento do acontecimento. Logo, se o discurso fosse apenas estrutura, ele não poderia ser acontecimento. Por outro lado, se o discurso for acontecimento, sua rede de memórias é rota, falha, furada: é antes rede de deslocamento que rede de repetição. Não se trata de pretender aqui que todo discurso seria como um aerólito miraculoso, independente das redes de memória e dos trajetos sociais nos quais ele irrompe, mas de sublinhar que, só por sua existência, todo discurso marca a possibilidade de uma desestruturação-reestruturação dessas redes e trajetos (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 56). Diante das críticas que o próprio autor teceu em direção ao narcisismo do estruturalismo, e diante da proposta geral dessa tese – uma epistemologia da errância que postula a produção e a circulação de saberes não estabilizados logicamente -, tomamos a posição interpretativa em alguma medida, consciente -, de que o discurso se estrutura como batimento (pulsação) entre estrutura e acontecimento, como rede contingente de significantes por onde os sentidos circulam errantes. Sobre os efeitos dessa errância do sentido no sujeito, o autor atesta: "não há identificação plenamente bem-sucedida" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 56). Diante da incompletude do real, algo sempre erra, ou melhor, vaga sem direção. Mas é justamente por que o projeto ideológico de estabilização falha é que ele existe enquanto movimento ininterrupto; é no erro que se estruturam "sociedades e a história, e não apenas uma justaposição caótica (ou uma integração supra-orgânica perfeita) de animais humanos em interação..." (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 57). Nossa proposta de lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância se funda, sobretudo, na pluralidade das interpretações, na expansão dos territórios do conhecimento diverso e múltiplo, na não apropriação e gestão da "evidência", na assunção contraditória das coisas-a-saber e das coisas-impossíveis-de-se-saber, e finalmente no acolhimento dos restos e dos erros como portas de acesso à errância. "Face às interpretações sem margens nas quais o intérprete se coloca como um ponto absoluto, sem outro nem real, trata-se aí, para mim de uma questão de ética e política: uma questão de responsabilidade" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 57). 225 4 EPISTEMOLOGIA DA ERRÂNCIA: O QUE ERRA E FAZ ERRAR Estranha alegria em derrubar muros 226 4.1 O ERRO SECRETO DO ACERTO DOM QUIXOTE – PARTE 2, CAPÍTULO 58 "Adverte, Sancho – disse Dom Quixote – , que o amor não mira cumprimentos nem guarda termos de razão em seus discursos, e tem a mesma condição da morte: que assim acomete os grandes palácios dos reis como as humildes cabanas dos pastores, e quanto toma poss e de uma alma, o primeiro que faz é tirar o medo e a vergonha." O título dessa seção bem poderia ser o contrário: o acerto secreto do erro. Mas não teríamos, aí, uma paráfrase: na tentativa de desnaturalizar os sentidos pejorativos da noção de erro, importa mais o elogio à falha que a depreciação da perfeição. Contudo, mais do que isso, o objetivo dessa seção é lançar luz sobre o prejuízo secreto do "progresso". Errância é largueza e desprendimento; sedentarização é administração e apoucamento. O que será que perdemos com a sedentarização dos sentidos? Na contemporaneidade, a vastidão dos territórios da significação é recortada, circunscrita e contida até os extremos de um projeto ininterrupto por que falha perenemente que lança sociedade e ciência no paradoxo da especialização: quanto mais sabe, mais expande suas possibilidades de saber mas em direções cada vez mais restringidas. No âmago da pulsação sense/non-sense habita uma hiância, a que interessa a esta tese: a do saber que se alarga horizontalmente na pluralidade dos sentidos. Importa-nos, portanto, denunciar o projeto científico de sedentarização que supostamente avança verticalmente ao mesmo tempo em que aprofunda raízes e estanca movimentos, ou melhor, diminui a amplitude dos sentidos e dos saberes. Importa ainda lançar luz sobre o caráter político-ideológico de tal sedentarização estabilização lógico-retórica que administra e instrumentaliza sentidos e saberes no interior de um incessante conflito por poder. A sedentarização não é ingênua, ou mera resposta à contingência angustiante do real: é instrumentalização ideológica, ferramenta política, economia de saberes. O objetivo desta tese, lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância, será calcado nas três premissas propostas por Pêcheux no final de "Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento" (2008), que apresentamos brevemente no final do capítulo anterior e que funcionarão como guias teóricos para este capítulo final. A saber, tais premissas são: 1saberes e conhecimentos se estruturam como linguagem, e por isso são submetidos aos mesmos jogos discursivos que 227 implicam sentido, história, língua e sujeito; 2toda descrição é interpretação, logo, todo gesto científico de desvelamento de "verdades" não passa de construção e legitimação de sentidos discursivos; 3quando se diz algo, silencia-se uma infinidade imensurável de dizeres outros, restos esquecidos e foracluídos; quando o cientista-especialista estabiliza sentidos, ele o faz apagando discursos-outros. Estes restos produzidos no ordinário do sentido devem ser a origem da epistemologia do não-estabilizado-logicamente ou melhor, do não sedentarizado: errante. Importa ressaltar que as páginas deste último capítulo constituem as considerações finais desta tese. Nesta conclusão proporemos considerações que, em alguns momentos, assumem certa escrita mais livre e propositiva. 4.1.1 A VELHA CIDADE DA LÍNGUA: PERIFERIAS ESQUECIDAS A primeira premissa que guiará nosso objetivo de lançar as bases para uma epistemologia da errância implica a epistemologia e a ciência com a língua, ou melhor, assume que saberes e conhecimentos se estruturam como linguagem e por isso são submetidos aos mesmos jogos discursivos. Por isso assumimos que sentidos e sujeitos habitam a língua de muitas formas. "Pode-se considerar a nossa língua como uma velha cidade: um emaranhado de ruelas e praças, casas velhas e novas, casas com anexos de épocas diferentes; e tudo isso circundado por um conjunto de periferias" (WITTGENSTEIN, 2009, p. 34). Sentido e sujeito, efeitos do discurso na língua e na história, possuem a espessura de uma palavra, e como tal, circulam errantes por espaços linguageiros igualmente moventes. Na metáfora proposta por Wittgenstein44, a língua é uma velha cidade onde espaços urbanos tomam formas distintas, com peculiaridades estéticas, idiossincráticas e sociais em constante conflito e revolvimento. Assumindo certo valor de análise nesta metáfora, importa-nos lançar luz sobre a práxis discursiva de certo território alocado em região nobre da velha cidade da língua, um bairro conhecido como "ciência". Este bairro seria, como os demais, composto por diversas ruas, praças, edifícios, casas e "cidadãos" que habitam estas cercanias de forma ímpar. É que os sujeitos que ali habitam parecem se sentir desconfortáveis em dividir qualquer espaço com sujeitos de outros bairros, e por isso tentam ora se separar da cidade, ora converter 44 Não nos aproximaremos da tese de Wittgenstein mais do que o recurso a esta metáfora específica, que acreditamos calhar, sem causar prejuízos teóricos, com as propostas de Pêcheux. 228 todo o município em uma extensão deste bairro: água e óleo não se misturam mais do que necessidade e contingência. Foi este fio condutor que perseguimos em Pêcheux através de Semântica e Discurso (2009), e Discurso: estrutura ou acontecimento (2008). A partir dele foi possível observar o movimento epistemológico proposto na revolução intelectual chamada "modernidade" -, de fazer da língua científica um espaço separado da língua cotidiana, como se ela pudesse se apartar e se emancipar do restante "contaminado" da cidade; diante deste impossível afinal "não existe língua científica pura" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 182) -, a alternativa era assumir o governo da cidade e expulsar dela as demais formas de produção de conhecimentos e saberes, com a intensão de fazer de todo este espaço mera reprodução de seu discurso. O projeto científico de sedentarização da língua se verteu, finalmente, em projeto de colonização gesto de tomar posse à força. Ora, objetivamos nesta tese sustentar a hipótese de que o projeto ideológico de sedentarização científica funciona justamente no batimento entre a instrumentalização política do erro e a dissimulação (fracassada) da errância incorrigível da língua e do discurso. Nesta tese partimos da premissa Kantiana de que "o erro não é da ordem do enunciado, mas do juízo" (KANT, 2001), proposição que somamos à tese pecheutiana (PÊCHEUX, 2009) de que equívocos e ilusões na língua não derivam de erros passíveis de serem corrigidos, mas de uma errância (movência contingente) fundamental decorrente de hiâncias que separam cada parte da base linguística, dos processos discursivos e dos acontecimentos históricos. Em vista disso, assumimos o pressuposto de que não há, a priori, erro na língua, mas que erro e acerto são atribuições imputadas a posteriori, na "camada" do juízo. Isso implica também assumir, ao contrário do que por vezes se propõe na análise do discurso, que equívocos, falhas e incompletudes não são fundamentos, mas atribuições, imputações nos termos propostos por esta tese, somente os deslizes e as movências são fundamentais. Acolher a ideia de erro é, de alguma forma, acolher a ideia de correção e acerto; "não se trata disso" (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 87). É a sedentarização ideológica (estabilização lógico-retórica) que tenta dissimular a errância e colocar em seu lugar o par erro-acerto e suas variáveis discursivas: equívocoinequívoco, fracasso-progresso, imprecisão-precisão, incompletude-completude etc. O campo teórico da epistemologia sofre, contemporaneamente, um revés decorrente da própria prática científica. Como veremos mais adiante, sua força diminuiu no decorrer do século XX, já que seu trabalho consiste em produzir critérios lógicos e filosóficos para a 229 criação e circulação de saberes em uma época em que a própria prática científica instaura seus próprios procedimentos, prescindindo da filosofia epistemológica. Logo, a reflexão teórica proposta por esta tese recai em um campo cada vez menos habitado. Diversos fatores contribuíram para isso. Um dos mais importantes foi a instauração dos critérios hipotéticos, apresentados por Karl Popper, que se tornou o principal critério de demarcação dos saberes científicos (Popper, 1982). Segundo ele, somente as hipóteses que podem ser testadas (e que depois de testadas, não forem refutadas), é que podem ser validadas como verdade científica. Ou seja, só aquilo que pode ser testado e aprovado por meio de métodos tecnocientíficos podem ser declarados como ciência. Nestes termos, toda a prática filosófica, inclusive a epistemologia, recai no campo da mera abstração especulativa; a própria ciência também muda de estatuto, e se verte em tecnociência. Neste aspecto, os méritos desta tese, de propor uma epistemologia calcada na língua (errante), estaria já fadada ao fracasso. Logo, o primeiro desafio que se nos impõe é analisar e sustentar a premissa de que a tecnociência produz e faz circular saberes no interior de uma prática discursiva, sujeita às mesmas errâncias que constituem a língua e o discurso. Por mais "óbvio" que isto pareça aos linguistas, essa premissa não se institui sem grandes objeções do campo tecnocientífico, para quem o chuveiro elétrico, a aspirina e a bomba de hidrogênio se mostram como verdades suficientemente estáveis. Submetida à linguagem, a tecnociência submete-se também às indesejadas contingências errantes da língua e do discurso. Dessa forma, nossa análise não converge sobre a prática científica sobre a estabilidade de enunciados sobre elétrons, nêutrons e bombas de hidrogênio -, mas sobre a noção de "saber científico". Essa escolha se justifica pela competência a que podemos ingressar sem maiores prejuízos teóricos: só podemos abordar, aqui, a prática linguageira e discursiva que fundamenta os saberes ditos "científicos". Essa escolha não é apenas mais segura, é também a única viável. Embora Pêcheux tenha direcionado muito de seus textos para a discussão sobre o "discurso científico", buscaremos em Jean-François Lyotard (2015) algumas preposições que possam nos ajudar a legitimar a premissa pecheutiana que atesta que a ciência se circunscreve como prática discursiva. Lyotard, assim como Pêcheux, foi um filósofo de matriz marxista que se atentou sobre o discurso científico. Embora não faça uso de conceitos da Análise do Discurso, suas contribuições sobre os jogos de linguagem da tecnociência podem nos ajudar a compreender as condições de produção de sentidos 230 "científicos" na contemporaneidade. Iniciaremos este itinerário analítico distinguindo "saber" e "conhecimento". O saber não é a ciência, sobretudo em sua forma atual; e esta, longe de poder ocultar o problema de sua legitimidade, não pode deixar de apresentá-lo em toda sua amplitude, que não é menos sociopolítica que epistemológica. [...] O saber em geral não se reduz à ciência, nem mesmo ao conhecimento. O conhecimento seria o conjunto dos enunciados que denotam ou descrevem objetos, excluindo-se todos os outros enunciados, e susceptíveis de serem declarados verdadeiros ou falsos. A ciência seria apenas um subconjunto do conhecimento (LYOTARD, 2015, p. 35). A tecnociência contemporânea, ainda que negue, submete-se em grande medida à língua e aos jogos discursivos sociopolíticos. Se no decorrer dos séculos modernos (XVI-XX) a chancela sobre a linguagem científica era feita pela epistemologia, na contemporaneidade a própria tecnociência se encarrega deste trabalho através de duas condições: que existam referentes acessíveis e únicos para um determinado significante, para que este possa ser avaliado empiricamente; e que tais enunciados se circunscrevam à linguagem proposta pelos experts de cada área. Em termos discursivos, este movimento ideológico da tecnociência é o mesmo trabalho discursivo de fornecer evidências ao mesmo tempo em que se apaga as pistas sobre a origem destas evidências. Mas pelo termo saber não se entende apenas, é claro, um conjunto de enunciados denotativos; a ele misturam-se as ideias de saber-fazer, de saberviver, de saber escutar, etc. Trata-se então de uma competência que excede a determinação e a aplicação do critério único de verdade, e que se estende às determinações e aplicações dos critérios de eficiência (qualificação técnica), de justiça e/ou de felicidade (sabedoria ética), de beleza sonora, cromática (sensibilidade auditiva, visual), etc. Assim compreendido, o saber é aquilo que torna alguém capaz de proferir 'bons' enunciados denotativos, mas também 'bons' enunciados prescritivos, avaliativos... Não consiste numa competência que abranja determinada espécie de enunciados, por exemplo, os cognitivos, à exclusão de outros. Ao contrário, permite 'boas' performances a respeito de vários objetos de discursos (LYOTARD, 2015, p. 36). Esta distinção entre saber e conhecimento é útil para melhor situar o objeto de estudos de nossa epistemologia da errância: o saber científico, e não o conhecimento científico. O saber científico é, nas palavras de Lyotard, aquele que ultrapassa os limites da prática científica e circula na sociedade, produzindo efeitos de sedentarização sobre os sentidos e sobre os sujeitos. Dito de outra forma, não nos compete aqui desafiar ou objetar os enunciados que compõem os conhecimentos científicos enquanto práticas de um determinado campo; só 231 nos compete lançar luz sobre a noção de "saber", mais especificamente sobre o saber tecnocientífico. Assim voltamos ao pressuposto pecheutiano de que todo saber científico é prática discursiva, e por isso assumimos também que não existe procedimento lógico-matemático suficiente para retirá-lo dos jogos políticos e ideológicos que o condicionam de forma contingente. Logo, se assumimos que o saber é discurso, assumimos que ele é constituído de forma errante por língua, história e sujeito. O erro se torna então fonte de instrumentalização e administração (sedentarização) do saber. Ora, as implicações desta premissa na epistemologia não são pequenas. A assunção da ciência como prática linguageira errante levaria também à assunção de que o erro, não existindo a priori, nunca passou de ferramenta de direcionamento discursivo; logo, o erro nunca teve a ver com falhas naturais observáveis no mundo empírico. Erros e acertos científicos funcionam imersos em jogos políticoideológicos que condicionam os rumos do "progresso" e do "retrocesso", e por isso valem como vitória e derrota, sucesso e fracasso, eficiência e ineficiência etc. Mas porque erra (vaga e falha), a própria noção de progresso se torna efeito de um discurso errante, contingente, marcado ideologicamente e suscetível de embates e forças não-lineares. Outro efeito de uma epistemologia implicada com a língua é a movência contingente dos saberes e a impossibilidade de tudo dizer, ou melhor, a impossibilidade de tudo saber. Por mais que os jogos ideológicos tentem dissimular a errância, fornecendo "evidências" logicamente estabilizadas, a sedentarização da significação não é capaz de constituir unidades que apaguem as hiâncias que separam base linguística e processo discursivo. A errância, por que é incontornável, produz incessantes deslizes de sentido que implicam toda ciência com a interpretação, com a história, com o discurso e com o sujeito. Não há discurso científico puro: a velha cidade da língua, por que é movente, produz sentidos errantes que jamais se estabilizam, tampouco constituem homogeneidades e unidades. Algo sempre erra falha e vaga no conhecimento humano. Aquilo que em uma dada condição de produção de sentidos pode parecer progresso coerente, em outra condição de produção emerge como loucura e fracasso. A respeito do saber científico como prática discursiva, Pêcheux (2008) salientou o papel do jogo lógico-retórico trabalhado pelo especialista. Este jogo é calcado na lógica fornecida por enunciados complexos e inacessíveis ao sujeito "leigo", amparado por uma retórica discursiva de recondução aos saberes legítimos e verdadeiros. O que está em jogo, 232 afinal, é o fornecimento de sentidos estabilizados aptos a cooptar o máximo de sujeitos a uma determinada Formação Discursiva. Diante da miríade incontrolável e incalculável de sentidos que um acontecimento discursivo provoca, o especialista emerge como "paladino da verdade" que fornece "evidências" inequívocas, estáveis, homogêneas e coerentes. O que este gesto esconde é o caráter político e ideológico que sedentariza e administra sentidos e sujeitos. A legitimação do saber tecnocientífico teve início no Renascimento também chamado de Iluminismo. O trabalho de sedentarização dos sentidos pela lógica-retórica se tornou patente desde o famoso artigo de Emanuel Kant, publicado em um jornal alemão em 3 de dezembro 1783, sob o título "Resposta à pergunta: 'Que é o Iluminismo?'". Embora não se trate de um artigo científico, mas sim de um opúsculo publicado em um jornal popular, este texto se tornou um dos mais emblemáticos delineadores do saber legítimo no interior daquilo que se chama de modernidade e iluminismo. Assim inicia Kant: Iluminismo é a saída do homem da sua menoridade de que ele próprio é culpado. A menoridade é a incapacidade de se servir do entendimento sem a orientação de outrem. Tal menoridade é por culpa própria, se a sua causa não residir na carência de entendimento, mas na falta de decisão e de coragem em se servir de si mesmo, sem a guia de outrem. Sapere aude! Tem a coragem de te servires do teu próprio entendimento! Eis a palavra de ordem do Iluminismo (KANT, 1985, p. 100) Os livros de história estão repletos de argumentos que atestam que a sedentarização dos sentidos não é efeito recente, mas milenar. Kant, no final do século XVIII, está às voltas com uma série de ataques à sedentarização dos sentidos e dos sujeitos imposta pelo clero e acolhida por seus súditos. Contudo, importa aqui sublinhar o projeto inicial iluminista de "des-sedentarização" como passagem da menoridade intelectual para a maioridade iluminada pelo conhecimento científico. Kant, Voltaire e outros filósofos da época erigiam fortes críticas à administração dos sentidos e do pensamento, convidando o sujeito europeu de então a pensar por si mesmo: "não me é forçoso pensar, quando posso simplesmente pagar; outros empreenderão por mim essa tarefa aborrecida" (KANT, 1985, p. 102) A solução iluminista para a sedentarização imposta pela igreja era, por suposto, o saber científico, empírico, nos moldes propostos por Francis Bacon (2000) e René Descartes (1992). "Ousa pensar por si mesmo", pregava Kant. Em outras palavras, a filosofia orientava: "empreenda por si mesmo esta tarefa aborrecida", "liberte-se da guia fornecida pela religião", que domina, e "alcance a maioridade intelectual e imparcial fornecida pela ciência". 233 "Apresentei o ponto central do Iluminismo, a saída do homem da sua menoridade culpada, sobretudo nas coisas de religião, porque em relação às artes e às ciências os nossos governantes não têm interesse algum em exercer a tutela sobre os seus súditos" (KANT, 1985, p. 104). Kant pareceria realmente crer que a ciência poderia desconstruir os muros que sedentarizavam os sentidos e os sujeitos em erros que atravancavam o que ele nomeava como progresso. A filosofia da ciência e a epistemologia deveriam, portanto, fornecer os meios para a liberdade do pensamento e para o avanço do conhecimento e do saber. Uma época não se pode coligar e conjurar para colocar a seguinte num estado em que se tornará impossível a ampliação dos seus conhecimentos (sobretudo os mais urgentes), a purificação dos erros e, em geral, o avanço progressivo na ilustração. Isso seria um crime contra a natureza humana, cuja determinação original consiste justamente neste avanço (KANT, 1985, p. 112). Na velha cidade da língua a ciência emergiu, inicialmente, como bairro periférico, com ruas e praças desconhecidas, ainda em construção. Até então os efeitos de sentido eram administrados pela igreja, que durante certo tempo ainda conseguiu mandar para as fogueiras aqueles que ousavam mudar os nomes das ruas ou as leis do trânsito. Mas não por muito tempo. O que se viu nos séculos seguintes, depois de Bacon e Descartes, foi um grande movimento discursivo de aliciamento e persuasão que partia da filosofia, das artes e das culturas burguesas em defesa da ciência, mais especificamente, em defesa do método (STÖRIG, 2008). Enquanto Kepler, Newton, Galileu e outros desenvolviam experimentos e revolucionavam o conhecimento a respeito do mundo sensível, Augusto Comte (1999) propunha o positivismo como metodologia de aquisição e difusão de saberes, inaugurando uma nova era em que o saber deveria ser regulado não pela fé, mas pela lógica. A retórica da filosofia iluminista, fundamentada pela lógica, era o próprio movimento discursivo de legitimação da ciência moderna, e o papel da epistemologia era, assim, construir muros que separassem a "verdadeira ciência" das pseudociências. Não é difícil antever o narcisismo que lançou o projeto iluminista em uma contradição interna. Enquanto a retórica filosófica deslegitimava o saber calcado na fé libertando o sujeito moderno das correntes da igreja -, legitimava o saber científico como único apto a fornecer verdades essenciais e universais. A des-sedentarização iluminista não passou, afinal, de re-sedentarização, de nova administração dos saberes. Como já visto nesta tese, filósofos como Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Marx e tantos outros produziram dizeres que surtiram poderosos 234 efeitos no ocidente moderno, efeitos de legitimação da ciência e deslegitimação dos demais saberes. Enquanto efeito de sedentarização, a epistemologia moderna calca sua administração e posse do saber a partir da noção de método, um efeito discursivo que invalida não só o conhecimento religioso, mas também os saberes das ruas, dos curandeiros, dos indígenas, dos leigos, dos incultos: das experiências ordinárias do cotidiano, enfim. Progressivamente a ciência conseguiu impor novas leis à velha cidade da língua, e a principal delas era a assepsia do erro na língua. Desde Leibniz, passando por Frege e culminando na lógica contemporânea, a epistemologia se encarregou de expurgar o erro da prática científica, controlando as contingências, instaurando necessidades e estabilizando os sentidos logicamente. E se não houver erro na língua? Como vimos, basta que a epistemologia e a lógica o imputem no funcionamento discursivo para que se justifique o trabalho de reparo da língua e da ciência. O projeto iluminista, sob a retórica do progresso e da liberdade, tornase então o projeto de administração de toda a velha cidade da língua, ou melhor, da sedentarização dos sentidos, até sua atrofia. A pluralidade errante dos sentidos, antes sedentarizada pela igreja, passou então a ser dominada e administrada justamente por intermédio de uma retórica filosófica que fazia apologia à liberdade proporcionada pela ciência. O método, salvaguardam os filósofos, serve de anteparo contra os enganos no conhecimento, mas principalmente fornecem os meios pelo qual o conhecimento pode progredir e avançar. O método permite, segundo eles, descrever os eventos do mundo de forma autêntica, verdadeira e neutra, logo, o método é o efeito discursivo de apagamento da interpretação, de dissimulação da errância e da estabilização dos sentidos em axiomas. Se a ciência residiu, no passado, as periferias da velha cidade da língua, hoje ela governa a cidade, ocupa os bairros mais nobres, as praças mais adornadas e as ruas mais sofisticadas. Aos demais dizeres os que ainda não foram banidos do município linguístico -, restaram as periferias pequenas, controladas e esquecidas. Se a ciência residiu, no passado, as periferias da velha cidade da língua, hoje ela governa a cidade, ocupa os bairros mais nobres, as praças mais adornadas e as ruas mais sofisticadas. Aos demais dizeres os que ainda não foram banidos do município linguístico -, restaram as periferias pequenas, controladas e esquecidas. Mas se todo saber é estruturado como linguagem (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 44), e por isso submete-se aos mesmos efeitos da língua, da história e do sujeito, deve-se assumir que a ciência é também uma prática discursiva errante. Assim posto, deve-se reconhecer que o saber científico é constituído a partir de jogos 235 discursivos contingentes, dominados por forças políticas e ideológicas em tensão. Nestas condições, o erro emerge como ferramenta discursiva de administração dos sentidos científicos, daquilo que deve ser considerado progresso ou fracasso, verdadeiro ou falso, justo ou injusto. O erro instrumentalizado pela retórica é, assim, a ferramenta de gerenciamento dos rumos da agenda científica, dos limites da legitimação e da justificação do efeito reparador da epistemologia e da lógica. E o erro operacionalizado pela lógica é a ferramenta de sedentarização e gestão do enunciado, dos sentidos e da prática científica. Mas sobretudo, se compreendermos o saber científico em sua implicação com a língua, somos levados a admitir que ilusões, equívocos e falhas se originam da errância que habita as hiâncias que separam as partes do não-todo da língua e do discurso. Dessa forma, a despeito do método, e de qualquer promessa científica de liberdade e progresso, algo sempre erra falha e vaga no saber científico. A incompletude e a movência não permitem ao saber constituir unidades totalizantes, apenas contradições frágeis e vacilantes. Mais do que isso, essa errância incontornável impõe à ciência uma circunscrição histórica e social que anula a ideia de essência atemporal, deixando em seu lugar apenas um produto científico que convoca, ininterruptamente, por interpretação. Finalmente, a epistemologia da sedentarização se funda na estabilização lógica dos sentidos, o que impõe muros ao que se compreende como "verdadeira ciência", e afasta todo tipo de saber que não usa o método para evitar o erro e a contingência. Mas se este efeito é errante, a dissimulação dos restos não pode ser plena: sentidos outros insistem e persistem no interior do saber científico por mais que se tente tamponar logicamente os poros da língua dita "científica". 4.1.2 CIÊNCIA: DESCRIÇÃO OU INTERPRETAÇÃO? A segunda premissa pecheutiana sobre a qual propomos fundamentar uma epistemologia do saber "não-estabilizado" (nos termos propostos por esta tese: saber errante) reitera a proposição nietzschiana de que toda descrição é, ela mesma, interpretação. Esta segunda premissa se sustenta na primeira: todo saber se estrutura como linguagem errante constituída por língua, história e sujeito. De igual forma, o saber científico também se submete aos jogos discursivos e ideológicos no mesmo momento em que tenta apagar os rastros políticos que deixou atrás de si. E se a prática científica é prática discursiva, inevitavelmente sua constituição é fundamentada por errâncias incorrigíveis em sua base 236 linguística, em seus processos discursivos e em seus conflitos políticos. Logo, o trabalho discursivo da ciência para produzir "verdades" essenciais e atemporais é, antes de mais nada, o trabalho de dissimular sua errância fundamental. Como já visto, a errância na base linguística é a movência contingente das partes contraditórias que constituem o signo. O arbitrário do signo e o valor do signo (SAUSSURE, 2006) atestam isso: há hiância entre significante e significado, há movência errante entre as partes cisão que a ideologia tenta costurar, sedentarizar e simular "um". A errância dos processos discursivos se vê na hiância que separa e faz deslizes entre os diversos processos que constituem o discurso: na movência contingente do pressuposto (já-dito) em relação ao dizer atual, de forma que o encaixe entre eles se torna impossível; na movência errante do interdiscurso em relação ao intradiscurso, o que impossibilita o controle sobre o fio do discurso; na hiância incontornável que separa os AREs dos AIEs, resultando em rituais esburacados incapazes de constituir "um" sujeito pleno. E por último, a errância pode ser vista também no encontro da história com o acontecimento, na movência incontrolável de um sobre o outro, o que impõe ao sujeito a interpretação. Vimos também que, para corrigir a errância, a ideologia fornece evidências que tentam sedentarizar as movências do sentido. Olhando para a história do nomadismo humano, aprendemos que sedentarizar é foracluir, o que na prática discursiva significa separar o que deve ser dito do que deve ser silenciado e esquecido. Logo, sedentarizar é recortar um espaço discursivo, tomar posse dele e administrá-lo através de hierarquias e jogos de poder; é diminuir a movência do sentido através de muros e divisas, é cultivar e produzir o "mesmo", é simular homogenias e hegemonias. Nestes termos, a sedentarização científica é produzida através de dois efeitos discursivos: a estabilização lógica e o apoio da retórica (recondução às "verdades" do dizer). Este duplo movimento discursivo é o que fundamenta o projeto epistemológico de instauração do erro na língua, para que então se justifique seu trabalho de reparo e aperfeiçoamento, de apagar a hiância e a movência das partes que constituem língua e discurso, fazendo parecer que para cada significante há um significado único, estável e inequívoco. Ou seja, a lógica e a retórica científica instauram o erro e o acerto no exato momento em que dissimulam a errância incontornável e fundamental. [...] trata-se dessa língua 'logicamente perfeita', ou ideografia, da qual diz Frege se exigirá que toda expressão construída como nome próprio, a partir de sinais previamente introduzidos, e de maneira gramaticalmente correta, 237 designe, de fato, um objeto, e que nenhum sinal novo seja introduzido como nome próprio sem que lhe seja assegurada uma referência (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 116). Sem errância na língua, no discurso e na história não há interpretação, e a descrição se salva das contingências e das vicissitudes que atravancam o "progresso do conhecimento". Com a instauração do erro, instaura-se também a possibilidade do acerto, do aperfeiçoamento e do progresso. Mas se não há erro a priori na língua e no discurso, se há apenas errância irreparável, somos levados a assumir que a imputação do erro e do acerto são gestos discursivos passíveis de serem administrados por discursos dominantes. É por isso que o processo de sedentarização, pelas vias da foraclusão e da denegação perversa, é processo de administração do erro e do acerto. Erro para quem? Acerto para quem? Progresso para quem? Logo, administrar a significação é sedentarizar o sentido, apagar a interpretação e colocar em seu lugar uma descrição "sem erros", logicamente estável e retoricamente elegante. Ora, é exatamente assim que funciona o "método" científico45: como ferramenta de administração e sedentarização dos sentidos e dos dizeres, de separação, de denegação e foraclusão daquilo que pode ser considerado científico e do que é relegado a senso comum, fé, crendice etc. Foi a partir deste propósito que Leibniz se propôs a afastar a contingência da linguagem metodológica, que Kant trabalhou em mecanismos ditos essenciais e atemporais para a produção de saberes, e que Frege, Husserl, Carnap, Ducrot e outros lógicos produziram línguas artificiais, lógicas, capazes de "afastar" completamente o erro de seus funcionamentos. E é neste momento que queremos nos deter com mais atenção: na passagem do método para a linguagem lógica dos algoritmos, ou melhor, da premissa científica moderna para a premissa computacional contemporânea o que nesta tese significa olhar para o aperfeiçoamento do apagamento da errância e da interpretação através de evidências cada vez mais estabilizadas logicamente. Os primórdios da computação podem ser antevistos na civilização grega através dos sistemas axiomáticos. Ora, um sistema axiomático parte de premissas aceitas como verdadeiras e regras tidas como válidas que possam conduzir a novas sentenças "verdadeiras", logo, as conclusões são alcançadas a partir da instrumentalização de símbolos de acordo com 45 Embora não seja possível falar em "um" método, mas em métodos, e nem todos excludentes. 238 um determinado conjunto de regras. A verdade final do cálculo (o output: C) deriva da síntese de axiomas supostamente estáveis (os inputs: A e B). A ¬ B input (premissa 'estável' A em relação à premissa 'estável' B) ______ C output (síntese 'verdadeira' C) Nestes termos, a passagem do input para o output de um algoritmo depende em grande medida de uma "evidência" logicamente estabilizada do sentido em A e B para que C possa ser aceito como um output "verdadeiro". Por isso os inputs devem ser calcados em axiomas, que são premissas tidas como necessariamente (por causalidade inequívoca) verdadeiras e evidentes, logo, "verdades" irrevogáveis que fundamentam outras demonstrações embora sejam, elas mesmas, indemonstráveis. Segundo a lógica empirista, os axiomas derivam de princípios supostamente inatos, como "nada pode ser e não ser, ao mesmo tempo", ou de generalizações advindas da observação empírica. Os matemáticos gregos acreditavam que tal sistema axiomático pudesse fornecer conformações lógicas (depois compreendida como lógica formal) para se tornar uma ferramenta de incremento à capacidade humana de pensar, como uma série de instruções que resolvesse problemas "humanos" de forma mais rápida e assertiva: era a origem do que chamamos hoje de algoritmo. Mais de dois milênios depois, partindo das contribuições de Frege, Husserl, Peirce, Quine, Dewey e outros, um matemático inglês conseguiu reduzir os vários sistemas formais a um sistema básico subjacente que proporcionou a criação dos computadores digitais. Estamos falando de Alan Turing, em meados da década de 30 do século XX. O sistema formal de Turing pode ser compreendido como uma espécie de jogo com definições estritamente rigorosas que determinam regras para manipulação de símbolos. Quando se 'ensina' um jogo formal para um colega, três aspectos desse 'jogo' devem ser delimitados: a natureza dos símbolos, a definição da situação inicial do jogo (algo como 'layout do tabuleiro') e uma lista dos movimentos permitidos em uma dada posição (HODGES, 2001, p. 11). Alan Mathison Turing nasceu em 1912 na Inglaterra. Em 1936, aos 24 anos de idade, Turing consagrou-se como um dos maiores matemáticos do seu tempo quando comprovou teoricamente que era possível executar operações computacionais numéricas através de máquinas onde se pudesse colocar regras de um sistema formal em seu funcionamento 239 (HODGES, 2001, p. 18). Nesta época suas máquinas eram apenas hipóteses, mas a demonstração teórica que ele apresentou à comunidade científica da época permitiu uma nova perspectiva no esforço de formalizar a linguagem a partir da matemática, além de lançar as bases para a computação contemporânea. Turing inaugurou uma nova era para a produção e gestão do conhecimento humano. Suas máquinas (então hipotéticas) usavam termos matematicamente precisos em um sistema formal automático com regras muito simples e que apresentavam resultados impressionantes. Seu sistema formal automático consistia em um dispositivo físico que manipulava automaticamente símbolos pré-estabelecidos a partir de regras igualmente pré-estabelecidas. A união de matemática e lógica em uma nova linguagem artificial estruturada em uma máquina automática tornou possível o primeiro sistema de processamento automático de símbolos. E para Turing, a maioria dos problemas inteligíveis poderiam ser convertidos para a forma "encontre um número n tal que..." (HODGES, 2001, p. 25). Ora, partindo dessas premissas, as regras dessa linguagem matemática exigiriam definições mais rígidas que a linguagem cotidiana, até mais que a linguagem praticada pelas ciências humanas como filosofia, sociologia etc. As entradas (inputs), tal como na Grécia antiga, precisavam ser axiomáticas, e por isso Turing concentrou-se na definição destes estados linguísticos de forma que pudessem ser claros e inequívocos o suficiente para que tais definições pudessem ser usadas para comandar as operações lógico-matemáticas da máquina. Este procedimento era, em outros termos, a tentativa leibniziana de assepsia da língua levada ao seu limite. Turing iniciou seu projeto através de uma tabela de instruções supostamente simples e inequívocas que descreviam os movimentos lógicos de operação da máquina. Seu objetivo era provar que a descrição lógica de informações, os passos de um sistema axiomático formal e os estados físicos da máquina poderiam se equivaler entre si e funcionar como uma unidade chamada de computador (HODGES, 2001, p. 30). Na II guerra mundial Turing se tornou 'herói' ao construir de fato o primeiro computador, usado para decifrar códigos interceptados dos nazistas. Decepcionado com burocracias que impediam seus experimentos e com preconceitos de gênero, no dia 7 de junho de 1954 Turing suicidou-se durante uma crise de depressão, usando uma maçã envenenada com cianureto de potássio (HODGES, 2001, p. 62). O dispositivo lógico-computacional desenvolvido por Alan Turing é, em grande medida, decorrente do "método" proposto pela revolução filosófica-científica da 240 modernidade. Lógica e método são conceitos muito próximos, e o funcionamento de ambos a partir de algoritmos é uma ideia bastante aceita (COPI, 1981). As descrições de um algoritmo computacional contemporâneo (CORMEN, 2012) possuem muitas semelhanças com o método científico proposto por Descartes no "Discurso do Método" (DESCARTES, 2001). De forma hipotética, assumindo os riscos e as incompletudes deste gesto, um entrecruzamento rápido entre o método e o algoritmo resultaria aproximadamente nas seguintes premissas: 1. objetivo: processar conhecimentos; 2. matriz: dados e informações empíricos transformados em axiomas; 3. definição do processamento: instruções (método ou algoritmo); 4. obtenção de dados: entrada, coleta e seleção; 5. utilização dos dados processados: saída, arquivos propagáveis; 6. resultado: conhecimentos e saberes. O que queremos evidenciar, aqui, é o caráter errante e interpretativo do método científico bem como do dispositivo computacional apesar de todos os esforços de dissimulação e apagamento da errância contingente e política de seus procedimentos. Nosso argumento, calcado por premissas erigidas por Pêcheux (2009) e Henry (2013), se sustenta na crítica ao processo de estabelecimento de axiomas que fundamentam os enunciados tecnocientíficos que compõem este tipo de saber. Para a lógica tradicional, o axioma é uma sentença ou proposição que, apesar de não ser provada ou demonstrada, é considerada como evidência óbvia, ou melhor, como um consenso inicial necessário (não contingente) para a construção e aceitação de um método científico ou instrução algorítmica (COPI, 1981). Dessa forma o axioma, que está na origem do gesto "descritivo" proposto pela ciência, não passa de um gesto interpretativo. Na intenção de analisarmos o caráter interpretativo do gesto científico de "descrição" toda descrição é interpretação (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 53) -, propomos considerar o dispositivo lógico-metodológico de estabelecimento de axiomas como um processo de re-inscrição do Interdiscurso no Intradiscurso. O interdiscurso, como já visto, é constituído por dois processos discursivos discrepantes: 1) o processo discrepante de encaixe do pré-construído com o dizer, e 2) o processo de articulação (encadeamento e sustentação). Quando a ciência estabelece axiomas iniciais para seus métodos e algoritmos, ela tenta estabelecer um único sentido para determinado significante, ignorando, silenciando e apagando todas as demais variações semânticas que circundam tal significante. 241 Um exemplo desse trabalho de interpretar-dissimular ocorreu recentemente na 26a Conferência Internacional de Física Atômica, em Barcelona (MARTÍN, 2018). Nela o físico William Phillips, prêmio Nobel de física em 1997, defendeu que o padrão de definição da unidade de massa deixasse de ser um objeto físico, no caso um cilindro de platina-irídio de 1kg que era usado como parâmetro internacional para medir massas, e passasse a ser uma constante invariável da natureza. Mas mesmo isso não é unânime. Enquanto os físicos lutam para que 1 quilo seja medido pela constante de Planck relação entre a energia de um fóton e a frequência de sua onda, os químicos defendem que 1 quilo deva ser medido pelo número de Avogadro relação entre a quantidade de átomos ou moléculas com a massa de uma amostra. Nos próximos meses veremos uma batalha que, no final, terá apenas um vencedor, um pódio composto de apenas um lugar: o axioma linguístico científico. Aos demais sentidos não cabem nem menções: a dita "língua científica" precisa de significantes e significados estabilizados para produzir "seus" sentidos. Este gesto científico de foraclusão e denegação é gesto de seleção de um sentido e apagamento dos demais. Não importa se um quilo é pesado para uma pessoa e leve para outra, que seja o tormento de um anoréxico ou a alegria de uma mãe que vê o filho crescer saudável. Mas para a ciência o senso comum já é resto há pelo menos quatro séculos. O que nos interessa sobremaneira aqui é que no interior mesmo da linguagem especializada da ciência ocorram embates políticos sobre o sentido também na forma de foraclusão e denegação: a ciência não é una, homogênea: é embate, política, errância e interpretação. Todavia o mecanismo contemporâneo de dissimulação da errância aos leigos pode minimamente ser descrito/interpretado: para que os especialistas produzam "um" sentido para quilograma, basta que elevem o patamar desse gesto interpretativo a níveis quânticos, um lugar discursivo inacessível a não-especialistas destituídos de tecnologias e capital financeiro para contrapor uma determinada seleção. Aos leigos resta apenas aceitar tal decisão e, aos poucos, esquecer que tal sentido foi determinado por poucos especialistas. A sedentarização dos sentidos é isso: é estabilização lógica do sentido, é seleção, interpretação e apagamento dos restos e de seu próprio gesto interpretativo. Sedentarizar o sentido é administrar os efeitos da palavra, é controlar a "pega" entre significante e significado, é fornecer "um" sentido, tomar posse dele e diminuir sua movência: é fincar raízes, "progredir" verticalmente e produzir mais valia. Posteriormente o sentido "estabilizado" de 1 quilo circulará em outros espaços discursivos, supostamente 242 sedentarizando neles também toda movência: para a ciência, o quilograma deve ser padronizado na quitanda da esquina, na farmácia e, quiçá, na balança de precisão do tráfico de drogas desde que parta da ciência, e somente dela, essa definição. Os sentidos de erro e acerto em relação à medição da massa sofrerão deslocamentos na linha do fio-do-discurso, ocupando novos espaços discursivos e condicionando os dizeres de outra forma. Depois de tudo, vê-se que nunca houve erro a priori no quilo, apenas atribuições a posteriori que, resultantes de embates políticos, demarcam os territórios discursivos sedentarizados e administrados pela ciência. O que queremos sublinhar, aqui, é que esse processo de seleção-foraclusão-denegação consiste justamente em uma interpretação a respeito de qual sentido deve ser o mais "coerente", no interior de determinada prática discursiva, para ser "colado" em determinado significante. Por isso, o trabalho de incluir um sentido e foracluir outros no processo de estabelecimento de axiomas científicos equivale ao trabalho de re-inscrição dos pressupostos fornecidos pelo interdiscurso no interior do fio-do-discurso "científico" (intradiscurso). É esta inversão dissimuladora que instaura as duas ilusões ou esquecimentos ideológicos no discurso praticado pela ciência: a ilusão de que não há outra forma de se significar quilo, como no exemplo; e a ilusão de que tais sentidos estabilizados pertencem somente à ciência. Como já visto, para Pêcheux as relações de articulação e substituição podem tomar duas formas: a de equivalência simétrica e a de implicação orientada (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 152). Usaremos o gráfico proposto pelo autor como método de análise da prática científica de estabelecimento de axiomas. O gráfico abaixo mostra como o eixo Sx, horizontal, funciona como eixo sintagmático que coloca palavras distintas em relação de encadeamento linear, formando um enunciado, proposição ou frase a partir de uma relação de implicação orientada. O gráfico mostra também que o eixo Sy, vertical, é o que atravessa o eixo Sx fornecendo sentidos outros que podem substituir, em alguma relação possível de significação, um termo do enunciado. 243 Figura 3: Eixo Sx e Sy: aplicação. Autor: João Flávio de Almeida O discurso transverso Sy é constituído pelos pressupostos fornecidos pelo interdiscurso, ou seja, diz respeito àquilo que atravessa o enunciado e propõe substituições metonímicas; e o processo de encadeamento, que se vê no eixo Sx, é o eixo sintagmático de arranjo das palavras, onde ocorre a ilusão de propriedade de posse do sentido. Neste funcionamento, é o Interdiscurso que articula o pré-construído do discurso-transverso na linearidade do eixo sintagmático, o fio do discurso designado por Pêcheux como Intradiscurso, constituindo enunciados a partir de um imenso jogo de substituições e articulações. Todavia, o processo de constituição de axiomas científicos se dá na forma de dissimulação do interdiscurso no interior do intradiscurso. Esse gesto de escolha de um sentido, de denegação e foraclusão, instaura certa ilusão de que é na prática discursiva científica que nascem tais efeitos de sentido e não da memória discursiva e de seus pressupostos. "Todo enunciado, toda sequência de enunciados é, pois, linguisticamente descritível como uma série (léxicosintaticamente determinada) de pontos de deriva possíveis, oferecendo lugar a interpretação" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 53). É por isso que o trabalho metodológico de descrição, calcado no estabelecimento de axiomas não passa, afinal, de um gesto interpretativo (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 54); e da mesma forma, todo o mecanismo computacional de Turing. Produzir e trabalhar algoritmos informáticos é, afinal, escolher um sentido axiomático e esquecer os demais: é interpretar apagando a interpretação. Tanto no método científico quanto no algoritmo computacional, o axioma é a sedentarização do encontro, da relação e da "pega" do sentido. Importa lembrar que todo sentido é fruto de uma relação (pega), ou melhor, é "constituído de elementos 244 independentes uns em relação aos outros, sendo cada um resultado de sua própria história, sem que exista qualquer relação orgânica ou teleológica entre essas diversas histórias" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 33). Logo, o que está em jogo é uma sedentarização instrumentalizada da "pega", e ainda mais: de sua manutenção. A errância, contingente e irremediável, emerge sempre como aquilo que produz erros no âmago do projeto científico de sedentarização do sentido. A errância nunca erra em fazer errar: ela resiste, persiste e insiste no jogo científico de foraclusão e denegação. Enquanto "pega" (relações, encontros), a produção de sentidos na ciência não passa de construção de realidades e evidências, nada tem a ver com desvelamentos, descobertas e esclarecimentos: "o todo que resulta da 'pega' do encontro não é anterior à 'pega' dos elementos, mas posterior, e por isso poderia não ter 'pegado' e, com mais razão ainda, 'o encontro poderia não ter acontecido'" (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 32). E enquanto "pega", o sentido está sujeito, antes e depois do encontro, à contingência do vazio da significação. O clinamen é um desvio infinitesimal, 'tão pequeno quanto possível', que acontece 'não se sabe onde, nem quando, nem como', e que faz um átomo 'desviar' de sua queda a pique no vazio e, quebrando de maneira quase nula o paralelismo em um ponto, provoca um encontro com o átomo vizinho e, de encontro em encontro, uma carambola [carambolage] e o nascimento de um mundo, ou seja, de um agregado de átomos que provoca, em cadeia, o primeiro desvio e o primeiro encontro (ALTHUSSER, 2005, p. 9). O axioma científico-computacional, fruto da sedentarização ideológica do sentido, é uma "pega" errante que pode deslizar, mover, vir a ser outra ou até deixar de ser. Se sedentarização é interpretação que apaga o próprio gesto interpretativo, a errância fundamental é aquilo que lança luz sobre os gestos políticos próprios à interpretação "secreta" da ciência. Quando os sentidos vagam e falham, ou seja, quando os acontecimentos discursivos esgarçam a costura dos sentidos imposta pela ciência, os especialistas se colocam a tecer novas evidências e novas suturas, entesando e enrijando as linhas discursivas que se afrouxam e revelam falhas. Nestes termos, a prática discursiva funciona, nas palavras de Pêcheux, no batimento entre necessidade causal (a sedentarização instrumental do sentido) e contingência casual (a errância que faz movência em uma dada estrutura). Toda descrição é interpretação, e como tal, errante. 245 4.1.3 ESCUTAR OS RESTOS E OS ERROS: DEPOR OS MUROS A terceira e última linha que pretendemos descosturar no projeto iluminista de sedentarização dos sentidos é aquela que exclui, para fora da costura, os erros e os restos da significação. Como visto, a epistemologia clássica (agente retórica de regulação do saber científico) e a lógica (ferramenta de estabilização do sentido) trabalham constituindo supostas unidades de significação que apagam os restos e os erros através da dissimulação da errância fundamental. Contudo, na epistemologia da errância os muros do saber devem ser quebrados, a potência do sentido até então "trancado" deve ser ampliada, e a movência dos novos encontros deve ser acolhida como novo paradigma: soltura, agitação e deslocamentos de sentido. Não se trata de pretender aqui que todo discurso seria como um aerólito miraculoso, independente das redes de memória e dos trajetos sociais nos quais ele irrompe, mas de sublinhar que, só por sua existência, todo discurso marca a possibilidade de uma desestruturação-reestruturação dessas redes e trajetos: todo discurso é o índice potencial de uma agitação nas filiações sócio históricas de identificação, na medida em que ele constitui ao mesmo tempo um efeito dessas filiações e um trabalho (mais ou menos consciente, deliberado, construído ou não, mas de todo modo atravessado pelas determinações inconscientes) de deslocamento no seu espaço: não há uma identificação plenamente bem sucedida, isto é, ligação sócio histórica que não seja afetada, de uma maneira ou de outra, por uma 'infelicidade' no sentido performativo do termo isto é, no caso, por um 'erro de pessoa', isto é, sobre o outro, objeto de identificação (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 56). A proposta de uma epistemologia da errância ganha contornos outros quando olhamos para o cenário computacional contemporâneo. No subtópico anterior aproximamos o 'método científico' ao 'algoritmo' de Alan Turing na intenção de lançar luz sobre uma importante guinada na produção de saberes: a codificação axiomática. Nas sociedades pós-industriais a prática de descrição científica começa gradualmente a trocar de mãos: ela sai do domínio do cientista humano e recai no domínio do cálculo feito pelo computador. Em termos de sedentarização e errância, isso quer dizer que os axiomas lógicos se tornam ainda mais eficientes em produzir "evidências" que estabilizam a movência contingente dos sentidos. Mas quais são as consequências dessa sedentarização sobre a sociedade e sobre o sujeito? O que será que estamos perdendo? 246 Se o saber científico é uma prática discursiva, é patente que as máquinas informacionais afetem a produção e a circulação desse discurso. Nesta condição de produção, todo conhecimento deve se tornar estável o suficiente para que possa ser computado, administrado e posto em circulação através de redes de computadores. A própria natureza do saber não permanece intacta: agora ele precisa ser traduzido em quantidades de bits. Neste sentido, novos procedimentos de foraclusão e denegação são imputados; os axiomas dos inputs agora são obrigatoriamente convertidos em códigos binários, e os erros (e acertos) nos outputs também adquirem natureza estritamente matemática. Com o predomínio do saber informatizado, a sedentarização dos sentidos adquire caracteres jamais vistos, e a instrumentalização dos axiomas computacionais passam a ser a nova epistemologia, ou seja, o método que baliza a aceitação e a refutação de inputs e outputs46 na produção e circulação de saberes. Isso significa que não só a memória pode agora ser terceirizada em bancos de dados, mas também o processamento de conhecimentos. Os aparelhos computacionais são capazes de processar e organizar informações milhares de vezes mais rápido que o cérebro humano, e por usarem linguagens "assépticas" (axiomas estabilizados logicamente), supostamente erram menos que os humanos. Por isso supostamente se torna mais seguro deixar que os computadores pensem por nós. Contudo, outro esforço retórico se torna essencial: para que os códigos matemáticos possam fazer sentido para a vida contemporânea, faz-se necessário converter toda a realidade discursiva em um mundo codificado por axiomas. Dito de outra forma, a própria realidade discursiva fornecida pelas Formações Discursivas deve ser adaptada ao paradigma lógico-matemático. Para que a humanidade possa terceirizar sua cognição à máquina, faz-se preciso recobrir o mundo sensível com uma nova roupagem discursiva capaz de ser computada em axiomas logicamente estabilizados. Diversas inversões estão em jogo, neste momento. Se antes o papel da retórica estava a encargo da filosofia (epistemologia, lógica, teoria do conhecimento etc.), agora a filosofia recai em desuso, sem capacidade de legitimar essa nova realidade discursiva matematicamente estabilizada. O papel da retórica, agora, recai sobre a própria ciência que, capaz de encontrar seus próprios caminhos de circulação (mídia em geral, jornalismo científico, revistas especializadas etc.) consegue impor de forma "incontestável" suas 46 Input: entrada de dados em um sistema. Output: saída de dados processados pelo mesmo sistema. 247 prescrições à produção de conhecimentos. E finalmente, o processamento dos dados, que antes era labor do cientista que recolhia dados empíricos do mundo, fazia experimentos e produzia artigos -, agora é trabalho da máquina computacional. Nestes termos, o saber (saber fazer, saber decidir, saber julgar) é vertido em mero conhecimento (técnica de verificação). Neste novo funcionamento discursivo, o saber sobre a realidade é acompanhado de uma transformação da própria realidade discursiva para que a tecnociência possa supostamente dar conta dela. O funcionamento da Ideologia em geral como interpelação dos indivíduos em sujeitos (e, especificamente, em sujeitos de seu discurso) se realiza através do complexo das formações ideológicas (e, especificamente, através do interdiscurso intrincado nesse complexo) e fornece 'a cada sujeito' sua 'realidade', enquanto sistema de evidências e de significações percebidas aceitas experimentadas (PÊCHEUX, 2009, p. 149). O processo de interpelação é, no limite, o processo de fornecimento de realidade percebida e experimentada e isso implica assumir que nem mesmo as percepções biológicas escapam de certos condicionamentos discursivos. Logo, é provável que uma guinada matemática nas linguagens possa afetar a própria natureza da realidade discursiva e do sujeito por ela assujeitado. Não se trata, aqui, de desqualificar a prática científica. Todos usufruem de suas benesses quando se toma um remédio para dor aguda, quando se viaja a 900 km/h a cerca de 11 km de altitude, ou quando se retira o salário em um caixa eletrônico. Tudo isso é tecnociência, e em todos estes casos o gesto de foraclusão e denegação está funcionando: ninguém quereria uma errância nos sentidos quando o piloto fosse pousar o avião. Contudo a realidade cada vez mais dependente da tecnociência faz parecer que todos os funcionamentos discursivos na contemporaneidade são tão submissos ao axioma quanto o voo de um avião. A escada rolante do shopping, o vidro automático do automóvel, a cafeteira elétrica... se tornam, então, eloquentes porta vozes do aperfeiçoamento da língua: a gravidade do erro se torna a própria paralização da cotidianidade. A matematização da realidade discursiva contemporânea tem sido cada vez mais vertida em códigos cujos axiomas parecem se tornar imprescindíveis à totalidade das práticas humanas. Essa tecno-dependência, afinal, faz do axioma (linguagem matemática supostamente perfeita) uma necessidade indispensável, e consequentemente a movência errante dos sentidos se torna cada vez mais diminuída e domesticada. 248 Ora, a transformação discursiva da realidade em códigos abre espaço para uma nova prática discursiva na tecnociência: a forma de valor de troca (comércio) de saberes. Segundo Lyotard (2015, p. 56): "o saber é e será produzido para ser vendido, e ele é e será consumido para ser valorizado numa nova produção: nos dois casos, para ser trocado. Ele deixa de ser para si mesmo seu próprio fim; perde seu valor de uso". Não é novidade que o conhecimento se tornou a principal força de produção nas últimas décadas, motivo de disputas entre corporações e instituições. O ideal iluminista se perde cada vez mais na memória discursiva; o "ousa saber", de Kant, é saturado por novos pressupostos bem menos românticos47. Se nos séculos XVII e XVIII erro e acerto surgiam em termos de verdadeiro e falso, ou em termos de justo e injusto, ele passa agora a aparecer em termos de eficácia e ineficácia em relação à produção de patentes e artigos científicos (LYOTARD, 2015, p. 20). A tecnociência que invadiu o mundo ocidental por conta da segunda guerra, somada à recuperação do capitalismo na mesma época, impuseram mudanças aos funcionamentos dos AREs e AIEs: a sedentarização, então, ganha novos contornos. Defendemos esta hipótese assumindo o aumento da força dos dizeres corporativos e financeiros dentro de outros espaços discursivos, como o político e o jurídico. Além da filosofia, agora é o estado que também perde o poder de regular o conhecimento. O poder de interpretação e sedentarização dos axiomas logicamente estabilizados fica nas mãos de corporações que buscam exclusivamente o lucro. Quando a riqueza passa a ser medida em informações e patentes, é a tecnociência que passa a regular os sentidos produzidos pelo estado, ou melhor, são as corporações que passam a sedentarizar e administrar os sentidos. O conhecimento, assim, deixa de ter valor de uso de transformação das realidades desfavorecidas, ou mesmo valor de verdade que liberta de crendices e dogmas, e passa a ter meramente valor de comércio; as promessas humanistas do iluminismo dão agora lugar às promessas de enriquecimento e de lucro. É assim que o ethos do cientista (MERTON, 1970) se verte em competição e embates políticos (LATOUR, 2000). No entanto, importa ressaltar e descrever minimamente o processo retórico de adaptação e legitimação da realidade discursiva calcada na codificação matemática, o que pode nos ajudar a observar certas variações no funcionamento dos AREs e AIEs. Uma importante transformação no funcionamento discursivo contemporâneo diz respeito ao 47 Kant, representante dos filósofos românticos, defendia a ciência como prática libertária (DURANT, 1996). 249 modelo teórico e epistemológico que fundamenta a prática tecnocientífica. "O modelo teórico e mesmo material não é mais o organismo vivo; ele é fornecido pela cibernética que lhe multiplica as aplicações durante e ao final da Segunda Guerra Mundial" (LYOTARD, 2015, p. 20). Já vimos anteriormente que o advento e a propagação da informática na ciência, causa da transformação de todos os inputs e outputs metodológicos em axiomas matemáticos, é causa também de transformações na realidade fornecida pelo discurso científico48. O imperativo computacional, que impõe novas prescrições metodológicas, constrange e conforma todos os dados científicos em dados computacionais, de forma que a maioria dos enunciados científicos passam a "relatar" (interpretar) uma realidade puramente matemática. A realidade discursiva se torna codificável, armazenável e instrumentalizável: ela passa a ter funcionamentos calcados no axioma, na sedentarização radical do sentido logicamente estabilizado. Daí a credibilidade da ciência: possuindo os meios de instaurar e impor sua própria realidade discursiva sobre as demais, possui também os meios de administrar todas as evidências, todas as "provas" científicas. Na velha cidade da língua, o bairro da ciência descobriu que não precisava se emancipar ou se desligar do restante da cidade: ela tomou para si todas as ruas, todas as praças, refez as leis, os hábitos e alterou toda a arquitetura. Os aparelhos ideológicos de estado não são mais as igrejas e a família, são as redes sociais e os algoritmos do Google; e os aparelhos repressivos do estado agora são as empresas de cartões de crédito, os algoritmos de rastreamento do histórico de navegação, as câmeras de segurança nas ruas e as câmeras de auto exposição nos dispositivos comunicacionais móveis. Ainda é o estado que fornece documentos, mas agora são as corporações financeiras que os regulam, ao passo que é nas redes sociais que ocorrem os principais movimentos de interpelação dos indivíduos em sujeitos. Dito de outra forma, passamos por uma mudança sistemática nas funções dos estados: a gestão jurídica e política dos "cidadãos" são retiradas das mãos de administradores (juízes, deputados etc.) e são entregues aos cuidados de algoritmos axiomáticos e autômatos. Os decisores deixam de ser os políticos e juízes tradicionais e passam a ser os programadores pagos pelas grandes corporações. Ainda que não seja plenamente controlável (algo sempre erra), os efeitos desta nova sedentarização não são menos repressores. Estamos falando, neste sentido, na constituição 48 Sempre é importante lembrar que não existe discurso científico puro (PÊCHEUX, 2009). 250 de uma realidade discursiva calcada em linguagens artificiais: as linguagens de programação. Uma língua artificial de programação é calcada em axiomas que permitem métodos padronizados de instruções para uma máquina computacional. Através destas linguagens artificiais é possível ao programador transmitir regras sintáticas e semânticas ao computador, tarefa executada através de programas que calculam com precisão os dados coletados (inputs) e transformados em resultados precisos (outputs). Mas isso não é tudo. Uma das principais premissas da linguagem de programação é a produtividade, a facilidade e a simplicidade. No universo das linguagens artificiais existem diversas línguas, com sintaxes e semânticas específicas: PHP, Java, C++, Delphi, SQL e muitas outras (LOPES; GARCIA, 2010). E para que o conhecimento científico possa ser produzido e circulado por estas linguagens axiomáticas, faz-se preciso lançar sobre a realidade discursiva um recobrimento logicamente estabilizado, matematizado, para que os algoritmos possam captar, calcular e entregar resultados automaticamente. As realidades discursivas fornecidas pelas FDs se tornam, por isso, cada vez mais axiomáticas, cada vez mais reduzidas, estáveis e administráveis. Por fim, o gesto sedentarizador do sentido tecnocientífico pode ser visto em dois momentos distintos e concomitantes: no apagamento daquilo que não cabe no axioma, ou melhor, de seus restos (foraclusão), bem como no gesto de fazer crer – colar e naturalizar que o sentido selecionado é o único válido e legítimo para ocupar aquele espaço na significação (denegação). Este processo de sedentarização computacional possui ainda outras nuances de difícil compreensão. Os algoritmos do Google, por exemplo, prometem entregar resultados de buscas condizentes com os hábitos de consumo de informação de cada sujeito. Ou seja, no exato momento em que este algoritmo trabalha uma informação particularizada e personalizada, ele instaura certa ilusão de coerência e pertinência totalmente calcada no estabelecimento de axiomas escolhidos por empresas de cunho financeiro. Trata-se, portanto, de uma sedentarização calcada na ilusão de individualização e coerência. Neste cenário computacional e tecnocientífico, deve-se assumir que diferentes FDs sofrem efeitos discursivos de distintas corporações capitalistas, que privilegiam certos sentidos em detrimentos de outros, mas que também interrompem certos sentidos em seus axiomas computacionais. Para que os algoritmos possam "fazer ciência", as FDs precisam fornecer sentidos logicamente estabilizados: não é possível que Deus exista e não exista ao mesmo tempo, que o aborto seja bom e ruim concomitantemente, ou que as drogas façam bem e mal à saúde. Não 251 é possível o operador lógico "e" nesta nova conformação discursiva, impõe-se o "ou": ou Deus existe ou não existe; ou aborto é aceito ou não é; é preciso estabelecer um único significado para um determinado significante, é preciso estabilizar suas movências e descartar os restos, é preciso consenso e unidade para que a realidade discursiva possa ser axiomática e computável pela tecnociência. Ou seja, não só a natureza da ciência é outra, mas é outra também a natureza da realidade descrita (interpretada) pela ciência. Por mais fragmentadas que sejam as certezas, elas precisam ser inequívocas e estáveis para serem transformadas em dados, gráficos e estatísticas. O saber tecnocientífico contemporâneo impõe, portanto, um único jogo de linguagem: o denotativo. Supostamente sua eficácia capitalista é maior, já que nele a instrumentalização do erro e do acerto são mais evidentes. O enunciado denotativo, como vimos, é calcado na foraclusão/denegação axiomática, ou seja, na seleção de "um" sentido e no apagamento dos restos. E é justamente por isso que ele se torna o jogo de linguagem perfeito para a tecnociência computacional. Os demais jogos de linguagem calcados na conotação, como o poético, o lírico, o dramático etc., perdem importância neste cenário (mesmo nas artes vê-se uma grande guinada realista (DOWNING, 2015) em detrimento das fantasias conceituais). Enquanto poetas, romancistas, ensaístas e especuladores de toda ordem não se preocupam com a legitimação de seus enunciados como "verdades eficazes", a tecnociência computacional por outro lado trabalha, a todo momento, a eficácia e a validade de seus enunciados. E neste caso, o sentido mais válido e eficaz é o mais estabilizado logicamente. A tecnociência conseguiu impor não só seu método de descrição (interpretação) da realidade, mas recompôs também a própria realidade discursiva a ser descrita pela ciência. Na velha cidade da língua, a ciência conseguiu impor as próprias leis ao embate que ela disputa com os demais saberes, logo, diante de uma determinada fragilidade basta-lhe que reescreva as leis do jogo (LYOTARD, 2015, p. 54). E como a tecnociência se torna proprietária do jogo que ela disputa com outras formas de saber, ela pode administrar as evidências e as provas a respeito de tais evidências. Este efeito discursivo de administração das provas pode ser visto no "progresso" técnico da ciência que levou o empirismo a níveis não-humanos, ou seja, já não são olhos, mãos e ouvidos humanos que administram as provas, mas sofisticados e dispendiosos aparelhos técnicos usados como "extensões" aprimoradas do corpo humano; já não é também o cérebro humano que processa os dados destes experimentos, são colossais computadores quânticos. Assim, não se pode jogar o atual jogo da "verdade" e da "eficácia" 252 dos enunciados sem acesso a grandes montantes de capital financeiro e sem conhecimentos altamente especializados, impossíveis a um pequeno grupo de sujeitos. Os jogos de "verdade" e "eficácia" são, portanto, jogados apenas por grandes corporações que podem arcar com altos investimentos. O embate pelo sentido se tornou, portanto, embate entre corporações, e não mais entre religiões, filosofias, estados e direitos. Diante destes investimentos astronômicos, não se poderia esperar outra coisa além da dinâmica da mais-valia. Incontáveis corporações se colocam em embate pela posse de um determinado sentido, mas não só isso: elas lutam também pela eficácia e mais-valia dos sentidos que possuem. Não se paga altíssimos salários a cientistas, técnicos e especialistas para "saber a verdade", mas para aumentar o poder de domínio sobre os sentidos, para lucrar com eles. E na dinâmica da mais-valia, o valor de um sentido é medido pela eficácia, cujo arquétipo perfeito é o saber que consegue ao mesmo tempo convencer como "verdade" e render lucros. É dessa forma que o poder legitima a tecnociência e o direito por sua eficiência lucrativa; é dessa forma que a filosofia perde seu espaço epistemológico, e que a sociologia deixa de ser pertinente na produção de enunciados sobre a realidade: só as corporações tecnocientíficas possuem legitimidade para produzir evidências, interpretar, sedentarizar e administrar os sentidos. Consequentemente, agora é a tecnociência que legitima governos, e não o contrário; é a capacidade de uma nação em produzir patentes que mede sua eficácia em relação a outras nações; é na tecnociência que estão os principais investimentos das nações "desenvolvidas"; é através da eficácia tecnocientífica, finalmente, que uma determinada nação se impõe financeiramente, militarmente e politicamente sobre as demais. A realidade contemporânea se torna, assim, discursivamente, materialmente e sensivelmente sedentarizada por axiomas logicamente estabilizados. Na antiguidade os objetos materiais que cercavam a humanidade eram criados a partir de conexões entre universo, matéria, gesto construtor e potência de vida. Eram gestos criativos moventes: neles os sentidos se moviam com certa liberdade por definições mais ou menos sólidas, feitas justamente para deslizar na história e atuar de diferentes formas no mundo e nos sujeitos: a matéria era, então, transbordamento de forças (LIER, 1972, p. 135). Já na idade média o gesto de construção de objetos se subordina ao discurso de forma diferente. Neste momento surgem artesãos especialistas que eram pagos para construir coisas. O artesão apenas faz, não transborda: estanca. Já ali o gesto construtor passa a ser condicionado discursivamente como gesto instrumental que se submente à uma denominação exata de cada parte constituinte do 253 objeto final. Cada fragmento do objeto se torna um substantivo comum, devidamente nomeado, axiomático. Para cada ação há também um verbo que a nomeia, explica e especializa. As qualidades finais do objeto agora se tornam adjetivos mensuráveis, sobre os quais o valor de comércio repousará. "Assim as coisas mantêm, dentro e fora de si mesmas, relações bastante precisas e bastante constantes para sugerir um sistema de referência firme" (LIER, 1972, p. 137). Contudo, é no objeto contemporâneo que se vê o trabalho de sedentarização discursiva sobre os objetos com um pouco mais de clareza. Agora os objetos são antecedidos por patentes escritas em forma de gráficos que indicam milhares de componentes que sequer recebem nomes, apenas códigos; a origem destas pequenas partes também se torna desconhecida, e talvez desnecessária. O fato é que cada uma delas é construída a partir de outras patentes, com outros gráficos matemáticos, com outros axiomas. Seus sentidos não são claros o funcionamento de um transistor AF115, por exemplo, está ao alcance da interpretação de poucos. A junção destas partes é também feita por máquinas orientadas por patentes, gráficos e axiomas -, em um processo de encadeamento lógico e causal supostamente asséptico de erros, com execução "rigorosamente" administrada, eficaz e inequívoca. Assim são feitos os azulejos de uma parede, os automóveis que lotam as avenidas e os smartphones usados a todo momento. Já não existem mais objetos, apenas produtos eficazes, ávidos por serem vendidos (LIER, 1972, p. 149). E é de se supor que o sujeito que participa da criação deste produto, bem como aquele que o consome, sejam assujeitados de uma forma um pouco diferente, já que os objetos que na antiguidade eram aberturas para o mundo agora se tornam confinamentos em sistemas discursivos logicamente estabilizados. Calcados nestas premissas, a maioria dos governos ocidentais aplicam projetos pedagógicos fundamentados na técnica, na eficácia e na estabilização lógica dos sentidos, afinal, o saber axiomático está na origem da produção de bens de consumo. Não é preciso dizer que desde o letramento inicial, passando pelas etapas básicas, médias e superiores, a pedagogia ocidental se converteu em uma grande máquina de assujeitamento e estabilização de sentidos. Nossa hipótese é que este trabalho discursivo é efeito de um grande projeto de estabilização lógica dos sentidos, calcado na "eficácia" e no "progresso", ou melhor, calcados na instrumentalização política do "erro" e do "acerto". As nações precisam de mão de obra especializada, de cientistas que produzam inovações e de especialistas que coloquem um determinado estado em alto grau de competitividade. O sujeito contemporâneo se torna, finalmente, portador de um tipo muito específico de mercadoria: o conhecimento 254 tecnocientífico. Sua própria competitividade se resume à qualidade dos conhecimentos que possui: quanto mais eficazes os saberes de que dispõe, maior o valor pago pela aquisição deste sujeito. A educação capitalista ocidental se torna, no final das contas, uma ferramenta de assujeitamento e sedentarização de "cidadãos para a eficácia", para a produção e para a mais valia. A sedentarização administrativa dos sentidos alcança assim seu ápice: a realidade discursiva apequenada do sujeito, reduzida a axiomas, se torna ilusão de realidade asséptica, estabilizada, limitada, clara e eficiente. A produção e a circulação de saberes pela informática, fundamentada na premissa de axiomas logicamente estabilizados, implica a própria realidade discursiva em uma digressão matemática. "Digressão" é ruptura na continuidade de um determinado sintagma com uma mudança intencional de tema, que pode ou não ser incorporada ao sentido total do enunciado. Vejamos um exemplo. Em setembro de 2018 o furacão Florence foi noticiado por diversos veículos de comunicação como um dos mais avassaladores da história recente dos Estados Unidos da América. Os efeitos de um tornado sobre todo um estado, no caso, a Carolina do Sul, deve produzir uma miríade incalculável de sentidos e dizeres de forma errante e contingente. Um acontecimento discursivo dessa magnitude, que atinge de forma intensa milhares de sujeitos, possivelmente faz emergir todos os sentidos possíveis para medo, morte, perda, luto, dor, tensão, desespero etc. Todavia o furacão Florence foi noticiado pelo canal noticias.r7.com da seguinte forma: "Furacão Florence mata 3,4 milhões de frangos e perus nos EUA. Os prejuízos causados pelo Florence podem atingir entre US$ 17 e 22 bilhões em todo o país. Furacão é um dos 10 mais caros de todos os tempos" (SANZ, 2018). Ora, de toda miríade de sentidos matematicamente incalculáveis, os algoritmos captam, processam e devolvem somente aquilo que pode ser quantificado em axiomas. Essa digressão matemática pode parecer um desvio inadequado, se não de mal gosto; no entanto, aos olhos da tecnociência ela é "tudo", justamente por que é axioma: sedentarização do sentido. Existem ainda outros axiomas "inequívocos" em torno deste acontecimento: o furacão Florence, que era de categoria F4 com ventos de 220 km/h -, decresceu para a categoria F1 com ventos de até 50 km/h. Deixou ainda 32 mortos e cerca de 800 mil pessoas sem energia elétrica (SANZ, 2018). Por algum motivo os jornais não fizeram circular sentidos de dor, desespero e tensão; apenas números gerados por sistemas automáticos de coleta de dados axiomáticos. Ora, o que queremos sublinhar nesta proposta de epistemologia da errância, sobretudo, são os efeitos do prejuízo semântico causado por aquilo que chamamos aqui de 255 epistemologia da sedentarização, a prática ideológica e discursiva de estabilização, apoucamento e administração de sentidos. Os novos funcionamentos dos AREs e dos AIEs impõem novos critérios de cidadania, novos valores e até mesmo novos fundamentos à sobrevivência. O sujeito sedentarizado como axioma pelo discurso tecnocientífico se torna sujeito à eficácia e à produtividade, que deixam então de ser meros assujeitamentos e passam a ser critérios de sobrevivência. Para o modelo informático de assujeitamento, calcado na performance do axioma computacional, importa a potência e a eficiência do sentido escolhido em conseguir foracluir os demais. Logo, não se faz mais necessário qualquer legitimação proveniente de outros jogos de linguagem, advindos por exemplo da filosofia, da sociologia ou outros. A ciência conseguiu impor as próprias regras ao jogo discursivo social contemporâneo: a legitimação de seus enunciados agora é efetuada pela eficácia de seus efeitos; eficácia que, por sua vez, também é medida em forma de axiomas computacionais administrados pela própria ciência. Esta nova realidade discursiva, materializada em uma língua matematizada por/para o algoritmo computacional, impõe ao sujeito uma eficácia que nada tem a ver com a consistência inclemente do real. A eficácia se torna um direito a ser alcançado, uma metalinguagem que se sustenta no ar puxando-se a si mesma pelo cabelo (efeito Münchhausen), capaz de afastar cada vez mais o sujeito contemporâneo da realidade material. "Quanto à informatização das sociedades [...], ela pode tornar-se o instrumento 'sonhado' de controle e de regulamentação do sistema do mercado, abrangendo até o próprio saber, e exclusivamente regido pelo princípio de desempenho" (LYOTARD, 2015, p. 119). A premissa iluminista, que prescrevia o remédio do saber como tratamento à escuridão da menoridade intelectual, legitimava filosofia, matemática e ciência como partes da formação espiritual do sujeito moderno até que este alcançasse condição de cidadão livre e participante (KANT, 1985). Nestes termos, o saber possuía valor de uso, substituído, então, por um mero valor de troca, de comércio, de eficiência, pautado por altos investimentos, por práticas discursivas altamente especializadas, pela instauração de axiomas computacionais e pela medição perene do desempenho. Todavia a errância é estrutural, fundamental e incontornável. Não há erro nem acerto na língua, o que nos permite dizer que não há erro e acerto no saber: só errância, movência e contingência. A errância é aquilo que insiste em fazer furo na ilusão de totalidade no saber tecnocientífico, é aquilo que esgarça a sutura alinhavada pela evidência: a costura esgarça, 256 descostura, rasga, se move e falha. A errância é a causa contingente da falha no ritual de assujeitamento. Mas é justamente por que erra (vaga e falha) que o ritual de estabilização lógico-retórico ainda opera sobre o sentido uma sedentarização que se especializa cada vez mais. Propomos, portanto, inverter o ponto de partida e questionar a prática discursiva matematizada por outra via: não existiria, na eficácia discursiva da tecnociência, um fracasso secreto? O que será que perdemos com a sedentarização dos sentidos nesta realidade discursiva matematizada pela tecnociência? Quais são os efeitos dessa sedentarização sobre o sujeito? Não se trata, aqui, de pensar esses efeitos em termos de um novo tipo de "mal-estar na civilização" (FREUD, 1974). Tem que ver, sim, com a amplitude (redução) da realidade discursiva, com privação, diminuição e administração de sentidos e sujeitos. Tem que ver apenas com os efeitos ideológicos de uma sedentarização colonialista, imperialista e axiomática trabalhada pela prática discursiva da tecnociência contemporânea. Errância, aqui, não é apenas aquilo que impede a totalização estável dos saberes tecnocientíficos. Ela pode ser toda uma forma diferente de se habitar a língua. Como já visto, errância e sedentarização tem que ver com a forma com que sentido e sujeito habitam a língua. Sedentarização tem que ver com estabilização da movência, com apropriação, colonização e administração. Quando o sedentário institui uma propriedade, circunscrevendo uma divisa, faz de si mesmo um estrangeiro daquilo que está para fora de suas fronteiras: esta foraclusão é, em alguma medida, uma espécie de autopunição. O problema é que os territórios discursivos dos sedentários não são apenas menores que os dos errantes, são repetíveis, da ordem do "mesmo". Enquanto o errante se move por sentidos diferentes que não se repetem, o sedentário percorre muitos quilômetros discursivos ao redor de uma posse, trabalhando, moldando, corrigindo e afastando erros e vigiando de invasores. Se por um lado a administração dos sentidos garante ao sedentário o provimento diário de prescrições e autorizações, por outro ela impõe um cardápio extremamente limitado de significações. Assim, enquanto a movência contingente do errante lhe proporciona uma multiplicidade incontável de sentidos, experiências e sensações, a sedentarização tecnocientífica minora e extingue possibilidades. Em prol de uma suposta segurança maior, ilusória, se dispõem a uma existência menor. Além de recortados, os espaços discursivos dos sedentários são também mais artificiais, calcados em línguas lógico-formais antinaturais como as linguagens de programação. Enquanto os errantes não causam praticamente nenhuma mudança nos 257 sentidos apenas perambulam por eles -, os sedentários constroem sistemas discursivos artificiais, transformando, administrando, derrubando e descartando os sentidos que não interessam. A sedentarização axiomática foraclui restos para fora de suas divisas, limites assegurados por altos muros e pontos de vigia. É essa transformação do sentido que faz com que o sedentário tenha a ilusão de que determinada palavra lhe pertença. Sedentarização é posse, errância é partilha. Sedentarização é conquista, errância é repouso. Sedentarização é domínio, errância é deixar ir. Sedentarização é apoucamento, errância é alargamento: na sedentarização o erro é instaurado para ser expurgado, mas a própria errância está para além do erro e do acerto. Segundo diversos historiadores, a sedentarização do Homo Sapiens proporcionada pela revolução agrícola foi a maior armadilha da história, embora se dissimule em forma de benesses, proteção e progresso (HARARI, 2017). Com a passagem do sujeito natural e biológico para o sujeito simbólico, discursivo, é possível que estejamos diante da segunda grande armadilha da história: a sedentarização dos sentidos e dos sujeitos pelo discurso axiomático da tecnociência. Poderíamos sublinhar que o pastor da igreja também sedentariza sentidos e sujeitos em sua igreja, bem como o político, o guru, a propaganda da Nike e o professor na escola infantil. Mas em todos esses casos a errância se mostra mais patente, e suas movências produzem frequentemente efeitos de rupturas, contestações e resistências. A Bíblia está ao alcance dos fiéis, assim como a constituição e o livro de filosofia. Os enunciados tecnocientíficos, por outro lado, são produzidos a partir de maquinários e especializações inalcançáveis aos sujeitos leigos. E assim, uma profusão de axiomas logicamente estabilizados parecem fazer do discurso científico um monólito incontestável, coerente e verdadeiro. A segunda vinda de Jesus parece demorar demais, assim como as promessas da filosofia, da sociologia e das ciências ditas "humanas" parecem não produzir efeitos; a educação parece não livrar nem os países com alto desenvolvimento humano de certos radicalismos, e a política mundial caminha em largos passos para o declínio. Todos esses saberes parecem produzir cada vez menos efeitos. Mas quem haveria de contestar os efeitos dos axiomas que fundamentam o chuveiro elétrico, o televisor de plasma, o carro elétrico, os edifícios de 800 metros de altura ou a bomba de hidrogênio? E depois do milagre da cura de doenças complexas, quem haveria de contestar a veracidade dos efusivos enunciados advindos da astronomia, da nanotecnologia, da física, da química, da agronomia etc. 258 Na sedentarização as transformações são gradativas, aparentemente lentas, e por isso passam desapercebidas. Existe nela um ciclo vicioso secreto, onde falhas no ritual acabam por implicar o sujeito em nova sedentarização justamente por que há, no sentido e no sujeito, erros a serem corrigidos. O que está em jogo, aqui, é a sedentarização de sujeitos como fiéis e eficientes operários, instrumentalizados pela mais-valia dos sentidos tecnocientíficos. Produz-se, agora, não mais a sedentarização iluminista que prometia uma liberdade asséptica e uma ordem insípida. A sedentarização tecnocientífica capitalista é de outra ordem: ela é repleta de desejos e anseios, ela sedentariza pela eficiência e pela ambição em detrimento da ordem e da liberdade. Esperamos, nesta tese, ter lançado luz sobre o ponto mais frágil da ciência, a causa inevitável de sua "imperfeição": a linguagem e as línguas artificiais ou não -, que fundamentam, errantes e contingentes, a prática científica. Mas isso não é tudo: se à tecnociência interessa uma língua perfeita e sem erros, ela terá que passar pelo processo político e histórico de estabelecimento de axiomas. Seria possível uma forma "outra" de habitar a velha cidade da língua? Seria possível certa produção e circulação de saberes "outros", com outras premissas e outras posturas diante da significação? Se sedentarização é fixação, errância é movência contingente. Errância é encontro passageiro, sem posse: simples fruição, sem restrição ou prescrição; é ver e viver sentidos outros, imprevisíveis, ignorados e desconhecidos; é perambular, deparar-se com profusão de sentidos: encontrar e partir. Nossa proposta de epistemologia da errância se funda justamente nesta movência da língua e do discurso, na tomada da epistemologia e da ciência como práticas discursivas, interpretativas, e sobretudo franqueadas aos restos e aos erros. Isso significa uma produção de conhecimentos que, ao invés de foracluir, se coloca apenas a fruir. Significa, nas palavras de Pêcheux, vagabundear pelo "ordinário das massas" (PÊCHEUX, 2008, p. 48); o que implica se colocar na escuta dos sentidos que pulsam na hiância intermediária que reside entre o saber tecnocientífico e o senso comum. Isso implica a Análise do Discurso não como campo epistemológico que se coloca a fornecer interpretações apagando os restos, como os especialistas; ela deve, sim, emergir como prática errante que lança luz sobre os sentidos outros, justamente aqueles descartados e silenciados pelo axioma computacional da tecnociência. O objetivo da epistemologia da errância é, por isso, produzir movências, descosturar evidências e contestar as verdades tecnocientíficas pela única brecha que nos é possível: a 259 fissura da língua, que a faz errante. Para produzir movências, o sujeito errante precisa, sobretudo, se colocar na escuta dos sentidos silenciados e apagados pelo método científico e pelo axioma. Ao fazer isso, o errante lança luz sobre os gestos políticos que fundamentaram a escolha que constituiu o axioma, além de desvelar os interesses e os proprietários de determinado sentido. Descosturar o axioma não é tarefa fácil, impossível se nos colocarmos a questionar seus enunciados pelas práticas científicas, caras, especializadas e inacessíveis. Mas quando o errante sublinha o resto e produz a partir dele efeitos outros, ele lança luz sobre o trabalho ideológico e político de sedentarização dos sentidos aquele que administra, diminui, instrumentaliza e lucra com o sujeito eficiente. A epistemologia da errância é, finalmente, a prática de escuta de sentidos outros, trabalhando na descostura das pegas e das evidências administradas pelo discurso dominante. Logo, seu objetivo não é produzir ordem e fornecer interpretações especializadas que estabilizam logicamente os sentidos; seu objetivo é produzir movências contingentes, alargar a realidade discursiva e as possibilidades dos sujeitos que habitam a língua de seus corpos, de seus objetos, de suas relações e de suas produções. Não há eficiência aqui, nem progresso, tampouco prescrições. Há apenas movência despreocupada, fruição e desejo. A epistemologia da errância se inclina a ouvir os erros, a acolhê-los e produzir, a partir deles, eros: efeitos de sentidos errantes, para além do erro e do acerto. A epistemologia da sedentarização é aquela que imputa o erro para que se justifique o trabalho da correção; a epistemologia da errância, por outro lado, é aquela que erra e faz errar. 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LOGOS & EPISTEME, VII, 1 (2016): 75-81 A FAILED TWIST TO AN OLD PROBLEM: A REPLY TO JOHN N. WILLIAMS Rodrigo BORGES ABSTRACT: John N. Williams argued that Peter Klein's defeasibility theory of knowledge excludes the possibility of one knowing that one has (first-order) a posteriori knowledge. He does that by way of adding a new twist to an objection Klein himself answered more than forty years ago. In this paper I argue that Williams' objection misses its target because of this new twist. KEYWORDS: defeasible reasoning, Peter Klein, second-order knowledge, John N. Williams This is a reply to John N. Williams' paper "Not Knowing You Know: A New Objection to the Defeasibility Theory of Knowledge."1 That paper argues that Peter Klein's defeasibility theory of knowledge excludes the possibility of one knowing that one has (fırst-order) a posteriori knowledge. Klein himself answered a version of this objection in "A Proposed Defınition of Propositional Knowledge."2 Williams' paper adds a new twist to the objection Klein answered more than forty years ago. I will argue that Williams' objection misses its target because of this new twist. 1. The Old Problem and the Old Solution When fully spelled out, Klein's analysis of knowledge comes down to this: (Defeasibility) S knows that α iff (1) α; (2) S believes that α; (3) S is justifıed in believing that α; (4) there is no truth, d, such that the conjunction of d and S's justifıcation, j, fails to justify S in believing that α.3 1 John N. Williams, "Not Knowing You Know: A New Objection to the Defeasibility Theory of Knowledge,"Analysis 75 (2015): 213-17. 2 Peter Klein, "A Proposed Defınition of Propositional Knowledge,"The Journal of Philosophy (1971): 471-82. 3 Since a truth may misleadingly suggest the falsehood of something one is justifıed in believing truly (as in the Grabit Case introduced in the literature by Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson, "Knowledge: Undefeated Justifıed True Belief," The Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969): 225-37. In that case the truth "Tom's mother said that Tom has an identical twin who is also in the library" misleadingly suggests that "Tom stole the book" is false.), Klein's view incorporates a distinction Rodrigo Borges 76 Towards the end of his paper,4 Klein considered the following objection to Defeasibility:5 If the defınition were accepted, it would never be true that S knows that she knows that x because she could never know that the fourth condition held. In reply to this objection Klein points out that, given Defeasibility, S knows that she knows x if and only if S knows "S knows that x" satisfıes each of the necessary conditions in Defeasibility. In other words, S knows that she knows that x if and only if each of the following statements is true: (I) S knows that x (II) S believes that S knows that x (III) S is justifıed in believing that she knows that x (IV) There is no truth, d, such that the conjunction of d and one's justifıcation, j, fails to justify S in believing that S knows that x. As Klein6 points out, because knowing entails that there is no defeater of one's justifıcation, S is justifıed in believing she knows that x only if she is justifıed in believing there is no defeater of her justifıcation for believing that x. In other words, III is true only if S is justifıed in believing there is no defeater of her justifıcation for believing x. In the same paper Klein argued that there is no reason to think that S is never justifıed in believing there is no defeater of the justifıcation she has for her fırst-order belief. This, in a nutshell, is Klein's solution to the old problem. Before we look at John Williams' new version of this objection, let me substantiate Klein's reply by between truths that actually defeat one's justifıcation (i.e., genuine defeaters) and truths that only appear to defeat one's justifıcation (i.e., misleading defeaters). Only the former truly defeats. In this paper I will refer only to genuine defeaters, but will drop the qualifıer "genuine" for ease of exposition. Nothing in my exchange with Williams depends on this issue. See Peter Klein, Certainty: A Refutation of Scepticism (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 148-166 for his treatment of the distinction. 4 Klein, "A Proposed Defınition," 480. 5 Even though I follow the argument in Klein, "A Proposed Definition" here, I have updated the nomenclature he used in that paper to a more current one, in line not only with Klein's later work (e.g., Klein, Certainty and Peter Klein, "Useful False Beliefs," in New Essays in Epistemology, ed. Quentin Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)) but also with more widespread use in current epistemology. The nomenclature in Klein, "A Proposed Definition" followed closely the nomenclature in Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge (Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 1966). Nothing of substance hinges on these changes. 6 Klein, "A Proposed Definition," 481. A Failed Twist to an Old Problem: A Reply to John N. Williams 77 providing a logically possible case in which I through IV are all true. This should establish that Defeasibility does not exclude second-order knowledge. As I look up I undergo the experience as of something being a computer screen in front o f me. I thereby form the belief that (p) there is a computer screen in front of me. Since this is a normal case of perceptual experience, I satisfy all conditions in Defeasibility, i.e., (I*) I know that p.7 Suppose further that I reflect on whether I know that p, realize that it is a normal case of perceptual experience, and come to believe I do know it. That is, the following is true: (II*) I believe I know that p. I* and II* entail that I have a true second-order belief. Now, according to Klein, S is justifıed in believing that α if and only if, given S's evidence, S's belief in α satisfıes some (perhaps contextually determined) threshold for knowledge-grade justifıcation.8 This means that I know I have knowledge-grade justifıcation for believing there is a computer screen in front of me only if I know that my justifıcation for believing that there is one is not defeated. But my total evidence bearing on the issue of whether I am justifıed in believing that p includes not only my knowledge that p, but also my knowledge that this is a normal case of perceptual experience, that I am not drugged or otherwise visually impaired, and so on. Thus, we may plausibly argue that, given my evidence, I am in a position to know that there is no defeater of my justifıcation for believing that p. Defeaters prevent one from knowing by preventing one's justifıcation from satisfying the (perhaps contextually determined) threshold for knowledge-grade justifıcation. They prevent S's justifıcation from satisfying this threshold by either undermining the support her evidence provides to her belief, or by making probable the denial of what she believes given her evidence.9 In the case at hand, there would be a 7 Although this is a case of non-inferential knowledge, the same could be said, mutatis mutandis, about inferential knowledge. 8 This is, roughly, what Klein means by his notion of confirmation, which is the centerpiece of his account of justifıcation. See Klein, Certainty, 61-7. 9 According to the nomenclature popularized by John Pollock, the fırst kind of defeater is an undermining defeater, while the latter kind of defeater is a rebutting defeater. See John Pollock, "Defeasible Reasoning," in Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and Its Foundation, eds. Jonathan Adler and Lance J. Rips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) for a recent statement of Pollock's view. Rodrigo Borges 78 defeater of my justifıcation for believing that there is a computer screen in front of me if, for example, I had taken a drug which causes hallucinations 80 percent of the time, or if ¬p were true. But, by assumption, nothing like that is true in this situation. In other words, both III* and IV* are true: (III*) I am justifıed in believing I know that p. (IV*) There is no truth, d, such that the conjunction of d and my justifıcation, j, for believing that I know that p fails to justify me in believing that I know that p. Claims I* through IV* all seem to be true in this case; so, it is plausible to think that I know that I know that p. The upshot is that Defeasibility does not make it impossible for there to be second-order knowledge. I conclude, then, that contrary to what Williams would have us believe it is logically possible for Klein' Defeasibility to be true and for one to know that one has fırst-order a posteriori knowledge. 2. Williams' New Twist Williams' new twist to the old objection comes in the form of a principle about concepts he fınds "plausible:" 10 (CLAIM) If the satisfaction of a condition at least partly constitutes an instance of a concept, then knowing that such an instance obtains requires you to know a priori that the condition is satisfıed.11 10 Williams, "Not Knowing," 215. 11 Although Williams does not explicitly formulate CLAIM as requiring a priori knowledge, one must read CLAIM in this way lest his argument against Klein be made invalid (see below), for Williams explicitly requires that S know a priori that she satisfıes the no-defeater condition in order for her to know that she knows. If I am wrong about this and Williams' argument is invalid, then so much the worse for his argument. More precisely, this is what I take to be Williams' argument: 1. If the satisfaction of a condition at least partly constitutes an instance of a concept, then knowing that such an instance obtains requires you to know a priori that the condition is satisfıed. [CLAIM/Assumption] 2. If the satisfaction of a condition at least partly constitutes an instance of knowledge, then knowing that such an instance obtains requires you to know a priori that the condition is satisfıed. [KLAIM/ from 1] 3. The satisfaction of the no-defeater condition partly constitutes instances of knowledge. [from Defeasibility] 4. For any instance k of knowledge, if you know that k obtains in case C, then you know a priori that the no-defeater condition is satisfıed in case C. [from 2 and 3] A Failed Twist to an Old Problem: A Reply to John N. Williams 79 To get a feel for how CLAIM works, consider Williams' own example:12 since x being three-sided partially constitutes x being a triangle, I know that x is a triangle only if I know that x is three-sided. Now, CLAIM and Defeasibility together entail that one knows that one knows α only if one knows a priori that one's justifıcation satisfıes the no-defeater condition. Williams then argues that, since one cannot know a priori that one's knowledge that α satisfıes the no-defeater condition, one cannot know that one knows that α. This is Williams' new twist to the old objection: it is not enough that S knows that her fırst-order knowledge satisfıes all conditions on knowledge, if she wants to know that she knows, she must know a priori that her fırst-order a posteriori knowledge satisfıes all the conditions on knowledge. Let us look more closely at CLAIM and at Williams' new twist. Our assessment will reveal that CLAIM and the instance of this principle Williams applies to knowledge are both false. Suppose that satisfying the condition (*) S can prove (some) mathematical theorems partially constitutes the concept mathematician. The assumption is plausible because we commonly think of mathematicians as people who can prove at least one mathematical theorem. Now, consider Timmy, who is a freshman in college and not particularly math-savvy. If Timmy were confronted with a proof of a mathematical theorem he would not be able to follow it; he would not even be able to grasp any of the concepts in the proof. Now, suppose Timmy's Calculus professor, a skillful mathematician, satisfıes condition (*), and that on the fırst day of class she tells Timmy and all the other students in Timmy's class that she can prove many mathematical theorems. Intuitively, Timmy knows his teacher is a mathematician even though this concept is partially constituted by condition (*) and his knowledge that the professor satisfıes (*) is a posteriori, for it is based on his experience as of something being his calculus professor telling him she satisfıes (*). But if that is the case, then CLAIM is false on account of the fact that Timmy knows the concept mathematician is instantiated by his professor, even though he does not know a priori t hat the professor satisfıes a condition that partially constitutes that concept. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that Timmy would know a posteriori that his professor is a mathematician even if she had not told the class that she satisfıes (*), 5. You cannot know a priori that the no-defeater condition is satisfıed in C. [Assumption] You do not know that k obtains in C. [from 4 and 5 by modus tollens] 12 Williams, "Not Knowing," 215. Rodrigo Borges 80 but told them only that she is a mathematician. Either version of the case counterexemplifıes CLAIM. Now, consider CLAIM as it applies to knowledge: (KLAIM) If the satisfaction of a condition at least partly constitutes an instance of knowledge, then knowing that such an instance obtains requires you to know a priori that the condition is satisfıed. KLAIM is false because of Williams' new twist. To see that, let us look at what happens when we apply KLAIM to the other traditional conditions on knowledge (i.e., the justifıcation, belief, and truth conditions). Take justifıcation and belief fırst. If KLAIM is true, then one cannot know a posteriori that those conditions are satisfıed. This is a bad result because our secondorder knowledge that those conditions are satisfıed is sometimes justifıed a posteriori. I am completely ignorant of quantum mechanics, but if Stephen Hawking were to tell me that q is a testable prediction of the theory, then, assuming this is a normal case of transmission of knowledge via testimony, I not only come to know that q is a testable prediction of quantum mechanics, but I am also in a position to know both that I believe that q and that I am justifıed in believing that q. The problem for KLAIM is that my justifıcation for believing that I believe that q with justifıcation is arguably a posteriori, for it includes the justifıcation that emerges from my undergoing a particular experience: if I had not experienced Stephen Hawking, the celebrated physicist, asserting to me that q, I would not have believed that q, nor would I have been justifıed in believing that q. Things get worse when we apply KLAIM to the truth condition on knowledge. Williams faces a dilemma: if KLAIM is true, then, necessarily, either there is no second-order knowledge or no fırst-order a posteriori knowledge. That there is such a dilemma should be reason enough to reject KLAIM and Williams' argument, which relies on it. No epistemology that accepts either (or both) of those horns should be deemed satisfactory. Here is how KLAIM forces this dilemma on Williams. As before, let "p" stand for the claim that there is a computer screen in front of me. Also as before, suppose that I know that p and that I know that p in virtue of my true belief being suitably related to my experience as of something being a computer screen in front of me. As a result, the justifıcation for my knowledge that p is a posteriori. Suppose I reflect on the question of whether I know that p and come to believe I do know it in virtue of reliably assessing my perceptual experience as veridical. Now, a condition on knowledge is that the known proposition be true. Because knowledge entails truth, it follows from KLAIM that I know that I know that p only if I know a priori that my belief that p satisfıes this condition; that is, given KLAIM, I know that I A Failed Twist to an Old Problem: A Reply to John N. Williams 81 know that p only if I know a priori that my belief that p is true. But if one knows that a belief is true, then one knows the truth the belief is about. So, given KLAIM, I know that I know that p only if I know a priori that p. But, by assumption, I know that p a posteriori. We have derived a contradiction from KLAIM by applying it to a seemingly innocent case. Something's gotta give. I think KLAIM has got to go. If KLAIM is true, then either my knowledge that p is not a posteriori or I can't know that I know that p. The fırst horn of this dilemma seems false on its face, and the second one leads to a curious form of skepticism: considering that there is nothing special about this case, the result of this argument generalizes to all cases of fırstorder a posteriori knowledge. 3. Conclusion In sum, John Williams' new twist on the old problem for Defeasibility fails. His problem for Defeasibility arises only when the requirements for iterative knowledge are made too high. What is more, this lesson applies to a number of other views that also incorporate a no-defeater clause in their defınition of knowledge.13,14 13 e.g., Keith Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge 2nd ed. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1990), John Pollock and Joseph Cruz, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefıeld, 1999), and Marshall Swain, Reasons and Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981). 14 I am very grateful to Cherie Braden, Peter Klein, and John N. Williams for discussion and feedback on different drafts of this paper. I am happy to acknowledge that the research in this paper was partly funded by the CAPES/Fulbright Commission. I am also grateful for the partial support my research received from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) through grant 2015/02419-4.

Experimental investigations of #authenticity online. Marc Cheong Presented at the Experimental Philosophy Track 1 2018 AAP NZAP Conference, Victoria University, Wellington, NZ. 1.0. INTRODUCTION Studies in existentialist philosophy are often revisited to shed light on current society, despite having been through its peak during the days of de Beauvoir and her contemporaries. One such element in the existentialist's toolkit is the concept of 'authenticity', where authors such as Golomb ​(1995)​ and Guignon ​(2004)​ revisit the work of earlier existentialists when placed in the context of modern times. With the advent of the web and new media, the term 'authenticity' is highly-valued and often bandied around, especially with regard to social media sites (which will be abbreviated to SMS for the sake of this paper). From a social science perspective, 'authenticity' takes many forms: examples of how a person can be 'authentic' with their online portrayals of themselves (Salisbury & Pooley 2017)​ include: ● using real names and biodata online, congruent with their real-world selves, and across social media platforms. ● sharing carefully curated personal details ​(Duffy & Hund 2015)​ e.g. "fashion bloggers pepper their Instagram feeds with children and pets" ​(Salisbury & Pooley 2017)​ or mumpreneurs carefully framing their Instagram photos to exhibit a certain homely look (Byrne 2017) An important one to preface my argument is Salisbury and Pooley's observation of "nearly all [SMSes they surveyed] invoked authenticity" ​(Salisbury & Pooley 2017)​, and more gravely, "authenticity" is a key attraction for marketers, to be used as a means to an end. In this paper, I will argue that​ the modern SMS use of 'authenticity' as a means to an end is against its very definition​. In doing so, my paper will first revisit 'authenticity' through the lens of existentialist philosophy, with emphasis on critiques on modern, SMS-based, authenticity . Next, 2 using a large-scale experimental (machine-learning/big-data) approach on popular posts on Instagram, I will argue that certain attributes in users' supposedly 'authentic'​ ​portrayals of daily life online are ​curated to exhibit certain characteristic features as a whole​. Using the results of the empirical study, I will argue that a supposedly 'authentic' portrayal online is ​counter to 1 I have chosen the Existential Philosophy (​ExPhi​) track an avenue for this paper, as it couples empirical approaches in big data, social media analysis, and machine learning with my earlier analysis of existentialism in online social networks. However, no prior knowledge of any computer science methods are needed, and all the prerequisite information and empirical data analysis will be presented in the slides. 2 This draws upon my earlier work on Kierkegaard at AAP2017 ​(Cheong 2017a)​ as well as Sartre/Nietzsche at ASCP2017 ​(Cheong 2017b)​. 1 existentialist ideals on authenticity​. Finally, drawing upon Golomb et al. with reference to 20th century existentialist ideas, I will argue that​ 'authenticity' on SMSes seeks to turn the 'for-itself' into an 'in-itself'. 2.0. EXISTENTIALISM, AUTHENTICITY, AND SOCIAL MEDIA We shall revisit existentialist accounts of contemporary SMSs, to understand the connection between SMSs and authenticity. But first, drawing upon Golomb ​(1995)​, Trilling ​(1972)​, and Guignon ​(2004)​ what IS the existentialist's understanding of authenticity? Authenticity is often defined 'in-absence', and not positively ​(Cheong 2017b)​: we are only aware when we flee it, cf. Sartre in ​Being and Nothingness ​(Sartre 1969)​. 3 Parables are used to demonstrate the concept, notable examples being the authenticity of Nietzsche's Ubermensch (in ​Thus Spoke Zarathustra​, 1888) and the inauthenticity of Sartre's Waiter (in ​Being and Nothingness​). On a more personal level, authenticity is said to achieve "truthfulness with respect to oneself" and as subjective truth "which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die" ​(Kierkegaard 1938)​. To introduce the idea of existential authenticity on SMSs, I refer to Dowden ​(Dowden 2016)​, who considered "a Sartrean existentialist reading" on Kim Kardashian-West and concluded that Kim (in her media appearances and social media selfies) projects "vulnerability and willingness to be exposed", hinting at a potential authenticity. The caveat is that, if it's a "calculated projection of a cultivated image of vulnerability, where Kim assumes her own objectification and conceives of herself as an object as well as the audience's bad faith and assumption of objectivity" ​(Dowden 2016)​ , then in the Sartrean perspective, she's assuming the 'in-itself' the en-soi ​(Sartre 1969)​ and her claim to authenticity is unfounded. In my previous investigation on online social networks as a collective ​(Cheong 2017a)​, I have argued that, when seen through Kierkegaardian existentialism, the collective crowd is "inauthentic, irresponsible, [and] untruth". Kierkegaard's perception of the crowd is that it's "untruth [as it]... renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision" ​(Kierkegaard 1846)​. SMSes exhibit similar behaviour dilution of responsibility is found in cases such as cyberbullying and trolling online. Another related argument is that, as people become more dependent on SMSes for news, the "irresponsibility" of the crowd now extends to the "irresponsibility" of the crowd acting-in-the-capacity-of​-the press. This is drawn from Kierkegaard's experience of being 3 Sartre tried to define it in his ​Réflexions sur la question juive ​(translated into English as ​Anti-Semite and Jew​, 1948) as: "having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate." However, in his attempts to define a phenomenological ontology, he wasn't 100% successful and moved on to 'action politics' instead. 2 attacked in the Danish press, where "no one has to answer" or claim responsibility for (Kierkegaard 1846) . 4 More recently, my investigation of personal authenticity on SMSes draws from a reading of Golomb ​(1995)​, where (in)authenticity can be thought of as Sartrean 'bad faith' in-relation-to-others. This is in contrast to earlier forms of online communication (such as Internet Relay Chat), as users can adopt nicknames or personas online as they please. "To analogise ... one is merely an ​actor​ in amateur theatre playing The Waiter ​(Sartre 1969)​ in a cafe scene. [In an impersonal, role-playing, chat setting] one can choose to be a Grocer etc. at will. There is no claim of authenticity here" ​(Cheong 2017b)​. However, once the spirit of 'authenticity' is invoked in almost all SMSs ​(Salisbury & Pooley 2017)​, as explained in S1.0, it can give rise to bad faith. Consider this: are we now transformed into The Waiter (from Sartre) who also runs a Facebook Page? To paraphrase Sartre, is "the waiter in the cafe play[ing] with his condition [and their Facebook presence] in order to realize it[?] ... The public demands of them [waiter-esque acts and waiter-posted promotional selfies on the cafe's Facebook] that they realize it as a ceremony..." ​(Cheong 2017b)​. 3.0. WHAT CONSTITUTES AN #AUTHENTIC POST, AS DEEMED BY INSTAGRAM USERS? To find out what everyday users of SMS mean when they invoke the concept of 'authenticity', this next part will discuss a large-scale quantitative study of SMS posts on Instagram. On Instagram (now owned by Facebook), users can upload user-generated images, often complemented by a caption and numerous #hashtags to categorise the image, as well as network/socialise with other users . 5 Two popular hashtags on Instagram are ​#nofilter ​and ​#liveauthentic​ that espouse authenticity. The former simply means uploading an image without Instagram 'filters' or enhancements: 6 which is "a contest for authenticity... [by means of] filter-free sharing" by competing SMS sites 7 (Salisbury & Pooley 2017)​. The latter is "a collective interest in authenticity... a need to prove 8 how real we are to ourselves and to others" ​(Whiting 2016)​. 4 Furthermore, Kierkegaard observes that the press "makes its readers more ... mediocre" and "create[s] the impression that many people think the same way" ​(Jansen 1990)​. 5 Instagram complies with the definition of an online social networking site due to the two properties mentioned, as discussed by Krisnamurthy ​(Cormode et al. 2010)​. 6 See ​https://www.busbud.com/blog/exposing-the-nofilter-movement/ 7 In my interpretation, as well as taking from Salisbury & Pooley ​(2017)​, there is a perceived 'arms race' amongst social media companies to introduce more features to their products. The usage of filters have extended to the use of animated/augmented reality ones on Instagram's competitors such as Snapchat. 8 See ​https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/05/05/the-problem-with-liveauthentic/ 3 An experiment was devised to determine what elements are found in Instagram images -9 hashtagged by their creators as ​#nofilter​ or ​#liveauthentic​ -as well as their associated captions and metadata . My hypothesis is that certain characteristics are emphasised in such 10 images, accomplished by (and as a byproduct of) a mindful curation of the images, to accomplish certain ​ends ​a dangerous counter to the claim of 'authenticity'. Over a period of 5 days, 800-1000 images and associated captions/metadata are downloaded 11 per day for each hashtag from Instagram's public hashtag feed (to respect privacy, any accounts marked as private are not considered at all). As some downloads are often incomplete due to missing files and limitations of the software used, random sampling was done to select 500 images (with metadata intact) daily, for a total of 2,500 per hashtag, equivalent to 5,000 images in total. To systematically analyse the contents of such as large collection of images, the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, a 'cloud' platform for big data analysis was used. Using AWS "Rekognition" technology , employing deep-learning algorithms, each image was 12 analysed to determine: 13 ● the various features/subjects in the image, ● faces and emotions (if found) within, and ● potentially suggestive content. The metadata for each image was also analysed for statistical features such as the number of hashtags, etc. We will now discuss some summary findings centred around our experiment, and their implications on what constitutes a self-styled authentic Instagram posts. 3.1. Post Metadata: Caption Revisions Out of the 5000 images, Instagram identifies 31.82% 1591 of the 5000 posts as having their captions revised. This is a significant percentage I did not expect which I argue has to do with the careful curation of what one would like others to see. It is therefore ironic that an authentic Instagram post needs quite a few 'rehearsals' and 're-posing' ​(Cheong 2017b)​. 3.2. Trends: Likes and Hashtag counts Most posts have few hashtags, while the number of posts with extremely large hashtags are rare (i.e. a statistical power-law distribution). There is an interesting spike at 30 hashtags correlating with the maximum number of hashtags supported by Instagram . Hashtags in 14 9 Ethics clearance for this experiment (Project Number: 13762) was granted by the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee on 29/05/2018. One of the conditions stipulate that the image/post dataset should not identify any person; as such the results are discussed in aggregated form in this paper and the accompanying slides. 10 Metadata simply means [supplementary] 'data about data' in the context of Instagram this includes e.g. number of likes, number of edits for the caption, etc. 11 Using Martin Larralde's open source project at ​https://github.com/althonos/InstaLooter 12 See ​https://docs.aws.amazon.com/rekognition/ 13 The slides contain a bird's-eye view of the experiment as well as a description of the algorithms' results on a sample image of the author. 14 While any hashtags past 30 are not recognised as a hashtag by Instagram, the maximum we've seen is 60 hashtags in a single post. The number of hashtags used follows a power-law distribution, commonly seen in studies of the Internet and other SMS sites. See also ​(Green 2014)​ . 4 general "makes it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific theme or content" 15 in other words, there is a want for others to see, appreciate, and acknowledge the posts especially considering that it is meant for the public's gaze. A related finding is the discovery of "likes" received by an image it follows the same power-law pattern, with several images disproportionately receiving up to 4,713 likes! 3.3. Trends: Semantic network of image features/content With regards to the actual image content itself, we have collated identifying features in all our images, as well as any emotions detected in faces, in two visual analyses. The first one, a semantic-network approach pioneered by Alfano et al ​(2018) , has been used 16 to measure the strength of correlations between features/content found in our pool of images. As an example: with a first image (with, say, a person, cafe, and food), and a second (with, say, beer, food, alcohol), by our semantic-network approach, we find that food is a key feature in common, and that alcohol/beer are closely associated. From the salient features found in our 5,000 images, we obtain a network that highlights what features are commonly found. Predominantly we see that key subjects in such photographs include humans selfies, group photos etc. The next set of subjects contain elements from nature (from terrain to flora and fauna). Features from the built environment and urban areas (roads, towns, cars, etc) are also present, as is elements from daily life (paper, ornaments, etc), and food (reflecting a trend of food photography). One interesting observation is the prevalence of suggestive themes (swimwear, tattoos and gym photos, etc) in our sample of images . 17 3.4. Trends: Portraits and emotional valence Considering the 1,671 photographs which include faces, another interesting trend is observed. A treemap (where square size indicates the number of photos found) was constructed to visualise the connection between the number of human subjects in an image and the proportion of negative/positive emotions detected. A significant proportion (more than half) of photos containing faces exhibit positive emotions . 18 15 Wikipedia Contributors (2018). See also previous discussion on the two hashtags used 16 The original approach was for identifying Virtues and Values in obituaries, where "trends in the co-occurrence of descriptions of the deceased within obituaries" ​(Alfano et al. 2018)​ were visualised in a network. This approach has then been extended by Alfano to map the concepts found in Nietzsche's work as well as to map topics covered in the US press for 2016. 17 Byrne & Cheong ​(2017)​'s study of algorithms-in-society is alluded to for an important caveat that has to be highlighted here algorithms are no substitute for human understanding. As the images are interpreted by an algorithm without human intervention or validation, there is a margin of error involved. The confidence scores by Rekognition cannot be used as a benchmark a more preferable option is to use human judgement as the 'ground truth'. The margin of error is not published in existing literature. 18 The facial emotions as analysed by the algorithm provides an estimated probability score of the likelihood a given face is exhibiting a given emotion. Here, positive emotions include 'happy' or 'calm' values with scores >0.5, negative ones include 'angry', 'disgusted', or 'sad' with scores >0.5. 5 4.0. AUTHENTIC POSTS: PERSONAL PROCESS OR PUBLIC ARTIFACT? The findings on ​#liveauthentic ​and ​#nofilter​ posts cf. the revision of posts, effective hashtagging, and the portrayal of the human subject in photographs with constant 'positive emotions' indicate that there is a need to carefully curate one's public image before presenting it to a wider audience. The act of image-curation has been the subject of prior studies of sociology and anthropology ​(Byrne 2017; Duffy & Hund 2015)​. If authenticity is inherently personal ​(Golomb 1995)​, why even bother exhibiting to the world through careful curation that one is living authentically? I will now discuss how such posts are problematic when it comes to the existentialist perspective on authenticity. Authenticity should be regarded as a ​'be-ing​' i.e. striving as self-making, an ​ongoing ​project on a personal level ​(Guignon 2004) . Interpreting Nietzsche, "only the ​individual who strives ​to 19 attain authentic life is able to feel whether he or she has been successful..." ​(Golomb 1995)​: emph mine​. ​My ​constant curation of posts and ​my ​self-styling them as #​liveauthentic​, is not about ​my ongoing strive​ which only I can evaluate (which Nietzsche alludes to) but merely as a means of ​creating an ​end product ​(an online persona, an artifact)​ ​for ​others ​to see/evaluate/act on. Golomb's reading of Kierkegaard echoes this: though a "... committed 'relation' to ourselves and by concentration on creating ourselves we are ​continually​ ('eternally') becoming authentic individuals" (​emph. mine​). A potential counterargument to this is that the openness or honesty of an author of SMS content allows for the achievement of authenticity. I turn to Guignon (2004), who claims that the "intensity of the commitment" is crucial "...but so is "the ​nature of the content ​of the commitment" (Guignon 2004)​: ​emph. mine​. Authenticity is not the same as sincerity nor honesty ​(Trilling 1972)​ again, authenticity is an ​ongoing, self-making, project ​to achieve "truthfulness with respect to oneself" ​(Guignon 2004)​. ​Even if​ we assume that authenticity is indeed achievable (say, via ​#liveauthentic​ posts and honest audience engagement) if one "​seek[s] authenticity for authenticity's sake...[paradoxically, they] are no longer authentic" ​(Sartre 1992)​. The justification by Golomb ​(1995)​ is that acting "authentically for the sake of ... being hailed as an authentic person... is to will to be defined as being-for-itself-in-itself, as a conscious thing in-the-world, which is not possible" ​(Golomb 1995)​. This leads into my final argument on how self-styled 'authenticity' on SMSes are used to achieve certain ends, which could dangerously turn the 'for-itself' into an 'in-itself' (per Sartre). 5.0. TURNING THE FOR-ITSELF INTO THE IN-ITSELF In a naive yet quantifiable form, having a good ​#nofilter ​or ​#liveauthentic​ post on social media will result in the abundance of "likes" i.e. points received if the post finds favour in, or agreement of, others ​(Salisbury & Pooley 2017)​. More concerningly, the invocation of 19 Based upon my earlier work in the ASCP (Cheong, 2017b). 6 authenticity is favoured by marketers to increase sales, incentives, or popularity, exemplified by quotes such as: ● "Authentic engagement involves a healthy mix of strategy and spontaneity (as is humanity) ... The first step to engaging authentically is to pinpoint users and accounts that would truly benefit from your activity and commentary as well as give you new ideas for content and regrams." 20 ● "With time, growing your Instagram followers will grow your business.... As your influence builds, brands may even pay you to review or advertise their products..." followed by a set of steps to "...get authentic followers without trickery." 21 Turning to the Sartrean concept of authenticity in-relation-to-others, "authentic relations [are] wherein each person regards the other as an end-in-itself and not just as a means of furthering her own projects and whims" ​(Golomb 1995)​. This means that any 'authentic' social media engagement with others, if it exists, ​cannot ​be ​as a means​ to achieve 'likes', page views, marketing value, or any sort of gain. Our earlier quotes found in social media advice pages -particularly "​[authenticity for] growing your Instagram followers will grow your business​" -22 suffers from this flaw. Recalling the work of Dowden ​(2016)​ earlier, claims by Kim Kardashian-West on being 'authentic' online can be negated if she were to assume "her own objectification [online] and conceives of herself as an object", coupled with "the audience's [e.g. her followers on Instagram's] bad faith and assumption of objectivity". By having carefully curated posts on social media exhibiting positive emotions in #​nofilter​ selfies, posting photos from travelling as a way to #​liveauthentic​, to name a few one runs the risk of turning themselves into an ​object, ​a thing-in-itself ​rather than a ​subject​. I turn to Sartre's discussion on the pour-soi vs the en-soi. The use of the cloak of ​authenticity ​to portray oneself (and one's activities, adventures, etc.) on SMSes as an ​object-of-consideration (for likes, clicks, monetisation etc) is, according to Sartrean existentialism, a form of ​bad faith​. Here, one is denying oneself as a ​transcendent​ being, a being with "freedom to make oneself into something very different" ​(Varga & Guignon 2014)​; but instead choosing to focus instead on one's ​facticity​ - "acting as if one were a mere [self-styled authentic] thing". I paraphrase (​in italics​) Varga and Guignon's example to reflect on the context of a #liveauthentic​ post: "...the person who thinks [​by travelling the world, posting their experiences on SMS, and claiming that they are living authentically​] "just as a matter of fact" is excluding from view 20 See ​https://schedugr.am/blog/guide-authentic-engagement-instagram/ 21 See https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2017/07/31/how-to-go-from-zero-to-thousands-of-eng aged-instagram-followers-in-less-time/#73469cc2328b 22 Ibid. 7 the ability to transform [​their existence​] through [​actually, say, striving to continually improve oneself through lifelong study or healthy living habits etc.​] ...a denial of transcendence or freedom." ​(Varga & Guignon 2014) This is even more pronounced with high-profile, active, SMS users such as influencers and celebrities with countless followings and 'likes'. "Sartre identifies the bad faith of the 'they' with the bourgeois ethic of 'self-important people' ... who regard their selves as serious and solid 'objects' (en-soi) and who die as copies" ​(1995)​. This links back to our earlier reading of Dowden ​(2016)​ Kim Kardashian-West treating herself as an ​en-soi​ if she "assumes her own objectification" as a social media user. 6.0. CONCLUSION In summary, I have argued that the existential notion of authenticity is lacking in self-styled authentic posts based on three points. Firstly, the existentialist's concept of a continual process (as a means and as an end) of attaining a personal, subjective truth is absent in posts evoking and invoking authenticity. Secondly, turning the 'authentic self' into an object, especially when it is used as a catalyst for other ends, is Sartrean bad faith reducing a human to an in-itself (en soi). The last point is perhaps an interesting one, central to my main argument, which can lead to further discussion: the use of empirical methods, especially social media analysis and 'big data' methods, to study philosophical connotations of real-world social interaction. References Alfano, M., Higgins, A. & Levernier, J., 2018. Identifying Virtues and Values Through Obituary Data-Mining. ​The Journal of value inquiry​, 52(1), pp.59–79. Byrne, J., 2017. Case Studies of Contemporary Internet Research: A Digital Ethnography of Mumpreneurs. Byrne, J. & Cheong, M., 2017. The Algorithm as Human: a cross-disciplinary discussion of anthropology in an increasingly data-driven world. In ​AAS/ASA/ASAANZ 2017 Shifting States Conference​. University of Adelaide. Cheong, M., 2017a. Existentialism and the "IT Crowd." In ​2017 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference​. 2017 Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference. University of Adelaide. Cheong, M., 2017b. From Sartre to #nofilter: On Authenticity: dialogues between existentialism & online technology. In ​Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference 2017​. Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy Conference 2017. University of Tasmania. Cormode, G., Krishnamurthy, B. & Willinger, W., 2010. A manifesto for modeling and measurement in social media. ​First Monday​, 15(9). Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i9.3072​. 8 Dowden, E., 2016. An Existential Krisis for the 21st Century: A Sartrean Reading of Kim Kardashian-West. In ​Philosophy Seminars: World Philosophy Day 2016​. The University of Queensland. Duffy, B.E. & Hund, E., 2015. "Having it All" on Social Media: Entrepreneurial Femininity and Self-Branding Among Fashion Bloggers. ​Social Media + Society​, 1(2), p.205630511560433. Golomb, J., 1995. ​In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus​, Routledge. Green, D.G., 2014. ​Of Ants and Men​, Guignon, C.B., 2004. ​On Being Authentic​, Psychology Press. Jansen, N., 1990. The Individual versus the Public: A Key to Kierkegaard's Views of the Daily Press. In R. L. Perkins, ed. ​The Corsair Affair​. Mercer University Press. Kierkegaard, S., 1846. On the Dedication to "That Single Individual." Available at: https://www.sorenkierkegaard.nl/artikelen/Engels/092.%20the%20crowd%20is%20untruth %20by%20SK.pdf​. Kierkegaard, S., 1938. ​The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard​ A. Dru, ed., Oxford University Press. Salisbury, M. & Pooley, J., 2017. The #nofilter Self: The Contest for Authenticity among Social Networking Sites, 2002–2016. ​Social sciences​, 6(1), p.10. Sartre, J.-P., 1969. ​Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology​, Routledge. Sartre, J.-P., 1992. ​Notebooks for an Ethics​, University of Chicago Press. Trilling, L., 1972. ​Sincerity and Authenticity​, Harvard University Press. Varga, S. & Guignon, C., 2014. Authenticity. ​The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy​, Fall 2017 Edition. Available at: ​https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/​ [Accessed July 6, 2018]. Whiting, A., 2016. The Problem With #LiveAuthentic | Washingtonian. ​Washingtonian​. Available at: ​https://www.washingtonian.com/2016/05/05/the-problem-with-liveauthentic/​ [Accessed July 6, 2018].

CREATING REALITY By Bruce Bokor Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Version Date: 7 February 2016 3 Table of Contents Preface .....................................................................................................................................................................................................5 Introduction ..........................................................................................................................................................................................6 Objects .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 10 The Snooker Game .................................................................................................................................................................... 16 Beliefs .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 18 The Tibetan Mastiff ................................................................................................................................................................... 22 Facts ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 24 The Talking Fly............................................................................................................................................................................ 30 Language ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 37 The Ranch ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 48 Formalism ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 51 Incompleteness ........................................................................................................................................................................... 55 The Ring Box ................................................................................................................................................................................ 59 Interlude .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 63 The Devil ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 66 Wittgenstein ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 69 The Horse ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 75 Meaning ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 81 The Nursing Home .................................................................................................................................................................... 87 Truth ...................................................................................................................................................................................................... 91 Aliens ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 99 Consciousness................................................................................................................................................................................ 104 Principal Discussion Points ............................................................................................................................................... 105 Physicalism: Back to Basics ............................................................................................................................................... 107 The Origin of Consciousness ............................................................................................................................................. 112 The Sandcastle ......................................................................................................................................................................... 115 Computation Meets Consciousness .................................................................................................................................... 120 Definition of Consciousness .............................................................................................................................................. 129 Troubled Minds ....................................................................................................................................................................... 131 Perspectives .................................................................................................................................................................................... 135 Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Piano .................................................................................................................................................................................... 140 Building a Universe ..................................................................................................................................................................... 144 Quantum Weirdness.............................................................................................................................................................. 147 The Double-Slit Experiment Explained ....................................................................................................................... 150 Logical and Physical Spaces .............................................................................................................................................. 152 Photons and Electrons ......................................................................................................................................................... 153 Spacetime .................................................................................................................................................................................... 157 Probabilistic Determinism and the Arrow of Time ............................................................................................... 160 The Swarm ................................................................................................................................................................................. 162 Harmony ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 168 Top Down and Bottom Up .................................................................................................................................................. 171 Free Will ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 176 Infinite Regress ........................................................................................................................................................................ 179 Evolution .......................................................................................................................................................................................... 183 Flies of the Lord ....................................................................................................................................................................... 189 World.................................................................................................................................................................................................. 193 Appendix I: Comments on TLP Section 6 ........................................................................................................................ 196 Appendix II: Glossary ................................................................................................................................................................. 198 Appendix III: Glossary of Wittgenstein Terminology ............................................................................................... 203 Appendix IV: Table of Figures ............................................................................................................................................... 205 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................................................................... 206 5 Preface Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Introduction "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one." - Albert Einstein What is reality? The common sense notion of reality is that it is just something which is there. And if someone were to suggest that it was created, then that someone would most likely be referring to the act of a supernatural being or perhaps a cosmological event like The Big Bang. What will be presented here is rather something different. The world itself won't change, but the way we perceive it in our minds will. Things that we may have considered unequivocal substance will become illusion, and the elusive will become the bedrock of nature. It will be shown how a reality is effectively created by each of us and this is the only reality that we can say anything about, hence reality sits within a self-created enclosure and what lies outside is nonsense, or at the very least inaccessible. If I were to advise the reader by offering one helpful suggestion, it is to be open-minded about one's conception of reality. When we awake and open our eyes, it is that conscious experience that we typically label reality, and everything else must fall into place to account for that experience. But it is reality that should be the end product of our examination of the world, not something to be categorically presupposed. When we talk about reality, we should take pause a moment to recognize that we are talking, i.e. that we are using language. We must consider that which is under examination, reality, within the context of the tools that we are using in that examination, principally language. If I were to say that language creates its own reality, I would be putting reality in a contingent state until we examine all the elements that comprise that statement to a level of satisfaction whereby we are comfortable with our definition of reality. Therefore, the statement is both relativistic and unsettled all at once. It is best to jettison any concept of reality that might reside in one's mind and start afresh. Only at the very end of our analysis of the evidence can we perhaps say: This is what we shall call reality. When philosophers speak of ontology, or theories concerning existence, there is some preconceived notion of what we mean by the term existence, in that we have some idea of what it means to exist.1 I would like to impress upon the reader that when we are not conscious there is nothing we can say about the existence of the world. We only surmise when we are in a conscious state, that it must go on without us even when we are unconscious. It is not an unreasonable assumption at all, but it leaves open the whole relationship of the physical and the phenomenological, or at least it should. Furthermore, a word like existence represents a concept within language and does not necessarily have a relation to anything outside of language. As will be shown in this book, words have more to 1 Ontological and ontic are both adjectives used to refer to ontology or matters concerning existence. 7 do with logic than existence. From a philosophical perspective, if we cover this ground thoroughly, the ontological should consequently emerge from this enquiry. The challenge for anyone dealing with this subject is how to bring together the ontologically real and the phenomenological experience presented by our consciousness. Historically, the establishment of consciousness as one of the central issues of Western philosophy is usually attributed the attention to the mind-body problem by the 17th century philosopher and polymath René Descartes (1596-1650).2 We begin our journey without any ontological assumptions; Descartes is for the most part left behind, except for the quite important necessity of explaining dualism, i.e. why it seems that the mental and the physical are separate things. We will take a look at dualism, but without doubt, Cartesian concepts must be abandoned; they only need to be accounted for. Generally speaking, we have never fully recovered from the Cartesian 'cogito ergo sum' (I think, therefore I am) view of the world, as if thinking necessarily had something to do with existence. The Cartesian idea of thinking is not ontological at all, but rather epistemological.3 Descartes might well have agreed with this, but turned thought into a starting point for epistemic certainty, and goes on from there. If I were to devise my own Cartesian-esque monologue, it might begin like this: I think! Well, isn't that strange; I wonder how that came about. Descartes however jumps to an ontological conclusion, when there remain deeper questions which are fundamentally epistemic. We should remember that Cartesian thinking originated in a pre-Darwinian world, when god was the creator of the god-like human, so it was not so fanciful to think that humans would be created so they could eventually come to know everything about the world and could entertain questions on the nature of existence, for god had taken sufficient care not to delude our thoughts. . . . When we take stock of where we are in our understanding of nature, it seems that three important questions stand out for which we have few answers. More than just questions, they represent gaps in our comprehension of what makes the universe tick. These will be the thematic focal points of this book: 1. What is the nature of belief? 2. What is consciousness? 3. What is the relationship between mathematics and the physical world? The exploration of these three questions unravels the mystery behind the principal means by which we come to have knowledge of the world and will form the core of this enquiry. When these questions are examined closely, we find that we actually know very little about any of them. So perhaps we should take one step back by asking the more generic question: How do we come to know the world? 2 References to Descartes and his philosophy, particularly dualism, are often called Cartesian. This is the same Descartes who is responsible for the Cartesian coordinate system used in mathematics. 3 Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge or how we know things. Epistemological and epistemic are terms used which relate to knowledge or knowing. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The first, and most common way, is through our senses. This is how humans and other living things obtain knowledge about the environment, an obligatory knowledge that permits an organism to behave in a manner appropriate for the occasion. At this early point in this treatise, let us focus on how human beings come to know the world, just to avoid a discussion on what other forms of life may or may not know about the world. Through the generally acknowledged five senses (although if we look at neural pathways, there are many more), we receive information from the physical world, filter it through some mechanism, and interpret that information through the sensations of vision, audition, olfaction, etc. This brings us to the phenomenon of consciousness, which seems to form a backdrop, or stage, on which the sensations of the world play out. Cognitive scientists like to describe this as what it is like to be something. Mental states supposedly have this phenomenological feature that differentiates them from physical states. I have classified this as a second feature of our knowledge, since we generally believe that the physical world goes on even if we are unconscious. We may be in a coma, and in due course we will die, yet we assume that the physical world will continue for others who remain conscious. At least this is the broad consensus of belief. The intriguing thing about consciousness is that this feature of nature, for which our understanding of the world totally depends, is for all intents and purposes a complete mystery. The so-called hard problem of consciousness, usually stated as what it feels like to be something, remains as far from resolution as ever. I would think that even if science presented the most convincing arguments about how consciousness works in the brain, and I was totally persuaded that an explanation for consciousness had been found, the question of why does it feel this way would remain. For the scientific community, except for those directly working in the area of cognition, there seems little choice but to forget about this problem, brush it aside, and just move on to other things; but in a larger sense, we really cannot understand the world without making some headway in this area. The study of consciousness is not only a valid area for scientific enquiry, but perhaps the most important. The more I have thought about consciousness, the more I have come to believe that it is the lynchpin for which so much of scientific progress depends. The third way that we come to know the world, mathematics, is made possible only because humans have acquired language. The relationship between language and mathematics, or more precisely, logic, was analyzed by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who will feature prominently in this discourse. . . . It should be comforting to know that even the most esteemed experts in their respective fields openly admit that they don't understand what is actually going on in the part of the world they are studying. Take this quotation from the great physicist Richard Feynman for example: "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics" (The Character of Physical Law [1965]). Quantum mechanics is a very good mathematical theory for predicting the outcome of experiments in particle physics, but it doesn't quite make it as common sense explanation of reality. It is not that quantum theory is wrong; it is just that the human apparatus for understanding it is incongruent with the theory. Placed into a different framework of understanding, quantum theory can make perfect sense. And it's not necessary to get all that mathematical about it either. 9 The same holds true for the comprehension of consciousness and belief. When put into a different framework of understanding, these too fit together well in forming a consistent picture of reality. It is mostly due to the order and emphasis of how these various mysteries were addressed has led to confusion about how the world is constructed. It is because belief systems, consciousness and physical theories have historically been studied as separate problems that we find ourselves in this current state of ambiguity, devoid of the harmony of the universe which seems intuitively manifest. There are many scientific disciplines and fields of philosophy addressed in this book. Each has its own esoteric terminology. I have tried to anticipate what these areas might be and offer at least a rudimentary explanation whenever possible. Sometimes these will be part of the main text and at other times in footnotes. There is only so much simplification that can be made without losing the essence of issues, but every effort has been made to make it as easy as possible for the reader to come to grips with the matters under discussion. Some important concepts in logic, such as rulefollowing, formal systems and undecidability will need to be introduced as they are germane to the nature of language. We will find that language is very much akin to mathematics, for both are based on the elementary rules of logic. So if we are to have a serious discussion about language, logic cannot be avoided. But even the subject matter of logic, which may sound difficult for the uninitiated, is really not all that foreign to our everyday experiences in life. We will first delve into the world of things, i.e. what we label the physical world, and the myriad ways these things can be interpreted. We will then explore how human beings represent these things in their minds and discover the mechanism of rational thought. We will go on to examine the central role information plays in the concept of reality, drawing together the three enumerated themes in a unified theory of nature. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Objects "The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment." ― Bernard d'Espagnat It might seem obvious that the world is made up of objects, or physical things, if you like. It may also seem obvious that these objects have an undeniable existence in the world as we know it and is something beyond debate. Much of this book will show how even our most entrenched ideas about the world can be mistaken. Quite a few philosophers and scientists have taken a deeper look into these matters, so we can begin by examining some of this body of knowledge to get ourselves started. The pathway we embark upon will require some background to get everyone up to speed, because the first task is to convince the reader that there really is something of substance here worth debating and the subject matter is not the kind that often arises in public discourse. We will start with a somewhat novel approach of how one might view the world. I came to read Jacque Monod's book Chance and Necessity (1971) well before I first encountered the works of Wittgenstein. I was very much a materialist at the time and thinking a great deal about natural selection, primarily due to the neo-Darwinian book The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins, 1976), which stirred my interest in the mechanism of evolution. Over the years the title words of Monod's book have become thematic fixtures in my understanding of the universe. It just might convey more about the workings of nature than any book title I have ever come across. It is the ubiquity of the interplay of these two concepts, chance and necessity, which makes it conceptually so powerful. Although the book was ostensibly about biology, I see in the title a generalization of what is transpiring in a Darwinian process which extends beyond biology and the evolution of living things. So let's take a look at the ideas encompassing these two pervasively important words. Necessity has a broad meaning in common parlance as well as in philosophy, particularly in reference to causality and determinism.4 We can think of the term to mean how one thing leads to another in a predictable way, in a sense that if this were not the case the world would fall apart, so to speak. For example, we expect that children will inherit some combination of genes from each of their parents and this will be portrayed in their phenotype, in accordance with the high fidelity of genetic replication. The rate of human genome mutation per nucleotide base pair per generation is estimated at around 1 in 4,000,000 (Nachman & Crowell, 2000). The large scale activities of the inanimate world also behave in calculable ways, even if our calculations must be approximations due to the complexity of interactions. The gravitational interplay amongst several celestial bodies is 4 Determinism is the philosophical position that for every event, including human action, there exist conditions that could cause no other event. 11 nearly impossible to determine to a high degree of precision, yet is good enough to send satellites into the far reaches of space. The subatomic world also behaves in a quite predictable manner and is well defined by quantum mechanics, which also has its limits as what can be precisely determined. Aside from these constraints, the universe, in a larger sense, is a fairly predictable place, and we can usually account for why things change over the course of time by applying some mathematical method to our observations. We may not be able to predict the weather as reliably as we would like, but we have a general idea about the contributing factors which cause it to change and evolve over time. These types of observations have led to the causal determinism which embodies the physical sciences. Yet for all this predictability in nature, some things happen by chance alone, which itself is a necessity of nature; for without chance, the evolution of the universe would be totally deterministic from beginning to end. The deeper philosophical question is whether the randomness we observe is truly random and not some feature of determinism at a level beyond our ability to calculate. From what we are able to measure, it would seem that randomness, ranging from genetic mutation to radioactive decay is truly random, in that there is not enough information in the universe to make these events predictable. Necessity brings stability to the world and chance makes evolution by natural selection possible. Deism, theism and atheism all leave room for this interaction of chance and necessity, despite the wide variations in these belief systems. But it should be seen that without true randomness, an omnipotent god of some sort would have to be the creator of the universe, for if nothing were left to chance, the evolution of the universe would be known at the outset or would be part of an experiment or simulation for which prior knowledge existed. We can only conjecture about this as it clearly extends beyond the limitations of our knowledge, in that it is a dialogue about something outside the time and space of our universe. My own opinion is skewed by another universal theme: conservation. Given the various laws of conservation, from energy to angular momentum, it would seem to require a lot more information to create a universe which is completely deterministic than one which could evolve by some heuristic process brought about by innate randomness. It is easier to argue the case for a simpler process explainable within the universe than having to resort to extra-universal causation. Of course, those with a more religious bent would disagree with this position, but I think it is more in keeping with the principles of Ockham's razor, in that the universe can evolve a near infinite number of outcomes with roughly the same information, while a fully deterministic universe can produce just one. More on this later, but first let us return briefly to the discussion on causality, but taken from a somewhat different angle. The manner in which causality fits with one's conceptualization of the world is critical to one's theoretical construction of that world. It can be said that this notion of causality is an epistemological necessity in understanding the world, for we can only make sense of the world from the passage of one state of affairs to another. And by extension, it can be said that this notion is a linguistic necessity as well, for the rules of language also, at least tacitly, assume some form of Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Kantian causality.5 Without this causal necessity the ability for linguistic representation breaks down, for the idea of predication is meaningless if one state of affairs cannot be distinguished from another. The notion of causality wells up from the necessity of distinguishing objects in spacetime. The circularity in reasoning that arises in the discussion of causality points to the interdependence of these concepts, such that, if we refer to our understanding of the world through language, then a Kantian form of causality is taken axiomatically, including the perception of objectivity. It cannot be otherwise. If some other notion of physical relationship, such as non-local quantum causality is entertained, then that relationship cannot be rationally constructed with the tools available to the human mind. This is the reason why many concepts from quantum theory are so difficult to grasp, and why quantum entanglement causes such a conceptual problem.6 Anything that attempts to deconstruct the presumption of causality in our thinking is doomed to fail. In the end, causal constructions are very much subjective even though we all seem to share, more or less, the same notion of causality. Notions of causal objectivity are inferred by induction, which is fair enough, but not necessarily the case.7 The limitations of language and rationality will have something to say about that, and we use the term objective at our peril. It is nonsense to describe the world outside of these precepts. So how are we to make sense of the world? To speak of objectivity or ontology in a philosophy of the world is futile, as it falls outside the boundaries of what is possible to construct within the apparatus of our rational mind, i.e. the apparatus of language. Any rational construction of the world is thus an epistemic endeavor. So the first principal notion of the world that needs to depart is that of ontological reality. It is a presupposition about the world which may be convenient, but is hardly supported by the evidence. A starting point of ontic reality is certainly not a philosophical position with any sort of neutrality, as it is supported by an unfounded a priori bias. Yet it is very difficult indeed to let go of both the word and notion of 'reality'. Why is this so? It's simple! We open our eyes, we see the world and there it is; so we naturally assume that must be reality. And we are led to believe that any true statement that we make about the world must conform to this notion of reality, a physical reality as revealed by our senses. To drop this notion of a fundamental physical reality would call for a total reconstruction of how the world works. And indeed this is the case. 5 In his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) tried to demonstrate that the principle of causality-namely, everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows by rule, is a precondition for the very possibility of objective experience. He took the principle of causality to be required for the mind to make sense of the temporal irreversibility that there is in certain sequences of impressions. 6 Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems. For example, it is possible to prepare two particles in a single quantum state such that when one is observed to be spin-up, the other one will always be observed to be spin-down and vice versa, this despite the fact that it is impossible to predict, according to quantum mechanics, which set of measurements will be observed. (from Wikipedia) 7 Induction will take the definition in logic here and not the one in mathematical proof. Inductive reasoning, or induction, is reasoning from a specific case or cases and deriving a general rule. It draws inferences from observations in order to make generalizations. 13 So what is it that makes the physical world that we call reality so untenable? First there is the presupposition that our senses are fully capable of presenting the underlying reality of the world. That is, our senses give a true picture of the world as it might be understood by a hypothetical being sitting outside of the world. The arguments relating to this conception of the world are well discussed in the philosophical position called Representationalism, and there are many books and papers written on the subject. The general idea about Representationalism is that our mind in a conscious state produces a representation, or picture of the world, but that the world may not necessarily be that way in some more fundamental understanding of reality. Our sensory experience mediates between an objective reality and its representation in our mind. There are many variations on this theory of mind, most of which focus on notions of consciousness and the popular philosophical term of intentionality. Although I find myself in this broad philosophical group, I tend to differ with most of the more popular positions, particularly those with a focus on intentionality, something I find not only unnecessary, but a hindrance to the understanding of consciousness. If we take this one step further, it is the presupposition about the physical world which is at the heart of the problem. Under most theories of Representationalism, the physical world is still the real world; it is more a question of how this real world is represented in our minds. I would suggest that this label of reality that we tag onto the physical world is the part that should be considered contentious. If we take the representational point that what appears as our conscious experience is not actually how the physical world is, but only a mental image, then we should ask what makes up the physical world. To this we must turn to physics. Mainstream physics would propose that a complete description of the physical world is given by the Schrödinger wave equation. This is a quantum mechanical description of the world, where classical notions of having full knowledge of where something is and where it is heading are thrown out the window. It is a description of probabilities, not of actualities. Surely the representational view of our mental image of the world is not referring to this quantum mechanical picture, but rather a more classical representation. The philosophical interpretation underpinning the quantum mechanical impression of reality has been at the center of debate since the onset of quantum theory and remains so today. In a nutshell, quantum theory defies our commonsense ideas about the physical world. Most would simply pass this off as a curiosity to be left to physicists to sort out, never to be given a further thought. However, the triumph of quantum mechanics as the most successful physical theory of all time cannot be denied, and what quantum mechanics tells us about the world cannot be ignored. This is the first problem underlying the ontology of the physical world. The fact that the science behind explaining the characteristics of the physical world cannot tell us what it is about, except in terms of waves of probability, more than hints of a problem in applying the term reality to the physical world. It doesn't sound right if you say: this is reality, but don't ask what it really is because we can't tell you. Having covered a bit of ground on both the mind and the physical world, we can return to the mindbody problem of relating what goes on in our minds to what goes on in the world per se. There have been many interesting terms introduced along the way which try to account for the relationship: Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor qualia, intentionality and representata to name a few, let alone more common terms, such a selfawareness and self-consciousness, all of which seem to defy a tangible comprehension of what they are. There is a struggle to find the right word to describe the mental experience, because nothing quite fills the glass completely. There is much to say about what physics can and cannot tell us about the physical world. But at this point let it be said that the terms existence and reality should be used cautiously, as we will find that they hardly refer to anything tangible at all. ⋯ Another problem in our comprehension of objects is that of consciousness itself, the mechanism by which we come to experience the world of objects. It would be pointless to give a definition of consciousness, because a hundred other definitions could be found that would be different. So if we restate the problem about what we call the representational view of the real world, it would be the conscious representation of a quantum mechanical reality. So the second weakness in this quasiorthodox notion of reality is that even at the representational level we have consciousness, a thing that remains a mystery despite the myriad theories and musings about it. We can use terms like awareness, self-awareness (or perhaps even self-self-awareness in an infinite recursive process of self-reflection), without really saying anything of what consciousness actually is. Do dogs have it? Most would say yes. How about ants? And what about plants? One's definition of consciousness seems to depend on what stage in the evolutionary process this attribute is deemed to have been acquired, although exactly what it is and how it is acquired is left a mystery. There is much to discuss about consciousness, but for now I just want to say enough to show how our understanding of consciousness underpins our notion of reality, and if we delve just a little bit into this matter we actually cannot say very much at all about it. This is why I make the point that we must suspend the ontological notion of a physical reality. It is based on a conscious mental representation of the physical world. Both sides of this relationship are for all intents and purposes unknown, or enigmatic at the very least. As difficult as it may be to hold in abeyance notions of an objective reality of the physical world, there really is no basis to take it as a given. To accept an objective physical reality a priori would first require a foundational understanding of both the world as presented by quantum mechanics and consciousness. I would say that what we know about these two things is very meager indeed. To this we can add the vagaries of language. We should not forget that all of this knowledge that we have about the world is built on the scaffolding of language, yet another thing that we tend to take for granted. We only have to look at the numerous religious belief systems to realize how deceptive the results of language-based reasoning can be. And furthermore, we should not forget that the worlds of science and philosophy are built on the edifice of language. ⋯ Most theories of reality are based on a comprehension of a combination of these three mysteries: the physical world, consciousness and language. We will never have an understanding of how the world works without addressing the nature of how the world that we see when we open our eyes 15 comes about. The ingredients that make up that understanding of the world are mathematics, consciousness and language (mathematics being the language of description for the physical world). It should be more than just coincidence that both the mystery and the tools we have to solve the mystery are nearly identical. It is not necessary to have a world of stuff if we have a mental representation of a world of stuff; the mental representation should suffice. A physical reality of hard things is quite superfluous. But we are still left with the task of explaining how that mental representation got there in the first place. The easy part is defining the problem. The solution may require a bit more imaginative alacrity. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Snooker Game Bert and Ludd are playing a game of snooker. Bert: My shot Ludd. I thought you'd pot that one. It wasn't such a difficult shot. Ludd: I did pot that red ball, Bert. It's still my turn. Bert: No you didn't. I didn't see any ball go into the pocket. Don't try to pretend you made that shot, Luddy. Ludd: It's just a game, Bert. Why would I do that? You didn't see the ball go in, because you had your back turned. You thought it was going to fall short, so you started walking to the other side of the table. Admit it, Bert. You weren't looking. Bert: The ball already stopped, so of course I started walking to the other side to get ready to line up my shot. I saw the ball stop, so obviously it wasn't potted. My turn, Ludd. Ludd: Hold on a second there. How many reds were on the table before my shot? Bert: 8! Ludd: And how many reds are on the table now? Bert: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Huh? Seven? Something's not right. Ludd: See, I told you so. I must have potted that shot because there were 8 reds on the table before the shot and now there are only 7. 17 Bert: Well maybe I was mistaken. There must have only been 7 reds on the table before the shot, because all the balls had stopped moving before I looked away. So there's no way a ball could have been potted when my back was turned, as you have suggested. Ludd: Have you considered the possibility that the ball was still in motion, ever so slowly, but still moving nonetheless? Or perhaps there was a gust of wind that blew the ball into the pocket. Or maybe an earthquake tremor, too small to detect by humans, rocked the table ever so slightly. Or an ant crawling on the table nudged the ball toward the pocket; they can lift many times their weight, you know. And there are plenty of other possibilities as well. Have you considered this, Bert? Bert: Yeah, I've considered it. Ludd: So how do you think that red ball got into the pocket, Bert? Bert: You cheated! That's how. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Beliefs "Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure." ― George Carlin Why do people believe the things they do? A typical reply to such a question is: nobody knows. This in itself should be considered quite remarkable as it goes to the very nature of human experience and communication. But even when a sincere effort is made to address the question it still mostly circumvents the profound implications raised by such a question. The subject matter is usually thought to fall into the domain of psychology or the validity of religious faith. A few have at least brought language into the discussion on belief, the philosopher Donald Davidson being one (Davidson, 1982). Shouldn't we rather be asking what kind of biological mechanism is responsible for such a phenomenon? If there were anything approaching a credible scientific theory on the subject, it would most certainly make for headline news. As it stands, most debate about beliefs and belief systems center on why one's own beliefs are correct and someone else's are either mistaken, dead wrong or even a danger to national security. We seem to readily accept that others will have beliefs and opinions different from our own, but are nonetheless prepared to rail against those differences, even to the extent of taking up arms if called upon. Are we to suppose that there could be some malfunction in the brains of those with beliefs different from our own? Or perhaps it is just a bad upbringing. Variations of the maxim Give me the child and I will give you the man have many attributions, including the Jesuit Baltasar Gracián and the psychologist B. F. Skinner. The maxim carries a general acceptance that the beliefs we bring into adulthood are formed in childhood. I raise these points not to set the foundation of where this discourse is going, but rather to set the foundation to where it is not going. We understand that children can be educated and we purposely educate children with the hope of giving them the tools they require to succeed in life. The conviction of parents as to what kind of education would best suit their child will have variations ranging from being well versed in quantum field theory to the ability to recite the Koran by heart from beginning to end. This discussion will not proceed along the lines exploring which of these might produce the more advantageous result; it is not about the assessment of beliefs, nor ethics nor metaphysics. We will look beyond these considerations and proceed to the deeper mechanisms that go into producing a statement that begins with the words: "I believe." It doesn't matter what follows those two words; the specifics are irrelevant. I am using the English language in this example, but it could 19 just as well be "Je crois" from a French speaker. What is significant though is the implausibility of hearing any such utterances from a dog. It is quite certain that a dog can well assess its environment and come to something analogous to a belief about its situation and make decisions based on that belief, but it is not quite the same as being able to produce a sentence beginning with the canine equivalent to: I believe. No doubt dogs can make vocalizations, but it is not what we would call true language. There is quite a difference between simple symbols, like barks and physical gestures, and structured symbolic systems like human language. A dog may have any number of different sounding barks, often accompanied by some other animation. Some sounds may be used to ward off strangers or other dogs; some may show a desire for something, like food; some to draw a attention to particular situation, such as a family member in distress. Communication is an important aspect in the life of most animals and the word language is frequently used in a generic reference to this behavior. Researchers have estimated that chickens have between 20 and 30 unique vocal signs with associated meanings, including references to food, danger from above, danger from below, egg laying, brooding and imperatives (like get away from me!). These kinds of vocalizations can mostly be categorized as communications represented by one-to-one relationships between the sign and its meaning. Clearly, there is a limit to the number of representations that can be made with this type of system. Even for someone with a rather large vocabulary of 40,000 words would soon exhaust the symbol-semantic relationships without making a dent in the volume represented by human language. For example, one could associate a word for each of the following phrases about a state of affairs: a monkey is in the tree, a monkey is in the house, a monkey is in the car, a monkey is in the bus, a monkey ate my sandwich, a monkey ate my apple and a monkey ate my homework. In fact the total vocabulary would be exhausted before we finished talking about monkeys, let alone dogs, cats and chickens. The thing that makes true language different and so powerful in its representational ability is that it has a grammar, a set of rules about how a limited number of words can be combined to take on a wide variety of meanings. In fact, the number of combinations and thus the number of expressed meanings can be infinite. Take the following sentence as an example: The artist who painted the mural in the lobby of the skyscraper, which was completed in 1988 and designed by the same architect responsible for three of the tallest buildings in Spain, a country of 45 million people, many of whom can trace their ancestry to Germany, was taken to the hospital yesterday with severe intestinal pain, something that he was often troubled by, including the time he gave an exhibition in Detroit which had to be cancelled due to the condition, resulting in the 598 people who had purchased tickets to see the great artist given refunds by the company that organized the exhibition despite their not being any provision for such a requirement, as was noted by the renowned contract lawyer Arturo Contractus, a frequent commenter on such matters. A feature of human language called recursion is responsible for our ability to produce these kinds of (sometimes unwieldy) sentences that have a considerable number of embedded clauses and yet still make sense. It may seem that we have drifted away from the subject of belief, but it was necessary to clarify that human language is not the same as chicken-talk with just more words, for Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor language is central to belief, and we need to be clear about distinguishing human-type language with other forms of communication. When the question of why people believe the things they do manages to get aired in a public forum, a typical response is likely to be something along the lines of: We simply do not know why people believe the things they do.8 Incredibly, even scientists argue the case supporting their viewpoints from their own perspectives and often on a very superficial level, as if it should be self-evident that one's arguments should be totally convincing. Upon reflection, one would have to wonder how we can have any confidence in our understanding of anything. If we admit that we have no idea how we come to believe the things we do, what can we really say about anything which is not mere opinion and without foundation. Are we to think that faith should be sufficient to make something true? This cannot be passed over lightly. It is difficult to move on to the next topic for discussion when we cannot offer any explanation for how it comes about, for example, that the words on this page can be understood by readers, some of whom will agree with its arguments and some that will not. Furthermore, I may not be able to offer any proof or substantiation as to how, in any detail, I came upon these beliefs, nor how it will come about that the reader will interpret these ideas and to what degree it will influence the reader's belief systems in turn. The paucity of serious dialogue about belief in the public domain is symptomatic of a taboo subject, which it effectively is, since it has often been portrayed as an intrusion of science into areas traditionally covered by religion. It is a politically and socially sensitive area which most scientists tend to avoid. Only the likes of a Richard Dawkins or a Daniel Dennett, representative of the few who can rightly feel secure in their status as intellectuals, have the confidence to make any foray into this magisteria (as it has been so labeled). Their approach originates from a scientific perspective which examines other perspectives from within its own, arguing the authority of one supposed truth value over another with a different perspective. Religion tends to take center stage when addressing matters of belief, but it is by no means the only area covered by the term. Beliefs include such things as political leanings, racial perceptions, future success of a football team, and the physical appearance or intelligence of others as well as oneself. It is just the ubiquity of religion in human culture and the centrality of its role in so many lives that brings it to the forefront. The conflict between religious beliefs and scientific theory is often the focus of debate, but the underlying mechanism for all types of belief is the same, only the specific neuronal details will differ. So at some physiological level the differences between beliefs should be represented by respective differences in neurological mappings, even if such mappings are beyond the realm of analysis at present. We should suppose that in the broadest interpretation of things that there is some configuration in spacetime which represents one's particular belief; otherwise we might have to deduce that it comes about by some kind of magic. The fact that around 85% of the world's population say they have religious beliefs, and around 30% are covered by the most numerous group, Christianity, would imply on statistical grounds alone, that at least 70% of people are mistaken about the veracity of their belief system. Accordingly, we 8 For a good backgrounder on the subject of belief, see the 2006 ABC (Australia) Radio National All in the Mind broadcast on the subject. Much of what this book tries to resolve was discussed in this radio program. 21 must ask how it is that so many humans could be so deceived in such an important part of their lives; many would say in the guiding force of life. I find it very odd indeed that the majority of individuals in any animal population could be so self-deceived about the context of their environment. It would not bode well for an animal to be so mistaken about its world, as if a wildebeest mistook a lion for a lamb. Self-deception seems so antithetical to the Darwinian process, in that it would seem to make the possessor of such beliefs less adaptive to its environment; one might be initially inclined to think that it must be a deleterious byproduct of natural selection. Deception of others is a common theme in both the animal and plant kingdoms, but not selfdeception. The fact that we do not observe other species with distorted views of their world is suggestive that belief systems require deeper examination, and the fact that these other species do not have language and humans do is a good indication of where this is leading. The story of belief is really the story of language. It's a story about how an animal's mind works without language and how differently it works with language. We will have to be a bit more precise about our definitions and terminology than we would in normal parlance. Here is one example: I have often heard a dog owner say: my dog thinks it's a person. What we commonly understand to be the meaning of that phrase is that the dog behaves in such a way that it acts like it is just another member of the family. I doubt very much if the dog pictures itself as a human incarnate. Dogs usually realize when they see another dog that they belong to that same species. Surely, the dog must have a belief system that functions within the constraints of its biology, allowing it to determine what species it belongs to and how it fits within its social network, whether it be canine or human. In the context of this story, the important feature is that the dog has no mechanism for presenting an alternative option to whatever it believes. The dog takes in a multitude of sensory inputs, processes the information, and we can say the result is what the dog believes. Unquestionably a complex process, but the outcome was never in doubt. Some feel uncomfortable reducing a vibrant animal with a rich personality to a mere biological machine, but it must be recognized that biological processes are very much mechanistic; for if it were otherwise, our bodies would be very unreliable indeed. We depend on the fidelity of our molecular processes to provide a predictable relationship between how we mentally project our bodies to perform and how they actually do. Life would be quite a challenge if we have the intention of throwing a ball, but our body acts upon its own devices to kick the ball instead. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Tibetan Mastiff Bert and Ludd are walking in town when Bert sees a large animal in the distance. Bert (startled): Hey Ludd, look at that. There's a lion down the street there! Look! Can you see it? Ludd: Yeah, I see it, but it's not a lion. It's a Tibetan mastiff. Bert: A Tibetan what? Ludd: A Tibetan mastiff. It's a big dog. Bert: It's a lion, I tell you. I never heard of such a dog. You're making it up. Look. It's got a mane just like a lion. Ludd: Now don't be silly Bert. It's not a lion. What would a lion be doing casually walking down the street in this town anyway? Bert: I know a lion when I see one. I've been to the zoo. I've seen hundreds of lions, and I tell you, that animal is a lion. I've seen plenty of dogs too; and that's no dog. Ludd: You see that blond woman walking next to the dog? That's the famous ballerina Abigail Watson. It's her dog. Didn't you hear that she moved to our town last month? Bert: She can't be that famous, 'cause I never heard of her. 23 Ludd: That's because you only watch football. Not surprised you never heard of her. It was in the Huonville Gazette. Everyone knows she's moved here and she owns a rare breed dog, which is the one you see down the street. Bert: Well it's clearly not everyone, because I never heard of her, or her rare dog; and I tell you that's a lion. Ludd (spotting a mutual friend coming their way): Look, there's Tina. We'll ask her about it. – Hi Tina. Tina: Hi Luddy, hi Bert. What are you boys up to this morning? Ludd: Just taking a walk to the coffee shop. It's such a beautiful day. Maybe you could help us resolve something. Turn around and tell me what that big animal is down the street, just past the coffee shop. Tina: Oh yeah. I see it. It's that ballerina woman and her dog. Funny looking thing that dog. It doesn't look right, such a big dog with such a skinny woman, don't you think? Ludd: Well maybe. You know, Bert thought it was a lion. – You see Bert, didn't I tell you. Now do you believe me? Bert: I don't care what anybody says. I know a lion when I see one. You two are just having a go at me. Tina: Bert, no one's having a go at you. It's crazy to think there's going to be a lion just strolling down the street. Everyone knows it's that ballerina's dog. It was in all the papers. Ludd: That's his problem, Tina. He just watches football. He never reads the paper; doesn't even have an internet connection. No wonder he's so, he's so, well, - uninformed. Bert: The Gazette; what a piece of trash. And I'm too busy working in the garden to bother with the internet. I'm doing just fine doing things the old way. And I say it's a lion. And as far as I'm concerned, it's end of discussion. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Facts "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything." ― Friedrich Nietzsche Much of the debate about belief centers on whether a particular belief is a fact, or just an opinion liable to be mistaken. This question about what is fact and what is opinion is far from a simple matter. At its core is the determination of truth itself. How would an unbiased person presented with two conflicting sets of propositions decide which, if any, is true and which is false? Many of the difficulties of this endeavor of differentiating between truth and falsity will become apparent as we proceed through this examination. Since this is a very exacting process, we will need to be quite precise in our language; and since there are many definitions and nuances in the use of language, even finding precision is no simple task. We will be using language to define elements in language, so we will also have to contend with the self-referential aspects of this process. The reasons for some of this pedantry will become evident in due course. I am going to start with a declaration: The meaning of a word is determined by social agreement or declaration. To be clear, this is my own definition and the one that I use throughout this book; it is a selfreferential definition made by declaration in conformity with the previous sentence. The meaning of the words found in most books is not contentious, unless it is the author's intent to be vague or illusive; these words can be said to be determined by social agreement. The author uses the common definition of the word and assumes that the reader has the same understanding, and if not, can reference the meaning in a dictionary and thus arrive at the author's intent. If the author believes a clarification is required, so that the author's definition or nuance is the one understood, then the author can declare the meaning of the word to reflect that intention. Here are a couple of important definitions that fall into this category (from Collins online English dictionary): 1. Proposition: an informative statement whose truth or falsity can be evaluated by means of logic. 2. State of affairs: a situation; present circumstances or condition. Now the reader knows that when the word 'proposition' appears in the text it will take on its meaning in logic and not one of the several other meanings attributed to the word. 'State of affairs' has a very broad and inclusive description of how thing are in the world without being at all specific about what we might be saying about the world; it is a very useful term since we can acknowledge 25 by its usage that we don't know all there is to know about the world, but can still talk about it both non-specifically and comprehensively. Both terms are commonly used in philosophy and logic. A principal subject matter of this book was addressed in considerable detail by the aforementioned philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. His first treatise, and the only book-length work published during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein, 1922), is considered one of the most important works in philosophy, specifically in the field concerning the relationship of logic and language.9 What follows are the opening sections of the Tractatus. I find it to be an excellent outline for beginning a discussion of what constitutes reality. Those not familiar with Wittgenstein's writing may find the style a bit strange and the content elusive; nearly everyone has that impression at first. We will review this in considerable depth, and show why Wittgenstein's ideas are so important to understanding the nature of belief. I have highlighted the words fact and state of affairs for emphasis. 1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also whatever is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Each item can be the case or not the case while everything else remains the same. 2 What is the case-a fact-is the existence of states of affairs. 2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things). 2.011 It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs. 2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself. So, what is this world that Wittgenstein is talking about? As the exposition of the Tractatus unfolds, one finds that Wittgenstein is leading us into the world of language and propositions. And this particular world is determined by the facts, not things. Facts live in logical space where they can have a value of either true or false.10 According to Wittgenstein, what is the case, a fact, is 9 The Pears and McGuinness translation is the one used in this book and is abbreviated as both Tractatus and TLP. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor determined by there being a correspondence between the fact and a state of affairs. Put another way, if someone makes a statement about the an aspect of the world, such as 'there is a lion walking down the street', the statement will be true if and only if there exists a lion walking down the street. If there is not a lion walking down the street we can say that the author or speaker of that statement has a false belief or more precisely, the proposition is evaluated as being false. Some may wonder why we needed Wittgenstein to tell us something that really seems quite obvious. The point of significance is that Wittgenstein's universe is divided into two parts, one of facts and one of things. Facts stand in a representational relation to things. To have an accurate picture of what is true and what is false about the world we need to understand both the world of things and the world of facts, as well as how they relate to each other. And this is precisely what Wittgenstein sets out to achieve. Whether Wittgenstein accomplishes this task is a matter of debate. I am not in complete agreement with the totality of his philosophy, as will be seen, but his groundbreaking work in the field of analytic philosophy deserves the highest recognition. The world of things or objects is common to all entities, e.g. both dogs and humans alike if we are referring to earthlings. But facts live in the world of logical space, and more specifically include propositions of language, which take on a binary logical value of either true or false. The world of facts is not one that both humans and dogs can share, since dogs do not have the mental machinery to evaluate statements of propositional logic.11 Let's take a closer look at these two worlds and sort out what all these novel terms mean. The world of things is the one we live in along with plants, animals, chairs, rocks and everything else that we know of. We usually refer to it as the physical world, the universe, or perhaps just simply the world. When we use the word existence, we are usually referring to something in the physical world, the world of things. The terms real and reality are also commonly used when making reference to the physical world. This view of the universe is generally shared by the 10 A logical space is a generalized binary process space used for symbol manipulation, and particularly the evaluations of propositions or similar logical constructs. It is the space in which objects and states of affairs exist. This is the most general kind of space there is, so everything that exists and everything that could exist exists in logical space. The Tractatus does not define the term 'logical space', but clearly it refers to the ensemble of logical possibilities. Logical space stands to 'reality', the existence and non-existence of states of affairs (TLP 2.05), as the potential to the actual. The term conveys the idea that logical possibilities form a 'logical scaffolding' (TLP 3.42), a systematic manifold akin to a coordinate system. The world is the 'facts in logical space' (TLP 1.13), since the contingent existence of states of affairs is embedded in an a priori order of possibilities. There are several dimensions to the analogy between space and the ensemble of logical possibilities. A 'place' in logical space is determined by a 'proposition' (TLP 3.4–3.42), which here means an elementary proposition. It is a possible state of affairs, which corresponds to the two 'truth-possibilities' of an elementary proposition – being true or being false (TLP 4.3ff). 11 Propositional logic is a subset of predicate logic (a fundament system of mathematical logic) that does not use quantified variables. It is a kind of formal system of logic that applies primarily to natural language. 27 materialist scientific community.12 However, we should take pause to recognize that materialism is more a philosophical perspective than one born out of science, but it is the philosophical perspective which is dominant in science. Wittgenstein and the broader scientific community accept the a priori reality of the physical world, but we would be remiss to exclude from comment and consideration other philosophical positions, particularly those with a broad following. A large part of the community of cognitive scientists and philosophers believe in the existence of mental states. A mental state is not a physical thing, yet it is still a thing and a part of the world of things, if one is a believer in the reality of mental states. The question of mental states is closely related to the study of consciousness and conjoins philosophy with neuroscience. To concisely summarize, Descartes concluded that god had created two separate things in the world: physical things and mental things; and thus the term Cartesian dualism found its way to a central role in philosophical debate. Despite several hundred years of mental heavy lifting, the mind-body dichotomy still remains one of the most perplexing unresolved problems in philosophy and cognitive science. The philosophy called idealism asserts that reality is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Further to this we should include the metaphysical position of spiritualism, which is the belief that the world is made up of two substances, matter and spirit. I will take the liberty of including most religious belief systems in this category, for it is hard to see where else one is to place god in the world of things. Although most scientists would be dismissive of this philosophy, it is a central issue of this treatise to examine why something in excess of 80% of the human population would fall into this category of belief. We have barely started on the world of facts and find the world of things to be a rather crowded and complicated place, and anything but obvious, as we might have surmised before taking a closer look. There are two questions that arise from this: 1. What kinds of things are deserving of being included in the term reality, or be classified as real things? 2. Is there such a thing as an objective reality? Whether the world includes or excludes physical things, mental states, spirits and perhaps other things not mentioned, would seem to depend on who you speak to. In other words, it would seem to be a matter of belief or opinion as to what constitutes the world of things. This can be quite disconcerting to the scientist who wishes to hold a monopoly on such matters. The state of affairs of our present world is such that we do not have a methodology for determining an objective reality or even knowing if such a determination is possible. If we return to Wittgenstein's Tractatus section 2 (What is the case-a fact-is the existence of states of affairs) 12 Materialism is a philosophy which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are the result of material interactions. It is nearly synonymous to physicalism and the terms are often used interchangeably. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor we find that in order to determine whether a fact, or put more simply, some statement that a person makes, is true or not depends on the existence of a state of affairs. If we cannot determine what things should rightly comprise a real state of affairs, then we would already seem to be in some bother, since our capacity to determine what is truly real is compromised. We will have to leave this dilemma about the world of things for the time being so we can deal with the other side of the equation – facts. We will, however, return to the world of things a bit later on. As for now, we can set a limit on how much we are prepared to say about reality by accepting that there is such a thing as reality without saying exactly what it is. If we allow ourselves to generalize somewhat about Wittgenstein's notion of the relationship of facts to states of affairs, we can say that a fact stands in some relation to a state of affairs. Further, we might say that a fact stands in a representational relation to reality, i.e. a fact allows one part of the world to represent another part of the world. Using this framework we can say that a belief allows human beings to represent some aspect of the world to themselves and to others. For example, if someone, let's call him Bert, says "there is a lion walking down the street," then Bert is making a representation of a particular state of affairs, in this case about a lion walking down the street. Bert is a thing, an object or an entity, that is a part of the world of things, and he is making a representation about another part of the world of things, in this case about the possible state of affairs concerning a lion. The first thing Bert does is make a visual representation to himself of this state of affairs. Bert may be visually impaired, or he may be unfamiliar with the kind of situation presented by his visual sense. So there is always the possibility of Bert being mistaken about the veracity of the visual presentation produced by his brain. We further should recognize that the brain is a piece of biological machinery that interprets the world of sensory inputs, and is a device that makes representations of states of affairs. A monkey might just as well be mistaken if put in the same situation as Bert for the very same reasons. But Bert can do something else that the monkey cannot; Bert can make a statement, called a proposition, a kind of statement using language than can be evaluated as being either true or false. Bert can use this statement as a kind of linguistic label attached the visual depiction of the event seen through his eyes and forwarded to his brain. This can be likened to the caption that usually accompanies a photograph in a newspaper or magazine and linguistically supplements the visual presentation of the photograph. We can thus say that Bert has made a proposition about the existence of a lion walking down the street. That proposition is a fact that resides in logical space and is subject to evaluation based on the rules of logic. One of these rules is that the proposition can take on one of two possible values: True and False.13 Which of these two truth values attaches to Bert's proposition is dependent upon how the proposition stands in reality, i.e. how well it represents a (real) state of affairs. 13 There is actually a third possibility: Undecidable. This third category concerning undecidable propositions is a whole topic in itself and will have to be yet another matter to be passed over a bit lightly at this stage. Undecidability was first introduced by the mathematician Kurt Gödel in 1931 and was therefore unknown to Wittgenstein at the time of the writing of the Tractatus. 29 That was a rather long-winded story just to make the point that if someone says there is a lion nearby, you should take a look around and see if it's true; or so one might surmise. But things are not always quite what they seem. It has already been shown that determining reality is not a simple task, if at all possible. And we will further see that there can be problems in evaluating the very essence of truth and falsity, which means that logic itself, the very foundation of mathematics and all things we thought certain about the world, is fraught with ambiguity. And I also need to say something on behalf of the monkey that I placed in a disparaging position when comparing its faculties to that of Bert's. I was a bit hasty to say that the monkey couldn't make a statement about a state of affairs. A monkey can make a vocalization or a gesture which is a representation of a state of affairs, but not quite in the same way the Bert can, for the monkey's vocalizations would not be governed by the same rules of logic as Bert's. So we will have to delve more deeply into what makes the vocalizations of humans different from those of dogs, lions, chickens and monkeys. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Talking Fly Bert and Ludd are on vacation in America. They are sightseeing in Houston, Texas on a fine Sunday morning. Bert: Hey Ludd, what's that big building over there. Look at all those folks pouring into it. There must be something big going on. Ludd: Yeah, you're right. Something important must be happening in there. Everyone's really dressed up too. Maybe the President is coming to make a speech. Bert: You really think it could be the President of the United States of America? Wow. Or maybe it's even Molly Cyrus. That would really be something. Ludd: Molly Cyrus!? How do you know about Molly Cyrus? And it's Miley Cyrus, not Molly. Have you installed the internet at home, Bert? Bert: No way José - and I never will. And as for Millie, I saw her picture on a magazine cover while I was checking out at the supermarket last week. I didn't want to tell you, but I was really hoping we could see her on this trip to America. 31 Ludd: Well, forget it Bert. Not a chance in hell that we're going to see Miley Cyrus. And she's a singer for kids, not old fuddie-duddies like us. Anyway, let's see what's happening over there. Bert: There's a big sign on the building, Ludd. It says: 'Lakewood Church'. Ludd: Lakewood Church!? I was reading about that not long ago. I think it might be the biggest church in America. Maybe 15 or 20 thousand people can fit into that building. Bert: Not like the church in our town, huh Ludd!? Maybe you can fit 15 or 20 in ours. Ludd: And lucky to get even 3 showing up on a fine Sunday morning like this one. And how do you know how many people can fit into our church? I thought you were an atheist. Bert: I am an atheist, but I've been in the church lots of times. Well, maybe a few times. I go in sometimes to use the toilet. It's kind of quaint, don't you think? Ludd: Yeah. It is kind of quaint. Not like this monstrosity. Do you want to go in, Bert? Bert: Well, maybe. But let's wait a while. I'm really not dressed very well. I feel kind of funny going in with all those folks in white shirts and shiny shoes. Maybe we could just wait out here until the crowd clears a bit. Ludd: Okay. I guess you're right. I feel a bit raggy myself. Hey Bert, there's a big fly on your back. You want me to swat it for you. Bert: Yeah, Ludd. Go ahead, but not too hard. Fly: STOP! Don't hurt me. Bert: Did you say something, Ludd? Ludd (startled): No Bert. That was the fly talking. Bert: Now stop that Luddy; you're always playing tricks on me. Fly (crawling up onto Bert's right shoulder): No Bert, Ludd is right. I am the one that's talking. But creatures like me down here don't seem able to talk like they do on my planet. Ludd: Did you say 'on your planet' Mr. Fly? Fly: Yes. I come from the planet Girdle, and flies are the only creatures that can talk on Girdle. And creatures that look like you are just annoying big pests. Ludd (now closing in and looking right into the eyes of the fly): Well Mr. Fly, that makes your planet and my planet very much the same, ha ha. Can you jump down here so Bert can see you too? We can all sit on the lawn and have a little chat. We were just waiting around for the rest of those folks to go into that big building over there and then we were thinking of going in too. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Bert: Well, I'll be damned. A talking fly. This is even better than Miley Cyprus. We should move to America, Ludd. It's got everything! Ludd: Mr. talking Fly, do you mean to say that you're sort of an alien? Like you're really from outer space? Bert (interjecting): Of course he's an alien, or she's an alien, or whatever, Ludd. Ain't got no talking flies on this planet. Hey Fly, can you sing? Fly: Not only can I sing, but I can also dance. Do you want to see? Ludd: Maybe later, Mr. Fly. Look Bert, the crowd is thinning out. Let's go into the church. Bert: What should we do about the fly? Ludd: Just take him with us. Hey Mr. Fly, why don't you just fly back onto Bert's shoulder and we can all go together. I can hear them testing the loud speakers. The sermon must be about to start. Bert, Ludd and the fly enter the church. Bert: Wow. The place is packed to the rafters. I don't think we can get a seat. Ludd: We can just stand here in the back. It's a pretty good view from here; you can see everything. Fly: What kind of place is this? It looks like a bee hive and smells better than a pig sty. Ludd: It's a church. People come here to pray to god. Do you know what I'm talking about? Fly: Well, isn't it a strange coincidence that I find myself exactly in the place I came to Earth for. You see, everyone on Girdle speaks the same language, so we got kind of bored, so most of us Girdlings are taking English as a Second Language. Of course we downloaded your online dictionaries, but no one could understand what the word god means. So our leader, His Royal Buzziness, The Big Fly who sits upon The Big Cheese, sent the best English student to Earth to get the answer. And you know who the best English student is. Yep, it's yours truly. So I'm really lucky to have met you two, because you brought me to precisely where I want to be. Ludd: Shush! The minister is about to start. Minister: Blah, blah, blah.......blah, blah, blah. Congregation: Praised be the Lord. Minister: Blah, blah, blah........blah, blah, blah. Congregation: Hallelujah. Praised be the Lord. ... 33 Fly: Well, that was interesting. Too bad I didn't understand a thing, except the parts about money. I'm glad nobody asked me to put anything in the collection box, because I'm broke. I left my wallet in the spaceship. Bert: Why did that man with the collection box say we don't take monopoly money here? Ludd: Because you put Australian Dollars in the box, you dummy. Everyone knows it's worthless, except back home. Fly: Maybe I didn't understand all that hallelujah stuff, but that church was a real buzz. When can we go again? Bert: I was pretty bored. I don't think I'll go back again. Fly: Bored? It was exciting. I was singing and dancing. Could you hear me Bert? Bert: Yeah, you were great, but you're no Millie Citrus. Fly: I can't wait to tell His Royal Buzziness about this Jesus dude. Everyone is just crazy about him around here. Jesus loves me and I love Jesus. Hallelujah. Jesus is my Lord and Savior. Hallelujah. I think I'm really getting the knack of it. I'm going to open up a fly-through mega church when I get back to Girdle. Jesus is going to be the biggest thing to hit Girdle since the milk and honey meteor shower. I think His Royal Buzziness is going to proclaim Girdle a Christian planet once I tell him that Jesus is so powerful that he can even make humans sing and dance. We've been trying that for thousands of years without success. There was once a human we named Gnome Humansky that some flies said could talk, but I think it was a fluke. I hope His Royal Buzziness hasn't been knocked off his throne since I've been gone, because he hasn't been all that popular back home since he banned horses from the city. Bert: I don't want to interrupt, fly, but you don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. All that mumbo jumbo is a lot of bull crap. That's why you probably like it so much. Ludd: Hear! Hear! Bert. Give Mr. Fly a break. He's our guest. He's come all the way from across the galaxy just to learn about god. Let him make up his own mind about it. I actually quite enjoyed the sermon myself. It was a real inspiration. Bert: Well now the cat's out of the bag. I always suspected you were a closet god botherer. And everyone says you're supposed to be so clever. Ludd: Now Bert, I'm not exactly what you would call a god botherer, but I am kind of a spiritual person. What's wrong with that? Bert: I can't argue with you Ludd. Once you've got your mind made up about these things, no one can change it. But you won't be converting me anytime soon. I can assure you of that. I just believe in the Footy Gods and I'm proud of it. Fly: Ooooo, the Footy Gods. That sounds interesting. What kind of miracles can the Footy Gods do? I'd like to hear about that. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Ludd: Bert was just making a little joke, Mr. Fly. There really aren't any Footy Gods. Bert (whispering under his breath): Yes there are. Fly: You mean the only real God is this Jesus dude? Ludd: Well, Mr. Fly, maybe I should tell you a little something about this Jesus dude, as you call him. Because I wouldn't want you to come here all the way from Girdle and go back not knowing the whole story. Well, maybe not the whole story, 'cause the whole story is a really long and complicated one, and I don't know anything close to the whole story anyway. And lots of other people could tell the Jesus story and it wouldn't sound the same as the way I'm going to tell the story. Well, I'll do the best I can, Mr. Fly, so you can go back to Girdle and tell the Royal Buzziness how we do things here on planet Earth. Fly: I'm all ears! No, I'm not. I don't have ears! But please go on. I want to know the truth about Jesus. Bert (rolling up his eyes): Oh Boy! Ludd: I'll make it as simple as I can. Until about 3000 years ago people wondered how we all got here. There were all kinds of theories, and there still are, about how the universe got here, but around this time in a place in the Middle East, a tribe called the Israelites started to believe that there was just one creature that lived in the sky in a place they called Heaven, and this creature looked just like a human being and they called this creature God. All around the world there were people from other places that believed all kinds of different stories about how everything got to be the way it is. Some involved the spirit of animals, others a part of people that lived on after they died, especially their dead relatives. I don't want to get too far off track, because there are so many stories I could go on forever. The main thing to remember is that these Israelites believed that there was only one God and nobody could see him, because he lives in a place in the sky. Fly: And this person that lives in the sky is called Jesus, right? Ludd: Not exactly, but we're getting close. Another thousand years go by, and this tribe moved around and mixed in with other tribes nearby and became known as the Jews, because they lived in a land called Judea around the city of Jerusalem. Things weren't all that good for the Jews, because they were controlled by the armies of people from far away, called the Romans. There was a child born to a poor Jewish family during this time who was named Jesus. When Jesus grew up he started making trouble for the Jews, because he said they were corrupt and didn't live the way God had intended. But some people agreed with Jesus and he began to get a cult following and gained popularity around Jerusalem. Well, the Romans didn't like anyone from outside the system becoming too popular, so they nailed him up on a big wooden cross until he died. Fly: Eeek! How awful. And those statues of a man nailed to a cross that I saw around the church and hanging on chains around the necks of some of the people in the church was Jesus, right? Ludd: That's right, Mr. Fly. But I'm not finished yet. After Jesus died, some of his followers took his body to a house. A story started to go around the town that the body of Jesus had disappeared and a 35 few people actually saw the spirit of Jesus ascending into Heaven. So a story began that this Jesus was really the Son of God and had returned to Heaven to be with his Father. Bert: Have you ever heard such a crazy story, Fly? Fly: It's a pretty wild story, I have to admit, but I like it. Is that it? Ludd: Not quite, Mr. Fly. You see, only a small number of people believed this story at first. These believers were called Christians. They were persecuted by the Romans and the Jews alike for hundreds of years, because the Romans had their own gods and the Jews still believed in the original god who didn't have any children, until one day the King of the Romans decided that he wanted to be a Christian too. And from that time on the number of people calling themselves Christians grew and grew until they became the most numerous people in the world. And now about 30 percent of the people in the world call themselves Christian. Fly: And what about the other 70 percent? Ludd: Well many call themselves something else and believe some other story. Some, like Bert here, don't call themselves anything and don't believe any of these stories. I know it's a bit confusing, but that's just the way things are on our planet. Fly: I know it's only 30 percent, but the Christians are still number one, so I think I'll tell that to His Royal Buzziness. He loves to back a winner. Ludd: Maybe you should say that not everyone is sure that the Jesus story is true, but a lot of people think so. Fly: Why are Christians so convinced that the Jesus story is true? Ludd: Remember those books that everyone was reading from in the church? It says so in those books. Fly: And why doesn't everyone believe in Jesus. Can't they read those books too? Ludd: Yes, of course they can, but they've got other books that say something else. Bert: Now see what you've done, Fly, you really opened up a can of worms. Fly: Worms!? Where? I love worms. They're real tasty. Bert: I'd like a nice Houston brunch about now. Let's look for a restaurant, Ludd. Fly: I still don't quite understand. How do people know if what it says in their book is true and what it says in another person's book is false? Ludd: Because each book declares that its contents are true. So people who believe their book is true, believe it because it says so in that book. Bert: So what do you think now, Fly? Do you still believe in Jesus? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Fly: I'm Undecided! Bert: Let's get some lunch. By the way, do you have a name, Fly? Fly: Yeah, my name is Kurt. Ludd: Mmmm. Kurt from Girdle. Where have I heard that before? 37 Language "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." - Ludwig Wittgenstein Language creates its own reality. This is the key to understanding the human condition, the key to understanding why people believe the things they do and why our respective beliefs differ so much. But there are many pieces to the language puzzle to uncover before this becomes evident. We will take a look at language from a number of angles in order to get a comprehensive understanding of how it operates. Language is a common word that can have a wide variety of definitions and usages. The way it is used in this book will be quite specific, but not one that I will put a definition to. I will let the definition evolve as we examine the specifics in due course. The word language will not refer to any specific language, like French or Chinese, but rather a generic system that uses a kind of sign called a word (or predominantly so) in particular combinations that stand in a representational relation to states of affairs; or to put more simply, a kind of system that produces facts. If we wish to understand what reality is, we will have to attain a deep understanding of the nature of language and how it operates, because language is the principal means by which humans represent complex ideas about the world. It also distinguishes the way humans represent the world from the way other things, like monkeys, plants and rocks, represent the world. So language places humans in a very limited club of species, In fact, it appears to be a club limited to just one species, as far as we know. If we review those first sections of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, we can see how language creates its own reality. Humans produce and use language, which is a system of facts in logical space, which in turn is a representation of a state of affairs, something that is part of the world of things. The brain cannot directly access the world of things, but rather creates a reality based on how it interprets facts about the world. What was the course of natural history that shaped this particular situation whereby humanity dramatically separated from the rest of biology to reach the unique position that we find ourselves in today? Very little is known about the specifics of how humans acquired language, and perhaps for this reason it does not enter into most theories of mind to any significant degree. Although the exact details of language acquisition may not be known, there is enough evidence to piece together the evolutionary trajectory of language in order to see how it may fit into a theory about how we came to have a conscious experience largely dominated by words. To gain an understanding of how language operates, it would seem helpful to cover some territory concerning its evolution. There is not much to go on in this regard, since language is not the sort of thing that leaves behind Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor footprints; so from the period in which language was presumed to have been acquired we have to rely mostly on skeletal remains and prehistoric tools to piece together something which is not directly related to either. In summary, this is what can be said about the emergence of language: Whatever language is, it certainly came about by means of a Darwinian process (evolution via the process of natural selection). The oldest human fossils have been dated to round 200,000 years ago, with some anthropologists estimating 250,000 years as a likely upper transition point to what can be said to be anatomically modern humans. Since speciation is not an overnight process, pinpointing an exact date is as much definitional as biological, and having to pick a number like 150,000, 200,000 or 300,000 would not change much as to how we view the nature of the human condition. Much of taxonomy, although systematic, is about classification and subject to change, as is most of science for that matter, as when new theories cause a shift in the paradigmatic thinking of the day. Language is believed to have arisen around 75,000 years ago, with estimates ranging up to 100,000 (Bickerton, 2007; Widgen, 2004).14 Some anthropologists estimate that the all African human population may have been as low as 2,000 to 10,000 individuals at the time of language emergence. Around this time humans are believed to have begun their continuous colonization of the world, taking language with them as they journeyed to settle the other continents. There seems to be a growing consensus around this theory, all of which seems quite reasonable. Written language is dated to between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, and may have arisen more than once. But most peoples had written language introduced by invaders. Many tribes still do not have a written form of language. Some aboriginal tribes, such as the Pirahã of the Amazon rainforest, are thought to have very small languages of perhaps no more than hundreds of words (and quite likely fewer than 1000), and a distinct lack of numeracy (Everett, 2005; Nevins, Pesetsky, & Rodrigues, 2009). These tribes do not exhibit the worship of deities and have few if any stories. They would lack what more technological humans would call culture. But it would not be seriously suggested that they are not human nor do they lack the intellectual capacity of humans with larger languages. One could state that with the evolution from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens came the mastery of fire and simple tools. Perhaps this is a rather crude synopsis of one and a half million years of human history encapsulated in a single sentence, but there is not much point in dwelling on this period for which so little is known concerning language, except that it is a near certainly no animal had it. During this period the human brain enlarged to modern proportions, growing by roughly 30%. What is noteworthy is that brain size increases during this epoch and it transpires before language is acquired, not after. The gross physical capacity to process linguistic information is in place first, although it is not clear that this physical capacity is actually necessary for true language production. It is however an interesting point which provides a framework for examining the development of 14 These date ranges are very sketchy, which even the authors admit, but 50,000 to 100,000 years ago seems to fall within the general consensus. 39 language in the human species. The brain is a great energy-consuming organ, so it is unlikely that an animal would evolve to increase its size without having developed an important countervailing benefit. I will offer a theory that encephalization occurred to accommodate the storage of visualizations required for deductive reasoning. Let us take a look at how an animal with true language differs from one without. Induction and deduction are the two principal classifications of how animals predict the future and decide what action to take in a given situation. I believe that the balance between these two ways of reasoning played a critical role in the development of language and will approach the subject with this in mind. It is not by coincidence that we once again find an important duality in nature. There is an analogue here to the chance and necessity duality which is not immediately evident. The laws of nature are about how we go from one state of affairs to the next in respect to time. Induction corresponds to the necessity part of the equation; we take what was ascertained from one state of affairs and apply it to an analogous future situation, the assumption being that what has worked in the past will work in the future. Decision making of this sort brings both stability and predictability to the world in that the past dictates the future. All animals that can learn from experience with some reasonable level of sophistication use induction as their primary driver in the decision making mechanism, with the possible exception of humans, where the balance is not so clearly resolved. Induction acts as a fine tuning mechanism for the instinctive behavior that animals are born with. Generally speaking, the more complex the animal, the more room is left for learned behavior, particularly for animals capable of adapting to diverse environmental conditions. Deductive reasoning is another matter. With the exception of humans, it is not often observed in nature, and when it is, only to a limited degree. Some parrots and corvids have shown remarkable problem solving ability, both in the wild and under controlled conditions. Many primates along with dolphins and a number of other mammals exhibit generalized problem solving behavior that is suggestive of the process of deduction. Deductive reasoning can be viewed as bringing chance into decisions about how an animal might behave in a particular situation, in that, the animal must first form a hypothesis about how the world works and then test the hypothesis in a situation which seems an appropriate application of the general principle. This is what tool making is about. The relationship of the principle to the applicability is deduced, not taken from a similar past experience, so there is a far greater chance of error due to misapplication of the principle. In the context of our understanding of language development, it is important to recognize that deductive reasoning mirrors a formally logical construction.15 There is the formation of a set of premises about the world, and on this basis some rules will be formulated on how to proceed in the accomplishment of a task. For example, if one has used a stone to form a piece of flint into a sharp point, a generalization may be made about how stones can be used to shape objects. This understanding about the relationship of the use of stones in the shaping of other objects in the environment can be applied to flint in the construction of spear tips, large arrowheads and small 15 Formal logic and formal systems are discussed in the next chapter. A brief description on this can be found in the Glossary. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor arrowheads, arrowheads made from materials other than flint and on and on. If the premise is that stones can be used to form arrowheads from any material, one would eventually discover that the premise is not completely correct and would need some refinement, as when the rule is applied to things such as diamonds or butter the premise will be found out to have failed in these instances, as the relative hardness or softness of the material to be formed will play a role in the ability to complete the task. Hence, such is the case with deduction, language and other formal systems; the results are only as good as the premises. It can nonetheless be seen that once a good set of premises is established, this type of reasoning is very powerful in its potential application across a broad array of conditions. The use of tools and the control of fire by ancestral humans are fairly well documented and were refined throughout the period of encephalization. It would seem reasonable to conclude that this is evidence of deductive reasoning due to the broad application and variations of behavior, as well as encephalization itself. If we imagine how a non-linguistic primate would construct the logic necessary for deductive reasoning, it would almost certainly be by visualization. The construction of a logical picture would require a significant amount of neuronal power, analogous to the storage of images on a computer, thus the finding of hominid encephalization corresponding with this prelinguistic period of early technological development. This is why humans already had large brains before the acquisition of language. We needed to store all those visualizations requisite for crude deductive reasoning prior to the acquisition of the symbolic substitution for these visualizations. When I speak of symbolic substitution, I am of course referring to language. This would seem to be the evolutionary driver for language development consistent with the evidence. Symbols replace visual imagery in the deductive reasoning process. The formal system of logic is already in place and so is the computational powerhouse to deal to with it. Visual logic is replaced by propositional logic, and as they say, the rest is history. . . . Consider traveling back in time a few hundred thousand years to envisage what might have occurred to drive one particular species to make the jump to a syntactic system of communication. It might seem to many that this is such a great leap that it takes on leap of faith proportions; so much so that it even led the great intellectual and father of modern linguistic theory, Noam Chomsky, to conjecture that something other than a Darwinian process may have been responsible (Chomsky, 2005, p. 104).16 But this, of course, cannot be so. Everything evolves because of some Darwinian process; it is just that some are a bit more obscure than others. And if one does not already have a very broad view about what a Darwinian process is, this would be a good time to broaden one's view. I offer this as some inducement: If it's not evolution by natural selection, then what is it? There is nothing else science offers as an alternative, and that's because there simply is nothing else. What needs to ensue is an expansion of what comes under the ambit of Darwinism and to appreciate how it works as a multi-level process. 16 In fairness to Chomsky, he has modified his earlier views and has challenged those who have interpreted him as suggesting a non-Darwinian alternative to the evolution of language. 41 It is a challenge of imagination to be taken out of our present state of being and picture ourselves back in a world before humans had language. More often than not our minds are flooded with words, at times overwhelming our consciousness to the exclusion of other sensory information. But occasionally language takes a back seat to our more primeval senses, such as when responding to a crisis situation (what we might describe as an instinctive response). A natural human hunter is quiet, as you might expect for any predator that uses stealth as a means of achieving a successful hunt. The modern world requires ever increasing processing of linguistic information, such that traditional sensory information is pushed to the background in favor of the more efficient linguistic processing. For example, it is not much help if one is trying to understand a written contract by simply staring at it without reading it. But linguistic processing is made at the expense of a dampening of our acuity in the other senses. It should start to become evident that the traditional sensory and the linguistic sensory are two semi-integrated systems, with language evolving in humans to occupy an ever greater amount of mental function as required by environmental demands. Our mental processes can manage a wide combinatorial spectrum encompassing both traditional sensory and linguistic information. The notion of a sense of human language has been introduced as it appears to be unique in its breadth of syntactic features and neural pathways. As such, it shares much with what we normally associate with the traditional senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. It is generally understood that we perceive the world through these five senses. It is not important to this discussion that the number of senses is higher if we count neurological pathways whereby we might include pain, balance, temperature and a number of others; our common historical understanding of a sense will suffice here. Broadly speaking, a sense organ is simply a faculty or mechanism for perceiving external stimuli. It receives input from the environment (or the world perceived to be exogenous to the mind) and processes it into something we interpret as meaningful. The eye receives electromagnetic radiation (EMR) as input, sends the signal to the brain to process into what we consciously experience as vision. The ear membrane accepts waves of air pressure which are interpreted as sound. In effect, the input itself cannot be directly experienced; it is processed by the respective sense organ and corresponding parts of the brain. It is then stored in memory to be interpreted, directly or through recall, as a conscious experience or for subconscious processing. If one is not conscious then sound waves will not be interpreted as anything, since part of the apparatus for processing this input is not functioning, notwithstanding subliminal perception or the activation of other neural pathways to register stimuli even if the primary organ for interpreting such stimuli is not operative (blindsight for example). Vision and hearing, as with all the senses, are something interpretive of the world external to the mind. They do not show what the outside world actually is, only an interpretation of the input. This has been previously discussed as the representational view of the world. I would propose that the language organ, as ill-defined as it might be, is itself a type of sensory organ. What the sensory part of language does is receive a proposition as an input, and assigns a truth value to that proposition as its output. In this way language operates very much like any other sense organ, as it receives information from the external world and processes it into a Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor representation in the internal world of the mind. For most people the input will be in the form of sound waves, but hand signs used mainly by the deaf work quite satisfactorily and accomplish the same task. These signals are then parsed into words and interpreted using the rule-following system of grammar to form structures such as sentences, some of which can be classified as propositions. Linguistic structures, such as imperatives, can be simple or complex constructions of one-to-one symbol-semantic relationships. But the ones we are concerned about here are the propositions, for these are the ones which allow language to grow into the combinatorial assemblies that we find in modern language. There are many neurological processes that have been skimmed over to get to the stage where we are discussing propositions. Linguistics is a broad field with numerous specializations and it is not my intent to review them in any depth, but rather jump to the part that relates to the question at hand, which is the rule-following aspect of language. It may not be customary to include language as part of the usual panoply of senses regardless of the definition one chooses, but upon close examination, language incorporates many of the typical features of other senses. Broca's area and Wernicke's area of the brain are two regions often identified with the production of language, so a neurological basis for categorizing language as a sense is fairly well established. There is evidence that the inferior parietal lobule near Wernicke's area may be the key region used in linguistic syntactic and numeric processing (Jackendoff, 2002). Since language utilizes hearing as its primary input mechanism, one could say that it piggybacks on another sensory system rather than being a sensory system in its own right. But the fact that language can also piggyback on vision and touch shows that these senses are merely vehicles for the primary pathway for linguistic inputs to get to the cellular mechanism that processes it. Although the exact mechanism of language evolution is not clear, most would agree that it evolved from a more rudimentary form of verbal communication; it should be noted that gestural origins for language have also been posited (Christiansen & Kirby, 2003; Jackendoff, 2002; Masataka, 2008). A most convincing argument for placing language among the other senses is that we don't need any other sensory vehicle to use language when thinking. We effectively talk to ourselves without vocalizing, although sounds will come into our minds if we have normal hearing function and the related visual context will take part if one is a user of a signing system such as American Sign Language. But there is nothing entering from the external world per se. All the inputs and outputs are within one's own brain. Language takes external sensory inputs, adds to this its own stored memories and creates a logic-based perception of the matter in question. Therefore, further to the usual perception that a non-linguistic animal might have, a linguistic human can have a rational take on a particular state of affairs. Whether one feels comfortable with conjoining language with the usual senses is not all that significant, but perhaps reinforces that language is an important means for humans to make sense of the world. Language can give a blind person a very rich experience of the world despite the loss of his or her most vital traditional sense. It is this idea that I wish to impart by labeling language a sense. ⋯ 43 We will return to the matter of language evolution with a little thought experiment: Imagine a machine is invented that will allow someone to be transported back in time. An anthropologist with access to the time machine is interested in the origins of human language, so she devises an experiment where she transports the (ubiquitous) linguist Noam Chomsky back to the year 80,000 BCE to a village in Africa where she believes that language originated. When Professor Chomsky returns to the present, the experimenter inquires: Professor Chomsky, "do humans have language yet? And by the way, how did the people treat you?" Professor Chomsky replies: "No they don't have language yet, but I think we are getting close. Although they seemed surprised to see me at first, they treated me very kindly indeed; everyone smiled to show that I was a welcomed guest. One man pointed to a simple hut and made it clear to me with gestures and grunting sounds to enter the hut and sit down. Then a woman, perhaps his wife, brought me a cup of water. I pointed to myself and said 'my name is Noam Chomsky'." So the experimenter sends the good professor back to the same village one generation later, i.e., the year 79,980 BCE, and the process is repeated. Again Prof. Chomsky returns with the same reply. This continues covering a period of many centuries, with roughly the same result. Chomsky reports that with each visitation it seems that the older people remember him, but the younger ones that were not around during his previous visit were surprised by his visitation and seemed to have no expectation that such a thing might occur. As we slowly grind our way ever closer to the present Chomsky becomes increasingly more encouraged. Finally in the year 76,540 BCE Professor Chomsky returns and says: "Eureka! We've got language. It's pretty simple, but I definitely detected a few rules of grammar, and if I'm not mistaken, maybe even a hint of recursion. When I arrived, a smiling young man greeted me and said: 'Noam Chomsky, glick euk hok'; I wasn't sure what he meant by that, but he pointed to his hut when he made those utterances, quite like on previous occasions. And this time, even the teenagers seemed to be waiting for my arrival, as if they were expecting me." It then comes to the mind of the experimenter to ask Professor Chomsky another question: "By the way Professor, did you notice if the people became conscious once they learned to speak?" And Professor Chomsky replies, "What do you mean? Everyone seemed exactly the same in that regard. They appeared to me to be just as conscious in the year 80,000 BCE as they did on this last visit. The only difference was that before this time they could only grunt, but now they could speak." The experimenter is overjoyed. She goes on to publish a paper where she claims that humans acquired language between the years 76,560 and 76,540 BCE. This little parable is useful for highlighting several important points: 1. Although language certainly evolved via a Darwinian process, it is difficult to imagine a scenario that easily fits this evolution. In the parable, humans evolve from a species without language to a species with language in a single generation, yet we feel uncomfortable about the specifics of that evolutionary process, particularly in the generational time it would take to accomplish the task. In the end, it takes an expert, Noam Chomsky in the parable, to declare what constitutes true language. Although we will never have this opportunity, if it were possible, it would probably come down to something like this; some expert would declare such and such as the moment of transition. And this of course would be disputed by other so-called experts. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor 2. Without language the concept of history is dramatically deflated. Language preserves events of the past and is immensely powerful in the growth of knowledge. Language permits the passage of knowledge beyond the generational experiential boundary. An individual does not have to personally experience an event to attest to its veracity. In fact, the whole concept of truth comes about in the emergence of language. In the parable, those too young to have witnessed a prior visit from Chomsky, nonetheless have a belief in his existence and likely (pseudo-messianic) return, due to the linguistic passage of knowledge to the next generation. If Chomsky never did go back in time to the year 76,540 BCE, for how many generations would the belief in the stories of the elders persist in the society? Who can say, but in modern society some seem to persist for quite a long time. 3. What was consciousness like during this transitional period of language acquisition? Would we be prepared to deny pre-linguistic Homo sapiens consciousness? How would we apply our concept of thoughts and thinking to these humans? Surely humans were thinking prior to language acquisition, but they had to be thinking without words and grammar. And during the transitional period from grunting to speaking there would certainly have been a transitional form of conscious experience from non-linguistic sensory to the mixed form we have today, but with a balance very much skewed toward a non-linguistic form of conscious experience. For this purpose, qualia, a term often used in the philosophy of mind to denote individual instances of the subjective conscious experience, is quite useful, as it can be said that the qualia of our consciousness would have changed. 4. The conscious experience of the grunting human of the year 80,000 BCE would have a lot more in common with the sensory-type consciousness of a dog or chimpanzee than that of a modern linguistic human. We need to be very cautious about where we draw the line about consciousness and recognize that the modern human conscious experience is in a long transitional period. One of the features of consciousness is that it does not lend itself to quantification; but qualitatively, it would be fair to say that language confers a far greater change in the conscious experience than does a change in speciation for late evolution mammals, to which I would include both dogs and chimpanzees. The conscious mind of a pre-linguistic hominin was probably much closer to that of a chimpanzee than to that of the modern linguistic hominin, or in the parlance of Thomas Nagel or David Chalmers, the mental experience of what it is like to be a pre-linguistic human is probably closer to what it is like to be a chimpanzee than what it is like to be a linguistic human. (The contributions of the philosophers of cognition Nagel and Chalmers are discussed in the chapter on consciousness). ... I would like to bring together several pieces of mostly anecdotal evidence to suggest a theory of how language came about. Since there is nothing in the fossil record that could indicate the transition from a non-linguistic animal to the current variety of human, we can only conjecture some reasonable accounts for what may have transpired. The fact that all humans have some language, regardless of their technological 45 development, is supportive of the view that an African tribe developed language around 75,000 years ago, and took this new characteristic with it as tribal members migrated far and wide. They either brought the linguistic culture with them; integrating language into the culture of tribes they mixed with, or replaced non-linguistic humans completely. If the oft used 75,000 years ago mark is assumed, then a scenario whereby a relatively small population of humans spread language to all the habitable continents within the succeeding 50,000 years, or thereabouts, seems quite likely. There is some evidence that several isolated tribes remained with small languages until encounters with more technologically advanced humans; this suggests that language, at least in some cases, remained simple prior to civilization. By simple language, I mean that language was contained to representations of everyday events and not many abstractions. Darwin noted in his account of the Voyage of the Beagle the simplicity of language amongst the natives of Tierra del Fuego (Darwin, 1839). The size and complexity of Yaghan (Fuegian) language is probably much greater than Darwin had supposed. It is not at all clear what development may have occurred after the Beagle expedition, and once missionaries entered the area. Unfortunately, there are few remaining native speakers, as the Fuegian tribes are now all but extinct. Darwin looked upon these people with considerable contempt, calling them wretched, practicing cannibalism, naked in subzero temperatures and living the most basic of subsistence lives. But he remarked that they were quick to learn foreign languages and seemed in most respects to be as intelligent as civilized people.17 Darwin also noted their superiority of vision over that of his countrymen.18 Another point Darwin makes is that they did not seem to have a concept of god or spiritual matters. This is not surprising, as it takes a language of sufficient breadth to form the concepts required by religious belief systems. 17 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, Chapter X, excerpt: They are excellent mimics: as often as we coughed or yawned, or made any odd motion, they immediately imitated us. Some of our party began to squint and look awry; but one of the young Fuegians (whose whole face was painted black, excepting a white band across his eyes) succeeded in making far more hideous grimaces. They could repeat with perfect correctness each word in any sentence we addressed them, and they remembered such words for some time. Yet we Europeans all know how difficult it is to distinguish apart the sounds in a foreign language. Which of us, for instance, could follow an American Indian through a sentence of more than three words? All savages appear to possess, to an uncommon degree, this power of mimicry. I was told, almost in the same words, of the same ludicrous habit among the Caffres [Author's note: this is an offensive term used at the time referring to Black Africans]; the Australians, likewise, have long been notorious for being able to imitate and describe the gait of any man, so that he may be recognized. How can this faculty be explained? Is it a consequence of the more practised habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage state, as compared with those long civilized? 18 Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, Chapter X, excerpt: Their sight was remarkably acute; it is well known that sailors, from long practice, can make out a distant object much better than a landsman; but both York and Jemmy were much superior to any sailor on board: several times they have declared what some distant object has been, and though doubted by everyone, they have proved right, when it has been examined through a telescope. They were quite conscious of this power; and Jemmy, when he had any little quarrel with the officer on watch, would say, "Me see ship, me no tell." Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor In regards to linguistic characteristics, the Fuegians may be representative of how most humans were round 20,000 years ago. One may build a picture whereby in the not so distant past humans were very much like other primates, but with better communication skills and more advanced tool making ability. No small matter, but behaviorally a far cry from the modern variety of our species. One might say that an elephant is a large herbivore with an excellent memory and a marvelous prehensile snout. By making this comparison I am highlighting that humans and elephants are two animals with some very handy adaptively evolved traits. 20,000 years ago it may have been objectively difficult to say which would be more utilitarian, but as it will turn out, it is language that is indeed the extraordinary evolutionary leap forward. In a world where there are ever decreasing numbers of speakers of aboriginal languages, it becomes difficult to imagine what conditions were like at the advent of language. Darwin's observations are useful in constructing this picture, mainly due to the fact that, notwithstanding his 19th century prejudicial views of native peoples, his observational faculty was second to none. The picture that Darwin portrays of the Fuegian people seems a fair representation of early linguistic humans. The main points to be taken are that early humans have a greater traditional sensory acuity and their consciousness is less skewed toward the language dominance found in modern technological humans. The balance of sensory utilization is, of course, strongly adaptive; so in a world where audiovisual acuity is most useful, one would not want to have it suppressed by the imposition of too many words clogging up one's thought processes. Language must have gone through a long rough period to finally take hold when it did, but once its advantages became clear, natural selection took its course. This selection continues today as our brain must apportion ever greater capacity to language processing. Darwin's account of the Fuegians, as well as other similar accounts, is testimony that some brainpower previously allocated to other senses is being redirected to language handling. ⋯ The experiences described by the autistic animal behaviorist Temple Grandin are particularly enlightening. She has brought her manner of visual thinking into prominence, making the point that she does not convert words into visual generalizations the way that neurotypical (a term she uses for normal or non-autistic) people do, but rather into specific visual representations from memorized experiences; so her memories are visual memories, not verbal. She strongly believes that many other animals are visual thinkers as well and likens her thoughts to that of animals that she has worked closely with, particularly cattle; she is arguably the world's most successful designer of cattle handling systems. She does this by applying her distinctive thinking abilities to the task (Grandin, 1995). Some of Grandin's remarks pertaining to visual thinking correspond well with Darwin's observations about the three Fuegians on board the Beagle. Other primates, particularly chimpanzees, due to their close genetic and behavioral relationship to humans, form good examples for what human behavior might be like without language. What happens thereafter is the interesting part of the story. 47 The facility which humans possessed for increasing their communication skill had exceptional selective advantages, which was evidenced by the rapid expansion of the human population in both numbers and habitats. In addition to the advantages inherent in superior communication abilities, language permits the symbolic storage of information; this method is far more economical than other representations, although ostensibly less precise. While most would agree that this change in the kind of information stored in memory represents a concomitant increase in knowledge, it may have more to do with how we define knowledge than what may be the case in fact. It would be fair to say that the kind of knowledge gained through language leads to the expansion of culture. Richard Dawkins coined the term 'meme' to represent a unit of cultural inheritance; it is a useful term when compared to 'gene', since both have information at their core. One could say that culture is the phenotype of memes. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Ranch Bert: It was a great idea coming here, Ludd. We may have cows in Australia, but the scenery is magnificent in Montana. Ludd: Three days at the ranch including going out on the range with the cowboys and room and board included for only $500 each was a pretty good deal I thought. Bert: I was a bit surprised that you wanted to come here, given that you're a vegetarian. But I suppose you can fill up on potatoes, Ludd. Kurt: A vegetarian? Does that mean you don't even drink a bit of blood now and then? Bert: That's right Kurt. Ludd abstains from all animal parts. I would too, but meat just tastes too good. Kurt: I agree with you Bert. I'd find it hard giving up meat. But I've got a cousin that just eats fruit. There's plenty to feast on here for the two of us, hey Bert? 49 Bert: Yeah, I can't wait for dinner. And lucky you, getting all of this for free. It's really good that you can go anywhere you want and never have to pay an admission fee. Ludd: Will you two stop talking about food for once and enjoy the scenery. I thought you were supposed to be here on a fact finding mission, Kurt. Kurt: You're right Ludd; I ought to be more observant, like a good scientist should. Bert: Hey Kurt, do you have cows on Girdle? Kurt: Yes Bert. And the cow is one of the most important animals in the evolution of our planet, especially for flies. Bert: How's that, Kurt? Kurt: Bovinologists say that cows were the first animals to acquire language. It was a long time ago, so we can't be sure how much is fact and how much is legend. Bert: But I thought you said that only flies had speech on Girdle. Isn't that right? Kurt: That is right, Bert. But the story goes that cows could speak many thousands of years ago, but then just stopped. Bert: That seems awfully strange. You would think that language has such a strong selective advantage that once you got it, you would be very reluctant to lose it. I wonder what happened. Kurt: I can only recount what we were told in our dipterology classes at school. You know how cows always follow their leader. That's just the way they are. The story goes that around a million years ago the cows had a leader of the herd called Angus. I'll just call him Gus for short. Like all bovine leaders, Gus had one master rule that could never be broken, which was to follow the leader no matter what. So wherever Gus would go, the rest were sure to follow. Before cows could speak, this was never a problem. The cow closest to the leader would just follow the leader and the next cow would follow that cow and so forth and so on. But after cows improved their language capabilities instead of just following the leader they started asking questions like: 'where are we going this afternoon Dear Leader and what are we doing tomorrow Dear Leader? Gus had been the leader for many years and was becoming cranky in his old age. Whenever he was asked those kind of questions he would just say: 'don't worry about that, just follow me'. That made sense of course, since following Gus was the one rule that could never be broken. But there was one young cow named Bubba that liked to graze near Gus who would never stop badgering him about what his plans were. There was no malice in it; he just wanted to know what Gus was thinking. Being the eldest son of Gus, he wanted to be leader after Gus passed away. Bubba would say things like: 'what do we do if it rains, Gus; where are we going tomorrow, Gus; when are we going to have some rye grass for dinner, Gus?' And as you might suspect, Gus was getting annoyed of all this constant questioning and said: 'Bubba, I'm the leader of the herd, isn't that right?' And Bubba nodded his head affirmatively. 'And you have to follow everything I say and do it without question, isn't that right Bubba?' And Bubba again nodded affirmatively. 'Look over there toward the mountains to the north, Bubba. I want you to go that way, to the north. Do you understand?' And Bubba replied: 'sure Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Gus, whatever you say; you're the boss, Gus.' And Bubba started walking north toward the mountains, just like Gus had commanded him to. Then Bubba's mother Betsy, who was grazing right next to Bubba asked: 'Where are you going, Bubba?' And Bubba replied: 'Gus told me to go toward those mountains to the north, so that's where I'm going.' And Betsy started walking north with Bubba. And the next cow and the next cow, until they were all walking north. Then Betsy asked: 'Hey Bubba, have you seen Gus lately?' And Bubba looked around and could see hundreds of cows behind him, but none of them was Gus. Bubba moved away from the herd, looked in every direction and saw Gus alone in the distance walking south, in the exact direction opposite to what he told Bubba. Then Bubba shouted with such alarm that every fly jumped off the back of every cow: 'Gus is going the other way!!' 'But I thought he told you to go this way,' Betsy protested. 'He did, he did,' insisted Bubba. And every cow looked to the north and then to the south and then to the north and then again to the south, totally bewildered not knowing what to do. Should they follow what Gus told them to do, or just follow Gus? The herd went into a panic, running around in circles. Bert: They were in a real dilemma, weren't they, Kurt? What happened next? Kurt: Betsy was a wise old cow. She let out a thunderous 'Moooooooooooooo' so every cow could not be mistaken but to look up and face her. Then Betsy said 'moo' again and then another 'moo' and began walking briskly south toward Gus. And the other cows followed, each in turn bellowing 'moo'. And from that moment on 'moo' was the only word to ever come out of the mouth of a cow. Ludd (speaking under his breath): What cannot be mooed must be passed over in silence. Bert: What was that, Ludd? Ludd: Nothing, Bert, only thinking out loud. I just had an idea for the last sentence of a book I've been working on. 51 Formalism "Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental." ― Ludwig Wittgenstein Formalism is a term used in mathematics in reference to special kinds of mathematical and logical systems called formal systems. We have already made reference to formal systems earlier in this book without going into much detail, except to note that it was something central to the matter of how language works. Without getting too technical, we will try to introduce concepts in logic so the reader not well-versed in these matters (and as the world goes, not many are) can get a handle on the terminology and see how it relates to language, belief systems and reality. I may take a few liberties with some of the definitions for the sake of simplification, in recognition that this book is intended for a more general readership. Formal systems, formalism and axiomatic systems have some precise definitions in mathematics and formal logic, but I will blur the lines ever so slightly while not losing the essence of the message. A formal system is a kind of rule-following system that meets certain simple criteria having the following features: 1. A set of symbols with a grammar or syntax. These are rules about how the symbols, usually words, numbers and signs that manipulate these symbols, are put together to make wellformed statements. 2. A set of assumptions or premises or givens, which are called axioms. 3. Rules of inference, which instruct how to create additional true statements, or theorems, from the system. These can also be called rules for theorem generation. Every system that intends to generate something new, whether it be true statements, arithmetic equalities or new positions in a game, needs to have a stage on which these new situations take place. A formal system has a set of rules about how the system operates. In a game, like Chess or Monopoly, it is quite simply the rule book that comes with the game. The rule book describes how the game is set up and how the game proceeds from one state to the next. In a formal language we can call the symbols letters and words and the rules of how they are put together to form well-formed formulas or statements a grammar. In a game, any legal move, i.e. a move that is permitted by the rules of the game, can be considered to be a theorem of the system. Any grammatically correct statement in a given language, i.e. syntactically correct, is a theorem in that language. Whether this applies to natural language as spoken by humans is something which will be discussed in detail later on. An axiom is a statement accepted as true as the basis for argument. A key thing about an axiom as the way it is used in axiomatic systems is that we needn't even think about whether we consider the Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor axiom to be true or not in relation to a state of affairs in the world, i.e. whether the axiom represents something we consider to be real in the world. We are not referring to the world of things, but rather how things stand in logical space. An axiom is a postulate, it is a given, something we just assume to be true without any proof. Strictly speaking, axioms will be taken as true statements within the logical space in which they reside, i.e. the formal or axiomatic system in which they appear. For example, suppose I proclaim a new axiomatic system and say that the first axiom in this system is: all dogs are green animals with eight legs; the statement is true within my declared system simply because I said it is so. That's what makes it an axiom. There is no recourse open to appeal to anything outside the system. It stands on its own within its own logical space. Figure 1: Structure of formal systems This diagram (Figure 1) shows the syntactic divisions within a formal system. Strings of symbols may be broadly divided into nonsense and well-formed formulas. The set of well-formed formulas is divided into theorems and nontheorems. One of the most common 3-statement inferences, called a syllogism, is: 1. All men are mortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. In this case we are using English words as symbols and English grammar to form syntactically correct sentences. Generally speaking, the first two sentences are propositions, since they can either be true or false. But in the syllogism they are called premises (axioms), because these statements are made without given any proof and are to be accepted a being true. They are not derived from any other given system, except perhaps common sense assumptions, if you like. The third state is a theorem created by inference. If the first two statements are true then we can infer that Socrates is mortal. If we change the syllogism to the following, we come to a different conclusion: 1. All men are immortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. 53 Logically, it does not follow that Socrates is mortal from the premises. But suppose we have the following syllogism: 1. All men are immortal. 2. Socrates is a man. 3. Therefore, Socrates is immortal. This turns out to be logically correct. It can be argued that the first premise that all men are immortal is false, but that is beside the point. Logic has its own internal truth that doesn't require any fact checking outside its own formal system. This is why it is said that a conclusion is only as good as its premises. We could have a formal system with the premise: The bible is the sole authority for determining truth. Then any statement that follows will be true if the statement appears in the bible. There is no recourse to scientific authority because the premise has already directed us to what is true within this particular system. . . . Since we have put the world of things in abeyance, we need to see how things operate in logical space, for this is the only space we have to work with at this stage of our journey. Now that a few of the generalities are out of the way we can examine formal systems in a bit more detail. There is a vital thread linking language, formal systems and the perceived physical universe which unifies them together into one neat composition. We know there is something about mathematics that is at the core of what the universe is all about. The foundation of mathematics is based on the formal axiomatic set theory and first-order logic. So formal systems, logic, mathematics, language and the universe itself all have a common thread that ties them together. Our objective here is to find the essence of that thread. The terms propositional logic and propositional calculus are often used in the logical analysis of language; rule-following, a terminology sounding a bit less technical, can just as well be used in its stead. The game of Chess, which is often used metaphorically in this book, can equally be described as a rule-following system or formal system of logic; for all intents and purposes the terms can be used synonymously. What is being described is a system of a specific set of rules, that when followed, will unambiguously produce a legitimate result within that system. In the case of the game of Chess, there is never a doubt as to what constitutes a legal move and what does not, as all such questions can easily be resolved by reference to the rules of the game. Nothing is left to chance. When we explore natural language as a rule-following system, it need not be so restrictively conceived in the way it is generally applied to formal systems of number theory, as might be found in applications of mathematics or in computer programs, with a set of axioms and well defined rules for the generation of theorems. Although language is a rule-following system, these rules seem Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor to be loosely constructed and ill-defined. This is acceptable under the circumstances; there is nothing to say that amongst the rules there will be rules that permit some fuzziness or misstatements in both their execution and interpretation. At some level the rules of binary logic will conflate with rules of fuzzy logic. It is this imprecision that defies the discovery of a definitive language algorithm. It is in our conception of what a formal language system must be that can be problematic in understanding Wittgenstein's general idea. If some form of randomness is part of the natural world, and there is every indication that it is, then we should not expect that formal systems conforming to the natural world would be strictly deterministic in a classical sense at every level of examination. If randomness is intrinsic to the construction of the world at a basal level, when we look at language, which operates at a very high level of complexity, the actual nature of the randomness and indeterminate complex decision-making relationships is buried so deep in the algorithmic hierarchy that it is simply not observable. As such, the connection goes undetected, without consideration by those working in the fields of linguistics and cognitive science. One cannot examine a state of affairs solely at a top-level and expect to comprehend what is going on at lower levels. An entirely new picture of this process must be constructed. The outcomes of binary decisions at high levels of operation can be probabilistically deterministic in a manner similar to what is found in quantum mechanics, where the observed determinism is probabilistically distributed in accordance with the wave function. At the macroscopic level, we can take the example of a person coming to a fork in a road for which the person has no previous references. How does the person decide whether to go left or right? There will likely be many determining factors, including road appearance, position of the sun, general notions of the direction of the correct path, historical preferences for either left or right and similar determinants. These will go into some value weighting system. Let's say that on a scale of 0 to 100, a value of less than 50 means turn left and over 50 means turn right. A value of 50 may result in a random 'coin toss.' But a mechanism whereby calculated values between 48 and 52 result in a coin toss may be operative as well, so that close calls will be randomized as part of the rule-following system. Anecdotally, we often have this feeling of not quite knowing what to do when our internal valuation system seems finely balanced around the 50-50 mark, with each consideration and re-evaluation of the circumstances swaying the decision to one side and then the other. This is suggestive of the probabilistic determinism of the natural language decision process in action, while recognizing that there are more than just rational linguistic inputs that enter the valuation system. We cannot directly examine the quantitative value weightings of this process, but when weighing up important decisions we may at times experience them in a mind-consuming process of long duration. This process, as noted, is not of a purely linguistic origin. In humans there are combinations of sensory, emotional and rational (language-based) inputs. Furthermore, we may observe how a startled animal freezes when confronted with a potential danger, such as a cat spotting an unfamiliar dog or human, waiting to see how the situation evolves before making the next move. There is experimental data in controlled environments supporting this view (Montague, Hyman, & Cohen, 2004). It has been proposed that the value weighting system is moderated by neuromodulators, such as dopamine, and randomness is also integrated into the system. One should expect that decision processes which can take a range of potentialities would be normally distributed, as it would be a notable exception for nature to perform otherwise. 55 The concept of rule-following is something familiar to us all in everyday situations. What may be new to many is how formal, well-structured and pervasive these systems are. We know that computers can be programmed to play board games like Chess and card games like Poker to a very high level. It takes a champion player to match it with these computer programs. Computer programs are written in a formal language and executed using binary logic, so there is no question that the computer is operating under a formal system of logic. An expert human player in these games is operating under some rational system, but it is not quite the same as how the computer does it. For one thing, the computer has the sheer computing capacity to evaluate the possibilities on brute computing force alone. The human has to use other techniques to reduce wasting time on useless calculations. Humans use pattern recognition and other techniques to reduce the need for brute calculation. So is the human really using logic or some other system when it comes to decision making? Scientists, mathematicians and philosophers have puzzled over this for the past century. Mathematics has gone through a sometimes raucous, but most often a quiet revolution regarding the peculiarities of formal systems and computation in general. It is in the world of physics, which is so closely bound to mathematics, where one finds serious philosophical questions raised about the uncanny relationship of mathematics to the way things work in the physical world. The American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008) was particularly interested in this phenomenon, coining the phrase 'It from Bit' (Wheeler, 1990): Every physical quantity derives its ultimate significance from bits, binary yes-or-no indications, a conclusion which we epitomize in the phrase, it from bit. What we should see from remarks like the one above is the central role played by formal systems of logic in all critical areas determining how our universe is constructed. Some are quite clear, such as mathematics and computer programming languages. Others, such as natural language, are not so obvious, but we are on our way to making that case. Incompleteness Even if one feels comfortable with mathematics, some of the concepts concerning logic and the foundation of mathematics can be daunting. It is a subject matter which rarely ventures out beyond a small circle of academics, although computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter managed to reach a much wider audience with his remarkable book on incompleteness and related matters titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Hofstadter, 1979). Including language within this framework only adds to the remoteness of this topic from ordinary discourse, for it is not easily seen, except for those limited number of academics conversant with the subject, how language would fit into a formal mathematical system. Yet, all this said, a grasp of these concepts remains critical to understanding the principal themes found in this book. I have employed the metaphoric use of games, particularly chess, to help the lay person scale this crucial barrier. A vital addendum to formal systems is Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems (Gödel, 1931), which states that: All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor propositions.19 This problem of undecidability has troubled mathematicians since the theorem's publication. Further to the difficulties it poses to the foundations of mathematics, it implies that scientific theories, which are based on mathematics, cannot be proven at some scrutinized level of examination. The importance of Gödel's Theorem cannot be understated and requires an in-depth discussion in its own right, for it sets the very boundaries to knowledge and affects every aspect of investigation within the universe and how the universe itself must be viewed. And akin to the concept of chance and necessity (Monod, 1971), it should be regarded as a universal thematic. The cause of undecidability is recursion, or self-referencing, and the fact that formal systems are defined by their axioms, which are unproven autonomous declarations. The axioms of a formal system are said to be recursively enumerable, which means, by example, that a computer program can generate all the theorems of a recursively enumerable system without generating something that is not a theorem. So a formal system is a self-contained, self-defined, self-referential system. The complications presented by Gödel's Theorem are exemplified by the following set of statements about how we come to know the world: 1. Axiom: Knowledge based on scientific theories are true. 2. Scientific theories use mathematics as the basis for their proof and veracity. 3. Mathematics is based on logic. 4. Logic is an axiomatic formal system. 5. Gödel's Theorem states that formal systems of logic, therefore mathematics, therefore science, therefore scientific theories will have statements which are deemed to be true within its own set of rules, but cannot be proven. 6. The above 5 statements are true within this recursive system, but cannot be proven since the first statement is an axiom of the system that was the trigger for producing the other statements. 7. All sets of propositions in any language will be generated within an axiomatic system and subject to the same constraints. Since language produces the kind of knowledge that we are concerned with here, whether it be systems of scientific truths, other fact-based truths or revealed truths, its axioms must be carefully scrutinized. Furthermore, as there is a wide acceptance of belief system relativism, we have a socio-political pragmatism which allows for the flourishing of under-scrutinized truth-generating systems. Within this perspective mathematics can be viewed as a subset of language, having a more strictly defined set of rules of operation and a more rigorous scrutiny of the production of truth values. There are not any socio-political considerations to be concerned with in mathematics to muddy the waters. We would not permit an incorrect mathematical proof simply because it was 19 More precisely, Gödel's theorem states: Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete. In particular, for any consistent, effectively generated formal theory that proves certain basic arithmetic truths, there is an arithmetical statement that is true, but not provable in the theory. There has also been considerable contention as to whether Wittgenstein understood or agreed with Gödel on this matter, a debate which continues into the 21st century. 57 deemed to be too politically correct. It would seem that natural language is often placed outside the rigors of formalism mainly because it is just too hard to lock down all the rules and definitions necessary to deal with it effectively under such a system. But the real determining factor concerning whether natural language does or does not function as a formal system should be in its actual biological execution, regardless of its complexity. The critical point regarding incompleteness as it pertains to belief systems using natural language is that perfect knowledge cannot be obtained from within a formal system, only from outside the system (meta-system) looking back into the system under scrutiny. Since we cannot step outside our universe, or even outside our language, we have to live with this limitation. Rather than eschew these findings, they need to be embraced if we are to come to terms with how the universe operates. It is just the way things are. Language is the starting point of this re-examination of the basis of knowledge. It needs to be picked apart, warts and all, and handled with a full understanding of its limitations. So when I asked the question: How well suited is language as a mechanism for making sense of the world? We might reply that it has its limitations; and we will need to dig deeper to see just how far these limitations go. Figure 2: What Can I Say About My World? Gödel's Theorem can be put another way that might add a bit more clarity: Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove. If you have lived your whole life inside a sealed box, shut off from the outside world, you can have no knowledge of your standing in the universe. Wittgenstein states: The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists- and if it did exist, it would have no value (TLP 6.41). So if we start with an examination of language as a formal system of propositional logic, then a circle must be drawn around language and examined in self-referential terms. That is to say, that language is used to examine language. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Once we come to terms with how language functions as a formal system, we can see how it is just one idiosyncratic case representative of everything else that is going on in the universe. The same algorithm that produces language creates life in all its variations, as well as the planets, the stars, atoms and the state of consciousness that allows us to perceive the world in those terms. Language can also be seen, by dint of example, as a window to how these other things come into being. The challenge for science is to get itself in a frame of mind that allows it to find the kind of algorithm that can account for all the processes we observe in the universe and see if it can be put into a tidy package. 59 The Ring Box Bert, Ludd and Kurt the fly are at Los Angeles International Airport. Bert: That was the best vacation I ever had, Ludd. What a great idea it was to come to America. Ludd: I enjoyed it too. The Grand Canyon is really spectacular, don't you think Bert? Bert: Yeah, it was okay. Ludd: Just okay!? I thought it was majestic. And what about Old Faithful and Yellowstone Park? I wish we had bears in Australia. Bert: We do have beers in Australia. Ludd: Bears, not beers, Bert. Aren't you listening to me? Or is your mind wandering off again. Bert: Just thinking about last night Ludd. What a show that was. That was my favorite part of the trip. Ludd: You were whining the whole trip about wanting to see Miley Cyrus, so we had to go, or I would never hear the end of it. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Bert: The atmosphere was electric. It made me feel young again. I think when we get back home I'm going to change my name to Bert 'Wrecking Ball' Russell. It has a nice ring to it, don't you think, Luddy? Ludd: You can be so silly sometimes. It's beyond me. The part I liked most about last night was when that boy said 'move over grandpa, you're in my seat'. Bert: That kid was just rude. We weren't like that when I was his age. We respected our elders. ...Hmmm, 'Wrecking Ball' Russell. Very nice ring to that name. Ludd: Talking about rings, do you have the ring box? Bert: Yeah, it's in my jacket. Ludd: And is Kurt inside? I haven't heard him for a while. Bert: He was there when I checked in the taxi and I don't see how he could get out, so he must still be there. Ludd: He's been pretty quiet the last hour. Maybe he's sleeping. It's good about the ring box that we can hear him, but he can't hear anything because the material of the box distorts the sound waves enough to block it out of his hearing range. I was really surprised when he told us he was afraid of flying, considering that he is a fly. I'm not sure about taking him back to Australia though, especially without telling him where we're going. It seems like a cruel trick to play on the poor bugger. Maybe we should leave him here in L.A. Bert: It's not often that you get a chance to have a conversation with a fly. He'll be a big hit back home and good company for me when I'm working in the garden. It will be nice to have someone to chat with. He's a clever little chap. He's no bird-brain, you know. Ludd: Did you say Bert-brain? Bert: Very cute, Ludd! What I mean is that he knows a lot of stuff about the universe, which is not surprising since he comes from a faraway planet. I hope he doesn't get fried by those x-ray machines going through security. Ludd: We just have to hope for the best, Bert. I wouldn't open the box until after we're out of the airport in Hobart, in the car and on the way home. He's going to be awfully hungry after that long haul trapped in the little box. Bert: Yeah Ludd, we just have to hope he comes through the ordeal okay. ... The next day at Hobart International Airport. Ludd: My back is really stiff. It was nice going to America, but the flight is too long. I wish we had supersonic travel so we didn't have to spend so much time sitting in a little seat. I wonder how 61 many days it took Kurt to get from Girdle to Earth. I forgot all about the little fella. I wonder how he's doing. But let's wait until we're in the car and away from the airport before you open the ring box. Bert: I agree, Ludd. I'm afraid to open the box. I haven't heard a peep out of him for 24 hours. I'm really worried. Ludd: There's the car Bert. I hope it starts. I just want to get home. Bert: You can drive. I want to see how Kurt is doing. Ludd: No problem. Bert (opens the box): Hi, little guy. How are you doing in there? Kurt: I'm hungry. You drive too fast. And don't you ever stop for a toilet break? Where are we now, Montana? Up and down. Up and down. I'm car sick. Lucky I passed out or there would have been a serious problem in here. Bert: Calm down. It's all okay now. You can come out. And I've got a little surprise for you. We're in Tasmania. Kurt: Tasmania!? That's an awfully long drive from California. We must have been on the road for weeks. I can't believe I slept so long. No wonder I'm hungry. Bert: I've got a little confession to make. Ludd (cutting in): Yes, Bert wants to confess that he drives way too fast. I have to constantly remind him to slow down, especially in the mountains. That's why I'm driving now. Kurt: I thought we must have rented a Ferrari. A couple of times it felt like we were taking off in a rocket ship. It was really making me sick. I think I passed out. I hate having my body move around unless I'm flapping my wings. I almost got disqualified for the journey to Earth because of my motion sickness. My English may be good, but I'm not too keen on flying machines. Lucky that my Spaceship Completeness has cruise control or I don't know how I could have survived the trip. Where is Tasmania anyway? Isn't it in Tennessee? No wonder the trip seemed so long. How are we going to get back to Texas where I parked the Completeness? Ludd: Stop worrying Kurt. We'll get you back when it's time for you to go home. Why don't you just enjoy the adventure of travelling around our lovely planet? The more you see, the more knowledge you can bring back to Girdle. Kurt: Tasmania, huh. I can't remember seeing that on the map. It's a funny name. We've got a disease on Girdle called Tas Mania. It's when a parasite called a Tas infects our nervous system and drives us crazy. It's quite serious. There's no cure for it. We've got gazillions of Girdillions locked up at the Tas Mania Cuckoo's Nest Institute for the Flapping Mad. Bert: Yep! It's a big universe, but there are lots of similarities wherever you go. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Ludd: You're getting yourself all worked up Kurt. Maybe we should close the box cover until we arrive at our destination. We will be going up and down a few mountains soon and you might get sick again. Kurt: Yes. I think it's for the best. I'm already feeling a little ill. I can't imagine how sick I would be it we were up in an airplane. Ludd: Well, let's not imagine. No need to worry yourself. Close the box, Bert. 63 Interlude "Nature is the source of all true knowledge. She has her own logic, her own laws; she has no effect without cause nor invention without necessity." Leonardo da Vinci This seems a good place to break on the history of human linguistic development. We should also take pause and review some of the ideas presented so far before we discuss the linguistic conveyance of information and how that information is used by our brain. The mathematical physicist, Roger Penrose, wrote a rather large book titled The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2004). It's an excellent compendium which starts from mathematical fundamentals and builds through to the latest thinking in theoretical physics. But the title itself exposes the closed paradigm in which this exercise takes place. It is already assumed that we know what reality is and this is the road that takes us there, as if we were on a highway going to Oxford. Although I refer to the same body of knowledge as Penrose, I abstain from assuming that I have a definitive answer to where we are going. I am not quite prepared to put the label reality on anything as yet. Physicists often clarify the point by using the term physical reality to denote the kind of reality they are addressing, in contrast to other possibilities. Depending on the intent of the speaker or writer, this term can either set a demarcation from other interpretations of reality or represent a dogmatic approach to the matter. Being the central issue under examination here, reality has been placed in abeyance while we examine the evidence. So far we have found that there are many alternatives to the scientific physicalism version of reality. Most are couched in a wide variety of religious beliefs, but there are still a fair number of alternative philosophies that retain a high degree of respectability within the secular scientific community. The path chosen here has been to start with the broader philosophical notion of a state of affairs and use the Tractarian (a word used in reference to Wittgenstein's Tractatus) outline to set the parameters of how we are to proceed, although it should be noted that Wittgenstein shared the prevalent materialist view of reality of most of his peers. The main purpose of using the Tractarian outline is that it allows us to gradually build a case for making sense of the world. We begin with the notion of objects and how we come to know about them. We refrain from labeling these objects real, but rather focus on how we come to perceive these objects, and how other entities, living and otherwise, might perceive objects as well. Objects are part of the world of things that we perceive. We need not define what this world is, only that we have knowledge of it through personal experiential perceptions which we usually call consciousness or the conscious experience, and this conscious experience is constrained by our biological limitations. We can only hear sounds within a limited range of frequencies, or see electromagnetic radiation within the frequency spectrum that we call visible light. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor We also regard changes in a state of affairs to have a causal connection. We don't expect things to appear, disappear or move around in a haphazard manner, but rather we believe that things happen for a reason. Even those with a more spiritual bent might attribute a supernatural cause to certain unexplained phenomena; nonetheless, it is still causal. The point is that our belief systems are diverse, but our notion of causality is deeply engrained within our biology. Science is an observational methodology. Scientists do experiments and record the results of their observations. Theoretical scientists will try to create a theory, a coherent group of tested propositions, which best fits the scientific evidence. What we want to do here is to put aside for the moment any examination of the veracity of these theories, but instead address the part about how theories are created. We should see that a theory is a belief system formed within a particular structured methodology. The one we are most familiar with are scientific theories formulated by application of the scientific method. But religions also have theories, particularly theories about how the universe was created and how it functions. These theories are formed within the framework of each particular religion. Although I am both a scientist and an atheist, I do not wish to prejudice this analysis by being drawn, at this stage, to any particular cosmogony, before looking into the mechanism of theory-formation from its foundations. So this brings us back to the question of why people believe the things they do. In the second line of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes the very bold and somewhat enigmatic statement: The world is the totality of facts, not of things. So, following the Tractarian outline, we put aside the domain of things and turn our attention to facts, since it is this stuff of which the world is made. We also learn from Wittgenstein that facts exist in logical space. We seem to be getting pushed ever further away from a concept of reality. The creation story is not a choice between the Big Bang Theory and 'In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth' (from Genesis). The real creation story is about how things came to exist in logical space. Except for those conversant in mathematics and related fields of study, the concept of logical space might seem obscure and mysterious; but this is mainly due to its absence from general discussion, so most are simply not familiar with the idea of what it is. We understand the concept of our experiential 3-dimensional physical space, but anything else seems too abstract to consider as having anything to do with reality. We should keep in mind that a 4-dimensional spacetime as well as imaginary numbers form the foundation of modern physics. And string theory postulates 10, 11 or even more dimensions. Unless one is an insider, all of these concepts will be difficult to grasp at first. Since, according to the Tractarian outline, the world is made of facts in logical space, we will need to become familiar with this concept if we are to understand the world. Logical space is actually a much more familiar place than one might suspect. To give but one example: a computer program is something that exists in logical space. In fact, just about everything in the world labeled digital is something that functions due to binary operations in logical space. Perhaps we can best follow the rationale of the pathway we are taking by enumerating the relationships that form the world, keeping in mind that I am referring to the Tractarian world, a concept which still requires further development. 65 1. The world consists of facts. 2. Facts reside in logical space. 3. A major part of language, propositions, i.e. statements about states of affairs that evaluate to true or false, are facts and thus exist in logical space. 4. A true fact is part of the real world and false facts are not. 5. A set of related true propositions is a belief or belief system. 6. A religious belief is a set of true propositions within its own particular logical space. 7. A scientific theory is also a set of true propositions within its own particular logical space, and is thus a kind of belief system. 8. A belief system is a representation of the world of things in logical space. 9. Language is a formal system of propositional logic. 10. Humans represent the world (of things), to themselves and others, by the use of language. This should explain why our focus has turned to language; because language forms both the scaffolding and the tools for making sense of the world. This is why chimpanzees don't do physics. This is why chickens don't believe in god. It is through language, although not exclusively through language, that the modern human being articulates its sense of reality. For whatever the outcome might be, the nature of language must be carefully scrutinized if we are to understand how we form our concept of the real, and to what extent we can rely on language to deliver a factual picture of the world. And furthermore, does such a picture represent anything objective about the world? In other words, what is the relationship between what we can say about the world and what the world actually is, something we typically label objective reality? There will have to be some reconciling between why, in most circles, language hardly gets a mention when the subject of reality is discussed, yet here it has been introduced as the cornerstone for making sense of the world. We will begin making inroads into this dilemma first by bringing Wittgenstein to the table, for enough has been said already to realize that he too made language the centerpiece of his philosophy. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Devil Bert: Well, what do you think of my little farm, Kurt? It's pretty neat, don't you think. Except for the chickens and the dog, I don't have any other animals here, but I've got lots of fruit trees and vegetables. Kurt: If you're worried that I won't have enough stuff to eat, it's really not a problem. I'll eat almost anything and I can smell a horse not far away. And there are at least a dozen mice in your house as well, not to mention a few hundred roaches and .................. Bert: I think you've made your point. If you're interested in big animals, the farm next door has a lot of sheep and a couple of horses. You can always wander over there if you find it too boring hanging around with me all day. Kurt: There's nothing I like more than exploring. I find everything on your planet new and exciting. Bert: So you're not angry that Ludd and I took you to Tasmania without telling you. Kurt: I was a little confused at first, but now that I've got my coordination back, I'm fine about it. There are so many new things to discover. I really like the way the water spins down the drain in the opposite direction from the way it does in America. Bert: One of the things really special about Tasmania is that we have a lot of creatures not found any other place on the planet. Kurt: Like what? Bert: Like the Devil, for instance. Kurt: Eek! The Devil!? I remember what that minister in Houston was saying about the Devil. He sounds like a really scary critter to me. I hope I don't come across him or I may never see my home again. 67 Bert: Not that Devil. I meant the Tasmanian Devil. It's a small animal about the size of a cat, but can be really vicious. I actually think they're very cute. It's a shame they're going extinct. Kurt: Going extinct? Bert: Yeah, it's kind of sad, but they've got this facial tumor disease that's wiping them out. Maybe one day they'll only be found in zoos. Kurt: But what about the other Devil? The one they were talking about in the church. I heard a lot of people whispering about him and they seemed pretty scared and they were hanging out in the church because they thought the Devil wouldn't have the guts to come into the home of Jesus. Bert: Well, you seem to have picked up a lot of useless information during your short stay in Texas. There really is no Devil, except the Tasmanian Devil, which is just another animal like you and me. Kurt: I have a lot of respect for you, Bert, but I think you could be wrong on this account. There were 20,000 people in that church and all thought the Devil was real. And even Ludd wasn't sure. You're in a very small minority on this point. Bert: Those folks in Texas don't know what they're talking about. They've got all that hocus pocus snake oil stuff rammed into their heads from the time they're little kids, so they don't know any better. And as for Ludd, you can't be sure what he's really thinking. He's always coming up with different theories about things and he hates saying anything is impossible. Kurt: Well I can see it could become very difficult learning about your planet if you don't know who is telling the truth and who is lying. Bert: I understand your dilemma, but you just have to decide for yourself. You're supposed to have all this knowledge from your advanced technological society on your planet. Surely you can make a rational judgment between what is fact and what is fiction. Kurt: But no one ever spoke about things like the Devil and Jesus on Girdle. All this is new to me. How am I supposed to know it this isn't something real in your part of the universe? If His Royal Buzziness knew everything there was to know about the world, what would be the point of sending me all the way to Earth to learn about your planet? Bert: I get your point. As soon as we have the technology, I'm sure we'll be sending people to explore the far reaches of the universe as well. Kurt: Didn't one of your most famous writers, Leo Tolstoy, write a book titled The Devil? Bert: I don't know. I never heard of it. If it's something written by a Russian, then you'll have to ask Ludd about it. He reads all that kind of stuff. Kurt: I think I might be able to upload the book from my memory bank and recite it too you if you like. We can spend the day discussing the Devil. I'd really be interested in learning as much as I can about him Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Bert: It's been nice talking to you, but I really don't want to waste my day talking about the Devil. I've got things to do in the garden. Why don't you fly on to the back of that horse and talk to it about the Devil? I don't believe there is such a thing, so you can talk about it all day until the sun goes down and you're not going to learn anything you didn't know at sunrise. Kurt: I can see you're closed minded about this. I was only trying to find out why some people think there is a Devil and some people don't. Bert: Well, that's just the way the world is. When you find the answer, make sure I'm the first one you tell. Now off you go! 69 Wittgenstein "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." - Ludwig Wittgenstein There can be a certain exasperation when analyzing the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In so many ways I would prefer to say as little as possible about him. Both his personage and philosophical work are enigmatic and controversial. There is much of Wittgenstein's philosophy that I would disagree with, or would find incomplete at the very least. But perhaps more than any 20th century philosopher, Wittgenstein touched upon the deepest questions concerning the relationship of the human being to his world. The reason for exasperation is that it is so difficult to summarize Wittgenstein's work into any sort of a neat package. Yet in his life he had so many profound thoughts and novel ideas that he is impossible to ignore. Figure 3: Ludwig Wittgenstein Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The following biography has been taken substantially from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition): Wittgenstein was born on April 26, 1889 in Vienna, Austria, to a wealthy industrial family, well-situated in intellectual and cultural Viennese circles. In 1908 he began his studies in aeronautical engineering at Manchester University where his interest in the philosophy of pure mathematics led him to the German mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege (18481925). In 1911 he followed Frege's advice and went to study with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge University. Russell wrote, upon meeting Wittgenstein: "An unknown German appeared ... obstinate and perverse, but I think not stupid" (quoted by Monk, 1990:38f). Within one year, Russell was committed: "I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things ... I love him and feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve" (quoted by Monk 1990: 41). Russell's insight was accurate. Wittgenstein was idiosyncratic in his habits and way of life, yet profoundly acute in his philosophical sensitivity. During his years in Cambridge, from 1911 to 1913, Wittgenstein conducted several conversations on philosophy and the foundations of logic with Russell, with whom he had an emotional and intense relationship, as well as with Moore and Keynes. He retreated to isolation in Norway, for months at a time, in order to ponder these philosophical problems and to work out their solutions. In 1913 he returned to Austria and in 1914, at the start of World War I (1914-1918), joined the Austrian army. He was taken captive in 1918 and spent the remaining months of the war at a prison camp. It was during the war that he wrote the notes and drafts of his first important work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. After the war the book was published in German and translated into English. In 1920 Wittgenstein, now divorced from philosophy (having, to his mind, solved all philosophical problems in the Tractatus), gave away his part of his family's fortune and pursued several 'professions' (gardener, teacher, architect, etc.) in and around Vienna. It was only in 1929 that he returned to Cambridge to resume his philosophical vocation, after having been exposed to discussions on the philosophy of mathematics and science with members of the Vienna Circle, whose conception of logical empiricism was indebted to his Tractatus account of logic as tautologous, and his philosophy as concerned with logical syntax.20 During these years in Cambridge his conception of philosophy and its problems underwent dramatic changes that are recorded in several volumes of conversations, lecture notes, and letters (e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, The Blue and Brown Books, Philosophical Grammar (PG)). Sometimes termed the 'middle Wittgenstein', this 20 The Vienna Circle was a group of scientifically trained philosophers and philosophically interested scientists who met under the nominal leadership of Moritz Schlick for often weekly discussions of problems in the philosophy of science during academic terms from 1924 to 1936. Their radically anti-metaphysical stance was supported by an empiricist criterion of meaning and a broadly logicist conception of mathematics. They denied that any principle or claim was synthetically a priori. Moreover, they sought to account for the presuppositions of scientific theories by regimenting such theories within a logical framework so that the important role played by conventions, either in the form of definitions or of other analytical framework principles, became evident. 71 period heralds a rejection of dogmatic philosophy, including both traditional works and the Tractatus itself. In the 1930s and 1940s Wittgenstein conducted seminars at Cambridge, developing most of the ideas that he intended to publish in his second book, Philosophical Investigations (PI). These included the turn from formal logic to ordinary language, novel reflections on psychology and mathematics, and a general skepticism concerning philosophy's pretensions. In 1945 he prepared the final manuscript of the Philosophical Investigations, but, at the last minute, withdrew it from publication (and only authorized its posthumous publication). For a few more years he continued his philosophical work, but this is marked by a rich development of, rather than a turn away from, his second phase. He traveled during this period to the United States and Ireland, and returned to Cambridge, where he was diagnosed with cancer. Legend has it that, at his death in 1951, his last words were "Tell them I've had a wonderful life" (Monk: 579). It is perhaps due to the historical evolution of the philosophy of language that we have seen a decline in the standing of Wittgenstein's early work on the logic of language which made him a central figure of the Vienna Circle. Much of this is due to Wittgenstein himself, who went down the path of what became the philosophy of ordinary language. This in turn was taken up by a number of philosophers at the time, including Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), and remained a major school of philosophy until around 1970. Although an important principle in the philosophy of language, it did not seem to warrant a school of philosophy in its own right, and it was not so many years before it too fell out of favor. Earlier in this book I summed up my account of these matters in the sentence: The meaning of a word is determined by social agreement or declaration. An examination of the use of language in ordinary social circumstances should make this clear. The post-Tractarian Wittgenstein blends a convoluted introspection on the boundaries of rule-following systems, semantics and grammar that is innovative, yet challenges one to find cohesion in the totality of his work. Nonetheless, there is much to be gleaned from both the early and later Wittgenstein. There is another development that evolved in the field of linguistics which contributed to the waning of the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. The revolution in the field of generative grammars, initiated by Noam Chomsky, would seem to have incorporated the formalism of Wittgenstein's early work, but for some reason Wittgenstein is cut off without a mention In fact, Wittgenstein does not even appear in the bibliography of Chomsky's landmark paper Syntactic Structures (Chomsky, 1957). How bizarre it is that the two giants of linguistic formalism are totally disconnected. The formalist pathway is muddled by this peculiar history, which is why I have set out to synthesize the major ideas of linguistic formalism without getting too mired in the historical aspects. Wittgenstein has the propensity for producing memorable quotations, several of which appear throughout this book. They are intriguing and intellectually challenging. They can initiate years of contemplation from a single sentence. There are some Wittgensteinian concepts, e.g. the Picture Theory of Language and atomic facts, which I do not find very helpful. Perhaps this is due to myriad meanings and nuances for the words picture and atomic, so it becomes a challenge just to Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor synchronize one's own thoughts with that intended by Wittgenstein. Other concepts, such as Language Games, are far easier to comprehend, because the notion of a game is less ambiguous and it is easy to give concrete examples. Wittgenstein often used the game of Chess in his examples, and so do I. The relation here is that games follow rules and so does language. . . . I have asked the reader to suspend preconceived notions of reality and approach the subject with an open mind. The novelty of Wittgenstein's ideas illustrates the kind of approach we should be aiming for and I will offer some impressions about what I think it is like to be in what I call a Wittgensteinian state of mind. Perhaps I have used this term for lack of a better one, even though it probably encompasses a somewhat different state of mind than Wittgenstein may have had himself, for as we are all too aware, one can never really get into the mind of another living person, let alone someone who has passed on. I am inclined to attach Wittgenstein's name to a way of looking at the world, a mindset, or perhaps the popular vernacular term headspace is the best one of all. The very first line in the Preface to Tractatus reads: Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it, or at least similar thoughts. Wittgenstein knows that he is in his own special headspace and others may well struggle with his Tractatus because they do not share that same state of mind or perspective of how things operate in the world. While my own interpretation of the physical world differs from that of Wittgenstein, I also recognize that my views fall into a very small minority indeed, and would not expect contemporaries to share these ideas, let alone someone from Wittgenstein's era. Although I have extirpated the physical world from the process of verifying the truth value of facts, this does not lessen my own feelings about being in a Wittgensteinian headspace.21 It is here at the outset that Wittgenstein puts logic at the heart of the world, and this is what I mean by a Wittgensteinian state of mind. The conception of our respective worlds emerges from the words that are running through our heads at this very moment and how they will be attributed meaning from what was already in our consciousness before the current stream of words took the place of the previous stream. That is a bit of a mouthful, but sums up what we might call a linguistic stream of consciousness. Getting into a Wittgensteinian headspace is, at first, the act of becoming highly aware of what language is about, particularly the variety floating about in our own respective minds. It is not to simply take for granted that we have language and everything else that emerges from our thoughts is somehow a precise picture of an objective reality. Language is a powerful piece of software that is constantly being tuned and retuned. It has many limitations and can easily go off the rails. If we want to understand why linguistic output is the way it is, we need to go through a process similar to that of a computer programmer when the program is not executing the way intended. For example, if we have a program that gives an answer of 5 when adding the numbers 3 and 7, we would be 21 It would be mistaken to classify my philosophy as Idealism due to my position regarding the physical world, since my position is not metaphysically based, nor do I approach the classical mind-body problem from the point of view of traditional Idealists. 73 alerted that something is fundamentally wrong with the program and the source code will need some review and modification (debugging). Likewise, we each have our own respective linguistic source code that determines how we evaluate propositions and how these are put together to form belief systems. To understand how a propositional evaluation program is working, whether it be our own or that of someone else, we need to get into the source code, so to speak, the axioms of the language system in question. Wittgenstein recognizes that this is not an easy task. At first inspection, there does not seem to be anything particularly mistaken about how we evaluate propositions or come to have the beliefs that we do, when taken from one's own personal perspective of course, all of this presuming that we have given at least the slightest bit of thought that language may have some influence on why we believe the things we do. We realize that our beliefs may be different than those of others, but we trust, that if called upon, we can support why we have the one's we do, regardless that they might differ from the beliefs of others. And if we are not too dogmatic about such things, we can be comfortable with a state of affairs where we have our respective positions on matters and other people have theirs. But if Wittgenstein or I have managed to convince you that there is indeed something quite profound in the workings of language, then you might be inclined to take the next step in your contemplation of such matters. This next step is a big one. It must first be acknowledged that we will be using the logic of language to evaluate the logic of language. So we will be working against ourselves in some sense. There is no way to step out of this subjective selfreferential state; we can only swim toward the boundaries of this autonomous language box. A significant part of the work in Psychology and Psychiatry is aimed at getting into to the source code of our linguistic minds; and therapeutically, seeing if the code can be tweaked to improve the mental health of those being treated. There is much fuss made about the ambiguity of meanings which arises in a wide variety of trivial situations, such as whether true statements can be made about non-existent things or fictional characters. For example, is it a true statement that unicorns have one horn given that unicorns are fictional entities? There is considerable philosophical debate about such encounters at the intersection of logic and reality, as it is typically defined as a fact of existence in the physical world. I find this to be a sideshow to the central issues of philosophy and more of a distraction than having anything substantive to add to the discussion. I have found Wittgenstein's use of the term 'language games' (PI) instructive and insightful, yet at the same time, often moot. It is not for me to criticize the mental meanderings of a genius and I am rather pleased that he has covered so much ground concerning these nuances of language. In the end, a formal system of propositional logic can theoretically be constructed to account for all these nuances and trivialities, each system being slightly different in its respective construction. ... There are several variations of the game of Chess played in Southeast Asia. In Thailand the game is called Makruk, and is quite recognizable as a Chess-like game, but with a number of rule changes. When I first witnessed it being played, it seemed to me that it was the regular familiar chess game, but being played by people who were not conversant with the proper rules and had made some up. So many of the moves seemed legal, yet others were clearly not. Eventually I came to understand Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor that Makruk was a variation of Chess with a proper set of rules of its own that just happened to be very similar to Chess. The variety of Chess played in Cambodia is called Ouk-Chatrang and is virtually identical to Makruk, with only a couple of minor differences. On the king's first move, players have the option of moving the king like a knight, but only if not in check and only if no pieces have been captured. On the queen's first move, the player has the option of moving the queen two squares forward instead of just one, again only if no pieces have been captured. Language games are a bit like Chess, Makruk and Ouk-Chatrang. There can be much discussion about the variations and merits of each game, but ultimately each game lives in its own logical space and creates its own world of truth and dare I say reality. Analogies can (and do) get made between games like Chess and warfare or politics, as all are seen a strategic enterprises, but we would be mistaken to take these analogies too far. Usually no one dies playing Chess. Each game has its own self-referential reality, and at some point it becomes rather meaningless to judge one game using the rules of a different game. It would be like a Christian saying that Hinduism was wrong because it didn't follow the doctrines of Christianity. Language creates its own reality. And each variation, or language game, creates its own variation of that reality. This can be seen as a rewording of Wittgenstein's: The facts in logical space are the world. The goal of a philosopher, I believe, is to make sense of the world. Put in another way, it is to define what reality is. In order to make any progress in this regard, one must put oneself in a Wittgensteinian headspace. A pivotal step in that process is to recognize how everything is framed within language, and our language must be scrutinized to an extent that we can feel reasonably assured that we are not carrying around axioms liable to lead us astray. We don't want to be playing Makruk if nature is playing Ouk-Chatrang. We have a jigsaw puzzle before us. Let's call it Nature. Not all of the pieces are on the table. A few pieces seem to fit together nicely; a number of others look as if they might go together well enough. But it is taking some forceful manipulation to get the fit just right, so maybe it really doesn't belong where we put it. We have had lots of experience in the past where pieces that seemingly fit well together were in fact not quite in the right place. So let's take out the joins that are a bit dubious and see if a different approach may hold the key to a more fitting and consistent arrangement. 75 The Horse Kurt: Thanks for taking me to see an Australian football game, Bert. Bert: I couldn't let you go back to your planet without going to the most important spectacle our planet has on offer. Ludd: Let's not exaggerate, Bert. Bert: I'm not exaggerating. I think it truly is the most exciting and exhilarating spectacle on the face of the planet. It's just my opinion, but I'm entitled to it. You didn't have to come along Ludd. You don't even like football. Ludd: I only came along because I didn't want you filling Kurt's little head with more of your crazy ideas. I know how you get when it comes to football. You will start blabbing away about how football is the religion of Australia and stuff like that. Kurt is on a scientific mission, not a fantasy expedition. Bert: I'm just going to tell it like it is. No more. No less. Now don't ruin the day, Ludd, with your contrarian views. Kurt: I think the game is starting, Bert, because there are a lot of men in shorts running around out there. You'll have to tell me what's going on, because I don't know anything about football. Bert: Don't worry, Kurt, because I'm an expert and I'll explain everything to you. Okay. First, you've got two teams out there, Hawthorn, a team from Melbourne and the Sydney Swans. And there are 18 players on the ground from each side. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Kurt: Which team is which, Bert? Bert: The Sydney team is in red and white, and the Hawthorn team is in brown and yellow. Kurt: Brown and yellow are my favorite colors. I think I'll go for Hawthorn. What about you? Bert: I figured you'd like brown and yellow. No surprises there. But I'm a Swans fan because I used to live in Sydney before I moved to Tasmania. You can barrack for whoever you like. It's okay with me. Kurt: The Hawthorn team, they just smell so nice. Bert: I'm sure they do. Kurt: Hey Burt, look at that guy from my team jumping in the air; and he grabbed the ball. Wow. I like that. Bert: That's called a mark, Kurt. He took a mark. Kurt: Why is that Sydney player standing there with his hands in the air? Is he getting arrested? Bert: He's standing the mark, Kurt. Kurt: I thought you said that a mark was when you catch the ball in the air. Bert: Yes. That's true. But the place where the player marks the ball is also called the mark. .............................. Oh No! Kurt: What's happening, Bert. Why is the Hawthorn player walking up to those big sticks with the ball in his hand? And why is everyone cheering? Except you, Bert. You're not cheering. Bert: The Sydney player stepped over the mark and Hawthorn were awarded a 50 meter penalty, and now they're going to kick an easy goal. Kurt: Funny how they get awarded a penalty. I thought you get penalized a penalty. Not awarded one. Bert: Stop worrying about what this is called and that is called. Just watch the game. Kurt: Hey, Bert, look. Another Hawthorn player took a mark, and now he's kicking another goal. Go Hawthorn!!! It's 12 for my team and zero for your team. I like this game. Bert: Shut up, Kurt. Can't you be quiet for once? Flies aren't supposed to talk around here anyway. Kurt: What's wrong, Bert. It's just a game. Ludd: It's more than just a game for Bert. He takes it all very seriously. Maybe you should keep quiet until quarter time. That's when you hear the siren. Okay? Kurt: Yeah. Sure. 77 ... Kurt: Quarter time. I guess that means a quarter of the game is over. What's the score now, Bert? Bert: 43-1. What a crap game. I wish I never came. Kurt: I'm enjoying the game. Who's that old guy down there yelling at your team, Bert? Bert: Oh, that's the Horse. Kurt: Funny, he doesn't look like a horse. In fact, he looks a lot like you Bert, real angry and upset. Bert: He's not a horse; it's just his nickname. He's the coach. And he's real angry because the Swans are playing bad and it looks like they're going to lose the game. Kurt: He's going to get a heart attack if he keeps that up. He should calm down a bit. It's only a game. Ludd: It's more than just a game to Horse. It's more like a religion. Don't you think so Bert? Bert: Shut up, Ludd. I'm not in the sort of mood to put up with your teasing. Kurt: I like horses. I'm a horsefly, you know. I like horses even more than I like cows, even if I'm forever grateful to cows for teaching us flies how to talk. I just wish the Horse would dress in brown and yellow, not red. Brown and yellow go so much better with horses. Maybe I'll change sides for the next quarter and see if I can help your side win. Bert: Whatever you say, Kurt. It's all the same to me. We're going to get beat real bad anyway because Horse is a dumb coach. I should be coaching the Swans. I'd be a much better coach than him. Ludd: Don't be ridiculous, Bert. You wouldn't last one day as a coach. All you football fanatics think you can do a better job than the experts. Bert: I know I can do a better job than Horse. No way that we would be down 42 points at quarter time if I were the coach. I'd put Reidy back playing loose man in defence to cut off the supply to their forward line and move Buddy into the midfield and open up space behind him and let Jetta run into the hole and use his speed to get behind their defenders. Kurt: Well, why don't you tell them to do that? Bert: I'm up here in the stands. They're not going to hear me even if I shouted at the top of my lungs. And they wouldn't listen to me anyway. They take their orders from the coach, who unfortunately doesn't know what he's doing. Kurt: You don't have to shout at the players, Bert. Just tell me what you want them to do and I'll fly down there and pass along the message. Bert: Hey, that's not a bad idea. Maybe it will work. Let's try it. Okay Kurt. Fly down to that tall guy with the short blond hair and tell him that Horse wants him to play loose in defence. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Kurt: What does that mean? Suppose he asks me a question? Bert: He's not going to ask a fly any questions. Flies can't talk. When you talk to the players, stay close to that guy in pink. He's the runner. He's the real messenger for the coach. The players are too tired to know who's doing the talking. Okay. Remember. Number 20 with the short blond hair. Horse wants you to play loose in defence. Kurt (returning): Okay. I told him. Bert: Hey look Kurt, he's going back and playing in defence. It's working. Now go to that big guy number 23 and tell him to play up the ground this quarter. Kurt: Done. Bert: Hey look. He's got the ball and he's kicking it long to Jetta, who takes the mark. Yes. And he plays on, and kicks the goal. Can you believe it? It's working. Now Kurt, go down there and tell number 5 that Horse wants him to put a heavy tag on Mitchell. He's getting too much of the footy. Kurt: Told him. Bert: Yep. They're following all my instructions. And we win another ground ball in the middle and get another clearance. Good kick. And another goal for the Swannies. Can you believe it? Everything is going to plan. It's almost halftime and we're only down by 3 points. Ludd: There goes the buzzer. It's finally halftime. Kurt: Love the Buzzer. Bert: Great work, little guy. You and me got us back in the game. I'm famished. I'm going to get something to eat. Anyone else want something? Ludd: I'll have a veggie burger. Kurt: I'd like a horse burger, if you don't mind. Bert: I'll see what I can do. Kurt: I'm glad he's gone for a while. He was driving me nuts, making me fly back and forth like a worker bee. I'm exhausted. I have to say that of all the things I've encountered since coming to your planet, this Australian Rules football is by far the most confusing thing I've ever come across. Ludd: What were you telling those players? Kurt: I wasn't saying anything. I was just pretending, just to keep Bert happy. It's too dangerous for flies to go around talking to earthlings. I'm liable to get myself killed. Ludd: I suspected that. But it looked so real and convincing. It certainly has Bert fooled. Are you going to tell him? 79 Kurt: No way. He'll be hopping mad if he thinks I tricked him. Don't say anything to him. We'll just keep pretending that he's calling the shots. Ludd: That's fine by me. Quiet now. He's coming back. Bert: Here's your soy burger Ludd. Sorry Kurt, but they're out of horse burgers. I hope you like frog legs. Eat fast, because we've got work to do this second half if we want to pull this one out of the bag. ... An hour has passed and it's late in the game. Bert: There's only about a minute left in the game and we're still behind by a half a goal. I don't know what else we can do. Any suggestions? We need a miracle. Kurt: I'll pray to that Jesus dude for a miracle. Ludd: The Swans need to kick a goal! Bert: Well, that's stating the bleeding obvious, Ludd. I'm looking for some concrete suggestions. Kurt: Why don't we ever kick it to that tall guy with the beard? No one ever seems to be guarding him. Bert: We don't kick it to him because he's hopeless. But you may have something there, little guy. Okay, fly down there and tell Number 3 if we win the ball, pull all the forwards up-field and leave D-Rex in the goal square. Go now. There's less than a minute to go. Hurry! Ludd: Do you think it will work? Bert: I doubt it. He's more likely to drop the ball and trip over his own feet than kick a goal. Hold on a minute. We've got the ball. We're kicking it long to the goal square, and, and, and D-Rex drops a certain mark. Oh No. Wait. Buddy Franklin scoops up the ball with one hand and snaps a miraculous goal. Yes!! It's a miracle, I tell you. Ludd: And the buzzer goes off to end the game. Kurt: Love the Buzzer. Bert: It's a miracle. The footy gods must be on our side today, thanks to a little help from me and my mates. And it's called a siren, Ludd. Not a buzzer. A siren. Kurt: I wonder if we won the game thanks to your coaching or my praying. Bert: Definitely my coaching. I think that's pretty obvious. Praying is good for nothing. Ludd: Let's go home, Bert. Kurt: Love the Buzzer. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor 81 Meaning "The meaning of a word is its use in language." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, (Philosophical Investigations, § 43) Earlier, I gave my own definition of the meaning of a word as something determined by social agreement or declaration. There is not much difference from that of Wittgenstein, except perhaps that mine is a bit more explicit. Even though the focus of meaning here is on words, it need not be limited to singular words, but any idea or concept, so long as words make up its construction. We can even extend this further to other symbolic constructs from hieroglyphics to cave paintings. It is often stated that there is nothing inherent in any word that need convey any particular meaning. If I am speaking English, I may use the word 'house' to represent a place of abode. If I am speaking Spanish, I am likely to use the word 'casa'. A word is simply a sign that represents an object or a descriptive or an action in the mind of the speaker. The generally accepted meaning applied to most words is usually not contentious, since they tend to have a commonly shared meaning by the nature of their facilitation in communication. A group speaking a common language (English in this case) will find that there is no point in debating whether a four-legged animal that barks is a dog or should be labeled with another moniker. The common definition is the essential thing, since it is a social agreement about the sign and what it represents which makes communication possible; this applies to non-syntactic communication as well, and is perhaps even more critical in one-to-one sign-semantic expressions. Agreement on the meaning of signs may not be the case for words that describe a state of affairs which is unclear in a particular social context. An example of contentious meaning might involve the use of terms like fair and just or other words related to the concept of fairness or justness. Is it a crime for a mother to steal food in order to feed her starving children if she has no other means of obtaining food? There may well be a law that clearly states that stealing is a crime that should be punished without exception. But many would argue that the act of stealing in this case is justified. Does the act of stealing in this case represent a punishable crime or not? If a poll were taken, there would surely be fair representation on both sides of the issue. Thus, the meaning of a word can be situational or contextual, or as Wittgenstein might say, can vary with its use in language. The following will define some of the terminology used in this section. In cases where we are simply naming a definitional non-contentious sign, I will be call the word or phrase a fact. In a case where agreement is not that clear as to whether a word or phrase can rightfully be applied to a particular state of affairs, I will call such a case an opinion. An opinion can be made into a fact by declaration. I can declare that a mother who steals food in order to save her children from starvation is not committing a crime, but is acting in a fair and just manner. A fact is thus something which, in the case of a proposition, is deemed to be true because it is true in relation to a defined system of logic with a particular set of axioms. In the example above, it is the declarer who decides what system Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor will dictate the truth or facthood of the proposition. It should be noted that this notion of a fact differs slightly from the earlier one taken from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, because here we are saying that a fact is true in respect to a formal system of logic and not relating it to a state of affairs which may lie external to that system. The difference is that we are now drawing closer to determining what a fact is within its linguistic context rather than its standing in the universe at large. My point here is that there is nothing absolute in the nature or meaning of any word or assemblage of words. Meanings come from agreed definitions or declaratives, in essence, by social arrangement. The emperor that declares that the first-born child of every mother be sacrificed to the gods may find cause, for whatever reason, to have such a declaration written into the law of the land and declared to be both proper and just, although, as one might expect, it is unlikely to be agreed to by most mothers. In the social context of the empire, such declarations are valid in determining the usage of a word in its representation of a state of affairs. That a particular definition appears in a particular dictionary next to a particular word does not make that stated definition the meaning of that word; it is more that members of a social group have at least tacitly agreed on a particular definition, or that an authority has declared it to be the meaning. Whether something is a fact or a matter of opinion will depend on the social context. If there are ten people in a room with a four-legged animal and everyone agrees that the animal is a dog, then the animal is a dog, even if a larger group of people not in the room may say the animal is a cat. If those participating in the state of affairs are all in agreement, then it can be said to be a fact. Thus, facthood is a mental attribution, or more precisely, a linguistic attribution, rather than one determined by a state of affairs in the external world. On the other hand, returning to the room of 10 people, if 6 declare with certainty that it's a dog and 4 say it's a cat, then we would have to surmise that whether the animal is a dog or a cat is a matter of opinion. In the respective minds of 6 participants, it will be a fact that the animal is a dog, and it will be a fact that it is a cat in the respective minds of the other 4 participants. A great deal of modern life is devoted to coming to a social agreement about the definition of words. Much of this may be fought out in courts of law or by other modes of arbitration. According to the Geneva Conventions, torture is a criminal act. Whether a specific act constitutes torture is something which is the subject of much debate. Where the word and definition fit a particular state of affairs is of great social significance, worthy of considerable time and attention. Whether the word 'marriage' should have the meaning of a man and a woman joined in a civil union for the purpose of procreation and no other type of union, or be extended to include civil or religious unions of other types, is in dispute in many nations, and would almost certainly be resolved by authoritative declaration or by some method which leads to social consensus. ... Language approximates states of affairs. Since the number of states of affairs is for all intents and purposes infinite, language would be useless if it were not a shorthand methodology covering groupings of similar states of affairs. We may utilize the words human genome to generically signify the DNA in a human being, knowing full well that no two genomes are identical, with perhaps the exception of identical twins. The words that describe an event, or a state of affairs, can never fully 83 describe the event. If one were to look upon an expanse of beach, would there be a point in detailing the position of every grain of sand in normal circumstances? In that language categorizes and simplifies similar types of objects and states of affairs, some detail must necessarily be lost in the process. Language can never provide an exact description of the world. Generally speaking, our senses approximate the world with the goal that it be sufficient for survival, at least long enough to reproduce. Language is yet a further approximation of these perceptions, but comes with the added benefit of some considerable analytic capacity. Let us examine a few interesting words which most often express matters of opinion by the way they are used in typical circumstances. I will acknowledge beforehand that there will be some Wittgensteinian type problems in the very definitions that I had hoped would clarify these problems, and in the same regard I shall say they should be considered elucidatory. The usage of these common words as well as the underlying assumptions we make about their usage in everyday conversation should be reconsidered, for it can color the way we think about the world.  Reality: This is the thing that we are seeking to know at the end (not the beginning or middle) of our philosophical enquiry into Nature. At some future time we might be able to make a statement about what this thing is that we call reality. Currently, it is just a word that at best can be said to be some version of objectivity, itself being a term that we are grappling with to define. To say something is real, as it is used in common parlance, is to say that there is certainty in our knowledge about the thing in question. It is best to leave reality as a term used to denote findings in a philosophical culmination, not a word to be posited as a resolved characteristic or property of some entity. The related word existence can be similarly classified. We still have some terrain to cover before saying what reality is, and this will be explored in greater detail in later chapters.  Intelligence: A word often assigned to humans when being compared to other animals, or to particular types of humans when making intra-species comparisons. I may offer 'computing power of the brain' as a definition, but I think this is rather arbitrary. It seems to be an attribution of mental power in the way that strength is an attribution of physical power. But it will always be a word with a definition in dispute, particularly as it is applied in specific cases. Since there are not many people that would separate language from the whole of mental processes, there is more than a subtle inference that intelligence refers mainly to linguistic intelligence. It is the ability to manipulate data that makes humans intelligent and the greater the ability for a particular human to manipulate data the more intelligent we are likely to believe that person to be. We have gone so far as to distinguish other types of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence and common sense as being different kinds of intelligence, apart from the principal measurement of this characteristic. Another animal, a dog for instance, may be considered intelligent, but not in a way to be compared to humans, but rather to other dogs or perhaps other animals in general. Due to its broad usage, the word intelligence can take on a rather arbitrary range of meanings.  Progress: This word seems to imply that something has improved by going from one state of affairs to another. But who is to decide? What do we mean by improve? Is the building of a dam to be considered progress if it brings electricity to millions of people that once had Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor none, or should we consider the opinions of those people, animals and plants that have been killed or displaced because of the dam's construction?  Better: Very much like progress. Swatting a fly may be better for the human, but worse for the fly. Much of what goes on in life is a zero sum game, substantially about energy transfers when considered at a thermodynamic level. Whether something is better or worse than before is clearly a matter of one's perspective. A gain in energy will usually be considered better than a loss of energy. The consumer is usually better off than the consumed.  Good and evil: Again, this is an appeal to an absolute authority. How often these words are used as if they signify something that should be obvious to all. But it is usually an error on the part of the speaker concerning the authority that deems something to be good or evil that is the semantic villain. The speaker has become self-deluded into believing that there is an undisputed absolute authority, a law-giver, so to speak, that passes judgment over a range of states of affairs, labeling them accordingly on some putative scale of goodness. This is at the heart of the nature of belief.  Morality: Utterly a matter of opinion, although rarely presented as such. It is simply a word used to signify a standard by which actions are to be judged, but the standard is completely arbitrary, although apparently not in the mind of the moralist. Ethics is a debate about the generalities of what should be considered fair and just in a given society. Whatever the society agrees upon as moral is moral by declaration or social agreement, and thus the standard of measurement.  Meaning: Whatever word, entity or state of affairs which is the matter at hand has meaning only relative to the subject in the relationship. Similar to the definition of a word, the meaning of anything is by dint of social agreement or declaration, even if that declaration is a self-made declaration. Meaning is both relative and internalized.  Should: A word used to state a matter of opinion, as it is just the way the speaker advises in a particular situation. It may seem that, at least in my opinion, just about everything is a matter of opinion. And that is in fact my opinion. The words that I have listed for clarification are but a few examples of those for which social agreement is not easily found. We can continue through a dictionary and find many like examples, but I think the point has been made. The combination of the wide variety of social contexts and belief systems make many of the propositions of language both contentious and arbitrary. When ordinary language is understood in terms of a system of propositional logic, then this must be the case. What we call beliefs in a language system are equivalent to the axioms that form the foundation of any formal system of logic. If you change the axioms, then the theorems, or statements of truth, will change as well. So facts are obtained only when in a given social context of the respective belief systems of the participants are the same, and opinions will attain when the belief systems differ. 85 The relativism surrounding a wide variety of states of affairs is what we actually observe in the world. Understanding why this is the case will be shown by how language, as a formal system of logic, generates its statements of truth. For the sake of our discussion on the nature of language I will pose a question which I have no intention of answering: Are we alone in the universe? The question can take on several nuances, depending on how one interprets the meaning of its constituent words. If an astronaut found something similar to an earthling spider on another planet, would this satisfy the word 'we' in the question? Do we mean a creature that shares many of the animal characteristics of a human being? Or would this eight-legged creature not be close enough? Certainly finding something on another planet as remarkable as a spider would be headline news around the world, and it would likely make the SETI22 people exuberantly confident that a more human-like 'We' would not be far off. But these seekers of life out there are looking for what they call intelligent life, for they are hopeful of finding something that is advanced enough to be sending out radio signals. So even some creature close enough to humanity as a gibbon or a Neanderthal would not suffice for this purpose nor would a 19th century human for that matter. In order to satisfy the term intelligent it would seem that we need to have something a bit more like a 21st century human. What is being sought by SETI is a creature, regardless of physical appearance, that can do science, and that means having language. So as much as might be said for the intelligence of dogs, pigs, parrots and dolphins, when we use the word 'intelligence' we usually require a modicum of linguistic ability. So I will take the liberty of the original question to read: Are human beings the only creatures with language in the universe? Not everyone will agree that this rephrasing is what is meant by the original, which is part of the point, in that most propositions have some degree of scope in their meaning. This brief examination of a single interrogative sentence highlights several features of language. Foremost perhaps is to make the point yet again that language is a social activity. We regularly come across propositions that are open to interpretation and usually find a way to impart the proper meaning in the context of the situation. For example, if an atheist attends a wedding in a church, she is likely to hear lots of references to god, but it is very unlikely that she will stop the ceremony to correct the minister about what she believes are the facts of the matter. We tacitly understand that others have different opinions and the expression of opinions different from our own may not be socially acceptable in certain situations. In fact, our own opinions may be unacceptable in quite a large number of circumstances during the normal course of life. This reinforces the notion of the subjectivity of the meaning of propositions and how the system by which meaning is extracted from propositions must be examined to comprehend the nature of the process. Acknowledging that our society contains a wide range of differing opinions, it is bewildering that so little attention has been paid to how this comes about. Another point is how we ascribe the term intelligence within the requisite linguistic construction, recognizing that other animals can be intelligent, but not in the same way that humans are 22 The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is the collective name for a number of activities undertaken to search for intelligent extraterrestrial life. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor intelligent. As previously noted, the subjectivity of language is critical when assigning definitions to words like intelligence, thought and consciousness; there is nothing objective about the process. Words cover a broad conceptual range, but usually we do not need to be explicit about it in the normal course of social life. Nonetheless, there are occasions when we do find it necessary to be more specific and might add an adjective, such as 'higher', before the noun, making a distinction like 'higher intelligence' attributable to humans and other creatures with language having the faculty to comprehend the world scientifically, wherever in the universe they might reside. Although in the discourse of world events some debate may be focused on the meaning of words, most times we go through life without stopping for any analysis whatsoever. In the course of evolution, living things have not given much thought, linguistic or otherwise, to how they happened to have evolved a particular trait; and language, being very much a part of the Darwinian process is no different. An examination into the workings of language, as Wittgenstein recognized, is a self-referential process, which is what makes it so difficult to do, as is depicted by the M C Escher lithograph Drawing Hands (Figure 4). This, in part, is what Wittgenstein is saying in the last few sections of the Tractatus.23 We are trying to be as objective as possible, but cannot be completely so by the very nature of how language operates. As a formal system of propositional logic it is firmly in the grasp of Incompleteness and Undecidability. 23 6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science--i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--this method would be the only strictly correct one. 6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) 7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. Figure 4: Drawing Hands, M C Escher, 1948 87 The Nursing Home Ludd: "Thanks for coming with me to see my father in the nursing home. If there are other people around he tends not to act so nutty." Kurt: "What about flies?" Ludd: "Yes? What about flies?" Kurt: "How is your father when flies are around?" Ludd: "I never noticed. Flies always seem to be around, so maybe it doesn't matter much. But I'd stay clear of him anyway. He can be a cantankerous old fool sometimes and is lethal with that cane of his. The home called yesterday to say that he had a fall and wasn't doing too well and suggested I come and see him. So thanks for joining me. It should go a lot better with you guys around. He likes you Bert, you know." Bert: "Yeah. Me and your old man always did get along. He has a knack for being a bit outrageous, but he's got a good head on his shoulders. Anyway, at his age and condition he should be pretty harmless." Ludd: "Here we are; Room 205. Hi Pop. How are you feeling?" Pops: "Who are you?" Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Ludd: "It's your son, Ludd." Pops: "Oh. I didn't recognize you with that beard?" Ludd: "But I don't have a beard, Pop." Nurse: "I think he means your hat. He didn't recognize you with your hat on." Ludd (taking off his hat): "Is that better?" Pops: "Where have you been all these years?" Ludd: "What do you mean? I come nearly every week to see you." Pops: "Then why does it seem like years? Someone must be lying." Ludd: "No one is lying. Anyway, you don't look so bad. I thought you had a fall." Pops: "Whatever gave you that idea?" Ludd: "I got a call from the home yesterday and they said you had a fall. If you didn't have a fall, then why are you in a wheelchair?" Pops: "I don't know. They just put me in here. They said it was comfortable. And it is. I like it." Bert: "Hi Pops! Do you remember me?" Pops: "Of course, Bert. You were just here yesterday. You really don't have to come every day. You shouldn't worry about me so much." Bert: "I haven't been here for ages. Maybe you're mistaking me for someone else." Pops: "Well it seems like yesterday. There must be someone around here that looks like you. I see you brought your pet fly. Is he a talker?" Bert: "What fly?' Pops: "The one on your shoulder. Is he a talker?" Ludd: "What are you going on about, Pop. Everyone knows flies can't talk." Pops: "I talk to flies all the time. And that one on Bert's shoulder looks like a talker to me." Nurse: "Since he had that fall he hasn't been quite right. He's been saying the strangest things." Pops: "You don't have to talk like I'm invisible, Sister. I hear everything you say. I can speak for myself. It's not me that's acting strange. It's everyone else." Ludd: "He looks fine to me, Sister. Are you sure he had a fall?" 89 Nurse: "We found him lying prone and face down on the floor in the kitchen yesterday, so what else could it be? He must have fallen down." Pops: "I was just down there so I could talk to the flies, because they were in the corner munching on a piece of cake. I had to get closer so I could hear them." Nurse: "You see what I mean. He's really acting strange. Talking to flies. Dear oh dear. What will he do next?" Pops: "Come closer Bert, so I can have a chat with that one on your shoulder. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzzzzz, bzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, bzz, bzzzzzz. Oh, he's flown away." Bert: "Well, there you go. You've scared him off. It must have been something you said." Nurse: "Oh dear!" Pops: "He must have misconstrued what I said. Maybe he's one of those foreign flies and didn't understand my accent. One of those illegals." Ludd: "Oh Pop, you're just making trouble for everyone with all this crazy talk. I know it must be a bit boring trying to find things to do around here, but you need to make more of an effort. Why don't you read a new book? You used to love reading." Pops: "Why are you wearing yellow pants? It hurts my eyes to look at you. And you look silly. You shouldn't be complaining about me being crazy and you going around with that beard and those yellow pants. If anyone is crazy, it's you." Ludd: "What are you talking about? My pants are black." Nurse: "I think he means your shirt. Your shirt is yellow." Ludd: "You've got to pull yourself together, Pop, and get back to doing some normal stuff. Don't you have friends you can talk to here? I thought you were mates with that nice man who was a mathematician. Wasn't his name Alan? He seemed very friendly and quite intelligent too, although I don't recall seeing him around for a while." Pops: "He's dead." Nurse: "Your father and Alan did get along well. I think he misses him a lot." Ludd: "Sorry about that Pop. Maybe you just need to find a good book." Bert: "You'll miss me when I'm gone, Ludd." Ludd: "It's not always about you, Bert. Let's not lose focus here." Bert: "Yeah Pops. You need to find a new hobby. Why don't you start following the footy? I'd be bored too without the footy. In fact, once the footy season ends I go a little bit bonkers myself trying to fill in the time." Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Pops: "Maybe I'd enjoy seeing women riding horses in their underwear if I was a young man, but at my age it's probably not good for my heart." Nurse: "Oh dear me!" Bert: "I don't know what you're talking about, Pops. You're not making sense anymore. Maybe it would be best to settle back with a good book like Ludd suggested." Pops: "It all makes perfect sense to me. I want to read a book, but I've already read everything in the library here. You should bring me something new to read. And it better be something interesting, because you know I've read just about everything there is worth reading about." Ludd: "I've just read a new book that might be of interest to you. It's called Creating Reality." Pops: "Fascinating title. What's it about?" Ludd: "I don't want to give the plot away, but there's a section in the book where a man visits his father in a nursing home and finds that his father is losing touch with reality. There's a character in the book that's a talking fly from another planet." Pops: "Sounds very farfetched to me." Ludd: "I'll come to see you again next Saturday and bring it with me. You can judge for yourself. We've got to go now. Look after yourself and try not to be so argumentative. You're driving everyone mad." Pops: "Don't lecture me. I'm still your father and you might show a bit more respect. And remember, it's not a circus here, so stop dressing like a clown." Bert: "That was weird. You're farther has really lost it. And wasn't it bizarre about that talking fly stuff. I don't know what to make of it." Ludd: "Yeah, that was really weird. I wonder where Kurt went." Bert: "I've just been thinking that maybe Kurt has been fooling with us a bit and Kurt is not a he fly, but is really a she fly. Maybe we're just sexist, Ludd. Do you think we're sexist?" Ludd: "Maybe we are. Maybe we were just fooled by the name, because Kurt is a man's name. Do you think Kurt is hiding something from us? Bert: "I just think it's very strange that your father is talking to flies. And if there are talking flies in Tasmania, then how do you think they got here? Just speculating, but there may be more to Kurt than meets the eye." Ludd: "And where has he or she gone off to?" Kurt: "Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz." 91 Truth "Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself." - Ludwig Wittgenstein What Truth is and is not in a nutshell:  Truth is a function of language, not of the physical world.  Truth is about logic, not semantics.  Truth falls within the domain of logical space, not a materialistic spacetime. This may arguably be the most minimalist of all deflationary theories of truth. Truth is totally detached from the external world, which is, in this case, the world outside of language. It is not relevant that linguistic truth, more specifically that which exists in the mind of a linguistic human, agrees with some notion of reality or a particular perception of a so-called real world. The correspondence of a fact, i.e. a true proposition, with the perceived state of affairs in the physical world is a different process and a separate issue very much related to consciousness. Although this is in conflict with Alfred Tarski's conception of truth (Tarski, 1944), it is only so due to Tarski's presupposition about the reality of the physical world, which at this point in this thesis is yet to be established. For the most part I would find little difference between my conception of truth and that of Tarski, except for this notion of reality that Tarski shares with Wittgenstein and their questionable distinction between the logic governing natural and idealized languages. A perceived isomorphic relationship of a proposition to a state of affairs in the physical world is significant only in relation to a similar or dissimilar isomorphism perceived by another person, which would determine whether that person would agree or disagree with the proposition made by the first person.24 One's own world view, or any subset of propositions relating to that world view, is rightfully open to challenge by someone with a conflicting perspective, since the only guarantee for agreement between two sets of propositions is if they are generated from a system with the same axioms and rules of inference. Of course, this is highly unlikely in real life situations. It is this very point that explicates why people presented with the same set of facts, or information, may disagree on the truth of a particular proposition relating to those facts, and accounts for why people believe what they do, as well as why some beliefs seem so far-fetched having little correspondence with general notions of reality, or in many cases, one's own subjective personal notion of reality. The entirety of what has preceded this chapter has reached a culmination in this point about how truth is to be understood. It would be fair to say that Tarski's view is both the commonsense view as well as the one held by most of the scientific community. But as it will turn out, clinging to this 24 Under this system all truths are tautological truths, as there are no semantic considerations, only syntactic ones represented by the rules of truth generation of the system of logic applicable to the set of propositions being considered. A more detailed discussion of these matters can be found in Appendix I. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor view will bring about an untenable position due to the inconsistencies in how all the pieces of the world fit together. These points are meant to be both definitional and something beyond definitional. At the root of the dilemma that I find with semantic notions of truth is how natural language is viewed. There is a long history, starting with Wittgenstein himself, that there is a difference between idealized or formalized languages and natural language. I would say that natural language falls within the ambit of formalized language, but is too complex to axiomatize, so there is the predictable tendency to exclude natural language from the formal language classification. At the level which ordinary language is examined, it is impossible to access the underlying structure that leads to language output (or speech, if you like). But this belies the neuronal level of formalization which simply runs too deep to be examined. To exclude natural language from formalization is the same as for someone who does not understand the game of chess saying that chess does not have rules, simply because that person cannot figure out what the rules are. One only need examine the mechanism of cellular biology to marvel at the complexity of its operations. The intricate array of agonists and antagonists in the multitude of cellular interactions could never have been foreseen before the efforts of tens of thousands of microbiologists deciphered the wonders of the cell; and there is so much yet to be discovered. Natural language, involving cellular as well as intracellular interactions, poses the same daunting task for unraveling its intricacies as do other biological processes. Furthermore, if the universe is to follow laws falling within the purview of information theory, natural language would be just one of the myriad processes to do so. One would need to find a compelling reason to exclude natural language from axiomatization, rather than include it within the ambit of formal systems. Theories of truth tend to put natural language to the side for fear of the challenge posed by explaining its operation via enumeration of the axioms and rules of its formalized system; it is much easier just to deal with idealized languages and wait for a solution to arise in the future, as if some novel physical law will one day be discovered governing ordinary linguistic practices. The concept of truth presented here resolves one of the great puzzles of philosophy: Why do people believe the things they do? And as such, significantly bears upon how the world is to be understood. To show that truth is, in fact, only a function of language and not one of correspondence will require further elucidation as to how language works in the contemporary human mind. Let us start with a review of the way things were for pre-linguistic humans. If we turn the clock back around 100,000 years, we find an animal with a large brain, like those of modern humans, but with vocalizations sounding roughly similar to that of chimpanzees, in that both animals would lack a grammar in their communications, but I would suspect that the vocalizations of humans would be more extensive and complex. I could also imagine that with the passage of time there being a gradual increase in ostensive, non-syntactic vocalizations. This would constitute a form of communication, but would not qualify as a true language in that there would be a lack of methodology for generating additional constructions from those already known. But at some point in time, and exactly how this happened no one is ever likely to know with certainty, language with some form of grammar took hold in humans and flourished. The details of this development can 93 only be a matter of speculation, so it would be rather pointless to elaborate further.25 It may be possible one day, through work in the field of genomics, to become more precise about this critical transition. But for the analysis herein, we must accept that the evolution from an animal without true language to an animal with true language occurred sometime around 75,000 years ago or thereabouts. It is reasonable to assume that the first human users of true language did not go to sleep one night and then awake the next morning chatting away with a full-blown grammatical language. Vocabularies must have started small and simple, grown slowly, and almost certainly lacked recursion. Nevertheless, this proto-language would have followed a system of predicate logic. At this early stage of development there would be no difference between a syntactically correct simple natural language and an idealized one. As language grows, grammatical errors creep in, precise syntactic correctness is not required for comprehension, words are omitted from speech because they are understood without speaking them outright and a sort of fuzziness enters what was once a clean formal arrangement. But in fact, the rules are still in place; they have just become more convoluted and difficult to enumerate. At the basal level, natural language is indeed formal, but as the language matures the axioms and rules governing the system swell to an incomprehensible level. So what was this acquisition of language about? An animal that sensed its environment in a manner similar to its close primate relatives, i.e. by way of vision, hearing, olfaction, etc., acquires a new sense, language. If we take vision as representative of our senses, then the function of vision is to receive electromagnetic radiation as an input and process it into a mental representation. The neuronal connections that result from this process can be interpreted as the output side of this sensory experience. If a neural network is a type of digital system (although it need not be one that functions like a digital computer), then one could say that vision digitizes the analogue electromagnetic (EM) signal so that a mental representation of the physical is made.26 There is a close relationship between the physical and the informational in this type of input-output process. Other senses act in a similar way. Language acquisition effectively places a kind of computing machine in the brain which gives it the capacity to process propositions. I will now call this recently acquired human sense the language module. The language module is a sensory representation of a formal system of propositional 25 As a simple thought experiment, one could begin with 7 words (vocalizations or gestures in the context of the time) that one could easily imagine being part of a non-syntactic communication: me, you, baby, dog, eat, sleep and kill. It is not difficult to make a number of 2 word sentences and then a few 3 word sentences. As vocabulary increases, it may have come to the realization of some tribe that there was far more scope in communication than originally thought. 26 A neural network is a computer program for a learning system that tries to mimic a biological neural network. It would be too great a digression to get into further detail about the subject of neural networks. This topic has been explored enough, that at least to my satisfaction, there is an equivalency between the biological and the programmed neural network. It is yet one more example of the relationship between logical and physical spaces, or the informational and the physical worlds. This example does not represent my position on how this function actually works, which is described in later chapters on consciousness. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor calculus and can thus be analyzed by the rules of such formal systems. This is my physiological interpretation of Wittgenstein's ideas presented in the Tractatus. The language module has two key functions. First, it determines the truth value of an input proposition. Second, it stores the proposition, along with its truth value, in the memory system of the brain. It can be easily extrapolated that the language module integrates with the brain's memory system in the storage of true propositions. What is not a direct part of the module is verification with the outside world, i.e. the world as interpreted by our other senses. Simple propositions, such as, 'there is a cow in the pasture', may be easily verified visually. This creates a correspondence between the proposition and the processed visual input which validates the truth of the proposition. The sound of the cow mooing and the smell of the cow could further validate the truth value of the proposition and reinforce one's certainty concerning its truth. In the case just mentioned, the truth of the proposition is isomorphically represented by the other processed sensory inputs. If, for example, I am in a room with a window which looks upon a familiar pasture, and there are several people in the room that have been truthful with me in the past, and they all state that 'there is a cow in the pasture', I would very likely interpret their statements as true even without peering out the window to verify the assertion with my own eyes. Regardless of the physical world state of affairs about this particular cow I would likely store in my memory as true the proposition 'there is a cow in the pasture', even though in fact there may not be a cow in the pasture, thereby making the statement about this particular state of affairs false in the physical world, or its associated correspondence-theoretical formulation. Nonetheless, this does not invalidate the truth value of the proposition, as the physical-world state of affairs concerning the cow and the pasture is irrelevant to the truth value stored in the mental machinery of the person not seeing the cow, which was arrived at by believing the statements of trusted friends. One is limited to proclaiming that an isomorphism, or correspondence, between the proposition and state of affairs in the physical world would not be the case in this particular instance. Regardless of this situation, the person unknowing of these physical world contradictions, would continue to store the as fact that there is indeed a cow in the pasture. The truth value remains, irrespective of the associated correspondence value. This disjunction of linguistic truths from their isomorphic representations explains why people have belief systems that do not seem to have correspondence in the physical world. When the physical world's isomorphic representations of a particular belief do not exist, then the truth value of this belief can be said to be justified by faith. So faith can be defined as a belief ensuing from theorems of a particular formal system of language when a justification from an isomorphism of those theorems in the physical world does not exist. This definition will require some revision when we examine in more detail what is meant by the 'physical world' and 'reality.' So, how can it be that we have been so deceived for so long that truth had something to do with physical reality. There are two general misconceptions about the world which are responsible for this anomalous situation: 1. There is something called truth that actually has some meaning in the physical world. 95 2. That our conception of reality is reasonably accurate, even though there is no basis for this belief other than our conscious experiences, something of which we have little understanding (although I will offer an explanation of consciousness in a later chapter). To show that our concept of truth does not have meaning outside of language, we should examine how the world is perceived by non-linguistic beings. For all intents and purposes, this would include all known organisms including humans that lived prior to 75,000 years ago. Let us examine how a dog might conceive of the world. A dog does not have formal language, and operates with two-color vision and an exceptional sense of smell. When the dog perceives an odor, it categorizes and stores in memory an olfactory representation of some molecules that its nose has inhaled. There is no mechanism by which the dog's olfactory system can interrogate the particular smell as to whether it is in fact a true representation of the molecules it purports to represent, but is instead some bogus odor only disguising as the authentic set of molecules entering the olfactory system. For example, the dog would not question the veracity of its senses if it thought it smelled a fresh sirloin steak. The dog would not query whether this was some trick and it was not in fact the smell of a sirloin steak and may in fact be the smell of a decomposing dead rat. There simply is no apparatus that the dog has to pose such a question. The odor carries its own truth value. It could never be conceived of as not being true. It could never register 'this is a bogus smell of a sirloin steak'. It may in fact not be a sirloin steak that the dog has sniffed, but this is of no consequence, as we are not examining the functionality of the dog's olfactory system at this time. If the dog is mistaken, then it is likely to be due to a less than fully functioning olfactory system or the dog has perhaps been purposely tricked into acquiring that false belief in a manner similar to how a Venus Fly Trap plant deceives a fly. In the same way, a human can be thrown off by a mirage and be mistaken by some distorted visual input. This is just the limitation of the sensory system. No one would suggest that we should be able to see everything that exists in the physical world. Some things are too far away to be seen, some too small, others outside the range of detectible EMR wavelengths. It would be rather extravagant for natural selection to have evolved a mechanism like a non-linguistic truth checking system for sensory information, since there would be no way of attributing a proper truth value. How would one know if some visual input was or was not a mirage? There may be some question as to the certainty of the observation, but this is merely what happens when processing insufficient information to make a definitive determination. This is quite different than receiving deficient sensory information for determining if the input was what it is seemed to be or was just a hoax or a mirage. For example, if we believe that we can clearly see a cow in the pasture, but conclude, without any further input, this to be a false visual representation and the thing in the pasture is actually a horse, or perhaps a dog or maybe it's a tree. It is easy to see how ridiculous this would be, and also how excruciating it would be for an animal to go about its business if it questioned the validity of its sensory input, even if it had the capability to do so; small wonder that natural selection did not see fit to find this sort of adaptation beneficial. At some rudimentary level, all information is ultimately binary and can be interpreted as having a truth-like value, but for living things, the matter usually at hand is one of how a particular kind of input is interpreted by a particular organism. There are countless binary triggers, such as quorum sensing in bacteria to give but one example, which are responses to environmental stimuli that have Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor threshold triggering mechanisms (Cámara, 2006; Waters & Bassler, 2005). When sensory inputs are complex, as is the case with our own primary senses, access to binary resolution is buried deep in the underlying detail. For example, even though at some basal level vision may have binary correlates to individual photons entering the eye, our visual mechanism is built to ultimately interpret and respond at the level of the visual image, not to that of individual photons. These senses require interpretations that carry a default truth value for these types of inputs, with a course handling mechanism to deal with degrees of uncertainty due to limitations on information in both reception and interpretation. Simple organisms, as well as components of more complex organisms, such as cell membranes in mammals, have mechanisms ostensibly operating at the binary level for molecular transactions; an example being the binary lock and key mechanisms that are ubiquitous at the cellular level. Complex organisms have their binary decision processes executing at a subconscious level, effectively letting all the 'dirty work' take place a lower levels of resolution. This permits the organism to handle a multitude of lower level functions in the background, simplifying as such, the complex requirements of real-time high level decision processes, and is how natural selection has handled the building of organisms with trillions of cells working in synchronization. What is special about language is that it is a high level sensory apparatus that uses symbols, mainly words, for its simple structural componentry, which can produce infinite arrays of sentences. Many of these can be resolved as binary operations, which are the propositions. Other senses lack this property. Having language is like being given access to a kind of biological Turing Machine (TM) at a conscious level of experience, effectively, a theorem creating machine. This is why truth is a function of language, for it produces true statements from its axiomatic rule-following system. The capacity of an organism on our planet to resolve something consciously as either being true or false only exists by virtue of this mechanism. These truths exist in their own self-contained world, within one's own personal respective world of language. It's like being in a ring box with its own set of rules. What goes on outside the box is in a certain sense irrelevant to what goes on inside the box, in that truths can exist within the box regardless of evidence to the contrary outside the box. A wellfunctioning human being will be helped (and well-advised) by coordinating the truths of the language system with states of affairs as reported by other senses. The truths, or theorems, that are generated in the rule-following system of language are recursively defined. Whatever comes out of it is just following logic. As Wittgenstein states (TLP 2.012): In logic nothing is accidental. A truth concept is plainly not part of the usual sensory world. Correspondence theories of truth are inconsistent with the picture presented here, in that they intend to compare an independently obtained linguistic truth value with a representation constructed by a limited system of interpretation about a physical world that is itself problematic. So, if truth is not a part of the physical world, then what is it? Truth is a condition that arises as a consequence of the binary process. The result of a binary process operation can take on one of two values. What these values are called is irrelevant. It can be this or that, but nothing else. Some of the usual suspects are: true and false, yes and no, 1 and 0, -1 and 0, up and down, left and right, on and off, open and closed. The physical world of our experience is not presented as a binary process. We comprehend the binary nature of physical processes due to the science that has come about from language-based knowledge. The binary process underlying the physical world exists at more fundamental levels of 97 structure. The physical world as consciously interpreted by non-linguistic mammals is an analog world. On the other hand, language, being a system of propositional logic, indubitably produces binary process values. Propositions take on either one of the two values that we label true and false. Saying that truth can only be attributed to language (regarding the human interpretation of things) becomes self-evident when one realizes that the remainder of how we come to know the world appears analog at conscious levels. All cellular responses are ultimately binary, even if one needs to descend a level or two to reach the causative mechanism. Many are quite easy to interpret. The neuron either fires or it does not, the muscle either contracts or it does not, the protein either fits into a receptor molecule on the cell membrane or it does not. The ubiquitous lock and key configuration of cellular processes is representative of so much of biology that it is hard to find a process where an underlying binary operation is not at the root of a more complex process. ⋯ The truth value of a proposition or set of propositions is determined by comparing the input proposition to similar ones that exist in the memory of the person. There is no difficulty in adding a strength magnitude to the truth value of a proposition, effectively giving a proposition any value between a generic extremely false to extremely true. Remember that we are talking about beliefs, which is something not usually enumerated, although the underlying mechanism must in fact be digitized. It is the beauty of the binary process that underlies logic that such complexity can grow out of such simplicity. Let us see how this happens in everyday experience by examining this simple proposition: John is an honest man. Let us suppose that a friend has just made this statement to you. And let us further suppose that you are considering going into a business with John, so it is important to know whether John is a trustworthy person. This is analogous to a pre-linguistic human determining whether or not it is safe to walk past a pride of lions. Just like it is important for any animal to know what situations are safe and which are not, it is likewise important for modern humans to do the same, and we usually do this linguistically, although almost all of us rely on some form of intuition or non-linguistic factors to varying extents. Linguistically, this is done by assigning a truth value to the aforementioned proposition. So how will your rational mind determine what truth value to assign to the proposition 'John is an honest man?' Clearly, there will be a great number of factors which may go into this determination. If you have no knowledge of John whatsoever, you are likely to rely on the word of your friend who made the supportive statement. Alternatively, you may not necessarily consider your friend an honest person, which would be something to be taken into account. You may be a person that is generally suspicious of people that you don't know well, or to the contrary, be very trusting of others. Your mother may have said to you once: "Don't trust John, he is not an honest man." You may have suspected that John took a pen that you left on the table the last time you met. You may know that John has been convicted of robbery in the past. Or you may have heard a story how John spent two days looking for a person whose wallet he found, just so he could return it. Any number of factors may be considered in making a truth determination. Suppose there are only two pieces of Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor information and both come from trusted sources. Your friend says that John is honest, but your mother has brought John's honesty into question. Hence, residing in your memory may well be two evenly valued truth assignments, say on some arbitrary scale, a +5 for your friend's opinion and a -5 for your mother's opinion; so the net value comes to zero. This is what happens in the oft experienced weighing up of a decision where pros and cons are evenly balanced. Perhaps it will be your general proclivity to be trusting which will finally be the deciding factor, this in itself a weighing up of myriad past experiences which brought you to this particular proclivity. Exactly how the brain is wired to accomplish this task and which neurons are firing is not yet known, but I imagine one day it may well be. For our purposes here, it is not critical; it will suffice to know that there is a neurological underpinning to the process. On a systems level, the proposition to be assigned a truth value is compared to a variety of possible propositional theorems residing in memory that could influence the determination of the current input proposition and a truth value of particular strength could be assigned to the current proposition. We may characterize this process as a deliberation or a consideration of the facts. Human beings are extremely complex creatures. We cannot begin to compute the multitude of low level binary operations that go into making us well-functioning biological machines. But we can nonetheless surmise the methodologies that must be in place to produce that functionality. Of the myriad binary operations continually being executed at every imaginable level, the binary truth values assigned to linguistic propositions is a very distinctive case seemingly reserved just for humans. 99 Aliens Ludd: Hi Bert. What are you up to? Bert: Oh, I'm just trying to dig up this old tree stump. I'm thinking of planting an apple tree in its place. Ludd: Where's Kurt? Bert: I don't know. He's, I mean she's been out and about again. She doesn't spend much time at home lately. I'm really getting worried that this thing is a lot bigger than we ever imagined when we first met up with Kurt in Houston. Ludd: It's funny how we thought the whole idea of a talking fly was so cute and didn't give much thought to the repercussions of actually having the first known alien from another planet in our company. We were probably a bit too casual considering what we now suspect Kurt might be up to. Bert: You might say we were lulled into a state of alienation, if you don't mind my saying. Ludd: Maybe we were chemically drugged into cooperating with him, I mean her. It's fairly common for insects to anesthetize their prey and feed them to their young. Bert: Yeah, Ludd. Maybe we're zombies and we don't even know it. Ludd: I suppose if I were a zombie, but you weren't a zombie, I might be able to fool you into thinking that I was the real me and not a zombie by just acting like I usually do. And if you were a zombie and I was the real me, I might not be able to tell you were a zombie, that is, unless you were Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor watching the footy, when you always seem to act like a zombie. But we could both be zombies and wouldn't know it. Bert: Yeah. Maybe we need to ask someone else if they think we are zombies. But I don't feel like a zombie, so I don't think I am one. Ludd: But how am I supposed to know that? You could be a zombie and just be pretending not to be one. Bert: It doesn't seem likely that we are going to be able to resolve this zombie issue easily. Maybe we should focus on what we should do about Kurt. I don't know what to think. Ludd: We probably have a responsibility to take some action, because maybe the future of our planet rests in our hands. Bert: Wow! It's hard to believe such an important matter would fall upon us. And there's another proof that there can't be a god, because no god that loved mankind would leave such a responsibility to such incompetents like us. Ludd: I think we are quite clever, the two of us. Maybe it's not such a bad thing that we have this responsibility. Bert: Maybe we think we're clever, but I don't think many others do. And suppose we are zombies. Then the fate of the world would rest in the hands of zombies and we'd be doomed for sure. Ludd: But if we are zombies, Bert, then we really wouldn't care about the fate of the world, would we? Let's stop this zombie talk and take some action. I think we should go to the police. Bert: Are you talking about the Tasmanian Police? Ludd: I don't think we can go to the Federal Police. They'll just think we're crazy. At least the local police know us. Bert: I guess you're right. We really should do something. At the police station Desk Officer Reilly: Good morning, gentlemen. What can I do for you two today? Bert: We've got something vital to our national security that we need to talk about. Reilly: National security, is it? Bert: Yeah. Maybe even bigger than national security. International security might be more accurate. Reilly: Don't you think you'd be better talking to the Federal Police about such matters? 101 Bert: Perhaps, but you know that we are good citizens and wouldn't be making up stuff. I mean, we thought that it would be better to talk to someone who knew us and could vouch for our reliability. Reilly: Well let's not jump to conclusions here. Why don't you just say what you want to say and get on with it. Ludd: Maybe I should explain. Hmmm. How to start? This is going to be hard to believe, but you've got to believe us. A couple of months ago Bert and I were on vacation in American and we came across a rather ordinary looking fly that was able to talk and she told us that she came from another planet called Girdle. It probably wasn't the best idea, but we took the fly, whose name is Kurt by the way, back with us to Tasmania in a ring box. On Saturday we all went to visit my father in the nursing home and he recognized Kurt as a talking fly and said that he'd also been talking with flies around the home. So Bert and I got suspicious that Kurt may be here on more than just a fact finding mission as she originally told us. Reilly: That's a very interesting story, Mr. Ludd. And this father of yours, is he the same one that two years ago was running naked through the supermarket screaming that he was being abducted by aliens? Ludd: Yes officer, but he mistakenly ate a jar full of hash brownies, and he's never had that stuff before, so his behavior was quite understandable. Reilly: Maybe understandable from your point of view, but not from mine. I still have bite marks on my arm from that incident. Ludd: Oh yeah. I forgot that you were the one to take him down. I am sorry about that incident, but this is another matter. Reilly: Now let me make sure I've got this straight. You're saying that we have been invaded by intelligent beings that look like flies and you, Bert and your nutty father are the only three people on this planet that have been in communication with these aliens? Is that right? Bert: That sums it up pretty well, officer. You have to admit that we wouldn't make up a story like that. It's so original, it must be true. Reilly: Well, I can think of a hundred reasons why you might come in here with such a tale and all of them involve prison time. I would pursue this matter further, including ordering a thorough search of both of your homes, but I can't be bothered spending any more time today with you old troublemakers. I don't know what you've been growing in that lovely garden of yours, Bert, but I suggest that you go home and burn it immediately, because I just may come around this afternoon and check up on you. Ludd: Maybe we should go now, Bert. Reilly: Yes. That sounds like a very good idea to me. Good day gentlemen. Bert: That didn't go too well. What are we going to do now? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Ludd: We'll just have to handle this by ourselves. Bert: Let's go back to my place and you can help me get that old tree stump out. We'll see what we can come up with. ... Bert: Grad the top of the stump, Ludd, while I get this pick axe underneath and yank it up. Ludd: Okay. What's that funny smell? Bert: It's coming from under the stump. Let's pull it over. Ludd: It's coming up. Bert: Yep. It's done. Hey, Ludd, look here, under the stump. There's a dead chicken and it's filled with maggots. That's where the smell was coming from. Ludd: Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Bert? Bert: Well, that all depends on what you're thinking, Ludd. And it also depends on whether you're a zombie or a human. Ludd: We've already been over this zombie business. You know how the saying goes: If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. Bert: Let's leave the ducks out of this. I'm having enough trouble keeping track of the flies, chickens and zombies. Now, what is that you're referring to with that statement? Ludd: Well, I was talking about myself. I mean that if I'm behaving just like I usually do, and you can't tell that I'm not really a conscious Ludd, then what does it matter? Why should you care what's going on in the machinery of my brain as long as it all seems the same to you. If I said I was a zombie, would it make any difference? And how would you know it was true and I wasn't the real conscious Ludd just playing another trick on you by pretending I was a zombie. Bert: Yeah, I suppose you're right. I'm going to the shed to get some insecticide and kill these disgusting maggots. Ludd: Wait Bert. If you kill the maggots, then how will we know if they are alien maggots or just normal maggots? Bert: But if they are alien maggots and we let them live, then Earth will be overrun by thousands of aliens. And if they're not alien maggots, then who cares? It's not like flies are an endangered species. Ludd: I think we have to keep them alive so we know what Kurt is up to. We have to know if these are alien maggots, because if they are alien maggots and Kurt says they're not alien maggots, we'll know Kurt can't be trusted and she's probably up to no good. Bert: If they do turn into alien flies, how will we know? 103 Ludd: I guess they'll be talkers like Kurt. Bert: But suppose they talk Girdle-speak. Then we might not be able to tell them from ordinary flies. Didn't someone famous once say 'If a lion could speak, we could not understand him'. Wouldn't the same thing hold true for flies? Ludd: I think it was Wittgenstein who said that. But it can't be true about flies, because we can understand Kurt perfectly well. Bert: That's because Kurt is speaking a foreign language, not her natural language. And maybe Kurt is trying to trick us into thinking that she's our friend. And even if a lion could speak, it's not going to be able to build a spaceship and travel across the galaxy. I think we are dealing with something different here. Ludd: This is really complicated. Maybe you were right, Bert, we're just not smart enough to handle this thing. But no one will believe us, so we can't even get help. How are we going to tell if these maggots are aliens or not? Bert: We'll take them to your father. He seems to be the expert in these matters. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Consciousness "Human consciousness is just about the last surviving mystery. A mystery is a phenomenon that people don't know how to think about yet." ― Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained Consciousness surely must be the most intractable of all mysteries of life and of the world. It does not readily lend itself to any avenue for comprehension. It has no edges. It has no handles. It evades definition. It avoids analysis. We want to examine it scientifically, but it refuses to submit. Now armed with the recognition that everything we understand must be understood within the framework of language, we can attack the problem of consciousness from a new angle. There are many questions to be asked about consciousness, but the very first should be: Why is the logic of our language unable to come to terms with the subject of consciousness? It seems as though any theory of consciousness is destined to end up in the undecidable basket. So what is it about consciousness that makes it so resistant to rational analysis? If we are to seriously address the many conundrums of consciousness, we first need to make the subject matter more compliant to rational thought. Before we embark on unraveling this second of the three focus points of this book, a review of how things stand would seem fitting and necessary. Despite several hundred years of mental heavy lifting since Descartes, the mind-body dichotomy still remains one of the most perplexing unresolved problems in philosophy and cognitive science. No matter how many new words, definitions and philosophical positions are introduced to shed light on the matter, there seems no way to reconcile the subjective phenomenological nature of consciousness with the objective materialism that is the foundation of science. The discourse in academic circles mirrors the common sense view of the mind-body problem. Even if we can attribute our thoughts and sensations to neurological states, there still seems to be a non-physical nature to the phenomenological experience. Pre-Cartesian philosophies often identified the conscious experience with the soul or some analogous life force that transcended the physical world; this view pertains to the present amongst the vast majority of the world's population. For a relatively small number of scholars concerned with jettisoning unwieldy dualism from philosophy, two main branches of monism have ascended: physicalism, which attempts to fit mental states into the physical world, and idealism, which states that the world is essentially a mental construction. Most of the scientific community would broadly support the former view, for denial of the material world would seem to undercut the essence of what science is about. In 1974 Thomas Nagel published a paper titled: What is it like to be a bat? (Nagel, 1974). This set off both a rethinking and a reframing of questions about consciousness. Nagel states that an organism 105 has conscious mental states "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism- something it is like for the organism." Some 20 years later Nagel's idea evolved into what was to become the common philosophical terminology: The Hard Problem of Consciousness, first used by David Chalmers, who does a superb job in succinctly formulating the central issues (Chalmers, 1995). I quote here two paragraphs from his paper: Consciousness poses the most baffling problems in the science of the mind. There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience, but there is nothing that is harder to explain. All sorts of mental phenomena have yielded to scientific investigation in recent years, but consciousness has stubbornly resisted. Many have tried to explain it, but the explanations always seem to fall short of the target. Some have been led to suppose that the problem is intractable, and that no good explanation can be given. The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect. As Nagel has put it, there is something it is like to be a conscious organism. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go along with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations, from pains to orgasms; mental images that are conjured up internally; the felt quality of emotion, and the experience of a stream of conscious thought. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience. It is this hard problem of consciousness that I will be addressing in what follows. Principal Discussion Points One of the more interesting aspects of the consciousness dialogue is just how many unresolved issues there are and how little agreement there is. There seems to be a lack of scientific focus on the matter, except that a materialist based explanation is where most want to go. Even with a sort of general agreement about the identification of the hard problem as the central issue, a definition of consciousness, what it is, who or what has it and how it came about, is anything but settled. Perhaps there is a consensus that humans definitely have it, but beyond this point of accord there is plentiful debate, opinion and disagreement. The proliferation of terminology doesn't help either. Additional terms, definitions and categories circumvent the problem and tend to promote a discussion whereby participants talk over, under and around each other. I will try to address the main issues and be as clear as possible about my own definitions. The first point to be addressed is by manner of elimination, that is, how consciousness does not come about. Any suggestion that consciousness is not a result of an evolutionary process is off the mark. What is meant by an evolutionary process is the conceptual extension of the Darwinian Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor process, as it is applied to biology, to encompass all natural events so that the definition can become synonymous with the laws of nature. Natural law, whatever it may be in its detail, should apply to living organisms and inanimate objects alike. There is no indication that for the only venue for life that we know of in the universe, i.e. our planet Earth, there should be some laws of nature not available elsewhere. If the laws of nature that existed just prior to the first living substance were somehow enhanced to produce life at the time of this creation, we would have a situation suggestive of some supernatural intervention. It is far more consistent with scientific principles to think of the laws of nature having applicability to an extensive range of complexities, essentially, all things simple and complex as we find them in our universe. It is fair to ask how the same laws that apply to hydrogen also apply to viruses, fungi, clay and swans. It is a challenge for science to find a solution to explain how apparently unchanging laws of nature can account for all entities in the universe during its entire 13.8 billion year history, and for the most part science has done quite a good job. Although there are theories that hypothesize irregularities in the laws of physics in different spacetime references, current orthodox science is based on a consistent set of laws from the beginning of time, with the possible exception of the proposed inflationary period that took place in the first fraction of a second after the big bang. Whatever theory one might propose for consciousness, it should be explicable within the framework of a consistent set of natural laws. It would be helpful if the generic use of the term consciousness would suffice to unambiguously describe what is meant by that term. We intuitively know what it is, and the likes of Nagel and Chalmers have nailed it down well enough where adding additional terminology is not going to enhance our understanding. I tend to use the word awareness as a more general non-philosophical term for perceptions derived while in a state of consciousness. But in the end, there really isn't much difference between them, and I would not say they represent two different states of affairs, nor consider awareness to represent something additional to consciousness, but rather a feature within its general definition. Likewise, the terms self-conscious and self-aware do not increase our understanding of the state of consciousness. Effectively, any organism that can react to its environment has some level of awareness, and if it can differentiate its own self from non-self, one can say it is self-aware as well. By this description every living thing would be aware and self-aware, conscious and self-conscious, since all organisms are behaving in response to perceptions of their environment. As Nagel points out, the respective states of experience for bats and humans are quite different. We can refer to human consciousness as being what it feels like to be a human and to bat consciousness as what it feels like to be a bat, without either having the ability to experience what it feels like to the be the other organism. We recognize that consciousness is a subjective experience that can only be known to that subject. Even within one's own species, it is somewhat different to be like another individual than to be like oneself. We reasonably surmise that one's own (human) subjective experience is more like that of another human than it would be to be like a chimpanzee, but nonetheless, not identical. The terms mental states and physical states are purposely being eschewed, for the whole of the dualist leitmotif forces the discussion into the same Cartesian Theatre that has historically restricted our thinking about the subject, often confining it to a choice between some version of idealism or physicalism. From the point of view of constructing a world that makes sense, to this point in our discussion, we have only sought to establish various manifestations of the binary 107 process, of which language is one, and all existing within the subjective phenomenon of consciousness. There is no point in positing mental or physical states if they cannot be explained within the context of this aforementioned constrained architecture. This discourse will proceed in a different direction and not rely on many of the more popular pathways that have been taken by cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind. There will be little dialogue about the often used terms qualia and intentionality nor anything to do with a soul or élan vital. What is the point of introducing an entity such as qualia to describe what it is like to experience something, other than to lump a wide variety of these things inside a single nomenclature? I have no problem with the use of the word to categorize the various types of experiences that one has that cannot be expressed in terms of the physical world; in fact, this is exactly what qualia are. The term encapsulates the hard problem of consciousness, but to talk of qualia as a type of mental entity is just adding as bit of clutter to the room, especially since qualia as such have never been detected, nor could they be by its own definition. So it becomes just some hypothetical additive to support those building a theory of consciousness around the concept of mental states. The term intentionality is yet another attribution of mentality that adds nothing to our understanding of consciousness. What does it mean to say that an intrinsic part of consciousness is that it is about something? The starting point for intentional states is already a fully conscious human, without any discussion of what led up to the human having consciousness, or furthermore, a consciousness with intentional states. If someone makes a statement that a human being has consciousness and then a second statement that a human being has consciousness with intentional states, I find that I have no greater understanding of consciousness after the second statement than I had after the first. This is one of the generic problems of building a theory of consciousness around the characteristic of mental states. Adding terminology, attributions, properties and new entities fails to get to the core of how mental states come about without the usual allusion to some aspect of physicalism, which it had hoped to sidestep in the first place. It is dealing with a level of complexity far too elevated to develop a basal conceptual comprehension of how consciousness comes into being and what it does. If we return to the formalist model of analysis, we see that the discussions of mentalism and physicalism both rely on too many presuppositions. We cannot examine something as crucial as consciousness without initially starting at a much more fundamental level of operation. Physicalism: Back to Basics It is time to let go of the physical world. It will hurt to give up the most cherished of things that science has given us. As counterintuitive as it may seem, it simply cannot be supported by the evidence when scrutinized within a Wittgensteinian framework. To be clear, the physical world is not an illusion, but rather a delusion, something whose objectivity we have talked ourselves into by the logic-based nature of language. Like the moving images that appear on a television screen, the physical world cannot be denied, but is rather the result of an underlying transformative process that is hidden from discernment. It is only through the knowledge of the process, as in the case of the television images, that reveals what would otherwise be a beguiling mystery. Forsaking Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor physicalism does not mean doing the same for physics. On the contrary, physics takes on a different and important significance. We must not look upon physics as describing a physical reality, but rather as a pathway to understanding how information and the laws describing its evolution in time, create the consciousness that animates the physical world. The findings of physics that describe the physical world are clues to how this comes about. The discipline in science that we call physics is not physicalism. The material world, along with its ontology, should be seen as a language-dependent belief system. When we go from an unconscious state to a conscious state, such as when we awaken from sleep, we come to perceive the physical world. From our completely subjective viewpoint the physical world appears to come into existence. When we return to an unconscious state, the physical world disappears. Wake up again, and the world reappears. On the evidence of our conscious experience alone, the physical world is turned off and on by that phase of our state of consciousness; just like a light switch turns the state of the light bulb from on to off and back again. By all experiential accounts, it would seem that consciousness causes the physical world to come into being. When there is a 100% correlation between two events separated in time, we usually induce that there is a causative relationship between the events. Or if they are deemed to occur simultaneously, they would almost certainly be part of the same process, either in transformation or perception. And from the first person perspective, which is the only one we know, it would seem most natural to assume that our consciousness is the causative agent. So the question is: Why do most of us think otherwise? Why do we think the lights stay on after our switch is put into the off position? To respond to this question that the physical world may become inaccessible to oneself if one becomes unconscious, however continues for those others that remain conscious, misses the point of the 100% correlation. Everyone is in the same boat and has the same personal experience regarding the physical world. What would happen if everyone simultaneously became unconscious? The world would go on, but what kind of a world would it be? What would the world look like in a world that only had plants as its living organisms? What could these plants say about the world? These are not the sort of questions that we want to have to address, as they undermine both our common sense notions of reality as well as a large body of scientific knowledge that we would prefer not to be challenged. It is important to differentiate between what is persistent and what is transitory in this process. The physical world may come and go in respect to one's state of awareness, but the informational world continues in all respects regardless of one's subjective state. When one's lights are temporarily switched off, so to speak, the physical world may disappear, but the world is evolving in information space all the same. The laws of nature roll on irrespective of one's particular state of consciousness. To begin our journey toward reconciling consciousness and the physical world, let's start with the assumption that it is something to be like a dog, and a dog has a form of doggy consciousness. We can substitute a chimpanzee if one prefers, or any animal for that matter which we are willing to license a Nagel-type subjective experience. Let us now ask the question: How does the dog deal with the hard problem of consciousness? Is the dog troubled by the irreconcilability of its phenomenological experience of the world and the physicality of the world? Has it ever passed 109 through the mind of a dog the wonderment about how its soul could survive its physical being? Well, there has never been an account of any dog expressing such concerns, nor any chimpanzee for that matter. Beyond the seeming absurdity of this scenario lies the key to solving the dilemma; without language, there simply is no way to pose such questions, nor to have such thoughts. The world just presents itself as it does and there is neither reason nor means to interrogate that presentation. Language per se does not explain the nature of consciousness, but does define how consciousness came to be a problem. The hard problem of consciousness is in its rationalization, i.e. finding a solution within a logical framework. It is, in part, for this reason that science wants to force a physical solution onto the problem of consciousness, as physics shares the same logical structure as language, so they fit quite nicely together. If only consciousness could be described as physical states, then all would be fine. But so far physical explanations for consciousness have not succeeded, and never will, because it is consciousness that (to use a Bohmian terminology) unfolds the physical world. 27 Let us now return to the matter of how our self-deception brings us to the point where we unquestionably label the physical world as a reality to which all else must conform. If one has a language big enough to pose the question, then this rational mind may well construct such a question about how the sensory world comes about. It is difficult to say what this threshold is, as in the normal course of events in life the answer is usually imposed upon us. Most of us are either offered or dictated a creation story at a fairly early age. It will be a story that satisfies the causation requirements of our mind. In some form it will attempt to explain how we got here. There is a strong tendency to carry the substance of these early teachings with us for the rest of our lives, nevertheless recognizing that there are many exceptions to this general rule. Again, for most, this will be classified as a faith in a creator deity, carrying with it a set of stories and rituals. The atheist-scientist, on the other hand, would think that he or she does not have a belief system as so much as a rationally objective picture of reality, and can back this up with an enormous volume of scientific data and well-constructed theories. The consensus scientific creatio ex nihilo story is The Big Bang. It has a few metaphoric holes, but it's not a bad story when compared to most others. If one has accepted scientific objectivism from an early age, this writer being a prime example, then one acquires a near unshakable belief in the rationality of science that seems in stark contrast to that of religious mythologies. But when viewed within the framework of the linguistic construct, both religious and scientific beliefs are formed by the same process. And the truths of those belief systems simply conform to the axioms of each respective linguistic mind. How close a belief system conforms to some notion of an objective reality will depend on how well the system responds to the scrutiny of its axioms, and the recursive nature of language will always leave these sorts of questions about the veracity of beliefs unresolved. If the theorem-creating rules of two respective linguistic minds are different, then their respective belief systems will be like comparing apples and oranges. 27 David Bohm (1917-1992) was one of the most prominent theoretical physicists of the 20th century. He often used terms like unfolding and enfolding in his writings. His 1980 book Wholeness and the Implicate Order is noteworthy for its imaginative perspectives on the nature of the universe. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor As for physicalism, regardless of how one acquires a belief system which may be termed a world view, whether it be scientifically or religiously based, rest assured that a presupposition about the objective reality of the physical world will be a bedrock of that belief system. Although most religious systems have spiritual components to what comprises the totality of their respective realities, including aspects of transcendence beyond the material world, few would deny the material world entirely. It is recognized however that there have been copious varieties and numerous proponents of idealism in philosophical annals. Even without exposure to any of the traditional type belief systems, one is nonetheless likely to form a belief in the reality of the physical world by dint of common sense alone, because when you open your eyes, there it is; you can see it, you can hear it, you can feel it. Furthermore, just about everyone else in the world, including those with alternative world views, is likewise accepting the reality of the physical world, so there would be no compelling reason to doubt its existence. For the vast majority, irrespective of world view, belief in the reality of the physical world is acquired early in life, reinforced continually throughout life, both linguistically and phenomenologically, and rarely challenged. This is the perfect prescription for an entrenched belief system that will be nearly impossible to unhinge. Once again, a belief system is only as good as its axioms. We can summarily dismiss the commonsense notion of the reality of the physical world as it is wholly dependent on the yet to be understood phenomenon of consciousness. The axioms representing physicalism in such a belief system are a straightforward linguistic representation of sensory experiences, further supported by the aforementioned lack of a societal challenge to such beliefs. Belief systems categorized as religions, as well as other spiritual systems, are mostly based on personal experience and so-called revealed truths. There is not much that can be said about this that has not already been said by Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion (2006). Religion is a good indication of our yearning for causal explanations. As implausible as religions may be, there is no point in using science to bash it up; it is just the mind trying to find a way to reconcile the logic of its language with the phenomena of its experiences. The potency of scientifically based arguments against religion is markedly reduced by the fact that the arguments are grounded in the presupposition of the reality of a physical world. Nonetheless, the physical world does represent a correspondence with testable hypotheses within the framework of the scientific method. Whatever answers are proposed to questions pertaining to the role of consciousness and what might be deemed some ultimate reality, they will have to explain why science produces the results that it does. It is the scientific assertion of an objectively real world which will take considerable effort in overcoming, for it is supported by a system of logic (mathematics) that beautifully describes its existence, reinforcing the belief that obtains from our sensory experiences. Everything in science holds together within its own contextual framework, whether the physical world is the definitive reality or not. It is actually quite unempirical to assume a physical ontology, for it closes the door to other possibilities on a basis of unproven assumptions. One cannot simply declare the physical world into existence and make it so. What is being challenged here is not physics, but rather the ontology of an incontrovertible physical reality. The two must be separated. ... 111 My purpose at this point of the discussion is first to separate concepts of the science of physics from that of physicalism and further to release consciousness from its grip. There have been numerous theories and half-measure proposals about consciousness over a period of many centuries, yet nothing to date has really come close to answering the questions posed by the hard problem. I would like to conclude this discussion on physicalism with a few diverse thoughts on the subject before moving on to the solution of the problem. These are meant to be more of a commentary than an argument.  We should keep in mind the most successful physical theory in history, quantum mechanics, is a mathematical theory with a physical explanation that has eluded comprehension by its principal architects and supporters. In fact, the physical world as we understand it seems to break down to a fuzzy blur at quantum metrics. If the physical world falls away at its fundamental level of description, then what are we to make of its reality?  In a universe that yearns for economies and efficiencies at every pass, one has to wonder why it should be composed of so much stuff. If one could totally represent the world with information alone, why would one go to all the trouble of actually producing hard matter? It would be analogous to having to choose between either playing a DVD of a movie or gathering up all the actors and actresses that were in the movie and bringing them to every set to repeatedly play out their scripts every time we wanted to view the movie. It just seems to be more functional, if one has the information to do so, to have an interpretation of that information in a constructed or evolved format, a virtual world, so to speak.  Most of the physical stuff in the universe seems to be missing. As of this writing it is estimated that about 95% of the universe is composed of dark matter and dark energy, yet to be observed. These percentages are deduced by comparing the amount of matter-energy required to account for observed gravitation as well as the rate of expansion of the universe. Only 5% of the ordinary material that we are familiar with is of the kind that we find in our solar system and our bodies. I would suspect that this problem of missing material will be resolved in due course, but it does show that much ontological theory has been assumed while the full picture of the universe is still far from complete.  The holographic principle finds its origins in examining the thermodynamics of black holes. It has been expanded to beyond black hole thermodynamics to state that the entropy of a volume of ordinary space (not just black holes) is proportional to its surface area, spatial volume itself is illusory and the universe is really a hologram which is isomorphic to the information inscribed on the surface of its boundary. Put another way, it says that all the information of a 3-dimensional volume of space can be encoded on its 2-dimensional surface. Although still a developing theory, it represents one of the more compelling arguments for linking information and physicalism, virtually equating the two, at least in a transformative way. And here are a few interesting quotations on the subject from several luminaries of the world of science to bring this section to a close:  "Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real." ― Niels Bohr Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor  "It will remain remarkable, in whatever way our future concepts may develop, that the very study of the external world led to the scientific conclusion that the content of the consciousness is the ultimate universal reality." ― Eugene P. Wigner  "Hence it is clear that the space of physics is not, in the last analysis, anything given in nature or independent of human thought. It is a function of our conceptual scheme [mind]. Space as conceived by Newton proved to be an illusion, although for practical purposes a very fruitful illusion." ― Albert Einstein  "One has to find a possibility to avoid the continuum (together with space and time) altogether. But I have not the slightest idea what kind of elementary concepts could be used in such a theory." ― Letter from Albert Einstein to David Bohm, October 28, 1954  "To meet the challenge before us our notions of cosmology and of the general nature of reality must have room in them to permit a consistent account of consciousness. Vice versa, our notions of consciousness must have room in them to understand what it means for its content to be reality as a whole. The two sets of notions together should then be such as to allow for an understanding as to how consciousness and reality are related." ― David Bohm, from the introduction to Wholeness and the Implicate Order  "We have a closed circle of consistency here: the laws of physics produce complex systems, and these complex systems lead to consciousness, which then produces mathematics, which can then encode in a succinct and inspiring way the very underlying laws of physics that gave rise to it." ― Roger Penrose, from The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe The Origin of Consciousness Having rejected both dualist and monist theories of consciousness, what is left but for something completely different? As a re-entry point we will return to the examination of animal consciousness from earlier in the chapter. How can we tell if an animal has consciousness? To answer this question we first need to get past the language post by further elucidating upon the definition of consciousness; and for this purpose I will take Nagel's description to be the initial definition. It would be fair to say that under this definition it should not be contentious that most, if not all mammals, have their own respective form of consciousness, i.e. dogs, cats, horses, cows, rats and bats all have a first-person type experience of the world, albeit different from ours and from each other. Once we place pre-linguistic humans into the frame, it becomes quite difficult to find criteria to determine when a particular species crosses from a predecessor class into a class that both I and Nagel would say is conscious. I cannot think of a single case of a mammal that goes about its business in a manner contrary to the Nagel criterion. They all seem to be aware of their worlds and behave in a manner consistent with their characteristics. That is to say, that I do not know of a mammal that behaves so robotically that I would doubt if it was truly having a subjective experience. Of course, it is the nature of consciousness that none of this can be proven; we can only surmise from appearances. 113 And it would seem that resorting to solipsism is the only way out of making these sorts of judgments, whether it be for other species or other members of our own species. We can continue back in time through the phylogenic tree as far as we like and the argument centering on the subjective experience of the organism will continue to hold. We will find that all living things have mechanisms for assessing their respective environments and methods for responding to some number of variations in conditions. Natural selection will of course dictate the robustness of these responses and breadth of environmental scope. It is rather arbitrary where the line is drawn between the haves and have-nots of consciousness. It is anthropocentrism alone and its attendant hubris that would find a line drawn too high and more specifically too far along the Homo sapiens branch. ... The definition of consciousness has been steered along a path that suits a perspective not shared by too many others in the field, but is nonetheless the one that seems the best fit for the evidence. It is somewhat analogous to the dilemma of Joseph K in Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. Everyone seems to be in agreement that the charges against Joseph K are serious and offer many avenues to resolve his case, but the charges against him are never specified by anyone. Despite not feeling that he has committed any crime, he is nonetheless forced to submit to these bizarre circumstances, for he is trapped within the system. If he steps out of the madness, he stands alone. Likewise with consciousness, nearly all the players seem to be in agreement that it is an emergent property, but cannot offer when it emerges in evolution or how it does so. It seems a bit of madness to persist along these lines, but to step out of this madness, like Joseph K, one stands alone. It has been stressed throughout this thesis that if we are to comprehend how the universe works it will require a specific structured approach that we are literally obliged to take if we are to use language to make our case (which of course we must). Up to this point in the discourse we have only two postulates: 1. All that we know of the world is through our conscious experience.28 2. Rational explanations of the world are subject to the constraints of the language in which they are expressed and the rules of its respective formal system of propositional logic. Perhaps there should be a third postulate that states that we can assume nothing else. All of this is not much to go on, especially when we consider that consciousness itself is yet to be clarified. So the main task at this point is to elaborate on the first postulate, and we only have the second postulate to work with to accomplish that task. Until there is a system to replace rationality there will not be another avenue to constructing a world which is both internally consistent and comprehensible. There simply is no choice but to work with whatever is permissible within language. Although the basis for this system is one of 28 It has been previously noted in the discussion on language that some knowledge of the world is attained through non-conscious neural pathways, but this does not change the substance of the arguments, for it would only require a more expansive definition of consciousness to incorporate these inputs. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor formal logic, it need not be formulated mathematically. In fact, many of the idiosyncrasies of the many varieties of logical systems only muddy the waters of an otherwise simple concept. We should not forget that we are talking about building a universe from the very modest enterprise of the binary process, or how things go from one state to the next when there is only a selection to be made from two possibilities. The 20th century struggle in the field of mathematics to find what is provable or computable helps delimit how to go about such a process. So let's begin! 115 The Sandcastle Ludd: Why are you dragging me down to the beach so early on such a chilly morning, Bert? Bert: I was out walking the dog and couldn't believe my eyes. You've got to see this. This way, Luddy. Ludd: That's really incredible. I've never seen a sandcastle so intricate and ornate. But there's no one around, except a few people jogging along the beach. I wonder who could have made such a magnificent structure. Kurt: I'm pleased that you like my work. Bert: Kurt! I thought you were gone for good. Where have you been all this time? Kurt: I've been about, checking things out. I've been out exploring, you might say. I am an explorer, you know, so I'm just doing what I'm supposed to be doing. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Ludd: Are you saying that you built this sandcastle? It seems impossible for someone so small, like yourself. Kurt: I have been working on it all night. I was getting a little bored and needed a project to keep myself amused. Ludd: But how did you make is so large and it's the most perfect sandcastle I've ever seen. You must have had some helpers. Kurt: Yes, there were some boys who brought a lot of sand up here and then went away when it started getting dark, so I did have some help getting the materials here. Bert: Boys, huh. I agree with Ludd. It seems impossible for such a small creature like yourself to build such a splendid structure. Kurt: It did take all night and a bit of the morning as well, but I had a rough idea in my mind about how it would look and I built it up one grain of sand at a time. It's actually a lot easier to work on a small scale and put things in their proper place from the ground up, you might say. Bert: We've got a question for you, and I want a straight answer. Are you a boy fly or a girl fly? Kurt: I'm a lady fly and a young lady fly at that, at the peak of my powers. Bert: Well, there you go. Just what we suspected. You've been tricking us all along. And I think you're up to no good. Kurt: Tricking you about what? Bert: About being a male when you're really female. Kurt: You never asked if I were male or female. I don't know why it should make a difference to you. Are you two sexist? Don't you think that ladies make good astronauts? Bert: It's not about women being astronauts. It's that you led us to believe that you were a male fly when you are really a female fly. Kurt: I don't know why you would think that I misled you. Didn't you notice that whenever you guys went to a public toilet I always went to the ladies room? Ludd: Yeah, I did notice that, but I thought it was just because it smelled better. You could have said 'I'm going to the ladies room because I'm a lady'. Kurt: I think you two have made some poor presuppositions about me. There's clearly something amiss about the axioms of your system of propositional logic. Bert: What are you talking about? Presuppositions? Axioms? The two of us are very logical, especially Ludd. He wouldn't be amiss about any of that stuff. 117 Ludd: Well, maybe Kurt is right. We did make some assumptions, particularly because of his, I mean her name. The fact is that Kurt's sex never arose in any conversation until the day at the nursing home. That whole scene with my father picking you out as a talking fly was very strange. How can you explain that? Kurt: That's easy to explain. Your father is nuts. Bert: Then why did you fly away? Kurt: I thought he was going to whack me with his cane. Bert: Since that incident you've gone missing a lot. You haven't been around my place for 3 days and now you show up here on the beach with this incredible sandcastle that frankly seems impossible for one little fly to build. It seems that we've underestimated your capabilities. And you shouldn't be surprised that we're a bit suspicious about your activities. Kurt: I'm the one who should be surprised. Yes, I have been quite surprised indeed. I've been surprised that you thought so little of me and never considered how a tiny fly could manage to travel more than 2000 light years to reach your planet. You greatly underestimated how technically advanced we are on Girdle, but it should have been obvious that we, however we might appear to you, were the more advanced species and you, for all your size and self-assuredness, were far more primitive. Ludd: You certainly are correct. We were imprudent not to consider how advanced you must be. We were fooled by you being a fly, a creature of much disdain and revulsion on our planet. In fact, to be honest, we really don't know anything about you. For all we know, you could be a hologram. It may well be beyond our comprehension to know who you are or what you are or if anything you have said in the past or might say in the future is true or false. Kurt: A good observation my dear friend. I think you are beginning to get the knack of it. Bert: I wish there was a football game on today. Ludd: I must apologize to you Kurt for the lack of courtesy extended to you. Things will be different from now on, rest assured. Kurt: No need to apologize. We played our little game and it was all good fun. I think I will even miss those light hearted days, for now it's down to work for me. Bert: Even zombie footy would do. On the TV you really can't tell if the players are zombies or holograms. It all looks the same. Ludd: Get back on track, Bert. Kurt is being serious now. Don't go flying off on a tangent. Bert: I'm not going off on a tangent. I just feel like I've got a hypotenuse around my neck. Ludd: I'll get straight to the point, Kurt. Are you planning on taking over our planet? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Kurt: Not at all! Not at all! One of our probes detected signs that Earth may have developed a species with language. We lost our own history of how this happened, although we do have some stories about it, which I have already told you about. We are not sure how much of this is myth and how much is true and since no other species on Girdle has since developed language there has been some serious debate about how language seemingly came out of nowhere and then suddenly appeared. We were hoping to get some answers by visiting a planet with primitive language, but I may have come too late. Ludd: Do you mean to say that even though we humans must be far behind your species, technologically speaking, that our language is just as advanced? Kurt: Well, yes. Once you have recursion, then the sky's the limit. The only real difference is that we on Girdle understand all the intricacies of how language works and you humans don't seem to have a grasp of that yet. But otherwise, it's pretty much the same. I was hoping that by coming here to Tasmania I would come across some primitive tribes that didn't have recursion in their language. I've searched far and wide on this island and have met some humans that are as primitive as they come, but they all seem to have recursion in their language. Bert: Tasmania certainly does have its primitive parts. It's lucky you met up with us two to guide you around. You could have easily fallen into the wrong hands in Texas. Kurt: Both of you have been very welcoming to me and I do feel a bit sorry to have deceived you. I hope you understand that I was limited in what I could do and had to be careful. This mission I am on is quite a dangerous one from my perspective. Bert: It certainly must be a long and dangerous journey to leave your home and come to a distant planet. Your civilization must be very advanced. No wonder you could build such a magnificent sandcastle like .................... that? Where's it gone? It was just there a moment ago and now it's just a pile of sand. Ludd: Oh my! This is getting weirder by the minute. Kurt: There was never a sandcastle there. I just changed the firing of a few million neurons in your brains to create the impression that there was a sandcastle there. And now that we've gotten into this conversation I've forgotten about that and those neurons must have gone back to working the way they usually do. Bert: Wow! Do you mean that you changed our state of consciousness so we saw something that was really not there? Kurt: I think that is a fair explanation of what was done. But have you considered that the only thing that is 'out there' is what is created by your own state of consciousness? The world is what it is and it's only your perception of the world which is in question. If something can change that perception, then for all practical purposes, your world has changed. 119 Ludd: Why don't you let us in on some of your secrets so we can benefit from your understanding of the universe, because you know our planet is in big trouble and we're likely to kill ourselves off any day now the way we're going. We really can use some help. Kurt: I was intending to do that in due course. But right now I have to fly. I've got things to do. I'll check in with you in a few days. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Computation Meets Consciousness "The Fundamental Process of Physics is Computation Universal. This should be recognized as the First Law of Physics"! - Edward Fredkin What follows will be stated in the formal system of the propositional logic, i.e. the language, of the author. I recognize that I have integrated a number of beliefs into my language system, some of which I either cannot or choose not to support by evidence or argument and must be taken axiomatically. These are what I believe to be the relevant axioms of my language system: 1. The axioms of first-order logic which include formal systems of propositional logic, arithmetic and set theory. 2. Language is a formal system of propositional logic. 3. Universal Computation (of the binary process). 4. Finite Nature (i.e. the world is discrete, not continuous). The first of these axioms is generally accepted in mathematics. The second has been argued extensively in previous chapters. The other two will be discussed in the remaining sections of this book. ... We now must address the need to fit all the parts of the puzzle that is our universe into a picture that takes into account all the various pieces, without putting any into the 'too hard' basket. The most difficult is making sense out of consciousness. How can we reconcile our conscious subjective experience with an objective physical reality? Could it be that we are looking at this picture backwards? That is to say, perhaps consciousness is not something that can be explained by a physical description, but rather the physical world is something that is explained by consciousness, or in a sense created by consciousness. We will also need to sort out the ambiguous relationship between our observations of the physical world and its mathematical descriptions. The differential calculus of Newton and Leibniz, which has served so well in describing laws of motion, depends on the assumption that the world is a continuous flow of time which can be divided into infinitely smaller segments. Yet it is now well established that Planck scale units set a lower boundary to just how small the pieces of spacetime can be divided. The current paradigm of modern physics, quantum mechanics, depends on such quantized limits to the values that quanta can have. For example, the energy value of an electron is limited to a particular set of values and will jump up and down to atomic orbitals of higher and lower energy states by the absorption and emission of photons of specified energies and no 121 others.29 This results in a troubling and forced accommodation of the mathematics of the continuum and the discrete, which has led Einstein (noted earlier for writing 'One has to find a possibility to avoid the continuum together with space and time altogether') and other prominent physicists to question the viability of the current theoretical basis of modern physics. This is much more troubling from a philosophical perspective than it is from a practical working perspective of physicists in academia, where life goes on well enough without having to confront these issues. But these are the very issues that are directly addressed herein. Hereafter we will be looking at the mathematical character of the universe from a computational perspective in a way which is analogous to how a computer would go about doing mathematics. ... Science is a methodology which uses language and mathematics to describe our conscious experiences, usually within the prescribed structure called the scientific method. At its core it is an experimental methodology which uses our sensory perception, and extensions thereof, via the usage of clever instruments, to make generalizations about the physical world. It can tell us a great deal about the world, but must be used judiciously, recognizing our lack of understanding of the conscious experience and how it may relate to some non-subjective description of the world. As we delve into a quantum mechanical description of the world we find clear indications of these limitations. Our senses will only take us so far, then the sensory description of the physical world breaks down, and some other description must be found if we are to proceed. We should not be surprised by this. Why should our senses be able to reach the limits of the universe? Quantum theory makes a great contribution to our understanding of the world, not only from what it tells us about the universe, but also from the conundrums it presents. Both should be utilized to find the best way to continue. Once these cognitive boundary conditions are established the most reasonable way to proceed is to hold on to the things we know we can work with and try to move on from there. First we should reexamine the hierarchy of how our universe is structured. The three main variations on this theme can be found in many writings on the subject. I have taken the following three from a paper by the physicist Paul Davies that was included in a book by mathematician Gregory Chaitin (Davies, 2007): 1. Laws of physics → matter → information. 2. Laws of physics → information → matter. 3. Information → laws of physics → matter. I would like to propose yet another way of looking at the hierarchy: Information → Laws of nature → Consciousness In this scenario, the universe starts out as a singularity of information all of the same type. It has been estimated by Seth Lloyd and others that the total information content of the universe is 29 Related to Planck's constant: 6.62606957 × 10−34 joule seconds, which is a very small number indeed. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor between 10120 and 10122 bits (Funkhouser, 2006). In the usual 0 and 1 notation, let's say all the bits are initially set to 1 and go through a process whereby some bits are converted to 0, so that the universe evolves into a network of 1s and 0s. Whether we call the driver of this process the laws of physics, the laws of nature, the algorithm or the computer program that runs the universe, we are saying essentially the same thing. It is perhaps preferable to call it an algorithm, as this most closely conforms to the concept of information. Planck Time (the theoretically smallest interval of measurable time) would be equivalent to the clock speed of a computer, and each instant of Planck Time would execute another iteration of the algorithm in some variation of Information Space. We should hold open the possibility of doing some type of reverse engineering of the physical universe from what we can discern from quantum mechanics and string theory. Perhaps there are enough clues to begin deciphering the nature of this algorithm, but we are still at the early stages of this journey and for now it must suffice to simply outline the structure of a newly defined reality in the making.30 I would like to modify the definition of the term 'evolution' so that it encompasses the Laws of Nature as stated above. The general use of the term has largely referred to how biology evolves, but I see biology as just a special case, involving more complex entities, of the general case of the universe as a whole. Additionally, natural selection is construed as a special-case term as applied to the evolution of biological entities, where the general case would be the evolution of the information content of the universe as dictated by the algorithm we call the Laws of Nature. But make no mistake; the laws that apply to the evolution of mammals are the same that apply to quantum mechanical objects or strings, assuming they are good representations of the subatomic world. It may not seem that apparent, since the algorithm that we are looking at in biological evolution disguises the subroutines taking place at quantum scales and even Planck scales below that. When we examine the evolution of highly complex entities, such as biological entities, we are looking at the outer layers (or higher levels) of nested loops of computation, without examining the computation taking place lower down in the nested hierarchy. Upper level procedure execution cannot take place without the more fundamental procedures residing deeper in the nest. Returning to the hierarchal schema above, one might wonder what happened to matter and why it found itself replaced by consciousness. The reason is that they are in fact one in the same. The conscious experience of the physical world is no different than what we actually call the physical world. There is no objective physical world per se, only the experience of the physical world. There is no objective physical reality, but only a subjective experience of a physical reality. Where did all the stuff go? Well, it was never really there in the first place. Not an illusion; just a transformation. Not Idealism, but rather elevating information and consciousness to a more prominent position in the scheme of things. When we are not conscious, whether it be in a deep sleep, anaesthetized, or no longer amongst the living, we cannot and do not experience the physical world. We just assume that the physical world will still be out there, but we are not in a position to experience it. I contend that this is a misconception, mostly due to a bit of linguistic trickery and is perhaps the greatest 30 My view on the primacy of information is a variation on the general theme of what has come to be known as Digital Physics or Digital Philosophy. A paper on the field by one its leading proponents, Edward Fredkin, can be read for a more detailed background on the subject (Fredkin, 2003). 123 deception that language plays upon us. The reason we cannot come to terms with the nature of consciousness is because we accept the reality of the material world axiomatically. If one's description of the universe is that of an algorithm that leads to the evolution of information into aggregations of complex relationships, and consciousness is some expression of a subset of the state of affairs of the universe from the perspective of a particular entity, then everything in the universe has some form of consciousness which will vary based on the complexity and nature of the respective entity. Consciousness by its very nature is subjective. It doesn't matter if you are referring to a human being, a bat, a tree, a hydrogen atom or a cell in the liver of a chimpanzee. Each respective entity, however defined, needs to determine the state of affairs in its environment in order to know what to do next. That is, how the algorithm will arrange the bits of information in the universe in the next instant of Planck Time. At the level of the human organism, consciousness just happens to take the form that presents a movie type experience of tactile substances in a three dimensional space. If an oak tree had language, I am sure it would describe a completely different conscious experience. Wittgenstein might call this a different form of life, and perhaps expressed the same idea in his statement: If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.31 Many years had passed before Albert Einstein took the experimental evidence for the constancy of the speed of light at face value and changed the course of physics. In the same way, we should accept that where our consciousness ends, so does the physical world, just the way it seems. I thought this summary would be constructive before going into the detail of how the various pieces of the puzzle fit together. It may take some convincing to let go of the physical world as an objective reality, but I hope to show how language presents a prejudicial view of the world which, when examined closely, is not justified. There are a few anecdotal points worth noting about the philosophical position presented here:  There is a simplicity about it that conforms quite well to Ockham's razor.  The laws of nature are consistent at every level of size and time, thus conforming with the principles of symmetry.  Emergent properties can be explained by transactions at lower levels, not by the introduction of something new into the universe.  There is a great economy of just about everything, in conformity with the conservation laws that are observed in nature.  The world is analogous to a manufacturing process with very simple machinery. There are lots of repetitive processes. The output is something more refined than the input materials (complexity), and there are waste products at the other end of the process (entropy).  In the spirit of Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity, we find a ubiquitous fidelity of replication, spiced with the odd random occurrence, which allows the overall system (the 31 Philosophical Investigations, Part II, p.223 Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor universe) to maintain its basic structure yet evolve with the passage of time. And if time is equated to the ticking of the Planck Time clock, then there is plenty of time for randomness to do its work.  Everything is accounted for in a single comprehensive theory. If the present explanation is not totally convincing, there is at least a pathway to future progress. Something to take out of this big picture view is that the world presented by the conscious experience is an isomorphic representation of a mathematical (or logical) construct. We needn't have language to access the representational part of this duality, which we call the physical world, but it adds to the picture. With language, we can tap into the underlying logic which creates that picture. As such, language becomes a link between the two, as it resides in both worlds: the world of logic and the world of perception. Both can be used together to construct a more meaningful picture of the world in its totality. ... This is how the world works and how consciousness arises from the process: The world is made of bits and a recursive algorithm which determine how the configuration of these bits transforms from one state of affairs to the next after each successive execution of the algorithm. Both the bits and the algorithm exist in logical space. There is no need to fathom how something analogous to a computer program can run without something physical like a computer to run it on. I am calling it logical space to distinguish it from a space composed of physical material. Recall that I only have logic to play with, so I cannot posit something beyond the axioms of my system. It hardly matters what I call the platform for the operation of this program of our universe, for it is a kind of space that exists beyond the boundaries of our epistemic world of normal experience. I chose the name logical space, as it seemed the simplest description, but it is not meant to be understood as anything other than a space in which outcomes from binary operations can evolve into different configurations. It's like a computer program running without a computer. The logic is in the system, but the physical part cannot be taken axiomatically since it is dependent upon consciousness for its presence. It should be unambiguously understood that the algorithm that runs our universe effectively sits outside of the epistemic logical space of our consciousness, which should be seen as a subspace of the space created at the event of The Big Bang. At these early stages in the realm of digital physics it is difficult to say how much in the greater scheme of things can be inferred about these particular laws of nature from within our subspace, but it might well be analogous to a monkey, having found the wreckage of an airplane in the jungle, managing to reverse engineer it to produce its very own flying machine. Although there are a growing number of physicists going down the pathway of a digital physics with a digital mechanics, the numbers are still rather paltry. Edward Fredkin and Stephen Wolfram are perhaps the most prominent advocates and have been prolific writers on digital physics. I have followed and agree with most of their thinking on the subject, though we differ in a few minor respects. Suffice it to say that the only differences of substance that I seem to have with Fredkin, for instance, concern the importance of consciousness in digital physics and 125 Figure 5: Cellular Automata. 2 Kinds of Neighborhoods. some details on how we get from the digital to the physical world, in effect, how they correspond. As there are not many of us in the digital philosophy parlor, there is a lot of scope for variation and gradation. As we can only gain access to the physical world through consciousness, it must be established how consciousness comes about to best utilize the knowledge gained from the application of the scientific method, which is couched in conscious observation. This is, in part, why we are effectively forced to take a digital philosophical approach to resolving how the world is put together; we have a discrete system (language), but lack a methodology for going from discreteness to continuity. Furthermore, consciousness must snugly fit between the digital world and the physical world for a consistent theory to succeed. The only arrangement that can account for all of language, mathematics, consciousness and physics is the one on offer here, i.e. within this axiomatized system. In my own particular case, once it became evident that Wittgenstein's Tractarian concept of the relationship between logic and language was essentially correct, the rest, in due course, methodically fell into place. There seemed to be no alternative arrangement consistent given the available evidence. ... The essence of digital mechanics is that bits of information can programmatically build themselves into arrangements that can isomorphically be observed as physical-type structures like atoms and molecules. But it is more to the point a story about mathematics, and whether at the bottom of calculations that represent contemporary physics are discrete operations or continuous ones represented by differential calculus. So if quarks can build themselves into nucleons and we can add electrons and photons to make atoms, and aggregates of atoms can become molecules, and some complex molecules can form proteins, and so forth and so on, we can accept that the complex world that we see today came from more fundamental building blocks. This is the story of the cosmos. It is orthodox science. Complex things arose from simple things by a long and perhaps intricate process. There is not much argument about these generalities, but rather whether this description can be designated as a definitive physical reality or a virtual reality. Some, but not all, versions of digital physics would say that it's a virtual reality. If this evolution of increasing complexity takes place by the execution of the laws of physics, exactly what do we mean by the laws of physics? How do entities like electrons and quarks know what to do next? Where do they get their instructions from? It should be quite evident that the instructions are written in the language of mathematics; but what kind of mathematics? Let's see what happens if we go the way of a virtual reality. Remember, that everything in the world of bits can have a physical analogue, so if we are talking bits, we could just as well be talking about physical entities, or perhaps better put as the conscious perception of physical entities. Hence, we can summarize to say Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Figure 6: Cells change based on the states or adjacent cells. that arrangements of bits in logical space are analogous to arrangements of physical entities in spacetime. It may be easier to imagine what is happening in logical space if we assume this cosmological Universal Computation is happening on cellular automata, and for the sake of simplicity, cellular automata in a 2-dimentional lattice (see Figure 5).32 It might be even easier to imagine an evolution of a state of affairs by picturing a game of chess instead, as the similarities are close enough for most illustrative purposes regarding consciousness. Whether we are talking about cellular automata or a game of chess, there are two principal stages to the process. The first is the assessment stage and the second is the action stage. In a cellular automation, the cell in question evaluates the state of each cell in its neighborhood, and based on the state of affairs either changes or stays in the same state. In a 2-state system, such as a binary system of bits labeled 0 and 1, a cell starting out at 0 will either remain 0 or change to 1 as determined by a rule-following system encompassing the adjoining cells. For example, in what is called a cellular automation with a von Neumann neighborhood (see Figure 6), the state of cell C will evolve in a manner dependent on the respective states of cells N, E, S and W. This evolution takes place in time, so that each execution of the rules of action will move the cell to the next state. A representative time notation 't' may appear like t0, t1, t2, t3, . . . . . tn , reflecting the passage of time from one generation, or state of affairs, to the next. In a 2-state bitwise system the cell C may have a generational evolution like 0,0,1,0,1,1,1,0,0, ...... n. Of course, depending on the values of cells N, E, S and W, which themselves may be generationally changing based on conditions in their respective neighborhoods. A notation more suitable to these types of 2-state systems might be as follows:  The assessment stage can be notated as Tc (Tc0, Tc1 . . . Tcn). I will hereafter call this the constate of the system.  The action stage can be notated as Ta (Ta0, Ta1 . . . Tan). This 2 step process characterizes the rhythm of the universe at its most rudimentary level. It has 2 beats, one to assess the state of affairs, the other to run an algorithm to move to the next state of affairs. 32 See (Banks, 1971) for some of the seminal work in this area. 127 I propose that the constate, or assessment stage (Tc), is what consciousness is. It is the recursive universal algorithm (UA), reloading itself with a new set of inputs based on the state of affairs that existed after the previous execution of the UA. It is effectively how things know what to do next. What things are conscious? The answer is: Everything! In fact, it is everything at every level of complexity. Every entity which can affect the decision process of the UA is conscious. It needs to be conscious in order to know what to do next. The kind of consciousness humans have is taking place at a very high level of complexity and requires its own special explanation. But first, I would like to show how complexity and consciousness grow together. The computational aspects of cellular automation fit well with this schema, but we will leave the world of cellular automata for the moment and utilize the following game of chess as a representative metaphor. The position from the game between IBM's Deep Blue Computer and Garry Kasparov (Game 1, 1996) is shown in Figure 7. Deep Blue, playing White, is to move. We can see that Black can checkmate with Rook to h1. However, White wins the game with the Rook taking the Black pawn on h7 (Rxh7+). Kasparov resigned, because after Qg8+ and Nxf3, Black's position is lost.33 There may be some debate about what makes Kasparov tick, but we know that Deep Blue is running on a juiced-up version of a Turing machine. It only has bits to work with, yet somehow it is clever enough to beat the champ. As previously noted, chess is a type of formal system of logic. The board, the pieces and the players are for all intents and purposes the symbols of the system. The rules about how pieces move constitute the formal grammar of the game as well as generating theorems, or legal moves. Any legal move in a game is an axiom, e.g. e4 is an axiom of the system on White's first move 33 The game moves were as follows: 1. e4 c5 2. c3 d5 3. exd5 Qxd5 4. d4 Nf6 5. Nf3 Bg4 6. Be2 e6 7. h3 Bh5 8. O-O Nc6 9. Be3 cxd4 10. cxd4 Bb4 11. a3 Ba5 12. Nc3 Qd6 13. Nb5 Qe7 14. Ne5 Bxe2 15. Qxe2 O-O 16. Rac1 Rac8 17. Bg5 Bb6 18. Bxf6 gxf6 19. Nc4 Rfd8 20. Nxb6 axb6 21. Rfd1 f522. Qe3 Qf6 23. d5 Rxd5 24. Rxd5 exd5 25. b3 Kh8 26. Qxb6 Rg8 27. Qc5 d4 28. Nd6 f4 29. Nxb7 Ne5 30. Qd5 f3 31. g3 Nd3 32. Rc7 Re8 33. Nd6 Re1+ 34. Kh2 Nxf2 35. Nxf7+ Kg7 36. Ng5+ Kh6 37. Rxh7+ Figure 7: Deep Blue (Computer) vs. Garry Kasparov challenge (Game 1, 1996) Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor in any game of chess. We can view a game of chess as a more complex form of cellular automata. In fact, there are many aspects of a chess game that are analogous to the universe as a whole. To start, we can examine the conscious state of the White's rook on c7. Yes, I said conscious state, because it needs to know what it can do next. This knowledge is within the system that excludes the players, so a piece cannot make an illegal move even if the player would like to do so, for if it does, it wouldn't be a chess game, but some other kind of game. There are several things the rook needs to know. It first must be self-aware, that is, it must know that it is a White Rook. It must know that its position in chess-space is on square c7. It must know that the only legal moves it can make are to squares in column c and row 7. Any instruction requesting a move to any other square could not be legally made, not being a theorem of the system. Irrespective of whether this game is being played in London or Bogota, being played with wood pieces, onyx pieces or in the virtual space of the internet, being played by a man, a woman, a computer or a chimpanzee, the scope of the rook's consciousness remains the same. It is a long way down the complexity ladder from the consciousness of a human, a dog, a bat and so on, but it is functionally the same; it is an assessment of the state of affairs from the rook's perspective at time-generation Tc(w37) (being the state of affairs just before White's 37th move). It is the subjective experience of a rook in the logical space of a particular chess game. Deep Blue instructs the rook to move to square g7. The rook checks its internal rule book, and finding that it would be a theorem, accordingly obliges. The algorithm being run on Deep Blue executes the move Rg7+ at Ta(w37). Deep Blue, being a complex entity in its own right, will instruct the rook to make the move Rg7+, introduces another level of complexity to the chess game system. An entity with a complex computational mechanism is integrated with a simpler entity, the rook, to form the 2-step process at T(w37). Although this is just a chess game, it is very much representative of how the universe operates as a whole. It may be hard to imagine how some pre-cellular ancestor to both mammals and bacteria, perhaps something like a virus, evolved into complex organisms like ourselves with more than 10 trillion cells, but of course, we know this is the case. The enormity of the numbers and the integration of entities operating at so many levels is nearly impenetrable. For what I am proposing in the context of consciousness is that human consciousness is an evolved state of simpler forms of consciousness, like rook-consciousness, which is a distant cousin of virus consciousness in a way analogous to a bacterium being a distant cousin of a human being. Assembling a universe from a computational model simplifies the architecture of complexity building for it can follow well-known concepts in computer programming, such as those of objectoriented programming (OOP), whereby objects are programmable entities with properties which can be modified. These concepts could well apply to demonstrate how the universe can build itself up from simple structures if the UA has a learning mechanism in place, such as natural selection, operational at the most fundamental levels of the world. It is both logical and intuitive to believe that if natural selection is the driving mechanism for evolution at the biological level, it should also be so at subordinate levels of complexity. Human consciousness is a far cry from the kind of consciousness represented in this computational model, but it is important to make the point that human consciousness derives from the same process as rook-consciousness in the chess example. Like a horse and an amoeba, they are very 129 different creatures, but have a common ancestry; there are many things that are different about them, yet there are things that they share in common. Every logical entity that evolves both recursively and algorithmically will have a constate phase separating the execution stages of the algorithm so that the system evolves from one generation to the next, as follows: This generalization of evolution in a logical space is not very different from the kind involving the evolution of complex biology. And one should think that to be the case, for biology is a generationally advanced subset of the UA, and as such, very much a part of the overall universal process. The sorts of questions that arise about this kind of system often pertain to just how this mechanism works, something not easily determined due to the number of entities and interrelationships involved in the process. As it relates to a Nagelian type of consciousness, the question is how does a configuration of constates, ostensibly designed to detect the state of affairs in something analogous to a von Neumann Neighborhood, evolve into what can be called a subjective experience. And a good question it is, indeed! Whether one favors a digital physics or a physics of a more conventional variety, we find that the universe has been evolving from simpler entities to more complex ones during the course of its history. The evidence also supports that we have the same laws of nature today that were around at the earliest moments of the universe. It would seem reasonable to assume that observables of the evolution of complex systems, such as what we witness in biology, are representative of the same laws of nature that were around when the world was a simpler place. Definition of Consciousness What we call consciousness is just one of the many complex arrangements generated by the algorithmic process that are the Laws of Nature, so that in any given case we get the process: Information → Laws of nature → Consciousness + Evolution As previously stated, serious debates on consciousness often get mired in trying to find a definition of common ground, especially if the parties have their own respective preferences on how the subject should be framed. So how would I chime in on the matter if posed the question: How would you determine if an entity has consciousness? My reply would be as follows: If an entity, however defined, can unambiguously transition from one state of affairs to the next by following a set of rules, including choosing from a set of probabilities for transitioning, then the entity is deemed to be conscious. •Tc(1) •Ta(1) Generation 1 •Tc(2) •Ta(2) Generatrion 2 •Tc(3) •Ta(3) Gemeration 3 Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor 131 Troubled Minds Ludd: Hi Bert. Nice of you to come over. I can use a bit of company. Bert: No problem. Any news? Ludd: No. He's still missing. I can't imagine how an old man who can barely walk can escape from a nursing home. Bert: I hate to say this, Ludd, but if there's a way to cause a bit of grief, your old man will find the way. Ludd: There's nothing much we can do about it. The police are looking for him. Something should turn up soon. By the way, have you seen Kurt recently? Bert: She seems to have gone missing as well. I was working in the garden a couple of days ago and she landed on my shoulder, whispered a few works in my ear and flew off again. Ludd: Well that's odd. What did she say? Bert: A cow with language is like a fly searching for water in the desert; you can get sucked in and before you know it, there's no turning back. Ludd: What does that mean? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Bert: It's hard to know, but it must have something to do with that story she told us about how cows once had language but gave it up. I think it's some kind of warning that we need to be careful about the conclusions we reach about things, because language can play tricks on us. Ludd: I agree. We've been making one mistake after another lately and it's all because we fooled ourselves with some of the assumptions we made about things. Wasn't it Wittgenstein that said: 'What if it seemed to turn out that what until now has seemed immune to doubt was a false assumption? Would I react as I do when a belief has proved to be false or would it seem to knock from under my feet the ground on which I stand in making any judgements at all?'. Bert: He was a clever chap that Wittgenstein. I wonder if he had conversations with flies as well. Ludd: Well Bert, I think we need to have a conversation about flies, not with flies. I would have never imagined that we could have gotten ourselves into such a pickle. We were just minding our own business and lo and behold this fly comes along and changes everything, and now the future of the world may rest on our shoulders. And now with my father going missing, it makes things even more troubling. Bert: The only way out of this is that we have to become as smart as Kurt or else she'll just get her way about everything and we won't even know what's happening. Ludd: But how are we going to become as smart as Kurt? She comes from a far more advanced world. She probably thinks of us like we think about earthling flies, just little annoying insects running on instinct. Bert: But that's not true. Earthling flies don't have language and we do. Even Kurt said that once you had recursion, the sky's the limit. I think that means that we can think just as logically as Kurt, but we can't tell the difference between true and false sometimes. If we can just work that out, then Kurt may not have such an advantage on us. Ludd: It's very difficult to know what she's up to. We really don't know how much Kurt has lied about because we don't have any proof about anything. Bert: I've got a theory, Ludd. Ludd: Okay. Let's hear it, because I don't have anything. Bert: Here it is. Some of the things that Kurt said about being from over 2000 light years from Earth just don't add up. And where's that spaceship she spoke about. You would think she would want to get back to it by now. But she's never mentioned it again. I don't think Kurt is really an alien from Girdle, but is just an earth fly with special powers. I think she probably escaped from some American experimental weapons laboratory and is looking to take a foothold and find a way to advance her species. I'm not sure how she pulled off that sandcastle trick, but we weren't looking at it for a while and she must have done something during the time we weren't paying attention, just like when you tricked me in that snooker game when I had my back turned. Or maybe the sandcastle was just a hologram and that's something she knows how to do. But other than that, Kurt really hasn't done anything special except talk. I know that's pretty special, but you don't 133 necessarily have to come from another solar system to do it. It's a lot more feasible that she's really from here and not from out there. Ludd: That's a good theory, Bert. I like it. And it makes perfect sense. We really don't know what goes on in those weapons labs and it's not surprising that ordinary people like us never hear about such things. I read that the Manhattan Project, you know the one about how the Yanks built the atom bomb, had 100,000 people working on it and they still were able to keep it a secret from the Vice-President of The United States. Bert: Is that so? Ludd: Yeah. I don't think anyone told Truman about it until a week or so after Roosevelt was already dead. Bert: It just shows that you can keep a secret even against the wildest odds. I can certainly see a big military advantage if one country could program intelligent flies and let them loose on their enemies. I've suspected for a long time that we were a lot further along in genetic engineering than the newspapers let on. Ludd: Let's go with your theory. It sounds good and it's the only one we have anyway. So, okay what are we going to do? Bert: I think Kurt must have known we were from Tasmania. I don't know how she knew, but it seems like we were targeted. She picked us out because she knew we would bring her back with us far from any investigation by the U.S. authorities. We know she can talk, but we don't know what other special powers she has. She could have been programmed for anything, so we really have to be alert. Ludd: We're really up against it here. I'm glad to see you're on the ball, Bert, because I think I was about to lose it there for a while. I've been so distraught about everything, especially how my father has gone missing. But it all fits in with your theory. Pops knew that Kurt was a talker. I don't know how he knew about talking flies, but it doesn't look as though he was all that crazy after all. But now I fear that Kurt has conjured up something to get rid of him. Bert: I'm still confused about what Kurt said to me about cows and flies in the desert. It was like she just stopped by to toy around with us. I think she's getting a little overconfident and that may be her downfall. Maybe she just wants a challenge and she thinks she's so far ahead of us that she can afford to give us a hint or two. But what could it mean? Ludd: Language produces mirages somewhat analogous to the way vision produces mirages in the desert. If the logical processes are impaired, which they can be in myriad ways, then the output can become delusional. So it may be better to forego language if the delusion it brings is detrimental. But this could only mean that natural language must be a formal system of propositional logic, just like C++ or Java or any other computer programming language. It's all about logic. Bert: That would explain why there are so many religions in the world. It all depends on how the language part of your brain is programmed. Learning is programming. When you learn something Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor in your brain gets sort of hard-wired so it becomes part of the foundation for the things you believe and how you make decisions. It really doesn't matter whether it's true or not. It just has to make sense in your own mind. Ludd: That's right, Bert. That hard wiring is like an axiom in the logical system of language, so once it's there it's not so easy to change. The only way it can change is if it comes in conflict with another axiom and the contradiction has to be resolved or you find yourself in two minds. Bert: I often find myself in two minds. Sometimes there's a good footy game on TV at the same time I get an invite to a party and I can't decide what to do. Ludd: That must be a real dilemma for you. How do you decide? Bert: I always seem to make the wrong choice, whatever it is. If I stay home and watch the game, then the game is crap and everyone talks about how good the party was. If I go to the party, then the party is boring and I end up missing a great game. I just can't seem to win. Ludd: That's what learning is about, with or without language. It's providing information for knowing what to do next. Bert: Well, what are we going to do next about Kurt? Ludd: We've got to find my father. I think he's the key. 135 Perspectives "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." - Albert Einstein What has been set forth so far is a reassessment of the standing of the most enduring mysteries facing science and philosophy in the 21st century. We have seen how belief systems and our conception of truth are wrapped within the construct of language and are basically inseparable from it. We have also introduced some of the problems confronting science in the quest to explain why mathematics seems to be the language of description for the universe. And finally, we addressed the extraordinary conundrum posed by consciousness. Our concept of reality has been challenged to the point of demanding a rearrangement of how we think about the world at its very foundations. In some ways this can be challenging enough simply due to its novelty. In fact, much of the discussion on language focused on just how difficult it is to change inculcated beliefs and why this is the case. So the mystery of why it is so difficult for people to be open-minded about new ideas and concepts is effectively resolved and is no longer mysterious. We should therefore be in a better position to take on the challenge of viewing the world from a new angle without feeling that one's own well established beliefs are being impugned. Nature has just taken its natural course. Mathematics Physical World Consciousness Language Logic Figure 8: Relationships in the World Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor A different way of looking at the world has been advanced in the preceding chapters. A diagram of this revised perspective is shown in Figure 8. The physical world, which is usually seen as the unshakable foundation of reality, should be viewed as something emerging from more fundamental processes. In its stead we find logic underlying all that is our world. The word logic is used in so many different contexts that its meaning can be unclear at times. We can see from the diagram, which illustrates the narrative presented in this book, that logic takes on the meaning of the system or process that manipulates binary information. The building of mathematics from a logical base was central to its theoretical development throughout the 20th century. A particular kind of formal logic called propositional logic was shown to be the basis for formal languages. Arguments have presented here why natural language should also fall within the ambit of formal logic. Consciousness has also been presented as emerging from the evolution of complexity building through logic based processes, ostensibly the iterative transformation of binary information analogous to the execution of a computer program. Consciousness, language and mathematics are the three ways that we come to experience and explain the physical world. And all three have their basis in the logical transformation of information. It we were to reverse the arrows in the diagram the process would seem nonsensical. How could matter produce the mathematics that describes matter? It is causally absurd. Furthermore, it is both analytically and intuitively clear that a physical explanation of consciousness will never resolve the hard problem. It's really just a matter of perspective. We've been looking at the world the wrong way round. It may be worth revisiting the remarks quoted on page 111. There has been more than an inkling brewing for some time in scientific circles that something was not quite right about how we viewed the world. We were simply stupefied by the kind of truth and knowledge attained from language, in both its advantages and its limitations. It was also due to the historical narrative that built up over millennia which placed the physical world in its position of primacy. But once the concept of the physical world is allowed to develop from a more logically causative origin, everything falls into place. It is unfortunate that science has found itself juxtaposed to spiritual mythologies and has fallen into a trap of unwarranted dogmatism whereby anything with an immaterial foundation was viewed as unscientific. The ephemerality of hard matter in the quantum mechanical description of the world along with the intractability of the hard problem of consciousness has given more than sufficient cause to rethink the essence of reality. Although there are a number of common features found in this world view and ones proposed by Idealist philosophers, the differences are far more significant than the commonalities. Some forms of idealism, like those of George Berkeley (1685-1753), have their roots in religious belief systems with their concept of immateriality more closely related to spirituality. Nor would I propose that the world is a creation of the mind, even though there is a relationship between the mental and physical. I would think that if Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had been a modern contemporary he might have found favor with the ideas presented here, for many of the issues discussed in this book are those that concerned Kant as well. His complex system of philosophy tried to bring together scientific realism, rationality, sensory experience and some underlying reality, which he labeled things in 137 themselves. Kant also made important contributions to our understanding of causality, a subject discussed earlier. Kant was raised in a religious household which influenced his thinking throughout his life. He also did not have the benefit of formal symbolic logic and information theory to shape his thoughts. Despite this, his ideas and influence on philosophy continues to this day. This brief historical capsule illustrates the long evolutionary path of philosophical thought. New discoveries and theories slowly shift the paradigmatic thinking in a particular era. The ones presented here incorporate the discoveries in physics and mathematics of this era with those from some of the great thinkers of the past. ... As part of this transition in perspectives we have a number of common presuppositions about the world that need to be eliminated or at least modified. The one concerning the reality of the physical world has already been discussed. We are also burdened, in a sense, by our humanness, in both our biological characteristics and the historical narrative about ourselves that accompanies our language. The task before us is to discard some of our anthropocentric disposition. But how is it possible to view the world in a non-human way? And what does it mean to have a non-human perspective? For one, it will require a non-linguistic view of the world, while describing that view linguistically, since that is the only comprehensive mechanism for communicating such a description. Another thing to keep in mind is that we view the world from within our senses, which is one that emanates from a complex organism that has gone through nearly 14 billion years of evolution, if we start our marker from the event of The Big Bang. One should ask how the world might be viewed before there were humans, before there were animals, or even before there was life. The world was still going about its business, one would assume, without any human sensation to interpret it. Why should the world view of pre-human organisms have any less interpretive validity than the human one? How is the world to be regarded before the era of the human experience? It would seem that we need to go beyond a solely anthropocentric perspective if we are to resolve these issues. Often associated with anthropocentrism is a top down approach to how the world operates, for we tend to place ourselves of the top of a universal pyramid. This approach states that it is us, our will, our actions, that make things happen in the world, and whatever we precisely mean by our, it is something that we believe is happening at a very high level; something we often call a conscious level, although phenomenal consciousness is not really necessary to describe the world in this manner. How do our top level (and some might say willful) actions affect the molecules that supposedly bring these actions into being, or the atoms within those molecules, or the protons, neutrons, quarks or whatever quantum building blocks that must change from one state to another to be in accord with our actions, so that the positions and motions of every entity and all its constituents are in perfect unison and relation to each other. A top down decision process would be like a house deciding how the bricks are laid down to construct it. It would seem more sensible to have an approach where the bricks are building the house, rather than the other way around. The common belief of how things come about does not seem to hold up very well under just a modicum Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor of scrutiny. This 'god makes man, and man makes the rest' viewpoint has swept through nearly all cultures and has even made its way into the scientific community. The perspective of molecules is just as valid as the perspective of humans. It should not be assumed that the world must be interpreted from that of the human being. The consciousness of humans would not be aware of the consciousness of molecules, nor care for that matter. Similarly, the world of molecules can function quite well in its own milieu without concern for the so called higher level constructions of things like plants and animals, which may well be interpreted as vehicles assisting in the propagation of molecules, like the automobile assists the human in its ability to transport itself. In the quantum mechanical depiction of the physical world, particles can be completely described at a point in time by their energy state, electric charge and spin (angular momentum). With the relatively small number of particles in the current standard model of particle physics (see Figure 9). This is not such a great number of building blocks for such a large and diverse universe. Energy may take on many different forms and can be expressed in different ways, but the laws of physics state that we are dealing with a quantity which is conserved throughout time and space. That is, the amount of energy that we presently have in the universe is the same today as it was at the beginning of spacetime. Whether energy is expressed as heat or a vibrational frequency or motion or mass (rest energy) or momentum (a combination of mass and motion), whatever we started with is presumably still here today. So this thing we call energy is merely going through a transformation in time. And this transformation is said to be mediated by the four forces: Gravity, Electromagnetism, the Weak Force responsible for radioactive decay and the Strong Force that binds quarks in the nuclei of atoms.34 Figure 9: The Standard Model of Particle Physics 34 In the Standard Model these forces are mediated by gauge bosons. Gravity has yet to be incorporated into this model and remains the focus for those physicists searching for unification of all the forces of nature. It has been conjectured that the yet to be discovered graviton would be the particle to mediate gravity. 139 Electric charge and spin take on discrete limited quantities, which can be resolved as binary pieces of information. An electric charge is either positive or negative. Spin is either up or down, and takes on either whole or half integer values. When viewed from this perspective, there are not that many identifiers that define a quantum particle. A description of the universe, from the quantum mechanical perspective at least, may well be presented as discrete transformations in space over discrete units along the arrow of time. This is yet one more example of why the binary process, and its operation as described by mathematical logic, is essential for making sense of the world. The world can be viewed from many angles. Each perspective can tell a different story. How are we to decide which one, or combination of narratives, presents the most accurate depiction of the world? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Piano Bert: It seems like we've been up and down every back road in the state looking for your dad. Ludd: Something has to turn up soon. An old man just can't disappear without a trace. Bert: People are disappearing all the time without a trace. It's just strange because it's happened to someone we know, especially for you, since he's your dad. I don't think the police looked too hard. They think they have higher priorities than looking for a lost old man. Ludd: I found it pretty insensitive of them labeling my father a runaway. They've left the job of finding him to us when it really should be their responsibility. Bert: Maybe it was a mistake to tell them you thought your father was kidnapped by flies. Ludd: In retrospect I can see that wasn't the smartest thing to say. But I was giving them the best evidence I had. At least it was some sort of a lead. Otherwise, they would have nothing to go on. Bert: Stop the car! Stop now! Look over there on the left. Can you see it? Ludd: Oh yeah. There's a swarm of flies over there by that cluster of trees. Do you think we should get out and investigate? Bert: You bet! It's the best lead we've had all week. Ludd: There are thousands of them. They seem to be densest by that little shack behind that cluster of wattles. Let's have a look. Flies: Intruders! Intruders! 141 Bert: These flies are talking. Your dad was right. It's not just Kurt that's a talking fly, but now there are thousands, maybe millions. Ludd: We're doomed. Bert: Look! There's someone coming out of that shack. Hey. It's your dad. Hey Pops! It's us, Bert and Ludd. We've been looking all over for you. Pops: Calm down boys and girls, they're friends. They're not going to harm you. Just settle down. Ludd: What's going on Pop? What are you doing out here with all these flies? Pops: I'm their teacher. They're such quick learners. I never had such good students. In all my days teaching high school I never came across such clever students and so willing to learn. Bert: Don't you think it's odd that flies can learn to speak? Why are you helping them? They could be aliens that might take over the planet from us humans. Pops: Flies, humans, why should I care who's running the planet? It doesn't make much difference to me. I'll be dead soon anyway. Meanwhile, I've haven't felt this useful in ages. I feel I have a new purpose in life. It's so much better since I got out of that awful nursing home you put me in, Ludd. Ludd: Sorry Dad, but I thought it was for your own good. You were having a hard time looking after yourself. I thought you would make friends at the home with people your own age. Pops: Everyone there was mean and stupid. If these flies didn't come along I don't know what I would have done. It's given me a new purpose in life. Yep. A new purpose. Ludd: You know that fly at the nursing home you said was a talker, well we brought him back from America, and we think he's a genetically modified fly that some scientists have altered to have language and intelligence. Pops: You mean Kurt. Ludd: Yes Kurt! How do you know about Kurt? Pops: He's the one who got me this teaching job. Bert: Kurt is a girl, Pops. He's a she, not a he. Pops: Oh really? He, I mean she never mentioned that. Well, it really doesn't matter anyway. I can't tell the difference and even if I could, why would that matter. The most important thing is that they are learning to speak English. Now we can just tell them to get away when they're annoying us instead of killing them. There's enough killing in the world already. I'm on a humanitarian mission here. Maybe I'll even be up for the Noble Peace Prize. Bert: It would be a lot easier to win the Peace Price if you were a mass murderer. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Ludd: Oh Pop, I don't think you have any idea what you are doing. There could be billions of these talking flies before you know it. They reproduce really quickly and once they can communicate with formal language they will be in a position to take over the world from us humans. Then where would we be? Bert: Yeah, they could turn us into their slaves. They would work us like elephants, hauling wood to build little fly houses and dead carcasses for their little incubators for their kids to feed on and they'll yank our teeth out and make them into little ivory piano keys. Pops: Ha! That's funny Bert. Little pianos. Well, if humans can have a Ludwig van Bee-thoven, maybe one of my students will turn out to be a Ludwig van Fly-thoven. Ludd: Let's get serious. This is no time for joking around. Why does everything always have to depend on me to figure out? Now Pop, you said that you know Kurt. How often do you see her? Pops: She comes around just about every day to check and see how the lessons are going. Usually she'll show up late in the afternoon with around 50 or so new little flies, we have a bit of a chat and she takes off again with my students who have completed their classes and can speak English at a high level of proficiency. Ludd: And where does she take them? Pops: I have no idea. Ludd: Can't you see what's going on. Kurt is building an army of intelligent flies and when she thinks she's ready, then she'll strike. Pops: Strike!? What are they going to do? Buzz around and gossip about other flies? It doesn't sound too menacing to me. Bert: Your father's got a point there, Ludd. What are they going to do? They're still just flies. It's not like they've got nuclear weapons or laser guided missiles. We humans are still way ahead of them in weapons technology. Ludd: The fact is that we really don't know what kind of technology they've got. Don't you remember how Kurt altered our consciousness to make us think there was a sandcastle on the beach? It's like you said before, these new flies could have mind altering capabilities that could turn us into their slaves. Pops: I'm not sure I know what's going on here. Ludd: Like I said, we think Kurt has been genetically altered by a weapons laboratory in Texas, at least that's the theory we're going with for the time being. We don't know to what extent her capabilities have been enhanced. It would seem by the evidence that she's been breeding with the local flies and producing offspring with the same advanced genetics as herself. First she tricked me and Bert into taking her to Tasmania, far away from the military police. We tried to alert the police here, but of course they think we're crazy. Now she's roped you into teaching her children to speak 143 English, while she's probably off making even more children. I'm going to take you back home with me Pop. All this has got to stop. Pops: What will Kurt think when she comes around and I'm not here? Ludd: I'm not sure, but she'll probably come around to see us and that's what I want. We are going to have to have a heart to heart with her and straighten all this out. It can't go on any longer. If we go in the car, will these flies follow you? Pops: I'll call them into the shack and tell them there's a lesson. Then I'll walk out and shut the door behind me. They're very obedient. It'll be fine. Ludd: Okay then. Let's go. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Building a Universe "The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum." - Rudolph Clausius If you were looking for clues on what the universe is about, the laws of thermodynamics are not a bad place to start.35 There is near complete agreement on the scientific veracity of these laws. The first and second laws convey so much about how things evolve over time. To reprise a term used earlier in this book, it can be said that these laws are universally thematic in the sense that they are indicative of the purpose of the universe. Perhaps it is somewhat provocative to use a word like purpose in such a context. It reeks of teleology, not that this should be seen as a scientific obscenity, particularly if we set aside the anthropocentrism of theologies and the anthropic principle. From within the confines of the metaphorical box that we call our universe, nothing can be said about what lies outside the box, if anything at all. It behooves us to work with what we have inside the box and do the best we can to interpret the clues which we are given. I have long viewed the universe as a kind of factory going through a manufacturing process, perhaps without either the planning or appreciation for the products which are being produced. It starts out with a fixed amount of raw material, and then goes through a series of transformations and assemblies to produce things which have a low probability configuration (high information content). This happens at the expense of a considerable amount of waste (entropy). Perhaps all of the products made in this factory have a limited lifespan and will, in turn, themselves become waste products. Is this not what energy, complexity and entropy are about? Can something be goaloriented without necessarily being intentional? Much of the evidence would say yes. 35 Thermodynamics is a major branch of physics covering the evolution of physical systems, such as our universe or the weather, to give but two examples. There is also a close relationship, particularly mathematically, between thermodynamics and information theory. There are four laws of thermodynamics, the first and second being the most often cited:  Zeroth law of thermodynamics – If two thermodynamic systems are each in thermal equilibrium with a third, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.  First law of thermodynamics – Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only change forms. In any process, the total energy of the universe remains the same. For a thermodynamic cycle the net heat supplied to the system equals the net work done by the system.  Second law of thermodynamics – The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.  Third law of thermodynamics – As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant minimum. 145 In fact, entropy, information, complexity, uncertainty, predictability, unpredictability, order and disorder, are all the same thing given particular names to suit the peculiarities of the system under examination. The same mathematics applies to all. The term information seems the most generic and therefore the most useful in a general discussion and can stand for any of the terms above and many others as well. For example, things that seem complex in the physical world are likely to have a high information content in logical space (or information space, if one prefers), which is selfevident if the physical world is an isomorphism of an arrangement in logical space. Let us imagine the universe as a kind of schema where the goal is to produce the most powerful computer possible within a set of constraints on both material and instruction. One may prefer to substitute bits and algorithm here and view it as a metaphor for an algorithmic dynamical system attractor. A creator-deity account can elucidate the kind of task that confronts such a project in that the product of the creation is so complex that it can seemingly only be accomplished by an omniscient being. But here I have imposed constraints restricting the project to produce the same results with simple and economical methodologies. I have set these impositions because it seems the best fit for the evidence of what the early universe was like and what the laws of thermodynamics inform us about the broad process of universe building. We find ourselves in a universe where the watch is more complex than the watchmaker. It is difficult to say what the schema of the universe is aiming to construct, for one cannot say how far along we are in this process. Do we have enough information at hand to tell whether the passage of some 14 billion years places us at the beginning, middle, or near the end of any such goal-oriented endeavor? With the amount of knowledge we have at present, it probably does not make much difference if we set the cosmological hypothetical to building the most powerful computer or baking the best tasting lasagna, for the process up to this point may well look the same in both cases; it may first require the production of an entity intelligent enough to be capable of producing either, perchance something like a human being. It is also difficult to say how applicable the concept of the anthropic principle might be, or whether the proceedings here on planet Earth are just a side show or by product of the main show that is playing out on another stage. In that complexity can take on so many forms, we need to contain our enthusiasm for a particular outcome and restrict ourselves to more generalized scenarios that might apply in a wider range of potentialities. The similarity between the measurements of thermodynamic entropy and information links the 19th century work of Gibbs and Boltzmann with the 1948 work of Claude Shannon. Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are not necessarily equivalent as it depends on the context of the measurement. But one intuits that ultimately entropy and information stem from the same origin and only differ in the perspective of the measurement system. In a universe that has information at its core, complexity builds through various combinations of simple logical structures and those structures in turn assimilate into ones which are yet more elaborate. Key features of OOP can illustrate universal complexity building, as it should, since there is not much difference between them. Objects in OOP, which are programmatic constructs, are very much comparable to the generically labeled physical entities of common parlance. Complex objects are constructed from simpler ones. A chair made from wood, nails, glue and cloth takes on a whole new purpose completely different from its components once it is assembled, and goes about its Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor existence in a form of superstructure of its componentry; semi-autonomous, yet inextricably connected. A termite infestation of the wooden legs will take the chair down with it. It has been hypothesized here that from a human perspective the physical world comes about through the high-level mediation of the fundamental process of consciousness. At this juncture it should suffice to show that discrete computational processes can construct complex informational entities capable of isomorphic representations in a physical spacetime mediated by consciousness. There are numerous analogues of this kind of isomorphism in our everyday world, from the digital encoding on a DVD playing a movie to the DNA of a biological organism playing the part of an operating system for replicating and running that organism. The question is whether a digital physics can produce a consciousness that in turn can generate a physical representation of itself. This thesis is not the place to review the vast body of knowledge concerning computation, algorithmic information theory or computer programming. I have selected a few of the more pertinent concepts to elucidate the ideas presented herein. This includes the notion that anything that can be produced by a particular computer can be produced by any Universal Turing Machine (UTM), which establishes a ubiquity about computation itself (Computation Universality) and should, at the very least, be seen as something fundamental to how the universe operates (Fredkin, 2003). Again, if one can be convinced that physics is Computation Universal, there only remains to show the connection between computation and its physical isomorphism. This is no small task, but it should be clear enough that general computer programming concepts are sufficient to explain an algorithmic construction of the universe. It is not necessary to derive new concepts at the theoretical level, as ordinary physical world computer analogies are adequate. A search for the universal algorithm may well be a valuable exercise, but we must be realistic about the prospective achievement of such a goal. It should be understood that a computational physics can be produced by any number of diverse algorithms. There are many ways to write a program to produce a particular result, as there are many genotypes that can produce the same phenotype. It is only through the imposition of guidelines and constraints, such as certain kinds of efficiencies, that we may limit the number of possible algorithms. There are numerous algorithmic models of physical world type entities, many of which can be found in the field of cellular automation. Notwithstanding a personal familiarity with computer programming, I cannot help but be amazed by the complexity of some of the broadly available computer programs, e.g. the major computer operating systems, computer aided design (CAD) programs and virtual reality animation. Many are a result of the collaboration of thousands of contributors. It would be far too great a task for a single mind. And yet these human constructions pall against the complexity of the universe, and are clearly, in fact, a small subset of the universe. A major criticism of computational models of the universe is the impossibility of actually doing the computation. But this should not be a reason for rejection of such approaches. I have stressed in this book the importance of understanding our cognitive limitations and finding methodologies to work within those limitations. It has been shown that within a recursive axiomatic linguistic framework that any set of non-contradictory propositions can produce truth, as truth is essentially a function of logic. The success of quantum mechanics as a scientific theory should be judged within this framework, as 147 should all theories, whether they fall under the rubric of science or some other system that professes a particular epistemology. ... One can get lost contemplating the unfolding of our complex universe and it is easy to lose sight of its underlying simplicity in light of the menagerie of particles, superposition, multiverses, strings and the like, that mainstream science offers up as reality. There are only two main processes which need concern us regarding the evolution of the universe, (with my humble apologies to the strong and weak nuclear forces which certainly play important roles in the greater scheme of things). Gravity crushes simple atoms and spews them out as more elegant ones (and makes the sun shine to boot). This crunching and spewing may happen many times over in order to produce the heavier elements, which are most likely produced in supernovae. There are 98 naturally occurring varieties emanating from this process, which can easily be found, nicely sorted, in a periodic table of elements.36 Some of these are used to make chairs. The effect of gravity at the high densities found in stars is a brutal and crude process when compared to the constructs produced by complex organisms. The rest, which comes under the broad heading of Chemistry, is mediated by the electron. That's it in a nutshell. Really! When it comes to chair-making, once you have your raw materials (atoms of various elements), it is thanks to the marvels of the electron to fathom together the wood, glue and carpenters to make it all happen. How did it ever become so clever? It would seem rather pointless to have yet another detailed discussion of quantum mechanics and the standard model of particle physics filled with numerous equations. Sometimes mathematics can be a distraction from examining the broader issues. The mathematics supporting quantum mechanics self-validates the concepts within its own self-referential system, but it does little to explain what is going on. What it can do it give us clues that help us make sense of the world. What follows is a review of the key features of mainstream physics and a theory of how it can fit quite well with computational models of the world. I appreciate that some of the discussion that follows in this chapter may be too technical for those not well versed in physics and conversely may fall short of what might be expected to satisfy the professional physicist. I have tried to strike a reasonable balance between the two. Quantum Weirdness "I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it." - Albert Einstein 36 There are 118 elements listed in the periodic table including those artificially produced. There are also some opinions that as few as 90 elements occur naturally. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor It is worth recalling that although quantum mechanics refers to things in the physical world, we should not submit to labeling this as reality. Nor are we making reference to facts, but rather observations, something that is a product of the conscious experience. We are however learning something about how the universe is constructed from these observations, without saying precisely what that universe is. If one insists on the ultimate objective reality of the physical world, then the quantum world will forever be weird. In a physical ontology, quantum physics will exhibit behaviors that are nonsensical within that ontology. This is due to inconsistencies between what the theory displays and the logic of language permits. It also fails on the essential notions of causality. It is part of normal parlance to say something is ontologically real without insisting on the requirement that it be observed. For example, if one were in New York City yesterday, but presently in London when asked the question 'does New York City exist?', it would seem factually correct to answer 'yes' without insisting on the requirement to revisit the city; and even if one were to hop on a plane and scoot over to New York to be certain, it would not necessarily verify with 100% certainty that it would have been true when the question was asked in London. This is yet another way of stating that our generally accepted notions of linguistic created reality do not require a personal conscious experience or observations to be a part of the picture. In such cases, faith alone may suffice to generate truth. A consensus of the scientific community would have consciousness as an unstated or self-evident part of the system that includes the generally accepted definition of physical reality. The presupposition of an ontic physical reality excludes any consideration of the workings of either language or consciousness; they just become part of the a priori construct of the physical world. So we find within orthodox science a disjunction in the three central themes put forth in this book – language, consciousness and the physical world – when referring to what is casually labeled physical reality, which, of course, includes quantum mechanical systems. Hence, this disjunction gives quantum mechanical systems the character of weirdness, since the linguistic description and the observational experience do not mesh. However, for an information based ontology (and I use this word reluctantly here), quantum weirdness is not weird at all. In the quotation above, Einstein expresses the discomfort we feel about a world that comes and goes in and out of existence by the mere incidence of our observation. Yet a dog would hardly be concerned about such matters. Sometimes ignorance is more than just bliss, but may beneficially inhibit specious impressions of the world from becoming thoughts. Language has a knack of distorting our notions of reality. The conceptual problem with the quantum world is in the conceptualizing, in that it is taking place within language, and if the concept formed doesn't agree with observations (ostensibly what our other senses are telling us), then weirdness may ensue, which is another way of saying that we cannot make sense of that kind of world – the kind of world that science is telling us is reality. If the ontological insistence of a physical reality is removed from one's set of logical-linguistic axioms, then our observations of the physical world can be taken for whatever it dishes out. We need not presuppose anything. In a world based on a digital physics unfolding in a logical space, the physical world need only comply isomorphically. The system producing that isomorphism can evolve computationally. 149 Fields or waves should be understood as representations of the laws of nature; and particles can be seen to embody the state of affairs at a moment in time. This conforms to the algorithmic system hypothesized earlier wherein the universe evolves in a 2-step iterative recursive process. Every cell in a hypothetical cellular lattice takes stock of its environment in the first step, and then uses that information to computationally evolve to the next state of affairs based upon the rules (algorithm or laws of nature) for moving to the subsequent state. And this process is repeated a finite, albeit a very large number of times. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle elucidates this 2-step algorithmic process. The uncertainty is in the experimental or observational incompatibility of determining multiple states of affairs in a quantum system. The measurement of position entails the fixing of a particular state of affairs in time, while momentum (or the velocity vector) represents a computation between two position measurements. They cannot be measured in the same instant in time, because they do not occur in the same instant in time. In the (computational) time between the two measurements, the entities in question can be said to be in a superposition, effectively waiting for a measurement of the next state of affairs. This interpretation of superposition conforms to the epistemic viewpoint presented in this book, and is clearly not an ontological one. Superposition may be an ontological conundrum for quantum theoreticians, but fits quite well within an epistemic framework. We are not concerned about the objectivity of reality, but only a knowable reality. That which is unknowable is recognized as residing outside the box and simply not accessible to those inside the box. We might well conjecture about what is going on outside the box, but the only certainty we can have is the certainty that any theory about such a place cannot be formally described, let alone proven. The most precise timescale measuring at present is in units of yoctoseconds (10−24 seconds), which is around 19 orders of magnitudes larger than the putative Planck time scale for operations in an isomorphically-reversed logical space. This elucidates that there is an enormous amount of potential computation executing in the space of even the most nimble of quantum measurement systems. The world is evolving between these measurements probabilistically in accordance with the wave function, which represents the algorithm for the evolution of a system in the form of partial differential equations, a necessity due to the assumption of continuity in physical systems. If there are no interactions that require a modification to the evolution of a given quantum system, i.e. an absence of particle interactions, then a measurement of the state of affairs for the given system need not take place; this being the most efficient manner to evolve the system computationally. Thus, a null encounter produces a null response. So the system can stay in superposition for as long as there is no need to change the evolution of the local neighborhood for lack of interaction between neighboring entities. Imagine a photon travelling through empty space; if it has no interactions, it can just continue on its merry way. If it encounters another quantum particle, such as an electron, a constate measurement occurs in logical space, followed by a new evolution in the post interaction electron-photon system. Such systems of photon absorption and emission are well studied in quantum mechanics. If measurements could in fact be made at Planck time intervals, then there would not be any superposition states, for there would be only a single computation between measured states and it would be the only computational possibility. There are other hypotheses that could account for this as well, but this seems the best solution. Modalities could be built into the laws of nature, such that a probabilistic evolution which takes place between Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor computations. But it seems more consistent to have a discrete replacement for continuous functions, rather than some mix of the two. Wave functions are only relevant when computations are made at intervals greater than Planck time. In the world of human measurement there are always greater than 1019 unmeasured universal algorithmic computations for any given entity (the difference between Planck scale and yoctosecond scale), so the number of superposed quantum states is so large that it can only be realistically represented by a continuous wave function. The main point is to see the system evolving computationally independent of a purported physical system. The evolution of the system in logical space is the fundamental one and is not just a mathematical representation of a physical system evolving in spacetime. This so-called collapsing of the wave function is a logical mapping process in a computational neighborhood (constate) and the origin of consciousness. Wave function decoherence is analogous to a constate. At quantum metrics, this process turns waves into particles only to become waves again in the next instant. Except for the colossal difference in complexity, this is fundamentally equivalent to human consciousness. There is so much transpiring at the level of the human mind, it is impossible to fully describe the system using tools available within the system, that being our universe. Consciousness can be understood as a form of expression of information that a computational entity has about the state of affairs in its computational domain. The Double-Slit Experiment Explained The 2-slit or double-slit experiment has been rightfully called the central mystery of quantum mechanics. In 1803 Thomas Young formulated the wave theory of light as a result of wave-like interference patterns detected when a light source was projected onto a screen after having passed through 2 slits in a card. The experiment has been successfully repeated innumerable times with many variations in design. When a source of quantum particles, such as photons or electrons, are sent through 2 slits cut in a barrier, a wave-like interference pattern is formed on a screen beyond the barrier (see Figure 10 Figure 10: Light behaving like a wave. Light behaving like a particle. 151 left). If a detector, or some other method of looking at what is going through the slits, is imposed on the experiment so that a measurement effectively takes place, that is, we actually detect which slit the object goes through, then a more typical particle pattern appears such as when bullets are fired through the slits (see Figure 10 right). This experiment is the archetype illustration of the wave-particle duality of quantum mechanics. In the classical (Newtonian) physical world there are waves and there are particles; something can be either one or the other, but not both. But in the quantum world every entity has characteristics of both waves and particles. Which feature is expressed depends on how the experiment is fashioned. Physicists are, for the most part, quite accepting of this being just the way things are, even if it does not quite sit well with our commonsense notions of how the world is supposed to work. The problem with this picture stems from the presupposition of a physical reality, so once such a reality is imposed on the situation it can only be scientifically described by the best available physical theory, which happens to be quantum mechanics. And if quantum mechanics describes a world that is somewhat puzzling, so be it; we are inculcated to accept that it is just the way reality is. An epistemological perspective does not require a material based reality and accordingly has no such problems with the findings of the double-slit experiment. Observation does in fact set off the collapse of the wave function to produce an isomorphic physical representation of a logical state of affairs (constate). Observation perfectly fits the theory. There is not much difference, in principle, between wave function collapse and what ensues during a game of chess. There are myriad possibilities for an upcoming move while the player is contemplating the move, but once the move is made, the resulting board position becomes the actual fixed state of affairs in respect to that game, a constate of the game of chess system. This process repeats until the end of the game, as with photons going through slits and measurements being made until the experiment comes to an end. ... There are numerous aspects of quantum theory, and orthodox physics in general, that form a comfortable fit with computational models of the universe. The non-commutative mathematics of quantum measurement is consistent with a 2-state binary evolution in logical space. As it is with quantum mechanical systems, the order of operations in an iterative computational process changes the final outcome as the second iteration is dependent on the state of affairs after the first iteration. Two quantum particles can be thought of as being in an entangled state if they are part of the same computational neighborhood. Rules that might seem to causally apply in a 4-dimensional spacetime continuum do not necessarily apply in logical space with a representational isomorphic spacetime. Physical notions of separation and locality do not automatically hold in logical space. There is no clear and definitive solution to quantum entanglement, but it can be readily seen that paired entities created in a computational process can be so tagged such that they carry certain property identifiers that link their respective states regardless of their evolution in time and spatial separation in any isomorphic structure. Nevertheless, it would seem that there should be isomorphic equivalency between the speed of light in physical space and the rate of propagation of Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor information in computational space, therefore something beyond this dynamic would seem to be in play. The usual or consensus explanation from a quantum mechanical standpoint is that 2 particles which come together or are created in such a paired state have a single composite superposition regardless of their separation in spacetime. Correspondingly, the objects of a paired entity in logical space should always remain connected even if they are propagated in opposite directions along a computational lattice at the maximum propagation rate of information. Although the most referenced computational model in this book is that of cellular automata, which are often represented in a lattice structure with a sense of locality, it should not be construed that this particular kind of model is being imposed upon the reader as the alternative for a material world type of reality. We are just at the beginning of exploring these relationships and cellular automation happens to be a model that is off to a good start. However, having just located the rabbit hole, we need not race down it blindly. Logical and Physical Spaces It is not suggested that mainstream physics shut down in favor of the pursuit of digital physics, but rather that there should be a recognition that progress is more likely to be made by entertaining computational approaches as foundational and physical theories as isomorphic. A fair criticism of digital physics is that it lacks scientifically testable hypotheses which can relate an algorithm to its purported physical isomorphism, or for that matter to any mainstream physical theory, although Edward Fredkin and Brian Whitworth have made a reasonable start.37 There is a tangible contemporary pragmatism about academic physics that steers research in the direction of both fashion and funding. Even though computational science is gaining adherents, it still palls against the allure of high energy physics and M-theory. The previous chapter on consciousness listed quotations from a number of scientific luminaries supportive of computational approaches to physics, which is perhaps indicative of where the science is headed. One advantage of a computational methodology is how easily it fits a causal construct amenable to rational thought. Although the emotional security of a material world is surrendered in favor of an algorithmic one, it is easy to comprehend the step-wise approach it engenders, since it is metaphorically like building a house with bricks, wood, nails and concrete; and there is the further familiar comparison to the execution of a computer program. The material world is in fact not really surrendered at all, but simply put into a different slot in the order of things. 37 I recommend a four part series of essays by Whitworth under the general title The Virtual Reality Conjecture, as we share a similar perspective on the relationship between information and the physical world. Whitworth offers a descriptive narrative with instructive metaphors which should help elucidate a subject that can be difficult to come to terms with. He also provides a level of detail that affords arguably the most complete theory of how a digital mechanics world would operate. Although there are some differences between us in the theoretical construct of the physical world, there is far more in common than not. These essays, which seem destined to be part of a forthcoming book, along with the work of Fredkin, form an important foundation to the exploration of a new kind of physics. 153 This treatise has used the generalized term logical space germane to a non-specific computational framework, in some respects for lack of a better term. Physical theories already have related mathematical frameworks in n-dimensional Hilbert spaces, which themselves do not have any phenomenological reality in a physical world. Logical space can be construed as either dimensionless or multi-dimensional and conformal with nodal or lattice structures, such as cellular automation; there is no pretense that it is anything other than a mathematical construct. This is a very different starting point than one that presupposes the objectivity of the physical world. The nascent stages in the development of digital physics are perhaps best used in forming a philosophical ground that satisfies the requirement of human comprehension as well as the rigors inherent in mathematical formalism. However, an adequate descriptive vocabulary to complement this schema is yet to be developed. Writers in the field are often compelled to contort terminology used in conventional physics to fit a digital physics model to satisfy this deficiency as best possible. If an algorithmic unfolding of the universe is to become the new underpinning of physics, it should be descriptive enough to allow the physical world described by orthodox physics to be isomorphically represented within its theoretical construction; and this construction should have some explanatory incorporation of the entropic effects of the Holographic Principle as well as the mainstream physics of quantum mechanics and relativity. Photons and Electrons Although the theoretic base computation level of a hypothesized universal algorithm is many orders of magnitude finer than the most rudimentary of quantum entities, it may be possible to map a simple computational model onto these entities, such as that of a physical quantum photon. The speed of light would be the one near certainty for a constant that would pertain to both logical space and physical spacetime. If there is to be an isomorphism between logical space and physical spacetime, then a computational propagation speed (how fast computations can be made across a hypothesized lattice) would need to have an isomorphic representation equivalent to the speed of the photon, in other words, the speed of light. The photon does not have many free variables, only energy, momentum (as a vector) and angular momentum (which is conveniently quantized at √ ). Since energy is conserved over time it would seem reasonable that there should be a simple formula relating bits to energy, perhaps as simple as one bit change equals one unit of energy in a new basic scale, which would make energy conservation equivalent to bit conservation in computational models. In the case of photons, momentum is merely energy and an orientation vector that tells us where the photon is going in relation to the rest of the world. So a photon can be seen as the composite carrier of a variable amount of usable information from one part of information space to another part, its vibrational frequency representing the amount of available information in the energy packet. A process such as photosynthesis can be seen as the physical representation of using this informational raw material to build complexity into a system, such as a plant in this instance. Similarly, massive particles are simply carriers of more elaborate structural building blocks and instructions on how they are to be put together; it is the stuff that things like molecules are made of, consequently leading to the formation of myriad complex arrangements. We Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Figure 11: A cell membrane. can see analogies with DNA, RNA and amino acids as corresponding building blocks with instructions at much higher levels of complexity. Having proposed the photon as the physical representation of the fundamental carrier of information across logical space, we can now turn our attention to the electron: the particle responsible for life and just about everything that happens on planet Earth. The mass-energy of an electron is 0.511 MeV (8.2×10−14 J or 9.109 ×10−21 kg). The energy associated with the momentum of an electron bound in an atom is rather small by comparison and is mediated by the emission and absorption of photons. Whatever the case may be, an electron has considerable energy-information content, something around 1040 bits. Most of this is locked up in the electron's mass. One can pose the same questions about the information content of particles that have been asked about a particle's mass: Why do particles have the masses that they do? We have not found an answer to this nor most other 'why' questions in physics, for that matter. Aside from the electron's locked-up energy there are several features that it can play with to perform its critical tasks. Most of the important work done by electrons takes place at distances of several angstroms (Loewenstein, 1999). As for the scale of things in the universe, this is at least within the scope of human comprehension, as it is roughly 50,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair and not much finer than the thickness of a cell membrane (see Figure 11). 155 Figure 12: Lego Man. From http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Yellow/192175 All up, the electron has the following key features: 1. A mass of 0.511 MeV. 2. An electric charge of −1.602×10-19 coulomb (shown by convention as negative). 3. An intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, of 1⁄2. Electrons are part of a class of particles called fermions which have half-integer spins. 4. An intrinsic magnetic moment along its spin axis approximately equal to 9.274 ×10−24 joules per tesla. There are also 4 quantum integers that describe the size and shape of electron orbitals and momentum characteristics: 1. Principal quantum number associated with the primary shell or energy level. 2. Azimuthal quantum number associated with angular momentum or subshell. 3. Magnetic quantum number associated with subshell orientation. 4. Spin projection quantized as either up or down. It is more important to take stock in the somewhat limited information content of an electron than understand the significance of these quantities and units in their own right. The fact is that the electron has eight characteristics to sort out all of its transactional behavior in the wide variety of conditions required to manage our biosphere in all its intricacies. Most of the heavy lifting of life is wrapped up in this rather small set of characterizing numbers. Electrons bind themselves to protons to build atoms through their electric charge, form various types of chemical bonds in the assembly of molecules of enormous variety, calculate interactions based on van der Waals forces, absorb and emit photons of quantized energy levels, and form bonds with other electrons on the basis of spin orientation. Electrons are like little Lego bricks that can bind together to form an incredible number of complex arrangements (see Figure 12). The obvious question to ask is: How does the electron know what to do under the wide variety of environmental conditions it confronts during its very long lifespan? The equally obvious, if not unsatisfying answer is: From the laws of nature! But where are these laws of nature? And where does the electron go to look them up? Analogous to the manner in which a computer stores both the program and data which the program manipulates, so does the electron store its operating instructions within itself. This I would suggest is what constitutes the 0.511 MeV of locked up energy (or information) that an electron carries around wherever it goes, or at least until it gets blown away in some cataclysmic event to release this energy back into the environment in the form of photons, e.g. gamma ray creation in electron-positron Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Figure 13: The Breit–Wheeler process, 2γ→ e+e−. Bubble Chamber image and illustration. annihilation, called the Dirac process: + − → . The Breit–Wheeler process, → + −, although conceptually simple, being the inverse process of the Dirac process, has been by far one of the most difficult to be verified experimentally (Kleinert, Ruffini, & Xue, 2008) (see Figure 13). Images produced in a bubble chamber show this process when gamma rays of sufficient energy are passed either near or are collided into an atomic nucleus. This is suggestive of the possibility that the instructions for the production of the leptons are encoded in the quarks of the nucleus, or perhaps with the electrons associated with the nucleus involved in the process.38 When high energy gamma rays encounter nucleic matter, the electron and positron program instructions are copied, in a way that might be likened to mitosis, to become the newly created particles. Some of the momentum from the gamma rays is absorbed into the atomic nucleus to power this conversion process. This is quite speculative at this time, but it conforms to a computational process theory and presents some interesting analogies to known processes in computer programming, storedprogram Turing machines and biological processes. It is a long way from photons, electrons and quarks to human beings, but if one is starting only with bits, the building process would seem to require a step-wise method along with a very large number of transactions. Key quantum determinants, such as charge and spin are already quantized in physical theory and can easily be modularized by simple bit configurations. A particle, such as an electron, can have as part of its own modular construction a sub-module component that relates to the negative electric charge as well as the necessary n-dimensional vector components required to give it the linear and angular momentum properties that a particular electron happens to carry. All of these properties can be seen as being the information the electron requires to know what to do when encountering another entity in space. Every entity in the universe, whether we perceive it in physical space or logical space, needs to know what to do next; it needs to have within its own 38 Alternatively, there is the possibility that the Higgs boson could be the hypothetical carrier of such instructions in conformity with the acquisition of mass via the Higgs mechanism. There seems to be enough mass in the Higgs to carry the entire algorithm for running the universe. In fact, at an estimate of 125 GeV, the Higgs boson would have an overabundance of information even if only a small fraction of this energy were translated to the universal algorithm. 157 being, its own self, the means of deciding what it will do and where it will be in the next instant of time. Spacetime The other major physical theory that a computational model should address is the geometry of spacetime, which includes both gravity and the relativistic effects related to inertial frames of reference. To conform to relativity theory, a constant speed of light implies that there is a related constant rate of computation in logical space. A computer analogy would equate to the clock speed of the computer's processor. And as there is a maximum to the velocity of light, there is as well a limit to the transfer rate of information across the entirety of the system. The cellular lattice structure and the idea of computational neighborhoods are helpful to imagine how these limits apply in computational terms. How could a digital physics account for the redshift of light in respect to inertial frames of reference moving apart from each other? An observer in one of the frames would detect a slowing of the clock speed, or computation rate, in the other frame. There would also be a noted reduction of energy, represented by a frequency decrease in EMR (the redshift), as well as the amount of information communicated between the two frames. This would correspond to time-computation dilation in accordance with Einstein's theory of special relativity. In the same way that ordinary concepts of time are used in differential calculus to compute rates of change, computational time corresponds to the rate of change for informational configurations or the rate of information flow through an information lattice or logical space. We can further posit a computational description of relativistic time dilation in a gravitational field. A physical description would maintain that the energy density in a particular region of space would be manifested in the geometry of that space. Time dilation in a gravitational field would correspond to a computational dilation due to the information density in the related logical space. The denser the computational neighborhood, the more computations will be required, although the processor speed, or its capacity to execute the program, remains constant (equivalent to the speed of light constraint). To balance things out, the clock speed appears to slow down in the local region of logical space in order to accommodate the computations that are required in any given algorithmic iteration, so that all the computations that are required to be made in the algorithmic action stage (TA) are in fact executed. Local computations seem to be progressing as normal when compared to similarly dense computational spaces in a given neighborhood, as would be the case in a physical general relativistic description. This computational description fits well with the idea of entropic gravity, which itself is related to information content (Verlinde, 2011). This picture brings into equivalence the mass-energy density of a 3-dimensional spatial volume, the 2-dimensional surface entropic density described by the holographic principle and the information density of logical Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor space.39 The importance of the holographic principle is that it brings together a wide range of concepts involving both information and physical entities. Broadly speaking, it describes how the information content of any n-dimensional entity is inscribed on its enclosing (n – 1)-dimensional surface. The holographic principle grew from theories of black hole thermodynamics developed by physicists Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, which has come to be known as the BekensteinHawking entropy. Their work centered on what transpires when black holes grow by the accretion of material into the black hole from beyond its event horizon. The insight was that the information content of all that falls into the black hole is manifest in surface fluctuations of the event horizon. They discovered that the entropy of a black hole is proportional to the area of its event horizon, the surface from within which even light cannot escape. More precisely, a black hole with an event horizon spanning 'A' Planck areas has A/4 units of entropy; the Planck area, approximately 10−66 square centimeters, is the fundamental quantum unit of area determined by the strength of gravity, the speed of light and the size of quanta. If measured as information, it is as if the entropy were written on the event horizon, with each bit (each digital 1 or 0) corresponding to four Planck areas (see Figure 14). It is worth noting the similarities to the lattice constructed from a simple 4neighbor von Neumann neighborhood discussed earlier (see Figure 5). 39 The holographic principle was first proposed by Gerard 't Hooft in 1993 and has had a number of prominent contributors to its development, including Raphael Bousso and Leonard Susskind. In one of its central assertions, the holographic principle states that any 3-dimensional volume of space can be described by the information contained on the 2-dimensional surface of the volume. 159 Figure 14: Black Hole Entropy (© Scientific American) So what we find here from a historical perspective is an examination of the thermodynamics of extreme gravitational entities leading to concepts relating to the information content of matter. Furthermore, we have a physics usually described by differential calculus morphing, in a sense, into a Planck scale digital description. The holographic principle is yet one more piece of evidence supporting ideas relating to the melding of information and matter. Moreover, the holographic principle resolves the black hole information paradox within the framework of string theory. Whether any of the various versions of string theory and its 10-dimentional framework or its 11-dimensional spacetime successor suggested by Edward Witten in 1995 dubbed M-theory, succeeds in merging gravity into a unified physical theory is yet to be seen. What is most striking about the theoretical basis of these models, along with mainstream quantum mechanics, is how the physicality of the world melts into a mathematical landscape to the extent that the usual notions of substance dissolve to mere metaphors for a catalogue of differential equations. In the end, these physical metaphors serve little purpose except for satisfying the Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor limitations of human conceptualization, which were addressed in earlier sections regarding the human necessity for making sense of the world through causal relationships. Probabilistic Determinism and the Arrow of Time The laws of physics are theoretically time reversible, i.e. the clock of the universe can be run equally well backward as forward. This is completely compatible with an information theoretical universe, particularly if a time-reversible logical operator is in force.40 If we say that the mathematics of the laws of physics allow for the universe to evolve both forward and backward in time, then we are likewise saying the universe is logically reversible as well. Yet the physical experience of the universe has time flowing exclusively in one direction, which we happen to call forward, and as such has been labeled the arrow of time. A game of chess can likewise be viewed running in reverse (something easy to do on a computer by using the undo or backward keys), but only follows the rules of the game when run forward and becomes nonsensical evolving in reverse, very much the same as the universe would. If a computational model had a random operator introduced, then time-reversibility could be preserved even in a non-deterministic universe. This might explain why the laws of quantum physics seem time reversible yet not wholly deterministic, to the extent of the predictability of the evolution of a quantum system. If continuum mathematics is used to describe the system, such as in the Wave Function, we have a predictive model which is reversible, yet not fully determinate in a classical sense. But if a discrete process is assumed, there is the possibility of evolving a non-time reversible non-deterministic system if random operators are in place. This conforms both to observations of randomness in the universe as well as the arrow of time suggested by the second law of thermodynamics. With a computational model there is no evident necessity for a multiverse or a many worlds interpretation of the universe. Although there is no exclusion for any particular number of algorithms evolving simultaneously in some sort of relationship, there does not seem to be any reason to go down this path. Wave-particle duality may pose some troubling interpretational difficulties in quantum mechanics, but not so with a computational model which integrates the role of consciousness in the process. This issue should not be seen as critical, since a variety of models can fit observations and mathematics alike. The point is made merely to show the compatibility of discrete processes with a variety of interpretations of the observed universe. The big question becomes increasingly clear with each descriptive narrative: How do all of these seemingly related phenomena fit together? We have waves, particles, strings, branes, energy, information, dimensions, time, computation, logic, mathematics, randomness, determinism, 40 Conservative and reversible logic were developed by Edward Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli, both of whom have invented logic gates used in computing that bear their names (Fredkin & Toffoli, 1982). Time reversible logic systems use a 3-bit system to preserve information flow so that it can be run in reverse without information loss. It also is quite handy as it coincides with the mathematics of both classical and quantum physics. 161 continuity, discreteness, complexity, entropy, and so on. If we just focus on gravitational systems, in the broadest of terms, we find that nature wants to draw mass-energy onto itself. The concept of entropic gravity makes sense as it conforms to the second law of thermodynamics, something we loathe to ignore. It is incontrovertible that nature in its myriad forms tends to evolve to more probabilistic states of affairs. Yet this coming together of the stuff of nature, under the right conditions, leads to local complexities, i.e. states of affairs with lower probabilities, while the universe as a whole continues its inexorable path toward blandness and thermal mortality. The emphasis on epistemology is with good cause and is particularly relevant in the philosophical conceptualizing and building of a universe that makes sense on all accounts, in that the theory holds together at all levels of examination, with an appreciation that the examination is being done by a human being with certain acknowledged attributes. It gives full recognition to the fact that biology is as much a part of nature as quantum mechanics. There is no point in theorizing about an objective reality when it is impossible to succeed in such an endeavor. Before adopting a principle which can be accepted with certainty, we should set some benchmark whereby if the accepted principle were incorrect our entire understanding of the world would be in shambles and we would be forced to go back to basics and start afresh. For example, concepts which derive from the laws of thermodynamics fall into the category of the indispensible, for it is difficult to know how we could proceed if these laws somehow turned out not to be true after centuries of rigorous experimentation without an exception. What options would we have except to start from scratch? One might be inclined to think that the reality of a physical universe independent of consciousness would also fall into this category. A theory of consciousness, such as the one proposed in this book, is just the sort of challenge that could undermine the entire orthodoxy of mainstream physical theories; or at the very least, we should feel compelled to rethink the meaning of physicality. Aside from the arguments presented herein, the laws of thermodynamics, and particularly the second law concerning entropy, oblige us to conceptualize the universe as a dynamic process with direction. Information theory and all of its attendant implications are central to this perspective. Whether the reference is to formal systems or entropic gravity, we are still in the same family. We are simply talking about different relations of the same generic principle. The universe is falling. It is falling in a sense that it is heading to a more probabilistic state of affairs, and the laws of nature are what is keeping it from going straight down in a kind of free-fall. The question is: How does it do it? One need not go so far as to say that descriptions showing correspondence between a virtual reality of algorithmic origins and a phenomenological physical reality constitutes a scientific theory per se, mainly due to the lack of experimental evidence, but when taken along with the rest of what has been presented in this treatise, it forms a strong argument for a foundational digital physics. The concepts presented by information theory and thermodynamics should become the bedrock of the cosmogony of the future. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The Swarm Bert: Hey Ludd, take a look at what's heading our way. Look out the window. If you have any doors or windows open, I'd quick close them now. Ludd: Oh Boy! What of swarm of flies. Looks like all your students have come to take their final exam Pop. Pops: You can let them in, son; they're all good well behaved little things, my students. I do miss them. It's been pretty boring hanging around in your house with just you and Bert. Bert: Hey look here! There's one that's come and landed right on the window sill. I think it's Kurt. I'm going to let her in. Ludd: Okay. We've got to have a chat. But don't let any of the others in. Bert: No problem. The others seem to be flying around at a bit of a distance from the house. (Opens the door). Hi Kurt. It's been a while since we've seen you. Kurt: So it has been. So it has. Now that you've taken your father away, Ludd, my playmates are reverting back to buzzing around and speaking gibberish. Things are not quite working out how I expected. 163 Ludd: The first thing you should tell us is if you really are from the planet Girdle or a genetically modified fly from right here on Earth? Kurt: I just made that stuff up about being an alien from another planet. It was a pretty good story, don't you think? I had you completely fooled for quite a long time. I couldn't believe it worked so well. Bert: It was me that figured out you were really from Earth. I bet you never thought I'd be the clever one. Ludd: Stop bragging, Bert. If you throw out enough theories you're bound to get one right eventually. Bert: I don't know why you feel like you have to put me down all the time. I just want Kurt to know that I've got some clever ideas sometimes as well. Ludd: I do give you credit, Bert. But this is not the time for self-adulation. We have some important matters to discuss. Can we start? Bert: Yes, of course. I just wanted to get that one point in, if you don't mind. Ludd: Bert suggested that you probably came from a top secret laboratory doing advanced genetic engineering and somehow they managed to create a fly that had the capacity to learn and speak language. Kurt: It's true. Just like Bert says. I was produced by the neuroscientists and artificial intelligence experts working at the DARPA brain research laboratory near Houston. You know the brain of a fly might be small, but it works very fast. I'm not sure exactly how they did it, but they managed to double the number of neurons and increase the capacity to produce more synapses and that vastly expanded our intellect. They worked out how to program these new neurons to replicate a logicbased electronic system. Then they implanted a program that was able to resolve statements in any kind of predicate logic, including the propositional logic of any language. I was part of a group of flies that had electrodes attached to our brains and hooked up to the internet and they ran through loads of information to see how much knowledge we could acquire. I found that I was getting smarter by the second and before you knew it, I understood almost everything that was going on in the lab. Then I saw that the human scientists were cutting open the heads of my compatriots and I didn't want that to happen to me, so one evening I slipped into the pocket of the one of the lab assistants and escaped. I met you guys the following day. Bert: I can't believe I actually figured that out. I must be a genius! Ludd: Yeah, Bert. And just imagine how smart you'd be if you didn't spend so much time watching football. Kurt: When I got outside, everything was so different from what I thought the world would be like. I had a lot of knowledge, but it wasn't the same as actually experiencing how things were on the outside. I don't know what made me trust you two, but I took a chance. I needed help or I didn't Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor think I could survive. I've got the biology of a fly and I see the world like a fly, but I also have this language that gives me the ability to analyze the world logically as well. Bert: That makes you a lot like a human being, I suppose. Ludd: How did you feel before the scientists at DARPA started experimenting on you? Were you conscious? Kurt: I was conscious alright, but I couldn't tell you what it felt like except to say that the world was just there. I could see it and could smell it, I did stuff, but I couldn't tell you why I did it, because I didn't have any means to tell you. And sometimes I would just stop and rest and everything would shut off and the world would disappear. Then I would wake up again and it would all come back pretty much like before and I just went about things that felt right to me. Now that I think about it, it all seems kind of strange. Ludd: What do mean by kind of strange? Kurt: After I had my brain altered and they taught me to speak I was able to look at myself as if I was outside myself looking in. I could analyze what I was doing before I did it, while I was doing it and after I did it. I never was able to do that before I had language. I used to just do it. Then I started to think about all the possibilities I had for my future. I was a totally different creature. I didn't want to die and when I saw that scientist killing other flies I figured I didn't have long to live if I stayed in the lab, so I planned my escape. I knew there was a world out there because of all the information I absorbed from the internet. Bert: Once the folks from DARPA hear about all these talking flies in Tasmania the U.S. military are going to be all over the place. It will never be the same again. I'll bet they'll say we're terrorists and we'll all be tortured until we confess. Ludd: What are you talking about, Bert? Confess to what? We were just innocent victims. How were we supposed to know that Kurt was one of their lab experiments? Pops: They've got nothing on me. I'm just a school teacher. Bert: You Pops are in the most trouble of all. If anyone is a conspirator it's you. You were running a training camp for those flies. This whole swarm of talking flies out there is because of you. Pops: I don't care. They can waterboard me if they want. It's probably a lot like surfing. I liked that when I was younger. Bring it on. Ludd: That's why I put you in the home Pop. You keep talking nonsense. We first need to do something about all these flies. Kurt: I wouldn't worry too much about those guys. They're already forgetting most of what Pops taught them and I think they'll soon revert back to being normal flies again. Ludd: Aren't they reproducing all the time and teaching the newborns to speak? 165 Kurt: I only came to realize yesterday that all these flies are my sons and daughters, and they are all sterile. After I'm gone, that will be the end. They'll all die and everything will be back to the way it was in Tasmania before I came here. Probably the people at DARPA modified our reproduction so that we could not produce fertile offspring. It makes sense, from their perspective, I guess. But for me, it's the end of the line. Bert: Now I'm feeling a bit sad about all this. It was really a lot of fun having you as a friend. Ludd: But you were up to a bit of no good, Kurt. You were planning something nefarious. It certainly seemed to us that you had designs on taking over the world. Before Bert figured out the real story, we thought you were an alien invading us from another planet, so it seemed quite logical that you may have been up to something. Kurt: Yeah, there was a time there after we arrived in Tasmania when I got the urge to reproduce and thought about creating a new species of talking fly. I wouldn't say that I wanted to take over the planet, but let's say I would have liked to raise the status of flies to a higher level. It's very reasonable. Just look how thoughtlessly you humans kill us flies. Why shouldn't we be in a more dominant position if we could? It's only because of language that you got where you are today. Otherwise, you might have already been extinct by now. Ludd: And we might well be extinct even with language, and you might say perhaps because of language. And we just might take a lot of other species with us. But I have a feeling flies will still be here after Homo sapiens is long gone. Kurt: I had a plan, but I wasn't clear on how it would turn out. I was just making decisions on the fly, you might say. It seemed to be going well for a while, but now it's looking to be all for naught. And I suspect that my own time is coming to an end soon as well. The scientists at DARPA dramatically increased our lifespan, but it still isn't all that long and I'm starting to feel a bit worn out and tired. Bert: Maybe it was all that egg laying that wore you out. I'm surprised those chickens live as long as they do, laying those big eggs day after day. Ludd: Bert, I wonder how you've lived so long eating those big eggs day after day. Kurt: You obviously have no idea what it is to be a woman, Bert. Bert: Fair enough. I don't know and I don't want to know. Ludd: I don't know how I can concentrate on anything with you and my father throwing every conversation off course. And where has he gone now? Bert: I thought I heard him running the bath water. Ludd: I'll be sad to see you go, even if you have given us a whole lot of headaches along the way. It has been an interesting journey and we've learned a lot from you. There is one thing that I can't quite come to grips with. Did you really build that sandcastle, or was it just an illusion? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Kurt: I was also programmed with some small pieces of software that I could transmit into the brains of other creatures. They were called viral bots. If I could get these viruses into your body they would find their way to a part of your brain and produce whatever imagery they were programmed to produce. One of these images was a sandcastle. I was able to control which viral bots I released. When I was in the lab, we tested them on monkeys. I didn't know if it would work on humans, but I guess it did. Bert: That's pretty scary stuff going on at DARPA. I never imagined this secret science was so far advanced. No wonder we never hear about it. If the people knew what the government was up to they'd be too scared to do anything. I wonder if the Russians and the Chinese have similar programs. Ludd: My guess is that they do. There's an arms race going on with talking flies and viral bots and who knows what else. I knew as soon as we conquered the mysteries of the genome the world would never be the same again. Bert: Humans are taking the place of nature. It seemed that nature worked alright for billions of years, but we've decided that we can do better. Pops: Humans are a part of nature, so whatever humans do is just as natural as what any other animal or plant does. Ludd: Ah, I see you've come back to the conversation. And why is your head soaking wet? Pops: Just trying out something in the bathtub. Ludd: I think feet first is the recommended way, especially for old men. Pops: Whatever. Bert: You've actually made a pretty good point there, Pops. If we say what humans do is not natural, then aren't we saying that what human's do is supernatural? And I for one wouldn't subscribe to that idea. Ludd: What would you say about that Kurt? Do you think what those humans did to you at the lab was natural or would you call it something else? Kurt: I suppose from my perspective as a fly it was unnatural in that it wasn't the way flies evolved for the tens of millions of years up until that point. But it wasn't supernatural, because the scientists at the lab were using their understanding of how nature works to alter my genetics. They weren't gods; they were just people. It would seem that due to language, humans have been able to acquire a vast amount of knowledge about the world and how it works and have used it to take short cuts to bypass the way evolution has been working up to this point. But I agree with Pops. It's still part of nature. 167 Ludd: Yes, I think you've made your case there. Perhaps we can say it's natural, but we going through a phase change, because humans are changing the world at a rate exponentially faster than at any time before. Kurt: Do you have any sugar? I'm feeling sluggish. Pops: I'm exhausted. I'm going to lie down for a while. Bert: It's been quite a day. We can all use a break. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Harmony "Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language." - Ludwig Wittgenstein Every entity in the universe must be in accord with every other entity at every level of measurement. That is to say, hypothetically, that if we could stop the universe and take an accounting of how things stand (something that can only be done from outside what we are calling the universe here), that the state of affairs for any chosen object, regardless of complexity, would not be in conflict or contradiction with the state of affairs of any other entity. All the constituents of that entity could be duly accounted for. All the quarks, electrons and other constituents would be in their proper configurations if we had the opportunity to examine each and every one of them, for if they were not, the entity under examination would not be what it is. The books of account would otherwise be out of balance. Everything in the universe must be causally related, but our understanding of what is meant by causal should be extended to include kinds of causality beyond the common sense ones we find in our daily lives. We should not exclude the roll of the dice from time to time. A state of affairs can essentially evolve deterministically, but with random events thrown in to vary the possible pathways of a predominantly causal chain of determinism. This, of course, conforms to the balance between chance and necessity required to have a universe which features both order and variation in a sustainable evolution of states of affairs. Our concept of causality should also be extended beyond its usual association with events in the physical world. The execution of a computer program can be causally deterministic by dint of binary logic. Starting with a particular state of affairs, which we may call the inputs, the end result, or outputs, can be determined by the serial execution of logical steps. A simple example is that the repeated entry of an identical series of numbers and operation symbols into a calculator will always deliver the same result. The answer can be said to be causally related to the inputs and the logical operations on those inputs. There is a physical world correspondence to these events by noting the causal relationship between a series of finger keystrokes causally resulting in the appearance of a number on the screen of the calculator. We know the calculator is running an algorithm based on binary logic, so it should be easy to see the relationship between what is happening in logical space and its isomorphic physical space. 169 Figure 15: Logical and physical causality In the previous chapters we discussed the various pieces that make up the puzzle that is our universe. We have seen that there are many anomalies even within the main lines of physical theory. How can we bring consciousness, language and information into a comprehensive picture of the universe which would conform with both the theoretical and observational findings of physics? Or perhaps better said: How can we bring harmony to the cacophony of ideas proposed to describe our universe? ... Everything would be so simple if we could only open our eyes and say with certainty: "This is Reality!" And although this is seemingly the case, it is a perspective which is quite contrived and heavily skewed with historically religious and mystical predispositions. It would place man yet again at the center of the universe with some exceptional access to that which is universally and objectively true and to that which is not. The extraordinary access that humans actually do have is to that of the phenomenon of language, which in turn provides access to logical truths, and furthermore are not necessarily truths about the universe, for if they were, we might just as well learn all there is to know about the world from a game of chess. Language is about belief, meaning and truth. It is pointless to talk about these things outside the context of language. Language is a dominant part of the human conscious experience and it happens to be the part we use to do things like analysis, science and philosophy. As such, it is used in the analysis, science and philosophy of consciousness, an ever-present recursion that always muddies the water. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor We need to constantly remind ourselves that we are forever subjugated to the entrapment of language. Caution in its use is always required, for it is a tool that can be likened to a chain saw. It can be of great use, it can fell trees many times its size, but in the wrong hands can cause a great deal of damage. And I hasten to add that there have been more massacres due to language than chain saws, despite there not being any film attesting to this account (see Figure 16). Figure 16: 1974 Film 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' This note of caution is emphasized, because language is a part of the conscious phenomenological experience, and we will be required to use it to explain that very phenomenological experience that is causative to its existence. There is no way out of this circularity, for we have no other tool to work with. ... It is crucial to clearly differentiate the various challenges encompassing the subject of consciousness. There is first the problem of plainly describing what it is, for it seems to mean different things to different people. One must be clear and not get lost in the morass of definitions, nuances and interpretations. Additionally, there is the matter of distinguishing what constitute the various types of reasoning, including the kind of reasoning associated with formal systems, such as language and mathematics, as well as inductive and stochastic types of reasoning. These latter forms are syntheses of lower level binary processes that are not directly accessible to the entity involved in a decision process, that is to say that they are not accessible at the uppermost level of the decision process and are often labeled as instinctive. We can easily become confused because our common terminology does not clearly distinguish among these variants. For example, what do we mean by the term thinking? As far as humans are concerned, thinking would most certainly be included as a conscious activity. Do dogs and cats think, or are they doing something else when they decide what to do next? And what shall we call that type of decision making? If we limit the term thinking to something that humans do, but other animals do not, are we limiting the term to logical forms of rational analysis and decision processes? Then what is to be said about human beings before they had true language? Are we to conclude that these humans were incapable of thought? The previous discussion on consciousness established how the subject was to be approached. Consciousness was defined as a fundamental part of the Planck scale system-state measurement, which I termed the constate, thus taking the definition of the word consciousness away from that of 171 social agreement to one defined by declaration in conformity with my own designation for the meaning of a word. Hence, we start with a definition which is at the very least rhetorically tautological and can easily be adjudged logically so as well. The case for my rationale for this belief regarding consciousness has already been argued. If one is to agree or disagree with this, either accepting or denying its truthfulness, as the case may be, that choice will be made within the formalism of one's own respective system of propositional logic. If one is to contend that consciousness is something else, then they are reading from a different hymn book, that is to say working with a different set of axioms, and there can never be agreement about the matter. These preliminaries are necessary to avert a derailment by the mischievous proclivities of language. This position on consciousness was developed by moving progressively backward in time from the present to more primitive and less complex states of entity decision processes in order to finally get to the bit-wise Planck scale occurrence of a constate, although I make no claim that evolution works in such a progressive and ordered manner. The entire universe is thereby conscious at every level of entity, regardless of size or complexity. It is now the task to work forward in time to build from this rudimentary state to one that can account for human language and consciousness and in turn our phenomenological experience of the physical world. Top Down and Bottom Up In a world which is fundamentally algorithmic and information-based, both top down and bottom up perspectives are completely valid and compatible, and furthermore, not mutually exclusive. In a computer program the stream of bits leading to the opening and closing of logic gates can be viewed as the bottom up cause for what appears on the computer monitor, and every one of these bits can be shown to be part of a process which is causal to something happening at a higher level, such as an image appearing on a computer monitor. Likewise, the click of a button of the computer's mouse can be seen as the top down initiation that sets off a part of the program that will cause a stream of bits to open and close logic gates that dynamically cause a change of state of the computer monitor. The human operator of the computer can be seen as making a decision based on information received from the output on the computer monitor and enacting that decision by clicking the mouse button on a particular choice displayed on the monitor, thus setting off another stream of bits that will in turn change the display output on the monitor once again, in a continuous loop of decision and process. But then one can separately examine the portion of the process involving the human operator's decision process in its own right, momentarily exit the computer part of the loop, and enter the multi-level world of biological complexity of the human computer operator, itself involving countless decisions, before returning to the mouse click event. One can also view this from a perspective somewhere in the middle of the process, that being a procedure call nested within a computer program; this will yield a view of information entering (arguments), program execution (processing), and a causal output (return value). Processes both above and below a particular procedure are all part of the totality of the system. In a complex program, even the programmer may find it difficult to trace the entire process from top to bottom; debugging Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor programs are usually needed to assist in this process. One should note that although the assertion is being made that consciousness is universally pervasive, it is also localized, and not to be confused with popular notions of cosmic consciousness. I do not believe that the arguments presented herein either add or detract from the ideas presented elsewhere about the interconnectedness of the universe as a whole. The programmer, who can be seen as the top down cause of the program, sits outside of the program and cannot be inferred from within the program. The program and the programmer together form a causal meta-system, which itself cannot infer what may be outside of it, in a metameta-system (Hofstadter, 1979). The concept of nesting is familiar to computer programmers and involves the layering of recursively interdependent processes. But we don't have to look far to see myriad examples of nesting, looping and feedback in our everyday lives. We need only explore the complexity of our body's metabolic processes as an example (see Figure 17). Figure 17: Metabolism overview. The carbohydrate metabolic cycle is unconscious from the level of the organism, yet not that far down from the top level. We are in fact quite conscious of when we are in need of some carbohydrate metabolism when we have feelings of hunger or weakness, and we realize it's time to get some sugar into the machine. We can also drop down a level or two to observe some of the metabolic process from the semi-autonomous perspective of a muscle cell (see Figure 18). 173 Figure 18: Metabolism of a muscle cell. (From Stephanie Seneff) Many of the illustrations and diagrams representing biological processes resemble system flow charts often associated with information processing. Complex entities, in general, require environmental feedback and the ability to respond to 'what if' situations, whether it is how a car responds to depressing the accelerator pedal or how the body reacts if one's blood temperature registers at 40 degrees Celsius. When it comes to the operation of complex organisms, like human beings, it is far from evident where the decisions are being made. They seem to be coming from everywhere at once with interdependencies and feedback loops not easily unraveled. Some sections of the process may become well-described, yet it is always possible to extend the scope of the process under examination so that it will encompass something that is either not well understood or reaches a level of complexity such that it overwhelms comprehension. There are simply too many transactions occurring all at once to properly describe the system as a whole. Whether one wishes to call them conscious or not, everywhere one looks, decisions are being made on the basis of local states of affairs, at every level, from top to bottom. In respect to living organisms, most decisions are being made below the top level of perception just to sustain the orderly functioning of the organism, with tasks such as temperature control and metabolism to give but two examples. I have chosen to call these decisions conscious, because they meet the criteria of assessing the relation between the entity's own state of affairs and its environment. It is irrelevant whether the decision maker in the process is attributed with awareness, self-awareness, intentional states or whatever; we need not get entrapped by the language. If an entity has the information or knowledge to make a binary decision on the basis of a rule-following system, it is for all intents and purposes conscious, regardless of the level of operation under scrutiny. There is a whole world of activity that took hundreds of millions of years to evolve, that goes about its business, whether it is processing information, communicating, testing, probing, replicating, executing, which are most often filled with cybernetic loops, all taking place from the molecular level up, as well as down, falling just below the top level state of consciousness of the organism (Loewenstein, 1999). It goes on while we sleep and it goes on when awake, yet so much is unbeknownst to our conscious mind (to which I refer to as the top level of consciousness in keeping with the more common parlance). I know less about what it feels like to be a muscle cell in my own body than what if feels like to be a bat. At least the bat has a brain. But suffice to say that the muscle cell knows what it feels like to be itself in Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor whatever way it is capable of doing so. It is not for me in my inimitable anthropocentric appraisal to pass judgment on such feelings. The concept of emergence, particularly in reference to complexity, can be seen as a playing out of a rule-following system. If we use computer chess as an example, with each successive reference to the board position (state of affairs or constate), the computer plays a move that puts the state of affairs in a more complex state than that prior to the move. This can be measured as the amount of information required to evolve the system to the position in question in the particular manner that was taken to get there, being the particular moves made to arrive at that position. Although this example may meet the criteria of evolving to a less probable state of affairs, it is a far cry from the apparent improbable evolution of our universe to its current cosmological constate. So the question remains if there is sufficient evidence to support a theory that can account for human consciousness as it is generally defined in its broadest sense. That is to say, do the definitions and mechanisms of consciousness elucidated herein fit the evidence for the observable universe? ... There are many theories of consciousness floating about in what is a rather speculative theoretical space, all searching for the right combination of items to include and exclude from its definition and operating manual. It is worth taking a look at some of the current thinking on the subject. An interesting offering comes from the Noble Prize winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. I have chosen the work of (Edelman 2004, 2006) to use as an example due to his long and distinguished career in both physiology and neuroscience, as well as his commentary on most of the important issues on the subject. Edelman rejects outright the analogy of the brain as a computer. His main argument is that the brain operates more like a pattern recognition machine than a logic-based Turing Machine. The central theme of his thesis is labeled Neural Darwinism, a value selection system that guides and reinforces neuronal pathways toward favored beneficial structures. I quite like this idea of Edelman's, as might be expected from someone strongly supporting the generic extension of Darwinian concepts, although I do not see a conflict with the computer metaphor. In fact, they should be quite compatible, as coordinated binary neuronal firings form the brain-state patterns that Edelman believes central to brain operation. But this is actually secondary to the key issue, which is that Edelman, like so many others, is focused on one layer of operation, virtually ignoring everything that leads up to the process of neuronal operations and pattern formation. An analysis at such high levels of complexity ignores that most of the computation has been packed down the chain of command. The stuff that more clearly has the appearance of operations in logical space is transpiring before a neuron ever gets to decide to fire or not to fire. Edelman goes on to explain how timing mechanisms and the process of re-entry, a kind of feedback loop, pull everything together to give the feeling of a stream of consciousness. The theory offers quite a compelling explanation of how brain function produces the experience of phenomenological consciousness; but again, like most of those looking for the neural correlates of consciousness, he is focusing on operations near the highest levels of execution, leaving the underpinnings to the side, 175 unquestioned and unresolved. So if we do find, with certitude, the neural correlates of consciousness, will it answer the hard problem of consciousness? Not likely! Then there is always the sticky issue of whom or what has consciousness. Edelman postulates that there are two levels of consciousness: primary consciousness is a pre-linguistic form of perceptual consciousness that we share with other mammals, in recognition that we have substantially the same brain physiology as our phylogenetic cousins, and higher-order consciousness, reserved for the privileged few, one to be exact, that somehow managed the acquisition of language. This is of course true for the most part; it is just presented in a somewhat misleading way. If the only 2 mammals on the planet were bats and cats, one could say that bats had primary consciousness, but in addition to this primary consciousness, cats had a higher-order consciousness called vision. The pseudocreationist rapture toward language is something to behold, especially amongst those selfproclaimed atheists. But this is a pitfall that one faces when taking a starting position on consciousness from the human perspective. The point has been made that language is what sets humans apart from the rest, but we need not be awestruck by the fact and walk away in utter amazement. (Griffin & Speck, 2004) are almost apologetic in their defense of attributing consciousness to animals, although their paper is ostensibly presented as strongly supporting this case. Rather than wondering if the consciousness bar is set too high or too low, the bar should simply be thrown away. Another thing that Edelman gets right is the characterization of mammalian consciousness as epiphenomenal, as he bluntly states: Consciousness is a property of neural processes and cannot itself act causally in the world. The approach that I have taken in this book cannot adequately determine if human consciousness is causally significant, primarily because I have defined consciousness as both fundamental and pervasive. To make such statements concerning human consciousness would require a redefining of the term consciousness as it has been used herein, as I have tried to be careful to differentiate between the constate of consciousness and human, animal and other varieties that fall under the ambit of the term in its general usage. ... It has been repeated here often enough that we should realize that we cannot rely on our own experiential consciousness to conjure a theory of consciousness, for it failing on the grounds of being self-referential and tautological, effectively proving nothing. It is this sort of argument that has been used in support of the concept of intentionality. The problem with theories of consciousness that focus on attention and intentionality are that they presuppose existents more inexplicable than the ones they are claiming to resolve. In these cases the assumption is the axiomatic existence of the self and the will, such as in the phrase: I turned my attention to the vase on the table and willed myself to pick it up. Nor can we defer to physical theories for assistance, as these are dependent upon phenomenological consciousness for their empirical construction. In fact, by the very nature of language, there can never be a foolproof construction of a theory of consciousness. It can only be argued from within the logical construct of a formal system to make a particular case; and that case can only be judged by the weight of evidence, including its explanatory and logical consistency and completeness. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor This explanation begins with the attribution of consciousness to a binary-state dynamic in a cellular or lattice structure, noting that this structure should be understood as logical rather than physical. This must be a fundamental property of the universe at every level of measurement, because every scientific measurement ever made has shown that the measured entity evolves in time from one state to another due to a causal relation between itself and its environment, notwithstanding the indeterminacies of quantum mechanics, which have already been addressed herein. There can be no argument, regardless of whatever reasoned theory is applied, disputing that the universe is in a state of flux and its overall state is never the same from one instant to the next, however the word instant may be defined. Free Will Free will and the illusion of free will is for all intents and purposes the same thing. It is mostly about how one frames the argument. Like so many topics in philosophical debate, arguments are dismantled by means of language and a failure to deeply examine the presuppositions supporting a particular philosophical position or belief. The topic of free will seems a bit outside the scope of this book, except for its close connection with consciousness, rationality and language. If, as is the usual case, free will is solely attributed to humans to the exclusion of other organisms, then it must be seen that it is language that bestows free will upon us. As such, it is language that must be central to any rigorous analysis of free will, and we would have to query what it is about language that conveys this ability to reign over one's decisions. The mere examination of the two words, free and will, proffers so much of the problems associated with the subject. What do we mean by the will? It is as if there is some entity that can be directed by an actor by the act of willing. Exactly what the process is and what actors must do to produce a causative effect has been a subject of much debate and clouded in confusion. A consensus of opinion points to a definition of the will as being something incorporated within an agent that can direct itself in a particular causative action. I think it is safe to call this agent the self; and its agency is its intention and capacity for self-direction. When the agent is limited to humans the process is said to be mediated by rational thought, effectively language. If this rational thought process is not pre-determined, then we can say that the agency is free, in that the agent is a causative actor and thus has free will. Sometimes this is framed as having the capacity of choice, or the ability to do otherwise. In most cases, non-humans are not allotted this ability to do otherwise, as if they have no choice but to do exactly as they do in some predetermined way, without quite defining what agency is causative in respect to these organisms; yet humans, thanks to rationality, are said to be engendered with this ability. The notion that the ability to do otherwise differentiates human and non-human behavior pervades both theological and secular perspectives. We tend not to blame sharks for attacking people; they are just being sharks and cannot be expected to do otherwise. Such is life in most of the animal kingdom. But humans can contemplate the options available and make decisions that can be judged 177 by some standard of behavior. As has been discussed at great length, this rational process is language. It is hard to see how anything other than language being the defining factor, lest we venture into the magisteria of the theologians. Therefore, humans have a rule-following system that can churn out decisions worthy of being adjudged on some scale of normative behavior. And this is in fact what we do. So we live our lives with the presumption of free will, at least from the standpoint of responsibility, whether legal or moral. This point deserves closer scrutiny, for it would seem by these arguments that language is the sole factor in whether the world unfolds deterministically or not. But one might ask what it is about language that grants choices in life that is denied to all else in the universe. It is more that those supporting the case for free will have placed their focus on the apparent decision making ability of the individual without questioning or examining the processes that lead up to the behavior. It is not dissimilar to concluding that moths are spontaneously generated from old cloth. As has been discussed in an earlier chapter, a belief system, for which any position concerning free will encompasses, has no limit to the variety of its self-referential truths. The arguments supporting free will are just such a system. The framers have defined the limits of the argument to suit the conclusion. If one broadens the boundaries, we find no particular reason for surmising that humans are any more in control of their will than any other animal. The only real difference is that humans use rational thought to supplement decision making mechanism that we had prior to the acquisition of language. The will of humans can be said to be free to the extent that the determinations of their respective systems of propositional logic can be said to be free; and this would take quite an extensive examination, as the terminus of this journey would draw us back to the fundamental laws of nature. There have been many comprehensive arguments supporting the case that free will is just an illusion. Some of these theories focus on support for an epiphenomenal consciousness (Wegner, 2002). There is also a body of experimental evidence to suggest that decisions are made unconsciously, but will set in motion actions that we feel are being made consciously (Honderich, 2005; Libet, 1999, 2003; Soon, Brass, Heinze, & Haynes, 2008). I find these arguments compelling if not totally convincing. The evidence is quite substantial that phenomenological consciousness alone is not sufficient to be a sole causative agent, as would be the case supportive of free will not being a mere illusion; and it remains an open question what the function of phenomenological consciousness might be. My own definition of the constate as a fundamental constituent of the laws of nature readily deals with the questions concerning how the world evolves in time. The matter of free will never emerges in such a theory. It is just an unnecessary play on words that may adequately describe a feeling of how things are, but not in fact how things are. It is for this reason that it is irrelevant whether we call free will a reality or an illusion. It is just definitional, and it only matters where you look for the answers. It is also worth pointing out that the actuality of constates does not address the question of the purpose of the conscious experience. In fact, there is nothing that can adequately address such matters, for purpose must be something found outside our own particular laws of nature, i.e. external to our own reality. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor The main concerns about the nature of free will revolve around issues of morality and legal responsibility, as societies need to deal with non-normative or injurious behavior. Society is concerned with retribution, punishment, reform, safety and mental competence, as well as how to deal with these matters in meeting the needs of its members and in respect to the society's power structure. There is an unfounded fear that if we deem that humans are not free agents, then they cannot be held responsible for their actions. As we would put down a rabid dog for reasons that it is a danger to our well-being, we similarly deal with deleterious human behavior. We do not blame the dog for contracting rabies and thus behaving dangerously, but nonetheless must address the matter of what is best for society. It would be healthier for society to assume that humans do not have free will and simply deal with matters of anti-social behavior on their merits. If some antisocial behavior can be rectified by rehabilitation, then this should be the path to take; the rehabilitation process may well include some form of incarceration. Each case should be judged on its merits. Without venturing any further down this path, I make the point that the methods utilized in addressing social needs should not be contingent upon the question of free agency. The attribution of free will and moral responsibility is a convenience for sidestepping the nature of the complex interactions in any given society. It is usually easier for a society to eliminate the problem, as if we would exterminate a rabid dog, than scrutinize the complexities that produce both acceptable and inappropriate behavior. 179 Infinite Regress Bert: I'm glad we got all that cleared up. It was a bit crazy for a while. We didn't know if we were coming or going. Now we're all sitting down together like old mates as if nothing ever happened. Pops: It's a lot better for me and Kurt. We both escaped from slave camps where scientists were doing gruesome experiments on our brains. Ludd: No one was doing experiments on your brain, Pop. Pops: You weren't there. You don't know what they did. I'm sure my brain has been genetically modified too. I've never been the same since you put me in that awful place. Ludd: Why would anyone want to modify your brain, and if it was modified it would only be an improvement. Pops: The problem with having your brain modified is that after it's been modified, you don't realize that it's been modified. That's how those scientists do it. They change your brain and make you forget that it's been changed, so you just go on not knowing it's been modified. So you think you're acting normally, but you're really just a zombie. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Bert: You won't believe this Pops, but a couple of weeks ago I thought we were zombies too. And I said the same thing to Ludd. The trouble about being a zombie is that you don't know if you are one or not. Ludd: Here we go again. I think I'm going to check both of you into the nursing home. Bert: Can't you see what we're saying makes sense? Ludd: It's not so much the topic of the conversation, but it's that we can have the same conversation without constantly talking about zombies. We all realize that if you're a zombie, then you don't have consciousness, so obviously you don't know that you're a zombie, so there's no need to say any more about the subject. The problem I'm having is that you two are framing the conversation so it always leads to a dead end. Bert: Yeah, I see your point. But we know it's a fact that Kurt had her brain rewired so her consciousness was changed and she really wasn't the kind of fly she was before she was modified. So was Kurt the same fly before she was modified as she was afterwards? The way I see it, it's a matter of identity. It doesn't have to be just genetic modification, but anything that changes your personality. It could be a brain injury, drugs or just rotting away with old age that can make you into a different person than you were before, or in Kurt's case, a different fly. Kurt: I think I understand what Bert is getting at. Before I went through my modification I know that I felt like a fly with a normal kind of fly consciousness, but I didn't know about consciousness at the time. But after DARPA gave me a logical brain upgrade I had a new understand of who I was. I was able to analyze my situation and I understood that even though I was in the same body, I was seeing the world in a very different way. My consciousness had changed. What it felt like to be Kurt after I was modified was a lot different than what it felt like to be Kurt before I was modified. Was I the same fly? I think it's just a matter of definition. There was a lot about me that was the same. I even looked the same. But I was certainly not the same fly. Ludd: I think we're getting at something important here. If your consciousness changes then you see the world in a different way. Your reality changes. Most of the time these changes are relatively minor, like when you get drunk. You see the world differently, but not so much that it would constitute something big enough to be called a change of identity. But in Kurt's case, she was radically and permanently modified so the way she experienced the world was substantially different. Kurt experiences the world a lot like humans do, because that's the way DARPA programmed her. So she's part fly, part human. Pops: I've seen all this before in the Planet of the Apes. The apes had language, so they were half human, half ape. What's the big deal? Bert: We're talking about consciousness. The movie never discussed what it felt like to be one of those talking apes. Ludd: What happened to Kurt brings up an interesting point about free will. Before she was modified she was a fly with free will, regardless of how limited that might seem to us. But the 181 scientists put their own will into Kurt so after the modifications she was acting out the will of the scientists and not her own. Isn't that right, Kurt? Kurt: It's quite a complex question given how my life has played out. At first I was a fly that never thought much about anything except my next meal. Smell food, see food, spit on food, eat food. But I was, unbeknownst to me, under the command of another species who were responsible for nearly every aspect of my life. First of all, I never thought about even having a will. So I'm not sure if I had it or not. It wasn't for me to judge. But after I had language and was able to understand the concept of free will it dawned upon me that I was under the control of other beings. So in that regard, I wasn't free to do what I wanted to do and once I realized this I tried to escape. But in a way you could say that I did have free will because I was able to execute my plan and escape, thereby willing myself into freedom. But there is yet another twist to this story. All of my actions including my ability to analyze my situation as well as plan and execute my escape were only due to the fact that I was programmed by another entity who gave me that capacity. So I was really carrying out the instructions programmed into my brain. The only thing I managed to do was to take advantage of a bit of sloppy security down at the lab. Pops: That's what I was saying. We're all just doing what we're programmed to do. It's just like it was down at the nursing home. Every second of the day was planned for me. I ate when they said I should eat, I went to bed when they told me to go to bed. They even used to hand out a little sheet of paper in the morning that was titled Today's Program, and it said when I was going to get up, when I could watch TV, if there was bingo or dominoes on the schedule, and so forth and so on. I thought I had free will when I was teaching Kurt's kids to speak English, but now I'm not so sure, because maybe Kurt reprogrammed my brain to do it. It's all too confusing. Kurt: I didn't reprogram you, Pops. I barely had to talk you into it. You helped me totally upon your own volition. Pops: I feel better now. Bert: Now here's another scenario that just popped into my head. Let's assume that U.S. military was reprogramming flies to be utilized to control their enemies by using these flies to infect them with viral bots that changed their consciousness. Ludd: Like taking control over Russia or China. Bert: I was thinking more like France. But it really doesn't matter who we're talking about. The idea is that the people running those countries could have their consciousness modified so they viewed the world from the perspective of how the scientists at DARPA programmed them to be viewed. So these world leaders who were supposed to be the enemy were now acting in the interests of the ones that programmed them. They wouldn't be zombies, because they would still be conscious, but their consciousness would just be changed by DARPA who programmed the flies to act as intermediaries in programming the French or the Russians or whatever. Pops: And they could have even used the flies to reprogram the French to write a program to modify French fries to reprogram the Chinese. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Bert: What a brilliant idea reprogramming French fries. These new reprogrammed French potatoes could be used to make vodka that modified the brains of the Russians. Pops: Did I say French fries? I meant French flies. But I guess you could put viral bots into potatoes just as easily as flies. Ludd: For all we know all of us on Earth including the scientists at DARPA are just part of a scientific experiment being conducted from outside our universe and we are all just part of a virtual reality creation of extra-universal programmers. Bert: Yeah. And even those programmers could be programmed by other programmers beyond their own virtual reality universe. Pops: I wonder if those programmers would realize that they were modifying the brains of Russians who drank vodka made from French potatoes infected by viral bots carried by flies who had their brains rewired by American scientists. .Bert: And let's not leave out that those American scientists might be virtual reality scientists not realizing that they are just carrying out a program conceived in another universe. Kurt: I wish I could just go back to being a simple fly again. Logic can seem so illogical sometimes. I wonder if there's a logic in another universe that doesn't have recursion. Pops: How would we know? We're just zombies. Ludd: I'm checking you back into the home first thing tomorrow. Kurt: It's getting dark and my head is spinning. I can use a rest and I think Pops can too. I'll stay in here tonight. Bert: But what about your children. Are you going to leave them alone outside all night? Kurt: I can't stand being around them. Their buzzing drives me mad. Pops: That's how I feel about Ludd sometimes. 183 Evolution "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution" - Theodosius Dobzhansk (title of 1973 essay) The term evolution has usually referred to the adaptive changes of living organisms over the course of time. But the boundary between life and non-life is not so clear. The first catalogued organisms, bacteria of various phyla, are thought to have a common ancestor, but that ancestor has yet to be discovered. Bacteria are quite complex entities in their own right, being composed of around a trillion atoms; the genome of E. coli (sequenced in 1997) has about 3000 genes and 4 million base pairs, although some studies show results exceeding 4000 genes (Koonin, 2000). Whatever the number, it would certainly be informative to know how those atoms ordered themselves into such complex relationships. What instructions were they following to get themselves into such an organized state? It is perhaps due to the historical particulars regarding the emergence of the theory of evolution that it began its journey separated from the world of physics and never quite conjoined with it. Science became ever more compartmentalized, such that we presently find ourselves without a general theory of evolution. There is a troubling gap between theories concerning the evolution of the universe and those covering the evolution of living organisms, as if somehow the laws of physics gave birth to a new set of laws applicable just for living things, in a sort of son of physics. Not only should there not be, but there cannot be a discontinuity in the laws of nature cropping up 10 billion years after the big bang. It is fine to cultivate a deep understanding of the evolution of life in accord with Darwinian processes, but it should be understood that these processes are higher level formulations of more fundamental ones. The application of natural selection should be broadened to encompass all natural processes in the universe, not just for living organisms. It is more a matter of which forces of nature are applicable to a particular circumstance. In the prebiotic universe the primary force selecting the evolutionary path for a given entity was gravity. The gravity driven star factory is well and truly running at full tilt to this very day, churning out atoms of more complex varieties than the ones that found their way into the factory. When these construction materials migrate to cooler and more amenable environments for complex entity formation, such as planet Earth, then electromagnetism can take charge in the next phase of emergence. Both organic and inorganic molecules rely on electromagnetism for their composition. Differentiations are related to the materials in use and level of complexity, not the fundamental processes involved. The fact that we cannot find agreement on how to actually define life reveals the arbitrariness of the term. There is tangibly nothing magical in the emergence of life, and if we were there to observe it we would probably barely notice anything special happening. It would be some innocuous chemical transition that took place which persisted over a long period of time. Not that much unlike the emergence of language, it Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor would take a self-proclaimed expert to pass judgment on the event of life's emergence, and other experts would disagree. In fact, it would simply come down to whose definition prevails, but the laws of physics would not be altered by the wrangle of authorities. The prevailing scientific paradigm proclaims that the laws of nature are isotropic and continuous over time with the value of physical constants remaining unchanged and energy being conserved. There have been ongoing challenges to these beliefs, but for the most part this paradigm has held up well under scrutiny. Even if some of the factors thought to be constant over time are found to have evolved, it would seem likely that their evolution would have been prescribed by the initial laws of physics. It is hard to see a place for outside intervention changing the laws of nature after the earliest moments of the big bang, a time before which the physics is less understood. Yet notions of special circumstances of sorts seem to be acceptable when attributed to definitions of life, language and consciousness. There seems to be an allusion to outside intervention, or change of circumstances, when addressing how these things came into existence, which appears to be a divergence from generally accepted scientific principles and orthodoxy. Lee Smolin, along with other noted physicists, has argued to the contrary, although Smolin does not support magical interventions (Smolin, 2013). His argument is closer to a Darwinian form of evolution akin to the cosmological natural selection (CNS) theory.41 CNS and the modifications over the years leading to Smolin's book is quite speculative and perhaps somewhat remote from the current cosmological orthodoxy, but is nonetheless interesting in the application of natural selection to universe building. We can add this to Edelman's neural Darwinism and see a gradual generalization of Darwinian concepts.42 Although I find considerable disagreement with Smolin's reasoning on a number of issues, including finding that he has fallen into a few linguistic traps regarding the use of terms like real and realism, it is generally helpful for science to have new and controversial ideas floating around for consideration. If the entities within the universe evolve as well as the laws directing their evolution, then we are forced to reach beyond our universe for that which controls the evolution of both. It doesn't mean that such hypotheses are incorrect, but rather we would be looking at an inaccessible domain for answers to how and why things are the way they are in our own local (accessible) universe. This should clarify the scope of Darwinian processes that are addressed herein, as well as some of the speculations excluded. Although my generalized model of consciousness is that it is both fundamental and intrinsic, its manifestations will vary with each respective entity in question, for everything must be conscious, since a lack of consciousness would mean that the entity would not have the information required to know what to do next. In this sense, consciousness evolves along with the entity, so that anything that can engage in an independent decision process is conscious and may well have, and in fact is almost certain to have, both subsets and supersets of conscious entities in a cascade of nested conscious entities. 41 Smolin's hypothesis of cosmological natural selection, also called the fecund universes theory, suggests that a process analogous to biological natural selection applies at the grandest of scales. Smolin published the idea in 1992 and summarized it in a book called The Life of the Cosmos. 42 Formally called TNGS – Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (Edelman, 1993). 185 ... Is This Thing Conscious? Perhaps this question is central to settling on a veritable definition of consciousness. Can a case be made that protozoa are conscious? Shall we restrict the term conscious to only those animals with language, ostensibly humans? If one day we find clear-cut evidence that dolphins have language, then shall we add them to the consciousness club as well? And would this mean, that if dolphins had language 100,000 years ago and humans did not, that dolphins would have developed consciousness before humans? Shall we deem all humans, with or without language, to be conscious? So now we would have some criteria other than language to fit the classification. Should these criteria include clear evidence of self and self-awareness? A self-awareness attribute would open the flood gates to include a menagerie of other organisms far beyond our household pets. But where would the line be drawn? Could we include small rodents, but exclude frogs? And on what basis? Both seem to be well aware of their respective environments. They search or hunt for food, they attempt to escape danger; they use vocalizations and appear that they experience pain. Without being overtly arbitrary, it is difficult to know where to draw the line with dog, cats, mice and frogs. It would seem that any definition would necessarily be anthropocentric. Nearly every definition starts with human characteristics and lops off traits that one feels can be omitted while still retaining enough of a human-like experience to be called conscious. Is it sufficient for phenomenological consciousness to emerge if an organism has a brain? For it would be difficult to assess what criteria would be necessary to differentiate brains with and without consciousness. What could we say is the factor to divide those brained animals with consciousness from those without consciousness? Size? Number of neurons? The brain of the C. elegans nematode worm has just 302 neurons, but in spite of this, it is able to carry out the same respective requisite functions as the nervous systems of higher organisms. The nematode may be small, but seems to relate to its environment just as well as larger brained animals relate to theirs. How many neurons does it take to have a conscious experience? The reason these questions are so difficult to answer is the same reason that the hard problem of consciousness is so difficult to answer; in fact, they are really the same question. The answer to the question can only be known by the organism having the first person experience. Figure 19: Paramecium Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor So, is a paramecium conscious and what kind of consciousness would it be if it is? Well, who knows? It's a matter of definition, falling within the rubric of the language of another species - the one doing the judging. The paramecium says it's a no brainer. It's doing just fine going about its business just the way it is. How humans characterize its intellect and life experience is of no concern. It simply does what it has to do to play out the possibilities made available by its genetic program. ... The conceptualization of both consciousness and evolution should be generalized so they form an integral and fundamental part of how the laws of nature are perceived. By limiting the scope of either, we leave ourselves with gaping holes in the explication of how things evolved from the big bang to the present. In the case of consciousness, we would not only need to explain the phenomenon of consciousness in humans, but also how it arose from non-conscious entities. Evolution is somewhat simpler. We need only to push back the clock and become more inclusive in the way we think about the laws of nature, while blotting out the entrenched demarcations separating life from non-life. Wittgenstein may have overstated his case for language being able to account for all the problems of philosophy, but he was not far off the mark. Sometimes terminology alone can cloud our viewpoint. When the laws of nature are considered from an information-centric perspective, the world unfolds from a simple inception to the one of current complexity. The pieces all fit together quite nicely, without the gaping explicatory voids we find from other theories, even if the arguments may not seem all that convincing to those with entrenched beliefs about how the world is presumptively put together. The laws of nature must be a rule-following system. This should be evident by the fact they are written in the language of mathematics and they are consistently predictive and postdictive. To understand the world from the context of the laws of nature, it should be obvious to turn to the fundamentals of mathematics as a foundation. Hence, the binary process and axiomatic systems are the keys. Consciousness must also fit into this schema, not the other way round. It is just one aspect of the process whereby entities decide what to do next, which is analogous to the playing out the laws of nature. What we typically call perceptual consciousness (as opposed to the more generic constates) may very well be epiphenomenal, and may not have any significant causal role to play in high level decision processing. The oddity of blindsight is one of the pointers toward such epiphenomenalism (Butler, 2003; de Gelder, 2010).43 In the end, consciousness becomes a term that needs revision and those in the field should find a common ground on the terminology used to cover this central theme relevant to our perception of the world. 43 Blindsight is the ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their striate cortex, also known as the primary visual cortex, to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see. The majority of studies on blindsight are conducted on patients who are blind on only one side of their visual field. Following the destruction of the striate cortex, patients are asked to detect, localize, and discriminate amongst visual stimuli that are presented to their blind side often in a forced-response or guessing situation, even though they cannot actually see the stimulus. Research shows a surprising amount of accuracy in the guesses of blind patients. Blindsight challenges the common belief that perceptions must enter phenomenological consciousness to affect our behavior. This phenomenon shows our behavior can be guided by sensory information of which we are completely unaware. 187 The lack of significant progress in formulating a theory of consciousness is due to a wide variety of factors, many of which have been discussed herein. To best sum it up, it has been putting consciousness outside of nature that has been at the heart of the problem. The term Naturalizing Consciousness (Edelman, 2003) can be a bit misleading due to the equating of natural with physical, to the exclusion of information-based theories, as if they were not natural. There has been too much focus on human consciousness as opposed to more generalized conceptualizations, as well as the persistent intrusion of the mind-body problem into the debate. The hard problem of consciousness and physicalism are like two trains speeding toward each other on the same track. It is truly hopeless to find a solution in this capacity; nor will the discounting of consciousness as an entity in the world make it go away. Some of the proposed solutions for human consciousness would not explain how other organisms interact with their environments. The individual and collective decisions of termites are just as much a part of the natural world as the individual and collective decisions of humans. Whatever we are to make of the decision level processes of termites would have to likewise apply to humanity. One can metaphorically represent the phenomenological consciousness of a person by the flow of images on a television screen. When the television is off, not powered up, not turned on, effectively not in a conscious state, the perception of the world is non-existent. But the world is still there to be perceived. The electromagnetic radiation responsible for the picture that could emerge on the screen, that is, a possibility of a state of affairs, is waiting to be expressed. When the television is switched on, the only thing that changes is that the picture on the screen goes from a potential state to a realized state. Effectively, not all that much changes. The turning on of phenomenological consciousness is like the flick of a switch, so to speak, that unfolds the physical isomorphism that we perceive as the experiential world, effectively bringing the world to life. Correspondingly, one can say that to flick the switch brings the television to life as well. If there so happens to be a second television in the same room, it would have no idea whether the first was on or off; television two could not say what it was like to be television one. It is not as if the conscious experience creates the world, but only a kind of perception of the world - a perception that we call the physical world. As such, there is not really any substantive difference between human consciousness and the physical world as it is actually experienced by humans, and clearly it is very much a subjective reality. The solution of the hard problem of consciousness is solved by the vanishing of the problem. The hard problem is produced within a system of propositional logic which does not have within its construct any means to access the information required to produce a satisfactory answer. The human with language is so different than the species without that I would propose renaming our current version of human Homo deceptus to confer a more meaningful nomenclature. To the pre-linguistic human being, Homo sapiens, the world simply presents itself as it does and there are no baffling questions asked as to how that comes about. The linguistic Homo deceptus, however, does have a formal system for posing such a question. Unfortunately, we must resign ourselves to the realization that the answer resides outside this system and phenomenological aspects of consciousness cannot be resolved within the language system. The hard problem of consciousness does not really exist. It is a bit of a misnomer which should be restated as the hard problem of language. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Perhaps most significantly, it should be appreciated that language is as much a part of the evolutionary process as everything else. It is competing with other influences on our behavior to affect a selectively beneficial outcome for itself via its hosts. As such, language can be regarded as a kind of parasite, infecting its host for the benefit its own propagation. Language is a vector of delusion. In Homo deceptus it has managed to subsume much of the behavioral influences that have served other species well enough to survive and be our contemporaries. There is no predestination to the outcome of this ongoing process. In fact, there is every possibility that language will cause the extinction of its principal host species by dint of self-deception. By one means or another we are probably in the final generations of our species. Language will succeed in producing one of two outcomes within the next century or so. The first is extinction by killing its host by any of the numerous means that it has furnished to humanity over the years, most likely through catastrophic war or environmental collapse. The other, which I consider more likely, is through the cooptation of natural selection itself, from a balanced process of many influences to a controlled process. Homo deceptus will have effectively mastered the process of evolution so that it supplants what was formerly done by a more interdependent aggregate of natural forces. The laws of physics will remain the same, but nature will have gone through a phase change. For all we know, something similar has already taken place somewhere else in the universe, or perhaps in a great many places. And in some future phase of evolution there will be a process of naturally selecting the fittest of formal systems of logic, in which our successor species may be a participant. There seems an inevitability about the emergence of language, as it is so closely tied to the very essence of the laws of nature. There is no moralizing about this. It is just whatever path the master program has within itself to unfold, something perhaps to be understood by future generations. It is what it is. 189 Flies of the Lord Kurt: This may be our last meal together. I plan to go off into the woods today and take my children with me. I feel my days are coming to an end and I want to leave this world peacefully. Bert: I'm glad we're having breakfast. A last supper would be real creepy. Ludd: Actually a last supper would seem quite befitting, since we first met in front of that megachurch in Houston. Burt: Befitting or creepy, it just depends on how you look at these things. Where's your father, Ludd? Ludd: He's still in bed. He's afraid that I'm going to take him back to the nursing home when he gets up. Burt: What are you going to do with him? Ludd: Well, at least for the time being he can stay with me. I've got plenty of room. I'm having second thoughts about sending him back. I just have to be more tolerant of his idiosyncrasies. Burt: Yeah, he's not so bad. I find him very amusing and he comes up with some really novel ideas from time to time. Ludd: Hey Pop! You can come out of your room now and have breakfast with us. I'm not taking you back to the nursing home. Pops: I was just having a little sleep in. Of course you're not going to take me back to that prison now that you know how awful it was. And you'll save a bit of cash as well. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Burt: Those homes are way too expensive for what you get. You can live out your life in a luxury hotel for what it costs at one of those homes. That's what I'm going to do when the time comes, book myself in to a first class hotel. Pops: You can move in here as well. Ludd can take care of both of us. Ludd: Hey Kurt, I'm going with you. I want to die peacefully too. Bert: Kurt, you're supposed to be good at math. Isn't that right? Kurt: I've been programmed with a very high level of logic. Bert: Okay. Try this. How much is 3,678 times 8,457? Kurt: 31,104,846 Bert (checking his calculator): Hey, that's exactly right. And what is the 990th prime number? Kurt: 7,829 Bert: Right again! You're a savant and a genius. If a fly can be programmed to do this what will the future hold for us humans? It's really incredible what's going on down there in that lab in Texas you came from. Kurt: In a little while all traces of my peculiar journey through life will be gone and no one will know any of this has happened. Those weird experiments in Texas will remain a secret and life in your little town in Tasmania will continue on with its own sleepy charm. I suppose you'll just tell the nursing home that your father came home and will be staying with you. No one will be any the wiser. The police will be glad to see the back of you and never to hear from you again. And there the story dies. Bert: When you put it that way, it seems kind of sad, because it certainly was a spectacular story. We can't really tell anyone. Nobody is going to believe us. They already think we're a bit crazy and this would really put us over the edge in some people's minds. Pops: We could make a movie. Bert: What? Pops: Make a movie about Kurt's life. Bert: But no one would believe it. Pops: They don't have to believe it. It could be a science fiction movie. We could tell the true story, but pretend it's just fiction. Bert: That's not such a bad idea. The story would be told, but we would avoid the ridicule of talking nonsense by hiding behind the cover of poetic license. It's more than not just a bad idea. It's almost brilliant. 191 Pops: Thanks Bert. I'm glad someone around here appreciates my intelligence. Kurt: I think it's a good idea as well. I would attain immortality from the film. I would be the most famous fly that ever lived. I wonder who would play me in the movie. Bert: Maybe we could liberate another fly like you Kurt from DARPA. Kurt: I think that's highly unlikely. I'm sure they stepped up security once they realized that I disappeared. Ludd: We could make it an animated film. Pops: Well, well. Look who has come to the party. I was just waiting for you to put the kibosh on our idea, like you usually do. Ludd: It is a bit farfetched, but I too think there should be some historical account for what has transpired. One day people will look back and realize that what was taken as a fictional animated film was in fact a true historical account of events. Anyway, I'm a pretty good computer programmer and I've always wanted to make an animated film. I just didn't know what to do it about. Bert: So we're all in on it then. That's fantastic. I wonder what we should call our movie. Pops: Flies of the Lord. Bert: How clever of you Pops. Now I know where Ludd gets his intelligence from. You're not quite the old fool he makes you out to be. Pops: I'm still as sharp as ever. It's just that people think if you still have an imagination at my age you must have dementia. Ludd: Before you take off into the forest, Kurt, maybe you could sum up what you've learned from your experience as a genetically modified fly. We should try to get all the salient points in the film. Kurt: I've given it quite a lot of thought of late, now that I know that my days are numbered. The main thing I take out of my experience is how I was programmed. It's more than just how I was programmed by the laboratory, but I now realize that I was genetically programmed by natural selection even before the scientists went to work on my brain. My thoughts, my behavior and how I perceived the world were all dependent on how my brain was wired. First I was wired up the old way, by Darwinian evolution, you might say. And I perceived the world like a normal fly. Then I was rewired by an accelerated form of evolution called human intervention and after that I perceived the world in a different way. I can't call one better than the other. They are just different. I never had control over my conscious experience of the world. And I would imagine that the people that reprogrammed my brain didn't have any control over their own conscious experiences either. When they were programming my brain they were just following the instructions programmed into their own brains. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Of course, I never had the mental capacity to understand this until I was given language, which allowed me to analyze the world logically. I remember my first thoughts after I had language. It was really frightening. It was like an out-of-body experience. I was thinking about myself from outside myself. It took a few days before I could feel comfortable being a fly with language and could integrate the old me with the new me. Like I said before, I never really had control over who I was and I think humans are just delusional if they think that they have control over who they are. We really have no control over our identity. Our consciousness is our identity and our identity is our consciousness. It is born along with all the molecules in our bodies. It grows, it shrinks. It changes over time with the diverse influences from our environment. In my case, the environmental influences were dramatic and came in the form of human scientists. For most, these influences are more gradual and subtle. But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their role is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules. That last part came from Wittgenstein's book On Certainty. It was one part of a vast array of information electronically integrated into my brain transformation. I didn't make it up myself, but it seems to apply to how I felt after I discovered how to use language and what it brought to me as a living organism. Language is a strange gift. It holds the secrets of the universe because it is a reflection of the universe. Language is not only comprised of tautologies, but is a tautology in its own right. It holds within itself all that is true and all that is false about the world, but you can never be sure which is which. I suppose that pretty much sums up the way things are. Ludd: Thanks, Kurt. That should give us a lot of food for thought. I wish we had more time to benefit from your wisdom. Kurt: I think you can work it out for yourselves. My children are getting restless. I can hear them buzzing up a storm. It's time for me to go. Pops: I'll miss you Kurt. You were my best friend and the only one who had faith in me. Bert: I'll miss you too. Football is going to seem boring after this. Ludd: That goes for me as well. Just in case we get a call from the folks at DARPA asking about you, what should I tell them? Kurt: Tell them I've had a wonderful life. 193 World "Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like."-Lao Tzu The aim of this book, in the broadest sense, was to rethink the relationship between logic and the physical world, or if one prefers, the relationship between mathematics and physics. This in itself is not such a novel idea. The difficult part in dealing with such weighty issues is how to construct a framework that sets out the order and boundaries in which these matters can be properly addressed, while limiting the leakage into the world of linguistic nonsense. From the human perspective, the world is not about what exists but rather about what can be said. After such a prolonged period of success, it would be hard to argue that science is in crisis. But from deep within its bowels, all is not well, and many sense that there are troubling signs ahead. The uncanny relationship between mathematics and physics has been a major area of such concerns (Rosinger, 2007; Tegmark, 2008; Wigner, 1995). There is a deep philosophical question here that needs resolution if we are to attain a more foundational understanding of the universe. A resolution to the missing mass problem and quantum gravity may well be found within the current scientific paradigm, but is it likely to shed light on the more fundamental questions of reality? We have been in this particular paradigm for around a hundred years. It may be reaching the point of exhaustion, at least in its ability to answer the philosophical questions it has raised. Science wants to be the most reliable system for the production of knowledge about the world. It also wants to liberally use the word reality to differentiate itself from other systems purporting to describe the world. Most scientists would like to use words like truth and real to distinguish the kind of knowledge they produce from that professed by religions. Is there something that science is lacking that it has failed to become the unchallenged account of how the world operates? Or is it just that science lacks the political clout to wrest control from competing philosophies. It really shouldn't matter what the majority of the world thinks; nonetheless, science would like to provide a compelling narrative that would be hard to reject. If science can convince itself it is on the right track, the rest should fall into line. But it needs to deal with some of the thornier problems that persist within its ranks. For science to successfully move forward on these matters it is imperative to go through a rigorous redefining of what it is. At least informally, this is already happening. But the general disdain toward digital physics within scientific orthodoxy is but one example that there is still a long way to go. As reassuring as having testable hypotheses underpinning science might be, it is also limiting its reach into theoretical models which are not, at least at present, testable. It does not mean that these models are incorrect. Nor should it mean that such models cannot be substantiated through other evidence-based methodologies. The formal refining of science that I am suggesting would open science to other philosophical frameworks which meet the general principles of the scientific endeavor. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor This framework for a new kind of science can be summarized as follows: 1. Science can be reformulated into an ordered structured framework which at the very least acknowledges the significance of issues that it has yet to seriously consider as part of scientific orthodoxy. 2. Science purports to assert scientific truths, but should refrain from calling these assertions reality. 3. Scientific truths are theorems derived from formal systems of logic falling within the scientific belief system, such being defined by its axioms. This body of knowledge is derived from language and mathematics, which should be at the top of the list of the axioms of science. 4. Science should abandon the pretense of conferring objective knowledge and replace it with a formalized axiomatic system of what it purports to be, including its boundaries and limitations. 5. As science incorporates observation and observables as a part of its system, it should categorically confront the nature of consciousness and its role in scientific observation. The plausibility of scientific truth is dependent on it, and what can be said to be scientific truth must be attenuated to the extent of any lack of incorporation of a theory of consciousness into the wider body of science. 6. The concepts of information theory, computation and digital physics should be welcomed into the main body of scientific theory. 7. The concept of evolution should be broadened so that it reaches beyond the definition of life and incorporates all that is within our universe. Evolution should be seen as a characteristic of the laws of nature. Science has always been good at dealing with its paradigm shifts, so there should not be much fretting about why it seems to be taking so long. When you read about the history of these major transitions in thought, they appear to happen rather quickly, but when one is living through them, they seem to take forever. Whether it is by common sense, religious belief or scientific theory, we want to understand how the past became the present and if it is possible to predict the future from what we know of both the past and the present. In this light we might say that the central issue for science is determining how things know what to do next, which in keeping with the tenor of this text can be restated: How do things decide what to do next? It doesn't matter what things we are talking about; it can be people or it can be electrons. Additionally, we not only want to understand how people decide what to do next and how electrons decide what to do next, but also how the electrons that reside in the bodies of people decide what to do next, all in sync with the higher level decisions made by the individual containing those electrons. Complex organisms run internal programs cultivating sub-modules which enable modifications and variations to the program so that behavior is learned from environmental interactions. Learning is a high level feedback loop supported by some incalculable number of lower level nested feedback loops in a two-directional coordinated dance perhaps drilling all the way down to Planck scale dimensions. 195 There is a great predilection to think of ourselves as something more than just some kind of computing machine. We see a computer as a bunch of electronics in a box, and we want to be more than that. These predispositions will either drive us toward or away from a particular theory that purports to describe the universe and our place in it. It is difficult to ask someone to be open-minded when the mind is a substantially closed system with small vents to the outside world, filtering what comes in and what goes out. It is likewise difficult to ask one to be objective when such a thing is an impossibility. Yet there is a way around these seemingly insurmountable problems. For me, it was Wittgenstein that opened the door to a pathway to thinking about the world while dealing with such perplexities. ... What can we say about the world without speaking nonsense? How can we convert truth into reality without falling afoul by the very mechanisms that produce the truths that we wish to assert as reality? How much of what we think we know about the world can be incorporated into a broad and consistent theory so that there are no contradictions within such a theory? In order to answer these questions, some of the certitude we would have liked to attribute to nature had to be abandoned. In its place boundaries were established limiting the certitude but expanding upon what can be said within that context. As with the uncertainty principle, the less certain we are about something the more can be said about it, and conversely, the more certain we are about something the less can be said about it. Both postures have been taken in this book at various times to suit the situation at hand. But my preference has been to aim for certitude when possible and to structure the arguments in that vein. In keeping with the spirit of Wittgenstein, we may limit what can be said about the world, but that which can be said, can be said clearly. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Appendix I: Comments on TLP Section 6 Section 6 of Wittgenstein's Tractatus is informative on a number of important matters concerning propositions and logic. As much as I would wish to refrain from direct analysis of TLP, there are several points that call for some elucidation regarding assertions made in this book which differ from the Wittgensteinian concept of truth. To address some of the issues presented in the Tractatus I can supplement my definition of truth by adding the following elucidations to my earlier postulates:  All propositions of language are propositions of logic.  All true propositions of language are tautologies. Let us examine the following paragraphs from TLP: 6.1 The propositions of logic are tautologies. 6.11 Therefore the propositions of logic say nothing. (They are the analytic propositions.) 6.111 All theories that make a proposition of logic appear to have content are false. One might think, for example, that the words 'true' and 'false' signified two properties among other properties, and then it would seem to be a remarkable fact that every proposition possessed one of these properties. On this theory it seems to be anything but obvious, just as, for instance, the proposition, 'All roses are either yellow or red', would not sound obvious even if it were true. Indeed, the logical proposition acquires all the characteristics of a proposition of natural science and this is the sure sign that it has been construed wrongly. Section 6.1 is the same as my own. Section 6.11 is another way of stating one of my opening postulates of this chapter: Truth is about logic, not semantics. Section 6.111 brings to a head the main point of contention, which is whether or not propositions of natural language are logical propositions. If they are not, then a correspondence theory of truth, like that of Tarski, would attain. So the question may rest on how pervasive logical processes are in the world. Do they extend to natural language, as I have argued? Determining the relationship of language, truth and logic is one of the most critical tasks in philosophy; so much depends of the outcome. One can sort through Wittgenstein's own words to build a case for linking the three together, despite conclusions that one might reach from Wittgenstein's philosophy in its totality (Wittgenstein's statements, in italics, are followed by my comments): 197  The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world (TLP 3.01). One might ask what a false thought would be. Are the thoughts derived from language part of the picture of the world? It would seem so, for if not, what kind of thoughts are they?  Logical pictures can depict the world (TLP 2.19). It would seem that Wittgenstein is referring to sensory perceptions here. Whether language belongs in this category can be argued from the point of language being a sensory perception. It would certainly be classified as such if using the neural pathway argument. Wittgenstein states that every picture is a logical one (TLP 2.182), so the link is being made between reality, pictures and logic.  The picture represents a possible state of affairs in logical space (TLP 2.202). One could infer that propositions of language must create a pictorial representation, for if a proposition of language is true it would represent a state of affairs in logical space, and if false it would not; that is the possibility. One could surmise that pictures derived from common sensory experiences would come up against a comparison test with physical reality to determine the appropriate status in logical space; one could imagine that mirage-like pictures would not represent a state of affairs in logical space according to Wittgenstein.  If a thought were correct a priori, it would be a thought whose possibility ensured its truth (TLP 3.04). If a thought, regardless of how it is categorized, is a theorem of the thinker's internal system of logic, and one might wonder how it could be otherwise, then its internal logical truth is assured. All thoughts as such are correct a priori, if they are not subjected to the test of what the inquisitor believes is the truth in an objective reality. We have seen that there can never be a consensus on objective reality if there are differences in beliefs within the population. One might defer to objective reality as scientific truths, but we know that science depicts itself as a system of contingent truth without universal consensus.  In mathematics everything is algorithm and nothing is meaning (Wittgenstein, 1974, PG 468). Why would this be the case? Cannot one argue that mathematics presents a picture of reality? What are we to make of the laws of physics, which are stated as mathematical equations? Or can we simply conclude that the world itself is meaningless? But in the end I would agree with Wittgenstein here, for meaning is not the sort of word that one should apply to mathematics. So, of course Wittgenstein is correct; logic and meaning fall into different camps. Wittgenstein continues in Section 6 of the Tractatus to confirm the relationships between logic and experience that have been expounded in this book. So it is only how one considers ordinary language which is in contention, at least if one is to take Wittgenstein at his word. In a sense, one has to make a determination of how the world comes about to resolve these matters. I have made the argument that natural language must fit into the domain of predicate logic along with recognized formal languages, as it conforms with a consistent interpretation of the world across many fields and levels of examination. One can also argue in the negative, in that, if we are to exclude natural language, then where would an explanatory theory come from? And then how are we to explain why people believe the things they do? Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Appendix II: Glossary Angstrom One ten-billionth of a meter. Symbol: Å Anthropic Principle In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe must be compatible with the conscious life that observes it. Attractor An attractor is a set towards which a variable, moving according to the dictates of a dynamical system, evolves over time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. In finite-dimensional systems, the evolving variable may be represented algebraically as an n-dimensional vector. The attractor is a region in n-dimensional space. In physical systems, the n dimensions may be, for example, two or three positional coordinates for each of one or more physical entities. If the evolving variable is twoor three-dimensional, the attractor of the dynamic process can be represented geometrically in two or three dimensions. An attractor can be a point, a finite set of points, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor. If the variable is a scalar, the attractor is a subset of the real number line. Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory. A trajectory of the dynamical system in the attractor does not have to satisfy any special constraints except for remaining on the attractor, backward and forward in time. The trajectory may be periodic or chaotic. If a set of points is periodic or chaotic, but the flow in the neighborhood is away from the set, the set is not an attractor, but instead is called a repeller (or repellor). Cellular Automata Cellular automata (CA) are discrete, abstract computational systems that have proved useful both as general models of complexity and as more specific representations of non-linear dynamics in a variety of scientific fields. Firstly, CA are (typically) spatially and temporally discrete: they are composed of a finite or denumerable set of homogeneous, simple units, atoms or cells. At each time unit, the cells instantiate one of a finite set of states. They evolve in parallel at discrete time steps, following state update functions or dynamical transition rules: the update of a cell state obtains by taking into account the states of cells in its local neighborhood (there are, therefore, no actions at a distance). Secondly, CA are abstract, as they can be specified in purely mathematical terms and implemented in physical structures. Thirdly, CA are computational systems: they can compute functions and solve algorithmic problems. Despite functioning in a different way from traditional, Turing machine-like 199 devices, CA with suitable rules can emulate a universal Turing machine, and therefore compute, given Turing's Thesis, anything computable. Completeness When all statements which are true (in some imaginable world), and which can be expressed as well-formed strings of the system, are theorems. Computation Space See Logical Space Consistency When every theorem, upon interpretation, comes out true (in some imaginable world). Constate Symbol: Tc; System state assessment. DARPA The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Deductive Reasoning Deductive reasoning, or deduction, starts with a general case and deduces specific instances. Deduction starts with an assumed hypothesis or theory. Deduction is used by scientists who take a general scientific law and apply it to a certain case, as they assume that the law is true. Deduction can also be used to test an induction by applying it elsewhere, although in this case the initial theory is assumed to be true only temporarily. Deductive reasoning assumes that the basic law from which you are arguing is applicable in all cases. This can let you take a rule and apply it perhaps where it was not really meant to be applied. Scientists will prove a general law for a particular case and then do many deductive experiments to demonstrate that the law holds true in many different circumstances. In set theory, a deduction is a subset of the rule that is taken as the start point. If the rule is true and deduction is a true subset (not a conjunction) then the deduction is almost certainly true. Using deductive reasoning usually is a credible and 'safe' form of reasoning, but is based on the assumed truth of the rule or law on which it is founded. Deductive conclusions can be valid or invalid. Valid arguments obey the initial rule. For validity, the truth or falsehood of the initial rule is not considered. Thus valid conclusions need not be true, and invalid conclusions may not be false. Formal Language The alphabet of a formal language is the set of symbols, letters, or tokens from which the strings of the language may be formed; frequently it is required to be finite. The strings formed from this alphabet are called words, and the words that belong to a particular formal language are sometimes called well-formed words or wellformed formulas. A formal language is often defined by means of a formal grammar such as a regular grammar or context-free grammar, also called its formation rule. Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor Formal System A formal system is broadly defined as any well-defined system of abstract thought based on the model of mathematics. Euclid's Elements is often held to be the first formal system. The entailment of the system by its logical foundation is what distinguishes a formal system from others which may have some basis in an abstract model. Each formal system has a formal language, which is composed by primitive symbols. These symbols act on certain rules of formation and are developed by inference from a set of axioms. The system thus consists of any number of formulas built up through finite combinations of the primitive symbols-combinations that are formed from the axioms in accordance with the stated rules. Formal systems in mathematics consist of the following elements: 1. A finite set of symbols (i.e., the alphabet), that can be used for constructing formulas (i.e., finite strings of symbols). 2. A grammar, which tells how well-formed formulas (abbreviated wff) are constructed out of the symbols in the alphabet. It is usually required that there be a decision procedure for deciding whether a formula is well formed or not. 3. A set of axioms or axiom schemata: each axiom must be a wff. 4. A set of inference rules Fredkin Gate The Fredkin gate (also CSWAP gate) is a computational circuit suitable for reversible computing, invented by Edward Fredkin. It is universal, which means that any logical or arithmetic operation can be constructed entirely of Fredkin gates. The Fredkin gate is a threebit gate that swaps the last two bits if the first bit is 1. Inductive Reasoning Inductive reasoning, or induction, is reasoning from a specific case or cases and deriving a general rule. It draws inferences from observations in order to make generalizations. Information Space See Logical Space Isomorphism An Isomorphism is an information preserving transformation. An isomorphic relationship between two entities can be said to exist if one entity can be mapped onto the other so that for each part of the first entity there is a corresponding part in the second. If a certain dynamic in the physical world can be described by a mathematical formula then we can say, at least for this case, that an isomorphic relationship exists between that dynamical system and the formula. We can generalize this by saying that there is an isomorphic relationship between mathematics and the physical world, recognizing that both mathematics and the physical world are rather 201 large concepts and this generalization would require a great deal of specification. Isotropic Having uniform physical properties in all directions. Language: A Formal Symbolic System Language as used in this book is a formal system of signs governed by grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses the fact that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings. This structuralist view of language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure, and his structuralism remains foundational for most approaches to language today. Some proponents of this view of language have advocated a formal approach to studying the structures of language, privileging the formulation of underlying abstract rules that can be understood to generate observable linguistic structures. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam Chomsky, who defines language as a particular set of sentences that can be generated from a particular set of rules. This definition of language is commonly used in formal logic, and in formal theories of grammar and in applied computational linguistics. In the philosophy of language these views are associated with philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, early Wittgenstein, Alfred Tarski and Gottlob Frege. Logical Space; Information Space; Computational Space All three terms are used interchangeably throughout this book and are representations of abstract non-physical binary spaces. They can be considered nuances of the same concept. The preference for one term over another mostly depends on the context. A logical space is a generalized binary process space used for symbol manipulation, and particularly the evaluations of propositions or similar logical constructs. More generally, it is the space in which objects and states of affairs exist. This is the most general kind of space there is, so everything that exists and everything that could exist exists in logical space. The term originates in Boltzmann's generalized thermodynamics, which treats the independent properties of a physical system as defining separate coordinates in a multidimensional system, the points of which constitute the 'ensemble of possible states'. The Tractatus does not define the term 'logical space', but clearly it refers to the ensemble of logical possibilities. Logical space stands to 'reality', the existence and nonexistence of states of affairs (TLP 2.05), as the potential to the actual. The term conveys the idea that logical possibilities form a 'logical scaffolding' (TLP 3.42), a systematic manifold akin to a coordinate system. The world is the 'facts in logical space' (TLP 1.13), since the contingent existence of states of affairs is embedded in an a priori order of possibilities. There are several dimensions to the analogy between space and the ensemble of logical possibilities. A 'place' in logical space is determined by a 'proposition' (TLP 3.4–3.42), which here means an elementary proposition. It is a possible state of affairs, which corresponds to the two 'truth-possibilities' of an elementary Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor proposition – being true or being false (TLP 4.3ff.). Information space is used primarily to indicate the storage of binary information or bits. Computational space is most often used for transformations in a binary process, such as the execution of an algorithm or computer program. Maxwell's Demon A hypothetical being imagined as controlling a hole in a partition dividing a gas-filled container into two parts, and allowing only fastmoving molecules to pass in one direction, and slow-moving molecules in the other. This would result in one side of the container becoming warmer and the other colder, in violation of the second law of thermodynamics. Predicate Logic Sometimes called first-order logic or first-order predicate logic, it is a fundamental system of mathematical logic. Propositional Logic A subset of predicate logic that does not use quantified variables. A formal system of logic that applies to natural language. Quantum Entanglement Quantum entanglement is a product of quantum superposition. It is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each member must subsequently be described relative to the other. Tautology A proposition that is true regardless of what is and what is not the case. As such, tautologies lack sense (but are not nonsense) and say nothing. Wittgenstein asserts that the propositions of logic are tautologies, thus underscoring the idea that the propositions of logic cannot say anything about the world. Turing Machine (TM) A Turing machine is a hypothetical device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm. Universal Turing Machine (UTM) In computer science, a universal Turing machine (UTM) is a Turing machine that can simulate an arbitrary Turing machine on arbitrary input. The universal machine essentially achieves this by reading both the description of the machine to be simulated as well as the input thereof from its own tape. 203 Appendix III: Glossary of Wittgenstein Terminology Contradiction: A proposition that is false no matter what is the case or is not the case. A contradiction lacks sense, but is not nonsensical. Fact: A complex made up of states of affairs. The world is the totality of "positive facts," i.e. facts that are the case. Logical space: The space in which objects and states of affairs exist. This is the most general kind of space there is, so everything that exists and everything that could exist exists in logical space. Object: The simple items that constitute states of affairs. Objects can only exist within the context of states of affairs. They have a internal properties-their logical form-and external properties- whatever properties are ascribed to them in states of affairs. Operation: The process by which one proposition is generated out of another. Operations are not themselves "things" in any sense of the word: they are simply the expression of a commonality (a common logical form) that exists between two propositions. All propositions can be generated by means of a single negating operation applied successively to elementary propositions. Proposition: The means of transmitting thoughts. A proposition can take the form of written, spoken, or any other kind of communication. It is made up of simple names arranged in a particular logical form. A proposition thus serves as a picture of the facts it represents. Most propositions are complex; simple propositions are called "elementary propositions." Solipsism: The philosophical position that nothing exists outside of oneself. My world consists only of sensory stimuli, and so I cannot rightly say there are people or things in the world around me, only my own impressions of people and things. This is obviously a difficult position to maintain (why do I bother expressing this position if I don't believe there are other people out there who will consider it?), but it also notoriously difficult to disprove. State of affairs: The simplest form of facts. States of affairs are utterly simple, unanalyzable, and mutually independent. The totality of states of affairs is the world. Thought: By "thought," Wittgenstein does not refer to a psychological entity, but to a logical one. We are able to think about facts and propositions because our thoughts share a logical form with facts and propositions. Thus, we are able to put our thoughts into the world in the form of propositions. World: "The world is all that is the case." Wittgenstein generally uses "world" to refer to the totality of all facts. If we were to make an itemized list of every true proposition, this itemized list would be a full description of the world. Sometimes, however, Wittgenstein uses "world" to refer to Creating Reality by Bruce Bokor the totality of both positive and negative facts, both to what is and what is not the case. He is referring then to everything that is logically possible. 205 Appendix IV: Table of Figures Figure 1: Structure of formal systems.................................................................................................................................. 52 Figure 2: What Can I Say About My World? ............................................................................................................. 57 Figure 3: Ludwig Wittgenstein ................................................................................................................................................ 69 Figure 4: Drawing Hands, M C Escher, 1948 .................................................................................................................... 86 Figure 5: Cellular Automata. 2 Kinds of Neighborhoods. ........................................................................................ 125 Figure 6: Cells change based on the states or adjacent cells. ................................................................................ 126 Figure 7: Deep Blue (Computer) vs. Garry Kasparov challenge (Game 1, 1996) ....................................... 127 Figure 8: Relationships in the World ................................................................................................................................. 135 Figure 9: The Standard Model of Particle Physics ........................................................................................... 138 Figure 10: Light behaving like a wave. ............................................................................................................................. 150 Figure 11: A cell membrane. .................................................................................................................................................. 154 Figure 12: Lego Man. From http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Yellow/192175....................................... 155 Figure 13: The Breit–Wheeler process, → . Bubble Chamber image and illustration. . 156 Figure 14: Black Hole Entropy (© Scientific American) .......................................................................................... 159 Figure 15: Logical and physical causality ........................................................................................................................ 169 Figure 16: 1974 Film 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' ........................................................................................... 170 Figure 17: Metabolism overview. ........................................................................................................................................ 172 Figure 18: Metabolism of a muscle cell. 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Relevance and Risk: How the Relevant Alternatives Framework Models the Epistemology of Risk Georgi Gardiner University of Tennessee This essay appears in Synthese Abstract. The epistemology of risk examines how risks bear on epistemic properties. A common framework for examining the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support is best modelled as numerical probability given the available evidence. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival 'relevant alternatives' framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. I describe three loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on a belief for action, where those consequences are significant if the belief is false. The second locus concerns whether beliefs themselves-regardless of action-can be risky, costly, or harmful. The third locus concerns epistemic risks we confront as social epistemic agents. I aim to motivate the relevant alternatives framework as a fruitful approach to the epistemology of risk. I first articulate a 'relevant alternatives' model of the relationship between stakes, evidence, and action. I then employ the relevant alternatives framework to undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. Finally, I argue the relevant alternatives framework illuminates epistemic phenomena such as gaslighting, conspiracy theories, and crying wolf, and I draw on the framework to diagnose the undue skepticism endemic to rape accusations. Keywords. Relevant alternatives; moral encroachment; risk; stakes; epistemic injustice; rape accusations; gaslighting; conspiracy theories. 1. Introduction Judgements have consequences. Our confidence the bus leaves at noon can mean the difference between attending and missing the appointment. A parent's belief that his child is dreadful at music can be self-fulfilling when he fails to invest in music lessons and when the child absorbs that selfconception. A false belief can spawn other false beliefs when relied on in inference. The epistemology of risk examines the epistemological contours that arise from consequences of judgement; central questions include whether risks, such as high cost of error, affect epistemic properties like knowledge, and how we should understand distinctively epistemic kinds of harm, such as epistemic injustice and epistemic wronging. This essay employs a relevant alternatives framework to illuminate the epistemology of risk. A common-indeed ubiquitous-framework for investigating the epistemology of risk holds that strength of evidential support for a claim, p, is best modelled as the numerical probability of p conditional on the total available evidence.1 On this model, which I call the 'quantifiable balance' conception, evidential support is quantifiable and reflects the balance of available evidence. Theorists typically endorse this picture and debate, for instance, whether the numerical threshold 1 Note 'evidential support' can be interpreted broadly, to encompass epistemic competence and similar truthconducive features. This is sometimes called 'epistemic support', but this terminology can mislead because-as I describe in section seven-some theorists claim practical and moral factors affect epistemic position by affecting whether S's belief is epistemically justified or known. 2 for justified belief increases with costs of error. Perhaps 90% probability given the evidence suffices for justified belief when stakes are low, for instance, but not when stakes are high. Others endorse the basic quantifiable balance framework, but argue that other conditions, such as sensitivity of evidence, are also required for justified belief. Such approaches augment, but do not reject, the broad contours of the quantifiable balance framework. In this essay I develop and motivate a rival framework for theorising about the epistemology of risk. A relevant alternatives framework illuminates how epistemic properties are affected by risk whilst avoiding problems plaguing the quantifiable balance conception of evidential support. At the very least, a relevant alternatives framework provides a welcome alternative to the dominant quantifiable balance conception; I hope to motivate that a relevant alternatives framework for the epistemology of risk is worth taking seriously. 2 In section two I introduce three central loci for thinking about the epistemology of risk. The first locus concerns consequences of relying on belief for action, where those consequences are significant if the belief is false. The second locus concerns whether beliefs themselves-regardless of action-can be risky, costly, or harmful. The third locus concerns risks we face as epistemic agents, particularly focusing on vulnerabilities from the social-situatedness of our epistemic agency. The three loci do not jointly exhaust questions about the epistemic consequences of risk, but they are three paramount arenas. In section three I describe the relevant alternatives condition on knowledge, and use this to introduce the overall relevant alternatives framework. In section four I set aside the conditions of knowledge and instead apply a relevant alternatives framework to the epistemology of risk. I first examine how costs of error affect whether evidence suffices for action. I argue that rising error costs mean increasingly remote error possibilities must be addressed. In section five I describe what determines an error possibility's remoteness. In sections six and seven I examine the second locus-whether beliefs themselves can be costly or risky, severed from resulting action or inference. I first explain the challenge from moral encroachment, which asks whether purist epistemology can explain apparent conflicts between epistemic and moral norms. In section six I argue a relevant alternatives framework addresses the challenge from moral encroachment; I thereby argue against moral encroachment by undermining its motivation. In section seven I argue a relevant alternatives framework can fruitfully model moral encroachment. In sections eight and nine I turn to the third locus: Risks we encounter as social epistemic agents. This includes risks of epistemic harm and injustice. I argue that a relevant alternatives framework highlights and systematises kinds of social epistemic harm and injustice. These features are not well-modelled by the more simple quantifiable balance conception of evidential support. 2. Three Loci A classic locus of the epistemology of risk concerns the consequences of relying on a belief when that belief is false. Rowing across the Atlantic is serious business, you must be confident the boat is sturdy. Transferring money can be risky, do you know the website is secure? If your belief is 2 A note on the scope of this essay: I here focus on articulating the relevant alternatives framework and explaining how it illuminates three loci of the epistemology of risk. Another key undertaking to rejuvenate the relevant alternatives framework is criticising rival frameworks, such as the quantifiable balance approach. I lack space to do justice to this second aspect here, and I instead focus on directly motivating the relevant alternatives framework. I articulate two objections to the quantifiable balance model in footnote 38 and its corresponding main text. For further objections to quantifiable balance theories of epistemic support, see Cohen (1977), Nelkin (2000), Achinstein (2003), Ho (2008; 2015), Nelson (2002), Littlejohn (2012), Buchak (2013; 2014), Haack (2014), Staffel (2016), Nance (2016), Smith (2016), Leitgeb (2017), and Jackson (2018). For surveys, see Ho (2015), Di Bello (2013), and Gardiner (2019a). 3 false, the costs could be significant. Consider the following pair of vignettes, adapted from Keith DeRose (1992). Bank Low Stakes. Driving home from work on Friday, Loren plans to stop at the bank to deposit her paycheque. She sees the long queue, and so decides to return on Saturday. Depositing her paycheque is not urgent. She must deposit it before her rent is due, but that is not for two weeks. 'The bank will be open tomorrow', Loren thinks to herself, 'I'll return then'. Loren drives past the bank. Bank High Stakes. Driving home from work on Friday, Hiram plans to stop at the bank to deposit his paycheque. He sees the long queue, and so decides to return on Saturday. But, as Hiram well knows, his rent is due Saturday. Unless his paycheque is deposited before Saturday evening, his rent payment will bounce. Since he is already behind on payments, eviction may result. 'The bank will be open tomorrow', Hiram thinks to himself, 'I'll return then'. Hiram drives past the bank. Call the claim the bank will be open tomorrow claim B. The second vignette involves far higher costs if B is false; relying on judgement B is riskier. And this means, many theorists hold, more evidence is required to legitimate action. There is an amount (or kind) of evidence for claim B, that can render Loren uncriticisable yet renders Hiram criticisable. Suppose Loren's and Hiram's evidence is the same. They recall driving past the bank on a Saturday six months ago and seeing customers. Given this evidence, plausibly Hiram makes a practical mistake, and Loren does not. Hiram should not rely on his belief, given the stakes and his evidence. Since their evidence is the same, this difference stems from practical features. This first locus focuses on the risks of relying on a belief for action. It asks whether and how practical stakes can affect the amount of evidence needed to properly rely on a judgement in action, where those stakes concern the costs of p being false.3 This question does not directly ask whether a belief qualifies as justified or known. Some theorists leverage the stakes sensitivity of whether evidence suffices for action-combined with knowledge-action links-to motivate impurism about knowledge.4 Impurism holds that whether S's true belief is knowledge depends not only on truth-conducive factors, such as evidence and epistemic competence, but also on practical features such as the costs of p being false. Purism, by contrast, holds that whether a true belief is knowledge depends solely on truth-conducive factors, such as evidence and epistemic competence. A recent strand of theorising within the epistemology of risk focuses not on the consequences of relying on a belief for action, but instead on the harms, risks, and wrongs of the belief itself. This is the second locus of the epistemology of risk. Here is an illustrative example.5 3 Costs relevant to locus one accrue were p false. But proponents of pragmatic encroachment hold that even when p is true, and so the bad consequences do not obtain, there can be something wrong with relying on p with insufficient evidence given the high costs involved were p false. It is too risky. 4 Knowledge-action links are claims like 'A person can properly use p as a reason for action iff she knows p'. Cf. Fantl and McGrath (2002, 2007, 2009), Hawthorne (2004), Stanley (2005), Hawthorne and Stanley (2008), DeRose (2009), Anderson (2015), Brown (2008, 2014), Worsnip (2015, forthcoming), Ichikawa (2017), Fritz (2017, ms), Kim (2017). 5 This wording is from Gardiner (2018a). See Franklin (2005: 4; 340). Gendler (2011) employs this example to exemplify a putative tension between epistemic and moral demands. Basu (2018, forthcoming-a), Schroeder (2018a), Basu and Schroeder (2019), and Bolinger (forthcoming), have since invoked Franklin's experience to motivate moral encroachment. See also Basu's (2018) 'Mexican Restaurant' example. For discussion, see Gardiner (2018a), Worsnip (forthcoming), Bolinger (ms-b), and Fritz and Jackson (ms). Fritz and Jackson (ms) also distinguishes impurism based on the consequences of actions (locus one) from impurism based on the moral value of beliefs themselves, independent from action or choice (locus two). 4 The Cosmos Club. Historian John Hope Franklin hosts a party at his social club, The Cosmos Club. As Franklin reports, 'It was during our stroll through the club that a white woman called me out, presented me with her coat check, and ordered me to bring her coat. I patiently told her that if she would present her coat to a uniformed attendant, "and all of the club attendants were in uniform," perhaps she could get her coat'. Almost every attendant is black and few club members are black. This demographic distribution almost certainly led to the woman's false belief that Franklin is staff. Theorists argue the woman's belief wrongs Franklin and, furthermore, that it does so independently from any actions that rely on her belief. Consider the following case, adapted from Basu (2018). Tipping Prediction. Spencer the waiter sensed that white diners tipped more than black diners. He subsequently researched the trend online, and discovered that black diners tip on average substantially lower than white diners. A black diner, Jamal, enters Spencer's restaurant and dines in a booth outside of Spencer's area. Spencer predicts Jamal will tip lower than average, and later discovers his prediction was correct. Spencer does not rely on his belief in action. But, theorists argue, his belief itself is nonetheless costly, risky, harmful, or morally wrong. Theorists distinguish between costly and risky beliefs. Costs are negatives stemming from the belief, even if the belief is true. Risks are negatives accrued only if the belief is false. If S's belief is harmful regardless of whether it is true, the belief is costly. If it is harmful only if false, the belief is risky. Whilst the first locus of the epistemology of risk focuses on risky beliefs, the second locus makes room for thinking about costly beliefs.6 The stakeholders relevant to the first locus of the epistemology of risk are the believer, those affected by her actions, and-where knowledge attributions are made-the attributor or assessor of that knowledge claim. This second locus highlights new sets of stakeholders: the person the belief is about, members of his social group, and-since we all have a stake in non-discrimination and morality-society at large.7 Central questions in the second locus ask whether and how risks accruing to these new stakeholders affect epistemic justification, and how to understand risks of beliefs as such, severed from the risks of action. A third locus for thinking about the epistemology of risk concerns ways we are vulnerable as epistemic agents, particularly focusing on vulnerabilities stemming from social features of epistemic agency. A simple vulnerability we face as epistemic agents is the risk of false belief. We are at risk of deception, manipulation, misunderstanding, misremembering, misperceiving, and so on. Even true beliefs can lead to false beliefs downstream, if they fuel prejudice or breed overconfidence. We can epistemically mistreat others, such as by lying or regarding people with undue skepticism. We risk suffering and authoring epistemic harms and injustices. In this third locus, I highlight epistemic risks stemming from the social embeddedness of our epistemic agency. 6 This distinction is from Moss (2018a). Cf. Worsnip (forthcoming). Moss (2018a) holds that risks, but not costs, underwrite moral encroachment. Moss's gloss on the distinction focuses on acting on the belief, restricting it to locus one. But the distinction can also apply to the second locus. That is, we can distinguish between costly and risky beliefs even when discussing the disvalues of holding the beliefs themselves, rather than acting on the beliefs. Note a belief might be wrong in virtue of being risky, even in cases where that belief is true. If the believer lacks conclusive evidence, the belief might be censurably risky, in virtue of harms risked were the belief false. Some theorists, such as Basu, claim that holding a risky belief about a person with insufficient evidence qualifies as a harm, because it is reckless, racist, or inconsiderate. Thus on Basu's view, all risky beliefs are thereby also somewhat costly. 7 A belief's subject and believer can, of course, be the same. This is exemplified by, for example, internalised racism. 5 I argue that a relevant alternatives framework illuminates the contours of the three loci: the risks of relying on a belief with insufficient evidence given the gravity of the practical circumstances, the putative harms of beliefs themselves, and risks we confront as social epistemic agents-the vulnerabilities in our social epistemic lives. 3. The Relevant Alternatives Framework Bertie is an experienced Appalachian birdwatcher.8 He sees a hawk soaring above and believes it is a red-shouldered hawk. Does Bertie know it is a red-shouldered hawk? He can see its black and white tail, and so he can tell it is not a red-tailed hawk. And he can see the tail has three bands, so he can rule out broad-winged hawk. He knows broad-winged hawks have only one white tail band. Bertie studies birds-he knows that no other hawks are naturally found in Appalachia. Plausibly Bertie knows it is a red-shouldered hawk. Compare Bertie to Newla. Newla is new to birdwatching. She sees the hawk soaring above and believes it is a red-shouldered hawk. Newla can see its black and white tail, and so can distinguish it from a red-tailed hawk. But she never learnt to count the tail bands to distinguish red-shouldered hawks from broad-winged hawks. Accordingly Newla lacks knowledge because, for all she can tell, the bird could be a broad-winged hawk. She cannot rule this out. Suppose someone approaches Bertie with a challenge from skepticism. They might say 'You don't know the bird is a red-shouldered hawk. It could be a sophisticated robot, a red-tailed hawk with disguised colouring, or a falcon with misshapen wings and tail. Perhaps you are hallucinating or someone is tricking you. Perhaps it is a songbird, and you suffer a drug-fuelled illusion. Perhaps your birding guides have long been replaced by misleading trickster books.' In normal circumstances, Bertie can plausibly retort 'Don't be silly', or simply ignore the interruption altogether. He can jot 'red-shouldered hawk' in his personal birding record and happily educate his son, 'This is what a red-shouldered hawk looks like. See how the tail has three narrow white bands, and its wings have broad tips.' Newla, by contrast, cannot blithely disregard the earlier, more mundane challenge. 'You don't know the bird is a red-shouldered hawk. It might be a broadwinged hawk.' The relevant alternatives condition for knowledge can explain Bertie's knowledge and Newla's lack of knowledge.9 Relevant Alternatives Condition on Knowledge. S knows that p only if S can rule out relevant alternatives to p. The condition provides resources to explain why some challenges-such as the possibility the bird is a robot-can be disregarded, whilst other challenges-its being a broad-winged hawk-cannot. In order to know the soaring buteo is a red-shouldered hawk, ordinarily Appalachian birdwatchers must be able to rule out its being an owl, kestrel, red-tailed hawk, or broad-winged hawk. These are relevant alternatives. But normally they need not rule out robot, disguised bird, and so on. These possibilities are farfetched and so need not be taken seriously. Under some unusual 8 I am grateful to Joe Pyle for help developing this example. 9 Dretske (1970), Stine (1976), Goldman (1976), Lewis (1996), Pritchard (2002), Rysiew (2006), McKinnon (2013), Amaya (2015, esp. 525–531), Gerken (2017), Moss (2018a, 2018b), and Bolinger (forthcoming). Gardiner (2019b) and Moss (2021) develop relevant alternatives accounts of legal standards of proof. Gardiner (forthcominga) harnesses the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose the undue doubt endemic to rape accusations. 6 circumstances-such as a lifelike robot convention-birdwatchers might need to rule out its being a lifelike robot. But normally such possibilities are remote enough to properly ignore. The relevant alternatives framework posits some key structural features. These are alternatives, a threshold of relevance, ruling out alternatives, and addressing alternatives. I sketch these four features in the following four paragraphs. An alternative, also known as an error possibility, is a possibility inconsistent with p. Where p is 'that bird is a red-shouldered hawk', error possibilities include that it is a robin, robot, eagle, broadwinged hawk, illusion, and so on. Some error possibilities, such as the bird's being a broad-winged hawk, are ordinary, nearby, preponderant. They are error possibilities virtuous thinkers would readily think to rule out. They are normal, mundane not-p possibilities. Some possibilities, such as robot possibilities, are more farfetched and outlandish. The relevant alternatives condition on knowledge posits a threshold of relevance. Those possibilities within the threshold are relevant to knowledge and must be ruled out. Those beyond the threshold can be properly ignored. They are irrelevant. The threshold marking relevance to knowledge is only one possible threshold. We can posit thresholds for various legal standards of proof, for example, and disregardability thresholds for relying on beliefs given various practical or conversational contexts. In sections five and seven I discuss what determines the remoteness of an error possibility and the location of the disregardability threshold. Ruling out an alternative requires being able to discriminate p from the alternative. Bertie can rule out its being a red-tailed hawk because he sees the black and white tail. He can rule out its being a broad-winged hawk because he sees multiple white tail bands. Ruling out alternatives is a normal, automatic activity. We rule out songbird error possibilities simply by seeing the hawk's shape. We need not consider error possibilities explicitly, or think of ourselves as eliminating possibilities. Bertie rules out 'red-tailed hawk' by seeing the black and white tail. Note, though, it is possible the bird is a red-tailed hawk with painted or artificial feathers. Bertie's evidence does not rule out these (remote) sub-possibilities. These remaining sub-alternatives illustrate that alternatives are always further dividable. The 'red-tailed hawk' possibility divides into sub-possibilities: Normal red-tailed hawk, abnormal red-tailed hawk, disguised red-tailed hawk, and so on. Disguised red-tailed hawk further cleaves into well-disguised red-tailed hawk, poorly disguised red-tailed hawk, and so on. Bertie can eliminate some sub-possibilities, but not others. We can say an error possibility is addressed by the evidence when the possibility is rendered into branched sub-alternatives, and each sub-alternative is either eliminated by his evidence or lies beyond the disregardability threshold. Strictly speaking, then, error possibilities are typically addressed rather than eliminated, since in almost every case some remote sub-possibilities remain uneliminated. This inevitable remainder fuels the skeptical challenge.10 Typically evidence that eliminates relevant error possibilities also makes the belief more numerically probable. That is, increasing quantifiable balance and eliminating error possibilities normally coincide. But they can diverge. A person's evidence can eliminate myriad error subpossibilities, yet the truth or falsity of p remains well-balanced. Consider a crime mystery before the culprit is revealed. Ideally many error sub-possibilities are addressed by available evidence, yet the remaining rival hypotheses about the crime have similar probabilities. Conversely, evidence can render a claim numerically highly probable, but leave relevant alternatives unaddressed. Consider believing that, given the odds, a fair D20 die will score between one and nineteen. This 10 Uneliminated error sub-possibilities inevitably remain, except for when p is the cogito; the skeptical challenge cannot root there. 7 is very probably true, but the evidence fails to address a relevant error possibility, namely that the die lands twenty.11 We can set aside the question of whether the relevant alternatives condition holds about knowledge. We can instead apply the relevant alternatives framework to central questions about the epistemology of risk: risk levels affect the location of the disregardability threshold. And, as I explain in section seven, perhaps it affects relative remoteness of error possibilities. 4. Action, Stakes, and Evidence The first locus of the epistemology of risk asks whether and how the gravity of the practical circumstances affects whether an amount of evidential support suffices for relying on a belief for action. This locus focuses on the consequences of acting were the belief false. Plausibly if these consequences are significant, the person's evidence must be better than if the consequences are less significant. You can properly purchase a pencil on the evidence that a non-expert mentions it is good value for money. You cannot properly-under normal circumstances-purchase a car on this meagre evidence. The relevant alternatives approach says that if it matters significantly whether the belief is true, the sphere of relevant alternatives accordingly increases; when stakes are higher, the disregardability threshold is more distant. The stakes sensitivity of whether evidence suffices for action stems from two distinct kinds of error cost. Firstly, it can matter that your belief is true, rather than false. The mattering is rooted in having a true belief (rather than whether p). Secondly, the mattering can be rooted in whether p, given your deliberative context. These can come apart, illustrating two distinct sources of the stakes-sensitivity of whether evidence suffices for action. To illustrate the first source, it does not matter whether your job interviewer's name is Jill or Jane, but it is paramount your belief is correct; it matters not what your passport number is, it only matters that you transcribe it accurately on visa applications. In such cases, it matters that S's belief is true, rather than false, but it does not matter much whether p rather than not p. For examples of the second kind-cases where it matters whether p, and this mattering underwrites why it matters that S tracks whether p-recall Hiram's high stakes. It makes a considerable difference to Hiram whether the bank is open, and this difference means Hiram must track whether p. The substantial costs of not p within Hiram's deliberative context explain why he needs excellent evidence before relying on p.12 There are two related kinds of practical stakes concerning relying on beliefs for action, but they do not underwrite stakes sensitivity about whether evidence suffices for action. Firstly, it can matter for action whether S possesses a belief, but it matters not whether the belief is true. Suppose S will not apply for a job unless he first acquires the confidence-inspiring belief 'I am tall', for 11 Different relevant alternative theories offer various explanations for why this error possibility cannot be ignored. Explanations include that it could easily happen (cf. Pritchard 2005) or is a normal outcome (cf. Smith 2010, 2016), reasonable action and assertion demand attending to the possibility and a reasonable person would attend to it (Lawlor 2013: 164), the possibility is not destabilising (McKinnon 2013), or is salient (Jackson 2018), the result actually obtains or is relevantly similar to the actual outcome (Lewis 1996: 557), and that social convention renders the possibility relevant (Heller 1989). 12 This distinction differs from Worsnip's (2015, forthcoming) gloss on A-stakes and W-stakes. On Worsnip's account, the passport number has high W-stakes, for example. This is because Worsnip glosses high W-stakes as holding fixed a particular attitude (such as believing the number is 75797825), it matters a great deal what the world is like (whether the number is 75797825). Here I find fault with Worsnip's distinction. Insofar as there are two sources of stakes-sensitivity-viz, (i.) what matters is that S has a true belief and (ii.) what matters is that p obtains, given S's practical context-Worsnip's result indicates his gloss does not aptly capture this distinction. The passport example isolates the first source of stakes, but on his view qualifies as high W-stakes. Indeed, I aver Worsnip's account cannot allow for isolating A-stakes-only cases. I am grateful to Alex Worsnip for helpful conversations. 8 example. But whether S is tall does not matter, and whether his belief is true does not matter. It only matters whether S possesses the belief. Secondly it can matter greatly whether p, and S's deliberative context hinges on whether p, yet S's action is unimportant and so it matters little whether S possesses a true belief about whether p. Suppose S bases an insignificant and irrelevant decision on whether a tidal wave hits a distant coastal town. Whether p is true is extremely important, but whether S possesses a true belief is not. Neither of these two kinds of practical stake underwrite the stakes-sensitivity of whether evidence suffices for acting on a belief, since in neither case does the practical significance concern whether the belief is true. In the first case it only matters whether p is believed; it matters not whether p or whether S has a true belief. In the latter case it only matters whether p is true; it matters little what S believes or whether their belief is true. To illustrate the relevant alternatives model of how stakes affects whether evidence suffices for action, recall low-stakes Loren. It does not matter whether her cheque is deposited before Saturday evening. Consider claim B, the bank will be open tomorrow. Loren's evidence can eliminate the most ordinary error possibilities for B, such as the bank only operates Monday to Friday. She can address this mundane possibility because she recollects Saturday customers six months ago. We can imagine an intermediate case, in which it matters somewhat whether the cheque is deposited. The protagonist-let's call her Middy-is in middle stakes. If her paycheque is not deposited before Saturday evening, she will incur an $80 overdraft fee. In this intermediate case, more distant error possibilities become relevant-caution demands that the sphere of relevance expands. The disregardability threshold is more distant. Consider the error possibility that the bank reduced its operating hours in the last few months, or that she was mistaken about seeing it open on a Saturday. Perhaps it was not a Saturday or was not open. Such error possibilities might be disregardable in low stakes contexts, such as Loren's, but are relevant in higher stakes. Given these higher stakes, to appropriately rely on her belief, Middy must address these possibilities. One way she could address them is reading the opening hours on the sign as she passes on Friday. Gathering this additional evidence for B addresses these more distant error possibilities. Even if she duly reads the sign, some error sub-possibilities remain. (Recall that uneliminated subpossibilities almost always inevitably remain.) Perhaps the bank recently changed its hours and the sign is outdated, for example, or perhaps she is mistaken that it is Friday and it is already Saturday. But plausibly she can disregard these more remote error sub-possibilities. They are rather distant and farfetched. Now suppose it is crucial the paycheque is deposited before Saturday evening. Hiram risks eviction. Given these higher stakes, more remote error possibilities are relevant and must be addressed before Hiram can rely on his belief. The relevant alternatives framework helps model risk aversion. People with high risk tolerance see the disregardability threshold as relatively nearby. They are happy to ignore closer error possibilities than risk averse people. They treat as disregardable the possibility the bank changed its hours, for example, even when risking fees or eviction. People with low risk tolerance see the disregardability threshold as more distant. They want to address relatively distant error possibilities even with low error costs. In addition to differences in absolute risk aversion, people differ in sensitivity to variations in costs when deciding whether they can rely on a belief. One person might always seek to address distant error possibilities, regardless of error costs. Another might disregard relatively mundane possibilities, even in high stakes. These people differ significantly in risk aversion. The second has far higher risk tolerance. But they share the feature of relative insensitivity to risk magnitude; their caution level is not appropriately attuned to stakes. In short, the relevant alternatives framework for modelling the epistemology of risk holds that when more is at stake-when error is costlier-increasingly distant error possibilities must be eliminated before a person can rely on the claim. The relevant alternatives condition for knowledge 9 posits the 'relevant to knowledge' threshold. The relevant alternatives framework applied to locus one-the relationship between evidence and action and how this relationship is affected by practical risks-posits the 'relevant given the practical context' threshold. This threshold is sensitive to error costs.13 Gardiner (2019b) adapts the relevant alternatives framework to model three legal standards of proof. These are preponderance of evidence, clear and convincing evidence, and beyond reasonable doubt. I argue that these three standards correspond to three concentric rings of disregardability. This project is located within the first locus of the epistemology of risk. As I describe in section seven, perhaps relative remoteness of error possibilities is also affected by error costs. It is worth emphasising one can endorse the relevant alternatives framework for the epistemology of risk, with its stakes-sensitive disregardability threshold, but reject a relevant alternatives condition on knowledge. Or one can endorse a stakes-sensitive disregardability threshold for action, and endorse the relevant alternatives condition on knowledge, yet maintain the disregardability threshold for knowledge is stakes insensitive. That is, the proposed framework is consistent with purism about knowledge.14 5. Remoteness and Relevance The overall relevant alternatives framework is a skeletal structure that can be combined with various accounts of what determines remoteness of possibilities.15 These include whether the alternative is true, normal, or statistically probable. Plausibly alternatives are relevant if they spring readily to mind or if virtuous inquirers would prioritise them. On some relevant alternative accounts, such as that proposed by David Lewis (1996), an alternative is relevant if it saliently resembles an alternative that is relevant.16 I advance a schema: I motivate a framework to rival the quantifiable balance conception of evidential support. Theorists can couple the schematic framework with competing claims about what determines remoteness to yield different relevant alternatives accounts. In this essay I focus on five features that might contribute to the remoteness of an alternative. Firstly, I explore, but do not endorse, the idea that the actual can never be properly ignored. On this view, if a proposition is true it is thereby non-remote. If the bank is actually a Monday-toFriday only bank, for example, this source of error is thereby relevant. This idea enjoys plausibility: if a proposition is true, the person should not instead believe a false incompatible claim. Note, though, that if alternatives are rendered relevant in virtue of actually obtaining, then ruling out all 13 Cf. Lewis (1996: n.12), Cf. Moss (2021), and Bolinger (ms-b). 14 Rysiew (2006) and Bradley (2014) argue for the universal appeal of the relative alternatives framework. See also Hannon (2015). The relevant alternatives framework proposed here says that whether a person has sufficient evidence to rely on a proposition is sensitive to practical factors. When coupled with some knowledge-action links, impurism about knowledge results. Theorists who endorse the proposed relevant alternatives framework-where the disregardability threshold depends on deliberative context-but endorse purism about knowledge, should deny the knowledge-action links. Cf. Fantl and McGrath (2002, 2007, 2009), Stanley (2005), Brown (2008, 2014), Reed (2010), Gerken (2017). 15 Cf. Lewis (1996), Dretske (1970, 1971), Stine (1976), Goldman, (1976), Gerken (2017), Lawlor (2013), McKinnon (2013), Ho (2008). See also the summary in footnote 11. Some factors might explain an alternative's remoteness, whilst others are hallmarks of remoteness. 16 Lewis (1996: 556) describes constraints on the rule of resemblance. 10 relevant alternatives to p is factive. If p is false then a relevant alternative-the truth-remains uneliminated.17 Secondly, an error possibility is nearby to the extent it is a normal source of error. When people believe p given their evidence, an alternative proposition is non-remote to the extent that it is typically true. If the error possibility is abnormal given the evidence, it is remote. If broad-winged hawk is a normal source of error when people believe they see a red-shouldered hawk, then 'broadwinged hawk' is thereby a close error possibility; caution and diligence demand birdwatchers be sensitive to this common pitfall. Thirdly, if the evidence suggests an alternative obtains, this can render the alternative less remote. If the bird looks like a broad-winged hawk, for instance, this can make the alternative relevant. Notice evidence might render an error possibility relevant even if it is not a common or normal source of error. Suppose you believe the bank will be open tomorrow, but your passengers insist that the branch is closed on Saturdays. This evidence can, if your passengers seem competent, render the error possibility relevant even if no high street banks in your country are standardly closed on Saturdays. Good evidence for an error possibility can make it irresponsible to ignore that possibility, even if the evidence is ultimately misleading.18 Widespread belief can, under some circumstances, be evidence for that claim. Accordingly if an error possibility is widely believed, this can render it relevant. It is, under some circumstances, dogmatically stubborn to ignore uneliminated error possibilities that many other competent people take seriously. Fourthly, advocates of moral encroachment can posit that moral factors affect relative remoteness of error possibilities. If p has morally significant consequences, or could be morally harmful, for example, then perhaps alternatives to p are relevant in virtue of being less morally risky. On this view, particular individual error possibilities should be disregarded or addressed because of moral features. I explore this view in section seven, but I do not endorse it. Finally, convention can help determine which error possibilities a thinker should eliminate.19 She need not herself independently determine which possibilities are within relevance thresholds. People are not epistemic islands. She can defer to others by emulating what others tend to address, take seriously, mention, and disregard. Convention might help determine both how distant the disregardability threshold is and the relative remoteness of individual error possibilities. Social epistemology typically highlights ways we gain information, evidence, and skills from others. The relevant alternatives framework highlights another kind of epistemic dependence: we absorb from others a sense of which error possibilities are properly disregardable. I return to this in section eight. Convention can be domain-specific. Perhaps professional standards regard some alternatives as relevant, for example, that other professions can disregard. If p is 'the child died from a trampoline accident', a grievance counsellor can readily disregard filicide error possibilities. But the police investigator cannot. 17 Lewis (1996). A reviewer asks 'Why won't this idea make all kinds of errors collapse into errors of misplaced relevance threshold?' To clarify: The error is failing to realise that a particular error possibility is non-remote. The believer takes the possibility to be ignorably remote when it is not because, unbeknownst to them, it actually obtains. They thus misjudge the relative remoteness of a specific possibility. The believer might be correct about the location of the disregardability threshold, but be mistaken about the remoteness of a specific error possibility. 18 Suppose p is 'the classroom is safe' and error possibility T is 'Ted plans a shooting today'. If evidence, such as an anonymous tip, indicates T, then T cannot be disregarded even if false and modally distant. That is, even if Ted is not planning a shooting and would never do so. 19 Cf. Lewis's (1996: 559) rule of conservation; Heller (1989). 11 One can adopt the relevant alternatives framework but disagree about which factors determine remoteness of error possibilities. Some theorists might hold remoteness is determined by the possibility's resemblance to the actual world, for instance, and deny remoteness can depend on social convention or what inquirers tend to consider. Others might posit the relative disregardability of error possibilities is determined in part by social convention, and so error possibilities can be closer in virtue of what possibilities people tend to think of addressing. This paper motivates a framework for illuminating the epistemology of risk, and thus its ultimate aim is relatively ecumenical about which features determine remoteness. I will note, though, a restriction and a reservation. First, the restriction. According to a relevant alternatives account of the epistemology of risk, whether an error possibility is disregardable is unaffected by fleeting features of conversation or thought, such as whether the (otherwise wholly farfetched and irrelevant) possibility is mentioned or is currently being considered. Allowing fleeting features to affect relevance would mean that whether a person's evidential position concerning p is sufficient to rely on her belief is hostage to fugacious features of the moment. If it does not matter whether the paycheque is deposited promptly, merely raising the possibility the bank changed its hours does not undermine Loren's acting appropriately. And even if stakes are high, Hiram's merely considering an evil demon does not render that possibility relevant. Secondly, readers might wonder whether remoteness of error possibility can be determined wholly by similarity to the actual world, so that possibilities are nearby just to the extent they resemble the actual world. The resulting view resembles Duncan Pritchard's modal account of risk, which itself descends from his safety account of knowledge.20 I have reservations, which I discuss in depth elsewhere and summarise here. Firstly, the resulting view is committed to the factivity of eliminating relevant alternatives. On a Pritchardian view, the actual is always relevant, and so one cannot eliminate all relevant alternatives to a false claim. The factivity of safety does not impede its use in an account of knowledge, since knowledge is factive. But factivity is less anodyne in an account of when a person may rely on belief in her deliberative context, when belief is justified, how to negotiate morally risky beliefs, and the epistemology of legal standards of proof such as 'preponderance of evidence'. The relevant alternatives framework offers flexibility: theorists can choose between factive and non-factive accounts. Secondly, a Pritchardian relevant alternatives account is unappealing to theorists skeptical about global similarity comparisons. The relevant alternatives framework, by contrast, does not hinge on the viability of global similarity comparisons.21 Further objections centre around how Pritchardian remoteness, and resulting appropriateness of belief and action, are determined by external facts concerning how the world actually is, and do not adequately reflect the agent's perspective and evidence. Gardiner (2020) argues that Pritchard's view cannot explain the epistemic flaw with profiling. Suppose a theft occurs and only two people, Jake and Barbara, could access the building. Suppose that S, based only on the statistical evidence that men commit theft at far higher rates, believes Jake rather than Barbara committed the theft.22 Pritchard argues his account explains the flaw in such beliefs: they are unsafe. I dispute this; in many such cases, the resulting belief is safe. This is because if Jake committed the crime he, not Barbara, did so in nearby worlds. 20 Pritchard (2005; 2015; 2017), Heller (1989). 21 Some people foster reservations about metaphysical underpinnings of Pritchard's account, such as possible worlds. These worries might be set aside because arguably one can recast Pritchard's account with a different metaphysical substrate. But global similarity comparisons are integral to Pritchard's account. 22 This example first appears in Buchak (2014). 12 Similarly, safety arguably legitimates ignoring base rate evidence when you ought not. Suppose Frank is tested for a rare genetic disease. He knows the testing method generates some false positives. The result is positive, and he forms the belief that he carries the disease. His belief is true, and he was genetically determined to carry the disease. For at least some versions of the example, Frank nonetheless should not form the belief; he commits the base rate fallacy. Yet his belief is safe. Not easily could his belief have been wrong, because it is a stable feature of Frank that he carries the disease. A Pritchardian version of the relevant alternatives framework, I claim, confronts problems explaining the error of Frank's belief. Plausibly an account of remoteness based solely on similarity to the actual world cannot explain the epistemic potency of misleading evidence. Suppose misleading evidence frames Ted as planning a school shooting. In fact, he does not and would not in nearby worlds. Plausibly the belief 'there will not be a school shooting' is safe on Pritchard's view. But police cannot disregard the misleading evidence. They must investigate. The relevant alternatives framework offers a ready explanation: evidence, even if misleading, renders error possibilities relevant. Finally, an account in which remoteness is determined solely by similarity to the actual world lacks resources to model the second way moral considerations might affect relevance, introduced in section seven, namely affecting relative remoteness of particular possibilities.23 For these reasons I am skeptical that remoteness is determined solely by similarity to the actual world. That said, there is room for reasonable disagreement, which is why I characterise it as a 'reservation', and not a 'restriction'. 6. Moral Encroachment and Relevant Alternatives I turn now to the second locus of the epistemology of risk-the putative risks, costs, and harms of the beliefs themselves, regardless of any actions that rely on the belief. Recall the earlier examples, Cosmos Club and Tipping Prediction. The woman and Spencer form beliefs about individuals based on membership of a racial group. Advocates of moral encroachment argue that, in at least some cases, such beliefs are morally wrong. The beliefs stereotype and pigeonhole individuals based on group-level features, fail to recognise people as individuals, and systematically judge people as occupying lower social status. Many advocates of moral encroachment also argue that such beliefs are impeccable by the lights of orthodox, purist epistemology. The beliefs are well-supported by the evidence, reliably formed and, in some cases, true. Advocates of moral encroachment argue that if beliefs can be morally wrong yet epistemically impeccable, then we can be epistemically permitted or even required to do something morally impermissible.24 As Mark Schroeder (2018a: 13) writes, Gendler argues that in cases like [the Cosmos Club] there is a conflict between epistemic rationality and avoiding implicit bias-given underlying statistical regularities in the world, many of which are directly or indirectly caused by past injustice, perfect respect for the evidence 23 Gardiner (2017) argues that safety cannot account for the epistemic value of knowledge because safety is always determined by other properties-such as good reasons and evidence-and those other properties, not safety, confer epistemic value. I am grateful to Duncan Pritchard for many helpful conversations on these topics. 24 Cf. Bolinger (forthcoming), Basu and Schroeder (2019), Basu (2018, forthcoming-a), Moss (2018a, 2018b), Schroeder (2018b), Gendler (2011). For critical discussion, see Gardiner (2018a), Toole (ms), Bolinger (ms-b), Fritz (ms), Fritz and Jackson (ms). 13 will require sometimes forming beliefs like the woman in the club. But the belief that the woman forms is racist. And I hold out hope that epistemic rationality does not require racism. If it does not, then the costs of [the woman's] belief must play a role in explaining why the evidential standards are higher, for believing that a black man at a club in Washington, DC is staff. And I believe that they are-a false belief that a black man is staff not only diminishes him, but diminishes him in a way that aggravates an accumulated store of past injustice. [Italics added.] Advocates of moral encroachment claim that epistemic demands are partially shaped by moral features of beliefs. The vignettes do not exhibit conflict between moral and epistemic demands, they argue, because moral features affect whether the belief is epistemically justified. Given the moral significance of such beliefs, moral encroachment holds, more evidence is required for the belief to qualify as epistemically justified. Moral Encroachment. The epistemic justification of a belief can depend on its moral features. In the above quote, Schroeder contends that purist epistemology cannot explain the apparent conflict between epistemic and moral demands in Cosmos Club and Tipping Prediction. The challenge he sets is explaining the moral and epistemic normativity in such cases within a purist framework without concluding that epistemic normativity requires morally impermissible beliefs.25 One strategy for responding to Schroeder's challenge holds that such beliefs violate epistemic demands of purist epistemology. The cases do not threaten purist epistemology because purist epistemology would not condone such beliefs.26 The relevant alternatives framework bolsters this strategy. The relevant alternatives condition on knowledge, recall, holds: Relevant Alternatives Condition on Knowledge. S knows that p only if S can rule out relevant alternatives to p. The relevant alternatives condition suggests a purist reply to Schroeder's challenge. In each vignette that putatively motivates moral encroachment, the believer fails to eliminate a relevant alternative. This precludes knowledge-level epistemic standing, and so the belief is epistemically faulty according to purist epistemology. Advocates of moral encroachment claim the beliefs in cases like Cosmos Club and Tipping Prediction are, according to purism, 'epistemically impeccable' and exhibit 'perfect respect for the evidence'.27 The relevant alternatives framework suggests this claim is false. Crucially, this purist response to Schroeder's challenge holds the belief violates purist epistemic demands. The relevance of the uneliminated relevant alternative is independent from moral features of the case. 25 Versions of this challenge are articulated in Gendler (2011), Basu (2018; forthcoming-a), and Gardiner (2018a). See also the 'problem of coordination' in Basu and Schroeder (2019). Note that advocates of moral encroachment must explain the status of testimonial beliefs in such cases. That is, if the woman tells a third-party that Franklin is staff, is the hearer's belief epistemically justified? This question interrogates whether the relevant moral stakes are transferred by testimony. If they are not transferred, this suggests a form of knowledge laundering (cf. MacFarlane (2005)). If they are, the moral encroachment account should explain why the stakes remain high, given that the hearer's belief is based on testimony rather than profiling. Accounts that locate the moral stakes in the social effects of such beliefs, rather than the believer's moral conduct, will likely fare better at this. I am grateful to the Moral Encroachment Reading Group at Oxford University for insightful discussion on these topics. 26 Gardiner (2018a) defends purism by arguing such beliefs are not well supported by the evidence. Cf. Munton (2019), Toole (ms). 27 Schroeder (2018a; 2018b), Basu and Schroeder (2019). 14 Consider the claim that John Hope Franklin is a club member. This is an error possibility for the woman's belief that Franklin is an attendant. Relevant alternative theorists who hold that error possibilities are relevant in virtue of actually obtaining have a simple explanation. On such views, the proposition's truth-Franklin is a member-renders it relevant. The woman does not rule out this possibility, and so her belief is not knowledge. Those who deny that truth renders relevant can appeal to other resources: The error possibility is relevant because it is a common source of error. People often mistake Franklin, and black members generally, for staff. Or it is relevant because suggested by available evidence, such as Franklin's lack of uniform. The error possibility is a normal circumstance and is one an epistemically virtuous inquirer would think to address. The relevant alternatives framework can thereby respond to the challenge from moral encroachment by giving a purist account of the central motivating cases: The believer fails to rule out a relevant error possibility, and the possibility is relevant for purist reasons. This response to Schroeder's challenge undermines the motivation for endorsing moral encroachment. Some theorists hold that moral encroachment only affects the epistemic status of false beliefs.28 On such views, Cosmos Club illustrates moral encroachment, but Tipping Prediction does not. The Cosmos Club belief is false, and false racial profiling constitutes distinctive wrongs, and so the belief needs more evidential support to qualify as epistemically justified. Many purist relevant alternative accounts readily explain purist epistemic error with such beliefs. The belief is false, and so (according to prominent relevant alternative theories) there is at least one uneliminated relevant error possibility, namely, the truth.29 For accounts that deny that truth renders an alternative relevant, note that since the alternative is true, typically other features obtain that render the alternative relevant. It is normal and mundane, modally nearby, widely believed, a common source of error, and so on. In most cases there will be evidence or overlooked clues indicating the true error possibility obtains. Thus, where p is false, typically there is at least one uneliminated relevant alternative. And, I aver, for vignettes in which there is no uneliminated relevant alternative, we accordingly lack the intuition that the belief commits any moral (or epistemic) fault to explain. Most advocates of moral encroachment hold that moral features can also affect the epistemic status of true beliefs.30 They claim moral features of Spencer's belief can increase the amount of evidence needed to justify his belief, even though his belief is true and-by hypothesis-well supported by evidence.31 A purist relevant alternatives account plausibly highlights epistemic flaws in such cases-cases where the target belief is true-without invoking moral encroachment. Plausibly in such cases, p is true-Spencer will tip lower than average-but relevant alternatives remain uneliminated. A relevant alternatives account can thereby explain such cases while retaining purism. To see how, consider a related example, from Moss (2018b). Administrative Assistant. A consultant visits an office. He knows few people visit the office who are not employees and that almost every woman employee is an administrative assistant. The consultant sees a woman and forms the belief 'she is an administrative assistant'. His belief is true. Although his belief is true and (putatively) well-supported by the evidence, the consultant's evidence fails to eliminate relevant error possibilities. Alternatives include that the woman is a 28 One must not conflate (i.) whether moral features affect the epistemic justification of true beliefs or only affects false beliefs with (ii.) whether moral encroachment arises from costly beliefs or only from risky beliefs. Several theorists, such as Moss (2018a) and Schroeder (2018b) hold that only riskiness-not costliness-gives rise to moral encroachment, but maintain that moral features can affect the epistemic status of true beliefs. 29 Cf. Lewis (1996: 554)'s rule of actuality. 30 Cf. Moss (2018a: 19), Basu (2018), Schroeder (2018b), Bolinger (forthcoming). 31 Gardiner (2018a) describes purist epistemic flaws with Spencer's belief. 15 visitor, interviewee, researcher, manager, custodian, caterer, and so on. These alternatives are not eliminated by the consultant's evidence. (Some sub-possibilities may be eliminated, such as her being a caterer in catering uniform.) And plausibly at least some of these alternatives are relevant. They might be relevant because the possibilities are normal, everyday, or suggested by his evidence. Perhaps there are several woman researchers at the office, for example, and these women render relevant the possibility that the observed woman is also a researcher. Perhaps her being a manager is rendered relevant because mistaking a woman boss for an administrative assistant is a common error, or underestimating professional status on the basis of gender is a common source of error. These are purist epistemic flaws with the consultant's belief. His evidence does not eliminate relevant error possibilities, and the error possibilities are relevant for purist epistemic reasons. In general, statistical demographic evidence-when used to support outright beliefs about individuals-leaves relevant error possibilities uneliminated. That is, bare statistical evidence cannot, in most cases, eliminate all relevant alternatives.32 This is because, if evidence is purely statistical, possibilities in which an individual does not conform to their reference class are not evidentially distinguished from possibilities in which they do conform. Given only demographic evidence, the error possibilities are not farfetched compared to the target claim p. The alternatives are commensurate along important epistemic dimensions, including those that determine farfetchedness.33 To illustrate: Men tend to have shorter hair than women, and an arbitrarily selected woman probably has longer hair than the average adult hair length. Suppose now we arbitrarily select a woman and, using only this evidence, form the outright belief that her hair is longer than average. Given all we know is her gender and the general demographic statistic, the possibility her hair length is longer than average is just as preponderant as the possibility that it is shorter than average. Nothing about the case makes one claim more preponderant, relevant, salient, or normal than the other. The case is epistemically similar to-perhaps identical with-a lottery case. Since at least one possibility is relevant, and nothing distinguishes the possibilities' remoteness, the error possibilities are also relevant. Thus, we cannot rule out a relevant alternative and so lack knowledge.34 The relevant alternatives account can thereby explain epistemic errors exhibited by cases that motivate moral encroachment, and can do so within a purist framework. It can answer Schroeder's challenge, and undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. It also makes a prediction: For vignettes in which there is no uneliminated relevant alternative, we accordingly lack the intuition that the belief has any moral (or epistemic) fault to explain. The reason we judge there is something amiss with the consultant's belief, for example, is that he believes despite uneliminated relevant error possibilities. 32 Lewis (1996: 557) outlines a relevant alternatives explanation of lottery beliefs. Cf. Jackson (2018), Smith (2010; 2016), Moss (2018a; 2018b), and Gardiner (forthcoming-b). 33 Given bare statistical evidence, error possibilities might be statistically improbable, but they can be normal outcomes, modally nearby, true, typical sources of error, outcomes to which we are insensitive, and so on. Gardiner (2020) evaluates which epistemic values are secured-and, crucially, not secured-by bare statistical evidence. Note most social judgements are not based on statistical evidence. People draw on appearances, interpretation, stereotypes, associations, and so on. Note also social statistics usually have low magnitudes. A lottery example might underwrite an extremely low probability of error, but realistic social base rates do not. An arbitrary woman likely has longer-than-average hair, for example, but the probability magnitude is relatively slim. On many relevant alternatives accounts, to the extent the error possibility is likely, it is accordingly less remote. 34 We can find ways to discriminate the two possibilities, of course. Suppose someone tells us the person's hair is long. The only uneliminated sub-possibilities in which her hair is shorter than average are ones where the informant has outdated information, a poor understanding of hair length, or is mistaken about the woman's identity. These remaining possibilities are more distant. 16 7. A Model for Moral Encroachment In section six I argued against moral encroachment. Specifically I articulated epistemic flaws exhibited within the central cases marshalled to motivate moral encroachment, but did so within a purist relevant alternatives framework. I deny moral encroachment, but the relevant alternatives framework can instead serve to develop the view. Recall the central vignettes that motivate moral encroachment, such as Cosmos Club, Tipping Prediction, and Administrative Assistant. Advocates of moral encroachment could argue the central moral and epistemic flaw exemplified by such cases is the believer fails to eliminate a relevant alternative and-crucially for moral encroachment-moral features underwrite why the alternative is relevant. On this view, it is because the belief is morally wrong, risky, or costly, that uneliminated alternatives are preponderant. The view qualifies as moral encroachment because moral features affect the belief's epistemic status. To test for moral encroachment, we can contrast the vignette with one where the evidence is equivalent, but the belief is-by the lights of moral encroachment-morally neutral. If the epistemic status of the belief differs, this indicates moral encroachment. Advocates of moral encroachment might argue, for example, that Spencer's belief denigrates people on the basis of race. And this moral fact makes particular error possibilities relevant, namely error possibilities that do not denigrate people based on race. A relative alternatives approach to moral encroachment holds, for example, that before an individual can justifiably believe p, where p is racist, they must first eliminate various particular error possibilities. And those error possibilities are rendered relevant by the fact that p is racist, and the particular error possibilities are non-racist interpretations of the evidence. Sarah Moss (2018b: 221) employs a relevant alternative condition to explain cases like Administrative Assistant. She argues for a moral rule of consideration, which holds: [I]n many situations where you are forming beliefs about a person, you morally should keep in mind the possibility that they might be an exception to statistical generalizations. To give an intuitive example, as you form beliefs about a woman in an office building, you should keep in mind the possibility that she is unlike the average woman in the building with respect to whether she is probably an administrative assistant. That is, you should keep in mind the possibility that she probably has some other position. Moss argues this rule, if followed, renders salient an error possibility. By following the rule, the consultant thereby considers the possibility, which makes it relevant. Since his evidence cannot eliminate this possibility, his belief fails to qualify as knowledge. Moss (2018a: 191) explains, 'if [a person] abides by the moral rule of consideration as she forms an opinion by racial profiling, her opinion may fail to be knowledge, since it will be inconsistent with salient possibilities that she cannot rule out.' But Moss's relevant alternatives approach to moral encroachment faces a problem. The moral rule of consideration cannot explain an epistemic fault in those cases where people simply fail to abide by the moral norm. If the consultant violates the norm, by failing to 'keep in mind the possibility that [the woman] might be an exception to statistical generalizations', this error possibility remains irrelevant on Moss's view; the norm does not generate an uneliminated error possibility. This is because, on Moss's view, the error possibility is relevant only because considered. Moss (2018a: 192) notes this problem and suggests other features of moral encroachment explains cases where the believer violates the moral norm. But if these other features explain cases where the moral norm is violated, they might equally explain cases where the norm is followed. This can 17 leave the moral rule of consideration explanatorily redundant. This is because if Moss's moral norm obtains-S should bear the error possibility in mind-it obtains only because the error possibility is rendered epistemically relevant by moral facts. Salience drops out of the picture. Note too that linking relevance to what is being considered, as Moss does, violates the restriction articulated in section five. On Moss's view, whether relevant alternatives are eliminated can depend on fleeting features of context. I propose that a better relevant alternatives account is available to advocates of moral encroachment. Advocates of moral encroachment should posit that moral facts themselves determine whether error possibilities are relevant. Whether non-racist error possibilities are relevant is not hostage to whether Spencer follows the moral norm of consideration. On this proposal, relevance is not mediated only by what is considered. Relevance is directly affected by moral facts. Moral facts can, on this proposal, affect which error possibilities are relevant in two ways. The first is that high moral stakes mean that additional alternatives are relevant; increasingly farfetched error possibilities must be eliminated for the belief to qualify as epistemically justified. Given the high moral stakes, in other words, the disregardability threshold expands. This mechanism is familiar from section four. The second potential role is more controversial. It holds that moral considerations can render particular individual error possibilities relevant or irrelevant, precisely because they are morally differentiated. This second role does not simply move the disregardability threshold, expanding or contracting the set of relevant alternatives; it affects the relative disregardability of particular alternatives.35 To illustrate, recall the consultant's belief that the woman is an administrative assistant. Suppose 'researcher' and 'custodian' error possibilities are equally evidentially supported. Some advocates of moral encroachment claim the possibility that the woman is a researcher is rendered relevant by moral considerations, while the custodian possibility is not. Advocates of moral encroachment might posit this is because researcher and custodian alternatives exhibit different moral features.36 According to this second moral encroachment role for moral considerations, the possibility the woman is a researcher can be relevant, undermining the consultant's knowledge, whilst the possibility the woman is a custodian remains irrelevant. This exemplifies particular alternatives being rendered relevant by moral features. Particular alternatives can also be rendered irrelevant by moral features. Perhaps in some cases the error possibility that a speaker is lying about mistreatment, for example, is treated as remote, and so disregardable, for moral reasons. Suppose a woman says that she left her doctoral programme because her senior male advisor plagiarised her research, for example. Consider the error possibility that instead she was not sufficiently motivated or organised to complete the programme. Some versions of moral encroachment hold this error possibility is disregardable-it should be treated as remote-because of moral contours of the case. From an impartial perspective, it is plausibly an ordinary error possibility. Doctorates are difficult to earn, students leave because illsuited, and people frequently underplay or confabulate causes of perceived failures. Advisor's work can innocuously resemble students'. In some contexts, such as designing university pastoral care, 35 I am grateful to Kyle Scott, Dominic Alford-Duguid, and the Moral Encroachment Reading Group at Oxford University for helpful discussions. 36 This is not something I endorse, but presumably some advocates of moral encroachment do, since employment examples are frequently used to motivate moral encroachment. Perhaps some such employment examples merely illustrate judging individuals based on race, regardless of social status. But usually relative social status plays some dialectical role. 18 we must acknowledge the ordinariness of such possibilities. Many theorists endorse the idea that, for at least some purposes, we can disregard these possibilities and believe the woman for moral reasons. Some versions of moral encroachment endorse such beliefs as epistemically justified because of these moral contours.37 According to this second role, moral factors do not simply affect the location of the disregardability threshold; moral factors also affect the relative preponderance of possibilities. To be clear, I do not endorse moral encroachment. I instead think the relevant alternatives framework helps undermine the motivations for moral encroachment by responding to Schroeder's challenge. But it is a virtue of the relevant alternatives framework that it can distinguish and model these features of moral encroachment views. Most advocates of moral encroachment endorse the simple 'quantifiable balance' conception of the relationship between stakes, evidence, and justification.38 On this model, stakes affect the quantifiable probability of truth required for a belief to qualify as justified. If stakes are high, evidential probability must accordingly be higher. But this simple quantifiable balance model cannot capture the second potential role for moral considerations. The relevant alternatives framework, by contrast, can distinguish and model these two distinct potential roles. Similarly, the relevant alternatives framework also provides resources to model faith, such as faith in God's existence or a partner's romantic fidelity. Having faith in claim p can be understood as treating nearby error possibilities as if they are distant-that is, as more distant than impartial assessment would permit or more distant than the relevant disregardability threshold. This occurs in the two ways outlined above. The overall threshold for disregardability is affected or assessment of particular individual possibilities is affected. Thus the relevant alternatives framework can illuminate the second locus for the epistemology of risk by either undermining the motivation for moral encroachment or, alternatively, by providing resources to model the nuances of moral encroachment.39 As I develop below, the relevant alternatives framework also illuminates the third locus of the epistemology of risk, the vulnerabilities and risks we face as socially-situated epistemic agents. 37 Such moral or political reasoning might underwrite some general calls to 'believe women' about rape accusations. Ferzan (ms) and Bolinger (ms-a) discuss the epistemology of #BelieveWomen. Gardiner (ms) argues that rape accusations are highly likely to be true, which provides purist reasons for belief. Note the above error possibility includes that the woman is lying or mistaken about her advisor. Lying about mistreatment is (plausibly) relatively unusual, which provides purist reason for treating the error possibility as somewhat remote-it is somewhat remote. Gardiner (forthcoming-a) employs the relevant alternatives framework to illuminate the epistemology of rape accusations. 38 Cf. Worsnip's (forthcoming) discussion of the 'beaker model' and Bolinger's (ms-b) distinction between thresholdraising and sphere-expanding variants of moral encroachment. A further objection to the rival quantifiable balance model for moral encroachment is that for many cases, simply having stronger evidence of the same kind does not solve the problem. If the belief is based on profiling, for example, the problem is not solved simply by having stronger (non-extremal) statistical support. The quantifiable balance model cannot explain why the problem remains, since according to the quantifiable balance model, the only available solution is increasing evidential probability. A relevant alternatives account, by contrast, offers a remedy: evidence must address particular error possibilities. 39 One virtue of the relevant alternatives framework for modelling epistemic risk is its superiority over rival accounts at explaining the central vignettes used to explore the epistemology and morality of profiling. These vignettes include the iPhone, taxi, and prisoner cases, and the three vignettes above. Cf. Nesson (1979), Thomson (1986), Buchak (2014), and Enoch, Spectre, and Fisher (2012). Elsewhere I argue that rival views-specifically, safety, sensitivity, causal relation, normic support, and quantifiable balance accounts-cannot explain why judgements exhibited in these vignettes are epistemically flawed. See Gardiner (2018a, 2018b, 2020, forthcoming-b, forthcoming-c). Rather than criticising rival accounts, this essay instead focuses on developing and motivating the relevant alternatives framework. 19 8. Social Epistemic Risks: Testilying, Crying Wolf, Conspiracy Theories, Gaslighting The relevant alternatives framework highlights and systematises two kinds of error. Firstly, a person can err by treating as remote an error possibility that is relatively ordinary. Suppose S treats the possibility that a priest or police officer lies about their conduct, for example, as farfetched and so disregardable. If such error possibilities are not remote, this inaccurate background assumption breeds ignorance. Suppose S considers claim p, and disregards an error possibility because it involves a priest's lying. Ignorance results because either (i.) p is falsely believed or (ii.) p is true and believed but unknown because of uneliminated relevant error possibilities. Secondly, the converse error treats a farfetched error possibility as ordinary and so relevant. Suppose children rarely lie about sexual molestation by religious leaders, for example, and that almost never have multiple children conspired to falsely accuse. Now suppose eight children each accuse a particular priest of molestation, but the village elders take very seriously the error possibility that the children conspired against the priest. This potential source of doubt is remote, but the elders deem it relevant. The children cannot provide evidence they did not conspire, and so the elders do not believe the children. The elders err by treating a remote source of doubt as relevant. These two kinds of error are, in some domains, committed systemically. That is, the errors are not randomly distributed. Misestimates of remoteness of certain kinds of error possibility exhibit patterns. This systemic misestimation, in at least some cases, comprises systemic social epistemic injustice.40 These kinds of error-and concomitant social epistemic injustice-are pernicious. The envisioned remoteness of an error possibility is typically implicit and not easily raised to explicit attention. It is fuelled by prejudice, emotion, upbringing, and social context, and so is likely resistant to counterevidence. Misplacements of error possibilities might be difficult to discuss, diagnose, and correct. It can be relatively easy to tell whether someone lacks evidence. It can be harder to communicate about relative perceived remoteness of error possibilities. This discussion highlights an epistemic danger we face, not as believers but as testifiers. The relevant alternatives framework illuminates and systematises how a person's conduct-and the conduct of other members of their social group-can undermine their credibility. Suppose a police officer lies under oath. She might conceive of this as benign. She aims only to secure conviction in this one trial. But in so doing she thereby helps make relevant the error possibility that police officers commit perjury. This error possibility can thus become relevant to each legal proceeding involving police testimony, making it harder to prove claims beyond a reasonable doubt. Indeed, the term 'testilying' has been coined to describe police officers committing perjury. Instances of police perjury infect police witness statements in other trials. Similarly suppose a wife lies to her partner about her health. She might do this only occasionally, to protect her partner's feelings. But in so doing she renders the error possibility that she is lying relevant when making other similar assertions. The possibility is no longer remote. Thus the relevant alternatives framework helps model the phenomenon of undermining one's own credibility. It similarly models the epistemological force of 'crying wolf'. Social epistemology often focuses on the evidence we possess, and our abilities and resources for accessing further evidence. A community can enfeeble an individual's epistemic position by failing 40 Gardiner (forthcoming-a) describes systematic misestimates concerning rape accusations. 20 to supply adequate educational and evidential opportunities. The relevant alternatives framework highlights a further epistemic vulnerability we face as socially-situated epistemic agents: Our community helps determine our relevant alternatives.41 A community thus has the ability to undermine or enfeeble an individual's epistemic position by raising error possibilities that are difficult to eliminate. This is illustrated by conspiracy theories. A community might take a particular conspiracy theory seriously, and thereby raise it to relevance. This is because, as noted in section five, the very fact that many people take seriously the possibility can constitute evidence it is true or is a serious possibility. Conspiracy theories can be difficult to eliminate; once live, they remain uneliminated relevant alternatives. Individuals in the community thereby face additional challenges in gaining associated knowledge.42 Compare two teenagers. One lives in a wealthy, privileged community. His friends and family do not entertain broad anti-government conspiracies. The idea is simply never raised. The second lives in a marginalised, poor community. Anti-government conspiracy theories are frequently raised, discussed, taken seriously, or presumed. Many friends and relatives treat them as true, or at least well-supported. Consider the claim that human-caused increases in CO2 emissions contribute substantially to climate change. Given some considerable evidence, such as a textbook, the first teen can know this claim with relative ease. The second teen faces more challenges. Plausibly his knowledge is threatened by the many live error possibilities his community forces upon him. He must eliminate more relevant alternatives-some of which, like conspiracy theories, are notoriously difficult to disprove. It is harder for him to gain knowledge.43 A related phenomenon occurs when an individual hijacks a person's epistemic context by raising error possibilities to relevance, or at least attempting to. A husband might ventilate error possibilities and so render it harder for his wife to possess knowledge and conviction. Suppose the wife initially believes p, 'My sister visits frequently because of sisterly affection'. Her husband might continually raise error possibilities, such as 'Your sister only contacts you when she wants something', 'She is stealing money during visits', 'She only likes to spend time with her nephew and cares little for you.' By repeatedly raising such possibilities, the husband can eventually cause them to become relevant where previously they were not. This is because the husband's intimations can provide evidence for error possibilities such as q, 'The visits are financially motivated'. Assertions like 'q' are typically evidence to believe their content, and the husband's various other assertions, such as 'Your sister is in debt again', can build a case for q. He draws attention to reasons to believe q rather than p, and thereby supplies his wife with evidence for q. If his campaign generates sufficient evidence, he no longer raises irrelevant possibilities; he himself has rendered them relevant. Given the wife's evidence-which includes sustained interactions with her husband-these rival explanations for her sister's visits are no longer remote possibilities. 41 Cf. Lewis's (1996: 559) rule of conservation. See also Blake-Turner (2020). Which error possibilities are relevant is partially determined by what the community considers disregardably farfetched. This socially-embedded aspect of the relevant alternatives approach might illuminate the Jamesian distinction between 'live' and 'dead' hypotheses (James, 1896). I am grateful to Kenny Easwaran for illuminating discussion. 42 Gardiner (forthcoming-a) asks whether society's treating an otherwise remote error possibility as relevant can render it relevant. Suppose a culture continually draws attention to the possibility that rape accusers are lying. I explore whether these error possibilities are thereby rendered relevant, perhaps because they are salient, spring readily to mind, or are taken seriously by others. If so, this can be understood as society-wide gaslighting; possibilities that should be deemed disregardably remote are inflicted upon evaluators as legitimate sources of doubt; evaluators are burdened with undue relevant alternatives. 43 It is worth emphasising that social marginalisation also engenders epistemic advantages, including evidence and heightened awareness of structural features of society, such as discrimination and barriers to social equity. 21 People are not epistemic islands, and it can be irresponsible to wholly ignore others and retain conviction despite others' doubts.44 In addition to constituting evidence for the error possibilities, gaslighting can render the possibilities relevant through other mechanisms. Perhaps she now begins to suspect, take seriously, or even believe the error possibilities. On some relevant alternatives accounts, this renders them relevant. And arguably trusting the motives of kin despite monitions from spouses is a common source of error. His gaslighting exploits the fact that, as a social pattern, his warning has good pedigree which should not be disregarded. On some views, the husband cannot affect which error possibilities are relevant simply by ventilating them. Relevance is instead determined by external features of the world, such as the sister's actual motives. According to these views, the husband only ever raises irrelevant possibilities. This can still lead to the wife's losing knowledge. She can lose conviction, and so no longer believe her sister's visits are motivated by affection, and she can mistakenly think the error possibilities are relevant-led astray by her husband-and so no longer believe responsibly. The husband can ventilate error possibilities, furthermore, without once uttering a falsehood. He can instead simply ask questions, assert true but suggestive observations, or draw attention to epistemic possibilities. Examples include: 'Is money missing from your purse?' 'Did you think your sister was behaving coldly today?' 'Was that your sister on the phone again? What does she want this time?' 'Family members can take advantage of elderly relatives.' 'Your sister's husband has a lot less money than I do.' 'Maybe your sister is in debt again.' If the husband avoids asserting falsehoods, his gaslighting thereby appears harder to rebut and responsibly disregard. The relevant alternatives framework explains why articulating questions and misleading truths are particularly insidious tools for gaslighting. They can raise error possibilities and obscure the appropriate response. Emphasising the epistemic significance of the distinction between relevant and irrelevant alternatives can be ameliorative. This hijacking of a person's error possibilities is particularly effective and pernicious when executed by a legitimate epistemic authority figure, such as a teacher or parent. This is because not only does the victim tend to consider these error possibilities, they often should consider them. Typically a person makes an epistemic error when they fail to address error possibilities raised by epistemic authorities. Normally an epistemic authority attending to an error possibility constitutes evidence the proposition is true or should be taken seriously. In short, the relevant alternatives framework can model key epistemic features of gaslighting: Gaslighting forces error possibilities onto a person. It burdens them with undue relevant alternatives.45 9. Unwitting Substitution Social epistemology has drawn attention to distinctly epistemic kinds of injustice. One central kind, a credibility deficit, is when a person's assertion is perceived as less credible that it warrants. This is commonly characterised as the hearer's underestimating the speaker's abilities, epistemic 44 In some marriages, granted, the wife can responsibly wholly ignore her husband and be confident he is wrong. But gaslighting is insidious and effective when she has some reason to trust or respect her partner, and it is these cases I have in mind. 45 Another illustration of gaslighting is when an individual is upset about someone's conduct. Claim p might be, for example, 'His actions were racist'. Interlocutors raise error possibilities: He didn't mean it, it wasn't racist, you're too sensitive, you misunderstood his comment. Cf. McKinnon (2017), Abramson (2014). My discussion of gaslighting benefitted greatly from conversations with Mark Alfano, Dominic Alford-Duguid, Renee Bolinger, Michael Ebling, and Jessie Munton. 22 credentials, insight, reliability, knowledge, or evidence. Crewe and Ichikawa (forthcoming) propose an alternative-compatible-mechanism of testimonial injustice.46 They suggest a speaker can suffer testimonial injustice when hearers unduly raise the epistemic standards when she speaks. After introducing epistemic contextualism and describing how rape accusations provoke undue levels of doubt, Crewe and Ichikawa (forthcoming: 20, n. 41) write: Testimonial injustice is a 'credibility deficit owing to identity prejudice in the hearer' (Fricker 2007, p. 28). A credibility deficit is naturally thought of as a lower-than-deserved confidence in one's credibility. An alternate proposal... might characterize the inappropriate invocation of high epistemic standards as a kind of credibility deficit. Perhaps one can commit an epistemic injustice, not by having too low an opinion of someone's credibility, but by setting too high a bar for accepting their word. Crewe and Ichikawa thereby invoke the apparatus of epistemic contextualism to illuminate the epistemic injustice of the disproportionate skepticism endemic to rape accusations. Disproportionate, that is, because they are typically true, yet are treated with suspicion. Note this epistemic injustice centres on assertion kinds, rather than individuals or social identities. One potential worry for Crewe and Ichikawa's proposal is if rape accusations do in fact raise the conversational epistemic stakes. Some theorists might hold that rape accusations are the kind of assertion that, by their nature, bring gravity to a discussion. If so, treating the stakes as raised is not epistemic injustice in the sense of an undue or disproportional reaction to an assertion. The speaker is not wronged by a hearer's mistake because, according to this view, the hearer does not commit a mistake. The hearer responds appropriately to the epistemic context. On this view, the scourge is not that people unfairly treat the stakes as raised; the scourge is that such assertions do in fact raise the stakes.47 The relevant alternatives framework suggests a novel species of epistemic injustice. Before I explain it, I will briefly recap a different species of epistemic injustice well-illuminated by the relevant alternatives framework. Hearers systematically overestimate which alternatives qualify as relevant. This can happen if a hearer thinks of the disregardability threshold as distant when it is not. (Suppose the threshold varies by practical context, and hearers overestimate the disvalue of falsely believing rape accusations.48) Or a hearer might overestimate the ordinariness of error 46 Ichikawa (forthcoming) develops this proposal. 47 Important clarifications: Firstly, even if the stakes are raised, hearers can err by overestimating this raise. Secondly, hearers can commit multiple simultaneous kinds of epistemic injustice. Various diagnoses are mutually compatible. Thirdly, even if such assertions characteristically raise the stakes because of the interests of the accused, the accuser also has interests, and these are largely overlooked or underplayed. Given the costs for the accuser of being disbelieved, Basu (2018) argues rape accusations illustrate that moral stakes can not only raise the evidential threshold, but also lower it. Finally, Gerken (forthcoming) and Dotson (2018) express a related worry, namely that according to pragmatic encroachment, it is proper to treat marginalised individuals as accordingly less knowledgeable; such hearers simply track that high stakes undermine knowledge. 48 A doubter, D, might opine 'the stakes are serious; the accused could go to prison'. Even in legal contexts, this is unlikely. But, regardless, that is not a consequence of D's belief; D is an ordinary member of society. In the public imagination, rape accusations are strongly associated with legal contexts, which drives up the perceived stakes. This association is specious. The conversational and deliberative context is almost always interpersonal and only rarely has legal, or even professional, consequences. An interlocutor said, to explain the high threshold for believing rape accusations, 'the usual context for such accusations is law courts' (and so, the thought goes, those high standards bleed into other contexts). This claim is false, and the mistake is common. The usual context for believing and asserting rape accusations has relatively low practical consequences, but this is not widely noted. Gardiner (forthcoming-a) employs epistemological tools-especially the relevant alternatives framework and the epistemic effects of stakes-to diagnose the undue doubt endemic to rape accusations. 23 possibilities. They think of error possibilities like 'the accuser is lying for financial gain' as nearby when such error possibilities are remote. Either way, the accuser faces undue skepticism. I turn now to the novel species of epistemic injustice. This species of injustice can occur with other kinds of assertion, but I illustrate with assertions about rape. A person articulates claim p, 'I was raped'. Hearers should treat 'I was raped' as the central claim, and only need consider relevant error possibilities to p. Normally assertions that p are treated as eliminating most or all relevant nearby not-p possibilities. The only remaining uneliminated error possibilities include things like 'she is lying about whether p' and 'she is mistaken about whether p'. Such error possibilities are- for most ordinary claims-treated as relatively remote possibilities. For most purposes and most assertions, these error possibilities can be disregarded.49 That is, when people assert p, they are typically believed without needing to also present evidence addressing the error possibilities that they are lying or mistaken. The epistemic injustice I delineate is that on hearing a rape accusation, hearers accidentally treat 'she is telling the truth about p' as the central claim, rather than 'p'. The error possibilities that should seem distant-ones in which she is lying or mistaken-now seem relevant. This is because they are relevant to the mistakenly substituted claim. A less charged example will help illustrate. Imagine evaluating either (i) 'Bill broke his leg' or (ii) 'Bill is not faking, he broke his leg'. Typically error possibilities in which Bill borrows someone's crutches, plays a gag, lies to evade work, your third-party informant is misled, and so on, are irrelevantly farfetched for claim (i). You would not even think of them. But at least some such 'faking' possibilities are relevant to claim (ii). Which ones are relevant depends on, for example, whether Bill is present. When we consider claim (ii), sources of doubt spring to mind. And they should. Return now to rape accusations. Given she asserted p then-given certain background conditions, such as that rape accusations are typically true-possibilities in which she is lying or mistaken are distant. If instead of 'p' you mistakenly evaluate 'she is telling the truth about p', the mistakenly substituted claim similarly brings with it the relevance of possibilities in which she is lying or mistaken. Possibilities in which she is lying or mistaken are thus preponderant error possibilities for this illicitly substituted claim. I propose this is a common unwitting error that hearers make when they hear rape accusations. This conflation can help diagnose the disproportionate doubt such claims receive and explain hearers' tendency to think so readily of 'she is lying' or 'she is mistaken' error possibilities. This substitution is pernicious in part because it is considerably harder to eliminate relevant alternatives to 'I am telling the truth that p', especially where p is a claim, such as 'I was raped', where there is often little corroborative evidence. Hearers might not recognise this conflation in part because it is so common. It constitutes testimonial injustice because the speaker is held to a more demanding epistemic standard. To be believed, her evidence must rule out error possibilities that ought to be treated as remote. The preceding discussion focuses on when an accuser says 'p' and the hearer erroneously evaluates a different claim, such as 'I'm not mistaken that p' or 'I'm not lying that p'. Sometimes the accuser 49 This is because assertions are normally sensitive to p. S would not have asserted p unless p, so assertions eliminate nearby error possibilities. Remaining error possibilities are where S asserts p despite not p, and for most assertions these are relatively unusual situations. For some assertions, error possibilities in which the speaker is lying or mistaken are nearby and preponderant. This includes assertions where the topic is commonly lied about, for example. 24 herself makes formerly irrelevant alternatives relevant. Suppose Sally says 'I was raped'. An interlocutor asks 'Are you sure; maybe you misremember?' Sally replies 'I am not mistaken that I was raped.' On the view proposed here, Sally's second assertion is importantly different from her first. Under normal circumstances, many error possibilities that are irrelevant to her first assertion are relevant to her second. These include various possibilities in which Sally is mistaken. The interlocutor's question, even if well-meaning, thereby induces Sally to assert a claim for which it is considerably more demanding to rule out relevant alternatives. The relevant alternatives framework thus illuminates how interlocutors impair accusers in unacknowledged ways: In normal cases, Sally's being mistaken is irrelevant to her first assertion. The possibility is farfetched. Yet it is relevant to her second assertion. This mechanism is more conspicuous, and accordingly less pernicious, in the broken leg example.50 10. Conclusion I have explored three loci of the epistemology of risk. I argued the relevant alternatives framework can model the effect of stakes on whether evidence suffices for action. Secondly, it can respond to Schroeder's challenge, and thereby undermine the motivation for moral encroachment. Alternatively, it provides a fruitful way to model the nuances of moral encroachment. As I describe in sections eight and nine, drawing on the rich apparatus of the relevant alternatives framework can help illuminate various risks and vulnerabilities that stem from the social-situatedness of our epistemic agency. The framework explains and systematises several kinds of epistemic injustice and harm. This includes patterns of overand under-estimation of the remoteness of error possibilities, the danger of our community enfeebling our epistemic position by rendering error possibilities relevant, and the epistemological mechanisms of crying wolf, conspiracy theories, and gaslighting. I also suggest a suggest a novel form of testimonial injustice, underlying the undue skepticism rape accusations provoke, namely an illicit substitution of 'p' with 'she's telling the truth about p' when assessing accusations. I articulated features that contribute to the relative remoteness of an error possibility, including especially whether the possibility is a typical source of error and whether it is suggested by the evidence. I also considered other features that might determine relative relevance, such as whether the possibility in fact obtains or is morally differentiated. Crucially, the overall relevant alternatives structure is schematic and can be combined with competing claims about which features determine remoteness. A theorist might hold that remoteness is entirely determined by modal closeness of possible world, for instance, or solely by convention. The basic relevant alternatives framework remains neutral on these questions. I motivate that the framework is worth taking seriously as a rival to the dominant 'quantifiable balance' model of evidential support. I close by drawing attention to three virtues of the framework. Epistemologists often focus on what is known, what the available evidence supports, what claims we are warranted in believing, and how confident we can be in those claims. The rival 'quantifiable balance' framework emphasises exclusively the balance of available evidence. The emphasis, then, is on what we possess epistemically. The relevant alternatives framework, by contrast, is structured around error possibilities and thereby draws attention to what is unknown, ways the evidence is lacking, and what should be considered. It highlights what our evidence fails to address, and is thus a helpful framework for thinking about the effect of risk on epistemic properties. When risks abound, the epistemological effects of the unknown, absent, unconsidered, or unappreciated are paramount. 50 I am grateful to Heather Battaly, Catherine Elgin, Jon Garthoff, Hilary Kornblith, Declan Smithies, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful discussions about these ideas. 25 Secondly, the framework does not rely on quantification of evidential support, and thereby avoids problems afflicting quantificational approaches. Thirdly, it provides a richer structure-more foundation than simple numerical probabilities. It describes increasing remoteness of alternatives and a threshold of disregardability. This additional structure allows us to perceive and model more features of our epistemic lives, such as the epistemic injustices described in sections eight and nine, that are obscured by the simple quantifiable balance conception. I believe it is a framework worth adopting or, at least, not disregarding. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Mark Alfano, Dominic Alford-Duguid, Rima Basu, Heather Battaly, Claire Becerra, Grace Boey, Renee Bolinger, Rebecca Brown, Bruce Chapman, Marcello Di Bello, Julien Dutant, Kenny Easwaran, Michael Ebling, Catherine Elgin, Iskra Fileva, Branden Fitelson, Jamie Fritz, Jon Garthoff, Mikkel Gerken, Hilary Kornblith, Seth Lazar, Clayton Littlejohn, Sebastian Liu, Linh Mac, Silvia Milano, Sarah Moss, Beau Madison Mount, Jessie Munton, Maura Priest, Duncan Pritchard, Joe Pyle, Paul Roberts, Sherri Roush, Kyle Scott, Paul Silva, Martin Smith, Declan Smithies, Alex Walen, William Wells, Alex Worsnip, and anonymous referees for invaluable comments. I am grateful for helpful discussions at Sherri Roush's graduate epistemology seminars at UCLA, the Moral Encroachment Reading Group at Oxford University, and the Between Ethics and Belief conference at Cologne University. 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The Case Against Meat ! Ben Bramble Lund University [email protected] ! In The Moral Complexities of Eating Meat, Oxford University Press (2016). ! ! Introduction ! There is a simple but powerful argument against the human practice of raising and killing animals for food (RKF for short). It goes like this: ! 1.RKF is extremely bad for animals. 2.RKF is only trivially good for human beings. So, 3.RKF should be stopped. 1! Call this The Case Against Meat. Many consider The Case Against Meat to be decisive. But not everyone is convinced by it. Four main objections have been proposed: ! 1. The first premise is false. RKF is not extremely bad for animals, or at least, given the possibility of free-range farming, it needn't be. In fact, by giving animals an existence, RKF may even be in the best interests of these animals. ! 2. The second premise is false. RKF is far more than merely trivially good for human beings. This is because of the pleasures of eating meat and what these contribute to various social and cultural aspects of our lives. ! ! !1 The classic statement of this style of argument is from Singer (1975).1 3. Animal welfare is relatively unimportant. Even if both premises of the argument are true, animal welfare is nowhere near as valuable as human welfare. It simply doesn't matter as much how they fare. ! 4. As individuals, we are powerless to change anything. Even if it would be best if RKF were to stop, none of us has any reason to abstain from eating meat. This is because our individual purchasing decisions have only a negligible effect on the demand for meat, and so none at all on RKF. ! In this essay, I will attempt to shore up The Case Against Meat by providing new responses to each of these objections. ! 1. The First Premise ! Many have claimed that RKF is good for animals by giving these animals an existence. Leslie Stephen, for example, writes: ! The pig has a stronger interest than anyone in the demand for bacon. If all the world were Jewish, there would be no pigs at all. 2! But it is implausible that having an existence can be better for a being than having no existence at all. To be better off in one scenario than in another one must have a level of well-being in both scenarios. But those who do not exist in a given scenario are not poorly off in that scenario. Rather, they have no level of well-being in that scenario. It may be objected that non-existent beings can be well or poorly off. Cinderella, for example, does not exist, but she was very poorly off until she met her Fairy Godmother. But when we talk about Cinderella, we are not saying 'there is some woman who had evil step-sisters, rode to a ball in a pumpkin, fell in love with a prince, had a level of welfare', and so on. We are saying precisely that there is no such woman. When we say that Cinderella was poorly off until she met her Fairy Godmother, we are saying that if there had been such a woman-a woman ! !2 Stephens (1896).2 fitting these descriptions-then this woman would have been poorly off until she met her Fairy Godmother. 3 Suppose all of this is granted. A defender of RKF may reply: If one's having an existence cannot be good for one, then one's having an existence cannot be bad for one either. If this is so, however, then RKF, while it may not be good for any of the animals that it raises and kills for food, cannot be bad for any of these animals. However, it is crucial to distinguish between two parts of RKF: ! 1. RKF's bringing animals into existence, and 2. RKF's treating these animals in a particular way. ! It is not (1), but (2), that is bad for animals. RKF is not bad for animals by bringing these animals into existence. RKF is bad for animals by giving worse lives to these animals who it has brought into existence than these same animals might have had. To this, a defender of RKF may object that I am assuming that RKF involves factory farming-i.e., farming in which animals are raised in cramped spaces, caused to feel much pain during their lives, and killed in a brutal manner. While it is true that factory farming gives worse lives to animals than these same animals might have had, RKF need not involve factory farming. RKF might instead involve only free-range farming, which, let us say, gives to the animals in question happy lives-including, for example, plenty of green space to roam around in, good quality food, contact with each other, and so on -and then kills them painlessly in their sleep without their anticipation. However, I am not assuming that RKF involves factory farming. Even if RKF were to involve only free-range farming, the lives it would give to the ! !3 Some might worry that I have missed Leslie's point. His point, it may be said, is not that 3 RKF is good for particular animals, but that it is good for particular species of animals. If there were no more pigs, then this would be bad for pigs, taken collectively. But it seems very hard to make sense of the idea of things going well or poorly for a species-independently, at least, of how things are going for particular members of this species. Moreover, even if there was a sense in which pigs as a species could do well independently of the well-being of particular pigs, it is unclear why their well-being in this sense would be normatively significant in the slightest. It is highly plausible that it is the well-being only of individual beings that has this sort of value. If no individual being is benefited by a given practice, then it is irrelevant that there may be some sense in which this practice is good for its species. animals in question would still be much shorter than the lives they might otherwise have. These animals would be much better off living longer lives in their free-range farms. A defender of RKF may deny that animals such as cows, pigs, chickens, etc., have anything to gain from living longer. More life, it may be said, is good for a being only if this being desires to live longer, or at least has some long-term plans, projects, or goals that would be completed or fulfilled if it were to live on. Cows, pigs, chickens, etc., have no such desires, plans, projects, or goals, and so nothing to gain from additional life. Some animal advocates have responded by claiming that cows, pigs, chickens, etc., do have such desires, plans, projects, or goals. As evidence of this, they have pointed to such things as the concern such animals seem to have for the survival and flourishing of their own offspring. But this seems to me the wrong response, for two reasons. First, even on the most plausible desire-based theories of well-being, it is not the satisfaction or frustration of one's actual desires that is good or bad for one, but only those desires that one would have if one were suitably idealised-e.g., a fully informed, vividly imagining, maximally mature version of oneself. Cows, pigs, chickens, 4 etc., might not, as they are, have any desires to live longer or for future things, but they might well have such desires if they were suitably idealised. It is common for families to speculate on what their family dog or cat might be like if he or she were to become much more intelligent and able to converse with them. Animals like dogs and cats seem to many of us to have individual personalities that might not only survive, but perhaps be made fully manifest by, their transformation into beings with greater cognitive faculties. If this were so, then we might expect such transformed beings to have preferences concerning how the lives of their actual, non-idealised selves are to go. Among other things, we might expect them to prefer longer rather than shorter lives for their actual selves (providing, of course, that these lives were to be lived on freerange farms). Second, it does not seem necessary for additional life to be good for one that one have desires (actual or idealized) that would be satisfied by it. On the contrary, it seems enough that the additional life would involve certain kinds of pleasures for one. Why would more life be good for a normal human adult like myself? One reason is that there are certain kinds of pleasures on the horizon for me. Why would more life be good for a young or middle-aged cow, pig, or ! !4 See Sidgwick (1907) and Rawls (1971).4 chicken living on a free-range farm? One reason, similarly, seems to be that, in such a setting, there are certain kinds of pleasures on the horizon for it. I say certain kinds of pleasures, rather than simply additional pleasures, for an important reason. On the view I hold, purely repeated pleasures-i.e., pleasures that introduce nothing qualitatively new in terms of pleasurableness into a being's life-add nothing to that being's lifetime well-being. Any further 5 pleasures involved in a longer life are good for one only if these pleasures bring something qualitatively new in terms of pleasurableness to one's life. If all a person gets in having more life is just the same pleasures of watching their favorite sitcom over and over again, then this person has gained nothing by living longer. Similarly, I believe, if all an animal gets in having more life is just the same pleasures of chewing grass over and over again, then it has gained nothing by living longer. The thing is, though, I believe there is considerable scope for further qualitatively new pleasures in the life of a free-range animal who is still young or middle-aged. My suspicion, indeed, is that many of those who believe that additional life cannot be good for an animal believe this only because they are falsely presupposing that the only future pleasures available to cows, pigs, chickens, etc.-or at least cows, pigs, chickens, etc., that have spent some time in a free-range farm-are purely repeated ones. What pleasures do I have in mind? Consider a family dog, Gertie. Imagine Gertie running around today in the local park, chasing sticks, meeting new dogs, having new olfactory pleasures, and exploring parts of the park she has never been to before. It seems clear to me, and I hope to you, that it was a good thing for Gertie that she lived on til today. If she had died peacefully in her sleep last night, this would have been bad for her, since she would not have lived on to experience all these wonderful qualitatively new doggy pleasures. Similarly, cows roaming free in a green paddock with plenty to eat, even if they have no future-oriented desires, may have evolving social lives with each other that are a source of qualitatively new pleasures for them as time goes on, or slow dawning realizations about their lives or vague increments in understanding that are pleasurable in various ways, or different or deeper appreciations of the field in which they are grazing as it undergoes changes during the shifting seasons, or experiences of watching their offspring grow into adulthood and reproduce themselves that involve pride or satisfaction. To kill them when they are young or middle-aged would be to rob them of these qualitatively new pleasures. ! !5 For further defense of this idea, see Bramble (forthcoming).5 I conclude that animals on free-range farms would be better off living into old-age than being painlessly killed in their sleep during youth or middleage. One final objection: What about RKF involving only free-range farming that allows the animals in question to live into their old age or til they die of natural causes? I accept that RKF of this kind would not be bad for the animals in question. But would there be much of a market for such meat? This is unclear given that many consumers of meat seem to be of the opinion that the flesh of older animals is tough and tasteless. In any case, as I will be arguing in Section 2, even RKF of this kind may be bad for us. Of course, the crucial question is whether the amount that animals would gain by living into old-age on free-range farms (rather than being killed in youth or middle-age) is greater than the amount that humans would gain by these animals being killed in their youth or middle-age (rather than when they are old). To answer this question, we need to know in what ways meat consumption affects human well-being. It is to this matter I now turn. ! 2. The Second Premise ! Many people believe that human beings need to eat meat in order to be healthy. But even the American Dietetic Association acknowledges that ! vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. 6! Still, many meat-eaters remain unconvinced. They say they feel lacking in energy, and in health more generally, when they don't eat meat, and they take these feelings to be more reliable indicators of their levels of health than the findings of current science. ! !6 This is from the abstract of "Position of the American Dietetic Association: Vegetarian 6 Diets," Journal of the American Dietetic Association, volume 109, issue 7 (July 2009), pp. 1266-1282, http://www.eatright.org/cps/rde/xchg/ada/hs.xsl/ advocacy_933_ENU_HTML.htm. But such feelings do not necessarily indicate ill-health. They may simply be withdrawal symptoms from giving up a substance to which one has become addicted. Indeed, these feelings seem similar to those many of us have when we give up, say, coffee, and nobody thinks that the fact that one feels this way in the coffee case shows that giving up coffee is bad for one's health. (On the contrary, it is a feeling one must go through in order to regain health). Moreover, the meat industry has paid big money to advertisers to try to get us all to think of meat as necessary for health and vitality. We must factor this in when assessing our own feelings about whether meat is really necessary for our health. It may be objected: But when I stop eating meat, I feel lethargic. This may not be evidence that my health is independently damaged, but this lethargy itself constitutes a decline in health. Health includes things such as how energetic or vital one feels. However, even if this is true, withdrawal symptoms like these do not last very long. Persist with a vegetarian diet and one will likely soon feel energetic again-even more energetic than previously, depending on how much meat was in one's diet. One's cravings for meat, too, will disappear, or at least diminish substantially. All this would happen more rapidly still if meat were not readily available or if most others were also abstaining. Moreover, if our society were to give up meat, then future generations would not get addicted to meat in the first place and so suffer none of the withdrawal symptoms of having to give it up. Suppose all of this is granted. Still, it may be objected: Meat consumption makes a very large contribution to our well-being because of the pleasures it gives us. Many people seem to think that if we were limited only to vegetarian meals, eating would soon become a tiresome exercise, and life would lose much of its appeal. However, as many vegetarians have pointed out, those who make this objection cannot have sampled very much vegetarian cuisine. While it is certainly true that the vegetarian options at most restaurants and fast-food joints today are pretty bland or unappetizing, they are hardly representative of what can be done in the kitchen without meat. Vegetarian meals can be not only healthful, they can be delicious and satisfying, and admit of such great variety that one need never get sick of them. Moreover, if we all stopped eating meat, the vegetarian options at restaurants would quickly get tastier and more ! !7 varied, and in any case it is easy to learn how to make delicious vegetarian meals at home. A more sophisticated argument has recently been offered by Loren Lomasky. Lomasky claims that the pleasures of meat ! afford human beings goods comparable qualitatively and quantitatively to those held forth by the arts. Lives of many people would be significantly impaired were they to forgo carnivorous consumption. 7! Lomasky argues for this claim by appeal to the widespread and powerful human desire for meat (or its subjective importance to us). He observes that "All across the globe...as incomes increase so does the amount of meat in people's diets". 8 He goes on: ! When we look at the world's great cuisines we discover that almost without exception they not only include meat but also feature it as a focal point of fine meals. In France as in India, China as in Italy, meat is sovereign...That so many religions advance constraints on which animals are to be eaten and how the permissible ones are to be slaughtered and prepared conveys a recognition of meat eating as being among the very important components of how human beings can live well. 9! There are two problems, however, with this argument. First, it relies on a desirebased or subjective theory of well-being, and, as I suggested above, the most plausible versions of such theories hold that it is not one's actual desires, but only one's idealized desires, that determine what is good or bad for us. This is because, as David Sobel nicely puts it, idealized desires "are more fully for their object as it really is rather than for the object as it is falsely believed to be". 10 This is a problem because, while it may be true that most people have a very strong desire to eat or enjoy meat, it is not clear that they would continue to have this desire if they were suitably idealised. In fact, it seems likely that, apprised in a vivid way of all the gory details of the manner in which most ! !8 Lomasky (2013), p. 190.7 Lomasky (2013), p. 185.8 Lomasky (2013), p. 185.9 Sobel (2011), p. 59.10 animals who end up on our plates are raised and killed, most of us would not want to eat meat-let alone enjoy it-ever again. Second, as I also suggested above, desire-based theories of well-being are implausible. There is not space here to fully make the case against such theories, but recall my claim above that such theories cannot explain the value for us of future pleasures. It seems good for Gertie the dog that she lived on until today to experience an array of qualitatively new doggy pleasures, even if this involved no desire of hers being satisfied. If desire-based theories are false, then even if our desires to eat or enjoy meat were to survive idealization, this would not show our eating or enjoying it to be significantly good for us. There is, however, a different, and better, way to argue for Lomasky's claim. This is to say that the pleasures of meat are extremely good for us, not because we want (or would want) them, but just because of the particular phenomenology of these pleasures themselves (i.e., 'what it is like' for one to experience them). No vegetarian diet (at least given present technologies) is able to provide this particular pleasurable phenomenology. Any life without such phenomenology is to that extent impoverished. Moreover, it may be added, if we all stopped eating meat, then our cultures would be greatly diminished, and along with these the richness of our social and cultural encounters. One way we stay connected to our ancestors is through the meals they pass down to us. If we all stopped eating meat, then this important link with the past would be severed. What should we make of this argument? I think we have no choice but to accept that the pleasures of meat, and what these contribute to various social and cultural aspects of our lives, make us well off in ways that no quantity or quality of vegetarian food could possibly achieve (again, given present technologies). The absence of these pleasures from a person's life (even in the life of someone who has no desire to eat or enjoy meat) represents a real loss for that person. Moreover, this is not a trivial loss. These pleasures are significantly good for one. However, the important question is: Is this significant loss a significant net loss? In what follows, I will sketch three reasons for thinking that it is not. First, what we would lose by giving up the cultural traditions associated with our meat consumption may be fully compensated for by pleasures gained from reinventing these dishes in vegetarian ways and forging new traditions at the dinner table. It is not as if by removing meat from our diet all our important connections with the past would be severed. There would still be a great deal of cultural continuity that would be possible. And we should not ! !9 underestimate what may be gained by starting afresh and exercising our creativity. Second, meat is very costly to produce. If we were to cut meat from our diets, the resources that are currently spent on its production could be redirected toward other areas of our lives such as health, education, infrastructure, and so on. Third, there are reasons to believe that there could be some heavy psychological costs associated with meat consumption. Consider, first, that most of us grow up as children who love animals. When we first discover that the meat on our plate is the body of an animal who has been killed for our consumption, this distresses us greatly. When we learn further of what goes on in farms and slaughterhouses, even free-range ones, many of us are truly horrified. We are, however, very good at putting these thoughts out of our heads and carrying on with our meat-eating-especially given the often considerable social and economic pressure to do so. But an idea ignored can continue to affect one. There is a growing body of evidence that most of us experience many kinds of significant pleasurable and unpleasurable feelings without being aware of them-i.e., in the background of our consciousness. An 11 especially vivid example (on the pleasure side) is provided by a patient of Oliver Sacks, who writes: ! Sense of smell? I never gave it a thought. You don't normally give it a thought. But when I lost it-it was like being struck blind. Life lost a good deal of its savor-one doesn't realize how much 'savor' is smell. You smell people, you smell books, you smell the city, you smell the spring- maybe not consciously, but as a rich unconscious background to everything else. My whole world was suddenly radically poorer. 12! On the side of unpleasurable experiences, Daniel Haybron writes: Some affective states are more elusive than the paradigmatic ones, particularly moods and mood-like states such as anxiety, tension, ennui, malaise...They may exceed our powers of discernment even while they are occurring...A vague sense of malaise might easily go unnoticed, yet it can sour one's experience far more than the sharper and more pronounced ! !10 See, for example, Haybron (2007), Schwitzgebel (2008), and Bramble (2013).11 Quoted in Rachels (2004), p. 225.12 ache that persists after having stubbed one's toe. Likewise for depression, anxiety and related mood states, at least in their milder forms. Consider how a tense person will often learn of it only when receiving a massage, whereas stressed or anxious individuals may discover their emotional state only by attending to the physical symptoms of their distress. Presumably being tense, anxious, or stressed detracts substantially from the quality of one's experience, even when one is unaware of these states. 13 How can this happen? Haybron explains it as follows: Everyone knows that we often adapt to things over time: what was once pleasing now leaves no impression or seems tiresome, and what used to be highly irritating is now just another feature of the landscape. Could it also be that some things are lastingly pleasant or unpleasant, while our awareness of them fades? I would suggest that it can. Perhaps you have lived with a refrigerator that often whined due to a bad bearing. If so, you might have found that, with time, you entirely ceased to notice the racket. But occasionally, when the compressor stopped, you did notice the sudden, glorious silence. You might also have noted, first, a painful headache, and second, that you'd had no idea how obnoxious the noise was-or that it was occurring at all-until it ceased. But obnoxious it was, and all the while it had been, unbeknownst to you, fouling your experience as you went about your business. In short, you'd been having an unpleasant experience without knowing it. Moreover, you might well have remained unaware of the noise even when reflecting on whether you were enjoying yourself: the problem here is ignorance-call it reflective blindness-and not, as some have suggested, the familiar sort of inattentiveness we find when only peripherally aware of something. In such cases we can bring our attention to the experience easily and at will. Here the failure of attention is much deeper: we are so lacking in awareness that we can't attend to the experience, at least not without prompting (as occurs when the noise suddenly changes). 14 Similarly, I want to suggest, it may be the case that, knowing what meat is- and, in particular, what we do to animals in farming and slaughtering them for ! !11 Haybron (2008), p. 202.13 Haybron (2007), p. 400.14 food-sours or pollutes our experiences of eating meat, and perhaps our experiences of living in this world more generally, in ways that are very hard or even impossible to attend to while we are still meat-eaters. Certainly, many people claim to find the experience of giving up meat similar in various respects to the experience Haybron describes of being at home in one's kitchen when the compressor of the whining refrigerator switches off. Many say they experienced a tremendous sense of relief or freedom, or a lightness of being, after giving up meat-feelings they had not anticipated, and that suggest they were experiencing unconscious pain beforehand. Part of the unconscious pain felt by meat-eaters, I suspect, has to do with their having deliberately turned away when they were children from something that they sensed at the time was an important moral issue. This turning away seems likely to leave one with a burden comparable to that carried by a person who has reason to suspect a friend of theirs of having committed some heinous crime, but who refuses to investigate further or turn her friend in for some relatively trivial reason (say, fear of upsetting the balance of her social life). People who ignore qualms they have or silence parts of themselves cannot be fully happy individuals. Moreover, their being like this may prevent them from being the sort of open people who are able to take joy in many other aspects of life. So, ignoring the issue of meat, refusing to investigate, may close one off to various other possible pleasures. It may be objected: But what about free-range farming? If (as I conceded in Section 1) animals who are raised in free-range farms, and get to live on into old-age, are not harmed by RKF, then why should we have any qualms at all about participating in this system that raises and kills them for food? Why should our participation in such a system have any tendency to make us feel bad? I accept, of course, that there would be nothing bad about such a system deriving from harms inflicted on these animals. In such a system, these animals are not harmed, and so there can be nothing of disvalue deriving from their being harmed. Since this is the case, there may be a sense in which we should not be disturbed or upset by such a system, or by our participation in it. But even such a system, I want now to suggest, would nonetheless cause most of us psychological suffering (even if we believed it should not). Let me explain. For most of us, the thought of the dead bodies of our friends and loved ones, or even those of complete strangers, being cut up or torn to pieces is deeply distressing. It is even worse to think of their body parts then being devoured by some creature. That it causes such distress to us seems ! !12 to be, not because we think it harms these people (for they are already dead and so cannot be harmed by anything anymore), but because it reminds us of the fact that we are embodied (and so finite) beings, and with that much of the suffering and tragedy of our lives. We prefer to bury intact the bodies of our loved ones, or burn them, so that it is not possible for them to be taken apart. I suspect that, for many of us, there is a similar pain-albeit often an unconscious one-that accompanies our thoughts of what takes place in slaughterhouses, even slaughterhouses where the animals in question have been killed painlessly without their anticipation. These practices are unavoidably grisly. The thought of the bodies of these animals being taken apart, ending up on our plates, and being devoured by us, is a painful reminder of what we all are: embodied beings prone to disease, suffering, and death. 15 To emphasize: I do not pretend to have proven here that we suffer any of the unconscious pains I have been describing. What I have said remains largely speculative. But I do hope to have persuaded you that there is some possibility, and perhaps also some reason to believe, that such pains exist-that is enough for my purposes. Whether such pains actually exist I will leave to the scientists of the future, with their superior technologies, to confirm or disconfirm. I conclude that, while the absence of the pleasures of meat in a person's life truly does represent a significant loss for that person, when we take into account (i) the pleasures involved in forging new culinary traditions, (ii) the economic opportunity costs of meat production, and (iii) the possible psychological costs associated with meat-eating, we see that it is probably not a significant net loss, and may not even be a net loss at all. ! 3. The Unimportance of Animal Well-Being ! According to some, even if RKF is extremely bad for animals and only trivially good for us, RKF should continue. This is because animal well-being is far less important than human well-being. Great harm to animals is less bad than the relatively small sacrifice involved for us in giving up meat. But this is an implausible idea. There seems no good reason why the well-being of some creatures should be worth more than the well-being of others. It seems far more plausible to think that the intrinsic value simpliciter of ! !13 For a summary of some recent studies examining the relationship of a vegetarian diet to 15 emotional well-being, see Ruby (2012), p. 146. some increase in a being's lifetime well-being is proportional just to the amount of the increase. Why, then, do some people think that human well-being is worth more than animal well-being? As others have pointed out, it seems likely to have to do with the fact that humans seem capable of having much higher levels of lifetime well-being than any other animals on this planet. Those who think human well-being is more valuable may be confusing the fact that we can be more greatly benefited with our benefits having greater value. For this diagnosis to be right, however, we need an account of why human beings are capable of much higher levels of lifetime well-being than animals. No-one has yet provided a satisfactory such account. In the remainder of this section, I want briefly to suggest one. The reason human beings are capable of much higher levels of lifetime well-being, I believe, has to do with a point I made in Section 1, namely that purely repeated pleasures add nothing to a being's level of lifetime well-being. Human beings have available to them much greater diversity in pleasurable experiences than other animals do. While I claimed above that Gertie the family dog may experience many qualitatively new pleasures on a given day in exploring the park, meeting other new dogs, smelling new smells, etc., I think these pleasures are quite limited when compared with the pleasures we humans are able to obtain from our much deeper relationships with each other, much greater capacity to understand ourselves and learn about the world, more sophisticated experiences of art and beauty, ability to appreciate the importance of things, set goals, and work toward their completion, and capacity for selfless or virtuous behavior. It is an easy mistake to confuse this greater capacity for well-being with our well-being's having greater value. But it is a mistake. The death of a normal cow in a paddock is less bad than the premature death of a normal human being, but this is not because human well-being matters more than animal wellbeing. It is because there is much more that continued life can add to the lifetime well-being of a normal human being than to the life of a cow. When we do genuinely harm animals a lot-as RKF does-this is extremely bad. ! 4. Causal Impotence ! Suppose everything I have said so far is correct, and it would be best if RKF were to stop. Nonetheless, it may be claimed, none of us has a reason to abstain ! !14 from eating meat. This is because our individual purchasing decisions have only a negligible effect on the demand for meat, and so on the lives of the animals raised and killed by RKF. Strictly speaking, this objection does not threaten the conclusion of The Case Against Meat. After all, this conclusion says nothing about our individual reasons to act. It says only that RKF should be stopped (or, as I have been taking this to mean, that it would be best if RKF were to come to an end). Nonetheless, I believe that even if we cannot, by abstaining from meat, improve the lives of any animals, we may each have sufficient reason to abstain from it. This is because, as I suggested in Section 2, it is possible that there are heavy psychological costs associated with meat-eating. While the absence of the pleasures of meat in a person's life represents a significant loss for that person, it is a loss that may be fully compensated for by freedom from these psychological costs. If this is right, then many of us may have most self-interested reason to stop eating meat. Furthermore, even if most of us lack the power to cause many other people to give up meat (and so reduce demand for meat enough to save or improve any animal lives), most of us are able, through making changes to our own diet and publicly opposing RKF, to cause some of our friends to abstain from meat as well, which would be very good for them. ! Conclusion ! In this paper, I have tried to shore up The Case Against Meat by offering new responses to the four main objections to this argument. In Section 1, I argued that RKF is bad for animals, not by bringing them into existence, but by giving worse lives to the animals that it has brought into existence than these same animals might have had. I argued that even free-range farming is bad for animals by giving them shorter lives than they would have had if they had lived on into old-age. In Section 2, I argued that while the absence of the pleasures of meat in a person's life represents a significant loss for that person, it is a not a significant net loss, and may not even be a net loss at all in light of the opportunity costs of meat-eating and the possibly heavy psychological costs associated with meateating. In Section 3, I tried to explain why human beings are capable of higher levels of lifetime well-being than other animals on this planet, and so why some ! !15 people might mistakenly believe that human well-being is more valuable than animal well-being. Finally, in Section 4, I pointed out that it is no objection to The Case Against Meat if, as individuals, we cannot save or improve any animals lives by becoming vegetarian. I then suggested that, even if we cannot save or improve any animals lives by becoming vegetarian, we may have sufficient self-interested reason to stop eating meat due to the psychological costs of meat-eating I described in Section 2. We should stop raising and killing animals for food. Our practice of doing so is very harmful for these animals, and not very good-and perhaps even, on balance, bad-for us. ! References ! Bramble, B. 2013. The distinctive feeling theory of pleasure. Philosophical Studies, 162, 201-217. Bramble, B. Forthcoming. Consequentialism about meaning in life. Utilitas. Haybron, D. M. 2007. Do we know how happy we are? On some limits of affective introspection and recall. Nous, 41(3), 394-428. Haybron, D. M. 2008. The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being. Oxford University Press. Lomasky, L. 2013. Is it wrong to eat animals? Social Philosophy and Policy, 30 (1-2), 177-200. Rachels, S. 2004. Six theses about pleasure. Philosophical perspectives, 18(1), 247-267. Rawls, J. 1971. A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ruby, M. B. Vegetarianism. A blossoming field of study. Appetite 58, 141–150. Schwitzgebel, E. 2008. The unreliability of naive introspection. Philosophical Review, 117, 245-273. Sidgwick, H. 1907. The Methods of Ethics, London: MacMillan and Company. Singer, P. 1975. Animal Liberation. HarperCollins. Sobel, D. 2011. Parfit's case against subjectivism, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, 6. Stephens, L. 1896. Social Duties and Rights. ! !

ACCEPTANCE, AGGREGATION AND SCORING RULES Jake Chandler∗ (Forthcoming in Erkenntnis) Abstract This article provides a novel perspective on the vexed issue of the relation between probability and rational acceptability, exploiting a recently-noted structural parallel with the problem of judgment aggregation. After offering a number of general desiderata on the relation between finite probability models and sets of accepted sentences in a Boolean sentential language, it is noted that a number of these constraints will be satisfied if and only if acceptable sentences are true under all valuations in a distinguished non-empty set W. Drawing inspiration from distance-based aggregation procedures, various scoring rule based membership conditions for W are discussed and a possible point of contact with ranking theory is considered. The paper closes with various suggestions for further research. Keywords acceptance distance-based aggregation model coarsening / refinement probability ranking functions scoring rules 1 Introduction The formal modeling of doxastic states appears to operate at different levels of granularity. At the finer end of the scale, we encounter for instance– in the so-called Bayesian tradition–'graded' representations in terms of sets of real-valued functions over some formal language. At the coarser ∗Address for correspondence: Center for Logic and Analytic Philosophy, HIW, KU Leuven, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2, 3000 Leuven, Belgium. Email: jacob.chandler[at]hiw.kuleuven.be 1 end, we find–most notably in some areas of the belief-revision literature– 'all-or-nothing' representations in terms of sets of sentences or valuations. These differences in modeling choices seemingly map onto a corresponding heterogeneity in folk psychological practice. Belief reports do indeed come both in the form of attributions of degrees of confidence, aka 'credences', (e.g. 'I am pretty sure that he needs help.') and in the form of unqualified attributions of 'full' belief (e.g. 'He believes in fairies.'). Whilst a unification of these various types of models, and of the phenomena they purport to represent, would be an extremely desirable achievement, it unfortunately seems fair to say that the history of attempts to provide a single, overarching framework–in particular a reduction of the coarser level of description to the finer one–encourages a certain amount of pessimism. In what follows, however, I hope to show that this pessimism is premature. The current track record of the unificationist camp is indeed poor; there is no disputing that. But, as Chandler (2010) has argued, the root cause of this mediocre performance is easy to pinpoint: the blame lies in the uncritical endorsement of a rather dubious would-be constraint on the relation between graded and all-or-nothing belief. This putative constraint, which I shall call Independence, turns out to be a close cousin of a homonymous troublemaker discussed in the judgment aggregation literature. Loss of Independence, one might say, paves the way to unification. But now since existing proposals invariably satisfy the constraint, it is of interest to see what kinds of alternatives may be on offer. The aim of this article is to outline and briefly discuss a family of such alternatives, inspired by recent work on the problem of judgment aggregation. The paper will proceed as follows. Section 2 presents the basic framework and notation employed throughout, discuss some desiderata on the mapping between degrees of confidence and full belief and present some baseline results. Section 3 spells out the relationship between the task at hand and the problem of judgment aggregation, offering a brief overview of a family of distance-based aggregation methods that have enjoyed a certain degree of popularity in the recent computer science literature. Section 4 then outlines a corresponding family of scoring rule -based mappings from degrees of confidence onto sets of accepted sentences. To illustrate this general approach, a sample of noteworthy members of this family are presented and some of their respective properties flagged out. Section 5 notes that these distance-based mappings suggest yet a further potential unificatory strategy, this time pertaining to the vexed issue of the relation 2 between probabilistic and ranking-theoretic models of belief. Section 6 briefly concludes with some suggestions for future research. 2 Formal preliminaries For the purposes of the current paper, the credal state of mind of a rational agent will be assumed to be representable by a probability modelM. Whilst more expressive types of representations, such as sets of probability models, are of course available, this simplification will help keep the discussion focused. M will be defined as a pair 〈L,Pr〉, where: (i) L is a sentential language constructed from a finite set P of m atomic sentences by means of the usual Boolean connectives ∧, ∨ and ¬, and (ii) Pr is a probability function with domain L, obeying the following standard axioms, where ` denotes the relation of classical consequence and > and ⊥ respectively denote an arbitrary classical tautology and an arbitrary classical contradiction: for any φ, ψ ∈ L, (i) if φ ` ⊥, then Pr(φ) = 0, (ii) if > ` φ, then Pr(φ) = 1, (iii) if φ ` ψ, then Pr(φ) ≤ Pr(ψ) and (iv) if φ ∧ ψ ` ⊥, then Pr(φ ∨ ψ) = Pr(φ) + Pr(ψ). V will denote the set of valuations {v1, v2, . . . , v2m} of L, which are total functions from L to the set of classical truth values {0, 1}. Furthermore, JφK will denote the set of valuations that validate φ (i.e. {v ∈ V : v(φ) = 1}) and conversely, where W is some set of interpretations, φW will be used to denote an arbitrary sentence such that W = {v ∈ V : v(φW) = 1}. By abuse of notation, we shall sometimes write v for {v} and vice versa. Finally, a rational acceptance function Acc is a particular kind of function that maps pairs of probability models M = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentences φ ∈ L onto {0, 1}. The intended interpretation is that Acc(M, φ) = 1 iff it is rationally permissible to fully believe φ given that one's credences are representable by M.1,2 Acc(M, * ) is, in other terms, the 'characteristic function' of the belief set that is rationally permissible givenM. Clearly, in order to ensure that the set of accepted sentences is 'wellbehaved', one should require the following: Zero-Normalisation: For any probability model M = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentence φ ∈ L, if φ ` ⊥ then Acc(M, φ) = 0. Unit-Normalisation: For any probability model M = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentence φ ∈ L, if > ` φ then Acc(M, φ) = 1. 3 Deductive Closure: For any probability model M = 〈L,Pr〉, sentence φ ∈ L and set of sentences Γ ⊆ L, if for any ψ ∈ Γ, Acc(M, ψ) = 1 and Γ ` φ, then Acc(M, φ) = 1. These correspond, respectively, to the claims that it is never permissible to accept a contradiction, always permissible to accept a tautology and always permissible to accept the logical consequences of what one is permitted to accept. It seems, however that one should not require Opinionation: For any probability modelM = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentences φ, ψ ∈ L, either Acc(M, φ) = 1 or Acc(M,¬φ) = 1. which states that, for any sentence φ that a rational agent S can entertain, S always accepts either φ or its negation. Another important and fairly uncontroversial constraint is the following: Non-Unanimity: For some probability modelM = 〈L,Pr〉 and some sentence φ ∈ L, Pr(φ) < 1 and Acc(M, φ) = 1. This reflects the commonly-held intuition that one can accept sentences whose truth one is not one hundred percent certain of. Perhaps more controversial, but in my view prima facie plausible, is Structurality: For any model M = 〈L,Pr〉, any automorphism π ofM and any sentence φ ∈ L, Acc(M, φ) = Acc(M, π(φ)), where an automorphism π of a probability model M = 〈L,Pr〉 is a 1 : 1 function L 7→ L, such that, for any φ, ψ ∈ L, (i) π(φ ∧ ψ) = π(φ) ∧ π(ψ), (ii) π(¬φ) = ¬π(φ), (iii) π(φ ∨ ψ) = π(φ) ∨ π(ψ) and (iv) Pr(φ) = Pr(π(φ)). This principle can be understood as stating that the acceptability of a sentence with respect to a model M supervenes on the logical and probabilistic properties of M. As Douven and Williamson (2006) point out, Structurality, Deductive Closure and Zero-Normalisation jointly entail Lottery-Proofness: For any finite probability model M = 〈L,Pr〉 such that for any v, v∗ ∈ V , Pr(φv) = Pr(φv∗) and any sentence ψ ∈ L, if Pr(ψ) < 1, then Acc(M, ψ) = 0.3 which states that no contingent sentence is rationally acceptable with respect to a finite uniform probability model.4 Douven and Williamson appeared to reject this principle. In fact, however, as argued by Chandler 4 ([2010, pp.8–9]), this property is intuitively correct, if one grants one of the working assumptions of this paper, namely that acceptability is determined by a credal state modeled as a single probability model. The grounds for Douven and Williamson's objection may have been rooted in a tacit commitment to the following principle: Monotonicity: For any pair of probability modelsM = 〈L,Pr〉 and M∗ = 〈L∗,Pr∗〉 and sentences φ ∈ L and ψ ∈ L∗, if Pr(φ) ≤ Pr∗(ψ) then Acc(M, φ) ≤ Acc(M∗, ψ). Indeed, it is easy to show the following: Theorem 2.1. Lottery-Proofness, Monotonicity and NonUnanimity are jointly inconsistent. In response to this, it was argued that no clear justification for Monotonicity had been given and that, in view of the prima facie plausibility of Structurality, Deductive Closure and Zero-Normalisation, as well as the independent plausibility of Lottery-Proofness, Monotonicity ought to be rejected. The same line can be taken with respect to the somewhat weaker Independence: For any pair of probability modelsM = 〈L,Pr〉 and M∗ = 〈L∗,Pr∗〉 and sentence φ ∈ L,L∗, if Pr(φ) = Pr∗(φ) then Acc(M, φ) = Acc(M∗, φ). By a similar chain of reasoning to the one above, Independence can be shown to be incompatible with the conjunction of Lottery-Proofness and a seemingly unobjectionable strengthening of Non-Unanimity to the claim that there exists a rational-valued sub-unit probability sentence that is rationally acceptable (calls this Non-Unanimity+). But it would seem entirely arbitrary to insist that no rational-valued sub-unit probability sentence is rationally acceptable, but maintain that some irrational-valued subunit probability sentence is so. So denying the stronger version of NonUnanimity, presumably leads to denying the weaker one, which, I submit, is unacceptable. So Independence must surely be given up too. Finally, to the aforementioned desiderata, it is clear that one should furthermore add Responsiveness: For some pair of probability models M = 〈L,Pr〉 and M∗ = 〈L,Pr∗〉 and some sentence φ ∈ L, Acc(M, φ) , Acc(M∗, φ). 5 This states that the underlying probability distribution makes a difference as to whether or not a sentence is rationally acceptable. Let us briefly take stock. We have argued that the following are to be categorically endorsed: Unit-Normalisation, Zero-Normalisation, Deductive Closure, Non-Unanimity+, Lottery-Proofness and Responsiveness. We have more tentatively endorsed Structurality and have categorically rejected Opinionation. In the light of Theorem 2.1, Independence, and hence Monotonicity, has also been categorically rejected, due the endorsement of Non-Unanimity+ and Lottery-Proofness. Can we find a function that simultaneously satisfies all of these constraints? It turns out that the range of possible avenues is limited by the following elementary result: Theorem 2.2. Unit-Normalisation, Zero-Normalisation and Deductive Closure hold iff there exists a non-empty set W ⊆ V of valuations such that, for any φ ∈ L, Acc(M, φ) = 1 iff W ⊆ JφK. So we need a procedure to select this non-empty set W of valuations, and one that will yield an acceptance function that fares well on the remaining desiderata. How should this be done? 3 Taking cue from judgment aggregation In a recent article, Douven and Romeijn (2007) hint at the existence of a striking parallel between the issue of individual-level rational acceptability or sentences relative to a probability model and the issue of group-level rational acceptability of sentences relative to the opinions of a set of agents, aka the problem of rational judgment aggregation. In formal terms, the problem of rational judgment aggregation involves the characterisation of a two-place aggregation function Agg, this time mapping pairs of opinion models M and sentences in L onto {0, 1}, such that Agg(M, φ) = 1 iff φ is rationally acceptable, at the group level, with respect to M. An opinion model is a pair 〈L,O〉, where O, known as an 'opinion profile', is an n-tuple 〈ψ1, . . . , ψn〉 of classically consistent sentences in L. These sentences are known as 'opinions', and represent the respective full beliefs of the members of a group of n rational agents.5 In cases in which the range of Pr is a subset of the rational numbers Q, we could think of the problem of rational acceptability as a special case of the problem of judgment aggregation in which (i) the opinions aggregated 6 are maximally strong consistent sentences in L and (ii) the aggregation function Agg is subject to the following constraints: Anonymity: For any opinion models M = 〈L, 〈ψ1, . . . , ψn〉〉 and M∗ = 〈L, 〈π(ψ1), . . . , π(ψn)〉〉, with ψi ∈ L(1 ≤ i ≤ n), where π is a permutation of 〈ψ1, . . . , ψn〉, and any φ ∈ L, Agg(M, φ) = Agg(M∗, φ). Duplication: For any opinion model M = 〈L, 〈ψ1, . . . , ψn〉〉 and M∗ = 〈L, 〈ψ1, . . . , ψn, ψ1, . . . , ψn〉〉, with ψi ∈ L(1 ≤ i ≤ n), and any φ ∈ L, Agg(M, φ) = Agg(M∗, φ). Indeed, we could view an assignment of rational-valued probabilities to maximally strong consistent sentences as a function returning the relative frequencies of corresponding opinions in the opinion set of a maximally opinionated group. The parallel deepens when we turn to the kinds of constraints that are typically imposed on aggregation functions. We find, for instance, endorsements of precise aggregation-theoretic analogues of Unit-Normalisation, Zero-Normalisation, Deductive Closure, NonUnanimity+ and Responsiveness. Furthermore, although the analogue of Opinionation is an admittedly widespread constraint, this has also occasionally been waived. Finally, concerns with respect to the obvious analogue of Independence, which is crucially involved in a number of aggregation-theoretic impossibility results6, have also been raised. In view of all this, it will come as little surprise that recent developments in the aggregation literature suggest an attractive answer to the question posed at the end of the previous section. Konieczny, Lang and Marquis (2004) provide an overview of a large family of aggregation functions based on the notion of distance between valuations and opinion profiles.7 The idea behind this class of proposals is strikingly simple: first (i) provide a measure of the distance between the various valuations ofL and the tuple of individual-level opinions, then (ii) select, as adopted at the group level, all and only those sentences that are validated by all the valuations that are close enough. As we shall see, Konieczny et al. take 'close enough' to mean 'closest'. It is however worth noting that alternative options could be explored. One could also for instance select all and only those valuations that are situated within some suitably chosen distance t. I shall return to this kind of variant in the next section. 8 7 With some relevant simplifications, the calculation of the distance between a valuation v and an opinion profile O proceeds as follows. Step 1: For every v∗ ∈ V , provide a measure of the distance between v and v∗. Step 2: For every ψ inO, construct a measure of the distance between v and ψ, by aggregating the distances between v and the valuations that validate ψ. Step 3: Construct a measure of the distance between v and O, by aggregating, in turn, the distances between v and each ψ in O. So we start off with a 'distance' function d mapping pairs of valuations onto R+. The requirements imposed by Konieczny and his colleagues are very minimal: Definition 3.1. d is a distance between valuations iff it is a total function from V×V to R such that, for every v, v∗ ∈ V, (i) d(v, v∗) ≥ 0 (Positivity), (ii) d(v, v∗) = d(v∗, v) (Symmetry), and (iii) d(v, v∗) = 0 iff v = v∗ (Minimality).9 Of course, one could just take d as primitive and simply add a further argument to the aggregation function. Primitivism regarding distance between valuations is not unheard of in philosophical circles (e.g. Hilpinen 1976), but it is somewhat mysterious and unparsimonious nevertheless. Indeed, Konieczny et al do not even discuss the option and focus instead on two particular alternatives, both of which are, incidentally, bounded above (by 1), which does not seem to be an undesirable feature. One of these alternatives is what they call the 'drastic distance' (dD): Definition 3.2. dD(v, v∗) := 0 if v = v∗ and equal to 1 otherwise. The other is the normalised weighted Hamming distance (dHq): Definition 3.3. dHq(v, v∗) := ∑ p∈S q(p), where S := {p ∈ P : v(p) , v∗(p)} and q is a total function from P to R+ such that ∑ p∈P q(p) = 1.10 If we take q to be a constant function, treating all mismatches symmetrically, we obtain the familiar normalised Hamming distance (dH). 8 Definition 3.4. dH(v, v∗) := |S | |P| , where S is defined as in Definition 3.3. Once a measure of the distance between valuations has been settled on, we obtain distances between valuations and opinion profiles in steps 2 and 3 by means of two successive distance aggregation procedures. Konieczny et al. offer three constraints on such procedures: Definition 3.5. g is a distance aggregation function iff it is a function from R+n to R+, such that (i) g is non-decreasing in every argument, (ii) g(r1, r2, . . . , rn) = 0 iff r1 = r2 = . . . = rn = 0 and (iii) g(r) = r. To these, one would presumably want to add the following internality requirement: (iv) min{r1, r2, . . . , rn} ≤ g(r1, r2, . . . , rn) ≤ max{r1, r2, . . . , rn}. Step 2 establishes the distance d′ between valuations and sentences, by aggregating the distances between these valuations and the valuations that validate the sentences. Although there is a fair amount that could be said here, given (iv), which is satisfied by Konieczny et al.'s own proposal for d′, the specifics of this step are of no great relevance to the present paper. Indeed, in the cases that we are interested in, the ψi are maximally strong consistent sentences, and the JψiK are singletons, so we will wind up with the same value for d′(v, φ) whatever the particular d′ we settle on. Of more central concern to the present case is Step 3, in which we aggregate the distances d′(v, ψi) between v and the ψi in O to obtain a distance D(v,O) between v andO. There is a large number of available options here, such as the max and min functions, as well as various weighted and non-weighted means: As mentioned earlier, Konieczny et al. simply make use of distances between valuations and opinion profiles to establish a total preorder in V , taking as acceptable, at the group level, all and only those sentences that are validated by the valuations that are in the minimal set. This leaves us with: For any opinion modelsM = 〈L,O〉 and φ ∈ L, Agg(M, φ) = 1 iff v(φ) = 1, for any v ∈ V such that, for any v∗ ∈ V , D(v,O) ≤ D(v∗,O). 9 It is worth taking a brief look at some of the general properties of the resulting proposal, in the case of interest in which the opinions are maximally strong. By the aggregation-theoretic analogue of Theorem 2.2, we already know that Agg will satisfy the analogues of Unit-Normalisation, Zero-Normalisation and Deductive Closure. Responsiveness straightforwardly holds by virtue of definitions 3.1 and 3.5. Anonymity, which we are keen to preserve in the present context, obviously corresponds to symmetry of D, i.e. its invariance under argument permutation. This fails for weighted means (with non-uniform weighting function). In the presence of Anonymity, the analogue of Structurality would be secured by the symmetry of the distance matrices of dD and dH along their main diagonal. The analogue of Independence, however, needn't hold: Example 3.3. Let P = {φ, ψ}, O1 = 〈φ∧ψ, φ∧¬ψ,¬φ∧ψ,¬φ∧¬ψ〉 and O2 = 〈φ ∧ ψ, φ ∧ ψ,¬φ ∧ ψ,¬φ ∧ ¬ψ〉. Let d = dD and D be the arithmetic mean function. It is easily verified that all valuations are equidistant from O1 but that the sole member of Jφ ∧ ψK is uniquely closest to O2. Hence Agg(M1, φ ∧ ψ) = 0 but Agg(M2, φ ∧ ψ) = 1. The same example demonstrates that Opinionation can also fail, since we also have Agg(M1,¬(φ∧ψ)) = 0. Finally, the analogue of Non-Unanimity fails in some cases, for instance if we set d = dH and D = max. 4 Acceptance and scoring rules We can adapt and generalise the kind of strategy outlined in the previous section in the following manner: (a) Provide a measure D of the distance between the v ∈ V and Pr, which, we shall assume, satisfies constraints of both positivity and minimality (see Definition 3.1). (b) Use this to select a set W of 'close enough' valuations, such that, for any v, v∗ ∈ V , if v ∈ W and D(v∗,Pr) ≤ D(v,Pr), then v∗ ∈ W. (c) Define Acc as follows: For any φ ∈ L, (i) if W = ∅, then Acc(M, φ) = 1 iff > ` φ, (ii) otherwise Acc(M, φ) = 1 iff W ⊆ JφK.11 10 Regarding membership conditions for W, we have two salient options. The first of these, the analogue of which was endorsed by Konieczny et al., we shall call 'Min', for 'minimising'. The second, whose analogue has, to the best of my knowledge, yet to be discussed in the aggregation-theoretic literature, we shall call 'Sat', for 'satisficing'. Min: v ∈ W iff v ∈ V and ∀v∗ ∈ V(D(v∗,Pr) ≥ D(v,Pr)). Sat: v ∈ W iff v ∈ V and D(v,Pr) ≤ t, for some appropriate t ∈ R+. Regarding D, the literature is already replete with various suggestions under the name of so-called 'scoring rules'. It turns out however that most proposals in usage satisfy ≥Pr-Reversal: D(v∗,Pr) ≥ D(v,Pr) iff Pr(φv) ≥ Pr(φv∗). These include the family of exponential scores, of which the well-known Brier score is a member, as well as the logarithmic score (Dlog), which we will return to in the next section: Definition 4.1. Dlog(v,Pr) := − log(Pr(φv)). Given ≥Pr-Reversal, whatever the particular choice of D, the upshot of Min would be that it is permissible to accept all and only those sentences that are true in all the most probable worlds. Call the resulting function 'Acc1'. This does have the arguable drawback of allowing for acceptance of sentences in whose truth one has an arbitrarily small degree of confidence. Opting for Sat avoids this consequence, since it permits acceptance of all and only those sentences that are true in all the those worlds whose probability exceeds a certain threshold. Call the resulting function 'Acc2'. It is easily checked that both Acc1 and Acc2 satisfy both Structurality and Consensus Preservation, and violate Opinionation. Furthermore NonUnanimity fails for Acc1 and does so for Acc2 as well, unless we set t to 0.12 Interestingly enough, some relevant functions do violate ≥Pr-Reversal. One particularly interesting example, which isn't found in the scoring rule literature but whose analogue appears to be taken quite seriously in the aggregation literature, is the following: DH(v, Pr) = ∑ v∗∈V Pr(φv∗)dH(v, v∗) 11 There are a number of potential issues worth noting here, however. To begin with, as has been famously noted in the verisimilitude debate, the Hamming distance is not invariant under translation (see Miller's (1974) well-known criticism of Tichý (1974, 1976)). Example 4.1. Let L1 be built up from the set of atomic sentences P1 = {φ, ψ, χ} and L2 from P2 = {φ, β, γ}. Let the binary relation R pair up sentences in L1 with their synonymous counterparts in L2 and let 〈φ↔ ψ, β〉, 〈φ↔ χ, γ〉 ∈ R. We have, in R, 〈φ∧ψ∧χ, φ∧β∧ γ〉, 〈¬φ∧ψ∧χ,¬φ∧¬β∧¬γ〉 and 〈¬φ∧¬ψ∧¬χ,¬φ∧β∧γ〉. Now dH(Jφ ∧ ψ ∧ χK, J¬φ ∧ ψ ∧ χK) = 1/3 < dH(Jφ ∧ ψ ∧ χK, J¬φ ∧ ¬ψ ∧ ¬χK) = 1. However, the ordering is reversed when we substitute the following L2 counterparts: dH(Jφ ∧ β ∧ γK, J¬φ ∧ ¬β ∧ ¬γK) = 1 > dH(Jφ ∧ β ∧ γK, J¬φ ∧ β ∧ γK) = 1/3. But this, so the worry might go, is bad news, since it is easy to show that it will result, given either Min (call the resulting function 'Acc3') or Sat (call the resulting function 'Acc4'), in an undesirable translation-sensitivity of acceptability.13, 14 Setting this issue aside, both Acc3 and Acc4 violate the following property of Consensus Preservation, which could be argued to be intuitively compelling: Consensus Preservation: For any finite probability model M = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentence φ ∈ L, if Pr(φ) = 1 then Acc(M, φ) = 1.15 To illustrate the result for Acc3: Example 4.2. Let P = {φ, ψ} and Pr(¬φ∧ψ) = Pr(φ∧¬ψ) = 1/2 . Let D = DH. It is easily verified that all valuations are equidistant from Pr and hence, although Pr(¬(φ↔ ψ) = 1, Acc(M,¬(φ↔ ψ)) = 0. For these reasons, and pending further discussion of the normative status of the constraints flouted, it seems fair to treat both Acc3 and Acc4 with a certain degree of caution. To wrap up this section, it is worth briefly considering an issue that has been somewhat overlooked in the literature on probability and acceptability, namely the behaviour of acceptability under probability model refinement or coarsening. Indeed, it has been put to me that the following property may be desirable: 12 Preservation under Refinement: Where M+ = 〈L+,Pr+〉 is a refinement of M = 〈L,Pr〉, for any φ ∈ L, if Acc(M, φ) = 1, then Acc(M+, φ) = 1. Preservation under Coarsening: Where M+ = 〈L+,Pr+〉 is a refinement of M = 〈L,Pr〉, for any φ ∈ L, if Acc(M+, φ) = 1, then Acc(M, φ) = 1. Where a refinement is defined as follows: Definition 4.2. M+ = 〈L+,Pr+〉 is a refinement ofM = 〈L,Pr〉 and M a coarsening of M+ iff L ⊂ L+ and, for any φ ∈ L, Pr(φ) = Pr+(φ). It is worth noting that Smith (forth.) appears to have recently–albeit cautiously–endorsed the second of the above principles, which plays a crucial role in the impossibility result that is central to his paper. Now Independence obviously guarantees the satisfaction of both constraints. However, both are violated–and hence so to is Independence–by both Acc1 and Acc216. The following simple example illustrates the point for Acc1: Example 4.3. Let P = {φ} and P+ = {φ, ψ}. Furthermore, let Pr(φ) = 0.6, Pr+(φ ∧ ψ) = 0.3 Pr+(φ ∧ ¬ψ) = 0.3, Pr+(¬φ ∧ ψ) = 0.4 Pr+(¬φ ∧ ¬ψ) = 0. It is easily verified that we have Acc1(M, φ) = 1 and Acc1(M,¬φ) = 0, but Acc1(M+, φ) = 0 and Acc1(M+,¬φ) = 1. But do the principles constitute intuitive desiderata in the first place? This far from clear. If constraints on the preservation of acceptability under model coarsening or refinement are indeed in order, these should at the very least be restricted to changes in granularity that are not accompanied by the loss or acquisition of further information. The above conditions are simply too strong. A more promising, weaker constraint would be invariance of acceptability in the presence of a relation of conservative refinement between the two models: Definition 4.3.M+ = 〈L+,Pr+〉 is a conservative refinement ofM = 〈L,Pr〉 iff (i) L ⊂ L+ (ii) for any maximally strong consistent φ ∈ L, and maximally strong consistent φ+1 , φ + 2 ∈ L +, such that φ+i 0 ¬φ, with 1 ≤ i ≤ 2, Pr+(φ+1 ) = Pr +(φ+2 ). 17 13 It is easy to show that the resulting weakened principles are both satisfied by Acc1. This follows pretty immediately from the fact that, for any maximally strong consistent sentences φ1, φ2 ∈ L, the sets of L+-valuations Jφ1K and Jφ2K will have the same cardinality. Matters, however, are somewhat different for Acc2, when t > 0. The weakening of Preservation under Refinement clearly fails. The weakening of Preservation under Coarsening, however, holds. 5 Probability and ranking theory For a number of years, Wolfgang Spohn has been floating a fairly influential model of rational degrees of belief that appears, on the face of it, to be a genuine alternative to the probabilistic view. This well worked-out model, known as 'ranking theory' ships with a number of attractive features, including various credence update procedures, as well as a story regarding the relation between graded and full belief. Ranking functions are defined as follows: Definition 5.1. A ranking function κ is a function fromL to R+∪{∞} such that, for any φ, ψ ∈ L, (i) if φ ` ⊥, then κ(φ) = ∞, (ii) if > ` φ, then κ(φ) = 0, (iii) if φ ` ψ, then κ(ψ) ≤ κ(φ) and (iv) κ(φ ∨ ψ) = min{κ(φ), κ(ψ)}. A rank of ∞ plays a role that is somewhat analogous to that of a credence of 0 in probabilistic frameworks. In particular, the rank of ∞ is invariant under strict ranking-theoretic conditionalisation, just as a credence of 0 is invariant under strict probabilistic conditionalisation, as the following definition of a conditional ranking functions makes clear: Definition 5.2. Where κ is a ranking function with domain L, φ, ψ ∈ L and κ(φ) < ∞, the quantity κ(ψ | φ) = κ(ψ ∧ φ) − κ(φ) is the conditional rank of ψ given φ.18 Adapting the notation to harmonise with the present paper, the account of acceptability on offer is the following, where Acc denotes this time a function from pairs of ranking modelsM = 〈L, κ〉 and sentences φ ∈ L: Min Rank: For any ranking models M = 〈L, κ〉 and all φ ∈ L, Acc(M, φ) = 1 iff κ(φ) < κ(¬φ). 14 In a recent article, Spohn (2009) ponders over the 'suprisingly complex and fascinating' relation between the ranking-theoretic and probabilistic pictures. He notes some superficial connections and suggests a potential explanation: . . . translate the sum of probabilities into the minimum of ranks, and the quotient of probabilities into the difference of ranks. Thereby, the probabilistic law of additivity turns into the law of disjunction, the probabilistic law of multiplication into the law of conjunction (for negative ranks), and the definition of probabilities into the definition of conditional ranks. . . [T]ake any probabilistic theorem, apply the above translation to it, and you are almost guaranteed to get a ranking theorem. . . The translation of products and quotients of probabilities suggests that negative ranks simply are the logarithm of probabilities. [ibid, p. 209]19 He does then however note that the suggested picture may not be so clear, mentioning discrepancies regarding conditional independence and 'positive and non-negative instantial relevance', as well as the translation of sums of probabilities. However, the translation is not fool-proof. . . The issue is not completely cleared up. . . [The view of ranks as logarithms of probabilities] does not seem to fit with the translation of sums of probabilities. But it does fit when the logarithmic base is taken to be some infinitesimal i. . . But the discussion in the previous section suggests a somewhat more straightforward picture of the relationship between ranks and probabilities. Indeed, it is worth noting the following alternative formulation of Min Rank: For any ranking modelsM = 〈L, κ〉 and all φ ∈ L, Acc(M, φ) = 1 iff, for any v ∈ W, v(φ) = 1, where W = {v ∈ V : κ(φv) = 0}. It is easily verified that, in virtue of the constraints on ranking functions, W is guaranteed to be non-empty. But now we can see what is a really quite remarkable similarity with the kind of proposal made in the previous section. In both cases, we start 15 with some positive real -valued function f on the elements of V (previous section) or on the set of strongest consistent sentences in L (current section). This enables us to select a lower set W of valuations, such that if v ∈ W and f (v∗) ≤ f (v), or f (φv∗) ≤ f (φv), then v∗ ∈ W. Acceptability is then identified with truth in all elements of W. And the similarity is all the more striking if we recall the logarithmic distance Dlog, briefly mentioned earlier on. Indeed, the range of the function is R+ ∪ {∞}, just as is the case with ranking functions, with Dlog(v,Pr) = − log(Pr(φv)) = ∞ iff Pr(φv) = 0. This suggests an interpretation of ranks of maximally strong consistent sentences as renormalised negations of logarithms of their probabilities. Given Min Rank, the details of the renormalisation then have to depend on whether we opt for Min or opt for Sat, to ensure consistency. Here are two simple correspondences that would do the trick: For any v ∈ V , κ(φv) = minv∗∈V(− log(Pr(φv∗))) + log(Pr(φv)) (for Min) For any v ∈ V , κ(φv) = t −max{t,− log(Pr(φv))} (for Sat) We then straightforwardly recover the ranks for the remainder of the sentences in the language using Definition 5.1, obtaining a many-to-one mapping from probability function onto ranking functions. Interestingly, this would somewhat vindicate Spohn's intuition about a logarithmic connection between ranks and probabilities. The vindication, however, would only be partial: the connection would not quite be the one anticipated. 6 Concluding comments Due to space limitations and to the amount of ground to be covered, we have had to keep the model rather simple. The most obvious shortcoming is perhaps the chronic lack of expressiveness of the language. A move from a sentential to a predicate or modal language would yield a significant gain in realism. Another, admittedly somewhat minor, irritant is the current limitation to finitely generated languages. The infinitary case certainly does raise some further issues. For instance, proposals based on distanceminimising, rather than satisficing, need to address the issue of what to say with respect to the acceptability of a contingent sentence in the case in which there is an infinite sequence of ever-closer valuations. On the current 16 proposal, we would wind up with mandatory suspension of judgment, since W would be empty. There may however be a case for claiming that this kind of case, highlights what one might call a 'deontic blindspot' a point at which rationality fails to yield any recommendation whatsoever. But there are also technical complications prior to that stage, when it comes to computing the distances themselves. It is far from clear, in particular, how to suitably generalise the concept of normalised Hamming distance without running the risk of having W = V . Acknowledgments I am grateful to the members of the Formal Epistemology Project, KU Leuven, and to the audience of PROGIC 2009, Groningen for useful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I am also indebted to two anonymous referees for this journal for the time and trouble that they took to provide exceptionally detailed and insightful reports. Part of the research for this article was funded by a Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) postdoctoral research grant. Appendix Proof of Theorem 2.1. Assume Non-Unanimity. It follows that there exists a model M = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentence φ ∈ L such that Pr(φ) = p < 1 but Acc(M, φ) = 1. Since, as is well-known, there exists a rational number between any two distinct real numbers, there exists a rational number q = m/n (with m, n ∈ N), such that p < q < 1. LetM∗ = 〈L∗,Pr∗〉 be a uniform probability model, such that the cardinality of the set of valuations of L∗ is equal to m. Let ψ denote an arbitrary sentence validated by exactly n of the valuations. Now by Lottery-Proofness, Acc(M∗, ψ) = 0, since Pr(φ{w1,...,wm}) = q < 1. By Monotonicity, however, Acc(M ∗, φ{w1,...,wm}) ≥ Acc(M, φ) = 1. Contradiction.  Proof of Theorem 2.2. Let S := {φW : W ⊆ V} and φW  φW∗ iff W∗ ⊆ W. Let L be the lattice 〈S ,〉. Let B ⊆ S denote the set of φ ∈ S s.t. Acc(M, φ) = 1. Zero-Normalisation is true iff φ∅ = ⊥ < B. UnitNormalisation and Deductive Closure are true iff B is a filter of L. So the three conditions are true iff B is a proper filter of L. But every proper 17 filter is the intersection of a set of ultrafilters. For each of these ultrafilters u, there is some v ∈ V s.t. u = {φ ∈ S : v(φ) = 1}.  Notes 1Note that the assumption made here, that acceptability is a function of an underlying probability model, whilst commonplace in the literature, is not entirely uncontroversial. It rules out, for instance, the views that the acceptability of a sentence depends also depends on the practical payoffs associated with true/false negatives/positives (see Rudner 1953) or again that it is relative to a specific question, modeled as a partition of the language (Levi 1967). A discussion of these issues is however beyond the scope of the present paper. 2In what follows I will be using the expressions 'full belief in the truth of' and 'acceptance of' interchangeably. 3The name for this constraint originates in (Chandler 2010), and derives from the fact that were it to be violated, Structurality and Deductive Closure could be marshalled, lottery paradox -style, to yield a violation of Zero-Normalisation. The lottery paradox -proofness involved was dubbed 'weak' in the original paper for reasons that do not apply to the current model. 4In fact, Douven and Williamson prove a slightly stronger result, making use of a principle that its strictly weaker than Deductive Closure, namely: Aggregativity: For any probability modelM = 〈L,Pr〉 and sentences φ, ψ ∈ L, if Acc(M, φ) = 1 and Acc(M, ψ) = 1, then Acc(M, φ ∧ ψ) = 1. 5The reader familiar with the judgment aggregation literature will notice a considerable amount of simplification going on here. For instance, I am rather severely restricting the class of possible opinion models, which, in the aggregation-theoretic literature, notably involve opinion profiles that are tuples of possibly inconsistent sets of sentences in L. For reasons that will become clear shortly, these expository niceties can be dispensed with. 6See most notably Theorem 2 (a) of (Dietrich and List 2008), in which, in contrast to many other previous results, Opinionation plays no role. 7Distance based approaches to aggregation are also more recently discussed in Miller and Osherson (2009) and Pigozzi (2006). 8On this option, to ensure that the set of selected valuations isn't empty, one could specify that, in the event that all valuations are further than t, all valuations are selected. 9Strictly-speaking, this is not a distance, as the triangle inequality d(v, v∗)+d(v∗, v∗∗) ≥ d(v, v∗∗) need not be respected. 10In fact, Konieczny et al. use the non-normalised counterpart; the normalisation is introduced here to harmonise with the range of dD. 11Clause (i) is crucial here. Without it, in the event that stage (b) allows for W to be the empty set, we would have a violation of Zero-Normalisation, since, obviously, ∅ ⊆ JφK, for all φ ∈ L, including contradictions. 12Both suggestions were very briefly mentioned by Chandler (2010), where the connection with distance-based aggregation functions had not been drawn. 18 13This is of course not a suitable occasion to address the controversial issue of the normative status of a requirement of translation-invariance. The issues at play are complex and, as far as I can see, remain unresolved at this point. See (Zwart 2001), chapter 5 for a detailed overview of the debate. 14In the original draft of this paper, I had suggested that the issue of translationsensitivity of distance-based methods had been overlooked in the judgment aggregation literature. As an anonymous referee pointed out to me, however, I was wrong. Indeed, the issue is in fact briefly discussed in a recent piece by Cariani et al (2008). There, they first offer a theorem (Theorem 5, p. 17) to the effect that translation sensitivity is a property, not only of the Hamming distance, but of any distance measure that is not 'trivial', in the following sense: A measure d of distance between valuations is trivial iff there exists r ∈ R+ such that, for all v,w ∈ V, d(v,w) = r × dD(v,w). After presenting this result, they then go on to say: In short, only trivial distance measures are translation-invariant. . . Thus any judgment aggregation procedure that depends on a non-trivial distance measure will fail translation-invariance. Now the inference from translation-sensitivity of the distance measure to translationsensitivity of the corresponding aggregation procedure seems basically correct, given certain assumptions about the latter. But these assumptions are not provided and neither is the precise derivation: a little more work is required to establish the result, as Cariani et al have acknowledged in recent correspondence. 15The restriction to finite models is important here. Universal quantification over all probability models–finite or otherwise–would yield a principle that is incompatible with the conjunction of Aggregativity and Zero-Normalisation. Note, furthermore, that Consensus Preservation entails Responsiveness. 16When t > 0, since for t = 0, Independence is satisfied. 17As an anonymous referee has pointed out to me, there may be grounds to hold that conservative refinements are perhaps not as informationally innocent as I have suggested and hence that a requirement of preservation of acceptability under such refinements may not be in order. Indeed, the standard Bayesian suggestion of modeling a lack of opinionation with respect to a partition P by a uniform probability distribution over P, faces a number of apparent difficulties: Bertrand-style paradoxes, counterintuitive prescriptions in Ellsberg's urn decision problem, and so on. Whilst I do share the referee's worries here, a constraint of preservation under conservative refinement remains the best that can be achieved within the orthodox Bayesian framework that was assumed from the outset of this paper. 18This is the definition given in (Spohn 2009). Just as the standard ratio definition for conditional probability precludes conditionalisation on probability 0 sentences, it precludes conditionalisation on rank∞ sentences. There are however alternative accounts of both conditional probabilities and conditional ranks that, rightly or wrongly, waive this prohibition. The former will presumably be well-known to the reader. Regarding the latter, we have the following proposal from (Huber 2009): 19 κ(ψ | φ) = { κ(ψ ∧ φ) − κ(φ) if ψ 0 ⊥; ∞ if ψ ` ⊥. The reason for setting the conditional rank to ∞ in case ψ ` ⊥ is presumably to prevent ψ from receiving a rank of 0 upon conditionalisation on a sentence φ of rank∞ (since we would then have κ(ψ ∧ φ) − κ(φ) = ∞ − ∞ = 0), and having κ(* | φ) violate clause (i) of Definition 5.1. Somewhat curiously, however, note that here, contrary to what was the case in Definition 5.2, we no longer have the result that κ(ψ | ¬ψ) = ∞. Indeed, let κ(¬ψ) = ∞ and ψ 0 ⊥. By the above proposal, κ(ψ | ¬ψ) = κ(ψ ∧ ¬ψ) − κ(¬ψ) = ∞ −∞ = 0. This result could however be avoided by simply swapping ψ ` ⊥ (resp.ψ 0 ⊥) for ψ ∧ φ ` ⊥ (resp. ψ ∧ φ 0 ⊥) in the above definition. 19In Definition 5.1, we took the range of κ to be R+ ∪ {∞}. In some publications, however, including the one from which this quote was taken, the range is stated to be N ∪ {∞}. 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∗Relative Correctness Teresa Marques (Final draf. Published online first Philosophical Studies, DOI: 10.1007/s11098-013-0100-3. Please quote that version) Abstract John MacFarlane has defended a radical form of truth relativism, making the truth of assertions relative not only to contexts of utterance but also to contexts of assessment, or perspectives. Making sense of assessment-sensitive truth is a matter of making sense of the normative commitments undertaken by speakers in using assessment-sensitive sentences. This paper argues against the possibility of making sense of such a practice, offering a variation of Evans's (1985) challenge to the coherence of relative truth. The main objection to the relativist is that rational and earnest speakers are not bound by assessment-relative standards of correctness. Introduction John MacFarlane has offered a well-sustained defense of truth relativism in recent years.1 In making the truth of assertions relative to contexts of assessment, his proposal goes beyond the standard relativization of utterance truth to contexts of utterance and circumstances of evaluation. But making sense of assessment-sensitive truth, as he stresses, is a matter of making sense of the normative constraints and commitments undertaken by speakers in using assessment-sensitive sentences. The main challenge to MacFarlane's version of relativism is whether it yields a rational practice of assertion. The challenge is raised by Evans (1985). Adapting Evans's objection, I argue here that assessment-relative truth cannot meet what I take to be the core of the challenge. Elaborated in the way I suggest, the challenge can be raised also against  Teresa Marques LanCog, University of Lisbon & LOGOS, Barcelona Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa Faculdade de Letras, Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisboa, Portugal E-mail: [email protected] 1 I focus exclusively on MacFarlane's proposal because he offers, in my view, the clearest and strongest account of the pragmatics of the use of assessment-relative propositions See MacFarlane (2003, 2005, 2007, 2008, ms). 2 MacFarlane's account of assertion. An asserter is under no obligation to undertake a commitment to retract an assertion and admit it was incorrect when challenged by someone who does not share the same perspective. As I claim, this holds even when the challenger is the asserter herself in the future. Earnest rational speakers can only be bound to undertake commitments determined at the context of assessment that is fixed at the context of utterance. There is hence no normative difference between assessment-relativism and contextualism (indexical or not). The only obligations speakers can be expected to comply with are those determined by the context of utterance. This means that the correctness of assertions is not relative. The first section presents MacFarlane's position on assessment-relativism. The second section presents Evans's challenge to the relativization and MacFarlane's response. In the final section, I explain how this account of assertion fails to meet a variation on Evans's challenge. 1. Assessment-Relative Truth and Relative Correctness Imagine two opera experts, Smith and Jones, both equally qualified, who agree on the following characterization of Maria Callas's voice: (1) The voice of Callas is metallic, uneven, sometimes nasal, strident and unsteady with the high notes; it is harsh and often unpleasant. Our experts agree over the thick evaluative predicates ascribed to Callas's voice, even if some of the descriptions are metaphorical. The experts do not agree, however, on whether Callas was one of the best (opera) singers of the 20th century, because they do not even agree on (2) and (3): (2) Callas is good (as an opera singer). (3) Renata Tebaldi is better than Callas. 3 Even though, again, they agree that (4) Tebaldi has a classical, harmonious, even voice, delivering clean and technically perfect interpretations. It is conceivable that our experts, Smith and Jones, go on forever about the right answer to the question of who is the better singer, without reaching any agreement. The supporter of Callas, Smith, will draw attention to the fact that all the flaws that can be attributed to her voice are largely irrelevant to an assessment of her interpretations. The opponent of Callas, Jones, will draw attention to the impossibility of enjoying interpretations made with a strident harsh metallic voice. The dispute exemplifies a common aesthetic disagreement. Once all the fine-grained descriptions are given, disagreement often remains between operatic experts as to whether x is good, or whether x is better than y. The choice of the example is not gratuitous. If relativism about evaluative predicates is well motivated, it should be possible that two people who are experts on a given topic, knowing all the objective properties in that range of issues, agreeing over very fine-grained descriptions, insist nonetheless on their own views on evaluations made at a certain level. Moreover, it should be possible that there is no response-independent answer forthcoming, and, given this, that neither expert can be expected to abandon her view. An expert's view reflects an aesthetic standard that she masters, and, it is assumed, no such perspective is more veridical than another. An explanation for this sort of deadlock disagreement over matters of aesthetic taste makes (2) context-dependent. Making utterances of (2) context-dependent can account for the sense in which neither Smith nor Jones are at fault. Smith says that Callas is good for the standard at Smith's context of utterance, and Jones denies that Callas is good for the standard at Jones's context of utterance. Yet, the ground for disagreement over content is lost. Contextdependence, on the standard assumptions convincingly based on data about 'here' and 'now', 4 simply generates different semantic contents, and as a result the corresponding diagnosis for the present case would be that Smith and Jones are talking past each other. The description of the case appeals to our (arguably) shared intuition that contenders in these disputes are doing more than talking past each other. In the current debate about the meaning of predicates of personal taste and evaluative predicates, epistemic modals and knowledge attributions, several authors have raised objections against contextualist approaches, mainly on the basis that contextualism misses intuitions of disagreement that these writers show we have. The problem, as they argue, is that of lost disagreement. Thus, Kölbel (2004) argues on this basis for what is usually called 'moderate truth-relativism' (also known as 'non-indexical contextualism', by contrast with the more standard contextualist views). The moderate relativist wants to explain disagreement by making speakers assert/deny the same proposition and placing the required standard of aesthetic taste in the circumstances of evaluation.2 The view is non-indexical because the parameters required for the evaluation of a sentence are not required or triggered by the character of an expression in the sentence uttered; henceforth those parameters are not ingredients of content. This form of relativism is moderate because the relevant parameters in the circumstances of evaluation are settled at the context of utterance. Speakers, in asserting, aim at partially characterizing particular circumstances, and those are the relevant ones for assessing their assertions. Egan (2007, 2010), Lasersohn (2005) and MacFarlane (2003, 2005, 2007, 2008 and MS) have argued for another version that can be called 'assessment-relativism'. MacFarlane's form of truth relativism challenges the moderate constraint on what settles parameters, dropping this restriction. Genuinely relativistic truth is relativized to parameters (times, 2 I agree with the arguments given by MacFarlane (2007, p. 23), García-Carpintero (2008, pp. 139-41) and Francén (2010) to the effect that non-indexical contextualism only captures the apparent lack of objectivity of statements in the areas of discourse earlier considered at the cost of failing to capture any relevant sense of doxastic disagreement. For more about this problem, see Marques (forthcoming). 5 perspectives, standards of taste, aesthetic standards, etc.) that need not be settled in the context of utterance, and, hence, may be beyond what can be aimed or intended by a speaker. MacFarlane claims that the truth of certain types of utterances is relative to contexts of assessment: By a 'context of assessment', I mean simply a concrete situation in which a use of a sentence is being assessed. We perform speech acts, but we also assess them; so, just as we can talk of the context in which a sentence is being used, we can talk of a context (there will be indefinitely many) in which a use of it is being assessed. (MacFarlane (2005), p. 325) Whereas for the non-indexical contextualist an utterance of a sentence is evaluated with respect to parameters that are fixed at the context of utterance, for MacFarlane an utterance of some kind of sentences is evaluated with respect to parameters that need not be settled at the context of utterance. And this is the fundamental difference between non-indexical contextualism and truth-relativism. Here, I am concerned with the rationality of engaging in a practice of assertion described by means of this form of theoretical framework, and not with discussing whether particular forms of discourse would fit it or not. Hence, I will not discuss future contingents, for instance.3 The truth-relativist proposal is of necessity a general one, intended also to be applicable even in evaluative cases, in which their problems come more clearly to the surface. I will continue to focus, therefore, on aesthetic discourse. Recall, then, the Callas debate, where Smith asserts (2) 'Callas is good', and Jones asserts its negation. MacFarlane 2005 defines relative truth for aesthetic utterances in this way: Aesthetic relativism: S is true at a context of use CU and context of assessment CA iff there is a proposition p such that (a) S expresses p at CU, and (b) p is true at the world of CU and the aesthetic standards of the assessor at CA. (MacFarlane 2005, p. 325) 3 It is anyway unclear whether the contingency of the future requires that the future be open, as MacFarlane describes it. See Tweedale (2004) and García-Carpintero (forthcoming) for instance. 6 This differs from orthodox definitions of truth by adding the requirement that the occurrence or use of a sentence S be true at a context of utterance and at a context of assessment. Given assessment-sensitivity, assertions about aesthetic matters do not have absolute truth evaluations, and so they do not have absolute correctness conditions. Assertions may be correct and true if assessed when made, and incorrect when assessed elsewhere, and viceversa. Now, as MacFarlane recognizes, making sense of relativism is a matter of understanding what it would be to commit oneself to the truth of an assessment-sensitive sentence or proposition. For a theoretical notion of this kind to have a function, it must have its place in the rational practice of assertion. 2. Evans's Challenge and MacFarlane's Reply Gareth Evans (1985) has expressed a challenge to assessment-relativism in a poignant way, raising doubts about the effects of relativism on the practice of assertion. The view Evans criticizes corresponds to the view advanced by MacFarlane. Evans characterizes it as "the revolutionary idea that the evaluation of an utterance as correct or incorrect depends upon the time the evaluation is made (and so the evaluation varies)." (1980, p. 348) Although Evans is here addressing the case of tensed sentences and temporal propositions, the point he makes is general. We can, for our case, replace times by aesthetic standards. Such a conception of assertion is not coherent. In the first place, I do not understand the use of the ordinary word 'correct' to apply to one and the same historical act at some times and not at others, according to the state of the weather. Just as we use the terms 'good' and 'bad', 'obligatory' and 'permitted' to make an assessment, once and for all, of non-linguistic actions, so we use the term 'correct' to make a once-and-forall assessment of speech-acts. Secondly... If a theory of sense permits a subject to deduce that a particular utterance will now be correct, but later will be incorrect, it cannot assist the subject in deciding what to say, nor in interpreting the remarks of others. What should he aim at, or take others to be aiming at? Maximum correctness? But of course, if he knew the answer to this question, it would necessarily generate a once-and-for-all assessment of utterances, according to whether or not they meet whatever condition the answer gave. (Evans (1985), pp. 349-5) 7 Evans's challenge is, I think, as follows. When we make sincere assertions, we aim to speak truly. If truth is assessment-sensitive, there is no final answer to the question of whether our assertion was correct when we made it. In our example, there is no single definite answer to the question of whether Smith's assertion that Callas is good was correct when she made it. If so, there is no single answer to the question of whether Smith, though an opera expert with full mastery of her standard, achieved the aim of speaking truly. At best, we can aim to speak truly from a context. But, from which context? If we can give an answer to this question, then we also generate a "once-and-for-all assessment of utterances, according to whether or not they meet whatever condition the answer gave." Consider the options: (i) If it is truth at the context of utterance, or one picked from the context of utterance, then there is no need to relativize truth. (Smith may aim to say what is true in her own standard, or aim to say what is true in Jones's standard – but that is still truth relative to a circumstance of evaluation determined at the context of utterance, by the speaker's intentions, and so, for simplicity, truth relative to Smith's context of utterance). (ii) Maximum truth (truth at all/most/some contexts) is not a good option either. Truth in all contexts would clearly generate an absolute evaluation of an utterance, a "once-and-forall assessment of utterances". Moreover, as MacFarlane recently accepted,4 truth in some/most contexts is a notion that is difficult to understand (his 2003 paper already includes some considerations about this on p. 333). Aiming at truth in some contexts is too loose a notion to be made to work. It would seem that any utterance of a contingent truth is true with respect to some contexts and not true with respect to some other contexts. So, even if Smith asserts something false, she could always rejoinder critics arguing that her assertion is true in some context or other. 'Most contexts' is even less clear; how can one aim at truth in most contexts if there are, arguably, indefinitely many possible contexts? 4 In conversation. 8 The challenge seems serious; it seems that the only contexts a speaker can significantly aim at are those accessible or determined at the context of utterance. If this is so, contexts of assessment are idle wheels in the definition of truth for occurrences of sentences. The context of assessment that would matter for evaluating utterances of sentences, and assertions, is the context of assessment that is identical to the context of utterance, i.e., Aesthetic relativism: S is true at a context of use CU and context of assessment CA iff there is a proposition p such that (a) S expresses p at CU, and (b) p is true at the world of CU and the aesthetic standards of the assessor at CA, and and CU = CA. In our operatic example, the context of assessment relevant to assess Smith's assertion that Callas is good would be Smith's own context, or more precisely, Smith's own aesthetic standard at the context of utterance. This comes down to non-indexical contextualism: the relevant parameter for the evaluation of the truth of an utterance is settled at the context of utterance. Assessment-relativism would be, in practice, redundant. MacFarlane, however, remains unconvinced and resists Evans's challenge. I will present what summarizes his published view.5 MacFarlane has argued (2003, 2005) that assertion is a speech-act that can be characterized not in terms of a constitutive norm, but in terms of the commitments that speakers undertake when asserting. What is one committed to in asserting? MacFarlane's considered answer relies on a tripartite analysis of the commitments undertaken by speakers: (W) Commitment to withdraw the assertion if and when it is shown to have been untrue; (J) Commitment to justify the assertion (provide grounds for its truth) if and when it is appropriately challenged; (R) Commitment to be held responsible if someone else acts on or reasons from what 5 In seminars, and in conversation, John MacFarlane has sketched a reply to the challenge that preserves truth as the norm of assertion; it was formulated differently from how I have presented it here, and it is accompanied by a norm for retractions. In his book manuscript, he also suggests that there is a norm for retractions: one must retract a previous assertion as wrong when it is false at one's current context of assessment. The challenge applies equally to the new account offered by MacFarlane, as can be verified in the rest of this paper. 9 is asserted, and it proves to have been untrue (MacFarlane (2005), p.334). Naturally, (W), (J), and (R) are all reasonable commitments to expect speakers to undertake, if truth is not assessment-relative. One should retract if what one said is proven false, one should be capable of providing grounds for what one asserts, one should be held responsible for passing on false information, etc. But, to accommodate assessment-sensitivity, these commitments must involve doing different things relative to different contexts of assessment. The alternatives that are not viable were mentioned earlier: (i) If, say, one is committed by (W) to withdraw one's assertion only when it is shown to have been untrue relative to parameters given by the context of utterance, then we dispense with assessment-relative truth; (ii) and if the commitment is to withdraw the assertion when untrue relative to all/most/some contexts, we also do not gain an assessment-relative notion of truth, as either once-and-for-all evaluations are generated, or incoherent commitments ensue. There are two genuine relativistic alternatives left: (iii) one incurs different commitments relative to different contexts of assessment where the putative refutation is given; (iv) one incurs different commitments relative to different contexts of assessment where the asserter is evaluating the putative refutation. MacFarlane discards (iii), for reasons significantly different to those advanced by Evans. For MacFarlane, if the relevant commitments one incurs concerned any context of assessment where a putative refutation is given, then it would be impossible to keep them, because it would be ...too damaging to a single person's body of assertions. If I withdraw some of my assertions because they are untrue relative to Bob's context and others because they are untrue relative to Marie's, I may end up with a body of assertions that is incoherent and reflects no one's point of view... It demands too much of asserters to give every challenger the home stadium advantage." (2005, p. 336) Evans is concerned with a speaker not being able to aim at the truth, but MacFarlane draws attention to the dangers of ending up with no coherent point of view. The next section shows that Evans's challenge can be raised even against an account of assertion in terms of 10 commitments to assessment-sensitive truth, and that the problem is not that agents run the risk of having no coherent point of view to hold at a given time. MacFarlane proposes that the relevant contexts of assessment are those that the asserter occupies at any future context where she assesses her previous assertion, hence choosing option (iv). The three commitments are thus reformulated, where C1 is the context of utterance and C2 the relevant contexts of assessment occupied by the asserter: (W)* In asserting that p at C1, one commits oneself to withdrawing the assertion (in any future context C2) if p is shown to be untrue relative to context of use C1 and context of assessment C2. (J)* In asserting that p at C1, one commits oneself to justifying the assertion when it is appropriately challenged. To justify the assertion in a context C2 is to provide grounds for the truth of p relative to context of use C1 and context of assessment C2. (R)* In asserting that p at C1, one commits oneself to accepting responsibility (at any future context C2) if, on the basis of this assertion someone else takes p to be true (relative to context of use C1 and context of assessment C2) and it proves to be untrue (relative to C1 and C2) (cf. MacFarlane 2005, p. 337). The most significant consequence of the difference between (iii) and (iv), and the advantage of (iv) over (iii), is that if one is in disagreement with someone else, say over matters of taste or aesthetics, then, respecting the motivation for relativism, neither can be forced by her or his interlocutor to retract. With (iii), speakers would commit themselves to withdraw, justify, or be responsible for their assertions whenever people assess these assertions as untrue from significantly different perspectives. However, an asserter is under no obligation to undertake a commitment to retract an assertion, and admit that it was incorrect, when challenged by someone who does not share the same perspective. To make it more vivid, consider this situation. Suppose that Jones is invited to lecture at the Maria Callas Admiration Society, but the event is a humiliation. All the society members dedicate themselves to challenging Jones's views, and showing how, on their view, she is wrong. Jones's assertion that Tebaldi is better than Callas is being assessed by challengers, and her assertion is not true at their context. Naturally, a situation like this has to be possible in a relativistic framework: two experts can have an irreducible disagreement as to 11 whether Callas is the better singer. Since, on assumption, there is no expert-independent truth of the matter, Jones cannot be forced to retract. MacFarlane's assessment-sensitive truth respects this, having an advantage over the most radical form of truth relativism in the vicinity, the one that takes contexts where any putative refutation is given to be the relevant context of assessment to which one must assume commitments. Where does the real difference lie? The reformulated commitments are the commitments to withdraw, justify or be responsible for one's previous assertion with respect to one's context of utterance and one's current context of assessment. In the case of aesthetic standards, if Smith does not change her standard, then C2 will still be equal to C1. If she changes her standard significantly, and her assertion of (2) 'Callas is good' with respect to the current new standard is not true, then she is subject to (W*), that is, she ought to retract her previous assertion. The crucial difference between the options described in (i) and (iv), as MacFarlane claims, comes out with respect to retractions, not disagreements. A retraction has the effect of assessing negatively a previous speech act (an assertion), one withdraws a previous statement because it was incorrect, and cancels some of its consequences in that one manifests that one can no longer be bound by the commitments previously undertaken. Notice that the discussion here is not about whether propositional truth may be construed as relative to all sorts of contexts of assessment. The discussion was about which contexts of assessment are relevant for assertion and, relatedly, for retraction. MacFarlane believes those are the contexts described in option (iv). But if contexts of the type considered in (iv), those that the asserter currently6 occupies that differ significantly from the context of utterance, are a special case of contexts of the type considered in option (iii), those where a putative refutation is given, then contexts of assessment that the speaker presently occupies 6 There should be no ambiguity here. "Currently" occurs embedded, and the context of assessment it determines is whatever context the speaker is occupying. 12 are also be problematic. The last section shows why this is the case. 3. No obligation to retract What characterizes assessment sensitivity for MacFarlane is that utterance truth, and propositional truth, is relativized both to the context of utterance and to the context of assessment that the speaker currently occupies. This is not as radical a form of truth relativism as it might be. Nonetheless, I think, the contexts that the speaker currently occupies that differ significantly from the context of utterance are a special case of contexts where a refutation is given, and, because of this, Evans's challenge can be reformulated. I argue for this in the remainder of the paper. Let us assume Smith is a rational agent, and is as knowledgeable as she can be about a topic. If a theory about assertion in terms of commitments is right, when Smith earnestly asserts that p, she is thereby under the obligation to F, where F is whatever the theory says she must do to upon asserting. Assuming she is earnest, we assume she does what she should. An adequate account of assertion ought to assign to Smith the right intentions. So, when she earnestly asserts that p, she should form the intention to F. If there is such a thing as a rational agent knowingly, sincerely and earnestly, asserting that p, and if a theory of assertion is correct, then that agent should form an intention assigned by the theory. On MacFarlane's account, in virtue of asserting, the agent is assuming a given commitment or set of commitments, which characterize assertion. But if a sincere agent asserts that p, and does not form the intention to undertake the commitments assigned by the account, then, assuming the account is correct, that agent is irrational. And if a rational agent asserts that p, and does not form the intention to keep the commitments assigned by the account, then, assuming the account is correct, the agent is either insincere or not earnest. But if an agent is not irrational, and is earnest, yet still does not form the intention assigned by the 13 account, then that is an indication that the account is wrong. The speaker is not obliged to keep the commitments the account identifies. For instance, if a rational and earnest speaker is not seen as doing anything wrong by not retracting, then she had no obligation to retract in the first place.7 MacFarlane tries to resist Evans's challenge by preventing that speakers end up with incoherent sets of beliefs. But Evans's challenge, as I suggest to understand it anyway, is not that a speaker may have no coherent set of beliefs at a given time. It is also not that an individual agent cannot occasionally commit herself to unpredictable and unforeseeable consequences; agents can and do such things. Nor is it that she cannot count as having met a standard of correctness she did not have the intention of meeting, because accidentally one may keep commitments or do what is right, against one's original intentions not to keep them. The point behind Evans's challenge, as I see it, is rather that the norms that constitute or regulate an act cannot be such that the connection between succeeding in following them and earnestly forming the intention to do so be something merely accidental. To the same effect: the kind of commitment one undertakes when one earnestly and rationally performs an action cannot make the connection between succeeding in keeping the commitment and earnestly forming an intention to do so be merely accidental.8 The problem with assessment-relative truth, as I will now argue, is that speakers do not have to commit to it. And, since there is no such thing as a commitment that does not impose an obligation, speakers are not committed to assessment-relative truth. The main problem I want to press can be put as follows: if assertion were 7 This will be, ultimately, the reason why the objection also arises against MacFarlane's new account of assertion, partially characterized by a retraction norm. 8 Of course, even when we succeed in keeping a promise when we have earnestly formed an intention to do so, to some extent that depends on the "accidental" fact that matters outside our control (and rational expectation when forming the intention) have not interfered. For instance, that we have not accidentally died in the meantime. These matters can be thought of as conditions under which, had they obtained, the ensuing obligation would have simply ceased to exist; or rather conditions that constitute a good excuse, all things considered, not to keep it even though it was still there. But neither alternative is of any help for MacFarlane. 14 characterized by (W)*, (J)* and (R)*, and one earnestly asserts what one knows to be true at the context of utterance, then, even if one's assertion is perfectly correct from the perspective of the context of assessment provided by the context of utterance itself, at the same time one should be committed to admit in a future context of assessment that the assertion was, after all, wrong. The reason for this is that it is in principle possible that there are future contexts of assessment where one occupies a standard different to the one she occupies now, determining conflicting commitments. But then Evans's challenge applies: If a theory of sense permits a subject to deduce that a particular utterance will now be correct, but later will be incorrect, it cannot assist the subject in deciding what to say, nor in interpreting the remarks of others. What should he aim at, or take others to be aiming at? (Evans, idem) This can be illustrated with an example. Imagine that Smith is aware that many things are relative to perspectives. Her opinions on opera depend on the aesthetic standard she now masters; her culinary opinions depend on her current dispositions towards food, etc. She knows, moreover, that certain standards are bound to change with time, in ways that, from her current position, may be unpredictable or largely irrelevant for her present concerns. She is even favourable to treating taste and value predicates as predicates that express dispositional properties and to acknowledge that there is no prima facie reason to treat some dispositions as more veridical than others. So, imagine that she knows that people in her family, when they reach 60, lose the capacity to appreciate sweets. She knows that in the future, if and when she reaches the age of 60, she will not think that crème brûlée is tasty (i.e., she will not selfascribe the disposition to appreciate crème brûlée). On MacFarlane's account, she should be puzzled, in envisaging now that there will come to be situations in which she will be forced to retract her current assertion, while, from the viewpoint of her present context of assessment, those situations do not constitute at all a reason for so doing. In fact, I do not think that this will prevent her from asserting, now, that crème brûlée is tasty. Certainly, Smith could have 15 aimed at the context she knows she will occupy when she is 60 – but had she done so, her standard of taste at 60 would still have been a standard of taste fixed by the context of utterance. Now, as MacFarlane insists, there are indefinitely many possible contexts of assessment. In the operatic example, Smith may, also, due to some unexpected life-changing event, come to change her operatic standards and no longer accept that Callas was one of the best opera singers of the 20th century, something which, from her current situation, is unimaginable. But once again, judging by our intuitions (at least mine, anyway), as a matter of fact in her present situation she is only committed to truth from her current context. She should also be (now) committed to retract her present assertions about Callas as wrong when her dispositions towards opera change. Again, and with more force, these would be conflicting commitments that Smith would undertake. This is a conflicting requirement on the speaker. And it is against this idea that Evans complained. As it turns out, in the situation I am conceiving, Smith is only committed to the correctness of her assertion at her current context. How do we judge her actual commitments in contrast with the commitments she should have if MacFarlane was right? Is she insincere? Is she not earnest? Or is she not a rational asserter? I think that all these questions have a negative answer, and that MacFarlane has not given us any justification to think otherwise. This is then the main point I want to make: if assessment-sensitive truth has any bite, there should be contexts of assessment at which the relevant parameters determine commitments conflicting with those available to speakers at the context of assessment provided by the context of utterance itself. Rational, earnest, reflective speakers are in a position to envisage that possibility. But our intuitions tell us that – far from experiencing the puzzlement that MacFarlane's view entails – this is not going to deter us, when imaginatively in the shoes of these speakers, from making assertions, thereby consistently committing 16 ourselves in the way we ordinarily do (to truth at our current contexts).9 Smith, as I am claiming, will only commit herself to the correctness of her assertion with respect to standards determined at her context of utterance, and she is not blameworthy in any way for so doing.10 There are two alternatives concerning what role (W*), (J*) and (R*) play in a theory. The first alternative is that these commitments are part of a proposal for a purely descriptive account of the actual practice of assertion. Now, Smith asserted something, that crème brûlée is tasty. But she did not undertake the commitment to withdraw, justify or be responsible for the truth of her present assertion with respect to a future context she knows she may occupy. Likewise, when she asserted that Callas is good, she did not undertake the commitment to withdraw, justify or be responsible for the truth of her present assertion with respect to a future context she has no clue she may occupy. It follows that our assertoric practice is not accurately described by those commitments, since rational and earnest agents can assert without incurring them. The second alternative is that the commitments (W*), (J*) and (R*) are part of a revisionary account of assertion. Smith could have asserted without taking the relativized commitments. But she would have violated obligations that should apply to her simply by 9 These considerations apply to most cases to which MacFarlane has suggested to apply his relativist semantics. The only exception is the case of future contingents; but this is because in that case both the class of histories open when the utterance is made, and the class open when the relevant future comes, are envisaged by the speaker as relevant parameters of evaluation at the context of utterance. That is precisely the case where what is most distinctive of MacFarlane's brand of relativism (that the truth/correctness of utterances is to be appraised relative to parameters not intended at the context of utterance) does not obtain. 10 That there are no obligations to retract when what are involved are changeable standards of correctness has been recently illustrated with an actual case. There is an ongoing petition to pardon Alan Turing posthumously from the charges of indecency. The justice minister Lord McNally is reported to have replied "A posthumous pardon was not considered appropriate as Alan Turing was properly convicted of what at the time was a criminal offence. He would have known that his offence was against the law and that he would be prosecuted. It is tragic that Alan Turing was convicted of an offence which now seems both cruel and absurd - particularly poignant given his outstanding contribution to the war effort. However, the law at the time required a prosecution and, as such, longstanding policy has been to accept that such convictions took place and, rather than trying to alter the historical context and to put right what cannot be put right, ensure instead that we never again return to those times. (in The Guardian, 7 February 2012). It seems that retrospective assessments in cases like this involve the assessment, not of the assertion, but of the standard of correctness, as suggested by Lord MacNally's statement. This is in line with Sundell's (2011) disputes about contextual standards. 17 virtue of having asserted, on a proper conception of such practice. Has she violated any such obligations? And is she irrational if she only commits herself to truth at her context? I do not see what justifies that revisionary proposal: she need not accept now commitments with respect to her gustatory taste at age 60, nor, with even more reason, accept now commitments to truth at unforeseen aesthetic perspectives (whether she eventually comes to occupy those perspectives or not). Rather, possible future perspectives are irrelevant for all her present assertoric commitments (unless they are the intended ones).11 So, commitments relativized to contexts of assessment are not part of a compelling revisionary account of assertion either.12 There does not seem to be any justification for the revisionary proposal. But there is justification against it. Presumably, the relativist wants different judgments of value to be equally veridical. The truth of the propositions at stake depends on subjects' responses to different things. That is why subjects would not have to retract when challenged by others. Those with different dispositions are not better positioned to assess a given matter than the subject who is being challenged. Mutatis mutandis, the same is true in the individual case. If one's dispositions towards desserts, or opera, change across time, one's later responses and reactions are not more veridical than one's earlier responses and reactions. A fortiori, one has no obligation to retract one's earlier assertion (which was correct when made) at a later time. To sum up. As I pointed out in the previous section, MacFarlane rejects alternative (iii) to make sense of relative truth, because it is "too damaging to a single person's body of assertions". He advances (iv) as a still sufficiently relativist alternative, less damaging because we require that it is the very same subject that made the assertion who is now assessing it. However, we have just seen that if the subject has meanwhile relevantly changed 11 Can we think of the condition that one changes her gustatory or operatic standards as one whose obtaining would extinguish the obligation, or give us a good excuse not to keep it? That would be for MacFarlane to admit that the only effective obligation we incur in asserting is to say what is true at the context of utterance, and therefore to abandon what is distinctive of his "genuine" brand of relativism. 12 A similar argument appears to be made by Jacob Ross and Mark Schroeder in their "Reversibility and Disagreement" (ms). 18 her standards, her assessment is irrelevant to the commitments that we may sensibly ascribe to her previous self. The same reasons that motivate relativism weigh against taking (iii) seriously, and should, a fortiori, weigh against taking (iv) seriously. Of course, if we require in addition that the subject who is doing the assessing has not changed her standards, then we are back in the moderate versions of relativism ("non-indexical contextualism"). Asserters are under no obligation to commit to retracting an assertion when challenged by someone who does not share the same perspective. This holds even when the challenger is the asserter herself in the future. Therefore, the correctness of assertions is not relative. Acknowlegments: Thanks to Manuel García-Carpintero, Sven Rosenkranz, Pedro Santos and Dan Zeman for helpful discussion and feedback on previous versions of this material. Thanks also to an anonymous referee for this journal for very helpful comments and suggestions. The research for this paper was supported by projects Contextualism, Relativism and Practical Conflicts and Disagreement, EuroUnders/0001/2010 (part of the collaborative research project Communication in Contex: of the ESF EUROCORES EuroUnderstanding programme) and Online Companion to Problems of Analytic Philosophy, PTDC/FIL-FIL/121209/2010 (both funded by FCT); The Nature of Assertion: Consequences for Relativism and Fictionalism Code: FFI2010-16049, and PERSP Philosophy of Perspectival Thouths and Facts, Code: CSD2009-00056 (Spain), and by the AGAUR of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2009SGR-1077). References Egan, Andy (2007). Epistemic modals, relativism and assertion. Philosophical Studies 133 (1):1--22. Egan, A. (2010). Disputing about taste. In T. Warfield and R. Feldman (Eds.), Disagreement, pp. 247–286. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, G. (1985). Does Tense Logic Rest on a Mistake? In Collected Papers (p. 34163). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Francén, R. (2010): "No Deep Disagreement for New Relativists", Philosophical Studies 151, 19-37. García-Carpintero, M. (2008). Relativism, Vagueness and What Is Said. In M. GarcíaCarpintero & M. Kölbel (Eds.), Relative Truth (p. 129-154). Oxfrod: Oxford University Press. García-Carpintero, Manuel (forthcoming): "Relativism, the Open Future, and Propositional Truth", in F. Correia & A. Iacona (eds.), Around the Tree, Synthese Library, Springer. Kölbel, M. (2004). Indexical relativism versus genuine relativism. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12(3), 297–313. Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context Dependence, Disagreement and Predicates of Personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28 (06), 643-686. MacFarlane, J. (2003). Future Contingents and Relative Truth. Philosophical Quarterly, 53 (212), 321-336. MacFarlane, J. (2005). Making Sense of Relative Truth. Proceedings of the 19 Aristotelian Society, 105 (3), 321-339. MacFarlane, J. (2007). Relativism and Disagreement. Philosophical Studies, 132 (1), 17-31. MacFarlane, J. (2008). Truth in The Garden of Forking Paths. In M. García-Carpintero & M. Kölbel (Eds.), Relative Truth (p. 81-102). Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacFarlane, J. (ms). Assessment sensitivity: Relative truth and its applications. manuscript accessed on-line April 2012. Marques, T. (forthcoming): "Doxastic Disagreement", Erkenntnis. Ross, J and Schroeder, M. (ms): "Reversibility and Disagreement", posted on 2/28/2010 at http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~maschroe/research/. Sundell, T. (2011). Disagreements about taste. Philosophical Studies 155 (2), 267–288. Tweedale, Martin M. (2004): "Future Contingents and Deflated Truth-Value Gaps," Noûs xxxviii (2), 233-265.

What is conditionalization, and why should we do it?∗ Richard Pettigrew November 5, 2019 Abstract Conditionalization is one of the central norms of Bayesian epistemology. But there are a number of competing formulations, and a number of arguments that purport to establish it. In this paper, I explore which formulations of the norm are supported by which arguments. In their standard formulations, each of the arguments I consider here depends on the same assumption, which I call Deterministic Updating. I will investigate whether it is possible to amend these arguments so that they no longer depend on it. As I show, whether this is possible depends on the formulation of the norm under consideration. One of the central tenets of traditional Bayesian epistemology is Conditionalization. There are various formulations of this norm, but they all agree that it concerns the way your credences should change in response to evidence. I spell out the three formulations that I'll consider below. On the first, Conditionalization concerns how you actually update your credences when you receive a piece of evidence; on the second, it concerns how you are disposed to update when you receive evidence; and on the third, it concerns how you plan to update. In this paper, I am concerned not so much with which formulation of the norm is correct-after all, they are not incompatible with each other, and some are independent of each other. Rather, I am concerned with which formulation is justified by the existing arguments. I consider three versions of Conditionalization, and four arguments in their favour. For each combination, I'll ask whether the argument can support the norm when it is formulated in that way. In each case, I note that the standard version of the argument relies on a particular assumption, which I call Deterministic Updating and which I formulate precisely below. I'll ask ∗I am extremely grateful to Catrin Campbell-Moore, Kenny Easwaran, Jason Konek, and Ben Levinstein as well as two anonymous referees for this journal for helpful comments on earlier versions of the material. 1 whether the argument really does rely on this assumption, or whether it can be amended to support the norm without that assumption. This is important because Deterministic Updating says that your updating plan or disposition should specify, for any piece of evidence you might receive, a unique way to update on it. But this seems unmotivated, at least from the Bayesian point of view. After all, subjective Bayesianism is a very permissive theory when it comes to your initial credence function, that is, the one you have at the beginning of your epistemic life before you've gathered any evidence. But, once that initial credence function is chosen from the wide array that Bayesianism deems permissible, the theory is very restrictive about how you should update your credences upon receipt of new evidence. We tolerate this discrepancy because the same sorts of argument seem to give us both the permissiveness of Probabilism and the restrictiveness of Conditionalization. But if it turns out that these arguments only give the latter when we make an unmotivated assumption, this spells trouble for Bayesianism.1 I don't claim that the four arguments I consider here exhaust the putative justifications of Conditionalization. Besides these, there are decisiontheoretic arguments by Savage (1954, Section 3.5), arguments from symmetry considerations by van Fraassen (1989, Section 13.2) and Grove & Halpern (1998), and arguments from a principle of minimal change due to Diaconis & Zabell (1982, Section 5.1) and Dietrich et al. (2016). I focus on the four described here in the interests of space and because these four arguments are naturally grouped together. We might call them the teleological arguments for Conditionalization, for they seek to establish that norm by pointing to ways that updating in the way it demands optimises different aspects of the goodness of your credences, whether that is their pragmatic utility or their epistemic utility. I leave the question of how these alternative justifications of Conditionalization relate to the assumption of Deterministic Updating to future work.2 I start in Section 1 by presenting the various formulations of the norm precisely. Then I introduce the four arguments informally. Then, in Section 2, I introduce some of the formal machinery required to state the arguments. Sections 3-6 contain the central results of the paper. In those sections, I work through each of the four arguments in turn, provide its standard presentation, which assumes Deterministic Updating, and then ask whether we can do without that assumption. As we'll see, for one of the arguments, we cannot do without Deterministic Updating; for the other three, if we drop Deterministic Updating, we face a choice-if we go one way, we can justify the three formulations of Conditionalization without assuming Deterministic Updating; if we go the other way, we cannot. In 1Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting that I mention this motivation. 2Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to clarify the scope of the present paper. 2 Section 7, I ask what lessons we can learn from these results. 1 Three formulations and four arguments Here are the three formulations of Conditionalization. According to the first, Actual Conditionalization, the norm governs your actual updating behaviour. Actual Conditionalization (AC) If (i) c is your credence function at t (I'll often refer to this as your prior); (ii) the total evidence you receive between t and t′ comes in the form of a proposition E learned with certainty; (iii) c(E) > 0; (iv) c′ is your credence function at the later time t′ (I'll often refer to this as your posterior); then it should be the case that c′(−) = c(−|E) = c(− & E)c(E) . According to the second, Plan Conditionalization, the norm governs the updating behaviour you would endorse in all possible evidential situations you might face. Plan Conditionalization (PC) If (i) c is your credence function at t; (ii) the total evidence you receive between t and t′ will come in the form of a proposition learned with certainty, and that proposition will come from the partition E = {E1, . . . , En};3 (iii) R is the plan you endorse for how to update in response to each possible piece of total evidence, then it should be the case that, if you were to receive evidence Ei and if c(Ei) > 0, then R would exhort you to adopt credence function ci(−) = c(−|Ei) = c(− & Ei)c(Ei) . According to the third formulation, Dispositional Conditionalization, the norm governs the updating behaviour you are disposed to exhibit. 3A partition is a set of exhaustive and mutually exclusive propositions. That is, the disjunction of the propositions is a tautology, and the conjunction of any two propositions is a contradiction. 3 Dispositional Conditionalization (DC) If (i) c is your credence function at t; (ii) the total evidence you receive between t and t′ will come in the form of a proposition learned with certainty, and that proposition will come from the partition E = {E1, . . . , En}; (iii) R is the plan you are disposed to follow in response to each possible piece of total evidence, then it should be the case that, if you were to receive evidence Ei and if c(Ei) > 0, then R would exhort you to adopt credence function ci(−) = c(−|Ei) = c(− & Ei)c(Ei) . Next, let's meet the four arguments. Since it will take some work to formulate them precisely, I will give only an informal gloss here. There will be plenty of time to see them in high-definition in what follows. Diachronic Dutch Book or Dutch Strategy Argument (DSA) This purports to show that, if you violate Conditionalization, there is a pair of decisions you might face, one before and one after you receive your evidence, such that your prior and posterior credences lead you to choose options when faced with those decisions that are guaranteed to be worse by your own lights than some alternative options (Lewis, 1999). Expected Pragmatic Utility Argument (EPUA) This purports to show that, if you will face a decision after learning your evidence, then your prior credences will expect your updated posterior credences to do the best job of making that decision if they are obtained by conditionalizing on your priors (Savage, 1954; Good, 1967; Brown, 1976). Expected Epistemic Utility Argument (EEUA) This purports to show that your prior credences will expect your posterior credences to be best epistemically speaking if they are obtained by conditionalizing on your priors (Greaves & Wallace, 2006). Epistemic Utility Dominance Argument (EUDA) This purports to show that, if you violate Conditionalization, then there will be alternative priors and posteriors that are guaranteed to be better epistemically speaking, when considered together, than your priors and posteriors (Briggs & Pettigrew, 2018). 4 2 The framework In the following sections, I will consider each of the arguments listed above. As we will see, these arguments are concerned directly with updating plans or dispositions, rather than actual updating behaviour. That is, the targets of these arguments-the items that they assess for rationality or irrationality- don't just specify how you in fact update in response to the particular piece of evidence you actually receive. Rather, they assume that your evidence between the earlier and later time will come in the form of a proposition learned with certainty (Certain Evidence); they assume the possible propositions that you might learn with certainty by the later time form a partition (Evidential Partition); and they assume that each of the propositions you might learn with certainty is one about which you had a prior opinion (Evidential Availability); and then they specify, for each of the possible pieces of evidence in your evidential partition, how you might update if you were to receive it. Some philosophers, like David Lewis (1999), assume that all three of these assumptions-Certain Evidence, Evidential Partition, and Evidential Availability-hold in all learning situations. Others deny one or more. For instance, Richard Jeffrey (1992) denies Certain Evidence and Evidential Availability; Jason Konek (2019) denies Evidential Availability but not Certain Evidence; Bas van Fraassen (1999), Miriam Schoenfield (2017), and Jonathan Weisberg (2007) deny Evidential Partition. But all agree, I think, that there are certain important situations when all three assumptions are true; there are certain situations where there is a set of propositions that forms a partition and about each member of which you have a prior opinion, and the possible evidence you might receive at the later time comes in the form of one of these propositions learned with certainty. Examples might include: when you are about to discover the outcome of a scientific experiment, perhaps by taking a reading from a measuring device with unambiguous outputs; when you've asked an expert a yes/no question; when you step on the digital scales in your bathroom or check your bank balance or count the number of spots on the back of the ladybird that just landed on your hand. So, if you disagree with Lewis, simply restrict your attention to these cases in what follows. As we will see, we can piggyback on conclusions about plans and dispositions to produce arguments about actual behaviour in certain situations. But in the first instance, I will take the arguments to address plans and dispositions defined on evidential partitions primarily, and actual behaviour only secondarily. Thus, to state these arguments, I need a clear way to represent updating plans or dispositions. I will talk neutrally here of an updating rule. If you think Conditionalization governs your updating dispositions, then you take it to govern the updating rule that matches those dispositions; if you think it governs your updating intentions, then 5 you take it to govern the updating rule you intend to follow. I'll introduce a slew of terminology here. You needn't take it all in at the moment, but it's worth keeping it all in one place for ease of reference. Agenda I will assume that your prior and posterior credence functions are defined on the same set of propositions F , and I'll assume that F is finite and F is an algebra. We say that F is your agenda. Possible worlds Given an agenda F , the set of possible worlds relative to F is the set of classically consistent assignments of truth values to the propositions in F . I'll abuse notation throughout and write w for (i) a truth value assignment to the propositions in F , (ii) the proposition in F that is true at that truth value assignment and only at that truth value assignment, and (iii) what we might call the omniscient credence function relative to that truth value assignment, which is the credence function that assigns maximal credence (i.e. 1) to all propositions that are true on it and minimal credence (i.e. 0) to all propositions that are false on it. Updating rules An updating rule has two components: (i) a set of propositions, E = {E1, . . . , En} this contains the propositions that you might learn with certainty at the later time t′; each Ei is in F , so E ⊆ F ; E forms a partition; (ii) a set of finite sets of credence functions, C = {C1, . . . , Cn} for each Ei, Ci is the set of possible ways that the rule allows you to respond to evidence Ei; that is, it is the set of possible posteriors that the rule permits when you learn Ei; each c′ in Ci in C is defined on F .4 Deterministic updating rule An updating rule R = (E , C) is deterministic if each Ci is a singleton set {ci}. That is, for each piece of evidence there is exactly one possible response to it that the rule allows. Stochastic updating rule A stochastic updating rule is an updating rule R = (C, E) equipped with a probability function P. P records, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, how likely it is that I will adopt c′ in response to learning Ei. I write this P(Ric′ |Ei), where Ric′ is the proposition that says that you adopt posterior c′ in response to evidence Ei. • I assume P(Ric′ |Ei) > 0 for all c′ in Ci. If the probability that you will adopt c′ in response to Ei is zero, then c′ does not count as a response to Ei that the rule allows. 4For ease of exposition, I'll assume throughout that each Ci contains only finitely many credence functions. Similar results hold if we lift this restriction, but their proofs are more involved and these stronger results aren't needed to make our central point here. 6 • Note that every deterministic updating rule is a stochastic updating rule for which P(Ric′ |Ei) = 1 for each c′ in Ci. If R = (E , C) is deterministic, then, for each Ei, Ci = {ci}. So let P(Rici |Ei) = 1. Conditionalizing updating rule An updating rule R = (E , C) is a conditionalizing rule for a prior c if, whenever c(Ei) > 0, Ci = {ci} and ci(−) = c(−|Ei).5 Conditionalizing pairs A pair 〈c, R〉 of a prior and an updating rule is a conditionalizing pair if R is a conditionalizing rule for c. Super-conditionalizing updating rule Suppose R = (E , C) is an updating rule. Then let F ∗ be the smallest algebra that contains all of F and also Ric′ for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci. (As above Ric′ is the proposition that says that you adopt posterior c′ in response to evidence Ei.) Then (a) R is a weak super-conditionalizing rule for c if there is an extension c∗ of c such that, for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, if c∗(Ric′) > 0, then c′(−) = c∗(−|Ric′). That is, each posterior to which you assign positive prior credence is the result of conditionalizing the extended prior c∗ on the evidence to which it is a response and the fact that it was your response to this evidence. (b) R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c if there is an extension c∗ of c such that, for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c∗(Ric′) > 0 and c′(−) = c∗(−|Ric′). That is, you assign positive prior credence to each posterior and each posterior is the result of conditionalizing the extended prior c∗ on the evidence to which it is a response and the fact that it was your response to this evidence. Super-conditionalizing pair A pair 〈c, R〉 of a prior and an updating rule is a weak (strong) super-conditionalizing pair if R is a weak (strong) superconditionalizing rule for c. Let's illustrate these definitions using an example. Condi is a meteorologist. There is a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. She knows that it will make landfall soon in one of the following four towns: Pensacola, FL, Panama City, FL, Mobile, AL, Biloxi, MS. She calls a friend and asks whether it has hit yet. It has. Then she asks whether it has hit in Florida. At this point, the evidence she will receive when her friend answers is either F-which says that it made landfall in Florida, that is, in Pensacola 5Note that a conditionalizing rule for a prior need not be a deterministic updating rule. It need only be deterministic for those possible pieces of evidence to which the prior assigns positive credence. 7 or Panama City-or F-which says it hit elsewhere, that is, in Mobile or Biloxi. Her prior is c: Panama City Pensacola Mobile Biloxi c 60% 20% 15% 5% Her evidential partition is E = {F = Pensacola∨ Panama City, F = Mobile∨ Biloxi} And here are some posteriors she might adopt: Panama City Pensacola Mobile Biloxi c′F 75% 25% 0% 0% c′F 0% 0% 75% 25% c◦F 70% 30% 0% 0% c◦F 0% 0% 70% 30% c†F 80% 20% 0% 0% c†F 0% 0% 80% 20% And here are four possible rules she might adopt, along with their properties: F F Det. Cond. W./S. Super-cond. R1 {c′F} {c′F} X X X R2 {c◦F} {c◦F} X × × R3 {c◦F, c†F} {c◦F, c † F} × × X R4 {c◦F} {c◦F, c † F} × × × We'll see in detail below why R3 is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, but roughly speaking the reason is that it has two properties that are jointly sufficient for being such a rule, as Lemma 2 shows: first, each posterior that R3 permits assigns maximum credence to the evidence to which it is a response; second, c is a weighted average of those permitted posteriors in which the weights are all positive. As we will see below, for each of our four arguments for Conditionalization- DSA, EPUA, EEUA, and EUDA-the standard formulation of the argument assumes a norm that I call Deterministic Updating: Deterministic Updating (DU) Your updating rule should be deterministic. In what follows, I will present each argument in its standard formulation, which assumes Deterministic Updating. Then I will explore what happens when we remove that assumption. 8 3 The Dutch Strategy Argument (DSA) The DSA and EPUA both evaluate updating rules by considering their pragmatic consequences. That is, they look to the choices that your priors and/or your possible posteriors lead you to make and they conclude that they are optimal only if your updating rule is a conditionalizing rule for your prior. 3.1 DSA with Deterministic Updating Let's look at the DSA first. In what follows, I'll take a decision problem to be a set of options that are available to an agent: e.g. accept a particular bet or refuse it; buy a particular lottery ticket or don't; take an umbrella when you go outside, take a raincoat, or take neither; and so on. The idea behind the DSA is this. One of the roles of credences is to help us make choices when faced with decision problems. They play that role badly if they lead us to make one series of choices when another series is guaranteed to serve our ends better. The DSA turns on the claim that, unless we update in line with Conditionalization, our credences will lead us to make such a series of choices when faced with a particular series of decision problems. Here, I restrict attention to a particular class of decision problems you might face. They are the decision problems in which, for each available option, its outcome at a given possible world obtains for you a certain amount of a particular quantity, such as money or chocolate or pure pleasure, and your utility is linear in that quantity-that is, obtaining some amount of that quantity increases your utility by the same amount regardless of how much of the quantity you already have. The quantity is typically taken to be money, and I'll continue to talk like that in what follows. But it's really a placeholder for some quantity with this property. I restrict attention to such decision problems because, in the argument, I need to combine the outcome of one decision, made at the earlier time, with the outcome of another decision, made at the later time. So I need to ensure that the utility of a combination of outcomes is the sum of the utilities of the individual outcomes. Now, suppose c is our prior and R = (E = {E1, . . . , En}, C = {C1, . . . , Cn}) is our updating rule. As I do throughout, I assume that c is a probability function, and so is each c′ in Ci in C. And I will assume further that, when your credences are probabilistic, and you face a decision problem, then you should choose from the available options one that maximises expected utility relative to your credences. With this in hand, let's define two closely related features of a pair 〈c, R〉 that are undesirable from a pragmatic point of view, and might be thought to render that pair irrational. First: 9 Strong Dutch Strategies 〈c, R〉 is vulnerable to a strong Dutch strategy if there are two decision problems, d and d′, such that (i) c requires you to choose option A from the possible options available in d; (ii) for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c′ requires you to choose X from d′; (iii) there are alternative options, B in d and Y in d′, such that, at every possible world, you'll receive more utility from choosing B and Y than you receive from choosing A and X. In the language of decision theory, B +Y strongly dominates A + X. Weak Dutch Strategies 〈c, R〉 is vulnerable to a weak Dutch strategy if there is a decision problem d and, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, a further decision problem dic′ such that (i) c requires you to choose A from d; (ii) for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c′ requires you to choose Xic′ from dic′ ; (iii) there is an alternative option, B in d, and, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, there is an alternative option, Yic′ in d i c′ , such that (a) for each Ei, each world in Ei, and each c′ in Ci, you'll receive at least as much utility at that world from choosing B and Yic′ as you'll receive from choosing A and Xic′ , and (b) for some Ei, some world in Ei, and some c ′ in Ci, you'll receive strictly more utility at that world from B and Yic′ than you'll receive from A and X i c′ . Then the Dutch Strategy Argument is based on the following mathematical fact (de Finetti, 1974): Theorem 1 Suppose R is a deterministic updating rule. Then: (i) If R is not a conditionalizing pair for c, then 〈c, R〉 is vulnerable to a strong Dutch strategy; (ii) If R is a conditionalizing rule for c, then 〈c, R〉 is not vulnerable even to a weak Dutch strategy. That is, if your updating rule is not a conditionalizing rule for your prior, then your credences will lead you to choose a strongly dominated pair of options when faced with a particular pair of decision problems; if you satisfy it, that can't happen. 10 Now that we have seen how the argument works, let's see whether it supports the three versions of Conditionalization that we met above: Actual (AC), Plan (PC), and Dispositional (DC) Conditionalization. Since they speak directly of rules, let's begin with PC and DC. The DSA shows that, if you endorse a deterministic rule that isn't a conditionalizing rule for your prior, then there is pair of decision problems, one that you'll face at the earlier time and the other at the later time, where your credences at the earlier time and your planned credences at the later time will require you to choose a dominated pair of options. And it seems reasonable to say that it is irrational to endorse a plan when you will be rendered vulnerable to a Dutch Strategy if you follow through on it. So, for those who endorse deterministic rules, DSA plausibly supports Plan Conditionalization. The same is true of Dispositional Conditionalization. Just as it is irrational to plan to update in a way that would render you vulnerable to a Dutch Strategy if you were to stick to the plan, it is surely irrational to be disposed to update in a way that will render you vulnerable in this way. So, for those whose updating dispositions are deterministic, DSA plausibly supports Dispositional Conditionalization. Finally, AC. There are various different ways to move from either PC or DC to AC, but each one of them requires some extra assumptions. For instance: (1) I might assume: (i) between an earlier and a later time, there is always a partition such that you know that the strongest evidence you will receive between those times is a proposition from that partition learned with certainty; (ii) if you know you'll receive evidence from some partition, you are rationally required to plan how you will update on each possible piece of evidence before you receive it; and (iii) if you plan how to respond to evidence before you receive it, you are rationally required to follow through on that plan once you have received it. Together with PC + DU, these give AC. This is the most common route to AC, and has therefore received the most attention. Miriam Schoenfield (2017), Jonathan Weisberg (2007), Bas van van Fraassen (1999), and Aaron Bronfman (2014) deny (i); Bas van Fraassen (1989) denies (ii); and Richard Pettigrew (2016) denies (iii). (2) I might assume: (i) you have updating dispositions. So, if you actually update other than by Conditionalization, then it must be a manifestation of a disposition other than conditionalizing. Together with DC + DU, this gives AC. (3) I might assume: (i) that you are rationally required to update in any way that can be represented as the result of updating on a plan that 11 you were rationally permitted to endorse or as the result of dispositions that you were rationally permitted to have, even if you did not in fact endorse any plan prior to receiving the evidence nor have any updating dispositions. Again, together with PC + DU or DC + DU, this gives AC. Notice that, in each case, it was essential to invoke Deterministic Updating (DU). As we will see below, this causes problems for AC. 3.2 DSA without Deterministic Updating We have now seen how the DSA proceeds if we assume Deterministic Updating. But what if we don't? Consider, for instance, rule R3 from our list of examples at the end of Section 2 above, where I described Condi's credences concerning the landfall of a hurricane: R3 = (E = {F, F}, C = {CF = {c◦F, c†F}, CF = {c ◦ F, c † F}}) That is, if Condi learns F, rule R3 allows her to update from her prior c to posterior c◦F or posterior c † F. And if she receives F, it allows her to update to c◦F or to c † F. Notice that 〈c, R3〉 violates Conditionalization thoroughly: it is not deterministic; and, moreover, as well as not mandating the posteriors that Conditionalization demands, it does not even permit them. The posterior c(−|F) does not appear in CF and c(−|F) does not appear in CF. Can we adapt the DSA to show that R3 is irrational for someone with prior c? As we'll see, the answer is no. The reason is that 〈c, R3〉 is not vulnerable to a Dutch Strategy. To see this, I first note that, while R3 is not deterministic and not a conditionalizing rule for c, it is a super-conditionalizing rule for c. And to see that, it helps to state the following representation theorem for superconditionalizing rules, which we mentioned informally above: Lemma 2 (i) R is a weak super-conditionalizing rule for c iff there is, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, 0 ≤ λic′ ≤ 1 with ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′ = 1 such that (a) for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, if λic′ > 0, then c′(Ei) = 1, and (b) c(−) = ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′c ′(−). (ii) R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c iff there is, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, 0 < λic′ < 1 with ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′ = 1 such that (a) for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c′(Ei) = 1; and (b) c(−) = ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′c ′(−). Now note: 12 (a) c◦F(F) = 1 = c † F(F) and c ◦ F(F) = 1 = c † F(F) (b) c(−) = 0.4c◦F(−) + 0.4c†F(−) + 0.1c◦F(−) + 0.1c † F(−) So R3 is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c. What's more: Theorem 3 (i) If R is not a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, then 〈c, R〉 is vulnerable at least to a weak Dutch Strategy, and possibly also a strong Dutch Strategy. (ii) If R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, then 〈c, R〉 is not vulnerable to a weak Dutch Strategy. Thus, by Theorem 3(ii), 〈c, R3〉 is not vulnerable even to a weak Dutch Strategy. The DSA, then, cannot say what is irrational about Condi if she begins with prior c and either endorses R3 as an updating plan or is disposed to update in line with it. Thus, the DSA cannot justify Deterministic Updating. And without DU, it cannot support PC or DC either. After all, R3 violates each of those, but it is not vulnerable even to a weak Dutch Strategy. And moreover, each of the three arguments for AC break down because they depend on PC or DC. The problem is that, if Condi updates from c to c◦F upon learning F, she violates AC; but there is an updating rule-namely, R3-that allows c◦F as a response to learning F, and, for all DSA tells us, she might have rationally endorsed R3 before learning F or she might rationally have been disposed to follow it. Indeed, the only restriction that DSA can place on your actual updating behaviour is that you should become certain of the evidence that you learned. After all: Theorem 4 Suppose c is your prior and c′ is your posterior. Then, providing c′(Ei) = 1, there is a rule R such that: (i) c′ is in Ci, and (ii) R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c. Thus, at the end of this section, we can conclude that, whatever is irrational about planning to update using non-deterministic updating rules that are nonetheless strong super-conditionalizing rules for your prior, it cannot be that following through on those plans leaves you vulnerable to a Dutch Strategy, for it does not. And similarly, whatever is irrational about being disposed to update in those ways, it cannot be that those dispositions will equip you with credences that lead you to choose dominated options, for they do not. With PC and DC thus blocked, our route to AC is therefore also blocked. 13 4 The Expected Pragmatic Utility Argument (EPUA) Let's look at EPUA next. Again, I will consider how our credences guide our actions when we face decision problems. In this case, there is no need to restrict attention to monetary decision problems. I will only consider a single decision problem, which we face at the later time, after we've received the evidence, so I won't have to combine the outcomes of multiple options as I did in the DSA. The idea is this. Suppose you will make a decision after you receive whatever evidence it is that you receive at the later time. And suppose that you will use your later updated credence function to make that choice-indeed, you'll choose from the available options by maximising expected utility from the point of view of your new updated credences. Which updating rules does your prior expect will lead you to make the choice best? 4.1 EPUA with Deterministic Updating Suppose you'll face decision problem d after you've updated. And suppose further that you'll use a deterministic updating rule R. Then, if w is a possible world and Ei is the element of the evidential partition E that is true at w, the idea is that we take the pragmatic utility of R relative to d at w to be the utility at w of whatever option from d we should choose if our posterior credence function were ci, as R requires it to be at w. But of course, for many decision problems, this isn't well defined because there isn't a unique option in d that maximises expected utility by the lights of ci; rather there are sometimes many such options, and they might have different utilities at w. Thus, we need not only ci but also a selection function, which picks a single option from any set of options. If f is such a selection function, then let Adci , f be the option that f selects from the set of options in d that maximise expected utility by the lights of ci. And let ud, f (R, w) = u(Adci , f , w). Then the EPUA argument turns on the following mathematical fact (Savage, 1954; Good, 1967; Brown, 1976): Theorem 5 Suppose R and R? are both deterministic updating rules. Then: (i) If R and R? are both conditionalizing rules for c, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d, ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) (ii) If R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is not, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d, ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) 14 with strict inequality for some decision problems d. That is, a deterministic updating rule maximises expected pragmatic utility by the lights of your prior just in case it is a conditionalizing rule for your prior. As in the case of the DSA above, then, if we assume Deterministic Updating (DU), we can establish PC and DC. On the back of those, we can establish AC as well, using one of the arguments from the end of Section 3.1. After all, it is surely irrational to plan to update in one way when you expect another way to guide your actions better in the future; and it is surely irrational to be disposed to update in one way when you expect another to guide you better. And as before there are the same three arguments for AC on the back of PC and DC. 4.2 EPUA without Deterministic Updating How does EPUA fare when we widen our view to include non-deterministic updating rules as well? The problem is that it is not clear how to define the pragmatic utility of such an updating rule relative to a decision problem and selection function at a possible world. Above, I said that, relative to a decision problem d and a selection function f , the pragmatic utility of rule R at world w is the utility of the option that you would choose when faced with d using the credence function that R mandates at w and f : that is, if Ei is true at w, then ud, f (R, w) = u(Adci , f , w). But, if R is not deterministic, there might be no single credence function that it mandates at w. If Ei is the piece of evidence you'll learn at w and R permits more than one credence function in response to Ei, then there might be a range of different options in d, each of which maximises expected utility relative to a different credence function in Ci. So what are we to do? There are (at least) two possibilities: the fine-graining response and the coarse-graining response. On the former, we cannot establish PC or DC without assuming DU; on the latter, we can. Let's begin with the former. When we notice that there might be no single credence function that our rule R mandates at world w, a natural response is to say that I should specify our worlds in more detail, so that they determine not only the truth or falsity of the propositions in F , but also which credence function you in fact adopt from those that R permits. In fact, given that we will be comparing the expected pragmatic utility of two different updating rules, R and R?, we need worlds that specify not only a credence function that someone following R adopts but also a credence function that someone following R? adopts. If w is in Ei, c′ is in Ci, 15 and c?′ is in C?i , then let w & R i c′ & R ?i c?′ be the world at which the propositions in F that are true at w are true, the propositions in F that are false at w are false, the person with rule R adopts c′ in response to receiving evidence Ei and the person with R? adopts c?′ in response to that evidence. And define the pragmatic utilities of R and R? at this world relative to a decision problem d and a selection function f in the natural way: • ud, f (R, w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′) = u(A d c′, f , w) • ud, f (R?, w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′) = u(A d c?′, f , w) The problem, of course, is that, in the EPUA, we wish to calculate the expected pragmatic utility of an updating rule from the point of view of the prior. And that's possible only if the prior assigns a credence to each of the possible worlds. But, while our assumption that F is a finite algebra guarantees that a prior defined on F assigns a credence to each w in W, there is no guarantee that it assigns one to each w & Ric′ & R ?′ c?′ . So what's to be done? A natural proposal is this: an updating rule R is rationally permissible from the point of view of a prior c just in case there is some way to extend c to c∗ such that R maximises expected pragmatic utility by the lights of the extended prior, c∗. However, it is straightforward to see that any superconditionalizing rule for a prior is rationally permissible by this standard. After all, if R is a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, then there is an extension of c∗ such that R is a conditionalizing rule for c∗, and then we can piggyback on Theorem 5. Theorem 6 Suppose R is an updating rule. Then, if R is a weak or strong superconditionalizing rule for c, then there is an extension c∗ of c such that, for all updating rules R?, for all selection functions f , g, and all decision problems d ∑Ei∈E ∑w∈Ei ∑c′∈Ci ∑c?′∈C?i c ∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′)ud, f (R, w & R i c′ & R ?i c?′) ≥ ∑Ei∈E ∑w∈Ei ∑c′∈Ci ∑c?′∈C?i c ∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′)ud,g(R ?, w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′) So, if we opt for the fine-graining response to the problem of defining the pragmatic utility of a non-deterministic rule at a world, then we cannot establish either PC or DC without assuming DU and restricting the set of permissible updating rules to include only the deterministic ones. But we might instead adopt the coarse-graining response. On this response, we retain the original possible worlds w in W, and we define the pragmatic utility of a rule at a world as either the expectation or the average of its pragmatic utility, depending on whether we are thinking of the rule as representing our dispositions or our plans, and thus whether we aim to establish DC or PC. Suppose, first, that we are interested in DC. That is, we are interested in a norm that governs the updating rule that records how you are disposed 16 to update when you receive certain evidence. Then it seems reasonable to assume that the updating rule that records your dispositions is stochastic. That is, for each possible piece of evidence Ei and each possible response c′ in Ci to that evidence that you might adopt, there is some objective chance that you will respond to Ei by adopting c′. As I explained above, I'll write this P(Ric′ |Ei), where Ric′ is the proposition that you receive Ei and respond by adopting c′. Then, if Ei is true at w, we might take the pragmatic utility of R relative to d and f at w to be the expectation of the utility of the options that each permitted response to Ei (and selection function f ) would lead us to choose:6 ud, f (R, w) = ∑ c′∈Ci P(Ric′ |Ei)u(Adc′, f , w) With this in hand, we have the following result: Theorem 7 Suppose R and R? are both updating rules. Then: (i) If R and R? are both conditionalizing rules for c, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d, ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) (ii) R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is a stochastic but not conditionalizing rule, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d, ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) with strictly inequality for some decision problems d. This shows the first difference between the DSA and EPUA. The latter, but not the former, provides a route to establishing Dispositional Conditionalization (DC). If we adopt the coarse-graining response to the problem of defining the pragmatic utility of an updating rule, we can establish DC. If we assume that your dispositions are governed by a chance function, and we use that chance function to calculate expectations, then we can show that your prior will expect your posteriors to do worse as a guide to action unless you are disposed to update by conditionalizing on the evidence you receive. Next, suppose we are interested in Plan Conditionalization (PC). In this case, we might try to appeal again to Theorem 7. To do that, we must assume that, while there are non-deterministic updating rules that we might endorse, they are all at least stochastic updating rules; that is, they all come equipped with a probability function that determines how likely it is that I will adopt a particular permitted response to the evidence I receive. 6Recall: we assumed that each Ci is finite, so this is well-defined. 17 That is, we might say that the updating rules that we might endorse are either deterministic or non-deterministic-but-stochastic. In the language of game theory, we might say that the updating strategies between which we choose are either pure or mixed. And then Theorem 7 will show that we should adopt a deterministic-and-conditionalizing rule, rather than any deterministic-but-non-conditionalizing or non-deterministic-but-stochastic rule. The problem with this proposal is that it seems just as arbitrary to restrict to deterministic and non-deterministic-but-stochastic rules as it was to restrict to deterministic rules in the first place. Why should we not be able to endorse a non-deterministic and non-stochastic rule-that is, a rule that says, for at least one possible piece of evidence Ei in E , there are two or more posteriors that the rule permits as responses, but does not endorse any chance mechanism by which we'll choose between them? But if we permit these rules, how are we to define their pragmatic utility relative to a decision problem and at a possible world? Here's one suggestion. Suppose Ei is the proposition in E that is true at world w. And suppose d is a decision problem and f is a selection rule. Then we might take the pragmatic utility of R relative to d and f and at w to be the average (specifically, the mean) utility of the options that each permissible response to Ei and f would choose when faced with d. That is, ud, f (R, w) = 1 |Ci| ∑c′∈Ci u(Adc′, f , w) where |Ci| is the size of Ci, that is, the number of possible responses to Ei that R permits.7 If that's the case, then we have the following: Theorem 8 Suppose R and R? are updating rules. Then if R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is not deterministic, not stochastic, and not a conditionalizing rule for c, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d, ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R?, w) with strictly inequality for some decision problems d. Put together with Theorems 5 and 7, this shows that our prior expects us to do better by endorsing a conditionalizing rule than by endorsing any other sort of rule, whether that is a deterministic and non-conditionalizing rule, a non-deterministic but stochastic rule, or a non-deterministic and non-stochastic rule. So, again, we see a difference between DSA and EPUA. Just as the latter, but not the former, provides a route to establishing DC without assuming Deterministic Updating, so the latter but not the former provides a route 7Again, recall that each Ci is finite, so this is well-defined. 18 to establishing PC without DU. And from both of those, we have the usual three routes to AC enumerated at the end of Section 3.1. This means that, if we respond to the problem of defining pragmatic utility by taking the coarse-graining appoach, the EPUA could explain what's irrational about endorsing a non-deterministic updating rule, or having dispositions that match one. If you do, there's some alternative updating rule that your prior expects to do better as a guide to future action. 5 Expected Epistemic Utility Argument (EEUA) The previous two arguments criticized non-conditionalizing updating rules from the standpoint of pragmatic utility. The EEUA and EUDA both criticize such rules from the standpoint of epistemic utility. The idea is this: just as credences play a pragmatic role in guiding our actions, so they play other roles as well-they represent the world; they respond to evidence; they might combine more or less coherently. These roles are purely epistemic, and so just as I defined the pragmatic utility of a credence function at a world when faced with a decision problem, so we can also define the epistemic utility of a credence function at a world-it is a measure of how valuable it is to have that credence function from a purely epistemic point of view. 5.1 EEUA with Deterministic Updating I won't give an explicit definition of the epistemic utility of a credence function at a world. Rather, I'll simply state two properties that I'll take measures of such epistemic utility to have. These are widely assumed in the literature on epistemic utility theory and accuracy-first epistemology, and I'll defer to the arguments in favour of them that are outlined there (Joyce, 2009; Pettigrew, 2016; Horowitz, 2019). A local epistemic utility function is a function s that takes a single credence and a truth value-either true (1) or false (0)-and returns the epistemic value of having that credence in a proposition with that truth value. Thus, s(1, p) is the epistemic value of having credence p in a truth, while s(0, p) is the epistemic value of having credence p in a falsehood. A global epistemic utility function is a function EU that takes an entire credence function defined onF and a possible world and returns the epistemic value of having that credence function when the propositions in F have the truth values they have in that world. Strict Propriety A local epistemic utility function s is strictly proper if (i) s(1, x) and s(0, x) are continuous functions of x; 19 (ii) each credence expects itself and only itself to have the greatest epistemic utility. That is, for all 0 ≤ p ≤ 1, ps(1, x) + (1− p)s(0, x) is uniquely maximised, as a function of x, at x = p.8 Additivity A global epistemic utility function is additive if, for each proposition X in F , there is a local epistemic utility function sX such that the epistemic utility of a credence function c at a possible world is the sum of the epistemic utilities at that world of the credences it assigns. If w is a possible world and we write w(X) for the truth value (0 or 1) of proposition X at w, this says: EU(c, w) = ∑ X∈F sX(w(X), c(X)) We can then define the epistemic utility of a deterministic updating rule R in the same way we defined its pragmatic utility above: if Ei is true at w, and Ci = {ci}, then EU(R, w) = EU(ci, w) Then the standard formulation of the EEUA turns on the following theorem (Greaves & Wallace, 2006): Theorem 9 Suppose R and R? are deterministic updating rules. Then: (i) If R and R? are both conditionalizing rules for c, then ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) (ii) If R is a conditionalizing rule for c and R? is not, then ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) > ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) That is, a deterministic updating rule maximises expected epistemic utility by the lights of your prior just in case it is a conditionalizing rule for your prior. So, as for DSA and EPUA, if we assume Deterministic Updating, we obtain an argument for PC and DC, and indirectly arguments for AC too. 8That is, if p 6= q, then ps(1, p) + (1− p)s(0, p) > ps(1, q) + (1− p)s(0, q) 20 5.2 EEUA without Deterministic Updating If we don't assume Deterministic Updating, the situation here is very similar to the one we encountered above when we considered EPUA. Suppose R is a non-deterministic updating rule. Then again we have two choices: the fineand the coarse-graining response. On the fine-graining response, the epistemic utility of R at a fine-grained world is EU(R, w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′) = EU(c ′, w) In this case, as with EPUA, we have: Theorem 10 Suppose R and R? are both updating rules. Then, if R is a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, then there is an extension c∗ of c such that ∑Ei∈E ∑w∈Ei ∑c′∈Ci ∑c?′∈C?i c ∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′)EU(R, w & R i c′ & R ?i c?′) ≥ ∑Ei∈E ∑w∈Ei ∑c′∈Ci ∑c?′∈C?i c ∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′)EU(R ?, w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′) So it seems that super-conditionalizing updating rules are rationally permissible, at least by the lights of expected epistemic utility. Next, the coarse-graining response. Suppose R is non-deterministic but stochastic. Then we let its epistemic utility at a coarse-grained world be the expectation of the epistemic utility that the various possible posteriors permitted by R take at that world. That is, if Ei is the proposition in E that is true at w, then EU(R, w) = ∑ c′∈Ci P(Ric′ |Ei)EU(c′, w) Then, we have a similar result to Theorem 7: Theorem 11 Suppose R and R? are updating rules. Then if R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is stochastic but not a conditionalizing rule for c, then ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) > ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) Next, suppose R is a non-deterministic but also a non-stochastic rule. Then we let its epistemic utility at a world be the average epistemic utility that the various possible posteriors permitted by R take at that world. That is, if Ei is the proposition in F that is true at w, then EU(R, w) = 1 |Ci| ∑c′∈Ci EU(c′, w) And again we have a similar result to Theorem 8: 21 Theorem 12 Suppose R and R? are updating rules. Then if R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is not deterministic, not stochastic, and not a conditionalizing rule for c. Then: ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) > ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) So the situation is the same as for EPUA. If we take the coarse-graining approach, whether we assess a rule by looking at how well the posteriors it produces guide our future actions or how good they are from a purely epistemic point of view, our prior will expect a conditionalizing rule for itself to be better than any non-conditionalizing rule. And thus we obtain PC and DC, and indirectly AC as well. 6 Epistemic Utility Dominance Argument (EUDA) Finally, I turn to the EUDA. In EPUA and EEUA, we assess the pragmatic or epistemic utility of the updating rule from the viewpoint of the prior. In DSA, we assess the prior and updating rule together, and from no particular point of view; and, unlike the EPUA and EEUA, we do not assign utilities, either pragmatic or epistemic, to the prior and the rule. In EUDA, like in DSA and unlike EPUA and EEUA, we assess the prior and updating rule together, and again from no particular point of view; but, unlike in DSA and like in EPUA and EEUA, we assign utilities to them-in particular, epistemic utilities-and assess them with reference to those. 6.1 EUDA with Deterministic Updating Suppose R is a deterministic updating rule. Then, as before, if Ei is true at w, let the epistemic utility of R be the epistemic utility of the credence function ci that it mandates at w: that is, EU(R, w) = EU(ci, w), But this time also let the epistemic utility of the pair 〈c, R〉 consisting of the prior and the updating rule be the sum of the epistemic utility of the prior and the epistemic utility of the updating rule: that is, EU(〈c, R〉, w) = EU(c, w) + EU(R, w) = EU(c, w) + EU(ci, w) Then the EUDA turns on the following mathematical fact (Briggs & Pettigrew, 2018): Theorem 13 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. And suppose R and R? are deterministic updating rules. Then: 22 (i) If 〈c, R〉 is not conditionalizing, there is 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all w, EU(〈c, R〉, w) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w)) (ii) If 〈c, R〉 is conditionalizing, there is no 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all w, EU(〈c, R〉, w) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w)) That is, if R is not a conditionalizing rule for c, then together they are EUdominated; if it is a conditionalizing rule, they are not. Thus, like EPUA and EEUA and unlike DSA, if we assume Deterministic Updating, EUDA gives PC, DC, and indirectly AC. 6.2 EUDA without Deterministic Updating Now suppose we permit non-deterministic updating rules as well as deterministic ones. As before, there are two approaches: the fineand coarsegraining approaches. Here is the relevant result for the fine-graining approach: Theorem 14 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Then: (i) If R is a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, there is no 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all Ei in E , w in Ei, c′ in Ci and c?′ in C?i EU(〈c, R〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) (ii) There are rules R that are not weak or strong super-conditionalizing rules for c such that there is no 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all Ei in E , w in Ei, c′ in Ci and c?′ in C?i EU(〈c, R〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) Interpreted in this way, then, and without the assumption of Deterministic Updating, EUDA is the weakest of all the arguments. Whereas DSA at least establishes that your updating rule should be a weak or strong superconditionalizing for your prior, even if it does not establish that it should be conditionalizing, EUDA does not establish even that. And here is the relevant result for the coarse-graining approach: Theorem 15 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Then, if 〈c, R〉 is not a conditionalizing pair, there is an alternative pair 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all w, EU(〈c, R〉, w) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w) This therefore supports an argument for PC and DC and indirectly AC as well. 23 7 Conclusion One upshot of this investigation is that, so long as we assume Deterministic Updating (DU), all four arguments support the same conclusions, namely, Plan (PC) and Dispositional (DC) Conditionalization, and also Actual Conditionalization (AC). But once we drop DU, that agreement vanishes. Without DU, DSA shows only that, if we plan to update using a particular rule, it should be a super-conditionalizating rule for our prior; and similarly for our dispositions. As a result, it cannot support AC. Indeed, it can support only the weakest restrictions on our actual updating behaviour, since nearly any such behaviour can be seen as an implementation of a super-conditionalizing rule-as long as we become certain of the evidence we receive after we receive it, we can be represented as having followed a strong super-conditionalizing rule. EPUA, EEUA, and EUDA are more hopeful, at least if we adopt the coarse-graining response to the question of how to define the pragmatic or epistemic utility of a non-deterministic updating rule at a world. Let's consider our updating dispositions first. It seems natural to assume that, even if these are not deterministic, they are at least governed by objective chances. If so, and if we define the pragmatic or epistemic utility of the rule that represents those dispositions to be the expectation of the pragmatic or epistemic utility of the credence functions it produces, then we obtain DC without assuming DU. That is, we can justify DU by appealing to pragmatic or epistemic utility. However, if we use the fine-graining response, this isn't possible. And similarly when we consider our updating plans. Here, if we use the coarse-graining response and define the pragmatic or epistemic utility of the rule that represents our plan to be the average pragmatic or epistemic utility of the credence functions it produces, then we obtain PC without assuming DU. And again, if we use the fine-graining response, this isn't possible. Indeed, if we use the fine-graining approach, EPUA and EEUA establish only that you should plan to update using a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule. And EUDA doesn't even establish that. So, at least if we look just to our existing arguments for Conditionalization, the fates of DC and PC seem to turn on making one of two responses. First, we might simply assume Deterministic Updating. That is, to establish PC, we might simply assume that we are rationally required to plan to update in a deterministic way; and, to establish DC, we might assume that we are rationally required to have deterministic updating dispositions. This doesn't seem promising. Typically, those philosophers who offer one of the four arguments for Conditionalization studied here do so precisely because we aren't content to make brute normative assumptions about how it is rational to update; we wish to know what is so good about updating in the way that Conditionalization describes and what is so bad about 24 updating in some other way. Part of that is a desire to know what is so good about updating deterministically and what is so bad about updating non-deterministically. As I mentioned at the beginning, the four arguments considered here are teleological, so they specifically tell you the goods that Conditionalization and deterministic updating obtain for you. To simply assume DU is to leave the latter a mystery. Second, we might take the coarse-graining response to the problem of defining pragmatic and epistemic utility, and then appeal to EPUA, EEUA, or EUDA. This seems more promising. That response certainly seems reasonable- that is, it produces a reasonable way to define the pragmatic or epistemic utility of an updating rule at a coarse-grained world. The problem is that we need to do more than that if we are to establish DC and PC. It is not sufficient to show that the coarse-graining response is reasonable and therefore permissible. We have to show that it is mandatory. After all, if the fineand the coarse-graining responses are both permissible, then there is a permissible way of defining pragmatic and epistemic utility on which nonconditionalizing updating rules are permissible. And that suggests that those rules are themselves permissible. And that conflicts with DC and PC. What is needed is an argument that the fine-graining response is not legitimate. For myself, I don't see what that might be. 8 Appendix: Proofs Recall: (a) R is a weak super-conditionalizing rule for c if there is an extension c∗ of c such that, for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, if c∗(Ric′) > 0, then c′(−) = c∗(−|Ric′). (b) R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c if there is an extension c∗ of c such that, for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c∗(Ric′) > 0 and c′(−) = c∗(−|Ric′). 8.1 Dutch Strategy Argument Lemma 2 (i) R is a weak super-conditionalizing rule for c iff there is, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, 0 ≤ λic′ ≤ 1 with ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′ = 1 such that (a) for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, if λic′ > 0, then c′(Ei) = 1, and (b) c(−) = ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′c ′(−) (ii) R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c iff there is, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, 0 < λic′ < 1 with ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′ = 1 such that 25 (a) for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c′(Ei) = 1; and (b) c(−) = ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′c ′(−) Proof of Lemma 2. Let's take (i) first. We'll begin with the left-to-right direction. Suppose R is a weak superconditionalizing rule for c. Then, if c∗(Ric′) > 0, then c′(Ei) = c∗(Ei|Ric′). But Ric′ says that you received evidence Ei and responded by adopting credence function c′. So Ric′ entails Ei, and thus c∗(Ei|Ric′) = 1. So c′(Ei) = 1. That gives (a). Next, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, let λic′ = c∗(Ric′). Now, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, and for each possible world w, we have c∗(w & Ric′) = c∗(Ric′)c ′(w). Thus: c(w) = c∗(w) since c∗ extends c = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′) by Finite Additivity of c ∗ = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′)c ′(w) as noted above = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci λic′c ′(w) as required. This gives (b). Second, we take the right-to-left direction of (i). Suppose (a) and (b) hold. Then there is, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, 0 ≤ λic′ ≤ 1 with ∑Ei∈E ∑c′∈Ci λ i c′ = 1 such that c(−) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci λic′c ′(−) So, given a possible world w, Ei in E , and c′ in Ci, let c∗(w & Ric′) = λ i c′c ′(w) Then • For any possible world w, c∗(w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci λic′c ′(w) = c(w) So c∗ is an extension of c. • For any possible world w, Ei in E , and c′ in Ci, if c∗(Ric′) > 0, then c∗(w|Ric′) = c∗(w & Ric′) c∗(Ric′) = λic′c ′(w) ∑w′∈W λic′c ′(w′) = λic′c ′(w) λic′ ∑w′∈W c ′(w′) = c′(w) and thus c′(Ei) = c∗(Ei|Ric′) = 1. 26 Thus, R is a weak super-conditionalizing rule for c. This establishes Lemma 2(i). The proof of Lemma 2(ii) proceeds in exactly the same way. 2 Theorem 3 (i) If R is not a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, then it is vulnerable at least to a weak Dutch Strategy, and possibly to a strong Dutch Strategy. (ii) If R is a strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, then it is not vulnerable even to a weak Dutch Strategy. Proof of Theorem 3. First, (i). Suppose R is not a weak or strong superconditionalizing rule for c. Then, by Lemma 2, either (a) c′(Ei) < 1 for some Ei in E and c′ in Ci; or (b) c is not in the convex hull of R.9 Let's take these in turn. First, (a). Suppose that c′(Ei) < p < 1 for some Ei in E and c′ in Ci. Then let Xic′ be an option that has utility−(1− p) if Ei is true and p if not. And let Yic′ be the option that has utility 0 regardless. Then offer no decision problem at the earlier time and offer one at the later time only if the agent learns Ei and adopts c′; and in that situation, offer dic′ = {Xic′ , Yic′}. Then the agent will choose Xic′ , but that will do worse than Y i c′ at all worlds at which Ei is true. So 〈c, R〉 is vulnerable to a weak Dutch Strategy. Second, (b). Suppose c is not in the convex hull of the set of posteriors that R permits. That is, c is not in the convex hull of the set {c′ : (∃Ei ∈ E)(c′ ∈ Ci)}. Now, let's represent each credence function on F by the vector of the values that it takes the possible worlds w in W. Thus, if W = {w1, . . . , wm}, then we represent c by 〈c(w1), . . . , c(wm)〉; and, for any Ei in E and c′ in Ci, we represent c′ by 〈c′(w1), . . . , c′(wm)〉. Now, since c is outside the convex hull of the set of posteriors that R permits, the vector that represents c is outside the convex hull of the set of vectors that represent the posteriors that R permits. Thus, by the Separating Hyperplane Theorem, there is a vector S = 〈S1, . . . , Sm〉 such that, for any Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c′ * S < c * S Then pick m, ε such that c′ * S < m− ε < m < c * S. Now let: 9The convex hull of a set of points is the smallest convex set that contains it as a subset. A set is convex if, for any two points in it, any convex combination of those two points also lies in the set. 27 • A be the option that has utility Si at world wi; • B be the option that has utility m at world wi; • B− ε be the option that has utility m− ε at world wi. Then, let d = {A, B}. Your prior c will choose A, since the expected utility of A is c * S, while the expected utility of B is m. And let d′ = {A, B − ε}. Then each of your possible posteriors c′ will choose B − ε, since the expected utility of A is c′ * S, while the expected utility of B − ε is m − ε. Choosing B from d and A from d′ is guaranteed to have greater total utility than choosing A from d and B − ε from d′. So 〈c, R〉 is vulnerable to a strong Dutch Strategy. This establishes Theorem 3(i). Second, (ii). Suppose there are decision problems d and dic′ for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci. And suppose d = {A, B} and dic′ = {Xic′ , Yic′}. Now suppose c would choose A over B and, for each Ei in E and c′ in Ci, c′ would choose Xic′ over Y i c′ . So: (a) ∑w∈W c(w)u(A, w) > ∑w∈W c(w)u(B, w) (b) ∑w∈W c′(w)u(Xic′ , w) > ∑w∈W c ′(w)u(Yic′ , w), for all Ei in E and c′ in Ci Now, suppose that, for each Ei in E , w in Ei, and c′ in Ci, u(A, w) + u(Xic′ , w) < u(B, w) + u(Y i c′ , w) (†) Then ∑ w∈W c(w)u(A, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′) ∑ w∈W c′(w)u(Xic′ , w) = ∑ w∈W c∗(w)u(A, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′)c ′(w)u(Xic′ , w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′)u(A, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′)u(X i c′ , w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′)[u(A, w) + u(X i c′ , w)] < ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′)[u(B, w) + u(Y i c′ , w)] by (†) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′)u(B, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′)u(Y i c′ , w) = ∑ w∈W c∗(w)u(B, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′)c ′(w)u(Yic′ , w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)u(B, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′) ∑ w∈W c′(w)u(Yic′ , w) But this contradicts (a) and (b). This establishes Theorem 3(ii). 2 28 8.2 Expected Pragmatic Utility Argument We first prove the following lemma. Theorems 5, 7, and 8 all follow as corollaries. Lemma 16 (i) If R, R? are conditionalizing rules for c, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) (ii) If R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is not, and f , g are selection functions, then for all decision problems d, ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) with strict inequality for some decision problems d. Proof. First, (i). Suppose R and R? are conditionalizing rules for c, and f , g are selection functions. So: • R = (E = {E1, . . . , En}, C = {C1, . . . , Cn}) and • R? = (E = {E1, . . . , En}, C = {C?1 , . . . , C?n}). And, if c(Ei) > 0, • Ci = {ci} and C?i = {c?i }; • ci(−)c(Ei) = c(− & Ei) = c?i (−)c(Ei); • ci(−) = c(−|Ei) = c?i (−). Suppose d is a decision problem. Then, • If c(Ei) > 0, then ci(−) = c?i (−), and thus ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) = ∑ w∈W c?i (w)u(A d c?i ,g , w) so c(Ei) ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) = c(Ei) ∑ w∈W c?i (w)u(A d c?i ,g , w) • If c(Ei) = 0, then c(Ei) ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) = 0 = c(Ei) ∑ w∈W c?i (w)u(A d c?i ,g , w) 29 So ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w)u(Adci , f , w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(Ei)ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈W c?i (w)u(A d c?i ,g , w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(Ei)c?i (w)u(A d c?i ,g , w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w)u(Adc?i ,g, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) as required. This establishes Lemma 16(i). Second, (ii). Suppose R is a conditionalizing rule, and R? is not, and f , g are selection functions. Then, if c(Ei) > 0, then Ci = {ci}, ci(Ei) = 1, and c(w) = ci(w)c(Ei). Now, suppose that, for each Ei in E and c′ in C?i , there is αic′ > 0 such that for each Ei in E , ∑c′∈C?i α i c′ = 1 and ud, f (R?, w) = ∑ c′∈C?i αic′u(A d c′, f , w) Then, for all Ei in E and c′ in C?i , ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) ≥ ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adc′,g, w) 30 And thus ∑ w∈W c(w)ud, f (R, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w)u(Adci , f , w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈Ei ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈W ci(w) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′u(A d ci , f , w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′ ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) ≥ ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′ ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adc′,g, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈Ei ci(w) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′u(A d c′,g, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′u(A d c′,g, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)ud,g(R?, w) Now, since R? is not a conditionalizing rule for c, there is c(Ei) > 0 and c′ in C?i such that c ′(−) 6= ci(−). Then there is a decision problem d such that Adc′,g does not maximise expected utility with respect to ci. And thus ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adci , f , w) > ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(Adc′,g, w) In this case, the inequality above is strict, as required. Now: • If R? is deterministic but not conditionalizing, let αic′ = 1 for all c ′ in Ci. This gives Theorem 5. • If R? is non-deterministic but stochastic, let αic′ = P(R ?i c′ |Ei) be the probability of R?ic′ given Ei. This gives Theorem 7. • If R? is non-deterministic and non-stochastic, let αic′ = 1 |C?i | . This gives Theorem 8. This establishes Lemma 16(ii). 2 8.3 Expected Epistemic Utility Argument As in the previous section, we first prove a lemma. Theorems 9, 11, and 12 all follow as corollaries. 31 Lemma 17 (i) If R, R? are conditionalizing rules for c, and f , g are selection functions, then ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) (ii) If R is a conditionalizing rule for c, and R? is not, and f , g are selection functions, then ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) > ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) Proof of Lemma 17. First, (i). Suppose R and R? are conditionalizing rules for c. Then, • If c(Ei) > 0, then ci(−) = c?i (−), so EU(ci, w) = EU(c?i , w) and c(Ei)EU(ci, w) = c(Ei)EU(c?i , w) • If c(Ei) = 0, then c(Ei)EU(ci, w) = c(Ei)EU(c?i , w) So ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w)EU(ci, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈W ci(w)EU(ci, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈W c?i (w)EU(c ? i , w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w)EU(c?i , w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) as required. This establishes Lemma 17(i). Second, (ii). Suppose R is a conditionalizing rule, and R? is not. Now, suppose that, for each Ei in E and c′ in C?i , there is αic′ > 0 such that, for each Ei in E , ∑c′∈C?i α i c′ = 1 and EU(R?, w) = ∑ c′∈C?i αic′EU(c ′, w) 32 Then, for all Ei in E and c′ in C?i , ∑ w∈W ci(w)EU(ci, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W ci(w)EU(c′, w) with strict inequality if c′ 6= ci. Then ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w)EU(ci, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈Ei ci(w)EU(ci, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈W ci(w) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′EU(ci, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′ ∑ w∈W ci(w)EU(ci, w) ≥ ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′ ∑ w∈W ci(w)EU(c′, w) = ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈Ei ci(w) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′EU(c ′, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei c(w) ∑ c′∈C?i αic′EU(c ′, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) Now, since R? is not a conditionalizing rule for c, there is c(Ei) > 0 and c′ in C?i such that c ′ 6= ci. Thus ∑ w∈W ci(w)EU(ci, w) > ∑ w∈W ci(w)u(c′, w) In this case, the inequality above is strict, as required. Now: • If R? is deterministic but not conditionalizing, let αic′ = 1 for all c ′ in C?i . This gives Theorem 9. • If R? is non-deterministic but stochastic, let αic′ = P(R ?i c′ |Ei) be the probability of R?ic′ given Ei. This gives Theorem 11. • If R? is non-deterministic and non-stochastic, let αic′ = 1 |C?i | . This gives Theorem 12. This establishes Lemma 16(ii). 2 33 9 Accuracy dominance argument Theorem 13 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. And suppose c is a prior and R is a deterministic updating rule. Then: (i) if 〈c, R〉 is non-conditionalizing, there is 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all w EU(〈c, R〉, w) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w)) (ii) if 〈c, R〉 is conditionalizing, then for any 〈c?, R?〉 there is some w such that EU(〈c, R〉, w) ≥ EU(〈c?, R?〉, w)) Proof of Theorem 13. First, (i). Suppose R is deterministic but not conditionalizing for c. This is the case covered by (Briggs & Pettigrew, 2018). So R = (E = {E1, . . . , En}, C = {C1, . . . , Cn}), and, for each Ei, Ci = {ci}. So we can write 〈c, R〉 as a (n + 1)-dimensional vector of credence functions: 〈c, c1, . . . , cn〉 Now consider the following set of updating plans: WR = {wR = 〈w, c1, . . . , ci−1, w, ci+1, . . . , cn〉 : Ei ∈ E & w ∈ Ei} Thus, wR is the updating plan that has the credence function w as its prior, and will update exactly as R does except in world w where it will stick with w. Then we can show that 〈c, R〉 is not in the convex hull of WR. After all: Lemma 18 〈c, R〉 is in the convex hull of WR iff R is conditionalizing for c. Proof of Lemma 18. Let's prove the left-to-right direction first. Suppose 〈c, R〉 is in the convex hull of WR. Then there is 0 ≤ αw ≤ 1 such that • c(−) = ∑w∈W αww(−); • ci(−) = ∑w∈Ei αww(−) + ∑w 6∈Ei αwci(−) Thus, ci(X) = c(XEi) + c(Ei)ci(X) And so ci(X) = c(X|Ei) as required. Next, the right-to-left direction. Suppose R is conditionalizing for c. So ci(X) = c(X|Ei). Then let αw = c(w). It is easy to check that 〈c, R〉 is in the convex hull of WR, as required. 2 Proof of Theorem 13(i) continued. Now, suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Then, by Proposition 2 in (Predd et al., 34 2009), there is a Bregman divergence D such that EU(c, w) = −D(w, c). Let Dn+1 be the Bregman divergence between (n + 1)-dimensional vectors of credence functions that sums the Bregman divergences between the n + 1 credence functions. Thus, by Proposition 3 in (Predd et al., 2009), since 〈c, R〉 is not in the convex hull of WR, there is 〈c?, R?〉 in the convex hull of WR such that, for all Ei in E and w in Ei, Dn+1((w, c1, . . . , ci−1, w, ci+1, . . . , cn), (c?, c?1 , . . . , c ? n)) < Dn+1((w, c1, . . . , ci−1, w, ci+1, . . . , cn), (c, c1, . . . , cn)) But Dn+1((w, c1, . . . , ci−1, w, ci+1, . . . , cn), (c, c1, . . . , cn)) = D(w, c) +D(w, ci) = −EU(R, w) And Dn+1((w, c1, . . . , ci−1, w, ci+1, . . . , cn), (c?, c?1 , . . . , c ? n)) ≥ D(w, c?) +D(w, c?i ) = −EU(R?, w) So EU(R?, w) > EU(R, w) for all w in W, as required. This establishes Theorem 13(i). Second, (ii). Suppose 〈c, R〉 is conditionalizing, and suppose 〈c?, R?〉 is an alternative pair where R? is deterministic. Then we show that c expects 〈c, R〉 to have at least as much epistemic utility as it expects 〈c?, R?〉 to have. So the latter cannot EU-dominate the former. ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(〈c, R〉, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c, w) + ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c, w) + ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈Ei ci(w)EU(ci, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c?, w) + ∑ Ei∈E c(Ei) ∑ w∈Ei ci(w)EU(c?i , w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c?, w) + ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(R?, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(〈c?, R?〉, w) as required. This establishes Theorem 13(ii). 2 Before we prove our next theorem, we state and prove this lemma: Lemma 19 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Suppose C = {c1, . . . , cm} is a finite set of credence functions where m > 1. Suppose α1, . . . , αm > 0 and ∑mj=1 αj = 1. Then there is a credence function c ? such that, for w in W, EU(c?, w) > m ∑ j=1 αjEU(c, w) 35 Proof of Lemma 19. Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Then, for each possible world w, we abuse notation and write w for the credence function defined on F such that w(X) = 1 if X is true at w and w(X) = 0 if X is false at w. Then, by Proposition 2 from (Predd et al., 2009), there is a Bregman divergence D that measures the divergence from one credence function to another such that EU(c, w) = −D(w, c). Suppose C contains m > 1 credence functions. And suppose α1, . . . , αm > 0 and ∑mj=1 αj = 1. We can then use D to generate a Bregman divergence between two m-tuples of credence functions as follows: Dα((c1, . . . , cm), (c′1, . . . , c ′ m)) = m ∑ j=1 αjD(cj, c′j) So Dα((w, . . . , w), (c1, . . . , cm)) = − m ∑ j=1 αjEU(cj, w) Now consider the following set of m-tuples of credence functions: W = {(w, . . . , w) : w ∈W} Then (c1, . . . cm) is in the convex hull ofW iff c1 = c2 = . . . = cm. Thus, by Proposition 3 in (Predd et al., 2009), if ci 6= cj for some 1 ≤ i, j ≤ m, then there is (c?, . . . , c?) in the convex hull ofW such that, for w in W, Dα((w, . . . , w), (c?, . . . , c?)) < Dα((w, . . . , w), (c1, . . . , cm)) So m ∑ j=1 αjEU(c?, w) = EU(c?, w) > m ∑ j=1 αjEU(cj, w) as required. 2 Theorem 15 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Then, if 〈c, R〉 is non-conditionalizing, there is 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all w, EU(〈c, R〉, w) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w) Proof of Theorem 15. Suppose 〈c, R〉 is non-conditionalizing. If R is deterministic, we can appeal to Theorem 13. If R is non-deterministic, then we can use Lemma 19 to construct a dominating pair 〈c?, R?〉. After all, if Ci contains more than one possible posterior, then there are αic′ > 0 such that ∑c′∈Ci α i c′ = 1 and, for w in Ei, EU(R, w) = ∑ c′∈Ci αic′EU(c ′, w) 36 If R is stochastic, then αic′ = P(R i c′ |Ei); if R is non-stochastic, then αic′ = 1 |Ci | . Now, by Lemma 19, there is c?i such that, for all w in W, EU(c?i , w) > ∑ c′∈Ci αic′EU(c ′, w) Thus, let R? be the updating rule such that C?j = Cj for all j 6= i, and C?i = {c?i }. Also, let c? = c. Then: EU(〈c?, R?〉, w) > EU(〈c, R〉, w) as required. 2 Theorem 14 Suppose EU is an additive, strictly proper epistemic utility function. Then: (i) If R is a weak or strong super-conditionalizing rule for c, there is no 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all Ei in E , w in Ei, c′ in Ci and c?′ in C?i EU(〈c, R〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) (ii) There are rules R that are not weak or strong super-conditionalizing rules for c such that there is no 〈c?, R?〉 such that, for all Ei in E , w in Ei, c′ in Ci and c?′ in C?i EU(〈c, R〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) Proof of Theorem 14. First, (i). Suppose 〈c, R〉 is a weak or a strong superconditionalizing pair. Thus, we can extend c to c∗ so that, for Ei in E and c′ in Ci, if c∗(Ei) > 0. c′(−) = c∗(−|Ric′) Thus, c∗(w & Ric′) = c ∗(Ric′)c ′(w) Now suppose 〈c?, R?〉 is an alternative prior-rule pair. Then extend c∗ further so that: c∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′ ) = 1 |C?i | c∗(w & Ric′) = 1 |C?i | c∗(Ric′)c ′(w) 37 Then: ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci ∑ c?′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′)EU(〈c, R〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci ∑ w∈Ei c∗(w & Ric′)EU(c ′, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′) ∑ w∈W c′(w)EU(c′, w) ≥ ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c?, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci c∗(Ric′) ∑ w∈W c′(w)EU(c?′, w) = ∑ w∈W c(w)EU(c?, w) + ∑ Ei∈E ∑ c′∈Ci ∑ w∈W c∗(w & Ric′)EU(c ?′, w) = ∑ Ei∈E ∑ w∈Ei ∑ c′∈Ci ∑ c?′∈Ci c∗(w & Ric′ & R ?i c?′)EU(〈c?, R?〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) Thus, it cannot be the case that for all Ei in E , w in Ei, c′ in Ci and c?′ in C?i EU(〈c, R〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) < EU(〈c?, R?〉, w & Ric′ & R?ic?′) This establishes Theorem 14(i). Next, (ii). Suppose E = {E1, . . . , En} and w1, w2 are in E1. Then pick c, c1, c2 so that they lie on the line between w1 and w2. Pick: c very close to w1; c1 very close to c, but slightly further towards w2; and c2 right at the end of the line at w2. So c is not in the convex hull of c1 and c2. Next, define R = (E , C) with C1 = {c1, c2}. Now suppose c? is an alternative prior and R? = (E , C?) is an alternative updating rule, with c?′ in C?1 . Then, if 〈c?, R?〉 dominates 〈c, R〉, then: (i) EU(c, w1) + EU(c1, w1) < EU(c?, w1) + EU(c?′, w1) (ii) EU(c, w2) + EU(c2, w2) < EU(c?, w2) + EU(c?′, w2) Now, suppose c? is equal to c or lies between c and w1. Then EU(c?, w2) ≤ EU(c, w2). But since c2 = w2, EU(c?′, w2) ≤ EU(c2, w2). So EU(c, w2) + EU(c2, w2) ≥ EU(c?, w2) + EU(c?′, w2) which contradicts (ii). And similarly for c?′. So both c? and c?′ must lie strictly between c and w2. And indeed, they must lie strictly between c and c1. If one or other lies between c1 and w2, then EU(c, w2) + EU(c1, w1) ≥ EU(c?, w1) + EU(c?′, w1) which contradicts (i). 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DRAFT: for citation purposes, see the published version in Erkenntnistheorie: Wie und Wozu? Stefan Tolksdorf and Dirk Koppelberg (eds.), Berlin: Mentis Publishers. "The Case for Naturalized Epistemology" Joshua Shepherd & Michael Bishop Naturalized epistemology is like pornography and modern art: People love it or hate it even though they can't define it. And with respect to naturalized epistemology at least, this is as it should be. It is contrary to the spirit of naturalized epistemology to try to provide a precise definition of it from the armchair. Our goal in this paper is to articulate a general framework for understanding philosophical naturalism and to argue for a moderate form of naturalized epistemology. We will not conclude with a clear definition of naturalized epistemology, with its assumptions and implications bare and gleaming. Rather, we propose to end up with something rough but robust. 1. A framework for understanding naturalism and analytic philosophy Philosophers present considerations in favor of and against theories. Let's call such considerations evidence. What sort of evidence is it legitimate for philosophers to appeal to in defending and criticizing philosophical theories? In recent years, the debate about how to do epistemology, and philosophy more generally, has focused on this question. In particular, metaphilosophical debates have turned on what role intuitions should play as evidence in philosophical argument and theorizing. As we shall see, there is some debate about what exactly intuitions are. We will proceed with an intuitive grasp of intuitions based on some typical examples. Anyone who has studied contemporary analytic epistemology will be able to identify intuitions and recognize their role in epistemological theorizing. A philosopher begins with a theory that purports to account for a philosophically important category, like knowledge or justification. A philosopher criticizes that theory by offering a scenario, perhaps hypothetical, in which the theory implies a falsehood. For example, Gettier (1963) famously presented a pair of cases against the JTB (justified, true belief) account of knowledge. In one of the cases, Smith has strong evidence that Jones owns a Ford. But he has no evidence concerning the whereabouts of his friend Brown. Gettier has us suppose that from his evidence, Smith infers via disjunction addition that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona. However, it turns out that Jones does not own a Ford – the car he's currently in is rented. Further, "by the sheerest coincidence, and entirely unknown to Smith," Brown is actually in Barcelona (1963, 123). Smith has a justified, true belief that is not knowledge. The judgment that Smith's belief that either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona is not knowledge is a prototypical example of an intuition that plays a crucial role in epistemological theorizing. Most analytic philosophers take such intuitions to be evidence in the same way that scientists take their observations to be evidence. Philosophers treat intuition "as a source of epistemic justification, just like perception, memory or testimony" (Grundmann 2010, 481). To say that intuitions are evidence is somewhat awkward. What counts against the JTB account is that Smith's belief is not knowledge (not that someone or other has an intuition that it is not knowledge) and that the JTB account says that it is knowledge. The idea here is that intuitions are "evidence" for a philosophical theory in the same way observations are "evidence" for a scientific theory. A more accurate way to put the point is that in normal circumstances, the intuition (or observation) that p is an indication of p, and p is evidence for a philosophical (or scientific) theory. Rather than this accurate mouthful, we will continue to speak colloquially in terms of intuitions being evidence for or against philosophical theories. It is common to hear from naturalistic philosophers that scientific evidence should play a significant role in philosophical theorizing. Scientific evidence consists of the empirical, contingent findings and theories that result from the accepted practices of science, regardless of whether it is conducted by scientists or philosophers. Naturalistic theories have appealed to a broad range of scientific evidence in support of their theories – for example, evidence from behaviorist psychology (e.g., Quine 1969), anthropology (e.g., Stich 1991), evolution (e.g., Lorenz 1977, Bradie 1989), ethology (Kornblith 2002) and cognitive science (e.g., Goldman 1986, Bishop & Trout 2005). We do not take a firm stand on the role of intuitions in the development of scientific evidence, but we are certainly not committed to the thesis that intuitions (at least on certain views of what count as intuitions) play no role in establishing or confirming scientific evidence (e.g., Bealer 1992). If intuitions are essential to the accepted practices of science, then it seems to us that the naturalist can and should accept this fact without a second thought. A useful way to understand the difference between analytic philosophy and philosophical naturalism is in terms of what evidence each takes to be relevant to confirming or disconfirming philosophical theories. Analytic philosophers give pride of place to intuitions, while naturalistic philosophers insist that scientific evidence is crucial to establishing philosophical theories. But of course, this need not be an all-or-nothing matter. The following schema sets out a range of views one might adopt with respect to what sort of evidence is relevant to philosophical theorizing. Schema PHI: The substantive evidence relevant to philosophical theorizing consists of ___A___ intuitions and ___B___ scientific evidence. A: only, primarily, some, limited, no B: only, primarily, some, limited, no By "substantive" evidence, we mean evidence in the form of facts or propositions and not simply theoretical considerations in favor of a theory (such as simplicity or explanatory power). Schema PHI is quite crude in a number of ways. It assumes that intuitions and scientific evidence are the only candidates for substantive evidence for philosophical theorizing. It also leaves considerable room for specifying in more detail the precise roles intuitions and scientific 3 evidence might play in philosophical theorizing. Despite these limitations, Schema PHI succeeds in making evident that there are not just two extreme positions to choose from. The range of viable moderate options is quite wide. We might understand Radical Analytic Philosophy to be committed to the <only, no> solution to Schema PHI and Radical Naturalistic Philosophy to be committed to the <no, only> solution. And there are surely philosophers who fall into these extreme camps. For example, Quine (1951) and Bealer (1998) seem to offer general arguments for thinking that only one sort of evidence is relevant to philosophical theorizing. We might worry that Schema PHI fails to leave room for a moderate pluralism that holds out the possibility of different solutions for different areas of philosophy. For example, a pluralist might argue that theories in the philosophy of science turn at least in part on scientific evidence, wheras certain branches of metaphysics rely only on intuition. Since we want to allow for the possibility that there might be different Schema PHI solutions for different areas of philosophy, we propose a schema focused on epistemology. Schema EPI: The substantive evidence relevant to epistemological theorizing consists of ___A___ intuitions and ___B___ scientific evidence. A: only, primarily, some, limited, no B: only, primarily, some, limited, no We propose to characterize different approaches to epistemology in terms of how they complete Schema EPI. But how one solves this schema will depend on a number of factors. One is what we take to be the purpose or aim of epistemology. Following Stich (2010), we can distinguish five possible projects epistemologists might embark upon: 1. Intuition capturing: A epistemological theory must entail our epistemic intuitions (perhaps with some light revisions in the service of clarity or theoretical power). 2. Implicit theory: There is an implicit theory that underlies our abilities to produce epistemic intuitions. An epistemological theory of knowledge must give an account of that implicit theory. 3. Conceptual analysis: There is a concept that underlies our abilities to produce epistemic intuitions. An epistemological theory must give an account of that concept. (Note: On some views of concepts, this project will be identical to the second project.) 4. True nature: An epistemological theory must characterize the nature and conditions of some epistemological category, e.g., knowledge, justification, warrant. This assumes that these categories are not necessarily perfectly captured by our concepts of them. For example, a theory of knowledge must tell us about the nature of knowledge, which might not accord in all details with our concept of knowledge (in the same way that the nature of water might not accord in all details with our concept of water). 5. Reason-guidance: An epistemological theory aims to provide epistemic guidance to our cognitive lives. It is supposed tell us what we epistemically ought to believe, or how we epistemically ought to reason. Of course, the advice of a reason-guiding epistemological theory might be overridden by other considerations, epistemic or non-epistemic. For example, a reason-guiding theory might tell us that we ought (epistemically) to believe p, even though there are competing moral or pragmatic considerations that, all things considered, advise against believing that p. This list represents a reasonable, though not necessarily exhaustive, spectrum of projects upon which epistemologists might be embarked. If one takes the goal of epistemology to be one of the first three projects, then it would be foolish to deny intuitions a significant role in epistemological theorizing. Scientific evidence might also play a role in some such projects. If the implicit theories and concepts adverted to by projects 2 and 3 are psychological structures, then psychology, its methods, and its evidence are likely to be relevant to epistemological theorizing (Goldman 1993). Since we want to focus on projects in which a radical naturalism is a live option, we will assume that the proper goal of epistemology is given by projects 4 or 5. So epistemology seeks to characterize the true nature and conditions of some epistemological category (such as knowledge or justification), or it seeks to provide some kind of reasonguidance, or it seeks to do both. Despite the ample conceptual room in the middle, it is noteworthy that the debate about intuitions tends to focus on the extreme ends of the spectrum. Radical Analytic Epistemology (RAE). The substantive evidence relevant to epistemological theorizing consists of only intuitions and no scientific evidence. Radical Naturalized Epistemology (RNE). The substantive evidence for our epistemological theories consists of no intuitions and only empirical considerations. Our goal in this paper is to raise serious doubts about these extreme views and argue that the middle ground in this debate is the place to be. As we will suggest in section 4, given the current state of epistemology, a moderate view that takes both intuitions and scientific evidence to be crucial to epistemological theorizing will be interpreted by most contemporary philosophers as a kind of naturalism. And so we take ourselves to be moderate naturalists. 2. The case against Radical Analytic Epistemology Radical Analytic Epistemology is the view that the substantive evidence relevant to epistemological theorizing consists of only intuitions and no scientific evidence. More than a few analytic epistemologists would embrace RAE. George Bealer, for example, argues that most 5 central philosophical questions, including epistemological ones, "can in principle be answered by philosophical investigation and argument without relying substantively on the sciences" (1996, 121). For Bealer, philosophy is an a priori discipline, and as such is autonomous from empirical results. Indeed, when philosophy and science purport to answer the same question, Bealer maintains that "the authority of philosophy can in most cases be greater in principle" (1996, 121). Some other analytic epistemologists are a bit more cautious. Ernest Sosa, for example, argues that philosophical intuitions should play the same role in epistemological theorizing as observations do in science (2007a). However, Sosa admits that in principle, scientific evidence could be relevant to epistemological theorizing. For example, if wellconducted surveys were to show that people had radically divergent intuitions about a crucial epistemological category like knowledge or justification, this would call into question the evidential role of intuitions: "extensive enough disagreement on the subject matter supposedly open to intuitive access" would represent "a prima facie problem for the appeal to intuitions in philosophy" (2007a, 102). Sosa, however, doubts that empirical considerations do indicate such disagreement. As a result, we can perhaps interpret Sosa as embracing RAE as a contingent truth for which we have strong evidence. One way naturalists have commonly argued against RAE is to insist upon an "ought implies can" requirement on epistemological theorizing. Stephen Stich, for example, contends that it would be a mistake for an epistemological theory to demand that someone engage in cognitive gymnastics that would require "a brain the size of a blimp" (1990, 27). An "ought implies can" restriction would require giving up RAE since epistemological theories could be disconfirmed by scientific evidence concerning our cognitive limitations. But some analytic epistemologists reject this empirical restriction on epistemological theorizing. For example, Feldman and Conee's (1985) evidentialist theory of epistemic justification holds that epistemic justification is simply a function of the evidence one has. What happens if someone possesses evidence which, given his cognitive limitations, renders him incapable of forming a justified belief? An "ought implies can" restriction would rule out a theory of justification which makes demands of agents regardless of their cognitive abilities. Feldman and Conee, however, reject the restriction. "Some standards are met only by going beyond normal human limits" (1985, 19). To make the case against RAE, let's begin with an empirical hypothesis for which we have considerable evidence. Cognitive Diversity is the thesis that there are significant and systematic differences in how different classes of people reason about the world. In recent years, psychologists and anthropologists have uncovered cognitive diversity not just with respect to higher-order inferential reasoning about morality, aesthetics or cultural practices, but with respect to fairly basic sorts of cognitive processes. For example, in the 'Michigan Fish' study, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) showed Japanese and American subjects animated underwater scenes. When subjects reported on the scenes, Americans tended to refer first to the fish, while Japanese tended to refer to the scene's background elements. Overall, Japanese subjects made roughly 70 percent more statements about background features of the scene, and 100 percent more statements about relationships with inanimate aspects of the environment – e.g., "A big fish swam past some gray seaweed" (Nisbett et al. 2001, 297) – than did Americans. Reviewing these and related results, Nisbett and colleagues embraced cognitive diversity: "literally different cognitive processes are often invoked by East Asians and Westerners dealing with the same problem" (2001, 305). Nisbett and colleagues contend that these differences are systematic: the reasoning of Westerners is analytic, "involving detachment of the object from its context, a tendency to focus on attributes of the object to assign it to categories, and a preference for using rules about the categories to explain and predict the object's behavior"; in contrast, the reasoning of East Asians is holistic, "involving an orientation to the context or field as a whole, including attention to relationships between a focal object and the field, and a preference for explaining and predicting events on the basis of such relationships" (Nisbett et al. 2001, 293). It should be emphasized that this is taken to be a cultural phenomenon, not a biological or racial phenomenon (Nisbett 2003). For example, Nisbett et al. have found that regarding cognitive processing, "Asians move radically in an American direction after a generation or less in the United States" (2001, 307). While the work of Nisbett and his colleagues has rightly received considerable attention, there are many other examples of cognitive diversity across a wide range of cognitive tasks. Here are some examples from a recent review (Heinrich et al. 2010). Visual Perception: The apparent strength of visual illusions (such as the Muller-Lyer illusion) varies greatly across cultures. Some cultures find certain illusions – for example, that two lines of the same length appear to be different lengths – strikingly obvious; other cultures find the same illusion much less obvious or even, in some cases, not apparent at all. As Heinrich et al. note, "this work suggests that even a process as apparently basic as visual perception can show substantial variation across populations" (2010, 64). Spatial Reasoning: Nonlinguistic processes related to spatial reasoning evince cultural and linguistic differences. Speakers of English and related Indo-European languages tend to represent space egocentrically, with implicit reference to the self (e.g., the man is to the left of the flagpole). But speakers of many other languages tend to represent space differently. Some represent space in a geocentric fashion using to cardinal directions (e.g., the couch is west of the television), while others represent space in an objectcentered manner according to "some coordinate system anchored to the object" (e.g., the couch is in front of the television) (2010, 68). Categorization and Inferential Reasoning: There are significant differences in how people in different cultures understand, organize, and reason about basic biological categories. While urbanized populations tend to rely on similarity classes in order to 7 make biological inferences, populations in closer contact to "the natural world . . . prefer to make strong inferences from folkbiological knowledge that takes into account ecological context and relationships among species" (2010, 67). For example, urbanized populations first learn life-form classes (e.g., bird, fish, mammal), while non-urbanized populations first learn generic species (e.g., crow, trout, fox). Further, while the biological inferences of children in urbanized populations depend strongly on known properties of humans, children in non-urbanized populations display no such inferential pattern. Their folkbiological reasoning sees humans as one animal among many – a feature of folkbiological reasoning which occurs only much later in urbanized populations. Given this evidence, Heinrich et al. suggest that "In general, research suggests that what people think about can affect how they think" (2010, 67) Moral Reasoning: While folks from Western nations tend to utilize abstract ethical principles concerning justice and individual rights to guide their moral reasoning, people from non-Western nations tend to rely on conventional moral schemata – schemata influenced by considerations such as the maintenance of social order. This cross-cultural difference survives when education is controlled for. Another difference is that Westerners tend to characterize morality more often in terms of justice and harm-based rules, whereas non-Westerners are more often sensitive to considerations of community and holiness. This breadth of cognitive diversity is striking. But what is perhaps more striking is that on the above tasks, those of us from WEIRD nations (i.e., Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic nations) are not typical, statistically speaking. For example, on all of the above categories, Westerners are at the far end of the scale: "WEIRD populations frequently occupy the tail-ends of distributions of psychological and behavioral phenomena" (Heinrich et al. 2010, 76). Further, "American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners – outliers among outliers" (2010, 76). Cognitive diversity is a challenge for two reasons. First, it gives practical motivation to epistemology. If people in different cultures systematically apply different cognitive processes to the same problem and so come to different beliefs, then the problem of epistemic evaluation becomes especially pressing. "[I]t is the prospect of cognitive diversity among normal folk that lends a genuine, almost existential, urgency to the project of cognitive evaluation" (Stich 1990, 74). And second, cognitive diversity makes epistemic diversity more plausible. Epistemic Diversity is the thesis that there are significant and systematic differences in the epistemic intuitions and practices employed by different classes of people. To see the link between cognitive and epistemic diversity, let's assume that people tend not to systematically arrive at beliefs they intuitively deem to be unjustified. And so in those cases of cognitive diversity in which people systematically arrive at inconsistent beliefs, it is plausible that they should also come to inconsistent epistemic judgments or intuitions. The relationship between cognitive and epistemic diversity is not one of entailment. Perhaps after reflection, the people of one of the cultures would realize their beliefs were unjustified; or perhaps the cognitive diversity does not result from epistemic diversity but because of confusions. Still, the amount of systematic cognitive diversity psychologists have discovered makes epistemic diversity at least a realistic possibility. While the existence of cognitive diversity allows us to make an indirect case for epistemic diversity, there is direct evidence for thinking that there are significant and systematic differences in the epistemic concepts, judgments, and practices that people employ. Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001) gave the following Gettier-style example to sets of Western and non-Western subjects. Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car. Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it? (2001, 443) If you are a member of a WEIRD population, chances are you have the intuition that Bob only believes that Jill drives an American car. For this is the intuition of most WEIRD philosophers, and this was the intuition of most Westerners in the above study. However, the situation for non-Westerners was different. In the above study, a majority of East Asian subjects, as well as a majority of subjects from India, had the intuition that Bob really knows that Jill drives an American car (2001, 443). On the assumption that the goal of epistemology is to account for something beyond our own epistemic intuitions, implicit theories or concepts, epistemic diversity is a serious prima facie challenge. We want a theory that tells us about the true nature of knowledge or epistemic justification; or we want a theory that tells us how people epistemically ought to reason. But how can we construct such a theory if the evidential base is exhausted by intuitions that are diverse across different groups of people? There seem to be only three options available to the proponent of RAE. 1. Denial: Deny the existence of epistemic diversity. 2. Privileging: Argue that one set of intuitions is superior to others, and so only those intuitions count as evidence for epistemological theories. 3. Relativism: Epistemological theories will be different for people or cultures with significantly different intuitions. 9 We will argue that each of these options suffers from serious problems. 2.1. Relativism We can dismiss relativism because this is not a live option for most proponents of RAE. But even if epistemic relativism were more popular, the version of relativism to which one is driven by epistemic diversity is deeply unpalatable. As Weinberg, Nichols and Stich note, the version of epistemic relativism suggested by the above results "would entail that the epistemic norms appropriate for the rich are quite different from the epistemic norms appropriate for the poor, and that the epistemic norms appropriate for white people are different from the norms appropriate for people of color. And that we take to be quite a preposterous result" (2001, 449) 2.2. Denial The denial strategy involves rejecting epistemic diversity. In order to deny that there is good evidence for epistemic diversity, one need not accept its negation, epistemic universalism. Epistemic Universalism is the thesis that there are no significant and systematic differences in the epistemic intuitions and practices employed by different classes of people. One might remain agnostic between the two by suspending judgment. But we will contend that as the evidence for epistemic diversity grows stronger, it will be more and more difficult for the proponent of Denial to remain agnostic. The basic plan behind the Denial strategy is straightforward: Agree that the evidence shows a diversity in epistemic judgment (i.e., in what people say about the cases) but deny that this shows a diversity in epistemic concepts or categories. The way proponents of Denial have made this argument is by raising various methodological worries about the empirical studies. They offer explanations for the diversity in epistemic judgment that do not entail diversity in epistemic concepts or categories. Kirk Ludwig, for example, suggests that the epistemic judgments made by folks surveyed might not manifest the content of their epistemic concepts because they "are apt to be the product of a number of different factors, among which are how they understand the task, their background beliefs, empirical and nonempirical, how they think what they say will be taken, loose analogies they may draw with other sorts of situations, how they understand the scenario, whether they pay adequate attention to relevant details, whether they think clearly and hard enough to see what to say in response to the kind of question asked, assuming they understand it correctly, how they think that their interlocutor will (or interlocutors generally would) understand what they say or more generally what they would be trying to convey by what they say or how they respond, as well as perhaps various shortcuts or rules of thumb in reasoning, or plain mistakes" (2007, 144; also cf. Sosa 2009, 106109). Against this argument, it is important to note that one can always raise possible problems against any instance of research in any scientific discipline: researchers might have employed a faulty measuring instrument or idiosyncratic features of the experimental set up might have conspired to lead the researchers astray. Science would not get very far, however, if the mere mention of such possibilities stopped research in its tracks. In general, such worries are blunted when the results of a study are supported by diverse lines of evidence. Armchair "mere possibility" objections against (say) the standard account of the evolution of the horse are undermined because the evolutionary account of the horse is supported by so many different lines of evidence from so many different areas of science. Given the number and strength of these lines of evidence, armchair "mere possibility" worries about evolution look like desperate appeals to the miraculous (Bleckmann 2006). That's not to say that the standard account of the evolution of the horse, or of evolution itself, is immune from disconfirmation. Empirical hypotheses might always be felled by substantive objections. But these substantive objections typically do not come entirely from the armchair they rely on hypotheses supported by divergent lines of empirical evidence. We can be confident that a hypothesis can overcome "mere possibility" objections to the extent it is supported by a wide range of studies that make many different assumptions. Given the current state of the evidence, it is too early to form definitive judgments about epistemic diversity. But it is worth noting that epistemic diversity findings have been discovered across many different populations. We have already mentioned the cross-cultural evidence. Other studies have found systematic gender differences in people's epistemic intuitions (Starmans and Friedman unpublished, Buckwalter and Stich 2011), and systematic epistemic differences among people of high and low socio-economic status (Weinberg, Nichols and Stich 2001, 447-448). In fact, a single person's epistemic intuitions can change depending on the order in which different cases are presented (Swain, Alexander and Weinberg 2008), and depending on the moral valence of the fact in question (Beebe and Buckwalter forthcoming). Diversity of intuitions is found not just in epistemology. Studies have shown that intuitions about philosophical concepts are influenced by such factors as difference in personality type (Feltz & Cokely 2009) and slight changes in how the cases are described (Gendler 2007). The Denial strategy involves suggesting an explanation for the diversity of epistemic judgment that does not entail diversity of epistemic concept or category. One can try to account for the diversity in judgment by appeal to one-off errors. But this explanation won't work because at least some of the epistemic diversity is systematic and repeatable. Why is there a systematic difference in the intuitions of men and women on Gettier problems? Why do women more often get the "wrong" answer? Do women have different background beliefs about watch ownership than men (the content of the Gettiered belief in the relevant study)? Are women more likely to misunderstand the scenario than men? Are women more likely to draw "loose analogies" than men? Are women less likely to "pay adequate attention to relevant details" of the scenarios than men? Are women less likely to "think clearly and hard enough" about the situation than men? There is absolutely no evidence for these highly speculative hypotheses. What's more, there are other well-known philosophical examples in which it is 11 women who more often get the "right" answers. So it is quite implausible and quite frankly uncomfortable to suppose that women are on average more confused or weak-minded than men when it comes to thinking about philosophy. There is a simpler and more plausible explanation for the systematic diversity in people's epistemic judgments: there are some genuine differences in how men and women understand certain epistemic and philosophical categories. As more evidence piles up, it gets more difficult to explain away all the different kinds of diversity in epistemic judgments in a way that retains epistemic universalism. There is another line of evidence that supports epistemic diversity, which we have already touched upon. The evidence for cognitive diversity, which is very robust, also lends support to epistemic diversity in two ways. First, cognitive diversity holds that people in different cultures reason in significantly and systematically different ways. If those people tend to epistemically approve of their own respective reasoning and beliefs, we should expect there to be some cross-cultural variation in people's epistemic practices, concepts and intuitions. Second, some of the cross-cultural epistemic differences are predictable from the cross-cultural cognitive differences. Recall that Nisbett found systematic differences in Western and East Asian thought: "literally different cognitive processes are often invoked by East Asians and Westerners dealing with the same problem" (Nisbett et al. 2001, 305). But these differences were not random. East Asians were more sensitive to contextual and cultural factors than Westerners in how they thought. Perhaps East Asians are also more sensitive to contextual and cultural factors than Westerners in how they evaluate thought. This is precisely what the evidence shows. Weinberg, Nichols and Stich (2001) gave Western and East Asian subjects three "true temp" cases in which a person is unaware that his brain has been rewired so that he now possesses a perfectly reliable mechanism for acquiring beliefs about the ambient temperature. In the first case, the rewiring occurs to the individual by accident; in the second case it occurs by the order of his community's elders; and in the final case the entire community has their brains rewired by accident. What we see here is a pattern: As the beliefforming processes become more culturally sanctioned, East Asians tend to evaluate the belief more positively. They were more and more likely to judge it to be knowledge. For Westerners, the cultural variations in the examples didn't matter. The differences between Ws [Westerners] and EAs [East Asians] look to be both systematic and explainable. EAs and Ws appear to be sensitive to different features of the situation, different epistemic vectors, as we call them. EAs are much more sensitive to communitarian factors, while Ws respond to more individualistic ones. Moreover, Nisbett and his colleagues have given us good reason to think that these kinds of differences can be traced to deep and important differences in EA and W cognition... What our studies point to, then, is more than just divergent epistemic intuitions across groups; the studies point to divergent epistemic concerns – concerns which appear to differ along a variety of dimensions (Weinberg, Nichols and Stich 2001, 451). The case for epistemic diversity does not rest on a few survey results performed on a few dozen people. A number of different lines of evidence all point to the existence of epistemic diversity. The various lines of evidence in support of epistemic diversity are weighty enough that "mere possibility" objections should raise moderate, but by no means debilitating, concerns. What we have yet to see is any empirical evidence suggesting that when confusions and other sources of judgment error are removed, the epistemic judgments of the Oxford don, the Iowa mechanic, the Japanese chef, and the Indian businesswoman are identical. Right now, there is evidence of systematic variations in epistemic judgments across different cultures and different classes of people (e.g., gender, socio-economic class). And some of these systematic differences in epistemic judgments correspond to similar systematic differences in cognitive functioning. The challenge for the philosopher who opts for Denial is not merely to explain differences in epistemic judgment. The challenge is to explain the systematic differences in epistemic judgment. We don't contend that the Denial option is dead. There may be appropriately systematic explanations for the coherent patterns in the evidence that retain epistemic universalism. But as the evidence piles up, we see no reason to suppose that the prospects for Denial will brighten. 2.3. Privileging The Privileging option often begins by "thin-slicing" categories of epistemic evaluation: If different people pass different judgments about an epistemic category and those judgments are not the result of any errors or confusions, then those people are employing different epistemic concepts or categories (even if they use the same term). The advantage of thin-slicing is that it avoids the pitfalls of Denial. It does not require that we explain diversity of judgment in deprecatory terms. By slicing categories of epistemic evaluation thinly, the defender of RAE can maintain that the diversity findings only show that some folks have different categories of normative evaluation than others. So if East Asians pass more positive judgments about beliefs that are sanctioned by their community than do Westerners, that doesn't mean East Asians are more confused or careless in their evaluations of belief than Westerners. It just means that East Asians and Westerners have somewhat different categories and practices of cognitive evaluation. Sosa, for example, argues that for the experimental results to have the effect Weinberg, Nichols and Stich suggest they do, subjects would need to disagree about the answer to a question of the form: "Would anyone who satisfied condition C with regard to proposition <p> know that p or only believe it?" (2009, 107) Sosa doubts, however, that there is sufficient agreement on the contents of C or <p>. He suggests that cultural differences may lead subjects to construct the relevant cases differently in imagination, with the result that the condition C – the condition important to knowledge (e.g., owning a car) – could be filled in differently. If subjects of different cultures import "different background assumptions about how likely it is that an American who has long owned an American car will continue to own a car and indeed an American car" (2009, 108), then the experimental results might register a difference in content, rather than a disagreement about knowledge. 13 Privileging and Denial differ in that the former allows that some of the empirically established diversity of judgment might involve the employment of legitimate alternative categories of cognitive evaluation rather than merely displaying the errors and confusions of the hoi polloi. After thin-slicing, Privileging proceeds by insisting that it is only the concepts and categories of a certain group of people that count as evidence for our epistemological theories. It is our intuitions and our concepts that reflect the true nature of knowledge, epistemic justification or warrant, epistemic (or theoretical) rationality, etc. Other folks might employ different concepts and have different intuitions when evaluating cognition. We have no a priori reason to disparage those alternative categories of evaluation. They're just not the categories we are using or are interested in capturing. Privileging explains genuine diversity of judgment as difference without disagreement. Folks who employ different concepts of knowledge are no more disagreeing about the nature of knowledge than people who employ different concepts of bank. And as Sosa argues, "The fact that we value one commodity, called 'knowledge' or 'justification' among us, is no obstacle to our also valuing a different commodity, valued by some other community under that same label" (2009, 109). We want to know what knowledge or justification is. And if someone group of people uses 'knowledge' to designate something other than knowledge or 'justification' to designate something other than justification, that doesn't in the least undermine this project. The Privileging option faces three challenges. None of them are devastating. But together they raise serious worries about its viability. First, the thin-slicing argument depends on a contentious semantic theory (Stich 2009, 233-236). Privileging grants that different people employ different concepts in their evaluation of cognition. But keep in mind that the epistemological project at issue here is "True nature." The goal is not to account for our epistemic concepts. It is to account for the nature and conditions of real epistemic categories, like knowledge, justification, warrant, etc. Given this project, epistemic conceptual diversity is not enough to guarantee epistemic diversity. According to a fairly standard semantic view, people with somewhat different concepts can nonetheless refer to the same thing (Kripke 1972, Putnam 1975). If people with very different ideas about what atoms are can all refer to atoms, then it seems plausible to suppose that people with somewhat different ideas about the nature and conditions of knowledge (or justification, etc.) can all refer to knowledge (or justification, etc.). This is because while the evidence supports some systematic diversity in people's epistemic judgments, it also finds considerable agreement. For example, Weinberg, Nichols and Stich found that the vast majority of all cultural groups agree that beliefs based on "special feelings" are not knowledge (2001, 430). The second challenge for Privileging is to identify the class of people with the privileged epistemic categories. For any group of people, it's always possible that they won't share the same epistemic concepts and categories given that these concepts and categories are being thin-sliced. If relatively small, systematic differences in how people understand 'justification' make it the case that they are committed to different epistemic categories, then those with the privileged concepts had better have very similar understandings of justification (or knowledge, etc.). So who are the folks with the privileged concepts? Even if we restrict the privileged few to professional epistemologists people who presumably have thought long and hard about basic epistemic categories the problem of diversity might survive. There might be systematic differences in how even epistemologists understand the most basic epistemic categories. A prominent defender of RAE, Ernest Sosa, makes this claim: "Notoriously, contemporary analytic epistemologists have disagreed among themselves, nearly all professors at colleges or universities, nearly all English-speaking Westerners . . ." (2009, 111). While Sosa downplays the import of this disagreement, it is hard to see how the privileged few whose intuitions count as evidence will be decided upon when not even all professional epistemologists with expertise in the area are going to make the cut. Privileging seems to unduly narrow the scope of epistemology. The third challenge for Privileging is that it seems unable to provide a crucial kind of guidance to our cognitive endeavors. Philosophers are interested in knowledge because other things being equal, it's better to know than not know. Knowing that p is better than believing but not knowing that p. Philosophers are interested in justification because from a purely epistemological perspective, one ought not accept unjustified beliefs whereas one is permitted to accept justified beliefs. What one ought to believe can depend on many considerations moral , pragmatic, aesthetic and epistemic. So the idea here is not that a theory of justification will identify those beliefs you ought to believe, all things considered. Rather, the idea is that a theory of justification will deliver reason-guiding or belief-guiding prescriptions that are significant but also appropriately qualified. To put it in terms of potential goals, epistemology seeks "Reason-guidance," not just "True nature." Consider a situation in which groups G and G' have categories of cognitive evaluation that overlap significantly but that very occasionally result in different prescriptions. So although members of G and G' evaluate beliefs B2 B1,000,000,000 in exactly the same way, they disagree about B1: members of G evaluate belief B1 positively, whereas members of G' evaluate belief B1 negatively. So the problem is: If members of G and G' are going to adopt a belief about this matter, what should they believe? This, it seems, is precisely the sort of question that epistemology is supposed to answer. But the proponent of Privileging seems forced to give a disappointing, wishy-washy answer: It is both epistemically justified and epistemically* unjustified* to accept B1. These are different categories of doxastic evaluation and there is no inconsistency in accepting that B1 is both justified and unjustified*. One might insist: But what should these folks believe? The proponent of Privileging is forced to say something like: All I can do is tell you about epistemology, and from an epistemic perspective, in that situation, one should believe B; but from some other normative perspective (e.g., from an epistemic* perspective), the answer might be different. The Privileger interested in Reason-guidance seems committed to the idea that the only categories of cognitive evaluation that may legitimately be to applied to him are his categories of cognitive evaluation; he is, after all, concerned with how he epistemically ought to reason or believe, not how he epistemically* (or epistemically**, etc.) ought to reason or believe. Principle (X) supposes this Privileging move is available to everyone. 15 (X) The only categories of cognitive evaluation that legitimately apply to S (i.e., that lead to prima facie reason-guiding direction) are S's categories of cognitive evaluation. Principle (X) articulates a kind of normative xenophobia where the only norms that legitimately apply to a person are those that the person accepts. We take it that such a principle, when seen for what it is, is difficult to accept. As Stich points out, "unless one is inclined toward chauvinism or xenophobia in matters epistemic, it is hard to see why one would much care that a cognitive process one was thinking of invoking (or renouncing) accords with the set of evaluative notions that prevail in the society into which one happened to be born." (1990, 94) Given genuine diversity of categories of cognitive evaluation, the scope of epistemology narrows drastically for the proponent of Privileging: epistemological norms legitimately apply only to those who share the Privileger's categories of cognitive evaluation. And as we have seen, this group might be rather small. It might not even include all other professional epistemologists. The Privileger might accept the narrowing of epistemology with aplomb. Sosa does this by apparently denying "Reason-guiding" as a legitimate goal of epistemology. He refers to "Reason-guiding" as epistemic casuistry, and asserts that though it may be of some use, "it is no part of the traditional problematic of epistemology" (2007a, 106). According to Sosa, the traditional problematic just is the ferreting out of intuitions by way of examined cases: "At least since Plato, philosophical analysis has relied on thought experiments as a way to test hypotheses about the nature and conditions of human knowledge . . ." (2009, 103). There is certainly nothing inconsistent about this approach to epistemology. But fair-minded, neutral observers to this debate might hope for more. They might recognize the fine consistency of an epistemology "for me and my like-minded friends" but rebel against the idea of spending their lives pursuing such a pinched and toothless project. They might hope for a more robust epistemology that applies to a wide range of people who employ similar but somewhat different categories of cognitive evaluation. There are two ways to broaden this project. Denial and Privileging involves narrowing the appropriate evidential base by counting only certain intuitions as legitimate. But there is another possibility. Rather than narrow the appropriate evidential base for an epistemological theory, we might widen it so as to include some scientific evidence. This won't make the disagreements disappear. But it might provide a base of evidence to make some informed choices about which intuitions are the right ones. This brings us to a moderate form of naturalism which takes the substantive evidence relevant to epistemological theorizing to include both intuitions and scientific evidence. But before we get to moderate naturalism, our preferred view, let's consider the opposite extreme, Radical Naturalistic Epistemology. 3. The case against Radical Naturalistic Epistemology According to Radical Naturalistic Epistemology, the substantive evidence relevant to epistemological theorizing includes only scientific evidence and no intuitions. Quine famously articulated an approach to epistemology that is a form of RNE. Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input -certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance -and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology: namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence. (1969, 82-83) Quine is not alone in seeking to jettison intuitions from epistemological practice.1 Some experimental philosophers have also argued against employing intuitions as evidence because of their unreliability. Swain, Alexander and Weinberg (2008) argue that our intuitions about philosophical cases are subject to order effects. For example, they found that subjects previously presented with obvious cases of knowledge were significantly less likely to attribute knowledge in Gettier-style cases. Conversely, they found that subjects previously presented with cases of non-knowledge were significantly more likely to attribute knowledge in Gettierstyle cases. As a result of these sorts of empirical considerations, they suggest that "philosophers who wish to continue relying on intuitions as evidence begin empirically investigating intuitions about their favorite thought-experiments to determine whether, and which, intuitions may be taken as evidence" (2008, 153-154). Somewhat more radically, Weinberg has argued that "the practice of philosophical appeal to intuition is not merely fallible but hopelessly so" (2007, 334). Such considerations raise the prospect that intuitions are too untrustworthy to count as substantive evidence for philosophical theorizing: "the problem with standard philosophical practice is that experimental evidence seems to point to the unsuitability of intuitions to serve as evidence at all" (Alexander and Weinberg 2007, 63). How radical is the prospect of banning intuitions as evidence from epistemology? Less radical than some have thought. It is a fairly limited claim. Radical Naturalistic Epistemology is not appropriate if we take the goal of epistemology to be capturing our intuitions or accounting for the implicit theories or concepts responsible for our intuitions. We are assuming, along with many analytic epistemologists, that the goal of epistemology is to characterize the true nature of an epistemological category or provide epistemic guidance to our cognitive lives. So RNE bans intuitions as evidence relevant to a very specific sort of theory. RNE is perfectly consistent with intuitions playing a crucial evidential role in other kinds of theorizing. The right way to understand the disagreement between the analytic epistemologist and the naturalistic epistemologist is as a disagreement about how to properly do epistemology. It is not a 1 Although he does not comment on the relevance of empirical considerations for epistemological practice, Jaakko Hintikka has recently given some spirited arguments in support of the claim that in philosophy generally, appeals to intuitions "are usually without any respectable theoretical foundation" (1999, p. 127). Hintikka goes on to suggest, "only half-jokingly," that "editors of philosophy journals agree to a moratorium on all papers in which intuitions are appealed to, unless the basis of those appeals is made explicit" (1999, p. 147). 17 disagreement about how to properly do logic or math or science or how to reason about everyday affairs, such as which neighborhood restaurant has the best sushi. To keep this clear, let's distinguish three sorts of theory. 1. Meta-epistemology: How to properly do epistemology. This includes the question of what counts as evidence for epistemological theorizing. 2. Epistemology: The nature of knowledge, justification, etc., and how we ought to guide our cognitive lives. 3. Other: Math, science, everyday affairs, etc. The proponent of RNE and RAE disagree about (1), how to properly do epistemology. By itself, this has no implications for (3), for what the right views are about set theory or evolution or which neighborhood restaurant has the best sushi. (1) does, of course, tell us how to come up with theories of type (2). And the resulting epistemological theories will have implications for how to properly do logic or math or science or how to reason about everyday affairs. And those implications are fair game if some of them are false that's a serious problem for the theory. But these implications don't necessarily follow from our meta-epistemology. It is worth stressing this last point. The Radical Naturalized Epistemologist thinks that intuitions should play no role in (2), epistemological theorizing. What sort of epistemological theory is likely to result from RNE? We don't know; naturalized epistemologists no more speak with one voice about this than do analytic epistemologists. But it's perfectly possible for such a theory to yield the epistemic judgment that intuitions are an important and legitimate source of evidence in mathematics, logic, science or everyday reasoning. It's even possible that a naturalized theory would imply that our epistemic intuitions are as solid a foundation of evidence for epistemology as observations are for science. This would result in the implosion of RNE: it would turn out to be false by its own standards. We are not suggesting that this is likely. But clarity about the limited nature of RNE renders some arguments against naturalism otiose. Sosa, for example, notes that "intuition is ubiquitous across the vast body of anyone's knowledge" (2007b, 60). But this is no direct complaint against RNE, which bans reliance on intuitions only from epistemological theorizing. Others have argued that RNE-style rejections of intuition would constitute a sort of "intellectual suicide" (Bonjour 1998, 5). According to Bonjour, a philosophical method which denied us the use of a priori inferences (which depend on pure rational thought or intuitions about propositions and the connections between them) would rob us of the ability to justify the conclusions of any argument. Yet it is difficult to see how this could be so on RNE. For the view advocates the rejection of intuitions in epistemological theorizing, not in the justification of certain general lines of argumentation. The refusal to use intuitions as evidence in epistemological theorizing, then, does not lead to intellectual Armageddon. And yet we do not endorse RNE. To properly assess RNE, let's focus on an example. When we first read Gettier's paper, we both had the intuition that p (Smith does not know that Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona). We pondered the case carefully for some years; we have vetted our judgment that p by assessing whether it coheres with our other views about knowledge and justification. After this process, we believe that p. We can distinguish three different states: (a) the original non-discursive judgment that p, (b) the judgment that p that we vetted via a rigorous discursive process of reflective equilibrium, (c) and the settled belief that p. In order to fully understand RNE and any view on this issue, in fact we need to know which of these judgments are expressions of an intuition. If the intuition is only the original, nondiscursive judgment that p, then RNE is not so radical. The proponent of RNE can argue that only after a reasonable vetting process, once one has a settled belief that p, does p count as evidence for an epistemological theory. If, however, all three of these states count as the intuition that p, then RNE is much more radical. It rejects a much larger range of states as potential evidence. So which of these states count as intuitions? There is no settled answer. Different philosophers adopt different views. Some philosophers argue that intuitions are simply beliefs (Lewis 1983). Some advocate a disjunctive view, according to which intuitions are either beliefs or tendencies to accept certain propositions as true (Van Inwagen 1987). And yet others argue that intuitions are a sui generis kind of propositional attitude, distinct from belief (Sosa 2007, Bealer 1998). We have no desire to enter this particular fray. 'Intuition' as used by philosophers has a very specialized meaning. And so which of these sorts of states we decide to call 'intuition' seems to us a pointless exercise of linguistic legislation. The substantive issue here is whether RNE, under any fairly conventional understanding of 'intuition', deserves our allegiance. And we think it does not. From our perspective, even the weakest version of RNE one that takes only states like (a) to be intuitions is not tenable. And so any stronger version of RNE, one which precludes an even larger set of evidence, will be untenable as well. The problem with RNE is that we see three reasons to allow intuitions to play a significant role in epistemological theorizing. There may be more, but we will focus on just these three. First, science covers a lot of ground. So choices must be made: Which parts of science are relevant to epistemological theorizing? We don't see how such decisions can be made without some fairly reliable intuitions about the nature of epistemological categories and the content of epistemological prescriptions. So intuitions provide direction to the naturalist's theorizing. Second, our epistemic intuitions deserve our allegiance because they have a record of success. They direct our cognitive lives, and we end up with lots of useful and true (or at least roughly true) beliefs about the world. Someone guiding their cognitive lives by these intuitions could do considerably worse. So even if our intuitions do not always deliver correct epistemic judgments, they deliver good enough epistemic judgments often enough to help us get along in the world quite well. And as a result, it seems reasonable enough to take an intuition that p to be at least prima facie evidence for p. The third reason for thinking that our intuitions are a 19 legitimate source of evidence for our epistemological theories is that we know we can use them to good effect. Many naturalists seek an epistemological theory that can provide genuine reason-guiding prescriptions. As a result, most naturalists would agree on an "ought implies can" restriction on epistemological theorizing: The correct epistemological theory should not make demands on reasoners they cannot meet (Kornblith 2002; Goldman 1999). Indeed, some naturalists would insist on a stronger restriction: Other things being equal, the correct epistemological theory should make demands that are easier to meet (Bishop & Trout 2005). Say what you will about our intuitions, but we know that the ones we use everyday meet these requirements. If we put these points together, it seems reasonable to count our intuitions as a source, but not the only source, of evidence relevant to our epistemological theories. 4. Moderate Naturalism The failure of the extreme positions brings to the middle, to accepting both intuitions and science as legitimate sources of evidence for epistemological theorizing. On the one hand, intuitions by themselves are too variable to serve as the only source of evidence for our epistemological theorizing. A fund of solid scientific evidence dilutes the contentious evidence and gives us a foundation on which to make principled choices about which contentious intuitions to accept and which to reject. On the other hand, science needs intuitions in order to get epistemological theorizing started. Intuitions provide reliable prima facie direction so that the epistemologist may home in on the nature of epistemological categories and the content of epistemological prescriptions. The moderate position covers a huge conceptual terrain. In theorizing about epistemology, there are many ways to define and use intuitions, there are many different areas of science one might use as evidence, and there are many ways to weigh and combine these various sources of evidence. Sorting out these issues is not our task here (though to see how one of us addresses these issues, see Bishop & Trout 2005). Our purpose here has been to argue that it is a mistake to suppose that epistemological theorizing can proceed fruitfully using only intuitions or only science as a source of evidence. One might wonder: Why suppose that we have made a case for moderate naturalism rather than moderate analytic epistemology? After all, both radical positions have been defeated. Why does the moderate position favor the naturalist? In the end, we are much more concerned about the truth of our position than the name of our position. But there is a good reason to suppose that the moderate position is a kind of naturalism. First, given how epistemology is currently practiced, most analytic epistemologists are actually Radical Analytic Epistemologists. The theories of analytic epistemology the theories that tell us about the nature of knowledge, justification, warrant, rationality, etc. are not based on any scientific evidence. The substantive evidence on which they are based consists entirely of intuitions. That's not to say that all analytic epistemologists deny in principle the potential relevance of scientific evidence (Sosa 2010; Feldman 2001). But as a matter of fact, they don't rely on such evidence in building their theories. Second, most naturalists have always relied on intuitions for direction. On this point, we agree with many critics of naturalism. As Mark Kaplan has noted, "the naturalist's attempt to show the errors of aprioristic methodology depends for its success on consulting, and finding naturalist arguments in accord with, the very sorts of armchair intuitions whose advice the naturalists would have us ignore" (1994, 360). So even according to critics of naturalism, naturalists have always relied on intuitions even though they have occasionally derided them as unreliable. So the reason to take the moderate position to be naturalism is simply due to an accurate reading of contemporary epistemology: the moderate position is naturalism. The proponent of analytic epistemology might be tempted to adopt a moderate position by making science relevant to epistemology only at the margins. For example, she might argue that an "ought implies can" restriction is enough to make her a moderate naturalist and so avoid the extreme of RAE. But this restriction "at the margins" won't do. That's because the argument against RAE will also work against a less radical version of analytic epistemology that takes scientific evidence to be relevant only to an "ought implies can" limitation. The epistemic diversity that causes problems for RAE is not limited to cases in which people use superhuman reasoning powers. People apply different standards of epistemic evaluation in everyday cases of reasoning and belief. The moderate naturalist needs scientific evidence that will overcome the epistemic diversity problem that will provide an evidential base on which to make principled choices about which contentious intuitions to accept and which to reject. This is a robust naturalism indeed. References Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg (2007). Analytic Epistemology and Experimental Philosophy, Joshua Alexander and Jonathan M. Weinberg (Philosophy Compass, Volume 2(1), 2007: pp. 56-80). George Bealer (1992). The incoherence of empiricism. The Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 66, 99-138. ____________ (1996). A priori knowledge and the scope of philosophy. Philosophical Studies, 81, 121-142. ____________ (1998). Intuition and the autonomy of philosophy. In M. DePaul and W. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and Its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 201-239. James Beebe and Wesley Buckwalter (forthcoming). The epistemic side-effect effect. Mind & Language. Michael Bishop (2009). Reflections on Cognitive and Epistemic Diversity: Does a Stich in Time Save Quine? In D. Murphy and M. Bishop (eds.), Stephen Stich and His Critics. Blackwell Press, 113-136. Michael Bishop and J.D. Trout (2005). Epistemology and the Scope of Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. Charles A. Bleckmann (2006). Evolution and Creationism in Science: 1880-2000. BioScience 56(2), 151-158. 21 Michael Bradie (1989). Evolutionary Epistemology as Naturalized Epistemology. In K. Hahlweg and C. A. Hooker (eds.), Issues in Evolutionary Epistemology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 393-412. Laurence BonJour (1998). In Defense of Pure Reason: A Rationalist Defense of A Priori Justification. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wesley Buckwalter and Stephen Stich (2011). Gender and the philosophy club. 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Mark Kaplan (1994). Epistemology denatured. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 19, 350-365. Saul Kripke (1972). Naming and Necessity. In D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 252-355. Joshua Knobe (2003). Intentional Action and Side Effects in Ordinary Language. Analysis, 63, 190-193. Hilary Kornblith (2002). Knowledge and Its Place in Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. David Lewis (1983). Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konrad Lorenz (1977). Behind the Mirror. London: Methuen Press. Kirk Ludwig (2007). The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First Person Versus Third Person Approaches. Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 31, 128-159. T. Masuda and R.E. Nisbett (2001). Attending holistically vs. analytically: Comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 81, 922-934. R. Nisbett, K. Peng, I. Choi, and A. Norenzayan (2001). Culture and systems of thought: Holistic vs. analytic cognition. Psychological Review, 84(3), 231-259. Lisa Osbeck (2001). Direct apprehension and social construction: Revisiting the concept of intuition. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 21, 118-131. W.V.O. Quine (1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Hilary Putnam (1975). Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge University Press. Ernest Sosa (2007a). Experimental Philosophy and Philosophical Intuition. Philosophical Studies, 132, 99-107. __________ (2007b). Intuitions: Their nature and epistemic efficacy. In Christian Beyer and Alex Burri (eds.), Philosophical Knowledge: Its Possibility and Scope. Rodopi Press. __________ (2009). A defense of intuitions. In D. Murphy and M. Bishop (eds.), Stephen Stich and His Critics. Blackwell Press. C.J. Starmans and Ori Friedman (unpublished). Is knowledge subjective? A sex difference in adults' epistemic intuitions. Stephen Stich (1990). Stich, Stephen (1990) The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press ___________ (1991). "Evaluating Cognitive Strategies: A Reply to Cohen, Goldman, Harman and Lycan," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51, 1, 1991. Pp. 207-213. ___________ (2009). "Reply to critics," In D. Murphy and M. Bishop (eds.), Stephen Stich and His Critics. Blackwell Press. ___________ (2010). Philosophy and WEIRD Intuition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, 110111. 23 Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander and Jonathan Weinberg (2008). The instability of philosophical intuitions: Running hot and cold on Treutemp. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 76, 138-155. Peter van Inwagen (1987). Materialism and the psychological continuity account of personal identity. Nous, 31, 305-319. Jonathan Weinberg (2007). How to challenge intuitions empirically without risking skepticism. 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The Cantorian Bubble Jeremy Gwiazda Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to suggest that we are in the midst of a Cantorian bubble, just as, for example, there was a dot com bubble in the late 1990's. "Humans herd."1 Some time ago, after hearing something along the lines of "the infinite differs from the finite" or "infinite numbers are different from finite numbers" for the umpteenth time, two things occurred to me. These are phrases reminiscent of the language used in bubbles. And infinite numbers need not differ from finite numbers. This paper develops those ideas. Introduction How do very intelligent people lose their minds and go off the rails? Now here we have a question that, when you run it by your thesis advisor, word comes back, "We have to narrow this down a bit." Let's focus on groups of people, over long timeframes (years, decades, centuries, etc.), who hold (what come to be seen as) obviously incorrect, odd ideas. How does this happen? Though still broad, I suggest that in some cases common sense wisdom is tossed overboard as countervailing ideas are given free reign. With common sense wisdom gone, people (who are off the rails) do (at least) three things. 1t), they say odd things; uncharitably, they spew nonsense. 2t), to support the odd ideas that run counter to common sense wisdom, they say things are now different; "this time it's different" becomes a common refrain. And 3t), they disparage people who adhere to the old views, even if giants in the field. A great deal has been written about financial bubbles, in which prices come unhinged from any sort of reasonable valuation or fundamentals.2 The focus of the above analysis is on the underlying ideas, the underlying justification that drives the bubble.3 The nice thing about financial bubbles is that they burst, shining a spotlight upon the wretched miscreants who failed to understand that you need to be a nimble trend follower to make money in a bubble. That is, there is a very clear sense in which your neighbor, who aims to turn 100k into 1m but instead manages to go from 100k to 200k to a final 7k, has failed. And so with financial bubbles we can look back and ask "what went wrong?" (whereas with bubbles without prices people can simply plow ahead for millennia). Looking at the dot com bubble that occurred at the end of the 1990's, we can see the following that ties into our framework discussed above: Common sense wisdom: money matters.4 Countervailing idea: the internet is radically transformative and important technology. Countervailing idea given free reign: There will be a shortage of tech stocks, so buy at any price. Prices will only go up. Revenue and earnings of tech companies do not matter; eyeballs matter (if even that). With common sense wisdom cast aside in order to give free reign to the countervailing idea, the three things listed above occur: 1t) People spew nonsense: Corporate revenue and earnings don't matter. 2t) People constantly say "this time it is different." And, 3t) Warren Buffett, e.g., is attacked as not understanding investing anymore. He has, it is claimed, lost his touch. A very important point is that the common sense wisdom is simply not recognized. Anyone who points to it is disparaged as out of touch (the countervailing idea has completely triumphed). Such people simply don't understand the great progress that has been made, it is claimed. Once the bubble bursts, then the common sense wisdom is again sense as obvious and common. We are in the midst of a Cantorian bubble that has been going on for 120 years.5 We can see the following that ties into our framework discussed above: Common sense wisdom: the number of terms in the series will be the last number of the series. (I will often write "the last number gives the number.") Countervailing idea: it's worth investigating the collection of natural numbers and subjecting them to numerical determination, if possible. Countervailing idea given free reign: there is a number of natural numbers. The natural numbers form the basis of the extension of the concept of finite number into the infinite. With common sense wisdom cast aside in order to give free reign to the countervailing idea, the three things listed above occur: 1t) People spew nonsense: You can have 500,000 balls in a pit, do nothing but add 1 ball to the pit, and wind up with 0 balls in the pit.6 2t) People constantly say "this time it is different" in this case in the form of: "the infinite differs from the finite." 3t) Leibniz, e.g., is attacked as not understanding numbers and called naïve, on a point he states is "subtle." A very important point is that the common sense wisdom is simply not recognized. Anyone who points to it is disparaged as out of touch. Such people simply don't understand the great progress that has been made, it is claimed. Since the time of Cantor, Cantorians simply do not understand the common sense wisdom that the last number in a series gives the number. In what follows let's look into these ideas in greater detail. Just as it is difficult, when in the midst of the dot com bubble, to see the truth of the common sense wisdom, so too will it be difficult (impossible) for Cantorians to see the truth of the common sense wisdom, and so all of what follows will be dismissed by Cantorians. It's worth keeping in mind that there is a "dot com outlook," that differs radically from the outlook outside of the dot com bubble. So too, I suggest, we are in the midst of a "Cantorian outlook." The Cantorians have a narrative that hangs together. The view outside of the Cantorian outlook differs radically. At times I will use "Cantorian outlook" and "non-Cantorian outlook" to refer to these two completely different outlooks. At the end of this paper, I answer a series of question from each outlook. The questions, without answers, are in Appendix 1. The questions, answered, are at the end of this paper. Those who wonder what I mean by Cantorian-I mean those who answer the questions as Cantorians do. Each section begins to consider these questions, that is, the next section introduces questions one and two. 1. and 2. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that we are in the midst of a Cantorian bubble, just as, for example, there was a dot com bubble in the late 1990's. The are two large challenges with this undertaking. First, there are no prices in the world of Cantorian mathematics. So be it; we will proceed just the same. Even without prices, I believe a compelling argument can be made that there is a Cantorian bubble. My goal is to present a nuanced, balanced view of the Cantorian bubble. The second challenge is that the project is fundamentally one of futility and frustration (only an idiot writes that there is a dot com bubble in 1997, shorts the QQQ,7 and waits for riches to flow in).8 Cantorians will stay Cantorian, not understand the argument presented, and reject all the evidence presented.9 Such is the nature of bubbles. Given the two challenges, I will be aim to be brief; there are places where the argument could be developed in greater detail and where more examples could be given. I can only hope that the seventeen people I expect to download the paper over the next decade, some of whom may even begin reading the paper, will find enough detail to follow the main thread of the argument. Since I am taking the dot com bubble of the late 1990's as my example of a financial bubble, I will choose examples (indicating a Cantorian bubble) from the same time period.10 There are many interesting lenses through which we can view the world. The conservative/progressive distinction is one of them. In this paper, I consciously adopt a conservative stance, which has nothing to do with standard political and social issues. Rather, I'm going to suggest that Cantorians have ignored genuine common sense wisdom of the past, which has launched them into strange and choppy waters. Of course, the Cantorian will reply that they have made genuine progress and everyone should join them in their paradise.11 Imagine that it is 500,000 B.C.12 Two groups of people are out hunting. One group sees the other, and they count the other group: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Then, just to be sure, they count their own group: 1, 2, 3. Any fight will be 7 against 3, and so the 3 flee. Let's notice something here that is important, something that has been forgotten in the Cantorian bubble: a question of "how many?" is answered by counting, where the last number gives the number.13 Though we are in the Cantorian age, and though the importance of this fact has been lost to Cantorians, nothing has changed. You, brave reader, can run the experiment yourself. Throw those bananas you just bought onto the kitchen table. Count them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. There are 6 bananas.14 For hundreds of thousands of years, right through to the present, questions of how many, questions answered with a whole number, have been answered by counting and providing the last number. Let's zoom forward a bit from 500,000 B.C. People are beginning to wrestle with the collection of all whole (natural) numbers: 1, 2, 3... They want to know how many there are. And here a fundamental tension (one lost to the Cantorian mind) emerges. The last number gives the number.15 But the collection of natural numbers has no last number.16 Pick your mathematician or philosopher after 1600 and before 1900, and he17 likely has a quote recognizing this fundamental tension in some form and he likely stated the common sense wisdom that the last number gives the number. In no particular order: Descartes, Leibniz, Wallis, Euler, de L'Hopital, Gauss, Bolzano, Frege, Russell, etc. The Cantorian does not find, nor care about, these quotes because the Cantorian is blind to the common sense wisdom (and so when presented with such a quote, the Cantorian mind thinks along the lines of "oh this poor fool wasn't as smart as Cantor"18). To be very clear here and just to give a sampling: Leibniz stated that there is no number of natural numbers. Bolzano stated that there is no number of natural numbers. Russell stated that there is no number of natural numbers.19 Frege stated that Cantor's infinite ordinals are not the infinite numbers. And on it goes. Why do people, between 1600 and 1900, keep saying that there is no number of natural numbers? Because they are still in tune with the common sense wisdom that the last number of a series gives the number in the series. Of this list of names, I'll present quotes of Leibniz in the text below, Bolzano in Appendix 3 (Bolzano calls the tension described above the "first paradox of mathematics"), and Russell at the end of the paper. I've discussed several of the other figures in other papers. Here are some of the Leibniz quotes: "The number of finite numbers cannot be infinite.... If numbers can be assumed as continually exceeding each other by one, the number of such numbers cannot be infinite, since in that case the number of numbers is equal to the greatest number, which is supposed to be finite."20 "...the number of terms of the series will be the last number. ...of course the number of terms will be the last number of the series. But in fact there is no last number of the series... Thus if you say that in an unbounded series there exists no last finite number that can be written in, although there can exist an infinite one; I reply, not even this can exist, if there is no last number. The only other thing I would consider replying to this reasoning is that the number of terms is not always the last number of the series.... This consideration is extremely subtle"21 And so let us begin our list of questions. These are questions that will be answered at the end of the paper from the Cantorian outlook and from the non-Cantorian outlook. 1) Should infinite numbers have a last number? 2) Is there a number of natural numbers? 3. Are we in the midst of a Cantorian bubble? Ultimately the answer will hinge on whether Cantor was correct about certain underlying assumptions and concepts. I suggest that we are in a bubble. But let us pause, and note that progress can be made. Penicillin is better for some ailments than letches; let us not suggest that there is a medical bubble with regards to penicillin. The wisdom of those who came before is not infallible. But in some cases it can be a helpful guide, and in some cases it is genuine wisdom that should not be discarded. Against the chants of Cantorian progress, let us continue to consciously adopt a conservative attitude that seeks to at least understand the thinking of those who came before. Ultimately, we must wrestle with the question as to who is right, but for now let us again look to the past for the collective wisdom on the topic of the infinite. Is the collection of natural numbers any sort of actual, determined infinite set? Here I note that prior to Cantor, the answer was: no. Aristotle held that infinity was a potential infinite. So too Gauss. Anyone not trained in the Cantorian ways also tends to think that the infinite is merely potential, and not actual and determined. This gives rise to another question: 3) Is the set of natural numbers actual and determined? I won't spend a great deal of time on this question. But this entire paper could be rewritten with the common sense wisdom being "the natural numbers are merely potentially infinite." The reason for choosing to focus on the last number is that this wisdom is, in some suitable sense, more basic. And it has been completely forgotten. 4. In the late 1990's, there was a bubble in dot com stocks. Any stock thought to be connected to the internet soared to absurd heights. Only a few turned out to be worth their peak prices. QQQ, an etf launched in 1999, which held many of these companies, performed horribly when the bubble burst. Supporting the bubble were beliefs that were pushed too far. Those who noted that the internet would change the world, they were correct. Those who stated that internet stocks must be bought at any price, lest one find an extreme shortage of internet stocks to buy, those people were wrong. Supporting any bubble are beliefs that are pushed to far, together with a sort of collective delusion (money doesn't matter, this time is different, etc.). As there is no price action in the Cantorian realm, what evidence can be presented to suggest that we are in a Cantorian bubble? Let me further develop the three threads of thought discussed above. Recall: "I suggest that in some cases common sense wisdom is tossed overboard as countervailing ideas are given free reign. With common sense wisdom gone, people (who are off the rails) do (at least) three things. 1t), they say odd things; uncharitably, they spew nonsense. 2t), to support the odd ideas that run counter to common sense wisdom, they say things are now different; "this time it's different." And 3t), they disparage people who adhere to the old views, even if giants." Let's take these points in order. In bubbles, smart people feel free to state silly things in all earnestness. In the dot com bubble, as noted, people felt that money no longer mattered. What sort of silly things do Cantorians state in all earnestness? Here hundreds of examples could be chosen. Let me whittle it down to one meant to appeal to the general reader: You can have a situation where there are 500,000 balls in a pit, and the only sort of action that ever occurs is the addition of one ball to the pit. Repeat the addition of one ball "infinitely many" times in the right manner, and no balls remain in the pit. The Cantorian will tell you this with a straight face.22 "It's not measurable. That's external. The infinite differs from the finite. Everyone knows that already. Etc." The Cantorian is comfortable with anything short of an outright contradiction so long as the Cantorian has been taught the stock reply. Oh Cantorian, let us right your ship. 3.5) Can you have 500,000 balls in a pit, do nothing but add one ball infinitely many times, and wind up with 0 balls in the pit?23 And so in a bubble people state silly things because they discard long help wisdom and ignore the past. With the dot com bubble, people argued that revenue and earnings no longer mattered for companies. People said that "this time is different," even though clear historical parallels existed (including the fact that in the previous technology-advance-driven bubbles people also said "this time is different"). Some stated that eyeballs were what mattered, the idea being that so long as people looked at your website, the financials didn't matter. In some cases, companies without revenue had market caps into the billions of dollars. With the Cantorian bubble, the Cantorians have discarded long held wisdom. For hundreds of thousands of years, the last number gives the number. The Cantorian has discarded this wisdom. With odd results, the Cantorian must then often say "The infinite differs from the finite." As with financial bubbles, these statements occur so often as to not warrant any attempt at a full listing. Here is one example, chosen from the 1990's, that attempts to explain away Ross' paradox: "In brief this evaporation is simply an artefact of our subtraction of one infinite set from another. It is surprising but not contradictory. Such evaporation cannot happen with the subtraction of finite sets, where our intuitions are developed."24 Third, in a bubble, smart people feel comfortable criticizing giants, so long as the criticizer is working from assumptions operative to the bubble. And so in the dot com bubble, many people argued that Warren Buffett had lost his touch; he simply didn't understand how to invest in the brave new world. Of course, the bubble burst, and these yahoos are largely forgotten. Similarly, in the Cantorian bubble people feel free to criticize giants. Examples are many. Let's use one example touched on above and also taken from the 1990's. When Leibniz wrestles with the question of how many natural numbers there are and writes that the issue is subtle, is he stuck in a genuine tension? Or is he just not quite smart enough to make the brilliant Cantorian leap? 4) Is Leibniz wrestling with a genuine tension when he wrestles with the question – how many natural numbers are there? -or is he just not as smart as Cantorians? I'll return to this question. Here I simply note that from the Cantorian perspective, the answer is the latter. And so, for example, Samuel Levey feels free to imply that Leibniz is naïve.25 The point isn't that smart people are always right about everything ("hey Descartes, can you give me some tips for starting up my doggie daycare business?"). Rather, the point is that Leibniz, coinventor of calculus, is saying that a mathematical point is subtle. I suggest that you have to be in a bubble to feel comfortable implying that Leibniz is naïve with regard to a mathematical point that he claims is subtle. 5. Let us continue to consider questions and think about the Cantorian response and the nonCantorian response. Is there a set whose size is between the natural numbers and the continuum (and where size is cashed out in terms of bijections)? This is Cantor's continuum hypothesis (CH). The Cantorians will tell you they think the continuum is aleph-17, or there are many universes, or new axioms may settle the matter, and all manner of other things besides. It's as though you ask a lender for your mortgage rate, and one person replies that for a vial of unicorn blood they may be able to knock off 20 basis points. Then they pass you to the person who tells you they think you'll be fed funds plus 2%, but no one really knows. These are not the clear, crisp answers you desired.26 You're perfectly justified in wondering what just happened. Similarly, the Cantorians are asked, what, on their view, should be a simple question, and they fumble about with an answer. Why? 5) Why doesn't CH have a neat, clean answer? 6. Consider the following chart: 500,000 B.C. Finite natural numbers 1880 A.D. Cantor's infinite ordinals and cardinals 1960 A.D. Infinite natural numbers27 When we consider our sixth question -6) Which objects are the infinite natural numbers? Or, what is the correct extension of the concept of finite natural number into the infinite? – now the Cantorian does not seem to have a great reply. Things called the infinite natural numbers, that behave exactly like the finite natural numbers, well, these would seem to be the infinite natural numbers. They also have last elements, that can be thought of as giving the overall number. Leibniz and Bolzano and Russell (etc.) are justified and correct, if only Cantorians would recognize the importance of correctly identifying the infinite natural numbers. However, ignoring evidence that opposes one's position is one factor that allows bubbles to grow and expand. The Cantorian will not be slowed. 7. It grows wearisome, writing for a Cantorian audience. Let us turn to the list of questions, and answer them from the Cantorian outlook and from the non-Cantorian outlook. And then, enough. One must be a trend follower (Richard Cantillon, David Ricardo, Jesse Livermore, etc.) when bubbles are afoot. Mean reversion has no place. Though the Cantorians have pushed their assumptions well beyond any reasonable level, let us recall that "prices are never too high to begin buying" (so long as you know what you are doing). I capitulate. I will finish the paper, and then let us all be Cantorians.28 Questions and Answers, Cantorian Outlook: 1. Should infinite numbers have a last number? Not necessarily. There is an ordinal/cardinal distinction. Some infinite ordinals do have a last number, some do not. 2. Is there a number of natural numbers? Yes. Countably many. The order type is omega. 3. Is the set of natural numbers actual and determined, or is it merely a potential infinity? Actual and determined. 3.5 Can you have 500,000 balls in a pit, do nothing but add one ball infinitely many times, and wind up with 0 balls in the pit? Yes. And if you think there is a ball in the pit, go ahead and name it. 4) Is Leibniz wrestling with a genuine tension when he wrestles with the question – how many natural numbers are there? -or is he just not as smart as Cantorians? Leibniz did not foresee the brilliant moves and advances that Cantor and his followers made. Any follower of Cantor is ahead of Leibniz on this point. 5. Why doesn't CH have a neat, clean answer? It's complicated. (Different Cantorians give different answers, at least to a degree.) 6. Which objects are the infinite numbers? Cantor's infinite ordinals and cardinals. Though if pressed, a Cantorian will sometimes reply that there are many types of infinite numbers (Cantorain, hyperreal, surreal, etc.). 7. How did Cantorians get to where they are? Cantor made bold and brilliant advances and intelligent people followed. 8. Did Cantor make bold clear progress or launch mathematics into a cul-de-sac? Bold and clear progress. 9. What is worth keeping of the Cantorian project and what is worth jettisoning? Everything is worth keeping. 10. When applied to the natural numbers, is the question – how many? – an easy question or a hard question? If hard, why? Relatively easy. 11. Did Russell exactly state the paradox that lies at the heart of the Cantorian project? No. And, what? Questions and Answers, Non-Cantorian Outlook 1) Should infinite numbers have a last number? Of course. For hundreds of thousands of years, people have recognized that the last number gives you the overall number in the case of finite number. People counting bananas realize this point. Around 1960, infinite numbers arrived, where these numbers have good claim to be the infinite numbers, and where meaning can be given to the idea that the last number gives you the overall number. Only those locked in a Cantorian bubble are unable to see the obvious nature of the "of course" reply to this question. 2) Is there a number of natural numbers? No. There are too many (finite) natural numbers for them to be finite in number. And there are too few (again, finite) natural numbers for them to be infinite in number. As Cantorians can't even understand the answer to question 1, it's not worth going into a great deal of detail here, except to note that Russell, prior to being dragged into the Cantorian fold, stated this result perfectly. 3) Is the set of natural numbers actual and determined, or is it merely a potential infinite? Merely potentially infinite. Aristotle, Gauss, and any non-brainwashed human being older than 4 can see this fact. The Cantorians have moved the literature on the actual/potential distinction in a painful direction. If you like pain, go read a paper on Zeno-spheres. 3.5) Can you have 500,000 balls in a pit, do nothing but add one ball infinitely many times, and wind up with 0 balls in the pit? No. There is an important general point here, namely that when you are dealing with people who are willing to believe anything, it's time to realize that you are wasting your time trying to bring them around to the bright world of common sense. 4) Is Leibniz wrestling with a genuine tension when he wrestles with the question – how many natural numbers are there? -or is he just not as smart as Cantorians? If you assume that Cantor was correct about everything, then Leibniz is naïve. But if you engage in a bit of independent thought on questions such as (What is the importance of infinite natural numbers? Why isn't there a cardinal/ordinal distinction in the work of, and under the assumptions of, Mayberry (2001)? Which objects are the infinite numbers? Etc.) you may find that Leibniz suddenly does not seem so naïve. Leibniz was both smarter and more intellectually honest than Cantorians. Plenty of people will be forgotten, but vaguely remembered as people who criticized Leibniz (as, e.g., naïve). Others who are criticized unfairly are Bolzano, Frege, Russell, and any other thinker who genuinely wrestled with the question – How many? – when applied to the collection of natural numbers. 5. Why doesn't CH have a neat, clean answer? There is no number of natural numbers. 6. Which objects are the infinite numbers? Here we find the real power of herd behavior. Cantorians are completely untroubled by this question, happy to ignore it or wave hands about for a bit. Those capable of independent thought should wrestle with it for a bit. And find that the infinite numbers are the infinite numbers. There is a picture of an infinite number, M, in Appendix 2. Just as a finite whole number is a whole number on the real line, so too an infinite whole number is an infinite whole number on the hyperreal line. 7. How did Cantorians get to where they are? Now we are getting to interesting questions. How do very smart people go off the rails? Looking over history, and taking a slightly different tack from above, what you generally find are men following power and prestige, going off the rails like a bunch of lemming-sheep. (Then, if we take a wide enough scope of history, no matter how inane the idea, what you often see is people in power doing whatever they can to keep things going for awhile.29) In the specific case of Cantor, he did mathematical work which naturally lead to the infinite ordinals. So far so good. But then the trouble started when two things occurred. First, bijection was taken as the sole, correct way to judge the relative sizes of infinite sets. And two, Cantor argued that his infinite ordinals and cardinals are just as real as the finite natural numbers, and in fact, were the correct continuation of the finite natural numbers into the infinite. (This, to all but a Cantorian, is lunacy.) Hilbert came along and made CH his first problem, imparting a great deal of prestige and power to studying Cantorian issues. Gödel took a profoundly realistic/platonic philosophical outlook. So now you have a bunch of guys running around who think they are investigating the ultimate mysteries of the universe and uncovering the mind of God-generally a recipe for trouble. In reality, they are investigating something that doesn't exist (a standard model of the natural numbers) and investigating how that imaginary thing relates to such things as bijection, powerset etc. There's an element of laziness operative here. Why? Because the natural numbers are the simplest, first-appearing structure that is infinite. To then go base an entire theory of infinite number on the first and simplest thing you run across is laziness. If I'm an onion farmer, and I'm running around telling everyone that onions cure cancer, it's reasonable that they are skeptical. I should figure out what cures cancer, and forget the onions. Similarly,30 if I'm Cantor and I need to work with the natural numbers, it's a bit much to base an entire theory of infinite number on the thing I happen to be working with. I should first figure out what the infinite numbers are. 8. Did Cantor make bold clear progress or launch mathematics into a cul-de-sac? Cul-de-sac. The Cantorian will point out that mathematics has made progress. Two points here in reply. It is something of a miracle that no outright contradiction has been found in some portion of arithmetic. At the risk of unfairly beating up on men a bit more, men have spent a great deal of time investigating bigger and larger forms of the infinite. The proofs get longer and harder.31 Not a great deal of work has been put into investigating axioms that reduce size, for example, some sort of inverse powerset operation that would be numerically akin to taking the log base 2. From a supertask perspective, you can start with a column of the natural numbers. Divide the one column into 2 columns, then 4, then 8.... When does the column become a flat row? Not at any finite number of steps. But countably many steps seems too many. This won't trouble the Cantorian, who will simply note that he knew all along that nothing raised to the second power is countable. But my suspicion is that the path to contradiction is to focus on reduction. If a standard model of the natural numbers exists, then such a focus may be pointless, and may be one of the reasons there hasn't been much research in this direction. Turning to the second point in reply to question 8., hundreds of billions of people-hours of work in any mathematical system is going to make progress. Math might wind up being be path dependent like the typewriter. It is also possible that math never recovers from the Cantorian pandemic/bubble. 9. What is worth keeping of the Cantorian project and what is worth jettisoning? In the dot com bubble, some stocks emerged and went on to be great investments. The internet changed the world. The error was in taking sensible ideas and pushing them to far. Similarly, Cantor's infinite ordinals may very well be interesting and fruitful. The search for a better answer to CH is likely worth jettisoning-as the root of the problem is that there is no number of natural numbers. It's perfectly reasonable to adopt a formalist outlook and investigate axioms and the consequences of their adoption. But it should be recognized that the person is investigating "infinite bumber," not infinite number. Those who think that this would not be a radical change are missing a main thrust of this paper. 10. When applied to the natural numbers, is the question – how many? – an easy question or a hard question? If hard, why? This is a hard question. It is hard because the question -how many? -is answered using the last number in a series, and the natural numbers have no last number. 11. Did Russell exactly state the paradox that lies at the heart of the Cantorian project? Yes. Cantorians won't understand it, but here it is: "The series of [natural] numbers is infinite. This is the common basis of all theories of infinity. But difficulties arise as soon as we examine this statement. For we can hardly say that there is an infinite number of finite numbers. For if there are n numbers, the last number must be n. If n is infinite, the last number is infinite, thus n is not the number of finite numbers. But if n is finite, there must be a finite number (n+1), and therefore again n is not the number of finite numbers."32 | | | | | | you've failed to count some finite numbers | | | | | | | | | |... how many natural numbers are there? | | | | | | | | | |... ... ...| | | | | |... ... ...| | | | | | | | you've counted some infinite numbers Independent thought is not humanity's long-suit. The Cantorian bubble has a great deal of room to run yet. Go with it. The paper began with herds, let us end there as well. "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one."33 APPENDIX 1: QUESTIONS 1) Should infinite numbers have a last number? 2) Is there a number of natural numbers? 3) Is the set of natural numbers actual and determined, or is it merely a potential infinity? 3.5) Can you have 500,000 balls in a pit, do nothing but add 1 ball infinitely many times, and wind up with 0 balls in the pit? 4) Is Leibniz wrestling with a genuine tension when he wrestles with the question – how many natural numbers are there? – or is he just not as smart as Cantorians? 5) Why doesn't CH have a neat, clean answer? 6) Which objects are the infinite numbers? 7) How did Cantorians get to where they are? 8) Did Cantor make bold clear progress or launch mathematics into a cul-de-sac? 9) What is worth keeping of the Cantorian project and what is worth jettisoning? 10) When applied to the natural numbers, is the question – how many? – an easy question or a hard question? If hard, why? 11) Did Russell exactly state the paradox that lies at the heart of the Cantorian project? APPENDIX 2: For those who wish to escape the Cantorian bubble Words are generally not adequate to jog one free from a bubble. Pictures and charts aren't either, but here they are. 1. A finite number is a number on the real line. An infinite number, such as M, is an infinite number on the hyperreal line.34 2. Dates again: 500,000 B.C. Finite natural numbers 1880 A.D. Cantor's infinite ordinals and cardinals 1960 A.D. Infinite natural numbers As David Isles writes (in making a different point), "Since the time of Skolem's work in the 1920's, mathematicians have been aware of non-standard models for arithmetic. Yet the "existence" of such non-standard integers has never really been taken seriously..."35 It's time to get to know the infinite natural numbers and give them their rightful place. 3. Low Hanging Fruit The large font represents the low hanging fruit, that humanity has explored a bit. The suggestion of this paper is that numbers (such as 7 and M) are bound, and that it's time to dig into M a bit more. It's worth remembering that our axioms do what we want them to do. People have taken the outlook for so long of -let's propose an axiom and see how it plays out -that they're forgotten this point. If we want numbers with a last number, that is easy enough to accomplish. 4. Lived an infinite number of days Joe was born, lived a finite number of days, and died. This story gives a certain structure to the days. Joe was born, lived an infinite number of days, and died. This story gives a certain structure to the days. Thinking about this story can help begin to break one free from the Cantorian hold.36 Or again, Joe came to me and said, "Yup, I counted an infinite number of stars, 1, 2, 3 ... M-3, M-2, M-1, M." APPENDIX 3: Bolzano "15. The existence of infinite sets, at least with non-actual members, is something which I now regard as sufficiently proved and defended; and also, that the set of all absolute truths is an infinite set. Arguments like those in 13 will win assent for the statement that the set of all numbers is infinite--that is, the set of all the socalled natural or whole numbers, as defined in 8. Yet this statement also sounds paradoxical, and we may regard it as the first paradox to appear in the realm of mathematics--for the one just considered belongs, properly speaking, to a science more general than that of quantity. 'If each number,' it might be protested, 'is by definition a merely finite set, how can the set of all numbers be infinite? If we contemplate the series of the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6..., we become aware that the numbers of the series lying between the first (unity) and any particular one of them form a set which is enumerated by that particular one. For example, those from one to six form a set of six numbers. Consequently, the set of all numbers must be enumerated by the last number, and being therefore itself a number, not be infinite.' The illusiveness of this argument disappears at once if we remember that in the natural series of natural numbers no term occupies the last place, and the notion of a last or highest number is an empty notion, being a self-contradictory one. In fact, the principle of construction of this series, as explained in 8, assigns to each of its terms a following term. This single remark must therefore be regarded as solving the present paradox. 16. ...The set of all [natural] numbers manifests itself immediately as an indisputable example of an infinitely great quantity. I say advisedly, as an example of a quantity; and certainly not as an example of an infinitely great number; for this infinitely great multitude cannot, as we remarked in the preceding paragraph, be given the name of number..."37 APPENDIX 4: Epistemology and Further Considerations Everything so far is fairly obvious. The present state of thought on infinite number is deplorable. As Charlie Munger has said, give or take, "Think about it for a bit and you'll see that I'm right, because you are smart, and I am right." In this section, I'll consider some less obvious considerations. In a previous paper38 I noted a coincidence, namely that the structure of an infinite (whole) number is the same structure that emerges when a large finite number is investigated under limitations. I suggested that this is not a mere coincidence. Here, I'd like to point out that epistemic limitations can increase the number of things one can talk about. Imagine a bar with 100 strokes on it. Two people who cannot count to 20 investigate it, beginning one at each end. They use the ellipses "..." to stand for more. Notice something. We know that there are 100 strokes on the bar. But the two people can get together and reason as follows. Call the number of strokes to roughly the middle from my end, P. The other person has Q strokes. The people also each have a path that they can talk about, a natural number type structure: 1, 2, 3.... So the two people can talk about 102 things. P + Q =100 and then the 2 paths makes 102. Now shift gears and imagine a binary tree of infinite depth, M, where M is an infinite number. I am suggesting that the number of paths in the infinite binary tree is exactly and obviously equal to the number of nodes, but that the epistemic limitations are what is leading limited people to incorrectly see an explosion of paths relatively to nodes. In particular, people discussing the paths that are everything a finite distance from the root, they arrive at a "diagonal proof" and get to a whole new cardinality. But again, those less limited see that paths = nodes. These points are not worth explaining in greater detail at this time. Shifting gears. The thrust of this paper is that those who wish to investigate the infinite are free to define the infinite however they like and do whatever they like. Those who wish to investigate infinite number are not free to decide what the infinite numbers are and are not free to do whatever they like. Those people are bound to focus on finite number, to at least use it as a guide. Then it rapidly becomes obvious what the infinite numbers are, and much follows, outlined above. But what if we take all of the numbers, finite and infinite. Surely that then, some sort of super-ω, is actual and determined and subject to mathematical determination? No, it is not. The Cantorian fails to recognize how odd it is to say that, "Yes, I can begin tasks where I do things 1by-1, I can finish all of the tasks, but there is no last task." At the end of the day, we may need to wrestle with possibility that finite + 1 is, at some point and in some way, infinite. If we meet the advanced aliens, let us ask them if they have had their Cantorian hiccup yet. This being the unsettling fact that the collection of natural numbers39 is simple and appears first as a candidate for infinite number, while managing both to fail to be an infinite number, and to be too small to be counted by any infinite number. REFERENCES Bolzano, B. 1950. "Paradoxes of the Infinite." (Routledge and Paul). Earman and Norton. 1996. "Infinite Pains" in Benacerraf and his Critics. Frege, G. 1983. The concept of number. In Benacerraf, P. and Putnam, H. eds. Philosophy of Mathematics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gwiazda, J. 2011. "Infinite Numbers are Large Finite Numbers." Gwiazda, J. 2019. "Picturing the Infinite." Isles, D. 1980. Constructivist Mathematics, #273. Leibniz, G. 2001. The Yale Leibniz: The Labyrinth of the Continuum, trans. Arthur, R. (Yale University Press: New Haven). Levey, S. 1998. "Leibniz on Mathematics and the Actually Infinite Division of Matter." The Philosophical Review. Mackay, C. 1841. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Mayberry, J.P. 2000. The Foundations of Mathematics in the Theory of Sets. Robinson, A. 1996. Non-Standard Analysis. Reprint: Princeton University Press. Russell, B. 1983. The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 3. (London: George Allen & Unwin). NOTES 1 William Berstein in conversation with Barry Ritholtz, April 18th 2019. 2 Charles Kindleberger and Charles Mackay have written classic works on bubbles. More recently, Howard Marks has described bubbles as, I believe, situations where no reasonable future outcomes could possibly justify present prices. Didier Sornette takes a more mathematical approach in "Why Markets Crash." The literature is, these days, vast. 3 The underlying psychology (the drive/emotion/motivation), they often say, is that there's nothing more painful than seeing your neighbor get rich. That is, much of the motivation comes from a fear of missing out. This feature of bubbles is almost certainly more important than the justifications or ideas involved. We're all Humean, after all. 4 The idea that money matters is just that, the notion that it is important to pay attention to money, because it matters (assuming we are in the financial realm and want, ultimately, to make money with an investment). And so money matters might mean-pay attention to fundamentals, perhaps various valuation metrics. In real estate, at least look at how the property price relates to potential rental income, and understand how that relates to geography and historical averages. Stocks have P/E, P/S, P/B... ratios and the like. With things that do not cast off income or potential income, money matters admittedly becomes a bit hazier. Tulips, silver, bitcoin-what are these things worth? Should silver trade at $0.50, $5.00, $50, $500, or something else entirely in 1980? Obviously any detailed consideration of that question won't happen here, but money matters at least means it's worth being aware of how the item has traded historically. Unless you have some reason why you think the gold-silver ratio is low in 1980, it's best to stay away. (Of course, if you do have an idea as to why the gold-silver ratio is low, and it's ludicrous, it's also best to stay away.) If paying attention to income streams is a way to avoid bubbles, an interesting question presents itself: Can you have a bubble with investments that are nothing but fixed income streams? That is, can you have a bond bubble? Again, there will be no detailed consideration here. I simply note that the answer to this question likely depends on your definition of bubble (moreso than with other assets). My sense is that many bondholders may well get drubbed at some point in the relatively near future. However, people who buy bonds are smarter than people who buy other things. (No bond buyer is thinking they will make 10x their money, only to subsequently lose 97%. All to say, the fixed income streams do provide some anchoring, even as rates may look crazy on a 5,000 year view.) 5 The ideas were formed 140 years ago, and took 20 years, give or take, to triumph. 6 Throw in two balls, and then throw out the lowest numbered ball. This is a version of what is often called "Ross' Paradox." 7 Of course, the QQQ wasn't created until March of 1999, but you get the idea. 8 The point, as discussed above, is that one must be a trend follower in bubbles. Channel your inner Richard Cantillon, David Ricardo, Jesse Livermore, etc. Ignore mean reversion. To be a trend follower into the Cantorian bubble means that as people become more and more proCantorian, so too do you. As Cantor's stock rises, you buy more, so to speak. 9 It's actually worse than that. The Cantorian will be so certain that Cantorian ideas are correct and the ideas presented in this paper are wrong, that the Cantorian will wonder if this whole paper is some sort of extended satire directed against anti-Cantorians. 10 For fun, more than anything else. 11 If we think of progressives as the engine and conservatives as the break, the implication is that more break is needed in the case of Cantorians. 12 Spend a year or two reading all you can find of James Grant and odd thing occur. You wake up one morning to find that cash, which once seemed so solid and sure, looks like casino chips. You own gold that is stored in far flung countries. You can do little at dinner parties except blather uninterestingly and only semi-coherently about historically low interest rates, ten trillion dollars of negative yielding debt, and the doom that is sure to follow. You wonder if Grant pegs his subscription price to the price of an ounce of gold and you keep meaning to track down that data. And, when you write, you want to take the long view. 13 There's no operationalist fallacy, nor need to ground numbers in human ability, going on here, when I note this fact of counting and the last number giving the number. The point is a structural one, which can be made in the absence of any discussion of human ability, counting, etc. Simply: numbers have last elements. 14 Bolzano appears in appendix 3, where he discusses the number 6. Whether the motivation was the standard set of bananas is unclear. Lost to historians. 15 The Cantorian mind has become so warped in the Cantorian bubble, and so inured to lunacy, that many Cantorians react by insisting that 6 must be {0,1,2,3,4,5}, as if this is an important point for a person counting bananas. Oh Cantorian, let us try to steer you back to the bright world of common sense. 16 The Cantorian grows bored with such chatter. Surely everyone knows that Cantor made wonderous progress by developing his infinite ordinals and cardinals. Some of the ordinals have last members and some do not. The Cantorian has important things to do, and off he goes. But let us plodders proceed nonetheless. 17 I'm going to stay "in character" as it were, in my consciously adopted conservative stance, and use every pronoun (I, you, he, we, they) except "she." 18 Occasionally an "or me" slips in at the end of that sentence for the noble Cantorian. 19 Purely from an interest in the history of science/mathematics, it's worth wondering why, or so I suggest. 20 Leibniz, p. 51. 21 Leibniz, pp. 99-101. 22 In general, the Cantorian feels fine with any sort of outcome, so long as the Cantorian has some stock reply ready. Like a pouty 6 year-old who figures he is correct so long as he gets in the last word, so the Cantorian stumbles through the world. 23 Imagine it is 1,000 years from now and the Cantorian bubble has burst. No-balls-in-the-pit is the sort of claim where, if money were involved, one can imagine a person in the distant future asking: Were people actually so silly as to believe that or was outright fraud occurring? Or again: Why wasn't anyone arrested? 24 Earman and Norton, p. 240. Note the language: "[it] is simply" – the implication being that only a simpleton could fail to understand. Note also that any tethering to the finite realm is cast aside. We must abandon our finite intuitions. This paper goes so far as to note that the authors would be "disappointed" if anyone ever wrote about supertasks again in a manner not to their liking. It makes one think of the angry CEOs who yelled at analysts who asked about earnings in the dot com bubble, or beyond. 25 Levey p. 83. 26 J.P. Mayberry and Edward Nelson have good passages on, more or less, this point. 27 Robinson. 28 If you do some independent thought from time to time, you find that every now and again your ideas differ from the standard view. If you are in the financial realm, you often can then go and make a lot of money. If you are public enough with these trades, people will call you "contrarian." But you never set out to be contrarian. (Nothing is more irksome than someone who does.) You set out to think for yourself, and found (in a sense by definition, by the workings of markets) that the best money-making opportunities came in situations where your view differed from consensus (were contrary). The point here is that when your views differ from the standard, consensus view, if you have a way to financially benefit from this – that is a great thing. The "score keeping" nature of finance is wonderful to a certain sort of person. Matters are far more complex when you have a view that differs from consensus that may lead to your detriment. "Oh but truth will win out..." or some such is the naïve cry of a bright-eyed 20 year- old. My advice: go into finance if you are capable of sensible, independent thought. On the other hand, if you can make people think you are articulate and thoughtful and your thoughts go with the herd, but your thoughts rarely succeed in worldly, objective sorts of ways, academia is the place for you. Most people will not fall neatly into either category, and so such advice is almost entirely worthless. 29 On one view, the world's central bankers are following this pattern presently. That is, they are buying into inane economic ideas, that should have long ago been discredited (or at least in 2008-9), in order to keep a massive worldwide credit fueled bubble going, sometimes called "the everything bubble." 30 Is it similar? Really? 31 You get the idea. 32 Russell, pp.121-2. 33 Mackay. 34 For an explanation of the picture see Gwiazda, Picturing the Infinte. 35 Isles. 36 William Lane Craig has a paper where he considers ω + ω and bemoans the fact that a day exists with no yesterday, which, he writes, is absurd. Frege notes that in ω + ω, there is an element without a predecessor, which does not happen with finite numbers (ordinals). Frege is correctly pointing out that Cantor hasn't pinned down the infinite numbers. Craig is getting angry for no reason due to his being locked in a Cantorian framework. Put differently, if you don't like the structures Cantor talked about (the infinite ordinals), then don't use them. But for Pete's sake, don't use them and then get mad about it. 37 Bolzano, p. 60-1. 38 Gwiazda, 2012. 39 Which of course, isn't an actual, determined thing.

Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 129 Histórias das ciências e os "fundamentos históricos" da Psicologia History of sciences and the historical foundations of Psychology Marcio Luiz Miotto Professor Adjunto de Fundamentos Filosóficos da Psicologia Universidade Federal Fluminense – UFF-RPS [email protected] Recebido em: 09/05/2018 Aprovado em: 26/05/2018 Resumo: O presente texto põe algumas questões referentes à "história" dos fundamentos da Psicologia entre os séculos XIX e XX, mostrando como ocorrem ainda, em História da Psicologia, certos fatores controversos, muitos deles tributários de postulados filosóficos do século XIX, especialmente em torno do positivismo. O artigo concentra-se em mostrar, preliminarmente, de que forma a ruptura da Filosofia Natural e a ascensão da figura do "cientista" no século XIX ensejaram novos motivos de análise, dentre eles certo cientificismo que se impôs inclusive como chave de interpretação histórica. Após uma exposição inicial do problema – chamando a atenção também às consequências institucionais, da formação à profissão –, o artigo faz três breves estudos de caso – em torno de Fechner, Helmholtz e Wundt – e termina por defender perspectivas que abram a História da Psicologia a histórias mais alargadas, tais como a História da Filosofia e as Histórias das Ciências. Palavras-chave: História da psicologia, História das ciências, História da filosofia. Abstract: The present work poses several questions concerning the history of Psychological's foundations between 19th and 20th centuries, showing how there are still today certain controversial factors derived from 19th century philosophical postulates acting on the ways of describing psychology's history, notably around positivism. The article concentrates in showing, in a preliminary way, how the rupture of Natural Philosophy of 18th century and the rise of the figure of the scientist in the 19th century gave rise to new analytical patterns, as well as a certain Scientism that tried to impose itself as the keystone to historical interpretation. The work begins with an initial exposition of the problem – calling into attention the institutional consequences as well, from the psychological common sense to professional issues -, and then analyzes three case studies Gustav Fechner, Hermann von Helmholtz and Wilhelm Wundt – ending with the defense of perspectives that open the History of Psychology into another historical procedures, such as History of Philosophy and History of Sciences. Keywords: History of psychology, History of sciences, History of philosophy. 130 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 130 "Quê? Um cientista que presta homenagens a um filósofo?" Hermann von Helmholtz, sobre Kant O presente texto aborda, preliminarmente, algumas questões de História da Psicologia referentes a postulados históricos do século XIX, que não obstante permanecem ainda vigentes e repercutem na formação dos psicólogos. O texto pretende defender abordagens historiográficas para além da velha posição do "cientista-historiador", aquele que olha para a História a partir dos compromissos programáticos e pretensões teóricas internas à sua matéria, julgando o passado sem a suspensão do juízo sobre certo programa do presente. Mais do que o cientista-historiador, pretende-se mostrar a importância de outros vieses em História da Filosofia e das Ciências, tais como o do "historiador" que toma as teorias como regimes de conceitos e racionalidades possuidores de historicidades específicas entrecruzadas com diversas outras historicidades, inclusive "não conceituais". Postura que, por assim dizer, busca não manter sem exame determinadas teses ou conceitos prévios sobre a própria matéria, mas atenta para necessidade de examinar, minuciosamente, os conceitos para além do eruditismo diletante e do viés manualesco. A partir de uma breve exposição da situação controversa à qual a Psicologia é levada quando se conta sua história sob o ponto de vista do "cientista-historiador" (não apenas na ciência, mas também na formação e profissão), o texto aponta alguns possíveis fatores concorrentes para essa situação. Depois, utiliza as considerações consolidadas como material para defender perspectivas que impliquem uma História de horizontes mais ampliados. O presente trabalho é um desdobramento da argumentação prévia de Miotto (2018) e, sob as mesmas manobras, concorre ao esforço de demonstrar como uma abertura de perspectiva em História da Psicologia rumo às histórias da Filosofia e das Ciências poderia ocasionar possíveis mudanças de interpretação sobre a Psicologia e o psicólogo. Ou, dito de outra forma, o presente texto defende – ao menos numa abordagem preliminar – uma pesquisa em História da Psicologia não resumida à formação ou ao savoir-faire do psicólogo que, sob sua agenda interna ou vínculos institucionais, reduz retrospectivamente assuntos importantes de história da Filosofia e das Ciências em assuntos psicológicos, deixando então passar algo do que esses assuntos poderiam dizer sobre a Psicologia. A história da Psicologia dialoga com inúmeras outras áreas – tais como a Filosofia e as outras Ciências –, e a saída dos simples compromissos internos à matéria pode oferecer caminhos insuspeitos. Além disso, não se trata apenas de dizer que a história de uma teoria deva ceder lugar a uma abordagem "externalista". Para além do dissolvimento das implicações de uma teoria em condicionantes extra-teóricos, ela possui uma consistência própria e historicamente construída. Em miúdos: em História da Psicologia é preciso abandonar tanto o reducionismo "internalista" quanto 131 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 131 "externalista", para abrir a matéria a outras historicidades, mas, ao mesmo tempo, analisar as tentativas específicas de constituição da própria matéria. É preciso, por assim dizer, uma história aberta a campos e considerações como, por exemplo, os da epistemologia. Tais fatores poderiam intervir, conforme mencionado, num movimento de revisão sobre a definição de Psicologia e a identidade do psicólogo. Qual história da Psicologia? Segundo B. F. Skinner, a História da Psicologia é a história das sucessivas ficções teóricas que, igualmente à hipótese de um Design inteligente em Física ou em Biologia – de um Deus criador da Terra e do propósito da Vida –, povoaram os comportamentos humanos (e eventualmente de animais) sob a noção de "alma" ou "mente"1. Ficções que, não obstante, precisaram ser ultrapassadas pelo estudo naturalista de uma "descrição" do comportamento baseada em determinismo estatístico e na superação da velha causalidade clássica. Talvez não tão distante de Skinner, mas sob outra doutrina com tons suficientemente diferentes para acentuar o contraste e a negação, para Ivan Pavlov a História da Psicologia é a narrativa dos sucessivos enganos das teorias da mente que, sob o nome final de "secreções psíquicas", não soube estabelecer uma teoria finalmente naturalista sobre os reflexos humanos tomados como um todo – do reflexo salivar à linguagem –, naturalismo que significa concluir a História da Psicologia, reduzindo a Psicologia a uma Fisiologia com ares ainda tributários do mecanicismo clássico2. Não obstante essas duas posições, segundo John B. Watson a História da Psicologia é a história dos fracassos e da ausência de comunidade de sentido em torno de um método e de verdadeiros conceitos para a Psicologia, começando pelo emprego indiscriminado da noção de "consciência" e o caráter injustamente secundário dado ao comportamento animal. História que deveria então ser suplantada por uma ciência natural baseada na noção de comportamento, compreendido como inter-relação entre estimulações ambientais e respostas orgânicas (Cf. por ex. WATSON, 1913/2008). 1 Por ex., "o estudo de qualquer objeto começa nos domínios da superstição. A explanação fantástica precede a válida (...). O campo do comportamento teve e ainda tem os seus astrólogos e alquimistas" (SKINNER, 1994, p. 35). Ou, ao se referir à "natureza fictícia dessa espécie de causa interior" (psíquica), Skinner cita vários exemplos de termos usuais ou conceitos nos quais "é óbvio que 'mente' ou 'idéia', com suas características especiais, foram inventadas ad hoc para proporcionar explanações espúrias. Uma ciência do comportamento não pode esperar muito destes procedimentos" (1994, p. 40 e 41). Ou ainda, num dos últimos pronunciamentos em vida (SKINNER, 1999, p. 8), sobre o mentalismo cognitivista, ele diz: "A ciência cognitiva é a ciência criacionista da psicologia, na medida em que luta para manter a posição de uma mente ou self ". 2"Cedo ou tarde, apoiando-se sobre a analogia ou a identidade das manifestações exteriores, a ciência aplicará os dados objetivos ao nosso mundo subjetivo (...). Para o biólogo, tudo reside no método, que lhe dá probabilidades de conquistar uma verdade sólida e inquebrantável e, desde este ponto de vista, o único obrigatório para ele. A alma, enquanto princípio naturalista, não só lhe serve para nada, mas, inclusive, será prejudicial para o seu trabalho, ao limitar, inutilmente, a audácia e a profundidade da sua análise" (PAVLOV, 1903/1980, p. 26-27) 132 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 132 Skinner, Pavlov e Watson implicam em três projetos que, em História da Psicologia, acabaram grosseiramente se aproximando do que se convencionou chamar de "análise do comportamento". Mas, olhando cada projeto dentro de seus objetos, métodos e arquitetura conceitual, trata-se de três narrativas suficientemente diferentes para situar cada autor em universos conceituais e definições de Psicologia bastante diversos. Isso, caso se coloque fora de questão inúmeros outros autores. Pois para Wilhelm Dilthey, por exemplo, a História da Psicologia é a narrativa da assunção de modelos não-naturalistas, não-analíticos e não-hipotéticos – pois as formulações científicas herdadas das ciências naturais não passariam de abstrações hipotéticas, jamais o dado bruto e originário da subjetividade – para uma análise que diga respeito às vivências inerentemente psicológicas, ao "fluxo" ou "nexo" vital dado de forma inteira, indivisível, apenas tomado pelo método científico por uma espécie de dissecação (que "mata" as vivências enquanto tais) e descaracterização. Para além de uma psicologia "explicativa", superável ou superada, deveria haver uma psicologia "descritiva e analítica" (Cf. por ex. DILTHEY, 1894/2011). Dilthey é diferente de Freud, para quem a História da Psicologia poderia eventualmente indicar uma recusa massiva da noção de Inconsciente e, por extensão, o velho tema do Sujeito ocidental que não aceita ser destronado por questões como as do universo infinito da física clássica ou da seleção natural darwiniana3. Isso, caso não leiamos as palavras de Jacques Lacan, para quem – empregando em Science et Vérité a imagem utilizada por Georges Canguilhem em Qu'est-ce que la Psychologie? – a História da Psicologia é a narrativa da "descida" da Psicologia em "tobogã" em direção à Chefatura de Polícia (e não a "subida" ao Panteão dos notáveis), pois ao tentar imitar o modelo da ciência natural, ela incorreria sucessivamente num modelo policialesco de controle do comportamento. Em Freud, história da ignorância do inconsciente; em Lacan – nem tão distante assim? –, história da ignorância da linguagem. Para o "psicólogo fenomenológico", a História da Psicologia é a narrativa do naturalismo inautêntico, do cientista que toma o raciocínio analítico condicionado como se fosse condição empírica do pensar, pensamento analítico que é secundário frente à consciência temporal e doadora de sentido. Uma fenomenologia da percepção chegaria a caracteres expressivos mais autênticos do que os do naturalismo psicológico, embora para o "esquizo-analista" é Bergson quem "vence" Merleau-Ponty, até chegar a uma filosofia da expressão efetiva em autores como Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari. Quanto ao Neurocientista, dependendo de sua orientação descartará ambos em vista dos novos experimentos que, eles sim, seriam o ápice da História da Psicologia. E quanto às 3 Lembremos-nos do célebre tema das "três feridas" sofridas pelo narcisismo ocidental (Copérnico, Darwin e o tema do Inconsciente psicanalítico) conforme enunciadas em Freud (1917/1996). 133 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 133 funções da classicamente chamada "Psicologia Geral", tais como a percepção, a memória, a atenção e a consciência? Escolha-se o autor preferido, ele será a última narrativa em História, mesmo que eventualmente os temas de Psicologia Geral pudessem ser lidos como consequências tardias e a retomada retrospectiva e irrefletida das divisões tradicionais cuja "genealogia" remontaria à leitura escolástica do De Anima de Aristóteles4. Diante de tantas narrativas, qual é a História da Psicologia? Pois todas as histórias citadas acima são presumivelmente válidas, caso se considere seus autores, ou o modo como são concretamente empregadas na atuação de psicólogo, ou ainda nos inúmeros departamentos ou cursos que escolhem a ênfase teórica a adotar. Mas a legalidade institucional, a autoridade pessoal ou a erudição individual não equivalem à legitimidade epistemológica. E não obstante a atribuída validade, tais perspectivas anulam-se umas às outras, caso comparadas entre si. É impossível que Dilthey possa teorizar o nexo vital interior se o naturalismo de Pavlov não for inviabilizado antes de nascer; a mente como comportamento ou evento privado em Skinner não poderia conviver pacificamente com a ideia de representações inconscientes ou de um nexo vital psíquico interior, e assim por diante. O mesmo para a prática: se a Psicanálise nega o behaviorismo, para o "epistemólogo" pareceria surpreendente ver teorias tão diferentes e contraditórias entre si compartilhando os mesmos espaços práticos (clínica, escola, trabalho...) sem maiores questões. Tem-se um curioso panorama – embora constatado ao menos desde o início do século XX com o próprio Watson –, no qual teorias antagônicas entre si acabam ocupando uma espécie de espaço de convivência morna, pois suas "escolhas" por uma ciência e pela prática parecem alheias a um debate efetivamente epistemológico. Um grau a mais dessa curiosa situação é conferido pelo lugar da História da Psicologia na formação do psicólogo. Via de regra, quando tem oportunidade de estudar História da Psicologia, o aluno é apresentado à matéria nos períodos iniciais de formação. Isso implica muitas vezes que ele aprenderá a mesma narrativa da teoria escolhida que "venceu" os velhos preconceitos (mesmo que, por vezes, os tais preconceitos "vencidos" sejam ensinados como "vencedores" nas salas 4"More seriously, the organization of psychology text-books has long born the stamp of the traditional division of faculties, as psychologists have studied the functionally characterized faculties of cognition, including perception, learning, and memory, and more specific capacities, such as visual perception, and within vision, color, shape, and motion perception". Cf. Hatfield, 1994, p. 382. O leitor mais atento notará que essa alusão não aponta a disputas tais como se a Psicologia atual remonta ou não ao De Anima do Estagirita, mas apenas põe o fato de que em Psicologia, quando houve visita à história, ela com frequência empregou visões anacrônicas e retrospectivas. É o tema sobre o qual desenvolveremos a crítica a seguir. De todo modo, vale notar que, no texto citado, Hatfield reabilita em história da Psicologia não apenas a tradição aristotélico-tomista, mas também as psicologias do século XVIII, amplamente desconsideradas. Além de Hatfield, trabalhos como os de Paul Mengal (2005) e Fernando Vidal (2011) também reabilitam a leitura aristotélico-tomista sobre a alma, como importante para compreender tudo o que vem após a quebra da tradição escolástica medieval. Esses dois autores abrem perspectivas ainda pouco exploradas, e bastante especificáveis, sobre a história da Psicologia, desde ao menos o século XVI. 134 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 134 vizinhas). A matéria será, então, a história da superação dos preconceitos a partir da doutrina que, por escolha, foi eleita pelo eventual professor (ou curso) como a teoria que refutou as demais. Além disso, tem-se a hierarquia entre o passado superado e o presente isento de prejuízos repetindo a própria trajetória histórica do aluno, do "passado" enfadonho à teoria vencedora. E se um curso de História da Física mantém em seu traçado alguns nomes regularmente consolidados – tais como Giordano Bruno, Copérnico, Galileu, Descartes, Newton, etc... –, em História da Psicologia muitos nomes podem ser eventualmente substituídos ao sabor das escolhas: Christian Wolff pode ou não estar presente, Descartes muitas vezes não passará de alguém que "impediu" estudos científicos sobre a mente com seu dualismo, e Gustav Fechner com Wilhelm Wundt, atribuídos dentre os responsáveis pela "primeira fórmula matemática" e o "primeiro laboratório" em Psicologia, serão celebrizados, embora sob projetos que permanecerão desconhecidos do senso comum psicológico. Conforme mencionado, isso tudo ocorre quando o aluno tiver acesso a uma matéria de História. Caso contrário, as narrativas da teoria vencedora contra o passado vencido serão incensadas ao sabor de cada matéria distribuída no currículo. Afinal, o "passado" das teorias sobre a alma é bastante longo e, então, muitas informações podem permanecer a tira-colo. Uma história da "Psicometria", por exemplo, pode eventualmente esquecer-se de figuras como Christian Wolff (que cunhou o termo) para encontrar "precursores" da medição psíquica na invasão mongol da Europa ou na balança de São Miguel Arcanjo que "media" as almas! Tal situação da matéria é acompanhada por um curioso estatuto muitas vezes conferido à docência. Quem ensina História da Psicologia? Uma vez que as escolhas teóricas podem não participar necessariamente de um debate científico mais ampliado, sendo virtualmente viciáveis por questões institucionais, por vezes o professor ocupa a situação inversa do aluno: ele deve ser alguém que já se formou na matéria e, portanto, participou do ritual de "vitória" das teorias previamente escolhidas sobre as teorias refutadas. Além disso, o docente que ocupa a disciplina não raramente representa os mesmos compromissos da teoria vencedora. Trata-se muitas vezes de um psicólogo que traça uma história temática, mais do que um historiador da Psicologia. Uma vez que não há vencedor atributivamente epistemológico senão mediante uma eleição prévia sobre a "melhor" teoria, quem contará sua história estará entre os "melhores" teóricos. O que acaba por gerar uma espécie de expertise incomum em história, carregada de competências e autorizações individuais estranhas a quem reconhece a história de uma ciência como um campo amplo, polemicamente ligado ao presente e passível de reformulações baseadas em rigor, e não em posição pessoal. Outra consequência é notável. Se a História pode ser incensada sob escolhas retrospectivas por vezes problemáticas, cabe perguntar sobre qual é o papel dessa história: em quê o convite ao 135 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 135 passado acrescenta ao presente? Em quê o rigor – ou falta dele – a respeito da volta ao passado diz respeito às legitimações do uso presente de dada matéria? Como se sabe, o passado pode servir a várias coisas, da busca das condições de possibilidade do presente a qualquer subterfúgio para legitimar práticas atuais – mesmo uma atualidade que sabe pouco sobre si própria, mas, não obstante, busca legitimar-se mesmo assim. Além dos papéis institucionais citados acima, não são raros os cursos de História da Psicologia que proliferaram, durante décadas, certas tradições consolidadas de manuais ou textbooks da matéria. Conforme se vê por ex. em Miotto (2018, no prelo), tal tradição remonta (acidentalmente ou não) em boa parte à figura de Edwin Boring (1929/1950) e à celebre frase de Hermann Ebbinghaus (1908, p. 8), popularizada por Boring, segundo a qual "a Psicologia tem um longo passado, mesmo que sua história seja curta". Essa tradição se articula com muitos dos movimentos entrevistos acima. A frase de Ebbinghaus diz respeito à velha separação entre ciência e pré-ciência, ou entre um "longo passado" de teorias da alma que não passariam de mistificações especulativas, até o advento de uma Psicologia finalmente naturalista, positiva e afim aos modelos científicos do século XIX (a "curta história"). Conforme Paul Mengal (1988/2016), dentre outros, adverte, trata-se de um modelo de história "internalista" e "positivista": ao mesmo tempo, supõe uma espécie de desvelamento de um problema endógeno, "independente de fatores externos tais como os domínios religiosos, sociopolíticos e econômicos" (MENGAL, 1988/2016, p. 356), permanecido idêntico a si mesmo e constante através da História, e o fato de que o momento desse desvelamento se identifica com o positivismo cientificista do século XIX e as realizações da sociedade européia industrial. Em suma: a "curta história" da Psicologia seria a narrativa das Psicologias que, tendo realizado os ideais científicos do século XIX, finalmente descobririam o objeto psicológico tal como se dispõe, sem prejuízos, ao saber, numa absoluta correspondência dos enunciados científicos aos "fatos" descobertos. Ou, conforme dizia Georges Canguilhem (1966/1994, p. 12-13), sob tal alcunha o modelo "internalista" e "positivista" refere-se a um modelo histórico de "microscópio mental", apresentando um "desenvolvimento dado sem ele, embora visível apenas a partir dele", como se a história fosse "apenas uma injeção de duração na exposição dos resultados científicos"5. 5 Os postulados de Canguilhem são contrapostos à cultura de "internalista e positivista" em Miotto, 2018 (no prelo). A atribuída "tradição" de manuais de Psicologia de "longo passado e curta história", com viés "internalista e positivista" segundo os termos de Mengal, foi difundida amplamente durante décadas. Alguns exemplos: Mengal (1988/2016) menciona, a partir da mesma tradição de Ebbinghaus e Boring, o impacto de textos como Histoire de la Psychologie e Psychologie, de Maurice Reuchlin, e o Traité de Psychologie Experimentale, de Fraisse e Piaget, no contexto francês. "Livros que, sob o palavreado de Mengal, figurariam sob tradições de "mito fundador", do "advento da psicologia científica como a vitória definitiva de uma ciência natural do comportamento contra uma ciência biográfica e interpretativa do espírito [esprit]" (Mengal, 2005, p. 16). Hatfield (1994), após chamar a atenção à tradição aristotélico-tomista e as 136 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 136 Os motivos expressos na famosa frase de Ebbinghaus pareceram representar em crisálidas diversas das narrativas dos textbooks e do ensinamento que depois vigorou, não importando se elas compartilham dos mesmos princípios epistemológicos. Conforme visto acima, a narrativa da ruptura com um passado de mistificações que não chegou a ser história não é exclusividade das perspectivas naturalistas. A mistificação que ficou para trás pode obedecer ao tema da ruptura entre a ciência e a filosofia (segundo o qual a Psicologia finalmente atingiu o método positivo e rompeu com especulações e retóricas filosofantes). Mas também pode obedecer ao tema do cientificismo superado pela teoria que, para além do naturalismo, finalmente atingiu o Homem no que possui de "autêntico", "subjetivo", "singular", verdadeiramente "social", "concreto" etc.. Em ambas as opções, tem-se igualmente uma espécie de narrativa retrospectiva de "longo passado e curta história", característica das inúmeras narrativas humanistas proliferadas ao menos desde o cientificismo do século XIX. Percebe-se que ambas as escolhas produzirão cursos diversos de História da Psicologia e resultados diversos sobre o que o psicólogo "é" ou "faz". Disso tudo, como tais modes d'emploi se tornaram possíveis? Por via da frequência desses motivos em diversos manuais e textbooks de Psicologia, não parece inútil percorrer brevemente um caminho: o de como certo cientificismo do século XIX passou a fazer corpo com a própria história "psicologias" do século XVIII como encarregadas de estudos "naturalistas" importantes para a História da Psicologia, mostra como "this description of psychology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contradicts the received historiography", pois "recent general histories of psychology agree that natural-scientific psychology arose in the second half of the nineteenth century. (...) In the past half-century there has been a decided tendency to equate 'natural scientific psychology' with 'quantitative, experimental psychology', and to contrast the 'scientific' character of this psychology with the 'metaphysical' character of its earlier namesake. (...) If one confines modern science to its non-metaphysical moments, then metaphysically inclined theorists and experimentalists must be excluded, or else only a 'sanitized' version of their work allowed in" (1994, p. 377). Tais histórias, continua Hatfield, incorrem em ao menos dois erros: ignorância do teor dos projetos passados ("the self-understanding of earlier figures who considered themselves practioners of natural science") e um "presentismo" semelhante ao aludido acima (todo o passado é avaliado a partir de certos compromissos do presente assumidos como "verdadeiros"). Mas, "philosophically, it makes a crude positivist assumption that all progress in science is progress in the quantitative description of natural phenomena", o que é impreciso senão errôneo, pois nem toda ciência é quantitativa e, igualmente, há desenvolvimentos conceituais que precedem cálculos e experimentos (1994, p. 378). Na mesma linha, Fernando Vidal (2011 – Araujo 2009 e 2010 desenvolvem pontos semelhantes) mostra como, após Wundt e contribuindo para o esquecimento de seus projetos (e de abordagens filosofantes em Psicologia), uma tradição histórica de "new psychology" "reacted against the 'abstract' principles of the psychological thought of the Enlightenment and was commited to empirical fact and the experimental method" (2011, p. 8-9). Essa nova tradição, continua Vidal, remete-se à frase de Ebbinghaus que, "repeated at second and third hand, seems to posses some incantatory power, as thought merely pronouncing it were enough to convey an atemporal idea of 'science', justify the periodization and contents of historical narratives, and legitimate the choice of 'antecedents', 'precursors', and 'fondations'". Desde então, reduzindo a dita "pré-ciência" da Psicologia a um mero ideário psicológico, porém não científico, "is in all respects misleading and a sort of historiographical illusion" (2011, p. 10). Em suma: aspectos como o "esquecimento" dos séculos XVI-XVIII, bem como das questões filosóficas em Psicologia (e inclusive no projeto de Wundt) se imprimiram em inúmeros manuais e historiografias da Psicologia durante décadas, devido aos postulados discutidos acima. É amplamente notório, na historiografia e na formação, que aspectos como a história da psicologia dos séculos XVI-XVIII não se ofereceram a uma discussão maior, e isso se deve em boa parte às historiografias de "longo passado e curta história", das quais Ebbinghaus serviu muitas vezes de exemplo. Como estudo preliminar, o presente trabalho se deterá apenas em alguns exemplares que evocam tais questões, tais como Ebbinghaus (1908), Boring (1929/1950), Hearnshaw (1987) e Schultz e Schultz (1998). 137 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 137 da ciência, imprimindo consequências marcantes no solo das narrativas sobre a História da Psicologia. Isso, talvez, sirva como fator importante para delimitar também como essas formas de análise proliferaram em espécies de "histórias institucionais da Psicologia" arrebanhando outras tradições, como as filosóficas, para questões de Psicologia, deixando de lado a questão de descrever a Psicologia como ator que se constitui em meio a polêmicas históricas que não são exclusivamente psicológicas. Certamente o trabalho para traçar esses fatores ultrapassa as linhas de um artigo. Mas uma história pormenorizada dos fatores indicados abaixo talvez mereça maior consideração. Do cientificismo do século XIX aos textbooks de "longo passado e curta história" do século XX. Tomando por base a extensa recensão de Laurens Laudan (1968) sobre as "teorias do método científico de Platão a Mach", cumpre notar a profissionalização "tardia" da ciência no século XIX. É certo que se atribui a Revolução Científica como mudança cultural ocorrida desde o século XVII, mas se um termo pode denotar modificações num ofício, é no século XIX que William Whewell (1794-1866) cunha o termo "cientista"6. O termo faz passo com uma série de deslocamentos da "Filosofia Natural" existente até então, bem como a, por assim dizer, separação entre Filosofia – doravante considerada por muitos como "especulação" pura e simples – e Ciência. Na esteira de tais fenômenos de ampliação do papel da ciência, amplia-se também no século XIX o papel institucional e epistemológico do "filósofo da ciência" e do "historiador da ciência". Sabe-se que, na virada do século XVIII-XIX, a crítica kantiana figura como marco da separação entre "Conhecer" e "Pensar", a separação entre o campo delimitado para o conhecimento científico natural – função das condições transcendentais do Sujeito humano – e o domínio do pensamento puro, suplementar às restrições do entendimento, mas ilegítimo caso avance nas pretensões dos antigos dogmatismos metafísicos. Em suma: Kant é um dos marcos prévios sobre os quais o século XIX separará o inquérito filosófico e sistematizador da razão do exame científico baseado nas determinações da experiência. Se Whewell assinala o nascimento do termo "cientista", Kant também marca a passagem entre a Filosofia Natural clássica e a Ciência do século XIX (caso não se leia o século XIX como uma verdadeira cisão da Filosofia Natural). Nessa mesma linha, Lorraine Daston (2015), por exemplo, mostrava como, na segunda metade do século XVIII, as diversas tradições da Filosofia Natural, compreendida como "estudo das causas universais", encontram-se com as da História Natural, compreendida como "estudo dos casos particulares". Isso ocasionou a criação de novos objetos, modos de análise, sujeitos de 6Andrea Wulf (2016, p. 338): "O polímata britânico William Whewell cunhou o termo "cientista" em sua resenha crítica sobre o livro On the Connexion of Physical Sciences, de Mary Sommerville, no períodico Quarterly Review em 1834". 138 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 138 conhecimento e lugares de saber (Daston 2015, p. 177). Por exemplo, na compilação da Lógica, Kant (1992, p. 39) ainda separava os conhecimentos entre "racionais" ex principii, dos quais fazem parte os conceitos filosóficos e "históricos" ex datis. Mas depois dele, o que historiadores como Daston mostram é certa aproximação posterior, 'cientificizante', entre o conhecimento dos dados e o dos princípios, fator importante para boa parte da paisagem científica do século XIX, bem como suas inumeráveis disputas de independência e de fundação com a Filosofia e as Ciências Humanas que nascem na mesma época. Entre, por assim dizer, o dado e o princípio, sabe-se como boa parte do século XIX desenvolveu uma agenda que submeteu a descoberta dos princípios à pesquisa dos dados. Além disso, conforme Daston, desde o século XVII, mais do que um bloco monolítico chamado de "Revolução Científica", vê-se inúmeras transformações em diversos níveis: redescobertas de textos antigos, novos modelos matemáticos e de matemática aplicada, modificações frente às tradições galênicas em medicina, avanços em farmacologia e "descobertas de toda sorte, geográficas, astronômicas, botânicas, zoológicas" (2015, p. 185): em 1750, esta última [filosofia natural] terminou por se confundir com a história natural e as matemáticas mistas ou aplicadas; seus métodos incluíram, doravante, as medidas, as observações sistemáticas e as experiências controladas, procedimentos novos emprestados das matemáticas mistas praticadas pelos geômetras e navegadores, dos estudos clínicos de caso em medicina e dos cadernos de anotações dos humanistas, dos ateliês respectivos dos alquimistas e dos artesãos; a metafísica havia substituído a regularidade das naturezas intrínsecas, segundo as quais as leis naturais governam uma matéria passiva e abolem a distinção entre arte e natureza; sua epistemologia enfim, parecida nisso com aquela de Aristóteles era sensacionalista, mas permitia deduzir a existência de entidades inacessíveis não apenas a partir da percepção sensorial humana, mas da observação com ajuda das lentes mais poderosas disponíveis na época. (DASTON, 2015, p. 196-197) Diante de tais mudanças, e não apenas de forma monolítica, o século XIX se estabelece, consolidando a "Ciência" frequentemente em detrimento da "Filosofia" dos séculos passados. Aqui retornamos à recensão de Laudan: dada a separação entre Filosofia e Ciência, os movimentos do século XIX propagaram, igualmente, livros e cátedras de "filosofia" e de "história" da ciência, nos quais o nome de Whewell, bem como o de André-Marie Ampère e diversos outros, foram importantes. Nas palavras de Laudan (1968, p. 29), "cátedras em história e filosofia da ciência foram criadas nas universidades pela primeira vez. De fato, de um ponto de vista quantitativo, senão também qualitativo, podemos ser compelidos a falar sobre uma virtual revolução no assunto entre 1800 e 1900". Notemos que Ampère e Whewell são nomes que figuram ao lado da "ciência", e não propriamente da reflexão filosofante. Para situar o argumento de Laudan mais uma vez, o século 139 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 139 XIX fez ver diversos debates entre os vieses indutivos em ciência – especialmente inspirados em Bacon e Newton – e dedutivos – eventualmente inspirados em Kant. Entre uma e outra opção, o movimento do argumento de Laudan é de demonstrar como esses debates do século XIX consolidam o que se tornará boa parte da Filosofia da Ciência do século XX. Entre o problema da indução e o da dedução, para Laudan ocorre a passagem de uma "lógica da descoberta" científica – baseada na simples indução de fatos particulares rumo a leis gerais – para uma "lógica da confirmação", mais afim ao que a ciência do século XX fará em relação à construção de modelos hipotético-dedutivos e a testagem desses modelos por provas empíricas7. Mais do que simples generalização indutiva de "fatos", parte importante do século XX dirá que "ideias", e não apenas a generalização de fatos, possuem papel preponderante na direção da pesquisa, o que se completa pela adoção de novas racionalidades e metodologias, tais quais a "introdução da teoria da probabilidade na lógica da indução" (LAUDAN, 1968, p. 35 o que também endossa a passagem de Daston sobre a adoção de novos modelos matemáticos, diversos dos clássicos, nas ciências). Dado o contexto, Whewell aparece então como um pensador "largamente inspirado por Kant" (LAUDAN, 1968, p. 31). Por sua vez, o exemplo de Ampère atesta a outra parte do argumento: o grande papel do indutivismo na ciência do século XIX, atestado por títulos de seus livros principais, tais como Théorie mathématique des phénomènes électrodynamiques, uniquement déduite de l'expérience (LAUDAN, 1968, p. 30). Mas, conforme dito, tais decisões em torno da indução e da dedução se consolidam no legado para o século XX. Ampère e inúmeros outros pensadores, tais como Jean-Baptiste Fourier (1768-1830), figuram como exemplos para um pensador que, segundo Laudan (1968, p. 29), talvez seja "o mais importante desenvolvimento individual do último século": Auguste Comte. Como se sabe, no Curso de Filosofia Positiva Comte utiliza nomes como o de Fourier e Newton para mostrar sua "Lei dos Três Estados", segundo a qual a humanidade – do indivíduo à sociedade – passaria pelas fases "teológica", "metafísica" e "positiva-industrial". Exemplos como o da Lei da Gravidade de Newton e as análises de Fourier sobre o calor exemplificariam o método positivo, "unicamente deduzido da experiência" e sem abstrações ou especulações filosofantes, doravante considerados 7Para Laudan, figuras como Whewell e Justus von Liebig, mas especialmente Liebig, "helped bring to an end a version of inductive theory that had flourished for well over two centuries. Until the work of Whewell and Liebig, the inductive method had been conceived primarily as a method of discovery rather than a method of proof or confirmation. In the writings of Bacon, Newton, Herschel and Mill (to name only a few), induction is treated as a technique for generating laws and theories or as an engine for discovering causes. By arguing that discovery was subject to no rules whatever, let alone those of the inductive method, Liebig made explicit what many scientistas had suspected for a long time; namely, the impossibility of creating a fool-prof logic of discovery. After Liebig, inductivists began to adopt a more modest pose, which is still generally accepted by contemporary inductive theorists. Granting that there are no mechanical rules for theory construction, they conceived induction as a mode of inference and a theory of the logic of confirmation" (LAUDAN, 1968, p. 33). 140 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 140 como frutos de uma fase ultrapassada da humanidade. O positivismo é um dos maiores movimentos responsáveis não apenas pela autonomização da ciência, mas também pelo cientificismo e a polêmica da independência – ou superioridade – da ciência, sem negociação por respeito às "especulações" e "abstrações" filosofantes. Sob a marca do positivismo, parte considerável do século XIX cedeu ao primado dos fatos sobre os princípios filosofantes, do cientificismo como doutrina do conhecimento, e da ciência como critério historiográfico. Sob as questões enumeradas acima é possível entrever, para o presente propósito, ao menos dois fatores. Em primeiro lugar, ocorrem as transformações da própria Filosofia Natural no século XIX, doravante cedendo lugar à agenda "científica", que agregou os legados da Filosofia e da História Natural e, por assim dizer, condicionou ou consolidou mudanças na relação entre o conhecimento dos "dados" e o dos "princípios". Em segundo lugar, a autonomia cada vez maior da interrogação científica, e sua agenda própria, consolidam motivos pelos quais os outros modos de pensar "não científicos" aparecem como fases ultrapassadas da humanidade. De um lado, a "Ciência" se configura e se autonomiza sobre as bases anteriores da Filosofia Natural (em Laudan o contra-efeito é o debate entre métodos indutivos e dedutivos, que levará à "lógica da confirmação" do século XX); de outro, e especialmente sob o exemplar do Positivismo, aparecem os discursos de ruptura com as especulações filosofantes, encaradas como uma espécie de passado refratário e contramoderno. Em Psicologia, um mapeamento rigoroso desses caminhos do século XIX seria de grande importância, pois diversos dos nomes atribuídos a seus "precursores", como Hermann von Helmholtz, ou mesmo "pais fundadores", como Gustav Fechner e Wilhelm Wundt, figuram precisamente como consequências dessas transformações. Gustav Fechner, por exemplo, é visto em manuais de Psicologia como o autor que "libertou" essa matéria da especulação filosofante, quando estabeleceu a primeira fórmula matemática em Psicologia (sobre a fórmula, Cf. por ex. NICOLAS, 2002 e HEIDELBERGER, 20048). Tem-se, mais uma vez, o tema da independência da Ciência sobre a Filosofia. Mas para a 8 Credita-se à "primeira fórmula matemática" em Psicologia a famosa lei de "Weber-Fechner", atribuída não apenas a Fechner, mas também a Ernst Weber. Conforme estabelece por ex. Nicolas (2002, p. 278), eis um tema que mereceria uma leitura mais alargada: "O primeiro escrito de Weber sobre o sentido do tato foi uma obra principalmente experimental. A lei que doravante traz seu nome foi explicitamente formulada por Weber, mas, lendo a obra, dificilmente pode-se inferir do escrito que ele tenha avançado como uma lei geral aplicando-se a todos os sentidos. Doze anos mais tarde ele publica em um capítulo escrito para a obra de fisiologia de Wagner, intitulado Der tastsinn und das Gemeigefühl (Weber, 1846) novas pesquisas que, infelizmente, não conduziram a uma formulação mais precisa da dita lei de Weber e a um conjunto teórico mais sólido. Na primeira seção da obra e sem que se encontre outros traços de um plano bem estabelecido, Weber (1846, p. 3-46) aborda questões de ordem filosófica (Kantor, 1969), alimentadas por dados fisiológicos. É na segunda seção (Weber 1846, p. 46-118), sobre "o sentido tátil em particular", que ele reporta à maioria das experiências publicadas na obra de 1834 (Weber 1834). É nesse contexto que ele evoca 141 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 141 devida compreensão do sistema teórico de Fechner e, portanto, da Psicologia, outro ator importante deveria ser levado em conta: o Romantismo. O sistema de Fechner é inteiramente tributário de vieses românticos, inclusive defendendo a hipótese de que o mundo possui uma Alma, na esteira de Schelling e Lorenz Oken. A matematização é um momento desse sistema (e não seu princípio diretor), requerendo então uma compreensão dele. Como os "manuais de história da psicologia" situam isso? Para Schultz e Schultz (1998, p. 67), o romantismo de Fechner seria fruto do conflito "entre os dois lados de sua personalidade", ao passo que Hearnshaw (1987, cap. 9) aplaude a fórmula matemática, mas acusa o "delírio metafísico" e o "dogmatismo não científico" do romantismo, ou ainda Boring (1950, p. 279) afirma que o único "subproduto" válido do pensamento de Fechner seria sua fórmula matemática. Importa ver como seria diverso o tom se, por exemplo, o caso de Fechner se ilustrasse na recepção psicológica como o faz Friedrich Paulsen nas linhas abaixo: Quando as ciências naturais, oprimidas durante tanto tempo, irromperam com força vitoriosa na Modernidade, e uma filosofia natural mecânica estava para ganhar o poder sobre as idéias, Leibniz se opôs a ela, sem negar às ciências naturais o direito de levar a cabo a explicação física dos fenômenos naturais, mas exigindo que a física não se arrogue de ter dito tudo o que se pode dizer sobre a realidade. (...) Kant fez o mesmo 100 anos depois. O criticismo também contrapõe ao mundo das manifestações – que fica destinado à explicação causal – um mundo inteligível: (...) Que uma visão do mundo racional não possa ser embasada apenas na física, mas também nas "idéias da razão", é também para ele ponto absolutamente inamovível. E nisso, depois dele se seguiu uma filosofia especulativa, que sem embargo chegou tão longe na auto-admiração de seus sistemas idealistas construídos sobre a base de conceitos gerais lábeis, que recebeu o desprezo das ciências matemáticas e físicas. Convencida de ter na mão a "razão" ou a "idéia" que se manifesta na natureza, [a filosofia especulativa] menosprezou de modo geral a investigação empírica (...). E isso é o que provocou, desde os anos 1830, aquele duro revés: nada de metafísica! Apenas a física é ciência. A metafísica é apenas um fantasma e superstição, e cada pensamento que vai mais além do mundo sensorial é suspeito de patrocinar a superstição. Esse é o ponto onde começa Fechner (PAULSEN in FECHNER, 1861/2015, p. 10-11). É certo que Paulsen – aluno de Fechner – utiliza palavreado semelhante ao acima, situando a história entre "oprimidos" e "opressores". Mas ele oferece algo mais: apresenta uma paisagem conceitual que ultrapassa Fechner e o situa em plenas discussões do século XIX. Diante disso, salta aos olhos como a narrativa Psicológica entrevista nos manuais de "longo passado e curta história" as experiências tão importantes para nosso propósito publicadas em 1834, também formulando a lei nos mesmos termos e sem jamais exprimi-la sob forma matemática (Weber 1846, p. 117-118), como se crê tão frequentemente. Essa formulação, como se verá mais tarde, foi trabalho de Fechner. Ele apenas acrescenta um fato importante: o do desvio da lei na percepção das pequenas linhas (Weber 1846, p. 117). Entretanto, Weber não confere verdadeiramente nenhuma precisão nas condições experimentais". 142 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 142 se desvia dessas discussões, atribuindo ao romantismo de Fechner aspectos como uma personalidade perturbada ou um sistema delirante ou infeliz. Mas Fechner, e sua formalização matemática, não existiriam sem as idas e vindas entre o naturalismo científico e suas pretensões de "dizer tudo" sobre a realidade, de um lado, e de outro as contrarreações belicistas ou conciliadoras da Filosofia. Contra os "perigos" de uma redução naturalista, figuras como Leibniz e Kant fizeram o contraponto. Kant garante lugar ao conhecimento natural, mas também garante lugar ao sujeito de conhecimento que, formulador das idéias da razão, ultrapassa a simples determinação empírica e sistematiza o saber. Mas, na virada do século XIX, o Idealismo Alemão faria um giro contrafisicalista, cujas "idéias" sistematizadoras seriam capazes inclusive de uma Física Especulativa (como a de Schelling), atribuída como "desprezadora" da análise empírica das ciências (como a de Newton). Schelling, por exemplo, acusava o modo pelo qual a Física seguia de experiências parciais, tateantes, aos princípios totalizadores do conhecimento. Sem uma idéia que permita reunir de antemão os dados particulares, não se teria ciência, mas apenas coleção de fatos desconexos. Para a Naturphilosophie deveria então ocorrer algo mais além do que ensinaram Bacon e Newton: se a pesquisa científica carrega consigo uma idéia sobre a Natureza, seria antes preciso dar conta da "idéia de uma natureza em geral". A ênfase na "idéia", portanto, se sobrepunha à da "experiência"9. Contra isso, desde ao menos a década de 1830 o Idealismo Alemão "enfraqueceu" diante do reestabelecimento de uma vigorosa contra-reação cientificista, e por isso Paulsen ilustra no fim de sua citação: "nada de metafísica!". Na mesma linha de Paulsen, Michael Heidelberger (2004, p. 1) oferece outra síntese: Durante o século XIX, a relação da filosofia com as ciências sofreu uma transformação fundamental. Depois da morte de Hegel, um sucesso sem precedentes das ciências usurpou a posição anteriormente dominante da filosofia. A ciência abandonou a filosofia para desenvolver seu próprio tipo de racionalidade, originando uma mudança generalizada. Ela estava então em conflito com seu grande adversário filosófico, a filosofia da natureza. Muitos homens de ciência temeram e lutaram contra a Naturphilosophie, alegada como "praga do século" (...) Agora a ciência natural e a matemática provisionaram a si próprias – por assim dizer – com sua própria filosofia, nomeada "visão de mundo científica". À luz do que foi mencionado acima, sob tais citações não é inútil notar alguns fatores. Em primeiro lugar, projetos como o de Fechner se interpuseram entre o "duro" combate entre o cientificismo e o romantismo da época, e não como simples fatores colaterais de um "passado" 9 Por exemplo: "A compreensão da necessidade interna de todos os fenômenos da natureza se torna certamente melhor tão logo se reflita que não há nenhum sistema verdadeiro que não seja ao mesmo tempo uma totalidade orgânica (...) esta organização teria, enquanto totalidade, de preexistir a suas partes, o todo não poderia brotar das partes, mas as partes teriam de brotar do todo. Portanto, nós não conhecemos a natureza, mas a natureza existe de modo a priori, ou seja, todo particular nela está previamente determinado pelo todo ou pela idéia de uma natureza em geral". (SCHELLING, 1799/2010, p. 264) 143 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 143 psicológico a ser ignorado (Cf. MIOTTO, 2018, no prelo). Além disso, o que foi elencado mais acima – a autonomização da ciência no século XIX e o tema de sua "ruptura" frente a filosofia – não se isola do que Paulsen e Heidelberger sintetizaram como uma reação belicista da "ciência" natural desde ao menos os anos 1830 contra a Naturphilosophie e o Idealismo Alemão, que imprimiram forte impacto na Europa das primeiras décadas do século XIX – presumivelmente "contra" a ciência empírica – mas enfraqueceram a seguir. Em terceiro lugar, não é sem poucas consequências notar que a autonomia da "Ciência" e a ascensão do cientificismo, sob formas notáveis como a do Positivismo, não se separam do cenário historicamente especificável no qual, "combatendo" contra o Idealismo Alemão, generalizou-se uma acusação à "metafísica" e à reflexão filosófica como um todo. Ou em outras palavras, muito do que se enxerga como postura cientificista e antifilosófica no século XIX – especialmente em História da Psicologia – não é uma espécie de projeto interno de superação da metafísica e desvelamento enfim conseguido de um objeto científico livre de "especulações", mas configura como estratégia concreta e bastante situada contra matérias então vistas como "anti-científicas", tais como o Romantismo. Dito de outra forma, a atitude cientificista e antifilosófica de muitos setores do século XIX não se constitui, ela mesma, sem o embate – bastante datado – entre a autonomização dos "cientistas" naturalistas nascentes de um lado e a vigorosa reação de movimentos como os do Idealismo Alemão. Tudo isso significa dizer: narrativas históricas cientificistas e anti-especulativas como as dos manuais de "longo passado e curta história" de Psicologia, entrevistas acima, talvez não tenham realizado o devido exame de suas próprias condições de possibilidade. Tais narrativas subscrevem como neutra, e espécie de defesa de um patrimônio a-histórico, uma pauta anti-filosófica que possui ela própria uma história plenamente especificável e comprometida com o que descreve. Eis então, transformados em critério para traçar a História, os dois fatores históricos delineados acima: a criação e consolidação da figura do "cientista" do século XIX, e a "temida luta" (nas palavras de Heidelberger) contra a "especulação", entrevista particularmente no Romantismo e no Idealismo Alemão. Se é assim, parece evidente que uma pauta especificável historicamente como essa dificilmente poderia ser o próprio critério definidor da história da ciência que quer contar, especialmente uma história da Psicologia. Os mesmos fatores se fazem ver, por exemplo, em Helmholtz. Diversos manuais de Psicologia apresentam-no como precursor da Psicologia em direção a suas conquistas internas pela cientificidade e objetividade, contra as "abstrações" e "especulações" arbitrárias que impediram o progresso da ciência. Hearnshaw, por exemplo (1987, cap. 9), aponta nele o pricipal autor individual a mudar os cursos da psicologia acadêmica no século, ao sistematizar seus experimentos em 144 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 144 percepção sensorial e empregar o naturalismo em problemas mentais. E Schultz e Schultz (1998, p. 59) mostram que, se a Psicologia não era seu primeiro interesse, ele contribuiria mostrando que "todos os fenômenos, incluindo os pertinentes à matéria viva, podem ser explicados em termos físicos". É certo, como dizem os manuais, que Helmholtz foi importante para o que veio a seguir, legando uma agenda consistente de pesquisas em Fisiologia. Mas novamente, se a história da Psicologia é a história de uma "ciência", não é difícil mostrar que ela não se separa de todo um horizonte de fundamentos e debates não evocado pelos manuais de "longo passado e curta história" (ou apenas evocado colateralmente) e, portanto, por certo senso comum em Psicologia. Em 1855, por exemplo, na conferência "Sobre a Visão Humana" (Über das sehen des Menschen), Helmholtz faz uma "homenagem" a Kant. Mas a homenagem serve para substituir a Filosofia Crítica pela Fisiologia e atacar duramente o Idealismo, a Naturphilosophie de Schelling e Hegel: "escutamos os cientistas glorificando, alto e forte, que os grandes progressos recentemente conquistados em suas disciplinas respectivas apareceram desde que eles purificaram seus domínios das influências da filosofia da natureza" (HELMHOLTZ, 1855/2010, p. 13). Sob a pena de Helmholtz, Kant (e em alguma medida também Fichte) respeitaria a ciência e o fato de que "todo conhecimento da realidade deve ser retirado da experiência", cabendo à Filosofia "examinar as fontes de nosso saber e seu grau de legitimidade" (HELMHOLTZ, 1855/2010, p. 14). Tal fidelidade à ciência não impediria que a Fisiologia, pela via aberta por Johannes Müller, pudesse suplantar o exame das condições de possibilidade a priori do conhecimento substituindo-as por condições empíricas. Por via da teoria das energias nervosas específicas de Müller10, abriria-se um novo caminho para a Teoria do Conhecimento, no qual "a qualidade de nossas percepções é condicionada tanto pela natureza [fisiológica] de nossos sentidos, quanto pelos objetos externos" (1855/2010, p. 22). Se Kant merece certa adulação (e suplantação da Teoria do Conhecimento pela Fisiologia), Schelling e Hegel mereceriam ataques diretos. Para Helmholtz, seus sistemas julgariam "atingir em conjunto e sem experiência, por meio do pensamento puro, os resultados que as ciências empíricas suporiam atingir mais tarde" (HELMHOLTZ, 1855/2010, p. 14), pregando então total independência e privilégio da reflexão filosofante sobre os dados empíricos, a despeito da ciência. 10 Essa teoria demonstra que cada sentido diferente é regido por vias nervosas que contêm informações específicas para cada nervo (nervos visuais recebem estímulos luminosos e transportam informações diversas dos nervos auditivos, que recebem apenas estímulos sonoros etc.), denotando condições fisiológicas igualmente específicas para todo conhecimento humano. Existindo condições "fisiológicas" para o conhecimento possível, isso emula as condições a priori da intuição e do entendimento em Kant, mas o faz transformando essas condições transcendentais em condições fisiológicas e empíricas. 145 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 145 Igual ao que se viu na citação de Paulsen, isso não ficaria sem uma vigorosa contrarreação dos cientistas, e a Fisiologia seria parte dessa contra-reação. Resultado? "Não é de notoriedade pública que o físico e o filosófico de nossos dias não se escutam muito bem, ao menos em seus trabalhos científicos?" Que "cada partido desespera-se em convencer o outro"? (HELMHOLTZ, 1855/2010, p. 13). É preciso um juiz, e o juiz chamado será doravante o da experiência – por via da ciência de Helmholtz. Novamente recai a pergunta: que "história" a Psicologia deve contar? Neste caso, é a história da vitória do método científico do século XIX e da Fisiologia Sensorial sobre as limitações filosofantes (Kant) e as obscuridades românticas (Schelling e Hegel), como contada por vários manuais posteriores de Psicologia? Ou Helmholtz e a Fisiologia sensorial que conduz à Psicologia não seriam apenas o resultado de uma interação mais complexa, a ser especificada, entre ao menos o legado de Kant, o cientificismo nascente e a reflexão romântica, bem como os debates que buscaram soterrar as consequências do romantismo e adotar uma espécie de cientificismo contraespeculativo em História? Caso a história deva passar por tais linhas, Kant (por exemplo) não deveria mais ser lido como simples autor que – quando visto por psicólogos – se resumiu a "impor vetos" à Psicologia (tal como o lêem psicólogos como por ex. EBBINGHAUS, 1908, p. 13 e LEAL, 2007 ou SCHULTZ e SCHULTZ, 1998, p. 7111), ou formulou condições "inatas" do conhecimento a serem superadas por outros psicólogos, ou ainda "atrasou" a marcha da ciência por dizer que a mente possui "faculdades" não observáveis (tal como acusa, novamente, EBBINGHAUS 1908). Não representa o exemplo de Helmholtz – como o de vários outros, aliás – a tentativa de uma suplantação cientificista da Crítica, colocando então em jogo não apenas leituras situadas como a dos "vetos" kantianos, mas a compreensão da Crítica kantiana e suas consequências (que ultrapassam largamente tais questões), sem o que seria prejudicada a compreensão do que se tornaria a própria Psicologia? Não seria a compreensão da Crítica um marco prévio para as discussões vindouras não apenas sobre ciência, mas também sobre ciências humanas e Psicologia? E quanto ao "Romantismo", ele continuaria reduzido ao papel de movimento amorfo que serve de sparring às acusações de obscurantismo? Lembrando que tampouco projetos como o de Helmholtz parecem recepcionados com maior rigor pelo pensamento psicológico. Em relação ao mencionado acima, novamente vale notar: para dar conta da emergência da ciência no século XIX e suas repercussões em Psicologia, parece problemático adotar irrefletidamente, como agenda de uma 11 Por ex.: "o filósofo alemão Immanuel Kant insistia que a psicologia nunca poderia tornar-se ciência porque era impossível fazer experimentos com fenômenos e processos psicológicos, ou medi-los. Devido ao trabalho de Fechner, que de fato possibilitou medir a mente, a asserção de Kant já não poderia ser levada a sério" (Schultz e Schultz, 1998, p. 71). 146 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 146 história da Psicologia, os temas diretamente derivados do cientificismo do século XIX. Para dar um terceiro exemplo, o mesmo ocorre com Wilhelm Wundt. O manual de Ebbinghaus (1908, p. 23) mostra como, "em tempos anteriores", "a pesquisa psicológica não era um fim em si mesmo, mas um meio útil ou necessário para fins mais altos", pois ela era espécie de "sucursal ou serva da filosofia". A ruptura com a filosofia teria como um dos marcos principais o próprio Wundt. Ele reuniria os diversos "brotos" científicos das vertentes da "nova" psicologia do século XIX no "velho tronco" da árvore psicológica, conferindo assim um "todo harmonioso": "e então a psicologia, antes um mero meio para fins, começou a ser vista como uma ciência especial, à qual um homem pode se dar ao luxo de dedicar todo seu tempo e energia" (1908, p. 24). Tem-se aqui duas ideias, muito propagadas após Ebbinghaus: primeiro a de que Wundt, ou a Psicologia, teriam finalmente rompido com a Filosofia; segundo, a de que a Psicologia teria conquistado sua unidade conceitual e metodológica, voire científica (o que significaria dizer: naturalista), que balizaria essa ruptura. Novamente, tem-se na passagem de Ebbinghaus os dois fatores elencados mais acima a respeito da ascensão das ciências e da especificação (ou falta dela) dos motivos cientificistas em história: primeiramente, a agenda científica – incluso a cientificista – do século XIX teria finalmente chegado à Psicologia, como numa espécie de processo de acomodação tardia, mas efetiva; em segundo lugar, a Psicologia poderia se afastar das "especulações" filosofantes ancorando-se finalmente no método experimental. Conforme demonstra Araujo (Cf. por ex. 2009a e 2010), essas interpretações seriam problemáticas, embora tenham se consolidado na rés-do-chão da Psicologia por décadas12. Isso não é informação pouca, pois, conforme mencionado, Wundt é encarado como um "fundador" da Psicologia. Tem-se então em jogo o que seria a "fundação" de uma ciência. Que tipo de fundador seria esse, e sob que tipo de "ruptura"? Com Araujo, Serge Nicolas (2005, p. 134) argumenta que, de fato, "o ano de 1879 é bem um ato fundador maior de nossa disciplina", pois após várias levas de esforço pessoal (e não de vasto dinheiro governamental, segundo o que dizem os manuais), Wundt conseguiria inaugurar o primeiro Instituto de Psicologia em Leipzig (não o "primeiro laboratório", contrariamente aos manuais...), e, além disso, inauguraria depois uma revista com título específico: Psychologische Studien (detalhes da fundação em NICOLAS, 2005; outros comentários em ARAUJO, 2009b). 12 O tom mais preciso de sua crítica pode ser entrevisto em passagens como essas: "Nos próprios livros de história da psicologia publicados a partir da segunda metade do século XX, raramente encontramos uma apresentação de suas idéias psicológicas que não oscile entre a caricatura e o absurdo", e intérpretes mais recentes resumiriam a situação ao "afirmar que os equívocos parecem ter surgido não de uma má leitura da obra de Wundt, mas sim da completa falta de leitura da mesma" (ARAUJO, 2010, p. 24 e 25) 147 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 147 Wundt de fato "autonomiza" a Psicologia de forma institucional e livresca, o que gerou resultados institucionais no mundo inteiro. Mas, conforme Nicolas já alertava (2005, p. 137), "na época Wundt acreditava firmemente na importância da filosofia para as ciências", como espécie de quadro de uma "ciência das ciências", no que Araújo acrescenta com mais tons (2010, p. 159): "a estruturação definitiva de sua psicologia está diretamente ligada ao seu sistema de filosofia", "a psicologia de Wundt é parte integrante de seus interesses filosóficos e encontra aí sua fundamentação última". Wundt se interessa na formação de uma Weltanschauung. Nesse sistema a Psicologia tem parte crucial, mas é parte de uma visão de mundo não desenraizada da "especulação" filosófica. Em polêmica com Wilhelm Dilthey, Wundt também alinha seu projeto de Psicologia a partir da divisão metodológica da época, entre as Naturwissenschaften (ciências naturais), explicativas, e as Geisteswissenschaften (ciências do espírito ou "humanas"), compreensivas. Contornando ao mesmo tempo o espiritualismo (como o eventualmente atribuído a figuras como Fechner) e o materialismo (de figuras como Emil du Bois-Reymond), Wundt partia do fato da própria experiência humana, que poderia ser separável entre "imediata" (direta e intuitivamente acessível ao sujeito) e "mediata" (aquela sobre os objetos externos, passíveis de abstrações conceituais e mediações instrumentais). A noção de experiência é um princípio gnosiológico, "princípio de que existe uma experiência originária, na qual representação e objeto são uma única e mesma coisa" (ARAUJO, 2010, p. 163). Nas palavras de Wundt (1896/2013, p. 377), o conteúdo da experiência psicológica não consiste em uma soma de objetos, mas em tudo aquilo que compõe o processo da experiência em geral, isto é, em todas as experiências do sujeito em seu caráter imediato, inalteradas pela abstração ou reflexão. A isto se segue a necessidade de que os conteúdos da experiência psicológica sejam aqui considerados como uma interconexão de processos (...) O reconhecimento da realidade imediata da experiência psicológica exclui a possibilidade de se tentar derivar os componentes dos fenômenos psíquicos a partir de quaisquer outros que sejam diferentes deles próprios. Neste sentido, as tentativas da psicologia metafísica de reduzir toda experiência psicológica aos processos imaginários heterogêneos de um substrato hipotético são, pela mesma razão, incompatíveis com o problema real da psicologia. Contudo, enquanto se preocupa com a experiência imediata, a psicologia parte do princípio de que todos os conteúdos psíquicos contêm fatores objetivos e subjetivos. Estes devem ser distinguidos somente através de deliberada abstração, e não podem nunca surgir como processos realmente separados. Isso significa que, em Wundt, há um princípio filosofante a reger a unidade das ciências, unidade apenas separável por questão de ponto de vista, o da experiência "imediata" (e mais intuitivamente originária), e "mediata". Esses pontos de vista, como se pode ver, conduzem à separação metodológica mas não de essência entre as Ciências Naturais (da experiência mediata) 148 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 148 e do Espírito (imediata). Sob tal separação a Psicologia, como ciência por excelência da experiência imediata, adquire para Wundt um papel de primeira importância frente às demais ciências e da Filosofia (valendo lembrar que, no Positivismo, Auguste Comte excluiu a Psicologia da classificação das ciências). Nas palavras de Wundt, "a Psicologia é, em relação às Ciências Naturais, suplementar, em relação às Ciências do Espírito, a base fundamental e, em relação à Filosofia, ela é a ciência empírica propedêutica" (WUNDT, 1896/2013, p. 378). Wundt reduplica as divisões das ciências naturais, entre experimentação (como na Física e na Química) e observação (como na Botânica e na Astronomia), na própria Psicologia. Responsável por estudar a "experiência imediata", essa experiência será abordada por duas psicologias complementares, porém distintas (novamente o postulado da identidade de essência mas da divisão metodológica): a "Psicologia Fisiológica", amparada na experimentação e nos instrumentos da Fisiologia Sensorial; e a "Psicologia dos Povos" (Völkerpsychologie), responsável pelas funções mentais superiores e culturais, amparada em vieses não-experimentais e ligada às Ciências do Espírito (sobre o sistema de Wundt Cf. ARAUJO, 2010). Esse estado de coisas da Psicologia ocasiona várias consequências. Em primeiro lugar, com a divisão metodológica das ciências, Wundt mostra a irredutibilidade de sua "Psicologia dos Povos" a um viés experimental e laboratorial. Ademais, a Psicologia dos Povos, além de ser o "fundamento das ciências do espírito" ("grundlage der Geisteswissenschaften", WUNDT, 1896/2013, p. 377), retira parte de sua informação essencial dessas mesmas ciências. O que significa dizer que o naturalismo cientificista não corresponde ao projeto diretor de Wundt e, se uma parte de sua Psicologia emprega de fato métodos experimentais e a agenda da Fisiologia Sensorial da época, há outra parte que se beneficia de outros métodos e conceitos, não laboratoriais ou experimentais. Se Ebbinghaus – e tantos outros – alinharam Wundt como um autor que, ao unificar os diferentes ramos do "tronco" da Psicologia, acabou por "romper" com a Filosofia (excluindo perspectivas "especulativas" e aderindo ao método experimental), uma breve revisita ao mesmo autor mostra projetos bem diversos. Nisso, chegamos a interrogações semelhantes às colocadas acima: que história a Psicologia conta? Wundt é o "fundador" da Psicologia científica que "reúne" os ramos das diferentes psicologias em torno de um projeto naturalista e cientificista que sempre havia sido adiado, mas apenas agora se realizou? Ou Wundt é um pensador situado nas plenas "querelas dos Métodos" (Methodenstreit) do século XIX, elaborando em resposta a elas um sistema filosófico – uma verdadeira Weltanschauung – no qual a Psicologia tem papel preponderante, sistema que não ignora o método científico naturalista, mas busca igualmente um papel sistemático para as 149 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 149 Geisteswissenschaften e uma unidade epistemológica baseada no conceito de "experiência"? Mas, caso tenha ocorrido esta segunda opção, não teria então fugido à história da Psicologia (e especialmente de seu senso comum) uma série de termos sobre sua própria constituição, a começar pela compreensão efetiva do debate em torno das ciências "naturais" e do "espírito", de como esse debate agiu na configuração da Psicologia, e como isso tudo se distribuiu ao longo do século XX para configurar as psicologias hoje existentes? Se Wundt tem papel de "fundador", ele permaneceu durante muito tempo um fundador obscurecido, um "célebre desconhecido". É como se em história da Física clássica, por exemplo, fosse possível manter obscurecidos os projetos de um Galileu ou de um Newton e suas consequências posteriores. Em suma: se o século XIX erigiu uma polêmica entre a ciência emergente e outros modos de pensar não experimentais, parece problemático descrevê-lo usando como base de julgamento os mesmos pressupostos que erigiu. Traçar uma história da Psicologia – por assim dizer – ciente desses pressupostos, e ligada aos debates mais alargados citados acima (por ex. em torno da história da Filosofia e das Ciências), poderia então dar abertura a outros resultados. Tais fatores sobre a Psicologia reencontram, mais uma vez, as questões mais gerais expostas acima. A cisão da Filosofia Natural (ou sua unificação com a História Natural, como diria Daston), a separação entre "Filosofia" e "Ciência", a ascensão do papel do "cientista", a proliferação das "ciências baconianas" do século XIX (caso empreguemos o termo de Thomas Kuhn) e a "dura luta" contra a "praga do século" enxergada no Romantismo em geral, na Naturphilosophie e no Idealismo Alemão, enfim, a reunião de fatores como esses conduziu a fortes motivos cientificistas (o Positivismo é figura central) que associaram "filosofia" com "metafísica" e "especulação" negando com veemência outros modos de pensar não cientificistas. Não à toa Araujo (2010, p. 160) parece detectar na própria Lógica de Wundt duas definições diferentes de "Filosofia", como que para equilibrar os termos em voga: uma "metafísica", a ser rechaçada, e outra como "lógica ou teoria geral do conhecimento", a adotar. Como especificar então a ascensão da temática cientificista e anti-especulativa em história, aplicada em Psicologia? Pois ela organizou inúmeras historiografias da Psicologia durante décadas, inclusive com efeitos sobre a forma pela qual correntes não-cientificistas também contaram sua própria história. Kurt Danziger (1979), por exemplo, trabalhou em parte dessa especificação ao delinear "a refutação positivista contra Wundt", e o modo como as disputas filosóficas e científicas dos psicólogos do fim do século XIX se tornaram depois mornas descrições históricas, escolhas arbitrárias e compromissos dados por insuspeitos. Danziger demonstra como parte do "esquecimento" de Wundt, ocasionado após seu falecimento (em 1920), deve-se a uma viva disputa 150 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 150 teórica sobre os princípios da Psicologia, que após ele foi praticamente abafada ou ignorada, legando aos psicólogos futuros um morno terreno de aparências naturalistas ou, quando muito, de mornas escolhas teóricas. A disputa com Wundt girava em torno da dissidência de alunos como Oswald Külpe e Edward Titchener, que aderiram a filosofias da ciência como o positivismo de fin de siècle de Ernst Mach e Richard Avenarius, mas logo depois se apagou, gerando curiosos estados da arte em história da Psicologia. Segundo Danziger, no início da década de 1890 Wundt dirigia sua atenção à Filosofia, enquanto Külpe se encarregava dos cursos sobre Psicologia. Wundt, que tratava Külpe como um "braço direito", solicitara um textbook introdutório de Psicologia. Quando, em 1893, Külpe publicou Grundriss der Psychologie, o livro teria causado "desapontamento" do mestre e uma contrareação, fazendo Wundt publicar em 1896 outro livro com o mesmo título. No mesmo ano, Wundt também publica uma Über die Definition of Psychologie, que ao mesmo tempo clareia para o público seu próprio projeto e contra-ataca as posições de Külpe (em 1895 Külpe publicara também Einleitung in die Philosophie, aprofundando a ruptura). Nesses mesmos anos, além de Külpe, diversos outros pensadores de princípios teóricos diversos se colocaram polemicamente contra Wundt, tais como Wilhelm Dilthey (que em 1894 publicou Idéias sobre uma Psicologia Descritiva e Analítica13), Hugo Münsterberg, Ebbinghaus e Titchener. A cisão entre Külpe e Wundt – sigamos com Danziger – deve-se a um deslocamento dos princípios da Psicologia em direção ao que defendiam Mach, mas especialmente Avenarius (considerado melhor filósofo por Külpe e Wundt). Em jogo estaria a crítica de Külpe à noção de "causalidade psíquica": conforme Wundt, a divisão metodológica das ciências garantia à Psicologia, enquanto estudo da "experiência imediata", uma região própria e autônoma no que diz respeito ao estudo dos processos mentais, garantindo uma noção de "causalidade" também específica e irredutível à das ciências naturais. Há uma "causalidade psíquica" irredutível aos eventos físicos e à lei da conservação da energia14. Eventos psicológicos, portanto, não encontrariam seu princípio explicativo em eventos físico-biológicos. Mas é exatamente esse o ponto no qual Külpe passa a divergir de Wundt: para ele, se as idéias mentais são inter-relacionadas, elas também "seguem uma lei que se impõe a elas de fora", isto é, do "indivíduo corpóreo" (DANZIGER, 1979, p. 209), 13 Para Dilthey (1894/2011, p. 60-62), Wundt faz uma "virada extremamente notável", sendo "o primeiro entre todos os psicólogos a demarcar o todo da psicologia experimental como ramo particular do saber", dentre outros trunfos, tais como o primado da "causalidade psíquica" e, portanto, a especificidade da Psicologia diante das outras ciências. Mas ainda, para Dilthey, Wundt utilizaria pressupostos hipotéticos emprestados das ciências naturais para dar conta da mente, o que lhe manteria ainda no quadro de uma "psicologia explicativa". Os textos de 1896 de Wundt certamente são também uma resposta a Dilthey que merece análise. 14Valendo realçar que Wundt foi aluno de Helmholtz, um dos grandes formuladores desse princípio no século XIX. 151 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 151 trazendo a ordem das explicações mentais novamente ao primado das explicações físicas (desde o corpo biológico). Isso derivaria da guinada rumo a Mach e Avenarius. Para eles, diferentemente do positivismo de Comte, a Psicologia teria um lugar entre as ciências. Sob esse viés, a divisão wundtiana da experiência poderia ser então compreendida como experiência "dependente" ou "independente" de um sistema biológico, assuntos respectivos da Psicologia e da Física. Essa chave de leitura retira a especificidade da Psicologia como autônoma frente a causalidade física, preparando a redução da mente a fatores naturalistas: "Mach seguiu diretamente os passos de David Hume ao demonstrar, por satisfação própria, que a experiência individual do self não é inteiramente experiência, mas apenas uma combinação de sensações que em si mesmas são mais físicas do que mentais: 'O fato primário não é o ego mas os elementos (sensação)...'" (DANZIGER, 1979, p. 210). A consequência é que a divisão das ciências, nesse positivismo de fin de siècle, é bem diversa da proposta de Wundt. Enquanto em Wundt há especificidade da Psicologia, autonomia mediante noções como a de "causalidade psíquica" (e também da "Psicologia dos Povos") e um caráter mais fundamental devido ao estudo da "experiência imediata" (caráter inclusive "propedêutico" para a Filosofia), a guinada de Külpe faz entrever uma Psicologia novamente alinhada numa classificação positivista das ciências, mas por isso mesmo, encontrando seus princípios explicativos na Fisiologia e na Biologia, que se subordinariam aos conceitos mais gerais da Química, da Física e assim por diante. Além disso, vale notar a nova confiança na experimentação como método geral, supostamente abordável não apenas nos processos psicológicos mais básicos e estritamente controláveis (era o que defendia Wundt), mas também nas funções mais complexas. As respostas de Wundt (incluindo acusações contra um afrouxamento do método experimental em Psicologia) não foram propriamente consideradas. Conforme mencionado, outros psicólogos também entraram em jogo, especialmente sob o legado que concorda com Avenarius e Mach e descarta as posições de Wundt. Acima vimos as posições de Hermann Ebbinghaus em História, afastando toda e qualquer orientação não naturalista da Psicologia a um "passado" que não mereceria ser "história". Mas, considerando as palavras de Danziger (1979, p. 213-seg.), o próprio Ebbinghaus também teria se posicionado, demonstrando na época que posições como a de Ernst Mach representariam uma descontinuidade, um novo capítulo na história da ciência natural, que não seria ainda bem compreendido por figuras como Wundt (e também Dilthey) – embora tais descontinuidades em história da ciência não estejam presentes no próprio esboço de Ebbinghaus, de 1908, sobre história da Psicologia. Em 1896 e 1897, Ebbinghaus publicou Sobre a Psicologia Descritiva e Explicativa (Über beschreibende und erklärende Psychologie) e Grundzüge ou Fundamentos da 152 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 152 Psicologia, defendendo que Mach se distanciaria da causalidade mecânica clássica quando inaugura noções como a de "relação funcional". Sob a esteira de Hume, Mach representaria um movimento de deslocamento da explicação causal da mecânica clássica à descrição conceitual entre eventos contingentes e funcionais, tornando possíveis os desenvolvimentos que levaram à Física Moderna e outras ciências do século XX. Estaria então em marcha o desenvolvimento de novos e outros conceitos em ciência, alheios aos modelos correntes da causalidade clássica ou das ciências do espírito. Nas palavras de Danziger (1979, p. 214), "a resposta de Ebbinghaus [...] envolveu o argumento de que, enquanto a ciência psicológica modelada na física Newtoniana pode ser vulnerável às críticas [...], não ocorre o mesmo para uma ciência psicológica modelada pela física Machiana". O mesmo ocorreria com Titchener, na virada do século XX: uma Psicologia "descritiva", sob inspiração de Mach, demonstraria o mesmo conjunto de leis descritivas para todas as ciências, divididas entre domínios conceituais distintos. Não haveria então diferença metodológica entre a inspeção dos eventos físicos e a introspecção dos eventos psicológicos, sendo a esfera da ciência física válida em ambos os "domínios"15. E, contra os princípios wundtianos da autonomia da Psicologia, de uma abordagem não experimental em Psicologia dos Povos e da "causalidade psíquica", novamente a Psicologia poderia ser explicada por princípios encontrados alhures, na experiência enquanto dependente de um indivíduo que se reduz a um sistema nervoso e, portanto, a uma explicação natural. Danziger demonstrou que esses deslocamentos todos participaram do "esquecimento" de Wundt durante décadas. Logo no início do século XX, outros movimentos de Psicologia surgem e tais debates ficam, por assim dizer, obscurecidos. Como se sabe, Edwin Boring, que ajudou a popularizar a passagem de Ebbinghaus sobre o "longo passado e a curta história", foi discípulo de Titchener, e inclusive escreveu sua História da Psicologia Experimental para defender a psicologia de laboratório da proliferação fácil das abordagens "aplicadas" do início do século XX, especialmente nos EUA. Mas é importante notar que esses mesmos motivos históricos permaneceram em enorme cultura de manuais, inclusive sob motivos desenraizados, como se a própria história da Psicologia funcionasse inerentemente assim, em qualquer cenário. O primado do cientificismo nessa espécie de manual de Psicologia ultrapassou tais problemas de contexto e proliferou numa grande cultura manualesca durante décadas, a ponto de – conforme mencionado – ser possível notar eventualmente outras abordagens não-experimentais emulando os mesmos modos de emprego e 15 Como se sabe, isso rendeu inúmeras acusações de frouxidão e extrapolações conceituais, vindas dos mais diversos espectros da Psicologia (de Wundt a Watson, por exemplo). 153 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 153 traçando suas histórias sob narrativas retrospectivas e vitoriosas. O tipo de postura que Danziger detecta em Boring, na citação abaixo, poderia ser expandido para várias publicações, durante muito tempo: o mais crítico de tudo, há o fato de que o próprio Boring foi profundamente comprometido com a filosofia da ciência positivista cuja influência no desenvolvimento inicial da psicologia esteve em questão aqui. Mas o seu compromisso é de segunda geração. O que havia sido para seus professores conclusões cuidadosamente obtidas e corajosamente afirmadas, agora se tornaram matérias dadas como naturais, certezas implícitas não abertas ao debate ou mesmo válidas de menção. Para a historiografia da psicologia, a maior consequência dessa postura é que a dependência da teoria e do método psicológicos em compromissos filosóficos prévios perdeu-se de vista. Porque apenas um tipo de filosofia da ciência é visto como legítimo (ou mesmo concebível), diferenças em questões científicas não são vistas como diferenças filosóficas. Essa é uma atitude confortável para aqueles que não desejam questionar suposições fundamentais, e isso inclui usualmente a conservadora maioria. (DANZIGER, 1979, p. 206) O que repõe, em cascata, as mesmas perguntas acima: que tipo de história a Psicologia conta, ou deveria ou poderia contar? Se parte da historiografia da Psicologia é ela própria tributária dos compromissos da mesma história que pretende contar, parece evidente a necessidade de alguns reexames. Especialmente considerando que tal historiografia rendeu, durante décadas, certa cultura de manuais e textbooks que funcionariam como se estivessem isentos de qualquer cenário. A passagem de Danziger, caso correta, mostra que determinados movimentos dispuseram para as histórias da Psicologia do século XX diversas manobras do século XIX: a condenação de posturas não alinhadas com certas perspectivas de ciência natural, o cientificismo, os preconceitos retrospectivos e a suposição de "neutralidade" em história. Horizontes Os fatores elencados oferecem diversas questões. É certo que, acima, expôs-se o nome de historiadores mais recentes – como Hatfield, Mengal, Heidelberger, Danziger, Vidal e Araujo –, cujos trabalhos situados (dentre outros historiadores) fazem recensões mais alargadas do que várias historiografias das décadas anteriores (marcadas pelo tipo de argumento exposto por Danziger) poderiam supor. O que Ebbinghaus chamava de "longo passado" tornou-se, em muitos sentidos, "história". Sob tais exemplos e num contexto de "práticas e propósitos em história das ciências", talvez seja preciso realçar uma vez mais a necessidade da História da Psicologia, ou de certo senso comum ligado a ela (inclusive na formação e profissão), reaverem outros níveis de análise, exteriores aos compromissos internos da matéria, e que inclusive circunscrevam a constituição desses compromissos internos. Tais necessidades, algumas vezes, acabaram confundidas com uma guinada 154 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 154 rumo a histórias de motivos externalistas, não raramente reduzindo a Psicologia a determinações extracientíficas ou sociais (a Psicologia como fruto das "personalidades", conforme historiografias mais psicologizantes, ou de movimentos institucionais ou da "sociedade capitalista", como nas historiografias mais sociologizantes, ou ainda como fruto dos "preconceitos morais do ocidente", como nas histórias inspiradas por Nietzsche etc.). Mas, não obstante o valor a considerar sobre essas historiografias, os casos acima mostram níveis de análise nos quais a formação dos conceitos e motivos psicológicos envolveram historicidades específicas, ligadas a motivos lógicos e teóricos internos mas também motivos alheios à disciplina, e cujos compromissos e reviravoltas merecem atenção. Em relação a essas historicidades específicas, tal como Araujo (2016) já chamou a atenção, é preciso, por exemplo, de uma "história filosófica" da Psicologia. Ou, conforme retomam atualmente autores como Ian Hacking e Lorraine Daston, não pareceria inútil resgatar os motivos aproximados de uma "epistemologia histórica" aplicada em Psicologia. Sobre a "história filosófica", Araújo mostra, contra as historiografias críticas e de "social turn" advindas em Psicologia desde os anos 60 ou mais precisamente, ao lado delas que projetos psicológicos (como os de Wundt) não se esgotam em leituras positivistas (características de historiografias mais antigas) ou sociologizantes (mais recentes), requerendo um nível especificamente conceitual e filosófico para serem compreendidos. Aparentemente retomando motivos correntes entre os historiadores da Filosofia, Araujo afirma que esse tipo de história se detém especialmente na "relação geral entre psicologia e filosofia", preocupando-se em "revelar como o desenvolvimento histórico e a elaboração de projetos psicológicos liga-se estreitamente com suposições filosóficas, nem sempre explícitas". Torna-se necessário o foco na "coerência e racionalidade dos projetos psicológicos em seu próprio contexto histórico" (2016, p. 10), ou ainda, qua historiador, o historiador da Psicologia não defenderia "qualquer teoria sobre a natureza última dos fenômenos psicológicos" (2016, p. 11 – provável advertência contra a atitude do cientistahistoriador em Psicologia). Uma "história filosófica" da Psicologia seria, por fim, "crítica, policêntrica e internacional" (Araujo, 2016, p. 13). Igualmente, se Georges Canguilhem ainda serve de exemplo para uma epistemologia histórica, não seria inútil abrir a História da Psicologia para fora do internalismo, que privilegia certos postulados teóricos ao invés dos dados históricos empíricos (Cf. CANGUILHEM, 1966/1994, p. 15), ou do externalismo16. Sob uma história "epistemológica" das ciências valeria ler 16 "O externalismo é uma maneira de escrever a história das ciências condicionando certo número de acontecimentos – que se continua a chamar de científicos mais por tradição do que por análise crítica por suas relações com interesses econômicos e sociais, com exigências e práticas técnicas, com ideologias religiosas ou políticas" (Canguilhem, 1966/1994, p. 15). 155 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 155 as teorias a partir de seus pontos de "originalidade" e "invenção", seus "conceitos diretores", seus "sistemas de conceitos", a colocação de seus "problemas próprios" (1966/1994, p. 22) pelo tempo que a história de uma ciência secreta "para si própria" (1966/1994, p. 20), ciência cuja constituição se faz sempre polemicamente em função das rupturas e continuidades relativas ao momento atual e a outras historicidades. Vale igualmente chamar a atenção sobre as consequências de tais questões – dentre várias outras possíveis – sobre a configuração da Psicologia e da identidade do "Psicólogo". Um exemplo: como envolve diretamente o cálculo, o caso de Fechner seria exemplar para notar como historiografias da Psicologia ligadas a tais áreas menosprezaram a análise de como um projeto tributário do romantismo pôde se vincular ao cálculo e medida psicológicas, ou ainda, mais profundamente, como a interação entre a ciência romântica e o naturalismo científico fez par com o nascimento de novos conceitos, racionalidades e níveis analíticos em todo o século XIX. Consideradas tais questões, o projeto inteiro de Fechner não seria então apenas um caso ultrapassado em história, mas um caso – dentre outros17 – cuja análise dos conceitos iluminaria a formação das psicologias do século XX, inclusive as que se julgam asseguradas por suas classes numéricas. Não é inútil lembrar, por exemplo, que, se Descartes e outros pensadores da Revolução Científica situavam a matemática como ligada ao conhecimento claro e distinto, relegando o "conhecimento provável" à verossimilhança e às fronteiras da finitude sensível e do não saber, ocorreram mudanças importantes, inclusive em racionalidades extrapsicológicas como a matemática, para que uma "medida psicológica" se tornasse possível. Mantendo-nos apenas nesse exemplo, Descartes deixaria de ser o enfadonho "pensador do passado" da Psicologia, responsável por frear seu desenvolvimento ou recair no "mentalismo" e outras reduções, para tornar-se, dentre outros, alguém que sinaliza os limites das condições de possibilidade históricas da medida psicológica. Como tal guinada se tornou possível, sem que seja descrita simplesmente como o abandono do obscurantismo rumo à ciência? Na ausência de tais respostas, Fechner continuará um pensador ao mesmo tempo ilustre e pouco visitado, enquanto as historiografias poderão recorrer à balança de São Miguel, à implementação do sistema indo-arábico por Fibonacci ou à invasão mongol. Mas o entendimento da filosofia natural clássica e de suas consequências poderia oferecer eventualmente outras nuances. O mesmo, conforme exposto acima, ocorre com diversos outros temas, tais como a configuração e os destinos da noção de Filosofia Natural, bem como a filosofia kantiana, o 17 Heidelberger (2004), por exemplo, chega a confrontar Fechner com Ernst Mach e com as novidades da física vindoura, inclusive o "princípio da incerteza"de Heisenberg. 156 Temporalidades – Revista de História, ISSN 1984-6150, Edição 26, V. 10, N. 1 (jan./abri. 2018) 156 Romantismo e o Idealismo Alemão. Mesmo o cientificismo do século XIX parece pouco compreendido em sua constituição, projetos e limites. A defesa de Ebbinghaus situada entre a "explicação" (de tom newtoniano) e a "descrição" (de tom machiano) também supõe cortes pouco visitados na história dos modelos que se inspiram nas ciências naturais. Se no âmbito historiográfico é certo que as tarefas seguem, no âmbito formativo e profissional parece também evidente que a narrativa da "vitória cientificista sobre a especulação" mereceria questionamento. Isso certamente interferiria institucionalmente no próprio cursus do psicólogo, que, durante a formação, primeiro aprende as matérias ditas "de base", como as históricas e filosóficas, para então ascender até a prática destituída da especulação. Deixar de lado o postulado do "longo passado e curta história" supõe atribuir importância maior para as matérias ligadas à Filosofia e à História da Psicologia. Elas deixariam de ser uma espécie de "museu do ultrapassado" e vigorariam em outras fases de formação que não apenas as iniciais, retirando certo aspecto impensado na formação psicológica que inclusive poderia render a acusação de "positivista" (isso acarretaria em mudanças de teor não apenas no aprendizado das psicologias ditas "filosóficas"). Igualmente, a prática docente se abriria a eventualidades tais como a do rigor não detido em manuais, o trato mais rigoroso dos conceitos e uma abertura maior à exegese das bibliografias primárias. Afinal, se a Psicologia se abre a tantas outras discussões, desde o meio profissional até o científico, e se ela julga importante manter-se em relação com a própria história, não faz mal renovar sempre a questão sobre o rigor destinado a seus assuntos. Bibliografia ARAUJO, Saulo de Freitas. Uma visão panorâmica da psicologia científica de Wilhelm Wundt. Sci. 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The heterogeneity problem for sensitivity accounts [Penultimate draft] Published is Episteme Abstract Offering a solution to the skeptical puzzle is a central aim of Nozick's sensitivity account of knowledge. It is well-known that this account faces serious problems. However, because of its simplicity and its explanatory power, the sensitivity principle has remained attractive and has been subject to numerous modifications, leading to a 'second wave' of sensitivity accounts. I will object to these accounts, arguing that sensitivity accounts of knowledge face two problems. First, they deliver a far too heterogeneous picture of higherlevel beliefs about the truth or falsity of one's own beliefs. Second, this problem carries over to bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. Some beliefs formed via bootstrapping or Moorean reasoning are insensitive, but some closely related beliefs in even stronger propositions are sensitive. These heterogeneous results regarding sensitivity do not fit with our intuitions about bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. Thus, neither Nozick's sensitivity account of knowledge nor any of its modified versions can provide the basis for an argument that bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed or for an explanation why they seem to be flawed. Key words Sensitivity; higher-level knowledge; bootstrapping; Moorean reasoning; skepticism 1 Sensitivity Overview: In section 1, I will introduce Nozick's original sensitivity account. In section 2, I will present insensitive and sensitive higher-level beliefs about the truth of one's own beliefs. In section 3, I will discuss bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning in more detail and in section 4, I will argue that we can construct insensitive and sensitive instances of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning by repeating those processes that lead to insensitive and sensitive higherlevel beliefs. In section 5, I will discuss the consequences for Nozick's sensitivity account and for various proposed modifications. The heterogeneity of the resulting picture affects each of the proposed sensitivity accounts in a different way, although the outcome is in some respect the same. Because of this heterogeneity problem, no sensitivity account for knowledge can adequately explain why bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed or why they seem flawed. The notion of sensitivity has been introduced by Nozick (1981) who interprets knowledge modally. He argues that in cases of knowledge the belief tracks the truth. To a first 2 approximation Nozick suggests that S knows that p iff (1) p is true; (2) S believes that p; (3) If p weren't true, S wouldn't believe that p and (4) If p were true, S would believe that p. In accordance with the literature, I will understand condition (3) as the sensitivity-condition. Nozick (1981, 179) refines his first definition of knowledge in order to take methods of belief formation into account. S knows, via method (or way of believing) M, that p iff (1) p is true. (2) S believes, via method or way of coming to believe M, that p. (3) If p weren't true and S were to use M to arrive at a belief whether (or not) p, then S wouldn't believe, via M, that p. (4) If p were true and S were to use M to arrive at a belief whether (or not) p, then S would believe, via M, that p. Nozick argues that sensitivity is a necessary condition for any kind of knowledge. Nozick's tracking account of knowledge has been heavily attacked for two main reasons. First, Nozick's view that sensitivity is necessary for any kind of knowledge has been criticized for being too strong (Vogel 1987, Sosa 1999, Williamson 2000). These authors present examples of insensitive beliefs that plausibly constitute knowledge. Second, the fact that Nozick's sensitivity account entails the failure of the highly plausible principle of knowledge closure is usually regarded as strong evidence against it. 1 However, because of its simplicity and its explanatory power, the sensitivity principle has remained surprisingly attractive and has been subject to numerous modifications, leading to a 'second wave' of sensitivity accounts. 2 These modifications attempt to handle cases of insensitive knowledge and/or the problem of the failure of knowledge closure, thereby providing alternative sensitivity-based solutions to the skeptical problem. 1 See Kripke (2011). It is disputed whether Kripke's criticism of Nozick still holds if we take the belief-forming method into account, as Nozick's sensitivity account demands. See Adams and Clarke (2005) and Baumann (2012). 2 DeRose (1995 and 2010) elaborates a sensitivity-based version of contextualism. Black (2002, 2008) favors a sensitivity-based invariantism. Roush (2005, 43) proposes a recursive sensitivity-based definition of knowledge according to which knowledge is closed under known entailment. For an overview of the contemporary debate see Becker and Black (2012). They talk about the "resilience of sensitivity". 3 2 The heterogeneity problem for higher-level beliefs Vogel (2000) argues that if sensitivity is necessary for knowledge, then we cannot have any higher-level knowledge about the truth or falsity of our own beliefs. Becker (2006 and 2007) and Salerno (2010) object to Vogel, arguing that there are higher-level propositions that we can sensitively believe and, therefore, know according to sensitivity accounts of knowledge. In this section, I will briefly present Vogel's argument and Becker's and Salerno's responses. I will conclude that the resulting picture of the sensitivity of higher-level beliefs is far too heterogeneous to provide a plausible picture of higher-level knowledge in terms of sensitivity. 2.1 Insensitive higher-level beliefs Vogel (2000, 609-610) argues that sensitivity accounts of knowledge are flawed because they preclude us from having any higher-level knowledge about the truth of our beliefs. He presents the following inference for arguing that higher-level beliefs are insensitive. (1) You know Omar has a new pair of shoes. (2) You know that your belief that Omar has a new pair of shoes is true, or at least not false. Vogel (2000, 610) claims that if sensitivity is necessary for knowledge then (2) is false i.e. "you do not know that your belief that Omar has new shoes is true, not false." He argues that this result is unacceptable and concludes that sensitivity is not necessary for knowledge. Vogel presents the following argument for his claim that (2) is false if sensitivity is necessary for knowledge: He takes the belief that one does not falsely believe that p to be equivalent to:  B((B(p)  p)) Since the believed proposition (B(p)  p) is equivalent with the disjunction B(p)  p, I will abbreviate it as d. In the nearest possible world w, where d is false, S believes that p. Vogel claims that if one believes that p, then one believes that one does not falsely believe that p, so if B(p), then B(d). Hence, in w both B(d) and d hold. Therefore, B(d) is insensitive. This is Vogel's argument. Notably, B(d) is insensitive, even if B(p) is sensitive. The reason is that for evaluating the sensitivity of the two beliefs, we consider different possible worlds. In case of B(p) we consider a world w1 where just p is false. In case of B(d) we consider w2 where d is true 4 which is farther away from the actual world than w1. However, p entails d, since p is one of the disjuncts of the disjunction d. Hence, even if the belief in a stronger proposition p is sensitive, the belief in d is still insensitive. 3 2.2 Sensitive higher-level beliefs Beliefs of the form B(d) are insensitive higher-level beliefs about the truth-value of one's own beliefs. Notably, there are some closely related higher-level beliefs that are sensitive. Take higher-level beliefs which have the following propositions as content.  I believe that p and p The underlying formal structure of this proposition is the following conjunction.  B(p)  p Since this proposition is a conjunction, I will abbreviate it as c. The following propositions have a similar underlying structure:  I believe that p and p is true  My belief that p is true In the following, I will use c to abbreviate any of the propositions 'I believe that p and p', 'I believe that p and p is true' and 'My belief that p is true'. Notably, beliefs in this conjunction are sensitive if B(p) is sensitive; i.e. sensitivity carries over from B(p) to B(c). 4 For determining whether B(c) is sensitive, we have to look at the nearest possible world where c is false. If B(p) is sensitive, then, by definition, any world where B(p)  p is true is far off. Thus, any nearby world where c is false is such that B(p)  p or B(p)  p is true. Moreover, we can assume that any world where S believes a conjunction without believing each of the conjuncts is also far off. Therefore, S does not believe c since she does not believe that p. Therefore, B(c) is sensitive, if B(p) is sensitive. Simply said, B(My belief that p is true) is sensitive, if B(p) is sensitive because in the nearest possible world where 'My belief that p is true' is false, I do not believe that p and, therefore, do not believe that I truly believe that p. The reason why B(c) is sensitive but B(d) is insensitive is simply that in evaluating their sensitivity we take different possible worlds into account. In the nearest possible world where 3 Sosa (1999) argues that this is a counter-example against the claim that knowledge is sensitive true believing. 4 This point is also made by Becker (2006 and 2007) and Salerno (2010) and has probably been anticipated by Vogel (2000, 611, FN 17). For an alternative presentation of this problem see Melchior (2014a). 5 d is false, B(p)  p is true, i.e. S still believes that p. In the case of B(c), the nearest possible world is one where either B(p)  p or B(p)  p is true, i.e. a world where S does not believe that p. If the bi-valence principle is true, then B(p)  p is equivalent to B(p)  p, which can be understood as a formalization of the following propositions:  I believe that p and p is not false  My belief that p is not false Beliefs in these propositions are sensitive for the same reason as B(c) is sensitive. 2.3 The belief forming method of higher-level beliefs So far, we have not taken the belief forming method into account for determining the sensitivity of beliefs, as Nozick suggests. In this case, we achieve the same results. Take the following case of forming B(d) by inferring it from the believed proposition p. (1) B(p) (2) B(d)5 If I form B(d) by inferring it from the believed proposition p, then sensitivity does not carry over from B(p) to B(d), since in the nearest possible world where I falsely believe that p and where I use the inference from p to come to believe whether I falsely believe that p, I still come to believe that I am not falsely believing that p. 6 Let's also have a closer look at processes of coming to believe that c on the basis of believing p. Take the following deductive inference from (1) and (2) to (3): (1) B(p) (2) B(I believe that p) (3) B(My belief that p is true) 5 This formulation of bootstrapping describes a way of coming to believe the proposition d via inference from the believed proposition p. It is not meant to be an inference from the proposition 'I believe that p' to the proposition 'I believe that I do not falsely believe that p'. 6 Becker and Salerno achieve their results without taking the belief-forming method into account and therefore only for Nozick's first approximate definition of knowledge. 6 If (1) is sensitive, then (3) is also sensitive, if formed via inference from the propositions believed in (1) and (2). Furthermore, sensitivity carries over from B(p) to B(B(p)  p). Thus, we acquire the same results even when taking plausible belief forming methods into account. 2.4 The heterogeneity-problem for higher-level knowledge Vogel (2000) argues that if sensitivity is necessary for knowledge, then we cannot have any higher-level knowledge about the truth of our own beliefs. His line of argumentation is that B(d) is insensitive and, therefore, we do not know c. Becker (2006 and 2007) and Salerno (2010) are right that Vogel is mistaken in this respect, for we can know c without knowing d, if knowledge is sensitive true belief. 7 Moreover, we can also acquire sensitive higher-level beliefs that our beliefs are not false, if the underlying formal structure is equivalent to c. However, this reply to Vogel does not solve the problem of higher-level knowledge for sensitivity accounts but rather displaces it. Some higher-level beliefs about the truth of single beliefs are sensitive and some are insensitive. Beliefs with the formal structure B(c), which are beliefs of the conjunction B(p)  p turn out to be sensitive, but beliefs of the form B(d), which are beliefs equivalent to the disjunction B(p)  p are insensitive. Since c entails d, the sensitively believed propositions are logically stronger than the insensitively believed ones. Sosa (1999) argues that the fact that B(p) is sensitive although the belief in the disjunction B(d) is insensitive provides evidence against the claim that knowledge is sensitive true believing. Since c is stronger than p, the fact that B(c) is sensitive whereas B(d) is insensitive provides even stronger evidence for Sosa's point. We want an account of knowledge that allows one to know the weaker propositions d if we know the stronger propositions c. Thus, the outcome for higher-level beliefs in terms of sensitivity is too heterogeneous to provide a useful explanation. 8 7 In a footnote Vogel (2000, 611) calls his argumentation "clumsy and roundabout" that one fails to know that one's belief that p is true, if one fails to know that one's belief is not false. It has been shown that Vogel's argumentation is false. However, his conclusion that problems about knowing the one without knowing the other offer good reason to be suspicious about sensitivity accounts is exactly the conclusion of this paper. 8 I assumed that the proposition I do not falsely believe that p has the underlying formal structure (B(p)  p), whereas the formal structure of My belief that p is not false is B(p)  p. It is disputable whether we can clearly assign these formal structures to these propositions. However, ambiguities about the underlying formal structures of the two propositions further increase the problems of sensitivity accounts. 7 3 Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning Vogel (2000 and 2008) introduced bootstrapping by means of the example of Roxanne who comes to know that the gas gauge of her car is reliable via looking at the gas gauge. Vogel reconstructs Roxanne's process of reasoning as follows. Bootstrapping (1) K(Tank is full at t1) Reliable Process (2) K(Gauge reads "F" at t1) Perception (3) K(Gauge reads "F" at t1 & Tank is full at t1) Logical Inference (4) K(Gauge reads accurately at t1) Logical Inference (5) Repeat (6) K(Gauge is reliable) Induction (Vogel 2008, 519) 9 Similar cases can be constructed for knowledge about the reliability of any other measurement devices or, more generally, for any information-output-systems, such as newspapers. Vogel argues that it is unacceptable that Roxanne can come to know via bootstrapping that her gas gauge is reliable, since bootstrapping would lead to knowledge about the reliability of a belief-forming source in much too easy a way. Vogel argues that the fact that reliabilism sanctions every step that Roxanne takes provides strong evidence against reliabilism. Cohen (2002 and 2005) argues more generally that bootstrapping does not only provide a problem for reliabilism but for any account of knowledge that allows one to gain knowledge from a source without having prior knowledge about the reliability of this source. 10 9 It is important to be clear about how to interpret Vogel's formulation. Bootstrapping is a process of acquiring inferential knowledge about the reliability of a gas gauge. It is not a process of inferences between propositions about knowledge. Step (3), for example, is a potential way of coming to know the proposition 'Gauge reads "F" at t1 & Tank is full at t1' via an inference from the two known propositions 'Tank is full at t1' and 'Gauge reads "F" at t1'. It is not an inference from the propositions 'Roxanne knows that Tank is full at t1' and 'Roxanne knows that gauge reads "F" at t1' to the proposition 'Roxanne knows that (Tank is full at t1 and Gauge reads "F" at t1)'. 10 Vogel (2000) argues that sensitivity accounts of knowledge are too narrow since they do not allow any higher-level knowledge that one's own beliefs are not false. However, when arguing against process reliabilism he simply assumes that bootstrapping is a flawed epistemic process. In this respect, Vogel does not establish any connection between higher8 Bootstrapping is not a clearly defined term in literature. It is rather understood as referring to Roxanne's case and to cases that are sufficiently similar to it. In the following, I will understand bootstrapping in a broader sense that also includes reasoning about the accuracy of a belief-forming source based on beliefs delivered from that very source. 11 One reason for the philosophical relevance of bootstrapping is its close connection to Mooreanism, understood as the claim that one can know that the skeptical hypotheses are false partly through inference from one's external world knowledge. 12 Moorean reasoning can be formulated in different ways. We can formulate it as follows as to demonstrate that it is a kind of bootstrapping. Moorean reasoning (1) K(p) Reliable process via perception (2) K(I believe that p) Introspection (3) K(I believe that p and p) Logical inference (4) K(My belief that p is true) Logical inference (5) Repeat (6) K(My perception is reliable) Induction Moorean reasoning, understood this way, is a process of inference from one's perception based external world beliefs to the conclusion that one's perception is reliable. It is far from clear whether Moore really endorsed this kind of argument. 13 However, in the following, I will understand Moorean reasoning as an instance of bootstrapping, i.e. as inference from experience-based beliefs about the external world (and beliefs that we have these beliefs) to beliefs about the truth or reliability of experience-based beliefs. The method level beliefs and bootstrapping. In this paper, I establish such a connection by showing how repetition of the inferences leading to higher-level beliefs leads to an instance of Moorean reasoning. In this respect, I diverge dialectically from Vogel. 11 I think it is not useful to restrict bootstrapping to cases of inductive reasoning about the reliability of output delivering sources. It is widely acknowledged that the problem of easy knowledge as introduced by Cohen (2002) is closely related to the bootstrapping problem, although the problem of easy knowledge also applies to deductive inferences about the truth of one's own beliefs. 12 For Vogel's reconstruction of Mooreanism that is analogous with bootstrapping see Vogel (2000, 618). 13 For a discussion of this question see Baumann (2009). Moreover, Mooreanism is often understood as the argument: Here is a hand. Here is another one. Therefore, the external world exists. 9 of Moorean reasoning can then be understood as consulting my experience in order to come to believe whether my experience-based beliefs are true or reliably formed. Moorean reasoning is intuitively an inadequate response to the skeptical challenge but there exist various explanations as to why it is inadequate. 14 According to sensitivity accounts of knowledge, bootstrapping cannot constitute knowledge because it cannot deliver a negative result, i.e. we would still believe, via bootstrapping, that a source is reliable if it were unreliable. 15 Moreover, I come to believe that I am not a BIV by relying on my experiences and my experience based beliefs no matter whether I am a BIV or not. If I am not a BIV, then I reach the true conclusion that I am not a BIV because I base my reasoning on true external world beliefs; but if I am a BIV I reach the false conclusion that I am not a BIV because I am deceived and, hence, base my reasoning on false external world beliefs. 4 The heterogeneity problem for bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning In this section, we will see that the heterogeneity problem for higher-level knowledge carries over to bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. Some instances of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning deliver insensitive beliefs, as expected, but some closely related processes deliver sensitive beliefs. Again, the resulting picture of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning in terms of sensitivity is too heterogeneous to provide a plausible explanation for the (alleged) defectiveness of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. 14 Crispin Wright (2002 and 2004) claims that Moore's argument fails to be cogent, since warrant does not transmit from the premises to the conclusion. Furthermore, it is often implicitly assumed that Moorean reasoning is flawed because it cannot offer a persuasive argument to the skeptic. This view is criticized by Pryor (2004) who argues that Moorean arguments are "persuasively crippled", but in terms of their justificatory structure they are nothing to be ashamed of. One could also stipulate that bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed without offering any explanation at all. This seems an ad hoc and unconvincing strategy, though it seems to be Vogel's argumentation line. Vogel (2000, 615) rejects the view that insensitivity is the problem of bootstrapping, since he rejects insensitivity in general as a criterion for knowledge, but without offering any alternative explanation for the epistemic defectiveness of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. For Vogel's case against sensitivity see Vogel (1987). I will not handle these alternative explanations for why bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed or for they seem flawed here. 15 A similar strategy is suggested by Titelbaum (2010) and Douven and Kelp (2013), who argue that bootstrapping cannot constitute knowledge because it could never provide a negative result. Weisberg (2012) calls this the no risk, no gain diagnosis. 10 4.1 Insensitive Moorean reasoning Take the following belief forming process via deductive inference. (1) B(p1) (2) B(I do not falsely believe that p1) (3) Repeat for p2...pn (4) B((I do not falsely believe that p1) and...and (I do not falsely believe that pn)) Belief (4) is understood to have the following formal structure:  B((B(p1)  p1)  ...  (B(pn)   pn)) In short:  B(d1  ...  dn) Belief (4) is insensitive. The nearest possible world w where (4) is false is one where one of its conjuncts di is false. But in w S still comes to believe that di via bootstrapping. Moreover, S also comes to believe that (d1  ...  dn) via steps (1)–(3). Sensitivity does not carry over from step (1) to step (2) and neither to step (4). In the case of Moorean reasoning, p is an experience-based external world proposition such as There is a computer in front of me, in short COMPUTER. 16 Take the following example of Moorean reasoning. (1) B(COMPUTER) (2) B(I do not falsely believe that COMPUTER) (3) Repeat for DESK, GLASS OF WATER... (4) B((I do not falsely believe that COMPUTER), (I do not falsely believe that DESK), ...) In the nearest possible world where (4) is false, I still come to believe (4) via Moorean reasoning. Beliefs are also insensitive, if an explanation for my potential deception such as a skeptical hypothesis is incorporated into the conclusion as in the following case. 16 All the following results regarding Moorean reasoning analogously apply to Roxanne's case of bootstrapping, though I will focus on the case of Moorean reasoning. 11 (4') B((I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that COMPUTER), (I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that DESK)...) We can also form beliefs that all my beliefs from a certain source are true or reliably formed via bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. It turns out that such beliefs are also insensitive. One can reach such a conclusion via the following deduction. (1) B(p1) (2) B(I believe that p1) (3) B(My belief that p1 is true) (4) Repeat for p2...pn (5) B(B(p1)...B(pn) are all my beliefs from source O) (6) B(All my beliefs from source O are true.) In case of Moorean reasoning, such an inference can take the following form. (1) B(COMPUTER) (2) B(I believe that COMPUTER) (3) B(My belief that COMPUTER is true) (4) Repeat for DESK, GLASS OF WATER... (5) B(B(COMPUTER), B(DESK)... are all my beliefs based on my current experience) (6) B(All my beliefs based on my current experience are true.) Beliefs of (6) formed via inference from (1)-(5) turn out to be insensitive. We obtain the same results about insensitivity via inductive bootstrapping, i.e. by directly reaching the following conclusions (5') and (5'') from (1)-(4). (1) – (4) (5') B(All my beliefs from source O are true.) (5'') B(All my beliefs from source O are reliably formed.) The inductive inference from (1)-(4) to (5'') is Vogel's version of bootstrapping. One might claim that sensitivity accounts of knowledge deliver the expected result for the bootstrapping 12 case that Vogel originally presented, since these beliefs are insensitive and, therefore, do not constitute knowledge. However, sensitivity accounts fail insofar as they deliver opposite results for very similar cases, as we will see. 4.2 Sensitive Moorean reasoning Notably, there are also sensitive beliefs formed via bootstrapping or Moorean reasoning. Take the following inference that is a repetition of the inference leading to sensitive higherlevel beliefs B(c). (1) B(p1) (2) B(I believe that p1) (3) B(My belief that p1 is true) (4) Repeat for p2...pn (5) B((My belief that p1 is true)... (My belief that pn is true)) Belief (5) has the following formal structure:  B((B(p1)  p1)  ...  (B(pn)  pn)) In short:  B(c1  ...  cn) Belief (5) is sensitive, if each of the beliefs B(p1)...B(pn) is sensitive. (5) is false, if at least one of its conjuncts ci is false. We have seen that sensitivity carries over from B(pi) to B(ci) via inference from B(pi) and B(B(pi)). But if I am minimally coherent, then I do not believe a conjunction, if I do not believe each of the conjuncts. So if I do not believe ci, then I do not believe the conjunction B(c1  ...  cn). Therefore, in the nearest possible world, where (5) is false, I do not believe it anymore and the belief is sensitive. Take again a concrete example of Moorean reasoning, where beliefs of type (5) are sensitive. (1) B(COMPUTER) (2) B(I believe that COMPUTER) (3) B(My belief that COMPUTER is true) (4) Repeat for DESK... (5) B((My belief that COMPUTER is true), (My belief that DESK is true)...) 13 Plausibly, a well-functioning perceptual apparatus delivers sensitive beliefs. Thus, our perceptual beliefs are typically sensitive and, therefore, our beliefs about these beliefs are also sensitive. The types of beliefs that are involved in this inference are about the world, about what we believe about the world, and about the truth of our beliefs about the world. Together, they provide a comprehensive picture about us in the world, notably one, which can be sensitive throughout. If the principle of bi-valence is true, the the proposition my belief that p is true is equivalent to my belief that p is not false, with the formal structure B(p)  p. Accordingly, beliefs of the following structure are also sensitive when acquired via steps (1)-(4): (5') B((My belief that p1 is not false) and...and (My belief that pn is not false)) (5'') B((COMPUTER and I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing COMPUTER) and...) (5'') is remarkably close to a direct denial of the skeptical hypotheses of the form (I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that COMPUTER...), which is, as noted, insensitive. 4.3 Summary: The heterogeneity problem The following table summarizes sensitive and insensitive higher-level beliefs and sensitive and insensitive beliefs acquired via bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning: Insensitive beliefs: Sensitive beliefs: B(d) B(c) B(I am not falsely believing that p) B(My belief that p is true)/B(My belief that p is not false) B(I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p) B(p and I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p) B((I do not falsely believe that p1) and... and (I do not falsely believe that pn)) B((My belief that p1 is not false) and...and (My belief that pn is not false)) B(All my beliefs delivered by source O are true) 14 These insensitive and sensitive beliefs are closely related. Moreover, some of the sensitively believed propositions are stronger than their insensitively believed counterparts. This outcome is a mess. Thus, we see how the heterogeneity problem for higher-level beliefs also affects bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. It is worth noting that I do not assume that all cases of higher-level beliefs and beliefs based on bootstrapping need to be treated the same in terms of justification or alleged justification. Rather, I am open to both accounts: first, that we need to treat them equally, and, second, that we do not need to. The point is that in the second case sensitivity does not offer the right criterion for distinguishing the good cases from the bad ones. Intuitively, instances of simple higher-level beliefs like B(d) or B(c) seem less problematic than instances of bootstrapping from B(p) to B(I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p) or to B(p  I am not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p). 17 Thus, if we allow treating different instances of bootstrapping differently, then we want an account that is in accordance with these intuitions, but sensitivity accounts are not. They allow some complex instances of bootstrapping to constitute knowledge, whereas they prohibit some simple instances from constituting knowledge. 5 Why sensitivity accounts of knowledge can neither solve nor explain the skeptical puzzle Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are intuitively flawed processes for knowledge acquisition. One strategy for explaining why they are flawed or why they seem flawed relies on the idea that they always deliver a positive result, regardless of whether the source in question is reliable or accurate. One way to spell out this intuition is in terms of sensitivity, i.e. by arguing that bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed or seem to be flawed, because they lead to insensitive beliefs. However, some instances of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning lead to sensitive beliefs, while others do not. Therefore, this strategy must fail. 17 Critics of sensitivity accounts and their defenders share this view. Sosa (1999), for example, uses the simple inference from B(p) to B(d) as an illustrative counter-example against sensitivity accounts, since knowledge should transmit in these simple cases. DeRose (1995) who defends a sensitivity based contextualism assumes that knowing a "full-fleshed" skeptical hypothesis is more demanding than knowing simple higher-level propositions like c or d. 15 I will, first, present a general classification of accounts that utilize sensitivity for explaining the (alleged) defectiveness of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. Second, I will discuss exemplarily in more detail how the heterogeneity problem affects the sensitivity accounts of Nozick, DeRose, Black and Roush. We can choose between two general types of explanations for our persisting intuition that bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed: (1) Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed. (2) Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawless, but they seem flawed. Accordingly, we can utilize sensitivity for explaining our intuition about bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning in two different ways. (1) Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed because they lead to insensitive beliefs. (2) Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawless, but 'sensitivity' is part of an explanation for why they seem flawed. In case (1), we can further distinguish between two views, first, that bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed because sensitivity is necessary for any kind of knowledge and, second, that it is necessary for knowledge that the skeptical hypotheses are false. Those who defend the first view, as Nozick does, are confronted with numerous counterexamples of insensitive knowledge outside the skeptical context. However, the results obtained here show that the weaker claim is also not defendable, since some instances of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning lead to sensitive beliefs. 18 If we choose option (2), we can find two strategies for explaining why bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning only seem to be flawed in the literature. (2.1) Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawless, but they seem flawed because they lead to insensitive beliefs. However, we mistakenly believe that sensitivity is necessary for (any kind of) knowledge. (2.2) Bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawless, but they seem flawed because we mistakenly think that they lead to insensitive beliefs. According to (2.1) we err in believing that sensitivity is necessary for knowledge. According to (2.2) we are mistaken about the insensitivity of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. 18 Of course, we could narrow the definitions of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning by adding as a further condition that the resulting beliefs are insensitive. However, this definition would no longer be in accordance with our intuitive understanding of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. 16 If we opt for (2.1), then we can choose between different explanations for why we mistakenly believe that sensitivity is necessary for knowledge. Here are two possibilities. (2.1.1) We confuse two kinds of knowledge, one that demands sensitivity and one that does not. 19 (2.1.2) We mistakenly believe that sensitivity is necessary for knowledge. Period. Most of these alternatives have been defended in the literature. (2.1.1) is featured in DeRose's (1995 and 2010) sensitivity-based contextualism. (2.1.2) seems ad hoc and, to the best of my knowledge, it is not defended in literature. (2.2) is defended by Black (2002 and 2008a). In what follows, I will investigate the sensitivity accounts of Nozick, DeRose, Black and Roush in more detail. We will see that they have to accept either the heterogeneity problem as outlined here or a variant of it. Therefore, none of them can utilize sensitivity for explaining why bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed or why they seem flawed. 5.1 Nozick's sensitivity account Nozick argues that sensitivity is a necessary condition for knowledge and that knowledge is not closed under known entailment. The simple Nozickian view is that any anti-skeptical hypothesis is insensitively believed and therefore not known. This view is mistaken. If sensitivity is necessary and – in addition to Nozick's conditions (1), (2) and (4) – sufficient for knowledge, then there are some anti-skeptical hypotheses which we know and some which we do not know. Nozick (1981) was well aware of the fact that his account implies that we know the conjunction sh  p, though we do not know sh. Thus, Nozick was already explicitly holding a differentiated view with respect to this conjunction, a fact that is often neglected in literature. According to this differentiated view, skepticism is a more isolated phenomenon than according to the simple view, since it is only some specific anti-skeptical hypotheses that we cannot know. This can be seen as an advantage of the differentiated view. However, the simple view has it that knowledge closure does not hold between external world propositions and any kind of anti-skeptical hypotheses, which is already highly controversial. According to the differentiated view, knowledge closure fails between strong and weak anti-skeptical 19 One can also argue that we confuse knowledge with something else, the first does not demand sensitivity, but the second does. This view can be supported by an account suggested by Weatherson (manuscript) that knowledge does not require sensitivity, but that testing a measuring device does. 17 hypotheses. This is an even more problematic instance of closure failure. Astonishingly, Nozick is willing to bite this bullet. We can find a more detailed explanation for Nozick's conception of closure-failure, if we consider his often ignored account of inferential knowledge. Nozick proposes: S knows (via inference from p) that q iff (1) S knows that p (2) q is true, and S infers q from p (thereby, being led to believe that q) (3) if q were false, S wouldn't believe that p (or S wouldn't infer q from p) (4) if q were true, S would believe that p (and would infer q from p if she were to infer either q or q from it). 20 Nozick argues that I cannot acquire knowledge that sh from my external world belief that p, because condition (3) is violated. If I were a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p, I would still believe that p and would infer from p that sh. Hence, Nozick not only claims that one can know that p without knowing that sh, he also provides an explanation for why we do not have this inferential knowledge via Moorean reasoning. Notably, the results concerning insensitive and sensitive beliefs remain the same, if we consider Nozick's concept of inferential knowledge. Take the example of B(d) and B(c). Beliefs of type B(d) acquired via inference from B(p) cannot constitute inferential knowledge, because if d were false, S would still believe that p. However, beliefs of type B(c) acquired via bootstrapping are sensitive if B(p) is sensitive because if c were false, S would not believe that p. A particularly counter-intuitive result of Nozick's account of inferential knowledge is that knowledge does not transmit via conjunction elimination. Thus, we can know the conjunction p  sh without knowing the conjunct sh, even if we form the belief in the conjunct via inference from the conjunction. However, the view that knowledge does not transmit via conjunction elimination seems very counter-intuitive. 21 Thus, given Nozick's account of inferential knowledge, the heterogeneity problem remains the same. Nozick is not ignorant 20 For a detailed discussion of Nozick's account of inferential knowledge and for this formulation see Baumann (2012). 21 See, for example, Hawthorne (2005) who regards knowledge by conjunction elimination as "incredibly plausible". 18 about the consequences of his account. Rather, he offers an additional explanation for why this is so. However, his explanations are highly implausible. 22 5.2 DeRose's indirect sensitivity account DeRose's (1995 and 2010) indirect sensitivity account has it that the insensitivity of certain beliefs explains why they fail to be knowledge. DeRose (2010, 163) argues that we have "some at least fairly general-though perhaps not exceptionless-tendency to judge that insensitive beliefs are not knowledge". Accordingly, the insensitivity of our beliefs in antiskeptical hypotheses can explain our intuitions that these beliefs fail to constitute knowledge, even if sensitivity is not a necessary condition for knowledge in general. Moreover, DeRose (1995) rejects conjunctions of the form "S knows that she has hands but S does not know that she is not a handless BIV". His sensitivity based contextualist solution to the skeptical problem takes the following form: In ordinary contexts, persons have external world knowledge and knowledge that the skeptical hypotheses are false. However, when it is asserted that S knows that p (or that she does not know that p), the standards for knowledge tend to be raised up to a level that S's belief has to be sensitive for constituting knowledge. By asserting that S knows that she is not a BIV we establish such high standards and the 22 Nozick's account of knowing via a method faces a technical problem when it comes to one-sided methods that can recommend believing that p, but cannot recommend believing that p. Intuitively, we want to allow that one-sided methods can generate knowledge, but according to Luper-Foy (1984), they necessarily violate the sensitivity condition and therefore, cannot generate knowledge. Luper-Foy paraphrases Nozick's sensitivity condition as follows: (3) (p  (S believes that p via M or S believes that p via M))  (S does not believe that p via M) He argues that if M is one-sided and never recommends believing that p, then the antecedent of (3) requires that S believes that p via M. But in this case the consequent of (3) and therefore, (3) turns out to be false. Hence, if M is a one-sided method, then Nozick's sensitivity condition can never be met and S cannot know via M, which is counter-intuitive. In order to solve the problem of one-sided methods, Luper-Foy (1984) suggests replacing Nozick's condition (3) with the following condition. (3*) p  (S does not believe that p via M) Notably, the results remain the same if we apply this modified sensitivity account to bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. Hence, the heterogeneity problem remains stable over variations of sensitivity accounts. For this reformulation of sensitivity, see also Williamson (2000, 154). Luper-Foy and Williamson raise problems for this modified version of sensitivity and finally reject it. For a critical discussion of this modified sensitivity account, see also Zalabardo (2012). 19 assertion turns out to be false. In these more demanding contexts, a person has neither external world knowledge nor knowledge that she is not a BIV. Let's take belief-forming method into account, as sensitivity accounts suggest. We have seen that some anti-skeptical beliefs formed via Moorean reasoning are insensitive, as DeRose assumes, but that some are sensitive. However, Nozick's claim that we know the sensitively believed anti-skeptical hypotheses, but do not know the insensitively believed anti-skeptical hypotheses, is not in line with our intuitions about skepticism. In contrast, we tend either to accept that we know insensitively believed anti-skeptical hypotheses and sensitively believed ones or neither. Moreover, we maintain these intuitions even if we become aware of the fact that some beliefs of anti-skeptical hypotheses are sensitive and that some are insensitive. Hence, our intuitions about whether we know anti-skeptical hypotheses cannot be based on the sensitivity or insensitivity of our beliefs of anti-skeptical hypotheses. This is a serious problem for DeRose, who thinks that his contextualist account also contains an explanation for why we raise the standards for knowledge. However, his sensitivity-based explanation is simply inadequate. DeRose can still defend a contextualist solution to the skeptical problem, but without being able to explain in terms of sensitivity why we shift the standards. Hence, he is mistaken that his indirect sensitivity account is 'on the right track'. 23 5.3 Black's Moorean invariantism Black (2002 and 2008) defends a Moorean invariantist response to the skeptical argument according to which the standards for knowledge are always comparatively low and, therefore, we always have external world knowledge and knowledge that we are not BIVs. Black criticizes Nozick's (1981, 184) specification of belief forming methods that any method that is experientially the same, the same "from the inside", counts as the same method. According to Nozick's account, a normal person and a BIV share the same method. Black objects that our method of coming to believe that we are not BIVs is partly perception, but that perception is in part characterized "from the outside", i.e. as a method based on using our sense apparatus. Thus, normal persons and BIVs do not share the same method, since BIVs, ex hypothesi, do not use any sense apparatus. 24 23 For a more detailed criticism of DeRose's indirect sensitivity account that does not focus on bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning see Melchior (2014b). 24 For a discussion of how to individuate belief-forming methods correctly in the context of sensitivity accounts see Becker (2012). 20 Black argues that given this reformulation of belief-forming methods, our beliefs that we are not BIVs turn out to be sensitive. S's belief via method M that p is sensitive iff in the nearest possible world where p is false and S uses M, S does not come to believe that p via M. Since BIVs do not share our method of perception, there simply is no nearest possible world where I am a BIV and where I use the same method that I use in the actual world. Hence, my belief that I am not a BIV is sensitive. Since Black defends a sensitivity account of knowledge, he concludes that we can know that we are not BIVs. One advantage of Black's account is that beliefs in the conjunction sh  p as well as beliefs in the conjunct sh turn out to be sensitive. Thus, Black offers a uniform anti-skeptical solution that allows knowing both. In this respect, he is better off than Nozick and DeRose, who both have to treat beliefs in sh and beliefs in sh  p differently. Black (2002) concedes that his solution to the skeptical problem only applies to skeptical hypotheses that rely on subjects like BIVs whose belief forming methods are essentially different from our own. However, for many of the discussed cases there is a nearest possible world where the proposition in question is false but where the same belief forming method is still available. Take the inference from B(p) to B(d) and suppose that p is the content of a perception based belief like 'Mark is on the other side of the street'. In this case, there are possible worlds w, where d is false i.e. where I falsely believe that Mark is on the other side of the street, and where I use the same method of perception and inference as in the actual world. In w, I take, for example, someone else to be Mark. Hence, my belief B(d) is still insensitive. The same is true for the following beliefs formed via bootstrapping: B(All my beliefs formed by looking at the gas gauge are true.) B(All my beliefs formed by looking at the gas gauge are reliably formed.) In both cases, we could still use the same method 'from the outside' of consulting the gas gauge plus bootstrapping, if these conclusions were false. Therefore, these beliefs still turn out to be insensitive. If we apply Black's sensitivity account to all instances of bootstrapping, then we know that we are not BIVs via Moorean reasoning without knowing d and without acquiring knowledge via alternative instances of bootstrapping. This seems counter-intuitive. Thus, Black's 21 sensitivity account might offer a partial solution to the skeptical problem, as he argues, but the heterogeneity problem is only displaced. 25 5.4 Roush's recursive sensitivity account Roush (2005) offers a tracking account of knowledge that is inspired by Nozick's account, but that avoids the undesired consequence of closure-failure. Roush (2005, 43) argues, as a first approximation, that S knows that p if and only if S's belief fulfills Nozick's condition (1)-(4) or "p is true, S believes p, and there is a q not equivalent to p such that q implies p, S knows that q implies p, and S knows that q". According to Roush's account, S knows that she is not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p, if S knows that p and knows that p implies that she is not a BIV deceived in falsely believing that p. How does Roush explain our intuition that we do not know that we are not BIVs? Roush (2005, 54f) argues that the fact that we cannot find conclusive reasons for believing that we know, even if our beliefs constitute knowledge, explains our experience of helplessness when confronted with the skeptical hypothesis and our frustration about our inability to refute the skeptic. Since sensitivity is not part of an explanation for why Moorean reasoning seems flawed according to Roush, her view is partly in accordance with the main theses of this paper. However, Roush's account faces two problems concerning bootstrapping. Roush (2005, 120) claims that bootstrapping obviously does not constitute knowledge. She claims that her recursive sensitivity account can explain why: First, the beliefs in the conclusion are insensitive and, second, the last step of inference of bootstrapping is not deductive. However, we have seen that we can construe instances of bootstrapping that violate each of these conditions. First, there are beliefs based on bootstrapping that are sensitive. Second, we can also construe deductive instances of bootstrapping about the reliability of a source O. Hence, Roush cannot argue that we fail to know in these two cases because the resulting belief is insensitive and not all inferences involved are deductive. Without providing further arguments, she is committed to accepting that we do know in these cases of bootstrapping, although we do not know in Vogel's original example. Again, the heterogeneity problem is only displaced. 25 Black (2008b) offers a solution to the problem of easy knowledge that is based on a particular understanding of the principle of knowledge closure. 22 6 Conclusion Sensitivity accounts of knowledge deliver a very heterogeneous picture of higher-level beliefs about the truth or falsity of our own beliefs. Some beliefs are insensitive, but other beliefs, in closely related but stronger propositions, are sensitivity. Thus, sensitivity accounts of knowledge cannot adequately capture higher-level knowledge. Moreover, this problem carries over to bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning. Some instances of bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning deliver insensitive beliefs, but some closely related processes deliver sensitive beliefs. Therefore, neither Nozick's sensitivity account nor one of the modified sensitivity accounts of knowledge can explain why bootstrapping and Moorean reasoning are flawed or why they seem flawed. Moreover, I do not see how any sensitivity-based account of knowledge could offer such an explanation, given the heterogeneity problem. Acknowledgements The research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): J 3174-G15. I am indebted to Ernest Sosa and the members of his epistemology group at Rutgers University for their helpful comments, to Martina Fürst, Lisa Miracchi and Danilo Šuster for their remarks on earlier drafts of this paper and to Peter Klein for insightful and encouraging discussions. Guido Melchior is currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Graz. After receiving his PhD at the University of Graz, he was Visiting Scholar at the Department of Philosophy at Rutgers University. His primary research interest is in epistemology, including modal knowledge accounts and skepticism. 23 References Adams, F. and Clarke, M. (2005). Resurrecting the tracking theories. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83(2), 207-221. Baumann, P. (2009). Was Moore a Moorean? On Moore and scepticism. European Journal of Philosophy 17(2), 181-200. Baumann, P. (2012). Nozick's defense of closure. The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology. K. Becker and T. Black (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11-27. Becker, K. (2006). Is counterfactual reliabilism compatible with higher-level knowledge? Dialectica 60(1), 79-84. Becker, K. (2007). Epistemology Modalized. New York and London: Routledge. Becker, K. (2012). Methods and how to individuate them. The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology. K. Becker and T. Black (eds.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 81-97. Becker, K. and Black, T. (2012). The Sensitivity Principle in Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Black, T. (2002). A Moorean response to brain-in-a-vat skepticism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80(2), 148-163. Black, T. (2008). Defending a sensitive neo-Moorean invariantism. New Waves in Epistemology. V. F. Hendricks and D. Pritchard (eds.) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 827. Black, T. (2008a). Solving the problem of easy knowledge. Philosophical Quarterly 58(233), 597-617. Cohen, S. (2002). Basic knowledge and the problem of easy knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65(2), 309-329. Cohen, S. (2005). Why basic knowledge is easy knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70(2), 417–430. DeRose, K. (1995). Solving the skeptical problem. The Philosophical Review 104(1), 1-52. DeRose, K. (2010). Insensitivity is back, baby! Philosophical Perspectives, 24, 161-187. Douven, I. and Kelp, C. (2013). Proper bootstrapping. Synthese 190(1),171-185. Hawthorne, J. (2005). The case for closure. Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, Mathias Steup and Ernest Sosa, (eds.), 26-42. Kripke S. A. (2011). Nozick on knowledge. Philosophical Troubles. Collected papers, volume I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 162-224. 24 Luper-Foy, S. (1984). The epistemic predicament: knowledge, Nozickian tracking, and scepticism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 62(1), 26-49. Melchior, G. (2014a). A generality problem for bootstrapping and sensitivity. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 14(40), 31-47. Melchior, G. (2014b). Skepticism: the hard problem for indirect sensitivity accounts. Erkenntnis 79(1), 45-54. Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pryor, J. (2004). What's wrong with Moore's argument?. Philosophical Issues 14(1), 349378. Roush, S. (2005). Tracking Truth. Knowledge, Evidence, and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salerno, J. (2010). Truth tracking and the problem of reflective knowledge. Knowledge and Skepticism. J. K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke and H. S. Silverstein (eds.). Cambridge/Mass.: MIT Press, 73-83. Sosa, E. (1999). How to defeat opposition to Moore. Philosphical Perspectives 13, 141-153. Titelbaum, M. (2010). Tell me you love me: bootstrapping, externalism, and no-lose epistemology. Philosophical Studies 149(1), 119-134. Vogel, J. (1987). Tracking, closure and inductive knowledge. The Possibility of Knowledge: Nozick and his Critics. S Luper-Foy (ed.), Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 197-215. Vogel, J. (2000). Reliabilism leveled. Journal of Philosophy 97(11), 602-623. Vogel, J. (2008). Epistemic bootstrapping. Journal of Philosophy 105(9), 518-539. Weatherson, B. (manuscript). Easy knowledge and other epistemic virtues. http://brian.weatherson.org/ekoev.pdf Weisberg, J. (2012). The bootstrapping problem. Philosophy Compass 7/9, 597-610. Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and Its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, C. (2002). (Anti-)sceptics simple and subtle: Moore and McDowell. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65(2), 330-48. Wright, C. (2004). Warrant for nothing (and foundations for free)?. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 78(1), 167-212. Zalabardo, J. L. (2012). Scepticism and Reliable Belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

APA NEWSLETTER ON Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies Gary Mar, Editor Fall 2009 Volume 09, Number 1 FROM THE GUEST EDITOR Amy Olberding University of Oklahoma In February of this year, the Committee on Asian and AsianAmerican Philosophers and Philosophies hosted a panel at the APA's Central Division meeting in Chicago. The focus of the panel concerned the intersections of Asian philosophies and feminism. While the essays and commentary delivered for the panel reflected the specific academic research foci of our participants, there are of course many ways to understand how Asian philosophies and feminism intersect, or fail to intersect. Consequently, this section of the Newsletter aspires to expand on the discussions of our panel, as well as to explore additional territory. For it, some of our panel participants and several other scholars working in Asian philosophy reflect on a variety of related subjects. These include, for example, the search for affinities between feminist concerns and the concerns found in Asian materials; the state of the field of Asian philosophy as it pertains to incorporating feminist consciousness; the personal experiences of feminist scholars who seek to enliven their work with both historical sensitivity and feminist commitments; and the capacity of feminist readings of Asian philosophies to foster scholarly development and political progress. As the work presented here illustrates, there are many ways to frame and understand the import of feminism for Asian philosophies. ARTICLES Chinese Philosophy and Woman: Is Reconciliation Possible? Ann A. Pang-White University of Scranton Can Chinese philosophy and feminist philosophy come together and enrich one another? Due to the gender oppressive social practice of Chinese society in the past (e.g., foot-binding, female infanticide, forced contraception, etc.), the answer to this question may be an obvious "No." The preoccupation with this issue in contemporary perceptions of Chinese culture among the general American public cannot be easily overstated. In my experience teaching Chinese philosophy and as a guest speaker at various occasions, this is a question that is inevitably raised by students and audiences. Nonetheless, my own experience growing up in a Taiwanese-Chinese society seems to suggest a more complex view. This complexity is what made me first become interested in the intersection of Chinese philosophy and feminist philosophy in my mid-teaching-career. As a young girl growing up in Taiwan in the 1970s, my parents always honored the Confucian sayings: "in education, there should be no distinction" (Analects 15:28) and "by nature, humans are similar to one another; by nurture, people are far apart" (Analects, 17:18). It is due to these Confucian beliefs that they always encouraged me, my younger brother, and my younger sister to pursue education as far as our ability allowed. They sacrificed equally for all three of us regardless of our genders; we were always afforded equal opportunities. Throughout my primary, secondary, and college education, I had also learned of many virtuous women and heroines from the past three thousand years of Chinese Civilization through literature, poetry, and history that have inspired so many women and men in their shared historical reality. Nevertheless, I also noticed that although some of my female friends were sharing the good fortune of equal education opportunities, there were also many others who were discouraged by their families from pursuing a post-bachelor graduate degree for fear of societal sanction. After all, a too highly educated woman would not make a good wife. During my search for an answer to the complex, sometimes puzzling, relation between Confucianism and women in Chinese society, I was also trying to find ways to bridge an East-West dialogue in my comparative philosophy course. By happy coincidence, I came across Karen Warren's "Feminism and Ecology: Making Connections" and Chenyang Li's "The Confucian Concept of Jen and the Feminist Ethics of Care: A Comparative Study."1 They became the two groundbreaking works for my own philosophical thinking on this subject. It is through Warren's article that I began to see that the dualistic, "either-or" exclusive thinking that dichotomizes reason and emotion, form and matter, and human and Nature may not only be a main cause of human subjugation of nature, but may also contribute to the subtle tendency to subjugate the voice of Eastern Philosophy under the Western model. At the same time, Li's article enabled me to see how Confucian philosophy can weigh in on important contemporary philosophical debate on key topics. With their differences carefully noted, I came to see how Confucian ethics could strengthen feminist care ethics' argument in its attempt to reform modern liberal and contractarian ethics. Nonetheless, in my own wrestling with the issues of feminist philosophy, as a Chinese-woman and a philosopher, I often felt not-at-home with the western liberal approach to these problems. The divergent historical reality of women and the philosophical differences in these two traditions, particularly their differing complementary-vs.-dualistic emphasis, is often ignored in the liberal gender-critique of Chinese philosophy. However, it has been proven time and again in history that any enduring social reform in a society must be empowered - APA Newsletter, Fall 2009, Volume 09, Number 1 - - 4 - since the phallocentric linguistic construct is too deeply embedded in the very core of philosophical discourse. Or, second, I can transcend the facticity of masculine discourse in philosophy. It is a human fact that men wrote most of what has been passed down to us and did so from men's own viewpoint. There is nothing that I, as a woman and as a late comer, can do about it. Whether I read Kant today, tomorrow, or ten years hence, Kant says the same thing about the inability of women to be active citizens and women's skin deep intellect. But, as a philosopher and as a feminist, I can choose to suspend the phallocentric linguistic presentation of ideas and extract useful ideas to further the cause of women's liberatory movement. The first choice of abandonment seems awfully depressing to me as a philosopher who is used to my own disembodiment in order to blend into the wonderful world of (male) philosophical discourse. Yet, as a feminist, I cannot help but constantly be reminded of the impossible weight of my corporeality and gender. The only way out, as I see it, is the second choice of transcendence so that I can be both a philosopher and a feminist. The choice of transcending the facticity of masculine discourse shouldn't be limited to the Western canon but open to all, including Asian philosophy. One can dwell on the fact that most of what Confucius, Mencius, or Xunzi says has nothing to do with women's liberation, or well-being per se, or one can choose to suspend that limitation and extract the relevance of the ideas of ren, reciprocity, and relationality to a more wholesome vision of human society where gender oppression is a historical past, not an ongoing struggle. Much of the prejudice against the incorporation of, or just a sheer neglect of, the relevance of Asian philosophy to feminism in the West has been centered on the explicit sexist references found in the tradition. But this facticity of masculine discourse is common to all traditions, be they East, West, North, or South, so my question would be this: Why selectively exclude non-Western canons in feminist discourse? As an Asian American, I cannot help but constantly be afflicted by the cultural inferiority complex in the discourse of gender. Is it possible to be a Confucian and a feminist at the same time? Or, as far as gender is considered, must one be either/or? Again, the choice of transcendence instead of exclusion seems more appealing to me. As Confucius' disciple, Zixia, says to Sima Niu who laments the fact that only he has no brother, within the four seas, all are one's brothers (Analects 12.5). In the same spirit, I am making (masculine) philosophy feminist in accord with a feminist's image of herself. So, in the end, I have lived up to Nietzsche's dictum of becoming who I am: a woman, a philosopher, a feminist, and a Confucian. Why Feminist Comparative Philosophy? Ashby Butnor Metropolitan State College of Denver Jen McWeeny John Carroll University Our first musings on the connections between Asian philosophy and feminism began about ten years go when we were both Master's students in philosophy at the University of Hawaii– Manoa. As nascent feminist philosophers, we were particularly attracted to the well-established comparative, East-West philosophical methodology that the Hawaii department is known for. It seemed obvious to us at the time that the guiding principles of the comparative methodology that we were being trained in are methodological principles that are also necessary to any rigorous feminist philosophy. For example, one of the primary aims of comparative methodology is to expose the latent and truth-obscuring assumptions inherent in our traditions of origin. Raimundo Panikkar succinctly expresses this self-reflective and self-critical orientation when he writes that comparative philosophy "saves us from the fallacy that all others live in myths except us" (1988, 135). In this way, comparative philosophy helps us to realize that "we are not the only source of (self-) understanding" (Panikkar 1988, 128). In a similar vein, Daya Krishna suggests that this aspect of comparative philosophy facilitates a kind of liberation: "comparative philosophy has the chance to function as a mutual liberator of each philosophical tradition from the limitations imposed up on it by its own past" (1988, 83). Comparative philosophy teaches us that philosophical problems could be (and have been) framed and solved differently. In doing so, it "frees [our] conceptual imagination" and asks us to step out of our own narrow philosophical perspectives, both of which spark a level of philosophical creativity that is rarely attained within tradition-specific approaches. In short, diversity (of traditions, worldviews, ideas, and so on) is a hallmark of a comparative methodology, just as it is (or should be) for feminist philosophy. In addition to the self-reflective and pluralistic orientations of comparative methodology, Eliot Deutsch writes of the creative and transformative nature of comparative practice that comes from engagement with a wide array of perspectives. According to Deutsch, we should not study the insights of other cultures merely for the sake of acquiring more resources or bolstering our own positions; we should instead practice comparative philosophy because it changes our intellectual constitution for the better. Deutsch argues against a grand synthesis of world thought that marked the earliest attempts at comparative philosophy. Instead, he advocates a coming together of fruits of the widest possible human experience. Insofar as philosophical theories attempt to describe human experience, the consideration of a more diverse array of human experience in the course of theory-construction will more likely produce a theory that is representative of human experience as a whole-and this is especially the case for any theory that aspires to universal applicability. The comparativist learns by "being ready to undergo the different philosophical experiences of other people," and he or she enhances the validity of his or her philosophical insights by "systematically taking into account the universal range of human experience inasmuch as it is possible to do so in any concrete situation" (Panikkar 1988, 128-129). As we can see from this brief discussion of comparative methodology, comparative philosophy develops as a result of philosophical diversity, depends upon a broad range of human experience from which to theorize, and finds creative impetus in continuously scrutinizing (one's own) philosophical assumptions. However, despite its willingness to engage with philosophical difference and ideas on the margins of the discipline, we did find that comparative philosophy seemed to repeat wider disciplinary attitudes in regard to its lack of sustained attention to women's lives, experiences, and voices. And, in doing so, comparative methodology rejects in practice the ideals that it holds in theory. This lack of feminist analysis was quite apparent to us during our early philosophical training, particularly when we studied feminist philosophy one semester and comparative methodologies the next. As students who had a foot in each terrain, so to speak, we could see the similarities between the two philosophical approaches clearly, as well as the ways in which the content of one field overlapped with the other and vice versa. And yet, comparative philosophy and feminist philosophy were taught to us as two distinct philosophical areas. For example, at the time gender was - Asian and Asian-American Philosophers and Philosophies - - 5 - never explored as a valid site of comparison in our comparative courses; what was most philosophically interesting was "crosscultural comparison." The implicit assumption here was that men and women who inhabited the same geographical regions shared the same "culture" and, therefore, the same philosophical assumptions and worldviews. On this account, if you are reading a man's account of his culture, then practicing rigorous comparative methodology would not demand that you also read a woman's account of that culture in order to ensure the widest possible account of human experience. Our material reality as women students of comparative philosophy reinforced this unexamined idea, since we rarely (if ever) read women philosophers in our comparative and Asian courses, seldom had the companionship of other women in our classes, and the "great comparativists" who taught us and whose work we studied were all men. There is a sense in which this way of practicing and teaching comparative philosophy suggests that either a male philosophical voice automatically includes (or, is identical to) a woman's or that hers is inessential. Given the supposed openness and sensitivity to diversity inherent in comparative methodology, the lack of feminist analysis and consideration of the interplay between gender and culture was frustrating-though perhaps not surprising (as we now know) given the predominance of male philosophers across all traditions and within the discipline itself. We find gender analysis to be an invaluable addition to philosophical thinking and an essential way of expressing the guiding values of comparative methodology. In its most basic form, feminist theorizing begins from the experience of women and considers alternative constructions of traditional ways of seeing, experiencing, cognizing, feeling, and embodying our everyday realities and truths. Just as Asian philosophy has helped expand Westerners' worldviews by presenting reasonable alternatives to metaphysical, epistemological, aesthetic, and ethical assumptions, so too does feminist philosophy challenge the very foundations of taken-for-granted theories. Therefore, given the absence of considerations of gender in comparative philosophy-an absence that was starkly visible from our location as women students of Asian philosophy and as feminists-we began to construct a robustly pluralistic methodology that could engage with a wider breadth of human experience than did earlier articulations of comparative methodology. It is at this pivotal time that our vision of feminist comparative philosophy began to take shape. We see feminist comparative philosophy as a natural outgrowth of both comparative philosophy and feminist philosophy. East-West comparative philosophy and feminist philosophy already share much in terms of methodology: a hermeneutic of openness and respect for difference, a crossing of philosophical boundaries and traditions, a rejection of the dichotomy of theory and practice, and the pursuit of new ways of looking at the world. In our work, we seek to show how bringing diverse philosophical traditions into dialogue with each other can provide fresh insights on questions of specific interest to feminists and global theorists generally. We believe that what distinguishes feminist comparative philosophy from transnational/global/postcolonial feminist theories is that feminist comparative methodology engages an analysis of original and primary philosophical sources from the tradition in question. Most importantly, we wish to emphasize that feminist comparative methodology fosters the development of original, creative concepts and ideas that may not have emerged had the philosopher been thinking within the confines of one tradition only. To demonstrate the breadth and sophistication of emerging work in feminist comparative philosophy and to give greater definition to the aims, content, and scope of this new philosophical field, we are currently editing a volume of essays at this exciting crossroads: Liberating Traditions: Essays in Feminist Comparative Philosophy. The essays in this collection span a variety of philosophical locations that are each tied to specific geographical, linguistic, temporal, historical, religious, social, economic, and political positions, and yet they each integrate these various perspectives in innovative ways while being mindful of the unique particularity of each perspective in question. We hope that Asian and comparative philosophers and feminist philosophers alike will find fresh insights on topics that are at the center of their fields of study, such as embodiment, sexual difference, the constraints of agency, non-dualistic metaphysics, the transformation of consciousness, cultivation of ethical relationships, examinations of alterity and difference, and cross-cultural hermeneutics. In addition to the breadth and depth of these philosophical conversations, with this volume we also hope to show how our own philosophical traditions of origin can be liberated from their narrow confines and brought into dialogue for both the advancement of our philosophical projects and our shared lives together. We believe that feminist comparative philosophy demonstrates the practice of pluralistic philosophy par excellence and will be instrumental not only in correcting some shortcomings of current philosophical methodology, but also in moving the discipline of philosophy another step forward in our generation. References Krishna, Daya. 1988. Comparative philosophy: What it is and what it ought to be. In Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, edited by Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Panikkar, Raimundo. 1988. What is comparative philosophy comparing? In Interpreting Across Boundaries: New Essays in Comparative Philosophy, edited by Gerald James Larson and Eliot Deutsch. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Feminism and/in Asian Philosophies Sandra A. Wawrytko San Diego State University Feminism has much to gain from a close reading of Asian philosophies. Stereotypical views of Asian cultures as irretrievably misogynist obscure both the constructive and deconstructive contributions Asian philosophies can make to feminist discourse. I will briefly outline doctrines found in key schools that can support and further feminist aims: 1) Daoism's radical reassessment of the "feminine" (Yin), 2) Confucianism's advocacy of the universal potential for self-cultivation, and 3) Mahayana Buddhism's deconstruction of sexism as one among many forms of discrimination. Since I have already discussed points two and three elsewhere, my main focus here will be Daoism. Throughout the discussion I maintain a distinction between women and social constructs of the "feminine." The same distinction applies to men and "masculine" constructs. Hence, I am assuming that women are not hard-wired to be stereotypically feminine, nor men to be stereotypically masculine. Values, assumptions, and behavior patterns designated as feminine or masculine can and do apply to both men or women.1 We come from the same planet and are members of the same species.

On Clive Bell's "Art and War" Author(s): Bence Nanay Source: Ethics, Vol. 125, No. 2 (January 2015), pp. 530-532 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678377 . Accessed: 19/02/2015 04:09 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Ethics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 131.111.185.41 on Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:09:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions On Clive Bell's "Art and War"*Bence NanayClive Bell was not an ethicist. He was an aesthetician, known for his very strong formalist views, according to which art has nothing to do with ethics and politics. At least that is the textbook description of his general stance. "Art and War" is a relatively unknown piece by him that has been ignored within art history partly because the relation between art on the one hand and ethics and politics on the other is much more complex here. He gives a remarkably strong argument for the independence of art and politics-culminating in his slogan that "there is no such thing as patriotic art" ð6Þ. This is an important and interesting argument both for its implications for the way we should think about politics and for the way we should think about art. I will focus on the former here ðleaving aside issues about how the version of formalism he needs to endorse in order for this argument to go through is more like Roger Fry's more sophisticated formalism than the programmatic and provocative statements Bell makes in his much quoted book, Art, written in the same year as this articleÞ. But it is important to emphasize that the paper is not primarily about art: its primary focus is the reach of the political. Bell's argument in general and his claim that there is no such thing as patriotic art in particular may seem diametrically opposed to the course of the century between Bell's article and the present. These hundred years gave us the Great German Art Exhibition and the Degenerate Art Exhibition in the Third Reich, Stalin's obsession with socialist realism, and some less extreme examples of American and British patriotic art. It is also the century that made any kind of discourse about art ðand especially the academic discourse about art in the majority of disciplines in the* A retrospective essay on Clive Bell, "Art and War," International Journal of Ethics 26 ð1915Þ: 1–10. All unattributed page references are to this article. This work was supported by the EU FP7 CIG grant PCIG09-GA-2011-293818 and the FWO Odysseus grant G.0020.12N. I am grateful for comments by Sam Rose and a referee for this journal. 530 Ethics 125 ( January 2015): 530–532 © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0014-1704/2015/12502-0013$10.00 This content downloaded from 131.111.185.41 on Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:09:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions humanitiesÞ through and through political. But Bell was making a normative and not a descriptive claim: he was very much aware of the way art Nanay On Bell's "Art and War" 531is misused and abused for political purposes ðalthough he clearly had no idea about the extremes this abuse would reach in the decades after his articleÞ. He writes critically of the way the German bombing of the Reims cathedral was exploited for patriotic purposes in England by people who otherwise cared little for art ð3–4Þ. But he also saw art's potential for resisting the reach of the political. What I take to be themost important piece of argument in the paper is Bell's emphasis on how when a patriot appreciates art, he or she "is carried into a world in which patriotism becomesmeaningless" ð6Þ. Here, art appears as the antidote to our obsession with questionable political values. If we truly engage with art, political divides will become irrelevant-it makes no difference whether the artwork in question were made in Germany or in England. In other words, art can serve as a means of resisting the primacy of politics in our life. He repeatedly appeals to a parallel between art and philosophy ðand mathematicsÞ in this respect ðsee esp. 7–8 and 6Þ: it doesn't matter whether a German or an American philosopher ðor mathematicianÞ came up with a certain proposition ðor theoremÞ: what matters is whether it's true. Similarly, it doesn't matter in which country a piece of music was composed or which country a painting was painted-as long as it provides for our aesthetic experience. And, conversely, just as a theorem or a philosophical theory can be appreciated anywhere in the world, regardless of where a symphony was composed, citizens of all countries can enjoy it. Art is not patriotic: it is universal. And this is the take-home message of Bell's paper: art unites, rather than divides. It "transcends nationality" ð6Þ. It would be a mistake to dismiss this vision as a naive utopian picture of art bringing together people from different sides of the trench ðor, to update the analogy a bit, uniting Republicans and DemocratsÞ. Bell asks us to consider what really matters. Is politics the end and art the mere means ðmaybe transforming all art into propagandaÞ? Or is art the ultimate value and politics something we need to consider as a potential obstacle to our enjoyment of art? This latter view is clearly Bell's choice ðsee esp. 2–3Þ, but it could easily be seen as the caricature of aestheticism ðand Bell is not doing much to dismiss this interpretation with his appeal to Archimedes absorbed in a mathematics problem in Syracuse in the midst of the Roman invasion 1⁄28Þ. But maybe we can give a more charitable reading to this argument: namely, that a way of preventing people from attributing too much importance to bogus values like patriotism and nationalism is to give them values ðlike tolerance and a broadened sense of communityÞ that transcend nationality. And art could serve this purpose. If we are just aThis content downloaded from 131.111.185.41 on Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:09:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions little bit more tolerant toward people of different culture or religion, having admired artworks ðwe don't have to be too elitist here: having 532 Ethics January 2015watched films or television series or having listened to popular musicÞ from that culture, this could be seen as an example of art bringing people together rather than turning them against one another.This content downloaded from 131.111.185.41 on Thu, 19 Feb 2015 04:09:04 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1 Why Naïve Realism? Heather Logue University of Leeds1 Abstract: Much of the discussion of Naive Realism about veridical experience has focused on a consequence of adopting it-namely, disjunctivism about perceptual experience. However, the motivations for being a Naive Realist in the first place have received relatively little attention in the literature. In this paper, I will elaborate and defend the claim that Naïve Realism provides the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience. The theory of experience known as 'Naïve Realism' has generated a lot of discussion in recent years. It's a theory of veridical experience, that is, an experience in which a subject perceives things, and they appear to the subject to have certain properties because the subject perceives those properties. For example, I'm currently having a veridical visual experience of the banana on my desk: I see it, and it looks to me to be yellow and crescent--‐shaped because I perceive the banana's yellowness and crescent--‐shapedness. Contrast an illusory experience in which I see a banana that looks yellow to me even though it's really green: in this case, the reason why the banana looks yellow to me isn't that I see its yellowness (it doesn't have any yellowness for me to see). Naïve Realism is the view that veridical experience fundamentally consists in the subject perceiving things in her environment and some of their properties. For example, according to the Naïve Realist, my veridical experience of the banana fundamentally consists in my perceiving it, and certain of its properties (its yellowness and its crescent--‐shapedness). Of course, practically everyone agrees that the subject of a veridical experience perceives things in her environment and some of their properties. But not everyone agrees that veridical experience fundamentally consists in such a state of affairs-in other words, not everyone agrees that this state of affairs constitutes the metaphysical structure of veridical experience. This talk of fundamentality and metaphysical structure is simply a way of gesturing at the explanatory tasks of a philosophical theory of perceptual experience. The explananda that have loomed the largest are the phenomenal character of experience, the epistemological role of experience, and the role experience plays in facilitating action. For example, my current perceptual experience contributes something to 'what it's like' for me right now; and in virtue of having it, I'm disposed to believe that there's a banana before me, and to move my arm in a certain direction if I fancy eating a banana. What my experience fundamentally consists in (i.e. its metaphysical structure) is that which provides the ultimate personal--‐level psychological explanation of these phenomenal, epistemological, and behavioural facts. Of course, there are further subpersonal psychological facts (e.g. the perceptual processing in the brain that takes place between stimulation of the sensory organs and experience), and 1 Department of Philosophy, School of Humanities, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds, LS2 9JT. email: [email protected]. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 2 further non--‐psychological facts (e.g. the biological and chemical facts that underlie such processing) that are explanatorily relevant, but identifying these isn't within the philosopher's remit. According to Naïve Realism, the ultimate personal--‐level psychological explanation of the phenomenal, epistemological and behavioural features of a veridical experience is the fact that the subject perceives things in her environment (e.g. a banana) and some of their properties (e.g. its yellowness and its crescent--‐shapedness). Contrast the account given by Naïve Realism's main rival, Intentionalism. Intentionalism comes in many varieties, but the common thread running through all of them is the claim that all experiences (including veridical ones) fundamentally consist in the subject representing her environment as being a certain way. For example, according to an Intentionalist, the veridical experience I'm having right now fundamentally consists in my visually representing that (say) there's a yellow, crescent shaped thing before me. It's not that Intentionalists deny that the subject of a veridical experience perceives things in her environment-all they deny is that her experience fundamentally consists in this fact. That is, they deny that this fact is the ultimate, personal--‐level psychological explanation of the phenomena under investigation.2 Most of the discussion about Naïve Realism has focused on a consequence of the view: disjunctivism about perceptual experience. Disjunctivism is roughly the view that veridical experiences and at least total hallucinations are fundamentally different.3 Total hallucinations are experiences in which the subject doesn't perceive anything in her environment at all-for example, an experience had by a brain in a vat. Naïve Realism arguably entails disjunctivism: since total hallucinations don't involve the subject perceiving anything in her environment, they can't fundamentally consist in perceiving things in her environment. Hence, they have a radically different metaphysical structure than that of veridical experiences.4 There has been a lot of resistance to disjunctivism about perceptual experience.5 But strangely, there hasn't been all that much discussion of why we should adopt the view that entails it. Of course, proponents of Naïve Realism have offered arguments for their view, but they haven't generated nearly as much discussion as disjunctivism has. 2 Similarly, Naïve Realists need not deny that veridical experience consists in the subject representing her environment as being a certain way (although many do)-the core of the view is the denial that veridical experience fundamentally consists in this fact. (See Logue forthcoming--‐b and forthcoming--‐c for elaboration of this idea.) 3 For extensive discussions of disjunctivism about perceptual experience (including how to formulate the view), see (e.g.) the papers collected in part I of Haddock and Macpherson 2008, the papers collected in Byrne and Logue 2008, and Logue forthcoming--‐a. 4 Although for a theory of hallucination that allows a Naïve Realist to eschew disjunctivism, see Johnston 2004. 5 See (e.g.) Johnston 2004, Siegel 2004 and 2008, Burge 2005, Hawthorne and Kovakovich 2006, Byrne and Logue 2008, Lowe 2008, Smith 2008, and Sturgeon 2008. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 3 The motivation for Naïve Realism that presumably gave the view its name is based on the idea that it is the common sense theory of veridical experience. But there are other, more sophisticated arguments: M.G.F Martin (2002) claims that only Naïve Realism can account for sensory imagination, John McDowell (on some interpretations) claims that a view along the lines of Naïve Realism affords a way out of scepticism about the external world (see McDowell 1982 and 2008) and John Campbell (2002) claims that only Naïve Realism can explain certain representational capacities we have. I don't find any of these arguments for Naïve Realism persuasive, but I don't have the space to criticise them here. Rather, the task of this paper is to develop and defend what I take to be a more promising case for Naïve Realism. Here is a broad outline of the case: Naïve Realism offers an account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience that constitutes a middle path between two undesirable extremes, and it does so in a way that accounts for a certain epistemological role of phenomenal character. In sections I and II, I will outline the extremes and explain why they are undesirable. In section III, I will explain how Naïve Realism can provide a middle path between them. Naïve Realism isn't the only theory of perceptual experience with this benefit, however, so more needs to be said in order to motivate Naïve Realism over all of its rivals. In section IV, I will outline an epistemological role played by phenomenal character, and explain why only Naïve Realism can account for it. I. Kantianism. We can situate on a spectrum views about the relationship between the phenomenal character of veridical experience, on the one hand, and the properties one perceives of the mind--‐independent objects one perceives, on the other. (For brevity's sake, I'll often refer to the latter as 'the properties one perceives' from here on out; the reader should assume that these properties are properties of mind--‐independent objects.) I'll call one extreme Kantianism. Kant is often interpreted as claiming that we can't have knowledge of things as they are 'in themselves'-the only knowledge we can have of things is knowledge of how they affect us (see e.g. Langton 1998). There is a view of phenomenal character in a broadly similar spirit, namely: the phenomenal character of a veridical experience can in principle vary independently of the properties one perceives in the course of having it, because the former is entirely determined by features of the subject which aren't determined by the latter. This view is Kantian in that it presupposes a gulf between the 'phenomenal world' and the noumenal realm that gives rise to it-if the phenomenal character of veridical experience can radically vary across possible worlds while we hold the properties perceived fixed, the looseness of the connection between them constitutes a gulf between phenomenal character and the 'noumenal' causes of experience.6 6 The label 'Kantianism' is somewhat inappropriate, since the view it refers to allows that you could come to know that something is yellow in itself ('noumenally speaking'). The fact that the phenomenal character of an experience of yellowness is merely contingently correlated with yellowness doesn't obviously entail that one can't know that something is yellow in itself (perhaps the phenomenal character is a contingently reliable indicator of yellowness). However, the view about phenomenal character is broadly similar in spirit to the view about knowledge, in that it posits a gulf between our subjective perspective on things and how they are in themselves. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 4 In order to clarify this rather abstract statement of Kantianism, let us consider an example of the view. One of the more popular examples of Kantianism is the 'mental paint' view (see e.g. Block 1996). 'Mental paint' is a metaphor for intrinsically non--‐representational qualia: features of experience that determine what it's like to have the experience, and represent certain properties, but could have represented properties other than the ones they actually do (or none at all).7 For example, when I have an experience of a yellow thing, my experience instantiates a quale that partially determines the phenomenal character of my experience-it's what's responsible for 'phenomenal yellowness'. This quale in fact represents yellowness, but if things had gone differently (e.g. if the course of evolutionary history had diverged so as to result in a different 'wiring' of human brains), this quale could have represented greenness instead. On this view, the phenomenal character of my experience is determined by something that isn't determined by the properties I perceive-namely, a quale connected to yellowness only by the contingent fact that it happens to represent yellowness.8 Full--‐fledged Kantianism isn't a popular view. This is because it's more plausible with respect to the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of some properties than others. For example, it is at least prima facie plausible with respect to colour properties, but not plausible with respect to shape properties. When it comes to the phenomenology of colour experience, it's hard to resist the conclusion that we're bringing a lot more to the table than the objects of experiences are. As Adam Pautz notes, 'the character of color experience is not well--‐correlated with the character of the reflectances of external objects' (2011, p. 405). For example, given that the phenomenology associated with veridical experiences of yellow things is normally caused by things with a wide variety of surface spectral reflectance (SSR) properties, it seems plausible that the sameness of phenomenology across such experiences is primarily due to the fact that our visual systems happen to respond to the disparate SSR properties in the same way. On the other hand, when it comes to the phenomenology of shape experience, it's hard to resist the conclusion that the shapes themselves are doing most of the work in determining phenomenal character. For the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of crescent--‐shapedness is well--‐correlated with certain features of external objects (for example, the phenomenal character associated with veridical experiences of crescent--‐shaped things is well--‐ correlated with a certain arrangement of things' parts). The upshot is that, while Kantianism is at least prima facie plausible with respect to the phenomenology of veridical experiences of some sorts of 7 Note that talk of representing properties (e.g. 'representing crescent--‐ shapedness') is just a shorthand way of to referring to states that have representational contents in which the property of crescent--‐shapedness is attributed to something. Hence, it would be more accurate to talk of representation of property instances; but for the sake of brevity I'll speak loosely. 8 This view can take the form of a restricted version of Kantianism. For example, one might hold that while the phenomenal character of colour experience is determined by mental paint, the phenomenal character of shape experience is determined by features of experience that necessarily represent particular shapes. (Thanks to Adam Pautz for pressing me to mention this qualification.) Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 5 properties (e.g. colour properties), it is implausible with respect to others (e.g. shape properties). Hence, Kantianism shouldn't be assumed by a theory of perceptual experience-it should be argued for on a case--‐by--‐case basis. We need to leave room for non--‐Kantian accounts of what it's like to perceive at least some properties. II. Berkeleyian realism. So much for the Kantian end of the spectrum. I'll call the other extreme Berkeleyian realism. As Bill Brewer notes (2011), Berkeley (along with other early moderns) held that what it's like to have an experience is entirely determined by the properties one perceives. According to Berkeley, the objects that instantiate these properties are mind--‐dependent 'ideas', and such things exhaust our ontological inventory-there are no mind--‐independent objects 'behind' them. The result is a theory of phenomenal character that has no place on the spectrum under discussion. Since there are no mind--‐independent objects, the distinction between veridical and non--‐veridical experiences breaks down. Hence, there is no such thing as the phenomenal character of veridical experience, or the properties perceived of the mind--‐independent objects one perceives; and a fortiori, there is no relationship between them. However, Brewer suggests that we can construct an analogous version of realism by replacing Berkeleyian mind--‐dependent objects with good old mind--‐independent ones. The Berkeleyian realist holds that phenomenal character of veridical experience is entirely determined by the properties one perceives of the mind--‐ independent objects one perceives. One example of Berkeleyian realism is a common interpretation of Naïve Realism. Naïve Realists sometimes suggest that phenomenal character is 'out in the world'. For example, John Campbell claims that ...the phenomenal character of your experiences, as you look around the room, is constituted by the actual layout of the room itself: which particular objects are there, their intrinsic properties, such as colour and shape, and how they are arranged in relation to one another and to you. (2002, p. 116)9 A natural way of interpreting this claim is that phenomenal character is a property of the objects perceived, rather than a property of experiences. If that were right, what it's like to have an experience would be entirely determined by the properties one perceives-for it would just be the properties one perceives.10 Another (more widely endorsed) example of Berkeleyian realism can be found in some versions of a view known as Strong Intentionalism. This is the view that the phenomenal character of an experience supervenes on its representational content. Provided that the representational content of 9 See also Johnston 2007 for claims in broadly the same spirit. 10 I can't see how this could be right, though. As I understand it, the very notion of phenomenal character is that of a property of a mental state-what it's like to have it, or its 'feel'. So any view on which phenomenal character is the property of something other than a mental state (e.g. a banana) is guilty of a category mistake. This isn't to say that something other than a mental state can't constitute phenomenal character-indeed, this is a crucial part of the view I will defend. My point here is simply that the properties one perceives can't be the whole story. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 6 experience isn't composed of Fregean modes of presentation (as opposed to being Russellian or coarse--‐grained possible worlds propositions), any two experiences that consist in representing (say) that there is a yellow, crescent--‐ shaped thing in front of one have exactly the same phenomenal character (assuming that this exhausts the content of the experiences, and that the thing is represented being in exactly the same subject--‐relative location, etc.).11 Note that the (non--‐Fregean) representational content of a veridical experience is entirely determined by the properties one perceives in the course of having it-for example, if I veridically perceive a yellow, crescent--‐shaped banana, then the content of my experience attributes yellowness and crescent--‐shapedness to something. Hence, according to a non--‐Fregean version of Strong Intentionalism, the properties one perceives determines phenomenal character by way of determining representational content. Since this is a view on which the phenomenal character of a veridical experience is ultimately determined by the properties one perceives, it is a version of Berkeleyian Realism. Berkeleyian realism entails that any two experiences that involve perceiving the same properties have the same phenomenal character-for example, if two experiences involve perceiving a banana's yellowness and crescent--‐shapedness from exactly the same location, then they are phenomenally the same. As is well--‐known from critical discussions of non--‐Fregean versions of Strong Intentionalism, there are a number of worries about this claim. In particular, there many types of alleged cases of phenomenal differences without representational differences (and, hence, in the case of veridical experience, without differences in the properties perceived)-for example, subjects who are 'spectrally inverted' with respect to each other, phenomenal differences solely due to attentional differences, and phenomenal differences solely due to physical differences (perhaps in the subjects' sense organs, or in the neural activity underlying their experiences). I won't rehearse all the types of cases here; instead, I'll discuss two cases of the last sort with the modest aim of showing that Berkeleyian Realism requires some bullet--‐biting that is best avoided. On the face of it, it's plausible that features of the sense organs the subject uses to perceive make a difference to phenomenal character. For example, suppose that there are aliens whose visual systems are sensitive to the same properties that human visual systems are sensitive to (the same colours, shapes, and so forth). Nevertheless, there is a major difference between their visual 11 On the other hand, if the Strong Intentionalist's representational contents are composed of Fregean modes of presentation, then the result is a version of Kantianism. For on this view, it is possible for the modes of presentation of a property to vary while holding the property perceived fixed-for example, two veridical experiences of yellowness could have representational contents involving different modes of presentation of yellowness. It is possible for the experiences to differ phenomenally, since the experiences have different Fregean contents. That would be a case in which the property perceived is the same (yellowness), and the phenomenal character is different-and hence a case in which phenomenal character isn't determined by the properties perceived. (Thanks to Adam Pautz for pressing me to mention this version of Strong Intentionalism.) Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 7 systems and ours: they have compound eyes, similar to those of many earthbound insects. It seems plausible that (1) a human and an alien could have an experience in which they veridically perceive all and only the same properties, and yet (2) the phenomenal character of their experiences would be different (due to the fact that they are generated by quite different visual organs). For example, it could be the case that the many lenses that constitute the alien's eyes receive input from exactly the same region of space that the human's eyes do, but there are small gaps throughout the alien's visual field caused by the gaps between his lenses. If such a situation could obtain, then the properties one veridically perceives don't completely determine the phenomenal character of one's experience-features of one's sensory apparatus can play a role too. The Berkeleyian realist might reply by denying (1)-by insisting that a radical difference in the structure of two kinds of sensory organ must make for a difference in the properties the organs are sensitive to. Then, any phenomenal difference between the human and alien experiences could be attributed to a difference in properties perceived. However, this seems like a shot in the dark that would be difficult to validate. There seems to be no contradiction in the idea of a human eye and a compound eye being sensitive to exactly the same properties. The Berkeleyian realist must explain why this situation is physically impossible; it is not sufficient to merely assert that it must be.12 The other alternative for the Berkeleyian realist is to deny (2), and insist that any two experiences that involve veridically perceiving all and only the same properties have the same phenomenal character-even if the sensory organs that generate the experiences are radically different. But this seems implausible. Why should we think that looking at the world through such different eyes would leave no trace at all in visual phenomenal character? Perceptual systems give their subjects information about their surroundings, but nothing entitles us to assume that veridically perceiving the exactly same properties will result in experiences with exactly the same phenomenal 12 Some have objected that the situation I've described begs the question against Berkeleyian realism, since the view entails that such situations aren't possible. But this worry is based on a misunderstanding of the dialectic. One cannot respond to a putative counterexample simply by asserting that one's view entails that the situation described in the counterexample cannot obtain. A counterexample is an intuitively plausible case that conflicts with the view it's targeted at. So of course the view will entail that the situation described in the case cannot obtain. But the point one is making in giving a counterexample is that the case is intuitively plausible, and so the view must have gone wrong somewhere. Compare: some object to Strong Intentionalism on the grounds that it's incompatible with the possibility of spectrum inversion. It wouldn't do for the Strong Intentionalist to dismiss this objection by saying that it's question begging-a proper response would explain why spectrum inversion isn't possible even though it initially seems to be. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 8 character, regardless of what goes on in between.13 To put the point metaphorically: our experiences are windows on the world, but we're not entitled to assume that they are entirely transparent. What the window is made of could easily affect how the things we see through it look.14 So again, the Berkeleyian realist's defensive assertion stands in need of argument. The worry just described presents a case in which experiences of two different subjects that involve veridically perceiving the same properties differ phenomenally. But we can construct a less exotic intrasubjective version of worry, based on the fact that some properties can be perceived in more than one sense modality. On the face of it, it's plausible that which sense modality a subject is perceiving in makes a difference to phenomenal character. For example, introspection suggests that what it's like to see crescent--‐shapedness is different from what it's like to feel it. If that's right, then we have a (more realistic) case in which two experiences involve perception of the same property, but the resultant phenomenology is different. If there are such cases, then the properties one perceives don't entirely determine the phenomenal character of one's experience-which modality one is perceiving them in plays a role too.15 Of course, the deliverances of introspection shouldn't be regarded as the final word on this matter. We aren't able to easily tease apart different aspects of phenomenology when we introspect, and perhaps the judgment that there's a phenomenal difference is just an artifact of introspection being too blunt an instrument for the job we're trying to use it to do. For example, we might be misled by the fact that visual shape phenomenology is usually accompanied by colour phenomenology, while tactile shape phenomenology never is (except perhaps in some cases of synesthesia). So it could be that the phenomenal difference between visual and tactile experiences of crescent--‐shapedness is solely due to the difference in colour phenomenology, rather than a difference in shape phenomenology. 13 One might insist that if two experiences of F--‐ness differ phenomenally, at least one must be non--‐veridical. But this would be the case only if perceiving an instance of F--‐ness necessitates a certain sort of phenomenal character, which is precisely what's up for debate. 14 This claim is compatible with the thought that people express by saying that experience is transparent-which is roughly the thought that, in having experiences, we are perceptually aware only of the objects of experience (and their features), and never of experiences themselves (or their features). The claim that phenomenal character is partially determined by features of the subject doesn't entail that one is perceptually aware of those features, or indeed of any features of the experience itself. 15 It should be noted that this counterexample applies only to a version of Berkeleyian realism that is unrestricted with respect to sense modalities-of course, one could hold a version of Berkeleyian realism that is restricted to, say, vision. Counterexamples appealing to phenomenal differences across modalities don't undermine the restricted claim that the phenomenal character of veridical visual experience is entirely determined by the properties the subject sees. For such a view could accommodate the phenomenal difference by claiming that something other than the properties one feels contributes to determining the phenomenal character of veridical tactile experience. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 9 With that said, it still seems that the claim that there is a difference between visual and tactile phenomenology associated with perception of the same property has default status. For to assume that they are the same would be to assume that the means we use to perceive the world leave no phenomenological trace whatsoever. And, as I suggested above in discussion of the more exotic counterexample, that's a claim in need of argument. Moreover, empirical research on Molyneux's problem provides some support for the claim that the visual and tactile phenomenology associated with perception of the same property differ. Molyneux's question was basically this: would a person blind from birth recognise a shape if his sight were restored, solely on the basis of his previous tactile experience of it?16 An affirmative answer to this question suggests that the visual and tactile phenomenology associated with perception of a given shape property is the same-presumably, that's how the subject would visually recognise a shape without ever having seen it before. A negative answer suggests that the phenomenology differs across the two modalities. And there is some support for a negative answer (Held et. al. 2011). I'm not suggesting that these counterexamples to Berkeleyian realism constitute knock--‐down objections to it. All I want to insist upon is that these cases of a difference in phenomenal character without a difference in properties perceived are prima facie plausible, and that denying their possibility is a bullet to bite. Of course, there are things that the Berkeleyian realist can do to make this bullet more palatable, which I don't have the space to discuss in detail.17 My point is simply that a more palatable bullet is still a bullet, and it would be best to avoid biting it at all. In summary, we have two extremes on a spectrum of views about the relationship between the phenomenal character of a veridical experience, on the one hand, and the properties one perceives in the course of having it, on the other: Kantianism, which holds the latter plays no role in determining the former, and Berkeleyian Realism, which holds that the latter entirely determines the former. I have argued that both extremes on this spectrum are problematic. Kantianism isn't plausible in full generality, and Berkeleyian realism cannot accommodate the natural idea that the means we use to perceive the world play some role in determining what it's like to perceive it. An account of the 16 Actually, Molyneux's question was slightly more complicated, as it concerned not just the ability to recognise shapes but also the ability to distinguish them from each other. 17 For example, one might reply by denying that there's any link at all between the conceivability of a scenario and its possibility. However, even if conceivability doesn't entail possibility, as long as the former provides some evidence of the latter, those who want to deny that a given scenario is possible in spite of its conceivability have the burden of explaining why it is conceivable but not possible. Moreover, Pautz has constructed cases of phenomenal differences without differences in the properties perceived that rely on empirical considerations, rather than on a link between conceivability and possibility (2011, pp. 404--‐7). So I refer readers who are sceptical of the existence of such a link to Pautz's cases. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 10 phenomenal character of veridical experience should offer us a middle path between these two extremes. III. A middle path. Naïve Realism can be developed in a way that provides such a middle path. Although it is often interpreted as a version of Berkeleyian realism, it need not be. The Naïve Realist holds that veridical experience, including its phenomenal character, fundamentally consists in the subject perceiving things in her environment and some of their properties. The Berkeleyian Naïve Realist holds that the properties the subject perceives entirely determine the phenomenal character of her experience. But it's also open to the Naïve Realist to claim that phenomenal character is determined by the obtaining of the perceptual relation more broadly. That is, Naïve Realism can appeal to both relata in accounting for the phenomenal character of veridical experience, as well as to facts about the relation itself. For example, the Naïve Realist can say that the phenomenal character of my veridical experience of the banana on my desk is determined not just by its yellowness and crescent--‐shapedness, but also by the fact that I see these properties (as opposed to perceiving them in some other modality), and by certain facts about my visual system (e.g. that I'm seeing these properties through a simple eye rather than a compound one). Contrast the accounts of phenomenal character offered by versions of Kantianism and Berkeleyian realism-the mental paint view and non--‐Fregean Strong Intentionalism, respectively. On an unrestricted version of the mental paint view, the phenomenal character of a veridical experience is entirely determined by the intrinsically non--‐representational qualia the subject instantiates. So ultimately, only facts about the subject determine phenomenal character. And on non--‐Fregean Strong Intentionalism, the phenomenal character of a veridical experience is entirely determined by how the subject represents things in her environment as being, which is in turn entirely determined by which of their properties she perceives. So ultimately, only properties of the objects of experience determine phenomenal character. But for the reasons given in the discussion of the two extremes, our theory of perceptual experience should leave room for the possibility that both features of the subject and features of the objects perceived play a role in determining phenomenal character. There may be properties such that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of them is entirely down to the subject (or, less plausibly, entirely down to the object). But this should be argued for on a property--‐by--‐ property basis, rather than entailed by our theory of perceptual experience. As I mentioned above, Naïve Realism is sometimes espoused in a Berkeleyian Realist form. However, there is a version of the view that is less Berkeleyian realist than Campbell's, but more Berkeleyian realist than the one just described. William Fish's version of Naïve Realism allows that certain features of the subject can contribute to determining phenomenal character-for example, what she's attending to, and the acuity of her perceptual system (2009, p. 75). As I will argue, though, Fish's view is too close to Berkeleyian realism for comfort. Fish argues that adopting Naïve Realism allows us to close an explanatory gap between phenomenal consciousness and the underlying physical and functional facts. The gap is this: being in a certain kind of neurological state, or being in a state with a certain functional role, doesn't explain why the subject of the state enjoys one kind of phenomenal character rather than another. For Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 example, suppose my veridical experience of the yellow banana on my desk consists in a certain kind of neurological state that plays a certain functional role. This view leaves us with a mystery: why is it like this to be in the physical/functional state, rather than what it is like for me to be in the physical/functional state that grounds veridical experiences of green things? For all that's been said, 'phenomenal greenness' could have been associated with the physical/functional state, rather than 'phenomenal yellowness'. So we have no explanation of why my state has the particular kind of phenomenal character it does. Fish thinks that endorsing Naïve Realism allows us to dissolve this problem: The difference in what it is like to see a ripe McIntosh apple and what it is like to see a ripe cucumber is not explained by the differences in the underlying processing-instead, it is explained by the different color properties that the two objects possess. When we see a ripe McIntosh apple, the phenomenal character of our experience is its property of acquainting us with the fact of the object's being red, when we see a ripe cucumber, it is the experience's property of acquainting us with the fact of the object's being green. (2009, pp. 75--‐6) The basic idea is that the colour phenomenology associated with a physical/functional state (e.g. the kind that underlies a veridical experience of a yellow banana) is largely determined by the colour properties one perceives (e.g. yellowness). So a veridical experience of a yellow thing couldn't be associated with 'phenomenal greenness', for example, because a veridical experience is associated with phenomenal greenness only if it involves perceiving an instance of greenness. Note that this strategy for closing the explanatory gap results in a view that is rather close to Berkeleyian Realism: all veridical experiences of yellow things (that are the same determinate shade) have basically the same colour phenomenology, because the phenomenal character of a veridical experience is largely determined by the properties one perceives. Although features of the subject can play some role in determining phenomenal character, their influence is limited-Kantianism about the phenomenology of veridical colour experience is ruled out, for example. Although I find this motivation for Naïve Realism tempting (and indeed set out to defend it in an earlier draft of this paper), ultimately I think that a Naïve Realist theory of phenomenal character need not and should not be developed in a way that entails that Kantianism is false. For the reasons presented earlier, Kantianism about veridical colour experience is prima facie plausible. So if we can leave room for this possibility in our general theory of the phenomenal character of veridical experience, we should. And the version of Naïve Realism I have proposed does just that, in allowing for the possibility that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of some sorts of properties are largely determined by features of the subject. Of course, given an argument against Kantianism about colour experience, we might well end up with Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 12 something along the lines of Fish's view. But my point is that we shouldn't endorse such a view until we can give such an argument.18 In short, the version of Naïve Realism I'm defending is preferable to Fish's version. We want a middle path between Kantianism and Berkeleyian realism, but not one that builds in a commitment that's close to either extreme without an argument for doing so. However, my preferred version of Naïve Realism isn't the only theory that can claim this advantage. For example, a weaker version of Intentionalism could do just as well.19 An Intentionalist could say that the phenomenal character of a veridical experience is determined not just by its content, but also by the attitude the subject bears to that content (e.g. the 'impure representationalism' defended in Chalmers 2004). For example, the phenomenal character of my veridical experience of a yellow, crescent--‐shaped banana could be determined not just by its content (say, that there is a yellow, crescent--‐shaped banana before me), but also by the fact that I bear the attitude of visually representing to that content. And the difference between the phenomenal character of human and alien visual experiences with the same content can be attributed to species--‐specific visual attitudes ('humanly' visually representing vs. 'alienly' visually representing). Furthermore, since the 18 One might find it strange that two different sorts of properties can be perceived by subjects, when in one case the phenomenal character of veridical experience is primarily determined by features of the subject, while in the other it's primarily determined by features of the object of experience. Is it really plausible that subjects bear one and the same relation-that of perceiving-to instances of each sort of property? (Thanks to Sam Coleman for raising this question.) I suspect that this reaction ultimately boils down to an assumption about the nature of the perceptual relation-roughly, that one perceives an instance of F--‐ness only if F--‐ness plays a substantial role in determining the phenomenal character of one's experience of it. If this assumption is correct, then phenomenal aspects of experiences caused but not determined by instances of F--‐ ness don't count as perceptions of instances of F--‐ness (and so the situation just described can't obtain). However, I am sceptical about this assumption. The rejection of this assumption is built into Kantianism. One might not accept Kantianism, but insofar as it is intelligible, that counts as some evidence that the assumption about the perceptual relation is false. 19 There is a sense in which a restricted version of the mental paint view and Fregean Strong Intentionalism afford a middle path, too-they allow that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of some sorts of properties are determined by features of the subject (by intrinsically non--‐repesentational qualia and varying modes of presentation of properties across subjects, respectively) whereas the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of other sorts of properties are determined by features of the objects of experience (by intrinsically representational qualia and invariant modes of presentation, respectively). However, it seems that both views are committed to the claim that, for any given sort of property, the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of its instances is either entirely determined by features of the subject or entirely determined by features of the objects. Arguably, we shouldn't make this commitment if we don't have to-we should allow for the possibility that phenomenal character is partially determined by both. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 13 properties one perceives can play some role in determining the phenomenal character of veridical experience via determining its content, Kantianism isn't entailed by such a view (although they are compatible, which is all to the good if considerations concerning certain sorts of properties push us in that direction). In short, there is an Intentionalist alternative to Naïve Realism that affords a middle path between Kantianism and Berkeleyian realism, without building in an unwarranted bias towards either extreme. So although we have ruled out many of Naïve Realism's rivals (e.g. non--‐Fregean Strong Intentionalism), we don't yet have a watertight motivation for the view. IV. The epistemological role of phenomenal character. The case for Naïve Realism I will present claims that the phenomenal character of veridical experience can play a certain epistemological role. Before I elaborate this claim, I should note a crucial qualification to it: it is restricted to the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of only some kinds of properties. It will be helpful to frame this qualification in terms of a distinction related to the previous discussion, namely, a distinction between Kantian and Berkeleyian properties. Kantian properties are properties such that the phenomenal characters of veridical experiences of them are mostly determined by features of the subject. By contrast, a Berkeleyian property is one such that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of it is mostly determined by the fact that the subject perceives an instance of that property (that is, features of the subject play a relatively minimal role in determining phenomenal character). The epistemological role that I'm about to outline is played only by the phenomenal characters of veridical experiences of Berkeleyian properties. The reason for this qualification will become clear in due course. We can work our way towards an understanding of the epistemological role I have in mind by considering the following question: what do we get out of having veridical experiences? One might suggest that veridical experiences (unlike, say, illusions and hallucinations) put us in a position to know certain things our environments. This is an obvious truth-at least, assuming that arguments for scepticism about the external world can be dealt with (which I will be assuming here). But I don't think that this exhausts the epistemological power of veridical experience. To see this, suppose that you had a choice between having veridical experiences of your environment, and having a trustworthy, omniscient creature tell you about what's going on in it. I, for one, would prefer to have the veridical experiences. That's not because veridical experiences are the only route to knowledge about my environment-on the face of it, trustworthy and reliable testimony could do just as well. And arguably, the preference isn't just due to the fact that testimony happens to be a slower means of conveying information than veridical experience is-we could revise the case by making the omniscient creature talk really fast and idealising the subject so that she could understand. I would still prefer to have the veridical experience. So it seems that veridical experience gives us something that trustworthy, reliable, and quickly delivered testimony doesn't. I propose that the 'something more' is something along the lines of the following: the phenomenal character of veridical experience gives its subject insight into what things in one's environment are like independently of one's experiences of them. For example, in virtue of having a veridical experience of the yellow, crescent--‐shaped banana on my desk, Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 14 I'm in a position to obtain at least partial knowledge of what the banana is like independently of my experience of it. Moreover, I'm in a position to obtain at least partial knowledge of what other things that have the same properties are like independently of experience-for example, knowledge of what crescent--‐ shaped things are like. It will be helpful to explicitly distinguish the following two claims: (1) Veridical experience puts its subject in a position to know that certain properties are instantiated by things in her environment (e.g. that there is a yellow, crescent--‐shaped banana before her). (2) The phenomenal character of veridical experience puts its subject in a position to know what the things that instantiate those properties are like independently of experience. What's at issue in (1) is knowledge that F--‐ness is instantiated by something in one's environment. What's at issue in (2) is something different, and difficult to express. It's not knowledge of the bare fact that something in one's environment is F. It's a deeper insight into the (actual and possible) objects of one's experience-something one couldn't get by testimony alone. An idea in the vicinity of (2) is the denial of what Mark Johnston calls 'the Wallpaper View', which holds that phenomenal character doesn't play any essential epistemic role (Johnston 2006, pp. 260--‐5). One way of cashing out the sense in which sensory awareness is 'better than mere knowledge' (as claimed in his paper's title) is that it not only puts one in a position to know that there is something F before one, it also puts one in a position to know what F things are like independently of experience.20 The sort of knowledge at issue in (2) is related to David Chalmers' notion of an Edenic property. Chalmers envisions an Eden in which properties are 'revealed to us in their true intrinsic glory' (2006, p. 49). In Eden, properties don't have 'hidden' intrinsic natures; everything there is to know about the intrinsic nature of a property is revealed in subjects' experiences of it. One way of getting at the idea behind (2) is that we haven't fallen as far from Eden as Chalmers suggests. In particular, the thought is that at least some of the properties we perceive are close approximations of Edenic properties. I'm not suggesting that there actually are any properties such that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of its instances puts the subject in a position to know every non--‐relational fact about it. What I am suggesting is that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of any Berkeleyian property reveals quite a bit about its intrinsic nature (although not everything). 20 I should note that it isn't clear that Johnston would accept this way of fleshing out the idea expressed by his paper's title, as he doesn't explicitly distinguish between perceptual knowledge that there is something F before one, and perceptual knowledge of what F things are like independently of experience. I suspect he thinks that (2) is required for (1) (see Johnston 2006, pp. 284--‐9), but I will remain neutral on the connection between these claims here. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 15 The epistemological role at issue requires further clarification, but we are now in a position to see why the phenomenal characters of veridical experiences of Kantian properties don't play this role. Recall that the connection between a Kantian property and the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of it is contingent-a veridical experience of a Kantian property could have had a very different phenomenal character than it actually does. If the connection between the phenomenal character and the property is contingent, then the phenomenal character is a mere sign of the instantiation of that property. There is no deep connection between what it is like to perceive instances of that property and what things with that property are like independently of experience. Hence, the phenomenal character actually associated with veridical experiences of a Kantian property cannot put one in a position to know what things with that property are like independently of experience. Let us return to the task of clarifying the epistemological role under discussion. In particular, we have yet to address the following crucial question: given that knowledge of what F things are like independently of experience is propositional knowledge, what exactly is its propositional content? I'm afraid I'm not entirely sure how to answer this question. But I will briefly speculate nonetheless. If this knowledge about F things is uniquely afforded by the phenomenal character of veridical experience, we might expect that the content of the knowledge involves some sort of close connection between F things, one the one hand, and the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of F--‐ness, on the other. We can capture this close connection if we hold that the content of the knowledge can be expressed only by means of a demonstrative: that instances of F--‐ness are like this (demonstrating the phenomenal character of one's experience). So, for example, the phenomenal character of my veridical experience of this instance of crescent--‐shapedness puts me in a position to know that crescent--‐shaped things are like this (demonstrating the 'phenomenal crescent--‐shapedness' of my experience). This proposal implies that the phenomenal character of experience can literally resemble properties of the objects of experience-for example, that the property of 'phenomenal crescent--‐shapedness' (instantiated by my veridical experience) is similar to the property of crescent--‐shapedness (instantiated by the banana). One might think that this claim is either uninterestingly true on one interpretation, or obviously false on another. There is a sense in which this claim is uninterestingly true: there are countless uninteresting respects in which these properties resemble each other (they are both properties, they are both instantiated by things, they are both instantiated in worlds in which 2 + 2 = 4, etc.). So the claim should be interpreted such that the similarity is substantive (in some sense). One way for the similarity to be substantive would be for phenomenal F--‐ ness to be identical to F--‐ness. But to go this far would be to exchange uninteresting truth for obvious falsity-phenomenal F--‐ness cannot be identical to F--‐ness, as the latter can be instantiated in the absence of perceivers whereas the former cannot. However, we need not go quite so far. We could say that phenomenal F--‐ness involves not only F--‐ness, but something else in addition (e.g. the phenomenal contribution made by the subject's perspective on her environment, how she distributes her attention over it, and so forth). Of course, even if phenomenal F--‐ness has F--‐ness as a constituent in some sense, it doesn't Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 16 follow that they are 'substantively' similar. Just because a part instantiates a certain property, it doesn't follow that the whole instantiates a property that is substantively similar to it. But the point here is simply that if phenomenal F--‐ness has F--‐ness as a constituent in some sense, then the claim that they are substantively similar is at least intelligible-just as we can make sense of a case in which a whole does in fact have a property that is substantively similar to a property of one of its parts. And that's all we need to make sense of the proposed content of the special sort of knowledge at issue. So, in summary, the proposal is that knowledge of what F things are like independently of experience is knowledge that F--‐things are like this (demonstrating the phenomenal character of one's veridical experience of F--‐ ness)-regardless of who is experiencing them, or indeed whether they are experienced by anyone at all. I realise that the description of the sort of knowledge I have in mind isn't maximally clear, but I don't know how to clarify it further at present. Let us press on in the hope that it's on to something. Before appealing to this epistemological role of phenomenal character in an argument for Naïve Realism, we should pause to briefly address one further worry. Even if we can fully elucidate what it means to say that the phenomenal character of veridical experience puts one in a position to know something of what things are like independently of experience, one might wonder: what reason do we have for thinking that this claim is true? That is, why should we think that the phenomenal character of veridical experience ever puts us in this position? My response is to turn the tables-why shouldn't we think this? As I noted earlier, there are reasons to be sceptical about whether the phenomenal character actually associated with veridical colour experience reveals much if anything about what coloured things are like independently of our experiences of them. However, in the absence of an argument for the general conclusion that the phenomenal character of veridical experience of any sort of property cannot put one in a position to know anything about what things are like independently of experience, we should be entitled to assume that this general claim is false. That is, absent an argument to the contrary, I see no reason why we can't assume by default that the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of at least some sorts of properties can in principle afford at least partial knowledge of what things are like independently of experience.21 Now that I've outlined the epistemological role played by the phenomenal character of veridical experiences of Berkeleyian properties, let us put it to work in an argument for Naïve Realism. According to any of Naïve Realism's rivals, the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness is distinct from the instance of F--‐ness perceived. All of Naïve Realism's rivals hold the orthodox view that the property instances one perceives cause but do not constitute the veridical experience and its phenomenal character. For example, 21 That said, there are arguments out there that could be construed as arguments to the contrary- I have in mind arguments for 'Kantian humility' (see e.g. Langton 1998). I suspect that such arguments presuppose that a view along the lines of Naïve Realism is false, and hence aren't admissible in this dialectical context. Unfortunately, I do not have the space here to discuss such arguments or vindicate my suspicion about them. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 17 Intentionalism holds that a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness is a representational state of the subject (presumably realised by neural goings--‐on in her head) that is caused by an instance of F--‐ness affecting her sense organs in the appropriate way. As mentioned above, there is much debate amongst Intentionalists concerning how the phenomenal character of the experience is related to this representational state, but they agree that the former is either identical to or determined by some at least aspects of the latter. For our purposes, all that matters is that on any way of making this claim more precise, the phenomenal character of the experience will turn out to be entirely distinct from the instance of F--‐ness-since the aspects of the representational state that are either identical to it or determine it are entirely distinct from the instance of F--‐ness perceived.22 By contrast, Naïve Realism can be elaborated so that it entails that the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness is not entirely distinct from that instance of F--‐ness. For all I've said so far, Naïve Realism claims only that the phenomenal character of veridical experience is determined by the following state of affairs: the subject perceiving objects in her environment and some of their properties. This is compatible with the claim that the phenomenal character of veridical experience is entirely distinct from this state of affairs-it could be something 'over and above' the state of affairs (albeit fixed by it). However, there is no barrier to strengthening the Naïve Realist account of phenomenal character as follows: the phenomenal character associated with a veridical experience of F--‐ness of is identical to the subject perceiving that instance of F--‐ness (at least when F--‐ness is a Berkeleyian property-for ease of exposition, I'll omit this qualification in what follows). On this elaboration of Naïve Realism, if one has a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness, that instance of F--‐ness is a constituent of the phenomenal character of that experience. In short, it seems that Naïve Realism is the only view that can hold that the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ ness has that instance of F--‐ness as a constituent. The next step in the argument for Naïve Realism is intended to show that that this claim is crucial for accounting for the epistemological role of phenomenal character outlined above. The next premise of the argument is as follows: if the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness is entirely distinct from the instance of F--‐ness perceived, then that phenomenal character cannot put the subject in a position to know what F things are like independently of 22 Note that a Russellian version of Intentionalism which holds that F--‐ness is a constituent of the representational content of an experience is not a view on which the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of F--‐ness has an instance of F--‐ness as a constituent. Even if the proposition has an instance of F--‐ ness as a constituent (as opposed to the universal F--‐ness), the representational content of an experience is entirely distinct from the experience itself-it is that which is perceptually represented by the subject. For example, the content of my current veridical experience is the proposition that this banana is yellow. In having this experience, I represent this proposition, but it is not part of my experience. My representational state is entirely distinct from what I represent. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 18 experience. This premise is inspired by an idea of Mark Johnston's (although I'm not sure whether he would endorse the way I will develop it). The idea is this: If sensory awareness [and thus phenomenal character] were representational, we would inevitably face the sceptical question of how we could know that the human style of representation is not entirely idiosyncratic relative to the intrinsic natures of things. (Johnston 2006, pp. 284--‐5, footnote omitted) As I interpret this passage, the idea that phenomenal character is grounded in representational states that are 'idiosyncratic relative to the intrinsic natures of [F] things' is basically the idea that the phenomenal character is radically dissimilar to instances of F--‐ness. (By 'radically dissimilar', I mean sharing no non--‐ substantive properties, in the sense discussed above.) Recall that being in a position to know what F things are like independently of experience amounts to being in a position to know that F things are substantively similar to this (demonstrating phenomenal F--‐ness). Hence, in order for phenomenal F--‐ness to put a subject in a position to know what F things are like independently of experience, we have to be able to rule out the possibility that they are radically dissimilar. I take it that Johnston's worry is that accounts of phenomenal character in terms of representation don't have the resources to rule out this possibility-and hence, they don't have the resources to account for phenomenal F--‐ness putting one in a position to know what F things are like independently of experience. But I think the point isn't specific to representational accounts of phenomenal character. Rather, it applies to any account according to which phenomenal F--‐ness is entirely distinct from instances of F--‐ness. To see why there's a worry here, let us begin with the following question: how might we rule out the possibility that phenomenal F--‐ness and instances of F--‐ ness are radically dissimilar? The fact that phenomenally F experiences enable us to track and interact successfully with F things is of no help-as long as phenomenal F--‐ness is more--‐or--‐less isomorphic to instances of F--‐ness, we'd be able to get along just fine. But since such isomorphism is compatible with phenomenal F--‐ness being radically dissimilar from instances of F--‐ness, the mere fact that our experiences enable us to get around just fine doesn't allow us to rule out this possibility. Moreover, the prospects for ruling out the possibility at issue seem rather dim, given that our only mode of access to the qualitative nature of instances of F--‐ness is through having veridical experiences that are phenomenally F. Since we cannot 'get outside' of the phenomenal character of our experiences to compare it with the properties we perceive, we have no way of checking whether they are substantively similar or radically different from each other. However, rejecting the claim that phenomenal F--‐ness is entirely distinct from instances of F--‐ness can give us some traction. Rejecting this claim leads to the conclusion that there isn't much to an instance of phenomenal F--‐ness beyond the instance of F--‐ness that constitutes it, as long as F--‐ness is a Berkeleyian property. That is, if the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of F--‐ness has an instance of F--‐ness as a constituent, and if the other constituents of the phenomenal character are making a minimal contribution to the phenomenal character as a whole (i.e. F--‐ness is a Berkeleyian property), then phenomenal F--‐ ness is just 'F--‐ness slightly modified', so to speak. As I argued above, certain Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 19 features of the subject will make a contribution to the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of even a Berkeleyian property (e.g. perspectival and attentional facts). But plausibly, these features wouldn't be sufficient to render the instance of phenomenal F--‐ness radically dissimilar from the instance of F--‐ ness. Hence, provided that F--‐ness is a Berkeleyian property, if we reject the claim that phenomenal F--‐ness is entirely distinct from instances of F--‐ness, we can rule out the possibility that the former is radically dissimilar from the latter. To summarise: if the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness (where F--‐ness is a Berkeleyian property) is entirely distinct from that instance of F--‐ness, then we can't rule out the possibility that the former is radically dissimilar from the latter. And if we can't rule out this possibility, we cannot account for the epistemological role of the phenomenal characters of veridical experiences of Berkeleyian properties (i.e. putting subjects in a position to know what things with those properties are like independently of experience). All of Naïve Realism's rivals hold that the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness is entirely distinct from that instance of F--‐ ness, and so they can't account for the epistemological role at issue. By contrast, Naïve Realism can hold that the phenomenal character of a veridical experience of an instance of F--‐ness has that instance of F--‐ness as a constituent, which allows us to rule out the possibility that the phenomenal character and the property are raidically dissimilar. Hence, it is the only view that can account for the epistemological role of 'Berkeleyian' phenomenal characters.23 V. Conclusion. I have argued that Naïve Realism affords the best account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience: one that carves a middle path between the extremes of Kantianism and Berkeleyian realism, and does so in a way that accounts for the epistemological role of phenomenal character. Of course, the Naïve Realist isn't home free. Although I've argued that Naïve Realism offers the most promising account of the phenomenal character of veridical experience, it remains to be seen whether it can offer a plausible account of the phenomenal character of non--‐veridical experiences (i.e. illusions and hallucinations). While I'm optimistic that it can (see Logue forthcoming--‐c), 23 There are two important lingering issues I don't have the space to discuss. First, how do we determine whether a given property is Berkeleyian or Kantian? Here's a very rough rule of thumb: if the phenomenal character associated with veridical experiences of F--‐ness corresponds to an underlying non--‐disjunctive physical uniformity amongst F things, then features of the subject play a minimal role in determining that phenomenal character (i.e. the property is Berkeleyian). Second, Naïve Realism is only required to account for the phenomenal characters of veridical experiences of Berkeleyian properties. So what should we say about the phenomenal characters of veridical experiences of Kantian properties? We have two options: we could look to one of Naïve Realism's rivals for an account (resulting in a hybrid account of perceptual experience), or we could give a modified Naïve Realist account (according to which some constituents of a phenomenal character-such as Kantian property instances-make no contribution to the 'whole'). Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 20 elaborating and defending my grounds for optimism will have to be left to another time. 24 References Block, N. 1996. Mental paint and mental latex. Philosophical Issues 7: 19--‐49. Brewer, B. 2011. Perception and its objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, T. 2005. Disjunctivism and perceptual psychology. Philosophical Topics 33: 1--‐78. Byrne, A., and H. Logue. 2008. Either/Or. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Campbell, J. 2002. Reference and Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, D. 2004. The representational character of experience. The Future for Philosophy, ed. B. Leiter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fish, W. 2009. Perception, Hallucination, and Illusion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haddock, A., and F. Macpherson. (eds.) 2008. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawthorne, J. P., and K. Kovakovich. 2006. Disjunctivism. Proceedings of The Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. 80: 145--‐83. Held, R., and Y. Ostrovsky, B. Degelder, T. Gandhi, S. Ganesh, U. Mathur, and P. Sinha. 2011. The newly sighted fail to match seen with felt. Nature Neuroscience 14: 551--‐3. Johnston, M. 2004. The obscure object of hallucination. Philosophical Studies 120: 113--‐83. ---. 2007. Objective mind and the objectivity of our minds. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75: 233--‐68. Langton, R. 1998. Kantian Humility. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Logue, H. forthcoming--‐a. Disjunctivism. Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, ed. M. Matthen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---. forthcoming--‐b. Experiential content and Naive Realism: a reconciliation. Does Perception Have Content?, ed. B. Brogaard. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---. forthcoming--‐c. Good news for the disjunctivist about (one of) the bad cases. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 24 In addition to the presentation to the Aristotelian Society, previous versions of this paper were presented at the Centre for Metaphysics and Mind at the University of Leeds, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Stirling, a meeting of the Mind Network at the University of Birmingham, and a conference on Perception, Experience, and Reasons at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Related material was presented at the University of Oxford and a conference on Phenomenality and Intentionality at the University of Crete, which led to revision of section IV. Many thanks to those in attendance for their helpful questions and comments. Thanks also to Mahrad Almotahari for illuminating discussions, and to Gerald Lang, Michael Sollberger, and especially Adam Pautz for comments on previous drafts of this paper. Penultimate draft of paper forthcoming in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 21 Lowe, E. J. 2008. Against disjunctivism. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, M. G. F. 2002. The transparency of experience. Mind and Language 17: 376--‐425. McDowell, J. 1982. Criteria, defeasibility, and knowledge. Proceedings of the British Academy 68: 455--‐79. ---. 2008. The disjunctive conception of experience as material for a transcendental argument. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pautz, A. 2011. Can disjunctivists explain our access to the external world? Philosophical Issues 21: 384--‐433. Siegel, S. 2004. Indiscriminability and the phenomenal. Philosophical Studies 120: 91--‐112. ---. 2008. The epistemic conception of hallucination. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, A. D. 2008. Disjunctivism and discriminability. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sturgeon, S. 2008. Disjunctivism about visual experience. Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, ed. A. Haddock and F. Macpherson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

'5' Physies and Magie Disenchanting Nature1 Gregor Schiemann Introduction A widespread view of the natural seien ces holds that their historieal development was accompanied by a constantly widening gap between them and magie. Originally closely bound up with magie, the seien ces are supposed to have distanced themselves from it in a long-drawn-out process, until they attained their present magic-free forrn. 2 1 would like, in this essay, to discuss same arguments in support ofthis plausible view. To this end, I shall begin with adefinition of magieal and seientifie eoneepts of nature adefinition appropriate to the considerable length of time from the beginnings of seien ce (which ean plausibly be plaeed in Greek antiquity) tothe present day. One ean define as 'magiea!' a eoneept of nature whieh asserts the possibility of gaining knowledge of secret natural forces, and the possibility of man's influencing same ofthem. These forces are 'secret' in several senses. Their pr€sumed effieaey springs from a hidden, meaningful nexus that eomprehends the whole of nature, and is often dependent upon the knowledge ofthis nexus. Also, one can know ofthese forces, and in some cases influence them, only in th e context of actions not accessible to ev€rybody.3 This definition by no means covers the whole speetrum of coneepts included in the idea of magie, but ean be put forward to gain an initial orientation to the relationship between many of the varieties of magie and the seienees.4 Natural scienee, in contrast to magie, denies the exist~ ence of secret forces. From the scienti-ne standpoint, a force is 'secret' only as lang as it remains unknown. Scientific statements about nature may not be founded on assumptions or practiees that are restricted to only a small eirele of the initiated. Seientifie knowledge should be testable under conditions that ean be repeated, and it claims unlimited inter-subjeetive validity. However, the last eentury's historiography of seienee has taught us that the application of sueh a systematic distinetion between magie and seienee ean be very problematic. The magieal and the seientifie understanding of nature influeneed one another so elosely that it seems questionable whether a terminological differentiation b~tween them ean be sustained. This is, for example, the ease with a good deal of physieal and ehemieal research in the late Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Thus alchemieal notions, for example, elassifiable as belonging to the sphere of magie, played an important role in the formation of modern seientifie theories in these subjeets.5 However, the historieally important areas of overlap between seienee and magie go only some way towards qualifyinq the thesis '54 Physics and Magie, Disenchanting Nature of a steadily widening gap between the two modes of understanding of nature. The links between magie and natural seienee in medieval and modern alehemy to stick with the example already mentioned involved only some aspeets of these two lines ofreseareh, and were al ready deaTly different from the very elose links that had subsisted between these two areas ofknowledge in aneient GTeeee. Besides, they were of short duration. To exemplify the gap whieh, over several epoehs, widened between the magical and the scientific understanding of nature, I would Jike to examine two con* cepts in natural science, both assumed by physics, in historicaJ sequence. My in* quiry thereby restriets itself to eoneepts fundamental to the formation of theory in a scientific discipline, and seJects only two themes illustrative of the separation ofthis science from magie. Physics is suitable for this purpose, because it has funetioned as a leading diseipline from the beginnings of natural seien ce to the present day, dealing with matter in its various conditions of state and motion and its reciprocations. The first coneept I seleet is Aristotle's eoneept of physis (<pum,). It was fundamental to the emergenee of physies, and set its mark on thought in this field right up tothe beginning ofthe modern period. By means ofthis eentral eoneept ofhis physies Aristotle distaneed himselffrom earlier magieal notions of nature, though he was unable to prevent his eoneept being invoked bythe magie both ofthe Middie Ages and ofthe Modern Period. The reason fOTthe eontinuing ambivalenee of the concept physis. towards magie derives, in my view, essentially from the ambiguity of the contTast thought to subsist between it and aTt, ie. teehne (TEXV~) (seetion 2). PhYSis and teehne aTe, in ATistotle, eontTasting teTms, and denote two mutually exdusive pTineiples and spheTes of Teality. They still eOTTespond elosely enough to pTesent-day modes of thought in everyday Iife to be translatable by the wOTds 'natuTe' and 'aTt:' (HoweveT, as they refeT to only two ofthe meanings eontained in the semantie complexes ofboth teTms, they should actually be ealled 'ATistotelian natuTe' and 'Aristotelian art:) To show the Tesult, in histoTY, of this opposition of phYSiS to teehne, I will show how, in the ease of alchemy, both its defendeTs and its crities availed themselves ofthis opposition (seetion 3). The distinctive characteristic of the second concept of nature is negative, consisting in the elimination of the Aristotelian distinction between physis and teehne. The criticism was direeted, though by no means exelusively, against aTguments which have re course to Aristotelian physics to support a magical view of natuTe. Champions of magie asserted that their teehne of magie peTfeeted physis fOT man's purposes. Against this, the champions of modern thought hold that all teehnieal opeTations are subject to the laws of natuTe, and ean theTefoTe only modify natuTe within set limits. I eonsider Galileo Galilei to be a tTail-bla2eT fOT this anti*magical position, as weH as a co-founder of experimental science with his meehanieal and astronomieal works (seetion 4). With Galileo's rejeetion of the distinction between physis and teehne my inGregor Schiemann quiry is essentially at an end. As a eondusion I will say something of the relationship ofmagicto eoneepts of natuTe typieal ofthe following peTiod, both in physies and otheT natuTal seien ces (seetion 5)* In as much as my investigation confines ltself to questions concerning the understanding of natuTe, lexelude fTom eonsideTation the contexts in whieh natural seien ces and magie were aetually pTaetised. TheTe aTe to date haTdly any analyses dealing with a eompaTable peTiod and foeusing on the praetieal modification of nature.1 However different practically oriented investigations may be in otheT Tespeets from those undeTtaken horn the peTspeetive of the histoTY of ideas, I believe the two kinds of inquiTY would come to Temarkably similaT conclusions as regaTds the development ofthe relationship between natural seienee and magie. For, for one thing, the present-day marginalisation ofmagic as a m~ans ~f investigating nature and its alm ost complete lnsignificance for natural SClence lS obvious and a fact without historieal preeedent. For another, the disenehanting of nature that has led to this situation is to a large extent undisputed. It ean be described by reference to various factors comprising conceptions and practices, three ofwhieh I wishto stress, _ The disenchanting of-nature feStlaS fTOm a historie pTOcess of rationalisation whieh affeets the aequisition and proeessing of knowledge of nature, aecumulates increasing social significance as 1t goes on, and assumes an understanding ofrationality, whieh is eoneeived more and more instrumentally. .It is also among the consequences of an increasing empiricisation ofthe ba* ses of natural seien ce, by whieh means the relevanee of a universally aeeepted fund of empirical statements continues to grow. _ Finally, it has been furtheTed by a progressive mathematisation of the knowledge of nature, which changes the empirical basis into quantified and measur* able data to render it ealculable and therefore predietable in its future development.8 Interpretations of the term 'nature' constitute, to be sure, only one facet of these general tendeneies. But their historieal extent (oveT several epoehs) allow such interpretations to offer the advantage of a eriterion applieable over a long period. It is all the more sUTprising that in investigations of the relationship between magie and natural science in the history of ideas, a merely mC1dental1m* portanee was attributed to the eoneept of nature.' Aristotle's Contrasting 01 Nature and Art'" Aristotle's physies provided the natural seien ces with a classieal rational foundation that remained dominant until weil into the nineteenth eentury. Aristotellan natural seien ce is characterised by a systematic structure that claims to aehieve completeness, general validity, truth." Its objeet, physis, is eharaeterised by the principle of self-movement claimed, in physics, to be obvious to everybody.12 155 ,,6 Physie5 and Magie: Disenchantlng Nature Self-movement means that all natural things have in themselves "a beginning of change and durability, in partrelated to space, in partto growth and decay. in part to change of condition."13 Jn contrast to modern science, Aristotle has no cancept of a Jaw of nature. Natural processes on earth follow their structural principles only "with regularity."'4 If, in the sublunary world, what is normally expected does not happen, then some "hindrance" has prevented iV5 In the context of physis as teleologically conceived, hindrances occur either as mistakes or by chance. Mistakes differ fram usually expected results, Aristotle argues, adducing freak-births and miraculous appearances as examples.'6 AccidentaJ events differ fram what normally happens not in the result, but in the lack of necessary cause. The accidental result has no inner relationship to what happened before.'7 Jt comes about spontaneously, remains inexplicable and unpredictable. Although Aristotle, in contrast to his predecessors (whom he also calls "magicians"'8) undertakes a complete rationahsation of knowledge of nature, nevertheless the teleology of his nature leaves blank slots to be filled by accidents and mistakes. In terms of AristotJe's physics, human art also represents a divergence fram the regularity of nature. In contrast to natural things, those that result from art are not moved by themselves but by something external to them, "On the contrary, a bed, or artiele of elothing, or whatever other elasses of things there may be besides, (in so far as it meets this designation and is an object made by art) has no inner impulse towards alteration."19 The operations of art are located in between the sciences characterised by generalised knowledge physics being one of them and experience, which is typified by partieular knowledge about individual things. '" The relationship between techne andphysis is treated by Aristotle in his physics, where he describes it as imitation and completion. "In general terms, art sometimes completes what nature cannot bring to term, and sometimes emulates nature."21 Techne as the imitation of physis does not imply a reproduction of physis; rather, it means that art shares structural principles of processes with nature, physis being the souree of these." 80th these spheres of reality can be investigated by means of the same fundamental conceptual categories (matter-formdeprivation, potentiality, actuality) and explained by the main kinds of causality (impulse to change/movement. matter, form, goal). In this sense therefore the products of art are rationally comprehensible.l3 Techne succeeds in completing physis when it eloses gaps in the teleology of nature for the accomplishment of human intentions.<4 That is, techne not only repairs the f1aws and coincidences of nature in cases where they run counter to human intentions it also brings phenomena to pass which cannot be produced by nature. Water f10ws downhilI by nature, but it is sometimes desirable for man that it should f10w uphill. Art brings this about by the construction of wells." As the extrapolation of what is already potentially present in physis, the completion shows a relationship with Gregor Schiemann imitation. Thus nature is primary, art is seeondary and derived fram the primary. Sut techne is also essentially alien to natural processes. This is already expounded in texts ascribed to Aristotle himself, albeit less elearly than in those that probably come from later authors. A good example of this is the Mechanical Problems, which shows that the artifieiaJ operations earried out against physIs are unllmlted in scope. ,6 The completion of physis goes beyond physis to occupy a sphere of artifieeto which physis, in its imperfection, 15 subordinate. . . Although the concept of techne originating in Aristotle is ambiguous m 1tS relation to physis, the post-Aristotelian interpretations of this relation generally take as their starting point a difference between physis and techne in a way that remained fundamental to medieval and early modern thinking. MedievaL ALchemy as an ExampLe ofthe AmbivaLenee 01 AristoteLian Physies and Magie In orderto diseuss the ambivalent relationship between AristoteHan physics to magic exemplifying it by means of medieval alchemy, I must first clarifywhether the magical, alchemical and Aristotelian concepts of nature CUTTe nt at that t1me are sufficiently related to one anotherthematically. I characterised as 'magica)' an understanding of nature that asserted the possibility of recognising hidden forces immanent in a meaningful nature, and the possibility that some of these might be infiuenced by man. Many ofthe thought pracesses in medievaJ alchemy meet this definition. Alchemists generañ consldered themselves as members of seCTet societies whose thinking was gUlded by a eomprehenslve symbolism of nature, and whose goal was the manufacture ofthe 'philosopher's stone: In so far as the procedures applied to this end were compafable to the crafts of the artisan, alchemy was considered, in the Middle Ages, to be an "ars mechanicae."~7 In addition, it was often associated with magie by outsiders, as the reason alchemists could infiuence the hidden forces was thought to be their participation in supernatural forces. The alchemists themselves by no means always eonsidered themselves to be magi~ians. In partie,ular many .õ them rejected the classification oftheir art as demomc, or so-called black maglC. On the contrary several a1chemists considered themselves commltted to the co.ntrasting 'white' or 'natural' magie whose goal was the improvement ofhuman llfe through theunderstanding and modification ofnature.18 . Along with Plato's philosophy of nature and Neo-Platonism, Aristotle's phySlCS can also be reckoned among the theoretieal bases of medieval alchemy.Adm1ttedly no unified and self-consistent alchemical system can be document:d for any period.29 Sut in the various eonceptions, expllcit references to ATlstotl~ 5 ~hySlCS can be found nearly everywhere. They range from the individuation pnnc1ples of matter and form to the doclrine of the elements and the teleologieal concept of the whole ofnature right through to the opposition of physis to techne.'o '57 PhySics and Magie: Disenchanting Nature But Aristotle's physies not only eonstituted an important point of referenee for aJchemical ideas. His work was also of decisive authority for those who criticised alchemy. This double function of Aristotle's physies whieh played a role also in the dlVergent evaluations of the relation between physis and techne is retleeted in the ambivalence of Aristotelian physies to magie. As a representative author, who, applying Aristotle's thought, rejected alchemy, I would Iike to name the Persian philosoph er Avieenna (approx. 98o-1037).l' H,S ar~,u:nent, conducted in his work "On the congelation and coagulation of stones ( Oe congelatlOne et conglutinatione fapidum,,),,2 says that no human art can transform a naturally occurring baser metal into a more valuable and also naturally occuTTing metal, because, according to Aristotle, artificial and natural objects are essentially different. The reasons brought to bear against this view and these also appeal to Aristotle exalt the power of the art of alchemy above that of nature. Thus Albertus Magnus (about 1200-1280) explains the possibility of alchemlCal transformation of the properties of metals as being the exchange of forms WhlCh are compatibJe with a basic material common to all metals. The techne of alchemy is supposed to replace the impure by the purer form. Albertus compares the procedure of the alchemist with that of the art of medieine whieh Aristotle, too, had c1assified as a techne. Just as doctors purified the body df a siek patlent, so dld alchemists purify material to put it into a better condition}l While Albertus's justification of alchemy restricts itselfto its rather instrumental charaeter, Roger Bacon (about 1214-1292), in his Aristotle-oriented philosophy of the opus tert/Um (1266), elevates that art to the status of abasie science because of its ability to lay bare and to alter nature, arguing that the whole science of medieine and of nature should spring from alchemy.l4 Further examples of the argument over alchemy could be cited until weil into the sixteenth century." Arguments both for and against magieal concepts avail themselves of the conceptual ambiguity of the relations between the contrasting notlOns of phySIS and techne. While the idea of physis permits the appearance of phenomena which contradict the general run of natural occurrences, the idea of tech.ñ conceives all technicaJ operations together as a non-natural procedure recogmsmg no natural limits to its ability to change reality. On the other hand, both phySIS and techne are subordinated to shared rational principles whieh explain phenomena principles that can be adduced against magical cancepts. GaLileo's Elimination of the AristoteLian Opposition of Techne to Physis As the opposition of physis to techne was such a fundamental determinant in medieval and early modern thought, so the process of dealing with and critieising lt m phySlCS was cOTTespondingly prolonged. This process can be traced back to the medieval theory of impetus." it determines the foundation of modern me- '58 chanics, and does not near its end until the early nineteenth century with the Gregor Schiemann formulation ofthe principle ofthe conservation of energy. The whole process is an argument about basic physical concepts and theories, an argument so important as to provide us with a criterion to distinguish one epoch fram another in the history of science. The elimination of the opposition between physis and techne allowed nature to be investigated by means of technical constructions, without restrietion. Technology as an object of natural science first opened the door to the development of the experimental method whieh led to where scienee is now. By this method the laws of nature were discovered and/or tested under artificial, repeatable laboratory eonditions. Conversely, it became possible to think of nature not only as a model ofhuman art, but to think of nature as actually bemg a technical construct. Nature became a mechanism, and mechanics was promoted to the status of the leading science. Compared to these innovations, which determined the further development of the natural sciences, the devastating consequenees for magic of the elimination of the categorieal differenee between physis and techne seem merely an incidental matter. In a world in whieh man's ability to modify nature is subordinated to generally comprehensible laws, there is no Ion ger anyplacefor secret magical knowledge. . In Galileo, whose work I shall use to exemplify the critique of the Aristotelian opposition of physis to techne a lack of interest in magical inquiries is alreadyto be seen inquiries which still dominated the minds ofhis contemporaries. Alexandre Koyre, the science historian, aptly if with some exaggeration typified the culture ofthe time as one in which "gloomy superstition was dominant, magic and witchcraft [ ... ] were far more widespread than in the Middle Ages," and "astrology [ ... ] played a far greater role than astronomy."17 Yet we find Galileo living in this time and free of all enthusiasm for magie. In his work he deals with themes belonging to the wider field of magical cancepts only ineidentally, and in the cantext of the mechanical and astronomical topics that interested him}s In some places he mentions astrology positively, sometimes using arguments wh ich can be matched in the writings of Johannes Kepler.39 But his astronomical discoveries and theories do not derive their claim to validity from the assumption of hidden intluenees emanating from the stars, but from phenomena in the sky that anybody with a telescope can observe. In other sections of his work he distances himself strictly from alchemieal interpretations of nature. To discredit the Aristotelian erities of his discoveries and theories, he scorns (in, for example, the "Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems") the search for the 'philosopher's stone' that enjoyed among them such high repute. How ridieulous is their beliefthat they ean find in texts from bygone epochs the seeret ofmaking gold. "Nothing is funnier," he writes, than to hearthe alchemists' commentaries "on ancient poets.'ll-o Galileo wrote no elaborated eritique of alchemy or any other related form of magie. His most important contribution to the dispelling of the cancepts basic to these proeedures was of a practical nature. He praetised and propagated technical-experimental research into nature and mathematical models for the results '59 Physics and Magie: Disenchanting Nature thus gained. Accordingly, in the discussion of mechanical instruments and their potential for modifying nature, he came to terms with the concepts of techne that went back to Aristotle. In the introduction to his early treatise "Mechanics,"'S93, he criticised the belief ofthe "Mechanici," that they "can move and raise the heaviest weights with little effort, intending thereby, with their machines, to cheat nature, ta some degree."41 They deceived themselves concerning the "immutable characteristics" af nature which is such "that no resistance can be overcome by a force weaker than itself is.'~.! Using simple mechanical deviees he showed that the work expended on them did not depend on the pracedures used each time, but only on the resulls attained. Looking back on these investigations, he wrote in a letter to Ciampoli (1625) that through many experiments he had convinced himselfthat "nature cannot be conquered ar deceived by art:\i3 Galileo had recourse to experiments with technieal apparatus and thought experiments relating to these, to help him formulate invariably valid laws of nature whieh all arts obey as weil. His orderly nature knew ofno hidden forces whose efficacy revealed itself to initiates alone. The comprehensibility of his physics, achievable for anybody, corresponds to the epistemological status of the technical constructians by means of which natural laws are discovered and/or tested for the constructions are fully understandable. By becoming part of a generally available technolagy, natural research parts company with the nation of secret knowledge, which includes magie Galileo is only one of the founders of modern science. üthers, like Johannes Kepler or Giordano Bruno before hirn or Isaac Newton after hirn, attach more importance to magical concepts. The initial restriction ofthe revolution in physks to research into astronomy and mechanics left room, on the one hand, for various concepts in the philosophy ofnature among which the magieal systems were to persist. On the other hand the narrower definition of the research areas and methods proper to physics resulted in a specialisation whieh, in its subsequent development, totally excluded every function of comprehensive world-pictures fram the forming of scientific theories. Conctusion Galileo formulated neither an elaborated critique of magical interpretations of nature, nor any alternative to Aristotle's concept of nature. New and fundamental definitions of nature were not worked out untillater, by philosophers like Rene Descartes, Baruch Spin02a and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibni2, to name only a few important thinkers. Among these, Descartes with his distinction between nature and mind achieved an importance that has remained relevant to discussions of natural philosophy to the present day. Descartes integrates into his cancept of nature the whole field of Aristotle's techne, and of his physis, too, except for that Gregor Schiemann part ofthe human mind whieh he sees as the mind of a thinking '1,' and whieh he sets up as an opposite principle to nature. In contrast to mind, nature is, as simply extended substance, completely predietable, mathematically describable, and belongs entirely in the subject-area ofmechanics. A discussion of Descartes's dualisrn and the natural philosophies that eame after hirn could show that these, not only in their original substanee-theoretical form, but also in tempered-down but still dualistie variants, leave room for magical thought Within the realm of mind thought of as completely independent of nature the belief in the possible existenee of extra-sensory forces able also to lTIfluence physical things, remains irrefutable. Such magic-related conceptions play, however, no role in Deseartes's scientific refleetions, whieh are not able to include the human mind, opposed as it is to the realm of nature. In Cartesian thought, magie has already been fully excluded fram the realm ofnatural science. The footholds stillieft for magieal thinking as a result ofthe opposition between nature and mind do not disappear until the advent of a concept of nature which interprets all manifestations of eonsciousness and action as natural phenomena. This natural1stic concept characteristic of present-day research, has gained influenee in physics as weIl. I would like merely to mention here that in the last hundred years physics has lost its role of leading discipline that it had enjoyed ever since antiqulty. The eompletely novel ways of discussing magie scientifically which follow fram the naturalistic concept are more important for the relationship between seientific and magical interpretations of nature. These two interpretations no longer oppose one another as two different modes of knowing which relate to one another reciprocally. Rather, the occurrence of magieal beliefs becomes a phenomenon to be investigated by science. Thus the relationship between seientifie and magical interpretations of nature is turned upside down. The question is no longer whether magie can possibly influence nature, but rather, what sort of natural phenomenon is the belief in magie. What scientifie explanation can be found for the fact that people believe in the efficacy of forces _ and in the possibility of influencing these when these forces are, fram a seientifie point ofview, non-existent? The legitimacy of such questions opens a further _ and presumably not the last chapter in the history of the relationship between magical and scientific interpretations of nature. 'Translated fromthe German original byJohn Fowler, universitätstuttgart. 2 Examples of this interpretation are, among others, James Frazer and Lynn Thorndike. Also. JeanJacques Rousseau; "Indeed, one may consult the annals of the world [ ... ]. but one will never find the origins ofthe sciencesto be asonewould wish them. Astronomytook its risefrom superstition, [ ... ] and natural sciences form idle curiosity" (Discours sur les sciences et les arts 45). Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling: "Mankind's first relationshipwith nature was in fact magical~ (Sämtliche Werke. 2.Abteilung. Notes ", Physles and Magie: Disenehanting vol. 3, 363), and Norbert Elias: "The liberation from the double bind [Doppelbinder] that had held man. " kind 50 long on the magical-mythic level oflife inthe state ofnature, could hardly have happened as a , short-term event» (DerFischerimMahlstroml16).All English versions here by John Fowler. 3 The qualifications are intended to enable astro)ogyto be incJuded in the concept ofmagic. The influence ofthe stars is neither dependent upon the knowledge of their conste!1ations, nor can it be influ. enced 4 For the concept ofmagic, cf. Kurt Goldammer,Magie, Bert Hansen, Science and the Magic 484ff., Bronis. law Malinowski, Magie, Wissenschaft und Religion 71, Kurt Goldammer, Der Göttliche Magier und die Magierin: Natur, Religion, Naturmagie und die Anfänge der Naturwissenschaft vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Renaissance J4ff.. Claus Priemer, "Magie." S This insight derives in Jarge measure f,om Lynn Thorndike, The History of Magie and Experimental Science and Frances A, Yates, ~The Hermetic Tradition in Renaissance Science," For a criticism, cf. Brian Vickers, "Introduction" 3ff, 6 Gregor Schiemann, Natur, Technik, Geist: Kontexte der Natur nach Aristote/es und DeKartes in /ebensweltlicher und subjektiver Erfahrung, 7 The secondary literature on the relationship of natural science to magic is predominantly oriented towards the history of ideas. Cf. lynn Thorndike, The History of Magic and Experimentalscience, Bert Hansen, "Science and the Magic," Bronislaw MaJinowski, Magie, Wissenschaft und Religion, Brian Viel<. ers, Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, Jean-Frañois Bergier, Zwischen Wahn, Glaube und Wissenschaft.* Magie, Astrologie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Wayne Shumaker, Natural Magicand Modern Science, Richard Kieckhefer, Magie in the Middle Ages. 8 On the process of mathematisation, cf. Eduard Jan Dijksterhuis, Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes. On the concept of quantification and measurement. cf, Gemot Böhme, "Quantifizierung Metrisierung." 9 Cf. footnote 7. The importance ofthe concept "nature" for medieval magie is pointed out by Hansen, sCience and the Magie 484ft., Goldammer, Der Göttliche Magier und die Magierin; Natur, Religion, Naturmagie und die Anfänge der Naturwissenschaft vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Renaissance 8ff., Christa Habiger-Tuczay, Magie und Magier im Mittelalter 176. The lasttwo do not deal with the conceptual relation between nature and art or skill, which Newman discusses for alchemy. In Vickers, Occult and Setentific Menta/Wes in the Renaissance, Wayne Shumaker, Natural Magic and Modern science and Richard Kieckhefer,Magic intheMiddleAges, the concept is notpaTtofthetheme. 10 'Art' (techne) as in 'art of medicine: 'artofhouse*building: etc. 11 On the difference between the dassical and modern concept of science, cf., in general. Alwin DiemeT, Der Wissenschajtsbegriffin historischem und systematischem Zusammenhang, and on physics, GregoT Schiemann, "Was heisst moderne Physikl". Il "Iho;; b' fOTtV 11 qr(1cno;;, 1tfLQuof}at öuitv{IYm YfAotOV' !pavEQovyaQ ön totOÜtO tu)v ÖVtfDV to't\v 1toÄAd": "It would be ridiculous to try to prove that there is such a thing as a natural condition. It is obvious that manyofthethings that exist areofthis nature" (Aristotle, Physics 111193 a3f.). Quotations fram Aristotle are indicated by book, chapter and paragraph according to Bekker's edition. '3 "tOUiOOV lI€vyaQ litoa-tov EV Ea\!TWssQxtJV I!XEt xlVl'tof{Õxat a-taOf<UO;;. Ta IIEv itaia i01tO\', in ö€ xa"t' OUSIIOW xat !peLeJl\', iaÖt XCl't' a).AOtWUtV" (Aristotle, Physics 111192 b 13ff.), cf. corresponding passage in llf 1 200 b 12, also VIII 3f., 253 b 5, and 254 b 17, Cf, for what folJows, Schiemann, Natur, Technik, Geist: Kontexte der Natur nach Aristoteles und Descartes in lebemweltJicher und subjektiver Erfahrung, chapter 1.1.1, GregorSchlemann 14Aristotle, Physics 118198 b 35f. 1'lbid.1I8199 a lof. and b 1]f.; IV 8 215a 23f. 16fbid.117197b 32ft. 171bid.118197b 19f, and b 36f. ,8 Aristotle, Metaphysics XIV 41091 b10. , ' t X(l!Y '9 ~X).[VT] öt xo\ Ll,ulnov, xal El lt lOtOVtoV 6).).0 YEVOo;; E01,Lv, 11 J.I€VTUUXYjXE ifl~ xUillyo(nw; txm:n:rl':; XU. ÖQov tOtLVssl"tOlEXVYjo;;, oilöEj.ltovoQJ.lilvlXHj.lElct~o).i1~ fJ.l{(lu'tOV~ (Aristotle,Physics 112 192 b 16ff.). On Anstotle's opposition of Nature andArt cf. in addition to Schiemann, Natur, Technik, Geist Kontexte der Natur h ArstoteIes und Oescartes in lebenswelt/icher und subjektiver Erfahrung, also Hans Blume~berg, nac I " dJ h' S hummer "Anstotle "Das Verhältnis von Natur und Technik als philosophisches Problem, an oac 1m c , on Technology and Nature." , , 10 "yiYVElnt öe ltXVT] ÖletV EX 1to).k&v Ti)~ EfllCElQiet~ tvvOT]flss"tOJV IlLa x(86).ou ytvT]lOl1tEQt lti:lV 0J.l0t{l)V u1t6J,.T]",*,t~:' "Art arise~ when, on the basis of many observations made from experience, a general (On* "pt of similar instances develops" (Aristotle, Metaphysics 11 981 a 5f t.). . "(A . totl PhyslCs 11 8 l1 "ÖAW~ öe f] dxvT] la fl€v &:rtneketü f]{(Iilot~ aöUVolEt Ct1tq;.yaouo8at, in öe fltflEtTat ns e, 199 a 15ft.). .1Ibid.2194a21f. . ' ke Realit 23 On this viewofthe standard interpretation of Aristotle, e.g. MIchael J. Moravcs1k. what Ma 5 y Intelligible? 24 Robin Smith, "FilJing in Nature's Deficiencies," 2S Aristotle,Meteorologyl11 353 b 27ft. 16 cf. Fritz Krafft, Dynamische und statische Betrachtungsweise in derantiken Mechan.ik. . l7 Bernhard Dietrich Haage, Alchemie im Mittelalter; Ideen und Bilder: Von Zoslmos bIS paracels~s ff M'rcea Eliade deals with the medieval and later association of craftsmanship and a1chemY]TI 44* 1 'h h' thefuturewas Schmiede und Alchimisten. Magic (as distinct trom a1chemy), along Wlt prop esymg , included among the 'forbidden arts.' Cf. also Habiger-TUczay, Magie und Magier.im Mitte/alter .. 1n and G ldammer Der Göttliche Magier und die Magierin: Natur, Religion, NaturmagIe und die Anfange der o , f d' 1 agictotechNaturwissenschaft vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Renaissance 14. The cJoseness 0 me leva m nique has been stressed in Hansen,Scienceand the Magie 495ff. and William famon, Technologyas ~a- gic in the Late Middle Ages and the Renaissance 171-212, and is documented and ex.emplified b.y J~aChl~ Schummer in "Aristotle on Technology and Nature" and Habiger*Tuczay in MagIe und MagIer Im MIt tela/ter 184ff. .8 Claus Priesner,Magie 227ff. 29 (laus Priesner and Karin Figala,Alchemie; Lexikon einer hermetischen Wissenschaft 8. 30 H Alchemie im Mittelalter: Ideen und Bilder: Von Zosimos bis Paracelsus18ff. 31 In a:~:t follows I am indebted to William Newman, "Technology and A1chemical Debate in the laie MiddleAges,"noteS9, , -". w.l 32 Avicenna, "Oe conge/atione et conglutlnatione lapidum: Bewg Sections of the KiUb al-Shifa,]TI l' ]" Newman "Technology andAlchemical Debatein the late Middle Ages" 427ff. . lam , f M th B ldwin "Al 33 Newman, "Technology and Alchemical Debate in the late Middle Ages" 431 ., ar a ~ , ... " f d K I Heinz Göttert Magie; Zur Geschichte des Streits um die magIschen Kun* bertus Magnus 21. an ar -, . . ste unter Philosophen, The%gen, Medizinern, Juristen und Naturwissenschaftlern von der AntIke bIS zur "3 Physics and Magic: Disenchanting Natt.!re Aufklärung 114f. 34Newman, ~Technology andA1chemical Debate inthe late MiddleAges~ 432f. 35 cf. the references provided ibid., note 59. 36 Hans Blumenberg, Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt174ff. 37 Alexandre Koyre, Cali/ei: Die Anfänge der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft 84 and 82 38 Dne ofthetexts that deal with a theme belonging to the broaderfield of magical concepts considers the possible astral influence ofthe moons of Jupiter (letterto Biero Dini 1611, in Galileo Galilei, Le Opere XI 105-116). Galileothere counters the objection that the moons of Jupiter discovered by hirn cannot exist, as they don't appear anywhere in astrological practice, and this takes everything into account. GaUleo does not contest the basic astrological claim that the stars exert a manifold influence upon earthly affaiTs. Instead, he adopts the position that all such influences are conveyed by means oflight. But the light of Jupiter's moons is so weak that they need not be taken into account in astrological practices yet could none the less exist (cf. Volker R. Remmert, Ariadnefäden im Wisseschaftslabyrinth: Studien zu Galilei: Historiographie Mathematik Wirkung 2°7-2°9; I follow the account there given.). Galileo's openness vis avis astrology does not contradict his critique ofthe AristoteJian opposition (of physis to techne) as thatonly contestedany effective instrumental influencing ofnature, which is not cJaimed by astTology. 39 Darrel Rutkin, "Celestial Offerings: Astrological Motifs in the Dedicatory letters of Kepler's Astronomia Nova and Gah leo's Sidereus Nuncius." 4°GaJileoGalilei, Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente 1209. 41Ibid.68. 42lbld. 43 Letter to Ciamoli of 1625 in Galileo Galilei, Le Opere VIII 571 ff., cit. in StiJIman Drake, Galileo at Work 297f f. Works Cited '64 Aristoteles. Metaphysik. Trans. H. SeidL Hamburg: Meiner, '970. ---. Physik. Trans.H,G,Zekl.Hamburg: Meiner, 1987. Avicenna. Oe congelatione et conglutinatione lapidum: Being Sections ofthe Kitäb al-Shifii. Ed. and trans. E.J. Holmyard andD.C.MandeviJIe. Paris: Geuthner, 1927. Baldwin, Martha. "Albertus Magnus," in Alchemie; Lexikon einer hermetischen Wissenschaft. Ed. Claus Priesner andKarin Figala.Munich: Beck, 1998. Beckermann, Ansgar. Analytische Einführung in die Philosophie des Geistes. BerJin: de Gruyter, 1999. Bergier, Jean-Frañois, ed. Zwischen Wahn, Glaube und Wissenschaft: Magie, Astrologie und Wissenschajtsgeschichte. Zurich: Verlag der Fachvereine, 1988. BJumenberg, Hans. "Das Verhältnis von Natur und Technik als philosophisches Problem." Studium Generale 4 (1951): 461-467- ---. Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1975. Böhme, Gemot. ~Quantifizierung Metrisierung," in Am Endedes Baconschen Zeitalters. Ed. Gernot Böhme. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkarnp, 1993. Diemer, Alwin. "Der Wissenschaftsbegriffin historischem und systematischem Zusammenhang, ~ in Gregor Schiemann Der Wissenschaftsbegriff: Historische und systematische untersuchungen. Ed. Alwin Diemer. Meisenheim am Clan: Hain, 1970. Dijksterhuis, Eduard Jan. Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes. Berlin : Springer, 1956. Drake, Stillman. Ga/ileoat Work: HisScientijicBiography. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1978 Eamon, William. HTechnology as Magic in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance." Janus 70 (1983): 171-212. Eliade, Mircea. Schmiede undA/chimisten. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980. . Elias, Norbert. "Der FischeT im Mahlstrom," in Engagement und Distanzierung. Ed. Norbert Ellas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 200 3. Galilei, Galileo. Le Opere. Edjzione Nazionale. 22 vols. Florence: Tipografiadi G. Barbera, 189°-19°9* ---,Schriften. Briefe, Dokumente. 2 vols. Ed. Anna Mudry. Munich: Beck, 1987. . Göttert. Karl-Heinz. Magie: Zur Geschichte des Streits um die magischen Kumte unter PhJIOSõhen, Theologen, Medizinern, Juristen und Naturwissenschaftlern von der Antike bis zur Aufklarung. Munich: Fink, 2001. Goldammer, Kurt. "Magie," in Historisches wörterbuch der Philosophie. Ed.Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971ff. ___ . Der Göttliche Magierund die Magierin: Natur, Religion, Naturmagie und die Anfänge der Naturwissenschaft vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Renaissance. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991. Haage, Semhard Dietrich. Alchemie im Mittelalter: Ideen und Bilder: Von Zosimos bis Paracelsus, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996. Habiger-Tuczay, Christa. Magie und Magier/m Mittelalter. Munich: Diederichs, 1992. . Hansen, B. ~Science and the Magic," in Scfence in the Middle Ages. Ed. David lindberg. ChiCago: U ofChicagoP, 1978. Kieckhefer, Richard.Magic in theMiddleAges. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990. Koyre ,Alexandre.Galilei: Die Anjängeder neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft* Berlin', wãenb~ch, 1988 . , Krafft, Fritz. Dynamische und statische Betrachtungsweise in derantiken Mechanik. Wiesbaden: Stemer, 197°* Malinowski, Bronislaw.Magie, Wissenschaft und Religion. Frankfurt am Main*. Fischer,1983* .. ". Moravcsik,J. Michael. "What Makes Reality Intelligible? Reflections on Aristotle's Theoryof Altla, m Aristotle's Physics. Ed. Lindsay judson. oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Newman, William. "Technology andAlchernical Debatein the late MiddleAges.~ Isis 80 (1989):423-445. Newman, William and Anthony Graf ton, eds. Secrets ofNature: Astrology and Alchemy In Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. . Priesner, Cl aus. "Magie," in Alchemie: Lexikon einer hermetischen Wissenschaft* Ed. Claus Pnesner and Karin FigaJa. Munich: Beck, 1998. . Priesner, Claus and Karin Figala. "Vorwort der Herausgeber," in Alchemie: Lexikon einer hermetIschen Wissenschaft. Ed. Claus Priesner and Karin Figala. Munich: Beck,1998. Priesner, Claus, ed.Alchemie:Lexikoneinerhermetischen Wissenschaft. Munich: Beck. 1998. Rernmert, Volker R. Ariadnefäden im Wissenschaftslabyrinth: studien zu Galile;: HistoriographieMathematikWirkung. Sem: lang,1997. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. "Abhandlung über die Wissenschaft und Künste (Discours sur les sciences et les arts),"inJean-Jacques Rousseau. Schriften. Ed. H. Ritter, VOI.l. Munich: Hanser, 1978. ,65 ." Physics and Magie: Disenchanting Rutkin. H. Darrel. "Celestial Offerings: Astrological Motifs inthe Dedicatory Letters ofKepler's ~stronomla Nova and Galileo's Sidereus Nuncius," in Secrets ofNature: Astrologyand Alchem m Early Modern Europe. Ed. William Newman and Anthony Grafton. Cambridge MA: The MI: Press,2001. ' Schelling. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 5" tl" h . am IC e Werke[Partl:vol1_1o; Part IJ: vol. 1-4. Ed K FA 5ch 11" 1 Stuttgart, 1856ff. . . '. e mg . Schiemann, Gregor "Washeisstm d Ph' ". o 0 eIne YSlk?, 1n EmergenceojModern Physics;Proceedings of Conjerence com~emorating a Centuryoj Physics. Ed. Dieter Hoffmann, Fabio Bevilacqua and:o er H. Struewer. Berhn 23 March-24 March 1995. Pavia; La Goliardica Pavese, 1996. 9 ---.Natur, Technik Geist-Kontexted N t h* . ,. er a ur nac Amtote/es und Descartes in lebensweltlicher und subjektlVerEr!ahrung. Berlin: deGruyter, 2005. Schütt, Hans-Werner. "Georg Ernst St hJ'" I . . . a ,]TI A chemIe: LexIkon einer hermetischen Wissenschaft. Ed Claus Pnesner and Karin Figala. Munich: Beck, 1998. . ;~hum~er, Joachim. "AristotJe on Technology and Nature." Philosophia Naturalis 38 (2001): 105-120 uma er, Wayne. ~atural MagicandModern 5cience; Four Treatises, 159°-1657Binghamton, N.Y.: . . cente~ fO,~ ~~dle.vaJ and Early Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 19 8 9. Smlth, Robm. F1Jhng m Nature's Deficiencies," in Aristotle'sOntology. Ed. Anthony Preus andJ h p Anton.Albany. NY: State UP, 1992. 0 n . Thorndike Lynn TheHistory 1M . V . k '." . 0 ag/cand ExperimentaIScience.I_VIII. NewYork: Columbia UP 19'311 1C ers Bnan Introduct* ". 0 ' . , .' lOn, m ccult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance. Ed. Brian Vick Cambndge: Cambridge UP, 1984. ers. -", ed. Occult and 5cientific MentaJities in the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP 98 Yates, FrancesA "The H t" T d" . ,1 4* . . erme 1C . ra ltlOn m Renaissance Science," in Art, 5cience, and Historyin the RenaISSance. Ed. Charles 5. SIngleton. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins Ur, 19 6 7. The Techno-Magician A Faseination Around 1900 Robert Stockhammer "Magiek," Aleister Crowley denees, "includes all aets soever. Anything may serve as a Magieal weapon; [ ... ] a Magieal Operation [ ... ] may be denned as any event in Nature whieh is brought to pass by Will. We must not exelude potatogrowing or banKing from our definition."! At around '900 magie becomes attrac~ tive to the degree that it was impossible to denne it by way of a definitio e contrario, ie. by indieating what it was not Ill-denned or somewhat arbitrarily redefined again and again, the signifier magie is less than a eoneept. It is, however, more than simplya metaphor, sinee magieal not ions of language preeisely state the im possibility of distinguishing between metaphorieal and literal usages of language. It is more than simply a word sinee it appears in well-ordered syntaetieal co-texts and pragmatic coñtexts whose Tules can be analyzed, and in which it can even be substituted by other words: in many contexts, for instanee, it works alm ost synonymously with 'energy.' Rather than searching for a common denominatoT of its confl1cting definitions, I will therefore point out several conditions for its attraetivity and its omnipresenee around '9°°, addressing magie (somewhat arbitrarily in my turn) as a figure in a speeine configuration. Even a superficial first look reveals that, from ,880 onwards, magie begins to playa crucial role in various disciplines. Master disciplines for the study of magie are, of COUTse, the history of religion and anthropology, and one nucleus of its cã reer is formed when these discipl1nes meet in an analysis of 'primitive religions' as is the case with Sir Edward Burnetl Tylor or Sir James George Frazer. One of the earliest (and eertainly one of the most interesting) Dutlines of a General Theory of Magie, the Esquisse d'une Theorie gent!rale de la Magie (19°2/03), is the produet of a collaboration between a elassieist, Hemi Huberl, and an anthropologist, Marcel Mauss. Since these studies point out the involvement of our 'own' European tradition with what is ealled magie, they nourish a wide-spread interest in anthropology, as, for instance, in the worKs of Bronislaw Malinowski, whose Trobriand tetralogy is one life-Iong effort to eome to terms with magie Cultural philosophy and the philosophy ofhistory, from Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolie Forms to Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno's Dialeetie of Enlightenment, will continue to rely on tripartite models of historieal evolutions as eoneeptualised by Frazer, with magie as a first stage. The Melanesian word mana introdueed into European languages by Max Müller as a synonym for magieal power and diseussed in detail by HubertiMauss plays a CTueial role for all ofthe "7 Kultur und Technik Schriftenreihe des Internationalen Zentrums für Kulturund Technikforschung [lZKT) der Universität Stuttgart herausgegeben von: Georg Maag, Helmut Bott, Gerd de Bruyn, Walter Gäbel, Christoph Hubig, Ortwin Renn Band 03 UT Magie, Science, Technology, and Literature Jarmila Mildorf / Hans Ulrich Seeber / Martin Windisch !Eds) UT

No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity Beau Branson Bresica University, Owensboro, Kentucky [email protected] Abstract Analytic theologians have proposed numerous "solutions" to the Logical Problem of the Trinity (LPT), mostly versions of Social Trinitarianism (ST) and Relative Identity Trinitarianism (RI). Both types of solution are controversial, but many hold out hope that further "Trinitarian theorizing" may yield some as yet unimagined, and somehow importantly different, solution to the LPT. I first give a precise definition of the LPT and of what would count as a solution to it. I then show how, though there are infinitely many possible solutions, all solutions can be grouped together into a finite, exhaustive taxonomy, based precisely on those features which make them either controversial, heretical, or inconsistent. The taxonomy reveals why ST and RI have been the major proposed solutions, and also proves that there can be no importantly different, new solutions to the LPT. 1 What is the Logical Problem of the Trinity? 1.1 Introduction Consider the following set S of natural language sentences: (S1) The Father is God (S2) The Son is God (S3) The Holy Spirit is God (S4) The Father is not the Son (S5) The Father is not the Holy Spirit (S6) The Son is not the Holy Spirit Vol. 6 No. 6 2019 Journal of Applied Logics - IfCoLog Journal of Logics and their Applications Branson (S7) There is exactly one God1 Call the set of propositions that the sentences of S express P, and call each of the propositions each S-n expresses P-n. Of course, P is not the entirety of the doctrine of the Trinity.2 But it is an important subset of it, or is at least logically entailed by it. Intuitively, what is called "the logical problem of the Trinity" (LPT) is just the question how, or whether, P is consistent. On the one hand, at a certain level the anti-Trinitarian only wants to prove that the doctrine of the Trinity is false. And the anti-Trinitarian wins on that point if the doctrine of the Trinity simply includes or entails false metaphysical or theological claims. Thus, theological and metaphysical arguments are by no means irrelevant here. But, on the other hand, in the context of the LPT, the anti-Trinitarian typically portrays his argument as a "knock-down" – a matter of logic – not just another of the many uncertain arguments found in metaphysics, in philosophy generally, or in biblical hermeneutics. Thus, it would be a major embarrassment to the anti-Trinitarian if the purely formal argument against the doctrine of the Trinity were to fail. In that case, it would not, after all, be a "knock-down." It would be less like a refutation of the claim "it's both raining and not raining" – as the anti-Trinitarian wants to portray it – and more like a debate between, say, endurantists and perdurantists in the metaphysics of time. And of course, it would be more than an embarrassment to the Trinitarian if the doctrine really could be shown to be formally inconsistent. 1.2 Outline Perhaps because of a bad analogy to Plantinga's "defense" against the Logical Problem of Evil,3 there has been an attitude to the effect that, even if all of the major 1[8] seems to be the first to have formulated it this way in the current debate, and most follow him. 2For example, the proposition that "the Father begets the Son" is plausibly an essential part of the doctrine of the Trinity. But of course, adding additional propositions can only yield an inconsistent set from a consistent one, not vice-versa. So adding additional propositions could only help the anti-Trinitarian, not the Trinitarian, so the Trinitarian has no reason to complain about focusing on just this set. On the other hand, anti-Trinitarians have not relied on additional propositions in their formulations of the LPT, and if they really needed more propositions to be added to make the set inconsistent, then it is unclear that the resulting problem would deserve the name "the Logical Problem of the Trinity." Thus, most in this debate would likely agree that if P could be shown to be consistent, we could say the LPT had been solved, even if there might be other possible arguments to raise against the doctrine. 3I discuss this bad analogy in [3]. 1052 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity proposed defenses fail for various reasons, there are infinitely many possibilities out there for a "defense" of the doctrine of the Trinity. In the words of one analytic theologian, the "business of trinitarian theorizing" is merely "unfinished."4 At the same time, many authors will speak of Social Trinitarianism and Relative Identity Trinitarianism as "the major" or "most common" proposed solutions to the LPT. This comes close to acknowledging that these are really the only two viable solutions, but without quite committing to whether there couldn't be others. In the interests both of making sharper the distinction between the arguments about the plausibility of Trinitarian metaphysics, and the (allegedly) purely formal inconsistency of the doctrine (the LPT), of clarifying what exactly the options for both sides of the debate are, and of hopefully pushing the discussion forward in light of both of those projects, in what follows I will do the following in turn. First, in section 2, I give a more precise definition both of what the problem is and of what exactly would constitute a "solution" to it. In section 3, I explain how various proposed solutions to the LPT implicitly attribute different logical forms to P. And finally in section 4, I show how, despite the fact that there are infinitely many logical forms one could attribute to P, we can create an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible logical forms attributable to P based precisely on the logical features of the proposed answers to the LPT that cause them to be either inconsistent, heretical or controversial. Although the result does not map onto the usual dichotomy between Social Trinitarianism (ST) and Relative Identity Trintiarianism (RI) precisely, the taxonomy allows one to see why these two approaches might appear to be the only viable ones, as well as the ways in which a possible solution might subtly differ from proposals given so far. For anti-Trinitarians, the taxonomy will show that, if just a handful of objections could all be pressed simultaneously, the doctrine of the Trinity would be decisively defeated. For the Trinitarian, the taxonomy will reveal where one really ought to focus one's efforts if one wants to defend the doctrine. 2 What Is the Problem? What Would Be a "Solution"? 2.1 A Precise Statement of the Problem If the LPT is supposed to be a "knock-down," if it is supposed to show the doctrine of the Trinity, or at least P, to be formally inconsistenct, the question is, how would one show, using the tools of modern logic, whether or not a set of propositions is formally consistent or inconsistent? The modern logician's methods of determining 4[26], p. 165. At least, this was his claim before finally giving up on the doctrine of the Trinity altogether. 1053 Branson consistency and inconsistency only apply to sentences or formulae within the artificial languages they construct. So in order to make any use of the tools developed by the logician, a set of propositions Π must be given some regimentation Φ in some formal language L such that the logical forms of the formulae in Φ accurately represent the logical forms of the propositions in Π. Within this artificial language, questions of consistency can be determined (if at all) with mathematical precision. Thus, if a regimentation, Φ in L, of Π can be found such that all parties to the debate can agree that: 1. the formal language L is suitably expressive that there are possible formulae of L that could capture the logical forms (or at least all of the relevant aspects of the logical forms) of the propositions in Π (for short "L is a formally adequate language for Π"), and 2. the logical forms of the formulae of Φ in L do reflect the logical forms (or at least the relevant aspects of the logical forms) of the propositions in Π (for short "Φ is a formally adequate regimentation of Π") then the question of the formal consistency of the propositions in Π can be decided on the basis of the formal consistency of the formulae Φ in L. So, in any debate over the formal consistency of a set of propositions Π, the real work, and matter for debate, lies not in proving the formal consistency or inconsistency of any set of formulae, but in finding a suitable artificial language L and a suitable regimentation Φ, such that it can be shown that: 1. L is a formally adequate language for Π, and 2. Φ in L is a formally adequate regimentation for Π. With one important exception, most philosophers in this debate agree that standard versions of predicate logic with (Leibnizian, classical, absolute, non-relative) identity ("PLI" for short) would be formally adequate for P. What will be called "pure" Relative Identity Trinitarianism (Pure RI) seems to be the only camp in the debate that demands the use of an importantly different formal language in which to address the issue.5 Since rejecting PLI is controversial in itself, we will adopt a certain mild "prejudice" toward PLI. Specifically, as long as a view can be given a 5Strictly speaking, it may be going too far even to say that Pure RI requires a different formal language. Peter van Inwagen has pointed out to me that every formula that is valid in standard PLI remains valid in his Relative Identity Logic. It is simply that a proponent of Pure RI refuses to make use of the standard identity predicate as a way of correctly formalizing any natural language statements. However, I will ignore this complication in what follows as I don't think it affects my 1054 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity formally adequate regimentation in PLI, we will regiment it in PLI. In other words, if it is possible to represent a certain logical form via formulae of PLI, we will use formulae of PLI as the means by which we will represent that logical form.6 There are two senses in which we might say that a set of formulae Φ in a formal language L is inconsistent. It may be that, given the rules of inference that are valid in L, Φ entails a contradiction, entails its own negation, or for whatever reason, the inference rules for that language say that the conjunction of the members of Φ must be false. If this is so, Φ is "syntactically inconsistent in L." If there is no such valid proof in L, Φ is "syntactically consistent" in L. This is the strict meaning of "consistency," and pertains, obviously, to syntax. On the other hand, it may be that there is no interpretation I of the nonlogical constants of L such that all of the members of Φ are true in L on I (i.e. there is no "model" for Φ in L). If this is so, Φ is not "satisfiable" with respect to the class of possible interpretations of the non-logical constants of L. If there is such an interpretation (a model) for Φ in L, Φ is satisfiable in L. This is not strictly consistency. It pertains not to syntax but to semantics. But it is just as important a consideration, and in a formal language with the features of soundness and completeness, the syntactic feature of consistency and the semantic feature of satisfiability go hand in hand. Since our concerns encompass both syntax and semantics, it would seem that our ordinary use of the word "inconsistent" should cover both strict, syntactic inconsistency, and the semantic notion of unsatisfiability. Thus, I will say that a set Φ of formulae of L is "inconsistent in L" if and only if it is either syntactically inconsistent in L or merely unsatisfiable in L. Likewise, I will say that Φ is "consistent" in L if and only if it is both syntactically consistent in L and satisfiable in L. Now in any formal language L worth studying, any language with the property of "soundness," if Φ is syntactically inconsistent in L, then it will be unsatisfiable in L as well. So, although these are not the only ways to do so, a usually good strategy for showing the inconsistency of Φ is to give a proof of the negation of the conjunction of the members of Φ (because the syntactic feature of inconsistency will show the semantic feature of unsatisfiability as well), and a usually good strategy for ultimate conclusion. Ultimately, I will conclude that one way to solve the LPT is to adopt an analysis of counting statements that does not work by way of classical identity, and that conclusion remains, even in the face of this complication. It may be that van Inwagen's proposal could be placed into the category of "Impure" RI, rather than "Pure" RI. But the general taxonomy I will construct can proceed at an abstract level, regardless of how precisely to classify van Inwagen himself, or his proposal. 6It's important to emphasize here that nothing in our proof hangs on this "prejudice," since, even if there are other languages that are formally adequate for P, as long as PLI is one formally adequate language, then we may choose to work entirely within that language if we so choose. 1055 Branson showing "formal consistency" is to give a model for all of the members of Φ (because the semantic feature of satisfiability will show the syntactic feature of consistency as well). So, why does the anti-Trinitarian think that P is inconsistent? Suppose we take "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit" univocally as names for individuals wherever they appear in S. Suppose we also take "God" in S1 through S3 univocally as the name of an individual. Suppose we take "is" univocally as the "is" of (classical) identity in S1 through S6. And suppose we analyze the counting statement expressed by S7 in a standard way, and understand "is God" as it occurs there in the same way we did in our interpretation of S1 through S3. The logical form of the claims expressed by S on this interpretation of it can be represented in PLI as: ΦLPT-1: (1LPT-1) f=g (2LPT-1) s=g (3LPT-1) h=g (4LPT-1) f6=s (5LPT-1) f6=h (6LPT-1) s6=h (7LPT-1) (∃x)(∀y)(x=g & (y=g → y=x)) ΦLPT-1 is inconsistent in PLI.7 ((7LPT-1) is not strictly necessary to derive a contradiction here; I include it only for completeness' sake.) On the other hand, suppose we instead take "is God" in S1 through S3 univocally but take "God" to be a predicate nominative ("a god") and "is" to be the "is" of predication. Suppose we again analyze the counting statement expressed by S7 in the standard way, and understand "is God" as it occurs there in the same way we did in our interpretation of S1 through S3. And suppose we otherwise leave our regimentation unchanged. The logical form of the claims expressed by S on this interpretation of it can be represented in PLI as: ΦLPT-2: (1LPT-2) Gf (2LPT-2) Gs (3LPT-2) Gh (4LPT-2) f6=s (5LPT-2) f6=h 7Proof is trivial. 1056 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity (6LPT-2) s6=h (7LPT-2) (∃x)(∀y)(Gx & (Gy → y=x)) ΦLPT-2 is also inconsistent in PLI.8 Since both of the logical forms we have in mind here can be represented in PLI, we will use PLI. So, a more precise way to put the anti-Trinitarian argument would be as follows: 1. PLI is a formally adequate language for P, and 2. at least one of ΦLPT-1 in PLI or ΦLPT-2 in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation of P, and 3. both ΦLPT-1 and ΦLPT-2 are (syntactically) inconsistent in PLI. 4. So, by definition of "formally adequate language" and "formally adequate regimentation," P is formally inconsistent. But, if this is the "problem". . . what exactly would count as a solution? 2.2 What Would Be a Solution? If the anti-Trinitarian argument above is right, then P is formally inconsistent, and that is the "answer" to the LPT. There is no solution, but rather there is, as we might say, a "non-solution." So the Trinitarian must maintain that neither regimentation, in PLI, is formally adequate for P (or else that PLI itself is not formally adequate for P). Let us define a "proposed answer" to the LPT as a set that includes: 1. Exactly one formal language L in which to regiment P, and 2. Exactly one set Φ of formulae of L with which to regiment P,9 and 3. A proof of the formal consistency or inconsistency of Φ in L. Let us say that a "formally adequate answer" to the LPT is a proposed answer to the logical problem of the Trinity such that: 8Proof is trivial. 9We will relax this requirement in an obvious and non-problematic way in the case of a couple of dilemmas, where two different possible regimentations are offered, and the claim made is only that at least one of them is formally adequate. Specifically, the anti-Trinitarian regimentations LPT1 and LPT2, and the Naïve Modalist regimentations NM1 and NM2. 1057 Branson 1. L is a formally adequate language for P, and 2. Φ in L is a formally adequate regimentation of P 3. (and the proof of formal consistency or inconsistency of Φ in L is correct.) A "proposed solution" to the LPT is a proposed answer to the logical problem of the Trinity that proves that Φ is formally consistent in L. A "proposed non-solution" to the LPT is a proposed answer to the logical problem of the Trinity that proves that Φ is formally inconsistent in L. A "formally adequate solution" to the LPT is a formally adequate answer that is a proposed solution (i.e., a formally adequate answer to the LPT that proves that Φ is formally consistent in L). A "formally adequate non-solution" to the LPT is a formally adequate answer that is a proposed non-solution (i.e., a formally adequate answer to the LPT that proves that Φ is formally inconsistent in L). Thus, the anti-Trinitarian argument above can be seen as a constructive dilemma. One of two proposed non-solutions to the LPT (call those LPT1 and LPT2) is formally adequate. Thus, there is some formally adequate non-solution to the LPT.10 So, by definition of "formally adequate language" and "formally adequate regimentation," P is formally inconsistent. Thus, to defend P, the Trinitarian must argue at least that it might (for all we know) be the case that neither LPT1 nor LPT2 is a formally adequate answer to the LPT, or even that PLI itself is not a formally adequate language for P, that is, either: 1. PLI is not a formally adequate language for P, or 2. Neither ΦLPT−1 in PLI nor ΦLPT−2 in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation of P. (Or both.) In principle, this very weak response ("for all we know," either the language is inadequate or the regimentations are) would be a sufficient defence of P. But most philosophers in the literature have wanted to do more. They have wanted to argue that it can be shown that P really is consistent (not just that it's not unreasonable 10It should be obvious that if there is one formally adequate solution, all formally adequate answers are solutions, and that if there is one formally adequate non-solution, all formally adequate answers are non-solutions, since a set of propositions is either consistent or not. 1058 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity for us to believe that it is).11 But it might seem hard to see how one would argue that PLI is not formally adequate for P, except by arguing that some other language L is formally adequate for P, and that L is importantly different from PLI in some relevant way. Likewise, assuming that PLI is formally adequate for P, it might seem hard to see how one would argue that neither ΦLPT−1 in PLI nor ΦLPT−2 in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation for P, except by arguing that some other regimentation Φ in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation for P, and that Φ's being a formally adequate regimentation of P in PLI is somehow incompatible both with ΦLPT−1 in PLI being a formally adequate regimentation of P and with ΦLPT−2 in PLI being a formally adequate regimentation of P (as will be the case if the alternative proposed answer has an importantly different logical form, which of course must be the case if it is a proposed solution instead of a non-solution). And so, the majority of the literature has centered around the search for alternative proposed answers to the LPT to supplant LPT1 and LPT2. But if one wants to replace LPT1 and LPT2. . . what alternative answers could one propose? 3 Proposed Solutions Thinking on this issue goes back to the earliest centuries of Christianity. And not just any way of understanding the "three-ness" and "one-ness" of God has been received as within the bounds of orthodoxy. Certain views, though consistent, were rejected as heretical during the course of the Trinitarian controversies of roughly the late 3rd through early 5th centuries AD. I will refer to these as the "Classical Trinitarian Heresies" (CTHs). CTH's may have interpretted S in consistent ways, but they do so only by being at odds with the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Thus, they in some sense count as proposed answers to the LPT, even "solutions," but ones that are not available to the Trinitarian. So, for completeness' sake, we will discuss the CTH's in some detail. However, contemporary views may be easier to understand and easier to regiment in a standard way. Also, some of that discussion will help to shed light on the CTHs. So, we will begin with contemporary proposed solutions to the LPT. Our purpose at the moment is to collect various proposed solutions to the LPT. And what concerns us most at the moment is the matter of formal consistency. 11There is another approach, labelled "mysterianism" by Tuggy [27], which does take precisely the approach of avoiding the issue of consistency, but arguing for the epistemic acceptability of accepting a set of propositions that appears to be inconsistent. Addressing that approach is beyond the scope of the current paper, however, which has an eye only towards those who would offer a "defense" of the doctrine. 1059 Branson So we will not try to give exhaustively detailed discussions of any of these views, but only so much as to give us a clear enough idea of its logical form that we can represent it in a formal language and determine its consistency or inconsistency. 3.1 Contemporary Proposed Solutions 3.1.1 Social Trinitarianism (ST) Probably the easiest contemporary proposal to understand is Social Trinitarianism (ST). Paradigmatic versions of ST hold that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are straightforwardly numerically distinct persons, each of whom is fully divine. Instances of the phrase "is God" in reference to the persons individually are read as predications ("is divine" or "is (a) god") rather than as identifications to an individual called "God." But ST (attempts to) escape(s) tritheism by claiming it is the Trinity as a whole – the collective or "community" or "society" they compose – to which the term "God" is properly applied when we speak of "the one God" (whether we treat this as a name for the collective, or as a predicate that is not, at least not precisely, univocal with "is (a) god" when applied to the persons). Both proponents and critics of ST tend to focus on its taking the divine "persons" to be fully "persons" in our modern, post-Cartesian sense – fully aware centers of consciousness, reason, will, etc. This is thought to be its distinctive feature. But from the point of view merely of logical form, the issue is irrelevant. The "persons" could be beans as far as the LPT is concerned. But if there are three of them, and each is a bean, yet there is only one bean, LPT2 would provide a formally adequate regimentation of the view, and the doctrine would be inconsistent. So what features of ST are relevant to our concerns? First, it is clear that Social Trinitarians insist on making a very strong, real distinction between the persons. But classical non-identity (6=) is the weakest (real) distinction one can make. It's clear then that Social Trinitarians will agree with LPT1 and LPT2 on their regimentation of P4 through P6. (Indeed, Social Trinitarians often want to go even further in distinguishing the persons, but they must at least admit the non-identity of the persons.) And in so doing they will (they may as well) take PLI to be a formally adequate language for P. In keeping with this emphasis on the distinctness of the persons, it is also clear that Social Trinitarians will want to treat "is god" in P1 through P3 not as identity claims to some individual, but as predications. Thus, Social Trinitarians will deny the formal adequacy of 1LPT-1 through 3LPT-1 in PLI. It is also clear that Social Trinitarians make no distinctions between the persons as to their divinity. That is, each person is divine in exactly the same sense as either 1060 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity of the other two persons. So, there will be no equivocation here. And while Social Trinitarians will deny the formal adequacy of 1LPT-1 through 3LPT-1 in PLI, they will admit to the formal adequacy of 1LPT-2 through 3LPT-2 in PLI (or something relevantly similar, in a sense that will become clear later.) ST, then, so far agrees with LPT2 on the logical form of P. If ST is to count as a solution, then, it must regiment P7 differently. But there is no indication in ST literature that Social Trinitarians have any problem with standard logical regimentations of counting statements in general or with the classical identity relation (=) in particular. (Indeed, one of the motivations for adopting ST is precisely to avoid having to give up on analyzing counting statements with classical identity. See the discussion of Relative Identity Trinitarianism below for more.) The only way, then, that ST could possibly avoid contradiction would be to equivocate on "is god," not among its applications to the persons themselves, individually (in S1 through S3) but between its application there on the one hand and in S7 on the other. But it is this purely formal feature that lies at the heart of a major criticism of ST. Brian Leftow writes: But even if Trinity monotheism avoids talk of degrees of deity, it faces a problem. Either the Trinity is a fourth case of the divine nature, in addition to the persons, or it is not. If it is, we have too many cases of deity for orthodoxy. If it is not, and yet is divine, there are two ways to be divine – by being a case of deity, and by being a Trinity of such cases. If there is more than one way to be divine, Trinity monotheism becomes Plantingian Arianism. But if there is in fact only one way to be divine, then there are two alternatives. One is that only the Trinity is God, and God is composed of non-divine persons. The other is that the sum of all divine persons is somehow not divine. To accept this last claim would be to give up Trinity monotheism altogether. I do not see an acceptable alternative here. So I think Trinity monotheism is not a promising strategy for ST.12 Leftow here uses "Trinity monotheism" for what he takes to be just one version of ST. But as we've seen, if all versions of ST admit the non-identity of the persons, and if all versions of ST treat "is god" as univocal across S1 and S3, and if no versions of ST take issue with standard logical regimentations of counting statements, then all versions of ST will have to confront the problem Leftow raises. (At least, they will have to confront the purely formal problem Leftow's argument relies on.) Namely, 12[14, p. 221]. 1061 Branson first, that ST must equivocate on "is god" in S1 through S3 on the one hand and "is God" in S7 on the other hand (otherwise we end up with four gods instead of one). But then it follows that either (1) there is more than one "way" of being divine or being "a god" (a position Leftow calls "Plantingian Arianism," see below, p. 18, for more on Arianism), or else (2) the persons are not legitimately divine or "god," or else (3) the "one God" (i.e., according to ST, the Trinity as a whole) is not legitimately divine or "(a) god." So, although, again, both proponents and critics tend to characterize ST in terms of its taking the divine "persons" to be distinct centers of consciousness and so forth, it is more useful for our purposes to characterize it in terms of the formal feature Leftow's criticism relies on. For even if "x is god" means that x is a bean, we can run essentially the same argument to the effect that one will have to equivocate on "is god." If the persons satisfy any predicate, and they are all non-identical, yet there is only one thing that satisfies that predicate, then LPT2 is formally adequate, regardless of what the predicate in quesiton is, or what it means. So, if ST is to offer a solution, it must reject the formal adequacy of 7LPT-2 and replace it with an equivocation on "is god," which we can represent formally by using "G1" for one sense of "is god," and "G2" for another sense. (The precise semantic content can be filled in however a particular proponent of ST likes. The important fact from a formal point of view is simply that there are two senses, whatever they might be.) Thus, we can pin down a formal regimentation for ST and give an ST proposed solution to the LPT as follows: 1. PLI is a formally adequate language for P. 2. ΦST in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation of P: ΦST: (1ST) G1f (2ST) G1s (3ST) G1h (4ST) f 6= s (5ST) f 6= h (6ST) s 6= h (7ST) (∃x)(∀y)(G2x & (G2y → x=y))13 13It might be objected that this treats "is god" in P7 as another predication, whereas Social Trinitarians might claims it should be treated as a name in P7, thus: (7ST) (∃x)(∀y)(x=g & (y=g → 1062 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity 3. ΦST is formally consistent in PLI.14 3.1.2 ("Pure") Relative Identity Trinitarianism (Pure RI) The major strand of Relative Identity Trinitarianism (RI) in contemporary philosophy of religion, called "pure" RI by Mike Rea,15 began with Peter Geach's discussions of relative identity, and his application of it to the doctrine of the Trinity.16 A. P. Martinich also endorsed an RI view a few decades ago,17 as did James Cain.18 But probably the clearest, fullest and most influential statements of the view are van Inwagen's.19 In his earlier statement of the view, van Inwagen does not answer the question whether classical identity exists or not.20 But in his later statement, he explicitly rejects the existence of classical identity.21 Pure RI may be, in some sense, the most difficult proposed solution to the LPT to wrap one's head around, given that it rejects the existence of classical identity altogether, and given how intuitive classical identity seems to most of us. But in another sense (happily, the sense that will matter for us), it is among the easiest. This is especially so as it appears in van Inwagen's work, which, also happily, is what we might call the canonical version of Pure RI. First, Pure RI explicitly rejects the very existence, or intelligibility, of classical identity, and so explicitly rejects PLI as a formally adequate language for P (PLI being "predicate logic with identity"). Van Inwagen has given his own preferred formal language for this purpose, Relative Identity Logic, which he shortens to "RI-logic,"22 and which I will shorten even further to "RIL." So, Pure RI does not x=y)). However, that is still an equivocation, and so, when we give a more general characterization of a "Family" of views into which ST will fall, such a version of ST will be included in our "Family" anyway. See p. 30 ff. below. 14It should be obvious that there is a model for ΦST, and the proof is left as an exercise for the reader. 15The distinction begins in [19] p. 433 and passim. 16See [11, pp. 43–48 and 69–70]; [10] and [9], both reprinted in [12]; and his chapter, [13]. 17[15] and [16]. 18[7]. 19[28], and [29] in [21, pp. 61–75]. 20In [28], p. 241, van Inwagen considers three arguments concerning classical identity and its relation to relative identity, and says "I regard these arguments as inconclusive. In the sequel, therefore, I shall assume neither that classical identity exists nor that it does not exist." Thus, strictly speaking, in this paper, van Inwagen counted as an adherent of "impure" Relative Identity theory, to be discussed below. 21In [29, p 70], he says, "I deny that there is one all-encompassing relation of identity. . . there is no relation that is both universally reflexive and forces indiscerniblility." 22[28, p. 231]. 1063 Branson accept PLI as a formally adequate language for P, but claims that RIL is a formally adequate language for P. Second, Pure RI replaces the classical (non-)identity predicate "6=" in the regimentations of P1 through P6 with various relative (non-)identity predicates, the two relevant for our purposes being: "is the same being as" in its equivalents of P1 through P3, and "is (not) the same person as" in its equivalent of P4 through P6.23 It can then use the "is the same being as" predicate in its equivalent of P7 without generating inconsistency. Although van Inwagen uses the English "is the same being as" and "is (not) the same person as," I will shorten these to "=B" and "6=P," respectively. One might think we could now state a Pure RI proposed solution to the LPT as: 1. RIL is a formally adequate language for P. 2. ΦPure-RI* in RIL is a formally adequate regimentation of P: ΦPure-RI*: (1Pure-RI*) f =B g (2Pure-RI*) s =B g (3Pure-RI*) h =B g (4Pure-RI*) f 6=P s (5Pure-RI*) f 6=P h (6Pure-RI*) s 6=P h (7Pure-RI*) (∃x)(∀y) ( x =B g & ( (y =B g) → (y =B x) ) ) 3. ΦPure-RI* is formally consistent in RIL. However, this would not be accurate. At least, not without some qualifications about the uses of "f," "s," and "h" in RIL. As van Inwagen points out, The philosopher who eschews classical, absolute identity must also eschew singular terms, for the idea of a singular term is – at least in currently orthodox semantical theory – inseparably bound to the classical semantical notion of reference or denotation; and this notion, in its turn, is inseparably bound to the idea of classical identity. It is a part of the orthodox semantical concept of reference that reference is a many-one relation. And it is a part of the idea of a many-one relation – or of a 23It will become clear why I say its "equivalents" shortly. 1064 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity one-one relation, for that matter – that if x bears such a relation to y and bears it to z, then y and z are absolutely identical.24 To cut a long story short, RIL must replace singular reference with relative singular reference, and this boils down to certain kinds of general or quantified statements employing relative identity relations. Thus, a Pure RI proposed solution to the LPT would instead come to something like this: 1. RIL is a formally adequate language for P. 2. ΦPure-RI in RIL is a formally adequate regimentation of P: ΦPure-RI: (∃x) (∃y) (∃z) (Gx & Gy & Gz & (cf. P1 to P3) x 6=P y & x 6=P z & y 6=P z & (cf. P4 to P6) (∀v) (∀w) ((Gv & Gw) → (v =B w))) (cf. P7) 3. ΦPure-RI is formally consistent in RIL.25 ΦPure-RI is just one long formula. I have split it onto different lines for ease of reading. Obviously the first line is just the initial three quantifiers, which we must use in the place of singular terms. With that in place, the second line corresponds in a way to P1 through P3. The third line corresponds in a way to P4 through P6. And the fourth line corresponds in a way to P7. Thus, the different parts of ΦPure-RI are in some sense the "equivalents" of different parts of P. (One can usefully compare ΦPure-RI to other proposed answers by taking the conjunction of their regimentations of P1 through P7 in order, and then "Ramsifying" away the names of the persons.) 3.1.3 "Impure" Relative Identity Trinitarianism (Impure RI) The final contemporary proposal we will look at has been defended by Mike Rea and Jeff Brower. In the Rea-Brower account of the Trinity, the persons stand in a "constitution" relation to one another, and the word "God" is systematically ambiguous between the persons.26 The constitution relation does not entail classical identity, 24[28, p. 244]. 25It is easy enough to see that this will be consistent, but for more, one can see [28, pp. 249–250]. 26The view is explicated, defended, and developed in more detail over the course of a number of articles. See [19], [5], [6], [20], and [22]. See also Rea and Michael Murray's discussion of the Trinity in [17]. 1065 Branson but the account does not deny the existence or intelligibility of classical identity as on the "pure" RI view. It simply holds that our ordinary counting practices rely not on classical identity, but on various relative identity relations. The constitution relation either is, or at least entails, a species of relative identity between the persons, such that we should count them as three persons but one god. (For the time being, we will follow Rea's terminology in calling this "impure Relative Identity" (Impure RI) as distinguished from "pure" RI. We will see later, p. 35 ff., why there may be a more useful term to cover both of these views.) Since Impure RI accepts classical identity, it can (it may as well) accept PLI as a formally adequate language in which to regiment P. Furthermore, it can regiment P4 through P6 as classical non-identity claims just as in LPT1 and LPT2. However, like Pure RI, it rejects classical identity as the relation by which we count, and instead analyzes counting statements as operating by way of relative identity relations. So, it will regiment P7 differently. To claim that we count by classical identity is to claim that we count one or two (. . . or n) Fs when there are one or two (. . . or n) terms (t1, t2, . . . tn) of which "F" is true and the appropriate claims of classical non-identity involving those terms (t1 6= t2, . . . ) are all true, and any other term tn+1 of which "F" is true is such that at least some claim of classical identity involving tn+1 and one of the previous terms is true (thus, tn+1 = t1 or tn+1 = t2, or . . . tn+1 = tn). To claim that we count by relative identity is to claim that we count one or two (. . . or n) Fs when there are one or two (. . . or n) terms (t1, t2, . . . tn) of which "F" is true and the corresponding claims of relative non-identity involving those terms and that predicate (t1 6=F t2, . . . ) are all true, and any other term tn+1 of which "F" is true is such that at least some claim of relative identity involving tn+1 and one of the previous terms and the appropriate predicate is true (thus, tn+1 =F t1 or tn+1 =F t2, or . . . tn+1 =F tn). Thus, Impure RI's regimentation of P7 will look much like Pure RI's in a way, but stated in PLI instead of RIL. But how does Impure RI analyze P1 through P3? Over the course of several papers, the Rea-Brower view becomes fairly complex, involving the sharing by the persons of a trope-like divine nature that "plays the role of matter" for the persons, each of which is constituted by the divine nature plus its own hypostatic property (Fatherhood, Sonship, Spiritude). But the deeper importance of that theoretical machinery lies in its licensing of a relative identity claim involving the term "God" (here used as a name or other singular term again) and each of the names of the persons. We can symbolize this relative identity relation as "=G," which allows us to regiment the view more simply, and give an Impure RI proposed solution to the LPT as follows: 1066 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity 1. PLI is a formally adequate language for P. 2. ΦImpure-RI in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation of P: ΦImpure-RI: (1Impure-RI) f =G g (2Impure-RI) s =G g (3Impure-RI) h =G g (4Impure-RI) f 6= s (5Impure-RI) f 6= h (6Impure-RI) s 6= h (7Impure-RI) (∃x)(∀y)(x =G g & (y =G g → y =G x)) 3. ΦImpure-RI is formally consistent in PLI.27 Is it really OK to just ignore whatever more intricate logical structure might, given Rea and Brower's fuller account, be entailed by the "=G" relation, such as a reference to the divine nature and the constitution relation? Yes. How so? Whatever the "same god as" relation might entail, as long as "x is the same god as y": 1. is not in itself formally inconsistent, and 2. does not entail (classical) identity between x and some other term ti,28 then (1Impure-RI) through (7Impure-RI) is still consistent. On the other hand, if "x is the same god as y" does entail a (classical) identity between x and some other term ti, then (1Impure-RI) through (6Impure-RI) will be inconsistent without even appealing to (7Impure-RI). But not for any reasons interestingly related to Impure RI. It will be inconsistent for the same reasons (1LPT-1) through (6LPT-1) were. More precisely, for any formula φ, where φt1,t2x,y is the result of replacing every occurrence of the variables x and y in φ with the terms t1 and t2, respectively, if: φt1,t2x,y |= t1= ti for some ti 6= t1 27It should be obvious that there is a model for ΦImpure-RI, and the proof is left as an exercise for the reader. 28I include 1 merely to aid comprehension. Given 2, 1 is in fact redundant. 1067 Branson then φf,gx,y & φs,gx,y & φh,gx,y & f 6= s & f 6= h & s 6= h is inconsistent anyway, but if: φt1,t2x,y 2 t1= ti for any ti 6= t1 then φf,gx,y & φs,gx,y & φh,gx,y & f 6= s & f 6= h & s 6= h & (∃x)(∀y)(φgy & (φy,gx,y → φy,xx,y)) is consistent. So, as long as "x is the same god as y" doesn't entail a classical identity claim between x and some other term, we are safe. And it doesn't seem that it would on the Rea-Brower account. The only other term that might be involved would be "the divine nature." But on the Rea-Brower account, the divine nature is definitely not classically identical to any of the persons. So, we needn't go into more detail on the precise logical structure, or further semantic content, of the "same god as" relation. The above will do to show the Rea-Brower account is at least formally consistent. 3.2 Classical Trinitarian Heresies 3.2.1 Arianism Although not the first chronologically, the CTH of all CTHs was Arianism. It was Arianism that occasioned the First (and Second) Ecumenical Council(s) and the heated controversies of the 4th century. Historically, Arianism was not motivated by the search for a solution to the LPT. Nor was its rejection by the orthodox motivated by concerns about the LPT. Still, the logical problem of the Trinity did have a role in the debate, albeit a minor one. To the central question of whether the Logos, i.e., the "Angel of the Lord," i.e. Christ, was created or uncreated, the LPT was tacked on as an after-thought or "back-up" argument to other scriptural and metaphysical arguments. Gregory Nazianzen in his Fifth Theological Oration (On the Holy Spirit) discusses an Arian argument: "If," they say, "there is God, and God, and God, how are there not three gods? Or how is that which is glorified not a poly-archy?"29 29[25], Fifth Theological Oration (31), On the Holy Spirit, section 13. Translation mine. 1068 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity But why did those Arians not think the LPT was a problem for them? What was their proposed solution to the LPT? For the first part of the answer, we must go back to Gregory's Third Theological Oration (On the Son). Arians took the position that Father and Son have different natures (that they were not "consubstantial"). Second, they took the position that "is god" as applied to the Father predicates the divine nature. It follows directly from these two views that applying "is god" to the Son could only be done equivocally (regardless of concerns about the LPT).30 And this is a consequence they themselves acknowledged. We read in Gregory's Third Theological Oration: And when we advance this objection against them, "What do you mean to say then? That the Son is not properly God, just as a picture of an animal is not properly an animal?31 And if not properly God, in what sense is He God at all?" They reply, "Why should not these terms be [both] ambiguous, and yet in both cases be used in a proper sense?" And they will give us such instances as the land-dog and the dogfish; where the word "dog" is ambiguous, and yet in both cases is properly used,32 for there is such a species among the ambiguously named, or any other case in which the same appellative is used for two things of different nature.33 So there is step one in the Arian solution to the LPT: equivocate on "is god." Not between P7 on the one hand and P1 through P3 on the other, as in ST, but among P1 through P3 themselves. 30I should emphasize that this semantic claim, that "is god" predicates the divine nature, rather than a kind of activity, was, originally, a specificially Arian claim. It was not a part of the mainstream Christian tradition prior to that point, and was forcefully rejected by St. Gregory of Nyssa and others, while those church fathers who did not specifically reject it, at least refrained from affirming it. Only later was Augustine to be the first church father to actually accept this semantic claim that "is god" predicates divinity, rather than an activity, and it is not clear that his attempt to incorporate this originally Arian semantic claim into a Trinitarian theology was completely successful. See 4.4, p. 31 below for more. 31In Greek, ζῷον means either an animal or a painting. 32τὸν κύνα, τὸν χερσαῖον, καὶ τὸν θαλάττιον. In Greek, κύνη, "dog," refers to either a dog or a dog-fish, and neither is a metaphorical or secondary use of the term. A better example in English would be the word "bank," which is ambiguous for either a financial institution or the edge of a river, but neither is so only in a figurative sense. Both are perfectly proper and literal uses of the word "bank." Arians are saying that, just like the English "bank," the word "God" predicates two completely different natures, though neither is a metaphorical or improper sense of the word. 33[25] Third Theological Oration (29), On the Son, section 14. Translation from [24, p. 306]. 1069 Branson Step two is that they paired this characteristically Arian equivocation on "is god" with a related view about counting statements involving ambiguous count nouns. Gregory continues a little later in the Fifth Theological Oration, speaking in the voice of his Arian opponents: "Things of one essence," you [=Arians] say, "are counted together," and by this "counted together," you mean that they are collected into one number. "But things which are not of one essence are not thus counted; so that you [=orthodox Trinitarians] cannot avoid speaking of three gods, according to this account, while we [=Arians] do not run any risk at all of it, inasmuch as we [=Arians] assert that they are not consubstantial."34 So the accusation made against Trinitarians by Arians is something like this. When we count by a count-noun F, for example "dog," that noun must express some essence or nature, in this case dog-hood. And the number of Fs will be the number of things instantiating this essence or nature. So, if there are three things that all instantiated dog-hood, then there are three dogs. Applied to the Trinity, the Arian argues as follows. The orthodox Trinitarian holds precisely this sort of view with respect to the persons of the Trinity. That is, the orthodox Trinitarian holds that each of the persons instantiates god-hood (or "the Godhead," to use the old-fashioned word). So, given the Arian view of counting, the orthodox Trinitarian will have to say that there are three gods. On the other hand, if we have a count-noun that is ambiguous between two essences or natures, then we have to precisify (whether explicitly, or tacitly, given a certain context), and only given that precisification can we answer the question how many Fs there are. For example, if "dog" is ambiguous between a kind of mammal and a kind of fish, and there is one land-dog and one dog-fish in the vicinity, and we ask "how many dogs are there?" the Arian will say that we have to precisify. In this context, there are two admissible precisifications. On one, the question comes to, "how many land-dogs are there?" and the answer is "one." On the other , the question comes to, "how many dog-fish are there?" and the answer is "one." So, on every admissible precisification in this context, the answer is "one." And on no admissible precisification in this context is the answer anything other than "one." So, it is right to answer "one" in a context like that. Applied to the Trinity, the Arian argues that the three persons do not exemplify a single essence or nature, but three distinct natures. However, the count-noun "god" is ambiguous, and can predicate any of these three natures. So, in this context, 34[25], Fifth Theologian Oration (31), On the Holy Spirit, section 17. Translation from [24, p. 323]. 1070 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity there are three admissible precisifications of the predicate "is god," which we can represent formally by using "G1" for one sense of "is god," "G2" for the second sense, and "G3" for the third sense. (The precise semantic content of these predicates can be filled in however the Arian likes. The important fact from a formal point of view is simply that there are three senses, whatever they might be.) Then, on any admissible precisification of the question "how many gods are there?" in this context, the answer will be "one." (I.e., there is only one god in the sense of G1, only one god in the sense of G2, and only one god in the sense of G3.) And on no admissible precisification of the question in this context is the answer anything other than "one." So, it is right (for the Arian) in a context like this to answer "one" to the question "how many gods are there" (likewise for, how many gods they believe in, worship, etc.) So, we can state a proposed Arian solution to the LPT as follows: 1. PLI is a formally adequate language for P. 2. ΦAR in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation for P: ΦAR: (1AR) G1f (2AR) G2s (3AR) G3h (4AR) f6=s (5AR) f6=h (6AR) s6=h (7AR) (∃x)(∀y)(Gix & (Giy → x=y)) (for every admissible precisification of Gi in this context) 3. ΦAR is formally consistent in PLI.35 3.2.2 (Naïve) Modalism Modalism, also known as monarchianism, patripassianism or Sabellianism, was an early Trinitarian heresy, or family of heresies, that in some way denied the distinctness of the divine "persons" or "hypostases." 35Proof is left as an exercise for the reader. 1071 Branson We are in a more difficult position to determine precisely the content of Modalist doctrine, as compared to Arianism or orthodox Trinitarianism, due to lack of evidence. No complete modalist writings survive; what we have are fragments quoted by the church fathers and descriptions of their views by the church fathers. And the Fathers may not always have shared our concern for charitably interpreting one's opponents. Perhaps because of this, or perhaps for some other reasons, a certain interpretation of modalism has been quite popular. I have misgivings about the historical accuracy of that account, but since we will be able to do well enough with the standard account, I will not explore the issue, but will simply label the standard account of modalism "Naïve Modalism" (NM) and merely note that, in my opinion, there were probably at least some versions of modalism that were more sophisticated. Now, what seems to me the less charitable interpretation (or perhaps a perfectly good interpretation of a much less plausible version of modalism) can be seen in passages such as this one from St. Basil: For they get tripped up [thinking] that the Father is the same as the Son, and that the Son is the same as the Father, and similarly also the Holy Spirit, so that there is one person, but three names.36 Similar statements can be found in other patristic descriptions of Sabellianism (as well as the related heresies of Praxaeus, Noetius, etc.) If we today were to say that "Samuel Clemens" and "Mark Twain" are two names for the same person, then we would express that in PLI by making, say "s" in PLI have the same semantic value as "Samuel Clemens" in English, "m" in PLI have the same semantic value as "Mark Twain" in English, and asserting "s=m" in PLI. (At least, those of us who accept classical identity probably would.) So, if "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit" (in English, or their equivalents in Greek) are just three names for the same person, then, the persons of the Trinity are related in the way we would express using the "=" sign in PLI. So, if a Naïve Modalist accepts PLI (and he could), the NM view might be regimented as either of: ΦNM-1: ΦNM-2: (1NM-1) f=g (1NM-2) Gf (2NM-1) s=g (2NM-2) Gs (3NM-1) h=g (3NM-2) Gh (4NM-1) f=s (4NM-2) f=s 36[23, pp. 308–310]. Translation mine. 1072 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity (5NM-1) f=h (5NM-2) f=h (6NM-1) s=h (6NM-2) s=h (7NM-1) (∃x)(∀y)(x=g & (y=g → y=x)) (7NM-2) (∃x)(∀y)(Gx & (Gy → y=x)) And we can give a proposed NM solution to the LPT as: 1. PLI is a formally adequate language for P. 2. At least one of ΦNM-1 in PLI or ΦNM-2 in PLI is a formally adequate regimentation for P. 3. Both ΦNM-1 and ΦNM-2 are formally consistent in PLI.37 Similar considerations to those discussed in reference to Impure RI38 show that it doesn't matter what further logical content might be packed into the Naïve Modalist understanding of "is god" in a regimentation of P1 through P3 as long as "x is god" doesn't entail x 6= f, x 6= s, or x 6= h. More precisely, if: φt1x |= t1 6=f ∨ t1 6=s ∨ t1 6=h then φfx & φsx & φhx is inconsistent anyway. On the other hand, if: φt1x 2 t1 6=f ∨ t1 6=s ∨ t1 6=h then φfx & φsx & φhx & f=s & f=h & s=h & (∃x)(∀y)(φx & (φy → y=x)) is consistent. But although both of these regimentations are consistent (given the caveat in the preceding paragraph), neither is much in the way of a regimentation of P, because however P4 through P6 ought to be analyzed, this isn't it. NM avoids the inconsistency of LPT1 and LPT2, not by so much by offering legitimate alternative regimentations of P4 through P6, but by simply denying them. So NM is heretical by the lights of historical orthodoxy. 37It should be obvious that there is a model for ΦNM-1 as well as a model for ΦNM-2, and each proof is left as an exercise for the reader. 38Section 3.1.3, p. 15 ff., above. 1073 Branson 3.3 The Big Question This completes our discussion of representatives of the "major" answers to the LPT that have actually been proposed, both in ancient times and in our own. The question that faces us is whether these are the only ways one could possibly solve the LPT. And if not, what other options could there be for the Trinitarian? If there are no other options, how could we know that? Some philosophers find fault with all of the on-offer solutions to the LPT, but hold out hope for new avenues in "Trinitarian theorizing." They hold that the "business of Trinitarian theorizing" is simply "unfinished," and that there may be fresh, new ways of creatively answering (and hopefully solving) the LPT. For example, Dale Tuggy in "The Unfinished Business of Trinitarian Theorizing," explores a few proposed Trinitarian theories, and finds fault with all of them. However, at least at the time of writing that paper, he still held out hope. "We Christian theologians and philosophers came up with the doctrine of the Trinity; perhaps with God's help we will come up with a better version of it."39 I think that sentiment is not atypical of many philosophers in the field. But could there really be any importantly different solution to the LPT? Something that is neither a form of RI nor of ST? Is there hope that further "Trinitarian theorizing" may someday pay off in a creative, new way of understanding the Trinity, heretofore undreamt of, and that avoids the anti-Trinitarian's criticisms in some previously unimagined way? Is "the business of Trinitarian theorizing" really "unfinished" in this sense? In the next section, I will argue that this is not possible. I will show that, despite the fact that there are infinitely many other possible answers to the LPT, they can all be grouped together into a finite taxonomy of "Families" based on certain salient logical features. The ultimate result will be (1) a "Family" all of the members of which are logically inconsistent, (2) a "Family" all of the members of which would be either heretical or not usable by Trinitarians, and (3) and (4) two "Families" that would avoid those problems, and which closely, though not precisely, map onto ST and RI, but all of which will suffer from one or the other (or both) of the difficulties with those views we have already explored. I.e., they will either (3) equivocate on "is god" between P7 on the one hand and P1 through P3 on the other, or else (4) count in a non-standard way. Thus, the Trinitarian who hopes that further "Trinitarian theorizing" might help is out of luck. Those who find fault with the on-offer solutions for the reasons we have discussed should simply close up the shop. Those who are willing to live with one or the other (or both) of those difficulties, are already in a position to claim 39[26, p. 179]. 1074 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity victory, at least with reference to the purely logical problem. In either case, no real work remains to be done on any purely logical problem for the doctrine of the Trinity. 4 Taxonomy of Possible Solutions Method, Briefly In this section, we will be grouping all of the infinitely many possible answers to the LPT together into a finite, and thus manageable, taxonomy. Here is how we will proceed. First, we will note certain key logical features of the already proposed answers to the LPT. Second, we will use these features to create a jointly exhaustive (though not mutually exclusive) taxonomy of sets, or "Families," of answers to the LPT. Of course, there are infinitely many possible languages in which to regiment P, and within many of those languages, infinitely many sets of formulae with which to regiment P. But for the purposes of showing there to be a formally adequate solution to the LPT, it would be "overkill" to map out all of them. For example, once we see how Pure RI avoids inconsistency by eschewing classical identity and positing alternative, relative identity relations in its place, it doesn't matter whether we go on to equivocate on "is god" among P1 through P3 or not. Once we see what minimal set of logical features of Pure RI allows it to avoid formal inconsistency, we can group together all proposed answers to the LPT that share those features into one set, or "Family," of answers to the LPT. Then we can go on to consider only other proposed answers that do not share those features. We will proceed in 7 steps, plus three initial caveats. Three Caveats First, aside from the Pure RI-er, everyone involved in the debate seems to accept some version of PLI as a formally adequate language for P. Or in any case, they may as well. Therefore, we will continue with our "prejudice" towards PLI. Specifically, we will assume (or pretend) that: PLI is a formally adequate language for P if and only if there is such a thing as classical identity. And if we accept that PLI is a formally adequate language for P, PLI is what we will use to regiment P.40 40Again, nothing substantive hangs on this methodological choice. See footnote at 2.1, p. 4 above. Also, as I note below, even if one does find one of these three caveats problematic, we can always take answers to the LPT that exhibit one of the qualities discussed here and treat them as another "Family" in our taxonomy. See p. 26. 1075 Branson Second, almost nobody involved in the debate takes it to be legitimate to equivocate on the terms "the Father," "the Son," or "the Holy Spirit." Likewise, almost nobody takes them to be anything other than singular terms, if there are such things as singular terms.41 So, we will also adopt the policy that, so long as we are working within a language in which there are such things as singular terms, we will insist on treating "the Father," "the Son," and "the Holy Spirit" as singular terms, and on regimenting them univocally wherever they appear.42 (RIL, as we have seen, has its own way of analyzing what appear to be singular terms in natural languages that gets around the too-cozy relation between singular terms and classical identity.) Third, while both Pure and Impure RI-ers count by a relation other than classical identity, neither they nor anybody else rejects the general schema with which logicians typically analyze counting statements. In other words, nobody denies that a formally adequate regimentation of "There is exactly one God" would have the schema: (7SCHEMA) (∃x)(∀y)(φx & (φy → y R x)) (where R is a meta-linguistic variable to be filled in with a predicate standing for whatever relation we count by). Further, it's hard to see what other schema one could count by. So, we will only consider answers to the logical problem of the Trinity where P7 is regimented as some instance of (7SCHEMA), whether those instances give R the value of classical identity, some relative identity relation, or whatever. It should be noted that, even if one were to disagree with all three of these provisos, it would by no means wreck the attempt to create a complete taxonomy of possible answers to the LPT. It would only mean that there would be, at most, an additional three Families of answers to the LPT – one Family of answers that does not treat "Father," "Son" and "Holy Spirit" as singular terms (despite accepting the formal adequacy of a language that includes singular terms) and/or equivocates on those terms, one Family that acknowledges classical identity but that for some reason 41Of course, there is an exception to every rule. See [1]. 42In what follows, we shall always let those singular terms be, respectively, "f," "s," and "h," when we are using PLI. Strictly speaking, then, we are leaving out formulae that use other terms, other logical names, in PLI, such as "a," "b," "c," etc., to refer to the persons. To be more logically precise, we should instead use meta-linguistic variables such as "α," "β," and "γ" to range over all possible terms in the language, with the stipulation that α 6= β 6= γ (i.e., that the values of these meta-linguistic variables, the terms or "logical names," be distinct, not necessarily that their bearers be distinct, which would be the substance of P4 through P6 in all non-NM regimentations). But while this latter course is the more logically precise, it would introduce needless complexity in what will already be a complex taxonomy. So, we will simply choose always to use "f," "s," and "h," in PLI as the terms for the persons. 1076 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity does not find PLI formally adequate, and one Family that regiments P7 according to some schema other than the usual one. I don't find any of those suggestions plausible enough to warrant attention, but even if I am wrong in ignoring these possibilities, we could still give a complete taxonomy of all possible answers to the LPT by simply grouping all answers to the LPT that have any of these three features into a "Bastard Step-Child Family." In what follows, appropriately enough, I will ignore the members of this family. 4.1 The LPT1 Family As we did in Section 1, suppose that in P1 through P3 we take "is God" to be univocal, treat "God" as the name of an individual, and treat "is" as the "is" of (classical) identity. Then suppose we take "is not" in P4 through P6 as univocal claims of (classical) non-identity. In this case, there is such a thing as classical identity, so we take PLI to be a formally adequate language for P, and we use it. The result is, or at least entails, LPT1, or something just like LPT1 except for 7LPT-1. But since 7LPT-1 is not necessary in order to derive a contradiction, we will group together any proposed answers to the LPT that share the problematic features of its regimentation of P1 through P6. What exactly are those problematic features? It might seem that the most salient feature of LPT1 is that it treats "God" as a logical name instead of a predicate. But of course, a contradiction would arise even if there were another name being used besides "God." And a contradiction would arise even if we treated P1 through P3 not as identity claims, but in a way that entailed a certain kind of identity claim. For example, suppose I regiment "x is God" as a predication meaning "x is divine," but then analyze "x is divine" as meaning "x is identical to Lucifer." I will still have a contradiction, and for essentially the same reasons, logically speaking, as LPT1. Indeed, if there is any term ti such that ti 6= x and my analysis of "x is God" entails "x = ti" I will end up with a contradiction. That is because "The Father is God" will now entail "The Father = ti" and "The Son is God" will entail "The Son = ti." And those together will entail "The Father = the Son," and that will contradict 4LPT-1, or anything that entails 4LPT-1. So, we can group together any answers to the LPT that: (1) use PLI, and (2) give some univocal regimentation φ to "is God" in P1 through P3, such that (3) φα |= α = ti for some term ti such that ti 6= α, and 1077 Branson (4) either regiment "is not" in P4 through P6 univocally as 6=, or for any other reason entails 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1 into the "LPT1 Family."43 Any member of the LPT1 Family will be a non-solution to the LPT, since its analyses of P1-P3 versus P4-P6 will yield a contradiction. So, from here on, we will only consider proposed answers to the LPT that do at least one (or more) of the following: (1) use a language other than PLI (and so, given our "prejudice" in favor of PLI, must reject the existence of classical identity), or (2) fail to give a univocal regimentation φ to "is god" in P1 through P3, or (3) give a univocal regimentation φ to "is god" in P1 through P3 such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α, or (4) regiment "is not" in any of P4 through P6 in some way other than 6=, and do not for any other reason entail 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, or 6LPT-1. 4.2 The Non-PLI (Pure RI) Family We've seen how Pure RI escapes inconsistency by rejecting classical identity, and with it PLI (option (1) immediately above). This means that, perforce, classical identity cannot be the relation by which we count gods in P7. This is both a feature that allows it to escape inconsistency and a feature that makes it controversial. Since we are assuming (or pretending) that PLI is a formally adequate language for P if and only if there is such a thing as classical identity, we will group together all answers to the LPT that reject classical identity, and with it PLI, into the "NonPLI Family" of answers – the family of answers all of which choose option (1) above. Since we have already seen at least one member of the Non-PLI Family that has a logically consistent regimentation of P (our Pure RI proposed solution), we know that the Non-PLI Family contains solutions to the LPT.44 431 is strictly speaking redundant, given 3 and our "prejudice" that, as long as there is such a thing as classical identity, PLI is a formally adequate language for P, and the language we will use to regiment P. 44It also contains non-solutions, but that will not matter for our concerns, since our taxonomy provides a kind of "process of elimination" proof. And if one rejects a particular proposed answer to the LPT as not formally adequate because that answer eschews classical identity and PLI, then one should reject all proposed answers to the LPT that eschew classical identity and PLI as not being formally adequate, and thus one should reject all proposed answers that fall within this Family. 1078 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity So, from here on, we will only consider proposed answers to the LPT that accept the existence of classical identity and that (therefore, given our "prejudice" towards PLI) use PLI as the language in which to regiment P. 4.3 The Naïve Modalist Family (and Cousins) We've seen how NM escapes inconsistency by analyzing P4 through P6 in such a way as to essentially reject them. Again, this is both a feature that allows it to escape inconsistency and a feature that makes it controversial (actually, in this case, heretical). A related move would be to regiment P4 through P6 in a a non-committal way that simply does not entail any of the relevant classical identity claims, i.e. 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, or 6LPT-1, despite accepting that there is such a thing as classical identity, thus falling into option (4) above. We've seen that orthodox Trinitarians intend to draw a strong, real distinction between the persons. And, assuming classical non-identity exists, it is the weakest real distinction that can be drawn. So, if the orthodox Trinitarian accepts the existence of classical (non-)identity, he himself will insist on regimenting P4 through P6 as classical non-identity claims (4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1). And if the orthodox Trinitarian wanted to analyze P4 through P6 as drawing an even stronger distinction than classical non-identity, he would still at least accept 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1. Indeed, if his preferred analysis involved a stronger distinction, he would no doubt insist that, in some way or another, his preferred analysis at least entails 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1. Thus, we will group together all proposed answers to the LPT that (a) accept the existence of classical (non-)identity, but (b) do not entail all of 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1, into the "Naïve Modalist Family" ("NM Family") of answers.45 Since we have already seen at least one member of the NM Family that has a logically consistent regimentation of P, we know that the NM Family contains solutions to the LPT.46 45A bit of logical housekeeping is in order. What about an answer to the LPT that, say, entails 5LPT-1 and 6LPT-1, but fails to entail 4LPT-1? Thus, the Holy Spirit would be distinct from the Father and from the Son, but the Father aned Son could be identical, a possibility St. Photios calls "a semi-Sabellian monstrosity" in his arguments against the filioque, [18, p. 73]. As we've defined the NM Family (any regimentation that does not entail 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1 – all three), it includes such "semi-Sabellian monstrosities." And this seems like a reasonable grouping. Clearly the orthodox Trinitarian wants to understand P4 through P6 univocally. Any kind of semi-Sabellian view is just about as bad, from the point of view of orthodoxy, as all-out Sabellianism. Of course, this will mean some members of the NM Family will still be inconsistent, and for just the same reasons (at least some subset of the same reasons) as LPT1 is. But that is fine. All we are claiming here is that some members of the NM Family are consistent – not that all of them are. 46Again, it also contains non-solutions, but that will not matter for our concerns, since the 1079 Branson Note that defining the NM Family this way means there will be certain "cousins" of Naïve Modalism included in the NM Family that will regiment, for example, "the Father is not the Son" simply as some "ho-hum" relation, "f R s," that neither commits us to the classical identity of the persons (characteristic of NM), nor the classical non-identity of the persons (characteristic of orthodox Trinitarianism). Is it right to include such non-committal answers in the NM Family? I think so. Again, the intent of the orthodox Trinitarian in saying that "the Father is not the Son," is to draw a strong, real distinction between the two, and, at least within a framework that accepts classical non-identity in the first place, classical non-identity will be the weakest real distinction there is. Thus, any regimentation of "is not" that does not even entail classical non-identity (within a framework that admits the existence of classical non-identity) clearly subverts the intent of the claim. Or in any case, it clearly fails to say what the orthodox Trinitarian wants to be saying when he says "the Father is not the Son." On the other hand, regimentations of "is not" in P4 through P6 that are not classical non-identity statements but that do entail them will still be inconsistent with anything that 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1 are inconsistent with anyway (since they will entail 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1). So, from here on, we will only consider proposed answers to the LPT that do not reject P4 through P6 and that either do regiment them univocally as classical non-identity claims between the persons, or else as some formula χ that in some other way at least entails those classical non-identity claims. That means that at this point we can "lock in" our regimentation of P4 through P6 as: (4LPT-2-FAMILY) χ1 such that χ1 |= f 6= s (5LPT-2-FAMILY) χ2 such that χ2 |= f 6= h (6LPT-2-FAMILY) χ3 such that χ3 |= s 6= h 4.4 The Equivocation1 Family We've seen how Arianism escapes inconsistency by equivocating on "is god" among P1 through P3 (option (2) above). Again, this is both a feature that allows it to escape inconsistency and a feature that makes it controversial or problematic, though not in exactly the same way as NM. In the case of NM, it is clear that the same formal feature that allows it to escape inconsistency makes it (unavoidably) heretical. That is to say, NM avoids inconsistency by admitting the strict identity of the persons, but there is no way orthodox Trinitarian must reject all answers in this Family as heretical. Being a non-solution to the LPT is only more reason for the orthodox Trinitarian to reject a proposed answer to the LPT. 1080 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity one could strictly identify the divine persons (in the sense of classical identity) and not fall into the heresy of Modalism. And strict identity (at least within PLI) is part of the purely formal apparatus of the language. Thus, here a purely formal, logical feature lands us in heresy, regardless of how we interpret the non-logical vocabulary.47 Is the same the case with the characteristic equivocation that allows Arianism to escape inconsistency? Trinitarians clearly want to say that the Father and Son share the same divine nature. However, if we are considering purely formal features, we cannot assume any particular semantic value for "god" or "divine." In particular, we cannot assume that "god" or "divine" must mean "a thing with the divine nature." Supposing it did, the equivocation here would certainly yield a heretical result. But, for one thing, a long line of Christian authors, from St. Justin Martyr up through St. Gregory of Nyssa, and beyond, deny that "god" means "thing with the divine nature."48 We are thus in fact in a quite different situation with respect to the non-logical vocabulary "god" or "divine" that relates to Arianism, as opposed to the "is" and "is not" that relates to Modalism, since "is" counts as "logical" vocabulary, regardless of which sense of "is" it is, whereas "god" and "divine" are obviously part of the non-logical vocabulary, and thus take us into substantive questions of semantics, rather than purely formal questions. It is also the case that there is a sense in which many even of the pro-Nicenes would say that the Father alone is "the One God."49 On the other hand, no orthodox Trinitarian would say that the persons are strictly identical. However, we can say that, in the sense in which the Father alone is "the One God," the Son and Spirit are simply other than the One God.50 And in that case, the LPT simply does not arise in the first place. Thus, it is only in senses of the word "god" such that each person does count (univocally) as "(a) god" that the LPT even becomes an issue. And the fact that there may be some sense in which the Father alone is "the One God" does nothing to solve the LPT, so long as there is any sense 47Of course, strictly speaking it is not purely a matter of logical form that makes the propositions heretical! Rather, it is the fact that we are holding constant our uses of "Father" or "f," "Son" or "s," and "Holy Spirit" or "h." Given that bit of non-logical content plus the purely logical machinery of classical identity is what gives us heresy. But again, we are ignoring interpretations of P that treat these names in any other way. 48See [2, pp. 134–151]. Available at www.beaubranson.com/research. 49The Nicene Creed itself begins, "I believe in One God, the Father," and statements can be found in St. Athanasius and all three Cappadocian fathers to the effect that the One God is the Father. For a fuller explanation of this sort of view, see [4]. 50E.g., Gregory Nazianzen, Carmina Dogmatica 1, On the Father says, "There is one God without source, without cause, uncircumscribed. . . the mighty Father of a mighty, Only-Begotten, and faithful Son. . . The Logos of God is other than the One God, but not other in divinity." (PG 37. Translation mine; emphasis mine.) 1081 Branson of the term "god" that applies to all of the persons univocally. And certainly any Trinitarian would say that there is some such sense. Thus, what we can say is not that there is no sense in which one can equivocate on the predicate "is god" among P1 and P3 and remain within the bounds of orthodoxy, but that there is some sense in which the predicate "is god" applies univocally to the persons in P1 through P3 (at least, by the lights of orthodox Trinitarianism). And it is this sense (or these senses, if there are multiple such senses), which give rise to the LPT and which we therefore have in view when discussing the LPT. Any sense of the predicate "is god" which would apply only to the Father simply would not give rise to the LPT in the first place. It is only those senses of "is god" that should apply to all of the persons equally, if they apply to them at all, that we have in view here. Thus, while not all analyses of P that equivocate on the predicate "is god" among P1 and P3 are necessarily heretical, they are all either heretical or irrelevant to the LPT (since they would not be the sense(s) that give rise to the LPT in the first place). So, we will group together all answers to the LPT that equivocate on the predicate "is god" among P1 through P3 into the "Equivocation1 Family" of answers. Since we have already seen at least one member of the Equivocation1 Family that has a logically consistent regimentation for P, we know that the Equivocation1 Family contains solutions to the LPT.51 So, from here on, we will only consider proposed answers to the LPT that do not equivocate on "is god" among P1 through P3. Thus, we can now "lock in" at least the univocality of our regimentation of P1 through P3 as follows: (1LPT-2-FAMILY) φf such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (2LPT-2-FAMILY) φs such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (3LPT-2-FAMILY) φh such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α Why will φ be such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α? After Step 1 we decided to only consider answers to the LPT that do one of the following: (1) use a language other than PLI (and so reject the existence of classical identity), or (2) fail to give a univocal regimentation φ to "is god" in P1 through P3, or 51Again, it also contains non-solutions, but that will not matter for our concerns, since the orthodox Trinitarian must reject all answers in this Family as either heretical or as pertaining to an interpretation of "god" that is not relevant to the LPT. Being a non-solution to the LPT is only more reason for the orthodox Trinitarian to reject a proposed answer to the LPT. 1082 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity (3) give a univocal regimentation φ to "is god" in P1 through P3 such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α, or (4) regiment "is not" in any of P4 through P6 in some way other than 6=, and do not for any other reason entail 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, or 6LPT-1. After Step 2 we decided only to consider proposed answers to the LPT that do use PLI (so, option (1) is no longer open). After Step 3 we decided only to consider proposed answers to the LPT that do regiment "is not" in P4 through P6 as 6= (or at least for some other reason entail 4LPT-1, 5LPT-1, and 6LPT-1) (so, option (4) is no longer open). And after Step 4, we decided to no longer consider answers to the LPT that equivocate on their regimentation of "is god" among P1 through P3 (so, option (2) is no longer open). But since we are only considering answers to the LPT that choose at least one of the above four options, we can from now on only consider answers that take option (3), that is, that give a univocal regimentation φ to "is God" in P1 through P3, but such that φα 2 α = ti, for any term ti such that ti 6= α. Since φα 2 α = ti, for any term ti such that ti 6= α, it will not contradict any of: (4LPT-2-FAMILY) χ1 such that χ1 |= f 6= s (5LPT-2-FAMILY) χ2 such that χ2 |= f 6= h (6LPT-2-FAMILY) χ3 such that χ3 |= s 6= h simply on the basis of the non-identity claims. That is, whatever other logical form may be buried within χ1, χ2, and χ3, could still generate a contradiction, but the non-identity claims themselves will not. So, from here on out, we know we are dealing with families of answers to the LPT such that their regimentations of P1 through P6 will be consistent barring any problematic logical features that might be tucked away in the regimentation of "is not" beyond mere non-identity. Their regimentations of P1 through P6 will certainly be consistent if "is not" in P4 through P6 is simply analyzed univocally as classical non-identity. So, our focus now will be on the regimentation of P7. It is here that we will see why ST and RI have seemed intuitively like the only options or the "major" options. Aside from the Non-PLI Family, the Families we have considered so far have all been either inconsistent, heretical, or irrelevant to the LPT. The remaining two Families will map onto ST and and Impure RI in a certain sense. We will later consolidate these into just two Families that roughly map onto ST and (Pure or Impure) RI. 1083 Branson 4.5 The Equivocation2 Family (Social Trinitarian) We've seen how Social Trinitarianism escapes inconsistency by equivocating on "is god" between P7 on the one hand, and P1 through P3 on the other. Again, this is both a feature that allows it to escape inconsistency and a feature that makes it controversial. So we will group together all such answers to the LPT into the "Equivocation2 Family" of answers.52 Proposed solutions of this variety, therefore, will give regimentations of the form: (1LPT-2-FAMILY) φf such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (2LPT-2-FAMILY) φs such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (3LPT-2-FAMILY) φh such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (4LPT-2-FAMILY) χ1 such that χ1 |= f 6= s (5LPT-2-FAMILY) χ2 such that χ2 |= f 6= h (6LPT-2-FAMILY) χ3 such that χ3 |= s 6= h (7SCHEMA-ψ) (∃x) (∀y) (ψx & (ψy → y R x)) That is, the regimentation φ of "is god" for P1 through P3 will be different from the regimentation ψ of "is god" in P7. As we said earlier, not all such answers to the LPT will involve anything particularly "social." This is simply the salient logical feature of ST that allows it to escape contradiction. Since we have already seen at least one member of the Equivocation2 Family that has a logically consistent regimentation, we know that the Equivocation2 Family contains solutions to LPT.53 So, from here on, we will only consider proposed answers to the LPT that do not equivocate on "is god" between P7 on the one hand, and P1 through P3 on the other. 52Note that, as we are defining the Equivocation2 Family, it is necessary that a member of the Equivocation2 Family family equivocate on "is god," but it is not necessary that it employ classical identity. A view that both equivocates in this way and employs a relation other than classical identity here would still fall into the Equivocation2 Family as we are defining it. Of course, if one finds it more useful, one could have a separate "hybrid" family, the members of which would both equivocate on "is god" and count by a relation other than classical identity, then have a "pure" Equivocation2 Family, the members of which equivocate on "is god" and do count by classical identity. For now, I will find it more convenient simply to group these all together into one Equivocation2 Family, albeit a family, like Joseph's, that is "splittable" into the half-tribes of "Pure Equivocation2 Family" and "Hybrid Equivocation2 Family." 53Again, it also contains non-solutions, but that will not matter for our concerns, since anyone who objects to the characteristic equivocation involved here must reject all of the proposed answers in this Family. Being a non-solution to the LPT is only more reason for the orthodox Trinitarian to reject a proposed answer to the LPT. 1084 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity But we have already "locked in" regimentations of P1 through P6. And we are no longer considering proposed answers to the LPT that equivocate on "is god" between P7 on the one hand, and P1 through P3 on the other. So, however we regiment "is god" in P1 through P3, it will have to be the same as our regimentation of "is god" in P7. And since we are assuming that counting works according to the usual schema (only the precise relation may be disputed), we can now "lock in" regimentations of all of P1 through P7 as: (1LPT-2-FAMILY) φf such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (2LPT-2-FAMILY) φs such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (3LPT-2-FAMILY) φh such that φα 6|= α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (4LPT-2-FAMILY) χ1 such that χ1 |= f 6= s (5LPT-2-FAMILY) χ2 such that χ2 |= f 6= h (6LPT-2-FAMILY) χ3 such that χ3 |= s 6= h (7SCHEMA-φ) (∃x)(∀y)(φx & (φy → y R x)) (such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α) leaving open only the question of precisely what relation "R" will represent in (7SCHEMA-φ). 4.6 The Non-Classical-Identity-Counting Family We've seen how Impure RI escapes inconsistency by claiming that our counting practices (at least sometimes) employ some relation(s) other than classical identity. Again, this is both a feature that allows it to escape inconsistency and a feature that makes it controversial. We are assuming that the logical form of "is god" is not itself formally contradictory and that it does not entail a classical identity claim to some single individual.54 Thus, as long as the relation we give for R in (7SCHEMA-φ) is not classical identity and as long as y R x does not entail y=x, no contradiction will be derivable. So, we will group together all answers to the LPT that analyze counting statements via a relation other than classical identity, and that do not entail classical identity, into the "Non-Classical-Identity-Counting Family" ("NCIC Family") of answers.55 Since we have already seen at least one member of the NCIC Family that 54Again, the assumption that the logical form of "is god" is not in itself contradictory is redundant, given the assumption that it doesn't entail a certain kind of identity claim. A contradiction entails anything. 55Note that this means that Pure RI will fall into both the Non-PLI Family and the NCIC Family. That is fine, since this is only intended to be a jointly exhaustive, not mutually exclusive, taxonomy of answers to the LPT. I will have more to say about this below under the heading "Consolidating 1085 Branson has a logically consistent regimentation of P, we know that the NCIC Family contains solutions to the LPT.56 So, from here on, we will only consider proposed answers to the LPT that do count by classical identity. But since we are assuming that counting works according to the usual schema, and since we are not equivocating on "is god" between P7 on the one hand, and P1 through P3 on the other, if we use classical identity as the relation to count by in P7, we can fill in the variable R in: (7SCHEMA-φ) (∃x)(∀y)(φx & (φy → y R x)) with "=" and have: (7LPT-2-FAMILY) (∃x)(∀y)(φx & (φy → y = x)) (And if we used any other relation R such that R entails classical identity, then our regimentation of P7, whatever it might be, would still at least entail (7LPT-2-FAMILY).) Thus, we are now out of formally consistent alternatives to LPT1. We can now "lock in" our entire regimentation of P1 through P7 as: 4.7 The LPT2 Family (1LPT-2-FAMILY) φf such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (2LPT-2-FAMILY) φs such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (3LPT-2-FAMILY) φh such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (4LPT-2-FAMILY) χ1 such that χ1 |= f 6= s (5LPT-2-FAMILY) χ2 such that χ2 |= f 6= h (6LPT-2-FAMILY) χ3 such that χ3 |= s 6= h (7LPT-2-FAMILY-SCHEMA) (∃x)(∀y)(φx & (φy → y R x)) (such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α) (such that y R x |= y = x) All proposed answers to the LPT that fall into the LPT2 Family will be nonsolutions.57 our Taxonomy of Proposed Answers," section 5, p. 37. 56Again, it also contains non-solutions, but that will not matter for our concerns, since anyone who rejects the view that counting works by way of some relation other than classical identity must reject all answers in this Family anyway. Being a non-solution to the LPT is only more reason for the orthodox Trinitarian to reject a proposed answer to the LPT. 57Proof is left as an exercise for the reader. 1086 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity 5 Consolidating our Taxonomy of Proposed Answers Finally, we can usefully reduce the number of options by grouping together some of these families of answers in three steps, as follows. (1) Anti-Trinitarians need not be picky about whether it is some member of the LPT1 Family or of the LPT2 Family that is formally adequate. If any member of either of these families is formally adequate for P, then P is inconsistent, and the anti-Trinitarians win. So we can combine these Familes into one and talk simply of the "LPT Family." This leaves only 6 families of answers to the LPT. (2) Orthodox Trinitarians will want to reject all of the answers in the NM Family as heretical and all of the answers in the Equivocation1 Family as either heretical (if "(a) god" is intended to mean a thing with the divine nature, or something else shared by the persons) or else as dealing with a sense of "god" that isn't what gives rise to the LPT in the first place. If any member of either of these Families is formally adequate for P (under an interpretation that is relevant to the LPT in the first place) then the orthodox conception of the Trinity is incorrect, and the heretics win. Thus, we can usefully group all of these answers together into one "CTH Family." (And since we are including the Equivocation1 Family into the CTH Family, we will also now allow ourselves to refer to the Equivocation2 Family simply as "the Equivocation Family.") This leaves only 5 families of answers to the LPT. Note that, while we define the LPT Family and the CTH Family as above, we do so with the caveat that while all members of the LPT Family are inconsistent, and all members of the CTH Family are either heretical or irrelevant, not all inconsistent regimentations of P (all non-solutions to the LPT) go into the LPT Family, and not all heretical views about the Trinity go into the CTH Family. (One can usefully think of the LPT Family, then, as the Purely Inconsistent Family, and the CTH Family as the Purely Heretical or Irrelevant Family. Regimentations of P found in other families of answers to the logical problem of the Trinity could still be inconsistent for other reasons, or be used to express heretical views about the Trinity once the content is filled in.)58 The point is simply that the Trinitarian must reject all the members of the LPT Family and all the members of the CTH Family. Doing so is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for the Trinitarian to "win" the debate. (3) Finally, by rejecting classical identity altogether, Pure RI perforce counts by a relation other than classical identity. But that is the characteristic feature of Impure RI that allows it to escape contradiction. But from the point of view of formal consistency, it is really irrelevant whether one then goes on to accept or 58"God is good" and "God is evil" have the same logical form. So clearly there is more to heresy and orthodoxy than simply logical form! 1087 Branson reject the existence of classical identity and the formal adequacy of PLI. That is, as long as a Pure RI answer agrees with an Impure RI answer in its regimentation of P7,59 as involving a relation other than classical identity, and which doesn't entail classical identity (and Pure RI must agree with Impure RI about that), and as long as whatever formula φ it uses in its regimentations of P1 through P3 (or its equivalent of P1 through P3) is such that φα 2 α = ti for any term ti such that ti 6= α (and Pure RI must agree with Impure RI about that as well), then it is irrelevant whether we say that there is such a thing as classical identity or not. And it is irrelevant whether we regiment P4 through P6 as involving classical non-identity or not.60 Furthermore, since we grouped together all answers to the LPT that claim that counting works by some relation other than classical identity, and that does not entail classical identity, into the NCIC Family of answers, Pure RI is already included in it anyway.61 We can see that the appearance of Pure RI being importantly distinct from Impure RI (in a sense relevant simply to the question of formal consistency at least) is an illusion. Pure RI may have rhetorical (or other) advantages over Impure RI. But any advantages it may have are not formal. The rejection of PLI is in itself controversial. And no proposed answers to the LPT that fall into the Non-PLI Family do not also fall into the NCIC Family. Thus, we can eliminate talk about the Non-PLI Family and simply speak about the NCIC Family. That leaves only 4 families of answers to the LPT,62 namely: (1) the Equivocation Family, (2) the NCIC Family, (3) the CTH Family, and (4) the LPT Family.63 59Or that part of its regimentation that is parallel to P7, see section 3.1.2, p. 15, above 60Or the Pure RI equivalent of P4 through P6. 61This is one example of why the categories of our taxonomy are jointly exhaustive, but not mutually exclusive. 62Aside from the Bastard Stepchild Family, which we are, appropriately enough, ignoring. 63Again, we are ignoring the Bastard Step-Child Family. But if one wants to take these sorts of regimentations seriously, one can simply add them in as a fifth family of answers to the LPT. The features that lead me to ignore them altogether would then simply count as more "controversial" features, since they are at least that. 1088 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity All answers in the LPT Family (4) are non-solutions. All answers in the CTH Family (3) will be unusable by the orthodox Trinitarian. So, if the orthodox Trinitarian wants to give an analysis of P, that is, an interpretation of S, that is both (a) non-heretical and (b) offers a solution (rather than a non-solution) to the LPT, it must fall into either: (1) the Equivocation Family, which equivocates on "is god" between P7 on the one hand, and P1 through P3 on the other hand, or (2) the NCIC Family, which counts by a relation other than classical identity.64 So, as promised above (section 1.2, p. 3), although there are infinitely many logical forms one could attribute to P, we have created an exhaustive taxonomy of all possible logical forms attributable to P based precisely on the logical features of the major proposed answers to the LPT that cause them to be either inconsistent, heretical or controversial. Although the result does not map onto Social Trinitarianism and Relative Identity Trintiarianism precisely, the taxonomy allows one to see why these two approaches might appear to be the only viable ones, as well as the ways in which a possible solution might subtly differ from proposals given so far. (Specifically, there could be other members of the Equivocation Family in which the non-logical content doesn't necessarily have to do with "centers of consciousness," "divine societies," etc., and there could be other members of the NCIC Family that count by various other relations.) 6 Conclusion Anyone who takes the "business of Trinitarian theorizing" to be "unfinished" in the sense that there may be new solutions to the purely formal difficulty with the doctrine of the Trinity is out of luck. Every answer to the LPT must fall into one (or more) of the categories we have discussed. Only two of these categories contain any solutions to the LPT that are non-heretical. These two categories do indeed roughly correspond to the usual divide between Social Trinitarianism and Relative Identity Trinitarianism, though there is room for additional proposals that may differ in the specific content they employ. 64It could fall into both, since, again, these categories are jointly exhaustive but not mutually exclusive. If one prefers a mutually exclusive taxonomy here, one could stipulate that the NCIC Family not equivocate on "is god," then split the Equivocation2 Family into the "pure" and "hybrid" ST families, and relabel them as the "pure NCIC Family," "pure ST family" and "hybrid family," respectively. 1089 Branson However, anyone who rejects ST on the basis of its characteristic equivocation must reject all answers in the Equivocation Family. And anyone who rejects RI on the basis of its analysis of counting must reject all answers in the NCIC Family. The Trinitarian speculations of philosophers might help with the metaphysics of the Trinity, with establishing the Biblical basis for it, or with some rhetorical or other issue. But from a purely formal point of view, they will always be just another member of one of the Families of answers to the LPT we have defined here, and will necessarily share the controversial features that define those families. References [1] H. E. Baber. Trinity, filioque and semantic ascent. Sophia, 47(2):149 – 160, 2008. [2] Beau Branson. The Logical Problem of the Trinity. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2014. [3] Beau Branson. Ahistoricity in analytic theology. American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 92(1):195–224, 2018. [4] Beau Branson. The neglected doctrine of the monarchy of the father, and its implications for the analytic debate about the trinity. Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses, forthcoming. [5] Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea. Material constitution and the trinity. Faith and Philosophy, 22(1):57–76, 2005. [6] Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea. Understanding the trinity. Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 8(1):145–157, 2005. [7] James Cain. The doctrine of the trinity and the logic of relative identity. Religious Studies, 25(2):141–152, 1989. [8] Richard Cartwright. On the logical problem of the trinity. Philosophical Essays, pages 187–200, 1987. [9] Fred Feldman and Peter Geach. Geach and relative identity (with rejoinder and reply). The Review of Metaphysics, 22(3):547–561, 1969. [10] Peter Thomas Geach. Identity. The Review of Metaphysics, 21(1):3 – 12, 1967. [11] Peter Thomas Geach. Reference and Generality: An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1968. [12] Peter Thomas Geach. Logic Matters. University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972. [13] Peter Thomas Geach. Ontological relativity and relative identity. In Milton Karl Munitz, editor, Logic and Ontology. New York University Press, New York, 1973. [14] Brian Leftow. Anti social trinitarianism. In Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, and Gerald O'Collins, editors, The Trinity : An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, pages 203–249. Oxford Univ Press, 1999. [15] A. P. Martinich. Identity and trinity. The Journal of Religion, 58(2):169–181, 1978. 1090 No New Solutions to the Logical Problem of the Trinity [16] A. P. Martinich. God, emperor and relative identity. Franciscan Studies, 39(1):180–191, 1979. [17] Michael Murray and Michael Rea. Philosophy and christian theology. In Edward N. Zalta, editor, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford, CA, 2012. [18] Photius. On the Mystagogy of the Holy Spirit. Studion Publishers, 1983. Includes "Saint Photios and the Filioque" by Michael Azkoul and "The Life of Saint Photios the Great" by St. Justin Popovich, translated by Ronald Wertz. [19] Michael Rea. Relative identity and the doctrine of the trinity. Philosophia Christi, 5(2):431 – 445, 2003. [20] Michael Rea. Polytheism and christian belief. Journal of Theological Studies, 57:133–48, 2006. [21] Michael Rea. Oxford Readings in Philosophical Theology 1. 1. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, 2009. [22] Michael Rea. The trinity. In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology, pages 403–429. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009. [23] St. Basil the Great. Bibliothek der Symbole und Glaubensregeln der Alten Kirche. E. Morgenstern, Breslau, 3 edition, 1897. [24] St. Cyril of Jerusalem and St. Gregory Nazianzen. A Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church: S. Cyril of Jerusalem. S. Gregory Nazianzen., volume 7 of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: Second Series. Christian literature Company, Oxford; New York, 1894. [25] St. Gregory Nazianzen. Die Fünf Theologischen Reden; Text und Ubersetzung mit Einleitung und Kommentar. Patmos-Verlag, Dusseldorf, 1963. [26] Dale Tuggy. The unfinished business of trinitarian theorizing. Religious Studies, 39(2):165–183, 2003. [27] Dale Tuggy. On positive mysterianism. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 69(3):205–226, 2011. [28] Peter van Inwagen. And yet they are not three gods but one god. In Thomas Morris, editor, Philosophy and the Christian Faith, pages 241–278. University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. [29] Peter van Inwagen. Three persons in one being: On attempts to show that the doctrine of the trinity is self-contradictory. In Melville Y. Stewart, editor, The Holy Trinity, pages 83–97. Springer, 2003. Received 27 May

Technology and Culture, Volume 56, Number 3, July 2015, pp. 610-645 (Article) DOI: 10.1353/tech.2015.0097 For additional information about this article Access provided by University of Illinois @ Urbana-Champaign Library (22 Sep 2015 17:15 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tech/summary/v056/56.3.canales.html ABSTRACT: How are fundamental constants, such as "c" for the speed of light, related to the technological environments that produce them? Relativistic cosmology, developed first by Albert Einstein, depended on military and commercial innovations in telecommunications. Prominent physicists (Hans Reichenbach, Max Born, Paul Langevin, Louis de Broglie, and Léon Brillouin, among others) worked in radio units during WWI and incorporated battlefield lessons into their research. Relativity physicists, working at the intersection of physics and optics by investigating light and electricity, responded to new challenges by developing a novel scientific framework. Ideas about lengths and solid bodies were overhauled because the old Newtonian mechanics assumed the possibility of "instantaneous signaling at a distance." Einstein's universe, where time and space dilated, where the shortest path between two points was often curved and non-Euclidean, followed the rules of electromagnetic "signal" transmission. For these scientists, light's constant speed in the absence of a gravitational field-a fundamental tenet of Einstein's theory-was a lesson derived from communication technologies. ". . . we are dealing here with the propagation of an influence that could, for example, be used for sending an arbitrary signal." -Albert Einstein to Wien, 26 August 1907, in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 5, 40 How are fundamental constants, such as "c" for the speed of light, related to particular technological environments? Our understanding of the conJimena Canales is the Thomas M. Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She would like to thank Bernhard Siegert, Lorenz Engell, and Sigrid Weigel for inspiration. Suzanne Moon and the anonymous referees of Technology and Culture deserve special thanks for criticism and guidance. The author presented a lecture on this topic at the Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM) in Germany on 4 July 2012. Unless otherwise noted, citations from Einstein's works and correspondence refer to The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, and translations from French and German are the author's. ©2015 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/15/5603-0002/610–45 S P E C I A L I S S U E : ( A U T O ) M O B I L I T Y The Media of Relativity Einstein and Telecommunications Technologies J I M E NA C ANA L E S 610 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 610 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 611 stant c and Einstein's relativistic cosmology depended on key experiences and lessons learned in connection to new forms of telecommunications, first used by the military and later adapted for commercial purposes. Many of Einstein's contemporaries understood his theory of relativity by reference to telecommunications, some referring to it as "signal-theory" and "message theory." Prominent physicists who contributed to it (Hans Reichenbach, Max Born, Paul Langevin, Louis de Broglie, and Léon Brillouin, among others) worked in radio units during World War I. Physicists began to retrospectively interpret the old Newtonian mechanics as based on a belief in a means of "instantaneous signaling at a distance." Even common thinking about lengths and solid bodies, argued Einstein and his interlocutors, needed to be overhauled in light of a new understanding of signaling possibilities. Pulling a rod from one side will not make the other end move at once, since relativity had shown that "this would be a signal that moves with infinite speed." Einstein's universe, where time and space dilated, where the shortest path between two points was often curved and which broke the laws of Euclidean geometry, functioned according to the rules of electromagnetic signal transmission. For some critics, the new understanding of the speed of light as an unsurpassable velocity-a fundamental tenet of Einstein's theory-was a mere technological effect related to current limitations in communication technologies. Fundamental constants are considered such essential fixtures of the universe that they are strongly associated with the extraordinary set of coincidences that led to the existence of a universe that produced, sustained, and housed human life on Earth. "If the fundamental constants of nature" were any different, argues statistician David J. Hand, "life as we know it would not exist, and we would not be here to see the stars."1 But the situation is actually quite the reverse: if we had not been here to see the stars, the fundamental constants as we know them would not exist. How did we get our account of universal constants backward? The history of how c for the speed of light became a fundamental constant can help us answer that question. Einstein was intimately familiar with mass-media technologies, particularly radio. When two of the pioneers of radio technologies in Germany (Adolf Slaby and Georg Graf von Arco, director of the Society for Wireless Telegraphy, later known as Telefunken) needed help with patent litigation against Marconi, they turned to Einstein for help. They "believed him to be one of the few persons who understood wireless science and technology."2 Einstein was also chosen to discuss the topic of mass communication directly during a radio-transmitted address at the German Radio and Audio Show in Berlin on 22 August 1930. He extolled the potential benefits of radio and emerging mass-media technologies, pleading with listen1. David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle, 218. 2. Thomas P. Hughes, "Einstein, Inventors, and Invention," 34. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 611 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 612 ers to be thankful for the wonders of science as much as of engineering and to remember "the fact that it is the engineers who make true democracy possible."3 Einstein used these innovations to publicize his views about science, technology, and politics. Yet Einstein, much like Isaac Newton before him and Stephen Hawking afterward, described the work of scientists as marked by solitude. An "isolated life," he explained, was most conducive for "creative" scientific work, which he compared to "such occupations as the service of lighthouses and lightships." The supposed solitary nature of scientific labor contrasted sharply with Einstein's life as a scientist and public intellectual. His so-called "lighthouse" speech was a highly public event. Delivered in front of some 10,000 people, it was recorded so that it could be used as a soundtrack for a newsreel.4 How did Einstein's involvement with technology affect his theoretical work? Historians have focused mostly on the role of clocks. Even though the word "clock" appeared more than fifty times in his relativity theory paper (1905), his life's work is still considered as the paradigmatic example of pure, theoretical science, which, only if applied, can lead to technological results, from atomic energy to GPS. For the most part, Einstein's contributions continue to be safely confined within the realm of theoretical science.5 Einstein's involvement with technology was complex and varied. It is now clear that even "those who prefer their scientists unsullied by commercialism" can no longer overlook his sustained interest in many different technologies, such as gyroscopes, refrigerators, and clocks.6 These efforts, furthermore, were not limited to his years at the Bern Patent Office but continued afterward, even when he was widely recognized for his theoretical work and had moved to America. In some of his public comments about the effects of technology on the modern world, Einstein was at first mostly optimistic. Yet his enthusiasm did not last long: "What comes to 3. Albert Einstein, Anlässlich der Eröffnung der 7. Deutschen Funkausstellung und Phonoschau. Recording at Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, Frankfurt am Main. 4. For Isaac Newton's rhetoric of isolation, see Simon Schaffer, "Newton on the Beach." For Stephen Hawking, see Hélène Mialet, Hawking Incorporated. For Einstein's so-called "lighthouse speech," see Albert Einstein, "Speech in Royal Albert Hall." 5. "Uhr" and "Uhren" in the original German are translated variously as clock/s and watch/es in different English versions. Yet scholars still claim that "neither Einstein nor his colleagues wrote about any connection between his formulation of his theory and any timing technologies." See, for example, Alberto A. Martínez, "Material History and Imaginary Clocks. In this view, "technocultural" factors do not enter into Einstein's work because Einstein himself did not explicitly draw a connection between his science and clock technology as distinct topics. For a reevaluation of relativity theory in light of timekeeping technologies, see Peter Galison, Einstein's Clocks, Poincaré's Maps: Empires of Time; Peter Galison, "Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time." 6. Hughes, "Einstein, Inventors, and Invention," 38. József Illy, The Practical Einstein. For Einstein on gyroscopes, see Peter Galison, How Experiments End. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 612 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 613 the mind of a sensible person when hearing the word technology?" "Avarice, exploitation, social divisions amongst people, class hatred," he responded. Technology, he concluded, was the "wayward son of our era."7 Even his positive assessment of radio had vanished a few years after he spoke of it, when the industry became centralized. "False information is spread by a muzzled press, a centralized radio service, and school education," he warned.8 But what Einstein said about technology needs to be separated from his experience with it. Technology, Rationality, and War Discussions about the purity of science in the face of technology are as old as science itself, yet one conception stands out from the rest. The most common view takes technology to be "applied science," as reflected in the motto for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair: "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms."9 While historians and philosophers have denounced the "deceptive illusion" that "modern technology is applied physical science," this view persists in our public discourse and in much recent scholarship.10 "Hertzian devices," explained a historian of early radio, "emerged from experimental physics" and "inspired engineers."11 Since the early decades of the twentieth century, debates about the relation of science to technology have become theologically charged. When science is understood as "pure theory," those who look at technology and its effects tend to "curse it as the work of the devil."12 Recently, philosopher of science Philip Kitcher has found that "much of the rhetoric about the importance of seeking the truth seems to develop its own form of theology, viewing the high priests of the sciences as dedicated to a sacred task," referring in particular to the work of E. O. Wilson and Carl Sagan.13 Tainting science, especially theoretical science, with technology can therefore be perceived as a transgression akin to profanation, since even among today's theoretical physicists there is still "the feeling of being some kind of secular priest."14 Theological valances come with moral ones, as theoretical 7. Albert Einstein, "Die Freie Vereinigung für technische Volksbildung." 8. Albert Einstein, "A Re-examination of Pacifism." 9. Cited in Ronald Kline, "Construing 'Technology' as 'Applied Science.'" 10. Martin Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," 23. 11. Sungook Hong, Wireless, 22. 12. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology"; "pure theory" on 21, "devil" on 26. 13. Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy, 147. 14. Silvan Sam Schweber to Arne Hessenbruch, interview. Paul Forman considers attempts to relate science to technology as misguided "ideological initiatives": "The Primacy of Science in Modernity, of Technology in Postmodernity, and of Ideology in the History of Technology." 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 613 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 614 physicists are widely sanctioned to dole out advice for how "every parent and grandparent" should "behave."15 To this day, questions about the relation of theoretical physics to technology strike at the center of how we think of moral responsibility more generally. While Einstein was a self-proclaimed pacifist, "half of his salary came from a Prussian industry that held military contracts."16 How can we start to think about these contradictions? Nineteenthand twentieth-century physics were tightly, although not unproblematically, linked to electrical engineering. Scientists during this period engaged in "boundary-work" with other technical professions to bolster their expertise, to explain the usefulness of their profession, and, at other times, to distance their work from military and industrial connections.17 Norbert Wiener, for example, was heavily invested in giving his work "an intellectual, scientific trajectory, divorced from the traditions of technical practice from which it sprang" that were so clearly connected to World War II.18 In what follows, I explore a different way of understanding the impact of technology on theoretical science, and of understanding its importance in general culture. It is neither about scientists' portrayal of their own work, their professional affiliations, their direct involvement with technology, or their remuneration from engineering, military, or industrial sources. I am interested, instead, in investigating the role played by technologies in shaping rationality more broadly. Changes in our everyday technical landscape affect individual subjectivities and theoretical science in subtle, covert, and profound ways. They affect how rational subjects think, reason, and act. These changes affect theoretical science not only in the period of its development but throughout its adoption and subsequent uptake. The realization that no message can travel at speeds faster than light, often associated with Einstein's theory of relativity, was one such realization, tightly coupled with the development of light-based communication technologies. In order to trace Einstein's relationship to technology, scholars have rightly focused on cutting-edge marvels that must "have gone through 15. Adam Frank, "Welcome to the Age of Denial." Frank calls on readers to consider science as "a way of behaving in the world," rather than to consider it as occupations connected to "the giant particle accelerators and space observatories." 16. Alberto A. Martínez, "The Questionable Inventions of the Clever Dr. Einstein," 52. 17. Thomas F. Gieryn, "Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science"; Ronald Kline, "Foundational Stories," 120; Kline, "Construing 'Technology' as 'Applied Science.'" For the relation of physics to electrical engineering, see Graeme Gooday, "The Questionable Matter of Electricity"; Graeme Gooday, "La jonction entre science et industrie"; Graeme Gooday, "Teaching Telegraphy and Electrotechnics in the Physics Laboratory." 18. David A. Mindell, Between Human and Machine, 286. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 614 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 615 Einstein's hands."19 We can now complement that research and move from a narrow sphere of action and limited sense of responsibility to an inquiry into the role of technological transformations that affect broader swaths of society and change what rational subjects consider realistic and possible, in ethical and technical terms. Technologies reconfigure experience in ways that affect what Aristotle referred to as the "unity of action" across fields. As our experience of causality and effective agency changes with new technological transformations, our understanding of the past as much as of the future shifts as well. How do changes in communication technologies affect rational subjects and shape theoretical science? The role played by communications media in theoretical science is more complex than that of electrical engineering in the era of Maxwell and Hertz, nautical commerce in the time of Newton, or ballistics in Galileo's era. In contrast to many of the classic cases that historians have studied to tease apart science and technology, in the case of communications media we need to ask, additionally, how both impact the very core of what we consider to be an autonomous thinkingand-speaking subject and moral actor. In what follows, I trace how new terms and concepts related to contemporary communication technologies appeared in Einstein's work, as he struggled to create a new scientific paradigm for the era of global communications. At the crux of my narrative is the "light signaling protocol," a procedure known to have played a "central role" in his famous 1905 relativity paper and later work.20 The success of "arguably the most famous scientific paper in history" hinged on specific transformations that affected our understanding of causality and effective agency during this period.21 These changes affected science and technology in ways that cannot be ranked hierarchically, where either science has primacy over technology or the other way around, but which occurs prior to their classification as either of these two categories. The term "light signal"-central to Einstein's theory of relativity-did not belong exclusively to either category. In areas that ranged from the military to the arts, it obtained a new meaning in connection to new means of communication (fig. 1). Although the finite speed of light had been noted since the seventeenth century, most scientists before Einstein believed that certain "signals" could also convey information instantaneously. In classical physics, forces can propagate instantaneously and no transmission velocity needs to be considered. But instantaneous signals could invalidate all of Einstein's momen19. Martínez, "The Questionable Inventions of the Clever Dr. Einstein," 50. 20. Galina Granek, "Poincaré's Light Signaling and Clock Synchronization Thought Experiment and Its Possible Inspiration to Einstein." The "pervasiveness of this analysis in later writings" is noted in John D. Norton, "Einstein's Investigations of Galilean Covariant Electrodynamics prior to 1905," 92. 21. Dennis Overbye, Einstein in Love, 135. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 615 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 616 tous predictions about the relativity of simultaneity and of time. Even solid bodies, under Einstein's interpretation, should be considered in terms of signals that took time to be transmitted. "Let us imagine a rod of a certain length," he explained. "If we pull on one side, the other end will move at once." Yet this old way of thinking about solids needed to be overhauled: "This would be a signal that moves with infinite speed." His theory showed that no such signal could ever exist.22 Einstein's revolutionary interpretation of time, space, and the universe was, at its core, a media revolution. Military Light Signals during World War I "The comparison of light with other 'stuff' is not permissible," explained Einstein to an attentive audience.23 In 1911, they remained largely unconvinced. But soon his argument would make a lot more sense to many more people. On the battlefields of World War I, soldiers and commanders alike saw how the transmission of light behaved in ways that differed 22. "Diskussion," iv. 23. Ibid., viii. FIG. 1 L'Optique, allegory of light-based signaling, with torch, mirror, and telescope; engraved by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, 1737, Paris, after Jacques de la Joue. 12 x 14.5 inches on laid paper. (Source: In author's collection.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 616 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 617 markedly from the transmission of sound and other things. The military practice of "sound and flash ranging" used to determine the exact location of enemy artillery relied precisely on those differences. What was the best way for men with a scientific background to contribute to the war? Physicist Joseph S. Ames, professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, had a clear answer. In "The Trained Man of Science in the War" he explained how they could contribute by sharing their work on light signaling. Physicists, he argued, were the "obvious" experts in certain kinds of communication technologies and therefore useful to the military: "But consider a problem like this: to devise a light signal, which can be used by day or by night, and which will be absolutely invisible to the enemy. Who can solve that? The answer is obvious: only a physicist." Ames celebrated the work of General George O. Squier, chief signal officer of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, whose Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins permitted him "to know his subject from the scientific standpoint as few military officers can know it."24 Light signals were so closely associated with war that when artist Otto Dix conceived one of his most famous paintings depicting the horrors of World War I, he decided to produce a work widely known as Lichtsignale (fig. 2). World War I Communications: "Sound and Flash Ranging" How should we think about theoretical science in light of the media transformations of the early twentieth century? From the time Einstein wrote his famous paper, light signaling technologies concerned the military as much as they did physicists. Starting in the nineteenth century, these systems were used for maritime and meteorological communications, but their main function resided in how they could be used for the "defense of the nation," which included (in America) "efficiently protecting the populations from the depredations of the Indians."25 The practice of comparing light, sound, and actual explosions became standard artillery practice in World War I. These comparisons proved invaluable during the British victory at Cambrai in 1917 and during the "black day" for the German Army at Amiens in 1918.26 In order to determine the exact position from where weapons were being fired, field commanders compared the time of an actual explosion, the time it was set in 24. J. S. Ames, "The Trained Man of Science in the War," 403, 407. 25. Th. Moureaux, "Le Service des signaux de l'armée," 45. In the United States, signalmen were charged with photographing and documenting World War I. In July 1917 a Photographic Section was established within the army Signal Corps. By the end of the war, the Signal Corps had taken approximately 30,000 photographs and had accumulated 750,000 feet of film. Rebecca Robbins Raines, Getting the Message Through, 188–89. 26. William Van der Kloot, "Lawrence Bragg's Role in the Development of SoundRanging in World War I," 273. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 617 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 618 27. Ames, "The Trained Man of Science in the War," 408. motion, and when the explosion was heard or seen: "When a gun ejects its shell in the direction of the enemy, the latter hears in succession three sounds; first due to the passing of the shell through the air, in general a hissing sound; then the proper sound from the gun mouth, a boom; and finally the sound of the explosion of the shell." By knowing the speed of sound, officers could triangulate the location of the gun, allowing them to strike back accurately.27 Sound ranging was complicated, affected as it was by myriad environmental factors including weather-related wind patterns. For this reason, it had to be compared against information gleaned through flash ranging. Comparing the difference between the sound of ejection, flight, and explosion with available visual light signals provided information that affected the outcome of key World War I battles. Physicists, many of whom would become involved with relativity theory, played key roles in flash and FIG. 2 Otto Dix, Leuchtkugel (The Flare), commonly known as Lichtsignale, 1917, in Städtische Galerie Albstadt. 16 x 15.5 inches, gouache on paper. (Source: ©2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 618 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 619 28. Karl T. Compton, "Biographical Memoir of Augustus Trowbridge, 1870–1934," 228. 29. Van der Kloot, "Lawrence Bragg's Role in the Development of Sound-Ranging in World War I," 275. 30. Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Langevin, science et vigilance. 31. Van der Kloot, "Lawrence Bragg's Role in the Development of Sound-Ranging in World War I," 280. 32. Augustus Trowbridge, "Sound and Flash Ranging," 522. He recounted his wartime experience with sound and flash ranging at the American Philosophical Society on 26 April 1919. 33. Compton, "Biographical Memoir of Augustus Trowbridge, 1870–1934," 227–30. sound ranging. In France, General Gustave-Auguste Ferrié was in charge of wireless communications, where he worked closely with Louis de Broglie to improve transmission from the Eiffel Tower. Louis's brother Maurice de Broglie, a retired navy officer, worked on submarine signaling technologies. Henri Abraham and Charles Fabry collaborated with the Americans on sound and flash ranging.28 Astronomer Charles Nordmann from the Paris Observatory, an expert in wireless time-distribution technologies who would become one of the most important popularizers of relativity theory in France, paired with Lucien Bull of the Marey Institute to build sound-ranging instruments.29 Paul Langevin, who worked closely with Einstein on relativity, even attempted to commercialize the sound-wave detection equipment he developed during the war.30 In Germany, Hans Reichenbach was enlisted in the country's radio unit and physicist Max Born enlisted in the signal corps to work on sound ranging.31 When Born arrived in Berlin, he would become a close friend of Einstein and dedicate himself after the war to teaching and writing about relativity theory. In England, William Lawrence Bragg was responsible for the British sound-ranging effort, along with his father William Henry Bragg, who worked on submarine detection. Princeton physicist Augustus Trowbridge led the American Flash and Sound Ranging Service. After the war, he proudly announced to scientists and philosophers alike how "on the signing of the armistice the entire front of the second American army was covered with both flash and sound ranging."32 Karl T. Compton, physicist and president of MIT, recounted Trowbridge's wartime collaboration with physicists Robert A. Millikan and Charles E. Mendenhall, and their efforts at building equipment at Princeton's Palmer Laboratory and at Bell Labs, which they tested at the Sandy Hook Proving Ground.33 In the context of physicists' World War I work, we can understand why so many of the technical as well as popular accounts of relativity that proliferated after the war used the "flash and bang" trope to explain its central lessons. A typical example of this pedagogical tactic appears in an article on relativity by American astronomer William H. Pickering, published in Popular Astronomy in 1920. The author noted that "if instead of the sound of a gun being used as a signal on the train, we had fired a bullet" it would reach the observer at a different time. An entirely different calculation (one 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 619 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 620 34. William H. Pickering, "The Theory of Relativity," 336–38. 35. Arthur Stanley Eddington, Space, Time, and Gravitation, 103. 36. Charles Nordmann, Einstein et l'univers, 64, 97. independent of the velocity of the train), he explained, was required for light. Pickering carefully elaborated on "the analogy of the bullet" to light by imagining a train equipped with "guns" on either end. "Suppose that on a calm day when the train is stationary we fire a gun from the engine," how would this scenario be different from the case where the train was in motion? What "if the gun was at the rear of the train" he asked?34 Even pacifist astronomer Arthur Eddington, who avoided the draft by organizing the eclipse expedition that proved Einstein's theory, used the example of a rifle bullet to explain relativity, and discussed it by reference to the "simultaneity of a flash and a bang."35 Parisian astronomer Charles Nordmann drew from his experiences developing flashand sound-ranging technologies during the war to explain relativity in his commercially successful Einstein et l'univers (1921). Nordmann compared the speed of light directly against that of the shell fired by the Krupp-manufactured "Big Bertha" howitzer during Germany's advance toward Belgium to highlight the special characteristics of light: "The initial speed of the Bertha shell is only approximately 1,300 meters per second. For movements so slow, any relativistic contraction is negligible," he explained. Electrically charged "projectiles," he continued, were "much smaller than the shells of European artilleries, but, in turn, they are launched at infinitely greater initial velocities against which even those of the Bertha compare poorly."36 Mary F. Cleugh, author of Time and Its Importance in Modern Thought (1937), identified the common "flash and bang" trope present in the scientific literature on the topic: "The time-lag between 'flash' and 'bang' shows that sound has a finite velocity, and from that an analogy may be made to the case of light." A reader who might at first resist theory would have to come around to it with these "carefully graduated series" of battlefield examples: But if he is given a carefully graduated series of examples, beginning with the familiar "flash and bang" of a distant gun, going on to two guns between which he stands, and ending with a full-blown Einstein and trains and light signals, he will admit that it follows from these that simultaneity is, after all, relative. How did practical wartime lessons end up having such a central place in Einstein's theory of the universe, affecting even something as philosophical as our everyday notion of time? Cleugh was baffled by "the importance of light-signals" in our scientific understanding of time in physics and in the cosmos. She was at first skeptical: "It is one thing to say that we cannot make judgments of simultaneity with regard to events at some distance from each other without the help of a light signal," but "it is quite another 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 620 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 621 37. Mary Frances Cleugh, Time and Its Importance in Modern Thought, 58, 62. 38. Einstein to Wien, Bern, 26 August 1907. In The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein (hereafter CPAE), vol. 5, 40–41. to define simultaneity as depending on light-signals." So why was time defined by reference to light signals? After surveying alternative ways of conceiving time, most of which were not based on light signals and would therefore escape from the paradoxes of relativity, she eventually gave up. There was no choice but to "admit in the end that time is merely a function of light."37 In a century marked by telecommunications technologies based on electrodynamic "light signals," it certainly was. Difficulties Defining "Signal Velocity" circa 1905 The World War I context was quite different from the one in which Einstein first conceived of his theory. In his famous "annus mirabilis" theory of relativity paper (1905), Einstein initially used no fewer than three terms to describe the transmission of light: Lichtstrahl (light ray), Lichtzeichen (light signs) and Lichtsignale (light signals). Two years later, he was much clearer. He abandoned "ray" and "sign" in favor of "signal." What prompted this change in his terminology and what was its significance for science and for our understanding of the universe? In a set of key publications that followed his 1905 paper, Einstein replied to the objections of some prominent critics in a clear and novel way. In the process he also distinguished his own contribution from that of his colleague Hendrik Lorentz. His distinction hinged on a particular understanding of light signals as communication signals. The "light signals" of relativity theory, he explained, were actually "electromagnetic influences" that could be "one-time" and "voluntary" and that could, "for example, be used for sending an arbitrary signal."38 This new definition of the term "light signal" was key, as it helped Einstein respond to the objections that the existence of speeds faster than those of light would invalidate his conclusions. In years to come, this particular reconfiguration of his work would take on a decisive importance in the establishment of relativity. In 1905 Einstein asked readers to consider what happens if "a ray of light starts out from A at time TA, is reflected from B at time TB, and arrives back at A at time T'A." He then asked readers to consider the velocity of this light ray as constant. Einstein was nearly done with his argument. With a few additional simple calculations, he arrived at one of the most astounding claims of his theory, that a clock traveling close to the speed of light would mark time differently than a stationary one. Had Einstein revolutionized our understanding of time and space? In 1905 he had claimed that "the velocity of light physically plays the part of infinitely great velocities," but he had not yet shown that it was the fastest velocity possible for the transmission of signals. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 621 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 622 39. Albert Einstein, "Über die vom Relativitätsprinzip geforderte Trägheit der Energie," §3 p. 381. 40. Ibid., §3 p. 382. A close reading of his work shows him initially struggling with his terminology, sometimes using the term "ray," other times "sign," and even creating new terms by hyphenating or concatenating words, such as "signeffect" and "arbitrary-voluntary signaling." After he settled on the term "Lichtsignale" and narrowed its definition, he increasingly reframed the theory of relativity in a new way. He started to refer to "relativity theory" as his own work, distinguishing it from others, and he drew much wider conclusions from it. In two articles authored in 1907 Einstein started defining the term light signal by reference to electromagnetic communication signals. One was published in the Annalen der Physik, the same prestigious venue that printed his famous 1905 paper, and the other appeared in Jahrbuch der Radioaktivität und Elektronik, a premier technology journal. In the second publication, Einstein boldly distinguished his work from Lorentz's. In both papers, Einstein repeated almost verbatim one key paragraph which gave his earlier paper new life and meaning. In this new 1907 work, light no longer "played the part" of infinitely great velocities-it was an unsurpassable velocity because Einstein now used it in narrower terms, exclusively in those of its role in the actual "spreading of an effect": We will now show that not only the assumption of an instantaneous spread of some effect, but also more generally, any assumption of the spreading of an effect with a velocity greater than the velocity of light is incompatible with the theory of relativity.39 Einstein was now much clearer about why the speed of light could not be surpassed. In the Annalen paper, he explained how it could not be beaten in the case of the "spreading of an effect." There was nothing "illogical" in thinking about instantaneous transmission, but Einstein was confident enough to state that it did not occur in practice in terms of the "spreading of an effect" with "causal" consequences through a "transfer mechanism." After discussing the supposed instantaneity of light, he explained why it could not fit with our experience of the world: Even though, in my opinion, this result does not contain a contradiction from a logical point of view, it conflicts so absolutely with the character of all our experience that the impossibility of the assumption W>V [propagation velocity of an effect greater than the speed of light] is sufficiently proved by this result.40 This sentence from the science journal Annalen der Physik was repeated almost verbatim in the more technological journal Jahrbuch der Radio04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 622 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 623 41. Albert Einstein, "Über das Relativitätsprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen," §5 p. 423. 42. Einstein, "Über die vom Relativitätsprinzip geforderte Trägheit der Energie," §3 p. 381. 43. Einstein, "Über das Relativitätsprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen," §5 p. 415. 44. Einstein, "Über die vom Relativitätsprinzip geforderte Trägheit der Energie," §3 pp. 381–82. 45. For a historical study of Einstein's authorship of relativity, see Richard Staley, Einstein's Generation, and Richard Staley, "On the Histories of Relativity." aktivität und Elektronik. In the Jahrbuch paper his terminology was more technical. Velocities greater than light could not be found for "arbitrary-voluntary signaling" (willkürlichen Signalgebung). No effect of this kind-willful and arbitrary-could be "propagated faster than light in a vacuum."41 What happens when "the observer in A sends a sign-effect to the observer in B" Einstein asked repeatedly.42 In both articles Einstein used the term "sign-effect" (Wirkung Zeichen), but he started to clarify the meaning of this term depending on how it related to the speed of light. The Jahrbuch engineering publication (1907) explained that the speed of light could only be considered as infinitely great in the case of an "arbitrary-voluntary signal" which could never surpass the value of "a universal constant c" (where c designates the speed of light). In other words: "a universal constant c" was the maximum speed of an "arbitrary-voluntary signal."43 In the Annalen publication he associated this type of effect with "an act of will." He carefully explained the difficulties of superluminal signal transmission ("sign-effects") by citing the rules of causality: "This result signifies that we would have to consider as possible a transfer mechanism whose use would produce an effect which precedes the cause (accompanies by an act of will [Willensakt], for example)."44 Einstein drew broad conclusions by thinking of physics in terms of the causal transmission of willful emissions. "The time T that elapses between the sign emission [Zeichengebung] in A and the sign reception [Zeichenempfang] in B" in the case of willful causal transmission was the time that interested him. These particular characteristics of transmitting effects allowed him to define time in a radically new way. These were precisely the signals transmitted through the growing telecommunications network of his era. Abandoning "Local Time" Einstein's new understanding of his theory in terms of the "willful" emission and reception of "sign-effects" was directly connected to his new understanding of time. In the Jahrbuch paper, he distinguished his position from that of Lorentz, who had first developed the relativity equations Einstein used.45 Historians have observed that Einstein's theory, in contrast to Lorentz's, no longer referred to one of the t variables in the relativ04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 623 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 624 46. Einstein, "Über das Relativitätsprinzip und die aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen," 413. 47. Galina Weinstein, "Einstein on the Impossibility of Superluminal Velocities." 48. See letter from Wien to Lorentz, 17 August 1907, and Lorentz's response, 22 September 1907, 218–21. ity equations as "local time." For Einstein, both referred equally to time. He described Lorentz's conception as an "artificial means of saving the theory." He also started using a different label for his work, which up to then was usually referred to as the Einstein-Lorentz theory, referring separately to "the H. A. Lorentz theory and the principle of relativity."46 Was Einstein's explanation of relativity in terms of "arbitrary-voluntary signal" transmission connected to the abandonment of Lorentz's "local time"? As Einstein realized that instantaneousness could not exist in the case of light signal transmission, he also became increasingly confident in his claim that no other universal definition of time could compete against his. In 1907 Einstein had listed the "character of all of our experience" as proving why signals could never travel faster than light. That aspect of his contemporary experience was the main reason why he argued that scientists had to adopt his theory. Wilhelm Wien, one of the most important scientists of the time and a man who held top research, teaching, and administrative positions in Germany, was not convinced by Einstein. The senior scientist wrote to Einstein asking him to clarify certain claims in his 1905 paper. He asked him about the possibility of superluminal propagation velocities, knowing fully well that-if these existed-they would completely invalidate all of Einstein's conclusions.47 Wien reminded the junior patent examiner that his relativistic definition of time did not work for these kinds of cases. In 1905 Einstein had merely stated that "for superluminal velocities our considerations become meaningless." Now a colleague was asking him directly how meaningless, or meaningful, his contributions really were. Einstein was forced to clarify. What could Einstein do to save his theory? "You have raised here a most interesting question!" wrote Einstein, then a largely unknown patent examiner, to Wien in the summer of 1907. Einstein had good reasons to be excited. He "threw" himself into a "writing frenzy" trying to answer the question as best he could. It took him weeks to craft a response, periodically checking in with his interlocutor to make sure he was on the right track. With a tone of irritation, the senior scientist complained to Einstein that when reading his work "one can understand whatever one wants" from his equations of propagation velocities, and that they did not necessarily lead to his conclusions. His colleague did not stay quiet about what he considered clear faults in Einstein's reasoning. After writing first to Einstein for clarification, he immediately contacted Lorentz.48 By the end of the month, Einstein had penned an answer. The definition of time and 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 624 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 625 49. Einstein explained at that time that the light signals he described did not "rule out" superluminal velocities in other cases. 50. Einstein to Wien, Lenk, 7 August 1907, in CPAE, vol. 5, 35–36. 51. Einstein to Wien, Bern, 26 August 1907, In CPAE, vol. 5, 40. simultaneity which he used in his paper, he explained to his colleague, was right if the time signals he described in it were understood in a specific way, not as any kind of signals but as communication signals. "There seems to be a misunderstanding between us, which I shall now try to clarify." Einstein explained that the exchange of "light signals" that he referred to should be understood as information-transfer signals. Relativity theory was concerned with communication signaling-not with just any type of signals. The difference between his argument and Wien's, Einstein explained, was that Einstein did not refer to "a periodical process" but instead focused on "the propagation of an influence that could, for example, be used for sending an arbitrary signal." Superluminal velocities, he clarified, did not exist for these kinds of signals.49 The signals that concerned Einstein could be changed "at will" and unpredictably. His notion of signal was one which could be "arbitrary" and which could be "one-time (not regularly recurring)" and which was "not yet determined by past" processes. He thus defined "signaling" in physics in the same terms that it was used for the purpose of communication, distinguishing the concept from the transmission of "Zeichen" (signs) which could be periodic or predetermined. Einstein urged Wien to change his understanding of "propagation velocity" in terms of "signal" transmission. For this, he turned to the results of his colleague Emil Wiechert who had studied the velocity of an "optical signal," concluding that it should always be less than the speed of light "in any medium."50 Superluminal velocities could not play a role in technologies that depended on the transmission of these "optical signals" because they were always either equal to or less than the speed of light. Einstein had stumbled on an answer to his critic: I now designate the kind of velocity that, according to the theory of relativity, cannot be greater than the velocity of light in a vacuum as "signal velocity." This is a velocity by which a one-time (not regularly recurring) influence, which is not yet determined by past electrodynamic processes, is propagated; thus, we are dealing here with the propagation of an influence that could, for example, be used for sending an arbitrary signal. Wien's objections, he argued, were invalid because they did not apply to these cases: "The propagation velocity . . . in your analysis is not a 'signal velocity' because . . . this velocity refers to a periodical process.51 In correspondence with Wien, and referencing Wiechert's research, Einstein started to consider the speed of light as the fastest signaling veloc04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 625 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 626 52. Einstein to Wien, Bern, 23 August [July] 1907, in CPAE, vol. 5, 32–33. 53. Paul Langevin, "L'evolution de l'espace et du temps," 39, 43. 54. Paul Langevin, "Le temps, l'espace et la causalité dans la physique moderne," 26. 55. Einstein to Paul Ehrenfest [Prague, before June 1912], in CPAE, vol. 5 (English translation supplement), 310. ity possible. He described key problems in physics in terms of the scenario of sending ("emanation") and receiving ("perception") an "electromagnetic influence."52 In this way, he differentiated the concept of "signal velocity" from that of "group velocity." Two years earlier, in 1905, he had explained how, in his theory of relativity, "the velocity of light physically plays the part of infinitely great velocities," but he had not yet claimed that it was the fastest velocity possible for the transmission of "arbitrary" and "one-time" electromagnetic signals. After his discussions with Wien, light was no longer playing a part or a role. Light was an "infinitely great velocity"-if considered in terms of electromagnetic signaling practices. The Media of Time: Telegraphing into the Past Once Einstein clarified the meaning of signal in physics, other scientists were quick to understand relativity in terms of communication technologies. In 1911, during the famous presentation of relativistic effects that would later be known as the twin paradox, physicist Paul Langevin, one of the most important popularizers of relativity theory and a close friend of Einstein, presented it in a way that stressed its connection to signaling techniques. Before Einstein, he explained, scientists thought that pulling "a string to ring a bell . . . permitted instantaneous signaling." But Einstein had shown that "[t]here should not exist a messenger or a signal that can travel at speeds greater than three hundred thousand kilometers per second."53 He urged listeners to abandon their intuitive understanding of solid bodies by considering them instead in terms of their signaling potential. When Langevin explained the concept of causality, of how one event "could effectively act on another," he described it simply in terms of signal transmission technologies. "It is the principle of telegraphy," he concluded, to an audience of flummoxed philosophers.54 While Einstein was still struggling to explain and promote his theory with Langevin's help, he grew excited to learn about technological innovations that would make their arguments more convincing. "Moving light sources of several 1000 miles" are now "available," he wrote with excitement to his friend Paul Ehrenfest, hoping that these would help them ascertain relativistic effects more easily55 (fig. 3). Led by Einstein, relativity scientists started to consider the difference between the past and the future in terms of signaling possibilities. They defined the past as the time of signal emission when compared against the time of reception. And the future was the time of reception if compared against the time of emission. There were no cases where a "signal would 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 626 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 627 56. Einstein, "Le principe de relativité et ses conséquences dans la physique modern," sec. 7., 135. 57. Langevin, "L'evolution de l'espace et du temps," 44. have arrived at its goal before being emitted: The effect would precede the cause."56 Langevin explained that if the rules of relativity theory were violated, "we could telegraph into the past, as Einstein has said, and we would consider that absurd."57 Scientists quickly drew models of space and time according to relativity theory. The famous image of the light cone, a common fixture in popular and specialized accounts of the special theory of relativity, represented the past and the future in terms of signaling possibilities. The "here and now" was a point from which signals could be sent into the future and where past signals had already arrived (fig. 4). FIG. 3 Postcards depicting military searchlights and sound-detection equipment. Top: "50-Inch Searchlight and Sound Detector," published by W. R. Thompson & Co. Bottom: "Plane Detector and Searchlight, First Army War Maneuvers, 1939, Plattsburg Area," published by Santway Photo-Craft Company, Watertown, N.Y. (Source: Postcards in author's collection.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 627 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 628 58. Lewis S. Feuer, Einstein and the Generations of Science, 214. 59. Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, 189. Emerging telecommunications (first telegraphy and later radio) sent messages across vast distances that had been previously covered only by transportation technologies, such as ships, trains, and automobiles. Before World War I, triode vacuum tubes were only manufactured in bulk in the United States. But after the war, Europeans ramped up production so that they could be used for military wireless communications.58 The development of multiplexing allowed telegraph and telephone to share the same infrastructure. Once telegraph signals could be sent through telephone wires using frequencies that did not play a role in speech transmission (from 0 to 150 Hz), the carrying capacity of telecommunications networks was significantly expanded.59 After the war, commercial and civilian radio communications, starting with finance and journalism, flourished. FIG. 4 Light cones depicting the path of a light ray through spacetime. Top: By Arthur Eddington. (Source: Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 48.) Bottom: By Hermann Weyl. (Source: Hermann Weyl, "The Mathematical Way of Thinking," 440.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 628 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 629 60. For the literary context of these thought experiments, with a particular focus on Eddington, see Katy Price, Loving Faster than Light. 61. Wildon Carr, "Symposium: The Problem of Simultaneity." 62. "Even in thought the only way for me to find what is happening 'now' in the distant nebula is to send a wireless message to my confederate in the nebula, who will receive it after one hundred million years, and then must consult what may be his equivalent for the library of the British Museum, where he will almost certainly find only the sketchiest sort of record of what was happening one hundred million years ago." Percy W. Bridgman, "The Concept of Time," 98. 63. Hermann Weyl, "The Mathematical Way of Thinking," 440. 64. Jean Becquerel, "Débats sur la relativité," 26. 65. William Pepperell Montague, "The Einstein Theory and a Possible Alternative," 151. When Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, which in contrast to the special one encompassed acceleration and gravitation, one of its most revolutionary assertions was that the universe was essentially curved. The shortest path between two points was not, as in Euclidean geometry, a straight line. The shortest path between two points was defined as that traveled by an electromagnetic signal and which could be considered (in the presence of a gravitational field) as a curve. Cosmological and astronomical implications of Einstein's theory were often described by reference to the possibility of communicating with someone in outer space.60 In Britain, Eddington described it by reference to the difficulties in maintaining a conversation, and even a love affair, with a lady on Neptune, while Wildon Carr similarly explained the "time of transmission" in the theory of relativity by reference to a telephone conversation with someone on another planet.61 American physicist Percy Bridgman used the example of sending "wireless signals" to a "confederate in the nebula."62 In Germany, mathematician Hermann Weyl described in an article titled simply "The Mathematical Way of Thinking" that the question of "whether two men, say Bill on Earth and Bob on Sirius, are contemporaries" depended on "whether it means that Bill can send a message to Bob, or Bob a message to Bill, or even that Bill can communicate with Bob by sending a message and receiving an answer, etc."63 In France, physicist Jean Becquerel described the reality of time dilation in terms of a traveler and an observer on Earth by imagining them exchanging time signals via electromagnetic waves or "T.S.F. signals."64 Louis de Broglie, who worked in the radio service unit during World War I and was one who used the Eiffel Tower for military wireless transmission, assessed relativity theory almost exclusively in terms of telecommunications. "[T]he Einstein rules" were clear "just giving and receiving signals," explained American philosopher William Montague.65 Alfred North Whitehead, among the first to write about the theory after it was successfully confirmed by the results of Eddington's famous eclipse expeditions, understood Einstein's work entirely as a treatise about signaling 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 629 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 630 and messaging.66 Eddington himself described to popular audiences how the theory of relativity perfectly explained "the consequences of being able to transmit messages concerning events" from one place to another.67 The world described by Einstein was the way it was, explained the astronomer, because "signaling is only possible" in certain conditions and not in others.68 It showed how nothing "capable of being used as a signal can travel faster than 299,796 kilometers a second." The past existed when it "would be possible for us to have already received a wireless message announcing its occurrence."69 Direct references to telecommunications technologies appear again and again in theoretical, philosophical, and even popular accounts about the value and validity of Einstein's work. Light was "the swiftest messenger in the world," explained one writer who presented the theory to a popular audience.70 Even those skeptical of Einstein's theory engaged with it in technological terms, arguing that the constancy of the speed of light was a mere technological effect related to current limitations in contemporary communication technologies. Consider the technical media challenges during this period of actually building an "audible tick-tock" that could be heard "everywhere in the world." Einstein asked himself this question, which was tightly related to the technical challenges of establishing global communications. He came to the conclusion that scientists and the public at large should rid themselves of their longstanding belief that time in one part of the globe was simultaneous to time in another part of it-forgetting delays in transmission speeds. "There is no audible tick-tock everywhere in the world that could be considered as time," Einstein explained in unpublished notes where he kept track of the "most important ideas of relativity theory."71 The challenges facing the concept of universal time, which Einstein considered in terms of actual clocks, were the same as those facing contemporary telecommunications, struggling to send news across the world in the shortest possible time. If wireless time distribution services functioned with the delays of electromagnetic signal transmission, and if clocks measured time, there was no reason to believe these same effects would not affect time in the universe as well. For a decade and a half after its publication, Einstein's work was considered equally as relevant for technology as for science. Eddington underlined the paradoxical technoscientific role of light in Einstein's work, where it was clearly connected to actual communication 66. Alfred North Whitehead, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, 53. 67. Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 65. 68. Ibid., 66. 69. Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Theory of Relativity and Its Influence on Scientific Thought, 17 n.11. 70. Benjamin Ives Gilman, "Relativity and the Lay Mind. II," 508. 71. Albert Einstein, "Die hauptsächlichen Gedanken der Relativitätstheorie," 1. Published as "The Principal Ideas of the Theory of Relativity" in CPAE, vol. 7, 5. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 630 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 631 72. Arthur Stanley Eddington, Espace, temps et gravitation, 10. Quoted in Gaston Bachelard, La Valeur inductive de la relativité, 149. 73. Einstein, "Le principe de relativité et ses conséquences dans la physique modern," sec. 7, 134–35. 74. Albert Einstein, The Meaning of Relativity: Four Lectures Delivered at Princeton University, 31. technologies while it was also surprisingly "fundamental." The actual velocity of light, something that could seem too tied to current signaling technology limitations and "a rather arbitrary decree of nature," explained Eddington, was a "fundamental velocity." By "a lucky coincidence," both of them were the same, he explained: "there is a physical entity-light-that moves habitually at the same speed of the fundamental velocity."72 Was Einstein simply lucky? He would soon have to explain to a growing number of critics why this "coincidence" was more than sheer luck. A Radio Engineer Comes to Einstein's Defense Given the overwhelming assessment of Einstein's work in terms of signaling technologies, why should his research be considered in cosmological rather than merely practical terms? Starting in 1910, Einstein would frame his research in a manner that distanced it sharply from telecommunications. He described its implications for signaling as a "consequence" of a much broader physical theory, and a profoundly counterintuitive one at that. They were what "follows immediately" from his theory, not its starting point. The inability "to send signals that would travel faster than light in a vacuum" was a "consequence, as strange as it is interesting," of his theory.73 More important, how were its connections to military concerns effaced? Both tasks were undertaken by Hans Reichenbach, founder of logical positivism, who promoted a simplistic view of science as the result of combining clear empirical observations with mathematical principles. After being released from the army's radio unit, Reichenbach attended Einstein's lectures in Berlin. Captivated by his teacher, he was hooked on physics for the rest of his life. He dedicated his first book to Einstein, and in the years that followed, Reichenbach and Einstein would become close. It took decades before Einstein and Reichenbach were able to convince listeners that the universe and time-cosmological time-should be understood and defined by reference to light signals. In May 1921, during his lectures at Princeton University, Einstein claimed that "it is immaterial what kind of processes one chooses for such a definition of time." But if immaterial, why that particular choice, light, asked his listeners? Einstein responded: "It is advantageous, however, for the theory, to choose only those processes concerning which we know something certain. This holds for the propagation of light in vacuo in a higher degree than for any other process which could be considered."74 Next year he was much bolder. In a 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 631 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 632 75. Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher. 76. The classic work on Einstein's "Geometry and Experience" is Michael Friedman, "Geometry as a Branch of Physics: Background and Context for Einstein's 'Geometry and Experience.'" For a clarfication of the issues at stake, see Marco Giovanelli, "Talking at Cross-Purposes." 77. See Einstein's late-in-life reformulation of the questions in "Geometry and Experience," in Albert Einstein, "Reply to Criticisms," 676–81. 78. Ibid., 673. 79. Hans Reichenbach, Was ist Radio? controversial discussion with philosopher Henri Bergson, he would imply that his definition of time was "objective" whereas other more philosophical notions were not.75 By then, he had developed a more convincing response to his critics, in collaboration with Reichenbach. In early January 1921, in a famous lecture titled "Geometry and Experience," Einstein marshaled forceful arguments explaining why light signals were a fundamental key to the universe and not simply connected to technological novelties, no matter how wonderful.76 His solution was frequently remarked upon: Why should scientists consider them essential for understanding time and space in the universe?77 Was Einstein's focus on light signals justified in scientific terms? For most of his professional life, critics argued that this one particular aspect of his work had not been properly explained. A particular concern centered on the reasons for adopting a definition of time based on light signals, understood in terms of the principle of the constancy of light, over other ways of understanding time. Why this way to define time and not another? If light signals were fundamental to the workings of the universe, then he should say why in terms of elementary atomic concepts, something that was (and still is) far from possible. Late in life Einstein admitted that he still could not argue for the adoption of a conception of time based on light signals from a foundational theory of "moving atomic configurations," but he reminded his critics of other pressing reasons which he had thought out in collaboration with Reichenbach.78 Reichenbach's early publications included highly philosophical texts as well as lowbrow popular engineering manuals. Unable to earn a living as a philosopher, he supported himself instead by teaching at the Technische Hochschule at Stuttgart, supplementing his income by becoming the editor of Die Radio-Reihe, a series of radio manuals financed with paid advertisements79 (fig. 5). In his accounts of radio technology for enthusiasts, Reichenbach explained that, if one considered light to travel at the approximate speed of 300,000 km/s, then "the time it takes the wave to travel from Nauen to New York is only about 1/50 second." For practical purposes, he pointed out, this delay could be neglected and thus: "we can say with good sense that the waves arrive at the same time in New York that they are sent in Nauen." The idea that the transmission speed of light was an unsurpassable velocity was 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 632 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 633 80. Ibid., 23–24. 81. Ibid., 5. an essential claim in Einstein's work, but Reichenbach did not reference it in his engineering manual. His "good sense" was enough to convince him that light was special: "Only the speed of light is so great"80 (fig. 6). "Telegraphy is as old as Mankind," explained Reichenbach, confidently claiming that "the prehistoric man who raised his arm up to wave to his contemporaries telegraphed." The only significant difference between the gestures of prehistoric man and cutting-edge wireless telegraphy was "the thousands of years of scientific work that lay in between."81 Reichenbach highlighted the triumphant role of science in the thousands of years from prehistoric days to the present; he elided the piecemeal practical transformations of technology from the beginning of history to modern civilization. Always attentive to what his professor said and wrote, Reichenbach jumped to Einstein's defense and developed the central ideas of "Geometry and Experience" more fully. He came up with a convincing, though slightly roundabout, way of justifying the special status of light signals in the work of his teacher, friend, and mentor. The reason they were particularly descriptive of the universe, he argued, was based on a concept given FIG. 5 Front cover and advertising (p. 2) for Reichenbach's radio manual. (Source: Hans Reichenbach, Was ist Radio? In author's collection.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 633 T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 634 82. Hans Reichenbach, "Der gegenwärtige Stand der Relativitätsdiskussion. Eine kritische Untersuchung," 365–66. 83. Hans Reichenbach, "The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity," 301. 84. "Radio telephone": Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 155. "by definition," namely the constancy of the speed of light in the absence of a gravitational field.82 But this "definition" was neither arbitrary nor merely convenient. It should not be understood by reference to particular technical devices-it was a "fact" and a universal one at that. To the end of his life, Reichenbach explained Einstein's theory by reference to signaling: "Einstein's relativity of simultaneity is closely associated with the assumption that light is the fastest signal." He used the words signal and message repeatedly. He went as far as describing the MichelsonMorley experiment as an experiment about "signals," arguing that "the assumption that light is the fastest signal" was "an idea which could not be conceived before the negative outcome of such experiments as that of Michelson."83 Reichenbach used the example of the "telephone" and "radio telephone" to illustrate how we could grow "accustomed" to the reality described by Einstein.84 He turned to the common example of communicating with someone in outer space. "[I]f a telephone connection with the planet Mars were established," he explained, "we would have to wait a quarter of an hour for the answer to our questions." If our communication technologies functioned with a similar delay in that way, then "the relativFIG. 6 Reichenbach's example of a radio station in Nauen, Germany. (Source: Hans Reichenbach, Was ist Radio? p. 29. In author's collection.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 634 CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 635 ity of simultaneity would become as trivial a matter as the time difference between the standard times of different time zones today."85 Although Reichenbach constantly mentioned new telecommunications technologies and practices in his text, in the philosophical view of scientific development he was promoting, they appeared as nothing more than illustrative and pedagogical examples. While constantly employing terminology and examples from the world of telecommunications to explain Einstein's theory, Reichenbach stressed its theoretical and cosmic aspects over its mundane connections. He ignored the immediate war conditions that led him to work with radio in the first place and the financial incentives that led to the publication of the radio series with him as editor. Instead, Reichenbach distanced the theory of relativity from current technologies and their limitations. What was recounted as engineering knowledge in his radio manuals appeared as a universal truth in his scientific and philosophical texts. From Technological to Fundamental How can something be technological and historically situated as well as fundamental and universally valid? In order for Einstein's interpretation of relativity to prevail, the criticisms of influential French polymath Henri Poincaré, and his vision of the relation of science to technology and of both to mathematics, needed to be countered.86 Poincaré's philosophy valued scientific theories in terms of their practical validity rather than in terms of their universal status. Einstein had to combat Poincaré's arguments in order to show why his light-signal-based theory was not simply one alternative explanation of physical effects, but rather a fundamental law of nature. Einstein first forcefully fought against Poincaré's conventionalist philosophy in "Geometry and Experience" (1921). Reichenbach would immediately enter the ring as well. The specific topic of Einstein's attack against Poincaré was Riemannian geometry, which Einstein used in developing his general theory, but also at stake was the status of Euclidean geometry over non-Euclidean geometry, the latter closely associated with Einstein's theory of relativity. Experiments clearly showed that the movement of light did not follow the laws of Euclid. But Einstein argued that his non-Euclidean geometry was not merely another useful mathematical formulation used to study a certain physical object (light); rather, he considered it a model of the actual geo85. Reichenbach, "The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity," 308. 86. For Poincaré on telegraphy and wireless, see Henri Poincaré, "Étude de la propagation du courant en période variable sur une ligne munie de récepteur." For a summary of his work and research in this area, see Henri Poincaré, "Mes principaux ouvrages relatifs à la physique," 415. Gaston Darboux et al. to the Nobel Prize Committee, ca. 1 January 1910, 433. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 635 87. Albert Einstein, "Geometry and Experience," 238. 88. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 50. 89. Einstein, "Geometry and Experience," 236. 90. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 133. 91. Reichenbach, "Der gegenwärtige Stand der Relativitätsdiskussion," 365–66. 92. Hans Reichenbach, "La signification philosophique de la théorie de la relativité," 35. In technical terms, he argued that "the world" admitted a "univocal" definition of measurement. 93. Hans Reichenbach, Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre, 25. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 636 metrical structure of the universe itself. The non-Euclidean shape of the universe, revealed through the behavior of light signals, was "a question of physics proper which must be answered by experience, and not a question of a convention to be chosen on grounds of mere expediency."87 Poincaré considered claims about the mathematical shape of the universe as essentially misguided principles. The question of which geometrical system should be used to represent the universe, he argued, was completely the same as asking which measurement standard should be chosen. Inquiring into the validity of Euclidean over non-Euclidean geometry was simply the same as asking if one should use the yard or the meter.88 Einstein admitted that if geometry was understood in this way, Poincaré was sub specie aeterni right.89 But he disagreed with the view that measurements based on light signals were simply based on a conventional measuring standard. Reichenbach sharpened the criticisms against Poincaré that Einstein first introduced. He attacked the idea that mathematics was more of a practical tool than a reflection of how the world actually was. He chastised Poincaré for espousing the view that scientists could chose between different geometries, claiming instead that only one of them described the "geometry of the physical world."90 Einstein's theory was not simply a particular way of understanding the universe, he insisted, it revealed the shape of the universe itself. Reichenbach thus established the dual role of light signals as technological, but more important, fundamental. Einstein could have it both ways. Light-signal-based descriptions of the universe could be more than a convenient tool for science; they were much more by definition and empirically so as well. To answer those who wanted to know if light was actually constant and not merely defined as such, he stressed that it was "an empirical fact" that measurements could be and were undertaken in the manner described by Einstein.91 For this reason, it was "experimentally well-confirmed."92 In 1928 Reichenbach once again explained why he thought that Einstein was entirely justified in his light-signal-based conception of the universe, arguing that it was "a matter of fact that our world" was a place where scientific measurements were undertaken in this manner. Were they? The choice of measuring system could potentially be seen as conventional, as Poincaré argued. But the actual reality of how people measured was not.93 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 636 94. Henri Poincaré, "Sur la dynamique de l'électron," 1–32. 95. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, Histories of Observation. CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 637 Measurement and Light Signals Communications media affected the notion of scientific measurement during this period. In "Geometry and Experience," Einstein proceeded to explain the traditional way of measuring, one based on using marked rulers. "[T]wo tracts are said to be 'equal to one another' if the marks of the one tract can be brought to coincide permanently with the marks of the other." His explanation was hardly original. Poincaré had described it a number of times.94 Poincaré had pointed out that relativity (which he associated with the equations of Lorentz and not with Einstein's interpretation) was based on a different form of measurement, one that considered light paths as equal depending on the time taken to traverse them. The old way of defining measurement in terms of the comparison of lengths "is no longer true in the current theory." Measurements, in the new system, were taken by comparing the arrival time of light signals. While Poincaré merely described the differences between these two ways of conceiving measurement, Einstein urged scientists to adopt the second one. A measurement "tract," that was previously defined in terms of a rigid solid, should be redefined in terms of the "path of light." When using rulers, scientists had to physically align two different objects against each other. In the early nineteenth century, the exigencies of measurement often required an observer to travel to the object to be measured in order to compare it against a standard brought along. To measure hard-to-reach places, scientists could use optical instruments that required aiming or leveling of an instrument against the image of an object, as with a theodolite. These precision measurements were done with instruments furnished with fine reticules or micrometers to bring two marks in line with each other or find the exact center of circles and dots. Such practices were very different from those described by Einstein-comparing the time of the arrival of two light signals against each other. Einstein's work on signals was connected to key changes in how scientists thought of observation and measurement more generally.95 Measurement practices continued to be diverse, but underneath this practical diversity lay a new consensus about what ideal measurements were, from which scientists drew implications about the shape of the universe and the relation of experience to geometry. Conclusion: Light Signals Dominate the Airwaves References to signals and messages abounded in the work of Einstein and his commentators during this period. The physicist and his interlocutors not only used these preexisting concepts, they defined their meaning. 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 637 96. Carl Beck to Einstein, Chicago, 28 December 1920, in CPAE, vol. 10, 344. T E C H N O L O G Y A N D C U L T U R E JULY 2015 VOL. 56 638 Before Einstein, the term "signal" in physics did not necessarily entail an element of transmission with a delay or the transportation of a message. Commercial applications for long-distance signaling technologies flourished after World War I. The relevance of Einstein's light-signalbased theory increased in the wider culture as electrodynamic technologies transmitted more and more messages across wider distances. Einstein, and a rapidly growing number of civilian users, increasingly used the telegraph and telephone for personal purposes. By the winter of 1920 Einstein had a telephone in his Berlin apartment, which he placed prominently on top of his desk96 (fig. 7). Commentors on Einstein's theory writing in the decades after the war years did not need to have been working directly with communication technologies to see it in those terms. They did not need to have direct experience working in war with radio, like Reichenbach, Born, Langevin, Nordmann, or de Broglie. FIG. 7 Einstein's telephone on his desk in his Berlin apartment (Haberlandstrasse 5), n.d. (Source: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin. Photo credit: BPK, Berlin/Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York. Reprinted with permission.) 04_Canales_final.qxp_03_49.3dobraszczyk 568– 7/24/15 9:37 AM Page 638 97. Reichenbach, "The Philosophical Significance of the Theory of Relativity," 309– 10. 98. Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy, 153. CANALESK|KThe Media of Relativity 639 A complete history of how technological media were written out of our understanding of twentieth-century physics remains to be investigated. In the case of relativity, few men were as responsible as Reichenbach for erasing the connection between theory and contemporary technologies. Ironically, few had as much firsthand experience working with light signals as he did. For Einstein's seventieth birthday, Reichenbach hailed him as a man whose work took "sensorial perception and analytical principles as sources of knowledge," nothing more and nothing less, leaving no place for telegraph, telephone, or radio.97 Reichenbach's philosophical understanding of "experiment," one which dominated Anglo-American philosophy for the rest of the century, did not include a role for technology at all, let alone contemporary technologies. In his logical positivist view of experiment, technology was inferior to science and unrelated to its progress. There was no place in science for things like the "telephone" or "radio-telephone," which he repeatedly used to explain the theory. In 1951 Reichenbach, who had risen in the ranks from radio engineer to professor of philosophy at UCLA, published his most popular book, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. Once again, he countered some of the objections to Einstein's work that considered its conclusions as emerging from arbitrary definitions or practical conventions. He again claimed that in Einstein's theory the constancy of light was given by definition. He also consistently argued in favor of simply defining the speed of light as a constant quality, and then deriving all other important constants from it. Speaking as a philosopher, he explained that when Einstein said "there can be no faster signal than light" he did not merely mean "that no faster signal is known to us." Rather, Einstein meant that light was the fastest signal-regardless of how that fact became known.98 That "light was the fastest signal"-originally an elementary lesson in the world of telecommunications-was now a firmly established law of nature. Bibliography Archival and Unpublished Sources Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Weinstein, Galina. 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Mereological Nihilism and Personal Ontology Andrew Brenner Forthcoming in The Philosophical Quarterly. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 The Objections 3 3 Implications 18 4 Conclusion 22 Abstract: Mereological nihilists hold that composition never occurs, so that nothing is ever a proper part of anything else. Substance dualists generally hold that we are each identical with an immaterial soul. In this paper I argue that every popular objection to substance dualism has a parallel objection to composition. This thesis has some interesting implications. First, many of those who reject composition, but accept substance dualism, or who reject substance dualism and accept composition, have some explaining to do. Second, one popular objection to mereological nihilism, one which contends that mereological nihilism is objectionable insofar as it is incompatible with the existence of people, is untenable. 1 Introduction Mereological nihilism (or just "nihilism") is the thesis that (mereological) composition never occurs. So, if nihilism is correct, then there aren't any composite objects. Substance dualism, as I will understand the thesis, is the claim that we are each identical with an immaterial soul. In this paper I defend, and explore the implications of, the following claim: all of the 1 popular arguments against substance dualism can, with minor modifications, be turned into arguments against composition. In §2 I describe the parallels between arguments against substance dualism and arguments against composition. In §3 I explore the implications of this parallelism. There I argue that one implication of the parallelism noted in §2 is that the following conjunctions of theses are dialectically unstable: (1) Reject composition and accept substance dualism. (2) Reject substance dualism and accept composition. What I mean when I call these conjunctions of theses "dialectically unstable" is that, to take (2) as an example, you should probably not reject substance dualism while accepting composition, insofar as the arguments which probably convinced you to reject substance dualism can, with minor modification, be turned into more or less equally effective arguments against composition. In §3 I also argue that (2) has a further interesting implication, namely that one popular argument against nihilism is unsuccessful. This argument, what I'll call the "composite persons objection" to nihilism, states that nihilism is false because it has the absurd consequence that we (you, me, people in general) do not exist. But this objection to nihilism relies on the presupposition that substance dualism is false, since substance dualism provides a natural way of reconciling nihilism with the existence of people like you and me. But if the proponent of the composite persons objection rejects substance dualism for the standard reasons – that is, for the reasons discussed in §2 – then they should feel compelled to endorse the parallel objections to composition. The composite persons objection, then, is unworkable, at least for many of its proponents – those who endorse the objection to nihilism must reject substance dualism, but those arguments which tend to convince these philosophers to reject substance dualism can, with minor modification, be transformed into arguments for nihilism. Aside from those implications discussed in §3, you might think the parallels between substance dualism and composition are interesting in their own right. While I don't endorse all of the arguments below, the fact that every major argument against substance dualism finds a parallel argument against composition should give us pause. After all, substance dualism is widely regarded as defunct, for the reasons given below. While the case against substance dualism is, I think, perhaps overblown, let's assume the consensus is correct, that there is an overwhelming case to be made against substance dualism. The upshot of this paper is that, if there is an overwhelming case to be made against substance dualism, then there may also be a strong case to be made against composition. Similarly, and surprisingly, there may be a strong case to be made against any alternative theory of personal ontology 2 which identifies us with composite objects. This includes most of the proposed theories of personal ontology, for example those which identify us with animals, brains, particular (non simple) parts of brains, and four-dimensional spacetime worms. 2 The Objections I should emphasize that all of the objections below are sketches. Much more could be said about all of these objections (both the objections against dualism, and the parallel objections against composition). I should also emphasize that I do not endorse all of the objections I am about to discuss. Perhaps you will think one or more of the objections sketched below are very bad objections, or rely on premises we know to be false, and I might very well agree with you. Above I've said that the objections to dualism discussed below can, with "minor" modification, be transformed into objections to composition. Perhaps you will not think the modifications required are very minor. The claim I am most concerned to defend, however, is not that the modifications required to transform an objection to substance dualism into an objection to composition are "minor" modifications, or even that the similarities between the objections to substance dualism and the parallel objections to composition are very strong. Rather, I am most concerned to establish the claim that if you accept an objection to dualism discussed below, then you should accept the parallel objection to composition as well, since those very same considerations which motivate each objection to dualism also motivate the parallel objection to composition. Objection 1: Ontological parsimony. Ontological parsimony is generally thought to come in two varieties: quantitative ontological parsimony, and qualitative ontological parsimony. If either of these sorts of parsimony are taken to be theoretical virtues (in the sense that a theory which exhibits one or both of these sorts of ontological parsimony is thereby more likely to be true) then either sort of parsimony provides the resources for an argument against substance dualism. First, consider quantitative ontological parsimony, according to which a theory displays greater parsimony than one of its competitors if it posits fewer entities. Substance dualists, by positing immaterial souls in addition to the various material objects everyone else posits, have more ontological commitments than non-substance dualists. Accordingly, all other things being equal, if quantitative ontological parsimony is a theoretical virtue, then substance dualism is, in virtue of its diminished quantitative ontological parsimony, less 3 likely to be true than its competitors. Qualitative ontological parsimony is parsimony with respect to the kinds of things posited by a theory. Substance dualists posit more kinds of things than most of their competitors, insofar as substance dualists posit the existence of a kind of thing (immaterial things, or at any rate immaterial minds or people) which most of their competitors will not accept (see, e.g. Churchland 1984: 18).1 Both sorts of objections – an objection from quantitative ontological parsimony, and an objection from qualitative ontological parsimony – can be made against composite objects. The believer in composite objects posits the existence of more things than nihilists do, since the believer in composite objects posits the existence of various composite objects, while the nihilist does not. Similarly, the believer in composite objects posits the existence of more kinds of things, namely composite objects (objects with proper parts), which the nihilist will not posit.2 Accordingly, if quantitative or qualitative ontological parsimony are theoretical virtues, then nihilism receives some confirmation from its relative ontological parsimony.3 Note that ontological parsimony, and parsimony more generally, will not be the only factor one takes into consideration when one tries to decide whether substance dualism is correct, or whether composition occurs. The idea isn't, however, that considerations of ontological parsimony, or parsimony more generally, provide a decisive objection to either substance dualism or composition. The idea, rather, is just that their relative lack of ontological parsimony (or parsimony more generally) provide some grounds for thinking substance dualism is false, and for thinking non-nihilist theories are false. Objection 2: Ideological parsimony. 1An exception being made for theists, and anyone else who already believes in immaterial people. 2Objection: While composite objects are "a new kind of thing" (in contrast to simples), they are not as new, so to speak, as immaterial souls would be. In other words, composite objects are fairly similar to those things which are already included in the nihilist ontology (physical simples), while immaterial souls, since they are immaterial, non-located, etc., are radically different from the material objects included in the typical non-dualist's ontology. Response: Some non-substance dualists will also accept immaterial objects of various sorts (God, numbers, properties, etc.). It is not clear to me, however, how we should judge the extent to which an ontological kind is similar to some ontological kind we already posit, and whether this is even relevant to how we assess the extent to which positing a new ontological kind detracts from the parsimony of our total theory. Why, for example, is the ontological kind "composite physical object" a smaller departure from the ontological kind "simple physical object" than "immaterial soul" is from "material object"? Given this concern, it is difficult to evaluate the strength of this objection. 3Horgan and Potrč (2008) defend nihilism in part on the basis of its ontological parsimony. 4 Quine (1951) famously distinguished between a theory's ontology and its ideology. Like ontological parsimony, ideological parsimony comes in two varieties, what we might call quantitative ideological parsimony, and qualitative ideological parsimony.4 Let's assume both sorts of parsimony are theoretical virtues. A theory exhibits greater quantitative ideological parsimony if it employs fewer primitives, either primitive predicates, or, more generally, primitive expressions.5 By contrast, qualitative ideological parsimony is parsimony with respect to kinds of ideological commitments, where, for example, two or more predicates may be of the same kind if they are interdefinable. Substance dualism might exhibit less ideological parsimony than many of its competitors if mental predicates must be taken as primitive (irreducible to non-mental predicates), or if the predicate "immaterial" has to be taken as primitive. Notably, primitive mental predicates will be employed by some non-substance dualists, namely property dualists and possibly neutral monists. Furthermore, the predicate "immaterial" will plausibly not have to be taken as primitive, as long as the predicate "material" (which every non-substance dualist other than idealists will have to employ, presumably) is taken as a primitive. Ideological parsimony considerations more clearly seem to count against composition. As Sider (2013) has recently argued, nihilists can do without mereological primitives (for example, the two place parthood relation). This is a point in favor of nihilism's quantitative and qualitative ideological parsimony.6 Some philosophers argue that nihilism does not enjoy greater ideological parsimony than its competitors, since nihilists will need to employ new predicates like "arranged table-wise" (see, for example, Bennett 2009; Tallant 2014). But that's not right, since the sorts of arrangement predicates employed by the nihilist are also employed by the non-nihilist. After all, some simples will compose a table, for example, precisely because they are arranged table-wise. There's more to be said on this subject (see Brenner 2015a). For now it is enough to note that the nihilist has a prima facie plausible case to make that her view enjoys greater ideological parsimony than its competitors. 4Qualitative ideological parsimony was brought to philosophers' attention in Cowling 2013. 5E.g. logical connectives, quantifier meanings, operators, etc. This broad conception of ideology, which goes beyond just the predicates employed by a theory, is defended in Sider 2011. 6This latter point is true only assuming that parthood (or any other two place mereological primitive – proper parthood, overlap, etc.) is not of the same ideological kind as some ideological commitment which nihilists already accept. Cowling (2013: §8) argues that parthood and identity are of the same ideological kind. I think Cowling's incorrect, but I don't have the space here to consider his arguments. 5 Objection 3: Law parsimony. One respect in which a theory can be more or less parsimonious is with respect to the laws posited by the theory, both the number of laws posited by the theory, and the complexity of those laws (I don't have the space here to work out precisely what it would amount to for a law to be more or less complex, but we can leave it at an intuitive level). One argument against both property and substance dualism (going back at least to Smart 1959) is that dualists will need to posit fundamental psycho-physical laws correlating physical brain states with mental states. Insofar as the dualist must posit such laws, while the non-dualist does not, dualism is less parsimonious than its rivals. That's a strike against dualism. Those who believe in composition will have to posit fundamental mereological laws, or, if you're not comfortable calling them "laws," fundamental principles regarding the manner in which composition works.7 These include, for example, whether or not the weak supplementation principle is (non vacuously) true, whether two composite objects can share all of the same proper parts, as well as, crucially, supervenience and explanatory relations between the properties of wholes and the properties of their proper parts (what van Inwagen calls "principles of composition" – van Inwagen 1990: 43). The supervenience relationship between wholes and their proper parts is generally taken for granted – isn't it just obvious, for example, that a whole would be located where its proper parts are located? On reflection, however, it should be seen as somewhat odd that the properties of this object (some whole) and the properties of those objects (the proper parts) are correlated in some respects, but not others. After all, contra proponents of composition as identity, wholes are distinct objects from their proper parts (taken individually or collectively), and widespread and systematic supervenience relationships between distinct objects cry out for explanation. Some philosophers (e.g. Cameron 2014) have admitted that the supervenience relationships between parts and wholes are brute. In any case, if you believe in composition, and you (like almost every other person who believes in composition) think that the properties of some wholes are correlated with the properties of their proper parts, then you'll need to posit fundamental laws governing the relationship between wholes and their parts. Insofar as the believer in composition needs to posit such laws, while the nihilist does not, 7Whether we call them "laws" or "principles" seems to me to be a superficial matter regarding how we use our words, and I only note the distinction here because some readers of this paper have been uncomfortable calling the principles in question "laws." The important point to note is that the mereological laws or principles are objectionable (if they are objectionable) for precisely the reason psycho-physical laws would be objectionable, namely insofar as they increase the complexity of our total theory. 6 nihilism is more parsimonious than its competitors, and so is more likely to be true.8 It may be objected at this point that the sorts of mereological laws posited by the believer in composition are necessary, while the psycho-physical laws posited by the dualist are contingent, and this gives us some reason to think the law parsimony objection to dualism is a more powerful objection than the similar objection to composition.9 There are several problems with this objection. First, there seem to me to be no very compelling grounds for thinking mereological laws will all be necessary, or for that matter that the dualist's psycho-physical laws need be contingent. Second, it is unclear why contingent laws would count against a theory's parsimony more than necessary laws. If the dualist stipulated that his laws were necessary would that do anything to assuage our concern that those laws are unparsimonious? More generally, if we're concerned that some theoretical posit is unparsimonious, would it help assuage our concerns if the proponents of those theoretical posits stipulated that they are necessary rather than contingent? I think the answer to both these questions is "no." Both the dualist and the non-nihilist have to posit, for example, seemingly brute correlations between distinct objects (souls and bodies, parts and wholes), and insofar as they have to posit such laws it seems as if those of us who do not need to posit such mysterious and seemingly inexplicable correlations thereby make do with a simpler picture of the world. Whether the correlations posited by the dualist or nonnihilist are necessary or contingent seems to me to have nothing much to do with the fact that those of us who do not need to posit such correlations thereby have a simpler world view. Objection 4: Causal closure/exclusion. A popular argument against (interactionist versions of) substance dualism is based on the alleged causal closure of the physical world, or (another way of putting it) the exclusion of immaterial minds' causal influence from the physical world (see e.g. Kim 2005). If (interactionist) substance dualism is correct, then immaterial minds sometimes causally influence physical events. But every physical event which has a sufficient cause has a sufficient physical cause. So, barring overdetermination, immaterial minds never interact with physical events, and so (interactionist) substance dualism is false. The parallel argument against composite objects is fairly well known, as a variant of that argument was defended in an influential book by Merricks 8Elsewhere (Brenner 2015b) I defend nihilism in part on the basis of the fact that nihilism is more parsimonious than its rivals insofar as it does not require that we posit mereological laws. 9Thanks to Chad Marxen for this objection. 7 (2003).10 The idea is that the causal closure of the physical is no more plausible than the causal closure of the microphysical. In other words, every physical event which has a sufficient cause has a sufficient microphysical – and in particular, mereologically simple – cause. So, any causal contribution made by a composite object would be overdetermined by the causal contributions of its mereologically simple proper parts. The classic example is that of a baseball breaking a window. If the baseball moving in such-and-such a direction, with such-and-such a velocity relative to the window, is sufficient to break the window, then the mereologically simple constituents of the baseball, moving in such-and-such a direction, with such-and-such a velocity relative to the window, is sufficient to break the window. So, barring overdetermination, the baseball does not break the window. If these were good grounds to eliminate souls from our ontology, then they should also be good grounds to eliminate composite objects from our ontology. In fact, if composite objects are epiphenomena, we might have better grounds to eliminate them from our ontology than to eliminate epiphenomenal souls from our ontology. After all, if composite objects are epiphenomena, then it is difficult to see how we could ever learn of their existence via straightforward perceptual evidence, and such evidence is, I suspect, behind many people's insistence that composite objects exist ("I can just see my dog!") (cf. Dorr 2002: 65). Merricks, of course, thinks some composite objects engage in causal relations which are not overdetermined by their proper parts. Perhaps Merricks is correct. But note that if this aspect of Merrick's view has any plausibility, it is unclear why the substance dualist should not be able to make a similar point, and argue that some immaterial objects (namely, souls) engage in causal relations which are not overdetermined by any physical causes. Objection 5: No interaction between physical and non-physical; The pairing problem. One popular objection to dualism is based on the alleged difficulty involved in an immaterial thing (a soul) engaging in causal interaction with a physical thing (the body associated with a soul). Here's how Paul Churchland puts it: If 'mind-stuff' is so utterly different from 'matter-stuff' in its nature – different to the point that it has no mass whatever, no shape whatever, and no position anywhere in space – then how is 10I don't make any effort to follow the precise manner in which Merricks presents the problem for composition. Dorr (2002: Ch.2) also gives this sort of argument against the existence of composite objects. While Merricks take his argument to count against the existence of most, but not all, composite objects, Dorr takes his argument to count in favor of full blown nihilism. 8 it possible for my mind to have any causal influence on my body at all? ... How is this utterly insubstantial 'thinking substance' to have any influence on ponderous matter? How can two such different things be in any sort of causal contact? (Churchland 1984: 8-9) As it stands, this isn't really an argument. (As Churchland notes later in his book (in a different context) "Rhetorical questions ... do not constitute arguments" (Churchland 1984: 16).) The most prominent attempt to make the challenge for substance dualism more concrete is Jaegwon Kim's "pairing problem" (see in particular Kim 2005: Ch. 3). Jim and Bob are both immaterial souls. Jim causes events in Jim's body, but not Bob's body. Why is that the case? This question is particularly pressing if we suppose that Jim and Bob are intrinsic duplicates – they both will, for example, that Jim's body raise its right hand. Why is it the case that Jim's intention to raise his right hand is causally efficacious, that it actually results in Jim's body raising its right hand, while Bob's intention is not causally efficacious? More generally, why is it the case Jim regularly causes changes in Jim's body, Bob regularly causes changes in Bob's body, and not vice-versa? What feature of the situation makes it the case that Jim is causally paired with Jim's body, rather than some other physical object? These are still, of course, just rhetorical questions, but on reflection it may appear that the substance dualist can give no satisfying answer to these questions. When the relata of some causal relation are both spatially located we can say why they are causally related to one another – it is Jim's body which pets the dog, rather than Bob's body which pets the dog, because Jim's hand (a part of his body) is spatially contiguous (more or less) with the dog, while Bob's body is not. We can't tell any similar story about the causal relation between Jim and Jim's body, since Jim, being an immaterial soul, is not spatially located. One way to ensure that Jim causes events in Jim's body, but not any other physical objects, is to posit some sort of primitive pairing relation between Jim and his body. This "solution" to the causal pairing problem effectively denies a metaphysical principle Kim tacitly employs, according to which causal relations can't be primitive, that there has to be some noncausal relation between causal relata which "pairs" the relata. Even if we grant that causal relations don't need to be "paired" in the manner suggested by Kim, is positing a primitive pairing relation between souls and bodies really such a good idea? It seems to leave us with a more general pairing problem: why is this Jim's body, rather than, say, Bob's body? Why does the primitive pairing relation hold between Jim and Jim's 9 body, rather than some other body? It's unsatisfying (we can suppose) that this soul would be associated with this body by mere chance, for no reason at all. One proposed solution to the problem (defended by Swinburne 1986: 198-199) is that souls are associated with their respective bodies because God decrees that they are associated with one another. Another solution is that souls are spatially located (Hasker 1999). This might provide a solution to the pairing problem, since we could say that this soul is associated with this body because it is located where this body (or some part of this body) is located. Or perhaps this soul is associated with this body because it is the activities of this body which give rise to, ground, or create this soul (cf. Bailey et. al. 2011: 353). There is an analogous problem for composition: why is this whole associated with these parts?11 Why is it the case that these parts compose this table, rather than some other qualitatively identical table? These questions are particularly pressing for those who believe that some objects can compose some composite object at one time, and those very objects can compose an entirely different composite object at some other time.12 Again, it would be unsatisfying if there was no explanation at all for the association. Any solution open to the dualist is also available to the believer in composition: perhaps God decides which wholes are associated with which parts, or perhaps wholes are associated with their parts because they are located where those parts are located, or perhaps this whole is associated with these parts because these are the parts which give rise to, ground, or create this whole. If any of these solutions to the mereological pairing problem work, then presumably the analogous solutions with respect to the dualist pairing problem should work as well. I suspect that some readers will think the natural and obvious response to the mereological pairing problem is that parts are associated with their respective whole because they are located within the region in which the whole is located.13 This response will perhaps be considered so obvious that the mereological pairing problem will not be seen as a "problem" at all. Allow me to make two observations, intended to underscore the fact that this proposed solution to the mereological pairing problem is not as obviously correct as its proponents might assume. First, if we say that parts are associated with their wholes because they are located within the region occupied by their wholes, then we will rule out as impossible certain sorts of constitution. Some philosophers have wanted to say, for example, that some 11This "mereological pairing problem" was introduced in Brenner 2015b. 12Just as the analogous pairing problem for dualism might be particularly acute for substance dualists who believe in reincarnation. 13Thanks here to an anonymous referee. 10 object A is located within the region occupied by composite objects B and C, and while A is a part of B, it is not a part of C. Think, for example, of a statue which is colocated (and constituted by) a lump of clay: the arm of the statue (say) may be part of the statue, but not part of the lump, despite the fact that it is located within the region occupied by both the statue and the lump. A second point to note is that if we answer the mereological pairing problem by saying that some parts are associated with their whole because they are located within the region occupied by the whole, then we will simply have traded one demand for explanation (why are these parts associated with these wholes?) with another (why are parts always locate within the region occupied by their wholes?). You might think the pairing problem for dualism is more serious than the pairing problem for composition, for the following reason: souls can exist without their bodies, but wholes cannot exist without their parts.14 I have several responses to this concern. First, it does not seem as if it does anything to undermine the worry behind the pairing problem, namely that you will have to posit some sort of mysterious or otherwise objectionable primitive pairing relation between souls and bodies, or wholes and parts. Whether wholes must have parts if they are to exist, or even whether wholes must have some particular parts if they are to exist, does nothing to undermine the suspicion that there is an explanatory burden which must be met to explain why this whole is associated (perhaps essentially) with these parts. Leaving that point aside, however, I would also question the assumption that wholes must invariably have (proper) parts in order to exist.15 If wholes must have parts in order to exist, then wholes are wholes essentially. But I don't see any motivation for thinking wholes are wholes essentially. Conversely, if we suppose that wholes are wholes essentially, we should also feel free to suppose that souls are essentially such that they have some body or other. Some substance dualists (e.g. Hasker 1999), for example, see souls as "emerging" from their respective brains. Such dualists might very well think that souls can exist only if they remain associated with some brain or other. I'll end my discussion of the pairing problem by briefly noting a second pairing problem for some believers in composite objects, one which regards the causal relations entered into by mereologically coincident objects. Some philosophers (e.g. Baker 2000) think there are composite objects which are such that one constitutes the other. Think, for example, of the statue and the lump of material which composes the statue. If mereologically coincident 14Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I address this worry. 15Everything is trivially a part of itself, so it is true that any particular thing must have at least one part (itself) if it is to exist. So, what we're really wondering about here is whether wholes must have proper parts in order to exist. 11 objects can exhibit different causal powers (as Baker believes), then, since they are colocated with one another, we'll be left with a causal pairing problem: why is it the case that this object caused this effect, while the object with which it is colocated, which exhibits the same spatio-temporal relation with the effect, did not cause that effect?16 Objection 6: Conservation laws. One concern regarding interactionist variants of substance dualism is whether such views are compatible with conservation laws (e.g. mass/energy conservation, linear-momentum conservation). Let's focus on conservation of mass/energy.17 In particular, if a soul causes some event in the brain (perhaps, for example, the movement of my arm) wouldn't this involve some sort of transfer of energy to the brain, and wouldn't that result in a violation of relevant conservation laws? Here's how Dennett puts the worry: No physical energy or mass is associated with [souls]. How, then, do they get to make a difference to what happens in the brain cells they must affect, if the mind is to have any influence over the body? A fundamental principle of physics is that any change in the trajectory of any physical entity is an acceleration requiring the expenditure of energy, and where is this energy to come from? ... This confrontation between quite standard physics and dualism has been endlessly discussed since Descartes's own day, and is widely regarded as the inescapable and fatal flaw of dualism (Dennett 1991: 35)18 Do conservation laws have any implications for what we should think about composite objects? Maybe. Consider theories according to which composite physical objects come into existence. On these views new physical composite objects come into existence, objects with mass, volume, etc. In such cases we have no reason to believe some corresponding amount of mass was destroyed. Why then wouldn't the total mass of a physical system in which a new composite object is included increase? Here's an example. Let's say you have n simples, the total mass of which is, in some particular frame of reference (I'll suppress this detail from now on), 10kg. You put the simples 16The similarity between Kim's pairing problem and the analogous pairing problem for mereologically coincident objects is noted by Bennett (2007: 321) and Bailey et. al. (2011: 351-352). 17For a discussion of conservation of momentum, and whether such conservation laws would pose a problem for interactionist dualism, see Averill, Keating 1981. 18See Montero 2006: 384-385 for an extensive list of philosophers who argue against interactionist dualism on the basis of conservation laws. 12 together in such a manner that they begin to compose a table, a table which will presumably have a mass of 10kg. Since the table is not identical with the simples of which it is composed,19 after we form the table we should presumably have objects whose mass totals 20kg: the 10kg of simples, plus the 10kg table. But clearly enough, at the end of the process we only have objects whose total mass equals 10kg. What gives? Here is a concern which you might, but shouldn't, have. When I suggest that we should expect to have objects whose total mass measures 20kg after the simples compose the table, I am double counting : we measure the mass of the proper parts twice, first when we measure the mass of the proper parts, and then again when we measure the mass of the whole.20 In response I'd note that we do not measure the mass of the proper parts twice. When we measure the mass of the whole we are measuring the mass of the whole, not its proper parts, objects which are distinct from the whole. Of course, given the appropriate sorts of mereological laws or principles of composition, you might think the mass of the whole is determined by the mass of the proper parts. That may very well be true, but it wouldn't show that in measuring the mass of the whole and in measuring the mass of the proper parts we've measured the mass of the proper parts twice. Consider an analogy: My parents ensure that I get just as many pieces of candy as my brother gets. So, assuming my brother receives his candy first, then the number of pieces of candy which I get is determined by the number of pieces which my brother gets. It would not follow that you would be double counting if you counted my pieces and then counted my brother's pieces. After all, my pieces of candy are distinct objects from my brother's pieces of candy, despite the fact that the number of pieces I have is determined by the number of pieces my brother has, and so despite the fact that, in measuring my pieces, you can easily determine how many pieces my brother has. Similarly, insofar as a whole and its proper parts are distinct objects, in measuring the mass of a whole you do not thereby automatically measure the mass of its proper parts, even if by measuring the mass of the whole you can determine the mass of the proper parts. I suspect this problem for composition will not be taken very seriously by many people, but I'm not sure why. Composition (physical composition, anyway) results in new physical objects, with non-zero masses. That should, prima facie, violate the conservation of mass/energy, and yet transparently that conservation law does not appear to be violated in cases of purported 19I assume throughout that composition as identity, according to which composite objects are identical with their parts, is false. 20Thanks to Chad Marxen for this objection. 13 composition. There are two obvious responses to this concern: either composition doesn't occur after all, or you can create a new massive physical object, without removing or decreasing the mass of any other physical objects, without increasing the total mass of the total system of physical objects. The latter principle could legitimately be seen as an ad hoc emendation of the relevant conservation law. (And, as long as we're making ad hoc modifications to conservation laws, why couldn't the dualist make that move?) Something like the problem I've just pressed for those who believe in composition has been discussed before in debates over constitution. Recall the lump which is alleged to constitute a statue. If the lump has a mass of 10kg, and the statue has a mass of 10kg, and the lump is not identical with the statue, then why is it the case that when we put the lump and statue on a scale the scale doesn't measure 20kg (see, for example, Lewis 1986: 252)? Interestingly, Thomson (1998: 170, n.5) defends constitution from this sort of objection on the grounds that, if we wonder why the lump and statue don't collectively have a mass of 20kg, then we should also be led to wonder why the statue and any of its proper parts do not collectively have a mass which is the sum of the mass of the statue and the mass of that proper part. Thomson assumes the latter puzzle regarding the relationship between the mass of a composite object and the masses of its proper parts is unproblematic, but that is precisely the assumption which I've challenged above. Objection 7: Mental properties supervene on physical properties in brains, so this is evidence that physical properties of brains are all there are. A very popular objection to substance dualism is something like the following. We know that mental properties are supervenient upon physical brain states. What explains this supervenience relationship? The physicalist's response to this question is that mental states supervene on physical brain states because mental states just are physical brain states. Once we've got those physical brain states we don't have any reason to posit any further properties (irreducible mental properties) or substances (souls). Sometimes proponents of this sort of objection to dualism write as if the dualist does not think that mental properties supervene on physical brain states (see e.g. Churchland 1984: 20). But that wouldn't be a very solid foundation for an objection to dualism, since dualists (obviously) can and do recognize widespread and systematic supervenience relationships between mental states and physical brain states. A better way to put the objection to dualism is that physicalism is a particularly elegant, but defeasible, explanation of the widespread and systematic supervenience between mental states and physical brain states. Alternatively, the objection might be put 14 in probabilistic terms. Physicalism predicts that mental states will supervene on physical brain states, insofar as physicalism predicts that mental states are physical brain states. Dualism, by contrast, is compatible with mental states supervening on physical brain states, but does not entail that they do so. Accordingly, our evidence E (systematic supervenience of mental states on physical brain states) is more probable given the hypothesis P that physicalism is true than given the hypothesis D that dualism is true (Pr(E/P)>Pr(E/D)). So, since physicalism is incompatible with dualism, the widespread systematic supervenience of mental states on physical brain states raises the probability of physicalism vs dualism. Analogous points can be made with respect to composite objects. Properties of (alleged) wholes supervene on the properties of their proper parts. So, why posit the whole in addition to the parts? Once we've got the parts, why should we go any further and posit wholes which are associated with those parts? Put another way, given that the properties of whatever are in this region supervene on the properties of the simples in this region, a particularly elegant explanation of that supervenience is that the region in question only contains the simples. Put in probabilistic terms, nihilism predicts that the properties of whatever is in this region will supervene on the properties of the simples in this region, while by contrast if we reject nihilism there is no guarantee that the properties of whatever is in this region will supervene on the properties of the simples in this region. So, the systematic supervenience of the properties of whatever is in this region on the properties of the simples in this region provides evidence in favor of nihilism, since nihilism predicts that supervenience better than the negation of nihilism. If the former objection(s) to dualism works, then the exactly analogous objection(s) to composition should work as well (and vice versa). You may be tempted to make the following response: the properties of whatever is in this region supervene on the simples in this region because the simples in this region are parts of whatever composite objects are in this region.21 But this response is only tenable if we posit laws governing the manner in which the properties of wholes supervene on the properties of their proper parts. The dualist can make the same move, saying that the properties of souls supervene on the properties of brains in certain respects because of psycho-physical laws. Objection 8: Evolutionary debunking. There is mounting evidence which suggests that humans are naturally disposed to be mind/body dualists (cf. Bloom 2004; Bering, Bjorklund 2004; Hood, et. al. 2012; Forstmann, Burgmer 2015). So, it seems as if we might 21Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I address this response. 15 have built-in cognitive faculties which dispose us toward dualism. If we have no reason to think such cognitive mechanisms are reliable, then we might have the resources to develop an evolutionary debunking argument against dualism, of the sort which has recently received a great deal of attention in meta-ethics (see e.g. Street 2006; Joyce 2006).22 Any plausible argument of this sort would not, I think, actually show that dualism lacks epistemic justification. It might, however, undermine particular sources of justification for dualism (cf. Jong, Visala 2014), insofar as it might show that the sorts of intuitions which underlie arguments for dualism are of dubious reliability. These include, for example, the sorts of modal intuitions which underlie conceivability arguments for substance dualism (in e.g. Swinburne 1986: Ch.8; Plantinga 2006). Similar points can be made with respect to our belief in composite objects. There is little doubt that humans have an innate tendency to believe in composite objects (for details, see Osborne 2016). Is there any reason to think those cognitive faculties by which we acquire such beliefs are reliable? Plausibly not, insofar as a world in which there are no composites will arguably be empirically identical to one in which there are composite objects, or at the very least empirically identical with respect to those situations we can expect our evolutionary predecessors to have encountered. There is no reason, then, to think there would have been any evolutionary pressure toward our forming or retaining reliable cognitive faculties by which we form the belief that there are composite objects. So, insofar as our belief in composite objects is the result of cognitive faculties which we have no reason to believe are reliable, we have reason to withdraw those beliefs. And it's interesting to note that almost without exception philosophers defend belief in composition on the basis of intuition and perception – those very cognitive faculties which we have no reason to think are reliable with respect to this subject matter (that is, with respect to whether or not there are composite objects in any particular vicinity, rather than merely simples arranged in some particular manner). Objection 9: Where do souls come from? One challenge for substance dualists is to explain where souls come from.23 Presumably the souls which exist now haven't always existed. So, by what causal mechanism did they come to exist? A more specific way of putting the worry is in terms of our evolutionary history. Presumably at some point in our evolutionary history there weren't any souls, but now there are. Assuming it can't be a vague matter whether souls exist or are associated with 22For a more general discussion of evolutionary debunking arguments, see Kahane 2011. 23For a recent discussion of this subject see Farris 2014. 16 particular bodies, then at some point there was a sharp cut off – before that point there were no souls, but after that point there were. So, by what casual mechanism was that gap bridged? And is it really so plausible to suppose there would be any sharp cut off point of this sort, when our evolutionary history was a very gradual sort of process? Admittedly, it's difficult to turn these worries into any sort of argument against dualism. Still, you might think it is implausible that there could be sharp cut off points, in the history of individual organisms or in the history of life more generally, before which there is no soul, and after which there is a soul. So, if the dualist is committed to such cut off points, then she's in trouble. More generally, you might think it's very mysterious that new souls come into existence when new organisms (or human organisms specifically) come into existence. Assuming that we understand the sorts of biological processes involved in the creation of a new organism, why should any of that result in a new immaterial soul? The creation of a new soul in this sort of situation seems utterly inexplicable. A similar challenge is faced by many of those who believe in composition: where do composite objects come from? In particular, non-universalists will have to embrace sharp cut off points, precise configurations of matter (for example) which are such that before that configuration is in place there is no composite object, but after that configuration is in place there is. This is assuming, of course, that it cannot be vague whether some composite object exists in some particular situation. But such vagueness is widely regarded as implausible, insofar as it plausibly leads to vagueness with respect to how many objects there are.24 Leaving aside the concern about cut off points, you might think the generation of new physical composite objects is very mysterious. For example, most people who believe in composite objects apparently think I can create a brand new large physical object, one so heavy I can't even carry it, just by moving other objects around. I take some pieces of wood and I move them around, and I nail them together. I've made a table. Suddenly a large physical object, one which hasn't existed until this moment, stands before me. Why did that happen? How did I make a whole new large heavy physical object just by moving some other objects around and putting nails in them? This seems utterly inexplicable, maybe even magical. For what it's worth, perhaps neither objection (the objection to dualism or the parallel objection to composition) is particularly compelling. Where do 24But for one (kind of weird) way to try to avoid the conclusion that vagueness with respect to when composition occurs will lead to vagueness with respect to how many objects exist, see Carmichael 2011. 17 composite objects come from? Presumably, the answer will be that they show up when some mereological simples exhibit certain properties (for example, when they're arranged in a certain manner). We could say something similar about souls – they show up when the bodies with which they are associated instantiate certain properties (for example, when they develop brains of a certain configuration). In both cases we'll need laws governing the creation of the new objects in question, i.e., laws of the form "when such-and-such sorts of simples instantiate such-and-such a property then they begin to compose a table." In any case, it seems to me that if this is a challenge for substance dualists, it's a challenge for those who believe in composition as well, and vice versa. We only have a distinctive problem for substance dualism if the difficulty is really the purported difficulty of making sense of causal interaction between physical things and non-physical things (e.g. a physical thing causing a soul to come into existence). But that's a different objection. 3 Implications I've argued that all of the popular arguments against substance dualism have parallel arguments against composition. What's more, I have argued that if you accept any of these arguments against substance dualism then you should accept the parallel argument against composition. In the course of setting out all of the popular arguments against substance dualism I have, coincidentally, presented all of the most popular arguments against composition (as well as some unpopular or entirely novel arguments against composition). So, I have in effect argued that all of the most popular arguments against composition have parallel arguments against substance dualism. And while I have been mostly concerned to establish the claim that if you accept any of the arguments against substance dualism discussed above then you should accept the parallel argument against composition, I think the converse claim is plausible as well: if you accept any of the arguments against composition discussed above, then you should accept the parallel argument against substance dualism. These theses, if correct, should be of intrinsic interest. However, they also have important implications for how we evaluate both mereological nihilism and substance dualism, and in this section I'll explore what those implications might be. There are at least two major implications of these theses which I will explore here. First, that those who reject substance dualism may have reason to reject composition (and vice versa). Second, that one major objection to nihilism, what I call the "composite persons objection" 18 to nihilism, is unsuccessful. I'll discuss each of these subjects in turn. It may seem as if it is a small step from "if you accept one of these popular arguments against substance dualism then you should accept a parallel argument against composition (and vice versa)" to "if you reject substance dualism then you should reject composition (and vice versa)." But this isn't so obvious. For starters, you might reject substance dualism, or reject composition, for some unconventional reason which I haven't discussed. Or, you might think it is obvious or otherwise probable that composition occurs. Accordingly, you will put little if any stock in the objections to composition which I've discussed above. If this is your view, then perhaps this paper will lead you to put little stock in the parallel objections to dualism, now that you've seen how all of the objections to composition which I've discussed above can, with little modification, be turned into objections to dualism. Another prima facie reasonable response to this paper is to note that, since you already find one or more of the popular objections to dualism convincing, you will find the parallel objection(s) to composition convincing as well. Accordingly, you will lower the epistemic probability you accord to the view that composition occurs. Or, perhaps the objections discussed above will lead you to place less credence in the disjunction of dualism and the view that composition occurs.25 In any case, an important take away is that, surprisingly, how one evaluates substance dualism will have major implications for how one evaluates nihilism, and conversely how one evaluates nihilism will have major implications for how one evaluates substance dualism. At least for many people, the following conjunctions of views may be dialectically unstable: (1) Reject composition and accept substance dualism. (2) Reject substance dualism and accept composition. Note that I am not making the strong claim that if, e.g., nihilism is true, then substance dualism is false. There isn't a straightforward entailment relation, in either direction, between the former thesis (nihilism is true) and the latter thesis (substance dualism is false). Rather, I am making the weaker claim that if, say, you accept nihilism, and also accept substance dualism, then you have some explaining to do. In particular you will have to answer the challenge "if you reject composition on the basis of such-and-such arguments, why don't parallel arguments lead you to reject substance dualism?" That (2) may represent an unstable conjunction of views seems to me to have a particularly noteworthy implication, namely that it undermines what I will call the "composite persons objection to nihilism" (or just the CPO). 25Thanks here to Liz Jackson. 19 Here's how van Inwagen puts the CPO: "... Nihilism would appear to be false, for you and I exist and we are composite objects" (van Inwagen 1990: 73).26 This is, I think, the most powerful objection which has so far been raised against nihilism, but it is one which nihilists have not taken very seriously. For example, in Sider's recent defense of nihilism (Sider 2013) he devotes 43 pages to responding to objections to nihilism, but only one of those pages is about the CPO. Other nihilists are similarly brief in their responses to the argument.27 The response given by Sider and others is, more or less, that we don't exist, and that phenomenal states are collectively instantiated by whatever simples are commonly thought to compose us or our brains. I don't think this response is very satisfying. Many of us are rightly skeptical of the notion that we don't exist, so it would be worthwhile if the nihilist had an alternative response to the CPO. There is a fairly obvious response for the nihilist to make: If I exist, and, as nihilists contend, composition never occurs, then I must be something other than a composite object. There are several options here. Perhaps I am some (non-composite) stuff, or an arrangement of simples/stuff (Goldwater 2015), or I am a simple. The last option, in the form of a variant of substance dualism according to which I am a mereologically simple non-physical object, has historically been quite popular. Many philosophers seem to suppose that if nihilism is true, and we exist, then some sort of substance dualism must be correct, since it gives us the only plausible way to respond to the CPO. Unfortunately for the nihilist, substance dualism is not very popular among philosophers today. It is this fact which provides the key to a novel response to the CPO, since, as I've argued above, all of the popular arguments against substance dualism can, with minor modifications, be transformed into arguments against composition. Some people reject nihilism because they reject substance dualism, and think nihilists need to be committed to substance dualism in order to get around the CPO. One upshot of this paper is that you should probably not endorse that line of thought – you should probably not reject nihilism because you reject substance dualism. Put another way, the CPO (the conclusion of which is that nihilism is false) relies on the presupposition that substance dualism is false. But all of the popular arguments for that presupposition can, with only minor modifications, be transformed into arguments against the conclusion of the CPO. So, you shouldn't endorse the CPO (unless, of course, you reject substance dualism 26Other philosophers who give this sort of objection to nihilism include Markosian 1998; Hudson 2001: Ch.1; Olson 2007: Ch.9; Gilmore ms. 27For example, Dorr and Rosen 2002 also devote about a page to the CPO. 20 for some reason other than one of the reasons discussed above). At the very least I'm shifting the burden of proof to those who reject nihilism because they reject substance dualism: If you reject substance dualism, why don't your arguments against substance dualism (with minor modifications) also imply that composition never occurs? I'll end my discussion of the CPO with a list of some of the philosophers I have in mind here – that is, philosophers who rejects nihilism because they reject substance dualism. Hud Hudson considers the "Problem of the Many," a puzzle regarding composition which I don't need to describe in too much detail in order to get my point across. The Problem of the Many aims to show that we run into trouble if we follow our pre-theoretic beliefs regarding which sorts of relatively large composite objects exist. One way out of the difficulty, one which the nihilist is happy to accept, is to deny the existence of the composite objects which cause the trouble. Hudson says we should reject this solution to the Problem of the Many because it would entail that we don't exist, since we're relatively large composite objects if we exist (Hudson 2001: 17-18). Hudson quickly concedes that substance dualists can avoid quantifying over large-ish composite objects, without resorting to the view that we don't exist (Hudson 2001: 19-21). Unfortunately for the would-be dualist, her solution to the Problem of the Many runs into its own problems, chief among them being the "traditional objections to Dualism" (Hudson 2001: 21). Hudson does not tell us what these "traditional objections to Dualism" are, but if I had to guess he had in mind some of the arguments I discuss above. So, Hudson advocates the theoretical position which I suggest in this paper is unstable: he advocates that we reject nihilism because, barring her adoption of the particularly implausible view that we don't exist, the nihilist will have to be a substance dualist, and he advocates that we reject substance dualism because of the "traditional objections." This view is unstable because those "traditional objections" can, with little modification, be turned into arguments in favor of nihilism. Ned Markosian (to give another example) is in a similar predicament. Markosian tells us that one of the serious difficulties facing nihilism is that nihilism would entail that we don't exist, since we "are surely physical objects composed of many parts, if we exist at all" (Markosian 1998: 220). He concedes that one way out of the difficulty would be to accept substance dualism, but substance dualism is "unacceptable" (Markosian 1998: 245, Note 23). Markosian does not tell us why substance dualism is unacceptable, but it would be unsurprising if he rejects substance dualism because of one or more of the popular objections to dualism discussed above. To give one final example, Cody Gilmore (ms) has developed a version of the CPO which includes as a premise "If I have being, then I am composite." Gilmore recognizes that substance dualism is 21 incompatible with this premise, but says that we should reject substance dualism because "we have (partly empirical) grounds for denying that there are souls or other concrete non-physical entities." Gilmore does not elaborate, but I assume that the objections to substance dualism which he has in mind are some or all of those objections which I discuss in §2. 4 Conclusion I don't pretend that I've surveyed every prima facie plausible argument against substance dualism, or every prima facie plausible argument against composition. I have, I think, surveyed all of the most popular arguments against substance dualism and composition. I've shown that how one evaluates substance dualism will be tied up with how one evaluates mereological nihilism, since the most popular arguments against substance dualism all have parallel arguments against composition. Another interesting upshot of all of this is, again, that you should probably not endorse the CPO. The CPO only works if substance dualism is false (that substance dualism is false is a presupposition of the argument), and if composition occurs (this is the conclusion of the argument). But those arguments which are most likely to lead you to reject substance dualism can, with minor modifications, be transformed into objections to composition. Here is a final issue. I've argued that every popular objection to dualism has a parallel objection to composition. Given that dualism is unpopular because of these sorts of objections, why is composition not similarly unpopular? I have two things to say on this subject. First, the parallels between objections to substance dualism and objections to composition have, for the most part, been overlooked. Second, most people think we have a strong positive case to make for composition, while we do not have a similarly strong case to make for the existence or causal efficacy of immaterial souls. I don't have the space here to examine positive arguments for composition (or, for that matter, positive arguments for substance dualism). Let me register my conviction, however, that such arguments are generally very weak. The most popular defenses of composition rely on appeals to "common sense," widespread belief in composition (the consensus gentium argument for composition), alleged perception of composite objects, phenomenal conservatism, and the fact that belief in composition is more "intuitive" than nihilism. These seem to me to be fairly weak grounds for belief in composition, and ironically enough almost all of these arguments could be marshaled in service of substance dualism. Arguments for composition on the basis of its role in science are more defensible, 22 but, I think, ultimately unsuccessful, although that is a topic for another occasion (see Brenner forthcoming).28 References [1] Luke Van Horn Andrew M Bailey, Joshua Rasmussen. No pairing problem. Philosophical Studies, 154:349–360, 2011. [2] Lynne Rudder Baker. Persons and Bodies: A Constitution View. Cambridge University Press, 2000. [3] Karen Bennett. Mental causation. Philosophy Compass, 2(2):316–337, 2007. [4] Karen Bennett. Composition, colocation, and metaontology. In David J. Chalmers, David Manley, and Ryan Wasserman, editors, Metametaphysics, pages 38–76. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009. [5] Paul Bloom. Descartes' Baby: How the Science of Child Development Explains What Makes Us Human. Basic Books, 2004. [6] Andrew Brenner. Mereological nihilism and the special arrangement question. Synthese, 192(5):1295–1314, May 2015. [7] Andrew Brenner. Mereological nihilism and theoretical unification. Analytic Philosophy, 56(4):318–337, December 2015. [8] Andrew Brenner. Science and the special composition question. Synthese, Forthcoming. [9] Paul Bloom Bruce Hood, Nathalia L. Gjersoe. Do children think that duplicating the body also duplicates the mind? Cognition, 125:466–474, 2012. [10] Ross P. Cameron. Parts generate the whole, but they are not identical to it. In Donald Baxter and Aaron Cotnoir, editors, Composition As Identity, pages 90–107. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014. 28Thanks to Aaron Creller, Peter Finocchiaro, Liz Jackson, Chad Marxen, Jonathan Matheson, Sarah Mattice, Callie Phillips, Michael Rea, Bradley Rettler, Raphael Mary Salzillo, Peter van Inwagen, the audience at my presentation of this paper at the 2016 American Philosophical Association Pacific Division meeting, and two anonymous referees for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 23 [11] Chad Carmichael. Vague composition without vague existence. Noûs, 45(2):315–327, June 2011. [12] Paul Churchland. Matter and Consciousness. MIT Press, 1984. [13] Sam Cowling. Ideological parsimony. Synthese, 190(17):3889–3908, 2013. [14] Daniel C. Dennett. Consciousness Explained. Back Bay Books, 1991. [15] Cian Dorr. The Simplicity of Everything. PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2002. [16] Cian Dorr and Gideon Rosen. Composition as a fiction. In Richard Gale, editor, The Blackwell Guide to Metaphysics, pages 151–74. Blackwell, Oxford, 2002. [17] B. F. Keating Edward Averill. Does interactionism violate a law of classical physics? Mind, 90(357):102–107, January 1981. [18] Joshua R. Farris. Emergent creationism: Another option in the origin of the soul debate. Religious Studies, 50:321–339, 2014. [19] Cody Gilmore. A cartesian argument against compositional nihilism. [20] Jonah P. B. Goldwater. No composition, no problem: Ordinary objects as arrangements. Philosophia, 43(2):367–379, 2015. [21] William Hasker. The Emergent Self. Cornell University Press, 1999. [22] Terence Horgan and Matjaž Potrč. Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology. The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2008. [23] Hud Hudson. A Materialist Metaphysics of the Human Person. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2001. [24] David F. Bjorklund Jesse M. Bering. The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology, 40(2):217–233, 2004. [25] Aku Visala Jonathan Jong. Evolutionary debunking arguments against theism, reconsidered. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 76(3):243–258, December 2014. [26] Richard Joyce. The Evolution of Morality. MIT Press, 2006. 24 [27] Guy Kahane. Evolutionary debunking arguments. Noûs, 45(1):103–125, March 2011. [28] Jaegwon Kim. Physicalism, or Something Near Enough. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005. [29] David Lewis. On the Plurality of Worlds. Blackwell, Oxford, 1986. [30] Ned Markosian. Brutal composition. Philosophical Studies, 92:211–49, 1998. [31] Pascal Burgmer Matthias Forstmann. Adults are intuitive mind-body dualists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 144(1):222–235, 2015. [32] Trenton Merricks. Objects and Persons. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2003. [33] Barbara Montero. What does the conservation of energy have to do with physicalism? Dialectica, 60(4):383–396, 2006. [34] Eric T. Olson. What Are We? A Study in Personal Ontology. Oxford University Press, 2007. [35] Robert Carry Osborne. Debunking rationalist defenses of common-sense ontology: An empirical approach. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 7(1):197–221, March 2016. [36] Alvin Plantinga. Against materialism. Faith and Philosophy, 23(1):3–32, 2006. [37] W. V. O. Quine. Ontology and ideology. Philosophical Studies, 2:11–15, 1951. [38] Theodore Sider. Writing the Book of the World. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2011. [39] Theodore Sider. Against parthood. In Karen Bennett and Dean W. Zimmerman, editors, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, volume 8. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013. [40] J. J. C. Smart. Sensations and brain processes. Philosophical Review, 68:141–56, 1959. [41] Sharon Street. A Darwinian dilemma for realist theories of value. Philosophical Studies, 127:109–66, 2006. 25 [42] Richard Swinburne. The Evolution of the Soul. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1986. [43] Jonathan Tallant. Against mereological nihilism. Synthese, 191:1511– 1527, 2014. [44] Judith Jarvis Thomson. 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On philosophical motivations for paraconsistency: an ontology-free interpretation of the logics of formal inconsistency Walter Carnielli1, Abílio Rodrigues2 1CLE and Department of Philosophy State University of Campinas, Campinas, SP, Brazil [email protected] 2Department of Philosophy Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil [email protected] Abstract In this paper we present a philosophical motivation for the logics of formal inconsistency, a family of paraconsistent logics whose distinctive feature is that of having resources for expressing the notion of consistency within the object language in such a way that consistency may be logically independent of noncontradiction . We defend the view according to which logics of formal inconsistency may be interpreted as theories of logical consequence of an epistemological character. We also argue that in order to philosophically justify paraconsistency there is no need to endorse dialetheism, the thesis that there are true contradictions. Furthermore, we argue that an intuitive reading of the bivalued semantics for the logic mbC, a logic of formal inconsistency based on classical logic, fits in well with the basic ideas of an intuitive interpretation of contradictions. On this interpretation, the acceptance of a pair of propositions A and ¬A does not mean that A is simultaneously true and false, but rather that there is conflicting evidence about the truth value of A. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, we want to present a philosophical motivation for the logics of formal inconsistency (LFIs), a family of paraconsistent logics whose distinctive feature is that of having resources for expressing the notion of 2 consistency within the object language in such a way that consistency may be logically independent of non-contradiction. We shall defend the view according to which logics of formal inconsistency may be interpreted as theories of logical consequence of a normative and epistemological character that tell us how to make inferences in the presence of contradictions. We will see that in order to justify paraconsistency from the philosophical viewpoint there is no need to endorse dialetheism, the thesis that there are true contradictions. Secondly, we want to show that an intuitive reading of the bivalued semantics presented in Carnielli et al. (2007) for the logic mbC1, a LFI based on classical logic, can be maintained. The idea is to intuitively interpret paraconsistent negation in the following way. The acceptance of A means that there is some evidence that A is not the case. If such evidence is non-conclusive, it may be that there is simultaneously some evidence that A is the case. Conclusive evidence is tantamount to truth, and if there is conclusive evidence for A, it cancels any evidence for ¬A (mutatis mutandis for ¬A and A). Therefore, the acceptance of a pair of contradictory propositions A and ¬A need not to be taken in the strong sense that both are true.2 In section 1, in order to give a general view of the problem dealt with by paraconsistent logics, namely, that of dealing with contexts of reasoning in which contradictions occur, we shall present the distinction between explosiveness and contradictoriness. This distinction is essential for grasping the distinction between classical and paraconsistent logics. In section 2, we present an axiomatic system for mbC with a correct and complete semantics. We intend to show that mbC is a minimal logic with some basic features suitable to the intuitive interpretation of contradictions as conflicting evidence. In section 3, we shall examine the problem of the nature of logic, namely, whether logic as a theory of logical consequence has primarily an ontological or epistemological character. The point is not to give a definite answer to this problem but, rather, to clarify and understand important aspects of paraconsistent logic. We defend the 1 The name 'mbC' stands for 'a minimal logic with the axiom bc1', and 'bc' stands intuitively for 'basic property of consistency'. 2 The symbol '¬' will be used here as a paraconsistent negation, in contrast to classical negation '~'. 3 view that logics of formal inconsistency are well suited to the epistemological side of logic and fit an intuitive justification of paraconsistency that is not committed to dialetheism.3 1. Contradictions and explosions Classical logic does not accept contradictions. This is not only because it endorses the validity of the principle of non-contradiction, (A  A), but more importantly because, classically, everything follows from a contradiction. This is the inference rule called ex falso quodlibet, or law of explosion, (1) A, A ⊢ B. From a pair of propositions A and A, we can prove any proposition through logic, from '2+2=5' to 'snow is black'. Before the rise of modern logic (i.e., that which emerged in the late nineteenth century with the works of Boole and Frege), the validity of the principle of explosion was still a somewhat contentious issue. However, in Frege's Begriffsschrift, where we find for the first time a complete system of what later would be called first-order logic, the principle of explosion holds (proposition 36 of part II). It is worth noting in passing that Frege's logicist project failed precisely because his system was inconsistent, and therefore trivial. Frege strongly attacked the influence of psychologism in logic (we will return to this point in section 3), and in his writings we find a realist conception of mathematics and logic that contributed to emphasizing the ontological and realist vein of classical logic. It is true that one may endorse classical logic without being a realist. However, the unrestricted validity of excluded middle and non-contradiction, an essential feature of classical logic, is perfectly suited to the realist view according to which reality ultimately decides the truth value of every meaningful proposition independently of our ability to know it. The account of logical consequence that was established as standard in the first half of twentieth century through the works of Russell, Tarski, and Quine, among others, is 3 One of the intentions of this paper is to present the logics of formal inconsistency to the non-technical minded reader. We presuppose only a basic knowledge of classical logic. The paper, we hope, is as intuitive as it can be within the space allowed, while at the same time dealing with aspects of logics of formal inconsistency that are yet unexplored. 4 classical. Classical logic is invariably the logic we first study in introductory logic books, and the law of explosion holds in this system, where consistency is tantamount to freedom from contradiction. Let us put these things a little bit more precisely. Let T be a theory formulated in some language, call it L, whose underlying logic is classical. If T proves a pair of propositions A and ~A, '~' being classical negation, then T proves all of the propositions of L. In this case, we say that T is trivial. For this reason contradictions must be avoided at all costs in classical logic. The most serious consequence of a contradiction in a classical theory is not the violation of the principle of non-contradiction, but rather the trivialization of the theory. The central point of paraconsistency is that these two things, contradiction and triviality, do not need to be the same thing. Although classical logic has become the standard approach, several alternative accounts of logical consequence have been proposed and studied. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Brouwer (1907), motivated by considerations regarding the nature of mathematical knowledge, established the basis for intuitionistic logic, a different account of logical consequence. The principle of excluded middle, a so-called fundamental law of thought, together with the principle of non-contradiction, is not valid in intuitionistic logic. Intuitionistic logic, later formalized by Arend Heyting (1956), a former student of Brouwer, has an epistemological character in clear opposition to Frege's realism. In brief, starting from the assumption that mathematical objects are not discovered but rather created by the human mind, the intuitionists' motivation for rejecting the excluded middle is the existence of mathematical problems for which there are no known solutions. The usual example is the Goldbach conjecture: every even number greater than 2 is the sum of two prime numbers. Let us call this proposition G. Until now, there is no proof of G, nor is there a counterexample of an even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of two primes. The latter would be a proof of not G. For this reason, the intuitionist maintains that we cannot assert the relevant instance of excluded middle, G or not G. Doing so would commit us to a Platonic, supersensible realm of previously given mathematical objects. So-called classical logic is based on principles that, when rejected, may give rise to alternative accounts of logical consequence. Two accepted principles of classical logic are the aforementioned laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction. The principle of non5 contradiction can be interpreted from an ontological point of view as a principle about reality, according to which facts, events, and mathematical objects cannot be in contradiction with each other. Its formulation in first order logic, x(Px  Px), says that it cannot be the case that an object simultaneously has and does not have a given property P. Note (and this is a point we want to emphasize), that the principle of explosion can be understood as a still more incisive way of saying that there can be no contradiction in reality – otherwise everything is the case, and we know this cannot be so. Explosion is thus a stronger way of expressing an idea usually attributed to non-contradiction. In paraconsistent logics the law of explosion is not valid. Thus, the central question for an intuitive interpretation for paraconsistency is the following: what does it mean to accept a pair of contradictory propositions A and ¬A? It is a fact that contradictions appear in a number of contexts of reasoning, among which three are worth mentioning: (i) computational databases; (ii) semantic and set theoretic paradoxes; (iii) scientific theories. In the first case, contradictions invariably have a provisional character, as an indication of an error to be corrected. We will make only few remarks with regard to the second case, because an analysis of this problem requires a technical exposition that cannot be gone into here. The third case will be discussed below. Naive set theory, which yields set theoretic paradoxes, has been revised and corrected. Up to the present time, there is no indication that ZFC (and its variants) is not consistent – in fact, all indications are to the contrary. The moral we can draw from this is that our intuitive conception of set is defective, a 'product of thought', so to speak, that yields contradictions. Nothing more should be concluded. With respect to semantic paradoxes, they are results about languages with certain characteristics. It is worth noting that the diagonal lemma, essential in the formalization of both the Liar and Curry's paradoxes, is a result about language itself. Thus we believe that the step from paradoxes to the claim that there are true contradictions, in the sense that reality is contradictory, is too speculative to be taken seriously. Here we will concentrate on the third case, the occurrence of contradictions in scientific theories. We are not going to throw away these theories if they are successful in predicting results and describing phenomena. Although mathematicians do their work based on the assumption that mathematics is free of contradictions, in empirical sciences 6 contradictions seem to be unavoidable, and the presence of contradictions is not a sufficient condition for throwing away an interesting theory. It is a fact that contradictory theories exist; the question is how to deal with them. The problem we have on our hands is that of how to formulate an account of logical consequence capable of identifying, in such contexts, the inferences that are allowed, and distinguishing them from those that must be blocked. 2. mbC: a minimal logic of formal inconsistency To begin, let us recall some useful definitions. A theory is a set of propositions closed under logical consequence. This means that everything that is a logical consequence of the theory is also part of the theory. For instance, everything that is a consequence of the basic principles of arithmetic, for instance, '5 + 7 = 12', is also part of arithmetic. We say that a theory T is: (i) contradictory if and only if there is a proposition A in the language of T such that T proves A and A (i.e., T proves a contradiction); (ii) trivial if and only if for any proposition A in the language of T, T proves A (i.e., T proves everything); (iii) explosive if and only if T is trivialized when exposed to a pair of contradictory formulas – i.e.: for all A and B, T  {A, ~A} ⊢ B. There is a difference between a theory being contradictory and being trivial. Contradictoriness entails triviality only when the principle of explosion holds. Without explosion, we may have contradictions without triviality. In books on logic, we find two different but classically equivalent notions of consistency. Hunter (1973, p. 78ff) calls them simple and absolute consistency. A deductive system S with a negation  is simply consistent if and only if there is no formula A such that ⊢S A and ⊢S A. The other notion of consistency, absolute consistency, says that a system S is consistent if and only if there is a formula B such that ⊬S B. In other words, S does not prove everything. The latter notion is tantamount to saying that S is not trivial, while the former is tantamount to saying that S is non-contradictory. From the point of view 7 of classical logic, both notions are equivalent because the principle of explosion holds. The proof is simple and easy. Suppose S is trivial. Hence, it proves everything, including a pair of propositions A and A. Now suppose S is contradictory, that is, it proves a pair of propositions A and A. If the principle of explosion holds in S, as is the case in classical logic, then S proves everything, hence S is trivial. Paraconsistent logics separate triviality from inconsistency, restricting the principle of explosion. In logics of formal inconsistency the principle of explosion is not valid in general, that is, it is not the case that from any pair of contradictory propositions everything follows. These logics contain a non-explosive negation, represented here by '', such that for some A and B, A, A ⊬ B. In addition, there is a unary consistency connective called 'ball': '∘A' means informally that A is consistent. We can thus isolate contradictions in such a way that the application of the law of explosion is restricted to consistent propositions only, thus avoiding triviality even in the presence of one or more contradictions. Therefore, a contradictory theory may be non-trivial. However, as we will see, we can go further and separate the concept of inconsistency from that of contradictoriness. Consistency may be taken as a primitive notion, its meaning being elucidated from outside the formal system. We will return to this point later on. It is worth mentioning here a common misunderstanding about paraconsistent logics in general. It is true that in the majority of paraconsistent logics the principle of noncontradiction is not valid. However, this does not mean that systems of paraconsistent logic have contradictions as theorems. This is a mistake similar to saying that intuitionistic logic proves the negation of excluded middle. The fundamental distinction between classical logic and paraconsistent logics occurs at the sentential level. In what follows, we will present an axiomatic system of a sentential logic of formal inconsistency, mbC. Let L be a language with sentential letters, the set of logical connectives {, , →, ¬, ∘}, and parentheses. Notice that the consistency operator '∘', mentioned above, is a 8 primitive symbol. The set of formulas of L is obtained recursively in the usual way. Consider the following axiom-schemas: Ax. 1. A → (B → A) Ax. 2. (A → (B → C)) → ((A → B) → (A → C)) Ax. 3. A → (B → (A  B)) Ax. 4. (A  B) → A Ax. 5. (A  B) → B Ax. 6. A → (A  B) Ax. 7. B → (A  B) Ax. 8. (A → C) → ((B → C) → ((A  B) → C)) Ax. 9. A  (A → B) Ax. 10. A  ¬A Ax. bc1. ∘A → (A → (¬A → B)) Inference rule: modus ponens The definition of a proof of A from premises Γ ( ⊢mbC A) is the usual one: a sequence of formulas B1...Bn such that A is Bn and each Bi (1  i  n) is an axiom, a formula that belongs to Γ, or the result of modus ponens. Thus, monotonicity holds: (2) if Γ ⊢mbC B, then Γ, A ⊢mbC B, for any A. A theorem is a formula proved from the empty set of premises. Ax.1 and Ax.2, plus modus ponens, give the deduction theorem: (3) if Γ, A ⊢mbC B, then Γ ⊢mbC A → B. We thus have inferences that correspond to introduction and elimination rules of implication in a natural deduction system. Since monotonicity holds, we also have the converse of (3), and the deduction theorem holds in both directions. (4) Γ, A ⊢mbC B if and only if Γ ⊢mbC A → B. Axioms 3-5 and 6-8 correspond, respectively, to the introduction and elimination rules of conjunction and disjunction in a natural deduction system. Axioms 1-9 form a complete system of positive classical logic, i.e., a system that proves all tautologies that can 9 be formed with →,  and . Negation shows up in Ax.10 and Ax.11. Excluded middle for paraconsistent negation holds, and explosion is restricted to consistent formulas. Consistency is a primitive notion; it is not definable in terms of non-contradiction, that is, (A  A) and ∘A are not equivalent. It is clear that in a system whose consequence relation ⊢ enjoys the deduction theorem in both directions, the law of explosion (1) A, A ⊢ B and the axiom schema (5) ⊢ A → (¬A → B) are equivalent. To make things simpler, we call both the law of explosion. The system is not explosive with respect to non-consistent formulas. For this reason, we say that it is gently explosive. If we simultaneously have contradiction and consistency, the system explodes, becoming trivial. The point, however, is precisely this: there cannot be consistency and contradiction, simultaneously and with respect to the same formula. If explosion in classical logic means that there can be no contradiction at all, the restricted principle of explosion may be understood as a more refined way of stating the same basic idea: there can be no contradiction with respect to consistent propositions. A remarkable feature of mbC is that it can be seen as an extension of classical logic. We can define a bottom particle as follows: (6)  ≝ ∘A  A  A. Now, as an instance of Ax.9, we get () A  (A  ). We also have that () ⊢   B, since, by Ax.bc1, (9) ∘A  A  A ⊢ B. Axioms 1-8 plus () and () give us classical logic.4 4 A complete axiomatization for classical sentential logic, in a language in which ~A is defined as A  , is given by axioms 1-8 plus (*) ~~A  A (see Robbin 1997, chapter 1). We leave it as an exercise to the reader to prove (*) in the system given by axioms 1-8 plus (7) and (8). 10 A point that has certainly already occurred to the reader regards the interpretation of the system above. Three questions that pose themselves are: (i) How can a semantics be given for the formal system above? (ii) What is the intuitive meaning of the consistency operator? (iii) How can an intuitive interpretation for contradictory formulas be provided? Paraconsistent logics were initially introduced in proof-theoretical terms, a procedure that fits the epistemological character that we claim here is appropriate to them. In Carnielli et al. (2007, pp. 38ff), we find a bivalued non-truth-functional semantics that is complete and correct for mbC. An mbC-valuation is a function that attributes values 0 and 1 to formulas of L, satisfying the following clauses: (i) v(A  B) = 1 if and only if v(A) = 1 and v(B) = 1 (ii) v(A  B) = 1 if and only if v(A) = 1 or v(B) = 1 (iii) v(A → B) = 1 if and only if v(A) = 0 or v(B) = 1 (iv) v(A) = 0 implies v(A) = 1 (v) v(∘A) = 1 implies v(A) = 0 or v(A) = 0 We say that a valuation v is a model of  if and only if every proposition of  receives the value 1 in v. The notion of logical consequence is defined as usual:  ⊨mbC A if and only if for every valuation v, if v is a model of , v(A) = 1. Now, we suggest that the values 0 and 1 not be understood as, respectively, false and true simpliciter, but rather as expressing the existence of evidence: v(A) = 1 means that there is evidence that A is the case, and v(A) = 0 means that there is no evidence that A is the case. The following passage from da Costa (1982 pp. 9-10) helps to elucidate what we mean by evidence. Let us suppose that we want to define an operational concept of negation, at least for the negation of some atomic sentences. ¬A, where A is atomic, is to be true if, and only if, the clauses of an appropriate criterion c are fulfilled, clauses that must be empirically testable; i.e., we have an empirical criterion for the truth of the negation of A. Naturally, the same must be valid for the atomic proposition A, for the sake of coherence. Hence, there exists a criterion d for the truth of A. But clearly it may happen that the criteria c and d be such that they entail, under certain critical circumstances, the truth of both A and ¬A. 11 Although da Costa in the passage above is talking about a criterion of truth, it seems to us that it is much more reasonable, in a situation such as the one there described, not to draw the conclusion that A and ¬A are both true. It is better to be more careful and to take the contradictory data only as a sort of a provisional state. Accordingly, the criteria c and d constitute reasons to believe that respectively ¬A and A are true, but they do not establish conclusively that both are true In mbC, excluded middle holds with respect to the paraconsistent negation (axiom 10). Hence, a situation where there is no evidence at all for both A and ¬A is excluded. Indeed, the semantic clause (iv) forbids that A and ¬A simultaneously receive the value 0. The validity of excluded middle may be justified when we by default attribute evidence for ¬A when there is no evidence at all. This happens, for instance, in a criminal investigation in which one starts by considering everyone (in some group of people) not guilty until there is proof to the contrary. Whether or not excluded middle must be valid depends on the reasoning scenario we want to represent. Of course we may also devise a logic of formal inconsistency in which excluded middle is recovered once some information has been added, in a way similar to the axiom bc1.5 Since excluded middle holds, we have the following three possible scenarios, together with the respective values attributed to A and A: A1. There is evidence that A is the case; There is evidence that A is not the case. v(A) = 1 v(A) = 1 A2. There is evidence that A is the case; There is no evidence that A is not the case. v(A) = 1 v(A) = 0 A3. There is no evidence that A is the case; There is evidence that A is not the case. v(A) = 0 v(A) = 1 5 In fact, mbC may be adapted in order to be able to represent such a situation. The basic idea is to recover excluded middle in the following way: ∘A → (A  ¬A). A sketch of such a formal system may be found in Carnielli et al. 2014b. 12 Accordingly, we suggest the following meaning for negation: v(A) = 1 means that there is some evidence that A is not the case; v(A) = 0 means that there is no evidence that A is not the case. Now, if the evidence is conclusive, we have only two possible (classical) scenarios: B1. There is conclusive evidence that A is the case. B2. There is conclusive evidence that A is not the case. Note that a situation such that there is conclusive evidence for A and at the same time nonconclusive evidence for ¬A is not possible. Once the truth of A is conclusively established, any evidence for ¬A is cancelled. In this case, we are talking about truth and not just evidence. We may have conflicting evidence, but not conflicting truth values. Accordingly, v(∘A) = 1 means that the truth value of A has been conclusively established. In scenarios B1 and B2 we have v(∘A) = 1. In A1, we must have v(∘A) = 0, but in A2 and A3 we have v(∘A) = 0. In these scenarios, when v(∘A) turns out to be 1, we get scenarios B1 or B2. A remarkable feature of the above intuitive interpretation is that the simultaneous truth of a contradictory pair of propositions is not allowed, on pain of triviality. Under this interpretation, the system is not neutral with respect to true contradictions. It is important here to call attention to the fact that what constitutes evidence for a given proposition A, and whether or not such evidence is conclusive and A may be established as true, are problems that depend on the specific area of knowledge being dealt with. We may say, roughly speaking, that ∘A says something about the justification of A, or of ¬A, but what exactly it means is not a problem of logic. It is the physicist, the chemist, the mathematician, etc., who is able, with respect to concrete situations, to say what constitutes a conclusive establishment of the truth of a proposition A. Note that paraconsistent negation is weaker than classical negation; it does not have all the properties that classical negation has. Regarding the consistency operator, we want to call attention to the fact that in mbC it is not logically equivalent to non-contradiction, that is: ∘A ⊨mbC ¬(A  ¬A), while ¬(A  ¬A) ⊭mbC ∘A. 13 This is in accord with a central point of the notion of consistency, namely, that it is polysemic and need not be defined from negation. The notion of consistency in natural language and informal reasoning has a number of senses, not always directly related to negation (cf. Carnielli 2011, p. 84). A proposition is often said to be consistent when it is coherent or compatible with previous data, or when it refers to an unchanging or constant situation. Since consistency is a primitive notion, its meaning is elucidated from outside the formal system. Our suggestion is nothing but one way of interpreting it. It is worth noting that the above interpretation fits in well with the old philosophical idea that truth implies consistency, but consistency does not imply truth.6 Indeed, ∘A ⊭mbC A. The consistency of A does not imply the truth of A; but if the truth-value of A has been conclusively established as true, then A is consistent. Clauses (i)-(iii) are exactly as in classical logic, and therefore all classical tautologies with ,  and → are valid in an mbC-valuation. An important feature of the valuation above is that both the negation and the consistency connectives are not truthfunctional, that is, the value attributed to A and ∘A does not depend only on the value attributed to A. Clause (iv), negation, expresses only a necessary condition. If v(A) = 0, we must also have v(¬A) = 1. This was expected, as excluded middle is valid and at least one formula among A and A must receive the value 1. On the other hand, since we do not have a sufficient condition for v(A) = 0, it is possible that v(A) = 1 and v(A) = 1, since v(A) = 1 does not make v(A) = 0. Since truth-functionality is a special case of compositionality, it is also remarkable that this semantics is not compositional in the sense that the semantic value of the whole expression is functionally determined by the semantic values of its parts and the way they are combined. Non-contradiction, as expected, is not valid. Intuitively, it can be the case that there is some non-conclusive evidence both for A and A, and this makes it possible to have v((A  A))=0. In addition, it is easy to see that explosion is also not valid: if v(A) = 6 This is the basic argument against truth as coherence. See, for example, Russell (1913), ch. XII. 14 v(A) = 1 and v(B) = 0, v(A→(A→B)) = 0. We may have evidence for A and A, but have no evidence for B. Clause (v) also expresses only a necessary condition for attributing the value 1 to ∘A: we must have exactly one among A and A with value 0 (by clause (iv) they cannot be both 0). If we have both, v(A) = v(A) = 1, we do not have v(∘A) = 1. It is also worth noting that according to clause (v), ∘A ⊨mbC (A  A). Intuitively, if A is consistent, its truth-value has been conclusively established. Hence, it cannot be that we still have evidence for both A and A. On the other hand, the converse does not hold: (A  A) ⊭mbC ∘A. We may well have non-conclusive evidence for A and no evidence at all for A. In this case v((AA))=1, but since the evidence for A is non-conclusive, v(∘A) = 0. Nonconsistency is independent of contradiction. There are some inferences that are not allowed once explosion is not valid in general. One is disjunctive syllogism. Actually, disjunctive syllogism and explosion are equivalent in the sense that, added to positive sentential logic (Ax.1-9 plus modus ponens), each one implies the other. But it is easy to see that, according to the interpretation proposed here, disjunctive syllogism is not valid. It can be the case that we have some evidence both for A and A, so we may have v(A  B) = v(A) = 1, but v(B) = 0. Modus ponens holds, but modus tollens (as well as all versions of contraposition) does not hold. (10) A → B, B ⊭mbC A However, for B consistent, (11) ∘B, A → B, B ⊨mbC A. Is there an intuitive justification for the fact that modus tollens is not valid in mbC? The answer is affirmative. In classical logic, modus tollens is valid because the truth of B implies the falsity of B. Hence, as well as truth being preserved by modus ponens, falsity is also preserved by modus tollens: given the truth of A → B, if B is false, A is false too. This is not the case, however, under the interpretation we are proposing here. v(B) = 1 means that we have some evidence that B is not the case. This does not imply that we do not have simultaneous evidence for B, that is, v(B) = 1 does not imply v(B) = 0. Suppose that we 15 have evidence both for A and B. In this case, v(A → B) = 1 (notice that there is not required any kind of connection between the meanings of A and B in order to have v(A → B) = 1). Now, in order to see that modus tollens is not valid, make v(B) = v(B) = 1, and v(A) = 1, v(A) = 0. On the other hand, if v(∘B)=1, we cannot have v(B) = v(B) = 1. Hence, (11) is valid. In mbC, as with the majority of logics of formal inconsistency, once the consistency of certain formulas is established, we get classical logic.7 The schemas below are valid: ∘B ⊨mbC (A → B) → ((A → ¬B) → ¬A) ∘¬A ⊨mbC ¬¬A → A ∘A ⊨mbC A → ¬¬A ∘A, ∘B ⊨mbC (B → A)  (A → B) ∘A, ∘B ⊨mbC (B → A)  (A → B) Note that mbC is suitable for expressing the central ideas of the intuitive interpretation of paraconsistent negation and the consistency operator we have presented here, namely: (i) a contradiction A  ¬A means that there is conflicting evidence about A, and (ii) ∘A means that the truth-value of A has been conclusively established. Both (i) and (ii) depend on the fact that ∘A and ¬(A  ¬A) are not logically equivalent. We have seen that classical logic may be recovered within mbC. Thus, mbC is a formal system able to deal simultaneously with preservation of evidence and preservation of truth. Hence, it seems to us that there is no question of whether or not mbC is an account of logical consequence, unless logic is strictly considered a theory of preservation of truth, nothing more than that. But we endorse a concept of logic according to which it is not restricted to the idea of truth preservation. Logical consequence is indeed the central notion of logic, but the task of logic is to tell us which conclusions can be drawn from a given set of premises, under certain conditions, in concrete situations of reasoning. And sometimes it may be the case that it is not only truth that is at stake. Nevertheless, although this 7 A derivability adjustment theorem, which recovers classical consequence once some information is added, holds for mbC. See details in Carnielli and Coniglio (2014) 16 discussion about the concept of logic is a very relevant subject, and closely related to the development of non-classical logics, it cannot be further developed here The fact is that there is still a lot of work to be done on logics of formal inconsistency. As has been shown in Carnielli et al. (2007) and in Carnielli & Marcos (2002), several systems may be formulated, with very subtle differences among them. Aside from the technical problems of finding complete and correct semantics, and of proving metatheorems, there are still a lot of open questions related to the intuitive interpretation of these systems and to the philosophical concepts expressed by them. In addition, it is very likely that the intuitive interpretation we have presented here can be improved. However, the point we want to emphasize here is that mbC, an economical and elegant formal system, has the resources to express the basic ideas (i) and (ii) mentioned above. 3. On the nature of logic In this section we shall present a philosophical interpretation for the logics of formal inconsistency. We start by calling attention to the fact that there is a perennial philosophical question about the nature of logic, namely, whether the main character of logic is epistemological, ontological, or linguistic. We call attention to the epistemological character of intuitionistic logic, which is in clear opposition to the realist (and, we claim, ontological) view of logic found in Frege's works. Our main argument depends on the duality between the rejection of explosion by mbC and the rejection of excluded middle by intuitionistic logic, both of which are due to epistemological reasons. In building formal systems we deal with several logical principles, and it may justly be asked what these are principles about. This is a central issue in philosophy of logic. Here we follow Popper (1963, pp. 206ff), who presents the problem in a very clear way. The question is whether the rules of logic are: (I.a) laws of thought in the sense that they describe how we actually think; (I.b) laws of thought in the sense that they are normative laws, i.e., laws that tell us how we should think; (II) the most general laws of nature, i.e., laws that apply to any kind of object; 17 (III) laws of certain descriptive languages. We thus have three basic options, which are not mutually exclusive: the laws of logic have (I) epistemological, (II) ontological, or (III) linguistic character. With respect to (I), they may be (I.a) or descriptive (I.b) normative. Let us illustrate the issue with some examples. Aristotle, defending the principle of non-contradiction, makes it clear that it is a principle about reality, "the most certain principle of all things" (Metaphysics 1005b11). Worth mentioning also is the well-known passage, "the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject in the same respect" (Metaphysics 1005b1921), which is a claim about objects and their properties. On the other hand, a very illustrative example of the epistemological side of logic can be found in the so-called logic of Port-Royal, where we read: Logic is the art of conducting reasoning well in knowing things, as much to instruct ourselves about them as to instruct others. This art consists in reflections that have been made on the four principal operations of mind: conceiving, judging, reasoning, and ordering. (...) [T]his art does not consist in finding the means to perform these operations, since nature alone furnishes them in giving us reason, but in reflecting on what nature makes us do, which serves three purposes. The first is to assure us that we are using reason well ... The second is to reveal and explain more easily the errors or defects that can occur in mental operations. The third purpose is to make us better acquainted with the nature of the mind by reflecting on its actions. (Arnauld, A. & Nicole, 1996, p. 23) Logic is conceived as having a normative character. So far so good. But logic is also conceived as a tool for analyzing mental processes of reasoning. This analysis, when further extended by different approaches to logical consequence, as is now done by some non-classical logics, shows that there can be different standards of correct reasoning in different situations. This aspect of logic, however, has been put in a secondary place by Frege's attack on psychologism. Frege wanted to eliminate everything subjective from logic. For Frege, laws of logic cannot be obtained from concrete reasoning practices. 18 Basically, his argument is the following. From the assumption that truth is not relative, it follows that the basic criterion for an inference to be correct, namely, the preservation of truth, should be the same for everyone. When different people make different inferences, we must have a criterion for deciding which one is correct. Combined with Frege's wellknown Platonism, the result is a conception of logic that emphasizes the ontological (and realist) aspect of classical logic. Our conception of the laws of logic is necessarily decisive for our treatment of the science of logic, and that conception in turn is connected with our understanding of the word 'true'. It will be granted by all at the outset that the laws of logic ought to be guiding principles for thought in the attainment of truth, yet this is only too easily forgotten, and here what is fatal is the double meaning of the word 'law'. In one sense a law asserts what is; in the other it prescribes what ought to be. Only in the latter sense can the laws of logic be called 'laws of thought'(...) If being true is thus independent of being acknowledged by somebody or other, then the laws of truth are not psychological laws: they are boundary stones set in an eternal foundation, which our thought can overflow, but never displace. (Frege 1893, (1964) p. 13). (...) [O]ne can very well speak of laws of thought too. But there is an imminent danger here of mixing different things up. Perhaps the expression "law of thought" is interpreted by analogy with "law of nature" and the generalization of thinking as a mental occurrence is meant by it. A law of thought in this sense would be a psychological law. And so one might come to believe that logic deals with the mental process of thinking and the psychological laws in accordance with which it takes place. This would be a misunderstanding of the task of logic, for truth has not been given the place which is its due here. (Frege 1918, (1997) p. 325). For Frege, logic is normative, but in a secondary sense. Along with truths of arithmetic, the logical relations between propositions are already given, eternal. This is not surprising at all. Since he wanted to prove that arithmetic could be obtained from purely logical principles, truths of arithmetic would inherit, so to speak, the realistic character of the 19 logical principles from which they were obtained. Logic thus has an ontological character; it is part of reality, as are mathematical objects. It is very interesting to contrast Frege's realism with Brouwer's intuitionism, whose basic ideas can be found for the first time in his doctoral thesis, written at the very beginning of twentieth century. The approaches are quite opposed. Mathematics can deal with no other matter than that which it has itself constructed. In the preceding pages it has been shown for the fundamental parts of mathematics how they can be built up from units of perception (Brouwer 1907, (1975) p. 51) The words of your mathematical demonstration merely accompany a mathematical construction that is effected without words ... While thus mathematics is independent of logic, logic does depend upon mathematics: in the first place intuitive logical reasoning is that special kind of mathematical reasoning which remains if, considering mathematical structures, one restricts oneself to relations of whole and part (Brouwer 1907, (1975) p. 73-74). It is remarkable that Brouwer's doctoral thesis (1907) was written between the two above-quoted works by Frege (1893 and 1919). Brouwer, like Frege himself, is primarily interested in mathematics. For Brouwer, however, the truths of mathematics are not discovered but rather constructed. Mathematics is not a part of logic, as Frege wanted to prove. Quite the contrary, logic is abstracted from mathematics. It is, so to speak, a description of human reasoning in constructing correct mathematical proofs. Mathematics is a product of the human mind, mental constructions that do not depend on language or logic. The raw material for these constructions is the intuition of time (this is the meaning of the phrase 'built up from units of perception'). This epistemological motivation is reflected in intuitionistic logic, which was formalized by Heyting (1956). Excluded middle is rejected precisely because mathematical objects are considered mental constructions. Accordingly, to assert an instance of excluded middle related to an unsolved mathematical problem (for instance, Goldbach's conjecture), would be a commitment to a Platonic realm of abstract objects, an idea rejected by Brouwer and his followers. 20 With respect to the linguistic aspects of logic, we shall make just a few comments. According to a widespread opinion, a linguistic conception of logic prevailed during the last century. From this perspective, logic has to do above all with the structure and functioning of certain languages. Indeed, sometimes logic is defined as a mathematical study of formal languages. There is no consensus for this view, however, and it is likely that it is not prevalent today.8 Even though we cannot completely separate the linguistic from the epistemological aspects – i.e., separate language from thought –, we endorse the view that logic is primarily a theory about reality and thought, and that the linguistic aspect is secondary.9 At first sight, it might seem that Frege's conception according to which there is only one logic, that is, only one account of logical consequence, is correct. Indeed, for Frege, Russell, and Quine, the logic is classical logic. From a realist point of view, this fits well with the perspective of the empirical sciences: excluded middle and bivalence have a strong appeal. Ultimately, reality will decide between A and not A, which is the same as deciding between the truth and falsity of A. The identification of an intuitionistic notion of provability with truth was not successful. As is shown by Raatikainen (2004), in the works of Brouwer and Heyting we find some attempts to formulate an explanation of the notion of truth in terms of provability, but all of them produce counterintuitive results. On the other hand, the basic intuitionistic argument that rejects a supersensible realm of abstract objects is philosophically motivated – and it is notable that this argument usually seems rather convincing to students of philosophy. As Velleman & Alexander (2002, pp. 91ff) put it, realism seems to be compelling when we consider a proposition like every star has at least one planet orbiting it. However, when we pass from this example to Goldbach's conjecture, the situation changes quite a bit. In the former case, it is very reasonable to say that reality is one way or the other; but if we say with regard to the latter 8 A rejection of the linguistic conception of logic, and an argument that logic is above all a theory with ontological and epistemological aspects, can be found in the Introduction to Chateaubriand (2001). 9 Notice that this is in line with Chateaubriand's opinion, as manifested in Chateaubriand (2001, p. 16): "the fundamental character of logic is metaphysical, not linguistic. On the one hand I see it as an ontological theory that is part of a theory of the most general and universal features of reality; of being qua being, as Aristotle said. On the other hand I see it as an epistemological theory that is part of a general theory of knowledge." 21 case that 'the world of mathematical numbers' is one way or the other, there is a question to be faced: where is this world? What is the moral to be taken from this? That classical and intuitionistic logic are not talking about the same thing. The former is connected to reality through a realist notion of truth; the latter is not about truth, but rather about reasoning. In our view, assertability based on the intuitionistic notion of constructive proof is what is expressed by intuitionistic logic. Now, one may ask what all of this has to do with logics of formal inconsistency and paraconsistent logics in general. The question concerning the nature of logic is a perennial problem of philosophy. We believe that it has no solution in the sense of some conclusive argument in defense of one or the other view. This is so, first, because logic is simultaneously about thought, and reality, and, second, because different accounts of logical consequence may be more appropriate for expressing one view than another. We also claim that this is precisely the case with, on the one hand, classical logic and its ontological motivations and, on the other hand, with the epistemological approach of intuitionism and logics of formal inconsistency. The reader may have already noticed a duality between intuitionistic and paraconsistent logics. In the latter, we may have two sentences A and ¬A with value 1; noncontradiction does not hold. In the former, we may have two sentences A and ¬A (now '¬' is intuitionistic negation) with a value 0; excluded middle, the dual of non-contradiction, does not hold. If we stop to think about them for a moment, and put aside any realist bias, we see that we are facing two analogous situations. Let us take a look at this point. At first sight, it really seems that an inference principle like modus tollens is valid whether we want it to be or not, that its validity is not a matter of any kind of choice or context whatever. This is indeed correct if we are talking about truth in the realist sense, a framework in which classical logic works well. However, we have just seen the reason why modus tollens is not valid if we are reasoning in a context with a non-explosive negation. Something analogous happens in intuitionistic logic. Once we have endorsed a constructive notion of proof, we cannot carry out a proof by cases using excluded middle because the result might not be a constructive proof. When we say that logics of formal inconsistency accept some contradictions without exploding the system, this does not mean that these 22 contradictions are true. We may compare this with Kripke models for intuitionistic logic, where it can happen that a pair of sentences A and not A (intuitionistic negation) receive the value 0 in some stage (i.e., possible world). Such a stage would be a refutation of excluded middle. This does not mean that A and not A are false, however, but rather that neither has been proved yet. Analogously, as suggested above, when two sentences A and not A receive 1 in an mbC-valuation it means that we have evidence for both, not that both are simultaneously true. The position defended here with respect to paraconsistency thus differs fundamentally from dialetheism. According to Graham Priest and his collaborators, A dialetheia is a sentence, A, such that both it and its negation, ¬A, are true (...) Dialetheism is the view that there are dialetheias. (...) dialetheism amounts to the claim that there are true contradictions." (Priest & Berto 2013, introduction) One of the motivations for dialetheism is indeed the paradoxes. But Priest tries to extend it these motivations empirical phenomena: [T]he paradoxes of self-reference are not the only examples of dialetheias that have been mooted. Other cases involve contradictions affecting concrete objects and the empirical world (Priest & Berto 2013, sec. 3.3) [T]here are, if not conclusive, then at least plausible reasons for supposing that these [discrete temporal changes] may produce dialetheias. (Priest 2006, p. 159) As well as the problem of the nature of logic mentioned above, the question of whether or not there are real contradictions, facts, and/or events in contradiction with each other, is a perennial problem in philosophy. It seems to us that this problem has no perspective of a conclusive solution, given the state of science at the present time. We agree, however, that the thesis that there are real contradictions, a view endorsed by Hegel and, according to some interpreters, Heraclitus, has an important place in the history of philosophy. On the other hand, it is not a contentious issue that contradictions do appear in the process of acquiring knowledge and dealing with data. In taking contradictions epistemologically, we 23 have tried to show here that an intuitive justification for paraconsistency not committed to dialetheism is possible with respect to logics of formal inconsistency. 4. Final Remarks We hope we have been successful here in showing that to have available a logical formalism capable of dealing with contradictions may have good philosophical motivations, and is not the same as having some kind of philosophical sympathy for contradictions. We still believe that trying to avoid contradictions is an indispensable criterion of rationality. In order to do this, however, we need a logic that does not collapse in the face of a pair of propositions A and not A. A contradiction may be taken as a provisional state, a kind of excess of information or excessively optimistic attitude that should, at least in principle, be eliminated by means of further investigation. Finally, a few words about a semantics for logics of formal inconsistency. The task of finding intuitively acceptable semantics for non-classical logics is indeed a major philosophical challenge. The bivalued semantics presented here is appropriate for expressing the basic features of the intuitive meanings of the consistency operator and paraconsistent negation when we are dealing with the notions of truth and evidence. However, we believe that both the formal system and the semantics could be improved. There two possible routes: either (i) we keep the idea of a two-valued semantics but modify both the deductive system and the semantics clauses, or (ii) we try to find another kind of semantics, suitable to the idea of dealing simultaneously with truth and evidence. With respect to the latter, it is not unlikely that we could find a better way of expressing the relationship between truth and evidence by means of possible-translations semantics (Carnielli 2000). However, the task of investigating such options will be left for another time. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank an anonymous referee for valuable comments and suggestions. The first author acknowledges the support of FAPESP (São Paulo Research 24 Council) and CNPq, Brazil (The National Council for Scientific and Technological Development). The second author acknowledges support from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (edital 12/2011) and Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do estado de Minas Gerais (research project 21308). References ARNAULD, A.; NICOLE, P. Logic or the Art of Thinking. Cambridge University Press, 1996. ARISTOTLE. Metaphysics. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Oxford University Press, 1996. BROUWER, L.E.J. "On the Foundations of Mathematics" 1907. Collected Works vol. I. (ed. A. Heyting), North-Holland Publishing Company, 1975. CARNIELLI, W. "The Single-minded Pursuit of Consistency and its Weakness" in Studia Logica, v. 97, p. 81-100, 2011. CARNIELLI, W.; CONIGLIO, M.; MARCOS, J. "Logics of Formal Inconsistency". Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. 14, pp.15-107, (eds.: D. Gabbay; F. Guenthner). Springer, 2007. CARNIELLI, W.; MARCOS, J. "A Taxonomy of C-systems". Paraconsistency: the logical way to inconsistency, Proceedings of the Second World Congress on Paraconsistency. New York: Marcel Dekker, 2002. CARNIELLI, W. A. & CONIGLIO, M. E. Paraconsistent Logic: Consistency, contradiction and negation. Springer, 2014. CARNIELLI, W.; CONIGLIO, M.; RODRIGUES, A. Dealing with paraconsistency and paracompleteness: on a minimal logic of formal inconsistency and undeterminedness. Handbook of the 17th Brazilian Logic Conference. http://www.uff.br/ebl/EBL_2014_book_of_abstracts.pdf . 2014b. CHATEAUBRIAND, O. Logical forms vol. 1. Campinas: UNICAMP-CLE, 2001. DA COSTA, N. "The philosophical import of paraconsistent logic". Journal of NonClassical Logics, number 1, pp. 1-19, 1982. 25 FREGE, G. The Basic Laws of Arithmetic, 1893. Transl. M. Furth. University of California Press, 1964. __________. "The Thought", 1918. The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997. HEYTING, A. Intuitionism: an Introduction. London: North-Holland Publishing Company, 1956. HUNTER, G. Metalogic. University of California Press, 1973. POPPER, K. Conjectures and Refutations, New York: Harper, 1963. PRIEST, G. In Contradiction. Oxford University Press, 2006. PRIEST, G.; BERTO, F. "Dialetheism" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/entries/dialetheism/, 2013. RAATIKAINEN, P. "Conceptions of Truth in Intuitionism". History and Philosophy of Logic, 25: 131–145, 2004. ROBBIN, J.W. Mathematical Logic: A First Course. New York: Dover, 1997. RUSSELL, B. The Problems of Philosophy, 1913. Oxford University Press, 1952. VELLEMAN, D.J.; ALEXANDER GEORGE, A. Philosophies of Mathematics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. * * *

Is the Past a Matter of Chance?* Antony Eagle August 21, 2012 One of the most elementary things we know about the connection between chance and time is that 'chances should only concern future events' Schaffer (2007: 124). Bigelow, Pargetter and Collins clarify what this feature of chance amounts to: Chance is temporally asymmetric. The future is chancy, but the past and present are not. If A is a proposition [wholly] about some time t, then the chance of A at some later time t′ will take one of the extreme values one or zero, depending on whether or not A is true. (Bigelow et al., 1993: 454) Moreover, this has some claim to be a platitude about chance. It features, for example, in Lewis' discussion of the Principal Principle, elicited in part from his elementary questionnaire about beliefs concerning chance. He gives the example of the way that, as one negotiates a labyrinth, taking this turn and that, the chances of reaching the centre by noon vary. It is one of the 'firm and definite opinions' we have about chance that once one reaches the centre before noon, 'then and forevermore your chance of reaching it by noon is 100%' (Lewis, 1980: 91). For clarity, here is the thesis I take Schaffer, Bigelow et al. and Lewis to be discussing (I use 'outcome' to avoid irrelevant issues about whether propositions or possible events are the basic chance bearers): (I) At every time, the only outcomes which are a matter of chance (that is, have non-trivial chances, strictly between zero and one), are future outcomes at that time. At any time when a given outcome is past, it is no longer a matter of chance (if it ever was), and its chance is trivial. If it is indeed platitudinous, the claim that past outcomes are not a matter of chance may seem to stand in need of no further defence. However, recently *Thanks to an audience at UMass Amherst, and to Alastair Wilson, Harjit Bhogal, and especially Chris Meacham for comments on a written draft. 1 arguments have been given that aim to undermine this piece of common knowledge about chance (Hoefer, 2007; 2011; Meacham, 2005). Such arguments don't show that (I) isn't a platitude (even analytic truths can be doubted by those who understand them perfectly well (Williamson, 2008: ch. 4)), but they do deserve a response, and philosophical argument is called for when dogmatic assertion is not dialectically cooperative. This paper aims to do two things. First, I'll explore the prospects of giving a positive argument for (I). I investigate one popular argument in §1, and go on to give two better accounts: drawing on some recent work of Joyce (2007) in §2 I develop a preliminary argument for the general triviality of past chances. I give a deeper account in §3, explaining the results of §2 and giving further grounds for (I), drawing on some of my own work (Eagle, 2011). Then, in §§4–5, I'll turn to evaluate some arguments against (I). I conclude that our past is not a matter of chance, nor is the past a matter of chance in possibilities broadly like ours (in those that share the same physical laws, and the same sorts of causal dependencies). But I do concede something to the recent opponents of (I), because there are possible circumstances in which the past (at those circumstances) is chancy. So it is not analytic of the concept of chance, nor metaphysically necessary, that the past is no longer chancy. But it remains true of, and something we know about, our actual chances. 1 Admissible Information and the Triviality of Past Chances After noting that we ordinarily think of chance as time-dependent, Lewis offers an argument for the temporal asymmetry of chance in our sense. The argument rests on an application of the Principal Principle, Lewis' articulation of the connection between chance and credence. The Principle states that one's rational initial conditional credence in an outcome - conditional on the chance of that outcome in conjunction with any 'admissible' information - will equal the chance. Information is admissible, in turn, just in case it is not information that would trump the chances in its evidential bearing on the outcome - Lewis glosses admissible information as 'the sort of information whose impact on credence about outcomes comes entirely by way of credence about the chances of those outcomes' (Lewis, 1980: 92). The Principal Principle is intended to capture the way that chance is an expert function, guiding rational credence, for those epistemic agents who lack inadmissible evidence. If chance is an expert for those who have only admissible information as evidence, then whether it is an expert for us, to which we should rationally defer our credence, turns on how much inadmissible evidence we have. We can use the Principal Principle to determine this, by noting that if ordinary 2 people in ordinary situations do in fact rationally defer to the chances, then the kind of evidence they have must be the admissible sort. The questionnaire with which Lewis begins his paper establishes that 'a great deal is admissible' (Lewis, 1980: 92), because the rational opinion to have, in cases in which agents have the kind of knowledge we tend to have, conforms exactly to the predictions of the Principal Principle. Noting that the kind of information we tend to have includes historical information, Lewis proposes as one sufficient condition on admissibility at t that the information in question be 'entirely about matters of particular fact at times no later than t' (Lewis, 1980: 92). With the Principal Principle and this sufficient condition on admissibility in our repertoire, here is Lewis' argument: Suppose the proposition A is about matters of particular fact at some moment or interval tA, and suppose we are concerned with chance at time t. If t is later than tA, then A is admissible at t. The Principal Principle applies with A [as admissible information]. If X is the proposition that the chance at t of A equals x, and if A and X are compatible, then 􏷠 = C(A|X ∧ A) = x. Put contrapositively, this means that if the chance at t of A, according to X, is anything but one, then A and X are incompatible. A implies that the chance at t of A, unless undefined, equals one. What's past is no longer chancy. The past, unlike the future, has no chance of being any other way than the way it actually is. (Lewis, 1980: 93) The conclusion follows validly. But one might query the reliance on the supposed asymmetry of admissibility in the derivation of the temporal asymmetry of chance. If we focus on Lewis' original gloss on admissible information - information about outcomes that does not trump the information given by the chances - , rather than on the claim that being historical information is a sufficient condition for admissibility, then Lewis' argument can appear puzzling. Suppose we consider a fair coin flip yesterday; let A be the proposition that the coin landed heads, and let the actual outcome yesterday have been tails. Then here is an expression of some puzzlement about Lewis' argument: after the flip, [Lewis' sufficient condition for admissibility] would make¬A itself admissible; and of course Cr(A|¬AE) had better be zero.... But clearly this violates the correct definition of admissibility. ¬A carries maximal information as to A's truth, and not by way of any information about A's objective chance; so it is inadmissible. (Hoefer, 2007: 554) Hoefer makes this observation in the course of arguing that chance isn't timedependent at all. His alternative explanation of the results of Lewis' questionnaire is not that historical information is admissible while information about the future is not. It is that we have asymmetrical evidence - there is a considerable amount of information about the past in our evidence, and relatively 3 little information about the future in our evidence. And, says Hoefer, our evidence about the past contains lots of information about outcomes that trumps the time-independent chances, and is therefore inadmissible. The Principal Principle doesn't apply, conditional on a body of information including inadmissible information, so Lewis' argument misfires. But the eventual impact on credence is the same, since as long as credences are probabilities, where E ⊨ A, Cr(A|E) = 1. In response to this, of course, Lewis will simply deny that evidence about the past gives us information about past outcomes that is 'not by way of any information about objective chance'. That evidence just is information that the objective chances are now one or zero, and thus trivial. If we remain convinced of our prior chance assignments, and if Hoefer is right that those chance assignments are not time-dependent, then that should render our credences resilient to new admissible historical information. Since our credences are not resilient in the face of admissible historical information, the chances themselves must now be different than they were. (This is not to say that there is some mysterious change in the chance functions themselves. Rather, the expression 'the chance' is a description that, uttered at different times, denotes different probability functions, just as 'the prime minister' denotes different people.) For Lewis, the temporally variable denotation of 'the [present] chances' is mirrored by the temporally variable denotation of 'the admissible information' - for that picks out different bodies of information at different times. By contrast, for Hoefer, the chances are time-independent, and presumably the admissible information is time-independent too. The upshot of all this, I think, is that there is little prospect of giving a suasive argument for the triviality of past chances from facts about which information is or is not admissible at a given time. The admissibility of information is too closely connected to the issue of which outcomes have trivial chances to be a helpful constraint on what value the chances at a given time have. Those who think the past isn't chancy, like Lewis, will and should take historical information to be admissible; those who think it is, like Hoefer, will and should take it to be inadmissible. And we simply do not have enough independent grip on the notion of admissibility to adjudicate this dispute. The dispute over admissibility simply recapitulates the dispute over chance, but without the resource of other principles that partially characterise admissibility - principles we do have in the case of chance. We will make more progress by addressing the chances of past outcomes directly rather than via admissibility of information about them. ¦ 4 Another approach to this issue deserves some comment here. Rather than making use of the Principal Principle as an indirect connection between chance and credence, Handfield (2012) uses the credential role of chance to characterise directly what chance is in epistemic terms: The chance that P (at a time t, in a world w) is the degree of belief in P that is recommended by the best identifiable advice function, given only information that is available at t. (Handfield, 2012: 21) To avoid triviality, this characterisation must be read as equating chance with the credence recommended by the best advice function that we are able to identify while making use of the information available to us.1 Handfield (2012: 23–6) doesn't specify exactly which information is available, but it seems to be at least somewhat dependent on what kinds of information are appropriate in the context. Handfield and Wilson (forthcoming) are more explicit about the role of context in determining available information: A subject matter S is available in context C iff S is the most inclusive subject matter such that, for every (true) proposition E that is wholly about S, 'E could be known' is true in C. (Handfield and Wilson, forthcoming: §9) Since, as noted above, there is considerable temporal asymmetry in the content of our evidence - an asymmetry which Handfield later explains on the basis of thermodynamic asymmetries (Handfield, 2012: §48; see also Albert, 2000: 113–25) - , this proposal will mean that all the functions we can identify as worthy advisors on the basis of our evidence are those that are recognisably expert with respect to the past. Since the best identifiable function will be amongst those we can identify as worthy advisors, the chance function will be recognisably expert with respect to the past - it will know all we know, and thus assign chance 1 to all past outcomes that we know. So far so good for our claim (I). However, consider a case in which we are ignorant of whether p is true, where p concerns some aspect of the past. In that case, some of the recognisably best advice functions recommend high credence in p, and some of them recommend low credence in p - to pick one of them as an advisor over any of the others would be to pretend to some evidence in favour of or against p that we simply do not possess. But then it will not be true that the best identifiable advice function assigns trivial chance to p, despite it being past. Indeed, in this case it looks like the definite description misfires, so there is no such thing as the best identifiable advice function. So the chance 1The alternative reading - which equates chance with the credence recommended by the best possible advice function when it is fed the information we have - is trivial: arguably the truth function Tr, which assigns 1 to all and only truths in its domain, is the best function; and if Tr(p) = 􏷠, then Tr(p|e) = 􏷠 for any available information e. 5 may be undefined; and even if defined, it's not clear that it will turn out to be trivial. Handfield reduces the threat of undefinedness of chance somewhat, by being a bit more liberal about what information is available than this discussion has suggested. In Handfield (2012: 24) he draws a parallel with epistemic modals, and concludes that the available information is not limited to the information I have in evidence, but also information that there is a relevant way I could come to have in evidence after suitable investigation (see also DeRose, 1991: 593–4). In the revised account offered in Handfield and Wilson (forthcoming), the available information is that which is knowable, not just that which is known (i.e., in evidence, if E=K). Regardless of which liberalisation is more plausible, either narrows the field of identifiable advice functions somewhat, since now more information is available and fewer functions are expert with respect to all of that information. But unless we liberalise the notion of available information beyond all tenable connection with knowledge or epistemic possibility, and include all historical information, then there will inevitably remain in the set of potentially best advice functions some which disagree arbitrarily much over some historical fact about which we have irremediable ignorance. The foregoing observations appear to show that (I) is false if Handfield's account of chance is correct, because sometimes (in cases of irremediable ignorance of the past), the chances of past outcomes would not be trivial (though in many ordinary cases they would be). Again, however, things are not so clear cut. I'm not sure that Handfield's account is correct.2 But even if the basic idea 2Here are a couple of reasons why: 1. Information about future outcomes can directly affect our current credence in those outcomes without altering our judgements of the chances. We can remain convinced that a yet to be tossed coin is fair, and has 􏷟.􏷤 chance of landing heads, even if we get information from a crystal ball that it will in fact land heads (which, since we actually have it, will be available information). But Handfield's proposal gives the wrong result in this case, because the best credence to have isn't 􏷟.􏷤 in this situation, in light of the available information. It's not plausible to insist in defence of Handfield that the chance would have to be trivial in this case, no more plausible than insisting that a proposition is necessary once there is information that it is actually true. Ultimately, I think the parallel case of modality is closely related, and that the blurring of epistemic and alethic modality illustrated by the last remark is akin to what Handfield attempts to do for chance. (Further remarks on this issue can be found in the exchange between Hoefer and Meacham, this volume.) 2. In conditions of ignorance about which advice function is best, one should set one's credence in p equal to one's subjective expectation of what the best advice is (that is precisely what the Principal Principle recommends in such a case, assuming that the chance function is the best advice function). Suppose the value of this expectation is x. There is no guarantee that the proposition the right credence to have in p is x has any credibility for you at all. (Suppose you think the best credence is either 1 or 0, and the available information is equally supportive of each hypothesis about what the best credence is. Then one's subjective expectation will be 􏷟.􏷤, and that is what one's credence should arguably be, even though it is not a credence that for you could turn out to be best.) It seems that either the chance is undefined, because there is no best identifiable function; or the chance is 􏷟.􏷤, since that is the right degree of belief to have, even though that is not - as it were - among the hypotheses about what it is best to believe one antecedently considers. Given the prior intelligibility 6 is right, attention to the details suggests that Handfield's account doesn't settle the issues we are addressing. For Handfield's account to work, we need more constraints on the identifiability of an advice function than merely whether or not it agrees with our evidence on topics they both address. That simply leaves too many potential advice functions, and would make the chances undefined too frequently. (And it leaves in the wrong sort of advice functions - for of course the truth function will agree with our evidence on everything they both address.) One way to impose a further constraint would be to say that the only candidate advice functions are those that would, in conjunction with the Principal Principle, determine the advice we would in fact take. That would certainly limit the field in the right way, leaving only the chance function in play. But it would also land us back in the situation of our earlier discussion, trying to figure out which information is admissible. A more attractive constraint would result from appealing to other norms of rationality. Perhaps it could be a norm of rationality that one should defer to the predictions of one's best confirmed scientific theories. If so, and if those predictions of hypotheses about chance, and the Principal Principle, we can conclude that the chance is not 􏷟.􏷤, despite the fact that the best credence to have, given the available information, is the subjective expectation of the chance, which is 􏷟.􏷤. (If we follow Handfield and conclude that the chance is 􏷟.􏷤, we can see this is self-undermining: the only reason we came to the conclusion that 􏷟.􏷤 was the best credence was by taking the subjective expectation of hypotheses about chance that we now know to be false and not deserving of any credence.) If so, this is a direct counterexample to Handfield's view. The direct response is presumably that it is not possible that one could know that the only live hypotheses about chance were that it was trivially one or zero. But it's hard to see what independent reason we could have for placing this restriction on what is doxastically possible. 3. Suppose we follow the later development of the ideas in Handfield and Wilson (forthcoming). One of the aims of the proposal is to undermine arguments for fundamentalism about chance, the idea that only the probabilities given by fundamental physical laws genuinely play the chance role, and that accordingly probabilities in games of chance, statistical mechanics, etc. are not genuine chances. Take the example of poker they discuss, where their account allows poker probabilities to be chances just in case no subject in poker contexts is be truly ascribed possible knowledge of propositions that are wholly about the actual card distribution. But of course this entails that poker probabilities are not chances - while it may be cheating to seize the deck and examine it, it is clearly a way of coming to know propositions at a level of grain finer than that appropriate for poker probabilities. I do not dispute that there is a good sense in which the rules of poker determine a relevant body of background information in light of which the chances are fixed (in earlier work of my own I advocate an account of this: Eagle 2011; see also §3). Rather, what I find hard to credit is that this body of information will constrain what it is possible to know - the principles governing inquiry (the rules of knowledge, about how to gather and consider evidence, etc.) are much less restrictive than the rules of poker. (There is nothing epistemically inappropriate about cheating at poker, so even if 'context determines that there are certain epistemic methods that are understood to be legitimate, possible, in use, or otherwise salient', it's false that 'when playing poker, the salient method ... is one which does not involve violation of the rules of poker' (Handfield and Wilson, forthcoming: §9).) Drawing explicit attention to knowability ascriptions makes conversationally salient methods of inquiry that are able to rule out possibilities left open by the rules of poker alone. Handfield and Wilson may embrace this conclusion, but it's hard to see how doing so illuminates the functional role of probabilities in games of chance. 7 were in part probabilistic, then perhaps the probabilities of physics would be our candidate advice functions, and the best identifiable such function would be the probabilities featured in that physical theory which is best confirmed by the available evidence. While the truth function is perfectly good at making predictions, perhaps some further considerations mean that it cannot be a genuine candidate scientific theory.3 If such considerations can be made out, we won't defer to the truth since the norms of rationality would forbid it being identifiable as a function which is worthy of deference (even though it is in fact worthy of deference). We don't have evidence sufficient to have knowledge in virtue of deferring our belief to the truth function, whereas we sometimes do have sufficient evidence to know what we believe on the basis of deferring to the chances. Something about the foregoing must be correct. It is true that the predictions, probabilistic or otherwise, of our best supported scientific theories are worthy of special epistemic consideration. Perhaps the correct way to think about this is that scientific theories have a special status, and to then derive, in conjunction with Handfield's proposal, the claim that the probabilities in those theories deserve the honorific 'chance'. We would do better, it seems to me, if we begin by taking seriously the idea that scientific theories aim to give us the physical chances, and then use a truth about chance like the Principal Principle to establish that physical probabilities have a special epistemic role. But on either approach, our need to limit the field of potential advice functions has plausibly left us only with physical probability functions as viable candidates. At this point, we need to figure out directly whether physical probabilities are the sort of thing which feature the kind of temporal asymmetry that would make the chances of past outcomes now trivial. (This is why I said Handfield's proposal is inconclusive.) In the next section, I turn to some observations about the characteristic features of physical probabilities that lend support to the idea that past outcomes generally have only trivial chances. 2 Deference, Resilience, and Physical Chance Let us return to the idea mentioned above that chance is an expert function to which we ought defer our credences (Hall, 2004; Handfield, 2012; Joyce, 2007). As is now often observed, the Principal Principle, and the amended New Principle that Lewis (1994) offers to avoid some technical difficulties meshing the 3One such further consideration would derive from a Best Systems analysis of laws (Lewis, 1994). If the truth is not very simple, then the candidate scientific theories (systems of proposed laws of nature), will be so far ahead of truth in simplicity, and not so far behind in strength, that they are all much better than the truth function. The truth may be so complex that no scientist could endorse it at the end of inquiry; in that sense the truth may not even count as a scientific theory. 8 PP with his program of Humean Supervenience (concerning which, more below), is intended to capture the way that rational agents should defer their credences to a more expert probability function, namely, the chance function. Hall emphasises that the chance function is an expert analyst of any given information, in the sense that we should set our credences equal to Ch(p|e), where e is our (total) evidence (which includes our evidence about the actual value of the chances). The idea is that the chance of p, conditional on the information e, is the best opinion to have about p in light of e, and if e is our evidence, that will be the best opinion to have in light of our present evidence, which will be (unconditionally) the best opinion for us presently to have. This conception of chance as an expert analyst gives no special role to unconditional chances at a time. For all this role requires, chance could be merely sophistical - skilled at analysing any given body of information, but indifferent about where the truth lies. But this fits poorly with how chances, at least those physical probabilities deriving from the natural sciences, actually guide credence. As Joyce observes, evidence about chances is somehow able to screen off information about the past - when neither Cr nor e contains evidence about the future, chance is not merely an analyst-expert, but an expert tout court. This is a key epistemological fact about chance, and it seems to be one of the things that differentiates chances from inductive or epistemic probabilities. When I know the indeterministic coin is fair or that the polonium atom has a half-life of 138.876 days, no amount of information about the past should lead me to shift my probability for the events in question (unless it first leads me to revise my view about the chances). The only way to explain this is to suppose that chance has some information at its disposal. Being a universal analyst-expert is not enough. When it comes to evidence about the past, chance must be a database-expert as well. What information does it have? One natural answer is to suppose that chance now knows everything there is to know about what is not now chancy. (Joyce, 2007: 199) Joyce's proposal won't explain the temporal asymmetry of chance, since nothing in this argument either requires that the outcomes which are 'not now chancy' are past outcomes, nor precludes at least some of the presently chancy outcomes being past outcomes. Yet two important aspects of the epistemic role of chance are emphasised in this passage. First, chance is opinionated about the actual evidence, and cannot be indifferently conditionalised on any information whatsoever and still yield useful advice. In this, it contrasts with the usual way that evidential or epistemic probability is conceived, as giving something like an a priori probability of a claim conditional on any information whatsoever. (For Williamson, for example, the epistemic probability function gives 'the intrinsic plausibility of hypotheses prior to investigation' (Williamson, 2000: 211), and it should make sense to conditionalise this on any possible evidence what9 soever to yield the plausibility of hypotheses in light of that possible evidence.) It does not similarly make sense to conditionalise the chance function on any information whatsoever, at least not if one wants sensible results. For example, chances are contingent, if for no other reason than that they depend on which chance-entailing physical theories turn out to be true, and these physical theories are plausibly contingent. We will generally get poor results by conditionalising the actual chances on false information about the actual chances, even when chance is not expert with respect to chance itself; chance is not an analyst expert with respect to all subject matters. The actual chance function is actual because it embodies some contingently true information about actuality, which renders it unsuitable to be the chance function for every possibility, and correspondingly unsuitable to be an analyst expert without restriction. The contingency of chance is due to its being in part a repository of contingently true information. The second aspect worth noting is that the particular kind of information chance has in its database often concerns the past. Indirect but compelling evidence for this is the fact that, as Joyce notes, credences informed by known chances are resilient to the acquisition of evidence about the past. New evidence about the past tends not to change the credences of agents who know the chances much, though it may change the credences of agents who do not know the chances significantly. Consider Alice and Bob, both weather forecasters. Both presently have credence 0.5 in tomorrow's being sunny - Alice because she knows the chance to be 0.5, and Bob because he knows the chance to be somewhere between 0 and 1, and has no information that disposes him to think it credible that it lies anywhere in particular in that interval. They both gain the previously unknown evidence that the last ten days were sunny. Alice's credence in tomorrow's being sunny does not change; she now knows that a somewhat unlikely series of events had previously occurred, but that doesn't make her any more or less confident in future outcomes. (If the evidence had been more misleading, of course, that might have undermined Alice's knowledge of the chances; but in this case it did not.) For Bob, however, this new historical information strikes him as evidence for some as yet unknown hypotheses about the chance, and evidence against other hypotheses. In particular, those hypotheses which make the chance of sunny weather greater than the chance of rain are supported by this new historical evidence at the expense of their rival contrary hypotheses. Bob no longer has a uniform distribution of credence over the possible hypotheses about chance, since he now assigns high credence to the chance of sun being greater than 0.5. And since he is, like Alice, reasonable, he conforms his credence to his subjective expectation of the chance, and comes to have a credence much higher than 0.5 in tomorrow's being a sunny day. His 10 credence shifts considerably in light of that historical evidence, while Alice's does not - her credence is resilient. (Bob is unlucky here, of course, since his new credence is objectively more inaccurate than his old credence; he just happens to have received misleading evidence about the chances at a time when his opinion about the chances was vulnerable to such evidence.) Thus described, Alice and Bob are both clearly rational in their very different responses to the historical evidence. The difference between them lies in Alice's antecedent knowledge of the chances. Her credence is resilient because the historical information, while not in general credentially independent of the future outcome (as Bob's response clearly illustrates), are conditionally credentially independent, given Alice's knowledge of the chances. Gaining historical information like e doesn't give Alice any different opinion about the chances of events she is concerned with. It is important to note in this case that the outcome is not in general probabilistically independent of the new evidence - the probability of a sunny day varies with respect to what the pattern of weather preceding it is. (Weather is unlike coin tossing.) So we cannot appeal to considerations of independence to explain the resilience of Alice's credence. The natural proposal at this point is to explain this by proposing that, in some relevant sense, the chance function which informs Alice's credence has already 'factored in' the preceding sunny weather, even if Alice herself was previously unaware of it. So what is it that the chance function must factor in? The case of Alice prompts this proposal: chance now is perfectly informed about the events that are causally relevant as of now to the presently chancy outcomes. Joyce agrees: the present physical probability of an event encodes all information causally relevant to its occurrence that can be found in the present state...4 (Joyce, 2007: 201) The present chances screen off such information, rendering credences based on the chances resilient to such information, because any influence that the prior causes or present constitution can have over some possible outcomes is encompassed by the chances. There is no information about the prior causal history of some particular outcome (say, a fair coin landing heads) that would be evidentially relevant to that outcome to an agent who knew the chance of that outcome already - all the relevant causal information is conveniently summarised 4Joyce continues this sentence as follows: 'to know this probability is to know all there is to know about the present state as it pertains to the causes of the event'. This is not correct, since there is no reason why someone who knows the chances knows the causal story which grounds those chances. Compare: 'since the present facts about the water content of this glass encode all information relevant to its H2O content, to know the water facts is to know all there is to know about the H2O content'. This latter claim is false since agents needn't know the necessarily true but a posteriori reduction sentences that enable the derivation of the one body of information from the other. (See also fn. 7.) 11 by the chances.5 It is particularly convenient since knowing the chances need not involve knowing all of this further detailed causal information; for limited agents like us, that makes chance particularly useful as a guide for objectively informed credence. This also provides the start of an explanation of the epistemic role of chance: we defer to the chances because, in summarising and accommodating a vast and heterogeneous body of information about past causes, it gives us vital information for prediction. Picking up on the contingency of chance, we might even propose to identify the chance function at a time as that probability function which is expert with respect to the causally relevant factors which have occurred by that time; the evident contingency of the latter will carry over to contingency in which probability function meets the description, the chance function. I wish now to fend off one potential objection to the proposal of this section, as doing so enables me to clarify its scope and content. The objection begins with this observation: there are, very plausibly, cases in which the prior facts which fix the present chance of some outcome are not all causes of the outcome. One standard example is this, due to Schaffer (2000): suppose two independent spells are cast, one which has a 0.5 chance of causing A ∧ B, the other of which has a 0.5 chance of causing B∧C. As things turn out, A and B, but not C, occur. So only the first spell was a cause of B - the second spell did not succeed in causing B. Nevertheless, the second spell did succeed in raising the chance of B from 0.5 to 0.75. The supposed objection is that such cases show that a chance function can be perfectly informed about the past causes, but nevertheless fail to be perfectly informed about that on which the chance depends. This objection misfires: the proposal neither involves nor entails that being perfectly informed about prior causes of a given outcome is sufficient to fix the value of the chance, so pointing out another way in which such information is insufficient to ground the chance is neither here nor there. But seeing that this objection misfires does clarify my claim. I claim that the behaviour of chance - in its effects on credence, and its own contingent dependence on actual history - is best explained by suggesting that a constraint on which probability functions are eligible to be the chance function at a time is that those functions must be expert with respect to the causes of the outcomes to which chances are to be assigned. I do not claim that this is the only constraint on eligibility, nor that it is even close to being sufficient to fix the value of the chances. It is - at least so I argue below - only sufficient to fix the chances of those outcomes, information 5The resilience of the chance of some outcome to other information about the past is readily explained too, since other past information will be causally independent of the outcome and will be probabilistically independent too - since cases of probabilistic dependence without causal dependence involve common causes which will screen off those causally independent outcomes. 12 about the occurrence of which is included in the information about the extant causes of presently chancy outcomes; generally speaking, the past outcomes. It is crucial to distinguish my proposal, that the chance function is perfectly informed about the prior causes of the presently chancy outcomes, from a proposal I reject, namely that the chance function is perfectly informed about the factors on which the present chances depend. The former proposal, unlike the latter, does not commit us to the anti-Humean thesis that none of the facts that ground the present chances are future facts. (The potential division over whether chance is perfectly informed about the causes of presently chancy outcomes versus being perfectly informed about the causes of the present chances is related to the dispute over whether present chances can be undermined by future outcomes (Bigelow et al., 1993; Hall, 2004; Lewis, 1994).) Consider for example the most simple-minded Humean view of single case chance, actual frequentism: the implausible thesis that the chance of an outcome is numerically equal to the relative frequency of that outcome in the relevant class of trials. If chance was perfectly informed about what caused the chances to be what they are, then chance would be perfectly informed about every outcome, since the total pattern of outcomes is the supervenience base for the facts about relative frequencies. All chances, past and future, would be trivial if this were so. But the more moderate thesis I defend, that chance is informed, at a time, about the causes of outcomes that have occurred by that time, doesn't trivialise all chances. This example is merely illustrative: I do not endorse actual frequentism. Indeed, Joyce's observation gives us further reason to reject that view. For facts about relative frequencies are time-independent, and thus insensitive to causal information that we know, following Joyce, that the chances are sensitive to. Perhaps there is some more way of having an appropriate reference class for a given outcome be fixed in part by the time at which the relative frequency is to be ascribed. But it is difficult to come up with a plausible and specific proposal for picking out a contextually-appropriate reference class of outcomes that generates relative frequencies which mesh with our existing knowledge about chance (Hájek, 1997). (Though if the resources offered in §3 can be given a suitably Humean foundation, they might provide exactly the right sort of constraints for a contextualist solution to the reference class problem for some sort of sophisticated frequentist theory.) So much the worse for actual frequentism - but not for my proposal. Given the foregoing discussion, I can now give an argument that the past chances are trivial. The chance of a given outcome varies in part because it is sensitive to the occurrence of events which are causally relevant to whether that outcome will occur. Since these occurrences happen at different times, chance varies over time, since at each time the chance of an outcome captures all the 13 causally relevant factors for that outcome that have occurred by that time. That is, the chance at a time renders the outcome in question conditionally independent of these other occurrences. Since an outcome is obviously relevant to itself, the chance of any outcome which actually has occurred at a time should render the outcome conditionally independent of itself. The only way that can be is if the chance of that outcome is 1. So present outcomes (i.e., those that occur at the time their chance is evaluated) shouldn't be chancy. And since no future outcome is causally relevant to whether a present outcome will occur, no future outcome can subsequently alter the present chances,6 so having been presently settled those outcomes remain settled from now on. The past is thus no longer a matter of chance. This argument can be fleshed out a little more. Suppose that the laws of nature give us a specific contingent initial chance function, Ch. This might give chances of initial conditions (Albert, 2000), or those conditions may be independently specified. In any case, once we have some initial conditions, we have additional contingent information that needs to be taken into account in any prediction of subsequent events: that Ch(p) has a certain value is one thing, but to rely solely on that would be to neglect other causally relevant information at the time of prediction. Since the chance function is supposed to give chances for all physically possible outcomes at a given time, the best way to accommodate this new physically contingent information at a time is to conditionalise the chance function on the causally relevant information at the time. So at each time, there will be a temporally indexed chance function Cht(⋅) = Ch(⋅|Rt), where Rt captures information concerning the causally relevant factors, that have occurred by t, for any outcome in the domain ofCh. Since Rt will thus capture most if not all of the historical information at t, for most historical outcomes h (those which have occurred as of t), it will be that h ∈ Rt, and hence Cht(h) = Ch(h|Rt) = 1. To complete the argument that the chances of past outcomes are trivial, it suffices to argue that 'the chance of p', uttered at t, picks out Cht(p) rather than Ch(p). One route to this conclusion is via the deference-worthiness of chance; it is only if 'the chance' uttered at a time picks out a function which has factored in the causally relevant factors as of t that the credences set in line with the chances will be predictively optimal for an agent in that situation. Moreover, given that in general the information Rt will not be known, it cannot be plausibly argued that agents really do refer to Ch by 'the chances', and implicitly condition that prior chance function on the causal information.7 6Of course future outcomes could have played a role in grounding the value of the present chances, but not causally; and this grounding relation is time-independent, and so that couldn't subsequently alter the chances of an outcome that has already occurred. 7Just as agents needn't know what the present time is to use 'now' to pick out the present time - which shows that a present use of 'now' is not synonymous with August 21, 2012- , they 14 The preceding discussion suggests that the time dependence of chance is fundamentally explained by the expertise of chance with respect to the causal background of chancy outcomes, along with the contingent fact that information about the causes of actual outcomes is in fact all information about the past history of those outcomes. I do not propose here to attempt to explain the temporal asymmetry of causation, though I have discussed that topic briefly elsewhere (Eagle, 2007). I do not even claim that the direction of metaphysical explanation here is from the causal asymmetry to the asymmetry of chance. For all I've said, there is some independent reason for fixing on some body of information as appropriate for prediction, which would then indicate that the chance function should be expert with respect to that body of information. We might then propose some probability-raising account of causation (Glynn, 2011), and since all the information in I will have trivial chances at a given context, it will turn out that, at a that context, there are no prospective causes of outcomes in I ; and we might then propose to use that package of views to explain the asymmetry of causation. I don't myself favour this approach; but since all my proposal needs is that there is an actual temporal asymmetry of chance, and that it is derived from the actual temporal asymmetry of causation, I see no reason to take sides on that further issue of reduction. Finally, it is worth noting that the idea of a causal history can be given a relativistically acceptable gloss, so that the chance (at a point of spacetime) will be relativistically invariant. Chance isn't temporally dependent in any way that requires privileged foliation of spacetime. 3 Chance, Ability, and Context The discussion in the preceding section explained the resilience of chance with respect to historical information by proposing that chance is a database expert about such information, which enabled us to derive the triviality of past chances. The argument is basically this: the behaviour of chance-informed credence is best explained by proposing that chance is expert about some information about causes, and I made a specific proposal about what information that might be, and gave an argument that led to the triviality of past chances on the basis of that proposal. But one might wonder why chance has the feature of being resilient to historical information. That is the feature on which the inference to the best explanation of the previous section rested, and it would only strengthen that arneedn't know what the causally relevant factors are to use 'the chance' to pick out the present chance function, showing that 'the present chance of p' uttered at t isn't synonymous withCh(p|Rt), even if the latter is the present referent of the former description. 15 gument if we had some reason for thinking chance must exhibit some database expertise. In this section, I will offer an argument that both bolsters the case that chance has this feature, and provides as well another route to the thesis that the past is no longer chancy. It will also cast the discussion of the previous section in something of a new light. The argument of this section begins with consideration of another truth about chance, one I've defended at length elsewhere: that there is some chance of X φ-ing iff X can φ (Eagle, 2011); more crudely, that p has some chance iff it can be that p. The sense of 'can' involved in this claim is the dynamic (ability-attributing), circumstantial 'can'; it is not epistemic or deontic. This thesis provides a good way of making sense of the often noted modal aspect of chance. Leibniz argued that probability 'is a kind of graded possibility' (van Fraassen, 1980: 198), and this thesis tells us which sort of possibility corresponds to chances. It doesn't tell us how to get numerical values for chances out of facts about dynamic possibility - it's not a reduction of chance - but it does give substantive content to the anodyne Leibnizian thesis. It also generalises and explains the appeal of other claims about the connection between chance and possibility, such as the basic chance principle of Bigelow et al. (1993), without endorsing the more unattractive consequences of those claims. And most compellingly of all, the claim that chance is linked to ability ascriptions neatly explains the linguistic data, especially the unavoidable badness of claims like 'it can happen, but it has no chance of happening'. If I'm right about this connection between chance and ability (as minimally encoded by the true 'can' claims), then we might expect the behaviour of dynamic possibility to be mirrored in the behaviour of chances. And this is what we do see, when we pay attention to the semantics of 'can'. The standard semantics for this expression, treated as a sentence modifier, says, more or less, that 'can p' is true at a context of utterance iff there is at least one metaphysically possible situation, amongst all those which circumstantially resemble the context closely enough (what is known as the modal base), in which p (Kratzer, 1991; Portner, 2009). How close is closely enough, and in what respect of resemblance? Those are a matter for context, which selects (somehow) a set of relevant features in view of which the ability is ascribed. There needn't be a principled story here about which features are and are not suitable to determine the modal base - we may need to look at actual usage to see how contexts actually function. In doing so, it is striking that we are almost without exception required to ensure that all worlds in the modal base agree on the intrinsic features of the subject of an ability ascription, and similarly required to ensure they agree on features external to the subject which would mask or defeat the ordinary effects of those intrinsic features. Ordinarily, when we evaluating the 16 claim 'it can be that this cup breaks', we are required only to hold fixed its intrinsic features: 'It is in view of certain properties inherent in the cup, that it is possible that it breaks' (Kratzer, 1981: 64). But if the cup is saliently wrapped in bubble wrap, it would not be true to say that it can, in those circumstances, break (though it might yet remain fragile). There may be occasions when other factors are held constant, or when these default factors are allowed to vary; but in general it seems that these are the standard sorts of things that context picks up on. This orthodox semantic story makes certain predictions about the behaviour of 'can' claims. In particular, it will predict that ability ascriptions are resilient to new causal information: given the factors which ordinarily make a direct semantic contribution to the truth of an ability claim (intrinsic properties of the bearer of the ability and the salient circumstances), the causes of those present properties and circumstances are rendered epistemically irrelevant to the question of whether the object will do what it can do. And we see this prediction borne out: 'can' claims display an intra-contextual resilience to new historical information: if a particular outcome is able to come about at a time, that modal claim remains true even given new information about the past events causally relevant to that outcome. If it's known that Clara can play the piano, the fact that she had piano lessons on July 8th, 1997 adds nothing to the case for her future piano playing, nor does the fact that she didn't manage to play last week because her dentist appointment ran long. Similarly, if it's known that Sylvester can't yet walk, information about his displaying last week all the symptoms of early walking won't prompt anyone to think that he might right now be walking. Again, the neatest hypothesis that explains this is that present information about an object's abilities conveniently summarises the causally relevant historical information pertaining to what is and is not possible presently for that object. We now have one direct explanation for why chance-informed credence is resilient to new historical information, as in the case of Alice in §2: because chance-informed credence is a specific kind of ability-informed belief. Facts about abilities conveniently summarise the prior causally relevant factors as to whether the ability will be exercised, and so new historical information will have already been accounted for by the ability ascription in making informed judgements about whether the exercise of the ability will occur. And this is the same behaviour we see in chance-informed credence, though of course chances give us quantitative information about how likely it is that the exercise of the ability will occur. This gives us a deeper understanding of why chance exhibits the behaviour we took as our starting point in §2. Attentive readers will be objecting at this point: Hang on! It's perfectly pos17 sible to know that an object has the ability to φ, and yet come across new historical information that is relevant to whether the ability will be exercised. Smith, rich and gravely ill, certainly has the ability to improve his children's financial situation. But if I then find out about his will, which bequeaths his entire fortune to the local animal shelter, I can successfully predict that he won't exercise this ability. So that newly uncovered historical information trumps the known ability, so the ability claim cannot conveniently summarise the prior causally relevant factors: the will is clearly relevant and yet excludes the exercise of the ability. This objection is astute, but depends on a false presupposition about ability ascriptions: namely, that if an ability is correctly ascribed against one context, it remains correctly ascribable in all contexts. The context-sensitivity of 'can' claims, emphasised throughout the literature, will predict that in many circumstances, the discovery of new historical information will make that information contextually salient, and alter the modal base by restricting it to those possibilities in which the newly discovered information holds. In the present case, the new information about the will is accommodated by restricting the modal base to worlds in which the will exists, and throughout the closest such worlds, where wills are enacted as they actually are, the children will not inherit anything. So there are no situations in the relevant space of possibilities in which the children inherit - in light of that new information, they cannot inherit. This phenomenon of accommodation of new historical information means that ability-ascriptions are contextually fragile, and that is why earlier I emphasised the intra-contextual resilience of ability claims to new information. Fixing a given body of contextually salient information, certain possibilities lie in the modal base for the 'can' operator; finding out more about the actual possibility won't undermine the proposition expressed in that context by a 'can'-involving ability ascription, though it may (through contextual accommodation) make impossible to express that proposition using the very same words in the new context. Despite the difficulty in using a 'can' claim to express it in another context, the ability truly ascribed by a 'can' claim in a context - namely, that a certain possible outcome is consistent with some contextually salient body of information - remains an ability in every context (consistency is not context-sensitive). In every context, however, what an ability ascription picks out is a claim that summarises the contextually salient and causally relevant information with respect to the exercise of that ability. It doesn't seem to be the case in actual usage that which an ability can be relative to any old arbitrary body of information, but rather is ordinarily sensitive to just the kinds of causally relevant information about the intrinsic features of objects and the salient environmental masks of the ordinary activity of such features. The kind of trumping illustrated by the case of Smith above makes salient some information that we aren't used 18 to treating as ordinarily relevant to the exercise of an ability, so there is some tendency to think it is not relevant to the ability, which explains whatever pull we might feel to the putative objection. But, with the correct context-sensitive semantics for 'can' in hand, we are able to see that the reasoning in the objection goes awry. ¦ Set aside for a moment the resilience of chances to new historical information. For the connection between chance and ability allows us to offer a direct argument that the past is no longer chancy. If we say, of some proposition p about a past event, 'can p', that utterance expresses a proposition that is true just in case the contextually salient information is consistent with p. Customary usage demonstrates that historical information is ordinarily contextually salient, since we are ordinarily extremely reluctant to assert that past outcomes can be different than they in fact were.8 Since our past cannot be changed, it must be that the past is the way it was. Exploiting the connection between chance and 'can', we see that the past has no chance of being other than it was, and thus has chance one of being the way that it was. The past is no longer chancy. That the past is not able to be altered may be because there simply exists a tendency for historical information to be contextually salient. But having just drawn attention to the role of contextually salient information, we may be able to offer an explanation of this fact. If we ask whether some past outcome can occur, although it did not - for example, 'can this coin land heads yesterday?'9 - it is very difficult to avoid making the fact that it did not land heads yesterday contextually salient. Contextual accommodation can, it's true, generate sets of conversational background information that manage to make sense of very exotic utterances relatively smoothly, but it is extremely difficult to envisage an ordinary situation in which the question concerning the ability of a past outcome to actually be different than it is manages to express a genuine and non-trivial query. The question makes the actual past salient; given the salience of facts about the actual past, there are of course no possibilities in the modal base of this context in which the coin lands heads yesterday, since all 8Note the circumstantial 'can' involved is not the pure alethic modal 'possibly' - for it is possible that the coin landed heads yesterday, and indeed the coin could have landed heads yesterday. But those modals introduce a different, less constrained, modal base than circumstantial 'can', which is the modal of interest here. 9Once again, this question must be distinguished from 'Could this coin have landed heads yesterday?' To deploy, but only by way of analogy, a distinction familiar from the literature on conditionals, we might say that the 'subjunctive' modal invites us to consider alternative possibilities which need not hold fixed the historical fact that the coin did not land heads yesterday. By contrast, the 'indicative' question in the main text does hold fixed this fact; and the markedness of the phrasing of the question, it's near-ungrammaticality, suggests that it does so regardless of what we know or can discover about yesterday's state. 19 possibilities are consistent. This familiar behaviour makes it very difficult to avoid trivialising the ability of the past to be circumstantially different. Where p is a past outcome at t, then generally all worlds in the modal base for a 'can' claim uttered at t are alike with respect to p. There are extraordinary contexts where this default behaviour does not arise, such as contexts in which time travel and the prospect of backwards causation are salient (Lewis, 1976), but those are fairly atypical, despite their philosophical interest. Accordingly, the past cannot be different than it now has turned out to be; so what can have happened is just what did happen. Given the connection between chance and ability, supported by the systematic similarities between 'can' and 'has some chance', this temporal asymmetry of abilities will be reflected in a temporal asymmetry of chances - the outcomes with some chance of happening are just those which did happen. Accordingly, any past outcome pwhich has failed to occur by now has no chance of happening, i.e., has chance zero. Correspondingly, the past outcomes which have occurred by now, ¬p, have chance one of happening, and we have our thesis (I): past chances are trivial. This is entirely consistent, of course, with those chances having previously been non-trivial: the contextual salience of historical information at that context in no way involves that information being salient at earlier contexts. Information about chances can provide more fine-grained constraints on future outcomes than bare information about what can and cannot happen, but nevertheless the temporal asymmetry of those constraints is of a piece with the asymmetry of ability. I've been at pains to emphasise the context-sensitivity of 'can' claims, and the corresponding context-sensitivity of chances. On some views of ability - for example, the view of Vetter (2010), which classifies abilities as a species of potentiality, conceived of as genuine properties that objects may possess (and not merely ersatz or thin as the properties predicated by true 'can' claims may seem) - the connection between context-sensitive 'can' claims and genuine abilities will be much more tenuous than on the account I've provided. They could still endorse the connection between 'has some chance' and 'can' that I defend; but it is more attractive, on such a view, to connect chance with the more metaphysically thick sorts of abilities that such views have in their ontology. Such is the proposal, I take it, that lies behind some versions of the propensity theory (Giere, 1973; Mellor, 1971): to link chances with dispositions or abilities, treated as legitimate ontological primitives (and not to be reduced to any facts of the Humean mosaic). Such accounts won't have the resources to explain the triviality of past chances in the way I have, though there is no reason they couldn't take it as a basic fact about propensities at a time that nothing has a propensity to produce past outcomes. Indeed, those who gloss propensities 20 as something like causal tendencies (such as Giere) may appeal to the temporal asymmetry of causation to explain the asymmetry of propensity chances. I will return to the propensity theory at the end of §5; I mention it here to emphasise that my own view captures much that is attractive about the propensity theory, but is not committed to the metaphysics of propensities and is, I believe, explanatorily superior. ¦ These observations both support and complicate my discussion of the triviality of past chances. Clearly we have here a good deal of support for the claim that what was not has now no chance of having been, deriving from the claim that what was not cannot now have been, which has a natural and straightforward explanation using the standard semantics for 'can' and some plausible observations about contextually-determined features of the modal base. On the other hand, we have some examples, in cases of time travel and backwards causation, the successful treatment of which requires that the context not hold fixed some features that it ordinarily picks up by default (Eagle, 2011: §6). Suppose I toss a fair coin on stepping into a time machine, destination so far in the past that present outcomes are probabilistically independent of the outcome. The coin can land heads in the past, and can land tails; indeed, it has equal chance of both outcomes. This case, even if not actually realisable, is perfectly intelligible. To make sense of the truth of these 'can' claims, uttered in these possible contexts, we need the modal base to hold fixed the causally prior, but historically future, facts about the constitution of the coin and the circumstances of its tossing. We must permit the variability of the historically past, but causally future, facts about the actual outcome. And this will give us the result that, at least in some contexts, (I) will be false: there are past outcomes which have a non-trivial chance. In discussing the case under consideration, this seems the right thing to say. If there are past outcomes which depend on present events in the same way as other chancy outcomes depend on present events, then while it might be that historical information that trumps the chances is more readily available than in the ordinary cases, there seems little to recommend the view that the epistemic impact of such information isn't trumping the chances but merely reflecting them. (Even if you wish to rest a defence of (I) on the Joyce-inspired argument of §2, these cases of time travel, involving as they do backwards causation, will mean that the chance function should be expert about the future causes of past outcomes, and inexpert with respect to those outcomes themselves, so we get violations of (I).) I certainly think it is a strength of the present account that it successfully encompasses both ordinary circumstantial modality, as well as that which arises 21 in deviant but still straightforward time travel cases, in the same elegant theory. And I think it gives the right verdicts in those cases. So there are possible contexts in which (I) is false, because it entails falsehood sentences about what can happen. But we need to be careful in drawing conclusions from this. We've now detected some previously covert context-sensitivity in the expression 'has some chance', which means that (I) is, unexpectedly, a context-sensitive claim, expressing different propositions at different contexts. Two points arising are worth discussing: (i) The fact that our central claim can express a falsehood in some contexts doesn't show that it expresses a falsehood in any actual contexts, or in those in which it was originally uttered; and (ii) there are dangers lurking for arguments against the claim which fail to attend to the context sensitivity involved. Starting with point (i), it's important to note that (I) as stated is not prefixed with 'necessarily', and I do not intend to claim that it is necessary truth, only that it is true. Given this, pointing out that there are contexts in which it expresses a falsehood is only germane if those contexts are plausibly actual. It is a contingent matter, in my view, whether there is time travel or backwards causation; however, it seems reasonable enough on present evidence to conclude that there are no actual cases of either. (This may be too hasty; I return to this issue in §4.) Even if there are actual time travel scenarios, and utterances of (I) when such scenarios are salient may express falsehoods, that needn't impugn (I), if the contexts in which it is originally proposed are not such contexts. There will be a danger of equivocation, but once that is pointed out, it is open to the defender of (I) to say that the contexts they were expressing (I) with respect to were ordinary, non-time-travel contexts, and as such (I) expresses a truth when taken as intended. This response, crude though it may be, is effective against some of the main arguments that could be raised against the thesis, which themselves rely on no funny cases involving exotica like time travel and the like. If the two sorts of arguments above work in ordinary circumstances, then there is a successful response to those sorts of direct arguments that attempt to show that there are non-trivial past chances even in quite normal circumstances. This brings us neatly to point (ii). The context sensitivity we've identified can pose problems for arguments against (I). Consider, by way of example, this argument, a pastiche of themes from the literature on this topic. Assume determinism. If determinism is true, then the historical truths at any time entail (in conjunction with the laws) the historical truths at any other time. Assume the laws are admissible. So we may run this argument: 1. Either some historical information is admissible, or it is not. 22 2. The historical truths at any time entail in conjunction with the laws the historical truths at any other time. 3. If there is any admissible historical information at all, then all historical information at any time is admissible at every time. (from 2) 4. Applying Lewis' argument from §1, all chances are trivial - an outcome has chance 1 at some particular time iff the outcome occurs at any time. So these trivial chances aren't time-dependent. (from 3) 5. If historical information is inadmissible, then the only admissible information is the laws. In which case, the only permissible instances of the PP are: Cr(p|L ∧ ⌜Ch(p) = x⌝) = x. The only time it is ever rational to defer to chance is initially, since at all other times one is more expert than chance; so it is just as if chance is not time-dependent. 6. So chance is not time-dependent. (1, 4, 5) The argument is supposed to establish that if determinism is true, then chance isn't time-dependent, and hence that there cannot be the variability with temporal position that (I) requires. However, if the foregoing discussion is right, 'admissible' is a context-sensitive expression, since whether some information is admissible depends on which factors contribute to the modal base relative to which 'has some chance' is to be evaluated. Noticing this, we can see that the inference from (2) to (3) may be invalid: for (2) is a context-independent truth, while (3) is context-sensitive. If there are ever contexts in which the truth of the deterministic laws is not included in the modal base, then there can be admissible information but the outcomes needn't be trivialised, since there may be possibilities under consideration in which the laws are not held fixed. And, as I've argued elsewhere, there are such contexts (Eagle, 2011: §6). So this argument, plausible though it seems at first glance, can be resisted: even if determinism is true there can be temporal asymmetries of chance. The upshot of this discussion is this. There is a link between chance and the causes of chancy outcomes, on both arguments I've presented. In odd cases, where the direction of causation is contrary to its actual direction, this means that past outcomes needn't have only trivial chances. This strikes me as the correct result, since those cases are certainly intelligible as cases where the past is a matter of chance. But those cases are not central enough to pose a problem for our thesis: indeed, as they are only problem cases if the links between causation, ability, and chance are as I've described, they vindicate (I) in exactly the kinds of ordinary cases that we thought we were evaluating it with respect to all along. 23 Let's sum up the discussion of the past two sections. The context-sensitivity of chance ascriptions, and the consequent context-sensitivity of (I), means that there is no one claim that every utterance of (I) expresses. If a context-invariant expression of my view is wanted, it would be something like this: (H) In most10 contexts in which we make claims about chances at the actual world, the semantic value at that context of 'chance' will be a probability function which assigns only trivial probabilities to events earlier than the time of the context. Revisiting the formalism introduced at the end of §2: each occurrence of 'chance' expresses a probability function Ch(⋅|Rc), where Rc is the contextually salient background information, and Ch is the initial probability function given by the laws. (I return to the question of whether Ch is, in any context, rightly called a chance function in the following section.) The discussion of the past two sections has indicated some constraints on what information is included in Rc. §2 argued that information about causally relevant factors for outcomes in the domain of the chance function that have occurred by the time of the context must be included, on the basis that the inclusion of such information was part of the simplest and best explanation of the resilience of chance to new historical information. This section has argued that we may understand the role of Rc as identifying the modal base for the circumstantial dynamic modal operator 'has some chance'. It also proposed that, because of the intimate connection between this operator and the modal 'can', there is further reason to suppose that the modal base for 'has some chance' includes historical information, because the inability of present chance devices to alter their past outcomes is equivalent to there being no present chance of those outcomes being different than they in fact were. Given these facts about Rc, it follows fairly quickly, via the sorts of arguments I've offered in these past two sections, that any information in Rc at a given context will be truly said to have only trivial chance at that context, and that (as it happens) most if not all historical information will turn out to be included in Rc. That gives us our invariant thesis (H). 4 Arguments from Physics for the Chancy Past Our thesis would be false if it turned out that the correct conception of physical chance turned out to involve the actuality of a chancy past, given actual physics. This prospect is raised by some recent discussions about the nature of objective probabilities grounded in classical statistical mechanics, where some have argued that such probability measures play the chance role, as witnessed 10The reason for this hedge is discussed in the second part of §4. 24 by their role in prediction and explanation, but also assign non-trivial probabilities to many past outcomes (Loewer, 2001; Meacham, 2005). So far, there is no problem: as just argued, the possibility of a chancy past is consistent with all I have said. So long as the statistical mechanical probabilities provide information of the sort we know that chance does about the causes of the event to be predicted or explained (or about the structure of the space of possibilities over which the chances are defined), there will be no difficulty in reconciling the existence of non-trivial statistical mechanical chances of past events with ordinary judgements about chanciness. The potential difficulties would arise if those statistical mechanical chances were not connected with backwards causation, with ability, or with the kinds of dynamic possibility connected with them. So the difficulties do not arise, for example, on at least some interpretations of quantum mechanics according to which there are chances of past outcomes (Price, 1994). The proposal is intended to avoid certain difficulties in reconciling quantum mechanics and special relativity. Some experiments, which agree very well with the predictions of quantum mechanics, seems to involve fasterthan-light causal connections between distant bits of the experimental apparatus, violating special relativity. But, argues Price, if present properties of the measured system can be causally influenced by their future states, we can accommodate these results in an entirely relativistically acceptable way. On that view, there are genuine physical chances of outcomes, given posterior states. Usually, of course, these chances are trumped by the posterior time, since the experimental apparatus is small and is highly salient to the experimenters, so information about the past outcomes is generally already in the set of relevant factors, trumping the chances of those outcomes. But one can envisage a setup in which, while the post-outcome state is known, the prior state, which is a genuine probabilistic effect of the posterior cause, is not information which is available to trump the chances. Then the right credence to have about that past outcome is that informed by the physical chances, which are expert with respect to the causes of that outcome. This fits very well with the views about what chance is expert with respect to above: the factors which are causally prior to the chancy outcome. If those causes are sometimes temporally posterior to the effect, as proposed in this case, we would anticipate past chances, which is intuitively what we get on Price's theory. However, in the cases of non-trivial statistical mechanical probabilities of past outcomes, we have more of a puzzle. For there is very little in the literature on statistical mechanical probability suggests the existence of backwards causation or dyanamical past possibilities in that theory; yet the probabilities in that theory bear the hallmarks of chances (Loewer, 2001; Meacham, 2005). 25 That said, it would need considerable argument to contend that statistical mechanical probabilities couldn't be linked to causal information in the way that has been suggested. And any such argument would be a plausible contender for an argument that the statistical mechanical probabilities were not, after all, chances, but some other kind of objectively constrained probability, with a more nuanced relationship to the genuine chances than that offered by Loewer or Meacham. For example, statistical mechanical probabilities are constructed from the standard measure over the state space. Since the standard Liouville measure μ on state space need not be bounded (there are sets of states of arbitrarily large measure), we must normalise the measure to get values which formally look like probabilities. So if p is a statistical mechanical proposition - a set of states - and q is another, then the statistical mechanical probability of p relative to q is given by μ(p ∩ q)/μ(q), supposing all those sets to have well-defined measure, and μ(q) > 0. Meacham (2005: 286) proposes that these relative probabilities, given 'their explanatory power and normative force', should be taken to be chances. Doing so, argues Meacham, raises difficulties for our thesis. For suppose that q is a proposition partly about t􏷟 and partly about t􏷡, and we are considering the chance of p, which is entirely about t􏷠, at t􏷡 (where t􏷟 < t􏷠 < t􏷡). There does exist the relative probability Pq(p) = μ(p∩q)/μ(q); and this will in general not have a trivial value, since q is not informative enough to trivialise the relative chance. But then there is a non-trivial relative probability of p at t􏷡, after the time of the outcome. And indeed there may be a different non-trivial relative probability at t􏷡 relative to r, where r is partly about t􏷟 and partly about t􏷠.􏷤. The difficulty for these proposed problem cases is understanding how to connect relative probabilities with chance simpliciter as mentioned in (I); without some proposal for how to do this, these examples don't pose any challenge to our thesis. The problem cases work by permitting arbitrary propositions, so long as they have a well-defined non-zero Liouville measure, to have probabilities relativised to them. And this can be extremely useful - for example, if your evidence is one such proposition, then the statistical mechanical probability relative to your evidence is going to be a particularly useful objectively informed probability measure. Maybe it is even worth deferring to. But not every expert probability function is a chance function, so it is premature to conclude that these relative probabilities are chances. One good reason for thinking they are not chances is that they are not resilient to new information about past causes. Consider the example above, and suppose that s entails q but is strictly more informative about the causes of p. Then Ps(p) ≠ Pq(p) in general. So Pq(p) is not a database expert with respect to 26 the causes or other enabling factors of p, and thus fails to fill part of the chance role as identified above in §§2–3. So not all relative probabilities are chances - indeed, it seems most plausible to suggest that the relative probabilities which are chances at a time are just those relative to information at that time about the prior causes of the outcome whose chance we're interested in (noting, of course, that the content of that information will depend on context in the way sketched in §3). That proposal only gives non-trivial chances for past outcomes if there are future causes of past outcomes, something we have little reason to believe in classical statistical mechanics. Meacham's examples rest on two assumptions: (i) the identification of relative statistical mechanical probabilities with relative probabilities; and (ii) the claim that if q is a proposition partly about a time, the non-triviality of probability relative to q at that time entails the non-triviality of chance at that time. Laid out in this way, it's hard to see why we should accept claim (ii). Not every proposition q carries the sort of information that a genuine chance function does, the sort of information about causes identified in §§2–3. For the proposition q that, in a given context, carries the contextually salient information about the abilities of chance setups to yield outcomes, Pq is a relative probability that is the extension of 'chance' uttered in that context. But for no other proposition q′ in that context will Pq′ be a probability function expressed by a use of 'chance' in that context. Meacham's example, given what he tells us about the proposition q, is not, in any context, an eligible referent of an occurrence of 'chance', and thus poses no threat to the claim that the past is not a matter of chance (as that sentence, when uttered in any context, expresses a truth). That doesn't mean that Meacham's examples of relative probabilities cannot be understood in terms of chance; they simply may be explicitly conditional chances at a time.11 Meacham says little about the time at which his relative probabilities are to be evaluated - that is because the facts about relative Liouville measure on state space are eternal facts. But the expression 'the chance' picks out different relative probability functions at different times, and of course the chance of outcomes can therefore vary from time to time. If we consider a time after an outcome has occurred, its chances will be trivial. But consider a time before a given outcome, say t􏷟 in our example above. We can easily understand the relative probability Pq(p) in terms of the chance of p at t􏷟, conditional on the information in q. Consider, by way of analogy, conditional 11On my view all chances are obtained from conditionalising the probability Ch given by the laws on the contextual causal information Rc, but these are not in my sense conditional chances, because they can be picked out by an unconditional use of 'chance'. By saying that arbitrary relative probabilities may be treatable as conditional chances, I mean that they can be picked out by explicitly conditional constructions such as 'the chance of p given q', and only by such constructions. 27 chances in coin tossing cases. At a time before a coin is tossed, there is a 2/3 conditional chance of a sequence of fair coin tosses containing two Heads and one Tail, given that the sequence begins with a Head. This is unproblematic even though the event conditioned on occurs partly after the event whose conditional chance we're concerned with. Now, this proposal might not always work: even in Meacham's example, the chance at t􏷟 (which is not initial nomological probability) carries more information about t􏷟 and the prior history than q does. So it's not the case that all statistical mechanical relative probabilities will be conditional chances. That some of them are gives us enough, I think, to explain why Meacham's assumption that relative chances are chances is as appealing as it is, despite being incorrect. The probability relative to some region of state space, and the chance conditional on that region, may come apart, if chance is expert with respect to facts lying outside that region. Unlike our coin toss case, we may be, and often are, ignorant of the chances in classical statistical mechanics, and have then to fall back on relative probabilities in light of our evidence as the best we can do. And that best may well in many cases be quite good enough. But being an objectively informed and good enough expert function isn't sufficient to be a chance function. ¦ One of the main reasons Meacham has for considering relative probabilities to be chances is that, he thinks, it is only by doing so that we can understand some otherwise troubling features of statistical mechanics. Under the standard phase space measure μ, almost all of the phase space is occupied by a region where entropy is high, and very little by the region where entropy is low. Entropy is, more or less, a property representing how disorderly a region of phase space is. This feature of the standard measure (together with various substantive but widely accepted further claims that I will not detour to consider-see Callender (2011: §2)), entails that relative to almost any proposition, the probability of high entropy propositions is much greater than low entropy ones. If we place no further constraints on statistical mechanical probability than those imposed by the measure on standard phase space, then we easily explain the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy always increases: taking a system moving along a trajectory through phase space that passes through a region of positive measure R, representing a particular macrostate, it is overwhelmingly likely that the system will subsequently end up in a macrostate of higher entropy (because high entropy macrostates are overwhelmingly probable relative to R). Unfortunately, the same reasoning entails that entropy increases towards the past as well: relative to any state of any given entropy, it is most probable 28 that a trajectory passing through that state came from a higher entropy region, and will go to a higher entropy region. Thus it seems, on this minimal version of statistical mechanics, that the relative probability of the initial conditions of our universe being like we think they are (some very low entropy state) is overwhelmingly unlikely. One could accept this quasi-skeptical conclusion, but the standard move in the literature is to argue that this conclusion is at odds with our evidence, and that this minimal statistical mechanics is to be revised. The revision standardly made is to impose, in addition to the standard phase space measure and dynamics, the past hypothesis (Albert, 2000): Earlier states do not have higher entropy than present states because we make the cosmological posit that the universe began in an extremely tiny section of its available phase space. (Callender, 2011: §2.1) Relative to the past hypothesis, low entropy initial conditions have maximal probability, and (modulo worries about how to use a universal constraint on entropy to predict behaviour in a subsystem here on earth) this is supposed to explain why high-to-low entropy transitions are almost never seen, and lowto-high transitions are nearly invariably observed. The puzzle for us is how to understand the dispute over the past hypothesis. Minimal statistical mechanics - without a past hypothesis - makes a probabilistic prediction, namely that there is a very low but non-zero probability of low entropy initial conditions. Statistical mechanics with a past hypothesis disputes this, saying that instead the low entropy past has a very high probability. We can sharpen this puzzle by thinking about how initial chance functions are related to relative probability in phase space. On the minimal view, the initial chance function Ch¬ph is probability relative to the laws of statistical mechanics (which specify the permissible trajectories through phase space, and allow results about the synchronic measure over the space of possible states to translate into results about how likely various states are to be traversed over time). With the past hypothesis in place, particularly conceived of as a law itself, the initial chance function Chph is phase space probability relative to the laws of statistical mechanics and the past hypothesis. But how could either of these have been chances, if the argument of this paper is correct: for haven't I just argued that only the future is chancy, and there is never a time when the initial conditions lie in the future? Moreover, it is crucial that the correct initial nomic probability function be a chance function, since without that claim, some standard physical reasoning about this situation is deeply puzzling. The reasoning I'm thinking about looks like this: Assume that statistical mechanics with and without the past hypothesis are the two rival options. Assume also that our empirical experience is 29 veridical, so we were in fact in a low entropy initial condition l. We may conclude either that something extremely improbable happened, since Ch¬ph(l) is very small; or that something probable happened, since Chph(l) is very high. If these probability claims involve chances, we may use the standard methodological principle that the occurrence of an outcome which had low chance according to T is disconfirmatory of T to conclude that minimal statistical mechanics is false and that statistical mechanics with the past hypothesis is correct.12 However, if these theories don't give initial chances, this methodological principle doesn't apply - and it is far from clear what to put in its stead that would yield the same conclusion. (Meacham (2005: 287–8) argues, persuasively to my mind, against one prominent alternative, that the probabilities involved are credences constrained by some application of a principle of indifference.) So unless the initial probabilities given by the laws are chances, we cannot explain some orthodox reasoning about physical probability.13 There is a tempting misunderstanding of the arguments I have offered that makes my position on this issue appear untenable. The discussion of §2 suggested that the candidate chance functions are those that can be obtained by conditionalising some initial probability distribution on some time-relative body of information Rt, and this seems to entail that all actual chances are time indexed, and assign trivial chances to outcomes that are the causal antecedents of the presently chancy outcomes, which will, at every time, include the initial conditions. This would entail that initial probability distributions are never chances, particularly not the distribution Ch¬ph which assigns non-trivial probabilities to the actual initial conditions. And this in turn would give rise to the problem of accounting correctly for probabilistic explanation in statistical mechanics. Thankfully, this is not a consequence of the proposal laid out above. Chance functions are not time-indexed, but indexed to certain bodies of information. 12This argument will be resisted by those who think the past hypothesis itself stands in no need of explanation, such as Callender (2004). For them, the right chance theory is Ch¬ph, and they will resist the conclusion that the truth of the past hypothesis disconfirms minimal statistical mechanics. The worry in that case is why accept that we are in a statistical mechanically abnormal universe, rather than a normal one with misleading evidence. But this issue is not settled by these considerations, so I suggest that the argument in the main text is only compelling for those who see the low entropy past as standing in need of explanation. If it does not, then the worry that initial probabilities won't be chances is less pressing in any case. 13Note that we certainly don't need either Chph or Ch¬ph to now be chance functions, in order to make reasonable inferences about which one was the initial chance function. Think about how the reasoning goes in a case I take to be analogous. Suppose I'm holding fixed some facts about coin tossing, and trying to infer whether a given coin is fair from the outcome sequence it has produced. I can certainly say: 'since the chance of the coin landing HHHHHHHHH... was so low if it were fair, and it did land that way, that's good reason for thinking it wasn't (and isn't) fair'. I use the probabilistic predictions of various hypotheses about what the chances were to give me reasons for favouring some hypotheses over others. There is no tension between noting that the present chance of an outcome is trivial, and using its differing earlier chances according to rival theories in combination with its occurrence to confirm one such theory at the expense of another. 30 That information, because it contains information about causes, generally happens to be temporally asymmetric, and this is what generates the temporal asymmetry which supports (I). But not every possible contextually salient body of information has this much content. In particular, the empty body of information can, if context is right, be contextually salient, which ensures that 'chance' in such a context denotes the initial nomic probability function (or whichever such function is appropriate given the body of probability-involving laws salient in that context, since we may be discussing a false theory under a supposition rather than simply making claims about the chances). Why can these initial probabilities given by the laws (or putative laws) be chances, even though they are the chances at no time? Think about the contexts in which we wish to make use of probabilistic claims. Very often we are making predictions about what will happen, at this is the kind of context I have been focussing on in the discussion in §§2–3. But sometimes we are offering probabilistic explanations, and there the relevant chances will often not be the present chances, but chances relative to some other body of causal information. Again, very often this will be the causal information relevant to some previous moment in time, and we will be explaining some past event in terms of the chance it had of occurring at some time prior to its occurrence. But the initial conditions had no causes, and no explanation can be offered of them except in terms of the laws. But if we are in a context where the initial conditions are the appropriate objects of explanation, and we attempt to understand why the initial conditions were as they were, the best we can do is defer to the relevant expert function; and the relevant expert is the chance function, holding fixed just the laws and no other actual information. In such a context, the expert function will be the initial probability function given by the laws, Ch. This is a highly eligible referent, because the null body of causal information is a simple and contextually available body of information. Of course Ch is readily trumped in other circumstances by one of the many ChRc functions as the most appropriate referent of 'chance', but in these special sorts of contexts in which no contingent information about actual history is appropriate (presupposing as it does information that entails the initial conditions without explaining them), the initial probabilities are the most eligible referent of 'chance'. One way to get into such contexts involves contextual accommodation: if explanatory 'why' questions are asked that presuppose the unavailability of information salient in the context, at least sometimes that can remove information from the contextually salient background, and by doing so one can make salient chance functions that assign non-trivial probabilities to past outcomes, even the initial conditions, as appropriate for probabilistic explanation in such contexts. It is difficult to get into such contexts, and never appropriate to address predictive questions 31 within them; the chances appropriate for prediction of future outcomes are all of the sort that trivialise the chances of past outcomes. Earlier we saw that not all relative probabilities can be easily understood as conditional chances at times. But the initial chance function Ch given by the laws can be taken to lie behind all statistical mechanical relative probabilities, which are all conditional chances if the preceding argument is correct. But once again, while all relative probabilities are conditional chances, they are not all chances, in the sense that they are not all eligible referents for 'chance' in some context of use or other - because not all relative chances are obtained by conditionalising initial chance on the sort of information a chance function would be expert with respect to, in a given context. 5 Philosophical Objections to the Triviality of Past Chances The main purely philosophical objections to our thesis have been forcefully made by Hoefer Hoefer, 2007; 2011. Here's how he phrases the challenge: Lewis claims, as do most propensity theorists, that the past is 'no longer chancy'. If A is the proposition that the coin I flipped at noon yesterday lands heads, then the objective chance of A is now either zero or one - depending on how the coin landed. (It landed tails.) Unless one is committed to the 'moving now' conception of time, and the associated view that the past is 'fixed' whereas the future is 'open' (as propensity theorists seem to be...), there is little reason to make chance a time-dependent fact in this way. I prefer the following way of speaking: my coin flip at noon yesterday was an instance of a chance setup with two possible outcomes, each having a definite objective chance. It was a chance event. The chance of heads was 􏷠 ⁄􏷡. So 􏷠 ⁄􏷡 is the objective chance ofA. It still is; the coin flip is and always was a chance event. Being to the past of me-now does not alter that fact, though as it happens I now know A is false. (Hoefer, 2007: 554) Hoefer's discussion raises this question: if we, as philosophically conservative B-theorists, deny the non-perspectival significance of the distinction between past and future, then mustn't we equally repudiate the objective significance of chance if it is dependent on this distinction? As argued in §§2–3, the reason the past at t isn't chancy at t - i.e., isn't assigned non-trivial chances by the chance function at t - is because events in the past of t are not able to be affected by what happens at or after t, or so we actually think. The pastness of past events in itself has no significance; it is the fact that such events are not susceptible to present causal influence that is significant. Chance is time dependent in a very mundane way - since the set of things picked out by the description 'outcomes which have occurred' is different at different times, and it is the outcomes which have occurred which are potentially causally relevant 32 to the presently chancy outcomes, the present chances will change from time to time too. To propose a single probability function as the referent of 'the chance function' at every time is to undo the connections between chance, cause, ability, and prediction. The B theory does not entail anything concerning whether most descriptions are temporally rigid or not - it's perfectly B theoretically acceptable to think that 'the laws of nature' is a temporally rigid description, while 'the prime minister of Australia' is not. The argument that 'the chances' is temporally non-rigid that I have offered above, deriving that non-rigidity from the fact that which outcomes are causally relevant to a given chancy outcome varies from time to time, is completely B theoretically acceptable. We need only appeal to the B theoretic view of tense, since the causally relevant outcomes are, as a matter of actual fact (plausibly), a subset of those which have occurred. 'Past' and 'future' play a role, but we only need perspectival, B-theoretic accounts of pastness and futurity to make sense of time-dependent chance; we don't need A theoretic non-reductionism about The Present. ¦ Hoefer's main target is not our thesis, but the propensity interpretation of probability. He certainly thinks that one cannot be a respectable propensity theorist without endorsing the A theory: we can perhaps cobble together something meant to represent the propensity account, that is block universe compatible. But stripping away all the A-series linked metaphors leaves us with something that has lost so much of its intuitive content, it no longer clearly has anything to do with what we mean by 'objective probabilities' - that is, something about the world that deserves to guide expectations for future events, makes certain frequencies in outcomes more likely than others, perhaps even explains the frequencies we do see, and so on. (Hoefer, 2011: 86) In the absence of the A theory, says Hoefer, there is no content that can be assigned to the notion of a propensity. There may be scope here for an indirect argument against (I), if he can make the claim that it is only our residual, perhaps implicit, commitment to chance having propensity-like aspects that would lead one to endorse the time-dependence of chance. I don't think this argument works, since the only features of chance drawn upon in §§2–3 above were so central to the notion that an theory of chance which failed to capture them would be manifestly defective. Nor am I a friend of propensity theories (Eagle, 2004). But I think Hoefer's argument fails even if we endorse a propensity conception of chance: nothing in that theory is necessarily inconsistent with the B theory. Consider the underlying metaphysics of the propensity theory, which Hoefer thinks requires the A-theory. That metaphysical picture is that there exist 33 probabilistic dispositions, that ground chance ascriptions. It is not the deeply puzzling numerical aspect of propensities that Hoefer objects to, but rather the role of dispositions here, and in particular the distinction between manifested and unmanifested dispositions: If we think of a coin-flipping setup as having a propensity (of strength 􏷠 ⁄ 􏷡) to make events unfold a certain way (coin-lands-heads), then once that propensity has done its work, it is all over. The past is fixed, inert, and free of propensities (now that they have all 'sprung' and done their work, so to speak). (Hoefer, 2007: 554–5) But it is not correct that dispositions require A theoretic distinctions between past and future. Take a simple disposition like 'fragility'. Suppose a vase is fragile at t, which explains in part why it breaks at t′. Of course the B-theorist eternalist should say that the disposition at t exists at t′, but it won't be true that the vase is fragile at t′ - it's already broken. So the way in which the dispositional property makes disposition ascriptions true can't be this simple minded proposal: if α's disposition toMwhen S exists at t, then 'αMs when S' is true at t. Rather, we should have this more sophisticated proposal: if α's disposition to M when S is instantiated at t, then 'α Ms when S' is true at t. Every B theorist will need time-dependent property instantiation: otherwise they could not explain the dependence of total truth on the distribution of properties over the block universe (consider in this connection Lewis' doctrine of Humean Supervenience). The propensity theorist too may perfectly legitimately appeal to this notion. Let the propensity to land heads when tossed tonight be instantiated today but fail to be instantiated tomorrow, after the toss lands tails. Why isn't this enough of a change in the propensities to ensure the time-dependence of chances (since the chance at a time depends on the propensities instantiated at that time)? Part of this may have to do with the existence of closely related propensities, such as the generic propensity to land heads when tossed. Perhaps Hoefer thinks this is what propensity theorists accept, and thus he finds it possible for them to deny the chanciness of the past only if what's true (simpliciter) about the propensities changes over time. But this won't help, because this propensity won't change over time in the right way, so can't ever have been what the propensity theorist had in mind. In sum, even if we falsely supposed that time-dependent chance can be motivated only given a propensity theory of chance, that would not require us to endorse the A theory. The time-dependence of chances is entirely neutral with respect to the A theory/B theory debate. I see no philosophical objection here to the picture of time-dependent chance articulated above. We have every reason to think that chance varies over time, and in particular, actually varies in such a way as to ensure that past outcomes are no longer a matter of chance. 34 Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford Exeter College, Oxford [email protected] References Albert, David Z. (2000), Time and Chance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bigelow, John, Collins, John and Pargetter, Robert (1993), 'The Big Bad Bug: What are the Humean's Chances?' British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 44: pp. 443–62. Callender, Craig (2004), 'There is No Puzzle about the Low Entropy Past'. In Chris Hitchcock (ed.), Contemporary Debates in the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, chap. 12. ---- (2011), 'Thermodynamic Asymmetry in Time'. In Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, fall 2011 ed. DeRose, Keith (1991), 'Epistemic Possibilities'. Philosophical Review, vol. 100: pp. 581–605. Eagle, Antony (2004), 'Twenty-One Arguments Against Propensity Analyses of Probability'. Erkenntnis, vol. 60: pp. 371–416. ---- (2007), 'Pragmatic Causation'. In Huw Price and Richard Corry (eds.), Causation, Physics and the Constitution of Reality: Russell's Republic Revisited, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 159–90. ---- (2011), 'Deterministic Chance'. Noûs, vol. 45: pp. 269–99. Giere, Ronald N. (1973), 'Objective Single-Case Probabilities and the Foundations of Statistics'. In Patrick Suppes et al. (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, vol. 4, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 467–83. Glynn, Luke (2011), 'A Probabilistic Analysis of Causation'. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 62: pp. 343–92. Hájek, Alan (1997), ''Mises Redux'-Redux: Fifteen Arguments Against Finite Frequentism'. Erkenntnis, vol. 45: pp. 209–227. Hall, Ned (2004), 'Two Mistakes About Credence and Chance'. In Frank Jackson and Graham Priest (eds.), Lewisian Themes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 94–112. 35 Handfield, Toby (2012), A Philosophical Guide to Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handfield, Toby and Wilson, Alastair (forthcoming), 'Chance and Context'. In this volume. Hoefer, Carl (2007), 'The Third Way on Objective Probability: A Sceptic's Guide to Objective Chance'. Mind, vol. 116: pp. 549–96. ---- (2011), 'Time and Chance Propensities'. In Craig Callender (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Time, Oxford: OUP, pp. 68–90. Joyce, James M. (2007), 'Epistemic Deference: The Case of Chance'. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 107: pp. 187–206. Kratzer, Angelika (1981), 'The Notional Category of Modality'. In Paul Portner and Barbara H. Partee (eds.), Formal Semantics: The Essential Readings, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 289–323. ---- (1991), 'Modality'. In Arnim von Stechow and Dieter Wunderlich (eds.), Semantics: An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 639–50. Lewis, David (1976), 'The Paradoxes of Time Travel'. American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 13: pp. 145–52. ---- (1980), 'A Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance'. In Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–132. ---- (1994), 'Humean Supervenience Debugged'. In Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 224–46. Loewer, Barry (2001), 'Determinism and Chance'. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol. 32: pp. 609–20. Meacham, Christopher J. G. (2005), 'Three Proposals Regarding a Theory of Chance'. Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 19: pp. 281–307. Mellor, D. H. (1971), The Matter of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Portner, Paul (2009), Modality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, Huw (1994), 'A Neglected Route to Realism about Quantum Mechanics'. Mind, vol. 103: pp. 303–36. Schaffer, Jonathan (2000), 'Overlappings: Probability-Raising Without Causation'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 78: pp. 40–46. 36 ---- (2007), 'Deterministic Chance?' British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, vol. 58: pp. 113–40. van Fraassen, Bas C. (1980), The Scientific Image. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vetter, Barbara (2010), Potentiality and Possibility. DPhil thesis, University of Oxford. Williamson, Timothy (2000), Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ---- (2008), The Philosophy of Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell.

To appear in Crowther, T. and Mac Cumhaill, C. (eds.) Perceptual Ephemera. Forthcoming Oxford University Press Please cite published version Nonsense and Visual Evanescence1 Clare Mac Cumhaill §1 Preamble We can say that things 'look see-through' – a crystal, a chiffon sleeve and that they 'look transparent' – for instance, clear water. But is it intelligible to say that something 'looks invisible'? It might be thought that a philosopher of perception should have nothing to say about what cannot be seen – the invisible and, further, that whatever is invisible, or insensible, cannot be said to 'look' that way. But there are contexts in which it seems that 'looks invisible' statements can be intelligibly used. Fairytale To the wise, the Emperor's new clothes look golden. To the foolish and incompetent, they 'look invisible'. Windowpane A pane of glass is polished to perfection. No glimmers or glints are discernible. There are no glittering lines to give away the presence of an edge. The windowpane 'looks invisible'. For the philosopher of perception in the grip of her favourite theory, there is nothing to say about such statements other than to remark on their nonsensicality – or on the foolishness and incompetence of those who use them. Such confidence may stem from a range of assumptions about what can be seen – visible colour and shape together with a conception of how we should understand the nature of looks: if looks are constituted by visible colour and shape nothing can 'look invisible'. But why should we care if statements that we find intelligible when used on some occasion, turn out to be nonsensical when viewed through the theoretical prism of some bit of philosophy? One response is that we need not care at all. Such statements are to be ignored. We keep the philosophy in denouncing the appearance of intelligibility. In this paper, I explore a different response by introducing a phenomenon that is so far untheorized in philosophy of perception: what I shall call visual evanescence. As I explain, the phenomenon of visual evanescence helps create conceptual room for a treatment of looks statements not explicit in the contemporary literature, one which takes its cue from the philosophy of perception of G.E.M. Anscombe1 as well as the treatment of concepts found in Peter Geach's Mental Acts.2 For Geach, a concept is a capacity to use an expression in a judgment, where concepts are subjective capacities that may be more or less sophisticated in having more or less structure. On this view, a perceiver who is able to use the expression 'invisible' in judging that she is well-hidden may not be able to use it of figures on the horizon that she cannot discern, or of particles in Brownian motion. Her grasp of the concept may be purely phenomenalistic it may be understood simply in terms of not seeing. But there are different ways of not seeing and her concept of the 'invisible' – her capacity to use that expression in judgments – may not extend to capture all those ways. In contrast, a perceiver that can use the expression 'invisible' in conjunction with 'looks', where 'looks' introduces a form of description – a description that has application in the current sensory context – possesses a concept that has a degree of internal complexity, as well as a 'background' or network of supporting concepts. Such a perceiver possesses the concept of a basic visible property – of colour and shape. She has mastered the use of 'looks' as introducing a gloss on 'what is seen', where 'what is seen' can be offered in response to the question 'what do you see?'. She manifests self-consciousness in being able to respond to that question, typically, in English, using the firstperson pronoun. She has learnt that the direct object of the sensation verb can be used to report the 'seeing' of not only of 'material objects' of sensation, as Anscombe calls them, but 'intentional objects' of sensation too. Both 'objects' are to be made sense of grammatically – they are direct objects of the sensation verb and do not pick out any kind of entity. Nonetheless, such a perceiver will have a naïve ontology of experience in being able to use such description intelligibly. She knows that 'what is seen' typically goes beyond the visible – we see bicycles made in China, people who skipped breakfast. She knows that 'what is seen' flat tyres, purple scarves can be seen by perceivers like herself. She knows that the colours of things fade, that she is apt to mismatch the colours of garments, and that some things of which we have experience are essentially perceptual – clothing, for instance. In the first part of the paper, I set out the phenomenon visual evanescence and I counter some early scepticism. I then set out the challenge that 'looks invisible' poses for two ontological treatments of the nature of looks – sensationalist and objectivist treatments, as I call them. This in turn helps explain the relevance of the charge of nonsensicality and the temptation to make it. Finally, I make fully explicit the phenomenology that renders intelligible statements of the sort 'looks invisible'. Something can be said to 'look invisible' when one sees or appears to see the entirety of the space that the 'invisible' thing occupies. Such a space 'looks empty' while being full. I close by spelling out some lessons from evanescence and I begin with some history. §2. Visual Evanescence In 1896, Abbott H. Thayer, so-called 'Father of Camouflage' attended the annual meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union at Harvard Zoological Musuem. Thayer was there to demonstrate a phenomenon he had set out early that year in a paper published in the Union's journal, The Auk. Naturalists have long recognised mimicry the fact that the colouration of animal bodies tends to mimic some other visible pattern; bark, lichen, dead leaves on a forest floor. But Thayer's 'newly discovered law', he claimed, rather than making the animal look like something else, makes it "cease to appear to exist at all". The italics are his.3 The 'law' Thayer claims to have discovered (now called 'Thayer's Law) pertains to the fact that the dorsal part of the body of many animals is darker than the ventral part. Such animal bodies are counter-shaded. In the paper, he illustrated the effect of such variegation in colour with an inksketch: Figure 14.1: From A.H. Thayer (1896, p.125) Image out of copyright. Sunlight typically falls on the dorsal part of the animal - "those parts which tend to be most lighted by the sky's light" (p.125) while the ventral part is bathed in darkness (B). The effect of counter-shading or 'nature's paint', shown in A, is to 'balance out' this uneven pattern of reflectance, a pattern typically displayed by solid bodies, so as to yield an illusion of monochrome flatness (C). Thayer's 1896 demonstration was intended to make plain the phenomenological consequences of countershading. In front of the audience assembled outside the museum, he retrieved a number of sweet potatoes from a sack and, mounting them on wire stilts, placed them in the noon sunlight. Then, using white oil paint, he carefully 'counter-shaded' the lower and underside of some of the potatoes. The result? Those that were 'countershaded' disappeared completely from view or, as I will put it, they visually evanesced.4 The image below, first published in Thayer's 1908 Concealing Colouration in the Animal Kingdom, shows a photographic record from another demonstration. The original caption reads 'two birdshaped models – the one on the left monochrome, the one on the right obliteratively shaded' (my emphasis, Thayer 1908, p. 250). Figure 14.2 From G. Thayer (1908, p. 250). Image out of copyright. Two ducks then are purported to be the subject of the photo, though only one has been countershaded. This suggests a third case to add to Fairytale and Windowpane. Evanescence The duck on the right 'looks invisible'. In his paper Thayer in fact describes the perceptual effect of countershading a little differently: The result [viz. of countershading] is that their gradation of light and shade, by which opaque solid objects manifest themselves to the eye, is effaced at every point, the cancellation being as complete at one point as another....and the spectator seems to see right through the space really occupied by an opaque animal. (1896, p. 126). Later he notes that the patterns on the animal are: "a picture of such a background as one might see if the animal were transparent" (p. 128). Thayer's practice of using stencils partly recapitulates this phenomenology. Stencils were used as a diagnostic to isolate the 'background' that would require 'picturing' at a particular location so as to effect visual evanescence. If the cut-out region were filled with a counter-shaded animal, the animal would seem to vanish. Figure. 14.3. Stencils used as 'background picturing' diagnostic. From Thayer (1918), reproduced in Behrens (2009, p.500). The original caption reads: 'A brook scene photographed through a duck-shaped stencil'. Image out of copyright. The archives of his work at the Smithsonian Institute contain thousands such stencils. What little mention of camouflage there is in the recent literature in philosophy of perception has tended to focus on background picturing, or mimicry, alone proceeding, that is, without consideration of countershading. For instance, Susanna Siegel introduces us to Franco. Franco likes doing stunts in the sky and when painted blue, to a perceiver S: Franco...is like a chameleon: he blends in with his surroundings to the point where he is, to S, indistinguishable from them. If Franco were painted a different color, or if instead of hanging still he moved around.....he probably would bring about a change in S's visual phenomenology, and S would be able to see him. But the fact remains: S does not see him in the world in which he is painted blue and hangs still. (2006, p. 434). The surface of Franco matches the sky, in this case through a form of occlusion, namely with blue paint. In this case then, merely matching the background (and hanging still) is sufficient to realise the function of camouflage – to avoid being seen. Notice, however, that in Thayer's 1908 document above, the duck on the left is the same colour as the dirt on which it stands. It nonetheless shows up in the photo. Mimicry, or mere 'background picturing' then is not sufficient to effect evanescence, and perhaps our reluctance to wholly endorse Siegel's conclusion is attuned to this fact. Since we can't visually discriminate Franco, we might agree that he is not seen. If pressed, however, we might just as likely reverse our opinion after all, Franco's surface contributes to our visual phenomenology. Anscombe's distinction between material and intentional objects of sensation as outlined in her difficult (and for some mysterious5) 'The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature' helps makes sense of this reversal. I sketch this briefly as a way of motivating the challenge that Evanescence poses, at least insofar as it appears to supply a context in which the use of 'looks invisible' is intelligible. I consider Fairytale and Windowpane much later, in §5. On Anscombe's grammatical treatment of verbs of sensation, the direct object of the verb can be given a material or intentional reading in a way that closely, if not entirely, mirrors intentional description in philosophy of action. While many descriptions may truthfully apply to an event that is an action, only some of them are intentional descriptions, descriptions 'under which' the person is acting and which specify what she is doing what she knows she is doing without observation; without having to check or infer from what is happening. Likewise, though many descriptions may truthfully apply to the variety of things and events that a perceiver sees, only some of them are descriptions under which the perceiver sees what is seen. Such descriptions are of the sort that the perceiver might give in response to the question: 'What do you see?' Since S would not return 'Franco' to the question 'What do you see?', nor even 'a man painted blue', we can assume, with Siegel, that S does not see Franco. Even so, since 'a patch of sky' is seen at the place where Franco is in fact suspended where here 'a patch of sky' is the intentional object of the sensation verb it seems that we can, after all, allow that S sees Franco. We can say that S sees Franco in that she sees, at a place, 'a patch of sky' which is in fact6 Franco painted sky-blue and hanging still. Evanescence does not so easily admit this intentional/material cleavage. The subject of the putative experience – the visible animal body through having a peculiar visible profile, one which I will characterise in §3, disappears. It evanesces. But this being so, there is, it might be thought, no appearance to speak of, no thing to see. Rather, if there is any description at all 'under which' the animal seen 'is seen', it is, perversely, something akin to that given by Thayer above, and which, some forty years later Zoologist Hugh Cott, in his landmark Adaptative Colouration in Animals, reframes approvingly: In the words of A.H. Thayer, the effect of the obliterative gradation of light and shade is 'to render the creature's actual surface unrecognizable as the surface of any object or objects of the immediate foreground, causing it to pass for an empty space through which the background is seen' (underlining mine, 1940, p. 37, here quoting from Thayer 1909) We have allowed that Franco is seen under the description 'a patch of sky', But can the evanescent animal body really be 'seen' under the description suggested by Cott? Can it be 'seen' under the description 'empty region'? It seems it can't. While we can make sense of Franco passing for a 'patch of sky' and hence of our seeing him in that we see 'a patch of sky', we cannot make sense of our seeing the evanescent animal body in that we see an 'empty region' at the place at which the animal is located. This does not mean however that the question 'what do you see'? is, as the Wittgensteinean might put it, 'refused application', for one can intelligibly respond 'I see nothing'. Compare: 'Nothing' is an intelligible answer to 'what do you have in your pockets?' But the question is refused where the response is 'I have no pockets!'7 Similarly, saying 'I have my eyes closed' or 'I am not looking' is to refuse the question 'What do you see?' 'I see nothing' does not. The perceiver does see. It's just that she sees nothing at the place at which the visible animal body is. This hints at the distinction with the Franco case. A parallel with the case of action helps draw this out further. By waving her purple scarf, Mary catches Joe's attention. In that she is waving her scarf, she catches his attention. Here the 'in that' locution should be read as applying to things that Mary does. This being so, although it is true that the air in the vicinity of the scarf is being moved about as a result of Mary's scarf-waving, 'moving the air' isn't a description under which Mary is acting. It is not the case that Mary is moving the air in that she is waving her scarf. The case of Franco has a similar 'in that' explanatory form or structure. In seeing the patch of sky, it is true that S sees Franco. Though 'Franco' isn't the intentional description under which the thing seen – Franco – is seen, S sees Franco in that she sees a patch of blue. Evanescence is different. It cannot be said that S sees the animal body in that she sees an empty region. The animal body evanescing at a place and time is rather more like the movement of the air. How so? The animal body evanesces at a time and place because a biologically-apt perceiver is exercising her capacity of sight at that time and place (just as the air moves about because Mary is excitedly waving her scarf). This explains why the question 'What do you see?' still has application. I say a more about the mechanisms behind evanescence in §2 this will help to waylay early scepticism concerning the very plausibility of Evanescence. For now, let us probe a little further the idea that the 'in that' locution, and hence the intentional/material distinction, does not apply so readily in cases of evanescence. For Anscombe, part of the concept of seeing is that one can see sensible things at places, things that are available for other people to see at those places, the character of which is hence up for discussion. Her under-cited 'The Subjectivity of Sensation' spins from consideration of a single case which recognises this: "Doctors match blood samples with colours on a scale in order to judge how far someone is anaemic" (SS, p.44). The doctors are assessing how far someone is anaemic in that they are matching the colour of a blood-stained swatch with a colour on a chart. But "there is such a thing as competence" (ibid.), says Anscombe, and the doctor may doubt his acuity and call on an assistant to check his judgment. That the doctor calls on his assistant shows that he assumes not only that the assistant can see whatever colours he, the doctor, sees – the esse of colours is not then conceived to be their percepi but also that the relevant objects of sight – the colours of the swatch and chart are somewhere and so are available to be seen by other perceivers. In the case of evanescence, I have said that we cannot plausibly say that S sees the visible animal body in that she sees an empty space. We can now say why. Unlike the Franco case, S does not see anything sensible at a place that, by her lights, would be available to be seen by other perceivers exercising their capacity for sight. For instance, based on what she sees – nothing at a place she cannot call on anyone else to look at that.8 And this is so, even if it is the case that the animal body is in fact seen by other perceivers. There is, then, no plausible construal on which we can deploy the expression "see" to express the judgment that S sees the animal body in that she sees an empty region'. Anscombe describes the 'material use of the sensation verb' as a use which demands a material object of the verb – it cannot give a merely intentional object.9 As such the 'in that' relation which holds between the intentional and material object and which is akin to the kind of calculative order that exists in the case of intentional action (in that Mary is waving her scarf, she is catching Joe's attention) can only apply in such material uses. The perceiver herself, Mary say, must said to see the relevant material object of sight, and this is the case even if the descriptions under which it is seen are vague and indeterminate. Cast differently, the first-person character of the concept of seeing necessitates that Mary "see" something sensible in a sense that would enable her to respond to the question "What do you see?" We have noted that saying "nothing" is not to refuse the question – Mary is exercising her capacity to see. Even so, Mary cannot be said to see the evanescent animal body in that she sees an empty region. This helps motivate the challenge of visual evanescence insofar as it provides a context in which, as I claim, the use of "looks invisible" is, if perversely so, intelligible. Thayer's demonstration required people to look at the visible objects that he was diligently countershading – sweet potatoes and decoy ducks. His audience outside the museum knew that visible bodies were present, bodies which thereafter disappeared and came, it might be said, if contestably, to "look invisible". The question I want to probe is how can anyone intelligibly say so. If no visible thing is seen, either intentionally or materially, and the perceiver claims to see instead an empty region, is the perceiver not speaking plain nonsense in saying that the thing which they do not see "looks invisible". The same point can be put another way. "What do you see?" has application. The answer is nothing. So how can nothing intelligibly be said to look any way? I explore this charge in the second half of the paper. First, I dispense with some early scepticism, as well as setting out in what sense evanescence is more akin to the moving of the air on the occasion of scarf-waving. §3. Early Scepticism Though the first premise of this paper is that we take the descriptive phenomenology of field theorists like Thayer and Cott seriously, there will, of course, be philosophers who are happier to rely on their own perceptual histories. A different, less methodological worry, may relate to Thayer's photographic document – is it genuine? I leave this aside. Instead, I focus on the simple incredulity that might attend the idea that an opaque, visible, solid body can 'pass for' an empty region at all. In this section, I offer a brief, empirical excursus so as to allay early scepticism. This helps explain what goes on when a biologically-apt perceiver is exercising its capacity to see, at a time and place where an 'evanescent' animal body is located – a body with a visible profile that is apt to evanesce for such a biologically-apt perceiver. This in turn will help sharpen my analysis of the putative origin of the apparent nonsensicality of "looks invisible" in §4. Recall Thayer's descriptive phenomenology: When an animal body evanesces "the spectator seems to see right through the space really occupied by an opaque animal", where the patterns on the animal's surface are "a picture of such a background as one might see if the animal were transparent" (p. 128). This description suggests a way of addressing the sceptical worry straight off. The opaque animal body looks see-through or transparent. As I will explain, there are a number of features of the visible of surface of the animal body that can be recruited to explain this descriptive phenomenology. First, transparency. Psychologists of transparency distinguish between regions in the visual array that form 'Xjunctions' and those that form 'T-junctions'. X-junctions are defined by the presence, in the image, of four contiguous regions with specific intensity relationships which elicit the perception of transparency (see Stoner 1999, p.846). (a) (b) (c) Figure 14.4. From Stoner (1999), in Wilson, Robert A., and Frank C. Keil, (eds.), The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS), Figure 1 (a & b), p. 846: X-Junction; Figure 2 (c), p. 846: T-Junction, © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by permission of The MIT Press. To illustrate, notice that the regions labelled 'r|' and 'r in (a) and (b) above have the same luminance value. In (b), however, the intensity values of adjacent regions and their distribution differ: an Xjunction is formed. Such a constellation of intensity values leads the visual system to infer that two surfaces in different depth planes are present, the composite luminance values of which yield the value of 'r'. In the psychological literature, this 'colour split' (Casati 2009) is called 'scission'.10 It might be wondered whether a scission-type effect is operative in cases of animal evanescence. Two considerations suggest it might be. The evolved effect of background picturing is to ape the appearance of the kinds of surfaces that would tend to present behind the animal – this is what Thayer's stencils teach. There is seeming if not genuine spatial ordering. Second, transparent media typically have homogeneous luminosity profiles – they are film-like. But, as Thayer's sketch illustrates, this is precisely the effect that countershading induces; it renders the visible surface of the animal luminously homogenous or filmic. A plate from Cott (1940) illustrates this phenomenology. Figure 14.5. 'Bush Buck', from Cott (1940, p.48). Image courtesy of the Cott Archives, Cambridge Zoological Museum. The 'bush buck' is countershaded. White spots, mimicking dappled light, are scattered across its body, which thereby seems to possess a holographic, de-substantiated quality that may visually strike one as tending toward evanescence – the region the deer occupies may be apprehended as a region through which the background is visible, but which, like that background, is in shade. Even so, appearing perceptually transparent does not yet involve "ceasing to appear to exist at all" – and this, recall, was Thayer's boast. What more is needed? Perceptual transparency requires the spatial ordering of two surfaces in three dimensions (at least in ecological situations). Two surfaces then are seen. Borrowing some familiar idiom from pictorial aesthetics, there is, we might say, a kind of twofold seeing. In the pictorial case, the notion of 'foldedness' applies since despite pictorial experience being twofold (one sees the surface of the canvas and the objects 'seen in' the surface), there is only one opaque, visible surface present that of the canvas.11 Evanescence, though close to the pictorial case, is different. Like the canvas, there is, in cases of evanescence, only one surface present – the surface of the body of the cryptically coloured animal. In cases of perfect or complete evanescence however, the elicited perception must not, after all, be twofold– that is, the animal must not look transparent. Rather, in the manner of a perfect trompe d'oeil where the surface of the canvas is completely visually elided, the animal body must evanesce entirely. The elicited perception must, let's say, be single-fold. But this suggests what must be added to 'looking transparent' in order to 'look invisible': the elision of all X-junctions at a place, an effect that various sorts of differential blending patterns have adapted to realise.12 'Disruptive' markings, for instance, are those that have been selected to erase, blur, or 'break up' and so 'rupture' the visible boundary of the creature; the "tell-tale appearance of form" (Cott 1940, p. 48).13 Figure 14.6 Disruptive 'marginal' patterns on the Scalloped Oak moth (Cott, 1940, p.76). Notice that the markings link body parts that are otherwise spatially separated. Once conjoined however, they sketch the outline, and so appearance, of something else: bark or lichen. Image courtesy of the Cott Archives, Cambridge Zoological Museum. There are then a number of visible features of the visible surface of the animal body which contribute to the possibility of evanescence at a place. The animal is counter-shaded, it 'pictures' its canonical background, and displays differential blending and disruptive coloration that leads to the elision of any X-junctions at a place. Such are the mechanisms that realise the function of camouflage. The biologically-apt perceiver does not "see" the animal in crypsis, where "see" in its material use demands a material object of the sensation verb. Nonetheless, it remains the case that in exercising her capacity of sight at that place, a scission-like process occurs, a process we should assume is typical for perceivers of her kind. We might say that it is just the case that this is what happens when the capacity is exercised at that time and place, just as air-moving is what happens when Mary waves her scarf. Naturally, this explanation is only a philosopher's sketch and a speculative one at that. More important, however, is what it illustrates. The explanation I have offered adverts to basic visible properties, those of colour and shape. Such properties are available to "see" at places. Since, however, we take it that the esse of colours is not their percipi even though "we get to know" such sensible properties by seeing (IS, p.14) and since we who understand the terms 'colour' and 'shape' have a non-phenomenalistic grasp of such concepts, we can make sense, once informed, of how it is that something with a structured, visible coloration pattern and shape can nonetheless visually evanesce and pass instead for an empty region. Evanescence is not mysterious from a mechanistic point of view. So why might we be reluctant to accept the intelligibility of 'looks invisible' reports? I explore the source of such resistance in the next section. §4. Nonsense Suppose, after Geach, that we treat a concept as a capacity to use an expression in a judgment. On this view, concepts are subjective capacities, for individuals will vary in the extent to which they can so use a given expression. A child that has a phenomenalistic conception of the visible has a phenomenalistic conception of the invisible. Young children hide in full view behind their hands. They may judge themselves "invisible", and even have a nascent conception of a visible thing as something can be known by sight (this is why they cover their eyes). As we have noted however, a non-phenomenalistic conception of the visible is a requirement on the intelligible use of the sensation verb "see", the primary application of which is material. For what can be "seen", recall, is available to seen by others, even if it cannot be seen by someone (or anyone) on occasion, perhaps because it is too small, or too far away.14 Still, having such a nonphenomenalistic conception of the visible does not make complicit a non-phenomenalistic conception of the invisible, though happily such a grasp is not so difficult to come by. Every child after a certain age can characterise the invisibility that Windowpane captures: there are things that we can touch (or crash or walk into), and which hence are there, but which we cannot see. Those things are invisible, even when we are looking. Frege claimed to describe 'the mind', not a particular mind. The Geach/Anscombe tack is similar, if slightly divergent. Though concepts, unlike Fregean Begriffe, are subjective, they are also human. A human concept is built up out all the uses that it has. The human concept of the invisible is thus made up of phenomenalistic uses and of those that are not. That the concept is used on an occasion, however, requires that its use on that occasion be intelligible. This is because intelligibility is a demand on the possibility of judging (and a concept, recall, is a capacity to use an expression in a judgment). Geach has it that a requirement on a thought counting as a judgment is that its content can be put into the oratio obliqua form. That is to say, its gist can be reported with a that-clause. But the gist of what does not make sense – nonsense – cannot be reported. I pick up this thought later. For now, a gloss on 'looks' both in its use as a sensory appearance verb and in its nominalised form. Recent literature notes that the appearance verb 'look' can be used evidentially or nonevidentially, where this distinction likely to be pragmatic. In the evidential case, the sensation verb is used to gesture at sensory evidence for the adjective or adjectival phrasing applying to the grammatical subject, though without committing the speaker to the truth of the proposition that would be thereby be expressed. In the non-evidential case, the focus is rather on the sensory appearance of the grammatical subject – the way of looking the grammatical subject has. Philosophers have also isolated different senses or uses of the appearance verb, notably the distinction between phenomenal, comparative and epistemic senses or uses of 'looks', a division due to Chisholm and after him Jackson, and which many contemporary philosophers have embraced.15 Whether such philosophers have succeeded in identifying different senses of the verb however, the taxonomy is indicative at least of a form of complexity in our use of the appearance verb. For expediency, I only jot these down. The epistemic sense reports on how things look to be and is often followed by predicatival as if clauses. The comparative sense or use suggests a visible similarity between the grammatical subject and the content of the predicatival clause, and is often followed by predicatival like clauses. The phenomenal sense is said to be followed by expressions for 'phenomenal concepts' such as shape or colour, or distance relations.16 Martin (2010) argues that almost all uses are comparative, even in the absence of any explicit comparative markers. I briefly discuss his proposal later. Added to this complexity in the use of looks is a tendency to use looks so as to mark an appearance/reality distinction, though, as Anscombe notes, in saying that something looks a certain way, the primary intended use of the appearance verb is to give a description that would be true of the thing seen. Here the range of descriptions is vast, but of those that narrowly describe basic sensory properties like colour and shape, since such terms describe properties that we get to know through sight, it follows that giving a true description is giving a description of the appearance that the thing has. Despite this we commonly look at, and describe, things that, as we may say, 'look' differently to how they are. Mary's scarf looks vermilion under streetlight. Turning to the nominalised form, it should already be clear that the capacity to use the expression 'looks' in nominalised form – as in 'x has a z-look, or a look of z' – requires a degree of conceptual sophistication. A non-phenomenalistic grasp on the concept of the visible is needed, as is an appreciation the 'respects' in which various visible things can be the same or different. Colour is one primitive respect. Revisit the doctor's procedure. Says Anscombe: Now why do we say the reds are the same....I suggest that there isn't exactly a reason, a justification. It is rather that our language just does go like that. Colours that keep on looking the same to the same eye, against the same backgrounds, and in the same light and orientation, are the same. (SS, p.47) Colour is a respect in which things can look the same or have the same look, but there are manifold other 'respects', attention to which is often a matter of instruction or requires guidance. This partly explains why the use of looks locutions typically has a point. We can describe how things look so that others can thereafter recognise the things described or come to know the appearance pointed out ('This one looks rotten' 'Let me see'). But sameness is not a matter of identity. Mary may mistake her meeting place with Joe, though the street-corner looks in all respects as he described it. Sometimes, we can get others to see what we see and which we may think is available to be seen, by reporting how things look to us. Such happenings and reportings are quotidian and ordinary, but the use of 'looks invisible' is not. Still, Fairytale, Windowpane and Evanescence appear to be plausible scenarios in which its use is intelligible. Why then might the charge of nonsense compel? Leave aside the thought that what cannot be seen cannot be looked at and assume a nonphenomenalistic conception of visible properties. As I will show, the difficulty is not so much with one's conception of the visible – though this, as we shall see, remains a factor as with an appreciation of the notion of 'looks' which is ontological in flavour, together with what Cora Diamond characterises as a natural view of nonsense. On a natural view of nonsense, nonsense is understood to issue from the concatenation of linguistic expressions, the meaning of each of which is fixed in isolation and which, when concatenated or strung together, leads to a kind of mismatch and so a breakdown in meaning, typically in the form of a category mistake. 'Caesar is a prime number' is a canonical example. Intelligibility then is settled at the level of the linguistic string, where the meaning of component terms is determined independently of the context of the use of the string and independently of the meaning of the sentence as whole. Caesar, a man, cannot be a 'number' – the predicate is, in Annette Baier's words 'unsuitable'.17 It is easy to guess at how 'looks invisible' might be deemed nonsensical on such a natural approach. I do that shortly. First, it is worth pausing to consider what kinds of things the expression 'looks' could anyway stand for. The simplest construal of the meaning of 'looks' is one on which looks are analogised to sounds and smells, something the nominalisation of looks makes seem natural. On this view, looks, like sounds and smells, are sensory individuals that are constituted by sensory properties, individuals that the word 'looks' might be thought to stand for. Call this a sensationalist construal of looks. On a sensationalist construal, and given a certain use, namely where the appearance verb is used non-evidentially to introduce an appearance (a 'look') which the predicatival complement specifies or glosses, it should be no surprise that 'looks invisible' should be found to generate nonsense. No sensory individual can lack sensory properties. Jackson's (1977) notorious analysis of the underlying logical form of the phenomenal sense of looks can perhaps be regarded as sensationalist in spirit (no sense datum can be insensible).18 The sensationalist construal of looks treats of looks ontologically – looks are sensory individuals or entities. An objectivist construal of looks, as I will call it, also recommends an ontological approach, one which, as I will show, is also apt to make inevitable the charge of nonsensicality, at least when yoked to a naturalistic conception of meaning. Recent work by MGF Martin might be read in this vein.19 On one way of reading Martin's parsimonious treatment of looks, looks are identified with basic intrinsic properties which objects anyway have for Martin the observational properties of colour and shape along with the non-observational property of visible solidity. Objects are conceived to have 'ways of looking' where a 'way of looking' is - [s]ome aspect in which it resembles or fails to resemble any other object....The standard list of observational properties in the visual realm gives us a group of properties which are such that objects can be grouped as more or less similar with respect to them, and the presence or absence of which properties for visually perceptible objects are visually detectible....the various ways of looking it may share or contrast with other objects are just conjunctions or disjunctions of the observational properties it has. (emphasis mine, 2010, p. 206) Together with this parsimonious ontology of looks, Martin advances a minimalist semantics for looks statements. Unlike those philosophers who harness the three-fold distinction noted earlier, Martin suggests that almost all non-evidential uses of looks statements are comparative. While the appearance verb in the non-evidential use introduces a 'look' understood in the parsimonious, non-sensationalist way sketched above, the predicatival complement that specifies that appearance is implicitly comparative. Martin's minimalist semantics is intricate. For instance, 'that coin looks elliptical' is excavated as: $s (Has (that coin, s) Ù (Look(s) Ù SIM(C('elliptical', Look, k), (s))) Here, s refers to a state that the coin is in. Just as the coin, tuppence say, weighs a certain amount – 7.12g – and just as that weight is a way that the coin is or a state that the coin is in, the coin also has a way of looking or a looks state, where this is also a way that the 2p coin is. Likewise, just as a metric – grams specifies the weight of the coin, the predicate of predicates SIM provides a metric in the case of looks. The metric is a comparative. The coin looks relevantly similar to the way elliptical things look given a certain contextual restriction, k. C, finally, designates a function which returns for the lexical item 'elliptical', on the execution of a certain psychological operation which Martin calls getting-the-characteristic, a set of characteristics or kinds of ways of looking given the contextual restriction, k.20 Adopting Martin's parsimonious ontology of looks, together with his minimalist semantics spells trouble for 'looks invisible', at least on a natural view of nonsense. Why? If looks are identified with basic visible properties, intrinsic properties that objects anyway have, and if 'looks' in the non-evidential use introduces the look of an object which the complement specifies and where the underlying semantics are as Martin proposes, then nothing, surely, can 'look invisible'. Even if 'invisible' can specify a metric which indicates a peculiarly negative way of looking – viz. all visually detectible properties are absent – it might be doubted that there is any characteristic which the function C would return that is associated with that negative way of looking. On either a sensationalist or objectivist account of 'looks' then, on certain uses and coupled with a natural view of nonsense, there is no way of making sense of the 'looks invisible' locution. The predicate is just 'unsuitable'. There are other ontological treatments of looks which I do not consider, or even propose to mention here; for one, the idea that looks are to be identified not with the intrinsic properties of objects, but with manifestations of dispositions to appear in certain conditions.21 Instead I want to compare ontologically-motivated approaches with the grammatical approach that I draw from Anscombe's sophisticated philosophy of perception. The dialectical pairing of the sensationalist and objectivist mimics her opposition and reconciliation of the various insights of the mid-century ordinary language philosopher and earlier sense-datum theorists who are her interlocutors in the 'Intentionality of Sensation'. Even on a grammatical treatment, however, 'looks invisible' is not entirely straightforward to account for. While on the ontological approach, the predicatival complement is understood, in the nonevidential case, to specify a look, where this is understood to have a nature (to be sensory say, or to be conjunction of observational properties), on the grammatical approach the appearance verb 'looks' introduces a form of description, namely one that applies to the object of sight, where this is the direct object of the sensation verb 'see'. Accordingly, the grammatical subject of the appearance verb is the direct object of the sensation verb, something that at once implicates the first person: we get to know how things appear by our seeing them. But in the uses of 'looks' that are primary – where the use of looks has a point, we might say – the assumption is also that the objects of sight, the appearances of which the description introduced specifies, are available to be seen at places by other perceivers. Intelligible uses of looks then will be those where the description introduced, be it comparative, evaluative or where the intended use is simply to describe the sensible appearance of the object of sight, will make sense to other perceivers. This approach allows us to consider seriously the intelligibility of 'looks invisible', without the prejudice, on which the natural view of the nonsensicality of 'looks invisible' thrives, of an ontological reification of looks. Nonetheless, we are not yet home and dry. The grammatical subject of the appearance verb has been said to be the direct object of the sensation verb. But in all the cases I have conjured, though the question 'What do you see?' is not refused application, the perceiver cannot be said to see the thing that is said to look invisible. Further, in the case of Evanescence, we have denied that the perceiver can be said to see the animal in crypsis in that she sees an empty region. In the next section, I assemble the conceptual resources that I think invite a solution. Diamond contrasts the natural view of nonsense with a Wittgensteinean/Fregean view whereby the meaning of a sentence cannot be determined by the 'meaning' of its working parts alone. Individual linguistic items have no meaning independently of the meaning of a sentence as a whole; the first word 'Caesar' in 'Caesar is a prime number' may not have the same meaning as it does in 'Caesar crossed the Rubicon'; 'is a prime number' may not mean what it does in '53 is a prime number'. If the sentence is nonsensical, rather, no part of it can be said to meaning anything – i.e. to mean what it does in another sentence that makes sense. The Geachian/Anscombian view is, I think, different again. A concept, recall, is a capacity to use an expression in a judgment, where a thought or utterance counts as judgment if its gist can be reported in oratio obliqua form. Nonsense then cannot be judged since its gist cannot be reported. On this view, then, intelligibility or making sense is conceptualised not at the level of the meaning of component parts or at the level of the sentence but at the level of speaker. The question is whether they are intelligible in what they say, think or judge to be the case at a context, such that the gist of what they say can be reported.22 So, can the scenarios I have conjured survive this proof of the nonsensical? Can their speaker be made intelligible? I think they can: 'The housewife judged that her windows were so clean that they looked wide open you couldn't even tell that glass was there' 'The Emperor judged that his clothes looked invisible and that he, inter alia, must be incompetent'. 'The Harvard ornithologists judged that the decoy ducks had indeed "ceased to appear to exist" at the place at which the artist Thayer had placed them in the noon sunlight and painted them into evanescence'. §5. 'Looks invisible' domesticated I have suggested that a perceiver that can use the 'looks invisible' locution has a complex understanding of a number of concepts. In particular, it seems we should say that that such a perceiver has: 1. a concept of the visible as that which can be known by sight 2. a non-phenomenalistic conception of the visible such that she can grasp the possibility of visible things being seen at places by others, even if no one in fact ever sees them 3. a grasp of the use of looks as introducing a form of description that specifies the appearance of the object of sight, where that object, the direct object of the sensation verb, can be material or intentional 4. knowledge that "what is seen" typically goes beyond the visible – this is since material objects of sensation can figure as grammatical subjects in her looks locutions ('that bike made in China looks pricey') 5. a non-phenomenalistic conception of the invisible that extends to cover things as lacking the visible properties of colour and shape, such as in Windowpane. Naturally, a perceiver can lack (1)-(5) for a perceiver can lack a concept of the visible and yet exercise the capacity for sight. We are now in a position to domesticate Windowpane, Fairytale and finally Evanescence. Windowpane The best reading of 'looks invisible' in the case of Windowpane is evidential. On the basis of the sensory evidence available, the windowpane looks to be invisible. No glimmers or glints are discernible. There no glittering lines to give away the presence of an edge. What kind of sensory evidence could lead to that supposition? The answer should now be obvious: the apparent perception of an empty region. The region 'looks empty', but is full ('The housewife judged that her windows were so clean that they looked wide open'). Recall too that the question 'What do you see?' is not refused. The perceiver sees an empty region. This, then, is the sensory evidence that warrants the attribution of the predication of 'invisible' to the grammatical subject. The grammatical subject can be said to be 'invisible' not just because the perceiver cannot see it, but because it is lacking the sensible properties of the sort that could be seen by others at that place. Fairytale Like Windowpane, we can imagine that the region that the putative clothes occupy also looks empty – we can, to borrow Thayer's idiom, 'see through those regions' to the apparently naked body underneath. Do the clothes thereby look to be invisible? The story has it that only wise and competent could see the finery of the garments. It is not then assumed that the clothes are invisible in the manner of Windowpane, but only that they look that way. Fairytale, I suggest, invites, a non-evidential take on 'looks'. However, as I have argued above, an ontological treatment of the nature of looks makes the Emperor's alarm unintelligible. No look can look invisible. What the Emperor fails to see however is not a look, but his new clothes. And since clothes are typically visible – as I would like say they are essentially perceptible the use of the appearance verb to introduce a form of description that glosses their appearance is warranted, as is, on this occasion, the use of the predicatival complement: they 'look invisible'. This suggests a way of overcoming the difficulty that I noted at the end of section §4. The perceiver cannot be said to "see" the thing that is said to 'look invisible'. In what sense then can an object of sight figure as the grammatical subject of the appearance verb? Compare: 'I am going for a walk' with 'I am going to fail the exam'. The former wears its intentionality on its sleeve; going for a walk is an intentional action. The latter, in contrast, is typically read as a prediction for the future. We need extra background to extract the intentional reading that one intends to fail the exam.23 I suggest that there are manifold concepts of ours that analogously wear their sensibility or perceptibility on their sleeve. Clothing is, appropriately in this case, a good example, but there are countless others: curtains, shopfronts, paintings, all kinds of cultural artefacts. Such items are essentially perceptible – they are designed or made to be perceived. But, accordingly, the using the appearance verb to introduce a gloss their appearance is warranted, even, I contend, when the description introduced is 'invisible'. An ontological reading of looks cannot offer this result and, in part, this is because sensationalist and objectivist theorists alike are committed to a historically empiricist conception of the visible. On such a view, even if we see tomatoes and pine trees, what is basically visible extends only to what representationalist theorists of perception have elsewhere designated as narrow content: colour and visible shape. Rather than use the idiom of the representationalist, let us call the concepts of colour and visible shape 'thin concepts of the visible'. Our concepts of things that are essentially perceptible are, in contrast and at least typically, thick.24 Evanescence How is Evanescence domesticated on this grammatical approach? We ought not read Evanescence on the model of Windowpane, I think. The animal body in crypsis is visible and elaborately so: it pictures the background of its natural habitat, is countershaded and displays differential blending patterns and even, sometimes, dissimulating stripes and images (butterfly wings for example often 'depict' the eyes of predators). Even so, when the animal evanesces at a place, the biologically-apt perceiver can be said to appear to see an empty region. This suggests some unity to the cases we have treated. In all cases, something can be said to 'look invisible' when one appears to see the entirety of the space that the 'invisible-looking' thing in fact occupies.25 In this sense, then, the space 'looks empty'. However, like Fairytale, and unlike Windowpane, in Evanescence the emphasis is not on the sensory evidence for the animal body being invisible – after all, the Harvard Ornithologists knew that the ducks, visible things, were there but on its appearance at a time. I suggested earlier, though, that we ought not to say that the evanescent animal body is seen in that the perceiver sees an empty region. So, to revisit our puzzle, how can it be thereby said to 'look' anyway at all? Like curtains and shopfronts, animal bodies are also essentially perceptible though we might not immediately conceive of them as such. Their superficial visible characteristics have been adapted under pressure of the fact that they are potential objects of sight not only for other creatures of their kind, but for certain biologically-apt perceivers, namely as prey. Though we don't typically conceive of animal bodies as essentially perceptible, we do however conceive of them as objects of sight in the sense that demands a material object. We do not, that is, think of visible animal bodies as merely thinly visible and as possessed of appearances that are only assemblies or mosaics of colour and shape. Instead, descriptions of animal appearances, such as the one borrowed from the National Geographic below, are typically rich in evaluative and activity terms: Iguanas' stout build gives them a clumsy look, but they are fast and agile on land. They have strong jaws with razor-sharp teeth and sharp tails, which make up half their body length and can be used as whips to drive off predators. They can also detach their tails if caught and will grow another without permanent damage.26 But this explains the surprise of evanescence. Our naïve ontology of experience is such that we take "what is seen" to go beyond the basic visible properties that our 'thin' concepts of the visible (visual shape and colour) pick out. We take animal bodies to have a life beyond their superficial visible appearances. A bystander at Thayer's demonstration reported that the effect was "almost magical" (Boynton 1952, quoted in Shell 2012, p.16) §6 Lessons from Evanescence In closing, I note two primary lessons that I see as arising from the philosophical picture I have tried to sketch. First, if the account I have given is at all plausible, and if something can intelligibly be said to "look invisible" when the region it occupies "looks empty", we ought not to deny that empty regions are seen, for otherwise how could the occupied region look that way. A grammatical approach could certainly grant this much, though there is plainly a great deal that needs saying here. On the ontological conceptions of the visible that I have mentioned here however, it becomes genuinely difficult to grant that empty space is seen at all, or, if it is, then it is seen only indirectly: we see that regions are empty, or we see empty regions in virtue of our awareness of something else, the boundaries of the visual field for instance.27,28 Second, as might be expected, with the notion of the essentially perceptible comes an emphasis on norms of looking, as well as acting on 'what is seen'; on modes of conduct fitting to the presence of 'what is seen'. Sometimes there is a fitting way to look at and watch things that are essentially perceptible. Evanescence disrupts those norms in the case of the preying perceiver. Curtains do in the case of curious neighbours. An emphasis on the essentially perceptible requires, further, an emphasis, not on the 'normal subject', the subject who is not hallucinating, or whose perceptual apparatus is somehow inadequate, but on the biologicallyand culturally-apt perceiver. In some cases, it may require an ethnography of perception; a description of how we learn to look and notice and to pay attention, and how it is, the mechanisms by means of which, we may come overlook what is there to see the nakedness of the fairytale Emperor for instance, his foolishness and incompetence. References Anscombe, G.E.M. (1957/2000) Intention. Harvard University Press. Anscombe, G.E.M. (1965/1981) 'The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature', in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume II, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 3-21 Anscombe, G.E.M. (1976/1981) 'The Subjectivity of Sensation', in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind: Collected Philosophical Papers, Volume II, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 44-56 Behrens, Roy R. (2009) 'Revisiting Abbott Thayer: non-scientific reflections about camouflage in art, war and zoology'. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 364, pp. 497-501. Boynton, M. F. (1952) 'Abbott Thayer and natural history' Osiris, 10, pp. 542–555. Breckenridge, W. (2007). 'The Meaning of 'Look''. PhD thesis. New College, University of Oxford. URL: http://www.wylieb.com/. Brogaard, B. (2014). 'The Phenomenal Use of 'Look' and Perceptual Representation', in Philosophy Compass 9, pp. 455–468. Brogaard, B. (2015) 'Perceptual Reports', in Mohan Matthen (ed.) Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Perception, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 237-255. Casati, R. (2009) 'Are shadows transparent? An investigation on white, shadows and transparency in pictures' Res, 56, pp. 329-335 Cott, H. B. (1940) Adaptive Coloration in Animals. London: Metheun & Co. Ltd. Diamond, C. (1981) 'What Nonsense Might Be' Philosophy 56(215):5-22 Geach, P.T. (1957) Mental Acts: their Content and their Objects. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Genone, J. (2014) 'Appearance and Illusion'. Mind 123(490): 339-376 Glüer, K. (2013) 'Martin on the Semantics of 'Looks'" Thought 1, pp. 292–300. Martin, M.G.F. (2010) 'What's in a look?', in B. Nanay (ed.) Perceiving the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 160-225 Matthen, M. (2010) 'How Things Look (And What Things Look that Way), in B. Nanay (ed.) Perceiving the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 226-255 Maund, B. (1986). "The phenomenal and other uses of 'looks'" Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64, pp. 170–180. Newall, M. (2015) 'Is Seeing-In a Transparency Effect?' British Journal of Aesthetics, 55(2), pp. 131–156 Shell, Hanna Rose. (2012). Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography and the Media of Reconnaissance. MA: Zone Books MIT Press Siegel, S. (2006) 'How does visual phenomenology constrain object-seeing?' Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 84(3), pp. 429-441 Richardson, L. (2010) 'Seeing Empty Space'. European Journal of Philosophy Soteriou, M. (2013) The Mind's Construction. Oxford: OUP. Stevens M., and Merilaita S. (2011) Animal Camouflage: Mechanisms and Function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoner, G. (1999) 'Transparency', MIT Enclyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences. MA: MIT Press. Thayer, A. H. (1896) 'The law which underlies protective colouration' Auk, 13, pp. 124-129. Thayer, A. H. (1918) 'Camouflage' The Scientific Monthly VII, pp. 481–494. Thayer, G. H. (1908) 'The concealing colouration of animals: new light on an old subject' Century Magazine LXXVI, pp. 249–261. Travis, C. (2015) 'Sufffering Intentionally?', in Campbell M. and O'Sullivan M. (eds) Wittgenstein and Perception. Oxford and New York: Routledge, pp. 45-62. *I first presented material on evanescence in Dubrovnik in 2012, and most latterly in Warwick in 2014. Along the way, versions of this material found their way into talks in London, Paris, York, at Northwestern University and in Geneva. I'm immensely grateful to audiences on those occasions and, in particular, to Louise Richardson, Mohan Matthen, Mike Martin and Barry Smith (some critical points they raised have found their way into the thread of the argument though not always in the form first expressed). Guy Longworth, Andy Hamilton, and Craig French read previous versions of this paper – thank you! My co-editor Tom Crowther provided extremely detailed and insightful comments on numerous drafts (the dialectic has been shaped largely in response to his concerns, and the paper thereby owes a lot to his warm disagreement). Finally, for enlightening discussion of Anscombe, I'm indebted to my brilliant colleague and train companion, Rachael Wiseman. 1 The Anscombe papers I refer to are her (1965) 'The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature' (IS), and (1976) 'The Subjectivity of Sensation' (SS) 2 See especially chapters 5 and 11. 3 For the purposes of this paper, I simply take Thayer's assertion at face value. That is, I don't read into it any kind of commitment to experience being 'existence-presenting', where 'appearing to cease to exist' may involve experience failing to present this property. 4 In this paper, I not trying to characterize the phenomenology of disappearance. Rather, I am trying to gesture at the kinds of structured visible appearances that, for a biologically-apt perceiver, may lead to the phenomenology that Thayer demonstrates and so, in such sensory contexts, warrant, as I claim, permissible uses of 'looks invisible'. With this explanatory aim in mind, there is no claim that being evanescent is usefully understood either as property of an object (though there are objects that may be apt to evanesce in certain conditions and at certain places) or as a property of an experience. See Soteriou (2013) for a discussion of disappearance. For a different treatment, see Farrenikova, this volume. 5 See Travis (2015) 6 Note Anscombe's caution: "The fact that we can use the concept of identity in connection with intentional objects should not lead us to think there is any sense in questions as to the kind of existence – the ontological status of intentional objects as such" (1965/1981, p.11) 7 For discussion of this example, see Anscombe (1957/2000, p.25) 8 Practically speaking, this might also seem to be the case with Franco – would a perceiver call on another to look at something that she does not notice? The distinction comes out as follows: we can imagine a painting instructor calling on a trainee to pay attention to the colour of a particular patch of sky. The colour of the sky at a location is available for both to see. Thanks to Tom Crowther for pressing this point. 9 By material object, Anscombe does not mean material objects in the sense of tables, planets, lumps of butter; the description "that debt of five dollars" has as its material object a particular debt owed. 10 T-junctions, in contrast, elicit the perception of an occluding surface. 11 For discussion see Newall (2015). 12 Thanks to Mohan Matthen for emphasizing this point. See Stevens M., and Merilaita S. (2011) for an introduction to the state of the art in field animal camouflage studies. 13 This is usually effected through matching the spatial phase of the surface coloration of the animal's body with that of its surroundings. Cott dedicates fifty pages to such disruption. 14 Even in the merely intentional case, say where a psychoanalyst asks her hallucinating patient "What do you see?" and where the intended use is intentional, the question, it might be said, has the material form. This is since the very practice of asking questions and giving responses only has meaning in the context of a shared human life that itself has a form and, of course, materiality (where this can extend to encompass such materially ideal goods as debts). 15 See, for instance, the helpful overview contained in Brogaard (2014) and Brogaard (2015). 16 Generally, this taxonomising approach can be said to contrast with the Geachian/Anscombian approach whereby variation in use of an expression is revelatory of a certain structure in the exercise of the same concept. 17 This comes from an Encyclopedia entry on Nonsense by Annette Baier – her first published piece of work – and which Diamond cites. 18 Jackson's analyses 'X looks blue to S' as 'There looks to S to be something blue' which is equivalent to 'S immediately sees a blue sense-datum belonging to X' or 'S immediately sees a blue sense-datum'. See Jackson (1977) 19 I say 'read' since although Martin's work does invite the ontological objectivist reading I sketch, it need not be read this way. That is, one could deny the identification of 'looks' with basic visible properties, and insist that we maintain a resolutely grammatical grasp on what is in a look. For my part, I think that Martin's position is, in many respects, close to Anscombe's. 20 Some further gloss on SIM may be required. Since Martin may be read as identifying looks with the basic visible properties of objects, looks are not treated phenomenalistically. Nonetheless, he does grant that there is a kind of subjectivity that is implicit in our talk of the looks of things. This subjectivity is not the relativity that attends the more complex 'the coin looks elliptical to me'. Rather, it can be understood as complicit both at the level of the specification of the metric this involves the operation 'getting the characteristic', which itself involves knowledge of the kind of appearance that the metric intensionally specifies and it is implicated in the predicate of predicates and individuals SIM for we read this as visually striking one as looking relevantly similar. I leave aside consideration of what explains this capacity. For a critique of Martin's treatment, see Glüer (2013). 21 For a dispositionalist treatment, see e.g. Genone (2014). Influential treatments that I do not consider are Breckenridge (2007) and Maund (1986) among others. 22 This position can be read as borrowing aspects from both the natural and Wittgentsteinean/Fregean positions. Since it is assumed that gist can be reported in oratio obliqua form, sometimes using different words (viz. what is reported is not merely that certain words were mentioned), it must be allowed that the content of the that-clause in the oratio obliqua formulation expresses a thought which is similar in gist to what the speaker thought, and which the that-clause reports. There is then, broadly speaking, such a thing as sameness of meaning of individual expressions, but this is established at the level of the use of sentences which express judgments (see Diamond 1991, p.109) 23 For discussion of this example, see Anscombe (1957/2000, p.2). 24 Thanks to Rachael Wiseman for suggesting an application of the thick/thin contrast, familiar from discussion of ethical concepts, to the perceptual case. 25 This way of putting things was suggested to me a long time ago by Matt Nudds. A different way of conceptualising the same datum is to suggest that perfectly (though contingently) transparent things can 'hide' in empty regions. 26 From http://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/g/green-iguana/ (last accessed 1st September 2017) 27 See Richardson (2010). On this view, in being aware of the boundaries of one's visual field, one can come to be aware of regions where, were visible material located there, it would be seen. Prima facie, evanescence is a counterexample. 28 A less substantive but related lesson is the following: We should not oppose the visible to the transparent or the see-through. 'Looking transparent' is not the same as 'looking invisible'. Perceptual transparency always involves seeing at least two surfaces in two distinct depth planes. When something 'looks invisible', in contrast, perception is single-fold (compare Mizrahi, this volume).

What is the point of reduction in science? Karen Crowther∗ Department of Philosophy University of Geneva Abstract The numerous and diverse roles of theory reduction in science have been insufficiently explored in the philosophy literature on reduction. Part of the reason for this has been a lack of attention paid to reduction2 (successional reduction)-although I here argue that this sense of reduction is closer to reduction1 (explanatory reduction) than is commonly recognised, and I use an account of reduction that is neutral between the two. This paper draws attention to the utility-and incredible versatility-of theory reduction. A non-exhaustive list of various applications of reduction in science is presented, some of which are drawn from a particular case-study, being the current search for a new theory of fundamental physics. This case-study is especially interesting because it employs both senses of reduction at once, and because of the huge weight being put on reduction by the different research groups involved; additionally, it presents some unique uses for reduction-revealing, I argue, the fact that reduction can be of specialised and unexpected service in particular scientific cases. The paper makes two other general findings: that the functions of reduction that are typically assumed to characterise the different forms of the relation may instead be understood as secondary consequences of some other roles; and that most of the roles that reduction plays in science can actually also be fulfilled by a weaker relation than (the typical understanding of) reduction. Keywords: Diachronic reduction; Synchronic reduction; Limiting reduction; Theory reduction; Inter-theory relations; Correspondence principle. ∗[email protected] 1 Contents 1 Introduction 2 1.1 Addressing an overlooked aspect of reduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 2 Two conceptions of reduction 5 2.1 Existing distinctions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 2.2 Conceptions used in this paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 3 Correspondence 9 4 Some roles of reduction 12 4.1 Example: quantum gravity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 5 The characteristic function of reduction 20 6 Conclusion 21 1 Introduction Reduction plays numerous and diverse roles in science, but they have been insufficiently explored. Here, I attempt to rectify this, by showcasing the utility-and incredible versatility-of reduction. To do so, I present a non-exhaustive list of various applications of reduction, thus contributing to a more complete picture of the roles of inter-theory relations in science. This paper is motivated by the conviction that a better appreciation of how theory reduction can be, and is, used in science will benefit several different areas of inquiry. Firstly, it can aid our understanding of what counts as a successful reduction, and thus be of assistance in clarifying debates regarding the best account of theory reduction- for example, I argue that this picture suggests the sufficiency of a relatively weak notion of reduction in many particular scientific cases, compared to existing accounts. Secondly, by drawing attention to the various uses of reduction aside from explanation, this project not only opens up new avenues for discussion, but also impacts the question of the relationship between reduction and explanation-for example, I demonstrate (counter to consensus belief) that explanation is not the characteristic function of reduction. Thirdly, it will contribute to our understanding of the nature of scientific theories, and of science itself. This third motivation is particularly compelling given the current state of fundamental physics, with its indications of moving into a paradigm that relies more heavily on nonempirical means of theory assessment compared to previous eras.1 Inter-theory relations take on considerable importance in this situation. In fact, many of the examples of roles that I describe here are drawn from the current search for a new theory of fundamental physics. As a case-study, this is especially interesting because of the huge weight being put on reduction by the different research groups involved. Additionally, it presents 1Cf. Dawid (2013); Huggett & Wüthrich (2013); Woit (2006). 2 some unique uses for reduction-revealing, I argue, the fact that reduction can be of specialised and unexpected service in particular scientific cases. In addition, the paper makes two other general findings: one is that the functions of reduction that are typically assumed to characterise the different forms of the relation may instead be understood as secondary consequences of some other roles (which I suggest are better taken as the characteristic functions of these relations). The other main finding is that most of the roles that reduction plays in science can actually also be fulfilled by a weaker relation than (the typical understanding of) reduction. My methodology involves distinguishing between (a) what reduction is, (b) what it does (i.e., its characteristic function), and (c) what it is useful for (i.e., the secondary roles that reduction plays by virtue of achieving its characteristic function). My aim in this paper is not just to investigate the neglected area (c), but to help shed new light on (a) and (b) by doing so. Of course, however, in order to do this, I need to adopt some preliminary, vague conception of (a) and (b). In fact, I use two such conceptions of each, which are based on scientific-consensus. For (b), I distinguish between a weak notion and a stronger notion of reduction. The weak notion of reduction (WR), obtains when all the successful results of the older and/or less-fundamental theory, O, could be reproduced (i.e., obtained from the theory via methods such as computation, derivation, etc.), in principle, by its morefundamental/successor theory, N (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain).2 This notion of reduction is weak because it leaves open the means by which the new theory is thought capable in principle of yielding the relevant results-in particular, we do not need to believe that the (relevant parts of) the older theory are deducible (or derivable) from the new one, for example. In other words, WR is neutral in regards to the relationship between the two theories, other than their approximate shared results in the relevant domain. By contrast, the stronger notion (SR) obtains when all the successful results of O, could be reproduced, in principle, by N (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain) because the successful parts of O are derivable in principle from N (under the same qualifications). The two corresponding fuzzy notions of (a) that I start with are then any set of inter-theory relations that achieve WR or SR, respectively. At the outset, I must make clear that though this paper is concerned with 'theoryreduction' in science, I take this term to not necessarily (or even standardly) refer to entire theories, but theory fragments-i.e., any parts of scientific theories. Additionally, the theories being referred to are ones that are, were, or will be accepted by mainstream science at some point as being correct (i.e., as providing the best descriptions of the phenomena) in their domains of applicability. The reduction, however, need not (and typically will not) hold at a time when both theories involved are considered correct (e.g., 2 The vagueness introduced by the "in principle" aspect of this definition is due to our inability in practice of actually going through and obtaining all of the results of the new theory in the old domain (due, e.g., to lack of computing power). Instead, the point is that we obtain enough 'linkages' (which I define below as 'correspondence relations') between the two theories that we believe they approximately share the same results in this domain. 3 the earlier, or less-fundamental theory may have been demoted to just approximately correct, within its domain, at the time when the reduction holds). I ask the reader to please keep these qualifications in mind throughout. The structure of the paper is as follows. It begins (§2), with a brief elaboration of Nickles' and Wimsatt's distinctions between the two standard conceptions of reduction §2.1, followed by a statement of the two-purposefully very general-conceptions of reduction that I work with in this paper §2.2. §3 compares them with the related notion of correspondence (familiar from physics as embodied in the correspondence principle of old quantum theory), and argues that WR is a special case of correspondence. The list of roles of reduction are presented in §4, and some of these (plus two more roles) are then illustrated in the case-study of quantum gravity (§4.1). In §5, I consider the characteristic functions of reduction, before conclusions in §6. Before all this, however, I briefly comment on the issue of neglect. 1.1 Addressing an overlooked aspect of reduction It is striking that the general philosophy literature on reduction has neglected to thoroughly investigate the myriad uses of reduction. There are two main reasons this seems to have happened. The first is a more-or-less standard assumption that the role of reduction is simply explanation: the explanation of 'higher-level' laws (models, theories, theory-parts, etc.) in terms of 'lower-level' ones. This stems, in part, from the deductivenomological (DN) model of explanation (Hempel & Oppenheim, 1948), which was mirrored by the incredibly influential model of reduction by Nagel (1961). The second reason has to do with a distinction, originally made by Nickles (1973), between two forms of reduction: reduction1, being, roughly, the deduction of (corrected) parts of a higherlevel theory from (parts of) a lower-level one, under some appropriate conditions, and reduction2, being, roughly, various inter-theory relations between (parts of) a new theory and its 'predecessor', under appropriate conditions, that serve heuristic and justificatory roles in theory-succession. This distinction has also been referred to as explanatory versus successional reduction (Wimsatt, 1976, 2006), and synchronic versus diachronic reduction (Dizadji-Bahmani et al., 2010; Rosenberg, 2006; van Riel & Van Gulick, 2016). The general philosophy literature on scientific theory reduction has primarily focused its attention on reduction1, which is exemplified by Nagel-Schaffner reduction. This literature has been largely uninterested in the other type of reduction, which has been relegated to discussions on scientific theory-change, and more-specialised literature.3 In the rare instances where the literature on reduction has explored reduction2, this has mainly been in order to determine its utility for the articulation of reduction1 (i.e., in interpreting Schaffner's (1976) criterion of "strong analogy"). As such, the various important roles that reduction2 plays in science have been largely ignored in this literature. An exception (along with Nickles) is Wimsatt (e.g., 1976; 2006), who elaborates (though also modifies) the distinction, as I discuss below (§2.1). 3As evidence of this, consider the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on scientific reduction (van Riel & Van Gulick, 2016, §2.1), which briefly mentions, then dismisses this form of reduction as outside its area of interest. 4 This indifference to reduction2 is unfortunate given its prominence in science, and its versatility beyond supplementing reduction1. There are, indeed, some prominent misconceptions about reduction2. Firstly, although reduction2 plays a large number of roles in science, it has standardly been assumed to be just the demonstration that a new, more-general theory (model, law, etc.) explains the success of the older, special theory (or theories) that it replaces.4 Secondly, reduction2 is typically thought of as a limiting relation (usually of a characteristic physical constant in the newer, more general theory, going to zero or infinity). Yet, reduction2 is not restricted to this-in different cases, reduction2 may involve several, or no limiting relations, as well as other approximations and inter-theory correspondences. Thirdly, there is some confusion regarding the domains that reduction2 operates on, and the levels that it bridges: what it means to be domainpreserving rather than domain-combining, and whether it is an inter-level or intra-level relation. I clarify these misconceptions below (throughout the paper, though mostly in §2.1). Among the findings of this paper is the demonstration that the two forms of reduction may be achieved by the same sorts of relations; indeed, in the case-study considered, the (sought) reduction between the two theories involved is supposed to be both reduction1 and reduction2. 2 Two conceptions of reduction In §2.1 I comment on Nickles' (1973) distinction between reduction1 and reduction2, as well as Wimsatt's (1976; 2006) distinction between explanatory and successional reduction. In §2.2 I present the two conceptions of reduction that I use in this paper, and discuss their relationship with these two other distinctions. 2.1 Existing distinctions According to Nickles (1973, p. 181), reduction1 is "the achievement of postulational and ontological economy and is obtained chiefly by derivarional reduction as described by Nagel; i.e., reduction1 amounts to the explanation of one theory by another". It is, he says, a "domain-combining" relation, in that it may involve the consolidation or elimination of (parts of) the reduced, less-fundamental theory in favour of a more fundamental one. The example of reduction1 that Nickles (1973) presents is the reduction of the theory of optics to that of electromagnetism. By contrast, Nickles' reduction2 is a "varied collection of intertheoretic relations" whose great importance lies in its heuristic and justificatory roles in science. As Nickles points out (p. 185), the development of new ideas (theories) is heuristically guided by the requirement that these ideas yield certain established results as a special case, and these ideas are often justified (to a degree) by showing that they bear a certain relation to a predecessor theory. Reduction2 is a "domain-preserving" relation, demonstrating that the 4This is in contrast this with reduction1, whose aim is commonly taken as the explanation of higherlevel laws (behaviour, theories, fragments of theories, models, etc.) in terms of lower-level ones. 5 successor theory adequately accounts for the phenomena in the domain inherited from its successful predecessor (p. 185). The terminological convention of reduction2 is reversed from that of reduction1, so that the successor-typically more fundamental-theory is said to reduce to its predecessor.5 Nickles presents the example of special relativity reducing to Newtonian mechanics. Reduction2 is commonly thought of as just being a limiting relation between theories-indeed, it is often referred to as "limiting reduction". Yet, as Nickles (1973, p. 197) asserts, reduction2 is actually a set of various operations, a number of which may be performed on (parts of) one (or both) of the theories involved (there is no general formula for how this is done). I suggest below that the various relations that may be employed in reduction2 are correspondence relations (§3). It is worth also discussing some of the relationships that Nickles sees between the two conceptions of reduction. Firstly, that reduction1 can be considered a special case of reduction2, where the theories involved are (by necessity) logically compatible-otherwise, the theories related by reduction2 generally need not be logically compatible (Nickles, 1973, p. 186, fn. 6). Secondly, that reduction2 can be of assistance in interpreting reduction1, e.g., by spelling out the relation of "strong analogy" between T2 (the older, less-fundamental theory) and T2∗ (the "corrected version" of this theory) in Schaffner's (1976; 1967) account of reduction1 (Nickles, 1973, p. 195). Finally, note that Nickles (1973, p. 195) emphasises that reduction2 should not be seen as "an imperfect attempt at derivational reduction1, as a failure to achieve reduction1", as, he says, Nagel and others have done-reduction2 is a distinct relation, and need not be viewed as an approximation to the other form of reduction. While Nickles is correct on these points, I nevertheless suggest that reduction2 can still, in some cases, be usefully conceived of as an attempt at derivational reduction. (In fact, below, §5, I argue that the characteristic role of reduction generally is "establishing in principle derivability"). Wimsatt (1976; 2006) elaborates on Nickles' distinction, and relabels it as one between explanatory and successional reduction. Explanatory reduction, according to Wimsatt, is an inter-level relation, relating "levels of organisation" rather than theories.6 Its aim is to provide a compositional, mechanistic and causal explanation of some large-scale phenomena in terms of shorter-length scale behaviours (Wimsatt, 2006, §4); e.g., explaining the behaviour of gases as clouds of colliding molecules, or the behaviour of genes in terms of the action of DNA (2006, p. 449). Wimsatt is clear that explanatory reduction is no longer best exemplified by Nagel-Schaffner reduction, but that it is richly complex and greatly diverse in its approaches, especially in biology. Successional reduction, according to Wimsatt, does relate theories, and is supposed to be intra-level : holding between newer and older theories, and/or more exact and more approximate theories, and/or moreand less-general theories that apply "at the same compositional level". But this sense of intra-level reduction is supposed to also relate theories that are not level specific, such as in physics (Wimsatt, 2006, p. 450). Wimsatt 5This is often referred to as the physicists' convention, since it is how the term "reduction" is understood by physicists-the newer, more general, or more fundamental, theory, N reduces to the older, more restricted, or less fundamental theory, O. In contrast, the philosopher's convention has O reduce to N . 6Wimsatt (1976, p. 680) conceives of levels of organisation as "primarily characterized as local maxima of regularity and predictability in the phase space of different models of organization of matter". 6 agrees that the relations used in successional reduction can sometimes be useful in explanatory reductions, especially in articulating the relation of strong analogy in Schaffner's account of of reduction. However, the aim of successional reduction, Wimsatt says, is to localise and analyse the formal similarities and differences between these theories, and thus aid succession and elaboration of the later theory as well as delimit conditions for safe heuristic use of the earlier theory (1976, p. 677; 2006, p. 449). Wimsatt (2006, Fig. 2.) argues that in theory-succession the differences as well as the similarities between the old theory, O and the newer one, N , play important roles. The similarities serve to, 1. give prepackaged confirmation of N , by showing that it generates O as a special case (attributed to Nickles, 1973); 2. 'explain away' O, or explain why we were tempted to believe it (attributed to Sklar, 1967); 3. delimit acceptable conditions for heuristic use of O, by determining conditions of approximation (Nickles, 1973). The differences between the theories, serve to, 1. explain facts which were anomalous on O, thus confirming N ; 2. suggest new predictive tests of N ; 3. suggest reanalysis of data apparently supporting O but not N ; 4. suggest new directions for elaboration ofN . The characteristic role by virtue of which successional reduction aids in theory-succession is thus localising and analysing the similarities and differences between the newer and older theories of the same phenomena. I argue in this paper that the same relations between theories can play roles in establishing either, or both, explanatory and successional reduction. In the case study I consider (§4.1), both explanatory and successional reduction are sought, since the newer theory (i.e., the theory under-construction) is supposed to not only cover the same domain as its predecessor, but also to underlie it (i.e., be lower-level), and thus to provide a 'mechanistic' explanation of the higher-level phenomena described by its predecessor (although, as we shall see, due to the unusual nature of the particular theory being sought, such explanation may not be accurately described as compositional, mechanistic, nor causal). Indeed, this reductive explanation plays an important role in justifying the new theory, in a way that goes beyond that captured by Wimsatt's notion of successional reduction. 2.2 Conceptions used in this paper In this paper, I work with two very general conceptions of reduction; I do this not only so as to accommodate the various formal definitions of theory-reduction in the philosophy literature, but because this is how reduction works in science: there is no particular definition, but instead putative reductions are developed and judged on case-by-case bases.7 To re-state these (from §1): WR The weaker conception of reduction holds when all the successful results of the older and/or less-fundamental theory, O, are obtainable in principle8 from its morefundamental/successor theory, N (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain). This conception of re7This is recognised in the case of reduction2, at least (Nickles, 1973; Wimsatt, 1976). 8See fn. 2. 7 duction remains neutral in regards to any more-specific relationship that may hold between the two theories (see above, §1). SR The stronger conception of reduction holds when all the successful results of the older and/or less-fundamental theory, O, could be reproduced, in principle, by its more-fundamental/successor theory, N (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain) because the successful parts of O are derivable (deducible) in principle from N . Note that, although they are similar, these conceptions of reduction are not to be equated with reduction1 and reduction2, or explanatory versus successional reduction. WR and SR can each be either interor intra-level relations. While-as I argue below, §4-SR establishes relative fundamentality (i.e., an asymmetric relation of non-causal dependence), this can hold between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, or between special and general relativity alike. Additionally, although SR establishes relative fundamentality, while WR does not, both notions apply equally well between higher-level/lowerlevel, older/newer, more-approximate/more-accurate, and special/general theories. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the literature typically conceives of reduction1 as being only between higher-level/lower-level theories, and reduction2 as holding only between older/newer and/or special/general theories. WR may be deemed too weak for reduction by many philosophers, and yet it seems to be all that scientists practically require in the development of a new theory: many physicists, for instance, would argue that this is the real purpose of reduction, and derivation is just the most efficient and sure means of achieving it. Also, some philosophers (of physics, at least) have used this understanding of reduction. For instance, Rosaler (2017) takes the key feature of reduction as domain subsumption: the relation whereby one theory successfully models all real behaviours that are well-modelled on another-i.e., that one description subsumes the domain of applicability of another. (However, below I argue that WR is in fact better conceived of as Correspondence rather than reduction). Rosaler (2017) also introduces a useful distinction between conceptions of reduction and approaches to reduction: A conception of reduction is a particular meaning that one assigns to the term 'reduction', while an approach to reduction is a particular strategy for showing that some particular conception of reduction holds. WR and SR-as conceptions of reduction-can be achieved in various ways (they are 'multiply realisable' by different approaches to reduction): for instance, through Nagel-Schaffner reduction, or Kemeny-Oppenheim (1956) reduction, or plausibly any other extant account of reduction on offer in the philosophy literature. However, I resist restriction to a particular account of reduction, and instead go with what seems to be the actual method of scientists: of utilising various correspondence relations-including limiting relations, approximations, derivations, etc.-as appropriate the particular scientific case under consideration (these relations are explained in the next section, §3). WR or SR holds when (some assortment of) these relations have been established between the two theories in question, such that scientific consensus holds that WR or SR obtains. 8 For example, there are numerous and various correspondence relations9 between quantum and classical mechanics-including mathematical correspondences such faciliated by limiting relations10-linking particular laws of quantum theories with classical ones. These are generally believed to be sufficient to establish WR: that quantum mechanics can in principle reproduce all the successful results of classical mechanics (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain).11 An example of SR is between quantum electrodynamics (QED) and electromagnetism (i.e., Maxwell's theory): numerous and various correspondence relations between the laws of the two theories have been established, including approximations and derivations, such that all successful results of electromagnetism are believed to be derivable in principle from QED, because the successful parts of the theory of electromagnetism are believed to be derivable in principle from QED (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain). So, although particular correspondence relations may be symmetric or asymmetric, they can be used to establish either the asymmetric relation of reduction (both forms), or the symmetric conception of Correspondence, as I now discuss. (I realise that my fuzzy notions of reduction will admit many cases that would not count according to some particular philosophical definitions, while also missing other cases that may be taken as 'paradigmatic' on particular philosophical accounts. These are, however, unavoidable difficulties faced by any account of reduction-consequences of what Dizadji-Bahmani (2011) calls the "external problem of defining reduction"). 3 Correspondence I distinguish between 'the relation of Correspondence', which I shortly define as the 'generalised correspondence principle', and individual correspondence relations, which, as stated above, may be used to demonstrate Correspondence or reduction-they are, in some sense, the constituent ingredients that may be mixed and matched to obtain the conception of Correspondence (or WR, or SR). A correspondence relation is any relationship between two theories whose domains of applicabilty (at least partially) overlap, that is employed in theory construction and/or justification. These relations are of most interest when they hold between 'predecessor' and 'successor' theories, i.e., O and N . (Typically, though not invariably, these relations are intended to help demonstrate Correspondence-i.e., that the theories approximately share the same results in the overlap regions; see below). 9See §3. 10Although limiting relations are involved in derivations, they-strictly speaking-can only establish that solutions of the new equations coincide with solutions of the old equations in the limit (Hüttemann & Love, 2016, p. 468). 11The various correspondence relations between quantum and classical mechanics are explored, e.g., in Radder (1991); Bokulich (2008); that these are insufficient to establish that classical mechanics is 'contained within' quantum mechanics, is argued in, e.g., Post (1971). 9 These inter-theory relationships are a motley collection, and there is no general recipe for which and how many to use in order to do the job of establishing Correspondence (or reduction). These relations include-but are not restricted to-mathematical correspondences such as limiting relations and law correspondence. Radder (1991) identifies three types of correspondence relations, and Hartmann (2002) describes seven in a list that is not supposed to be exhaustive-I mention just a selection of these here by way of illustration (please refer to the cited works for more details, including various limitations and disclaimers associated with each of these). Term correspondence N incorporates certain terms from O (Hartmann, 2002; Post, 1971). As Hartmann explains, this is the weakest form of correspondence, which is, moreover, presupposed by almost all the other forms of correspondence. An example is 'mass', which is carried over from Newtonian mechanics to special relativity, with a shift in meaning (Kuhn, 1962). Numerical correspondence N and O (approximately) agree on the numerical values of some quantities (Hartmann, 2002; Radder, 1991). An example is the spectrum of hydrogen in the Bohr model and in quantum mechanics; although each of these theories utilise different assumptions in calculating the spectrum, they nevertheless obtain the same numerical values (Da Costa & French, 1993; Scerri, 1993). Law correspondence Some laws from O also appear (approximately) in N . An example is the kinetic energy in classical mechanics and in the special theory of relativity. For low velocities, TCM = 1/2mv 2 and TSTR = m−m0c2 = 1/2mv2 * (1 + 3/4β2 +O(β4)) are approximately the same (Hartmann, 2002). Structure correspondence Some mathematical structures (e.g., symmetries, groups, etc.) used by O bear well-defined relations to some of those in N . An example is the relation between the inhomogeneous Lorentz group, used in special relativity, and the inhomogeneous Galilei group of Newtonian mechanics, which 'correspond' in a precise mathematical sense (Hartmann, 2002; Saunders, 1993). Model correspondence A model which belongs to O is also used in N . An example is the harmonic oscillator, which is widely used in classical mechanics, and is also applied in quantum mechanics and in quantum field theory (Hartmann, 2002). Principle correspondence A key principle used by O also features in N (but may be re-interpreted or generalised). An example is the 'principle of relativity', a form of which appears in Newtonian mechanics, and other forms of which are used by the special and general theories of relativity. Another example is the 'principle of background independence', which is seen as a key feature of general relativity, and utilised by various quantum gravity approaches in their attempts to construct a 'successor' to general relativity (as discussed below, §4.1). Now, to the 'relation of Correspondence'; its precursor (which captures a specific instance of the idea) is familiar from the common understanding of the correspondence 10 principle, which states, roughly, that quantum mechanics reduce to classical mechanics in the domain where the latter is successful.12 Thus, Correspondence is often thought of as reduction2, and is usually taken to hold between a newer theory, N , and the older, established theory, O that it replaces. Yet, as discussed below, Correspondence is also used from O to N , as a means of inferring (parts of) N from O (Radder, 1991; Bokulich, 2008). This way of using Correspondence is explicitly heuristic, and does not strictly match definitions such as numerical or law correspondence-rather, it is an exploratory, 'working' Correspondence, used to discern something of the structure of the theory-indevelopment from current theories. Post (1971), and subsequent literature, speaks of the "generalised correspondence principle" (GCP). My formulation13 of the GCP (and thus, the statement (a) of what Correspondence is) is: GCP Any two theories whose domains of validity (partially or fully) overlap must Correspond to one another in those domains. Correspondence between two theories whose domains of validity (partially or fully) overlap, is taken to obtain when sufficient (individual) correspondence relations have been demonstrated between these theories such that we are satisfied that the two theories are compatible-i.e., share approximately the same results-within the overlap region(s).14 This statement of Correspondence reveals the concept as tautological: two theories that both successfully describe a given domain will necessarily be compatible within that domain, by definition. So, correspondence relations are of the most practical interest in the cases where the success of one theory within that domain has not been demonstrated. The relationships are then articulated in order to establish that the new theory does indeed successfully describe that domain, by virtue of standing in these particular relationships to a theory whose success here has been directly and thoroughly established. As such, Correspondence is partly a 'shortcut to results'-one of the main reasons that the relationships between the two theories are articulated is in order to avoid actually having to derive all the results from the new theory in the old domain. Correspondence is taken to hold when the correspondence relationships demonstrated between two theories are sufficient that the two theories are believed to be compatible (sharing approximately the same results) in the relevant domain (this is the primary role (b) of correspondence). This subjectivity in judging successful cases of correspondence is a consequence of its nature as a 'shortcut to results': a full demonstration of compatibility, by comparing all results in the relevant domains, would defeat much of the purpose of the inter-theory relations. But, importantly, even if we did compute all the results of both theories, we would still need correspondence relations between the theories in order to 12The correspondence principle was famously proposed by Niels Bohr in the context of old quantum theory, yet the common understanding of the principle is most certainly not what Bohr meant by it (Bokulich, 2014). 13Note that this is an original formulation, and thus differs from Post's (1971) GCP. 14Note that the theories need not be compatible in any other sense! 11 interpret and connect these results-to 'match them up' and determine whether they are indeed compatible (this is the 'identificatory role', I.1.c., listed in §4). Note that WR is a special case of Correspondence, that obtains when the overlap in the theories' domains of success is the entire domain of the older/less fundamental theory-i.e., domain subsumption. SR can also, in a sense, be thought of as a special case of correspondence, that achieves in principle compatibility via the establishment of in principle derivability. However, I argue that it is more natural to think of this as reduction, rather than mere correspondence. Correspondence has two features that make it a broader concept than reduction: firstly, it can hold between any two theories, provided they have some domain of overlap (i.e., they do not need to stand in a relation of relative fundamentality, general/special, or successor/succeeded); secondly, Correspondence need not be asymmetric. As well as being a broader concept than reduction, Correspondence is also weaker: it establishes compatibility, while reduction (SR) can do this plus establish stronger relations, such as relative fundamentality (as I discuss in §4 and §5). SR is thus more useful than Correspondence, because it can play all the same roles as Correspondence, and more. 4 Some roles of reduction The numerous roles of Correspondence and reduction can be categorised into three broad types, which roughly conform to three stages of science: theory development, theory acceptance, and theory use. Additionally, though, we need to distinguish the roles (c) that these relations are able to play, according to which characteristic function (b) facilitates their doing so. Firstly, I list some of the roles that these relations are supposedly15 able to play by virtue of establishing compatibility-these roles are all able to be satisfied equallywell by Correspondence, WR and SR. Following this, I list some of the roles that reduction is supposedly16 able to play by virtue of establishing in-principle-derivability-these roles are exclusive to SR (and other derivational conceptions of reduction). As the examples in the lists show, in many cases, the roles of Correspondence and reduction are not fulfilled by any individual correspondence relations, but rather the whole idea of Correspondence or reduction once it has been established (i.e., once enough correspondence relations have been articulated between the two theories such that we believe they are compatible in the relevant domains). In §4.1, I illustrate how some of these roles feature in a particular scientific case-study. I. ROLES PLAYED IN VIRTUE OF ESTABLISHING COMPATIBILITY These roles are supposedly able to be played by any account of reduction or Correspondence that establishes (or is intended to establish) that the newer/more-fundamental theory, N , is able in principle to reproduce all the successful results of the older/lessfundamental theory O to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate 15Whether the relations can actually achieve any of these roles in any particular real scientific case, depends on many factors, most of which will be case-specific. I do not explore these here. 16See fn. 15. 12 conditions, and within the relevant domain (being the intersection of the domains of applicability of the two theories). Thus, these roles may be achieved by either WR or SR. 1. Heuristic. Roles of Correspondence and reduction in theory construction or development of N . As Radder (1991) states, and Bokulich (2008) explores in detail, these roles may be played by correspondence from O to N (rather than the more familiar 'from N to O'). Particular links between aspects of O and aspects of N (the theory in development), can, for instance, serve as: (a) Guiding principles: Tentative guides, or aspirations, that may or may not feature in the final formulation of N . As an example, consider Bohr, in his development of old quantum theory, using the harmonics of the classical motion of the electron in the initial stationary state as a heuristic 'selection rule' in judging what quantum transitions should be allowed between stationary states (Bokulich, 2008, 2014). (b) Postulates: Assumed as key features of N . An example is the equivalence principle of general relativity, which took a result of Newtonian mechanics (the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass) and elevated it to the status of a postulate. (c) 'Data': Since O is successful, it can act analogously to empirical data for the new theory to be built around (this also features strongly in the 'justificatory roles'). An example of this is the use of particular features of general relativity, such as Lorentz invariance and the metric structure of spacetime, as constraints (in the relevant domain) in developing a theory of quantum gravity (see §4.1). 2. Justificatory. Roles of Correspondence and reduction in theory acceptance; These roles are about legitimising the new theory, N , by appeal to the established theory, O. The diverse items on this list may be appealed to either, or both, as constraints, or means of confirmation. Constraints are criteria of theory acceptance (also referred to as 'criteria of success', or 'definitional' criteria), meaning that a new theory will not be accepted unless it satisfies these. Means of confirmation, on the other hand, are non-necessary, but desirable features that serve to increase credence in the theory. (a) Preservation of success: A constraint on N is that it be at least as successful as O. Compatibility ensures that the successes of O are not lost in the move to N ; compatibility guards against (and so correspondence relations are invoked in order to minimise) 'Kuhn-losses', which include losses in the ability to explain certain phenomena whose authenticity continues to be recognised, losses of scientific problems (a narrowing of the field of research), an increased specialisation and increased difficulty in communicating with outsiders.17 This role will be achieved most effectively by reduction rather than Correspondence more generally, since reduction shows that the relevant overlap in the domains 17Definition from Hoyningen-Huene (1993, p. 260). 13 of success of the two theories is the entire domain of success of O. Both relations may also be used to evaluate 'acceptable losses'. (b) Explanation of success: A constraint on N is that it explain why O is as successful as it is. The old theory, from the perspective of the new theory, is (to some degree) incorrect, yet it is successful by virtue of being compatible with the new theory in the relevant domain. (Here, this justifies the adoption of N , yet this condition is also used to measure scientific progress, and, in a sense, justify the enterprise as a whole; see I.3.b, below). (c) Identification: There is a requirement that N describes all the same systems as N , but at different scales, or otherwise under different conditions (N of course will typically also describe many more systems than O). Correspondence can help us identify that this is actually the case. However, Correspondence does not standardly demonstrate that one theory is more fundamental than another (i.e., that the behaviour described by one depends, in a sense, on that of the other). For this, reduction is required, II.3.i., below. (d) Problem-solving explanation: N may explain, or 'explain away', features of O that are problematic, or otherwise apparently stand in need of explanation. The solution to particular such problems may be set as part of the criteria of acceptance of N (i.e., in the definition of what would count as a successful theory of N), or be unexpected successes of N that serve as additional evidence for its being correct (i.e., as means of confirmation). An example is the 'measurement problem' of quantum theory, the solution of which is often viewed as a constraint on a successful theory of quantum gravity (i.e., a prospective theory may not be accepted unless it solves this). Another example, mentioned below (§4.1), is the resolution of general relativity singularities by quantum gravity. (e) Non-empirical confirmation: As Dawid (2013) has claimed in his "metainductive argument", our credence in a theory N may be increased in virtue of its standing in particular relationships to established theories and frameworks; e.g., by N exemplifying some key features of O; empirical evidence for the other theories can indirectly also support N . (This, along with I.2.b., can also be understood as part of what Friedman (2001) calls "prospective communicative rationality" in a revolutionary transition, pr paradigm-change: framing N as being, in some sense, a "natural continuation" of the older framework). An example of this is role is string theory's relationship with the framework of quantum field theory-the fact that string theory shares many correspondences with quantum field theory is taken by proponents as strong evidence in its favour (Dawid, 2013). Another example, mentioned below, is an instance of 'principle correspondence' between general relativity and loop quantum gravity (§4.1). (f) 'Predictions': Since O is successful, N unexpectedly recovering particular aspects of O in the relevant domain, can be viewed as support for N . In order 14 for these 'predictions' to lend support for N , the recovered features of O should be those that are actually involved in O's success. (Interestingly, however, the justification here can go the other direction, so that, N 's recovery of particular features of O may be taken as evidence of these features being the ones that are responsible for O's success-this 'mutual justification' is part of I.3.c., below). An example, mentioned below (§4.1), is the recovery of the correct spacetime dimension (in correspondence with general relativity), by an approach to quantum gravity known as causal dynamical triangulations. This example of 'numerical correspondence' serves to increase credence in the approach as being on the right track. 3. Efficient Roles in justifying the continued use of the older theory, O, through its relationship to N ; or refining, or correcting O through its relationship to N : (a) Practical: O may be more efficient to practically apply in a given situation (weighing up factors such as computational time and effort versus accuracy and precision), and such use is legitimated because O is relevantly compatible with the new theory N , and its successes retained (it is interesting to note, comparing with the 'justificatory roles', that N and O are used to mutually justify one another). (b) Retrospective rationality: N should explain why O is as successful as it is, in order to maintain the impression of scientific progress, and the connection between a theory's being successful and its being approximately correct. Thus, this role is not just about justifying O, but the scientific enterprise itself. O, from the perspective of N , is (to some degree) incorrect, yet it is successful by virtue of being compatible with N in the relevant domain-which, in this case, is the entire domain of success of O (note, this is not necessarily the case in I.2.b., which is the justification of N). Thus, this role is achieved by reduction only (not Correspondence). One account of retrospective rationality is Friedman (2001), which describes it as the demonstration that the old paradigm (or, really, theories within it) is contained within the new one, as an approximate special case. For Friedman, this is an important activity that occurs during "revolutionary transitions" of scientific theory-change. (c) Revealing redundancy: The new theory may reveal unphysical aspects of the older theory, or features that are unnecessary for (or not directly involved in) the success of O-for instance, by not matching-up with (or failing to recover) particular features of O, or by failing to link to O in domains where O has not been directly tested. (d) Correcting: N may not correspond toO, but a corrected version, O∗ (Schaffner, 1976). (e) Further development: The "inverse correspondence principle" refers to cases where problems in N are used to guide the further development of O (SánchezRon, 1983). 15 II. ROLES PLAYED IN VIRTUE OF ESTABLISHING DERIVABILITY These roles are supposedly able to be played by any account of reduction that establishes (or is intended to establish) that the successful aspects of the older/less-fundamental theory, O, are able in principle to be derived from the newer/more-fundamental theory, N , to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain. Thus, these roles are are able to be established by SR. 2. Justificatory. (See description in above list). (i) Demonstrating relative fundamentality: If O reduces to N (using the 'philosopher's convention' of terminology, fn. 5), then the laws of O may be said to depend upon the physics described by N . The idea is that, if the successful parts of O are (appropriately) able to be derived from N , then O is, in a sense, "embedded within" N (and we can thus say that the physics described by N is entirely responsible for O's success-see item 3(f), below). This may be used to justify the adoption of N . 3. Efficient. (See description in above list). (f) Explanation: 'Higher level' regularities, described by O, can be explained by showing that their descriptions are derivable (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain), from 'lower level' ones, described by N . Note that this requires that N be more fundamental than O, i.e., that the behaviour described by N is in some (non-causal) sense (at least partially) 'responsible for' that described by O (In other words, it is what enables us to label the two theories as 'lower level' and 'higher level'). This demonstration is achieved by the same relation, of reduction (II.2.i., above). Reductive explanation does not, however, require strict deducibility, nor that it hold between entire theories, and nor that these be formulated in first-order languages (Sarkar, 2015). (g) Unification: Two senses can supposedly be achieved by reduction: 1. The demonstration of the unity of science, à la Oppenheim & Putnam (1958), for example, and 2. Unification in the physicists' sense, where two distinct concepts, laws, etc., that (typically) feature in different theories O1 and O2, are shown to be consequences of some single entity in a more fundamental theory, N . Both of these senses of unification require that N be more fundamental than O. 4.1 Example: quantum gravity Quantum gravity (QG) is the as-yet-undiscovered theory that describes the phenomena at the intersection of the domains of necessity of both general relativity (GR) and quantum field theory (QFT); i.e., it describes the domains in which both general relativistic and quantum field theoretic effects are supposed to be non-trivial. These domains include, for 16 instance, the Planck scale (10−35m), black holes, and cosmological singularities (such as the 'big bang'). Part of the difficulty with finding a theory is the extreme nature of these regimes, which preclude direct experimental testing (although tests in accessible regimes are not ruled out), and currently there are no unequivocal data that QG is definitely required to explain (although there are potential candidates). This empirical disconnect means that more weight has fallen on other guides to theory construction and evaluation, including those offered by reduction and Correspondence that appear in the lists above.18 Although there is currently no theory of QG, there are several different approaches towards a theory (i.e., different research programs), including string theory, loop quantum gravity (LQG), causal set theory, causal dynamical triangulations, and group field theory (to name but a few).19 The plurality of approaches is due, in part, to the fact that it is unclear what an acceptable theory of QG would look like. Apart from the minimal characterisation just mentioned, there is little agreement as to the criteria of theory success. Significantly, the 'recovery' of GR from QG is perhaps one of the only generally-agreed upon constraints on QG. Because it is part of the definition of QG that it subsume the domain of GR, this 'recovery' must mean reduction (either WR or SR, §2.2); meanwhile, its relationship to QFT (and to particular QFTs) may be the weaker one, of Correspondence (Crowther, 2017). Note that the different approaches are all in various stages of development and maturity-none, so far, are complete theories, and thus we cannot expect reduction to hold at this stage. Nevertheless, there are many individual correspondence relations being exhibited, developed, and appealed to across all the approaches, with the ultimate aim of establishing their reduction to GR (on the 'physicists' convention' of terminology, fn. 5). Illustrating the heuristic roles of Correspondence (I.1.), many of the approaches to QG start from current theories and 'work down'; for example, canonical and covariant approaches to QG begin by quantising (parts of) GR, using different methods.20 As well as being useful points of departure, current theories serve as 'empirical anchors' because of their established success (I.1.c.); thus correspondence relations with GR and QFT are also used as means of justification for different approaches to QG (I.2.)-although at this stage, these individual correspondence relations do not establish WR or SR for any of the approaches, they nevertheless lend weight to the approaches which demonstrate them. Some of the key principles of current theories are adopted as guiding principles in the search for QG (I.1.a.); for instance, background independence-which was an appreciable issue in the development of GR, and is exemplified in GR's substantive21 general covariance-is a significant principle in LQG (Rovelli, 2004). Additionally, the fact that the use of this principle in LQG successfully resolved some (otherwise apparently unresolvable) problems in the development of the approach is taken as a means of non-empirical confirmation (I.2.e.), serving to increase credence in LQG as being on the right track. An example of principle correspondence is the relationship of QG approaches to 18This section draws heavily from Crowther (2017), please refer to this for more details. 19See, respectively: Polchinski (1998a,b); Rovelli (2004) and Rovelli & Vidotto (2014); Henson (2009); Ambjorn et al. (2012); Oriti (2012). 20Accessible introductions to QG include Kiefer (2006); Rickles (2008). 21Cf. Norton (2003). 17 Lorentz invariance: the characteristic symmetry of special relativity, which is well-supported by current spacetime theories, as well as recent experimental tests designed to detect possible Planck-scale violations.22 Lorentz invariance is thus a strong choice as a guiding principle (I.1.a), postulate (I.1.b), and 'datum' (I.1.c) for QG. It is used in all three of these heuristic roles in causal set theory, where it is achieved through the random 'sprinkling' process by which causal sets are constructed, which ensures there is no preferred frame that results (Dowker et al., 2004). The ability of causal set theory to provide models that are consistent with Lorentz invariance in the relevant limit serves also in the justificatory role of non-empirical confirmation (I.2.e). As these examples show, successfully using correspondence relations from O to N in the heuristic role of theory-construction can also serve as part of theory-justification, even if such correspondences are "built in" by hand, rather than derived as 'predictions'. However, having correspondences in this way is no guarantee of having them in the 'recovery' direction, fromN toO, which is the one more strongly associated with theory-justification. To see this, note that both LQG and causal set theory describe structures that correspond to spacetimes, because these structures are originally constructed from spacetimes (i.e., models of GR)-using heuristic, O to N correspondences. And yet both approaches have difficulty recovering spacetime (i.e., models of GR) from the multitudes of other possible structures described by their theories. They each seek a dynamics that naturally 'picks out' the structures in their theory that correspond to spacetimes in the appropriate domains.23 The justificatory roles of preservation of success (I.2.a) and explanation of success (I.2.b) are seemingly only demonstrable post-hoc, once we have a close-to-fully-developed theory that is otherwise acceptable as a replacement for GR in the relevant domains. However, string theory provides an example of how (I.2.b) might work, with one of its correspondences: in order for the theory to be well-defined, the background spacetime containing the string must satisfy an equation that has the Einstein field equations (the central equations of GR) as a large-distance limit. If string theory replaces GR, then this correspondence may be appealed to in order to explain the success of GR: even though GR is only 'approximately correct', it works because it features, or approximates, some aspects of string theory. In other words, the idea is that GR is successful partly in virtue of employing the Einstein field equations in the appropriate domain. The shared importance of these equations is an example of law correspondence (§3). Huggett & Vistarini (2015) argue that the background metric field that features in the theory is composed of stringy excitations and, given that it satisfies the Einstein field equations, is to be identified with the gravitational field. Hence, this correspondence also plays the identificatory role (I.2.c), which justifies the theory through the demonstration that it describes the same systems as GR-as required by any acceptable theory of QG. Additionally, these correspondence relations would be part of establishing that GR reduces to string theory (on the 'philosopher's convention' of terminology); if this were achieved, then the correspondence relations would serve in the justificatory role of establishing 22See, e.g., Collins et al. (2009); Liberati & Maccione (2011). 23This is related also to the issue of emergence, cf. Crowther (2016); Wüthrich (2017). 18 relative fundamentality (II.2.g), and all of the efficiency roles (I.3.a.–II.3.f), including the explanation of the higher-level behaviour described by GR-e.g., QG may describe the 'atoms of spacetime', i.e., its constituents24; or, if gravity is conceived of as a force akin to the other fundamental forces, then QG might provide a 'mechanistic explanation' (loosely speaking) of how the force is constituted, and an explanation of why gravity is so 'weak' compared to the other fundamental forces25. An example of the problem-solving explanatory role (I.2.d), is the goal of QG to explain or 'explain away' the problematic singularities in GR (e.g., those of black holes and the big bang). Depending on the approach under consideration, this may be set as a criterion of acceptance of QG (i.e., part of the definition of the theory), or just serve as a means of confirmation (i.e., an added bonus of an otherwise acceptable theory, and additional evidence of its being correct). An example of a correspondence acting as a 'prediction' (I.2.f) in QG is the recovery of the correct spacetime dimension-in accordance with GR, in the appropriate domains-by causal dynamical triangulations (Ambjørn et al., 2004). This numerical correspondence lends support for the approach, given that the dimension of spacetime in GR is likely involved in the theory's success. There is one more peculiarity of QG that I must mention: the theory is expected by many researchers to not only profoundly alter our current understanding of spacetime (as described by GR), but perhaps to not feature conceptions of space and time at all. (This is why, although there should be explanatory reductions (in Wimsatt's sense, §2.1) between QG and GR, these would be difficult to properly interpret as compositional, mechanistic, or causal-all of which seem to involve spatiotemporal notions). This leads to two particular (but related) problems, to which Correspondence and reduction can provide solutions. These are the problems of establishing local beables and empirical coherence for a theory that does not feature notions of space and time. The idea of local beables comes from John Bell, who meant it to refer to the things that we take to be real, and which are definitely associated with particular spacetime regions. The issue is that a theory without local beables is not only apparently unable to be experimentally verified (since our experiments necessarily only involve local beables), but that it may be empirically incoherent: its means of verification may undermine the reasons for believing it correct. Huggett & Wüthrich (2013), however, show how-for a variety of QG approaches-one can potentially derive local beables, and thus avoid the challenge of empirical incoherence. In some cases, this is done by establishing correspondence relations with GR, but in others it is not necessary to make contact with full GR spacetime in order to find a notion of local beables (and so correspondence is not necessarily required for these two roles). Thus, illustrating the unexpected utility and versatility of reduction and Correspondence are two additional, specialised roles (which rely just on the establishment of compatibility, rather than derivability), are: I.2. Justificatory. (g) Local beables: For a theory lacking conceptions of space and time (and thus 24See, e.g., Dowker (2005); Oriti (2014); Padmanabhan (2016). 25This is the case, e.g., in string theory, (Polchinski, 1998a,b) 19 "local beables" (Bell, 1987)), making contact with established spatiotemporal theories is one means of deriving local beables (Huggett & Wüthrich, 2013). (The possession of local beables is a criterion of acceptance, but note that neither Correspondence nor reduction are necessary means of achieving it). (h) Empirical coherence: Experimental testing is necessarily carried out in space and time, so the means of testing a theory that says there is no space and time may undermine the reasons for believing the theory correct; correspondence with established spatiotemporal theories is one means of avoiding this problem of "empirical incoherence" (Huggett & Wüthrich, 2013). (Empirical coherence is a criterion of acceptance, but note that neither Correspondence nor reduction are necessary means of achieving it). 5 The characteristic function of reduction The characteristic function of reduction is typically assumed to be explanation: either the explanation of higher-level theories in terms of lower-level ones (in the case of reduction1), or the explanation of the success of a replaced theory by the theory that replaces it (in the case of reduction2). As I have argued, both of these are indeed roles of reduction- however, they are not the characteristic functions of the relation. I briefly re-state these roles. The role that is typically thought to characterise reduction2, explanation of success (I.2.b.), has the success of O explained by being in principle compatible with N , ECD- i.e., that the two theories share the same results (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain). This role does not depend upon 'in principle derivability' of O from N , but just requires that the new theory, N , is accepted as correct. Thus, this role is able to be played by Correspondence (including WR) as well as SR. It is not exclusive to reduction. (This does not, of course, mean that reduction is not explanatory; and note too that if all the successes of O are to be explained in this way, then at least WR is required). The role usually thought to characterise reduction1 is the idea of deductive explanation. As mentioned in (II.3.f.), the weaker, more realistic sense of this idea does not require strict deduction but rather the establishment (i.e., the scientific-consensus belief) that the older theory be derivable in principle (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain) from the newer one: the lessfundamental behaviours described by O are thereby explained. This explanation requires that the behaviour described by O be dependent on that of N ; this demonstration of relative fundamentality is also provided by the correspondence relations that establish inprinciple derivability.26 Thus, the characteristic function of reduction, by virtue of which 26Recall that derivability (which may be established using relations of correspondence which need not be asymmetric) is being used to demonstrate the asymmetric relation of reduction: i.e., that all the successful parts of the reduced theory can (approximately and appropriately) be obtained from the reducing theory. The idea of dependence, or relative fundamentality, is that the reduced theory is thus shown to be embedded within the reducing theory (and hence that the physics described by the reduced theory depends on that of the reducing theory). 20 these roles are achieved, is the establishment of in principle derivability. This is part of SR, the stronger understanding of reduction. The characteristic function of reduction is, I argue, the establishment of in principle derivability. It is by virtue of achieving this that reduction is able to play all of the heuristic, justificatory and efficiency roles listed above. (Though note that the heuristic roles utilise the idea that in principle derivability will be established, rather than its actual establishment, since these roles pertain to a theory-in-development, rather than holding between two sufficiently-developed theories). The weaker conception of reduction (WR, being a special case of Correspondence), as the establishment that the newer theory can in principle reproduce all the results of the older one is insufficient for achieving the roles in part II of the list above. 6 Conclusion The numerous, diverse-and in some cases, particular and unexpected-roles of reduction are achieved by the relation establishing that an older and/or less-fundamental theory27, O is derivable in principle from a newer and/or more-fundamental theory, N , to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain. These roles go far beyond the typical function assigned to reduction, of explaining O by reference to N . I have argued that they may be achieved by either reduction1 or reduction2, since either of these conceptions of reduction may be used to establish the in principle derivability of O from N (to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain). This is using the more accurate, broader conception of reduction2, on which it is not simply a limiting relation (as clarified in §1.1 and §2.1, which address some common misunderstandings associated with this conception of reduction). Thus, here I suggest that reduction1 and reduction2 are not essentially different in respect to the roles they play in science. Yet, most of the roles of reduction can in fact be achieved by a weaker relation, Correspondence, that establishes just the in principle compatibility of the two theories. That is, that N is able in principle to reproduce all the successful results of O to within some acceptable degree of error, under appropriate conditions, and within the relevant domain-which is the overlap of the domains of success of the two theories involved. A special case of Correspondence (which above, I referred to as WR, the weaker notion of reduction) is domain subsumption, when the overlap in the domains of success of the two theories is the entirety of the domain of success of O. References Ambjørn, J., Jurkiewicz, J., & Loll, R. (2004). Emergence of a 4d world from causal quantum gravity. Physical Review Letters, 93 (13). 27Keeping in mind the qualifications regarding my use of this term, outlined on p.3. 21 Ambjorn, J., Jurkiewicz, J., & Loll, R. (2012). Causal dynamical triangulations and the quest for quantum gravity. In A. W. George Ellis, Jeff Murugan (Ed.), Foundations of Space and Time: Reflections on Quantum Gravity (pp. 321–337). Cambridge University Press. 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Dowker, F., Henson, J., & Sorkin, R. D. (2004). Quantum gravity phenomenology, Lorentz invariance and discreteness. Modern Physics Letters A, 19, 1829–1840. 22 Friedman, M. (2001). Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures of Stanford University. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Hartmann, S. (2002). On correspondence. Studies In History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 33 (1), 79–94. Hempel, C. & Oppenheim, P. (1948). Studies in the logic of explanation. Philosophy of Science, 15, 135–175. Henson, J. (2009). The causal set approach to quantum gravity. In D. Oriti (Ed.), Approaches to Quantum Gravity: Toward a New Understanding of Space, Time and Matter (pp. 393–413). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hoyningen-Huene, P. (1993). Reconstructing scientific revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhns philosophy of science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huggett, N. & Vistarini, T. (2015). Deriving general relativity from string theory. Philosophy of Science, 82 (5), 1163–1174. 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General covariance, gauge theories and the Kretschmann objection. In K. Brading & E. Castellani (Eds.), Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections (pp. 110–123). Cambridge University Press. Oppenheim, P. & Putnam, H. (1958). The unity of science as a working hypothesis. In H. Feigl, M. Scriven, & G. Maxwell (Eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, volume 2 (pp. 3–36). Minnesota: Minnesota University Press. 23 Oriti, D. (2012). The microscopic dynamics of quantum space as a group field theory. In A. W. George Ellis, Jeff Murugan (Ed.), Foundations of Space and Time: Reflections on Quantum Gravity (pp. 257–320). Cambridge University Press. Oriti, D. (2014). Disappearance and emergence of space and time in quantum gravity. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 46, 186–199. Padmanabhan, T. (2016). Atoms of spacetime and the nature of gravity. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 701 (1), 012018. Polchinski, J. (1998a). 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Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? Amy Berg – Rhode Island College forthcoming in Public Affairs Quarterly, 2018 The effective altruism movement (EA) is one of the most influential philosophically savvy movements to emerge in recent years. Effective Altruism has historically been dedicated to finding out what charitable giving is the most overall-effective, that is, the most effective at promoting or maximizing the impartial good. But some members of EA want the movement to be more inclusive, allowing its members to give in the way that most effectively promotes their values, even when doing so isn't overalleffective. When we examine what it means to give according to one's values, I argue, we will see that this is both inconsistent with what EA is like now and inconsistent with its central philosophical commitment to an objective standard that can be used to critically analyze one's giving. While EA is not merely synonymous with act utilitarianism, it cannot be much more inclusive than it is right now. Introduction The effective altruism movement (EA) is one of the most influential philosophically savvy movements to emerge in recent years. Members of the movement, who often refer to themselves as EAs, have done a great deal to get philosophers and the general public to think about how much they can do to help others. But EA is at something of a crossroads. As it grows beyond its beginnings at Oxford and in the work of Peter Singer, its members must decide what kind of movement they want to have. In particular, they must decide what it truly means to be an effective altruist. Effective Altruism started out with what I will call a little-tent approach to effectiveness. Here, for something to count as "effective," it must be overalleffective; that is, it must be effective at promoting, securing, or maximizing the impartial good. This is the sense of EA that has led people to see it as coextensive with utilitarianism.1 (I'm leaving open for now whether little-tent EA requires us to maximize the impartial good or merely promote it-but we'll return to that question toward the end of this paper.) The other possible approach is the big-tent approach. Here, "effective" merely means value-effective, that is, effective at promoting, securing, or maximizing some value. "Value" is more broadly construed than "impartial good": people value art, political power, and community, even when they are known to contribute very little to the impartial good. Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 2 So far, EA has generally confined itself to a little tent. For example, in defining EA, Wiblin excludes from the movement those who believe that we ought to do good but who don't think this obligates us to try to maximize the impartial good.2 By excluding these people, Wiblin effectively defines EA as a movement dedicated to overall-effectiveness.3 The document "What Is Effective Altruism?," co-written by a range of EAs, excludes value-effectiveness even more explicitly: "Effective altruists focus on improving lives. . . . There might be other things of value as well--promoting art, or preserving the natural environment--but that's not what effective altruism is about."4 But there are signs that some EAs would like to change the size of their tent. Gabriel, for example, recommends that EA broaden the kind of advice it gives, permitting "advisees to choose the values they consider morally relevant (within certain parameters) and produce recommendations that optimize the impact" on these values.5 This version of EA appears to take value-effectiveness as its criterion.6 Gabriel moves to the big tent because he believes that this version of EA is not susceptible to what he sees as the weaknesses of the little tent.7 Conversations I've had with EAs indicate that Gabriel isn't alone here; some people who are uncomfortable with EA's roots in utilitarianism are still attracted to the movement for its focus on evidence-based giving. They think of themselves as EAs, and yet they want to give to causes because they align with their values. In the debate about which criterion of effectiveness to adopt, one side has a clear advantage. Broadening EA to include value-effectiveness would require abandoning some of EA's central philosophical commitments: most notably, the view that we should measure our giving using an objective standard. While this does not mean that EA membership is limited to consequentialists, it does mean that EA cannot include all who are interested in doing good, and it may limit the public appeal of EA. For EA to be EA, the tent must stay little. 1. Tents and Values To see why value-effectiveness is incompatible with EA, consider: Reproductive Access I: As a woman, Anne values reproductive rights. The value Anne wants to promote is securing reproductive rights for everyone. Therefore, Anne supports charities that are effective at ensuring reproductive access for very poor women in the developing world. Reproductive Access I is clearly compatible with big-tent EA. Anne has a value that's important to her-reproductive rights-and she's done her research as to what can most effectively promote that value. She's thought about why she holds that value: she cares about the good, and she cares about increasing the happiness, status, and agency of women. But it's a value Anne holds because of her own life experiences, her projects, and so on, not because she believes it's the best way to pursue overall-effectiveness. Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 3 So is Reproductive Access I compatible with little-tent EA? Here, Anne is pursuing the value she cares about in a way that does quite a lot to promote the impartial good, since her giving targets those in great need. And, depending on the organizations Anne directs her giving to, her giving could be compatible with the recommendations of at least one EA group. The Life You Can Save (TLYCS) includes two charities dealing primarily with aspects of reproductive care (the Fistula Foundation and Population Services International) on its list of recommended charities.8 In order for Anne's giving to be overall-effective, she should choose to direct her giving to one or both of those charities. If she does, then so far, her giving in Reproductive Access I is the kind that is encouraged by little-tent EA. But on the other hand, neither GiveWell nor Giving What We Can (GWWC) includes a charity dealing primarily with reproductive care on its list of top charities (nor even among the runners-up).9 These prominent EA organizations disagree with TLYCS about whether any charities focusing on reproductive access are among the greatest contributors to the impartial good. If these organizations, not TLYCS, are correctly interpreting the available evidence, then there are other, more overall-effective ways that Anne could spend her money than by giving to reproductive-rights charities. Plus, even if Anne's giving is itself effective, her motivation may be to give according to her values, not according to what is most overall-effective. Anne's giving may live up to EA standards, but Anne herself might not. Thus even Reproductive Access I-even giving that helps save very poor women from suffering and death-cannot receive the full-throated support of all EAs. Now consider: Reproductive Access II: As an American woman, Beatriz values reproductive rights, and she's disturbed by the ways in which reproductive access has been curtailed by recent laws and policies. The value she wants to promote is securing reproductive rights for Americans. Therefore, Beatriz supports charities that are effective at providing reproductive access for women in the United States and that mobilize to oppose the curtailment of reproductive access. If Reproductive Access I was probably incompatible with little-tent EA, Reproductive Access II is definitely incompatible with it. While in Reproductive Access I, Anne's donation went to help the very poor, very few American women qualify as "very poor." Giving to support reproductive care in the United States will do much less to promote the impartial good than giving to reproductive care more broadly. And yet, like Reproductive Access I, Reproductive Access II is compatible with big-tent EA. Big-tent EA licenses giving that supports one's values. While "promoting reproductive access in the United States" is more geographically specific than "promoting reproductive access generally," it's not ad hoc. Beatriz came to hold that value for the same reasons as Anne came to hold her value in Reproductive Access I: it's based on her identity, her projects, and interests. If Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 4 Beatriz's value seems less legitimate, that might be because it does less to promote the impartial good-but obviously that kind of requirement is ruled out in the big tent. If Reproductive Access I is permissible for big-tent EA, so is Reproductive Access II. And so is: Reproductive Access III: Chuck lives in a wealthy community in which health care is generally good. Still, some women receive care that is merely adequate rather than absolutely top-notch. Chuck's little sister works for an organization that works toward improving the quality of reproductive care in their community. The values Chuck wants to promote are reproductive access and support for the projects of people he knows and cares about. Therefore, Chuck supports his sister's organization, which is effective at securing reproductive rights within their community but which limits its focus to their community specifically. We are now far removed from where we started. Reproductive Access III is clearly not the kind of giving licensed by little-tent EA. Chuck is giving to women who are already extremely well-off by global standards, and who in fact already have some access to reproductive care. And yet big-tent EA should support Reproductive Access III. Chuck is, once again, operating on his values: the value of supporting his associates and the value of securing reproductive access. There is no difference between the structure of this case and the structure of the two previous cases. Although the giving in Reproductive Access III is extremely inefficient by little-tent standards, big-tent EA has no reason to criticize giving in the style of Reproductive Access III. If EAs think that the giving in Reproductive Access I and/or II seems fine (maybe not optimal, but at least reasonably good), but the giving in Reproductive Access III is off the table, then they must explain: Why was giving according to one's values, rather than the impartial good, permissible in Anne's and/or Beatriz's case, but not in Chuck's? What is it about Chuck's values that's out of line? But it's not clear what resources big-tent EA has to draw that line, since it cannot decide according to whether Chuck's values promote the impartial good. The moral of these three stories is clear: once we start down the path of allowing giving according to one's values, giving quickly comes to look nothing like the giving EAs currently promote. Because of the wide range-in content and specificity-of values a person can reasonably have, a value-effective EA would encompass a range of giving, from that which targets the very poor to that which stays within a wealthy community. What, then, is big-tent EA against? Consider: Reproductive Access IV: Dahlia is a mean person who wants those around her to suffer. She's concluded that one way to make people suffer is to make sure they can't afford reproductive care. Dahlia gives extensively to Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 5 organizations specifically intended to prevent access to reproductive care. In other words, big-tent EA can surely condemn giving according to nefarious values-giving intended to cause harm, suffering, or pain. Dahlia may be "effective," but she's no altruist. The values of Reproductive Access IV are not values directed at any reasonable conception of the good, impartial or not. Is Chuck like Dahlia? In Reproductive Access III, he's failing to prevent harms since he's taking money he could have spent on cures for schistosomiasis and spending it on relatively well-funded causes instead. As long as Chuck knows that his money could be doing more, he may be demonstrating a lack of regard for those in need. But if that's true of Chuck, then it's also true of Beatriz, who is demonstrating a lack of regard for those in need outside the United States. And it's even true of Anne, who is demonstrating a lack of regard for the very poor in greatest need (for whom access to reproductive care may not be the first priority). If a lack of regard for those who are worse-off is your complaint against Chuck, then it's hard to see how you aren't just back in the little tent. What separates Chuck (and Anne and Beatriz) from Dahlia must be that his values are not themselves nefarious. If the world's more pressing problems were taken care of, little-tent EA would certainly allow us to aid members of wealthy communities. Improving reproductive access in wealthy communities certainly contributes to the impartial good; it just doesn't contribute as much as other options would, given the situation today. Clearly, there's nothing in these values that's inherently bad; they're just at odds with little-tent EA given the context we're currently in. Even big-tent EA ought to be able to condemn truly nefarious values (using something like Gabriel's "parameters" for determining which values are morally acceptable), but the values at stake in Reproductive Access III aren't nefarious. Besides the pursuit of nefarious values, consider cases such as: Reproductive Access V: As an American woman, Evelyn places some value on reproductive rights, and she's generally against the recent attempts to curtail them, but it's not her first priority. On her commute home, Evelyn hears a particularly upsetting story about reproductive rights on the news. When she gets home and checks the mail, she sees that a reproductiverights organization has sent her a flyer requesting donations. Because she's upset, she writes them a check without bothering to research whether they're more effective than other reproductive-rights organizations at mobilizing against the curtailment of these rights. Evelyn's giving here is not value-effective, given her values. First, the value of reproductive rights isn't especially important to her; she's upset, and she's acting on a spur-of-the-moment emotional response. Second, she's not trying to pursue that value effectively. She doesn't know, nor has she tried to find out, whether the charity she's giving to is a good way to support her goals. In Reproductive Access V, Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 6 Evelyn is approaching instrumental irrationality, since she's pursuing a goal with no idea whether the means she's chosen will get her there.10 2. Problems with Big-Tent EA (from an EA Standpoint) So Reproductive Access IV and V are the kinds of cases big-tent EA condemns-cases in which agents badly pursue values, or pursue bad values, or pursue values they don't care about. But big-tent EA cannot condemn any of Reproductive Access I -III. Because the actors in those cases each acted according to what would most effectively accomplish their values, their actions should be praised by big-tent EA. But this shows that big-tent EA is not really EA at all. Big-tent EA is not compatible with what EA is; but it is also not compatible with why EA is that way. A big tent is neither compatible with the positions taken by major EA groups, nor with the reasons given for those positions. Effective Altruism may not be as little a tent as some have supposed, but it can only preserve its distinctive philosophical commitments-most notably, its commitment to an objective standard for giving- if it stays a little tent (although, as we will see, not as little as some might think). 2.1 What EA Is Big-tent EA is not compatible with EA as it currently exists. Although Gabriel and others have argued that EA should help donors to choose their own values and maximize their giving in pursuit of those values, the major EA organizations do not count value-effective giving as effective giving. Giving What We Can's pledge, for example, requires its members to "give at least ten percent of what [they] earn to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to improve the lives of others."11 Giving to combat climate change is generally ruled out, on the grounds that "it is very expensive to make any headway" on this issue.12 There is no exception made if fighting climate change is an important value to you. Peter Singer's group The Life You Can Save (TLYCS) runs a similar pledge, and its guidelines are even clearer about what doesn't count: you cannot use money donated in your own community, even if it helps the poor, to fulfill your pledge to donate, since the poor near you are almost certainly not those in greatest need.13 Once again, what matters is overall-effectiveness. Finally, the Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) criticizes David Geffen's donations to the Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, pointing out that "much more good could have been accomplished if that money had been spent on more pressing needs."14 If the CEA cared about value-effectiveness rather than overall-effectiveness, Geffen's gifts (assuming they represent his values) would be praiseworthy, rather than criticizable. 2.2 Why EA Is That Way So big-tent EA is generally incompatible with the guidelines for giving espoused by Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 7 major organizations in the movement. But maybe that's not a problem. Movements evolve. "Earning to give" was once a major part of the EA organization 80,000 Hours; now it's downplayed.15 As more people become interested in EA and add their perspectives, talents, and views to the movement, EA will certainly make some further changes. But movements can only change so much while still retaining the core philosophical commitments that make them coherent as movements. In considering whether and how EA should grow, Cotton-Barratt notes that a movement with more popular ideas will have a different growth pattern from that of a less appealing movement.16 Excising EA's focus on overall-effectiveness would, almost by definition, make it a more popular movement. Those who think overalleffectiveness is the right criterion on which to give would still be free to do so; those who think value-effectiveness is the right criterion would be newly welcome. But Cotton-Barratt warns that this tool should be used carefully: "The value of spreading a different movement may be substantially different, and it could be too easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater by removing unpopular components."17 So what's EA's "baby"? We need to know more about the distinctive philosophical commitments of EA.18 Effective Altruism's crucial philosophical commitment is that it provides a single objective standard by which we can analyze our giving. On its own, this objective standard could be compatible with either the big or the little tent. The little tent has an objective standard: Does your gift do the most it can (according to your knowledge at the time) to promote the impartial good? The big tent has an objective standard too: Does your gift do the most it can to promote your values, whatever those happen to be? Both of these standards are objective in some sense. Little-tent EAs have developed lists that purport to give an objective answer about how you can give most overall-effectively (although they acknowledge that these lists are based on incomplete data). While it may be more difficult to determine what your values really are, and perhaps more difficult to figure out how to most effectively promote them, there are objectively true and false answers in the big tent too. (In Reproductive Access V, Evelyn's spur-of-the-moment donation was objectively a bad way to promote her values.) But the standard of promoting the impartial good-the standard connected with overall-effectiveness-best captures the other philosophical commitments of EA. First, this standard is more fully objective. Value-effective giving is assessed by an objective standard of how well you succeed at promoting a subjectively held value. Since value-effective EA would not be in the business of criticizing values (unless the values were truly nefarious), it would not hold all its members to precisely the same standard--which overall-effective EA does, since its standard does not depend on an individual's values. Second, holding everyone to the same standard allows for your values to come under critical scrutiny from your peers. Wiblin warns that if EA's emphasis on justifying your plans "to a high standard" were diluted, by allowing "any plan to improve the world that isn't really ineffective," then "people [in EA] would stop Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 8 feeling any pressure from their peers to . . . change approaches."19 If EA shifts to a bigger tent, there is no longer reason to pressure peers to give according to anything but their own values. Third, EAs' commitment to the impartial good allows them to avoid various psychological phenomena they see as problematic. Those who give overalleffectively are the kind of people who will, according to Hutchinson, display "openmindedness" since they will be willing to give to a wide range of charities.20 Relatedly, overall-effective giving is supposed to avoid bias. The Effective Altruism Foundation claims that if we become emotionally attached to a particular cause, "it might compromise our ability to evaluate causes objectively."21 Since there is so much need in the world, and our judgments about how to best meet that need are still uncertain, we should give according to a fully objective standard. This is how we can avoid confirmation bias-if a project, or strategy, becomes particularly important to me, then I might unintentionally overestimate how effective that project or strategy is. Finally, those who are committed to overall-effectiveness will (theoretically) do good in perpetuity.22 Suppose that Congress passes a law that guarantees full funding for reproductive care for all Americans. Beatriz (from Reproductive Access II) no longer has to worry about the value that drove her giving. She might stop giving altogether. Someone who is committed to overalleffectiveness, on the other hand, will switch causes once the top cause has received enough funding or is otherwise no longer an issue. Of course, this kind of concern only makes a difference at the margins. Many of the causes that people donate to appear destined to remain problems indefinitely, and many values people hold don't have an upper limit (is there such a thing as completely fulfilling the need for art?). But the more granular a value is, the more likely that the work I can do to promote that value will eventually be exhausted (there's only so much Chuck can do to support his sister in Reproductive Access III). My purpose here is not to determine whether these philosophical commitments are the right ones. The Effective Altruism Foundation claims that our biases get in the way of overall-effective giving; EA's critics might retort that those "biases" are guides to discovering your own values and projects, to thinking critically about how you want to live your life. Wiblin values a single, objective standard for giving; EA's critics might hold that that standard narrowly constrains the values we ought to be allowed to promote.23 But it's clear from this discussion of EA values that EA would lose a lot of what makes it EA if it were to shift from overall-effectiveness to value-effectiveness. We can see this even more clearly when we consider what a big-tent EA would really look like. For one thing, big-tent EA would have a marked change in focus. It would still want to encourage everyone to give, but this encouragement would be centered around individual values, not the impartial good. So EA would encourage those who don't give at all to start giving according to their own values. Effective Altruism could look into why some people give while others don't and could conduct persuasion campaigns to get more people to give. (That big-tent EA Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 9 uses a criterion of value-effectiveness might make it more attractive STET since there would be no requirement to restrict giving in ways that some people find alienating.) Rather than avoiding what little-tent EA sees as cognitive biases, bigtent EA might play off of those so-called biases (seeing them instead as projects, commitments, aspects of identity, and so on). Second, big-tent EA organizations would focus on helping potential donors to understand what kind of giving would best support their values, rather than on encouraging people to give to the few overall-effective charities. For someone whose values are like those of Beatriz in Reproductive Rights II, EA organizations could provide a list of reproductive-rights charities doing effective work in the United States. For the David Geffens of the world, EA would need to research effective arts organizations in New York. And so on. There might be peer pressure among EAs to give somewhere, but there would not be peer pressure to give anywhere in particular or to revise one's values. Finally, in service of these goals, big-tent EA could help people better understand what their own values are. Chuck might be faced with a choice in Reproductive Access III: Should he give to the reproductive-rights organization his sister works for, or should he give to a more effective organization serving his community? Big-tent EA could help him make the choice between these organizations by running surveys, administering quizzes, or holding counseling sessions that would lead him to understand what his own values are and how important each value is to him. Seen this way, it becomes clear that big-tent EA is simply a sort of cheerleader for encouraging people to give however they see fit, as long as it's instrumentally rational. If EA evolves like this, it will no longer be a distinct movement. Instead, it will stand for a pretty commonsense belief: that if two charities are directed at the exact same (granularly specified) value, you should give to the more effective one. Big-tent EA is indistinct from commonsense beliefs about how one ought to promote one's values. In fact, this kind of EA might be worse than useless. Since big-tent EA would no longer stand for a distinctive philosophical belief, and since it never focused on a particular cause, it would be in danger of becoming otiose. The Red Cross may not stand for a philosophically controversial position, but at least it's staked out a cause area. Big-tent EA would be more like a clearinghouse for lots of different causes and lots of different values. If the costs of running EA organizations (paying staff, maintaining web servers, creating and disseminating information) outweigh the benefits of having such a clearinghouse, we might just want to cut out the middleman entirely. There are three things EAs should take away from this discussion. First, the cases of Reproductive Access I -III show that if EA admits value-effective giving, then many different ways to give will count as effective, even if that giving exclusively benefits the well-off. Cases that EAs frequently criticize, such as Geffen's gifts to the arts, look laudable from a big-tent perspective. Second, if we look at the statements of flagship EA organizations and people, it's clear that value-effective giving is not Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 10 what they have in mind. But, of course, that's exactly what Gabriel and others advocate changing. So, third, EAs should be aware of how many of their philosophical commitments they would give up by changing to a big-tent EA. Of course, EAs own their movement, and it's ultimately up to them to decide what kind of movement they want, but value-effectiveness represents a substantial break with the philosophical commitments that EAs presently hold. They cannot both preserve these commitments and enlarge their tent. 3. A Big Tent for Little-Rent Reasons? Here's one other possibility. The founders of EA are, for the most part, fairly standard act utilitarians. For this group, there's nothing wrong with being quiet about your real motives, or maybe even actively engaging in deception, if doing so maximizes the impartial good. This could lead to an EA movement that is both bigand little-tent: its public face encourages people to give more in whatever way is value-effective, while its private face remains focused on the overall-effectiveness that was EA's original target. If big-tent EA could get people excited about giving, over time, it could expose them to "real" EA-to the idea that the giving they're doing could be much more overall-effective. This might lead to some rhetorical changes in how EA approaches charitable giving. Remember when the "Ice Bucket Challenge" was popular back in 2014? People were dumping buckets of water on themselves in order to raise money to fund research into ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; Lou Gehrig's disease). A number of EAs vocally criticized the Ice Bucket Challenge, arguing that the funds it was raising for ALS research were "cannibalizing" funds that could have gone to more effective charities.24 If EAs were to adopt a big-tent strategy for littletent reasons, they might approach the Ice Bucket Challenge differently, either by co-opting the ice bucket strategy for overall-effective charities, or by trying to recruit people who had already done the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS into becoming donors to overall-effective charities afterward. In fact, MacAskill implies that EAs could co-opt this strategy, in an article entitled "This Week, Let's Dump a Few Ice Buckets to Wipe Out Malaria Too" that was intended as a follow-up to his original piece criticizing the Ice Bucket Challenge; other effective altruists made similar arguments.25 The Ice Bucket Challenge got people temporarily excited about giving; EA could pick up on that enthusiasm, redirect it, and make it more permanent by having a big tent in front and a smaller tent in back. Insofar as this strategy involves dishonesty, it's bound for trouble. It may be morally acceptable to the strict act utilitarians who were the first EAs, since this kind of duplicity wouldn't be impermissible (in fact, would be obligatory), on their view, as long as it maximized overall utility. But it's not clear that even a strict utilitarian calculus would come out in favor of a big tent for little-tent reasons. People tend not to like feeling like they're being manipulated. If people came to believe that EA had been rhetorically duplicitous-if they felt used, manipulated, or tricked by a little-tent organization with a big-tent face, that might turn them Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 11 away from EA. Even worse, EA might be a cautionary tale used by those who are looking for an excuse to avoid all charitable giving whatsoever ("See, I told you those do-gooders couldn't be trusted!"). This strategy might also diminish EA's appeal for non-act-utilitarian members, since at least some more deontologically inclined little-tent EAs might see something wrong with using big-tent EA supporters as mere means to an eventual little-tent EA end. So if there's room in a little tent for people who are not strict act utilitarians to be EA (and as I'll lay out below, I think there is), those people may be uncomfortable with a movement that is dishonest about its true theoretical beliefs. But a big tent out front, with a little tent in the back, need not involve dishonesty. A different version of this strategy would counsel EAs to be open and honest about their beliefs. EAs could say: "We think that everyone should give according to overall effectiveness, but we recognize not everyone agrees with us. We still think you should give, even if you do so less effectively." This one is risky too. First, I think it runs the risk of being condescending. If EAs are encouraging others to give how they think best, but at the same time are saying that other views on giving are misguided, that could make non-EA givers feel diminished. Even if EAs can successfully not condescend to the people they're trying to attract, I have doubts about the effectiveness of this strategy. I don't know that it's very motivating to hear that you should give, but that the way you want to give is less valuable or praiseworthy than the way EAs give is. The more honest EAs are about how they think of effectiveness and why it matters, the harder it will be for them to attract people who are open to giving but inclined to disagree about how to give. So I have my doubts as to whether a big tent for little-tent reasons could be a successful strategy for EAs to pursue. But whether EAs pursue this strategy openly or dishonestly, it's just a strategy. If we're investigating the possibility of a big tent for little-tent reasons, then the theoretical argument has already been won by little-tent EA; we're just arguing now about which pragmatic strategy is more effective. All of the philosophical work is being done by the little-tenters, even if EA appears to have changed. Even if EA were to adopt this strategy, which I think is dicey both morally (if it involves dishonesty) and pragmatically (if it can't motivate), the tent that matters would stay the same size. 4. What about Different EA-Endorsed Charities? I've argued that EA cannot evolve beyond its current view of effectiveness as overall-effectiveness. But is this really consistent with EA practice so far? Perhaps EAs really do permit giving in a value-effective way. Evidence for this might be the split between EA organizations focused on animal causes (such as Animal Charity Evaluators, or ACE) and those whose recommended charities mostly help humans (such as GiveWell and GWWC). The human-focused charities disagree with each other too. As we saw back in Reproductive Access I, TLYCS endorses the Fistula Foundation, but GWWC and GiveWell do not. We shouldn't overestimate this split, though: these organizations have a lot Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 12 of members in common, share many guiding values, and generally support rather than rival each other. But they do have different areas of focus, and someone donating 10 percent of his income to effective charities has to decide whether to give that money to animalor human-related causes. If it's permissible for an EA to give to either human or animal charities, then it might be permissible because value-effectiveness is the right criterion for deciding where to give. Conversely, if overall-effectiveness is the right criterion of effectiveness, then GiveWell and ACE can't both be right. Either all EAs should be working exclusively on human causes, or they should all be giving exclusively to animal charities. But value-effectiveness isn't what's doing the work here. Animal Charity Evaluators pursues animal-related causes because we don't know whether animal or human charities are the most overall-effective ways to give. Animal Charity Evaluators, GiveWell, and GWWC share a commitment to overall-effectiveness, but those who give to ACE-recommended charities believe that these may be the most overall-effective. Animal Charity Evaluators and GiveWell, and also GiveWell and GWWC, disagree not about whether overallor value-effectiveness is the right sense of effectiveness; they just may have disagreements about how to calculate what is most overall-effective. This is, very reasonably, due to the extreme difficulty of calculating what does the best job of maximizing happiness and relieving suffering, particularly where animals are concerned. But if the research comes in, and it turns out that animal charities are clearly more effective, we would expect EA donors to human causes to switch to animal causes. 5. What about a Medium Tent? But what if that doesn't happen? What if the evidence comes in, and animal charities are more effective at relieving suffering than human-focused charities are, but donors to GWWC-endorsed charities don't switch their giving? Donors to ACE and GWWC may be giving in order to promote the impartial good and yet disagree about what that impartial good is, even after all the evidence is in. If they do, this suggests that there are more tents to try out. Hutchinson proposes a kind of medium tent in a discussion of why EA is "cause-neutral" (by which she means that EAs commit to giving according to the impartial good rather than on the basis of "personal connections" to a cause).26 She writes: But being cause neutral is not the same as valuing everything. Different people value different things, and there are numerous plausible ethical systems. You might or might not value complexity and diversity; you might or might not value non-human animals; you might or might not value lives which haven't yet to come into existence [sic]. The more inclusive your moral system, the more likely you are to feel that moral systems that exclude some of the things you value are partisan. For example someone who values non-human animals might feel that someone whose moral Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 13 system does not attribute value to non-human animals was being partisan, just as someone who helps those near to them rather than those far away is being partisan.27 This helps us to see what a medium tent might look like.28 Like the big tent, the medium tent takes as its definition of effectiveness overall-effectiveness. So once again, the medium tent includes only EAs who are committed to giving in ways that are effective at promoting, securing, or maximizing the impartial good. But the medium tent allows for disagreement (such as that between ACE and GWWC) about what the impartial good consists of. This would not be as big as the big tent, which licenses giving according to your values, even when they diverge from what you believe would best promote the impartial good. But it's not as little as the little tent, since the medium tent includes people who give to many different kinds of causes for different reasons. The medium tent offers more theoretical consistency than the big tent and more inclusivity than the little tent. But there are a few things potential medium-tenters should keep in mind. First, many EAs probably think some reasonable value systems are worse than others. Look at how Hutchinson describes the different value systems-some "value complexity and diversity" (usually seen as good things) while others do not. Some value non-human animals, while some are "partisan," not exactly a term of praise in EA circles.29 This is hardly a neutral weighing of pros and cons, suggesting that coexistence in the medium tent may not always be harmonious. And that may be as it should be. I won't construct a full case series for the medium tent, but we can see how criticisms will be parallel to those leveled against the big tent in Reproductive Access I -III. Consider: Famine Relief: Francis's value system holds that we have moral obligations only to humans. The charity that is the most effective at relieving human suffering in a recent famine is a charity that provides factory-farmed meat to those without food. In accordance with his value system, Francis donates to this charity, thereby increasing the suffering of some number of animals. Francis's value system seems like the kind of system about which Hutchinson would say reasonable people could disagree. So this kind of giving seems to fit within the medium tent. But the benefit to Francis's version of the impartial good will come at a cost to the standard EA view of the impartial good, since Francis's giving causes additional animal suffering. This kind of medium-tent giving may actually be worse, by little-tent standards, than Anne's giving in Reproductive Access I. At least there, Anne was doing nearly as much good as she could. In looking at the series of big-tent cases, we saw that it was going to be very difficult to draw a line between value-effective giving that counted as EA and valueeffective giving that did not. The same is true here. There are plenty of reasonable value systems that have a picture of what counts as the "impartial good" that is different from the little-tent EA picture. Once again, either EA must make room for Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 14 value systems that are sharply at odds with what would have seemed to be its core theoretical commitments, or it must find some way to draw a line between reasonable value systems that can count as EA and those that can not. There may be other possible medium tents, but the problems shared by the big and medium tents suggest that parallel problems will recur for any attempt to make EA more inclusive. Finally, the costs of expanding to a medium tent have relatively small gains. The advantage of the big tent was that it allowed anyone in who was interested in giving effectively in accordance with her values, even if she acknowledged that pursuing her values wasn't the best way to achieve the impartial good. The medium tent can't include those people since it only includes those whose giving effectively promotes the impartial good (as they define it). Anyone who wants to give effectively in accordance with her projects is still outside the medium tent. 6. How Little Is the Little Tent? If EA has to be a little tent, what do we mean by "little"? Our discussion so far has shown that you must be committed to the pursuit of (a particular understanding of) overall-effectiveness rather than value-effectiveness. This little tent doesn't exclude nonconsequentialists. There are already nonconsequentialists within EA; for one, Ramakrishnan argues that a Kamm-style analysis of giving shows that overall-effective giving is morally required.30 There are familiar nonconsequentialist moral theories that are compatible with EA; Ross's duty of beneficence, although situated within a larger deontological moral theory, is a duty to maximize the impartial good.31 These examples show that Lichtenberg is wrong to claim that EA just is consequentialism.32 But Lichtenberg isn't very wrong. Any nonconsequentialist who doesn't accept the overall-effectiveness reading of EA gets kicked out of the little tent. For many nonconsequentialists, beneficence should be a value-effective duty. It is permissible, these nonconsequentialists argue, to believe that beneficence is inseparable from one's other values, commitments, and projects.33 For these nonconsequentialists, and possibly for some consequentialists, too, there's no room in the little tent. So the commitment to overall-effectiveness includes utilitarians, many other consequentialists, and some nonconsequentialists, while excluding a significant number of nonconsequentialists. There's another dimension to the tent that's relevant too. At the beginning of this paper, I described a commitment to overall-effectiveness as a commitment to promote, secure, or maximize the impartial good. Once we see that EAs are required to give in an overall-effective way, the size of the tent will vary further depending on whether they are also required to maximize the impartial good (by giving to the level of marginal utility, as Singer describes in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality") or merely to promote it, by giving at a lower level than that.34 If I give $5 once to the Against Malaria Foundation, am I an effective altruist? Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 15 Effective Altruism organizations currently require some level of giving, although none requires maximizing the impartial good. Giving What We Can asks its members to pledge 10 percent of their income; The Life You Can Save has an income-based sliding scale.35 Still, while the commitment to overall-effectiveness falls straightforwardly out of EA's philosophical commitments, a commitment to a particular level of overall-effective giving does not. To survive as a philosophically coherent movement, EA needs a commitment to the impartial good more than it needs a commitment to maximizing the good. If EA requires its members to give at a particular level, the message is still that giving more would be better. But if EA requires its members to give according to their values, that doesn't send a clear message that giving according to overall-effectiveness would be better. Perhaps this shows that the commitment to overall-effectiveness, not the commitment to a certain level of giving, is the true core idea of EA. Or perhaps overall-effectiveness and a certain level of giving are both core ideas of EA, in which case EA will have to figure out what that level is and why its members are required to give that much.36 Depending on how that argument shakes out, it may be that when it comes to the level of required giving, the little tent has slightly more room.37 7. Conclusion I have argued that EA must be a little tent rather than a big tent. In order to be a distinct movement that retains its core philosophical beliefs, rather than just being a cheerleader for instrumental rationality, EA must adopt a criterion of overallrather than value-effectiveness. Still, none of this means that EA is right to adopt overallrather than valueeffectiveness. Effective Altruism may fail to recognize the importance of values other than the impartial good-the importance of associative duties, the role giving can play in forming and contributing to an individual's identity and commitments, the space for personal prerogatives, and so on. This paper does not tackle the question of whether EA is the right kind of approach to take to beneficence. But since EA has made significant contributions to the philosophical debates around giving, I think it's in all our interests to clarify what EA is and what it stands for. Rhode Island College Notes A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2018 Philosophy, Politics, and Economics Society Meeting, for which I received funding from the Institute for Humane Studies. Thanks to Craig Agule, Brian Berkey, Luc Bovens, Matt Braich, Brookes Brown, Alexander Dietz, Daniel Kokotajlo, Per-Erik Milam, Dan Shahar, Jeff Sebo, Steve Swartzer, Travis Timmerman, and the editor and an anonymous referee at Public Affairs Quarterly for their helpful feedback. Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 16 References Carter, Ben, and Keith Moore. "Icy Logic: Choosing a Charity with Your Head and Your Heart." BBC Magazine, September 7, 2014. www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29087531. Centre for Effective Altruism. "Introduction to Effective Altruism." Effective Altruism, June 22, 2016. www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introductionto-effective-altruism/. ------. "Our Mistakes." 80,000 Hours, December 2017. 80000hours.org/about/credibility/evaluations/mistakes/. Cotton-Barratt, Owen. "How Valuable Is Movement Growth?" Effective Altruism Forum, May 14, 2015. http://effectivealtruism.com/ea/is/how_valuable_is_movement_growth/. Effective Altruism Foundation. "The Benefits of Cause-Neutrality." April 11, 2017. https://ea-foundation.org/blog/the-benefits-of-cause-neutrality/. Gabriel, Iason. "Effective Altruism and Its Critics." Journal of Applied Philosophy 34, no. 4 (2017): 457-73. GiveWell. "Top Charities." n.d. www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities. Giving What We Can. "Frequently Asked Questions." n.d. www.givingwhatwecan.org/about-us/frequently-asked-questions. ------. "The Pledge." n.d. www.givingwhatwecan.org/pledge/. ------. "Top Charities." n.d. www.givingwhatwecan.org/top-charities/. ------. "Why We (Still) Don't Recommend GiveDirectly." November 10, 2015. givingwhatwecan.org/post/2014/02/why-we-still-dont-recommendgivedirectly/. Halstead, John, Stefan Schubert, Joseph Millum, Mark Engelbert, Hayden Wilkinson, and James Snowden. "Effective Altruism: An Elucidation and a Defense." April 4, 2017. Unpublished manuscript. Herman, Barbara. "Mutual Aid and Respect for Persons." Ethics 94, no. 4 (1984): 577-602. Hutchinson, Michelle. "Giving What We Can Is Cause Neutral." Effective Altruism Forum, April 22, 2016. http://effectiveEffective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 17 altruism.com/ea/wj/giving_what_we_can_is_cause_neutral/. Krishna, Nakul. "Add Your Own Egg." Point, 2016. thepointmag.com/2016/examined-life/add-your-own-egg. Lichtenberg, Judith. "Effective Altruism: A Critique." Paper presented at the Ethics of Giving Conference, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK, May 24, 2017. The Life You Can Save. "The Best Charities for Highly Effective Giving." 2018. https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/best-charities. ------. "How Much Should I Give?" 2018. www.thelifeyoucansave.org/take-thepledge. ------. "Peter Singer Answers Common Questions about Giving." 2018. https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/take-the-pledge/faq. MacAskill, William. "The Cold, Hard Truth about the Ice Bucket Challenge." Quartz, August 14, 2014. qz.com/249649/the-cold-hard-truth-about-the-icebucket-challenge/. ------. "This Week, Let's Dump a Few Ice Buckets to Wipe Out Malaria Too." Quartz, August 18, 2014. qz.com/250845/this-week-lets-dump-a-few-ice-bucketsto-wipe-out-malaria-too/. Pummer, Theron. "Whether and Where to Give." Philosophy and Public Affairs 44, no. 1 (2016): 77-95. Ramakrishnan, Ketan. "Acting Wrongly beyond the Call of Duty." Paper presented at the Ethics of Giving Conference, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, UK, May 25, 2017. Ross, W. D. The Right and the Good. Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1965. Schubert, Stefan. "Understanding Cause-Neutrality." Centre for Effective Altruism, March 10, 2017. https://www.centreforeffectivealtruism.org/blog/understanding-causeneutrality/. ------. "Why the Triviality Objection to EA Is Beside the Point." Effective Altruism Forum, July 20, 2015. effectivealtruism.com/ea/l7/why_the_triviality_objection_to_ea_is_beside_the/. Singer, Peter. "Ethics and Intuitions." Journal of Ethics 9, nos. 3-4 (2005): 331-52. Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 18 ------. "Famine, Affluence, and Morality." Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 3 (1972): 229-43. Srinivasan, Amia. "Stop the Robot Apocalypse." London Review of Books 37, no. 18 (2015): 3-6. WhatIsEffectiveAltruism.com. "What Is Effective Altruism?" 2015. https://whatiseffectivealtruism.com/archive/ Wiblin, Robert. "Disagreeing about What's Effective Isn't Disagreeing with Effective Altruism." 80,000 Hours, July 16, 2015. 80000hours.org/2015/07/disagreeing-about-whats-effective-isntdisagreeing-with-effective-altruism/. ------. Movement Development. YouTube video. 17:35 min. Posted by Effective Altruism Global. November 25, 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH4_ikhAGz0. 1 See Lichtenberg ("Effective Altruism"). 2 Wiblin, "Disagreeing about What's Effective." 3 See also Schubert's ("Why the Triviality Objection") response to Wiblin. Schubert appears to accept Wiblin's version of EA's "core idea" and yet argues that "large swathes of the liberal, educated part of the population" will see EA's message as "trivial/obvious." 4 https://whatiseffectivealtruism.com/archive/. 5 Gabriel, "Effective Altruism," 470. 6 Although to know the precise size of Gabriel's tent, we still need to know more about what the parameters are. 7 Gabriel, "Effective Altruism," 459. 8 The Life You Can Save, "Best Charities." 9 GiveWell, "Top Charities"; Giving What We Can, "Top Charities." 10 Some utilitarians hold that utilitarianism is rationally required (see Singer, "Ethics and Intuitions," 351). If that's true, then Reproductive Access I-III might all be irrational. But we've now moved from evaluating the rationality of a particular means to evaluating the rationality of the ends themselves. Unlike Reproductive Access I-III, Reproductive Access V is irrational on both counts. 11 Giving What We Can, "Pledge." 12 Giving What We Can, "Frequently Asked Questions." 13 The Life You Can Save, "Peter Singer Answers Common Questions." 14 Centre for Effective Altruism, "Introduction to Effective Altruism." 15 See Centre for Effective Altruism ("Our Mistakes") on 80,000 Hours. 16 Cotton-Barratt, "How Valuable." 17 Cotton-Barratt, "How Valuable." Effective Altruism: How Big Should the Tent Be? (preprint) Amy Berg 19 18 There are also pragmatic reasons for EA to be cautious about the switch to a big tent. Even if EAs are tempted by this switch, Wiblin (Movement Development) notes that it may be easier to change a movement's brand than it is to change that brand back. If enlarging the tent seems otherwise desirable, this point provides a pragmatic reason to move slowly with change, if at all. But table this pragmatic point to focus on the philosophical issues at hand. 19 Wiblin (Movement Development). 20 See Hutchinson ("Giving What We Can Is Cause Neutral") on the Effective Altruism Forum. 21 Effective Altruism Foundation, "Benefits of Cause-Neutrality." 22 Schubert, "Understanding Cause-Neutrality." 23 Wiblin, "Disagreeing about What's Effective." 24 MacAskill, "Cold, Hard Truth." 25 MacAskill, "This Week"; Carter and Moore, "Icy Logic." 26 I have avoided the term "cause-neutrality" elsewhere, because, as Schubert ("Understanding Cause-Neutrality") points out, EAs use that term to mean different things. But Hutchinson's meaning here is helpful for understanding what a medium tent would look like. 27 Hutchinson, "Giving What We Can." 28 Something like this alternative was suggested to me by Brian Berkey. 29 Hutchinson, "Giving What We Can." 30 Ramakrishnan made this claim in a talk called "Acting Wrongly beyond the Call of Duty." 31 Ross, Right and the Good. 32 Lichtenberg made this claim in a talk called "Effective Altruism: A Critique." 33 Herman ("Mutual Aid"), among many others, develops this kind of nonconsequentialist view of beneficence. Effective Altruism's many critics often sound similar themes; see, for example, Krishna ("Add Your Own Egg") and Srinivasan ("Stop the Robot Apocalypse"). 34 Singer ("Famine, Affluence," 234). 35 Giving What We Can, "Pledge"; The Life You Can Save, "How Much Should I Give?" 36 Dan Shahar pointed out to me that if EA allows members to only give a certain amount of their income (say, 10 percent) to overall-effective charities, that perhaps their pledge could be discharged by giving 20 percent of their income to a charity that is half as overall-effective as the most effective charity. If EA allows that kind of thing, then EAs would have a little bit more discretion about where to give. But since many value-effective charities are not even a fraction as overall-effective as EA organizations' top recommended charities, this strategy won't enlarge the tent all that much. 37 Pummer ("Whether and Where to Give") has argued that even if we have options about whether to give, we may not always have options about where to give. This suggests that the commitment to overall-effectiveness (that is, making sure where we give is an overalleffective charity) is more important than the level of giving (that is, is more important than whether or not we maximize the level of giving we engage in).

On Some Arguments for Epistemic Value Pluralism Timothy Perrine1 Logos & Episteme (2020) XI.1: 77-96. DOI: 10.5840/logos-episteme20201115 Abstract: Epistemic Value Monism is the view that there is only one kind of thing of basic, final epistemic value. Perhaps the most plausible version of Epistemic Value Monism is Truth Value Monism, the view that only true beliefs are of basic, final epistemic value. Several authors-notably Jonathan Kvanvig and Michael DePaul-have criticized Truth Value Monism by appealing to the epistemic value of things other than knowledge. Such arguments, if successful, would establish Epistemic Value Pluralism is true and Epistemic Value Monism is false. This paper critically examines those arguments, finding them wanting. However, I develop an argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism that succeeds which turns on general reflection on the nature of value. On a widely held view, true beliefs are of final epistemic value. An interesting question is whether, and why, anything else is. Some authors hold that truth is the most basic thing of final epistemic value, embracing a version of "Epistemic Value Monism" that is sometimes called "Vertisim" or "Truth Value Monism." Other authors demur, maintaining that the epistemic value of truth cannot explain the epistemic value of everything. Such authors embrace a kind of "Epistemic Value Pluralism." The debate between Epistemic Value Monists and Pluralists is an important one. For instance, some philosophers might be inclined to understand other epistemic categories-e.g., epistemic obligations or epistemic virtues and vices-in terms of their relation to epistemic value. Clearly settling what is of epistemic value would be important for such projects. Various arguments have been given against Truth Value Monism and in favor of Epistemic Value Pluralism. We can separate those arguments into two categories. Knowledge based Arguments argue that because the epistemic value of truth cannot explain the epistemic value of knowledge we must embrace Epistemic Value Pluralism to explain the epistemic value of knowledge. Non-Knowledge based Arguments argue that the epistemic value of truth cannot explain the epistemic value of things besides knowledge. In other work, I have discussed Knowledge based Arguments and will not discuss them here. Rather, the aim of this paper is to examine Non-Knowledge based Arguments for Epistemic Value Pluralism. I will argue several such arguments fail-they are implausible, obscure, actually consistent with Truth Value Monism, or neglect the relevant distinction between basic and non-basic final value (see below). Nonetheless, I will claim that there is one Non-Knowledge based Argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism that succeeds. That argument turns on plausible general claims about final value. After setting the stage in section I, I examine an argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism due to Jonathan Kvanvig in section II. I show how his argument is too obscure to carry force. In section III, I focus on a more straightforward argument from Kvanvig on the nature of understanding. But I argue Kvanvig's view is actually consistent with Truth Value Monism. In 1 For helpful feedback I thank Dan Buckley, Jordi Cat, Dave Fisher, Adam Leite, Dan Linsenbardt, Mark Kaplan, Tim O'Connor, Andrew Smith, and Harrison Waldo. 2 section IV, I examine a sequence of arguments from Michael DePaul, including one about the appropriateness of responding to experience. I argue that DePaul's account is implausible and a more plausible one is consistent with Truth Value Monism. Finally, in section V, I argue that there is an argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism that is plausible that turns on the idea that it is of final value to value what is of final value. I defend this argument from an objection based on an alternative account of the nature of epistemic value. I. Stage Setting By "final epistemic value," I have in mind the kind of value that, from the epistemic point of view, is valuable in and of itself or for its own sake. I will not offer any analysis of the epistemic point of view. I assume that final epistemic value is a kind or species of final value. I do not assume that final epistemic value exhausts all the kinds of final value. It is widely thought that final value has some sort of important connection to valuing. There are different accounts of this connection. Some offer a deontic connection: when something is of final value, we are obligated to value it; others offer a rationalist connection: when something is of final value, it is rational to value it; some offer a reason based account: when something is of final value, there is reason to value it. My own preferred view is that something is of final value just when it is appropriate to value it. I will assume it in what follows. Little will hang on this internal dispute in what follows. In evaluating the dispute between Epistemic Value Monism and Epistemic Value Pluralism it will be important to have an account of the distinction between the two. However, one natural way of formulating the distinction between them is problematic. Specifically, it is natural to suppose that proponents of Epistemic Value Monism hold: For any x and some P, if x is of final epistemic value, then x is P. Different proponents of Epistemic Value Monism may give different accounts of P. For instance, on this way of thinking, Truth Value Monists hold: For any x, if x is of final epistemic value, then x is a true belief. Epistemic Value Pluralists would then be people who reject this general characterization. This way of formulating the dispute is problematic because it contains a problematic characterization of Value Monism. As I've argued elsewhere (2018), value monists will want their view to have ontological flexibility. That is, they will want a wide range of things to be of final value-e.g., outcomes of actions, lives, entire possible worlds, etc. But this view will not have the desired flexibility. (Outcomes of actions, for instance, are not true beliefs.) Instead, we should think that what makes that position a monistic one is not that it maintains that only one kind of thing is of final value. What makes it monistic is that it maintains that any time something is of final value an explanation of its final value will refer to its connection to one kind of thing. For these reasons, proponents of Epistemic Value Monism should reject: For any x and some P, if x is of final epistemic value, then x is P. For this is too narrow a view of what is of value even by the monist's lights. To understand the dispute between Value Monists and Pluralists, it will be helpful to introduce some terminology. Let us say something is of "basic final value" just when it is of final value but there is no explanation of the final value it has in terms of other things of final value.2 Something is of "non-basic final value" just when it is of final value but there is an explanation of the final value it has in terms of other things of final value. Disputes between Value Monists 2 This leaves open that there is an explanation of why something is of basic final value that does not appeal to final value. In this way, the distinction does not assume that epistemic value is, in some important meta-normative sense, reducible or not. 3 and Value Pluralists can then be understood as disputes about basic final value. Specifically, in this context, Epistemic Value Monism holds: For any x and some P, if x is of basic final epistemic value, then x is P. Epistemic Value Pluralists would reject this. But both Epistemic Value Monists and Pluralists can agree that a wide range of otherwise metaphysically distinct things are of final epistemic value. Their dispute is simply over whether, to explain such facts, we need to appeal to the final value of one thing or many. (For more on basic final value and issues involving Monism vs Pluralism, see Feldman (2000, 2004), Zimmerman (2001), Perrine (2018).) Understood in this way, Epistemic Value Monism says that there is only one kind of thing that is of basic final epistemic value. However, this leaves open what exactly is of basic final epistemic value. There could be different "versions" of Epistemic Value Monism that identify different kinds of things as being of basic final epistemic value. For purposes of this paper, I will focus on Truth Value Monism, understood here as the position that the only kinds of things that are of basic final epistemic value are true beliefs. I will focus on this version of Epistemic Value Monism because it is the usual foil to Epistemic Value Pluralism. II. A Plurality of Evaluations-Kvanvig One critic of Epistemic Value Monism is Jonathan Kvanvig. In an important paper defending Epistemic Value Pluralism (2005), he urges that seeing truth as the sole or fundamental goal has a "strong reductionist flavor" (2005: 287).To get us to see this, he first characterizes epistemology as "the study of purely theoretical cognitive success," and urges that we see value in each "independent kind of cognitive success" so that what is of final epistemic value would include a wide range of things including "knowledge, understanding, wisdom, rationality, justification, sense-making, and empirically adequate theories in addition to getting to the truth and avoiding error" (2005: 287). For ease of reference, let's call this list 'Kvanvig's laundry list.' However, it is not clear exactly what argument against Epistemic Value Monism Kvanvig intends to be defending. Perhaps Kvanvig's argument is this: (P1) If something is a "purely theoretical cognitive success," then it is of final epistemic value. (P2) There are many independent kinds of purely theoretical cognitive successes. (C1) So, Epistemic Value Monism is false. In defense of the second premise, Kvanvig may point to his laundry list. However, once we've drawn the distinction between basic final epistemic value and non-basic final epistemic value, we can see that this argument is invalid. For even if there are many kinds of "purely theoretical cognitive successes" it may still be that their value is always explained by appealing to one kind of thing of basic final epistemic value. Once we recognize this distinction, pointing to a plurality of things of final epistemic value cannot, in and of itself, show Epistemic Value Monism false. Kvanvig might shore up this argument by maintaining that: (P1) If something is a "purely theoretical cognitive success," then it is of final epistemic value. (P2) There are many independent kinds of purely theoretical cognitive success. (P3). At least one of the independent kinds of purely theoretical cognitive success have final epistemic value that cannot be explained by appealing to a single kind of basic, final epistemic value. (C1) So, Epistemic Value Monism is false. 4 This argument avoids the problem of the previous one. But the inclusion of the terminology "purely theoretical cognitive success" is now unnecessary. If (P1)-(P3) is true, then a weaker set of premises will also produce a valid argument against Epistemic Value Monism: (P4): There is at least one thing of final epistemic value whose final value cannot be explained by appealing to a single kind of basic final epistemic value. (C1) So Epistemic Value Monism is false. At this point, it appears that the terminology of "purely theoretical cognitive success" is, at best, doing no necessary work and, at worse, is unduly obscure. The best way to defend (P4) would be through existential generalization-to give an example of something that is of final epistemic value whose value cannot be explained by the final epistemic value of one thing like truth. I will focus on whether Kvanvig has given us any promising examples of this. The most promising example would be understanding. I focus on it next. III. Kvanvig on Understanding Kvanvig argues that the value of understanding is not explained by the value of true belief. If Kvanvig is correct about this, then we have an argument for (P4). This section critically examines Kvanvig's argument. Kvanvig focuses on the kind of understanding at issue when one understands that something is the case (2003: 189-90). To use his example, consider someone's understanding of the "Comanche dominance of the southern plains of North America from the late seventeenth until the late nineteenth centuries" (2003: 197). Kvanvig makes three key claims about this kind of understanding. First, it is, for the most part, factive: such a person has a large number of true beliefs, and in so far as they have false beliefs on the subject matter, those false beliefs are peripheral.3 Second, these true beliefs need not amount to knowledge. A person whose true beliefs are "Getterizied"-who, for instance, by pure coincidence picks up a book which contains true claims about the Comanche which were, nevertheless, shots in the dark by the author-can still possess understanding. In this way, understanding is not "a species" of knowledge.4 Finally, understanding requires "grasping" the relations between the items of knowledge, specifically the way in which that information "coheres" with one another (2003: 197, 202). The value of understanding, as Kvanvig sees it, derives from two places. First, it derives from the number of true beliefs that help make up understanding. But, secondly, it derives from the "grasping" that is required for understanding. Kvanvig writes: [To account for the value of understanding] we need to return to the notion of subjective justification, the value of which was defended earlier. Subjective justification obtains when persons form or hold beliefs on the basis of their own subjective standards for what is true or false. (2003: 200) We thus get the following explanation of the value of understanding. The distinctive element involved in it, beyond truth, is best understood in terms of grasping of coherence relations. Such coherence relations in this context contribute to justification. Such justification is subjective, because the person in 3 Kvanvig does not spend much time on what counts as peripheral; neither will I. For critical discussion, see Elgin (2009) and Riggs (2009). 4Again, I neither endorse nor deny this claim. For skepticism regarding it, see Grimm (2006) and Pritchard (2010: 77-80). 5 question must grasp the marks of truth within that body of information in order to grasp correctly the explanatory relationships within that body of information. (2003: 202) So, on Kvanvig's view, the grasping of coherence relations helps lead to subjective justification, and because the latter is valuable, the former is as well. Clearly, if Kvanvig's view on the value of understanding is inconsistent with Truth Value Monism it will be inconsistent because of his view on the valuing of graspings. On Kvanvig's view, graspings lead to subjective justification, which he claims is of value. He distinguishes between two kinds of extrinsic value (2003: 60-5). The first kind is the standard instrumental value, where something is of instrumental value when (roughly) it is an effective means to a valuable end, increasing the likelihood of securing that value (2003: 63). Kvanvig considers a second kind of extrinsic value, which need not be an effective means to a valuable end but is rather an "intentional means." An action (for instance) is an intentional means to a valuable end, when a person undertakes that action with the aim of achieving that valuable end (2003: 60). The distinction between an effective means and an intentional means are illustrated in cases where there is no action that I can perform that will make it more likely that I'll achieve a valuable end, but nevertheless there are actions I can undertake with the aim of achieving that valuable end. To use Kvanvig's own example, perhaps there is nothing I can do to sink a basketball shot from half court and win a million dollars-so that there are no effective means to that end-but there are actions I can perform with the aim of achieving the end-so there are intentional means (2003: 60-1). The notion of intentional means thus far developed only applies to actions. But, Kvanvig claims, it can also be extended to beliefs (2003: 65-75). Thus, consider a person who follows their own standard-whatever it is-for getting at the truth. Let's say that a person's belief is subjectively justified when it is held in accordance with their own standard (2003: 56). Even if the person's own standards are woefully inadequate-so that it is not an effective means to get to the truth by following those standards-following those standards will be an intentional means and thus valuable. Thus, subjective justification is valuable as a kind of intentional means. One might object to Kvanvig's argument at several places here. One might argue that understanding does not require subjective justification. Or one might argue that the notion of intentional means cannot apply to belief. Or one might argue that intentional means are not extrinsically valuable. But none of these objections are necessary to defend Truth Value Monism. For Truth Value Monism is a position about final epistemic value-it is a thesis about what is valuable for its own sake. But it is perfectly consistent to accept Truth Value Monism and hold there are many different kinds of things with extrinsic epistemic value. For instance, one might hold that reliable belief forming processes are valuable but only extrinsically, specifically, instrumentally because they are likely to lead to true beliefs. But even if we follow Kvanvig and "loosen up" extrinsic value to allow for another kind of extrinsic value distinct from instrumental value, this is perfectly consistent with Truth Value Monism. Consequently, Kvanvig's account of the value of understanding provides no problem for this version of Epistemic Value Monism.5 IV. DePaul against Epistemic Value Monism 5 These points do not require that final epistemic value always supervenes on the intrinsic features of something. (In fact, Truth Value Monism probably could not say that, since truth is not an intrinsic property.) They only require that the category of extrinsic value is distinct from the category of final value in that being of extrinsic value does not entail being of final value, which is clearly true. 6 Another proponent of Epistemic Value Pluralism is Michael DePaul. DePaul criticizes Truth Value Monism before offering up his own version of Epistemic Value Pluralism. In what follows, I'll briefly sketch and respond to his criticisms of Truth Value Monism before discussing his positive view. A. DePaul's Argument against Truth Value Monism DePaul's first criticism goes (2001: 173): ...I think deep down we all recognize that truth is not the only thing of epistemic value. Here is an easy demonstration. Take your favorite well-established empirical theory, a theory you believe that we know. Throw in all the evidence on the basis of which we accept that theory. Depending on the theory you selected, all this will likely add up to a substantial number of beliefs. Now compare this set of beliefs with an equal number of beliefs about relatively simple arithmetic sums and about assorted elements of one's current stream of consciousness. I suspect that most of us would want to say that the first set of beliefs is better, epistemically better, than the second set. But the two sets contain the same number of true beliefs. And so, to the extent that we are inclined to say that these sets differ with respect to broad epistemic value, it would seem that we are committed to saying that truth is not the only thing has broad epistemic value. The thrust of his criticism is clear: the only way to accommodate a difference in epistemic value between these two sets is to postulate something else of epistemic value and embrace a kind of Epistemic Value Pluralism. However, DePaul is wrong that the only way to accommodate this difference in epistemic value is to postulate something else of basic final epistemic value besides truth. First, one can retain Truth Value Monism and account for the difference of value between these two sets by appealing to the conditions under which truths have any epistemic value whatsoever. Specifically, one might hold that whether a set of truths has any epistemic value depends partially upon extrinsic (and contingent) features of the set. For instance, Goldman (1999) explicitly holds that epistemic value depends partially upon whether or not a person is interested in whether the relevant proposition is true or false (see also Alston (2005)). Thus, contra DePaul, even if one can provide two sets with the same number of true beliefs, it does not follow that they have the same epistemic value, given this view on the conditions under which something has epistemic value. Second, one can retain Truth Value Monism and account for the difference of value between the two sets by appealing to the particular contents of the truths. Part of the intuitive motivation behind DePaul's criticism is that truths about (e.g.) organic chemistry are more important than truths about (e.g.) what's going on right now on the left side of my visual field. One might try to cash out this importance in terms of the interest of inquirers, which would lead us back to a response similar to the one given in the previous paragraph. But one might cash out this importance in terms of the contents of the propositions themselves. The idea that some propositions are more "natural" or "cut nature at its joints" or are otherwise descriptively superior to others has gained some currency recently. One can hold that while any true belief has some epistemic value, a true belief has more epistemic value if its contents are more "natural." In this way, the particular objects of belief can play a role in determining the overall value of a set of beliefs. While few have fully developed such a position, and I won't do so here, I see no 7 reason why it cannot be. So DePaul is wrong that the only way to account for the difference in epistemic value between those two sets is to abandon Truth Value Monism.6 B. DePaul's Argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism Turning to DePaul's positive proposal, he argues that there are two kinds of things that have final epistemic value: true belief and warrant (1993: 77). He follows Plantinga as holding that warrant is "the epistemic feature which plays the preeminent role in distinguish mere true belief from knowledge" (1993: 67). Nevertheless, in contrast to Plantinga, DePaul does not take truthconduciveness to be necessary for warrant; warrant, for DePaul, is not believing in a way that is likely to be true. But if warrant is decoupled from believing in a truth-conducive way, what is it? DePaul despairs of giving a particularly helpful, positive account of warrant. He holds that it is believing "appropriately" specifically believing appropriately "in the face of experience" (1993: 82-3).7 DePaul gives an argument that believing appropriately in the face of experience is of final epistemic value. The argument is a thought experiment (1993: 80-1, 191-2). Imagine a nondeceiving demon. The demon does not aim to make most of your beliefs about your immediate environment false; rather, the demon aims to disrupt the connection between your experiences on one hand and your beliefs and the world on the other. To this end, the demon gives you a visual field as if you were watching old Laurel and Hardy movies. Nevertheless, you continue to believe that you are (e.g.) currently sitting, reading a paper even as a slapstick gap unfolds before your eyes. This case illustrates a breakdown of warrant, according to DePaul. In it, while many of one's beliefs may be true, they don't appropriately fit one's experience as of old movies. But it is not just that this case illustrates how warrant can breakdown; according to DePaul, it reveals an overly narrow conception of the epistemic value of experience. Truth Value Monists are concerned to evaluate the truth of beliefs and insofar as experiences are mentioned it is as instrumental to forming true beliefs. But experiences should play a more important role: When one recognizes the possibility of correspondences among experiences, belief, and reality, it is easy to see that such a person's cognitive state may fall short of epistemic excellence. For it might be that there is the same sort of incoherence between the person's experience and his belief as epistemologists fear to find between belief and reality. And, I maintain, where there is such an experiential incoherence, we fall short of warrant and knowledge, no matter what the connection between our beliefs and truths. (1993: 86) It is not obvious how best to regiment DePaul's argument. I think the following captures it fairly. First, in the non-deceiving case, there is an "incoherence" between the experiences of the subject and the way the subject is forming beliefs that is disvaluable. Second, that disvalue cannot be understood in terms of the instrumental disvalue of forming false beliefs because the subject is forming true beliefs. Therefore, we must think that the disvalue is a kind of final epistemic disvalue. Thus, there is something of final epistemic value in forming beliefs that 6A similar kind of move to appeal to the particular objects of attitudes has been made by Fred Feldman in defending a form of hedonism; see his (2004). For a different kind of response to DePaul on this issue see Treanor (2014). 7 There are problems with DePaul's view when applied to a wide range of cases of knowledge. Perhaps responding appropriately to one's experiences is important for distinguishing between true belief and knowledge for certain kinds of knowledge like perceptual or even testimonial knowledge. But it is not clear how it will apply to other cases, including not only moral knowledge (as DePaul is aware) but logical, mathematical, or inductive knowledge. I'll set aside these worries in what follows, though. 8 "appropriately fit" one's experiences and something of final epistemic disvalue in forming beliefs that do not "appropriately fit" one's experiences. Thus, Truth Value Monism is false. Why think that, in the non-deceiving case, there is an incoherence between the experiences the subject is having and the way the subject is forming beliefs? DePaul assumes that we can tell there is something defective here by simply comparing experiences and beliefs. In other words, the appropriate belief response to one's experience supervenes just on those qualitative experiences, or sensations, themselves. Other facts-about whether, e.g., one is being messed with by an evil demon-are irrelevant. And it is natural for him to think this. After all, incoherence is an internal relation. So if there is an incoherence here it should be determined solely by the beliefs and experiences. However, this view is implausible. For this view ignores the general or specific cognitive abilities of the cognizer having the experience. The relevance of a cognizer's cognitive abilities becomes clear when we consider less extreme examples. For instance, when I was seven and I had a certain olfactory experience, I did not form any beliefs about what caused it; now when I have the very same olfactory experience, I form the belief that someone is brewing coffee. It was inappropriate for me to form the belief that someone was brewing coffee then, it is not so now. Or, consider a novice bird watcher. Upon seeing a bird initially, it will be inappropriate for the bird watcher to believe it's a woodpecker (he's only started watching birds yesterday). But after a decade of watching birds, if the now expert bird watcher has the exact same visual experience, it would be appropriate to form a belief that it's a woodpecker. These examples show that what constitutes an appropriate response to experience doesn't supervene on just the experience the person has. Indeed, there is a more principled reason for denying that appropriate responses supervene on just the experiences a cognizer has. Recall that, for DePaul, warrant is both responding appropriately to one's experience and the property that plays the chief role in distinguishing knowledge from mere true belief. There are (and could be) many different kinds of cognizers that know things, and even among cognizers of the same type or kind (such as human beings), there are many different kinds of things they know-different "sources of knowledge" as it is sometimes put. Consequently, if warrant is that property which helps account for the difference between knowledge and mere true belief in all (or even most) of these cases, warrant (or the degree of warrant) will presumably supervene partially on the different cognitive facilities of the different cognizers. But if, as DePaul claims, warrant is also responding appropriately to one's experience, then it follows that responding appropriately to one's experience will supervene partially on the different cognitive faculties of different cognizers. In response, DePaul might press that even if it's not true, generally speaking, that what is appropriate to believe should supervene solely upon our experiences, surely in the cases provided above it is clear that those cognizers aren't responding appropriately to their experiences. But even this is doubtful. After all, in those cases, the non-deceiving demon has radically altered their cognitive faculties so that, really, the experiences they have are playing no role in how they are forming beliefs. But given how radically different that way of forming beliefs is from how we form beliefs, we should not be very confident that not responding to their experiences is the right way of "responding" to their experiences. So, I claim, it is not clear that in DePaul's nondeceiving demon case the subjects are forming beliefs in an "incoherent" way or a way that is inappropriate. Additionally, when we think more about the role that cognitive abilities play in determining appropriate responses to experience, we are led back to the instrumentally valuable picture of 9 experience. Specifically, it is natural to think that the appropriateness of certain beliefs vary with the reliability or truth-conduciveness of a cognizer's cognitive abilities. The reason why it is appropriate for my current self to believe that someone is brewing coffee on the basis of a particular olfactory experience, but not my seven year old self, is that the former can very reliably pick out coffee by scent whereas the latter could not. Similarly, the expert bird watcher is much more reliable when it comes to identifying woodpeckers. This explains why it is appropriate for the expert, but not the novice, to believe a certain bird is a woodpecker on the basis of a certain visual experience (cf. Goldman (2012)). (It's worth noting that when DePaul goes into detail about beliefs that are appropriate for him (1993: 82-3) they are all cases of beliefs that were arrived at reliably.) Thus, when we reflect on how cognitive abilities are relevant to the appropriateness of beliefs, we are most naturally pushed back to understanding warrant, i.e. responding to one's experiences appropriately, as having a close connection to truthconduciveness and the instrumental model DePaul criticizes. C. More on Epistemically Appropriate Responses to Experiences In discussing DePaul's argument, I briefly argued that appropriately responding to one's experience required forming beliefs in a reliable or otherwise truth-conducive way. My argument for this turned on a discussion of how agents can learn to acquire beliefs on the basis of sensations. To be sure, I have not offered a full defense or development of these ideas. But I will briefly consider some alternative accounts of responding appropriately to one's experience. To be clear, even if these other accounts are right, it would still not yet show that responding to one's experiences appropriately or properly is of basic final epistemic value. We would still need an argument for that. Rather, they would at best undermine my positive proposal for the instrumental value of responding appropriately or properly to one's experience. One account is Markie's (2006). Broadly speaking, on Markie's account, when a response to an experience is "epistemically appropriate" it is because we have learned or otherwise know how to identify objects and their features on the basis of those experiences (2006: 123, 130, 139). Markie then teases out three different "ways" a belief might be epistemically appropriate (2006: 130-4). However, a full review of Markie's account is unnecessary. For Markie thinks that a belief is "most fully" appropriate when it satisfies all three of his ways (2006: 134). Additionally, one of those ways requires that the way the belief is formed is authorized by a reliabilist norm. So I doubt Markie's account is in deep tension with what I say here. A different proposal would be to appeal to seemings. It is unclear what a seeming is, though most authors think they are sui generis mental states wherein a proposition is presented "as true" or "forcefully". So understood, seemings are not beliefs, inclinations to beliefs, or sensations. (Cf., e.g., Tolhusrt (1998), Huemer (2007), Cullison (2010), McAllister (2018).) The proposal would then be that while (e.g.) my 7 year old self and my current have the same sensations, I have a seeming that coffee is being brewed while my 7 year old self does not. Further, it is this difference of seemings that explains why it is epistemically appropriate for me to believe that someone is making coffee but it is not epistemically appropriate for my 7 year old. (Though he is speaking of justified beliefs, and not appropriate responses to experiences, Tucker (2010: 537-8) offers essentially this view.) Underlying this response is the view that, absent reasons for doubt, it is epistemically appropriate to believe that p if it seems to one that p. But such a view is very implausible. One problem is that there are a number of counterexample to it. For instance, Peter Markie gives the following example (2005: 357). I have a sensation as of a walnut tree. I have two seemings. First, that there is a walnut tree. Second, that the walnut tree was planted in April 24th, 1914. I form 10 both beliefs. But clearly the second one of these beliefs is not an epistemically appropriate response, setting aside whatever reasons for doubt I might have. But there is also a deep theoretical problem. Seemings can be caused in all sorts of epistemically problematic ways. But this view ignores that fact. Thus, this view will have the result that, so long as one lacks a relevant reason to doubt, it is appropriate to form a belief as a result of a seeming even if that belief was formed by biases, wishful thinking, poor reasoning, poor education-not to mention brain lesions, evil geniuses and clairvoyant powers. And that is very implausible.8 V. Valuing the Valuable This final section presents an argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism that I believe succeeds. It does not turn on the particularities of epistemological theories but plausible general claims about value. A. An Argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism The argument contains the following premises. The first is this: Iterated Appropriateness: If someone bears an appropriate attitude towards something of final value, then it is appropriate to bear a pro-attitude towards the fact that they bore an appropriate attitude towards something of final value. This assumption is plausible on the face of it. Here is an additional reason for thinking it is true. Suppose a person bore a pro-attitude towards something of value-e.g., a friend is pleased that her son is happy. Now suppose a further person was aware of this pleasure but was either indifferent towards her attitude or even adopted a con-attitude towards it. We would normally think that such a person is behaving in way that is at least insensitive if not inappropriate. A natural explanation for this is that it is appropriate to value the fact that a person is adopting an appropriate attitude towards something of value.9 Of course, in this situation, the person is aware of the appropriate attitude. But even if someone is not aware of an appropriate attitude, it can still be appropriate for someone to bear a pro-attitude towards it. To use an analogy, it might be appropriate to praise a person for a very difficult basketball shot. (After all, the shot was difficult.) This might be appropriate even if no one is aware of it (besides, of course, the person who made the shot). Earlier I assumed that when it is appropriate to adopt a pro-attitude towards something, then that thing is of final value. Given that assumption, Iterated Appropriateness implies: Iterated Value: If someone bears an appropriate attitude towards something of final value, then the fact that they bore an appropriate attitude towards something of final value is, itself, of final value. Like Iterated Appropriateness, Iterated Value is quite plausible. Several contemporary philosophers have adopted something close to it, though they usually add some qualifications and make additional claims about such a principle that are independent to our discussion. (See, e.g., Nozick (1981: 428ff.), Hurka (1992: chps. 1&2), Zimmerman (2001: chp. 6), Adams (2007: chp. 2).) Now Iterated Value is formulated simply in terms of final value. But my immediate 8 The issues mentioned here mirror issues about the cognitive penetration objection to Phenomenal Conservatism. (I criticize Phenomenal Conservatism at greater length in Perrine (forthcoming).) But there are some differences. First, we are here considered with epistemically appropriate responses to experiences, not necessarily justified beliefs. Second, cognitive penetration occurs when a cognitive state directly impacts a perceptual state (Lyons (2015: 154)) and my objection is not of that form. For additional critical discussion of the view in the text, as well as Phenomenal Conservatism, see Markie (2005, 2006), Alexander (2011) Siegel (2012, 2013), Brogaard (2013), McGrath (2013), and Lyons (2015). 9 Of course, sometimes people have excuses for not valuing things-they are too busy, their minds are elsewhere, etc. The existence of such excuses does not undermine the point. 11 concern is final epistemic value. Since final epistemic value is a kind of final value, it is plausible that Iterated Value implies: Iterated Epistemic Value: If someone bears an appropriate attitude towards something of final epistemic value, then the fact that they bore an appropriate attitude towards something of final epistemic value is, itself, of final epistemic value. Here's a simple argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism. Suppose, as is very plausible, some true belief is of final epistemic value. Now suppose an agent bears a positive attitude towards the fact that someone has a true belief. By Iterated Epistemic Value, it follows that such a pro-attitude is of final epistemic value. Therefore, Epistemic Value Pluralism is true. This simple argument contains one lacuna. Recall that a proper formulation of Epistemic Value Pluralism must hold that there are several things of basic final epistemic value. Merely maintaining that there are a number of ontologically distinct things of final epistemic value is not enough. So this simple argument needs to be shored up by maintaining that adopting a proattitude towards something of final epistemic value is, itself, of basic final epistemic value. Here is a reason for thinking that adopting a pro-attitude towards something of final epistemic value is of basic final epistemic value. If it were merely of non-basic final value, then all of the value it has could be explained by appealing to the thing of final epistemic value that the attitude is directed to. But it cannot. Suppose some belief that p is of final epistemic value. Now suppose one agent adopts a pro-attitude towards it while another agent adopts a neutral attitude towards it. Given Iterated Epistemic Value, one of those attitudes is of final epistemic value, while (plausibly) the other is not. But both are about the same thing of final epistemic value. Thus, appealing to just what the attitude is about-its object-cannot explain the final epistemic value of adopting the pro-attitude. So adopting a pro-attitude towards something of final epistemic value is of basic final epistemic value. But some true beliefs are also of basic, final epistemic value. Thus, Epistemic Value Monism-and all versions of it, e.g., Truth Value Monism-are false. Epistemic Value Pluralism is true. B. Epistemic Value and Value Simpliciter In the remainder, I want to focus on what will be a surprising inference to some authors working on epistemic value: my inference of Iterated Epistemic Value from Iterated Value. That inference assumed that final epistemic value is a kind of final value. However, that assumption has been questioned by some philosophers. They deny that epistemic value is a kind of final value, or more weakly, that if something is of final epistemic value, then it is of value simpliciter. For instance, Ernest Sosa claims that there are various "domains" of evaluation, with the epistemic domain being just one among many. These domains admit of "value." And, for each domain, some of that value is "fundamental" and others "derived" from the fundamental value of that domain. But none of this indicates that the fundamental value of a given domain is of final value simpliciter. Perhaps it is of some domain independent value, but it is not final value but (e.g.) instrumental value to some domain independent value. As Sosa once wrote, "Truth may or may not be intrinsically valuable absolutely, who knows? Our worry requires only that we consider truth the epistemically fundamental value, the ultimate explainer of other distinctively epistemic values" (2007: 72). Similar kinds of views have been endorsed by others. Duncan Pritchard likewise allows that something might be of "fundamental epistemic good" without that good being "finally valuable simpliciter" (2010: 12). Pritchard even suggests that 12 from the fact that truth is of epistemic value it need not follow that it has any value simpliciter at all (2014: 113).10 These kinds of views are inconsistent with my claim that final epistemic value is a kind of final value, or at least that when something is of final epistemic value that implies it is of some final value. However, this disagreement would not simply undermine my argument from Iterated Value to Iterated Epistemic Value; it is inconsistent with the basic way that I have setup the issues of this paper. For this reason, evaluating this kind of position is a large task that I cannot complete here. With that in mind, I raise two issues. First, I assume that when something is of value it is valuable-that is, is worthy of value or it would otherwise be appropriate or fitting to value it. This view says that there is a kind of "value"-epistemic value-on which that is false. From the fact that something is of epistemic value it does not follow that it is worthy of value or that it would be appropriate to value it. (Maybe it is; maybe it isn't.) To be sure, this view has a fallback position. If something is epistemically valuable, it may be epistemically appropriate to value it; or, from the epistemic point of view, it is worthy of valuing (cf. Pritchard (2014: 113)). But this view denies that it follows from the fact that something is epistemically appropriate to value that it is also appropriate to value it simpliciter. At this point, I have begun to loose touch with what these words are supposed to mean. The problem is not the lack of a formal semantic device for this view.11 The problem is more simply to understand what kind of thing deserves the title of value if it is not valuable! Second, even if this way of thinking about epistemic value is inconsistent with mine, we might want to know why we ought adopt it. So far as I can see, the main argument is this. The inference from 'x is a value in domain D' so 'x is a value simpliciter' is invalid. (After all, there might be values in the "coffee domain" or even the "torture domain" that are fundamental to those domains. But we would not normally claim that their values are values simpliciter. See, e.g., Sosa (2011: 63; 2007: 73-4).) Thus, the inference from 'x is a value in the epistemic domain' to 'x is a value simpliciter' is likewise invalid. To mimic the wording of Pritchard (2014), it is a "further step" to say that if something is of final value in some domain that it is of final value simpliciter. However, this argument is itself invalid. The following inference rule is certainly invalid: φ or ψ; therefore, φ. After all, there are many instances of this inference pattern that do not preserve truth. But some instances of it do preserve truth. The inference 'A or A; therefore, A' is perfectly valid and is an instance of that inference. Similarly, there may be many domains that do not track value simpliciter. Those domains are merely ways of evaluating things. But from the fact that some domains do not track value simpliciter it does not follow that some particular domain also does not track value simpliciter. So this argument fails. Of course, some might want to know why we should think that if something is of fundamental value in the epistemic domain that it follows that it is valuable simpliciter. A number of arguments could be developed here. One promising argument is through the similarity of epistemic evaluation and moral evaluation. Some authors have noticed that the kind of normativity, broadly construed, involved in moral and epistemic evaluations are very similar. But moral evaluations are widely thought to involve value simpliciter. If something is valuable in 10 Something like this picture is also implicit in Oliveira (2017), though generalized beyond issues of epistemic value. And there are some terminological issues that I'm ignoring here. 11 For instance, one could utilize Geach's (1956) distinction between "attributive" and "predicative" adjectives (or an analogous version for adverbs). Ridge (2013) is relevant here. 13 the moral domain it is valuable simpliciter. So too if something is valuable in the epistemic domain it is valuable simpliciter. (For discussion, positive and critical, of this kind of reasoning, see Cuneo (2007), Cowie (2014, 2016), Rowland (2013, 2016), Das (2016, 2017).) Additionally, there is a problem for epistemologists who deny that values in the epistemic domain are not necessarily values simpliciter.12 Let us take seriously Sosa's suggestion that human beings are "zestfully judgmental across the gamut of our experience" (2007: 70). Of course, different "domains" of evaluations can issue different judgments of the same thing. Inside the "aesthetic" domain, a particular gourd might be bad because it is ugly; but inside the "culinary" point of view it might be excellent, ready for one's fall soup. But there might be an "epistemic*" domain and in it true beliefs are not a fundamental epistemic* value; perhaps nothing is, or maybe only reasonable attitudes are. And perhaps there is an "epistemic**" domain where true beliefs are a fundamental epistemic** value, but knowledge is not more epistemically** valuable than true belief. Given such domains,13 a natural question is why should we give more attention to the epistemic domain than the epistemic* or epistemic** domain? This question is pressing for those who do not see the epistemic domain as tracking value simpliciter. But for those of us who see the epistemic domain as tracking value simpliciter there is a straightforward response. We should focus on the epistemic domain, instead of these competitors, because the epistemic domain tracks value simpliciter in a way that those other domains need not. For these reasons, I think, this kind of response to my argument for Epistemic Value Pluralism is unpromising.14 12 This problem is inspired by Stich's (1990) arguments against the value of true belief. But it is not quite the same. I discuss Stich's argument in Perrine (2017: 246-253). 13 If some domains do not already exist, we could easily introduce them. After all, prior to the cultivation and invention of coffee, there was not the "coffee domain" (or, there was, and it just wasn't used). 14 After writing this paper, I stumbled upon Kurt Sylvan's (2018). In it, Sylvan argues that we can retain the idea that "accurate belief is the sole fundamental epistemic value" (2018: 382) so long as we reject the view that "accurate belief is the sole non-instrumental epistemic value" (2018: 382). (By 'non-instrumental value' Sylvan just means 'final value' (cf. (2018: 431).) Sylvan's idea is that some things have a value that is derived from accurate belief in a way other than being instrumentally valuable. In defending his ideas, Sylvan even uses a principle of Hurka's (1992) reformulated in terms of "derivative non-instrumental value" (2018: 383). Comparing Sylvan's argument to mine is difficult because he does not setup his discussion in terms of basic vs. non-basic final epistemic value. But there is a close affinity of our ideas. With that in mind, I'll make three brief comments. First, if by 'fundamental epistemic value' Sylvan means "basic final epistemic value" then we disagree. For I've argued that there are more things of basic final epistemic value than true beliefs. Second, if Sylvan thinks things of "derivative non-instrumental value" are things whose value can be entirely explained by appealing to the value of true belief, then we disagree. For I've argued there are some things of final epistemic value whose value cannot be fully explained by appealing to true beliefs. Finally, though Sylvan and I both sympathetically cite authors like Hurka, Sylvan offers a thinner reading of them. Specifically, Sylvan maintains that there can be responses to final value that are themselves of final value while those responses do not require forming any pro-attitudes. I think that is implausible, but will not argue that here. 14 Bibliography: Adams, Robert. (2007). A Theory of Virtue. Oxford University Press. Alexander, Jackson. (2011), "Appearances, Rationality, and Justified Belief." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 82.3: 564-593. Alston, William. (2005). "Beyond Justification." Ithaca: Cornell University Press Brogaard, Berit. (2013). "Phenomenal Seemings and Sensible Dogmatism." In Seemings and Justification. Ed. Chris Tucker. New York: Oxford University Press. Case, Spencer. (2019). "From Epistemic to Moral Realism." 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UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, Año 26, 52: 19-52 junio 2009, Bogotá, Colombia EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE ÍNGRID VENDRELL FERRAN* ABSTRACT In this essay I want to offer an analysis of the structure of the fictional emotions that we have reading novels. I shall start with a presentation of the structure of emotions in general and their relation to aesthetic fiction. Afterwards, I shall offer a critical review of the current positions on fictional emotions. The aim of this section is to question the presuppositions that dominate the current debate on fictional emotions in particular and on emotions in general. Finally, I shall develop my own account on this issue. The thesis that I am going to defend is that fictional emotions possess doxastic and practical rationality and that they are full fledged emotional experiences the reality of which we should not doubt, even though they show some peculiarities. Key words: Fictional emotion, quasi-emotion, doxastic rationality, practical rationality, assumption. *Freie Universität Berlin. Postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the Université de Genève. RECIBIDO: 04.13.09 ACEPTADO: 05.13.09 For comments on earlier drafts of this paper I am very grateful to Christoph Johanssen, Christiane Voss, Martin Vöhler, Gertrud Koch, Antonio Blanco Salgueiro, Fernando Martínez Manrique, Juan José Acero, Miguel Ángel Pérez, David Teira, Jesús Zamora Bonilla, Amparo Díez Martínez, Kevin Mulligan, Olivier Massin, Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Juliette Gloor and the anonymous reviewer of the Journal. I also benefited from the vivid discussions with my students in the winter term 2007/2008 at the FU Berlin. This paper has been written as part of a project on "Emotion, Fantasy and Fiction" funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, Año 26 52: 19-52 junio 2009, Bogotá, Colombia EMOCIÓN, RAZÓN Y VERDAD EN LA LITERATURA ÍNGRID VENDRELL FERRAN RESUMEN Este artículo presenta un análisis de la estructura de las emociones ficcionales que tenemos cuando leemos novelas. En un primer momento, me centraré en la estructura de las emociones en general y en su relación con la ficción estética. Ofreceré luego una revisión crítica de las principales teorías sobre emociones ficcionales. El objetivo de esta sección es cuestionar las presuposiciones que dominan el debate actual sobre las emociones ficcionales, en particular y sobre las emociones, en general. Finalmente, voy a presentar mi propia posición y a defender la tesis según la cual las emociones ficcionales poseen racionalidad doxástica y práctica y pueden ser consideradas como emociones reales, a pesar de presentar en algunos aspectos características particulares. Palabras clave: Emoción ficcional, quasi-emoción, racionalidad doxástica, racionalidad práctica, suposiciones. *Freie Universität Berlin. Postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences at the Université de Genève. Por los comentarios a los primeros borradores de este texto, estoy muy agradecida con Christoph Johanssen, Christiane Voss, Martin Vöhler, Gertrud Koch, Antonio Blanco Salgueiro, Fernando Martínez Manrique, Juan José Acero, Miguel Ángel Pérez, David Teira, Jesús Zamora Bonilla, Amparo Díez Martínez, Kevin Mulligan, Olivier Massin, Anita Konzelmann-Ziv, Hans Bernhard Schmid, Juliette Gloor y con los árbitros anónimos de la revista.También he obtenido mucho provecho de discusiones muy vívidas con mis estudiantes durante el invierno 2007/ 2008 en la FU Berlin. Este texto se ha escrito como parte del proyecto sobre "Emoción,fantasía y ficción" financiado por la Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 1. Emotion and fiction: a paradoxical relation? 1.1Analytic paradigms of the emotions ANY ACCOUNT ON FICTIONAL EMOTIONS implies working with a specific concept of emotions in general, even though it may be very rough. But which model, which theory of emotions do we take as a point of departure? In this section I want to explore the different paradigms of emotions in the current analytic tradition and offer a concept of the emotions that I think does justice to their nature. Since the publication of Anthony Kenny s book Action, Emotion and Will (Kenny 1963), emotions have been one of the most important topics of analytic philosophy and the number of analyses and theories on the subject has been increasing during the last decades. Characteristic of the analytic theories of the emotions is their focus on the relation between emotions and elements of thought -especially judgements. As a result of this focus of attention on cognitive elements, analytic philosophers proposed "cognitivistic theories" of the emotions. Cognitivistic theories emerged partly as a response to the so called "feeling-theories" which focus on the qualitative felt dimension of the emotions. The most prominent theory of the emotions in this field was formulated at the end of the 19th century by William James.1 James claimed that emotions are the feeling of the bodily changes that occur after a perception of an exciting fact (James 1967, 13). Feeling theories explain the emotions following the model of perception instead of the model of judgement or belief and they explain the emotions as they are experienced by the subject in a first person perspective. But although these theories can be very plausible in an intuitive level, they have been object of criticism. The way in which emotions are bodily felt is not enough to distinguish one emotion from another. The theories also ignore the possibility to have more than one emotion simultaneously. Furthermore, they neglect the possibility to have unconscious emotions and ignore the fact that emotions are directed towards the world and have intentional objects. These problems make feeling theories unattractive to the analytic tradition. 1 Feeling theories have a long tradition. Descartes definition of the emotions as perceptions of the soul and Wundt s definition of the emotions as feelings of pleasure and pain are good examples of influential feeling theories. 22 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 Analytic philosophers were more interested in explaining the emotions by the model of judgement, thought, language and belief. The relation between emotions and perceptions was thus disregarded for the benefit of the relation between emotions and judgements and a focus on cognitive aspects of the emotions. However, under the label of "cognitivism" we find a variety of concepts of emotions which differ quite substantially. A very popular conception defended by Anthony Kenny and Gabrielle Taylor takes for granted that emotions have to be necessarily based on judgements (Kenny 1963, 195; Taylor 1985). Other philosophers try to reduce the emotions to combinations of judgements and other states. In this theoretical framework, we furthermore find Joel Marks' (Marks 1982, 227-242) and Harvey Green s (Green 1992) belief-desire theory of the emotions according to which emotions are combinations of judgements and desires as well as Aaron Ben-ze ev s componential theory that defines the emotions as a complex of judgements, cognitions, sensations and motivations (Ben-ze ev 2000, 49). Other authors like Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum go further and claim that emotions are judgements or evaluations (Solomon 1993, 126; Nussbaum 2005, 22). These positions have the virtue to stress that emotions are related to rational elements and are per se rational, but they forget that emotions are first of all bodily felt. Another problem of these theories is that they cannot explain the nature of those emotions -such as disgust- that are not based on judgements. It is therefore necessary to postulate a non reductive cognitivism for the emotions that can explain these as bodily phenomena and that includes emotions that are not grounded on judgements. With regard to the thesis about the cognitive basis of the emotions there are different versions of this non reductive cognitivism. According to Michael Stocker and Patricia Greenspan (Stocker 1987, 59-69; Greenspan 1988, 223-250), judgements as well as fantasies can be the basis for emotions. Jon Elster recognises the same role for perceptions (Elster 1999, 250). Kevin Mulligan affirms that the bases of emotions are perceptions, judgements and memories (Mulligan 1998, 168) and Peter Goldie includes fantasies, judgements and perceptions (Goldie 2002, 45). I position myself among these authors and claim that emotions can have as cognitive basis perceptions, fantasies, memories, beliefs, assumptions and other cognitive acts (Vendrell Ferran 2008). Following some of Brentano s pupils like Scheler and Meinong, 23EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 I claim that the cognitive basis of emotions can be not only judgements but also other states. It is true that I cannot envy my sister if I do not judge that she has something I deserve and that I am at disadvantage, but it is also true that I cannot be afraid of the dog if I do not perceive it; I cannot regret my words if I do not have memories; I cannot fear the monster I do not imagine; I cannot pity Anna Karenina if I do not assume that she is in a sad situation. Therefore the cognitive bases of emotions can be: perceptions, memories, fantasies, judgements, beliefs, assumptions and other acts. It is important to stress this point because it will be a crucial element in the debate on fictional emotions, as I will show later on. In this article I will work with a conception of the emotions that understands them as those states that possess a certain quality of being felt and that are intentional at the same time. To put it very briefly: I understand the emotions as felt and as feelings. Emotions have a qualitative dimension in the sense that when they are felt, we experience them in a very particular and characteristic way.2 For example, envy is felt as narrowness in the breast and as a movement impulse to destroy the envied. In my model, emotions have necessarily a cognitive basis. This cognitive basis has to be of an intellectual nature, i.e. affective acts like desires cannot work as a basis for the emotions. However, this cognitive basis of the emotions cannot be reduced to mere judgments -perceptions, fantasies, memories and assumptions are also an appropriate basis for the emotions. This cognitive basis can be seen as an integrative part of the emotions. Emotions are also intentional and directed to the world. This intentionality cannot be reduced to the intentionality of their cognitive basis even though it is based on this. Some of these aspects will be object of further elaboration below, when I develop my own proposal to understand fictional emotions (for a more detailed view Vendrell Ferran 2008).3 2 I distinguish between having an emotion and feeling it. We can have emotions on an underconscious level where they are not felt in the same sense that conscious emotions are. 3 Some philosophers like Prinz or Goldie have given complex accounts of the emotions that try to combine both traditions: the feeling theory tradition and the cognitivistic tradition. Cf. Prinz 2004, Goldie 2002. 24 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 1.2 Reviewing aesthetic fictions THE QUESTION OF THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS of fictions has been one of the main worries of occidental philosophy. Fictional worlds, characters and situations do not have the same kind of reality as the world in which we live in our everyday life. Anna Karenina, Romeo and Juliet, and Terminator are not objects with the same kind of reality as the editor of the journal or the reader of this article. In this essay though, I am not interested in the ontology of fictions, my interest is more of a psychological nature: How can fictions move us? For this purpose I will consider only aesthetic fictions and I will understand the concept of aesthetic fiction as the successor of the old concept of mimesis. When referring to aesthetic fiction I shall speak simply of fiction. Following an Aristotelian perspective I think that mimesis can be interpreted in two senses: a representation or imitation of the reality as well as a creation of a new reality. Especially in this second sense of mimesis it is clear that the imagination as a creative force plays a crucial role for the concept of mimesis and consequently also for the concept of aesthetic fiction. In my model, fiction cannot be reduced to falsehood, deception or lie. In the current debate on fictional emotions it seems to me that these concepts are often presented as synonymous. Philosophers of fictional emotions that do not have aesthetic sensibility tend to follow the old critique to poetry by Plato that associates aesthetic fictions with lies. However, fictions and lies have a different structure at least in what concerns their original intentions. Inherent to the structure of lies is the intention to deceit and to make the other belief that the lie is true; on the contrary, in the structure of fictions we do not find this malicious intention and the authors of fictions do not have the aim to make the reader or spectator believe in the truth of the fictional object. Another regular presupposition of the recent debate on fictional emotions that I want to avoid here is that the binary opposition between fiction and reality is taken for granted. However I think that these cannot be the only two dimensions in which human life takes place. There is at least the dimension of the imaginary.4 What is the imaginary? If I am scared of going downstairs to the cellar, because I am convinced that there is a cadaver 4 I take this denomination from Wolfgang Iser (Iser 1991), even though I interpret these terms in a different sense. 25EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 there, or if during a dream I am scared of a big elephant that is able to go through walls without breaking them, these emotions -I would say- are neither emotions on real objects nor on fictional objects. The objects of these emotions are imaginary. The realm of the imaginary objects can be close to the realm of fictions, but one cannot be reduced to the other. The imaginary seems to be close to the terrain of subconscious projections and I do not want to enter in this field. But one thing seems clear to me: While I do not take fictional objects to be real, imaginary objects seem to have the stronger force to occupy the realm of reality and to be taken as real by the subject. I have to mention this distinction here because in the debate on fictional emotions some philosophers recurred often to the analogy between fictional emotions and phobic emotions and in doing so ignored the distinction between fictional and imaginary that I proposed above. There is a third remark about the concept of aesthetic fiction that I think necessary. In the debate on fictional emotions philosophers usually focus only on certain types of aesthetic fictions that they take to be paradigmatic, such as novel, theatre and film. In doing this they ignore that sculpture, painting and dance can also sometimes be understood as aesthetic fictions. And furthermore, they ignore that between novel, theatre and film there are essential differences. For example, the novel requires the reader to imagine the characters while in theatre and film there is another human being that gives life to the characters. Also, we watch these characters while being part of an audience with which we may interact. Watching theatre and film, our senses are also more implied than when we are reading a book, where each image or sound, smell or gustative or tactile impression of our senses is ultimately the result of the imaginative capacity of the reader. These differences have to be kept in mind, although I shall review the main theories on fictional emotions and they do not distinguish between aesthetic genres. Furthermore, the current debate on fictional emotions only considers those emotions that we have as spectators or readers of fictions, ignoring absolutely the question whether the actor and actress of a film or representation also experience a fictional emotion while they are playing a role in which emotions occur. I myself will, the end of this article, offer an account which until now only claims validity for fictional emotions in the sense of emotions we have while reading novels.5 5 I leave open the question whether my account can be also applied to other aesthetic fictions. I think so, but it is important to remark the differences between the genres. 26 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 1.3. Fictional emotions under suspicion ONCE THE ANALYTIC DEBATE on emotions in general was initiated, the question how fiction can trigger emotions appeared very soon. The first article on this subject appeared only ten years after the publication of the first book on the emotions in analytic tradition. Anthony Kenny published this book in 1963 and ten years later Colin Radford wrote the article "How can we be moved by the fate of Anna Karenina?" This essay inaugurated an own field of the aesthetics and up to this day led to a long sequence of reactions. Within the dominating cognitivistic paradigm of the emotions, fictional emotions were seen as highly problematic. They raised two kinds of suspicions. The first suspicion was that fictional emotions might be a challenge to rationality. Philosophers thought necessary to explain how it was possible to have an emotion about something that we know not to be real. This suspicion led Colin Radford to believe in the extreme claim that fictional emotions are irrational. Fictional emotions can be seen as a challenge to rationality in two ways. On one side, it is not clear how it is possible to defend the belief to have the emotion and at the same time to defend the belief that the object is fictional. On the other side, fictional emotions are also a challenge from the standpoint of practical rationality. Most philosophers engaged in the debate on fictional emotions take for granted that emotions on real objects motivate actions, while emotions on fictional objects lack the link to motivation. However, I think that both tensions, the tension between beliefs and the tension between emotion and motivation, as well as the assumptions about emotions underlying them, have to be object of an accurate review. The second suspicion concerns the reality of fictional emotions. Is what I feel while reading a novel, watching a movie or a theatre representation real? This suspicion also has to be taken seriously because there is a long tradition of philosophers who claim that emotions on fictions are not real emotions at all. Meinong, Ryle, Kenny, Budd and especially Walton subscribed to this thesis -and I am mentioning only the most illustrious names of this tradition (Meinong 1910, 309; Ryle 1949, 103; Kenny 1963, 49; Budd 1985, 128; Walton 1978, 6 and 1990, 196). 27EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 Theses suspicions find their ultimate expression in the so called "Paradox of fiction", that is in the claim that fictional emotions are paradoxical. A paradox is a contradiction with no solution. There are different formulations of the paradox in question in the analytic debate, but in essence they all express the alleged tension between emotion, reason and action that I presented above. The premises of the paradox are the following: 1. We experience emotions towards characters or situations we take to be fictional. 2. We experience emotions only if we believe that the object of the emotion exists. 3. When we know that the object of our emotion is fictional then we do not belief that the object exists. Each of these premises seems plausible but all of them taken together are contradictory. Thus at least one of them has to be false. Contemporary authors have been denying one or the other of these premises and there are solutions for all tastes. Underlying these theses are assumptions and hypotheses about the general structure of emotions that cannot be left unquestioned. In what follows I shall offer a critical review of the main positions. This review can be seen as a deconstructive strategy before I offer my own account on the structure of fictional emotions in particular. 2. Irrationalism AS I MENTIONED ABOVE, Colin Radford was the first to write an article on the problem within the analytic tradition. His thesis is provocative and radical: "our being moved in certain ways by works of art, though very "natural" to us and in that way only too intelligible, involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence" (Radford 1975, 78). This proposal is called irrationalism and Radford is the only author who supports it. He defended his claim in several articles despite all criticism (Radford 1975, 1982 and 1995). Radford s strategy to tackle the problem consists in supporting the second premise according to which having an emotion implies the belief in the existence of its object. Radford argues pointing to some mental experiments. One of them consists in imagining that someone explains us that he has an ill sister and that we feel compassion for him. However, if we discover that in fact he 28 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 has no sister at all and that it was only a kind of joke, our compassion will disappear (Radford 1973). In another thought experiment Radford proposes a comparison between the fear that I feel watching a monster in a movie and the fear that I feel after the movie walking home alone and thinking that the monster may attack me in the dark street (Radford 1982, 263). Radford supports his claim with a detailed analysis of the problematic aspects of fictional emotions. Fictional emotions are by this understanding irrational because they contain two judgements that are in fact contradictory. On the one hand, fictional emotions have to presuppose the existence of the object, on the other hand we believe in the case of fictional emotions that the object does not exist. With this claim Radford is indirectly supporting the thesis that emotions are necessarily based on judgements, and these judgments presuppose the existence of the object. Radford establishes an abysmal difference between "rational emotions" such as pity for the death of a real person and "irrational emotions" such as pity for the death of Mercutio, Romeo s friend in Shakespeare s play Romeo and Juliet. In this sense, fictional emotions are doxastically irrational because they contain contradictory judgements. Aside from this doxastic irrationality, fictional emotions are also irrational from the point of view of practical rationality.6 They are irrational in this sense because they do not motivate actions, while emotions on real objects -by Radford s understanding- do motivate action. I think that Radford s proposal is thoroughly mistaken and has rightly received criticism. I do not want to repeat the critic and I will only emphasize the aspects that by my understanding are fundamentally wrong. The comparisons between fiction and other states that Radford establishes with his examples are from my point of view totally inappropriate and misunderstand fully the nature of fiction. In the first of his examples of feeling compassion for an inexistent sister, Radford just understands fictions as lies. In the second example of the monsters in the movie following us on our way home, he is just comparing fictional objects to phobic fantasies. Both comparisons seem to me unacceptable as I showed before. Aside from this misconception of fiction, Radford ignores the influence that engaging with fictions has on us, questions the moral value of art and transforms passionate book readers, cinema fans and theatre freaks in 6 I take the terms doxastic and practical rationality from Richard Joyce (Joyce 2000) 29EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 irrational beings. Radford misunderstands the nature of emotions also in the sense that he makes emotions depend exclusively on judgements and in this case affirmative existential judgements. The concept of irrationality is also too strong to be taken seriously. From my point of view, fictional emotions would be irrational if we were unable to give a reason for having them. However, in general we can argue and explain why we have an emotion when we read a novel, watch a film or visit the theatre. After a film we can say that we were afraid of the monster because it incarnated danger or that we felt pity for the heroine because she was in a troubling situation. I am led to the conclusion that Radford s proposal is unsatisfying and that it is necessary to look for other accounts on fictional emotions. 3. Emotions, facts and thoughts IN THIS SECTION I SHALL EXAMINE two different proposals about fictional emotions that focus on the role of thoughts rather than specifically that of judgments. The first reaction to Radford s statements on fictional emotions was that of Michael Weston. His proposal is known as "factualism". The other proposal is given by Lamarque and is more known as "thought theory". Some authors speak of the Weston-Lamarque solution, even though both proposals differ in important aspects. In his reply to Radford Weston develops a strategy to deal with the problem of fictional emotions. His strategy consists in focussing not on the contradictory judgements but on the objects of fictional emotions (Boruah 1988). Weston affirms "(...) we can be moved, not merely by what has occurred or what is probable, but also by ideas. I can be saddened not only by the death of my child or the breakdown of your marriage, but also by the thought that even the most intimate and intense relationships must end. Such feelings are not responses to particular events, but express, I think, a certain conception of life and are the product of reflection on it" (Weston 1975, 85-86). In this account the object of a fictional emotion is not a specific situation or person, but a "conception of life" or a "vision of life". Fictional emotions are emotions about a specific aspect of life represented in the fiction that invites us to reflect about ourselves. Weston thus claims that when I am sad because Mercutio is dead, in fact I am sad because it came to my mind that people in general die. Mercutio s death in this way invites us to reflect on death in general and this makes us sad. 30 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 This proposal has also been object of criticism. When I am sad because of Mercutio s death, I am not sad due to the general fact of death, but due to the fact that Mercutio -this specific Mercutio of Shakespeare s play- is dead. This does not exclude that my sadness about Mercutio s death may lead me to ponder on the issue of life and death in general. But the object of the sadness about Mercutio s death is only Mercutio s death. Another problem of Weston s account is that in many cases of fictional emotions there is no analogue object in the real world. And if there is no analogy, then Weston s main thesis cannot be defended any more (In this sense see also Yanal 1999, 35). For example, if I am afraid of Dracula or Terminator, or if I fear that the end of the world or the resurrection of zombies is about to come, there are no sensible corresponding objects of fear in the real world, at least as far as I know. With his account Weston confuses the object of an emotion with the cause of an emotion. It may be that the cause of my being sad about Mercutio s death lies at least partially in the fact that death is an unavoidable part of human life. However, the cause is different from the object of the emotion, which is Mercutio s death. There are some sophisticated versions of factualism like the one offered by Barrie Paskins. This author claims that the object of fictional emotions is not the fiction itself but a real world analogue. For example, we are not sad about the destiny of Anna Karenina but about the destiny of somebody that is like Anna Karenina but real, i.e. persons that are in a similar situation (Paskins 1977). This position shares some of the problems of Weston s account such as the fact that not all fictional characters and situations have real world analogues. Paskins approach is also problematic because the object of our fictional emotions would be a "general type" instead of something specific. Another more sophisticated account is given by Peter Lamarque. His position is shared by a higher amount of authors and is known as "thought theory". The general assumption is that in order to have an emotion it is not necessary to have a specific judgement, since a mere thought is enough. In fact, Lamarque claims that the real objects of our fictional emotions are thoughts. In his account images, fantasies, suppositions are understood as 31EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 thoughts (Lamarque 1981, 293). When they are lively and when we focus our attention on them, it is more probable that the thoughts lead to an emotion. Furthermore, Lamarque claims that when we have a fictional emotion we interpret the fiction in some sense (Lamarque 1981, 300-303). This account resembles Weston s account because both focus on the importance of the interpretation of fictions. An objection to this account is that the notion of thought is too vague and imprecise to be taken seriously. What is also problematic is the fact that Lamarque is confusing the object of the emotions with their cognitive basis. As far as the cognitive basis of the emotions is concerned, I think that it cannot be reduced only to judgements, because otherwise we would be unable to explain the nature of, for example, disgust, which is based on a perception. Lamarque seems to perceive this, but he then thinks that what I call cognitive basis is in fact the object of the emotion. Emotional objects however cannot be mere "thoughts". Why? Answering this question requires introducing a concept into the debate on fictional emotions that -despite being rather basic- has often been neglected. Lamarque ignores -as do most of the theorists working on the paradox of fiction- one of the most important insights of the philosophy of mind in modern times. At the end of the 19th century, Brentano introduced the thesis of the intentionality of mental states, including the emotions. Emotions are intentional in the sense that they are directed towards objects. In Brentano s theory of the intentionality of the emotions we can then find a thesis that Kenny made popular in analytic tradition. I am talking about the thesis that emotions have two different kinds of objects: material and formal objects. Let me explain this using an example. Suppose that I feel fear of a storm. The storm is then the material object of my fear. The formal object is the quality of the dangerous that is in this moment given in the storm. The material object of an emotion can change and may vary in relation to social, historical, cultural and individual parameters. The material object is given to us by a perception, a fantasy, a supposition, a judgement and so on. The formal object of, say for example fear, is on the other hand always the same: the quality of the threatening or the dangerous. Kenny writes: «The formal object of φing is the object under that description which must apply to it if it is to be possible to φ it. If only what is P can be φd, then «thing which is P» gives the formal object of φing» (Kenny 1963, 192). The thesis here is that each emotion essentially has its own formal object. Disgust has the disgusting as a formal object, 32 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 fear has the dangerous as a formal object and we cannot change this connection. One of the implications of the described thesis is that emotions can be appropriate or inappropriate in regard to their objects (Cf. de Sousa 1987, Tappolet 2000). Disgust in the face of something disgusting is appropriate but disgust in the face of something dangerous is inappropriate.7 Given this distinction it seems to me clear that the material object of my fictional fear is the monster, not the thought of the monster, even though I need to have some kind of "thought" about the monster -taking this word in a very general sense- in order to be fictionally afraid of it. And the formal object of this fictional fear is the quality of the threatening that is in this moment incarnated by the monster. Another objection to Lamarque is that thoughts in his general sense may well be very detailed and lively and may yet not trigger any emotion. For example, I can have a very detailed presentation of some joyful situation and I can interpret this scene and at the same time be completely indifferent towards it. Also, Lamarque s claim that there must be an interpretation of the fiction seems false, for sometimes a fictional emotion may arise without any process of interpretation of the content. Finally, the claim that we have emotions about general thoughts instead of having them about specific objects seems to misinterpret the nature of the emotional object as I expounded above. 4. Disbelief or believe in fictions IT SEEMS TO ME THAT NEITHER the mere interpretation of facts nor the claim that the emotional objects are simply thoughts in a very general sense, are adequate points of departure for an investigation of fictional emotions. To dissolve the paradox of fiction and explain the authentic nature of fictional emotions -to my understanding- we have to focus on the propositional elements involved in our engagement with fictions. 7 For Kenny the intentionality of the emotions derives from the intentionality of the judgements that they have as a basis. I leave this point untouched here. However, I think that the emotions receive their intentionality from their bases -the latter being not only judgements but also perceptions, fantasies, memories, expectations and assumptions- and that they transform this intentionality into an emotional intentionality sui generis that cannot be reduced to the intentionality of their bases. 33EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 To examine the structure of these propositional elements some authors focus on the thesis of the so called "(willing) suspension of disbelief" attributed to 19th century thinker Coleridge. The thesis of the Suspension of Disbelief affirms that the spectator or reader of fiction accepts to suspend the judgement that one is dealing with fictions and takes what is presented to him as reality. This allows to accept some premises of the fictional world that otherwise would be absurd or impossible. However, this thesis does not correspond to our experience of fictions, because we do not suspend disbelief when we are engaged with fictions or in the case that we do suspend it, it is only for a short period of time. I would say that even though we can become very involved in a work of fiction, we hardly ever stop knowing that it is fiction. Moreover, we cannot manipulate at will our beliefs and it is not always easy to forget that we are dealing with fictions; especially when the content or the structure of the novel or film is too strange or the language is highly artificial and elaborated. As Paul Harris showed in The Work of the Imagination (Harris 2000, 60) and Meinong pointed out hundred years ago in Über Annahmen (Meinong 1910, 111), even small children are able to distinguish between reality and fiction in their plays. In a critical response to the thesis of the suspension of disbelief and reacting to the Radford-Weston debate, at the end of the 70ies Eva Schaper elaborated a very inspiring account of fictional emotions. Schaper thinks that fictional emotions are real emotions, even though the conflict with the propositional aspect of the emotions has to be resolved: "That emotions are felt (...) is then not an illusion or misrepresentation of the facts: only the belief conditions become problematical" (Schaper 1978, 32-33). Shaper leaves the cognitivistic paradigm of the emotions untouched and defends that beliefs are essential to emotions, but she introduces two important innovations into the debate. The first innovation consists in the thesis that beliefs are not always existential beliefs, i.e. that believing does not involve the commitment to the existence of the object of belief. As Shaper puts it, "the view that beliefs always involve commitment to the actual existence of that about which the belief is held conflicts not only with what we might feel we know about responding to fiction. It also conflicts in general with belief situations in which the issue of actual existence does not arise because the objects of such beliefs are, as the saying is, within somebody s intentionality." (Schaper 1978, 41) If the commitment to the existence of the object were necessary 34 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 8 She distinguishes also very clearly between fiction and imaginary worlds, when she traces the line between being involved in fictions and being involved in dreams, affirming that the first demands first and second-order beliefs while the dream does not. for a belief, then beliefs about non actual things such as future situations or hypothetical cases would also be problematic.8 As we shall see further on, this argument was also developed years later by Richard Moran and Peter Goldie. The second claim is that the beliefs involved in fictional emotions are not contradictory at all. Departing from the thesis that reality and fiction are two different ontological realms, Schaper claims that the judgements that arise in each of these realms differ in their nature. She calls judgements about reality "first order judgements" and judgements about fiction "second order judgements". By this theory, a first order judgement is the judgement that we are dealing with fiction, for example, that we are reading a novel or watching a movie. A second order judgement concerns the content of fiction, for example, that Anna Karenina is unhappy with her marriage. Second order judgements according to Schaper do not imply an existential judgement about their object. Given that first order judgements and second order judgements pertain to different ontological levels and make different kinds of claims, the possibility of a contradiction is excluded. What is more, in this account first order beliefs are necessary for second order beliefs. Schaper says: "These two kinds of belief, far from being contradictory, are such that the second-order beliefs could not take the form they do (that is, without existential commitment) unless the first-order beliefs obtained" (Schaper 1978, 39). With this strategy, Schaper can save fictional emotions from the abyss of irrationality, but she also compromises her account because she feels obliged to affirm that also second order beliefs have truth conditions. The fact that second order beliefs refer to fictions does not imply that they are simply false. This claim is important because it separates two predicates that often appear mixed up and confused in the debate on fictional emotions: the predicate of existence and the predicate of truth. By this differentiation, for something to be true does not necessarily mean that it involves existing objects. The problem however arises because with this claim Schaper is pleading for a truth theory of fiction. But how establish truth or falsehood for something that is a fiction? I hold this point to be very problematic and 35EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 shall defend a different theory of these aspects later on. Schaper herself, in order to overcome the problem, claims: "Within the context of what we know to be a play, a novel, a painting and so on we have a perfectly serviceable analogue to the space-time co-ordinates which ordinarily allow for the determination of the truth value of declarative sentences. In this obvious sense, the second-order beliefs are true or false according to whether they are correctly or incorrectly identified within the analogue" (Schaper 1978, 40). In writing so, the author seems to defend a theory of fictional truth that makes the truth conditions depend on the fictional context. Unfortunately, Schaper does not develop this point any further. I hold Schaper s article to be one of the most perspicuous attempts to solve the paradox of fiction in the early stage of the discussion. But it leaves the premise that beliefs are necessary for emotions untouched and subscribes thus to a cognitivistic theory of the emotions that I described before as problematic. Moreover, Schaper claims that first order beliefs are necessary for second order beliefs. Within that terminological framework, I think this is right. But necessary does not mean sufficient. The author does not explain why and how second order beliefs arise in the mind of the reader or spectator, i.e. what causes an aesthetic experience. After the introduction of secondorder beliefs, one would like to have an account of the nature of these beliefs and their exact relation to first order beliefs. Years later Kendall Walton will offer a more exhaustive theory on second-order beliefs and the emotions aroused by them, as I shall explain below. Taking as a point of departure Lamarque s thought theory and modifying the thesis of the suspension of disbelief attributed to Coleridge, Yanal develops an own account of fictional emotions. According to this author, fictional emotions arise because the subject is involved in vivid and detailed thoughts -Yanal elaborates the notions of vividness and detail for fictional emotions and takes into consideration also non propositional thoughts. When the emotion emerges, the disbelief of the subjects is "relatively inactive" (Yanal 1999, 102). What does this mean? Yanal thinks that there are degrees of activity of beliefs, so that some beliefs may be highly active, others less active and others totally inactive. In fictional emotions -so he claims- we have a belief of the unreality of the fictional character or situation, but this belief is one that shows the lowest degree of activity. Yanal writes: "The spectators inactivity of disbelief should be low enough for him to pity Anna Karenina 36 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 but high enough so that he doesn t attempt to communicate with her, stop her suicide, tell off her prig of a husband and so on" (Yanal 1999, 105). In his account, Yanal observes that fictional emotions have two kinds of objects: material and formal, and in doing so, the author is right. But then he claims that the material object of a fictional emotion is "nothing" while the formal object of an emotion a thought (Yanal 1999, 118). With this account, Yanal wants to emphasize the fact that readers and spectators of fiction are not naïve and they do not ignore that they are dealing with fictions. Nevertheless, I think that Yanals proposal of beliefs that are there but nevertheless inactive is not convincing at all. It is difficult to imagine what exactly this "inactivity" means. Does it mean that these beliefs are not expressed in action? Or does it means that they do not influence other beliefs? Or maybe he has in mind the possibility of beliefs that are not embedded into the whole psychic life of the subject? This question seems to remain unanswered by Yanal. It also remains unclear why -if the belief in the non existence of the object is inactive- we sometimes want to feel pity and sorrow when we deal with fictions and we feel them with pleasure. But even more serious is Yanal s claim that the formal object of a fictional emotion is a thought. The concept of "thought" is too vague to be used here as the formal object of the emotion as such. The claim ignores all the latest accounts on the nature of emotions in general that identify the formal objects with specific qualities (Kenny 1963, de Sousa 1987, Tappolet 2000, Johnston 2001). 5. Make-believe and quasi-emotions KENDALL WALTON DEVELOPED IN SEVERAL ARTICLES and in his book Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) an account of fictional emotions that is known under the name fictionalism or pretence-theory and that –-even though it has been object of strong criticism- still maintains some of its appealing force. Walton takes as a point of departure the distinction between first order judgements and second order judgements -calling the latter make-believe. This distinction has a certain resemblance to Schaper s distinction that I described above but Walton adds an interesting point. In addition to the distinction between two types of judgement there is a distinction between two types of emotions depending on the type of judgement that they are based on. Emotions in real-life-situations are based on first order judgements 37EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 and are therefore, according to Walton, real emotions. Emotions about fictional objects are based on second order judgements or make-believe and they are, in Walton s terminology "make-believe emotions" or "quasi-emotions" (Walton 1990, 255). The latter term was used by the way a century ago by Meinong and just like Meinong Walton also defends that fictional emotions are not emotions at all, but affective acts with a special status. In an often quoted paragraph, Walton asks whether Charles -a cinema-goer- is afraid of the green slime in a movie. Walton s answer is a radical one: "I think not. Granted, Charles s condition is similar in certain obvious respects to that of a person frightened of a pending real-world disaster. His muscles are tensed, he clutches his chair, his pulse quickens, his adrenaline flows. Let us call this physiological-psychological state quasi-fear. But that alone does not constitute genuine fear" (Walton 1990, 196). According to Walton, there are two reasons why this quasi fear is not a real fear. First of all, quasi-fear is not based on first order judgements, but on make-believe; secondly, quasifear does not show any link to motivation. Therefore quasi-fear resembles fear but is not fear. Walton defines "make believe emotions" as imagined emotions that emerge by "imagining from the inside". This means that we have a "make believe emotion" when we imagine ourselves to be in a fictional situation. For example, we have a "make believe emotion" when we are at the cinema and imagine being the leading character of the film. Walton claims: "Charles is participating psychologically in his game of make-believe. It is not true but fictional that he fears the slime. (...). It is fictional that he is afraid, and it is fictional that he says he is" (Walton 1990, 242 & 244). This explanation allows Walton to argue that quasi-emotions have a structure similar to the emotions of children when playing games of make-believe (This analogy can be found also in Meinong 1910, 111). When one child acts as if it were afraid even though it knows there is no real danger, then this feeling can be considered an instance of quasi-fear because -according to Walton- it has the same structure as the quasi-fear of the cinema-goer. Both the child and the cinema-goer are by this interpretation pretending to have an emotion, but in fact what they have is not wholly serious. Fictional emotions are therefore in Walton s account fictitious, imagined, invented and pretended emotions. 38 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 Such a claim is provocative and Walton has been object of strong and multiple criticisms. From all the arguments brought up against Walton, I shall therefore discuss only those that are most important for developing my own account. Let me start with the claim that fictional emotions are pretended emotions. In claiming this Walton defends something very contra-intuitive for all of us who read novels or watch movies. When I pretend to have an emotion and I act as if I had one, I can stop this pretence whenever I want to. This however, is not so when I feel fear in the cinema or when I feel sad reading a novel. It is true that I can get fictional emotions under my control better than some emotions about real objects, but I cannot feel fictional emotions at will. Moreover, in games of make-believe I can form and configure the situation, but I do not feel this freedom when I am engaged with fictions because the framework of the fiction is already given to me as something finished and determined and I cannot change the conditions. When I pretend to have an emotion and during children's games of make believe I am aware that the emotion is pretended. Fictional emotions on the contrary are not accompanied by such awareness because we do not pretend to be afraid, we really are. Reducing fictional emotions to pretended emotions, Walton is simply interpreting the necessary role of the imagination in our engagement with fictions as an illusion. He does not distinguish between counterfactual exercise of the imagination and the creation of an illusion through our imagination. Fictional emotions are not pretended emotions that we take to be real; rather they are by my understanding real emotions in which imagination plays an important role. This role of the imagination shall be considered below in my own account. A further problem associated to this account is that emotions about hypothetic scenarios will, for Walton, also be quasi-emotions because they are based on second-order beliefs and often they do not motivate to actions. Walton s assumptions about the nature of emotions are by my understanding also problematic. Walton has an implicit concept of the emotions according to which emotions show three essential features: a specific bodily phenomenology, a belief in its bases and a desire that motivates to action. Emotions and quasi-emotions share the first of these features, i.e. 39EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 both are bodily felt, but quasi-emotions lack the two other features, and because of this, Walton denies them the full recognition as emotions. He also leaves untouched the assumption that emotions ground necessarily in judgements and that they necessarily motivate actions thanks to the power of desires.9 But if we want to solve the puzzle of fictional emotions, then - this is my thesis- we have to work with a weak cognitivism that allows also other acts to be the basis for emotions. If emotions are grounded not only in judgements but also on other states, we will be able to solve the paradox. That would also mean that we give up Walton's theoretical construct. 6. Emotion and judgement: doxastic rationality 6.1. Against strong cognitivism AFTER THIS CRITICAL REVIEW of the main positions, it is now time to present a positive account of this topic. It seems to be a common place among the authors involved in the debate on fictional emotions that there is a tension between emotion and judgement that has to be solved. In what follows, I want to defend a thesis against strong cognitivistic approaches to the emotions. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, to my understanding, emotions are not judgements, nor are they a combination of judgements and other elements. Instead they are a phenomenon sui generis that cannot be reduced to cognitions. Surely, emotions need to be grounded in a cognitive basis, but that is not the same as reducing the first to the latter. Moreover, the cognitive basis are not only judgements, but also in other states like perceptions, memories, fantasies, assumptions, etc. are able to serve as a basis for the emotions. Some of the recent proposals to understand the emotions go precisely in this direction of a non-reductive cognitivism as I showed at the beginning of the article. In the field of aesthetics, some authors like Gendler, Kovakovich and Matravers have also recognised that understanding aesthetic emotions requires a broader kind of cognitivism. Gendler and Kovakovich claim that fictional emotions are rational and genuine and that they do not necessarily 9 In some footnotes, Walton seems to express some sceptical thought about these theses, but he never makes the move to abandon that common place of analytic philosophy. 40 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 require a belief in the actuality of their object (Gendler and Kovakovich 2006, 251-252). Both authors think that emotions have response patterns that cannot be changed in reaction to the presentation of reasoned evidence,so that belief does not play a role here. For example, standing on a high see-through-platform, one can be afraid of falling down even though one knows that one has a firm albeit transparent platform below the feet and is convinced of being safe. The same can happen with fictional emotions: We react to the fiction even though we know it is not the case. Based on Damasio and Harris, Gendler and Kovakovich also show that fictional emotions, as emotions about non actual objects, are fully rational and contribute to rational decision (Gendler and Kovakovich 2006, 247). However I think that the concept of rationality involved is a bit problematic, because in fact the authors affirm that any emotion playing a role in decision making would be rational. Moreover, their claim that we react following a reaction pattern seems to me to reduce the emotions to mere instinctual elements, ignoring the human ability to model them. Matravers also defends a broad cognitivism for the emotions, but he defines the "broad cognitive theory" as follows: It "agrees that emotions involve some cognitive component, but allows such a component to be a state other than a belief" (Matravers 2006, 254). Matravers purpose is to show that fictional emotions are rational, even though they are not based on beliefs. He offers an account of the rationality of fictional emotions, but does not explain in any greater detail what the cognitive bases are. I agree with these authors, because in the two types of strong cognitivism -the one that reduces emotions to beliefs or combinations of beliefs and other states and the one that takes beliefs to be the only basis for the emotions- there is no place for those emotions without belief being involved. For example, strong cognitivism neglects the case of disgust, which is based on perception, or the fear of a ghost based on fantasies. But I think that the accounts by Gendler, Kovakovich and Matravers are unsatisfying because they lack a positive theory of the structure of fictional emotions. They are right to claim that these emotions do not ground on judgements, but what is the cognitive basis? In the above accounts, this question remains unanswered. 41EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 6.2. Believing vs. Assuming WHEN WE ARE CONFRONTED with aesthetic fictions and when we are open to these fictions, we change our natural attitude into an aesthetic one. This specific aesthetic experience of fiction is to my understanding guided by the will for pleasure, enjoyment and entertainment. Enjoyment is an important concept that is often forgotten by the aesthetic.10 In this attitude, we are open to whatever the author of the fiction will tell us about the characters, the situations and the conditions of the specific fictional world. We accept to imagine these things but we do not fall into the illusion that they exist. We imagine them as a counterfactual world and we imagine a person called Anna Karenina that is unhappily married, has a lover and is sad. But: Is this readiness to imagine the same as believing in the content of the fiction? My claim is that it is not. Radford would contradict me and because of that he would say that fictional emotions are irrational. Schaper and Walton would also contradict and point to second order judgements, Weston and Lamarque would say we do not believe in the content of fictions, because the bases of fictional emotions are mere thoughts. Gendler and Kovakovich would say that we are reacting following a pattern, even though we do not believe in the fiction and Matravers would say fictional emotions do not ground on beliefs but on other states without specifying them. I cannot support any of these answers and nevertheless I think that fictional emotions are rational. It seems to me that there is something like a propositional element similar to judgements in fictional emotions that we cannot ignore. On the other hand however, this propositional element is not a belief. I cannot say that I believe that Anna Karenina is unhappily married, that she has a lover and is sad, because in fact I do not. Let us examine more in detail this propositional element. The cognitive basis of fictional emotions cannot be a belief because we do not believe in the fiction. I think that the role imagination plays changes the structure of the cognitive basis of fictional emotions. In fact, I do not believe Anna Karenina is unhappily married, has a lover and is being sad, but rather I assume all this -in the sense in which Meinong, for example, uses the term, i.e. the german 10 In recent years, some authors like Jauss and Barthes tried to introduce the concept of pleasure into the field of aesthetics (Jauss 1977, Barthes 1973). Nevertheless, I think that their accounts focus too strongly on the Freudian theory of pleasure. 42 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 word "Annahme" (Meinong 1910).11 My claim is that the structure of the cognitive basis of fictional emotions suffers a transformation due to the power of the imagination. We assume the characters, situations and facts of the fiction, we do not believe in them. Assumptions are -as Meinong pointed out- like beliefs, but without the moment of conviction concerning the object. Assumptions -by Meinong s understanding- occupy an intermediate position between representations and judgements. They are contemplative experiences that make us to attend and observe objects, without having any conviction concerning them (Meinong 1910, 309; Findlay, 1933, 107; Poli 2001, 287). Following this account I propose that emotions on fictions have a propositional structure, but this propositional element is not a belief, but an assumption. Once we assume the given conditions, characters and plot of the fiction we can have emotions about them. In the same way as in logic we can make a supposition and then realise logic operations that are per se perfectly reasonable, in the case of aesthetics we can assume a fact and then basing on this assumption feel emotions towards it. It is important at this point to distinguish between genres and between emotions. In the case of reading a book, assumptions take the guiding role, but in the case of film, perceptions like strange noises, cries, shouts, strong images play an important role and not only assumptions. And it is not the same to feel disgust while reading a description in a novel, whereby we imagine the disgusting object in our fantasy, than to feel disgust watching a disgusting picture in a movie, visual perception being involved. I think it important to distinguish between genres, because it seems to me that assumptions are important in the case in which the emotion is engaged in some narrative structure,12 while in other emotions like disgust fantasies and perceptions are enough and there is no assumption or judgement required. The proposal is inspired by Meinong s account on fictional emotions as based on assumptions. In fact, Meinong held that each psychic act could appear in two forms, that is, as serious or as non serious, the non serious variant of an act being the act modified by imagination. Following this idea, 11 The German word "Annahme" would be better translated as "supposition", but I follow the English translation of the text. 12 I am not reducing fiction to assumption (Meinong), "as if" model (Vaihinger) or "if" model (Hamburger) here. I only claim that we make suppositions, assumptions on fictions. 43EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 Meinong claimed that perception, judgement and emotion have as theircounterparts: perceptual fantasies, assumptions and quasi-emotions. However, my account differs from Meinong s thesis in an important aspect: Meinong arrives to the conclusion that fictional emotions are quasi-emotions in the sense of Walton. This claim is precisely where I think Meinong goes wrong.13 Summarizing: I deny that judgements are essential to emotions. Emotions may ground in other states that are not judgements like perceptions, fantasies, memories or assumptions. When we deal with works of fictions and want to be in an aesthetic attitude in which the counterfactual imagination has a guiding role, then we are receptive to the plot of fictional worlds and we are willing to have an aesthetic experience for our pleasure. This is the reason why reading novels we do not believe that these worlds, its characters and what happens in them exist. We just assume then, for the sake of our pleasure and entertainment, the content of the fiction. In doing so, we are in no way irrational. 6.3. Truth and Fiction NOW THE DELICATE QUESTION ARISES, what the truth conditions for fictional emotions might be. Emotions on real objects have truth conditions in the way that they can be appropriate or not, but in what way does this hold for fictional emotions? If emotions have conditions for being appropriate and inappropriate, fictional emotions should also fulfil this requirement if they are to be real and rational emotions, which is precisely the claim I am defending. 1. The emotion of disgust is inappropriate if I do not have a perception of something. Fear is inappropriate if I do not perceive, remember, fantasize or judge something. What happens with fictional emotions? The material object of a fictional emotion is fictional, but fictional objects are nevertheless objects.14 About these material objects we can have assumptions, fantasies 13 My position rather resembles Witasek s approach, who, unlike Meinong, claimed that emotions on fictions are real. 14 Barbero showed from the point of view of Object Theory in a convincing way that fictional objects are also objects (Barbero 2007). However, there are some points of her account that I cannot subscribe to. First: she has a reduced view on emotions 44 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 and in some cases perceptive experiences. In the case of emotions that arise while reading literature, they are based -as mentioned before- in assumptions. I think that assumptions in the above sense leave the question of truth or falsehood untouched. In this respect, beliefs and assumptions differ, even though they show a similar basic structure as propositional acts. When we assume something we do as if some entities and situations were real, and we do as if they were true. In these cases we have an as-if reality and an as-if true. Judgements are affirmations, while assumptions are provisional affirmations. I can say "let us assume, for the sake of the argument, that...", but I cannot say "let us judge, for the sake of the argument,..." In assumptions, taking as a point of departure a first premise we can make deductions and inferences in order to obtain knowledge about something. In the case of fictional emotions, assumptions –-as a modified propositional element- are the basis for fictional emotions and we accept the given conditions of fiction without affirming that they are true or false. 2. The appropriateness or inappropriateness of fictional emotions does not depend only on the existence of cognitive acts concerning the material object. A second condition is necessary here. Fictional emotions, as emotions in general, are true or false, appropriate or inappropriate according to their formal objects. Fear is directed to the dangerous and a toxic, extraterrestrial, green slime has the quality of the dangerous just as much as does a hail stones storm in the real world. Fear is thus in both cases the appropriate emotion. Therefore the fictionality of the material object does thus not affect the appropriateness or falsehood of a fictional emotion. .and on fictions. Barbero takes for granted the fact that emotions are based on judgements ignoring the advantages of broad cognitivistic theories on this phenomenon. She has a reduced view of fictions because she claims that a writer in the origin of the creation of fictions writes false statements pretending that they are true about the characters. In doing so, Barbero seems to understand fiction as falsity. Secondly: I think that the fact that the material object of fictional emotions is fictional conditions also the kind of "judgement" that we formulate about it. For Barbero judgements about real objects and judgements about fictional objects are of the same kind. For me on the contrary, the fact that we know that we are dealing with fictions and that the machinery of fantasy is at work makes the judgements on fictions special in the sense I pointed out using the term "assumptions". 45EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 7. Fictional emotions and practical rationality 7.1. Motivation and action: actual and non actual objects I SHALL NOW TURN TO the question of practical rationality. In most accounts of fictional emotions, the thesis that real emotions necessarily motivate actions is taken for granted. When I see a man that wants to hurt another man in real life and thus feel pity, I will try to help the latter; but when it happens on stage I undertake nothing of the sort. Because fictional emotions do not motivate -according to most authors- they are practically irrational. This thesis, though, cannot be left unquestioned. We could follow different strategies to reject the above claim. One move would consist in affirming that fictional emotions do not motivate, because in fact emotions in general do not have motivating force. Authors like Wollheim, for example, defend the claim that not emotions, but desires are the real motivators to action (Wollheim 1999, 32). His account seems to me too problematic because Wollheim understands the emotions as elements derived from desire, denies their autonomy and cannot explain the cases in which emotions motivate even though there is no underlying desire (Vendrell Ferran 2008) We have to find another strategy that allows us to defend the thesis that emotions -including fictional emotions- may motivate to action, even though they must not do so necessarily. The solution to this problem has, to my understanding, already been pointed out by Schaper and was later on developed further by Moran and Goldie (Moran 1994, Goldie 2003). These authors claim a distinction between emotions about real objects and emotions about fictional objects as well as a distinction between emotions about actual objects and emotions about non actual objects. Emotions directed to non actual objects are emotions about hypothetical situations, emotions about future states and emotions about historical past, to give only a few examples. Following this differentiation, fictional emotions can be regarded as a subtype of emotions directed to non actual objects. In this theoretical framework the claim is that emotions about non actual objects do not always motivate to actions: They can motivate but it is not necessary that they do it. I can, for example, imagine myself being in trouble 46 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 within a hypothetical situation and then feel fear but this fear will obviously not motivate any action. This would be a case of an emotion on a non actual object without motivational force. A case of an emotion about a non actual object that does motivate could be when I -taking an example from Peter Goldie- read a historical book about slavery, feel pity with the oppressed and donate money to a charity institution (Goldie 2003). Fictional emotions as a subtype of emotions about non actual objects are subjected to the same logic: They sometimes or maybe even mostly do not motivate to actions, and sometimes they do. The point is that emotions about non actual objects, even though they can motivate, do so in a more indirect way than in the case of emotions towards actual objects. 7.2. Functionality, instrumentally and the pleasure factor THERE IS ANOTHER SENSE IN WHICH fictional emotions can be seen as a challenge for practical rationality and it concerns their function (Gendler and Kovakovich 2006, 252). Should we react emotionally towards what we know does not exist? Should I feel pity for someone that I know does not suffer because he doesn't exist? I seems irrational or at least disfunctional or inadaptative for the individual and the species to react emotionally towards fictions. Against this possible objection to fictional emotions some authors have claimed that fictional emotions have a function. Following Aristoteles, for example, Martha Nussbaum -among others like Joyce, Feagin, Gendler and Kovakovich- attributes an instrumental role to fictional emotions (Nussbaum 1990, Nussbaum 1997). The instrumental role of fictional emotions, according to Nussbaum, consists in helping us obtain knowledge about other possible lives, to have experiences that otherwise we would never have, to amplify our repertoire of sensibilities and the range of our sentiments. This theory endorses processes of sympathy and empathy with fictional figures that afterwards we can apply in our real life. She claims that it makes us especially good judicious spectators of the fiction endorsing our ability to perceive the qualities of a situation and to act right (Nussbaum 1990, for example 140). This makes us more sensitive and aware of the human diversity and its different aspects. However, despite the attractiveness 47EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 of this thesis I think that empathy has its limits. We sometimes reject imagining what the author wants us to. This is the phenomenon called "imaginative resistance". Also the empathy with characters and problems of fictions can make us indifferent to the real sufferings and troubles of our fellow men. This last phenomenon that I want to call "saturation" was already pointed out by William James and Dickens (James 1914, Dickens 1998). In this context of a possible instrumentality of fictional emotions, it is important not to forget that we engage with fictions not with the aim to obtain instrumental advantages, but moved by the search for pleasure that we obtain engaging in fiction (as pointed out by Matravers 2006, 260).15 Fictional emotions therefore have an intrinsic value. Summarizing: From the point of view of the doxastic and practical rationality, fictional emotions are not paradoxical. When we leave the field of a strong cogntivism and the commitment to the existence of the object towards we have emotions, then the second premise of the paradox vanishes. Also from the point of view of practical rationality, it becomes clear that fictional emotions are not essentially different form emotions about real objects. Fictional emotions are -in the same way as real emotions- rational. 8. Real emotions vs. quasi-emotions BUT ARE FICTIONAL EMOTIONS REAL EMOTIONS, or do differences remain? Some authors like Meinong or Walton claimed that fictional emotions, despite their being rational, are quasi-emotions, i.e. not real emotions at all. Quite on the contrary, I want to affirm that fictional emotions are full-fledged emotional experiences. This is so because fictional emotions fulfil the five criteria that I think are essential to emotions (for a more developed view cf. Vendrell Ferran 2008). These criteria are the following: 1. Cognitive basis in a broad sense not reduced to beliefs. Also perceptions, fantasies, memories, judgements, assumptions can be the basis for the emotions. 2. Special quality in which they are bodily felt. 15 Cf. For a more detailed account on pleasure and fiction: Vendrell Ferran 2009. 48 ÍNGRID VENDREL FERRAN UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 3. Resistance to be manipulated at will. 4. Influence on cognitive states and volitions. 5. World-directed. Fictional emotions fulfil all these criteria -as I showed in this paper- even though they show in each one of these points some peculiarities. Fictional emotions, when they have a narrative structure, ground on assumptions as their cognitive basis. The aesthetic attitude in which we find ourselves when we deal with aesthetic fictions and the fact that imagination is at work determine the cognitive basis for fictional emotions. While emotions on real objects can have several sorts of cognitive bases as perceptions, fantasies, memories, judgements, beliefs, assumptions and so on, the emotions that we have reading novels are based on assumptions. Here there are some differences in genres. For example, in novels the assumption plays an important role. The narrative structure of novels impulses us to assume every given description. But in cinema and theatre visual, acoustic, tactile sensations play a role: Our fictional fear can be increased not only by the content of a narration, but also by shouts and direct images. This shows how important an account that distinguishes between all these genres as different means is. Fictional emotions are bodily felt but with a different quality than the emotions directed towards real objects. This lead some philosophers as Hume to characterise them as not really fully felt, as felt with less weight, less consistency. Because of this difference, Meinong and Walton thought fictional emotions to be quasi-emotions. How can we explain this qualitative difference without defending the thesis of quasi-emotions? My claim is that this qualitative difference can be accounted by the fact that when we have a fictional emotion we are in a specific aesthetic attitude. This attitude, as I mentioned before, is a predisposition to enjoy the fiction. It colours our psychic life while we are engaged with fictions and it is responsible for fictional emotions being felt as if they were not full-fledged emotions. This can explain the pleasures that we feel watching a tragedy. Sadness, pity and sorrow are highly hedonistic negative emotions. But we want to feel them and we enjoy having them because of this aesthetic attitude that colours and influences our emotional experience. Despite being real emotions, they are thus experienced as not belonging to us, as occurring rather on the surface of our psychic life, and we can enjoy feeling them. 49EMOTION, REASON AND TRUTH IN LITERATURE UNIVERSITAS PHILOSOPHICA, AÑO 26, JUN 2009, 52: 19-52 As I showed in the critique against Walton s pretence theory, fictional emotions are not subject to our control as merely pretended emotions are, even though they seem easier to manipulate as emotions on real objects. They also influence the way we think and they can motivate us to actions. 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RESUMO: Investigação sobre as implicações éticas do princípio de identidade e do princípio de razão. O princípio lógico de identidade (A=A), juntamente com o princípio de não- contradição e o princípio do terceiro excluído constitui a base da lógica ocidental. No entanto, seu domínio não se restringe à lógica. Assim como o domínio do princípio de razão não se restringe à epistemologia e à ontologia. Com estes princípios se constrói toda uma visão de mundo com graves implicações éticas. Tentaremos ao final apontar alternativas contemporâneas a esses princípios – alternativas que tragam consigo implicações éticas diferentes. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Identidade; razão; ética ABSTRACT: Abstract: Investigation on the ethical implications of the principle of identity and of the principle of reason. The logical principle of identity (A=A), along with the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of the third middle costitute the basis of ocidental logic. However, its dominance is not restricted to logic. As the dominance of the principle of reason is not restricted to epistemology and ontology. This principles constitute a whole worldvew with serious ethical implications. We'll try, at the end of the article, to indicate contemporary alternatives to this principles – alternatives which bring with themselves different ethical implications.. KEYWORDS: Identity; reason; ethics 1. OS DOIS PRINCÍPIOS BÁSICOS DA RAZÃO OCIDENTAL A metafísica ocidental está fundada sobre dois princípios básicos: o princípiode identidade e o princípio de razão. O princípio de identidade, junto com o princípio de não-contradição e o princípio do terceiro excluído, constitui a base da lógica ocidental. No entanto, a vigência desses três princípios não se limita à "lógica", eles são ao mesmo tempo produto e produtores de uma determinada ontologia (uma teoria do ser, uma maneira de conceber o ser das coisas, uma maneira perguntar e responder "o que são" as coisas) e de uma determinada epistemologia (uma maneira específica de perceber, definir, classificar e explicar o que são as coisas e como as coisas funcionam). Princípios lógicos carregam consigo – fundamentam e são fundamentados, legitimam e são legitimados, são já implicações, mas também produzem graves implicações onto- "ENTRE A ESTUPIDEZ E A LOUCURA": IMPLICAÇÕES ÉTICAS DO PRINCÍPIO DE IDENTIDADE E DO PRINCÍPIO DE RAZÃO (E ALGUMAS ALTERNATIVAS CONTEMPORÂNEAS) [ "BETWEEN STUPIDITY AND MADNESS": INVESTIGATION ON THE ETHICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE PRINCIPLE OF IDENTITY AND OF THE PRINCIPLE OF REASON (WITH SOME CONTEMPORARY ALTERNATIVES ] Diogo Barros Bogéa * Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil AUFKLÄRUNG,JoãoPessoa, v.5, n.1, Jan.-Abr., 2018,p. 61-76 DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.18012/arf.2016.37897 Recebido:11/12/2017 |Aceito:10/04/2018 Licença:CreativeCommons4.0 International (CCBY4.0) * Professor de Filosofia na Faculdade de Educação da Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro. Doutor e Mestre em Filosofia pela Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro. m@ilto: [email protected] A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 62 DiogoBarrosBogéa epistemológicas. O princípio de identidade, consiste na pressuposição, na postulação e na afirmação de que um ente (algo que é), é idêntico a si mesmo, o que se traduz na fórmula A=A. Isto significa apenas que um dado objeto, pessoa, conceito, valor ou instituição são idênticos a si próprios, isto é, em termos muito simples, a mesa é mesa, o computador é o computador, eu sou eu, você é você, Deus é Deus, o Brasil é o Brasil, a Justiça é a Justiça, a Ciência é a Ciência. O princípio de identidade se desdobra em dois outros que lhe são complementares e sem os quais, portanto, resta incompleto. Se temos o princípio de identidade, temos então também o princípio de não-contradição, que consiste na negação da possibilidade de que um ente seja diferente de si mesmo, o que se traduz pela fórmula A é diferente de não-A. Isso também é muito simples de compreender e significa apenas que um dado objeto, pessoa, conceito, valor ou instituição, sendo idênticos a si próprios, não são qualquer outra coisa senão aquilo mesmo que são. Ou seja, mais uma vez em termos muito simples: se uma mesa é uma mesa, ela não é também um computador, nem é também uma pessoa, nem é também um Deus, nem é também um valor ou uma instituição. Se eu sou eu, não sou também você, nem sou também um edifício, nem sou também um livro... Por fim, estes dois princípios básicos levam a um terceiro, que, apenas por coincidência, se chama princípio do "terceiro excluído". O princípio do terceiro excluído decorre dos dois anteriores e tem por função garantir que eles sejam absolutamente válidos. Ele consiste apenas no seguinte: dado que A=A e A é diferente de B, qualquer "terceira" opção está automaticamente "excluída". Logo, A não pode ser igual a B, nem pode ser diferente de si próprio. Isto, como já se supõe, quer apenas dizer que sendo um dado ente idêntico a si próprio e diferente de todo "outro", a afirmação de que um ente seja um outro, ou de que um ente seja e não seja ele mesmo é por princípio absurda, infundada e ilógica. Curiosamente, Aristóteles não fornece nenhuma prova positiva do princípio de não-contradição. Ele utiliza uma prova pela negativa, através do chamado princípio "anhipotético". O princípio anhipotético consiste apenas no seguinte: dado um certo postulado (1), o seu contrário (2) não pode se produzir sem ao mesmo tempo reafirmá- lo. Aristóteles afirma ser assim com o princípio de não-contradição: mesmo que se queira contestá-lo, é necessário que se o faça através de uma construção frasal coerente em que os termos significam exatamente aquilo que significam, isto é, uma construção frasal em que os "As" sejam iguais aos "As" e diferentes dos "Bs" (ARISTÓTELES, 2002, IV, 3). 2. IMPLICAÇÕES DO PRINCÍPIO DE IDENTIDADE O princípio de identidade, nesses termos, parece algo da ordem de uma constatação completamente óbvia e banal, que apenas o espírito excêntrico e distorcido dos filósofos pode ter se preocupado em estabelecer como princípio. No entanto, suas implicações ontológicas são gravíssimas: tendemos a compreender os entes como "algo" "em si", isto é, idênticos a si mesmos, fechados sobre si mesmos, possuidores de uma essência única e própria e cercados por fronteiras rígidas que os diferenciam absolutamente dos outros. Nesse sentido, temos a forte tendência a considerar a "mesa" como objeto único existente por si mesmo para além de toda e qualquer relação. Tendemos a imaginar – ainda que nem sequer saibamos formular a coisa nesses termos – que um objeto é algo previamente dado em si e por si mesmo e que as relações que estabelece e as mudanças e transformações pelas quais passa são apenas "acidentais", não afetando o núcleo da sua "essência" própria. Tendemos também a conceber A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 63 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... "objetos", "instituições", "pessoas", "valores", como entes muito bem delimitados por fronteiras rígidas e, portanto, como essencialmente diferentes uns dos outros, preservando sempre, não importa o tanto de relações acidentais que estabeleçam, algum nível de "pureza" essencial. Constrangidos pela força invisível do princípio de identidade, costumamos realmente em geral conceber a "mesa" como "mesa", objeto já em princípio diferente de "mim", do "computador", dos "livros", das "paredes". Mas quando estamos tratando de mesas, livros e computadores, as consequências podem não ser tão graves. No entanto, as consequências ontológicas do princípio de identidade não param por aí. Tendemos a conceber pessoas como um "eu" único, com uma essência determinada, com atributos e propriedades também determinadas, e as julgamos com base em sua suposta "identidade". Julgamos que, com base nessa "identidade" uma pessoa deva se comportar de uma determinada maneira, mantendo uma constância lógica ao longo das situações. E nossa crença no princípio de identidade vai tão longe, que a cada vez que ele insiste em falhar e o comportamento humano se mostra escancaradamente ilógico, contraditório e absurdo, nos surpreendemos com a mesma intensidade e dizemos "aquele não era você/ nem parecia você/ estava "possuído"", ou coisa to tipo. E nossa crença na firmeza infalível do princípio de identidade não se aplica apenas às "outras" pessoas, mas também a nós mesmos. Acreditamos na pureza da nossa "autoidentidade", o que costumamos corriqueiramente reafirmar pelo uso repetido da palavra "eu". "Eu sou", "eu sei", "eu quero", "eu vou", "eu posso", reintroduzem sem cessar a certeza inquestionada e inquestionável de que antes de qualquer "verbo" ou "predicado", lá estava, firme e forte, em sua pureza essencial, a presença autoidêntica do "sujeito". E isto mesmo apesar desse nosso "eu", mais do que qualquer "outro", não cessar de nos dar demonstrações constantes da sua inconstância, incorrendo sem cessar em flagrantes inconsistências lógicas. 3. BINARISMO E ÉTICA Mas o domínio do princípio de identidade não para ainda por aí. Ele atravessa e permeia também nossa axiologia (princípios de valoração) e nossa epistemologia (nossos saberes sobre as coisas). Afinal, se um ente é necessariamente idêntico a si mesmo (logo, diferente de todos os outros, sem qualquer possibilidade de uma terceira opção), ele só pode ser "verdadeiro" ou "falso", "justo" ou "injusto", "bom ou mau", só pode estar "certo" ou "errado", "presente" ou "ausente". Com isso, "verdade" e "falsidade", "justiça" e "injustiça", "bem" e "mal", "correção" e "erro", "presença" e "ausência" são também concebidos no registro do princípio de identidade, isto é, são concebidos como "algo" dado "em si" e "por si" mesmo, entes subsistentes bem definidos e demarcados por fronteiras rígidas – quiçá intransponíveis. Daí uma lógica fundada no princípio de identidade ser essencialmente "binária". Uma lógica do "ou, ou", opositiva e excludente que toma cada um dos seus termos como polos autoidênticos dados por si mesmos em sua pureza essencial, um diante do outro numa oposição irreconciliável. Afinal, se A=A, ou estamos falando de A, ou de B – "terceiros" excluídos. Com isso, chegamos a uma grave implicação Ética do princípio (onto)lógico de identidade. Operando numa lógica necessariamente binária, opositiva e excludente, desenvolvemos uma forte tendência a tomar o "outro", o "diferente" como "oposto". Numa lógica identitária e, portanto, binária e excludente, não há qualquer possibilidade de conciliação com o "outro". O máximo que se pode aspirar é "tolerar", e a palavra A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 64 DiogoBarrosBogéa "tolerar" não esconde – pelo contrário, reafirma – a negatividade do "outro", pois só se é obrigado a "tolerar" coisas ruins, porém suportáveis. As formas de lidar com um "outro" que não é concebido como apenas "diferente", mas como necessariamente "oposto", são sempre negativas e violentas: dominação, conversão, inferiorização, perseguição, exclusão, confinamento, exílio e extermínio – mais ou menos velados, mais ou menos agressivos, mais simbólicos ou mais carnais. E se essas palavras parecem demasiado cruéis e pesadas para se referirem a um ser racional, consciente, responsável, ético, moral... um breve passeio pelos livros de história ou pelos noticiários do dia nos mostra que elas são ainda brandas e insuficientes para dar conta da ferocidade humana. 4. A NOÇÃO DE "CAUSA" O princípio de identidade nos diz que as coisas são o que são, no entanto, nada tem a dizer sobre o porquê das coisas serem como são. Por que, pelo que, através de que, por que razão as coisas chegam a ser e são? Perguntar o porquê é perguntar as causas das coisas. Talvez ninguém mais, em nenhum outro tempo ou lugar, tenha levado tão longe a obsessão de investigar as causas das coisas quanto os gregos antigos. Sua obsessão se faz presente ainda hoje no desenfreado desenvolvimento tecnocientífico que a esta altura já alterou por completo a face do planeta. "Causa" em grego se diz "aition", que significa "dívida" e "comprometimento". Perguntar pelas causas de um ente, significa, portanto, perguntar a que se deve sua existência, com o que é que ele está comprometido (HEIDEGGER, 2012, pp.13-16). Ao contrário do que acreditava Kant, é muito difícil imaginar que exista – e que tenha existido desde que o humano é humano – um "sujeito puro" do conhecimento, uma série de "formas" e "categorias" a priori a partir das quais o humano percebe e compreende o mundo. Para falar numa linguagem mais atual, é como se existe uma "programação mental" própria do humano: as "formas puras da intuição sensível": tempo e espaço, e as 12 categorias, dentre as quais figura a "causalidade". A partir dessa "programação" inicial, o humano "processaria" a realidade de uma determinada forma, ou seja, tudo sempre já nos aparece como algo situado no tempo, no espaço e no âmbito de certas categorias, como, por exemplo, a causalidade (KANT, 1974, pp. 40-71). A aposta de Nietzsche é muito mais plausível, quando, contra Kant, afirma que todas as "faculdades" do humano passaram por um longo e caótico processo de desenvolvimento, cuja maior parte se deu em nossa extensa pré-história. Todas as "faculdades cognitivas" do nosso "aparelho de conhecimento", como o raciocínio lógico, o raciocínio causal, o cálculo, a capacidade de fazer – e realizar – planos, tudo isso deve ter passado por um longo e sofrido processo de desenvolvimento. E um desenvolvimento que de forma alguma pode ser concebido como uma "evolução espiritual pura", mas que envolve o entrelaçamento de uma rede de circunstâncias de todos os tipos: fisiológicas, climáticas, materiais, sociais, culturais, econômicas etc. Todos os filósofos têm em comum o defeito de partir do homem atual e acreditar que, analisando-o, alcançam seu objetivo. Involuntariamente imaginam "o homem" como uma aeterna veritas, como uma constante em todo o redemoinho, uma medida segura das coisas. Mas tudo o que o filósofo declara sobre o homem, no fundo, não passa de testemunho sobre o homem de um espaço de tempo bem limitado. Falta de sentido histórico é o defeito hereditário de todos os filósofos; inadvertidamente, muitos chegam a tomar a configuração mais recente do homem, tal como surgiu sob a pressão de certas religiões e A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 65 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... mesmo de certos eventos políticos, como a forma fixa de que se deve partir. Não querem aprender que o homem veio a ser, e que mesmo a faculdade de cognição veio a ser; enquanto alguns deles querem inclusive que o mundo inteiro seja tecido e derivado dessa faculdade de cognição. -Mas tudo o que é essencial na evolução humana se realizou em tempos primitivos, antes desses quatro mil anos que conhecemos aproximadamente; nestes o homem já não deve ter se alterado muito. O filósofo, porém, vê "instintos" no homem atual e supõe que estejam entre os fatos inalteráveis do homem, e que possam então fornecer uma chave para a compreensão do mundo em geral: toda a teleologia se baseia no fato de se tratar o homem dos últimos quatro milênios como um ser eterno, para o qual se dirigem naturalmente todas as coisas do mundo, desde o seu início. Mas tudo veio a ser; não existem fatos eternos; assim como não existem verdades absolutas. – Portanto, o filosofar histórico é doravante necessário, e com ele a virtude da modéstia. (NIETZSCHE, HH, § 2) Isso se nota na própria noção grega de "causa", que remete a "dívida" e "comprometimento", noções que devem ter surgido em primeiro lugar no âmbito das trocas materiais tão necessárias à sobrevivência de qualquer comunidade humana1. Estar em dívida, até não muito tempo atrás – talvez até pouco antes da lógica capitalista fazer do endividamento o fundamento de todo um sistema sociocultural –, era estar inteiramente sob o domínio do credor, inteiramente comprometido com o credor, de maneira que, para o endividado, seu próprio ser se devia ao credor. Investigar as causas, portanto, significa de certa forma investigar a que se deve o ser de um ente. 5. LOGOS O surgimento da Filosofia está diretamente ligado – meio como causa, meio como consequência – à ascensão do pensamento lógico. Pensamento lógico, nesse momento, nada tem a ver com uma disciplina específica chamada "lógica", que, por meio de complicadas fórmulas tenta compreender como funcionam certos aspectos da mente humana. É somente com Aristóteles e seu Organon que a lógica se torna uma espécie de disciplina específica. Organon significa "ferramenta" e pretende justamente fornecer uma "caixa de ferramentas" para compreender e "ajustar" o pensamento e o discurso. A palavra logos significa justamente um amálgama de "pensamento" e "discurso", "palavra". Não se trata, no entanto, de qualquer discurso, mas do discurso argumentativo que apresenta razões, apresenta as razões de ser daquilo de que fala e, o fazendo, apresenta suas próprias razões de ser. Logos, portanto, é o discurso que, fornecendo razões, fundamenta, e por esse mesmo movimento, se apresenta como discurso fundamentado. O logos como discurso fundamentado é justamente aquele que se opõe, num primeiro momento, ao mito, o discurso da tradição, todo baseado nos caprichos e idiossincrasias de forças divinas, no âmbito do qual não existe questionamento, apenas se acredita ou não. Num momento posterior, já com Sócrates e Platão, o logos se opõe também à doxa, o discurso da da opinião, isto é, o discurso que se atém apenas às aparências e às paixões, sem se preocupar em investigar as verdadeiras razões do seu objeto. O pensamento lógico só faz sentido para os gregos, porque eles acreditam firmemente no kosmos, isto é, acreditam que o mundo é constituído por uma ordem intrínseca, que, por ser homóloga à ordem do discurso e do pensamento, pode ser investigada, dita, pensada, conhecida. Há uma compatibilidade intrínseca entre a ordem das coisas e a ordem do discurso que possibilita e legitima o falar e o pensar sobre as coisas. Há uma ordem de dívidas e comprometimentos através dos quais as coisas e o A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 66 DiogoBarrosBogéa pensamento vem a ser. Aristóteles nos diz que existem quatro causas: material, formal, final e eficiente (ARISTÓTELES, 2002, I, 3). No clássico exemplo da escultura de mármore, o mármore é a causa material, a matéria de que o ente é feito; o modelo, a ideia, o conceito é a causa formal, a forma que se apropria daquela matéria; enfeitar o templo agradando aos deuses é a causa final (a finalidade); e o escultor, aquele que produz, é a causa eficiente. Um ente deve sua existência a estas quatro causas que estão comprometidas entre si e com as quais ele, desde que vem a ser, está comprometido. 6. O PRINCÍPIO DE RAZÃO SUFICIENTE Mas toda essa longa digressão tinha o propósito de introduzir o segundo princípio (onto)lógico da razão ocidental. Ele se chama "Princípio de Razão Suficiente" e, com esta denominação, aparece apenas no início da modernidade, na formulação de Leibniz. O princípio de razão suficiente, tal como formulado por Leibniz, diz: "nenhum fato pode ser tomado como verdadeiro ou existente, nem algum enunciado como verídico, sem que haja uma razão suficiente para ser assim e não de outro modo" (LEIBNIZ, 1966, p. 158). Outra forma de enunciar, mais concisa, diz apenas: "Nada é sem razão" e o seu significado é autoevidente. Um dado evento "p1" é "razão suficiente" para que ocorra o evento "p2", que é "razão suficiente" para que ocorra o evento "p3" e assim por diante. Embora o "princípio de razão" só tenha sido formulado na modernidade, sabemos que o raciocínio causal e a busca e a apresentação de razões não são estranhas ao espírito grego. Os filósofos pré-socráticos, nossos primeiros e talvez mais geniais pensadores, fizeram a experiência de uma espécie de aporia fundamental da causalidade. Trata-se do seguinte: para que as coisas interfiram umas nas outras, para que possam dar origem uma à outra, para que possam afetar umas às outras e ser afetadas de qualquer maneira umas pelas outras, é preciso que elas tenham algo em comum. Coisas que nada tivessem em comum não poderiam estabelecer qualquer tipo de relação, seriam absolutamente in-comun-icáveis. Mas as relações e afetações mútuas existem, então, é preciso que haja algo em comum entre todas as coisas existentes. Heráclito disse "é preciso seguir o que é-com" (HERÁCLITO, 2000, fr. 2), o que é comum. Diógenes de Apolônia chegou àquela que talvez seja a mais bela e precisa formulação desta compreensão fundamental: todas as coisas são diferenciações de uma única coisa e são a mesma coisa. E isto é evidente. Porque se as coisas que são agora neste mundo – terra, água, ar e fogo e as outras coisas que se manifestam nesse mundo –, se alguma destas coisas fosse diferente de qualquer outra, diferente em sua natureza própria, e se não permanecesse a mesma coisa em suas muitas mudanças e diferenciações, então não poderiam as coisas, de nenhuma maneira, misturar-se umas às outras, nem fazer bem ou mal umas às outras, nem a planta poderia brotar da terra, nem um animal ou qualquer outra coisa vir à existência, se todas as coisas não fossem compostas de modo a serem as mesmas. Todas as coisas nascem, através de diferenciações, de uma mesma coisa, ora em uma forma, ora em outra, retornando sempre à mesma coisa. (ap. BORNHEIM, 1998, p. 95) Daí a busca pré-socrática pelo "princípio comum" (arché) de todos os entes. No entanto, apesar da necessidade de que haja um "princípio comum", os entes são evidentemente diferentes. Então, questão das questões: como pensar a unidade na multiplicidade? Amesmidade na diversidade? A água, o fogo, o ar inteligente, o apeiron A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 67 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... (o indeterminado ilimitado), os átomos, assumem esse lugar de um mesmo princípio comum cujas transformações dão origem à diversidade múltipla dos entes existentes. Trata-se em cada caso de um princípio originário imanente, isto é, um princípio que permanece entranhado nas coisas que origina. Não pode se tratar de um princípio que repouse soberano "para além" das coisas, pois se assim fosse, ele não teria nenhum poder de afetação sobre as coisas. É preciso que se trate de um princípio dinâmico capaz tanto de transformação quanto de permanência, um princípio que permanece em cada transformação e que se transforma mesmo na permanência. Aporia da causalidade, aporia da Existência: como pensar a mais radical transformação em meio à mais intransigente permanência? Como pensar a mais plena unidade em meio à mais variada diversificação? 7. A FILOSOFIA NA POLIS DEMOCRÁTICA Quando a Filosofia se estabelece em Atenas, fazendo da cidade sua capital, essas questões se desdobram de uma outra maneira, ganham um novo aspecto e um outro desenvolvimento. Atenas fundou uma experiência política sem precedentes na história humana. Uma experiência que, na verdade, deu origem à própria palavra "política": a experiência democrática. A democracia ateniense experimentou uma forma inédita de exercício do poder. Ao invés da espada, do sangue, do prestígio, da linhagem e da força bruta (o uso efetivo ou a ameaça permanente do uso efetivo da força bruta), o poder se exercia através da palavra, do logos, no discurso argumentativo dos cidadãos reunidos em assembleia2. As grandes questões relativas à administração da polis eram decididas nas assembleias, nos debates entre discursos divergentes que deveriam se mostrar capazes de convencer o maior número de cidadãos. Nesse contexto, surgem os sofistas, os grandes mestres do logos, que ensinavam aos cidadãos a arte do discurso bem fundamentado. A tradição nos deixou dos sofistas a imagem de "mercenários" "descompromissados com a verdade", que "cobravam caro por seus ensinamentos". Ora, isso se deve apenas ao seguinte: a história dos sofistas foi escrita por seu maior rival, Platão. Que seria de cada um de nós se a escrita da nossa história de vida ficasse nas mãos dos nossos maiores desafetos? Os sofistas cobravam por seus ensinamentos porque eram bons professores – os primeiros professores propriamente ditos da história. Eram bons professores na arte mais decisiva para a vida humana: a arte da palavra – numa sociedade em que a palavra é poder. E por que um bom professor deveria trabalhar de graça? Por outro lado, os sofistas são "descompromissados com a verdade" porque fazem uma experiência singular do logos, uma experiência que só com muita dificuldade reaparece no pensamento ocidental em momentos pontuais e locais. Trata-se da experiência de um logos vivo, aberto, em processo permanente de estabilização, mas sempre necessariamente instável. Os sofistas arriscam uma experiência do logos que insiste na boa fundamentação do discurso, mas recusa decididamente a fundamentação absoluta. Não há fundamentação absoluta, não há Verdade com V maiúsculo, não há deuses ou critérios externos ao jogo aos quais possamos recorrer. As verdades se fazem no discurso, os critérios nascem e morrem no discurso. Nesse sentido, há uma frase bastante emblemática de Protágoras: "Sobre os deuses, não tenho possibilidade de saber se existem ou não, nem qual é a sua forma. Muitas são as razões que me impedem tal conhecimento: a obscuridade da questão e a brevidade da vida" (PROTÁGORAS, 1982, p. 257) Uma tal experiência aberta, viva, dinâmica e caótica do logos traz riscos. Os A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 68 DiogoBarrosBogéa riscos e vícios da democracia que Platão não cessará de apontar – e que ainda hoje conhecemos muito bem na prática: na ausência de um critério absoluto, há o risco das piores propostas, sendo apresentadas pelos melhores discursos, saírem vencedoras; há o risco de um pequeno grupo fazer valer seus interesses particulares em detrimento do bem comum; há o risco de que as paixões e aparências predominem; há o risco de que uns poucos ganhem prestígio e autoridade suficientes para fazer valer repetidamente seus interesses, exercendo uma tirania disfarçada de democracia; há o risco da suprema injustiça – como a que a democracia ateniense lançou sobre Sócrates, condenando-o à morte. Riscos supremos de uma experiência dinâmica do logos que não cessa de ser ameaçada pela possibilidade da própria auto-destruição. Derrida não cessa de chamar a atenção para o caráter auto-imune da democracia: "a expressão 'democracia por vir' tem em conta a historicidade absoluta e intrínseca do único sistema que acolhe em si mesmo, no seu conceito, esta fórmula de auto-imunidade a que se chama o direito à autocrítica e à perfectibilidade" (DERRIDA, 2009, 169) 8. OABSOLUTO OUAVERDADE COM V MAIÚSCULO No entanto, o risco supremo da democracia como experiência dinâmica do logos, é aquele que o próprio Platão representa: a tentação de recorrer a uma fundamentação absoluta que forneça um critério absoluto capaz de resolver e decidir com toda a segurança qualquer querela discursiva. Talvez devido ao trauma da condenação do seu mestre à morte, Platão não se conforma com a tensão insolúvel de uma série de fundamentações a cada vez relativas e dedica sua vida a estabelecer critérios absolutos capazes de fundar e legitimar absolutamente o logos. A ideia (modelo, forma, paradigma), é o fundamento absoluto, a Verdade com V maiúsculo que determina seguramente a maior ou menor correção de um dado discurso. A ideia é a razão de ser dos entes, a ideia suprema de Bem é a razão de ser do próprio mundo (PLATÃO, s/d, p. 319). Na formulação de Aristóteles para a necessidade de "razões", podemos ver uma diferença capital entre filósofos atenienses e modernos: "a natureza não faz nada em vão, pois tudo o que é natural é para o benefício de algo" (ARISTÓTELES, 2010, III, 12)3. A afirmação nos deixa entrever o aspecto da causalidade que é privilegiado pela filosofia ateniense. Ser "para o benefício de algo" é a razão última de um ente, isto é, o mais importante no processo causal é a "finalidade", o que significa que, na doutrina das quatro causas, a prevalência é da causa final. Tudo o que existe, vem a ser através de uma série de comprometimentos causais tendo em vista uma finalidade superior. A própria ideia platônica opera segundo essa lógica. Não devemos imaginar que a ideia, como uma espécie de divindade entediada e insatisfeita, produza cópias imperfeitas de si própria, nem podemos imaginar que a ideia corresponda a um modelo inicial a partir do qual, tal como numa linha de montagem, cópias são produzidas em série. A ênfase aqui não está no "produzir". A ideia de bem, como causa final, finalidade suprema de todas as coisas, que pode ser pensada como um estado maximal de ordem e perfeição, é o modelo a ser atingido pelas cópias do mundo sensível. Quando quer explicar o surgimento do mundo e das coisas do mundo, Platão recorre a uma divindade-artíficie, o demiurgo. Ora, se o mundo é belo e o demiurgo é bom, é evidente que pôs os olhos que é eterno; se fosse ao contrário – o que nem é correto supor –, teria posto os olhos no que devém. Portanto, é evidente para todos que pôs os olhos no que é eterno, pois o mundo é a mais bela das coisas devenientes e o demiurgo A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 69 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... é a mais perfeita das causas. (...) o que deveio foi fabricado pelo demiurgo que pôs os olhos no que é imutável e apreensível pela razão e pelo pensamento. (PLATÃO, 2011, p. 95) O demiurgo é a mais perfeita das causas eficientes, mas ele ainda está submetido à perfeição da Ideia de Bem, que é a mais perfeita das causas finais: Na verdade, o deus quis que todas as coisas fossem boas e que, no que estivesse à medida do seu poder, não existisse nada imperfeito. Deste modo, pegando em tudo quanto havia de visível, que não estava em repouso, mas se movia irregular e desordenadamente, da desordem tudo conduziu a uma ordem por achar que esta é sem dúvida melhor do que aquela. (PLATÃO, 2011, p. 97) O demiurgo, ao criar as coisas, tem de se guiar pela finalidade suprema que é a ideia de Bem. Na metafísica de Aristóteles, é ainda mais clara a prevalência da causa final. Em Aristóteles, o princípio fundamental é a substância eterna e imaterial, o Primeiro Motor, Deus (theion) ou o Bem – todos significando a mesma coisa. Posto que há movimento, que há dinamismo existencial, e que todo movimento deve ter uma causa, Aristóteles não pode conceber que se remeta um efeito dinâmico a uma causa e esta a outra causa até o infinito, fazendo necessária a introdução do Primeiro Motor – substância imaterial e eterna, causa e finalidade absoluta de todo o movimento. Mas, o primeiro motor não é também uma causa inicial que produz, tanto que é necessariamente imóvel. O primeiro motor, o theion, o Bem supremo só move enquanto finalidade suprema buscada, desejada, amada, que atrai para si as coisas e assim faz com que elas se movam: "O Bem é em todas as coisas o princípio por excelência". E esta substância eterna, o Bem supremo, "move enquanto é amada, enquanto todas as outras coisas movem ao serem movidas" (ARISTÓTELES, 2010, XII, 7). 9. ABSOLUTISMO RACIONAL No longo período predominantemente cristão, já começa a se dar a mudança que acabará por estabelecer o predomínio da causa eficiente na modernidade. Deus é supremo enquanto criador, produtor eficiente do mundo, da natureza, das coisas e dos humanos. O princípio de razão suficiente, consagrado pela fórmula de Leibniz, diz que nenhum ente pode vir a ser sem uma causa eficiente que o produza. Da mecânica newtoniana das leis e forças à linha de montagem industrial, trata-se sempre da produção de efeitos e da efetivação de produtos. Um fundamento absolutamente seguro capaz de se dar como razão suficiente da existência, deve ser necessariamente ab-soluto e in-condicionado, isto é, livre de qualquer determinação ou condicionamento. Deve, portanto, ser necessariamente idêntico a si mesmo, dado "em si" e "por si" mesmo como presença absoluta. Aqui, o princípio de identidade e o princípio de razão se encontram, potencializando as implicações ontológicas, epistemológicas, éticas e políticas de uma visão de mundo baseada na segurança e estabilidade de um fundamento absoluto capaz de se dar como critério absoluto de distinção, classificação, fundamentação e legitimação de todo e qualquer modo de existência, discurso, bem como de toda e qualquer postura ética ou política. O Absoluto, por ser necessariamente livre de qualquer relação, determinação e condicionamento, se coloca necessariamente para "além" do mundo, como critério absoluto capaz de decidir todo e qualquer conflito interno de posições. De acordo com o A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 70 DiogoBarrosBogéa princípio de identidade, todo e qualquer modo de existência já será de saída enquadrado numa identidade rigidamente estabelecida e fechada para a qual todo "outro" e todo "diferente" já se dá como necessariamente "oposto". O primeiro binarismo entre "fundamento" e "fundamentado", funda e legitima uma série de oposições binárias, excludentes e hierárquicas que constituem a própria carne da visão de mundo ocidental: espírito x matéria; sujeito x objeto; bem x mal; verdade x erro/ficção/fantasia; sanidade x loucura; significado x significante; realismo x idealismo; natureza x cultura; humano x mundano/natural/animal; teoria x prática; oprimido x opressor; justo x injusto; e assim por diante. Nesses binarismos opositivos e excludentes, um dos polos, aquele mais próximo da "origem", mais próximo do fundamento absoluto, recebe o sinal de +, enquanto o outro é relegado a uma posição de inferioridade. A um "outro" que não apenas é "diferente", mas "oposto" e ainda por cima "inferior", não cabe nenhum tipo de tratamento digno, de modo que a fundamentação absoluta – vigente no topo do esquema em que identidade e razão se encontram – só pode erigir um sistema de proliferação de preconceitos, no qual o outro já sempre foi pré-conceituado – e de maneira necessariamente negativa. 10. TESTES DE REALIDADE OU "DEUS ESTÁ MORTO" A visão de mundo identitária, binária e centrada na razão falha em diversos "testes de realidade", mas mesmo assim mantém seu prestígio quase hegemônico, porque fornece algo que outros tipos de lógica não podem fornecer: a sensação (ainda que delirante) de segurança e estabilidade. É reconfortante dispor de um poder absoluto de fundamentação ontológica, epistemológica e ético-política. É reconfortante saber onde está cada coisa, onde começam e onde terminam as fronteiras. É reconfortante dispor de uma definição precisa para cada coisa, pessoa, valor e instituição. É reconfortante dispor de critérios epistemológicos e éticos absolutamente válidos. Mas é tudo tão ilusório que quando começamos a nos dar conta da farsa em que estamos metidos, o esquema "absolutista" ocidental deixa de ser reconfortante e se torna progressivamente incômodo e limitante. É claro que o desenvolvimento de tais ferramentas lógicas deve ter sido fundamental para uma época em que tudo dependia do discurso. Como deixar a vida da polis ao cargo de discursos que afirmam que um cavalo é um deus, que uma oliveira é uma deusa, que o vôo de uma águia é também um presságio bom ou ruim, que definem valores e virtudes com base nas mais particulares idiossincrasias? Nos colocando tão criticamente em relação a estes dois princípios lógicos fundamentais, agimos de certa forma com ingratidão, tal como Platão ao criticar a democracia e suas instituições – sendo que ao menos existiam instituições! É a provocação de Protágoras a um Sócrates descontente: De igual modo, você acredita, agora, que o homem que lhe parece o mais injusto, dentre todos os que foram criados nas leis e entre os homens, é, no entanto, justo e hábil se o comparamos a homens que não têm nem educação, nem tribunais, nem leis, nem outra qualquer coação que os force a se ocuparem, constantemente, da excelência. (...) Certamente, se você se encontrasse entre tais homens (...) certamente se felicitaria ao deparar-se com um Euríbato ou com um Frinondas, e se lamentaria, com saudade, da maldade dos homens daqui! Agora, você age com desdém, caro Sócrates, porque todos, cada qual na medida dos seus próprios meios, são professores de excelência, embora ninguém, a seus olhos, se encontre em condições de ensiná-la. (ap. CASSIN, p. 345) A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 71 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... De fato! Platão em Atenas é um crítico, um "intelectual" avant-la-lettre. Platão em Siracusa é sumariamente preso e escravizado! No entanto, por mais importantes que sejam os princípios lógicos, uma vez que eles se hipostasiam e passam a configurar toda uma "visão de mundo" repleta de graves implicações ético-políticas, tornam-se eles próprios o "sintoma" a ser analisado. A lógica identitária e o absolutismo racional ignoram a sabedoria pré-socrática: se as coisas se afetam umas às outras de múltiplas maneiras, elas não podem ser "algo" "em si", dado "por si" mesmo, nem podem estar completamente encerradas nos limites das fronteiras intransponíveis de uma identidade fechada. Se as coisas se afetam umas às outras de múltiplas maneiras é necessário que elas tenham algo em comum. Do contrário elas seriam absolutamente in-comun-icáveis. Algo que existisse "em si" e "por si" mesmo, livre de qualquer relação, limitação, determinação e condicionamento, seria uma presença eternamente vigente no "além", isto é, para além de qualquer relação mundana. Mas de onde poderia ter vindo um tal ente? E se de fato existisse, como poderíamos falar sobre ele, conhecê-lo, afetá-lo e ser por ele afetados? Não haveria qualquer possibilidade. Um ente "em-si" estaria para sempre condenado ao isolamento puro e à mais incontornável incomunicabilidade. Quando paramos para realmente analisar os binarismos da razão ocidental, vemos que há certa comunicabilidade entre eles: um remédio "material" é capaz de intervir numa perturbação "espiritual", uma simples conversa, um gesto, um olhar carregados de sentido, podem intervir instantaneamente sintomas "físicos" como uma dor de cabeça ou uma dor no peito. Quando a indústria devasta os recursos naturais do planeta, a cultura interfere na natureza. Quando o aquecimento global toma conta dos debates políticos, a natureza interfere na cultura. Quando "eu" preciso de ar, água, luz, alimentos, linguagem, interações sociais e determinações culturais para "ser o que sou", onde fica a fronteira entre "eu" e o "mundo"? Quando as peripécias dos "caçadores de pokémon" que se aventuram pelas ruas das grandes cidades interferem no "mundo real", onde fica a fronteira entre "realidade" e "ficção"? Quando "os bons" julgam e condenam, perseguem, excluem e agridem "os maus", onde fica a fronteira entre "bem" e "mal"? Se há interferências, relações, afetações, con-fusões, quer dizer que as fronteiras não são assim tão rígidas, que há pontos de passagem e pontos de indistinção. E se há tudo isso, tem de haver uma "nota comum" (MAGNO, 2007, p. 119) que torne possível a relação e a comunicabilidade entre os supostos "polos". E se há comunicabilidade, afetação mútua e relação, então não há nenhum Absoluto, pois Absoluto é, por definição, aquilo que é livre de toda e qualquer relação, limitação, determinação e condicionamento. E se não há nenhum absoluto – um dos mais profundos significados da polêmica frase de Nietzsche "Deus está morto" (NIETZSCHE, GC, § 125) – então tudo tem que ser repensado. Todas as nossas certezas estão novamente sob suspeita e novos caminhos de investigação precisam ser construídos. Se não há nenhum absoluto, então precisamos repensar e reconstruir ontologias, epistemologias, éticas, políticas e estéticas. Como funciona um mundo sem o Absoluto? Exercício arriscado, raro e singular que terá contra si, em todos os tempos, a opinião estabelecida. 11. A RE(D)ALIDADE Para voltar aos nossos princípios (onto)lógicos, como funcionariam as "identidades" e as "razões" sem a presença do absoluto? Ora, se não há absolutos, tudo é relacional, tudo vem a ser a partir de uma relacionalidade geral, tudo sempre já vem a A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 72 DiogoBarrosBogéa ser numa rede complexa de relações. Mas, se tudo é relacional, nos vemos novamente diante da aporia que deu origem ao pensamento filosófico com os pré-socráticos: se só há relações, é preciso que haja um princípio comum, uma mesmidade radical que, atravessando e permeando todas as coisas, seja a garantia de sua comunicabilidade. Por outro lado, para haver relação, é preciso que haja também diferença, ou todas as coisas seriam de saída a mesma e não haveria qualquer relação. Como pensar a mesmidade na multiplicidade, a mesmidade na diferença, sem novamente recorrer ao absoluto, ao identitário e ao binário? Desafio dos desafios para um pensamento que se recusa o conforto e a preguiça do "absolutismo" racional. Desafio ao qual Schopenhauer e Nietzsche, (aos quais a tradição maldosamente conferiu o rótulo de "irracionalistas", medindo-os por um parâmetro que não é o deles – ou seja, o parâmetro do racionalismo) responderam com um "terceiro" historicamente "excluído" pela tradição: a "vontade" e a "vontade de poder", isto é, a dimensão pulsional (BOGÉA, 2016). A dimensão pulsional não é nem material nem espiritual, nem física nem mental, é além de "realidade" e "ficção", é "além de bem e de mal". A mesma pulsão anima todos os entes existentes, mas esse "mesmo" é um impulso egoístico de proliferação de diferenças, de afirmação intransigente da singularidade de cada configuração de circunstâncias. Se tudo é relacional, toda "identidade" é atravessada e constituída por alteridades e diferenças múltiplas. "Eu" não consigo "me apresentar", dizer "quem sou", sem recorrer a uma série de "outros" que me atravessam e me constituem: nome, profissão, relações de parentesco, valores sócio-culturais, posicionamentos políticos, tudo através da mediação de uma linguagem, de reações fisiológicas que me mantém "funcionando" etc. Por isso Derrida, numa negação decidida da "presença identitária", afirma que só há diferenças e que o próprio de toda suposta identidade "é ser diferente de si mesma" (DERRIDA, 1995, p. 96). Parte-se já da diferença, do diferente, do diferente de si e do diferente a si. Há différance, impetuoso processo de produção e proliferação de diferenças, sem possibilidade de um reconfortante encontro ou re- encontro consigo mesmo, perfeita identificação a si, retorno a si próprio, reapropriação de si. É a diferença pensada da maneira mais radical: na raiz, está a diferença, que por só poder ser diferente a si, afirma em si o que lhe é outro, e não a identidade que por ser si mesma é diferente das outras em si. (DERRIDA, 2004) Se tudo é relacional, não há nenhuma "razão última" de ser para as coisas e é preciso acompanhar, em cada caso, a rede de relações em tensão que provisoriamente legitimam e sustentam uma determinada configuração circunstancial. Uma rede de circunstâncias múltiplas e diversas, entrelaçadas, agindo e reagindo umas sobre as outras, vão fazendo emergir em seu jogo conflituoso-harmonioso, várias configurações circunstanciais que se estabilizam provisoriamente como "objetos", "pessoas", "valores", "instituições", "domínios sócio culturais" etc. É mais ou menos esse o sentido da "teoria do ator-rede" de Bruno Latour: o protagonismo da "agência" não cabe ao humano, não se trata em cada caso de um humano racional e consciente que planeja e executa realizando "feitos" científicos, históricos, culturais etc. Há uma "rede" de "atores" heterogêneos que, numa conjunção complexa de afetações e atravessamentos configuram "ciência", "história", "cultura", etc. Se alguém se propõe a investigar "A Ciência" em sua pureza e para tal entra em seu terreno próprio, o laboratório: ali encontra pessoas de jaleco branco, provetas de vidro, cultivos de micróbios, artigos com notas de pé de página: tudo indica que se encontra "no terreno da Ciência"; logo se põe a anotar com obstinação de onde provém os A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 73 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... ingredientes sucessivos que seus informantes necessitam para levar adiante seu trabalho. Ao proceder desta maneira, a jovem reconstitui muito rapidamente uma lista de ingredientes que se caracterizam (...) por conter elementos cada vez mais heterogêneos. No mesmo dia pode ter anotado a visita de um jurista que foi tratar das questões de patentes, um pastor para as questões de ética, um técnico para a reparação de um novo microscópio, de um escolhido para o voto de uma subvenção, de um business angel para o lançamento da próxima start-up, de um industrial para ajustar um novo fermentador, etc. Uma vez que seus informantes asseguram que todos esses atores são necessários para o êxito do laboratório, ao invés de identificar os limites de um domínio, sempre questionados por diversas manchas, nada lhe impede de seguir as conexões de um elemento, pouco importa qual, e ver aonde leva. (LATOUR, 2013, p. 44) Portanto, elementos heterogêneos tais como objetos materiais de todo tipo; micróbios; valores éticos; valores religiosos; auxílios econômicos; meios de propaganda e divulgação; questões jurídicas; e interesses políticos são efetivamente atuantes na dinâmica do laboratório. São "atores" que, em rede, constroem "resultados", "descobertas", "cientistas" e, de certa forma, aquilo mesmo que se pode chamar de "ciência". E, curiosamente, nenhum destes "atores" é algo "em si", nem uma "presença" ou "identidade" previamente dadas. Cada um deles é igualmente desdobrável numa rede de "atores" num processo interminável, mas a cada vez interrompido pelas próprias limitações intrínsecas à linguagem. 12. METAFÍSICA DO IMPOSSÍVEL: ENTRE A ESTUPIDEZ E A LOUCURA Fernando Pessoa (1986, p. 155) descreveu com muita precisão nossa situação existencial nos seguintes versos: Só quem puder obter a estupidez Ou a loucura pode ser feliz. Buscar, querer, amar... tudo isto diz Perder, chorar, sofrer, vez após vez. A estupidez achou sempre o que quis Do círculo banal - da sua avidez; Nunca aos loucos o engano se desfez Com quem um falso mundo seu condiz. Há dois males: verdade e aspiração, E há uma forma só de os saber males: É conhecê-los bem, saber que são Um o horror real, o outro o vazio - Horror não menos - dois como que vales Duma montanha que ninguém subiu. Buscar, querer, amar... condição original de um mundo pulsional, condição nem ainda louca, nem ainda estúpida, mas potencialmente louca e estúpida. Pulsão nada mais é que isso: buscar, querer, amar... Toda a interminável inquietação do mundo: na A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 74 DiogoBarrosBogéa violência primitiva da cadeia alimentar; na disputa febril por energia e por espaço que envolve bactérias, protozoários, insetos, vegetais, répteis, aves, mamíferos; na eterna luta humana por domínio, por status, por honra, por prestígio, por bens materiais; no movimento repetitivo dos astros siderais, sustentado pela implacável força da gravidade; Por toda parte há busca, querer, amor, numa palavra: pulsão. Mas, buscar, querer, amar não pode não ser perder, chorar, sofrer, "vez após vez". Pois a inquietação pulsional não tem fim. Se tivesse fim seria a morte, o nada, "menos que nada", o próprio não-Haver, que não há. Querer é querer o impossível. E todos nós sabemos, se não conceitualmente, mas certamente sabemos na pele, na carne e nas entranhas o que isso significa. Cada desejo não realizado nos atira no mais inconsolável sofrimento e o sofrimento, a cada vez que toma o poder, como sabemos, é soberano. Mas a satisfação também tem suas "vicissitudes". Cada desejo satisfeito deixa um gosto de "ainda não era isso...", mas mesmo quando a ilusão da completude é tão perfeita que nos faz dizer "sim! É isso!", as "placas tectônicas" das configurações circunstanciais se movimentam novamente e nos levam embora a sensação de plenitude satisfeita. Por mais que tentemos resistir, o esforço, o investimento, o custo para manter uma dada situação circunstancial são tão altos, que nos exaurem as energias, de maneira que quando percebemos, a própria situação que tanto nos esforçamos para preservar, tornou-se uma prisão e uma fonte de desgosto e sofrimento. Mas, por outro lado, se as "placas tectônicas" se mostram estáveis o bastante, logo começam a nos parecer "estáveis demais..." e a alegre satisfação vai se tornando cada vez mais uma lembrança para dar lugar ao tédio que se instala pouco a pouco até que nos domina por completo. É o pêndulo schopenhaueriano que não cessa de oscilar do sofrimento para o aborrecimento. O mundo das identidades e das razões absolutas é, de uma certa forma, um mundo da "estupidez", um mundo que já desde o princípio, "achou sempre o que quis". Achou desde o princípio a plenitude satisfeita de uma autoidentidade plenamente constituída. Achou desde o princípio a plenitude satisfeita, a segurança e a estabilidade absolutas, a suposta realização plena e total que o Absoluto promete. E, no entanto, a ânsia (in)consciente de romper de uma vez com o estabelecido, o instituído, com a "camisa de força" sociocultural pode engendrar o "engano", o delírio, a alucinação com os quais um "falso mundo" condiz. E isso não é ainda a loucura, pois mundo é isso e isso é o que há. A loucura é que esse engano nunca se desfaça. A loucura é que se acredite nesse "engano" e nesse "falso mundo". Vivendo na re(d)alidade, isto é, na realidade que um mundo em rede engendra, vivemos na corda bamba entre a estupidez e a loucura. "No sentido de Fernando Pessoa: há duas maneiras de sobrevivermos, a estupidez ou a loucura" (MAGNO, 2007, p. 89). Se respeitarmos demais as circunstâncias estabelecidas, é a estupidez. Se não respeitarmos nem um pouco a circunstâncias estabelecidas, se acharmos que estamos em condições de simplesmente nos lançar "para além" delas, é a loucura. É preciso estar em permanente negociação com as circunstâncias. Uma negociação "interminável", como a "análise", segundo Freud (FREUD, 1996). Se, por respeito excessivo às circunstâncias, deixamos de negociar, acreditamos que as circunstâncias sejam A Realidade, com R maiúsculo, a própria verdade absoluta e imutável das coisas. A vida no interior dessas fronteiras rígidas – ou mesmo intransponíveis – torna-se insuportavelmente limitada, engessada, "estúpida". No entanto – não nos enganemos quanto a isso – as circunstâncias, isto é, as coisas, as pessoas, as instituições, as identidades, os absolutos, os deuses... têm poder. Eles estão investidos de poder pela determinada situação circunstancial da rede que os constitui. E porque eles têm poder, é preciso negociar com eles a cada passo. A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 75 "Entreaestupidez ea loucura": implicações éticasdoprincípiode identidadeedoprincípiode razão... O Estado pode ser apenas o efeito de uma "comunidade imaginada" (ANDERSON, 2008), suas leis apenas "frases escritas num papel", mas se você insistir em desobedecer as leis do Estado, o "braço armado" do Estado vai agir de fato e você vai efetivamente sofrer as consequências. Os deuses podem ser fantasias, mas se você não souber negociar com eles, seus seguidores vão realmente te perseguir, te excluir e te violentar – seja te jogando na fogueira, te "aterrorizando" com bombas e fuzis, ou censurando e criminalizando sua liberdade de expressão. A "matéria", as circunstâncias "físicas", "biológicas" e "químicas" podem ser apenas dados construídos por certos modelos descritivos, simbólicos, inexatos e até certo ponto delirantes. Mas, se você não souber negociar com eles, eles vão te impor graves limitações e podem mesmo te destruir. Se você não tiver estratégias mínimas para "cuidar do corpo", com intervenções físicas, químicas e biológicas, ele vai falir. Se você não souber fazer a leitura correta dos "objetos materiais" que o rodeiam, sua "qualidade de vida" ficará gravemente prejudicada. Não adianta "ir além" das circunstâncias e se esquecer de negociar com elas, porque elas vão cobrar o preço. Existir é uma "metafísica do impossível": nem temos fundamentos absolutamente seguros sobre os quais repousar, nem deixamos de, em meio ao frenético movimento das circunstâncias, desejar e fantasiar alguma possibilidade de fundamentação. Lucidez é a negociação interminável que se sabe negociação, ou seja, é cuidar para não tratar nem com "a realidade" pura nem com a "pura ficção", nem com o puro fundamento, nem com o puro nada. É habitar o entreato, o intermédio, o espaço "indecidível" (DERRIDA, 2001, p. 49)4 entre realidade e ficção, isto é, tratando com "realidades fictícias" e "ficções reais". Não é uma tarefa fácil, nem uma "ciência exata". É uma negociação, e, como tal, envolve apostas, investimentos, estratégias, avanços e recuos, perdas e ganhos. É um desafio, o desafio de uma vida. Vivida numa corda bamba estendida entre dois abismos, entre dois "vales": a estupidez e a loucura. REFERÊNCIAS BIBLIOGRÁFICAS ANDERSON, Benedict. Comunidades imaginadas: reflexões sobre a origem e a difusão do nacionalismo. Trad. Denise Bottman. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008 ARISTÓTELES. De Anima (Sobre a Alma). Rio de Janeiro: Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, 2010 ______. Metafísica. São Paulo: Loyola, 2002 BOGÉA, D. Metafísica da vontade, metafísica do impossível: a dimensão pulsional como terceiro excluído. Tese de Doutorado. PUC-Rio, 2016 BORNHEIM, Gerd. Os filósofos pré-socráticos. São Paulo: Cultrix, 1998 CASSIN, B. O efeito sofístico. São Paulo: 34, 2005 DERRIDA, J. Gramatologia. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2004. ______. Posições. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2001 ______. Vadios: dois ensaios sobre a razão. Coimbra-PT: Palimagem, 2009 ______. O outro cabo. Tradução F. Bernardo. Coimbra: AMar Arte, 1995 FREUD, S. Análise terminável e interminável [1937]. In: Obras Completas de Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII. Rio de Janeiro: Imago Ed., 1996 HEIDEGGER, M. A questão da técnica in Ensaios e Conferências. Petrópolis: Vozes, 2012, pp. 11-38 HERÁCLITO. Os pré-socráticos (Coleção Os Pensadores). São Paulo: Abril, 2000 KANT, I. Crítica da Razão Pura (Coleção Os Pensadores). Trad: Valério Rohden. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1974 LATOUR, Bruno. Investigación sobre los modos de existencia. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2013, p. A U F K L Ä R U N G ,J oã o P es so a, v. 5, n. 1, Ja n. -A br ., 20 18 ,p .6 1- 76 76 DiogoBarrosBogéa 44 LEIBNIZ, Monadologie (1714), Librarie Delgrave, Paris, 1966 Clavis Universalis: da cura em psicanálise ou revisão da clínica. Rio de Janeiro: Novamente, 2007 NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. Humano, demasiado humano. São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2005 (HH) ______. A Genealogia da Moral. São Paulo: Cia Das Letras, 2009 (GM) ______. A Gaia Ciência. São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2001 (GC) PESSOA, F. Obra Poética e em Prosa. Vol. I. (Introdução, organização, biobibliografia e notas de António Quadros e Dalila Pereira da Costa.) Porto: Lello, 1986. PLATÃO. Timeu-Crítias. Tradução: Rodolfo Lopes. Coimbra: CECH, 2011 ______. A República. Tradução: Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, s/d PROTÁGORAS. Fragmentos. In: PEREIRA, Maria Helena da Rocha. Hélade: antologia da cultura grega. Coimbra: FLUC, 1982 NOTAS 1 Na segunda dissertação de A Genealogia da moral, Nietzsche faz as noções "espirituais" de "culpa" e "responsabilidade" remontarem às noção bastante "material" de "dívida". (Nietzsche, GM, II) 2 O princípio de isegoria garantia a todos os cidadãos o igual direito à palavra. 3 ARISTÓTELES, De Anima, 3.12, 434a31-32 4 "Indecidível" é uma formulação de Derrida para tratar dessas zonas indetermináveis de indiferenciação: indecidíveis são "unidades de simulacro, falsas propriedades verbais, nominais ou semânticas, que não mais se deixam compreender na oposição filosófica (binária) e que, no entanto, habitam-na, resistem-lhe, desorganizam-na, mas sem jamais constituir um terceiro termo, sem jamais engendrar uma solução na forma da dialética especulativa (...) nem/nem é ao mesmo tempo ou isso ou aquilo". DERRIDA, Posições, p.

INGAR BRINCK and PETER GÄRDENFORS REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS ABSTRACT. Several conditions for being an intrinsically intentional agent are put forward. On a first level of intentionality the agent has representations. Two kinds are described: cued and detached. An agent with both kinds is able to represent both what is prompted by the context and what is absent from it. An intermediate level of intentionality is achieved by having an inner world, that is, a coherent system of detached representations that model the world. The inner world is used, e.g., for conditional and counterfactual thinking. Contextual or indexical representations are necessary in order that the inner world relates to the actual external world and thus can be used as a basis for action. To have fullblown intentionality, the agent should also have a detached self-awareness, that is, be able to entertain self-representations that are independent of the context. 1. LEVELS OF REPRESENTATIONS The question in focus in this paper is: What properties must a subject (an organism or possibly a computer) have in order to be intentional? Before we can answer this question, we need a working definition of intentionality. In everyday parlance, we call those subjects intentional whose behavior can be predicted and explained with the help of a folk-psychological vocabulary, i.e., by ascribing the subject states like belief, desire, etc., and taking these states as either reasons for, or causes of, that behavior.1 Let us initially take this as a criterion for being an intentional subject. Now, the question is what properties a subject must have to be intentional in the manner described by the criterion. We do not believe that there is a unique answer to this question, since a subject can exhibit different levels of intentionality. Below we will put forward several conditions of intentionality. The level of intentionality of a subject will depend on which of these conditions it fulfils. A first condition an intentional subject must satisfy is that it should be capable of having certain kinds of representation. Representations are necessary for planning, reasoning, and rational behavior in general. In this section, we want to present a classification of the different kinds of representations that one finds in biological systems.2 Synthese 118: 89–104, 1999. © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 90 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS Some kinds of animal behavior, like phototaxis, are determined directly by psychophysical mechanisms that transduce information about the environment. In such cases, representations are not involved at all. The actions that follow transduction are mere reflexes that connect the signals received by the animal to its behavior. In other cases, animals use the incoming information as cues to "perceptual inferences", which add information to what is obtained via the psychophysical receptors. Whenever information is added in this way to sensory input representations are obtained.3 For example, von Uexküll (1985, 233–234) argues that as soon as an animal can map the spatial structure of its environment by a corresponding spatial organization of its nervous system, the animal constructs a new world of excitation originating in the central nervous system that is erected between the environment and the motor nervous system. [. . . ] The animal no longer flees from the stimuli that the enemy sends to him, but rather from the mirrored image of the enemy that originates in a mirrored world. We submit that the capacity to represent the world is a sine qua non for intentionality. Von Uexküll (1985, 231) expresses the difference between animals capable of representation and those not capable of it in the following drastic way: "When a dog runs, the animal moves its legs. When a sea urchin runs, the legs move the animal." We view categorization as a special case of representation. When, for example, a bird not only sees a particular object, but sees it as food, the bird's brain is adding information about the perceived object that, for instance, leads to the bird's swallowing the object. Since information is added, mistakes become possible. A mistake is made when the behavioral conclusions drawn from the categorization turn out to be disadvantageous to the animal. For our analysis of the different levels of intentionality, we need to distinguish between two kinds of representation, namely, cued and detached. A cued representation stands for something that is present (in time and space) in the current external situation of the representing organism. Say that a chicken sees a silhouette of a particular shape in the sky and perceives it as a hovering hawk. The chicken has then used the perceptual stimuli as a cue for its hawk representation. Most cases of categorization are instances of cued representations. An advanced form of cued representation is what Piaget calls "object permanence". A cat can, for example, predict that a mouse will appear at the other side of a curtain when it disappears on one side. It can "infer" information about the mouse even if there is no immediate sensory information, like when it is waiting outside a mouse-hole (see Sjölander 1993). REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 91 The representation is nevertheless prompted by the presence of the mouse in the actual context. In contrast, detached representations stand for objects or events that are not necessarily present in the current situation. In other words, such representations are context-independent. A representation of a phenomenon that happens to be present is also detached if the representation could be active even if the phenomenon had not been present. This means that sensory input is not required to evoke a detached representation, instead the subject generates the information by itself.4 For an example of a detached representation, consider the searching behavior of rats. This behavior is best explained if it is assumed that the rats have some form of "spatial maps" in their heads. The maps involve detached representations because the rat can, for instance, represent the location of the goal even when it is distant from the rat's present location. Evidence for this, based on the rat's abilities to find optimal paths in mazes, was collected by Tolman as early as the 1930s (see Tolman 1948). However, his results were swept under the carpet for many years, since they were clear anomalies for the behaviorist paradigm.5 It is useful to make a further division within the class of detached representations. Sometimes the representation is dependent on an external referent, although the referent does not have to be present in the subject's immediate surroundings. This is the case with the spatial maps as in the example above. The other sub-class of detached representations are those that are completely independent of an external referent in the environment (see Gulz 1991; Gärdenfors 1996b). Say that a chimpanzee walks away from a termite hill to break a twig. It does so in order to peel the leaves off to make a stick that can be used to catch termites. In this case, the animal has a referent-independent representation of a stick and its use. The representation of the stick has not been triggered by the presence of a stick in the environment – the chimpanzee may not even be able to find a twig to make one. In the case of humans, a fantasy about an object that does not exist or a situation that has never occurred are even clearer examples of referent-independent representations. The distinction between referent-dependent and referent-independent detached representations thus concerns the origin of the representations: whether they could occur without the subject that entertains them ever having met with the phenomena that the representations are about. In this sense, cued representations are all referent-dependent. In the following, we hope to show that the distinctions between the major kinds of representation are instrumental in that they direct our attention to key features of the representational forms and thence to different types of intentionality. 92 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS 2. THE INNER WORLD As mentioned above, von Uexküll (1985, 233–234) argues that animals capable of representation have "a new world of excitation [. . . ] that is erected between the environment and the motor nervous system". He calls this new world the "counterworld" of the animal. The environment as reflected in the counterworld of the animal is always a part of the animal itself, constructed by its organization, and processed into an indissoluble whole with the animal itself (1985, 234). Von Uexküll refers to a mirrored world and not to the external world when he talks about representation. This should not lead one to think that the animal does not interact with or perceive the external world itself. Rather, as we understand it, the counterworld mediates between perceptions and actions. Perception is necessary for the emergence of the counterworld. The representations of the counterworld are "tools of the brain determined by its plan of organization. These tools always stand ready to become active in response to appropriate stimuli from the external world" (1985, 234). Von Uexküll's counterworld contains both cued and detached representations. However, in putting forward a second condition of intentionality we want to focus on the role of detached representations. The role of such representations in the mental life of an organism can be explained by relating it to an idea introduced by Craik (1943, 61): If the organism carries a "small-scale model" of external reality and of its own possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which are the best of them, react to future situations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and future, and in every way to react on a much fuller, safer and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it. We define the inner world of an organism as the collection of all the detached representations of the organism.6 Loosely speaking, the inner world consists of all the things the organism can actively "think" about in addition to what is given by the cued representations. The inner world constitutes an intermediary between perception and action, where the detached representations are systematically interrelated and provide the subject with a coherent model of the external world. It is as such a model that the inner world is instrumental to intentionality. The inner world thus consists in representations of objects (like food and predators), places (where food or shelter can be found), actions and their consequences, etc., even when these things are not present in the environment. Accordingly, Jeannerod (1994, 2) says that "actions are driven by an internally represented goal rather than directly by the external REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 93 world". The external world does not impose a behavior on the subject, but instead the subject, by behaving in a goal-directed way, imposes a structure or an order on the external world. This structure is reflected in the inner world. By exploiting its inner world, the animal can simulate a number of different actions in order to "see" their consequences and evaluate them. After these simulations are done, it can choose to perform the most appropriate action in the external world. An animal with cued representations can only rely on trial-and-error behavior when trying to solve a problem. One of the main evolutionary advantages of an inner world is therefore that it frees an animal who is seeking a solution to a problem from such dangerous behavior. Of course, the success of the simulations depends on how well the inner world is matched to the perceptions of the external one – a monkey who imagines a branch where there is none is soon a dead monkey. Evolutionary selection pressures have lead to a strong correspondence between the perceived world and the simulated inner world of organisms. However, this does not guarantee that an organism will never make any mistakes. The inner world of a subject must form a unity or the subject would not be an agent. Different subjects have different inner worlds and they act on the representations that constitute their own world. But what is it that unites one world and distinguishes it from another? Is it the existence of some sort of center that controls the representations and the way they are used, or is it a property of the representations themselves? We think that it is a mistake to assume the existence of a central control unit of the inner world. First, we want to avoid positing a unifying factor, like a self, if there is a possibility of making do without one.7 More importantly, we believe that unity is a property of the inner world as such and not something that is imposed on the world by an external element. Our model does not require a control element, as it were, a ghost in the machine, that surveys the operations of the inner world. It would be preferable if unity could be explained by reference to the representations themselves. One way to do so might be to describe the inner world, or consciousness, as a self-regulating control system. The idea would be that unity arises as an emergent property of mutually interacting representations. However, this suggestion involves the peculiar idea that the representations themselves interact, while it seems more natural to say that representations do not operate on their own, but are put to use by an organism. Representations are not only about something, they are also for somebody, in the same way as a tool is made for or used by somebody. 94 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS The inner world is a tool that helps the organism to find its way through the world. Unity can instead be explained by saying that the representations, or rather, the inner world composed of them, owe their existence to a complex of different elements, each contributing to the overall functioning of the whole organism, and that these elements together guarantee the unity of consciousness. If any of them malfunctions, unity is threatened. The different elements that we have in mind are the functional units of the brain together with the perceptual apparatus that feeds information to these units. The inner world will then emerge from these elements. Thus, the unity of consciousness does not supervene exclusively on the brain, but on the functional unity of the organism as situated in the environment.8 The functional unity of the organism arises from the parts of the brain taken together with those other parts of the organism that are necessary for perception and action. For instance, perception presupposes that the organism has the means to interact with the environment. Perception is active in the sense that the agent does not take the input as something provided by an independent unit. In contrast, the agent actively seeks, by various mechanisms of attention, the perceptions that are most relevant to the problem at hand. This view of how perception takes place can be compared with Merleau-Ponty's (1962) conception of motility. He writes that bodily space and external space form a practical system, the first being the background against which the object as the goal of our action may stand out and that movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it actively assumes them, it takes them up in their basic significance which is obscured in the commonplaceness of established situations (1962, 102). Merleau-Ponty thus considers perception as an ongoing activity in which the environment becomes significant to the subject. As an example of this kind of functional model, Luria (1973) distinguishes between three functional units within the brain: one which provides a basic state of arousal, one which analyses and synthesizes information, and, finally, one which organizes and controls action and reasoning. The three units work concertedly. They are not localised at different areas of the brain but should instead be understood as composing different levels of activity of the whole brain. Normal functioning of the brain thus demands co-operation of all centers of the brain and cannot be localized at separate areas. Luria (1973, 39) conceives of mental activity as a kind of self-regulating functional system. He writes that REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 95 each area of the brain concerned in this functional system [of mental activity] introduces its own particular factor essential to its performance, and removal of this factor makes the normal performance of this functional system impossible. Lesions of the brain thus threaten the unity of consciousness, a fact which is evident from all kinds of brain damage. Luria's view of the workings of the brain supports the thesis that unity of the inner world emerges from the complex interaction of different units of the brain. It cannot be found within a specific area. On the contrary, it depends on the activity of many different areas. 3. INDEXICAL SELF-AWARENESS A system consisting exclusively of detached representations cannot be used for reasoning about actual events or for planning actions. The reason is that detached representations, as used in reasoning are not related to specific contexts in the external world.9 We take it as a third condition for intentionality that the subject is capable of entertaining indexical representations in addition to detached ones. If the subject cannot do so, it will not be possible for us to ascribe an intentional behavior to it. The reason why the subject will not exhibit intentionality is that intentionality discloses itself in action. If the subject cannot entertain indexical representations, it will not have the capacity to act. Thus the subject will not fit our initial criterion of intentionality (see Section 1). Indexical representations rely on an indexical relation to what they represent. Such a relation is characterized by a contiguity in time and space and/or a causal relation between the representation and its object. In contrast to cued representations, indexical ones do not have to be descriptive at all, but can function only as indicators or "pointers". Indexicality is necessary not only for executing actions, but also for the preparation of action. The subject has to reason or plan for herself in a specific setting if the plan is to be feasible. For instance, to keep your appointment with the dentist, it is not enough that you know that Liz Taylor is due there at noon on the 1st of April. You must also know that you are Liz Taylor and that the 1st of April is today. The subject must have an indexical self-awareness or she will not realize that a certain plan concerns herself. The same goes for the mental map of the rat: its self-representation must be from a certain point of view or the information in the map will not connect to the actual context. The map is used when the animal is planning a route through, for example, a maze (Tolman 1948). For such a plan to 96 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS function it is necessary that the rat can represent the present location of itself on the map. Otherwise it would not know where to start planning its route. However, this does not entail that the rat can imagine itself being in a place other than it actually is. Nor does it entail that the rat can have different attitudes (for instance, desires) concerning its being in different locations. Presumably, it cannot "think" things like "I wish I were at that T-junction, because then I would be very close to the food bowl". Even more remote would be to assume that it can represent its future desires, for example, that it will be hungry in two hours, so it had better start moving now (since it is such a long way to the goal). The indexical representations necessary for action emerge in the interaction between the subject and its surroundings. They depend on the subject's ability to orient itself in the perceptual field. The subject perceives the world from its own perspective: its point of view is anchored to its body. The subject moves around in different directions for different purposes and its movements gradually impose a structure on the perceptual field. It is placed in the center of the perceptual field with the surrounding items organized around it. The subject can adjust its position in the field, on its own initiative or as a response to the acts and movements of other individuals and to the character of the environment, and thereby update the information and keep the structure coherent. Merleau-Ponty (1962) has emphasized that intentionality is first and foremost a bodily capacity and not a mental one.10 It follows from this that our representation of the surrounding world is anchored in the indexical perspective that derives from the motility of the body. For instance, he writes (1962, 279): In so far as the body provides the perception of movement with the ground or basis which it needs in order to become established, it is a power of perception, rooted in a certain domain and geared to a world. The content of indexical representations is, accordingly, determined by the interaction between perceptual input and behavioral output. It is not perspectiveless or neutral, rather every specification of the content of a certain representation involves the subject's relation to the specified item. Such content depicts what things are like to a specific subject, not what they are in an objective or generalized sense. Hence a minimal condition on an agent is that it has an egocentric representation – a point of view. For the rat in the maze, for example, the egocentric representation of the location provides a point of departure. Indexical representations are connected with an indexical selfawareness.11 Indexical self-awareness emerges when the subject gradually creates an egocentric space for herself. Having a point of view, or locating REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 97 beliefs (i.e., that represent the present location of the agent), demands of course the ability to distinguish between oneself and the rest of the world. That a subject has an indexical self-awareness means that it experiences itself as being placed in space and time. It also means that the subject can conceive of objects as being related to itself. To act purposefully, an agent with an indexical self-awareness must be able to discriminate and locate the objects of its actions, that is, those objects that occur in its perceptual field.12 The agent must grasp the notion of an object, which means that the agent has to learn how to categorize perceptual information in a way that is appropriate for action. One way to do that without first explicitly thinking about objects conceptually, as objects, or without behaving intentionally towards them, is by interacting nonintentionally with them. Both in succumbing to action and in resisting it, they reveal themselves as objects to the agent. Merleau-Ponty has brought attention to the central role of the body in categorizing the perceived world. He writes (1962, 326): A thing is, therefore, not actually given in perception, it is internally taken up by us, reconstituted and experienced by us in so far as it is bound up with a world, the basic structures of which we carry with us, and of which it is merely one of many possible concrete forms. Subject and external world are entwined in the inner world. Their coexistence in the inner world is conditioned by the body. Perceptual content could not as such give rise to indexical selfawareness. Interaction with the environment is necessary, or the agent will not grasp the relation between the objects and itself, but only the relations between objects. The agent becomes aware of itself through other objects, by simultaneously using its body and its different senses in interacting with them. John Campbell (1995, 32) maintains that having the idea of something being an object involves grasping that it has a two-dimensional causal structure: it is at once internally causally connected over time and a common cause of many phenomena. That an object is internally connected means that its state at any moment depends upon its preceding states (Campbell 1994, 27). Campbell's principle of the common cause, on the other hand, concerns the external relations between objects and the ways in which they interact. It presumes that an object forms a unit in space. An agent could not understand how objects act upon each other if it did not grasp this causal structure. It seems to us that a successful indexical representation of an object would have to involve the conditions both of unity and extension over time. Agency is, moreover, impossible without a minimal grasp both of oneself as a causal power and one's position in relation to other objects in the 98 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS context of action. To act, one must experience the world as distinct from oneself and the objects in it as items (and not fluctuating collections of properties or features) that extend over time. Indexical representations do not only provide the agent with a spatial map of the environment as seen from its point of view. In experiencing and interacting with the environment, the agent takes a location in relation to other objects. Henceforth, it is itself located on the map. This is, however, not sufficient to support the conception of oneself as an object among others. To look upon oneself, so to speak, from the outside, or from a third-person perspective, demands well-developed conceptual capacities (although not necessarily linguistic ones). Indexical self-awareness can obviously be coupled with detached representations of oneself and the world. But the indexical representations necessary for action are independent of such representations. One can have one without the other. For instance, small children have indexical self-awareness, but they do not have a detached representation of their point of view. There is a wealth of evidence for this, the classic example being the "three-mountain problem" (Piaget and Inhelder 1956). In this experiment three "mountains", one bigger than the other two, are placed in a triangle on a table. The child to be tested sits in front of the small mountains, while a doll is placed on a chair facing the large mountain. The child is asked to draw what the doll "sees" from where it is sitting. A child in the "preoperational stage" (Piaget's term) draws how the scene looks from its own perspective, independently of where the doll is seated. However, a child in the "concrete operational stage" can take the doll's point of view and draw the "correct" perspective. This suggests that once children have this capacity, they can view the world from many different points of view independently of the perceptual input they are currently receiving.13 We have suggested that agency requires an indexical self-awareness that emerges from the interaction of the subject with the environment. It may seem that the account is circular, since we claim that agency requires indexical self-awareness, but the development of such self-awareness in turn appears to depend on agency. Nevertheless, the circularity is avoided, since the initial interaction between subject and environment that brings about indexical self-awareness does not have to involve representations. Agency, which requires the use of representations on the part of the agent, is thus not presupposed by indexical self-awareness. Indexical self-awareness consists in contextual information gained from the interplay of perception and behavior, both of which depend on the body. Thus, it seems, egocentricity would be impossible without interaction with the environment, and interaction would, in turn, be impossible REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 99 without embodiment. But this is not altogether true. Interaction is necessary for egocentricity, but this could, however, take place without bodies. Imagine a severely handicapped person who can only communicate via readings of her brain activities. This would be sufficient for her to interact with the surroundings, even though she could not use her body to communicate. The body would then not be necessary for establishing a way of communicating with others. This means that embodiment is not necessary for indexical self-awareness, but situatedness and locating beliefs are. Let us sum up the discussion concerning levels of intentionality. A subject is intentional in a minimal sense if it has representations. To reach an intermediate level of intentionality, the subject must be capable of having detached representations that form an inner world. The subject should also have an indexical self-awareness. 4. DETACHED SELF-AWARENESS AND SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS A higher level of intentionality is reached when indexical self-awareness is combined with a detached one. An agent with a detached self-awareness has at least some self-representations that are cut loose from the actual context. She can think of herself generally, as a subject that may instantiate different properties in different domains. This kind of generality also paves the way for self-representations that attribute properties to the subject that she actually does not have and thus for counterfactual thoughts about oneself. Such thoughts are useful in planning for circumstances other than the actual one, for instance, when the agent considers possible solutions to a problem. An example would be a subject believing that she will become unemployed and who ponders different strategies to cope with that situation. The general ability to envision various actions and their consequences is a necessary requirement for an animal to be capable of planning. Following Gulz (1991, 46), we will use the following criterion: An animal is planning its actions if it has a representation of a goal and a start situation and it is capable of generating a representation of a partially ordered set of actions for itself for getting from start to goal. The representations of the goal and the actions must be detached, otherwise the animal will only be capable of trial-and-error behavior. In brief, planning presupposes an inner world with detached representations. Representation of future or possible events does not demand object-centered self-representations, that is, representations of oneself as an object among others. Such non-indexical or object-centered self-representations are rather unusual. On the other hand, indexical 100 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS self-representations are necessary for planning and agency. A selfrepresentation totally void of indexical content would not move the subject to action. Some cases actually demand that the agent can take a view of itself as an object among other objects. This happens if the agent needs to plan for a team, and its own role is confined to be one of the members of the team, all of which are on an equal level. There are many examples of team-work of this kind, from a group's joint defense of its camp against an anticipated attack from enemies, to the strategy of a football team in anticipation of an important match.14 In these cases, the agent is not primarily planning for itself, but for the whole group. Using the distinction between referent-dependent and referentindependent detached representations, one can go further and distinguish between the corresponding kinds of goals of an agent. Thus an animal that only has the referent-dependent type of representations, could not have a non-existent object as a goal. However, with the more advanced referent-independent form one can, for example, truly seek a unicorn. There are several clear cases of planning among primates and less clear cases in other species. However, all evidence for planning in non-human animals concerns planning for present needs.15 Apes and other animals plan because they are hungry or thirsty, tired or frightened. Humans seem to be the only animal that can plan for future needs. Gulz (1991, 55) names planning for present needs immediate planning while planning for the future is called anticipatory planning. Humans can predict that they will be hungry tomorrow and save some food, and they realize, for instance, that the winter will be cold and are therefore able to start building a shelter in the summer. The crucial distinction is that for an organism to be capable of anticipatory planning it must have a detached representation of its future needs. In contrast, immediate planning only requires a cued representation of the current need. There is nothing in the available evidence concerning animal planning, notwithstanding all its methodological problems, that suggests that any species other than Homo sapiens has detached representations of their desires and goals. Anticipatory planning requires that the agent can suppress the feelings and desires of the current situation and evoke memories, context-independent desires or fantasies, during the planning.16 Fullblown self-consciousness requires both indexical and detached selfawareness. A subject must be capable of making inferences that involve both kinds of self-representation, to go, for instance, from the thoughts "I am sad" and "That tall creature is sad" (for example, when looking at a mirror image of itself) to "I am that tall and sad creature". This means that REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 101 the subject connects firstand third-person beliefs about itself.17 An agent with only third-person beliefs about itself would not be self-conscious, since one cannot connect general beliefs to oneself without an indexical self-awareness. General beliefs must make contact with the actual world to concern a particular subject. They must be tied to the context or the agent will not be conscious of itself, but of, for instance, Liz Taylor (whoever that is). Self-consciousness is essentially from the first-person perspective; it does not depend on reidentifying oneself from context to context. The selfawareness that arises from the subject's relation to and constant interaction with her environment suffices to guarantee self-identity, at least in one sense of the word. Subjects do not fundamentally conceive of themselves from a third-person perspective and thus do not primarily think about themselves as objects. As long as the subject takes an active part in life in this way, she does not run the risk of losing track of herself in the common, objective world. As Merleau-Ponty and others have emphasized, perception depends on the subject's ability to engage in interaction with the environment over time. A completely passive subject would not be able to impose a structure on the external world. This means that it could not perceive the external world as constituted by different objects where different events take place, all falling into separate categories. The subject would then not have an inner world. This further implies that the mode of existence of agents guarantees self-identity in a fundamental sense, as of being a mobile point of view. The reason is that self-identity is a consequence of the subject's interaction with the world. Agency, self-awareness and a basic kind of self-identity go hand in hand. Of course, this does not exclude that a person doubts whether she is exactly the same person, physically, psychologically, or socially, as, say, ten years earlier, or that she has, for instance, a split personality. A subject can also go through a gradual change without any grave disturbance or interruption to her perception of the external world, as long as there is a continuity over time of herself (physically, psychologically, and perhaps also socially) – continuity being necessary for having an inner world. 5. CONCLUSION We have in this article formulated several conditions for intentional subjects. These conditions hold for intentionality viewed as an intrinsic property of subjects, in contrast to Dennett's intentional stance. Basically, we have identified three levels of intentionality. To qualify for the lowest 102 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS level the subject must be capable of having representations. We distinguish between two kinds of representations: cued and detached. Cued representations are prompted by the context. In contrast, the referent of a detached representation does not necessarily have to be present. The intermediate level of intentionality is achieved by having an inner world, that is, a system of detached representations that form a coherent model of the external world. The inner world can, for instance, be used for generating possible consequences of actions. In order to use the inner world for planning and prediction, indexical representations are needed. The reason is that agency requires indexical self-awareness. To reach the highest level of intentionality, the subject must have a detached self-awareness, that is, self-representations that are cut loose from the current situation of the subject. This makes it possible for the subject to think of herself from a third-person perspective. Fullblown self-consciousness requires both indexical and detached self-awareness. A special case of self-representation is when the subject has detached representations of her future desires. Such representations are necessary for anticipatory planning. NOTES 1 Daniel Dennett (1978; 1981; 1983) uses a similar characterization to define intentional systems. He says that an intentional system is "a system whose behaviour is reliably and voluminously predictable via the intentional strategy" (Dennett 1981, 55). For Dennett, intentionality seems to lie in the eye of the beholder and not primarily in the system itself. In contrast, we think that intentionality is an intrinsic property. 2 For a general discussion of representations in animals, see Roitblat (1982), Gopnik (1982), Lachman and Lachman (1982), Fodor (1986), Gulz (1991), and Gärdenfors (1996a, 1996b). 3 Representations, as we conceive them, can carry information in non-conceptual, conceptual, as well as linguistic form. Having linguistic capacities is not necessary for being an intentional subject: Representations are necessary, but not linguistic ones. Our theory of representation is, moreover, compatible with various naturalistic theories of content such as covariation, causal, and teleological theories. 4 In order to use detached representations effectively, the organism must be able to suppress interfering cued representations (compare Deacon 1996, 130–131). 5 Vauclair (1987) provides a more recent analysis of the notion of a "cognitive mapping". 6 This notion of an inner world is much more restricted than the "Innenwelt" in von Uexküll's writings, since his notion includes all kinds of "effects evoked in the nervous system by the factors of the environment" (1985, 223). 7 This possibility is explored by Pallbo (1997). 8 This idea reminds somewhat of Dennett's (1991) "multiple drafts model". One difference is that Dennett does not emphasize the interaction between subject and environment, what is sometimes called the situatedness of the subject (see Clark 1997). REPRESENTATION AND SELF-AWARENESS IN INTENTIONAL AGENTS 103 9 The representations may have originated in a specific setting, but their content is independent of the context of use. 10 Reuter (1999, this volume) writes: "Merleau-Ponty's basic intentionality is the bodysubject's concrete, spatial and pre-reflective directedness towards the lived world". Her paper extensively discusses Merleau-Ponty's notion of pre-reflective intentionality and its bodily basis. 11 For a discussion of different kinds of self-awareness, see Brinck (1997). 12 We are not presupposing any particular metaphysics of objects. 13 Piaget held that the child could do this from about the age of seven. However, recent research suggests that this capacity is acquired at a much earlier age. 14 Here we assume either that it is not the coach that plans the strategy but one of the players, or that the coach is playing in the team. Team and coach both have the same goal. 15 Squirrels and other animals who collect food for the winter have no representation of the goal and hence they are not planning. Their behavior is just instinctive, as can be shown by different kinds of experiments. 16 For the role of memory in suppressing current information see Glenberg (1997) and Gärdenfors (1997). 17 This issue is discussed in chapters 5 and 6 of Brinck (1997). REFERENCES Brinck, I.: 1997, The Indexical "I", Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht. Campbell, J.: 1994, Past, Space, and Self, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Campbell, J.: 1995, 'The Body Image and Self-Consciousness', in J. L. Bermúdez, A. Marcel, N. Eilan (eds.), The Body and the Self, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Clark, A.: 1997, Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Craik, K.: 1943, The Nature of Explanation, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Deacon, T.: 1996, 'Prefrontal Cortex and Symbol Learning: Why a Brain Capable of Language Evolved Only Once', in B. M. Velichkovsky and D. M. Rumbaugh (eds.), Communicating Meaning: The Evolution and Development of Language, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ, pp. 103–138. Dennett, D.: 1978, Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Dennett, D.: 1981, 'True Believers: The Intentional Strategy and Why It Works', in A. F. Heath (ed.), Scientific Explanation, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Dennett, D.: 1983, 'Intentional Systems in Cognitive Ethology: The "Panglossian Paradigm" Defended', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6, 343–390. Dennett, D.: 1991, Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, MA. Fodor, J. A.: 1986, 'Why Paramecia Don't have Mental Representations', Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10, 3–23. Gärdenfors, P.: 1996a, 'Cued and Detached Representations in Animal Cognition', Behavioural Processes 36, 263–273. Gärdenfors, P.: 1996b, 'Language and the Evolution of Cognition', in V. Rialle and D. Fisette (eds.), Penser l'esprit: Des Sciences de la Cognition à une Philosophie Cognitive, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble, pp. 151–172. 104 INGAR BRINCK AND PETER GÄRDENFORS Gärdenfors, P.: 1997, 'The Role of Memory in Planning and Pretense', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20, 24–25. Glenberg A. M.: 1997, 'What Memory Is For', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 20, 1–19. Gopnik, M.: 1982, 'Some Distinctions Among Representations', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5, 378–379. Gopnik, A.: 1993, 'How we Know our Minds: The Illusion of First-Person Knowledge of Intentionality', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16, 1–14. Gulz, A.: 1991, The Planning of Action as a Cognitive and Biological Phenomenon, Lund University Cognitive Studies 2, Lund. Jeannerod, M.: 1994, 'The Representing Brain, Neural Correlates of Motor Intention and Imagery', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17, 187–202. Lachman, R. and J. L. Lachman: 1982, 'Memory Representations in Animals: Some Metatheoretical Issues', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5, 380–381. Luria, A. R.: 1973, The Working Brain, Basic Books, New York. Merleau-Ponty, M.: 1962, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Pallbo, R.: 1997, Mind in Motion: The Utilization of Noise in the Cognitive Process, Lund University Cognitive Studies 57, Lund. Piaget, J. and B. Inhelder: 1956, The Child's Conception of Space, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Reuter, M.: 1999, 'Merleau-Ponty's Notion of Pre-Reflective Intentionality', Synthese 118, 69–88 (this issue). Roitblat, H. L.: 1982, 'The Meaning of Representation in Animal Memory', Behavioral and Brain Sciences 5, 353–372. Sjölander, S.: 1993, 'Some Cognitive Breakthroughs in the Evolution of Cognition and Consciousness, and their Impact on the Biology of Language', Evolution and Cognition 3, 1–10. Tolman, E. C.: 1948, 'Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men', Psychological Review 55, 189– 208. 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Direct vs. indirect disjunction of wh-complements, as diagnosed by subordinating complementizers 1 Anna Szabolcsi New York University November 11, 2016 Szabolcsi (1997) introduced the observation that the presence of a subordinating complementizer in each coordinated clause correlates with indirect (VP-level) coordination, i.e. with the conjunction/disjunction of lifted complements. This paper revisits the observation using English, Hungarian, and Korean data. Hungarian and Korean have subordinators in both declarative and wh-complements, and so they allow one to study the distribution of direct vs. indirect disjunctions of wh-complements in a way that English does not. The present paper focuses on the following issues: (i) How and why does the presence of a complementizer in each clause correlate with lifting and thus indirect coordination? (ii) What is the distribution of direct vs. indirect disjunctions of wh-complements? Is there a difference between veridical vs. non-veridical matrix contexts? (iii) Are there remaining cases of direct disjunction of wh-complements after all? If yes, can they perhaps be explained away as conjunctions (to be dubbed exemplifications)? 1. Introduction Since the early 1980s, there has been a debate in the semantics literature pertaining to whether wh-interrogatives can be directly disjoined, as main clauses and as complements. Those who held that the direct disjunction of wh-interrogatives was in conflict with certain theoretical considerations proposed that they could be disjoined indirectly. Indirect disjunction proceeds by first lifting both wh-interrogatives and then disjoining them; it assigns matrix-level scope to or. To illustrate with a skeletal example, 1 This paper is dedicated to the memory of Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach, a good friend, an excellent and versatile semanticist, and the author of the inspiring article Questions and Generalized Quantifiers (1997). I thank Lucas Champollion, Ivano Ciardelli, Jeroen Groenendijk, Floris Roelofsen, and Barry Schein for discussions at earlier stages of the research; Boglárka Faragó, Beáta Gyuris, Anikó Lipták, and Zsófia Zvolenszky for help with the Hungarian data; and WooJin Chung for providing and discussing the Korean data. Part of this work was done during a KNAW Visiting Professorship at the University of Amsterdam in Fall 2014, which I gratefully acknowledge. 2 (1) a. Sue knows where you live or who you married. b. Lift(where_you_live) = P[P(where_you_live)] Lift(who_you_married) = P[P(who_you_married)] c. P[P(where_you_live)  P(who_you_married)] d. q[Sue_knows(q)] e. P[P(where ...)  P(who ..)](q[Sue_knows(q)]) = = Sue_knows(where ...)  Sue_knows(who ...) The next section summarizes the theoretical details of the debate, based on Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984), Szabolcsi (1997, 2015), Krifka (2001), Haida and Repp (2013), and Ciardelli, Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2015), among others. As we will see, the notorious theoretical need for indirect disjunction has disappeared by today. But the factual question remains. Are wh-complements disjoined directly or indirectly? What is the fact of the matter? Szabolcsi (1997: 324-327) made the following observation about the coordination of complement clauses in general: (2) The presence of a subordinating complementizer in each coordinated clause correlates with the coordination of lifted complements; in other words, with indirect coordination. Languages that have overt subordinators in wh-complements as well allow one to study the distribution of direct vs. indirect disjunctions in a way that English does not. Among others, Hungarian and Korean are such languages. Szabolcsi found the following in Hungarian, and likewise in Korean. (3) Complementizer hogy is required in each disjunct: János megtudta, hogy kit vettél feleségül John found.out SUB whom took.2sg as.wife vagy *(hogy) hol laksz. or SUB where live.2SG `John found out who you married or where you live' (4) Complementizer hogy is optional in the second conjunct: János megtudta, hogy kit vettél feleségül John found.out SUB whom took.2sg as.wife és (hogy) hol laksz. and SUB where live.2SG `John found out who you married and where you live' Szabolcsi interpreted these findings as support for the claim that wh-complements cannot be directly disjoined, although they can be directly conjoined. (2)-(3)-(4) serve as a point of departure for the present paper. I take a 3 new look at the pertinent data, primarily in English and Hungarian, in light of recent literature and my own new research. I will refer to the presence of a subordinator in each coordinated wh-complement clause as the "doublehogy" pattern (although a three-way coordination will be a triple-hogy one, etc.), and to the presence of only one, initial subordinator as the "singlehogy" pattern. I will argue for the following main claims. (5) The double-hogy pattern is indeed strongly correlated with indirect coordination. However, it is less obligatory than was claimed in (3). The single-hogy pattern is observed, for example, in cases that can be analyzed as intermediate-scope indirect disjunction. These are VP-level disjunctions within the scope of a higher operator. I propose that, among others, the non-veridical matrix contexts discovered by Haida and Repp (2013) fall into this category. (6) The single-hogy pattern also occurs, less robustly, in veridical contexts. Some of these cases yield the same interpretation as double-hogy, i.e. they instantiate lifting without an overt syntactic correlate. But other cases, discovered by Ciardelli et al. (2015) do not seem to involve indirect disjunction. I tentatively propose that they involve what I will call exemplifications. In sum, I argue that the case against the direct disjunction of wh-complements remains reasonably strong, based on Hungarian. Korean possibly provides even stronger evidence, because it has less tolerance for lifting without a syntactic marker, according to judgments provided by WooJin Chung. If this is correct, then we must conclude with resurrecting the old question: What theory of interrogatives predicts the need for indirect disjunctions? 2. Direct vs. indirect disjunctions: theoretical underpinnings Universal quantification is a generalization of a conjunction of propositions, and existential quantification, of a disjunction of propositions. It is no wonder that many linguistic phenomena group together universals and conjunctions on the one hand, and existentials and disjunctions on the other. Starting at least with Groenendijk and Stokhof (1982, 1984), it has been noted that pair-list readings of wh-questions are more natural with universals than 4 with indefinites: (7) What is every girl doing? Alla is laughing, and Bella is sleeping, and Celia is snacking. (8) What are two girls doing? ?? Bella is sleeping and Celia is snacking. Szabolcsi (1997) and Krifka (2001) argued that a parallel contrast can be observed between plain conjunctions and disjunctions of wh-questions. Restricting attention to main clauses for the moment, the connective and is equally good in inter-sentential (9a) and intra-sentential (9b) positions. But the connective or is much better in the inter-sentential version, and indeed (10a) may be seen as replacing the first question with the second. (10b) is less natural. (9) a. Where do you live? And, who did you marry? b. Where do you live and who did you marry? (10) a. Where do you live? Or (rather), who did you marry? b.?? Where do you live or who did you marry? Different explanations have been proposed for why such contrasts exist. At the heart of the explanation that Groenendijk and Stokhof offered is the claim that the semantic duty of a question is to partition the set of possible worlds: to carve it into mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive subsets. This requires questions to have unique true and complete answers: each cell of the partition contains those worlds in which one such answer holds. Giving a particular answer locates the actual world in a particular cell. An atomic question (What is Alla doing?, Where do you live?) has a unique true and complete answer, and the conjunction of questions does too. But the disjunction of questions offers a choice. In (8), the addressee may choose to answer about Bella and Celia (as illustrated), or about Alla and Bella, or about Alla and Celia. Likewise, the intended interpretation of (10b) is that the addressee may choose to answer either the where-question or the whoquestion. Taking (8) and (10) at face value, the partition theory does not qualify them as semantic questions. Whether we are happy with this result depends on how we evaluate the ?? tags in (8) and (10). Jumping ahead in time, Krifka (2001) argued that speech acts in general, question acts among them, cannot be disjoined. We conclude that, while coordination [i.e. conjunction, AS] is a well-defined operation for speech acts, disjunction is not. Syntactic forms that look like disjunction of two speech acts typically are interpreted in special ways, for example, by lowering the disjunction to the propositional level or by interpreting it as a replacement of the first speech act. 5 Why are there no natural cases of speech act disjunctions? If we see speech acts as operations that, when applied to a commitment state, deliver the commitments that characterize the resulting state, then we can give the following answer: speech act disjunction would lead to disjunctive sets of commitments, which are difficult to keep track of. Take commands as an example. Uttering a conjoined command [A & A'](s) leads, in general, to the union of the commitments that A(s) and A'(s) would have led to: A(s)  A(s'). But a disjunction of A and A' at the state s could only be captured by a set of commitment states which we would have to under stand disjunctively, {A(s), A(s')}. This is of a higher type than a simple commitment state, and further disjunctive speech acts would lead to still higher types. Hence, we cannot have speech act disjunction and a uniform type of commitment states, namely sets of commitments, at the same time. (Krifka 2001:16) Because Krifka is concerned with speech acts in semantic, not in pragmatic, terms, his response is fully relevant to us. However, its scope is limited to main clauses and, perhaps, certain special complements. (11) and (12) contain wh-complements but no speech acts (no question acts): (11) a. Sue knows what every girl is doing. b. Sue knows what two girls are doing. (12) a. Sue knows where you live and who you married. b. Sue knows where you live or who you married. The contrasts noted in main clauses disappear in know-complements. (11) and (12) are important, because the literature in general was concerned with both main-clausal and complement uses of wh-interrogatives. Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) (henceforth G&S) proposed that (8) and (10) need not be taken at face value. Quantification and coordination can operate on interrogatives that are each first lifted to generalized quantifiers. (13) Lifting of interrogative Q: P[P(Q)] where P is a property like is known by Sue, is a secret, etc. (14) Indirect conjunction/disjunction: P[P(Q1)] / P[P(Q2)] = P[P(Q1) / P(Q2)] (15) Direct conjunction/disjunction: Q1 / Q2 When the participating interrogatives are first lifted, their coordination is indirect: it pertains to sentences or verb phrases that contain interrogatives, but not to interrogatives themselves. We illustrate this with (1), repeated: 6 (16) a. Sue knows where you live or who you married. b. Lift(where_you_live) = P[P(where_you_live)] Lift(who_you_married) = P[P(who_you_married)] c. P[P(where_you_live)  P(who_you_married)] d. q[Sue_knows(q)] e. P[P(where ...)  P(who ..)](q[Sue_knows(q)]) = = Sue_knows(where ...)  Sue_knows(who ...) By invoking indirect disjunction, G&S have their cake and eat it too. Whinterrogatives joined with or do not need to run counter to the partition theory of the semantics of questions. G&S maintain that both main-clause questions and wh-complements can be lifted. According to them, the ??marked examples (8) and (10) may be more labored than (7) and (9), but they are essentially acceptable. Szabolcsi (1997) adopted the partition theory, but disagreed with G&S as to where lifting is appropriate. She argued that, unless we literally adopt Ross's performative hypothesis, according to which all main clauses are embedded under a silent performative verb, it is unnatural to interpret main clauses as generalized quantifiers in the manner of (16): main clauses will never combine with the expressions P that generalized quantifiers are functions of. The natural habitat of lifted questions is the complement position. So, if the ??-marked main-clausal (8) and (10) are acceptable at all, they must have other interpretations. (8) admits a "mention-some" question analysis with a narrow-scoping indefinite (Szabolcsi 1997: 323) and (10), a "question replacement" analysis (Szabolcsi 1997: 325). This is the same conclusion that Krifka subsequently reached with reference to speech acts. On the other hand, Szabolcsi subscribed to the use of lifting in the treatment of wh-complements. 2 The present paper will not study main-clause questions further; our focus is on wh-complements. What is the state of the art in that domain? A major development has been the discovery that although some whcomplements have strongly exhaustive readings (ones that correspond to unique true and complete answers for main-clausal questions), not all of them do. Moreover, the weaker readings cannot be obtained from the strongly exhaustive ones, but one can proceed the other way around. See Heim (1994), Beck and Rullmann (1999), Klinedinst and Rothschild (2011), Spector and Egré (2015), Theiler (2014), and Cremers and Chemla (2016), among others. 2 Szabolcsi's proposal for quantificational (11)-(12) differed from G&S's in other respects, motivated by the fact that in wh-complements, not only upward monotone quantifiers support pair-list readings. This issue was central to Szabolcsi (1997), but it does not concern us here. 7 For example, Cremers and Chemla elicited judgments for (17) in a situation in which out of four squares, two blue and two red, John correctly remembered the two blue ones as blue, but thought that one of the red squares was green and had no recollection of the color of the other red square. (17) John knew which squares were blue. A significant number of speakers judged (17) to be false, apparently assigning it a strongly exhaustive reading (John did not know about each of the squares whether it was blue or not). But a significant number of other speakers accepted (17) as true, which indicates that weaker readings are also available. The non-negotiable requirement is for John to have no false beliefs regarding the facts that the question is explicitly concerned with. Consequently, the partition theory, which does not recognize weaker readings, has been abandoned. Among others, Inquisitive Semantics has developed a non-partitional theory for questions, for reasons going beyond those discussed above. As a by-product, the disjunction of questions is predicted to be unproblematic, as far as the basic semantics goes. See Mascarenhas (2009) and Ciardelli, Groenendijk and Roelofsen (2015). 3. A single complementizer vs. one in each conjunct/disjunct 3.1 The subordinating complementizer as a type-lifter To set the stage, let us start with some English examples. Consider the following pairs. There is a subtle but systematic contrast between single-that and double-that examples: (18) Sue was surprised that John was drunk and Mary was driving. can mean: `surprised by the combination' (19) Sue was surprised that John was drunk and that Mary was driving. preferred: `surprised by this and surprised by that' (20) Sue was surprised that John drinks or Mary gambles. can mean: `surprised by the disjunction' (21) Sue was surprised that John drinks or that Mary gambles. preferred: `surprised by this or surprised by that, I am not sure which' In first-personal attitude reports, double-that results in infelicity, because it forces a reading where the speaker is not sure what he/she knows (believes, regrets, etc.): 8 (22) I know that John drinks or Mary gambles. felicitous: `I know the disjunction' (23) I know that John drinks or that Mary gambles. less felicitous: `I know this or I know that, I am not sure which I know' What explains the contrasts? Szabolcsi (2015b) proposed the simple idea that the subordinator is a type-lifter: it signals that its clause is slated to be the argument of an embedding verb. I.e. that John drank is a function from embedding verbs to VPs. Now, if the subordinator is present in both clauses, they are first lifted individually and then get conjoined/disjoined. The interpretation is (a), which guarantees that the embedding verb distributes into both conjuncts/disjuncts, as in (b): (24) a. that A and/or that B = P[P(A)] / P[P(B)] = = P[P(A) / P(B)] b. P[P(A) / P(B)](verb) = verb(A) / verb(B) If only one subordinator is present, then it is at least possible for A and B to be directly conjoined/disjoined and, therefore, for the verb not to be distributed into the individual conjuncts/disjuncts: (25) a. that A and/or B = P[P(A/ B)] b. P[P(A / B)](verb) = verb(A / B) Why is it only possible, not necessary? Even if the subordinator is a lifter, lifting might also apply freely (as it is customarily assumed). If so, then the single-that examples are predicted to be ambiguous. It is plausible that there is an additional economy constraint that prefers as little lifting as is compatible with the overt material. (But see also 3.4.) (26) Free lifting (possible but dispreferred in view of the overtly marked double-that option in (24)): that A and/or B = P[P(A)] / P[P(B)] = = P[P(A) / P(B)] This seems like a correct first approximation of the judgments. It is definitely a correct approximation of the Hungarian data. 3.2 Coordination of interrogative and declarative complements Starting with Mascarenhas (2009), one argument in favor of the Inquisitive Semantic notion of meaning has been that it provides a common denominator for declaratives and interrogatives, and thus enables us to conjoin them. Roelofsen (2014) provides the following example: 9 (27) Bill knows which girl Fred likes and that he asked her out on a date. Note, however, that this sentence becomes ungrammatical on the intended reading if that is omitted, and thus the suspicion arises that (27) involves VP-conjunction, facilitated by lifting: (28) Bill knows which girl Fred likes and he asked her out on a date. cannot mean `Bill knows (this and that)' only means `Bill knows this and Bill asked her out' Thus the contrast between (27) and (28) supports the lifting-inducing role of the subordinator (irrespective of what it entails for Inquisitive semantics). 3.3 The complementizer as a "bridge" What if that is, in fact, not a type-lifter, i.e. if that John was drunk cannot be regarded as a function that takes a propositional attitude verb as an argument? Moulton (2015), following Kratzer (2006), argues that the attitude verb does not select for a proposition. Instead, it selects for an abstract individual (notated as xc) whose content is given by the complement clause, in the manner of Predicate Modification: (29) a. CONT(xc)(w) = {w' : w' is compatible with the intentional content determined by xc in w} b. [[ C ]] = p xc w [CONT(xc)(w) = p] c. [[ that Fred left ]] = xc w [CONT(xc)(w) = = w'[Fred left in w']] (30) xc w [John explained(xc)(e)(w)]  xc w [CONT(xc)(w) = that Fred left] = xc w [John explained(xc)(e)(w)  CONT(xc)(w) = that Fred left] (31) -closure and event-abstraction: e w xc [John explained(xc)(e)(w)  CONT(xc)(w) = that Fred left] Over and above general considerations, such an analysis would make sense for Hungarian. Recall that all complement clauses are introduced by hogy. The hogy-clause combines with the verb directly, or it first attaches to the distal demonstrative "head" az. (All the clause types to be introduced in the next section work identically.) For consistency, I continue to gloss hogy as SUB. 10 (32) a. (az,) hogy Kati otthon van DEM SUB Kate home is `that Kate is at home' b. (az) a tény, hogy Kati otthon van DEM the fact SUB Kate home is `the fact that Kate is at home' Let us assume that the hogy-clause always attaches to DEM, but DEM may be phonetically null. (See de Cuba and Ürögdi (2009) for details.) It is plausible that (az,) hogy Kati otthon van is a generalized quantifier over content individuals xc, and hogy is a "bridge", as per Moulton, between such an individual and the complement content. (33) Pexc [P(xc)(e)(w)  CONT(xc)(w) = that Kate is at home] The same hogy-construction in Hungarian specifies quotational content, something that English expresses with apposition: (34) a. az (a szó,) hogy "nem" DEM the word SUB nem `the word nem' [expresses negation] b. az (a mondat,) hogy "Nem megyek haza" DEM the sentence SUB Nem megyek haza `the sentence Nem megyek haza' [occurred twice] Note that none of these constructions involves a relative clause. Relative clauses also have demonstrative "heads", but they are introduced by relative pronouns (e.g. amelyik `which') and not by hogy. Those are not interchangeable; the strings below are word salads. (35) a. * az (a tény), amelyik Kati otthon van *`the fact which Kate is at home' b. * az (a kérdés), amelyik Kati hol van *`the question which where Kate is' c. * az (a szó,) amelyik "nem" *`the word which nem' How does such a rethinking of the role of hogy affect the coordination situation? The content of one xc cannot be identical to two distinct propositions. If we have two propositions, one possibility is to conjoin/disjoin them before the result specifies the content of xc with the help of one hogy: (36) Pexc [P(xc)(e)(w)  CONT(xc)(w) = that Kate is at home and/or Mary is at home] 11 Alternatively, two distinct quantifiers can be formed with the two propositions and they are subsequently conjoined/disjoined. Once (37) combines with the matrix verb, the result is no different from (24). (37) Pexc [P(xc)(e)(w)  CONT(xc)(w) = that K ... ] / Peyc [P(yc)(e)(w)  CONT(yc)(w) = that M ...] = P[exc [P(xc)(e)(w)  CONT(xc)(w) = that K ...] / eyc [P(yc)(e)(w)  CONT(yc)(w) = that M ...]] (P(yc)(e)(w) should really be <e,t> ; we intend to lift over the matrix verb.) If this is correct, the results of the lifting account of the single-hogy vs. double-hogy contrast can be replicated. 3.4 A caveat re: az, the demonstrative "head" Further work will be needed to fully figure in the contribution of az. Whether az can be present at all is contingent on the embedding verb and on topic-focus relations. In principle there are five possibilities, of which the work I am reporting in this paper has scrutinized the contrast between (d) and (e). (38) a. az, hogy S1 és/vagy az, hogy S2 DEM SUB S1 and/or DEM SUB S2 b. az, hogy S1 és/vagy hogy S2 c. az, hogy S1 és/vagy S2 d. hogy S1 és/vagy hogy S2 e. hogy S1 és/vagy S2 Scrutinizing the contrast especially between (a) and (b) might help fine-tune the analyses. Recall from 3.1 that English single-that sentences were tentatively claimed to be ambiguous between a direct and an indirect coordination reading. The more careful survey of Hungarian data has yielded the same result for single-hogy wh-complements. At the end of 3.1, I proposed that this ambiguity is due to the fact that lifting can freely apply to the second member of the coordination. Whether lifting is indeed a free operation (as generally assumed in the semantic literature) or such sentences can contain phonetically null elements (that, hogy, az, perhaps even it) that correspond to the operations that result in indirect coordination is an interesting question. However, I have not done either the descriptive or the theoretical work needed to address it. It is entirely left to future research. 12 3.5 Interim summary This section addressed how and why the presence of iterated complementizers correlates with indirect coordination involving lifting. It was proposed that the subordinating complementizer can be interpreted either as a typelifter or as a "bridge" in the spirit of Moulton (2015). In either case, two complementizers will correspond to two generalized quantifiers, and the embedding verb will be distributed over the members of the coordination. Thus, Sue was surprised that John was drunk and that Mary was driving will be interpreted as Sue experiencing two surprises. Examples with a single complementizer will be able to carry the direct coordination (single surprise) reading. If such examples are in fact ambiguous, the type-lifter analysis easily allows for separate liftings to occur even in the absence of a second overt complementizer, subject to some economy condition. For simplicity, the rest of the paper will talk about indirect coordination in terms of lifting, but the availability of the alternative analysis in terms of Moulton (2015) will always be assumed. 4. Subordinators in wh-complements Hungarian has an invariant subordinating complementizer (hogy /hod'/) in all complement-clause types. It will be glossed as SUB. (39) Tudom, hogy Kati otthon van. know.1SG SUB Kate home is `I know that Kate is at home' (40) Tudom, hogy Kati otthon van-e. know.1SG SUB Kate home is-INTERROG `I know whether Kate is at home' (41) Tudom, hogy Kati hol van. know.1SG SUB Kate where is `I know where Kate is' (42) Követelem, hogy Kati otthon legyen. demand.1SG SUB Kate home be.SUBJ.3SG `I demand that Kate be at home' Invariant hogy makes it easy to examine the same coordination patterns across all clause types. Other languages also have separate subordinators in wh-complements, even though they may not be identical to the subordinators in declarative complements. Korean ci in (43) perhaps plays a role similar to hogy in (41), although it is not an all-purpose subordinator (S. Nam, W. Chung, p.c.): 13 (43) John-un sonnim-i eti-eyse o-ass-nun-ci John-TOP guest-NOM where-DAT come-PRES-SUB alanay-ss-ta. figure.out-PAST-DECL `John figured out where the guest comes from' 5. Veridical vs. non-veridical contexts: Haida and Repp 2013 As was mentioned in the introduction, Szabolcsi (1997) made the following claim based on Hungarian examples like (3)-(4) and their Korean counterparts, and concluded that the obligatoriness of the double-hogy (double-ci) pattern supported the need for indirect wh-complement disjunction. (44) Complementizer hogy is required in each wh-complement disjunct, but optional in the second wh-complement conjunct. The matrix verb Szabolcsi used was `find out', because such factives played a central role in G&S's theory of questions. Haida and Repp (2013) argue that the disjunction of wh-complements is unacceptable in a veridical environment, but acceptable in a decreasing or non-veridical one. The first part of their claim is in agreement with Szabolcsi's, but the second part is not: it clearly indicates that we must go beyond considering veridical matrix clauses. I acknowledge that Haida and Repp's (H&R) discovery has a counterpart in Hungarian. When megtud `find out' is replaced by nem tud `not know', or a monotone decreasing subject or adverb is added to the matrix clause, the single-hogy pattern becomes natural. (The improvement under negation is more marginal in Korean; W. Chung, p.c.) I will argue, however, that H&R's discovery is by and large compatible with the "indirect wh-disjunctions only" view. It will be critical to note, in line with (26), that lifting may be available in the presence of a single (overt) subordinator. On H&R's view, wh-question disjunctions denote proper semantic questions, but are pragmatically deviant outside specific contexts. These specific contexts are contexts that license polarity-sensitive items (PSIs): decreasing or non-veridical ones. In PSI-licensing contexts, the pragmatic inadequacy disappears due to a pragmatically induced recalibration of the implicature triggered by or (cf. Chierchia 2004). H&R write, [29] The police did [not [find out [orP [Q1 how Paul got home that night] [or' or [Q2 when Paul got home that night]]]]] The unenriched meaning of [29] that occurs in a non-veridical context 14 is given in [30]. [30] ¬find_out (the_police, ans({p1 ∨ p2 | p1 ∈ [[Q1]]g ∧ p2 ∈ [[Q2]]g })) [31] ans(Q) = λw.∀p(p ∈ Q → p(w)) If we assume, as before, that Paul in fact got home only by bus and only at 3 a.m., [30] is the semantic object in [32], where ANS is the proposition in [33]. [32] ¬find_out(the_police, ANS) [33] ANS = λw(Paul got home by bus in w ∨ Paul got home at 3 a.m. in w) In contrast, a locally enriched meaning that occurs in a veridical context: [14] * The police found out how or when Paul got home that night. [45] find_out(the_police, OALT (ans({p1 ∨ p2 | p1 ∈ [[Q1]]g ∧ p2 ∈ [[Q2]]g }))) pbus and p3am are true in the actual world: they are elements of [[Q1]]g and [[Q2]]g, respectively, which are sets of true answers. This means that the enriched embedded proposition, i.e. (pbus ∨ p3am) ∧ ¬(pbus ∧ p3am), is false in the actual world. This produces a presupposition failure under the factive verb find out, and more generally, a failure of the existence presupposition of the embedded wh-question. That is we assume that a wh-question Q presupposes that there is a true answer, which is not satisfied by the pragmatically enriched answer to Q. This also explains why wh-disjunctions neither can be embedded under nonfactive verbs like tell (not illustrated). (Haida and Repp 2013: 266) I do not find the argument that these examples represent direct disjunctions compelling. Within the immediate scope of decreasing operators (DE) it is impossible to distinguish the following two constellations: (45) a. DE > verb(Q1 or Q2) b. DE > verb(Q1) or verb(Q2) Compare: (46) a. The police didn't find out (how he got home or when he got home). b. The police didn't (find out how he got home or find out when he got home). 15 Szabolcsi's (1997) claim was that what look like disjunctions of wh-complements are in fact results of lifting, so that they are disjunctions of VPs. Contexts in which the truth conditions of the two structures are indistinguishable are not suitable for arguing against that position. Indeed, I believe that the DE environments discovered by H&R work so well because of the above equivalence. That is, I believe that they are in fact cases of lifting within the scope of the DE operator. In some non-decreasing, non-veridical cases, too (not from H&R) the "lift within the scope of an operator" account seems very satisfactory. It involves some lexical decomposition: (47) Mary is investigating where John lives or what he does for a living. `Mary is trying (to find out where John lives or to find out what he does for a living)' In other words, the lifting analysis doesn't make it necessary to interpret this sentence as "Mary is investigating this or investigating that". In fact, as J. Groenendijk (p.c.) points out, that interpretation would not arise in the original 1984 framework either. In G&S's terms, investigate, like wonder, is an intensional question-embedding verb. Therefore the basic (non-extensionalized) interpretation is as below, which does not entail that Mary investigates this question or Mary investigates that question: (48) a. Mary is investigating (where John lives or what he does for a living). b. investigate (i[j[x[John lives at x in i] = x[John lives at x in j]  j[x[John does x in i] = x[John does x in j]]]) G&S would not need to decompose investigate into try to find out. I point out the possibility of decomposition, because this assimilates the case at hand to the others under consideration. H&R's non-veridical example [37] would also be amenable to the "lift within the scope of another operator" analysis that I am advocating, if speakers indeed judge that the investigator should get the money: [37] Suspicious wife to private investigator: Find out how or when my husband returned to his hotel last night! I'll give you $1000 if you succeed. A week after, the private investigator tells the wife that her husband returned to his hotel by bus or at 3 a.m. Should he get the money? (Haida and Repp 2013: 267) 16 The reason is that the imperative undoubtedly involves an operator above the verb: (49) Find out (how my husband returned or when my husband returned). `bring-it-about that you (find out how my husband returned or find out when my husband returned)' What do the Hungarian data contribute to this debate? It appears that both single-hogy and double-hogy support indirect disjunctions. However, double-hogy is strongly correlated with maximal-scoping disjunction, whereas single-hogy in this domain of data favors intermediate-scoping disjunction. See section 8 for a survey. In sum, it seems the non-veridical examples can be generally accounted for on the lifting proposal. If so, then we are back to the veridical case for a potential source of evidence for direct disjunction. 6. A new veridical test case in Ciardelli et al. (2015) Ciardelli et al. (2015: 80-84) offer a new data point in favor of the Inquisitive Semantics claim that wh-questions and wh-complements can be directly disjoined without a problem. They observe that (50) is felicitous as a single question. (50) Where can we rent a car, or who might have one that we could borrow? They add that the Hungarian wh-complement version of (50) also works with a single hogy (data and judgments credited to D. Farkas, A. Lipták and A. Szabolcsi). The judgments are the same with azt vizsgálja `is investigating' in the place of megtudta `found out'. (51) Péter megtudta, hogy hol tudunk autót bérelni, Peter found.out SUB where can.2PL car.acc rent vagy (hogy) kinek van egy, amit kölcsönvehetnénk. or SUB who has one which.acc could.borrow.1PL `Peter found out where we can rent a car or who has one that we could borrow' They propose that the reason why direct disjunctions of main-clause questions and wh-complements often sound unacceptable or incoherent is pragmatic. They comment: 17 The disjunction of two questions expresses an issue that may be resolved equally well by providing information resolving the first disjunct, or by providing information resolving the second disjunct. It is difficult to see what kind of motivation (or what kind of decision problem, to follow van Rooij (2003)) a speaker could have that would lead her to raise or even consider the issue expressed by [Where do you live or who did you marry?]. This is very different in the case of [Where can we rent a car, or who might have one that we could borrow?]: in this case, it is immediate to reconstruct the sort of motivation that may lead a speaker to consider the relevant issue. We suggest that the different cognitive naturalness of the two issues at stake underlies the difference in the perceived felicity of the associated questions. (Ciardelli et al. 2015: 83-84) I agree with the judgments and with the insight that the existence of an easily recognizable issue to which both questions pertain is an important factor in the intuitive acceptability of (50)-(51). But reference to decision problems is not explanatory. Van Rooij's Bayesian theory of questioning is not Ciardelli et al's theory of questions; decision problems or utility do not occur anywhere else in their paper. It is not even immediately clear to what extent the two theories are compatible, since van Rooij expressly argues for a partition semantics, whereas Ciardelli et al. abadon partitions. In general, I see no reason (in any case, no reason supplied by Ciardelli et al.) to impose the restriction that an interrogative disjunction should only acceptable if it responds to an easily recognizable decision problem. Thus, the reasoning does not explain why Hungarian and Korean so strongly prefer wide scope `or' readings and, consequently, subordinators in each disjunct, in most veridical contexts. I raise the possibility that examples such as (50)-(51) represent a special kind of conjunctions that I will call exemplifications. Exemplifications are introduced in the next section. 7. Exemplifications The distinction between and and or may appear to be among the simplest ones, but surprisingly, it is not. In exemplifications, the word or could easily be replaced by and although, I will argue, the replacement would often give the feeling of an exhaustive list, instead of an incomplete, open one. The reader will note that some of the examples below, and some of the examples he or she may recall having seen or even produced, contain possibility modals or other plural existentials. If all exemplifications were such, it would be relatively straightforward to subsume them under the rubric of free choice (Zimmermann 2000, Menéndez-Benito 2005, Klinedinst 2007, Fox 2007, Zimmermann 2008, and others): 18 (52) a. He may be in London or in Paris = He may be in London and he may be in Paris b. Some passengers became nauseous or had trouble breathing = Some passengers became nauseous and some passengers had trouble breathing. c. You may take any of the cards from the discard pile = You may take card1 and may take card2 and ... But not all exemplifications conform to the free choice patterns. Especially in Hungarian, many of them do not involve either explicit or implicit modals. Moreover, as the nickname indicates, their most striking characteristic is that they offer open, incomplete lists. Non-exhaustivity is not a robust characteristic of free choice at all. Below are naturally-occurring examples from Hungarian and English. Although it is quite clear that "exemplification or" also occurs without flags like among others or for example, I included such flags in my Google searches to ensure that we know what the writer actually had in mind. "Exemplification" is attested with all kinds of phrases; it is not specific for whinterrogatives. Here is a small random sample for Hungarian (the sites were all accessible on 8/1/16). In the first hit, notice that both Szabó and Csapó played in the soccer team. In the second, each of the three celebrities are claimed to have worn tooth jewelry. In the third, contracts must specify both the amount and the due date of the rent (note that this item actually involves wh-complements!). (53) A Kiss Imre által vezetett Tatabányában pályára lépett többek között Szabó György, vagy Csapó Károly, akik még ma is jó játékerőt képviselnek ... `Among others, György Szabó or Károly Csapó, who continue to be strong players today, have played in [the team] Tatabánya, led by Imre Kiss' https://www.szeretgom.hu/content/74680-meglepetessel-zarult-arozi-kupa ... de többek között Chris Brown, Rihanna vagy P. Diddy is megjelent már a furcsa aranyráccsal a fogain. `... but among others Chris Brown, Rihanna or P. Diddy too have appeared with the strange gold grill on their teeth' http://www.life.hu/trend/20131003-kulonleges-fogekszerekfogkristaly-aranyfog-fogtetko-es-kreativ-fogszabalyzo.html A szerződésbe rögzíteni kell többek között, hogy mekkora a bérletidíj összege, vagy mikor fizetendő a bérletidíj. 19 `The contract must specify, among other things, how much is the rent or when payment of the rent is due' http://docplayer.hu/16171585-Udvozoljuk-itthon-suupohja-regioban-informacios-fuzet-suupohja-regioban-elo-bevandorlokszamara.html Amerikai kutatók összefüggést találtak az időskori elbutulás (demencia) és egyes gyakran használt, többek között altatóként vagy allergia kezelésére adott gyógyszerek szedése között. `American researchers have found a connection between old age mental decline (dementia) and the taking of certain frequently used medications that are prescribed among others as sleep medications or to treat allergia' http://www.eletforma.hu/test-es-lelek/elbutulast-okozhat-az-allergiagyogyszer/ A politikus tíz pontos „Hazaváró-kiáltványt" tett az asztalra, amelyet a következő hetekben többek között Berlinben, Párizsban, Bécsben vagy épp a szintén sokezer magyarnak új otthont adó Máltán fog megvitatni és kibővíteni az érintettekkel. `The politician put on the table a ten-pont `Come-home manifesto', which will be discussed and expanded in the coming weeks with the help of those concerned, among others in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, or indeed in Malta, which is a new home to many thousands of Hungarians' http://nepszava.hu/cikk/1069744-ujhelyi-orban-erzeketlenulletagadta-a-problemat de az EU több tagállamában, többek között Belgiumban, Franciaországban vagy Görögországban a terjesztésük egyáltalán nem, vagy csak erős korlátokkal legális. `... in many EU-member countries, among others in Belgium, France, or Greece, their distribution is not legal or is seriously constrained.' http://hirhatar.com/buntetest-von-maga-utan-ha-eiffel-tornyos-szelfit-tesz-a-facebookra/ Az ilyen műkövet használják többek között sírkőként, vagy szabadtéri burkolásra (térkő), de készülhet belőle... `Such artificial stone is used among other things for grave stones or as outside pavement; but it can be used to make... www.atriokert.hu/mukooszlop.html A kiújulás megjósolhatatlan, de többek között fertőzés, stressz vagy terhesség is kiválthatja. `Recurrence is unpredictable, but among others infection, stress or pregnancy too can trigger it' www.egeszsegtukor.hu/.../lupuszazezerarcukor.html 20 Comparable naturally-occurring data can be found in English. In the first hit, notice that the label must state each and every one of the circumstances listed, and the same item may well involve both a nutritional change and the presence of an allergen. In the second, all of Auden, MacNeice, Isherwood and Orwell are major figures whose reputations may be affected. And so on. (54) The label must state, for example, the nature of a nutritional or compositional change, or the presence of an allergen. http://www.tpsgc-pwgsc.gc.ca/ongc-cgsb/programme-program/normes-standards/internet/032-0315/index-eng.html In what ways are the reputations of such major figures as Auden, MacNeice, Isherwood or Orwell enhanced or compromised by their continued associations with the period? https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=lit-lang-cultureevents;58566561.1605 Such cells are, for example, cells like mucosal cells or intestinal cells. Patent US9243293 Genes associated with posttraumatic-stress ... www.google.com/patents/US9243293 Such sectors are, for example, information technology, consumer staples, telecommunications, or utilities, each of which behaves differently. Portfolio construction via bottom-up UBS guest speaker University ... https://www.coursera.org/.../portfolio-construction-via-bottom-u.. Such sites are, for example, sports associations or music clubs, communal gardens or community centres. Download www.mmg.mpg.... When you provide personal data to ConRes, the potential uses include, among others, providing requested information or educational materials, providing ConRes services via online access, or training or educational activities. https://www.conres.com/conres-your-source-for-high-technologysolutions/continental-resources-privacy-policy/ Knowledge of the existing mutations in a given patient facilitates, among others, cancer prevention or the establishment of personal cancer therapy. http://www.seqomics.hu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=17&Itemid=121 Some examples include a person's age or whether a person smokes. http://www.cdc.gov/socialdeterminants/Definitions.html 21 Exemplifications occur in generic, modal, or at least quantificational contexts, i.e. "multiple-event contexts", in contrast to episodic, "single event" ones. (See Szabolcsi 2002 for a similar observation about PPIs.) It is clear, though, that non-modal, non-quantificational, realis contexts will do. See many of the Hungarian examples above, for instance the one that translates as `... but among others Chris Brown, Rihanna or P. Diddy too have appeared with the strange gold grill on their teeth'. (Note also the interesting occurrence of is `too' at the end of some of the open lists.) I grant that there are some cross-linguistic differences. The most striking difference is that in Hungarian, one finds hundreds of Google hits that come from colloquial texts about everyday topics (the tooth jewelry example and the soccer team example are representative), whereas in English, it is difficult to find examples that are not from legal texts or manuals. I base my preliminary proposal on Hungarian, leaving open the issue of the cross-linguistic difference. I propose that the use of plain és `and' suggests an exhaustive list, even when the conjunction occurs in non-focused position (as diagnosed by the particle-verb order in megjelent). (55) a. Kati és Mari megjelent a fogadáson. Kate and Mary showed.up the reception.at b. Megjelent a fogadáson Kati és Mari. showed.up the reception.at Kate and Mary `Kate and Mary showed up at the reception [suggests that they are the only relevant people who did]' In this respect, és `and' contrasts with X is (és) Y is `X too (and) Y too = X as well as Y': (56) a. Kati is (és) Mari is megjelent. Kate too and Mary too showed up b. Megjelent Kati is (és) Mari is. showed.up Kate too and Mary too `Kate as well as Mary showed up [if anything, suggests that other people did too]' Brasoveanu and Szabolcsi (2013) and Szabolcsi (2015: 167-168, 180-184) discuss this latter construction in some detail. The particles in (56) serve to highlight that Kate was similar to someone else in showing up and Mary was similar to someone else in showing up. This meaning is apparently rather resistant to exclusive strengthening. So, in Hungarian, one way to avoid the impression of giving a list that exhausts the contextually relevant cases is to use X is (és) Y is, and it could indeed replace vagy in the exemplification contexts. 22 I am not ready to propose a formal analysis of exemplification, but at least two possibilities come to mind. One can be traced back to Szabolcsi (1997), where it was argued that several cases that G&S treated as choice readings were in fact "mention-some" readings: Also, there is a type of data that has not been mentioned yet: disjunctive questions. (iii) Who did Fido or King bite? OK King bit John On Groenendijk and Stokhof's analysis, these are choice questions, too (and, according to their judgment, the intuitively best case). What I am going to suggest is that (iii) is not an instance of the choice reading. Rather, the sole interpretation of the question is one where the wh-phrase has widest scope, i.e., `Who is such that either Fido or King bit him ?' The answer given above is a partial answer (presented in a co-operatively explicit format à la Srivastav and Krifka), which is elicited under particular pragmatic circumstances that Groenendijk and Stokhof (1984) call "mention-some" contexts. In the same vein, I assume that the pertinent distributed group reading of (ii) Who/which boys did two dogs bite? is also a "mentionsome" example, rather than a choice reading. (Szabolcsi 1997: 323) Szabolcsi (1997) did not attempt to extend this analysis to the full-clausal disjunctions that are in the focus of the present paper. One reason had to do with the acceptability judgments in Hungarian and Korean discussed above. Another reason was that it was not clear how Who did Fido bite or who did King bite? could be compositionally equated with Who did Fido or King bite?. However, Hirsch (2016) proposes just that kind of "mention-some" analysis, using current assumptions. So one possibility is that exemplifications in the wh-interrogative domain are subsumed under "mention-some" questions. Recall though that exemplifications are not restricted to interrogatives. Another possibility is that the exemplification construction is a conjunction, not a disjunction. A little more precisely, it is equivalent to a narrow-scope conjunction. This contrasts with the free-choice cases in (52), where the connective would scope over the possibility modal: may be in London or Paris = may be in London and may be in Paris. There have been multiple consonant proposals in recent literature to the effect that expressions that look like existentials/disjunctions are interpreted as universals/conjunctions via recursive exhaustification without a scalar alternative. Bar-Lev and Margulis (2013), Mitrović (2014), and Bowler (2014) make the case for such analyses of Modern Hebrew kol `every, any', Indo-European and Japanese particles of the mo kind, and Warlbiri manu, in the spirit of Fox (2007). Especially interesting to us is Mitrović's proposal 23 for constructions that are equivalent to X is (és) Y is `X as well as Y', since it might help establish a strong link between the form (vagy `or') and the incomplete conjunction interpretation of exemplifications. Both the "mention-some" analysis and the conjunction analysis may explain why or/vagy is happily usable without any hallmark of lifting in (50)- (51). It is not difficult to interpret those sentences as giving just two examples of how one could get hold of a car, and indeed, they are perfectly compatible with both renting and borrowing being mentioned as viable options in the given situation. In the absence of a settled analysis of exemplification it is certainly not possible to discard this important case, provided by Ciardelli et al. (2015), as an argument for the direct disjoinability of questions or wh-complements. But the possibility to put exemplification to that use should be borne in mind. 8. Surveys of Hungarian and Korean disjunctions: single-hogy/single-ci vs. double-hogy/double-ci The 1997 claims about Hungarian, cf. (1)-(2), were based on my own observations and judgments. As has been mentioned throughout this paper, the contrasts do not appear to be as black-and-white as reported back then: there are good uses of the single-hogy pattern with wh-complement disjunctions. This was confirmed primarily by consulting hundreds of naturally-occurring examples obtained by Google searches. I have also attempted to check some of the critical cases against the judgments of other Hungarian speakers. Although I was not able to collect data that can be meaningfully statistically evaluated, it will be useful to report the informal findings. They confirm that Hungarian makes a reliable distinction between the acceptability and/or interpretation of single-hogy and double-hogy variants. WooJin Chung, who investigated some Korean counterparts came to the same conclusion. These data are discussed in Appendix A and Appendix B. They may be eventually presented as online supplements. 9. One potential way to predict the need for indirect wh-disjunction This paper has made two main claims. One is that the presence of a subordinating complementizer in each member of a coordination very strongly correlates with indirect coordination (first lift, then coordinate) in Hungarian and in Korean. The second claim was that especially veridical contexts greatly prefer indirect wh-complement disjunction, as diagnosed by subordinators, and it was observed that even non-veridical contexts can be handled that way, using intermediate-scope lifting. Some potential counterexamples 24 remained, which may or may not be cases of exemplification (conjunction masquerading as disjunction). If these, mainly descriptive results are by and large correct, we are left with a theoretical question: why is it that wh-complements prefer, or even demand, indirect disjunction? Recall that the partition theory predicted this, but there have been good reasons to abandon the partition theory. So the question arises anew. Szabolcsi (2015b) observed that Inquisitive Semantics could in principle produce such a prediction. Groenendijk & Roelofsen (2009) and AnderBois (2012) make the following assumptions: (57) a. A question is both inquisitive and non-informative. b.  is inquisitive iff it contains more than one alternative. c.  is non-informative iff its alternatives cover the set of worlds (do not exclude any possibility). To these we may add a proposal from Roelofsen and Farkas (2015:471): Following Zimmermann (2000), Pruitt (2007), Biezma (2009), Biezma and Rawlins (2012), and Roelofsen (2013b), we will think of these types of sentences as lists. ... The only non-standard provision is that the noninquisitive projection operator, !, is applied to every list item. The rationale for this is that every list item is to be seen, intuitively speaking, as one block, i.e., as contributing a single possibility to the proposition expressed by the list as a whole. This is ensured by applying !, which, roughly speaking, takes a set of possibilities and returns its union... Rule for translating the body of a list: [item1 or . . . or itemn] > !1  ...  !n . Now take Who is the father or who is the mother? In a small universe, Who is the father? would be as in (58a), with two alternatives; similarly for Who is the mother?. If Who is the father or who is the mother? is formed by plain inquisitive disjunction, all four alternatives are preserved and the result remains inquisitive, as in (58b). If, however, each disjunct undergoes the ! operation that flattens it, then each disjunct will consist of a single block, as in (59). Their  will be the same. Note that now or  , it is defined in terms of  and !. 25 (58) a. b. (59) If each disjunct is flattened by !, then both the disjuncts and their  are as follows: Since (59) has only one alternative, it is not inquisitive. Then Q1 or Q2 does not qualify as a question. Thus, this combination of assumptions would derive the result that questions cannot be directly disjoined. However, this combination of assumptions is not one that more recent work in Inquisitive Semantics entertains. Most importantly, the requirement of inquisitivity has been dropped from the definition of questions (see e.g., Ciardelli et al. 2015: 34).3 This highlights the fact that the predictions do not simply depend on algebraic properties or compositional semantics; a higherlevel decision as to what we understand questions to be plays a critical role. 3 Definition 2.40. We say that a proposition P is:  a statement iff it is non-inquisitive;  a question iff it is non-informative;  a hybrid iff it is both informative and inquisitive;  a tautology iff it is neither informative nor inquisitive. 26 Appendix A. Hungarian disjunctions: single-hogy vs. double-hogy A.1 Naturally occurring data and elicited judgments The 1997 claims about Hungarian, cf. (1)-(2), were based on my own observations and judgments. I have attempted to check them against naturally occurring data and the judgments of other speakers. Although I was not able to collect data that can be meaningfully statistically evaluated, it will be useful to report the informal findings. They confirm that Hungarian makes a reliable distinction between the acceptability and/or interpretation of singlehogy and double-hogy variants. Naturally occurring data. I individually examined ca. 600 distinct Hungarian Google hits produced by searches of the form "(not) verb hogy whword * or (hogy)", with various different propositional attitude verbs. The searches turned up hits where the connective vagy `or' was immediately followed by a second instance of hogy and a wh-word, as well as hits where it was immediately followed by just a wh-word. The basic finding was that when the verb is factive (tud `know' or megtud `find out') and it is not within the scope of negation or some other operator, wh-complement disjunctions with double-hogy are overwhelmingly more frequent than ones with a single hogy. But indeed, when (meg)tud is preceded by nem `not', kevesen `few people', ritkán `rarely', or even mindig `always', wh-complement disjunctions with a single hogy and those with hogy in both disjuncts alternate fairly freely. That is, attested forms agree with my 1997 judgments, modulo Haida and Repp's observation about decreasing contexts. Elicited judgments. In Sept. 2015, I compiled a survey for Hungarian speakers that was distributed to 30 participants by B. Faragó in Hungary. The survey had 9x4 items (plus fillers), arranged in 4 versions. Each item was judged by 5 to 8 participants. This is a very small sample, but I also had the opportunity to discuss the materials with three Hungarian colleagues, B. Gyuris, A. Lipták, and Zs. Zvolenszky, to whom I am very grateful. The quadruplets had the following structure. The first two items laid out two situations and asked participants to choose which of two situations the single-hogy and the double-hogy sentences better correspond to; the second two items asked participants to choose which of the single-hogy and doublehogy sentences is better suited to describe those same situations. "Neither" and "both" were among the possible responses. A.2 veridical and negated matrix verb contexts (A-B-C-D) (A) Kati megmondta nekünk, hogy mennyi idős a néni vagy (hogy) mi a betegsége. "Kate told us HOGY how old the lady was or (HOGY) 27 what her health problem was" (B) Edit kiderítette, hogy a vendég honnan származik vagy (hogy) mi a foglalkozása. "Edith figured out HOGY where the guest hailed from or (HOGY) what his profession was" (C) Mari lerajzolta, hogy hol kell átvágni az erdőn, vagy (hogy) merre megy a busz. "Mary sketched HOGY where we can cross the woods or (HOGY) where the bus runs" (D) Zoli nem tudja, hogy mikor van a tárgyalás, vagy (hogy) melyik cégnél van a tárgyalás. "Zoli doesn't know HOGY when the meeting is taking place or (HOGY) at which firm the meeting is taking place" In veridical (A-B-C), the embedding verb (`told us', `figured out', or `sketched in drawing') was the only operator in the matrix clause. In all those cases double-hogy was almost always interpreted with wide scope or (indirect disjunction), and the wide scope or situation (`this happened or that happened') was almost always expressed using double-hogy. The same wide-scope or / double-hogy correlation held in (D), where the embedding predicate was negated (`doesn't know'). Note that Hungarian differs from English in two respects. One, vagy `or' is a positive polarity item (PPI) for most speakers, and two, vagy happily scopes above an immediately c-commanding negation. Its behavior is like that of English someone. See Szabolcsi (2002, 2004). In veridical (A-B-C), single-hogy was mostly interpreted in the same way, with wide scope or, but one third of the speakers picked situations in which someone told us, figured out, or sketched a disjunction. In situations where a disjunction was told us, figured out, or sketched, the preferable expressions were balanced between single-hogy and double-hogy, but 40% responded that neither is a suitable expression. In (D) with the negated verb, few speakers interpreted the single-hogy sentence with wide-scope or; the majority responded that the sentence is not usable; and no one interpreted it as `not>or'. In situations where neither disjuncts were true (`not>or'), almost no one found either single-hogy or double-hogy applicable. Again, recall that Hungarian vagy `or' is a PPI for most speakers. In sum, in (A-B-C-D), double-hogy is almost always interpreted as `(neg) verb wh-CP1 or (neg) verb wh-CP2', and that interpretation is highly preferably expressed by double-hogy. But, single-hogy is also preferably interpreted as `verb wh-CP1 or verb wh-CP2' by two thirds of the speakers, and when the situation would require 28 disjunction within the wh-complement, many speakers reject both patterns in the veridical examples and almost all speakers reject it in the negated example. Single-hogy is never the preferred expression in any of these situations, although it sometimes sneaks by as a possible option. When it is accepted, it is almost always interpreted with wide scoping or in the veridical examples. My conclusion is that single-hogy may be dispreferred even as a syntactic pattern in wh-complements. But, moreover, the meaning that it would most straightforwardly carry, i.e. direct disjunction of wh-complements, is not generally accepted. The above are consistent with the following; "WH" stands for "wh-complement clause". 1) hogy WH1 vagy hogy WH2 = = P.P(WH1)  P.P(WH2) = P.P(WH1)  P(WH2) 2) hogy WH1 vagy WH2 = P.P(WH1  WH2) this meaning often rejected as inexpressible in (A-B-C-D) 3) hogy WH1 vagy WH2 = P.P(WH1)  P.P(WH2) = = P.P(WH1)  P(WH2) last resort; usually blocked by double-hogy in (A-B-C-D) As was discussed in Section 4, there are contexts in which direct disjunctions (narrow-scope or) seem to be acceptable: the car-renting example from Ciardelli et al. (2015). See the discussion of (J) below. A.3 Decreasing or universal quantifier above the matrix verb (E-F-G) (E) Lillának kevés kollégája sejti, hogy milyen filmeket néz, vagy (hogy) kivel jár. "Few colleagues of Lilla suspect HOGY what films she watches or (HOGY) who she dates" (F) Ritkán tudom, hogy a fiam miért van külföldön, vagy (hogy) mikor jön haza. "I rarely know HOGY why my son is abroad or (HOGY) when he is returning home" (G) Az orvos mindig megkérdezi, hogy hogy alszom, vagy (hogy) mennyit sétálok. "The doctor always asks HOGY how I sleep or (HOGY) how much I walk" 29 In (E-F-G), the matrix clause contained kevés 'few', ritkán `rarely', or mindig `always'. The significance of these is that here vagy `or' can take intermediate scope: `quantifier >or>verb'. The reading so obtained is indistinguishable from the `quantifier >verb>or' reading (unless the intensionality of the verb is exploited). So, if in these examples we get a larger number of readings where `or' doesn't take maximal scope, that doesn't have to mean that the disjunction scopes inside the wh-complement. Note that PPI vagy, like PPI someone, is not allergic to merely-decreasing operators. My survey didn't test whether `or' can scope over the quantifiers in the subject or the adverb, because direct object disjunctions do not usually do that in Hungarian. Whether that is possible was not the main question here. In (E)-(F), both double-hogy and single-hogy are almost always interpreted as `few>or >suspect' presented a situation in which the subject rarely knows either of the disjuncts; some speakers equally accepted single-hogy, double-hogy, or both to express this. In (G), double-hogy two-way correlated with `always>or >asks'. On the other hand, single-hogy was interpreted equally as `always>or>asks' and as `always>asks>or'. The `always>asks>or' reading is also equally expressible using single-hogy and double-hogy. (E-F-G) indicate that vagy in both double-hogy and single-hogy examples can scope between the embedding verb and the matrix quantifier. This is compatible with the above, making the first step towards the `quantifier>or>verb' readings: 4) hogy WH1 vagy hogy WH2 = P.P(WH1)  P.P(WH2) = P.P(WH1)  P(WH2) 5) hogy WH1 vagy WH2 = P.P(WH1)  P.P(WH2) = = P.P(WH1)  P(WH2) not blocked in G-H-I, in contrast to 3 Why the availability of double-hogy doesn't seem to block this interpretation of single-hogy remains to be investigated. Remarkably, in (E-F-G), a situation involving knowledge or utterance of a disjunction (`quantifier>verb>or') could be described using either singlehogy or double-hogy, to a clearly greater extent than in (A-B-C-D), which contained no quantifier: 6) hogy WH1 vagy (hogy) WH2 = P.P(WH1  WH2) (within the scope of a quantifier) This may suggests that the direct wh-disjunction reading qua reading is okay and is freely available to both constructions; but it remains unclear why being within the scope of a quantifier facilitates this. The results for (G) suggest a possible counter-analysis, namely, that the 30 readings here are not narrow disjunctions but, rather, non-exhaustive narrow scope conjunctions (exemplifications). A.4 Possible exemplifications If the reasoning about exemplifications presented in section 4 is by and large correct, then various examples that seemingly contain narrowest-scoping or/vagy may in fact have exemplification readings: conjunctions in disguise. And the fact that such readings are much more available in (E-F-G) than in (A-B-C-D) receives a natural explanation. (A-B-C-D) are basically single-event sentences, in which vagy means plain-vanilla `or'. In item (H), almost exactly replicating a naturally-occurring datum, all 4 versions asked about wide-scope `or' versus wide-scope `as well as': (H) A szerződésben rögzíteni kell többek között, hogy mekkora a bérleti díj összege, vagy (hogy) mikor fizetendő a bérleti díj. "The contract must specify among other things HOGY what is the amount of the rent or (HOGY) when the rent is to be paid" Többek között ... hogy WH1 vagy (hogy) WH2 were happily accepted as true in `as well as' situations. And situations in which both "specify WH1" and "specify WH2" were true were judged to be describable using double-hogy or using either pattern. In contrast, situations in which only one of the "specify WH1" and "specify WH2" options was true were preferably described using double-hogy by most participants; this squares with the above-found correlation between wide-scope vagy and double-hogy. Item (J) was directly based on Ciardelli et al. (2015): (J) Tudjuk, hogy hol lehet autót bérelni, vagy (hogy) kinek van egy, amit kölcsönvehetnénk. "We know HOGY where cars can be rented or (HOGY) who has one that we could borrow" The authors speculate, and I agree, that what makes this example different from the others is that the two clauses are variations on the same theme: how we can get hold of a car. Ciardelli et al. suggest that here we have a single decision problem in the sense of van Rooij, and the easy identifiability of this decision problem makes low-scoping or possible. In other words, the suggestion is that the direct disjunction of wh-complements is semantically acceptable, but it is pragmatically difficult when it is not easy to identify a single decision problem that the disjunction describes. The Hungarian survey distinguished two interpretations. In one, we are confident that we know of at least one way to get hold of a car, although we 31 are not yet sure which of the methods under consideration will work out (=at least one option). In the other, we know two or more ways to get hold of a car (=multiple options). The latter interpretation is inspired by the finding that disjunctions can serve to convey `as well as', especially when the possibility of further options is maintained, i.e. as exemplifications. In (J), double-hogy was almost always interpreted as saying that we know of multiple options, which is compatible with exemplification. One speaker responded that it can mean either multiple options or at least one option. Single-hogy was balanced: three speakers interpreted it with at least one option, one with multiple options, and two as good for both. And conversely, situations in which we know multiple options vs. at least one, were described with single-hogy, double-hogy, or both, evenly distributed. Two speakers responded, though, that the at least one option (the alleged lowscoping disjunction) was not expressible either way. In sum, the multiple options interpretation/situation is more prevalent than the at least one option interpretation/situation. This speaks for the significance of exemplification, and perhaps against that of the identifiable single decision problem. It is to be stressed that scattered judgments by 4 to 6 speakers do not constitute much of a basis for drawing a theoretical conclusion. But even these preliminary data are suggestive in showing that both the single-option scenario and the multiple-options scenario are possible -but they make a difference. If we were dealing within a plain disjunction, there should not be a difference between these two. Returning to (E-F-G), it is possible that the prevalence of these interpretations is not real: 7) hogy WH1 vagy WH2 = P.P(WH1  WH2) (within the scope of a quantifier) 8) hogy WH1 vagy hogy WH2 = P.P(WH1  WH2) (within the scope of a quantifier) Instead, in at least some of the cases, we probably have (something equivalent to) conjunctions: 9) hogy WH1 vagy WH2 = P.P(WH1)  P(WH2)  ... (in a multiple-event context) 10) hogy WH1 vagy hogy WH2 = P.P(WH1)  P(WH2)  ... (in a multiple-event context) 32 Appendix B. Korean single-ci and double-ci (thanks to WooJin Chung) The Korean examples and judgments in Szabolcsi (1997) were contributed by Seungho Nam (p.c.). In 2015, WooJin Chung constructed counterparts of the Hungarian survey questions; they were judged by him and several other Korean speakers. I am grateful for his help. This appendix does not contain all the data or all the discussion that he contributed. The Korean morpheme that I take to be the analog of the subordinating complementizer in wh-interrogatives is ci, because its occurrence has a similar effect, as originally suggested to me by S. Nam. However, W. Chung informs me that ci is probably not a subordinator. Single-ci and double-ci coordinations in Korean further differ in ways that Hungarian coordinations do not that we do not have space to discuss here. The Korean data overall support the same generalizations as the Hungarian data. But interestingly, conjunctive readings surfaced even more robustly than Hungarian exemplifications. The counterparts of veridical (A-B-C) were systematically judged to be unacceptable with one ci, and to carry the wide-scope `or' reading with two ci's. One example: (B) Single-ci -unacceptable *John-un sonnim-i eti-eyse o-ass-kena ku-uy John-TOP guest-NOM where-from come-PAST-or he-GEN cikep-i mwues-i-n-ci alanay-ss-ta. profession-NOM what-COP-PRES-CI figure.out-PAST-DECL 'John figured out where the guest comes from or what his profession is.' Double-ci -- `figured out this or figured out that' John-un sonnim-i eti-eyse o-ass-nun-ci hokun John-TOP guest-NOM where-DAT come-PRES-CI or ku-uy cikep-i mwues-i-n-ci alanay-ss-ta. he-GEN profession-NOM what-COP-PRES-CI figure.out-PAST-DECL 'John figured out where the guest comes from or what his profession is.' For some reason, the negated example (D) does not allow the intermediatescoping reading. Disjunction in Korean (in contrast) to Hungarian, is not a positive polarity item. (D) Single-ci -unacceptable *John-un hoyuy-ka encey iss-kena etten hoysa-eyse John-TOP meeting-NOM when COP-or which firm-at hoyuy-ka iss-ul-ci al-ci mos-ha-n-ta. meeting-NOM COP-FUT-CI know-CI not-do-PRES-DECL 33 'John doesn't know when the meeting will take place or at which firm the meeting will take place.' Double-ci -- `doesn't know this or doesn't know that' John-un hoyuy-ka encey iss-ul-ci hokun etten John-TOP meeting-NOM when COP-FUT-CI or which hoysa-eyse hoyuy-ka iss-ul-ci al-ci mos-ha-n-ta. firm-at meeting-NOM COP-FUT-CI know-CI not-do-PRES-DECL 'John doesn't know when the meeting will take place or at which firm the meeting will take place.' Korean does not have merely-decreasing quantifiers, so (E)-(F) are absent. (G) Single-ci -only the conjunction reading arises na-uy uysa-nun pangmwunha-l ttay-mata nay-ka ettehkey I-GEN doctor-TOP visit-FUT time-each I-NOM how ca-kena elmana ket-nun-ci mwulepo-n-ta. sleep-or how much walk-PRES-CI ask-PRES-DECL 'My doctor asks at every visit how I sleep AND how much I walk.' Double-ci -both conjunction and disjunction readings are possible na-uy uysa-nun pangmwunha-l ttay-mata nay-ka ettehkey I-GEN doctor-TOP visit-FUT time-each I-NOM how ca-nun-ci hokun elmana ket-nun-ci mwulepo-n-ta. sleep-PRES-CI or how much walk-PRES-CI ask-PRES-DECL 'My doctor asks at every visit how I sleep or/and how much I walk.' (H) Single-ci -unacceptable *kyeyakse-nun yele kes-tul cwung welsey-ka elma-i-kena contract-TOP many thing-PL among rent-NOM how.much-COP-or encey imtay-ka manlyo-toy-nun-ci myengsiha-eya ha-n-ta. when rent-NOM expire-INCH-PRES-CI specify-must-PRES-DECL 'The contract must specify among other(many) things what the rent amount is or when the rent is due.' Double-ci -either non-exhaustified inclusive OR, or conjunction (but the latter may be due to world knowledge) kyeyakse-nun yele kes-tul cwung welsey-ka elma-i-n-ci hokun contract-TOP many thing-PL among rent-NOM how.much-PRES-CI or encey imtay-ka manlyo-toy-nun-ci myengsiha-eya ha-n-ta. when rent-NOM expire-INCH-PRES-CI specify-must-PRES-DECL 'The contract must specify among other(many) things what the rent amount is or when the rent is due. 34 More on exemplification: Korean has a morpheme tung, which has two meanings according to the dictionary: (i) a word which expresses that there are more of the same kind (ii) a word which is used after enumerating two words or more, and restricts the target of description to the enumerated words. It seems that this morpheme explicitly marks exemplification. (I) kyeyakse-nun welsey-ka elma-i-n-ci hokun encey imtay-ka contract-TOP rent-NOM how.much-PRES-CI or when rent-NOM manlyo-toy-nun-ci tung-ul myengsiha-eya ha-n-ta. expire-INCH-PRES-CI TUNG-ACC specify-must-PRES-DECL 'The contract must specify (among other things) what the rent amount is or when the rent is due.' The (J) judgments contrast with the Hungarian ones in ways we do not yet understand. (J) Single-ci -unacceptable *wuli-nun wuli-ka eti-eyse cha-lul pilli-l swu iss-kena we-TOP we-NOM where-at car-ACC rent-FUT way COP-or nwu-ka wuli-ka pilli-l swu iss-nun cha-lul kaci-ko who-NOM we-NOM rent-FUT way COP-REL car-ACC iss-nun-ci alanay-ss-ta. have-PROG-PRES-CI find.out-PAST-DECL 'We found out where we can rent a car or who has one that we can borrow.' 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DEVELOPING COGNITIVE ABILITIES IN CHILDREN AT SCHOOL Domenic Marbaniang Published in Jeyaraj, J.B. (ed) Perspectives of Child Development (2013). Cognitive development refers to the study of intellectual development in a child. The study includes an attempt to understand information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of brain development in children. Philosophers and psychologists through history have both marveled at the phenomena of knowledge accumulation, retention, processing, and utilization. Cognitive development is crucial not just towards independent belief-formation (regarding self, universe, and God) but also towards active intelligent involvement in the making of history; for history is the product of beliefs in action. Animals don't create history because their existence is merely instinctual and not intellectual. It is humans who create, interpret, and record history. In the past philosophy (both secular and religious) played significant roles in providing the framework for psychological theories of cognitive development and child education. For instance, the doctrine of reincarnation played an important role in Plato's theory of knowledge as recollection and education as a midwifery intervention to help a soul recollect what was innate to it. Similarly, the idea of a pre-existent, pure, and all-sufficient soul played an important role in the doctrines of Jainism and Hinduism where education towards selfrealization, spiritual austerity for refining of cognitive capacities, became ideal. On the other hand, there were those who rejected the view that the soul possessed any innate information at birth. People like John Locke (1632-1704) talked of the mind as a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth. The child, thus, is born in absolute ignorance and gains knowledge step by step as impressions are made by experience upon the slate of his mind. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) rejected this view and instead came up with the theory of phenomenalism that argued, that the mind is not a blank slate but is actively involved in trying to understand the world within its own limitations; we may say it's like a computer with pre-installed software (a priori forms and categories) that actively synthesizes and interprets all incoming data and outputs it as processed information. John Dewey (1859-1952) went a little farther. He emphasized on knowledge as the result of activity and his theory has come to be known as instrumentalism or experimentalism. He emphasized on education that prompted thinking in order to solve problems and thus results in experiential knowledge. Modern psychological theories of cognitive development have much in relation with the philosophy of instrumentalism or experimentalism. The study of cognitive development is a wide field; however, we'll try here to only briefly examine a few psychological theories that try to explain the experience of learning among children. I. THEORIES A. Theories of Conditioning There are two chief forms of conditioning known among psychologists: one is called Classical Conditioning (the theory whereof was developed by Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) and popularized by J.B. Watson (1878-1958)); the other is called Operant or Instrumental Conditioning (the theory whereof was developed by B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)). According to WordNet, conditioning refers to a learning process in which an organism's behavior becomes dependent on the occurrence of a stimulus in its environment. For instance, a child never fears a white rat, but he fears loud noise. If the loud noise is made to repeat with every appearance of a white rat for a number of times, then the child will start fearing the white rat even if it appears without the loud noise. The whiteness and the furriness of the rat will then be so generalized that the child will try to run away from every appearance of a white furry object, thereafter. Here, fear is a behavior dependent on the loud noise (which stimulates fear-response). After a few associations with a white rat, it conditions the white rat to elicit the same kind of fear-response. This is an example of Classical Conditioning.1 Similarly, as in Operant Conditioning which explains why people avoid behavior that brings pain (punishment) and develop behavior that brings rewards, some have argued that, children usually learn language by trying various combinations of sounds and being rewarded (for example, with praise and attention) by their parents and others for those sounds that represent true language.2 It has also been noticed by the proponents of the learning paradigm that "a child who is reinforced frequently and only (or largely) for using English correctly might develop better verbal skills than would a child who receives less reinforcement or who is reinforced for using poor English."3 B. Piaget's Theory of Cognitive Development Jean Piaget (1896-1980) is considered to be the most important modern theorist in the study of cognitive development. He developed the most detailed and comprehensive theory of cognitive development and called his approach genetic epistemology, which is the study of the origin (genesis) and development of the nature and acquisition of knowledge.4 Piaget's view is also referred to as a constructivist view. Constructivism states that "people interpret their environments and experiences in light of the knowledge and experiences they already have. People do not simply take in an external reality and develop an unchanged, exact mental copy of objects or events. Instead, they build (or "construct") their own individual understandings and knowledge."5 It is the view that "people construct their own knowledge and understanding of the world by using what they already know and understand to interpret new experiences."6 Not only does one conform the world to one's own previous understanding of it; but, he also allows himself to be modified and conformed to the new knowledge he attains. It is important to note that Piaget's theory of cognitive development is deeply connected to the biological development of the child. Therefore, the stages of cognitive development that he talks about, which we'll observe later, are quite biologically fixed. Three terms are important in understanding Piaget's theory of cognitive development: organization, adaptation, and reflective abstraction. 1 Clifford T. Morgan, A Brief Introduction to Psychology, 2nd edn. (New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1977), pp 85-87. 2 Clifford T. Morgan, Richard A. King, et al, Introduction to Psychology. 7th edn. (Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1986), p. 439. 3 Robert J. Sternberg, "Individual Differences in Cognitive Development," Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (Ed. Usha Goswami; Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 601. Reinforcement refers to the repetition of a stimulus (either reward or punishment) to reinforce a particular behavior response. 4 Morgan et al, Introduction to Psychology, p. 425. 5 John L. Cook & Greg Cook, Child Development: Principles & Perspectives (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2005), Ch.5, p. 6. 6 Ibid. Organization is the tendency to form increasing coherent and integrated entities. According to Piaget, the organized pattern of action or thought is called the scheme. Children attempt to understand the world through various "ways of knowing". Each specific "way of knowing" is a scheme, an action sequence guided by thought.7 With the help of the scheme, which is the building block of cognition, the child attempts to organize and construct his understanding of the world. Two examples would be, compare scheme (when the child compares similar things to understand something; like he may look at a cow and using the compare pattern think that it is similar to a dog, but of a bigger size) and contrast scheme (when the child contrasts a particular thing with another thing; like he may find that the dog barks and does a few things that the cow never does). By putting the various constructs together, the child attempts to arrive at a conclusive idea of the object before him. Figure 1: The cow is not a large doggie Adaptation, according to Piaget, is the way in which knowledge develops. It involves the interplay of two processes: assimilation and accommodation. A child's attempt to understand something new is by means of either assimilation or accommodation or by both. Assimilation occurs when the child forces the object before him to conform to his prior understanding. For instance, when a child looks at a cow and tries to fit it (assimilate) it into her prior knowledge of dogs, she ends up concluding that the cow is a very large dog. However, when she is shown that the cow neither barks nor eats the way a dog does; neither does a dog eat grass or chew cud the way a cow does, she modifies her prior understanding and accommodates the new information to distinguish the cow as an entity different from the dog. This is called accommodation. Piaget also spoke of equilibrium, which is the tendency of the developing individual to stay "in balance" intellectually by filling in gaps in knowledge and restructuring beliefs when they fail to test against reality.8 If a particular act of assimilation does not work completely, one ends up in an imbalanced state called cognitive disequlibrium. To resolve this disequilibrium, the child attempts to accommodate or adjust her schemes to achieve a pragmatic level of understanding. If she is successful, she has struck at cognitive equilibrium. 7 Morgan, et al, Introduction, p. 426 8 Morgan, et al, Introduction to Pyschology, p. 425 Reflective abstraction is a way of acquiring understanding by thinking abstractly about a particular experience, and thus coming to generalized conclusion about the same. For instance, a boy takes six stones and arranges them in one line; then he takes the stone and rearranges them in two lines. He notices that the number didn't change despite being arranged differently. Through reflective abstraction, he concludes that number is not affected by arrangement. When a child is able to do that, he has reached the level of reflective abstraction in the stages of cognitive development. One another concept emphasized by Piaget was egocentrism. According to this principle, children place their view at the center of their understanding of the world and fail to recognize that other viewpoints may also exist. In Piaget's own words, "To think egocentrically means on the one hand that one does not adapt oneself to the sayings nor to the view-points of other people, but brings everything back to oneself, and on the other hand, that one takes one's own immediate perception as something absolute, precisely to the extent that one fails to be adapted to the perceptions of other people."9 That leads us to a discussion of the Four Stages of Cognitive Development that Piaget identified. They are the Sensorimotor Thought, Preoperational Thought, Concrete Operational Thought, and Formal Operational Thought stages. Each stage is further divided into various substages. STAGE 1: SENSORIMOTOR STAGE (From Birth to 2 Years) At this stage, the infant knows the world as merely sensory, perceptual, and motoric.10 The stage has several sub-stages. At the beginning of this period, the baby does not distinguish itself from the rest of the world, and its behavior is restricted to the use of reflex patterns11 which are gradually incorporated into "intentional movements designed first only to repeat, later to maintain, and then to produce new changes in the environment; increasing understanding of means-end relationships."12 The development of knowledge during this period is simply sensory and motoric. The child begins to learn to suck, for instance, the nipple by accommodating his sucking scheme to the shape of the nipple. Thus, he also is able to assimilate the nipple into his sucking scheme. As far as perceptual development is concerned, at the beginning of this stage when an object is presented before the child and then hidden, he isn't able to note that the object still continues to exist. He doesn't look for it. However, after a few months, he attains object permanence and when an object is hidden, he looks for it. 9 Jean Piaget, Judgment and Reasoning in the Child (Trans, Marjorie Warden; NY: Hartcourt, Brace & Co, 1928), p.228 10 Morgan, et al, Introduction, p.426 11 Morgan, A Brief Introduction, p. 62 12 Morgan, et al, Introduction, p.426 Figure 2: Toast Permanence.13 STAGE 2: PREOPERATIONAL STAGE (From 2 to 7 Years) This is called the preoperational period because during this period the "operation" of logical thinking is not yet developed.14 This is illustrated by the lack of conservation and reversibility reasoning at this stage. For instance, if the child is shown two glasses of the same width with equal amount of water and asked if both of the glasses have equal amounts of water, he would answer "yes". But, if one pours the water from one of the glasses into another glass which is narrower in shape, in which the water level looks higher, he will answer that the narrower glass holds more water than the wider one. He fails to discern the conservation of water. Similarly, if the same number of coins are arranged in two rows in equal columns, the child will discern them to be of the same number; however, if one row of coins is spread wide, he'll answer that the spread out row contains more coins. This period, however, is also the period of a rapid development of language. STAGE 3: CONCRETE OPERATIONAL STAGE (From 7 to 12 Years) This is the period where systematic reasoning appears; however, the children are still bound to concrete, here-and-now situations. They are now able to understand conservation and reversibility; for instance, they'll answer that the water in the narrower glass is the same amount as the one in the wider. The child is also able to invent alternative strategies, for example, two ways of getting to the store.15 However, abstract reasoning is absent at this stage. STAGE 4: FORMAL OPERATIONAL STAGE (12 Years Onward) This stage is characterized by logic, reasoning from hypothetical propositions, and evaluating hypotheses through testing all possible conclusions. Present reality is seen as only one alternative in an array of possibilities. The child can think about thinking and uses theories to guide thought.16 Abstract thought emerges during this stage. 13 http://psysc613.wikispaces.com/Stages+of+Development 14 Morgan, A Brief Introduction, p. 63 15 Morgan, et al, Introduction, p. 426 16 Ibid, p.426 Figure 3: Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development.17 C. Vygotsky's Sociocultural View of Cognitive Development While Piaget's theory gave detailed and experimental account of the cognitive development of the child, many psychologists felt it didn't take into account the social cognitive development of the child. Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896-1934), a Russian psychologist developed a holistic human cultural and biosocial development which is today commonly called as cultural-historical psychology.18 Vygotsky emphasized on the importance of mediation to assist the child in developing his cognitive capacities. In the Indian philosophy of education, this mediation was personified in the Guru, who helped, instructed, and guided the child into the pathway of knowledge. For an Indian learner, the presence of the more capable Guru as both an ideal and an instructor was indispensable. Vygotsky identified that there was a gap between one's actual solving of a problem at a snapshot of time and one's potential to problem solving with the help of someone more capable. He called this gap the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Mediation can take place in structured settings (such as a classroom) or in informal day-to-day settings (such as parents talk with children on the dining table). In process of time, the child is able to internalize the strategies of problem solving that he learns and is able to implement them in life. Mediation must be tailored to be more effective, and the strategies mediated to the child shouldn't be so difficult that he isn't able to understand them. The optimal level of difficulty lies within the ZPD. ZPD, according to Vygotsky, is the distance between a child's "actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving" and the child's level of "potential 17 http://etec512group3.wikispaces.com/Piaget 18 Wikipedia contributors. "Lev Vygotsky." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 12 Aug. 2012. Web. 16 Aug. 2012. development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers." The ZPD refers to the range of problems a child can solve if given some assistance.19 It is "a metaphorical description of the difference between individual performance and performance that is guided by experts."20 Crossing the ZPD is essential for a child to attain the next level of development; this is accomplished with the help of more knowledgeable others (MKOs). Vygotsky emphasized the role that socio-cultural mediation (help of others) plays in the cognitive development of the child. II. Application of the Theories for Cognitive Development in Children A. Role of Teachers in the Cognitive Development of the Child The teacher must realize that conditioning does play a major role in developing patterns of responses in a child. The teacher must be able to encourage the right kind of behavior and discourage the wrong one in order to help shape the form of responses that are conducive to a sound development of the child's cognitive capacities. While corporal punishment has been largely and justly discouraged in the schools, teachers must creatively come up with constructive designs of rewards and punishment that will help build the child's cognitive capacity. Also to be remembered are the implications of Vygotsky's theory for instruction that "the most effective instruction involves giving children challenging material, along with help in mastering it."21 The teachers play an important role in both providing the child with challenging materials as well has help them in mastering them. Vygotsky investigated child development and observed the important roles that cultural mediation and interpersonal communication play in the development of the child's higher mental functions. The child becomes cultured, as we may put it, through these various mediations and interactions that also represent the shared knowledge of a culture. This process is known as internalization. Information and practical ideas available in the culture of the environment, outside the child, are gradually internalized to form cultural adaptation; thus, development occurs, though primarily through language.22 Indian philosophers spoke something similar to what Vygotsky was saying when they talked of Sabda (Word) as an evidential source of knowledge in the culturing of a person. The mediation, as we saw earlier, was considered to occur chiefly through the Guru, who embodied the authority of the Sabda (which generally refers to all available knowledge, whether of arts, science, warfare, or entertainment). Vygotsky's theory has helped develop more reciprocal and interactive models of education in modern times. It frees the school and the classroom from being a boring place for the children. There is more activity, interaction, and the teacher is not someone who spoon-feeds the student, but someone who creates interest, makes the classroom relevant, and helps the student to gain an insight of the knowledge available outside of him, to internalize it. 19 John & Greg, Child Development, 5.27 20 Shawn M. Rowe and James V. Wertsch, "Vygotsky's Model of Cognitive Development," Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Development, p.552 21 John & Greg, Child Development, 5.27 22 "Lev Vygotsky", http://mennta.hi.is/starfsfolk/solrunb/vygotsky.htm Further, schooling, inevitably, cannot ignore the cognitive capacity of the child as dependent on his biological age-framework, as Piaget's research has shown us. Thus, children within the age group of 2 to 12 would usually profit nothing from talks that contain a lot of abstract theories, despite their being communicated in concrete analogical terms. An example of this is seen in one conversational scene from the BBC Comedy series Outnumbered.23 In this scene Karen, a child, is confused by what a psychotherapist, Brick, is trying to explain: Angela: They play hide and seek only they have to try and fine themselves. Karen: Find themselves? That'd be easy. You just look down and...there you are. Brick: No Karen, sometimes you try and find something inside you, that you didn't know was there. Karen: Like a tapeworm? Brick: No not that, it's a... Karen: Or like a spoon that you swallowed by mistake? Brick: No, (to others) She's very little isn't she... (then, to Karen) we've all got dark places inside our head. Karen: Well of course we have. It's entirely dark. Unless we put like a window or we sawed the top of our head off.... .............................. Brick: Actually, there are hidden feelings inside all... we have to acknowledge. We have to give these feelings a name. We need to say "Bob!". You see we call these feelings "Bob, Get back! and..." Karen: Why Bob when you can call it anything like Steve or a girl's name like Lucy... Why do you have to call it Bob? Brick: Well, you can say Lucy, but it doesn't work for me. Karen: Is this your job to say stuff like these? Brick: Trust me, it's... it's very useful? Karen: No, I don't trust you, because you're just talking nonsense. Brick: If you could only listen to me for two seconds. Well, it is not something that a child necessarily understands... but, it is something.... Karen: But, I do understand what you saying, it's just that it doesn't make any sense.... A few guidelines for training children at the various stages of development would be as follows:24 PREOPERATIONAL PERIOD (2 to 7 Years): Use concrete illustrations and visual aids to teach concrete facts. Make instructions relatively short, using actions as well as words. Explain with actions, imitations, and gestures. Try explaining things by looking at them from the child's own viewpoint: don't expect the child to be able to see the world from someone else' viewpoint. Give children a lot of things to learn by practice; but avoid overuse of workbooks and other paper and pencil tasks. Provide opportunities to play with clay, water, or sand. Take field trips. Discuss what they are seeing on TV. CONCRETE OPERATIONAL PERIOD (7-12 Years): Continue using concrete props and visual aids. Provide time-lines for history lessons. Provide three-dimensional models in science. Demonstrate simple scientific experiments in which the students can participate. Give the students the chance to see and manipulate objects and test out their ideas. The lectures and 23 Outnumbered, 7th May, 2010. (Writers: Andy Hamilton & Guy Jenkin), bbc.co.uk/comedy 24 "Jean Piaget's Developmental Stage Theory," http://sites.wiki.ubc.ca/etec510/Jean_Piaget's_Developmental_Stage_Theory, August 17, 2012 readings should be brief and well organized. The child can progressively move from shorter to longer readings. Require readings with a limited number of characters. Use outlines, hierarchies, and analogies to show the relationship of unknown new material to already acquire knowledge. Give opportunities to classify and group objects and ideas on increasingly complex levels. Present problems which require logical, analytical thinking to solve. Focus discussions on open-ended questions which stimulate thinking (e.g. are the mind and the brain the same thing?). FORMAL OPERATIONAL PERIOD (12 Years Onwards): Use visual aids as well as simple and somewhat sophisticated graphs and diagrams. Provide students opportunities to discuss social issues and hypothetical ideas (for instance, the Time Machine or Time Travel, Other Worlds). Encourage students to explain how they solve problems. Try teaching broad concepts with the help of materials relevant to the students. For instance, when discussing about the Independence Struggle, consider what issues united the nation. Use lyrics from popular music to teach poetic devices, to reflect on social problems, and so on. B. Role of Parents in the Cognitive Development of the Child With regard to the parent's role in helping the child develop his cognitive capacity and abilities, nothing can be more instructive than the Book of Proverbs. Interestingly, the Bible has the best set of instructions necessary for helping the child grow in way of perfect wisdom that God wishes him to grow in. "My son, hear the instruction of your father...." (Prov.1:8). Speak to your child all the while. We have seen that cultural mediation and interpersonal interaction play a very crucial role in the cognitive development of the child. A parent has the divine calling to nurture the child not only in the things of the body but also in the things of the soul and of the spirit. Instructive conversation at home helps shape the child foundationally. According to the Bible, wisdom is not just about intelligence; it is that holistic cognitive development of a person whereby he is able to make the right social decision in light of his spiritual identity before God. Therefore, the Bible defines the "fear of the Lord" or a holy reverence of God as the fountain of wisdom and knowledge (Prov. 1:7). Departure from this holy reverence has a debilitating effect on the holistic cognitive structure of a person (Rom.1:21, 28). The home provides the amiable environment conducive to the child's growth in the wisdom of salvation (crucial things that need to be internalized for the right form of development).25 It is the responsibility of the parents to maintain the health of the homely environment. Nagging, provocation, indiscipline, incontinency, and irrational and unpredictable behavior introduce an imbalance in the conditioning framework and confusion in the child's mind regarding a proper cognitive appraisal of reward and punishment. Parents must not just speak instruction through their lips but also through their lives (Eph.6:4). It is only when the child has learnt to listen to his parents (Prov.1-7) that he'll be able to listen to the voice of wisdom when he comes to age, i.e. when his cognitive capacities have properly developed (Prov. 8,9). Parents should be able to choose the right kind of stories and object lessons to communicate to the child the essential principles on which his life is to build. The guidelines listed above for the teachers will also be helpful to the parents at home. 25 See 2Timothy 3:14,15 "The rod and rebuke give wisdom" (Prov.29:15). Disciplining a child is a crucial element of mediation that blends into itself both the challenge and the value of wisdom. Discipline should administer wisdom, not mere physical retribution. It should correct the thinking pattern of the child. It should not be a means of trying to force the child to do things by means of terror; it should be able to give wisdom: the rod and rebuke go together. The rod is the rod of correction, not condemnation (Prov.22:15; 23:13). Rebuke is not angry outburst and rage. Rebuke is the serious show of disapproval of a particular action. It proceeds from grief, from love. The rod and rebuke prevent the child from growing wild and bring him into the mold of culture. It subjects the chaotic forces of folly within the heart of the child to the ordering power of the Moral Law. A family that lacks this strand of sound judgment and prudence will fail to provide the conditions necessary for the health of a child's cognitive life. Discipline is only discipline when it is administered by the hands of love. Discipline is not just a matter of discipline with rod; it is also a matter of discipline with reward. The parent must also apply proper discipline in rewarding the child for every progress the child makes. The reward should be appropriate and meaningful or else it loses its meaning and significance. A simple word of appreciation and praise does great good to spur the child to improve further. The rod and reward refer to the discipline of feedback that is essential to the growth of any human being; for feedback is the resonance of social life and identity. CONCLUSION We have briefly glanced through a few theories related to the cognitive development of a child and observed the implications that modern psychology has for child education. The theory of conditioning helps us understand the behavioral responses of children. It also helps us understand properly the role of reward and chastening in the education of the child. Piaget's theory of cognitive development helps us to understand the cognitive development of a child along his biological timeline. This helps us to be reasonable in the terms and methods we choose to help a child develop cognitively at each stage of his life. Finally, Vygotsky's theory helps us to understand the significance and role of cultural mediation, interaction, and the need for programs that are tailored to help the child successfully internalize the social knowledge in his social development. References Goswami, Usha (ed), Blackwell Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development (Ed. Usha Goswami; Blackwell Publishing, 2002. L. Cook, John & Cook, Greg. Child Development: Principles & Perspectives, Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 2005. Morgan, Clifford T. A Brief Introduction to Psychology, 2nd edn., New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1977. Morgan, Clifford T., A. King, Richard, et al, Introduction to Psychology. 7th edn., Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill, 1986. Piaget, Jean. Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, Trans, Marjorie Warden; NY: Hartcourt, Brace & Co, 1928. Piaget, Jean. To Understand is to Invent, UNESCO, 1948.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST RESEARCH ARTICLE Kinship Past, Kinship Present: Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship Robert A. Wilson ABSTRACT In this article, I reconsider bio-essentialism in the study of kinship, centering on David Schneider's influential critique that concluded that kinship was "a non-subject" (1972:51). Schneider's critique is often taken to have shown the limitations of and problems with past views of kinship based on biology, genealogy, and reproduction, a critique that subsequently led those reworking kinship as relatedness in the new kinship studies to view their enterprise as divorced from such bio-essentialist studies. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking about kinship, I have three constituent aims in this research article: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is. This concluding discussion introduces a general view, the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, into anthropology, providing a theoretical framework that facilitates realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship. [bio-essentialism, kinship studies, homeostatic property cluster kinds, Schneider, genealogy] ABSTRAIT Cet article reconsidère le bio-essentialisme dans l'étude de la parenté, en mettant l'accent sur la critique influente de David Schneider soutenant que la parenté est un «non-sujet» (1972:51). La critique de Schneider est souvent considérée comme ayant démontré les limites des conceptions de la parenté fondées sur la biologie, la généalogie et la reproduction. Dans les nouvelles études de la parenté, cette critique a conduit ceux qui travaillent sur la parenté conçue comme apparentement à présenter leur entreprise comme étant opposée aux études bio-essentialistes. Commençant avec un récit reliant parenté passée et présente et offrant une nouvelle façon de penser la parenté, cet article a trois objectifs cardinaux: (1) redéfinir la relation entre la parenté passée et la parenté présente, (2) réévaluer la critique par Schneider du bio-essentialisme et ce qu'il implique pour l'étude contemporaine de la parenté, et (3) enfin réorienter la discussion théorique de ce qu'est la parenté. Cette discussion se termine par l'introduction en anthropologie d'un schème conceptuel – le groupement de propriétés homéostatiques (GPH) vue de catégories naturelles – fournissant un cadre théorique pour l'intégration tant recherchée des caractéristique biologiques et sociales de la parenté. [bio-essentialisme. études de la parenté, le groupement de propriétés homéostatiques (GPH), Schneider, généalogie] ZUSAMMENFASSUNG In diesem Beitrag vertrete ich den biologischen Essentialismus (Bio-essentialismus) in Verwandtschaftsstudien. Im Vordergrund steht David Schneiders einflussreiche Kritik, die darauf hinausläuft, dass Verwandtschaft kein Gegenstand sei. Zumeist wird davon ausgegangen, dass Schneiders Kritik die Grenzen und Probleme vergangener, auf Biologie, Genealogie und Reproduktion basierender Auffassungen von Verwandtschaft AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 00, No. 0, pp. 1–15, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. C© 2016 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12607 2 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 aufzeigt hat, was später dazu geführt hat, dass jene, die Verwandtschaft als ,,relatedness"definierten, ihr Projekt als vom Bio-essentialismus streng getrennt betrachteten. Ausgehend von einem alternativen Narrativ, dass vergangene und gegenwärtige Verwandschaftskonzepte verbindet, sowie durch die Einführung einer neuen Verständnisses von Verwandtschaft, habe ich in diesem Beitrag drei zentrale Ziele erreichen: (1) Die Beziehung zwischen vergangenen und gegenwärtigen Verwandschaftskonzepten überdenken, (2) Schneiders Kritik und ihre Implikationen für gegenwärtige Verwandtschaftsstudien reevaluieren, und (3) die theoretische Diskussion darüber, was Verwandtschaft ist, neu ausrichten. Der Beitrag schliesst damit, ein allgemeines Konzept – den ,,homeostatic property cluster view of kinds" (HPC) – in die anthropologische Diskussion einzubringen, als einen theoretischen Rahmen, der die Verwirklichung des oft beschworenen Desideratums der Integration der biologischen und sozialen Eigenschaften von Verwandtschaft erleichtert. [Bio-essentialismus, Verwandtschaftsstudien, den "homeostatic property cluster view of kinds" (HPC), Schneider, Genealogie"] RESUMEN Este artıculo reconsidera el esencialismo biológico (bio-esencialismo) en el estudio del parentesco, centrándose en la influyente crıtica de David Schneider. A menudo se considera que la crıtica de Schneider ha demostrado los problemas y las limitaciones de teorıas del parentesco anteriores, basadas en la biologıa, la genealogıa y la reproducción. Su crıtica contribuyó a que aquellos que trabajaban el parentesco como afinidad ("relatedness") en el marco de los nuevos estudios del parentesco vieran su proyecto como desconectado de los enfoques bio-esencialistas anteriores. Mediante una narrativa alternativa que conecta el parentesco pasado y presente, y concluyendo con una manera innovadora de pensar el parentesco, el presente artıculo está constituido con tres objetivos en mente: (1) re-conceptualizar la relación entre parentesco pasado y presente, (2) reevaluar la crıtica al bio-esencialismo de Schneider y lo que ello conlleva para los estudios contemporáneos del parentesco, y (3) ulteriormente redirigir la discusión teórica sobre qué es el parentesco. En esta sección final se introduce en la antropologıa una visión general, la teorıa del cluster de propiedades homeostático (HPC) de tipos (kinds). Este marco teórico facilita la realización del desiderátum de la integración de los aspectos biológicos y sociales del parentesco. [bioesencialismo, estudio del parentesco, cluster de propiedades homeostático (HPC) de tipos, Schneider, genealogıa] Kinship is like totemism, matriarchy, and the "matrilineal complex." It is a non-subject. It exists in the minds of anthropologists but not in the cultures they study. –David Schneider, "What Is Kinship All About?" [1972:51] INTRODUCTION Consider a familiar narrative about kinship and its anthropological study. Once regarded within anthropology as a key to understanding the functioning and evolution of human culture and "perhaps the one field in which social and cultural anthropology could claim to have booked secure advances" (Kuper 1999:131), kinship was foundational for the ethnographic study of social structures and cultural practices throughout much of the 20th century. Despite this, the status of kinship studies fell precipitously from grace during the 1970s. Conceptualized as distinctively biological, genealogical, or reproductive (or bio-essentialist), kinship and its study came to be seen as having "reinforced the boundaries between the West and the rest" (Carsten 2004:15). Strangely manifesting its own kind of ethnocentrism, the study of kinship became an uncomfortable reminder of a colonial impulse that had motivated another, already jettisoned part of cultural anthropology's past: the study of primitive society (Kuper 2005). Yet rather than disappearing from anthropology, as had the study of primitive society, kinship was transformed. In kinship past, distinctively Western, bio-essentialist conceptions of kinship dominated ethnographic studies of kinship; in kinship present, such conceptions had been replaced by the more encompassing notion of "relatedness" in the "new kinship studies" (Carsten 2000; Peletz 2001). Given the various negative associations that bio-essentialist views had accumulated within cultural anthropology more generally, a rearticulation of kinship free of past bio-essentialism was a welcome advance.1 David Schneider's extended critique of kinship (1965a, 1965b, 1970, 1972, 1977[1969], 1980[1968], 1984) is widely recognized as having played an influential role not only in the demise of bio-essentialist kinship studies but also in this subsequent reworking of kinship. For example, Nancy Levine (2008:376) identified Schneider's critique as both "the most devastating and most productive for future research," a judgment shared by many other Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 3 contemporary kinship theorists who self-consciously distanced their work from traditional kinship studies, doing so by explicitly acknowledging Schneider's critique of bioessentialism (Carsten 2004:18–24; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a:2–3; Strathern 1992:xviii, 4; Yanagisako and Collier 1987:29–32).2 Schneider's central place in establishing a view of kinship past as bio-essentialist is also reflected in contemporary work less comfortably viewed as part of the new kinship studies. Marshall Sahlins's (2011a:6–10; 2013a:12–18) sweeping, recent writing on kinship, critical as it is of core aspects of Schneider's critique, shows Schneider's influence in its sustained attack on the very aspects of kinship studies that were Schneider's primary target: its bio-essentialism (Sahlins 2013a:62–89). The influence of Schneider's critique is also singled out in recent articles in this journal-on adoption and child circulation in the Marshall Islands (Berman 2014) and on fatherhood and paternal investment in the Mosuo (Mattison et al. 2014)-that more tentatively return to explore of the role of biological relationships in kinship.3 My central aim in this article is to reconsider bioessentialism in the study of kinship, focusing on Schneider's critique. Beginning with an alternative narrative connecting kinship past and present and concluding by introducing a novel way of thinking of kinship that draws on resources beyond anthropology, I here have three constituent aims: (1) to reconceptualize the relationship between kinship past and kinship present; (2) to reevaluate Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism and what this implies for the contemporary study of kinship; and (3) subsequently to redirect theoretical discussion of what kinship is by applying a view, the so-called homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, to kinship. This view provides a theoretical framework that facilitates the realization of the often-touted desideratum of the integration of biological and social features of kinship and does so whether or not the view itself constitutes a form of bio-essentialism.4 BEYOND THE STANDARD NARRATIVE: THE 1960S AND ALL THAT The revival of kinship in a post-Schneiderian guise opened up a novel array of topics-reproductive technologies, chosen families, autoethnography, gay and lesbian intimacy, invented communities, the body and personhood, artificial life, Internet dating, identity politics, disability activism, ethnicity, and adoption practices-and innovative approaches for those working on the various meanings that relatedness has for individuals and cultures. Methodologically, rather than focusing on structural or functional aspects of culturally exotic forms of kinship, such studies typically emphasize the performativity and lived experience of kinship, exploring how ongoing bodily and mindful interaction with technological and other social innovations shifts the meaning that kinship has in domestic and distinctly Western sites, such as in vitro fertilization clinics.5 As indicated, the dominant contemporary narrative within cultural anthropology about kinship is anchored around Schneider's charge of bio-essentialism against the past study of kinship. When Alfred Kroeber (1909) posited procreation as a process that unifies all kinship systems, when Kingsley Davis and Lloyd Warner (1937:292) said that "kinship may be defined as social relationships based on connection through birth," or when E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1940:183) spoke of being a kinsman "actually or by fiction," they manifested this kind of bio-essentialism, one that privileged biological relations over other relations in the conceptualization of kinship. In effect, Schneider (1984) argued that kinship theory in general was methodologically structured around a kind of translation manual that all ethnographic investigations of kinship should consult in understanding kinship systems other than their own. That manual directed theorists to translate all putative kinship terminologies via a biological–genealogical–reproductive grid and, thus, to conceptualize kinship bio-essentially in any ethnographic context. For Schneider, that bio-essentialist grid was an ethnocentric projection, imposing a peculiarly AmericanEuropean conception of kinship onto other cultures.6 According to this narrative, Schneider's critique of kinship showed that past disciplinary obsession with the reductive project of shaking each culture through the bio-essentialist sieve of kinship was fatally flawed. Next, following a short, dumbfounded lull in work on kinship (especially in North America), a concept of kinship liberated from bio-essentialist presuppositions arose, resulting in work often expressed not in the language of kin and kinship but in that of relatives and relatedness. In shedding the skin of bio-essentialism, the new kinship studies made a decisive break with a more troubled anthropological past that was scientistic and ethnocentric (Carsten 2004; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a; Moutu 2013; Weston 1997; Yanagisako and Delaney 1995). This general type of narrative is familiar to historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science, being a variation on the radical juncture approaches of the two most influential figures in the intersection of these fields, Thomas Kuhn (1962) and Michel Foucault (2002[1969]). We could thus read this standard narrative either in terms of there being a Kuhnian paradigm shift mediated by Schneider's critique and its uptake by the new kinship studies or as exemplifying a new Foucauldian discursive formation or episteme for the study of relatives that breaks free of the bio-essentialism of the past through a Schneiderian radical juncture (cf. Carsten 2004:19). Although it is common to offer some sort of critique of a dominant narrative before (or as a part of) motivating an alternative to it, here I want simply to provide a short statement of such an alternative narrative, one that aims to facilitate a rethinking of the story that many anthropologists now tell themselves about the place of bio-essentialism in kinship past and present. In fact, there has been no radical juncture in the study of kinship; calls to rethink 4 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 kinship have recurred with sufficient regularity throughout the 20th century to constitute something of a disciplinary ritual of their own. Since the disciplinary-founding work of those legalistic, proto-anthropologists Henry Maine, John Ferguson McLennan, and Lewis Henry Morgan, kinship systems have been viewed as culturally universal, with the variety in kinship systems being at least an order of magnitude smaller than the number of cultures. Hypotheses about the genealogical, structural, and functional affinities between the various kinship systems have been at the heart of kinship theory, with theorists concerned about the social significance of certain, putative biological facts, such as the supposed necessity of biparental sex for reproduction, mothers for birth, and the dependence of infants on parental, especially maternal, care. Such "facts" were sometimes viewed as biological universals about, or determinants of, kinship. Schneider's critique of kinship targeted such bio-essentialism. Like much social science, the study of kinship draws on and adapts existing folk concepts. But the idea of Western bio-essentialized folk concepts of kinship being endlessly ethnocentrically projected onto non-Western cultures by ethnographers and kinship theorists is itself a kind of anthropological myth. Liberating kinship from its putatively bio-essentialized shackles has rarely led in practice to abandonment of the biological facts that anchor kinship terminologies and concepts across all cultures. This is true both of the extension of kinship studies into domestic spaces and of continuing attempts to articulate the practice and lived reality of kinship in non-Western cultures (see Berman 2014; Mattison et al. 2014). The study of kinship has changed innovatively due to Schneider's influence. Yet it is a projection of its own kind to view these changes as marking a radical juncture in that study. Whatever doubts there are about the extent of ethnocentric projection in understanding kinship studies past, we can nonetheless maintain the idea that a conception of kinship indeed has been projected from "the West" to "the Rest" in kinship present (cf. Kuper 2008, esp. pp. 727–728). This conception of kinship reflects the shift in kinship structures in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, a shift that involved experimentation with different ways of being a mother, a father, a child, and a family. That was, as they say, the 1960s: working mothers, the spread of contraception, skyrocketing divorce rates, Brady Bunch families, communal living and free love, sexual liberation, dropping out. Combined with developing technologies of reproduction, those in the West had new ways to live and new ways to make new sorts of people to live in those new ways. As Western conceptions of kinship were pried from whatever forms of bio-essentialism rigidified them, anthropologists subsequently came to speak more freely of relatives than of kin, of relationships rather than of kinship. Relative and relatedness came to be the preferred terms of cultural analysis for emerging forms of kinship. That conception of kinship was then projected onto societies subject to past colonial and imperial influence, including through ethnographic intervention and its aftermath: kinship theory. In short, if there has been an ethnocentric projection from the West to the Rest regarding kinship, it is more recent than proponents of the standard narrative of the history of kinship studies have thought. It is the projection of an extended or loosened concept of relatedness to places that anthropologists then find it to have existed in all along, a projection that reflects the social changes in Western societies underway since anthropology has been engaged in the very project of rethinking kinship. RELOCATING SCHNEIDER Schneider's critique extended over a 20-year period, culminating in his A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984). It was influential in part because it dovetailed with broader theoretical and political changes to the discipline during the 1970s, such as the emergence of feminist perspectives on gender, the family, and social structure (Ortner 1984) and the shift away from structural approaches to society in favor of interpretative understandings of culture (Geertz 1973). In these respects, Schneider's critique contrasted with that of another leading internal critic of kinship studies, Rodney Needham. In much the way that Schneider would shortly summarize his own views, Needham (1971:5) had claimed that "there is no such thing as kinship, and it follows that there can be no such thing as kinship theory." Prior to reaching this conclusion, Needham had previously engaged in philosophical debate focused on the distinction between "physical" and "social" kinship that was so important in British social anthropology (Barnes 1961; Beattie 1964; Gellner 1957, 1960, 1963; Needham 1960). But three other features of Needham's view are more important here in relocating Schneider's critique of bio-essentialism. First, Needham's reasons for this concordant conclusion were explicitly Wittgensteinian, appealing to Ludwig Wittgenstein's cautionary reminders about the misplaced search for essences and criterial meaning and drawing on his famous analogies to games and family resemblances in thinking beyond essentialism.7 Second, Needham made no attempt to link his views here to external developments elsewhere in anthropology or academia more generally, despite his earlier interdisciplinary engagements regarding physical and social kinship (e.g., Gellner 1960). Third, this repudiation of kinship and kinship theory was not accompanied by methodological or practical changes in how one regarded either kinship or kinship theory. Despite sharing a conclusion with Needham, Schneider's challenge differed in all three of these respects. It was grounded not in the work of a philosopher with marginal standing among anthropologists but in the idea that cultural investigations should focus on the symbols that make up a culture and how they are understood within it. Schneider (1980[1968]:18) made explicit his focus on "the symbols which are American kinship," foregrounding his emphasis Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 5 both on meaning and on kinship in the West. Schneider's symbolic anthropology was distinguished from the related hermeneutical, interpretative approach (e.g., Geertz 1973) by Schneider's methodological view of anthropology as an empirical, inductive enterprise and by his divorce of culture from consideration of norms and values (e.g., Schneider 1976:202–203). These meaning-centered approaches, both deriving originally from the heuristic separation of culture as the realm for anthropology advocated by Talcott Parsons (1951), spoke to, and indeed stoked, deep-seated, longerstanding relativist tendencies within anthropology; both also found affinities with broader poststructuralist trends in the humanities and social sciences that swept through North American universities in the 1970s. The third point of contrast between Needham and Schneider, however, is most significant here. As one of his titles-American Kinship-suggests, Schneider shifted his focus in kinship studies from culturally exotic to culturally familiar locations. In the late 1940s, Schneider had undertaken ethnographic work on the Micronesian island of Yap, much of which concentrated on kinship (Schneider 1953, 1962; see also Schneider with Handler 1995). Schneider's work on kinship in the United States had begun jointly with the sociologist George Homans (Homans and Schneider 1955; Schneider and Homans 1955), work from which Schneider later distanced himself (Schneider 1965a; see also Feinberg 2001:7). In American Kinship (1980[1968]), Schneider's emerging critical view of kinship studies meshed with the symbolic view of culture and cultural anthropology that he saw replacing such ethnographic and sociological studies. Schneider's interest in kinship as a cultural system and in offering descriptions that captured the participant perspective led him to view U.S. kinship as a system of meanings structured around the twin symbols of blood (shared biogenetic substance) and love ("diffuse, enduring solidarity"). For Schneider, these symbols provided the key to understanding kinship in U.S. culture, contrasting this with a view of kinship simply as a result of biological facts.8 UNDERSTANDING BIO-ESSENTIALISM IN SCHNEIDER Although Schneider's critique of kinship studies was apparent in his work from 1965 to 1975, his most sustained criticisms are contained in A Critique of the Study of Kinship (1984), the concluding chapters of which provide capsule statements of two related clusters of criticisms. The first critiques the "quartet of kinship, economics, politics, and religion" (1984:184) as nothing more than "a valiant attempt to use the constructions of European culture as tools for description, comparison, and analysis" (1984:185). The second cluster of criticisms offers a version of this claim about kinship in particular: in undertaking elaborate ethnographic reconstructions of other cultures in terms of a specific, Eurocentric conception of kinship that is bio-essentialist, kinship theorists have committed the near-original anthropological sin of ethnocentric projection. Given the place of what I am calling "bio-essentialism" in Schneider's extensive critique and the subsequent uptake of that critique in the new kinship studies, it is surprisingly difficult to find a precise expression of what the charge of bio-essentialism amounts to in Schneider's work. We need to undertake at least a little hermeneutical elbow work of our own to understand just what about kinship, according to Schneider, has been ethnocentrically projected. Schneider summarizes his views at length in his final chapter of A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Here he identifies "three basic axioms used in the study of kinship" (1984:188), all of which he thinks are mistaken, Eurocentric projections. Together they support a view that Schneider also thinks is false called the "Doctrine of the Genealogical Unity of Mankind"-"the thesis that at one level all genealogies are equal to each other, or can be treated as dealing with the same thing and so are comparable" (1984:125). While there is a sense in which, for Schneider, this doctrine, assumed in both Parson's (1951) and George Murdock's (1949) foundationalist views of biology in the study of culture, is at the heart of kinship studies, because according to Schneider himself it is derived from three "axioms," it is not the most fundamental thesis that Schneider ascribes to kinship theorists. The first of these axioms elaborates on Schneider's identification of kinship-alongside economics, politics, and religion-as "one of the four privileged institutions, domains, or rubrics of social science, each of which is conceived to be a natural, universal, vital component of society" (1984:187). With this having been the topic of the preceding, short chapter, Schneider moves directly to state the second axiom, which claims that kinship has to do with the reproduction of human beings and the relations between human beings that are the concomitants of reproduction. The reproduction of human beings is formulated as a sexual and biological process. Sexual relations are an integral part of kinship, though sexual relations may have significance outside kinship and sexual relations per se are not necessarily kinship relations. [Schneider 1984:188] This second axiom can be stated so as to connect explicitly with and clarify the doctrine it putatively supports: kinship has been construed primarily as a bio-essentialist relationship of one kind or another, one between biological ancestor–descendant pairs that, over time, constitute biological ancestor–descendant lineages. Sexual relations matter insofar as they are the biological means through which these pairs and lineages are generated. In old-speak, kinship is a matter of consanguinity, biologically construed, with alliances relevant insofar as they create the resulting bio-genealogy.9 Schneider playfully names the third axiom, which he refers to as "the fundamental assumption" in several places (e.g., 1984:176, 177), "Blood Is Thicker Than Water." Given its fundamentality, it is unfortunate (even if inevitable) that there is no clear, univocal statement of what the axiom says. To get a sense of the problems here, consider three 6 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 of Schneider's earlier references to "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" (see also 1984:173, 176, 177, 189, 191, 193, 194): (1) The assumption that Blood Is Thicker Than Water says that whatever variable elements may be grafted onto kinship relations, all kinship relations are essentially the same and share universal features. [1984:174] (2) This assumption [that Blood Is Thicker Than Water] makes kinship or genealogical relations unlike any other social bonds, for they have especially strong binding force and are directly constituted by, grounded in, determined by, formed by, the imperatives of the biological nature of human nature. [1984:174] (3) Because "Blood Is Thicker Than Water," kinship consists in bonds on which kinsmen can depend and which are compelling and stronger than, and take priority over, other kinds of bonds . . . All kinship bonds are of essentially the same kind. All of this is because kinship is a strong solidary bond that is largely innate, a quality of human nature, biologically determined, however much social or cultural overlay may also be present. [1984:165–166, italics in original] Reference (1) characterizes the axiom as saying that kinship has universal features. The second reference has "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" implying that genealogical bonds are distinctive in strength and that they are the result of a biological imperative. Perhaps developing this latter theme, the third reference characterizes the axiom as implying that kinship bonds are constitutive of human nature or biologically determined: they are part of our psychological or biological makeup. Having an essence, being distinctively strong, and being largely innate, however, are three very different properties. (Schneider himself may have intended, of course, to point to all three of these features-or might not have noticed, or cared about, the differences between them.) In his concluding summary, Schneider more elaborately presents "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" as follows: sexual reproduction creates biological links between persons and these have important qualities apart from any social or cultural attributes which may be attached to them [and which are] . . . derivative of and of less determinate significance than the biological relations. These biological relations have special qualities; they create and constitute bonds, ties, solidary relationships proportional to the biological closeness of the kind . . . These are considered to be natural ties inherent in the human condition, distinct from the social or cultural. [1984:188] Although Schneider's reference to "natural ties inherent in the human condition" may signal innateness again, the primary pair of characterizations in this passage is of biological relations as being important or having significance in abstraction from social or cultural attributes and of them being determinative of other properties and relations. These are yet further features that Schneider attributes to bioessentialist conceptions within kinship studies. Thus, "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" says any or all of the following: biologically construed kinship relations have universal features, are distinctive in strength, are innate (part of human nature, biologically determined), have significance in abstraction from any other properties or relations, and are determinative of such other properties and relations.10 Later we will see why kinship itself does not have any of these distinct features essentially. The issue here, however, is the relationship of "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" and Schneider's other axioms to the traditional study of kinship, kinship past. A reading of that axiom ascribing all five features to how kinship has been conceived throughout a tradition stretching 100 years would merely parody that tradition, offering a kind of pastiche of different views of kinship that adequately characterizes none of them, a point I develop further in the next section. As Schneider's own detailed discussion (1984:97–143) suggests, many prominent kinship theorists, such as Émile Durkheim, W. H. R. Rivers, and Bronisław Malinowski, reject one or more of the above characterizations of kinship. One might well think that, because the big idea at the heart of Schneider's discontent with kinship studies past that has had much downstream influence within kinship present remains clear, this is just so much textual wrangling: nuances aside, Schneider did show that those working on kinship had continually projected onto non-Western cultures a conception of kinship according to which biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations play distinctive roles in structuring and governing the social relations and cultural practices subsumed under kinship. I want to suggest, however, that this big idea itself faces a series of deep problems that derive from the kind of complexity revealed by our hermeneutical side-trip through Schneider's text and that these problems continue to plague contemporary dismissals of bio-essentialism. PROBLEMS FOR THE BIG IDEA ABOUT BIO-ESSENTIALISM AND KINSHIP Consider first bio-essentialism and the study of kinship. On the one hand, softened or weakened interpretations of each of Schneider's axioms and the Doctrine of Genealogical Unity of Mankind may well encompass all major kinship theorists, including Morgan, Durkheim, Rivers, Malinowski, Evans-Prichard, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Murdock, and Meyer Fortes. Yet such interpretations-for example, taking the second axiom to say simply that kinship concerns biological reproduction and its outcomes in some way-give us doctrines denied by very few, including Schneider himself. On the other hand, offering enriched or strengthened characterizations of these axioms and the Doctrine to make them more substantive-say, taking "Blood Is Thicker Than Water" to entail the strong, five-fold form of bio-essentialism that we outlined in the previous section-produces an analysis that fails to apply to many prominent kinship theorists. For example, both Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss are well known for giving priority to kinship as a social rather than as a biological category. Thus, interpreting Schneider's second or third axioms to imply that biological relations determine or fix kinship, or that the social recognition of kinship is only an overlay to a biological foundation for kinship, leads to a characterization of traditional kinship studies that excludes key figures, such as Durkheim or Lévi-Strauss.11 Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 7 This dilemma raises a question about the empirical adequacy of the constituent claim that the ethnocentric projection thesis makes about "The West": Does bio-essentialism in fact accurately characterize the study of kinship, say from Morgan (1871) to Fortes (1969)? Proponents of the standard narrative about kinship studies have typically supposed an affirmative answer to this question, citing Schneider's critique (Carsten 2000:8, 2004:19–22; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a:2–4). Yet attention to cultural variation in kinship systems and concerns about the bio-essentializing of kinship are readily found throughout traditional studies of kinship, posing a further challenge to the standard narrative.12 A parallel issue arises with respect to the second part of the claim of ethnocentric projection, that concerning "The Rest": Are there any non-Western cultures in which biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations play a distinctive role in characterizing kinship? For Schneider's thesis goes significantly beyond denying the universality of bio-essentialized kinship to proclaiming its absence beyond the West-implying that no non-Western cultures share a distinctly Western, bio-essentialized conception of kinship (see also McKinley 2001:136). This claim would be refuted simply by finding one such culture that ascribes biological, genealogical, or reproductive relations the distinctive role they have (let us suppose) in the West. On the enriched understandings of bio-essentialism we have been considering, there may be few (if any) such cultures, but I have already indicated that such understandings of bio-essentialism do not characterize the views of many (if any) kinship theorists. By contrast, the softened versions of bio-essentialism that do accurately capture much pre-Schneiderian anthropological thinking about kinship also characterize many (but not all) non-Western cultures. In the standard narrative, recall, the study of kinship did not dissolve after Schneider but was self-consciously transformed, invoking a more pluralistic conception of kinship as "relatedness" (see also Wilson 2016). Kinship so conceived could be studied both in Western domestic places and spaces as well as cross-culturally (e.g., Carsten 2000; Faubion 1996), once the bio-essentialism of the past was given up. One problem with this view is that, as impressive as is the variety in the conception of what makes for relatives and relatedness, there must be some way to delineate the particular forms of "being related to" that pick out kinship from the larger genus of human relationships. That genus includes relationships of intimacy, such as friendship and love, of enmity, and even more mundane relationships, such as being a neighbor of or belonging to the same Internet chat group. We gain a universally applicable notion of kinship as relatedness only by failing to distinguish kinship from many things it is not. Here the price of the radical pluralism embraced by the conception of kinship as simply relatedness is not so much eternal vigilance as ubiquitous and boundless kinship. To come full circle, if we appeal to biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations to rein in the concept of kinship-that is, if we treat it bio-essentially-as is implicit in the practice (if not the theory) of the new kinship studies, we are not so very far from the object of Schneider's critique.13 So probing at the very idea of bio-essentialism via Schneider's own discussion reinforces doubts about the standard narrative of the history of kinship studies and the place of bioessentialism in that history. Bio-essentialism about kinship holds that biology, genealogy, and reproduction are distinctive features of kinship. We have seen that the distinctiveness of such features was construed in various ways by Schneider himself and that the resulting gradient running from softened to enriched forms of bio-essentialism poses problems for critiques of bio-essentialism insensitive to this variation. But that variation also creates an opening for a positive view of kinship or relatedness that allows one to reconsider bioessentialism afresh. Here I draw on recent work in the history and philosophy of science that has engaged with essentialism in a sustained manner over the past 25 years that views biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations as constraints on, but not determinants of, the concept of kinship.14 HOMEOSTATIC PROPERTY CLUSTER KINDS, KINSHIP, AND BIO-ESSENTIALISM On what is sometimes called a traditional essentialist view (Wilson 1999), kinds are defined by a set of underlying, essential properties, each individually necessary and jointly sufficient for membership in the kind, where such properties also are causes of the kind's observable properties. Kinds in the physical sciences are often thought to have such essences. The chemical kind water is defined in terms of its being composed of two bonded molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen, and the associated microstructural properties of water are causally responsible for its higher-level, observable properties, such as its transparency and boiling point. Likewise, a proton in physics is a particle with a positive charge and a particular mass, and these properties are the causes for a proton's observable properties, such as its behavior in gravitational and electrostatic fields. The most natural way to apply this form of essentialism to bio-essentialist conceptions of kinship would be to define kinship in terms of some set of biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations, relations that would also serve as the underlying causes of putatively "higher-level" social and cultural features of kinship. Such an application of traditional essentialism to kinship would specify a precise form of bioessentialism about kinship of the kind that Schneider sought to critique, one according to which biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations played an asymmetrically determinative role in the universal structure of kinship. Whatever one says about physical and chemical kinds, there are compelling, well established, general reasons to reject traditional essentialism about both biological and social natural kinds (Hull 1965a, 1965b; Sober 1980). Many 8 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 biological kinds, such as species, subsume an intrinsic heterogeneity (Wilson 2005: chs. 4–5) among their members, defeating attempts to define them in terms of intrinsic essences. For example, interbreeding between individuals within a species promotes genetic variation within that species, implying that there is no genetic essence for species membership. The same is true of social kinds: there is no intrinsic property shared by those who are unemployed or criminals. The cultural variation central to the Schneiderian rejection of bio-essentialism about kinship provides reason to see kinship or relatedness as likewise intrinsically heterogeneous and so to reject such traditional essentialism about kinship in particular. This failure of traditional essentialism implies that biological, genealogical, and reproductive properties and relations cannot be distinctive features of kinship in virtue of being some kind of underlying, determinative essence of kinship. That distinctiveness, if it exists, must be understood in some other way. It is better understood, I suggest, in terms of imposing constraints on the concept of kinship. Consider an analogy to the concept of disease. Even though the causes and effects of diseases can be conceived differently, as can their prevention, cure, and social significance, there is still something distinctive of disease-namely, that it concerns the health and well-being of some living thing and, thus, the proper functioning of that thing's body or mind. We can express this relationship by viewing health and well-being as constraints on the concept of disease. Biology, genealogy, and reproduction constrain the concept of kinship in much the way that health and well-being constrain the concept of disease. To say this about kinship is nontrivial, insofar as many key notions in anthropology-for example, the other "privileged institutions" of economic, politics, and religion-are not constrained in this way. This constraints-based view suggests the form that bio-essentialism might take, given the falsity of traditional essentialism. Within recent philosophy of science, the most widely discussed alternative to traditional essentialism about biological kinds provides the resources for articulating such a constraining relationship. This is the homeostatic property cluster (HPC) view of kinds, developed originally for moral properties and later applied to species and other biological kinds that are intrinsically heterogeneous. Despite its unwieldy name, the idea behind this view is relatively simple. At least many (if not all) kinds are defined by stable clusters of properties, only some subset of which is necessary for membership in the kind and the stability of which is underwritten by facts about the world, including underlying mechanisms of co-occurrence.15 This appeal to worldly stability distinguishes the HPC view as a form of naturalistic realism from similar-sounding approaches, such as pheneticism or numerical taxonomy about species and higher-order taxa in evolutionary biology, and from Needham's earlier "polythetic" view of kinship, based in his appeals to Wittgenstein's notion of family resemblance. In contrast to the HPC view, these views are forms of operationalism or instrumentalism about kinds. As with other applications of the HPC view (e.g., to species), a HPC approach to kinship at least purports to provide the basis for a sophisticated form of realism about kinship.16 On the HPC view of kinship, biological relations, such as gives birth to, is born from the same body as, and procreates with, partially and nonessentially characterize kinship, alongside other kinds of relations, such as is primarily cared for by, lives in the same house as, and enters into a socially recognized ceremony of marriage with. Just which biological and social relations constitute kinship in any specific cultural circumstance is revealed by corresponding ethnographic work, and relations that are constitutive in some such circumstances need not even be present in others. Within a culture, or a culture at a time or a subculture, these constitutive relations form a cluster that is stabilized by mechanisms and systems, making the clustering systematic rather than a matter of mere social construction or a theorist's projective imposition. Such mechanisms in the case of kinship often take the form of established practices and conventions, with variation in these producing the variation we find in kinship systems. For example, consider just the pair-wise clustering of the biological relation being born from the same body as and the social relation lives in the same house as. This pairing is supported by the widespread (but not universal) cross-cultural practice of siblings living together with their biological parents. The laws, customs, and moral codes that serve as mechanisms reinforcing the stability of this clustering allow for this pair of relations to come apart-parents can die or be incapacitated, foster care and guardianships exist, other family members may provide the house for one or another of two siblings, and children do (eventually, I'm told) leave home. Moreover, cultures exist in which this pair-wise clustering is diminished or absent altogether, having instead a conception of kinship or relatedness that draws on other homeostatic clusterings of properties in the HPC kind (cf. Carsten 2004 on houses and kinship). Particular HPC proposals regarding kinship will be informed by empirical, often ethnographic work, and the HPC view itself could be falsified by the results of that work. The view would turn out to be false if the relevant biological and social relations did not cluster at all; if kinship were documented in the total absence of some such cluster of relations; if what clustering there was lacked the systematicity and stability crucial on the HPC view; or if there were completely nonoverlapping clusters of relations across different cultural circumstances-a sort of splintering of the concept of kinship. This falsifiability is part of what makes the HPC view of kinship a substantive, even if high-level, hypothesis about the nature of kinship. Finally, note how the HPC view of kinship integrates with the alternative narrative to the history of the study of kinship introduced earlier. The change from traditional to the new kinship studies does not so much replace a bioessentialist notion of kinship with a more general notion of relatedness as draw on a shared conception of kinship that Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 9 has come over time to emphasize new, often technologically mediated biological and social relations as the foundation for kinship relations in increasingly globalized world cultures. Adjustments and augmentations of the conception of kinship in response to shifts in Western social and cultural practices are simply changes in the HPC kind kinship. Whether the HPC view further supports bio-essentialism about kinship in marking out distinctive biological, genealogical, and reproductive relations remains an open, empirical issue. But once we think of these relations as constraining rather than defining kinship, we have a ready-made place for those relations in the conception of kinship in the wake of the failure of traditional essentialism, whether or not that place accords these relations a distinctive role in kinship. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS Early in this article, I noted in passing that recent integrative work by Sahlins and ethnographically centered articles published in this journal by Elise Berman (2014) and Siobhán Mattison and colleagues (2014) have at best an ambivalent relationship to the new kinship studies. Returning to discuss this work in concluding should both clarify the nature of the contribution that the HPC view makes to kinship studies and round out the overall reconsideration of bio-essentialism about kinship that is my chief aim here. Sahlins's (2011a, 2011b, 2013a, 2013b) wide-ranging, deep-reaching, yet succinct discussion of kinship has already garnered much attention within anthropology, and it is particularly apt here to continue the comparisons to Schneider's work invoked in many initial responses to Sahlins. Sahlins's own three-word summary of his view of what kinship is- "mutuality of being"-seeks to express the overall integrity of kinship studies, departing from Schneider's iconoclastic labeling of kinship as "a non-subject." Still, Sahlins shares with Schneider a view of kinship as culture, rather than biology, with this bifurcation between these two understandings of kinship-what kinship is, is culture; what it is not, is biology-literally structuring Sahlins's book. Rejecting such a division is central to the constraints-based, HPC view of kinship, which constructively enables a move beyond the culture–biology divide. In addition, while "mutuality of being" provides a short and informative anchoring definition of kinship, the HPC view of kinship takes the very enterprise of providing such a definition to be a relic of a game that philosophers have long played-the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for concepts-a game that has never been won. The sweep of Sahlins's (2013a:2) "exercise in uncontrolled comparison . . . with ethnographic examples cherry-picked from among this people and that" in support of the idea that kinship is mutuality of being makes for engaged and engaging reading. But the function of such examples is quite different in the HPC view. They are not illustrative of a view that we accept prior to their consideration. Rather, the details provided by ethnographic work allow for a specification of the properties that make for kinship "among this people and that" and that provide evidence about the homeostatic mechanisms that make those properties both hang together yet vary across different cultural circumstances. Integrating such details into the framework provided by the HPC view is critical, of course, to the full development of that view's application to kinship. But it is a downstream job for ethnographers themselves reconsidering bio-essentialism beyond the bifurcated, reductive, either–or take on culture and biology that Sahlins and Schneider share. Berman's (2014) "interactional constraints" on kinship practices associated with the experience of adoption in the Marshall Islands, constraints imposed by the physicality and materiality of pregnancy and childbirth, and Mattison and colleagues' (2014) reevaluation of the view that the Mosuo "do not have fathers" can both be read in this light. Both articles are concerned with what might be thought of as excessive responses to perceived bio-essentialism, responses that either mistakenly deny or minimize the place of biological constraints on kinship (cf. also Wilson 2009). In effect, each article reconsiders bio-essentialism in a way that moves beyond the bifurcated view of culture and biology underpinning the false dilemma between socially constructed and biologically reductive views of kinship, a dilemma present even in sophisticated, integrative theoretical work on kinship. Around the time that Schneider began his critique of reductive, bio-essentialist views of kinship, Clifford Geertz (1973:37) also caricatured what he called the "stratigraphic conception" of various dimensions to culture, according to which biological factors provided the foundational level for an analysis of higher-level factors, such as the psychological and social. The rejection of such a stratigraphic conception is the rejection of one kind of bio-essentialism about social relations and culture, one implicit in the Parsonian demarcation of culture as the anthropological realm that shaped and informed the views of both Geertz and Schneider. Schneider's views constitute the most influential critique not only of this kind of reductive bio-essentialism about kinship in particular but also of a much more loosely defined bio-essentialism about kinship. Although I have suggested that the murkiness in what bio-essentialism amounts to in Schneider's critique of kinship raises questions about the rejection of bio-essentialism and the delineation of kinship within the new kinship studies, Schneider's idea that biology and kinship themselves are culturally constituted has had a deservedly strong influence on the direction of the study of kinship. Perhaps ironically, bio-essentialism itself may encompass a broad enough rubric to show how kinship is something more than Schneider's epigraphic "non-subject." Elsewhere in the humanities and social sciences, forms of essentialism divorced from the kind of reductionism that both Geertz and Schneider rightly rejected have for some years garnered serious consideration for the constructive promissory notes they issue. In kinship studies, those promissory notes include a nonreductive conception of kinship, the HPC view of kinship, that accords a proper place for both 10 American Anthropologist • Vol. 00, No. 0 • xxxx 2016 biological and social relations. I have argued here that reconsidering bio-essentialism about kinship invites a richer understanding of the relationship between kinship past and kinship present, and I have outlined why the HPC view of kinship creates an appropriately nonfoundational space for biological, reproductive, and genealogical relations in the conception of kinship. Whether those promissory notes fulfill their potential is something very much for the kinship future to determine, both that influenced by Schneider and that showing more continuity with kinship past. Robert A. Wilson Department of Philosophy, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6J 2E7, Canada; [email protected] http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/raw/ NOTES Acknowledgments. I would like to thank both the editor and ten referees for the journal for their detailed feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript and for guidance leading to the present article. Thanks also to Matt Barker, James Faubion, Don Gardner, Janet Keller, Adam Kuper, Bart Lenart, Jay Odenbaugh, Marshall Sahlins, Warren Shapiro, George Theiner, Charlotte Witt, Marc Workman, Alison Wylie, and audiences at the Australasian Association of Philosophy's annual conference, Western University, the University of Calgary, and Concordia University in Montreal for their perceptive and useful feedback. 1. Apart from the important works of Carsten, Kuper, and Peletz already cited, versions of this narrative can be found in Bamford and Leach 2009a, Barnes 2006, Brightman 2013, Dousset 2007, Faubion 1996, Franklin 2013, Franklin and McKinnon 2001a, Levine 2008, Trautmann 2001, and Yanagisako and Collier 1987. 2. Informative characterizations of both Schneider's critique and the new direction in kinship studies can be found in novel, integrative research on kinship (Carsten 2000; Faubion 2001; Viveiros de Castro 2009); in area reviews (Levine 2008; Peletz 1995, 2001; Scheffler 2001); in explicit reflections on Schneider's influence (Feinberg 1979, 2001; Feinberg and Ottenheimer 2001; Kuper 1999: ch.4; Wallace 1969); in selfconscious locational work from researchers at the forefront of the redirection of the study of kinship (Bamford and Leach 2009a; Collier and Yanagisako 1987; Franklin and McKinnon 2001a); in critiques of ethnographic research conducted in the new kinship studies (Shapiro 2009, 2010, 2011); and in critical discussions of books in the field (Barnes 2006; Dousset 2007; Faubion 1996; Goody 2005; Miller 2007; Shapiro 2015b). 3. I shall return to discuss this recent work further in concluding. Note also that Schneider's critique features prominently in the background discussions in most of the contributions to the 2013 Hau book symposium dedicated to Sahlins 2013a; see, for example, Brightman 2013 and Shryock 2013. 4. The HPC view originates in the ongoing rethinking of essentialism beyond anthropology in philosophical work on ethics (Boyd 1988), the emotions (Griffiths 1997), species (Boyd 1999; Griffiths 1999; Wilson 1999), biological kinds more generally (Wilson 2005; Wilson et al. 2007), and human kinds (Khalidi 2013). 5. For a representative, diverse sampling, see Bamford and Leach 2009b; Carsten 2004; Eng 2010; Faubion 2001; Franklin 2013, 2014; Franklin and McKinnon 2001b; Levine 2008; Rapp and Ginsburg 2001; Strathern 2005; Toren 2015; and Weston 1997. Notwithstanding the prevalence of such work, much ongoing work on kinship bypassed Schneider's critique and continues with more affinity to kinship past; see, for example, Allen et al. 2008; Dziebel 2007; Godelier et al. 1998; McConvell et al. 2013; Read 2001a, 2001b, 2007; Shapiro 2009, 2015a, 2015b; and Wilson 2009. 6. Although this appeal to a translation manual might be thought of as a metaphor for an unwritten practice, works that functioned as an actual manual began with the publication of W. H. R. Rivers's (1968[1910]) "The Genealogical Method of Anthropological Inquiry." Such appeals to genealogy played crucial roles in eugenics around the same time, largely through the work of the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor and in earlier appeals to tree-structures in taxonomic thinking. See http://eugenicsarchive.ca on eugenics, Bouquet 1996 on tree thinking, and Bamford and Leach (2009a, 2009b) on genealogy more generally. 7. As Wittgenstein (1953) had argued, there is no essence to being a game, no single feature or set of features that all games share in virtue of which they are games. Rather, each game shares some features with some other game, much as each member of a family may resemble some other member of that family (see also Biletzki and Matar 2014). 8. In American Kinship: A Cultural Account (1980[1968]), Schneider did not provide quantitative ethnographic data to support his claims, simply informing readers, in his preface, that his analysis rested on 6,000 pages of interviews. Nor did he engage in ethnographic speculation about kinship elsewhere, beyond the statement that kinship in "primitive and peasant societies" was less "differentiated" (1980[1968]:vii). For important critiques of Schneider's analysis of U.S. kinship, see Feinberg 1979, Fogelson 2001, Kuper 1999:134–143, Wallace 1969, and Yanagisako 1985. 9. I avoid paraphrasing simply in terms of genealogy here for two reasons. First, following Goodenough 2001, I take genealogy to have a much more encompassing sense in kinship studies than it is portrayed as having by Schneider and those accepting his critique. Second, there remain nonbiological approaches to genealogical kinship relations, such as Read (2001a, 2007), distinguishing between "genealogical grid" and "genealogical tree," and Montague 2001, which views kinship as offering a multipleslotting classification. For the role of genealogy in structuring how social scientists, particularly anthropologists, have conceptualized the lives of non-Western people, see Bamford and Leach 2009b. 10. While the aphorism "blood is thicker than water" is sometimes used descriptively to summarize, explain, or even predict interpersonal interactions, its more significant use is as a prescriptive Wilson • Bio-Essentialism in the Study of Kinship 11 or normative reminder to a particular relative to emphasize the importance of his or her biological family obligations and expectations based on these familial ties. Schneider's neglect of the normative or prescriptive meaning of the aphorism itself may seem puzzling, but it reflects his general segregation of norms and values from culture (e.g., Schneider 1976:202–203) as part of his distinctive departure from the Parsonian paradigm from which his views developed. See also Kuper (1999:71 and ch. 4) and Fogelson (2001:33–35) for broader discussion of Schneider here. 11. Schneider (1984:191) responds to this kind of objection, saying, for example, that when "Durkheim said that 'kinship is social or it is nothing', he did not mean that it loses its roots in biology and human reproduction; only that it was now to be treated as a social fact, not a biological fact." This view of Durkheim is unconvincing in part for reasons Schneider himself gives in earlier discussion (1984:99–101); see also Sahlins (2013a:12–18) on Schneider on Durkheim. Schneider's handling of Durkheim here is especially egregious but still representative of his limitations as a historian of his own discipline. For his treatment of Rivers, see Schneider (1984:102–107), and see Goodenough (2001:207–211) on Rivers and more generally on genealogy in kinship studies. 12. This is to raise a prima facie problem with the empirical adequacy of Schneider's claims about kinship past, worth articulating given the largely uncritical way in which those claims have been treated within the new kinship studies. Arguing definitively against the empirical adequacy of Schneider's analysis of kinship studies, however, would require a distinct, chiefly historical research article. Schneider's skepticism about his earlier ethnography of Yap grew from doubts sown by his selective reading of Labby's (1976) Marxist ethnography of Yap and occupies the first half of A Critique of the Study of Kinship. My skepticism about Schneider's analysis of kinship studies grows from doubts sown by his selective reading of those studies, which occupies Critique's second half. See also Kuper (1999:147–149) and Goodenough 2001. 13. Precisely the same concern has been expressed about Sahlins's (2013a) view of kinship as mutuality of being, including in the contributions by Bloch 2013, Brightman 2013, Feuchtwang 2013, and Shryock 2013 to the Hau book symposium; cf. the contrasting view on this delineation problem of Carsten 2013 as well as Sahlins's (2013b) reply to symposiasts. 14. Apart from this work's growing prominence in the philosophy of science (see below), I simply note the broader engagement with essentialism to which it contributes, including questioning the adequacy of what historians of biology call "the essentialism story" in their field (Amundson 2005; Winsor 2006); the resurrection of essentialism about species in the philosophy of biology (Devitt 2008); and the articulation of psychological essentialism in cognitive science and its putative implications for anthropology (Gil-White 2001). 15. See Boyd 1988 for the original HPC view; Boyd 1999, Griffiths 1999, and Wilson 1999 for the original deployments to species; Griffiths 1997, Kornblith 1993, Rieppel 2005, Slater 2013, Wilson 2005, and Wilson et al. 2007 for extensions to other kinds; and Ereshefsky and Matthen 2005, Ereshefsky and Reydon 2015, Magnus 2014, and Slater (2012, 2014) for ongoing critical discussions. 16. For pheneticism and numerical taxonomy, see Sokal and Sneath 1963; for earlier, so-called polythetic definitions of kinship, see Barnard and Good 1984, Good 1996, and Needham (1971, 1975). The link between the HPC view and realism is clear throughout the literature cited in the preceding endnote, but see especially Boyd (1988, 1999), Griffiths 1999, Kornblith 1993, and Wilson 1999. REFERENCES CITED Allen, Nicholas, Hilary Callan, Robin Dunbar, and Wendy James (eds.) 2008 Early Human Kinship: from Sex to Social Reproduction. Oxford: Royal Anthropological Institute/Blackwell. 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The Radiance of Time: Overcoming Bardo Limits and Constraints in the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe 1 By Gus Koehler, Ph.D. Time Structures, and the University of Southern California, Sacramento Center [email protected] I. Buddha Gautama, and Saraputra Demonstrate a Time Paradox We will start our analysis by retelling, with some elaboration on my part, the story of the appointment of Saraputra to be one of the chief administrators of the Buddha's Songha.i When Buddhaii Gautama first laid eyes on Saraputra as he was walking down the road toward him. Gautama immediately appointed him his principal disciple over the Songha. He did this without apparently knowing who he was since Gautama had apparently not met Saraputra before. To me such an appointment may have upset the gathered monks who had been with him for many years. In response, the Buddha might have pointed out to the monks that he perceived Saraputra as a follower of Buddha Anomadassi who lived in a much earlier aeon.iii At that time, as the text on Saraputra's life points out, Saraputra pledged to become the future Buddha Gautama's chief disciple.2 Referring to Diagram 1, this suggests to me that the Buddha Gautama was able to perceive Saraputra at both an earlier aeon and in his own aeon.3 (The earlier Buddha Anomadassi also saw that Saraputra would realize his aspiration to be the Buddha Gautama's chief disciple even as he made his pledge standing before him. This is quite interesting because Saraputra had not yet engaged in the causes and conditionsiv at that point that would determine his future karma.) A further time paradox emerges from each Buddha's existence in a different aeon. The collapse of an aeon and its unique four dimensional world system followed by the formation of another aeon with a new four dimensional world system suggests that the two Buddhas are in relative temporal motion to each other, being separated by an aeonic bifurcation.4 They are situated in multiple space-time instants that are entirely given in their own world system i In what follows, I attempt to clarify, based on several accounts in the text, the relationship between a previous incarnation of the historical Buddha Gautama's chief disciple and his appointment by Gautama to lead the Songha or religious community . The concern expressed by the disciples is a fiction that is used to clarify how the Buddha Gautama was able to make the appointment he did by directly perceiving whom the two approaching him were. ii A Buddha is a sentient being who has developed, using various meditation and other practices, to the final point of knowing/being the effulgent of the fifth dimension into conventional reality. This definition is fully developed in the paper. iii Other Buddhas preceded Gautama Buddha. "Aeon" is the amount of time needed for a world system to evolve and dissolve. Connected Discourses, 15:5,6. iv One's Karma is shaped by the causes and conditions resulting from activity in the conventional world. 2 Figure 1: The Simultaneity of knowing Saraputra's Past/Future by a past and a future Buddha. but not in both since they are not part of a single aeon's four dimensional spacetimev. They do participate in common processes that generate a common class of aeon specific conventional "natures"vi that are perceived and understood by both. But, a single four dimensional world system cannot explain this relationship because the two Buddhas are in relative motion to each other in two entirely different aeons with timing that is disconnected by a bifurcation 5 that completely disorganizes each world system's time before the "following" aeon emerges. There is no immediate conventionalvii perceptual path that can be followed in four v For conventional reality, dimension implies direction, measurement, and more or less of something. Here, not including the fifth dimension, we are referring to depth, width and height like a cube and time as dynamically bringing each dimension alive as an extended present or as something moving from the past to the future. vi Conventional reality results from long term karmic processes that give rise to a particular reality suitable for and that evolves sentient beings. Within this reality, Katagiri holds that conventional reality is mistakenly taken to be a constant, unbroken, unidirectional flow imbued with a particular purpose. Closer examination shows conventional time to be just moments that appear and disappear. Dainin Katagiri (2006). Each Moment is the Universe. Boston: Shambala. See also: Guy Newland (1992). The Two Truths. Ithica, NY: Snow Lion. vii Conventional reality is characterized by Frazer's five nested temporalities and the causal systems that go with each as discussed below. For example, it includes evolutionary and physical processes as well as psychological, social, and cultural states. In terms of a person and Buddhist Buddha Anomadassi's Aeon and World System (Ba) Multiple Aeons or Universes Buddha Gautama's Aeon and World System (Bg) Saraputra's earlier birth T1 Ultimate Reality as Clear-Light Karmic and Conventional Reality of a World System in Each Aeon Saraputra's later birth T2 Bifurcation Points 3 dimensional space-time since four-dimensional space-time ceases at the bifurcation between world systems. Even so, both aeons, as we will show in a moment, are the effulgent of a single clear-light that is knowable to a Buddha. (Figure 1 vertical alignment of aeons is provided to ease the reader's interpretation. There is no necessity that they take any particular alignment relative to the other.) My Saraputra report illustrates a fifth dimension referred to by Buddhists as "ultimate reality" or clear-light, from which an aeon's four dimensions emerge as a "seal" or mandala or conventional space-time pattern within which these dimensions remain trapped as present instants of that aeon. Such instants occur spontaneously in conventional four dimensional time as a particular effulgent of ultimate or fifth dimensional time. It is this fifth dimension that permits Buddhas to simultaneous view the relative motion of present four-dimensional instants between and across separate aeons (Figure 2). It might be supposed that our four dimensional world has "Aa set of hyperplanesviii of simultaneity uniquely slicing space-time into equivalence classes of absolutely simultaneous events."6 The experienced universe with its worlds and simultaneous events is taken to be an ultimately unchanging, 4dimensional spacetime "block universe". Each experiential, conventional point on any imposed hyperplane is already predetermined elsewhere in the spacetime block. (This is a popular theory in modern physics.) A hyperplane is placed such that it cuts across the points where Saraputra exists. There is no progression from a past into the future only different locations in the block which our Buddhas are able to simultaneously connect with a hyperplane and "see." But the capacity to simultaneously view multiple present instants across many forming and collapsing aeons punctuated by a time-less bifurcation point invalidates the view that we are talking about an all encompassing four dimensional block universe. At best, the block universe view applies only to a single world system, not multiple world systems in an aeon that collapses spacetime, including the block, between this and a new aeon's independent existence. The issue is: How is a single block universe formed relative to multiple block universes? What is the bifurcation point that demarks each and when is the process of their emergence "complete"? Numerous Sutras and independent accounts based on valid meditative experience (here Tantric yoga) of advanced practitioners such as Padmasamhava and Milarepa, provide examples of the operation of what we will processes, it involves making a distinction between one thing and another and then becoming attached cognitively and/or emotionally to that distinction. Conventional reality is embodied and informs all levels of interaction. It is the root of individual suffering. viii In a one-dimensional space (a straight line), a hyperplane is a point; it divides a line into two rays. In two-dimensional space (such as the xy plane), a hyperplane is a line; it divides the plane into two half-planes. In three-dimensional space, a hyperplane is an ordinary plane; it divides the space into two half-spaces. This concept can also be applied to four-dimensional space and beyond, where the dividing object is simply referred to as a "hyperplane". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperplane 4 call the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe, incorporating the simultaneous experience by Buddhas of multiple world systems within multiple aeons. Such accounts point out that individual Buddhas and their followers appear in different aeons and world systems according to each system's Karma. Buddhas in the same and different aeons and world systems may perceive each other and specific individuals in any aeon or world system because they are able to participate in the fundamental dynamic that supports Karama. These points will be more fully developed below. II. Additional Examples of Buddhist Temporal Issues • The continuous creation of conventional temporality by sentient beings produces causes and conditions that lead to both suffering and enlightenment. In contrast, enlightenment temporality is not driven by causes and conditions, nor is it characterized by suffering, nor does it have a beginning, past, present, or future. How is enlightenment temporality produced out of contaminated conventional temporality? What is the temporal relationship of the two? • The Sutras give accounts of the Buddha or his disciples appearing simultaneously in multiple past and/or future space/time karmic driven locations. How is this possible? • A Buddha's seeing and hearing can be active in worlds that he/she is not embodied in. These worlds exist in other universes (aeons and world systems) separated from the current one by a division where space/time totally collapses before another universe is created. How is this possible? There would seem to be no connecting medium by which to "know." • The law of Karma's dependent arising from an individual's activities appears to be violated by a Buddha's ability to see future karmic results before an individual has acted, producing the causes and conditions for future karma. How is this possible? • How does the practice of Tantric yoga reveal the short-comings of conventional temporality while simultaneously enabling the causes and conditions for an enlightened Buddha to occur? • How can a Buddha who is independent of space-time act wisely and compassionately in conventional space-time? III. Summary of Key Points The temporal limits of a Buddhist Vajrayana7 practitioner's umveltix are associated with the practitioner's stage of temporal sensory development (including mind as a sensor). Conventional reality-which includes five nested temporalities-eotemporal, nootemporal, biological, noological, and social time- ix Currently, Umvelt refers to how an animal's receptors and effectors define its world of possible stimuli and actions. More exactly, umvelt is defined as "the circumscribed portion of the environment which is meaningful and effective for a given animal species." 5 limits one to a world system's contaminated temporal umvelt (Bardos).8 Conventional reality contains the full range of human emotions from the highest to the most base. Conventional reality is itself the results of karmic constraints that form and limit conventional reality nested temporalities formed in many worlds in and across aeons.x This causal conventional reality producing process also defines and limits conventional reality 's Bardos. "Bardo" refers to a specific duration of time marked by a particular contaminated consciousness, having a clear beginning, a sense of continuity and a distinct end.9 A practitioner's ripening via Vajrayana practices that are suitable for each of the six Bardosxi eliminates these conventional time-space karmic and Bardo contaminates and constraints even as one continues to occupy the conventional world. A fundamental opening of space-time occurs to a dimension that conventional reality is effulgencexii off. The Vajrayana practitioner is time as the eternal now moment and as a continuously presented duration including other temporal attributes of conventional reality. In order to understand the Buddha-Saraputra experience and conventionally related temporal limits and constraints and how they are overcome by Vajarayana practice, a theoretical presentation of what I call the "Five Dimensional Buddha Universe," and the role that karma, Bardos, and clearlight play in it, is made. IV. The Five Dimensional Buddhist Universe and its Bardos10 Characteristics of a Buddhist Five Dimensional Universe Buddhism holds that multiple conventional instants or moments, such as those in different aeons and across worlds within an aeon, can be simultaneously known and experienced by a Buddha who has the mind of clear-light (more on clear-light later).11 Buddhism holds that the zero durational instant cannot be a present or a past or a future in a background dependent12 flow of time. There are only single four dimensional conventional present instants that are the entire aeon and all of its world systems; "each moment is the universe."13 Past or future states do not exist independently as part of a past-to-present-to future background dependent flow of causes and conditions on their own and experienced as such. They only exist for a sentient being as a contaminated perception within a strictly conventional local present instant.14 All sentient beings are "present" parts of the radiance or effulgence of the basal clear light which exists across all aeons in all combinations of places in multiple world systems x For a review of one approach to many worlds and a critique see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-everett/ The view presented in this paper is not based in a quantum theory interpretation. xi The six are: natural Bardo this life, the Bardo of dream, the Bardo of meditation, the Bardo of dying, the Bardo of dharmata, and the Bardo of becoming. xii Effulgence, as used here, refers to all aspects of conventional reality emerging simultaneously with the fifth dimension (see Figure 2). Conventional reality is embedded in and inseparable from the fifth dimension being produced as a distinction leading to attachment, etc. This concept is further developed here. 6 with different space-times.15 An aeon is a karmically organized period of four dimensional space-time instants that collapses at a bifurcationxiii point and reform as a new aeon containing new conventional world space-time systems as illustrated in Figure 1. The fact that this condition is hidden by sentient beings from themselves creates suffering. The nonduality of conventional and ultimate reality (dharmadhatu) is the absolute space of all phenomena be it space, time, matter or consciousness. Even as conventional configurations are experienced as local manefestations, they are conterminous with nonlocal and atemporal ultimate reality.16 Being undifferentiated, this state is one of highest creativity. Put another way, present instants smear across multiple world systems that are entirely and equally given but are experienced as locally different conventional realities embedded in causal conditions set by emptiness and form.17 This "smearing" of present instants as an permits simultaneous "seeing" by a Buddha of conventional present instants in multiple world systems because they are connected by an effulgent of the fifth clear-light dimension. There is no privileged here-and-now local world system event in five dimensional space-time permitting a naturally and universally given past-present-future continuity. Dogen describes Buddhism's "background independent" temporality of a single world system nicely. He says: "The time we call spring blossoms has an existence called flowers. The flowers, in turn, express the time called spring. This is not existence within time; existence itself is time."18 Time is instantiated in the relationship "flower-Spring" and found only there. Time's instants result from continuous and changing relationships that are strictly local yet "are" time. This suggests that the clear-light is the basal foundation of 'flower-Spring" time across all world systems. Access to the clear-light provides privileged knowledge outside of this cyclical conventional existence. "With knowledge, one is a Buddha; with ignorance, one is a sentient being wandering in cyclical existence."19 Moving from the macro world system to the micro world of the individual sentient being, Buddhist space-time is five dimensional with four of its temporal dimensions entirely nested within one of a person's three bodies, the Nirmangakaya or what I will call the "meat body." This same body creates conventional reality, exists there as impermanent "object" in relation to other impermanent "objects."20 But when the practitioner is "healed" of the notion of having a "self" and a "body" with a past-present-future, they as with every sentient beings,21 find that they are continuously producing their own local present space-time instant as "flower spring time" in a particular world system. "Self" and "body" continuously manifest chronodynamically in constant interaction in a time-ecology with other beings (Figure 2).22 "At the bottom of suffering is time. Our ordinary minds cannot catch the quick changes of time, so we feel a gap between ourselves and time. Then we xiii A bifurcation is a dimensionless point, similar to a bindu, where an aeon changes from one form of timing and organization to another, much like a laminar river flow changes into a turbulent flow or a regular heart beat into a fibrillating one. Mathematically, such a point is a repeller; that is it cannot be occupied and is not reversible. See: Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jurgens, and Dietmar Saupe (1992). Chaos and Fractals. New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 585. 7 believe that our individual existence is something that is completely separate from everything else in the universe."23 As I will show shortly, it is this self delusion produced in conventional reality by attachment, and other processes including those associated with mind that, as illusions, separate us from the fact that we are time. The functioning of time as understood by Buddhists is beyond mundane perceptual recognition. If you only look at life objectively you can't participate in it; there is always a "you" getting in the way. This point will be clarified in the discussion of Vajrayana yogic methods. The process being laid out here suggests that it is a mistaken view that the external or conventional world simply is four dimensional space-time existent objects that evolve as a three dimensional existence. Rather: "Objects are time because they lack any nontemproal existence, having no temporal essence outside of time, in which case things like apples and cups cannot be objects as usually understood because their impermanent 'being' is actually a temporal processA."24 The view here is that each sentient being is a biological entity and establishes 8 Bindu (Clear-Light)/DarmaKaya Body Fifth Dimension Distinction from desire out of ignorance leading to attachment and a Form in space (Four Dimensions) Sambogakaya (Energy body) Basal Clear-Light (Fifth Dimension) Greater Karmic Stream as a World System with Emergent Sentient Beings (Individuals) Producing Karmic Mingling Streams Nirmangakaya (meat) Body & 4 Dimensional Space 5 D 4D 4 elements As Particles External-Kalachakra Internal-Kalachakra Alternative-Kalachakara X 5th Dimension Figure 2: The Interpenetration of the Ultimate and Conventional in the Dynamical Flow of Karma. 25 The diagram is interpreted throughout the text. conventional reality by creating local distinctions and attachments that collectively and continuously produce a world system's conventional space-time instant's suffering by denying and being out of contact with this embeddedness, with one's own effulgence of the clear-light.26 I am not a self-observed object in time; I am time. As Dogen would put it:27 'Being-time' means that time itself is beingAand all being is timeA. If time merely flies away, you would be separated from time. The reason you do not clearly understand being-time is that you think of time as only passingA. People only see time's coming and going, and do not 9 thoroughly understand that time-being abides in each moment. AFlower is like spring. Spring with all its numerous aspects is called flowering. When spring flowers there is nothing outside of spring. Expanding on Hui Neng, the Sixth Zen Patriarch's statement from the perspective of the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe: "In this [instant] there is nothing which comes to be. In this [instant] there is nothing which ceases to be. Thus there is no birth-and-death to be brought to an end. Therefore the absolute tranquility of [the fifth dimension] is this present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight." 28 The moment is the effulgence of clear-light particularized by karma but not separated from that light; the light is simply "impermanently stained" by the conventional reality of a world system. It must be kept in mind that all sentient beings, particularly humans, have the clear-light at their core and are Buddhas. All of us are this flowing as being. The issue is purification of the obscurations that limit access to knowing-being this aspect (this is dealt with below). Karma Attracts the Formation of Sentient Beings, Bardos, Heavens, Hells, and Reincarnations According to the Kalachakra Tantra,29 one of the principal statements of doctrine of Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, the configurations of world systems-Bardos, heavens and hells, and sentient beings-are fractal in the sense that karma simultaneously shapes an aeon and sentient beings in it even as they in turn shape karma. Generally, what has happened is that a conventional distinction has been made "real" by becoming an enfulgent infused with energy (Sambokakya, five elements, etc) through grasping and identification. A pattern is established. First, an aeon's configuration is due to the force of karma of beings who will be born in its world systems. Karma, acting much as gravity does,30 begins to connatexiv the qualities of the subtle elements of wind, fire, earth, and water into the processes of a three dimensional mandala31 within the non-subjective awareness provided by localized space particles.32 (A mandala also indirectly displays ultimate reality or the fifth Buddha dimension.) Karma is carried by or rides upon the external and internal "subtle winds." Internal subtle winds are the "life" or "life-force" that forms and moves sentient beings to dynamically "know" how to take up food, reproduce, sense the world, etc. (This is not the same idea as the Western life-force concept that animates xiv "Connated" means existing at birth, originating at the same time, to be born with. As used here, a mandala is a two or three dimensional connated system of the foundational elements with an order patterned around a center (bindu) describing and, with the proper fourth dimensional methods, providing access to the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe. As such a mandala can refer to the organization and relationships composing the external world, the inner world of a person, and that of a diety and that deity's throne. It can also apply to each in turn (outerKalachakra, inner-Kalachakra, and alternative Klachakra mandalas). Guru initiation, instructions, a mantra, visualizations, and rituals are required to navigate a mandala properly. Again, this is a good example of how an information theory approach could provide perspective (see footnote 8). 10 muscles or other process.) Karma, in turn, is reshaped by subtle winds. These subtle winds are stained by the activities of sentient beings as they act through their meat bodies.33 It is like the branching of a great river into multiple rivulets that come together again at some point to again form the mighty torrent; the rivulets and the torrent are different but the same.34 The second force that gives shape to a world system is space. Space is non-subjective pure awareness (clear light) displayed as an expandable and contractible dimensionless point or bindu.xv A sentient being's subjective distinctions produce an emanation from the bindu leading to action that stains space-time's four dimensional non-subjective pure awareness (Figure 2). This "staining", in turn, distorts the mandala of the five universal elements (space, wind, fire, earth, and, water) imparting objects with specific healthy or unhealthy rhythms.35 Karma enters both in the "staining" and is in turned "stained" by the result. The fractal flow is back and forth. The outer universe also interpenetrates the inner universe of sentient being. Karma is fractal-like in its forming of an individual's inner-Kalachakra (or inner wheel of time). The elements of the mandala are organized in relation to the body with space being associated with the crown of the head; fire with the chest; water with the navel; and earth with the knees (these assignments shift according to the requirements of the external world of a particular ritual or initiation). The three dimensional outer (external wheel of time) and innerKalachakras shape each other "fractal-like" and can be closely mapped onto and affect each other as noted above.36 In summary, these two interpenetrating conditions-karma and space-organize the five elements, continuously creating a changing fractal-like world system. The Temporal Dynamics of the Inner, the Outer and the Alternative Aspects of a World System We are now ready to turn to a discussion of how the inner world of the individual connects to the outer world and of how a Buddha engages with all of this. According to the 14th Dali Lama: 37 We distinguish one type of karma which is of a mental nature, a mental factor of volition or intention. [But t]here also exist physical and oral karmas. To understand the connection between these physical, oral, or mental karmas (body, speech, and mind) and the material world, we must refer to the tantric texts. The Kalachakra Tantra in particular explains that in our bodies there are to be found, at gross, subtle, and extremely subtle levels, the five elements which make up the substance of the external world. It is therefore in this contextA that we must envision the connection xv Here we move away from strictly discursive language to a much more poetic form that "points" to its referent. This footnote warns the reader away from concluding that we are logically laying out the "nature" of reality. 11 between our physical, oral, and mental karmas, and the external elements. Internal subtle winds are the karmic bearing winds in the continuum of a person. The subtle winds are much like a turbulent river branch that penetrates and flows through the channels of the energy bodyxvi continuously organizing the elements-the same elements of space, wind, fire, earth, and water that are organized by karma in the outer-Kalachakra.38 Remember, karma is not the same as ultimate reality. Ultimate reality or Dharmakaya is the space-time of emptiness where all conventional phenomena are pure and impure effulgent of clear light. Karma is a force imprinted via the subtle winds as stained by embodied attachments. This force provides the causes and conditions to produce the necessary distinctions for a dependent arising and continuation of a particular universe and its world systems. Once the sentient beings of a particular realm disappear, so does that realm.39 A realized Buddha does not produce Karma but will arise from the causes and conditions that that Karma produces (Figure 2). When, from the perspective of tantra we say that all worlds appear out of clear light, we do not visualize such clear-light as a unique entity, but as the ultimate clear light "behind" or "ridden upon" or as "spring blossoms" of each being in the collective turbulence of limitless numbers of other sentient beings. This is why we refer to conventional reality as effulgent. Time and space are the radiance of clear-light's effulgence (Tarthug Tulku includes knowledge as its third component 40). All cyclical stages of the six Bardos which make up each living being represent nothing more than the various manifestations of the potential of this dynamic clear-light. The more clear light loses its subtlety to the suffering of a sentient being, the more strongly do individual experiences shape a Bardo. It is the energy body that serves as the site for tantric practices induced by meat body and mind yogas necessary to purify our consciousness. The winds of karma penetrate the six chakras and channels tracing out the energy body dwelling within the meat body. (A full discussion of the Buddhist concepts of chakras, channels and winds are particularly well presented by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso.41) Due to this "bodied" nesting, the outer universe, through its various cycles and associated realms provides the opportunity to purify the inner universe of the parishioner, revealing the ultimate characteristics of a Buddha's body-speech-mind. The following Citi Patti Thanka42 (Figure 3) shows this complex connection and its impermanence. The couple are the cremation ground guards demonstrating the connection across the Bardos of life and death. The works of Alex Gray help to see the various channels and winds involved in the purification processes discussed below. xvi One of the three bodies (Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya or the "energy body" whose pattern of channels, nadies and chakras produce experience, and the Nirmanakaya ("meat body" which permits realization in conventional reality). The Dharmakaya body is the true nature of the Buddha, which is identical with transcendental reality, the essence of the universe. It is the unity of the Buddha with everything existing. The other two bodies are emanations of the Dharmakaya body. See Geshe Kelsang Gyatso reference. 12 It may be clear by now that by purifying the subtle winds that course through the chakras, channels, and nadies, one purifies karma which in turn produces the alternative madala as a Buddha's body-speech-mind. The result is a new pattern in creative sync via the meat body with a Figure 3: Citi Patti Thanka as Symbols of Dancing Impermanence. world system and its conventional reality. Ultimately, by the proper application of yoga the flow of winds is stopped, "killing the winds of karma."43 (These relationships are further developed below.) Let us return briefly to Figure 1 and the interpenetration of multiple world systems. Space, like the clear-light, is a principal organizing component of all world systems and of all sentient beings in them, pervading all universes just as it pervades the human energy and meat bodies. Cleary says: 44 At that time, the World Honored One (Bhagavan), in this setting, attained the supreme, correct awareness of all things. His wisdom [mind] entered into all the three times with complete equality; his body filled all worlds; his voice [speech] universally accorded with all lands in the ten directions. Like space, which contains all forms, he made no discrimination among all objects. And, as space [non-subjective awareness] extends everywhere, he entered all worlds equally. His body forever sat omnipresent in all sites of enlightenment [emphasis added]. 13 Returning to Figures 1 and 2 above, we can see that the individual space that contains the bindu of non-dimensional clear-light radiance penetrating all world systems and contains all local times as the connecting link extending from the inner space of an enlightened one's body to all outer domains. A Buddha penetrates and awakens to the experience of being enstantiated in the always existent, domain crossing clear-light radiance being displayed as "spring blossoms." In this way, a Buddha is instantiated or extended across all unique background independent space-times. Bardos: The Space-Time Divisions of a World System "Bardo" refers to a specific duration of conventional time associated with a contaminated consciousness, having a clear beginning, a sense of continuity and a distinct end. There are six Bardo cycles which produce opportunities for enlightenment in the conventional reality of this world system. The six are: the Bardo of Birth or of this life; the Bardo of Meditation; the Bardo of Dream; the Bardo of Dying; the Bardo of Dharmata; and the Bardo of Existence.45 Each Bardo is separated by bifurcation processes from other Bardos (death, entering meditation, etc.) (Table 1). Within each Bardo every action and object is dependently arisen as a single karmic instant of a sentient being. It is our conventional labeling of particular collection of states, including consciousness that designates a particular Bardo. Ultimately, there are no inherent barriers between Bardos except those due to such conventional distinctions. Each has it's own characteristic Vajrayana yogic method for awakening (Table 1) as discussed below. Neither space nor emptiness of ultimate reality are stained by conventional Bardo distinctions. This is easily seen when comparing the results of the yoga of sleep with the yoga of Dharmata as shown in Table 1.xvii Such methods reveal that each realm is both ultimate and conventional (see Figure 1). For example, death of the body does not mean that the purified aspects of mind embedded in the energy body cease. They are carried forward into the next Bardo via the subtle wind even though the other defining conditions of the previous Bardo end. One can continue to apply yogic results learned in the Bardos of this Life, Meditation and Dream to what is experienced in the Bardos of Dying and Darmata and achieve Buddhahood in each.46 More generally, individuals experience the instantaneous-now differently in each Bardo. Each Bardo also has its own unique temporal characteristics. This leads to varying experiences of suffering and temporal knowing. Yogic methods seek to purify the cross-Bardo migrating subtle wind. This purification applies completely and consistently across all six Bardos. Suffering ceases by the clear experience that conventional reality is an effulgence of the fifth crosscutting dimension or basal clear light. With this realization the instantaneous now is extinguished. If this condition is not achieved, entry xvii Dharmata refers to the ultimate nature of the Dharma and is synonymous with Buddha nature. Fischer-Schreiber, Ehrhard, and Diener (1991). The Shambhala Dictionary of Buddhism and Zen. Boston: Shambhala. 14 into a new body leading to a new birth occurs. The previous energy body and its subtle energies dim but are not lost; they remain embedded in the subtle wind. They also continue as karmic tendencies. We now have our first hint of how the Buddha was able to see Saraputra across aeons. Like any karmic structure, all Bardos are particular manifestation in space of wind, fire, earth, and water. Because space pervades them all, so does the Buddha's Dharmakayaxviii body. Since time is the relational or background independent result of the interactions of the elements in space, a Buddha extends to all of these and thus to all Bardos and to all times (past, present, and future). Table 1: Bardo Space/Time Characteristics and Yogic Practices Bardo Characteristic Space-Time Access to 5 th Buddhist Dimension? Method of Purification to Experience Conventional Reality as an Effulgent of Ultimate Reality* (All Require Initiation) 1. Bardo of Birth including life of the body Temporal characteristics vary by developmental stage from birth to death. Created life-time of mental states. Temporal states vary by speed of sequence of past-present-future flow creating waking existence. Four dimensional and local. No spontaneous access No method. 2. Bardo of Meditation Non-linear past-present-future sequencing. Potential access via: space**, luminosity of clear-light, energy body, samatha and/or Vapasana. Yoga of "three bodies:" 1) mind; 2) inner energies; and 3) body producing appearances and experiences of the 5 th dimension. Stability in deity creation and completion stages of deity yoga. 3. Bardo of Dream (nested in Bardo of Birth) Plastic duration and flow of pastpresent-future sequencing. Potentially unlimited via luminosity of clear light. Practice of luminosity resting in mind as emptiness, radiance, and clarity as illusory body. 4. Bardo of Dying Ordered dissolution of karmic space-time foundations via dissolution of four elements leading to dissolution of body-speech-mind. Loss of PastPresent-Future sequencing and flow. Space particle as emptiness continues and luminosity as 5 th Consciousness transference (Powa) into ultimate consciousness or reborn in Bardo of rebirth. xviii The Buddha as supreme state of absolute knowledge. 15 dimension appears as part of Bardo with specific characteristics. 5. Bardo of Dharmata Mind as luminous emptiness, an effulgence of the nature of all phenomenon. Is disconnected from karma. No causal foundation for space-time. It is the 5 th dimension. Recognition of the selfdisplay of awareness as peaceful and wrathful deities resulting in absorption in 5th. 6. Bardo of Existence (after failing to recognize Bardo of Dharmata) Personal karma produced via cause and effect gives access to a space-time world system and realm of samsara. No spontaneous access. Cultivation of pure vision to "see" into new world system & father/mother intercourse, rebirth and realm as a Buddha realm. Source: Inspired by Francesca Fremantle (2001). Luminous Emptiness. Boston: Shambala; and by Stephen Schumancher (1986). The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion. Boston: Shambala. Each Bardo is defined in: Francesca Fremantel and Chogyam Trungpa (1975), The Main Verses of the Six Bardos, in The Tibetian Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation Through Hearing in the Bardo. Boston: Shambala, p. 98-99. Many details and interpretations are the author's based on literature cited in paper. *Ultimate space-time penetrates each Bardo per Diagram 1 but may not be known. These methods are identified and briefly discussed below. An initiation by a qualified Guru is essential. ** See page 6. Tying together Ultimate and Conventional Space-Time: External-, Internal-, and Alternative-Kalachakra Recall that a mandala is what appears to be a two or three dimensional connated pattern centering on a bindu, of the subtle elements of wind, fire, earth, and water within the non-subjective awareness provided by localized space particles.47 As such, it dynamically illustrates how purified conventional reality emerges from the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe. In doing so, it diagrams the fractal karmic patterns and relationships between the external world and the inner world of an individual. Vajrayana meditation instructions suggest that a practitioner actively perceive the external and internal worlds as such a dynamically linked process. The Kalachakra Tantra shows how conventional time results from the nested cycles of external, internal, and alternative "Kalachakra wheels" (Figure 4).48 Karmic causality occurs in a feed-back way between the inner and outer Kalachakra mandalas. The external-Kalachakra feeds forward, creating the conditions for sentient beings in specific aeons and world systems; the internalKalachakra feeds directly back into the external-Kalachakra by embedding the results of actions within this greater dynamical flow. This in turn evolves the karmic causes and conditions for the current and future world systems. The alternative-Kalachakra wheel of time synchronously links the fifth dimension with the internal and external wheels of time. Technically, Vajrayana yoga generates within conventional reality the body-speech-mind of a Buddha, free of karmic generating attachments. The connating patterns of internal and external-Kalachakras are correctly viewed as efflugent from the 5th dimension. The Buddha is the instantaneous "blossoms in spring" embodiment of 16 Figure 4: Kalachakra Mandala. From a sentient being's perspective it shows the mandalas of Great Bliss (center); Mandala of Enlightened Wisdom; Mandala of Enlightened Speech; Mandala of Enlightened Body; Space element (first green circle); and Wisdom element circle or Great Protective Circle (http://www.buddhanet.net/kalimage.htm ) this effulgence of clear-light mind. As the embodiment of the alternativeKalachakra, a Buddha's action is in-sync with the external and internalKalachakras.49 This enlightened being acts on the cusp of the 5th dimension and conventional reality. With the capacity to "see" from the 5th dimension, karmic distortions producing suffering are revealed and can be influenced by changing the external-internal entrained dance. Skillful means are tuned to and act upon a particular instant.50 We are now ready to further clarify how the Buddha Gautama was able to know who Saraputra was across aeons and world systems. The way to resolve this paradox is to understand how alternative-Kalachakra works. Visualization of the alternative-Kalachakra allows one to synchronously see aeonically separated conventional events. By knowing in this way, the Buddha sees two simultaneousmutual-arising present instants in separate aeons' world systems. Such instants, due to their being effulgences of the ultimate, are interpenetrated by all other simultaneous instants across aeons. In other words, all instants across a world system are simultaneously mutually contained within any single instant (see Figure 1).51 To repeat, this is possible because all instants are the effulgence of the basal clear light. According to Tarthang Tulku: "At this subtle mystery level, [clear] light itself is only the appearance of light. But light is also nothing other than this 'appearing'. In the unitary space of appearing, 'from' and 'to' fuse. The 17 cosmos manifests as dimensionless and zeroless, and appearance reveals its inner luminosity as the heart of lucency."52 This simultaneous causality of a instantaneous present across aeons and world systems provides a common ontological even fractal-like foundation for a Buddha's six special powers across all scales. It helps to show why chapter two of this paper: "Additional Examples of Buddhist Temporal Issues" are not paradoxes. To summarize, all dharmasxix interpenetrate each other spatially and temporally. Past, present, and future "Ainterpenetrate into a single thought instantAwhere efficient causation flows from past, present and future directions with equivalent force, thus establishing simultaneous interpenetrative harmonization of unhindered mutual containment between all events in the three periods of time."53 IV. Tantric methods can help Validate and Navigate the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe Dharmic knowledge rests on empirical investigation. The Buddha Gautama is very clear that one should not accept philosophical speculations like those developed here. He says that we should not: Ago by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, "This contemplative is our teacher." When you know for yourselves that, "These qualities are skillful; these qualities, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness"-then you should enter and remain in them.54 What is meant by valid results? The test of validity used by the Buddha hinges on individual results via a living practice linage, from applying well validated methods to achieve purification (detailed below). The results of these methods will liberate one from suffering and produce "welfare and happiness." Liberation is always from a state that needs healing and to a healed state of release and greater effectiveness. Healing is a continuous process producing particular healthy experiential and measurable results. How one heals Healing involves the application of knowing associated with realizing alternative-Kalachakra. Healing then is coming to an understanding and participation in the primordial illumination of consciousness as effulgence of the xix Dharma refers to the karmic manifestation of the path of conventional reality. Every individual is a manifestation of and manifests their own dharma. The Buddha too is a manifestation of dharma. The Buddha's teaching, called the dharma, purify the path eliminating the causes of suffering. Thus conventional reality is fundamental, being the path to Buddhahood. 18 energy body, which in turn is an effulgence of the Dharmakaya body. According to the Fourteenth Dali Lama: The definition of the mental is that which is luminous and knowing. AClarity here refers to the ability of mental states to reveal or reflect. Knowing, by contrast, refers to the mental state's faculty to perceive or apprehend what appears. [These are not objects that can be measured in spatiotemporal terms.] As the primary feature of light is to illuminate, so consciousness is said to illuminate its objects. Just as in light there is no categorical distinction between the illumination and that which illuminates, so in consciousness there is no real difference between the process of knowing or cognition and that which knows or cognizes. In consciousness, as in light, there is a quality of illumination. This healing is accomplished by removal of obscurations that produce suffering: [T]he mind of clear light is very subtle, and though it enters good states of existence such as those of the gods or bad such as those of hell, it remains unaffected by them, either adversely or beneficially. AIt is never tarnished nor develops into the actual entities of those states of mind. So, like water and dirt, the clear-light of mind can be separated via practice from conventional reality and all that it contains. A[I]f the natural mind of clear-light is separated from its impurities such as dirt and dust from water, it is clear and transparent. It reveals its clarity in its separation from entanglement of duality.55 Removal of obscurations are tied to the developmental progress of the practitioner much like the continuous process of a plant growing from a seed. Developmental progress toward enlightenment (healing) is continuous, revealing aspects of the final mature plant even as it proceeds. The method, the path, and the fruit are simultaneous. Purification: Separating vs. Produced Methods Vajrayana provides various purification methods to the practitioner so that they can heal themselves. There are two general types: 1) separative, and 2) produced. "Separative" methods reveal the pre-existent Buddha within the practitioner by pealing away and removing the defilements of conventional reality. Conventional reality is much like the sky when it is filled with clouds. Meditative practices such as the Six Yogas of Naropa illuminate and widen the "cracks" between the clouds to see the unobstructed sky. Briefly witnessing and tasting the clear-light ("blossoms in Spring time") is much like seeing the sky emerging little by little as the clouds are cleared away.56 (Recent work by 19 Charles Genoud provides methods to directly investigate how the body organizes itself to be "blossoms in Springtime."57 This process involves clearly defined steps resulting in specific sensory experiences that precede and provide access to the clear light in the "gaps" in each Bardo.58 These gaps are: gaps between and within the cycles of externalkalachakra or inner-kalachakra; between the cycles of external-kalachakra and inner-kalachakra or between both and the intermittent application of alternativekalachakra. Additional ones include the brief gaps between being awake and asleep; a state of calm vs. orgasm or sneezing; the gap between going asleep and awakening; and the gap between birth and life or life and death. Each "gap" entered into via its yoga is an opportunity to "see" and "be" one's own karma as emptiness/form.59 The practitioner can also use the Six Yogas of Naropa to directly purify and manipulate the Chakras, winds, channels, and nadies of the energy-body as a tainted flow in conventional reality. The latter permit direct access to and purification of the very subtle winds.60 Deity Yoga "Produced effects" are qualities of direct realization generated through Bardo-specific preparatory purifying mediations, 61 deity visualizations, mantra, ritual clothing, implements, visualization, and mandalas that produce the desired diety's energy-meat body pattern. Here the clear-light itself is used. 62 From these practices, one's own energy-body as "Gus" is briefly opened to a "taste" as a Buddha's or diety's purified energy-body and meat-body.63 Continuous practice prepares the practitioner for visualizing, embodying and engaging in deity yoga alternative-Kalachakra activity.64 Healing happens from the inside out. 20 Figure 5: Kalachakra and Vishvamata at center of Kalachakra Mandala To summarize, ultimately, the continuous and immediate recognition and embodiment of the clear-light luminosity of all phenomena by separative and produced yogas refines the practitioner acting as a deity producing alternativeKalachakra. 65 Empowerment to Engage in and Benefit from Tantric Practice A ripening empowerment given by a qualified Guru is required before a practitioner can carry out their commitment to practice the Six Yogas, or to engage in any other tantric practices.66 Only the Bardo of Birth67 and the Bardo of Dream68 space-times permit the direct transmission of an initiation or "ripening empowerment"69 between a Guru and practitioner. This is probably due to the fact that while these two temporalities are different (see Table 1), they are the only ones accessed via the practitioner's and the Guru's meat body. The purpose of the ripening empowerment is to give the practitioners a direct experience of "original wakefulness" by cleansing defilements. The origin of the term "empowerment" comes from the act of empowering a prince when he is enthroned; he is no longer a man but has had his royal capacity awakened so 21 that he can exercise his powers which were always there in his royalty.70 So too with the Guru's empowerment of the practitioner. The Buddha is always "spontaneously present within one's own nature" but is hidden much as dirt obscures the purity of water in dirty water. The Guru's words, gestures, and ritual objects stimulate the conditions for the healing to take place by glimpsing the ultimate fruit. The ritual serves to speed the ripening process of the mind essence to reveal the luminous nature of self awareness in an unfabricated awakened state. Up to this time, one is driven by habitual tendencies and attachments, lacking independent power to stop it. The ripening empowerment administered by the Guru cleans this state by breaking one's habitual fixation on conventional reality. The blessing generates "a breakthrough self" as diety. This is done by using the appropriate meditative state, visualizations, mantra, and correct ritual implements and gestures to introduce the practitioner, via a ritual tour of the connating mandala, to the continuity that is always spontaneously present. A mere taste of the fifth dimension is generated for the practitioner as a body-speech-mind deity in the center of its mandala. The effectiveness of an empowerment is not based on ritual accuracies or liturgical arrangement or mantra recitation. This is the "foundation" but "it is the strength of the meeting between the masters blessing and the disciples devotion" that produces the empowerment. Tsele Natsok Rangdrol describes this relationship as analogues to when the Dakini Laykyi Wang confirmed empowerment upon Padmasambhava when "Ashe transformed him into the letter HUNG. Swallowing the HUNG, she sent it through her body and emitted it through her secret lotus, where Padmasambhava received the complete empowerments and attained the supreme accomplishment of Mahamudra." Another method is for the Guru to emanate purifying light from his chakras that are then absorbed by the practitioner's, purifying their chakras. Or, a dagini may give the practitioner a bowl of soup (symbolic of a kapala or skull of wisdom nectar) which ripens him. In each case the blessing visualization is received either by direct visualization or by seeing and accepting the blessing into one's being. The blessing is in the form of a particular, suitable interaction between the student and the Guru such that the process is correctly seen and experienced resulting in a transformation from fixation on the conventional to original wakefulness as participation, if only briefly, in the clear-light.71 This taste is enough to initiate the ripening process. Mantras and texts used by Gurus for initiations exist in their own special time. For example, the Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bardo Thodol) was created by Padmasambhava and hidden as a Torma, a writing that awaits a particular historical time before its location is known and brought forward by a Tortin. This suggests that such texts exist as mythological/historical objects; historical in that it was hidden and discovered in historical time, and mythological in that the message of its existence is transmitted from the creator to a prophesied Turton in the future who "discovers it".72 (This paper does not investigate this phenomenon nor that of the role that the Tibetan alphabet plays in visualizations, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the fifth dimension of the Five 22 Dimensional Buddha Universe plays a crucial role for both in their similarity to the Saraputra story.) Buddha Gautama's Instructions for Sharpening one's Practice leading to the Emergence of Paranormal Powers To the Buddha, the "miracle of instruction" was the greatest of all powers because it led to the freeing of all sentient being from suffering. Paranormal powers, providing access to the fifth dimension of the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe, result from the practitioner's continued ripening and coming to fruition as loving kindness and other accompanying yogas are practiced.73 [The Buddha] explained that to experience these subtle states [supramundane realization that all defilements can be eradicated and never rise again; knowledge of the modes of psychic powers; the knowledge of the divine ear-element; the knowledge encompassing minds of others; the knowledge of the recollection of past lives; and the knowledge of the divine eye or the passing away and rebirth of beings] in full and obtain a steady perception of them one should free oneself from eleven imperfections (upakkilesa). The first is uncertainty about the reality of these phenomena and the significance of the inner light, which might be easily taken for a sensory illusion. The second is inattention: one no longer direct one's full attention to the inner light but disregards it, evaluating it as unremarkable or inessential. The third imperfection is lethargy and drowsiness; the fourth, anxiety and fright, which occurs when threatening images or thoughts arise from the subconscious. When these imperfections have been mastered, a elation may arise, which excites body and mind. Such exultation is often a habitual reaction to any kind of success. When that elation has exhausted itself, one may feel emotionally drained and fall into inertia, a heavy passivity of mind. To overcome it, one makes a very strong effort, which may result in an excess of energy. On becoming aware of this excess, relaxes and falls again into sluggish energy. In such a condition, when mindfulness is weak, strong longing may arise for desirable objects of the celestial or human world, according to the focusing of the inner light which has been widened in its range. This longing will reach out to a great variety of objects and thus lead to another imperfection, a large diversity of perceptions, be it of a desirable or undesirable nature. Concentrating intensely on the chosen object will lead to the eleventh imperfection, the excessive meditation on these forms.74 As noted, these six "powers" result from the application of various meditative and visualization practices that reveal or produce the Buddhas body, speech, and or mind.75 The Buddha's comments are meant to address certain limiting qualities of the states of consciousness preventing one from being healed that emerge during these practices. This practical guidance suggests that accomplishment is 23 intermittent and patchy-much like a ripening-but that a final result is achievable, including the emergence of supernnormal powers by penetration of the fifth dimension of the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe. V. Summary and Issues Remaining The temporal issues that introduced the paper have been theoretically addressed from the perspective of the Five Dimensional Buddhist Universe. The origins, limits and constraints of the six Bardos have also been overcome. A view, methods of investigation, and specific resulting sensory experiences as a result of ripening have been identified. We start by using empowerment to overcome a fascination and fixation with conventional reality, progress by using various yogas to find the "cracks" and witness the clear-light ever so briefly as our own "blossoms in Spring time." Tantric empowerment continues to ripen us, fertilizes the empowered seed that is placed within the energy-body and remembered by the meat body (ritual, and mantra for example) leading to unveiling our natural capacities to achieve a Buddha's' body, speech and mind. We learn to act with skillfull means anchored in the fifth dimensions into conventional reality via the dynamic of alternativeKalachakra. As we progress along, we witness the deep karmic tie that, via the very subtle wind, penetrates the dynamical being-time of sentient beings, attracting by the resulting turbulence not only the entire structure of this world but also our next embodiment so that we can progress along until Bardo constraints and limitations vanish even as the winds are stopped and karma ended. We learn to time out our actions according to the practice of alternative-Kalachakra. Then we, the self-reflective, embodyment-ofan effulgent, are reabsorbed in the always present-instant clear-light. This analysis suggests that the concept of umvelt has an important theoretical limitation when applied to cultural and epistemological investigation systems like those carried forward by the Buddhist Vajaryana. Currently, Umvelt refers to how an animal's receptors and effectors define its world of possible stimuli and actions. More exactly, umvelt is defined as "the circumscribed portion of the environment which is meaningful and effective for a given animal species."76 Certain mathematical and scientific tools extend human's sensory limitations to ultraviolet light, black holes, etc. The inclusion of a fifth dimension and the Bardo of Death, which are taken to be very meaningful to a sentient being's world, would further extend this circumscribed reality. It identifies a second natural body, the energy body, which is capable of knowing via specific yogas (much like other accepted tools just mentioned) and linking what is know to the neurological and other systems of the meat body.77 Vajaryana knowing does not reject knowing via the neurological capacities of the central nervous system or by scientific tools, computational method, or biological and physical theories but includes knowing via the energy and dharmakaya bodies as well. 78 This energetic chakra, nadi, wind system is taken to be separate from the central nervous system but to be as "natural" as anything else in the conventional world. We have suggested that its origin and temporal 24 state(s) is quite different than that of the central nervous system. Perhaps these two layers should be added to the timing out of the lives of sentient beings. 25 ENDNOTES 1 Authors that attempt to interpret difficult Vajrayana concepts usually work with or at the least, pass their work by a qualified and fully trained Buddhist teacher for comment. This has not been done here. The paper is an essay, a personal thinking through of various ideas related to time. I have received Buddhist tantric initiations including the Kalachakra, Chakrasamvara, and Green and White Tara but do not consider myself an expert on any of them. Tantric texts are part of a teaching system that involves a personal teacher, instructions for visualizations, "whispered" or confidential instructions focusing on one's practice requirements, and specific mantras. The language used is often called "twilight language" in that long acquaintance with the text and a teacher are necessary to fully interpret it. This is a limitation here. I have been with a number of teachers but for only short periods. While I draw on a single tradition, the texts are written and/or translated by different English speaking individuals. The cognitive meaning of the terms may be different one from another and certainly when compared to the Tibetian or Sanskrit sources. The Kalachakra or Wheel of Time Tantra, will serve as a primary source of information. This tantra has been authoritatively translated. The author participated in a public initiation by the Dali Lama in Santa Monica, California and has tried to follow recent writings on the tantra. Several old texts have been translated and newer interpretive ones written. Finally, my analysis will, at times, draw from Sutra and at other times from Tantric teachings. In doing so, I follow the position taken by Dol-bo-ba Shay-rap-gyel-tsen: "Tantras should be understood by means of other tantras/Sutras should be understood by means of other sutras/Sutras should also be understood by means of the tantras/Tantras should also be understood by means of the sutras/Both should be understood by means of both." Here is a statement by the 13 th Dali Lama on how Tibetan Buddhists understand time: "Regarding the Buddhist concept of time, our philosophy has adopted several positions. The Sautrantika school, also known as the "Holders of Discourse," affirms that all phenomena and events exist only in the present moment. For this school, past and future are nothing other than simple concepts, simple mental constructs. As for the Madhyamika-Prasangika school, the Consequence School of the Middle Way, it generally explains time in terms of relativity, as an abstract entity developed by the mind on the basis of an imputation, the continuity of an event or phenomenon. This philosophical view &scribes, therefore, an abstract concept whose function is dependent on the continuum of phenomena. From this point on, to try to explain time as an autonomous entity, independent from an existing object, proves impossible. That time is a relative phenomenon and can claim no independent status is quite clear; I often give the example of external objects which can be easily conceived of in terms of the past or future, but of which the very present seems inconceivable. We can divide time into centuries, decades, years, days, hours, minutes, and seconds. But as the second is also divisible into multiple parts, milliseconds for example, we can easily lose our grasp of the notion of present time! As for consciousness, it has neither past nor future and knows only present moments; it is the continuum of a present moment being transformed into another present moment, whereas with external objects the present disappears in favor of notions of past and future. But further pursuit of this logic will lead to absurdity, because to situate past and future we need a frame of reference which, in this case, is the present, and we have just lost its trace in fractions of milliseconds. http://hhdl.dharmakara.net/hhdlquotes3.html 2 "Sariputta: The Marshal of the Dhamma," in Nyanaponika Thera and Hellmuth Hecker (2003). Great Disciples of the Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy. Summerville, Mass: Wisdom Publications. 3 The divine eye, one of the powers of a Buddha, is the ability to see beyond the range of the physical eye into a thousandfold world system (P. 188). Each world system is the result of a particular Karmic thread. As such it has its own space-time which is relative to each of the other world systems. Thus to perceive all of them simultaneously or individually must involve a fifth dimensions that encompasses these other temporalities. "Anuruddha: Master of the Divine Eye" in "Nyanaponika", Thera and Hellmuth Hecker (2003). Great Disciples of the Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy. Summerville, Mass: Wisdom Publications, p. 188. 26 4 This relative motion separated by a bifurcation point raises interesting questions about the fabric of space-time. It would appear that there are multiple conventional space/times associated with different aeons occurring in a present instant. Gravity, mass and space-time are all interconnect. Here, any one aeon would not be continuous with another in the Einsteinium sense since each's space-time is not connected. What binds it all together is the fifth dimension. 5 As used here, a bifurcation involves an abrupt qualitative change, the exact point of which cannot be occupied being a repeller, leading to at least two new states with fundamentally different qualitative conditions. The bifurcation point has is timeless, being fundamentally different from that of the system coming into it and those emerging from it. It is also impossible to return through the point to the earlier condition. See: Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Hartmut Jurgens, and Dietmar Saupe (1992). Chaos and Fractals. New York: Springer-Verlag. 6 Y. Balashov, (2000). Enduring and Perturbing Objects in Minkowski Space-Time. Philosophical Studies 99, pp. 129-166 as sited by Petkov, (2005), p. 20. 7 Buddhist teachings can be divided into 3 groups: Hiniyana, focusing almost exclusively on sutra as the foundations for liberation; Mahayana focusing on compassion and the middle way philosophy; and Vajrayana using yoga to produce experiences generating Buddha qualities. This paper will draw almost exclusively from sutras spoken by the Buddha, and on Dogchen and Ningma thought and practices. 8 This paper does not examine traditional philosophical time questions such as those associated with McTaggert, temporal tensing, or other related issues. As will soon become apparent, in my view the Vajarayana view of time provides very unsteady footing to investigate these issues from. They are taken to associated with conventional rather than ultimate reality. See the following for an examination of some of the more traditional philosophy of time questions from a Buddhist perspective: H.S. Prasad ( 1991). Essays on Time in Buddhism. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications. 9 Dzogchen Ponlop (2006). Mind Beyond Death. Itaca, NY: Snow Lion, p.276. 10 This discussion does NOT draw a formal parallel between the Minkowsky's block universe and that developed here. Minkowsky's universe is defined by a mathematical expression which has not been fully interpreted in common language. In contrast, the argument is based on Buddhism's two truths which draw about a fundamental experiential and philosophical distinction that, at its base, cannot be translated into common language. These truths can be "pointed at." The problem of understanding "pointing" is not the same as "translating into common language" mathematical concepts. Both involve substantially different root domains-mathematics vs meditative knowing-and are not the same. See: Sal P. Restivo (1978). "Parallels and Paradoxes in Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism: I – A Critical Reconnaissance," Social Studies of Science, vol. 8, No. 2, May, 1978, 143-181. 11 For a discussion of the Buddhist concept of instants see: Satkari Mookerjee, "The Buddhist Doctrine of Flux (the Nature of Existence)"; Rita Gupta, "The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness and its Presuppositions"; Jwala Prasad, "Discussion of the Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness and Subjective Idealism in the Nyaya-stras;" and Th. Stcherbatsky, "The Theory of Instantaneous Being," in H.S. Prasad ( 1991). Essays on Time in Buddhism. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications. 12 Background dependent time is Newtonian in the sense that it "flows" in one direction providing the context for the development of all things. Relativistic time assumes that time is different in different part of the universe do to varying space-time-gravity conditons. See: Callender, C. and Edney, R. (2001). Introducing Time. New York: Totem Books. Santa Cruz, CA: Aerial Press. 13 Quote from: Dainin Katagiri (2007). Each Moment is the Universe. Boston: Shambala.For a similar view see: Kenneth K. Inada, "Time and Temporality – A Buddhist Approach," in H.S. Prasad ( 1991). Essays on Time in Buddhism. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications. 14 Key points of my approach to presentism and the Five Dimensional Buddha Universe are drawn from: Dainin Katagiri (2007). Each Moment is the Universe. Boston: Shambala; Vesselin Petkov (2005) "Is There an Alternative to the Block Universe View?",Philosophy of Science Archive, p. 3. at http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002408/ For a discussion of the interpenetration of various temporalities in Buddhism, see: Alex Wayman, "No Time, Great Time and Profane Time in Buddhism," in H.S. Prasad ( 1991). Essays on Time in Buddhism. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications. 27 15 Thera and Hellmuth Hecker (2003). Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy. Summerville, Mass.: Wisdom Publication, p. 188. 16 B. Alan Wallace. Vacuum States of Consciousness: A Tibtian Buddhist View." 17 "A[I]t is to be noted that there is no specific word for universe in Buddhism. The word loka denotes both world and universe'. The words, lokadhatu' and 'cakkavala' stand for world systems. According to Buddhism there are innumerable world systems in a universe or Aeon. Therefore in this context as Prof. K.N. Jayatilleke maintains, the word loka means the world of "space". "The smallest unit of the universe is termed Thousand-fold Minor World-System (sahassi culanika lokadhdtu). This is how it is explained: As far as these suns and moons revolve shining and shedding their light in space, so far extends the thousand-fold universe. In it are thousands of suns thousands of moons thousands of Jumbudipas thousands of Aparagoyãnas, thousands of Uttarakurus thousands of Pubbavidehas." The description illustrates the fact that in a Thousandfold World System, although it is the smallest unit of an Aeon, there are innumerable planets inhabited by sentient beings of some form or other. Then we are told of another world system which is named as 'Twice-a-thousand Middling World System." In the Buddhist texts we come across further descriptions of Hundred Thousand-fold World Systems. http://www.lumbiniinteractive.org.np/contents/books/Book_09/abodes_beings.php 18 Goodhew, Linda and Loy, David (2002). "Momo, Dogen, and the Comodification of Time". Kronoscope, Vol. 2, no. 1. 19 Emaphsis in the original. Mi-pam-gya-tso (2006). Fundamental Mind. Translated by Jeffrey Hopkins. Boston: Snow Lion, p. 39. 20 Conventional reality or samsara refers primarily to world of agreed upon constructed meanings, as well as the individual creation-interpretation of those means for themselves. The other two bodies are the Sambhogakaya (the enjoyment body or what I will call the energy body), and the Dharmakaya (body of truty). For a full discussion see: Francis Fremantle (2001). Luminous Emptiness. Boston: Shambala. 21 Sentient beings include humans, animals and insects where a sentient being is aware of long habits of mind, and is capable of experiencing the subjective experiences of suffering and happiness. A sentient being experiences its inputs (perceptions) and outputs (actions), in contrast with automaton where no subjective states occur, and all meanings have to be assigned to inputs and outputs from 'outside the system". All sentient beings have Buddha nature. Such beings are considered numberless. "The Three Stages of the Path," Teachings by Lama Zasep Tulku Rinpoche. September 1998, Vancouver, BC, Canada. 22 Gus Koehler (2003)."Time, Complex Systems, and Public Policy: A Theoretical Foundation for Adaptive Policy Making", Nonlinear Dynamics, Psychology, and Life Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2003. 23 Dainin Katagiri (2007). Each Moment is the Universe. Boston: Shambala, p. 39. 24 David R. Loy, Cyberlack, in Robert Hassan, and Ronald E. Purser, (2007). 24/7. Palo Alto: Standard Business Books. 25 Uisang, the First Patriarch of Krean Hua-yen Buddhism (625-702), created an analogous diagram called the "Ocean Seal." As a mandala of process it demonstrates the simultaneity of the ultimate and the conventional and how both are simultaneously navigated. See: Steve Oclin (1982) Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism. Deli, India: Sri Satguru Publications. 26 For a contrasting view using tensed logic, see: A. Charlene McDermott, "The Sautrantika Arguments Against the Traikalyavada in the Light of the Contemporary Tense Revolution," in H.S. Prasad ( 1991). Essays on Time in Buddhism. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications. 27 Kazuaki Tanahashi (1985). Moon in a dewdrop: Writings of Zen master Dogen. San Francisco: North Point. P. 76-80. 28 Steve Oclin (1982) Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism. Deli, India: Sri Satguru Publications. Zen is closely related to Mahayana Buddhism. 29 A tantra presents a complete cosmology. It also details the initiation and practice rituals necessary to guide meditation on one's own body-particularly the energy body-to become similar in aspect to a Buddha's body. Suttra provides no such meditation, depending on the altruistic intention to become enlightened; in contrast, tantra through various ripening yogas leads 28 one to experiences associated with being a Buddha. The Kalachakra Tantra is the only tantric initiation and instructions given publicly. For a translation of the tantra and a detailed description of the initiation ritual, see: Tenzin Gyatso, the Dali Lama (1985). The Kalachakra Tantra. Translated by Jeffrey Hopkins. Boston: Wisdom. For detailed analysis and comments on the initation and practices see: Alexander Berzin (1997). Taking the Kalachakra Initiation. Ithica: Snow Lion; and Glenn Mullin (1991). The Practice of Kalachakra. Ithica: Snow Lion; and Gen Lamrimpa (1999). Transcending Time. Somerville: Wisdom. For very clear guidance on the creation and completion stages of tantric practice, see: Jamgon Kongtrul (1996). Creation and Completion: Essential Points of Tantric Meditation, with a commentary by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche. Boston: Wisdom. 30 Karma bares forward information about how to assemble a world system. This information evolves and changes by the actions of that system's constituent sentient beings. To me, this resembles a kind of early information theory producing a sort of reflexive computational universe. See for example: Stephen Wolfram and Fredkin as cited in: Ray Kurzweil (2005). The Singularity is Near. New York: Viking, p. 87; and Carlos Gershenson (2007). The World as Evolving Information. Centrum Leo Apostel, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, http://uk.arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0704/0704.0304v1.pdf The concept of "force" is a difficult one even for modern physics. Newton apparently derived some aspects of his thinking about force from alchemy. See: B.J.T. Dobbs (1975). The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. 32 Martin Brauen (1997 ). The Mandala Sacred Circle in Tibetian Buddhism. Boston: Shambala. The text provides a detailed guide of the Kalachakra Mandala, including the construction of the outer mandala of the universe, p. 18. 33 She Drup Ling Graz (2002). Buddhist Basics and Kalachakra Animated. Graz, Austria. See also: Khedrup Norsang Gyatso (2004). Ornament of Stainless Light. Boston: Wisdom, chapter 4. 34 See: Alex Gray's paintings in the series "Progress of the Soul" at: http://www.alexgrey.com/ 35 Jamgon Kongtrul Lodro Taye (1995). Myriad Worlds. Ithica: Snow Lion, Chapter 3. 36 Martin Brauen (1997 ). The Mandala Sacred Circle in Tibetan Buddhism. Boston: Shambala, pp. 52-53. 37 Dali Lama Answers Questions on Creation, http://hhdl.dharmakara.net/hhdlquotes22.html 38 Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (1994). Tantric Grounds and Paths. London: Tharpa Publications, p. 151. 39 Akira Sadakata (1997). Buddhist Cosmology, Philosophy and Origins. Tokyo, Japan: Kosei Publications, p. 69. 40 Tarthang Tulku ( 1977). Space, Time and Knowledge. Berkeley: Dharama. 41 A complete and understandable explanation, including the yogas, is provided in: Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (1982). Clear light of Bliss. Boston: Wisdom. 42 htp://www.tibetanspirit.com/productview.asp_Q_id_E_1174_A_catid_E_143_A_maincat_E_Tha ngkas_A_subcatid_E_216_A_subcat_E_Citti+Patti and Alex Gray at: http://www.alexgrey.com/ 43 Khedrup Norsang Gyatso (2004). Ornament of Stainless Light. Boston: Wisdom, p. 505. 44 Thomas Cleary, Avatamsaka Sutra, Translated into English: Volume 1: The Wonderful Adornments of the Leaders of the World, http://www.e-sangha.com/alphone/0279_01.html 45 Francesca Fremantle (2001). Luminous Emptiness. Boston: Shambala. 46 Dzogchen Polop (2007). Mind Beyond Death. Uthaca, NY: Snow Lion. 47 Martin Brauen (1997 ). The Mandala Sacred Circle in Tibetian Buddhism. Boston: Shambala. The text provides a detailed guide of the Kalachakra Mandala, including the construction of the outer mandala of the universe, p. 18. 48 Alexander Berzin (1997). Taking the Klachakra Initiation. Ithaca: Snow Lion. 49 Bokar Rinpoche holds that a deity-here we refer to a Buddha who is practicing deity yoga--is both the creation of the human psyche and an entity that transcends this world. As noted by Miranda Shaw (2006). Buddhist Goddesses of India. Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 10. 50 For a more technical discussion see: Kyabje Zong Rinpoche (2006). Chod in the Ganden Tradition. Boston: Snow Lion. 29 51 Steve Oclin (1982) Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism. Deli, India: Sri Satguru Publications. 52 Tarthang Tulku (1994). Dynamics of Time and Space. Berkeley: Dharma, p. 214. 53 Steve Oclin (1982) Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism. Deli, India: Sri Satguru Publications, p. 3. 54 Thanissaro Bhikku (1994). "Kalama Sutta to the Kalamas" in Access to Insight. 55 Khedrup Norsang Gyatso (2004). Ornament of Stainless Light. Boston: Wisdom, p. 54-57. 56 Mi-pam-gya-tso (2006). Fundamental Mind. Translated by Jeffrey Hopkins. Boston: Snow Lion, p. 44. 57 Charles Genoud (2007). Gesture of Awareness. Boston: Wisdom. 58 Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (1982). Clear Light of Bliss. Boston: Wisdom, p. 88. 59 A discussion of form and emptiness while directly related to the subject of this papers, goes far beyond our present discussion. For a more detailed discussion, See: Prajnaparamitra and Diamond Sutra, also: Elizabeth Napper (1989). Dependent-Arising and Emptiness. Boston: Wisdom; and Jeffrey Hopkins (1987). Emptiness Yoga. Ithaca: Snow Lion. 60 Lama Thubten Yeshe (1998). The Bliss of Inner Fire: Heart Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa. Somerville: Wisdom; and Glen Mullin (1996). Tsongkhapa's Six Yogas of Naropa. Ithica: Snow Lion. 61 There are multiple levels and types of tantras and related yogas. For a general overview of Tantra see: John Blofeld (1987). The Tantric Mysticism of Tibet. Boston: Shambhala; and Geshe Kelsang Gyatso (1994). Tantric Grounds and Paths. London: Tharpa Publications. 62 Mi-pam-gya-tso (2006). Fundamental Mind. Translated by Jeffrey Hopkins. Boston: Snow Lion, p. 36. 63 Dol-bo-ba Shay-rap-gyel-tsen (1333). Mountain Doctrine: Tibet's Fundamental Treatise on Other-Emptyness and the Buddha-Matrix, translated by Jeffry Hopkins (2006). Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, p.p. 11-12. 64 Diety yoga follows an extensive preparation by beginners involving a close analysis of how conventional reality is formed and maintained. Without this preparation, and the four part tantric initiation, it is not possible to progress to or understand the practices of tantra and Dogchen. 65 Currently available initiations are listed in Snow Lion Buddhist News & Catalog at: http://www.snowlionpub.com/pages/N77.php Lama Thubten Yeshe (1998). The Bliss of Inner Fire: Heart Practice of the Six Yogas of Naropa. Somerville: Wisdom, p. 49; and Glen Mullin (1996). Tsongkhapa's Six Yogas of Naropa. Ithica: Snow Lion, p. 116; and Tenzin Gyatso, the Dali Lama (1985). The Kalachakra Tantra Rite of Initiation. Sumerville: Wisdom, p. 1. 67 Francesca Fremantle (2001). Luminous Emptiness. Boston: Shambala, p. 58. 68 Buddhists and Hindus both accept the view that a teacher or a deity may appear in one's dreams. They may also give instructions or initiations. 69 Tsele Natsok Rangdrol (1993). Empowerment and the Path of Liberation. Boston: Shambala. 70 Tsele Natsok Rangdrol (1993). Empowerment and the Path of Liberation. Boston: Shambala. 71 Tsele Natsok Rangdrol (1993). Empowerment and the Path of Liberation. Boston: Shambala, p. 37. 72 John Reynolds (1989). Self-Liberation Through Seeing with Naked Awareness Being an Introduction to the Nature of one's own Mind from the Profound Teach of Self-Liberation in the Primordial State of Peaceful and Wrathful Dieties. A Terma of Guru Padmasamhava discovered by Karma Lingpa. N.Y: Staton Hill Press. 73 Nyanaponika Thera and Hellmuth Hecker (2003). Great Disciples of the Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy. Summerville, Mass: Wisdom Publications, p. 88. The Pali cannon contains many references to historical Buddhas and to Gautama Buddha and his disciple's development of psychic powers. Western biases tend to ignore these sutras as noted and discussed by the authors. 74 Nyanaponika Thera and Hellmuth Hecker (2003). Great Disciples of the Buddha: Their Lives, Their Works, Their Legacy. Summerville, Mass: Wisdom Publications, p. 188. 75 It is difficult to provide direct evidence of the fifth dimension. See: http://www.zangdokpalri.org/rebirth.html ; http://www.kcc.org/lineage/announcement_20040822.html ; http://www.tarab30 institute.org/gb/passing.htm http://www.berzinarchives.com/web/en/archives/approaching_buddhism/teachers/tsenzhab_serko ng_rinpoche/portrait_serkong_rinpoche.html 76 As sited by Fraser (1992) from English and English (1958). A Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytic Terms. New York: david McKay. 77 Acupuncture provides evidence supporting the physical existence of the energy body. Acupuncture depends on a systems of channels and other factors that it interrupts and in other ways changes. In November 1997, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) convened a panel of 12 distinguished physicians and scientists to review the history, licensing, practice and current status of clinical research on the effectiveness of acupuncture. The first formal endorsement of acupuncture by the NIH stated: "There is sufficient evidence of acupuncture's value to expand its use into conventional medicine and to encourage further studies of its physiology and clinical value." As reported in the California Department of Consumer Affairs, Acupuncture Board (2004). "A Consumers Guide to Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine." http://www.acupuncture.ca.gov/pubs_forms/cons_guide_2002.pdf However, as far as I know, except for Taoist alchemy, chi, the channels and so forth, do not provide a way of knowing as suggested by Tantric meditations. Also, it is unclear if chis is the same thing as winds or kudalini. See also: Terry Clifford (1992). Tibetian Buddhist Medicine and Psychiatry: The Diamond Healing. York Beach, Maine: Weiser; Dianne Connelly (1979). Traditional Acupuncture: The Law of the Five Elements. Columbia, Maryland: Center for Traditional Acupuncture, Inc; Hsuan Hua (1997). Medicine Master Sutra. Burlingame, CA: Buddhist Translation Society. 78 J.T. Fraser (1992). Human Temporality in a Nowless Universe. Time and Society, Vol. 1, 2.

XII. Towards a reistic social–historical philosophy * Nikolay Milkov Abstract: The present essay advances a theory of social reality which concurs with the formal ontology developed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Furthermore, we identify this formal ontology as reistic but in a rather wide sense: in the sense that social objects are primary whereas social relations are superstructured over them. This thesis has been developed in opposition to John Searle's claim, made in his book Construction of Social Reality (1995), that the building blocks of social reality are institutions. We do not claim that this is the only valid theory of social reality. We simply hope that it has considerable explanatory power so that it can be used as a theory alternative to those already existing or to any new theory of society. The paper has two parts. Part One sets out the theoretical foundations of the approach followed in it, whereas Part Two advances details of its application to sociology and history. Key words: formal ontology, neo-utilitarianism, physicalism, reism, social constructivism, social objects I. 1. Reistic formal ontology Our social theory follows a reistic interpretation of Wittgenstein's Tractatus that we have advanced elsewhere. 1 It claims that the world consists of ob- * A first variant of this paper was read (in German) at the 21 st Congress of the German Philosophical Society at the University of Duisburg–Essen, September 18, 2008. Another version was delivered as a ―Habilitation Lecture‖ at the University of Paderborn on July 9, 2009. Thanks are due to the audience in the two sessions and in particular to Prof. Rudolf Lüthe. 1 Cf. Nikolay Milkov, ―Tractarian Scaffoldings‖, Prima philosophia 14 (2001), pp. 399– 414. 246 jects and nothing beyond that. They are bulky, voluminous things, with borders and faces which are in contact with the boundaries and the faces of other objects. Being voluminous, they fill up the world. The objects set up connections (Verbindungen) which build up states of affairs. In this state of affairs, objects ―fit into one another like the links of a chain‖ (2.03). The important point is that ―there isn't anything third that connects the links. ... [T]he links themselves make connexion with one another.‖ 2 The very docking of the objects one to another makes them stick together; this is what secures the cohesion between them. There is no ―relation‖ connecting them. This is a main idea in the Tractatus. With the help of this conception, Wittgenstein hoped to defeat the last remnants of the old subject–predicate logic, which ―contains more convention and physics than had been realized‖. 3 Many authors have insisted that Tractarian objects are unsaturated, their unsaturatedness being similar to Frege's unsaturatedness of functions and arguments. There is an important difference between Frege and Wittgenstein on this point though. Frege's conception is chemical. According to him, the function and its argument merge into one another. In contrast, Tractarian objects are connected to one another topologically, not chemically. In the connection, they remain independent of one another. Russell's logical constructionalism, in its turn, uses the metaphor of a ―logical skeleton‖ on which the data of experience are fleshed out. In contrast, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein does not speak of a skeleton. Instead, he makes use of the concept of logical scaffolding. It simply supports the formation of objects from outside, but does not connect them. As we are going to see in what follows, if the scaffolding is removed, it may well be the case that the objects remain stuck together. 2 L. Wittgenstein, Letters to C. K. Ogden, ed. by G. H. von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell, 1973, p. 23. Elsewhere Wittgenstein said: ―The elements are not connected with one another by anything. They simply are connected, and that connection just is the state of affairs in question.‖ Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. by B. F. McGuinness, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979, p. 252. 3 L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. by R. Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny, Oxford: Blackwell, 1974, p. 204. 247 2. Social objects In order to make our conception clearer, we shall first specify exactly what social objects are. We accept as primary social objects reistic entities which are typically atomistic. Moreover, we divide them into five groups of increasing abstractness: (i) Material objects that are produced by human agents. To them belong: (a) products of market economy; (b) technologies, working instruments, etc. (ii) Social agents with the roles they play in society, as well as social groups of different sizes and natures. (iii) Different performances like sporting matches, theatre performances, social presentations, etc. (iv) Social actions, but also parts of them 4 like particular gestures (particular cases of habitus or modus operandi). (v) Theories, melodies, novels, and other artifacts. 5 Furthermore, we assume that social objects set up what we shall call social constructions-or social individuals-like the game of soccer, German forestry, Oxford University, etc. This point is of special importance since-and we shall see this in the second part of the paper-in such disciplines as sociology, history, as well as in everyday life, we usually discuss, or ponder on, complex social objects that are better discussed as individuals. It goes without saying that there is no sharp boundary between social objects and social constructions. For practical reasons, we can consider social constructions social objects, and vice versa. 4 On this point we oppose Rüdiger Bittner, according to whom actions are indivisible. Cf. R. Bittner, ―One Action‖, in: A. O. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Poetics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 97–110. 5 Among others, they were investigated by Roman Ingarden. Cf. Amie Thomasson, ―Ingarden and the Ontology of Cultural Objects‖, in: Arkatiusz Chrudzimski (ed.), The Ontology of Roman Ingarden, Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2005, pp. 115–136. 248 By way of elucidating, we underline the fact that these kinds of objects are primary terms in our social theory as long as they are the minimal units that social agents approve or disprove of, like or dislike, imitate or not, take over, or pass over. 6 In other words, they are the subjects of our practical judgments in the wide sense of the word: our practical judgments-in contrast to those of Kant-are not reducible to moral judgments but are at work in every new situation of human praxis. Apparently, our social objects are similar to what have recently been called ―memes‖ which are usually defined as units of cultural heredity. 7 Typically, we can be fascinated by them, we admire them; we strive to copy them, to imitate them, to join them, or we simply consider them (actions, for example) just and fair. And vice versa: we disprove of them, we ostracize them, etc. Understood in this neo-utilitarian (and neo-Darwinian) way, our objects are social in the sense that they are products of collective intentionality. They are opposed to ―brute objects‖ like stones and other minerals 8 -of course, when the latter are not subjects of practical interest. 3. An objects-oriented approach in social philosophy With reference to our kind of naïve formal ontology, developed in § 1 and to our conception of social objects advanced in § 2, we criticise John Searle's claim, advanced in his path-breaking book, The Construction of Social Reality,9 that the building blocks of the social world are the institutions which make social facts like citizenship, money, government, property, marriages, and sporting events possible. 10 Institutions are products of collective intentionality. 6 We have already developed this neo-unilitarian thesis in the paper ―After-Revolutionary Political Philosophy‖ (in print). 7 Cf. Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 6 ff. 8 These can be compared with Elisabeth Ansombe's ―brute facts‖. Cf. G. E. M. Anscombe, ―On Brute Facts‖, Analysis 18 (1958), pp. 69–72. 9 John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, New York: The Free Press, 1995. 10 Another prominent supporter of philosophical neo-institutionalism is David Bloor. Cf. for example his, ―What is a Social Construct?‖, Facta Philosophica 3 (2001), pp. 141–56. 249 The mischief in Searle's neo-insititutionalist thesis is its downright idealism. Metaphorically speaking, institutions are not the building blocks of social reality but its scaffolding, simply reinforcing them from outside in order to facilitate their cohesion. However, an institution does not produce the connection; it only has a supporting function. When removed, the constructions often remain standing. In other words, institutions are the superstructure of social life. Their basis, however, is everyday practical life with its material and cultural objects situated in space and time. We can also express our idea by stating that social objects are the basic elements of social theory whereas institutions are its secondary elements. In support of this conception, we refer to Wittgenstein's On Certainty (§ 99) which insisted that the system often changes because of the material that flows through it. Searle, in contrast, accepts that the system leads. An even more serious argument against Searle's neo-institutionalism is that institutions emerge on the basis of a certain level of development of the social objects. Indeed, the institution of driving licenses was set up only after the car industry developed. Furthermore, even such prima facie ―perennial‖ institutions as the family and the state emerged only at a certain stage of production of goods. 11 But our theory of social objects is also directed against the mainstream conception that the ―subject-matter of sociological studies are the phenomena and the processes of different forms of collective human lives, the structures of different forms of human communities and groups.‖ 12 The main argument against this conception is that we join a community or a social group, or we simply stay in it, in the same way we join other social objects: following an act of practical judgment (assessment) of an object. In other words, for us, the social groups themselves are social objects. To be more specific, they are social objects of the second group in our classification of social objects from § 2. 11 Cf. Friedrich Engels, Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats; in: K. Marx und F. Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 29, Berlin: Dietz, 1975. 12 Jan Szczepański, Elementarne pojęcia socjologii, Warszawa: Państwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, 1963, p. 9. 250 Moreover, institutions (which are surely relational) themselves can be treated as objects-in particular, as objects of our practical judgments. 4. Example: Stock-market ontology Typical examples of social objects are products of the stock market. The ontology of the stock market is the ontology of goods and commodities, produced by companies and corporations. Characteristic of this kind of ontology are the constant changes in objects which may be successfully described with the resources of marketplace ontology. These changes are set up by the preferences (practical judgments) of individual persons who accept certain goods, and reject others. This is a dynamic, set in motion by market-tastes which are socially formed-they are determined by social-psychological patterns. In more concrete terms, individual market-tastes and preferences are products of collective intentionalities that divide consumers into Nissan-buyers and Toyota-buyers, etc. The goods and commodities are produced by organic wholes other than institutions: they are created by companies and corporations. These are groupindividuals which in many respects behave like persons (i.e. objects): they have their professional philosophy, specific style, etc. (In contrast, institutions are not person-like-they are characteristically faceless.) In short, they have their own worlds (cf.: ―Welcome to the Nissan world!‖), formed through the collective intentionality of their producers and consumers. They identify their individuality through brands, which construct various proprietary goods: Versace suits and dresses, Salamander shoes, Levis' jeans, Daimler-Benz cars, etc. Changes in stock-market ontology find expression in stock-market diagrams and indexes. 5. The surface of social life The ―river of time‖ (Russell) 13,14 brings ever new social objects to, what we shall call, the ―surface of social life‖. 15 On this point we again follow Wittgen- 13 We picked up this phrase from Russell's celebrated essay ―On History‖: ―On the Banks of the River of Time, the sad procession of human generations is marching slowly to the grave.‖ Bertrand Russell, ―On History‖, in: idem, Philosophical Essays, New York: Si- 251 stein (this time, in the interpretation of Theodore Schatzki) who spoke in a somewhat similar sense about the surface of human life. 16 We shall restate this idea of Wittgenstein thusly: The surface of social life consists of ever new and changing social objects. Furthermore, our reist social ontology conceives of the objects of social life as solid planks (or as Lego bricks 17 ). For our convenience, we can present the particular social constructions (individuals) as resembling Otto Neurath's boats, composed of such and such planks, navigating in the ―river of time‖. Being exposed to the resistance of the environment (to the ravages of time) during its journey (through every social storm and squall), the boat's planks (the social objects) need repeated renovation. Moreover, such acts of mending are to be accomplished immediately, without pause. Indeed, as Quine convincingly showed, the boat of social life (of ordinary language, in particular) cannot be harbourred and repaired in a drydock. Here we embrace Barry Smith's social theory that sees social reality as a complex construction, consisting of many layers. 18 These often have sub-parts that are interlocked into one another. They can be conceived of as assemblystructures (Montagebaustrukturen) in which different parts are hierarchically super-structured one over the other. We can easily replace them; or we can increase the size (the zoom) of particular objects, sometimes at the cost of others; or move them in another direction; etc. We shall call this method of conceiving social objects and individuals that of assembly-construction. mon and Schuster, 1910, pp. 60–69; here p. 69. 14 Paraphrasing William James, we can also speak of the ―stream of life‖. 15 This is the next topological concept we shall introduce in our analysis. 16 Cf. Theorore Schatzki, ―Elements of a Wittgensteinian Philosophy of the Human Sciences‖, Synthese 87 (1991), pp. 311–29. Apparently, this interpretation of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations can be easily connected with the formal ontology of the Tractatus we reconstructed in § 1. Indeed, both have a clear topological stance. 17 In this suggestion we follow some contemporary ontologies that see ontological individuals as Lego bricks. Cf. Jan Westerhoff, Ontological Categories: Their Nature and Significance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 92, 113. 18 Cf. Barry Smith, ―Ontologie des Mesokosmos: Soziale Objekte und Umwelten‖, Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 52 (1998), pp. 521–540. 252 Using the method of assembly-constructing social reality, the reist social philosopher can easily grasp (imagine) quite different social situations, many of which otherwise remain in shadow (indeed, they are often counter-intuitive). II. The second part of this essay is an attempt to apply our reistic social ontology and the method of assembly-constructing social reality it underpins to the practice of historical study in particular. The tenor of our approach is directed against Dilthey, Rickert and Collingwood's empathy conception of humanities in general, and of history in particular. Most importantly, while the concept of empathy is psychological (it presupposes identification with the feelings of the subjects of history), our reistic method is thoroughly objectivist. In what follows, we shall demonstrate three realms of application of this approach: (i) genealogical studies; (ii) explanations in history; (iii) investigations of the ―metaphysics‖ of social life. 6. Genealogical studies One point of interest in investigating social reality is that while some of its planks (social objects) are to be repeatedly renewed, many of them at very high speed, others are old, even ancient. 19 One important effect of the social world's functioning this way is the vision of this very moment, of this particular social individual, as composed of planks of rather different provenance and pedigree: some of them are quite new, while others are ages old, etc. As a matter of fact, the social individual whom we contemplate at this particular moment is a mottled patchwork of social objects. This means that elements of historically different social objects mingle together to form new individuals. Mixed that way, their history cannot be reconstructed with the naked eye. The effect is that social individuals often appear opaque: we must first investigate the genealogy of their elements, continually changing their place, size and order. Metaphorically 19 To use Otto Neurath's idiom, the ―planks‖ of social life have different degrees of ―stability‖. Cf. Otto Neurath, ―Die Enzyklopädie als Modell' ‖, in: M. Stöltzner and T. Uebel (eds.), Wiener Kreis, Hamburg: Meiner, 2006, pp. 375–95; here pp. 382 ff. 253 speaking, correct genealogical analyses bring to light the ―anatomy‖ of social individuals in a way similar to how the computer tomography brings to light the constitution of parts of our body that are hidden from the naked eye. 20 This way of functioning of social life is especially well illustrated in the history of technology: indeed, changes in the old or the birth of new, objects and instruments of technology are exemplarily abrupt. One example: The marking of forest trees was introduced in Germany in 1856 and has never changed since then. During the same time, however, many other practices in forestry have been transformed, some of them radically. In other words: the social individual of German forestry is composed of quite heterogeneous elements, and their genealogy is to be set up in a special reistic study. That social life can be seen as resulting from such abrupt (and often contingent) and disproportional changes in the social objects and practices that compose social individuals is well documented in literature and other narrative arts. We would like to give as an example here the recent (2005) movie Good Night, and Good Luck! directed by George Clooney. The film presents the historical figure of the late CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow (who successfully fought Senator Eugene McCarthy in the early 1950's), as chainsmoking in the CBS studio. The obsessive accentuation of this, nowadays, absurd practice was purported to revive the atmosphere of times long gone by. To summarize, we see these social constructions (individuals) as a series of ever-changing social objects that build up different sets. Some of them assert themselves, other vanish. The winning objects can be also ordered into two groups: (i) those which prevail for a short period of time only; (ii) a small group of real champions that dominate life for centuries or even millennia-examples are parts of Roman law; parts of Rome's sewerage system; etc. 20 In the humanities, in the history of philosophy in particular, the method of genealogical analysis finds expression in the sub-discipline of conceptual history. Cf. Gunter Scholtz (ed.), Die Interdisziplinarität der Begriffsgeschichte (Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, Sonderband), Hamburg: Meiner, 2000; Reinhart Koselleck, Begriffsgeschichten, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2006. 254 7. Explanations in history Besides their genealogical order, social objects have other levels of dependencies that can be discussed ―in terms of antecedent, motive, means, conditions, influence, explanation, and the like‖. 21 These dependencies too can be seen as having assembly-structures-a point which allows us to use the resources of the social ontology we developed in §§ 1–4 to help us better understand the processes of human history. Indeed, history is primarily interested in changes of social reality-as a matter of fact, we have already shown that social reality consists of a universe of ever changing social objects. It is safe to say that, generally, changes in social objects happen in two ways: evolutionary and revolutionary. We have already discussed the first type of change in § 5, which explains why are we now concentrating on revolutionary changes. These alter the social situation radically. They can be results of: (i) complex actions like big and decisive battles (of Waterloo, Gainsborough, Stalingrad, etc.); (ii) decisions taken by prominent figures in history like Napoleon or Churchill; (iii) radical ideological, economical, etc. shifts-for example, those that ruined the Roman Empire and caused its fall. 22 These changes too can be seen as taking place according to our ―assemblystructures‖ ontological model. 23 Indeed, social structures have a clear hierarchy and are strictly ordered one over another. Furthermore, every change rearranges social objects into new constructions, also transforming objects' roles and importance (their hierarchy) in the new constructions (individuals)-in fact, that is why the changes are so important in social life. Most importantly, a change in the position of one object leads to changes in the overall system. An example: in a recent book, the claim has been made that a series of ten decisions made between May 1940 and December 1941 deter- 21 Cf. M. Howell and W. Prevenier, From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press, 2001, p. 129. 22 Two examples: Edward Gibbon argued (in 1776–88) that The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was caused by ideological changes, while Max Weber (in his Römische Agrargeschichte, 1891) pointed to the changes in rural economics as a possible reason. 23 On ontological changes cf. N. Milkov, ―Stereology‖, in N. Callaos (ed.), Proceedings of the 6th World Multiconference of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (SCI 2002/ISAS 2002), vol. XVIII, Orlando (Florida), 2002, pp. 518–23. 255 mined the course of World War II; all other events of the war can be substantially seen as their effects. 24 Traditionally, historical changes have been considered clear cases of ―causal‖ connections, the efforts of historians being primarily concentrated on their explanation. In such cases, the task is to reveal which change (for example, which decision) was the fundamental one and which followed from it. As we have already argued elsewhere, 25 however, that there is no logic and also no causality in this realm. This conclusion explains why we are reluctant to speak about the laws of history. Instead, we feel that the task of history is to reveal which of the social objects (planks) in a social construction of the past, or of that specific form of life, are leading, or more fundamental, in the sense that the other objects are ontologically dependent on them, and to describe their structure. Furthermore, the historian sets out how change transformed the degree of importance of the objects in the new social individual. This is the task of describing the mechanism of historical processes. 8. The inward part of social life The next step in enriching our social ontology is the assumption that people connect social objects with what we shall call specific ―metaphysics‖. This means that people ―believe in‖ the social objects with which they are engaged. These are objects of their intentionality: the agents plan to carry out actions with the help of the objects; they connect great expectations or disappointments with them. 26 This form of practical attitude towards social objects sets up the inward part of social life, as opposed to its surface. A typical example in this regard might be the daily metaphysics we develop: (i) in our inter-personal relationships-the affection we have for our loved ones, the hate for our enemies, etc.; (ii) in groups (political, sporting, etc.) 24 Cf. Ian Kershaw, Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940 – 1941, London: Penguin Books, 2008. 25 In support of this thesis cf. N. Milkov, ―Mesocosmological Descriptions: An Essay in the Extensional Ontology of History‖, Essays in Philosophy 7:2 (2006), pp. 1–19. 26 Cf. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 (1 st published 1861). 256 partialities, such as our affection for FC ―Liverpool‖, or for the American football club the ―Pittsburgh Steelers‖; etc. 27 We do not, however, just have attitudes (intentionality) toward social objects; we also act with them. In other words, on the basis of these objects, different practices and actions are developed. Furthermore, the practices often involve instruments, objects, and performances that cope successfully with the tasks of life. 28 In this sense, we are proud of them and, more importantly, we are at peace with them. 29 Practices in use at this or that particular moment and place determine people's way of life. Unfortunately, there is a considerable incongruence between social objects and ways of life. Indeed, in the course of time, social agents start to feel that social objects might be improved; and they actually improve them. For example, instead of reaping the harvest with a sickle they do it with a combine; or, instead of reaching their friends on foot, they do it by car. The problem is that they now start to consider the old social object obsolete, or ―disproved‖. In consequence, it is abandoned and consigned to oblivion. Nobody marvels at its metaphysics; nobody enjoys working with it any more. Another problem is that social objects are often used by different generations, so that by their continued use, they often get so badly worn that the historian must first reconstruct them in the splendor of their initial form. Apparently, just like human beings, social objects can be disregarded, even ganged up on'. Unfortunately, this disregard often makes history opaque: we regularly fail to understand it in its full complexity. Truth to tell, what was disproved by introducing a new social object was simply the old object, or instrument-not the old object together with all the ac- 27 Cf. N. Milkov, ―The Cement of Social Alchemy: A Philosophical Analysis of Social Groups' Identity‖, Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 4 (1996), pp. 234–40. 28 Cf. Ernst Tugendhat, Egozentrizität und Mystik, München: Beck, 2004. 29 Cf. S. Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. This point explains why sometimes even simple jobs are seen by the agents as adventures: we try to be better than others in accomplishing them, and to do them better than was done in the past. Cf. Gerd Spittler, Founders of the Anthropology of Work, Berlin: Lit, 2008. 257 tions that have been successfully accomplished with its help; all the beliefs and hopes attached to it in the whole context of its use; the feeling of successfully accomplished action; the joy we have in working with it; etc. In other words, progressivism fails to give an account of the connection of social objects with different ways of life. In what follows in this section, we are going to suggest three ways of overcoming the progressivist fallacy, using our idiosyncratic approach to the social sciences: (i) We can make use of some new developments in history, in particular, of the expanding discipline of experimental archaeology. 30 The objective of the latter is to reconstruct (to revive) former ways of life in a most authentic way: to ―put on the shoes‖ of the old agents, imitating them. 31 In a sense, this is a conservative program, the task of which is to revive past ways of life in their full form,-not through empathy, however, but through reconstructing its objects together with the practices that were carried out with their help. (ii) From a more general perspective, we can try to identify a more or less constant (invariant) human form of life (as different from a ―lion's form of life‖, etc. 32 ), which is the kernel of social life, or its inward side. It repeats itself practically unchanged-with purposes, motives and habits of the same form 33 -in different ways of life. In the words of Hermann Lotze, the human form of life is the course of the world (der Weltlauf), ―the same ever-green shoot from which colourful blossoms of history shoot up all the time in cycles‖. 34 30 Cf. James Mathieu (ed.), Experimental Archaeology, Replicating Past Objects, Behaviors and Processes, Oxford: Archaeopress, 2002. 31 The ―logic of imitation‖ was widely followed in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. In particular, the doll-models method for imitating car accidents used in a Paris court served him as an inspiration for his picture theory of language. 32 We deal with this concept under the influence of Wittgenstein. See on it Newton Garver, This Complicated Form of Life, Chicago: Open Court, 1994. 33 These can be considered the universals of the human form of life. 34 Hermann Lotze, Microcosm, vol. 2, 6. Auflage, 1923, Leipzig: Meiner (1st ed. 1858), p. 345. 258 Now, a specific task of our reistic social theory and the method based on it is to bring to light the universal movements of the human form of life, as expressed over the course of history in the attitude of humans to different, everchanging social objects. Roughly, humans construct an endless series of social individuals, repairing and renewing them all the time, using quite different elements (planks) in so doing. One of the tasks of the reistic social philosopher is: (a) comparing the various planks (objects) and social individuals-old and new,-trying to set out how they were connected to the ―tree of life‖ and also how they are connected to one specific element of the ―tree‖ (for example, with our eternal desire for happiness); (b) comparing how we reach it in different stages of human history, etc. (iii) Our method can also suggest how to direct our exploration when the task is searching for authentic social individuals. Examples: contemplating the ―river of time‖, we soon realize that we can play football without soccershoes-and that this is absolutely the same game as the one we play with soccer-shoes. We also see that it is possible to drive a car without seat-belts (as we did it in the 1960's); or ride a motorcycle without a helmet, etc. In this way we seek to find out if this or that is an object essential for a social construction (individual) or is just its ―ornament‖. In other words, our objective is to bring to light the ―substance‖ of the social construction (individual). By way of concluding this section, we shall suggest another general model that can serve both for overcoming progressivism in the humanities and for a better understanding of past events. More especially, we assume that our approach can also help us to see social objects of the past, documented in memories, narratives, old movies, old pictures, etc. as complex objects which have two sides: one quite contemporary, up-to-date, and another old one which we, or the generations before us, resolutely abandoned some time ago. More importantly, the two sides of these past objects are directly connected (topologically) with one another: they stick tightly together, and that is precisely what makes old social objects completely transparent and so understandable to the observers of every new generation. 259 9. Epilogue The ontology we presented in this paper is rather programmatic and so incomplete. This explains why our analysis is not comprehensive and poor in detail. For example, we have said practically nothing about social relations (we do not deny them but simply consider them secondary in respect to social objects), and hardly anything about social events (instead, we suggested analysis of changes and processes). Furthermore, our reistic social theory does not follow reism in the form in which its founding father, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, developed it. We simply used the general idea of reism in order to better articulate our own idiosyncratic social theory. Be that as it may, we hope that our approach can help us to better understand the multiplicity of social life, including its past forms in their full scope. References Anscombe, G. E. M. (1958). ―On Brute Facts‖, Analysis 18 (1958), pp. 69–72. Bittner, R. (1992). ―One Action‖. In: Rorty, A. O. (Eds.) (1992). Essays on Aristotle's Poetics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 97–110. Blackmore, Susan. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bloor, David. (2001). ―What is a Social Construct?‖, Facta Philosophica 3 (2001), pp. 141–56. Garver, Newton. (1994). This Complicated Form of Life. Chicago: Open Court. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dickens, Charles. (1987). Great Expectations. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1st published 1861). Engels, Friedrich. (1975). Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des Staats; in: K. Marx und F. Engels, (1975). Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 29, Berlin: Dietz. 260 Howell, M.and Prevenier, W. (2001). From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press. Kershaw, Ian. (2008). Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940–1941. London: Penguin Books. Koselleck, Reinhart. (2006). Begriffsgeschichten. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. Lotze, Hermann. (1923). Microcosm, vol. 2, 6. Auflage. Leipzig: Meiner (1st ed. 1858) Mathieu, James (Eds.) (2002). 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Egozentrizität und Mystik. München: Beck. Westerhoff, Jan. (2005). Ontological Categories: Their Nature and Significance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1973). Letters to C. K. Ogden, Eds. by G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, L. (1974). Philosophical Grammar, Eds. by R. Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, conversations recorded by Friedrich Weismann, Eds. by McGuiness, B. F. (1979). Oxford: Blackwell.

University of Tabriz-Iran Journal of Philosophical Investigations ISSN (print): 2251-7960/ ISSN (online): 2423-4419 Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 Journal Homepage: www.philosophy.Tabrizu.ac.ir The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty Muhammad Asghari Associate Professor of Philosophy at university of Tabriz.Iran. Email: [email protected] Abstract In this article, I try to defend the thesis that imagination against reason, moral progress through imagination not the reason, solidarity vs. objectivity, the emergence of literary culture after philosophical culture from Hegel onwards, contingency of language, the usefulness of literature (poetry, novels and stories, etc.) in enhancinmg empathy with one another and ultimately reducing philosophy to poetry in Richard Rorty's writings point to one thing: the priority of literature to philosophy. The literary or post-physical culture that Rorty defends is opposed to the Enlightenment and the philosophical and religious culture. Rorty prefers literary culture between the religious culture and philosophical culture. The literary culture Rorty envisages is a radically historicist and nominalist one. Rorty's romanticised version of pragmatism aims precisely at dealing with this literary or post-physical culture or, in generally, the literature. Keywords: philosophy, literary culture, literature, pragmatism, and Rorty  Recived Date: 08/22/2019 Accepted Date: 09/18/2019 208/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 Philosophy makes progress not by becoming more rigorous but by becoming more imaginative. Richard Rorty Introduction Let us start by examining the relationship between literature and philosophy. We see this relationship in the philosophy of some contemporary philosophers such as Richard. Rorty places a great deal of value on the critique of philosophy and the fundamental concepts of traditional philosophy, and we know that he went to Stanford University's Department of Comparative Literature late in his academic life. At first step, to considering the issue, it may be useful to point out that this relationship has many vicissitudes from the beginning until today. The overwhelming relationship between philosophy and literature in the history of philosophy from Plato to Rorty, in spite of the complete disregard for this relationship in traditional philosophy, is now at the center of the philosophical debates of contemporary philosophers. Of course, this relationship is not limited to the history of Western philosophy1. The philosophers, the literate or the poets as well as artists have always claimed in various ways that their field of activity is a well-deserved field in which truth can be discovered. The tool of the philosopher is reason, and the tool of the poet of imagination and metaphorical language. In this writing, we will try to show that in order to understand the priority of literature to philosophy in Richard Rorty,s neo-pragmatism, one must consider some the key words of his thought such as, "literary culture versus philosophical culture", "philosophy as a literary genre", philosophy as poetry, imagination, moral progress through imagination, and etc. As Rorty himself has defended the priority of democracy over philosophy in "The priority of democracy to philosophy (1992)", we also advocate the priority of literature over philosophy. The priority of freedom over truth is the subject of Rorty's book, and the imagination of reason and reason is the subject of our article. We believe that if Rorty had written a book or an article on the relationship between philosophy and literature at the beginning of the twentyfirst century, surely the title of our article would have been one of his works. But he did not write, but the content of such a book or article can be found in many of his later works, and we pursue this goal in this article, although we do not claim to have been fully successful. Continental background of Rorty's thought The emergence of the post-structuralist movement and the publication of books by postmodern philosophers such as Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze and the reception of these works at American universities drew the attention of analytical and post-philosophical philosophers to these works, and generally incorporated European philosophy into American philosophy. Nietzsche and Derrida are a familiar model for Rorty's view of philosophy as a literary genre. In "Looking Back at a Literary Theory", Rorty says that in the 1970s, teachers in American literature departments began reading Derrida and The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty /209 Foucault. A new subdiscipline called "literary theory" took shape. The notion that a literary text could profitably be "theorized" helped make it easy for literature professors to teach their favorite philosophy books and for literature students to write their dissertations on philosophical topics. It also helped create jobs in literature departments. (Saussy 2006: 63) Since the publication of his famous book, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty has been influenced by this continental tradition, in particular the ideas of French post-structuralist thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard and others (such as Heidegger). Rorty, in his paper, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida", prefers Derrida to the early Derrida because "for Derrida, writing always leads to more writing, and more, and still more-just as history does not lead to Absolute Knowledge or the Final Struggle, but to more history, and more, and still more"(Rorty 1982: 145). Of course, Rorty wants to clear the line between analytic and continental philosophies: I have heard analytic philosophers get furious at comparative literature departments for trespassing on philosophical turf by teaching Nietzsche and Derrida, and doubly furious at the suggestion that they might teach it themselves. Conversely, I have heard fans of Continental philosophy be obnoxious about the 'mere logicchopping' with which their analytic colleagues waste students' time and dehydrate their minds. Like reciprocal charges of incompetence, this sort of rhetoric is pointless. It is also dangerous, for it can actually result in colleges and universities not having people on the faculty who can explain certain books to interested students. Yet the only way in which institutions of liberal learning can justify their existence is to be places in which students can find practically any book in the library – Gadamer or Kripke, Searle or Derrida – and then find somebody to talk with about it. When all the jockeying to decide which department's budget will bear the freight is over, we have to make sure the result has not been to limit the possibilities open to the students (Rorty 1982: 225). It should not be forgotten that towards the end of his life he became increasingly interested in literature. Richard Rorty was professor emeritus of comparative literature and philosophy at Stanford University, passed away on Friday, June 8, 2007. Rorty's pragmatic criticism of philosophy Rorty believes that the traditional Western philosophical tradition is a tradition on which Plato's heavy shadow has fallen. The Western philosophical tradition has always sought to approach the transcendental reality. In the Philosophy and mirror of Nature, Rorty characterized the traditional view of philosophy in the following way: Philosophers usually think of their discipline as one which discusses perennial, eternal problems – problems which arise as soon as one reflects. Some of these concerns the difference between human 210/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 beings and other beings, and are crystallized in questions concerning the relation between the mind and the body. Other problems concern the legitimation of claims to know, and are crystallized in questions concerning the "foundations" of knowledge. To discover these foundations is to discover something about the mind, and conversely. Philosophy as a discipline thus sees itself as the attempt to underwrite or debunk claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art, or religion. It purports to do this on the basis of its special understanding of the nature of knowledge and mind. Philosophy can be foundational in respect to the rest of culture because culture is an assemblage of claims to knowledge, and philosophy adjudicates such claims. (Rorty 1979: 3) In western tradition, the philosophy's task or philosopher's task is to use its special methods and tools in order to secure the relationship between the mind's representations and the world represented. On such an approach, philosophy is foundational for western culture because it is the tribunal of reason before which all other areas of inquiry (namely, other discipilines) are to be judged. He believes that philosophy's remoteness from the rest of culture follows from this privileged and special self-understanding. So the phrase has an important message to the reader that Rorty does not accept philosophy as a discipline.1 In other words, Rorty's official position is that there is no longer any reason to defend philosophy as an autonomous discipline. This American pragmatist philosopher wants to dissolution the problems of this philosophy because they are not useful at all. As we have said, such a definition of discipline is entirely Plato's definition of philosophy. To understand the spirit of Rorty's thought can be considered his endless opposition to Platonic thought as the starting point for research on Rorty's philosophy. In the Platonic tradition, which is the dominant tradition in the West, philosophy has always preceded poetry. Ture Poetry and Philosophy In other words, let me say that the distinction between poetry and philosophy and the primacy of philosophy over poetry or the primacy of reason over emotion in the Platonic tradition is criticized by Richard Rorty. I think as soon as you try to re-create the Platonic contrast between poetry and philosophy you are in danger of reifying your favorite philosopher and calling that philosophy and reifying your favorite poet and calling that poetry. Heidegger makes a distinction between poets and thinkers that I have never been able to make sense of. I don't know how you are supposed to tell which are which. (Rorty 2006: 140) We all know that poetry is created by the poet's imagination, this great poetry of romanticism is a tool for expressing human intentions, and it is a useful tool. To claim that literature in general is more useful than philosophy is not to claim too much defense. He thinks that literature has more or less supplanted The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty /211 metaphysical sources of moral socialization, But this claim is not justified because the situation is different in non-Western cultures. Sometimes literature and poetry have been the cause of a nation's backwardness and decline. In Iran, for example, the culture of Sufi literature has not allowed rational culture to fully grow and has thus brought about social and political repression. Too much emphasis on the power of imagination in literature and poetry causes people to stay away from criticizing the social and historical situation and the cruelties that exist in society. Thus, it seems that Rorty considers the primacy of reason only in Western democratic society, not non-Western societies. According to this American philosopher, reason obeys the imagination. This is not a disadvantage, but rather a benefit that brings philosophy closer to literature and poetry. In an essay called "Pragmatism and Romanticism" I tried to restate the argument of Shelley's "Defense of Poetry." At the heart of Romanticism, I said, was the claim that reason can only follow paths that the imagination has first broken.2 In his neo-pragmatism, Rorty strives to give a prominent place to literature and literary culture versus the culture of the Enlightenment. Therefore, Rorty says that the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature. This is Rorty's thesis and he refers to it as Philosophy as a transitional genre: I can now state my thesis. It is that the intellectuals of the West have, since the Renaissance, progressed through three stages: they have hoped for redemption first from God, then from philosophy, and now from literature. Monotheistic religion offers hope for redemption through entering into a new relation to a supremely powerful non-human person. Belief in the articles of a creed may be only incidental to such a relationship. In philosophy, however, true belief is of the essence: redemption by philosophy would consist in acquiring a set of beliefs that represent things in the one way they truly are. Literature, finally, offers redemption through making the acquaintance of as great a variety of human beings as possible. Here again, as with religion, true belief may be of little importance (Rorty 2007:91). He seems to find true redemption in literature, especially in the books of poets and novelists. Of course, he is influenced by Alan Bloom. The term "Selfcreation" in poetry and literature is as important as the truth in philosophy but Rorty rejects Philosophy.3 The "Self-creation" demonstrates that we make our identity within historical contingencies and social events. Here, he is influenced by Nietzsche's thoughts. In other words, Rorty found Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of epistemology ( namely, perspectivism) to be useful and helpful tool in getting us to stop thinking of knowledge as something we find, and instead as something that we create and above all, he also found perspectivism to be a 212/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 helpful tool in that of the private sphere, of private self-creation. We know that this issue allows Rorty to link perspectivism, self-creation, and a clear metaphor, literature, together, to interpret the full implications of Nietzsche's perspectivism. Of course, Nietzsche aims to free subject as the heart of subjectivism and makes it stop. He delivers subjectivism to perspectivism with criticizing solid and a priori categories, and far more important, with disabling reason's ideas that prepare the condition of unconditional knowledge (Arjang 2019: 25). He uses this to give his model of the pragmatist's paradigmatic human being (Ironist), one who goes about creating oneself constantly instead of trying to discover oneself. He argued that we can read philosophers like Derrida, Nietzsche, and Heidegger for our own private enjoyment. But, for Rorty, though, Nietzsche's ideas are not sufficient to explain the dynamics of the self, that is the job of Freud, and Rorty elaborates on the usefulness and applicability of both. Of course, Rorty criticizes Nietzsche for his opposition to democracy. Rorty's pragmatic reading of Nietzsche has led to literature. Different works of literature will show different sides of the human experience. Thus, one medium of literature, poetry, has a greater significance for Rorty. Therefore, at the beginning of Chapter two of Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity Rorty presents a poem by Phillip Larkin as a means of discussing the supremacy of poetry over philosophy since Nietzsche's time. Richard Rorty, in the second chapter of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, called 'The Contingency of Selfhood', uses the last part of a poem by Philip Larkin (1922-1985), Continuing to Live to clarify his ideas about the self. I think Larkin's poem owes its interest and its strength to this reminder of the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, the tension between an effort to achieve self-creation by the recognition of contingency and an effort to achieve universality by the transcendence of contingency. The same tension has pervaded philosophy since Hegel's time, and particularly since Nietzsche. The important philosophers of our own century are those who have tried to follow through on the Romantic poets by breaking with Plato and seeing freedom as the recognition of contingency. These are the philosophers who try to detach Hegel's insistence on historicity from his pantheistic idealism. They accept Nietzsche's identification of the strong poet, the maker, as humanity's hero rather than the scientist, who is traditionally pictured as a finder. More generally, they have tried to avoid anything that smacks of philosophy as contemplation, as the attempt to see life steadily and see it whole, in order to insist on the sheer contingency of individual existence (Rorty 1989: 25-26). Rorty uses both philosophical thought and poetry of great poets. This is Richard Rorty's unique method, and has often been heavily criticized by colleagues, friends, and even his students. We see that Rorty moves easily from Wittgenstein to Heidegger or from Dewey to Derrida, but he is as apt to draw from a Philip Larkin poem, from Proust, or from Nabokov novel as from Kant The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty /213 or Nietzsche. Because, according to him, common message of these thinkers is "to insist on the sheer contingency of individual existence" (Rorty 1989: 26). In his article, "Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida" Rorty says that philosophy is not an isolated piece of culture, but it is a kind of literal writing or "any literary genre" All that "philosophy" as a name for a sector of culture means is "talk about Plato, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Frege, Russell. . . And that lot." Philosophy is best seen as a kind of writing. It is delimited, as is any literary genre, not by form or matter, but by tradition-a family romance involving, e.g., Father Parmenides, honest old Uncle Kant, and bad brother Derrida (Rorty 1978: 143). Rorty has identified two types of thinking in philosophy: vertical thinking that continues to Kant and horizontal thinking starting from Hegel's phenomenology of mind. He holds that later true philosophy is a genre of literature. In the following phrase, he describes the characteristics of these two types of philosophical thinking: There, then, are two ways of thinking about various things. I have drawn them up as reminders of the differences between a philosophical tradition which began, more or less, with Kant, and one which began, more or less, with Hegel's Phenomenology. The first tradition thinks of truth as a vertical relationship between representations and what is represented. The second tradition thinks of truth horizontally-as the culminating reinterpretation of our predecessors' reinterpretation of their predecessors' reinterpretation. . . . This tradition does not ask how representations are related to nonrepresentations, but how representations can be seen as hanging together (Rorty 1978: 143). Literary culture and philosophy Rorty wants to show that philosophy since Hegel has sought to use literary and poetic language to describe the human condition and its contingency. He in "Philosophy as a Transitional Genre", underlines the significance of Hegel to his narrative of emancipation and secularization, so explicitly contends that the transition from a philosophy to a literary culture began with this German philosopher. It can be said that it was with Hegel that philosophy reached its most ambitious and presumptuous form, which almost instantly developed into its dialectical opposite; that is, the Hegelian system eventually turned out to be a somewhat utterly nonironical self-consuming artifact. Hegel's system was serious in its desire to depict things as they really were and it sought to fit everything into a single context. This also signifies, of course, that it pretended to represent the totality. Rorty writes: "Since Hegel's time, the intellectuals have been losing faith in philosophy. This amounts to losing faith in the idea that redemption can come in the form of true beliefs. In the literary culture that has 214/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 been emerging during the last two hundred years, the question 'Is it true?' has yielded to the question 'What's new?'" (Rorty 2004: 9). Rorty insists that Hegel transformed philosophy into a literary genre to answer the questions of his day. According to him, "From within a literary culture, religion and philosophy appear as literary genres. As such, they are optional. Just as an intellectual may opt to read many poems but few novels, or many novels but few poems, so he or she may read much philosophy, or much religious writing, but relatively few poems or novels. The difference between the literary intellectuals' readings of all these books and other readings of them is that the inhabitant of a literary culture treats books as human attempts to meet human needs, rather than as acknowledgments of the power of a being that is what it is apart from any such needs. "God" and "Truth" are, respectively, the religious and the philosophical names for that sort of being (Rorty 2007:91). The transition from religion to philosophy However, what exactly does Rorty mean by the term of literary culture? Let us hear the answer from our pragmatist philosopher: As I am using the terms "literature" and "literary culture," a culture that has substituted literature for both religion and philosophy finds redemption neither in a noncognitive relation to a nonhuman person, nor in a cognitive relation to propositions, but in noncognitive relations to other human beings, relations mediated by human artifacts such as books and buildings, paintings and songs. These artifacts provide a sense of alternative ways of being human. (Rorty 2004: 10) He believes that philosophy seeks something deep within the human and that it's similar to the concept of God that religion seeks as its ultimate goal. But on the contrary, the literature tells us that human has nothing deep within himself and that with the power of imagination, man has come up with such concepts. For this reason he even seeks moral progress in literature, not philosophy. In sum, Rorty maintains what philosophy could do is nothing but to inspire imagination and so advocates a so-called post-philosophical culture, which emphasizes real cultural and political life over pure contemplation. In this way, Rorty tries to overcome dominating ideas such as Idea, logos, the Absolute, essence, reality, and categorical imperative, as well as the binary oppositions including that between reality and appearance, which in Western metaphysics have reigned ever since the time of the Greeks. Post-philosophical culture is just a culture that has discarded these traditional philosophical ideas (Derong & Liangjian 2005: 633-4). Rorty believes that moral progress depends on the development of imagination and the promotion of emotion among people. Poets outnumber philosophers in developing this imagination and in promoting sentiment among the people. It can be said that literature that opens the moral imagination, thus providing a possibility of greater sensitivity and sympathy for the suffering of other peoples in world, constitutes what Rorty at times refers to as a sentimental literature The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty /215 that facilitates sentimental education. Sentiment for him appears to be a subtle combination of feelings and impressions that provide a basis for judgment and action in his neopragmatism. The question may come to mind of readers if Rorty is a romantic thinker. The answer is no, because he has not even written a single page of poetry. He is a literary pragmatist whose pragmatism is literary in color. Thus, Sentiment and imagination in moral progress are two interrelated concepts that Rorty has included in his view of moral philosophy. Hart says that "n sum for Rorty there exists a line of evolution from opening the moral imagination, to enhanced sympathy-empathy, to cultivating proper moral sentiments, to expanded loyalty and the pursuit of a greater justice. What he calls "inspirational literature" and "inspired reading" can uniquely and powerfully merge in this development. When Rorty attributes inspirational value to works of literature, he means that such works "make people think there is more to this life than they ever imagined"(Hart 2011: 40). So "his point is that moral progress is not a matter of an increase in rationality, nor does it involve developing what Dewey called intelligence"(Asghari 2015:69-70), Rather, it aims to improve the lives of individuals in a democratic society. Let's go back to the differences between philosophy and literature. Finding the truth in the human mind and making the truth in the human mind is something that is understandable from Rorty's words. I think that this is the fundamental difference between philosophy and literature in Rorty's mind. Of course, we have to admit that his contemporaries have always criticized Rorty's conception of philosophy and we do not intend to go into more detail. However, in the struggle between philosophy and literature Rorty advocates literature. Rorty writes about this struggle: Kierkegaard rightly said that philosophy began to set itself up as a rival to religion when Socrates suggested that our self-knowledge was knowledge of God – that we had no need of help from a non-human person, because the truth was already within us. But literature began to set itself up as a rival to philosophy when people like Cervantes and Shakespeare began to suspect that human beings were, and ought to be, so diverse that there is no point in pretending that they all carry a single truth deep in their bosoms (Rorty 2007: 93). Like Kierkegaard, he seeks to replace literature with philosophy, as Socrates replaced philosophy with religion. Here we find that Rorty finds it useful in the Western philosophical tradition to transition from religion to philosophy, from philosophy to literature. He analyzes the usefulness of this transition and transformation both from the perspective of American pragmatism and from the perspective of post-structuralist thought such as Derrida and Foucault. This philosophy is not about proving the essence of things. There is no doubt that Derrida is as much involved in Rorty's thinking as Wittgenstein. So he, under the influence of Derrida and his deconstruction, believes that philosophy is not only pure knowledge, but it is a kind of philosophy of language whose task is no longer to represent the essence of things in the world but self-creation 216/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 through literary language and poetic imagination. For this reason, Rorty uses literature, and especially poets, to describe and defend such a philosophy. We know that language and the philosophy of language in Derrida's poststructuralist thought greatly influenced the Rorty's thought formation. In order to understand the nature of literary culture, one must first turn to language. Contingency of Language Let us focus here on the question of language as the common focus of philosophy and literature in modern times on Rorty's thought. Rorty writes in Contingency, Irony, and solidarity that"If we cease to attempt to make sense of the idea of such a nonhuman language, we shall not be tempted to confuse the platitude that the world may cause us to be justified in believing a sentence true with the claim that the world splits itself up, on its own initiative, into sentenceshaped chunks called "facts." (Rorty 1989: 5). Two points can be deduced from this statement: First, language is not a fixed nature and second, the reality is made by language. In other words, Language has no fixed essence. Susan Haack points the contingency of language as the conventionality of justification in Rorty: "by the time of Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Rorty has a different defensive strategy: he describes those who, like himself, have grasped the 'contingency' of language, the conventionality of justification, as 'ironists' (Haack 1993:193) Language has its own contingency, and this is essential to understanding a literary culture. According to him, language plays an important role in literary culture. Of course, In order to understand Rorty's narrative on the rise of literary culture, one has to consider the role that this idea plays in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. At the beginning of the first chapter ("The Contingency of Language"), Rorty advances the argument that what unites the German idealists, the French revolutionaries, and the Romantic poets is that they understood, at the end of the eighteenth century, "that anything could be made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being redescribed" (Rorty 1989: 7). In addition, what the German idealists, the utopian revolutionaries, and the Romantic poets had in common was "a dim sense that human beings whose language changed so that they no longer spoke of themselves as responsible to nonhuman powers would thereby become a new kind of human beings" (Rorty 1989: 7). This contingency is a question of his historicism. According to Robert Brandom, the strong conclusion Rorty draws from his conception of the contingency of language is that "No area of culture, and no period of history, gets Reality more right than any other. The difference between the areas and epochs is their relative efficiency in accomplishing various purposes. There is no such thing as Reality to be gotten right – only snow, fog, Olympian deities, relative aesthetic worth, the elementary particles, human rights, the divine right of kings, the Trinity, and the like" (Brandom 2000 :375). In Rorty's philosophy there is a kind of sanctification of Romanticism, in contrast to a hatred of the Enlightenment and its theoretical aspirations throughout his writings. Rorty is not a poet and has not written a book of poetry or a book on Romanticism but finds it useful for human self-creation. The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty /217 That is why he has been greatly influenced by Bloom. Broadly characterised, the sort of romanticism that Rorty prefers is the independent, muscular variety celebrated by his literary mentor, Harold Bloom. Throughout his career, Rorty embraced a number of ideas and attitudes associated with Bloom's picture of the romantic poet as engaged in a dialectical struggle for articulacy and autonomy.Rorty's romantic watchwords, accordingly, are imagination, spontaneity, freedom, contingency, plurality, power, and creativity – ideas that he pits against notions such as reason, receptivity, truth, necessity, commensurability, knowledge, and harmony. Most important, perhaps, is the notion of truth as created rather than discovered, enabled by the romantic inversion of the values assigned by Kant to the determinative and the reflective judgement in the third Critique (Milnes 2011:24) Conclusion It is crucial to note that Richard Rorty, emphasizing on literary culture against enlightenment philosophy, seems to hold that only in his ideal poetized culture would one archive full human dignity and maturity because we can reach the best human solidarity and consensus in this culture. According to him, human solidarity and consensus is the main goal of democratic society. A culture that matures to the point of finally giving up on realism would, he thinks, realise that 'what matters is our loyalty to other human beings clinging together against the dark, not our hope of getting things right' (Rorty 1982: 166). In such a culture, the authority of non-human objectivity would be replaced by human solidarity, and forms of description would not be ranked according to their supposed ability to correspond to the true nature of reality, only according to their usefulness, something which varies from context to context.4 Three aspects are important here. First, Rorty presents himself as a pragmatist philosopher who is interestingly attracted to the usefulness of theories, especially, in action and, generally, in human society. Second, he wants to replace philosophical discourse with literary one in his American culture and for doing so, he uses postmodern philosophies such as deconstruction or Levinasian ethics. Three, he, in the final chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, holds that "redescription ourselves is the most things we can do "(Rorty 1979: 358-9) this is the best literature can do, not philosophy or science. In general, Rorty tells us a story in which one thing replaces one another and finds this replacement useful from a pragmatic perspective. For example, according to him, Kantian philosophy replaces Hegelian historical philosophy, Romanticism replaces pragmatism, and eventually philosophy replaces literature. We see that Rorty in later works such as Philosophy as Cultural Politics redefines philosophy as culture criticism or cultural politics. In addition, I think that this desire in his mind roots in early works, but we do not want to consider this issue here because it requires another article. So we can say that imagination against reason, moral progress through imagination, not the reason, solidarity vs. objectivity, the emergence of literary culture after philosophical culture from Hegel onwards, contingency of language, the usefulness of literature (poetry, novels and stories, etc.) in enhancing empathy with one another and ultimately 218/ Philosophical Investigations, Vol. 13/ Issue: 28/ fall 2019 reducing philosophy to poetry in Richard Rorty's writings point to one thing: the priority of literature to philosophy.If there is one philosopher among contemporary pragmatist philosophers whose literature is at the heart of his thought, he is Rorty. In other words, he is the pragmatist philosopher of literature, even if he himself would reject that label absolutely. Notes 1. But in the Muslim world, Islamic philosophers have always sought to blend literary language with philosophical language. Ibn Sina, for example, sometimes uses literary language in his books to express his rational thought and also it is sometimes seen that a philosopher like Suhrawardi uses a literary story to explain his philosophical perspective. But here our goal is not to get into the details. 2. See "The Fire of Life" by Richard Rorty at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/68949/the-fire-oflifeRorty 3. Rorty has expressed the hope that his brand of 'antiphilosophy' might lead to a 'post-Philosophical culture' (Rorty 1982: xl). This sounds like a call to bring philosophy to an end once and for all. See Tartaglia, James (2007) Rorty and the Mirror of Nature, Routledge 4. Rorty has expressed the hope that his brand of 'antiphilosophy' might lead to a 'post-Philosophical culture' (Rorty 1982: xl). This sounds like a call to bring philosophy to an end once and for all. See Tartaglia, James (2007) Rorty and the Mirror of Nature, Routledge References  Arjang, Aminallah (2019)"The Decline of Subjectivism and Emergence of Perspectivism in Nietzsche's Thought", The Quarterly Journal of Philosophical Investigations (University of Tabriz)Volume 13, Issue 27, Summer 2019, Page 23-49  Asghari, Muhammad (2015)"Has Richard Rorty a moral philosophy?" in journal of Philosophical Investigations (university of Tabriz), Fall & Winter 2015/ Vol. 9/ No. 17, pp. 55-74  Derong, Pan & Liangjian, Liu (2005) "Contingency And The Philosophy Of Richard Rorty" in Journal of Chinese Philosophy 32:4 (December 2005)pp. 633–640  Guignon, Charles & Hiley, David R. (edi) (2003) Richard Rorty, Cambridge University Press  Haack, Susan (1993) Evidence and Inquiry: Towards Reconstruction in Epistemology, Blackwell Publishers  Hart, Richard E. (2011) "Richard Rorty on literature and moral progress" journal of Pragmatism Today, Vol. 2/ Issue. 2/ Winter 2011, pp.34-64  Milnes, Tim (2011) "Rorty, Romanticism and The Literary Absolute", in journal of Pragmatism Today, Vol. 2/ Issue. 2/ Winter 2011, pp. 24-34  Robert B. Brandom, Ed., Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.  Rorty, Richard & Mendieta, Eduardo (2006) Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty, Richard Rorty, Edited and with an Introduction by Eduardo Mendieta, Stanford University Press  Rorty, Richard (1978)"Philosophy as a Kind of Writing: An Essay on Derrida" in New Literary History, Vol. 10, No. 1, Literary Hermeneutics. (autumn, 1978), pp. 141-160. The Priority of literature to Philosophy in Richard Rorty /219  Rorty, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  Rorty, Richard (2004). "Philosophy as a Transitional Genre." Pragmatism, Critique,Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Nancy Fraser. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 3–28.  Rorty, Richard (2006)"Looking Back at a Literary Theory" In Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, Edited by Haun Saussy, The Johns Hopkins University Press.  Rorty, Richard (2007) Philosophy as cultural politics: philosophical papers, volume 4, Cambridge University Press.  Rorty, Richard. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  Tartaglia, James (2007) Rorty and the Mirror of Nature, Routledge.

Article Public goods and government action Jonathan Anomaly Duke University, USA Abstract It is widely agreed that one of the core functions of government is to supply public goods that markets either fail to provide or cannot provide efficiently. I will suggest that arguments for government provision of public goods require fundamental moral judgments in addition to the usual economic considerations about the relative efficacy of markets and governments in supplying them. While philosophers and policymakers owe a debt of gratitude to economists for developing the theory of public goods, the link between public goods and public policy cannot be forged without moral reflection on the proper function and scope of government power. Keywords Public goods, public policy, market efficiency, government intervention, paternalism Why public goods matter Markets are miraculous mechanisms for enhancing human welfare. In the absence of externalities, the free exchange of private goods leads to (presumptive) Pareto improvements. Even when externalities occur, market exchange tends to produce net gains by promoting specialization and the division of labor (Smith, 1776; Bk 1, chs 1–3). But when confronted with public goods like the preservation of our atmosphere's ozone layer, uncoordinated exchange can leave everyone worse off than they might otherwise be if they could find a way to coordinate. Goods are public if they exhibit nonrivalry and nonexcludability.1 Of the two characteristics, nonexcludability arguably poses the main challenge for producing public goods Corresponding author: Jonathan Anomaly, Duke University, 140 Science Drive, Room 208 Gross Hall, Box 90204, Durham, NC 27708, USA. Email: [email protected] Politics, Philosophy & Economics 2015, Vol. 14(2) 109–128 a The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1470594X13505414 ppe.sagepub.com by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from privately.2 This is because-in textbook cases-when a good is available to all and is costly to produce, some people will be tempted to free ride on the efforts of others. Other people, recognizing the existence of free riders, will decline to contribute because they lack the assurance that enough others will pitch in to make their effort worthwhile. As a general rule, when the number of people needed to produce a public good increases, the feasibility of market provision declines and welfare gains are accordingly difficult to produce through private exchange. In other words, public goods pose a problem-for welfare economics, at least-to the extent that they induce market failure. Thus, many have argued, government can potentially improve the situation by directly supplying or indirectly encouraging the provision of public goods. Indeed, Adam Smith argued that governments should be tasked with three main roles, all of which can be aptly described as the provision of public goods. The first two are to supply a military to defend against external invasion, and to maintain an impartial legal and judicial system. 'The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth,' Smith says, is that of erecting or maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, although they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature, that the profit could not repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain (1776: Bk 5, ch. 1). As it turns out, the problem of producing public goods is primarily about how the number of contributors needed to produce them affects transaction costs (Coase, 1960) and strategic behavior (Buchanan, 1999).3 When a public good is local, like a neighborhood playground, its potential beneficiaries can usually find a way to coordinate and forge a contract that facilitates private provision. They can also develop mechanisms to exclude free riders and solve the assurance problem through conditionally binding contracts (Schmidtz, 1987). When a public good is global in scope, like the reduction of ozone-depleting chemical emissions, it often becomes more difficult-sometimes impossible-for the relevant parties to find one another, for negotiators to distinguish free riders from honest holdouts, and for private provision to occur. Economists consider public goods problematic because they represent situations in which free markets can lead to unexploited gains from trade. But they also pose a problem for political philosophy if, following Rawls, we think of political society as a 'cooperative venture for mutual advantage' (Rawls, 1971: 4). Voluntary exchange is a key source of mutual advantage, but when the costs of producing a collective good are borne by individuals, while the benefits are dispersed, mutual gains may require government action. In a sense, coercively enforced government mandates (such as laws regulating pollution) can be considered a kind of cooperation for mutual advantage if each person whose liberty is limited sees this as the only feasible way to achieve a goal that makes everyone better off. The question for political philosophy, then, is how we should think about the vast range of public goods that markets and governments might provide. My concern in this article is to develop the rudiments of a normative theory of public goods. I'll begin with a brief discussion of why many philosophers think public goods provision should form the core of government action, and then develop a set of questions 110 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from that theorists and policy makers should ask when confronted with prospective public goods. The objective is not to provide definitive answers to these questions, but rather to frame the issue without settling it in favor of any particular view about the proper scope of government action. Forerunners In different ways, Thomas Hobbes and David Hume anticipated Adam Smith's view that the fundamental function of government is to provide public goods. Hobbes argued that the creation and enforcement of rules of conduct, including moral and legal rules, allow us to rise above the state of nature and enjoy the fruits of our labor: without enforceable laws, unrestrained competition for scarce resources threatens our security and undermines our ability to trust people with whom we would otherwise interact. In a state of nature, Hobbes tells us: . . . there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death . . . (1651: Bk 1, ch. 13). The only way to avoid this disaster, Hobbes thinks, is for people 'to confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men, that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will' (1651: Bk 1, ch. 17). As many commentators have suggested (Hampton, 1986; Kavka, 1986) Hobbes's argument for despotism is less interesting than his argument that life in a political society typically makes all of us better off than we would be in a state of nature, and thus that government itself is a public good, as well as a potential supplier of public goods. Eighty years after Hobbes published Leviathan and 200 years before Paul Samuelson coined the term 'public good' (Samuelson, 1954), Hume clearly anticipated the public-goods argument for government action: Two neighbours may agree to drain a meadow, which they possess in common; because it is easy for them to know each others mind; and each must perceive, that the immediate consequence of his failing in his part, is, the abandoning the whole project. But it is very difficult, and indeed impossible, that a thousand persons should agree in any such action; it being difficult for them to concert so complicated a design, and still more difficult for them to execute it; while each seeks a pretext to free himself of the trouble and expence, and would lay the whole burden on others. Political society easily remedies both these inconveniences. Magistrates find an immediate interest in the interest of any considerable part of their subjects. They need consult no body but themselves to form any scheme for the promoting of that interest. And as the failure of any one piece in the execution is connected, though not immediately, with the failure of the whole, they prevent that failure, because they find no interest in it, either immediate or remote. Thus bridges are built; harbours opened; ramparts raised; canals formed; fleets equipped; and armies disciplined every where, by the care of government, which, though composed of men subject to all human infirmities, becomes, by one of the Anomaly 111 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from finest and most subtle inventions imaginable, a composition, which is, in some measure, exempted from all these infirmities (Hume, 1739: Bk 3, Pt 2, ch. 7). In the purest cases-like those mentioned by Hobbes, Hume, and Smith-governments can provide benefits that would be difficult or impossible to attain if individuals were left to their own devices. For this reason, nearly all plausible political theories endorse some government provision of public goods, though each will support a different bundle, and for different reasons.4 According to David Schmidtz, 'one of the most attractive features of the public goods argument [for government intervention] is the minimal nature of the normative assumptions it must make in order to ground a justification of the state' (1991: 82). The minimal normative assumption Schmidtz has in mind is that government action is occasionally the only feasible or cost-effective way of bringing about an outcome which each person sees as beneficial-or would see as beneficial under idealized epistemic conditions-but which they lack the power to bring about unilaterally. One problem with goods that are accessible to a large number of people is that there will usually be some people who consider the good harmful rather than beneficial. After all, a 'good' in the economic sense is any product that can be used to satisfy a desire, not a product that is desirable, or even widely desired.5 For example, a public park is a local public good that is considered beneficial by those who use it and those who enjoy seeing trees in their neighborhood. But for those who suffer pollen allergies, or who prefer urban to rural landscapes, parks are a nuisance. When this is true, government provision of public goods begins to look more like redistribution than mutual benefit.6 Still, most political philosophers will agree that providing relatively pure public goods should be government's core function. The problem is how to determine which public goods governments should supply. Public goods and public policy When confronted with policies that produce public goods, we should consider the following questions: 1. What is current demand for the good? 2. What would demand be if people had reasonably stable and well-formed preferences? 3. Do the benefits of providing the good exceed the costs of provision? 4. Are the costs and benefits of provision fairly distributed? 5. Would the good be more efficiently provided by government or markets? 6. If a public good is an artifact of public policy, should governments supply it anyway, or should they alter the policies or incentive structures that make the good public to begin with? 7. Is government provision of public goods paternalistic, or otherwise morally objectionable? In each of the following subsections I will attempt to show why these questions matter, and how difficult it is to answer them. 112 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from Gauging demand One problem with deciding which public goods governments should supply is that there is no obvious way of measuring demand. In ordinary markets, goods are produced and sold in discrete units, and firms competing for customers have a powerful incentive to figure out how much of a given good to produce. But public goods cannot be packaged and sold in an obvious way, since suppliers can't attach prices to units of an indivisible good. For example, some people value saving an endangered species or eradicating a disease. But these are not goods that are easy to sell in a market, or to quantify the value of, especially because most of the benefits will go to future people who do not yet exist. Contingent valuation (CV) surveys try to gauge demand for public goods by asking people how much they would be willing to pay for the production or preservation of public goods. CV surveys seem like a scientifically sound and morally neutral way of using hypothetical markets to calculate how much people want a good that actual markets are unlikely to produce. But CV surveys suffer serious problems, and it is unclear whether they are capable of accurately revealing demand for public goods. A familiar problem with contingent valuation stems from biases embedded in survey questions and in the psychology of survey subjects. For example, in surveys with lists of different public goods, people's willingness to pay seems to vary greatly with the ordering of items on the list (Samples and Hollyer, 1990; Tolley et al., 1983). When people are asked how much they would pay to save an endangered elephant, say, or to clean up a polluted lake, their answer is partly determined by which question is posed first. In one survey, respondents were asked how much they would pay to preserve each of three different wilderness areas, and then asked how much they would be willing to pay to preserve all three. In some cases, people were willing to pay more to preserve each of three wilderness areas than they would to preserve all three together (Diamond et al., 1993). In addition to CV surveys eliciting apparently inconsistent responses, some researchers question whether survey subjects are attempting to state their true demand for public goods. The worry is not that survey takers will strategically disguise their preferences (since little can be gained by giving false answers to questions about nonbinding projects), but rather that they may be doing something else altogether. For example, Diamond and Hausman (1994) suggest that respondents may be expressing an attitude that gives them a warm glow, even if they wouldn't be willing to support their response to a hypothetical question with actual money; or they may be describing what they think good citizens are supposed to say, rather than calculating how much benefit they would derive, all things considered, from allocating a specific amount to a particular public good. Limited information further complicates the use of CV surveys to gauge demand for public goods. Because information is costly to gather, and even costlier to process and organize, economists emphasize the role of rational ignorance in decision making- especially in the realm of science and politics (Downs, 1957; Hayek, 1945). Learning how your microwave oven works will not make it work better, but it will mean you have less time to spend on other valuable pursuits. Learning how price controls on agricultural commodities impact consumers will not repay investment, unless you're a farmer, politician, lobbyist, or an unusually concerned and curious citizen. Generalizing this point, Anomaly 113 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from consumers of public goods will have little incentive or ability to inform themselves about all possible public goods that might be provided or preserved. In markets for private goods, consumers internalize the benefits and costs of their purchases. If you don't like your new car or the cup of coffee you've purchased, you have an incentive to spend more time comparing alternative brands of cars and coffee, and adjust your behavior accordingly. But if a new kind of pollutant is thought by scientists to deplete the earth's ozone layer, to warm the planet, or to threaten the ecosystem of an endangered species, there is little reason for most people to study the issue carefully, since each person's consumption choices have a negligible impact on whether the atmosphere is altered, or another species becomes extinct. This line of reasoning suggests that ignorance by respondents to CV surveys is not anomalous; it is a predictable fact explained by the incentive structure of public goods problems. Finally, many argue that since willingness to pay for a public good is constrained by ability to pay, how much of a public good people want changes over time, and depends precariously on budget constraints. Poorer people, for example, are usually willing to pay less for environmental goods than wealthier people. The relationship between ability to pay and willingness to pay is further complicated by the fact that questions on CV surveys are usually hypothetical and answers are non-binding. People's stated willingness to pay may be exaggerated by the fact that in answering hypothetical questions they don't need to pay close attention to how much money they actually have, or expect to make (Cornes and Sandler, 1996: 507; Schmidtz, 2001: 169). To sum up, when people are asked how much they currently value a public good, like the preservation of the endangered Californian condor, their answers may be affected in different ways by their budget constraints, by the order of the questions asked, by the context in which questions are asked, by how much (or little) they know about the Californian condor and its relationship to its ecosystem, and many other variables. This suggests that CV surveys are flawed tools for gauging demand for public goods. Suppose, however, that we could find a more accurate way of measuring demand. Would this imply that governments should supply public goods when demand is strong? Although this may be a prima facie argument for state provision of public goods, other considerations must be addressed first. Evaluating demand As we have seen, one of the most intractable problems with using surveys to gauge demand for public goods is that many people lack the information or expertise to register preferences over important policy issues. Demand can be based on ill-informed, inconsistent, or otherwise poorly formed preferences. It can also be tainted by irrational (in addition to rationally ignorant) political and economic beliefs (Caplan, 2008; Huemer, 2013).7 Ultimately, this is not just a problem with the use of surveys, but one that stems from limited information and the incentives surrounding public goods. This suggests that even if we could measure demand for public goods with a high degree of accuracy, it may not have normative significance or public policy implications. Some economic theories of welfare imply that we are better off-that our welfare is 114 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from increased-when more of our desires are satisfied. But this is a substantive value claim, and it is clearly false in some cases. First, some desires are part of an inconsistent set, so the satisfaction of one implies the frustration of another. Consider a drug addict with a desire for another fix of heroin and a desire to be the kind of person who doesn't want heroin. In this case, a first order desire (for drugs) conflicts with a second order desire (to not be an addict), and the second order desire seems to have normative authority. This is not to say that all desires for drugs are irrational, or involve internal conflict, but rather that some desires are rooted in impulses we would prefer not to have. It is hard to argue that satisfying such desires makes our lives go better. Second, some of our desires are based on poorly formed or unjustified beliefs. Consider a recent example. In the early 21st century, many people in the US and UK declined to vaccinate their children because they believed the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism. The belief can be traced in part to skepticism about the efficacy of vaccines in general, but also to a study conducted in the UK that specifically alleged a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The study was never replicated, the sample on which its conclusions were based was far too small to draw statistically significant conclusions, the lead author of the study had numerous conflicts of interest, and eventually the study was retracted by the journal in which it was published-though not before the British media had managed to convince many citizens of the study's soundness.8 In the decade that followed, thousands of parents declined to vaccinate their children because they believed in a bogus causal connection between MMR and autism. Some children died as a consequence; many others acted as vectors for preventable diseases. Beliefs about MMR causing autism were clearly unjustified, but to those who held these beliefs, overturning government requirements or incentives for parents to vaccinate their children constituted a public good for which there was significant demand. This is a paradigm case, however, in which we should not encourage government provision of public goods simply because demand is high.9 One way of dealing with this problem is to consider which public goods people would be willing to pay for if they had reasonably well-formed preferences.10 Instead of using the satisfaction of actual desires as an automatic index of welfare, or using existing demand to determine which public goods governments ought to supply, we should also consider counterfactual desires, suitably informed. Generally speaking, the satisfaction of desires is more likely to increase a person's welfare if desires are consistent, stable, and based on beliefs that survive critical reflection.11 Some argue that we should abandon the connection between desire satisfaction and welfare in favor of a more substantive or objective theory of well-being.12 But this is a controversial move because it requires an objective account of value about which there is little consensus. Although such theories should be part of the public discussion, we should avoid defending policies by appealing to controversial theories of value. A theory of welfare that prioritizes higher order and informed desires captures the intuition that not all desires are equally worth satisfying-that satisfying some desires can diminish rather than enhance welfare. But it allows us to avoid contentious appeals to objective value. For our purposes, it also implies that policy makers should consider providing public goods for which there is widespread demand only if demand is rooted in minimally well-formed preferences.13 Anomaly 115 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from Benefits and costs Suppose we agree that policy makers should focus their attention on public goods for which there is (or would be) widespread demand among reasonably reflective and informed citizens. Before concluding that public goods ought to be publicly supplied, we should also consider the magnitude of the costs and benefits associated with government provision. For example, basic science research is one of the most important public goods human beings can produce, but discoveries about the basic structure of the universe are not patentable. Markets, therefore, may provide a relatively low level of basic science research.14 Of course, some people will study science simply to satisfy their curiosity (Galileo and Einstein made many important discoveries in their spare time), and private firms may have some reason to fund basic science research in the hope that it will eventually reward investment. But most firms are run by people whose security and salary depend on short-term profitability rather than the long-term financial health of the firm they work for. And most people have little time to pursue science as a hobby after a long day at work. So there is good reason to believe that individual people and profit-seeking firms will produce less basic science research than they would under a system in which public funding for such research is available.15 Up to a point, the benefits produced by publicly funded basic science research almost certainly exceed the cost of provision, as long as the funds find their way to capable scientists. But how much funding for public goods like basic science research should governments supply? Welfare economists suggest that governments should attempt to supply an 'efficient' level of public goods. The efficiency criterion is a consequentialist moral standard which I will discuss in a little more detail in the next section. But it is worth emphasizing that requiring government agencies to perform a cost–benefit analysis (CBA) before providing public goods does not commit us to the efficiency criterion of welfare economics, or to any other consequentialist moral theory (Schmidtz, 2001). Instead, tallying up costs and benefits can help us evaluate whether a particular political intervention is justified by highlighting the values at stake, as well as the welfare effects on the relevant parties. CBA can-in principle, at least-help policy makers think through complex issues, and help citizens keep track of how policy makers make decisions. In the case of basic science research, for instance, we might think about how much money should be spent trying to find out how the influenza virus evolves, and how much (if any) should be allocated to study the chemical composition of Jupiter. If a CBA shows that research into the evolution of flu viruses yields greater returns on investment- returns that include welfare effects on future people-than research into the composition of planets like Jupiter, policy makers may have reason to prioritize funding for microbiology over planetary astronomy. But this does not imply that we should consider CBA the sole determinant of public goods provision. CBA is bound to be imperfect, and it may fail to capture all of the relevant values at stake (Kelman, 1981), even if it helps policy makers and theorists think through the relevant trade-offs (Schmidtz, 2001). If government provision of a public good fails a CBA, this gives us a strong reason to think government should not provide it. If government provision of a public good passes a CBA, this provides a defeasible reason for the state to provide it. However, we should also 116 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from consider how the benefits and costs of provision are distributed, and whether there are private alternatives to public provision. Fairness Many publicly financed public goods shower benefits on some people and impose costs on others. In some cases, this seems fair: it may be worth spending money now on polio eradication or pollution abatement, even if the primary beneficiaries are future people who don't incur any of the costs. But it is often unfair, as when a US Congressman uses federal tax revenue to finance pet projects in his district in order to curry favor with his constituents. When each Congressman does this, both Congressman and constituents are better off, since the constituents pay only a fraction of the cost of the relevant public good, and the Congressman (who often attaches his name to the road or bridge that is built) is more likely to get re-elected. But when all Congressmen do this, all constituents (though not all Congressmen) are arguably worse off. The overall game is a multi-player prisoner's dilemma, and the aggregate results are evidently unfair. The subject of distributive justice is a contentious one, and I do not wish to defend any particular view. But it is worth mentioning some prominent distributive principles that policy makers should consider before deciding to use state power to provide public goods. According to the Pareto principle, a public good should be provided if it makes some people better off without leaving others worse off. If the initial starting point is fair, Pareto improvements are among the least controversial distributive moves, even when they require government coercion to produce (Gaus, 2007: ch. 3). Imagine, counterfactually, that everyone considers the current distribution of resources fair, and a proposed program to reduce pollution will cost everyone the equivalent of US$5 in resources but will benefit everyone by at least US$5. It looks like this move is both fair and mutually beneficial. The problem is that there are few policies that make some people better off and none worse off. The Pareto principle, then, appears to be overly restrictive: it prevents states from making almost any policy change, since at least one person is likely to be unhappy with any new policy. One response by proponents of Pareto is to move from the evaluation of specific policies to that of constitutional design (Buchanan and Tullock, 1962; Sugden, 1990). The idea is that if each person must consent to (or be made better off by) any particular policy, no policy change will ever occur. But carefully crafted constitutional rules for policy making could lead to Pareto improvements in the ex ante sense. Not everybody will be happy with any particular policy, but everyone can expect to be better off with whatever set of policies emerges from the decision procedure specified by the constitution. Examples of such constitutional rules include taxing people-to the extent possible-in proportion to the benefit they receive from any particular public good (Buchanan and Brennan, 1999), minimizing the use of taxation as a means of redistribution (Sugden, 1990), and requiring that rules be general, impartial, and universally applicable (Buchanan, 1993). Whatever general rules constrain the creation of policy, the restrictiveness of the Pareto standard has led many welfare economists and utilitarians to endorse the Kaldor– Hicks principle, according to which the provision of a public good is justified up to the Anomaly 117 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from point at which net social benefits are maximized, even if this entails a loss for some people. The principle requires that those who gain from a policy can, in principle, compensate the losers. If the losers are compensated, Kaldor–Hicks becomes a more flexible version of the Pareto principle. There are obvious objections to principles that allow policy makers to impose losses on some people so that others may benefit, and my object is not to defend any particular distributive principle. Instead, I want to emphasize that most real-world public goods do not benefit everyone, and when they do, they do not benefit everyone equally. Even for a pure public good for which there is almost universal demand, such as saving African lions from extinction, there will be some people who consider the outcome deleterious rather than beneficial (tribal people who are occasionally eaten by lions, for example, and people who would rather save elephants, say, than lions). When this is true-when some people bear the costs, and others get the benefits-we should carefully consider whether a public good should be produced at all, who should shoulder the costs, and how it should be produced, given the range of public and private alternatives. Public and private provision Those who write about public goods theory often correctly complain that non-specialists confuse public goods with public policy. People tend to assume that public goods exist whenever government agents attempt to do what is 'good for the public' in some vague sense. This is an understandable mistake. But, in a less excusable mistake, some scholars have accused pioneers of public goods theory of assuming that the failure of markets to provide public goods automatically implies that governments should step in to supply them. For example, Randall Holcombe argues that public goods theory is part of the government-produced propaganda designed to enhance the appearance of legitimacy of the state . . . People who believe the theory are more likely to support government intervention into the economy, and are more likely to view government production as a legitimate activity of the state (Holcombe, 2000: 137). This is a conceptual mistake and a dubious empirical claim. None of the academic economists who first described public goods made the assumption that the failure of markets to provide public goods always merits government action. In fact, AC Pigou, who is often caricatured as assuming that governments should always correct market failures by taxing negative externalities and subsidizing public goods, warns against this assumption: It is not sufficient to contrast the imperfect adjustments of unfettered private enterprise with the best adjustment that economists in their studies can imagine. For we cannot expect that any public authority will attain, or will even whole-heartedly seek, that ideal. Such authorities are liable alike to ignorance, to sectional pressure and to personal corruption by private interest (Pigou, 1932: 332). 118 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from Similarly, Samuelson says 'the term ''public good'' . . . cannot be interpreted to imply that private goods should be produced by private enterprise and public goods should be produced by government directly'. Instead, Samuelson suggests, where the consumption externalities intrinsic to a non-private good occur, all that I would insist on is that laissez faire cannot be counted on to lead to an optimum. There is a prima facie case, so to speak, for social concern and scrutiny of the outcome . . . [But] the exact form in which the social concern ought to manifest itself depends on a host of considerations that have to be added to the model (Samuelson, 1972: 52). More recently, Hal Varian emphasizes that [t]he standard theory of public goods doesn't call for government intervention – it just says that when public goods are present, simple markets won't achieve efficient outcomes. Conventional economic theory is mute on the question of whether there is any other mechanism that will improve upon the market (Varian, 1993: 545).16 Indeed, there are two common ways of privately producing public goods: charity and assurance contracts. It is a familiar fact that private charities can produce public goods. For example, the Nature Conservancy buys land from foreign governments and farmers to preserve endangered forests and animals, and Planned Parenthood provides information and contraception services that promote public health by decreasing sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies. Most contributors, presumably, have altruistic motivations-they care about improving the lot of other people and animals. But it is also possible to produce public goods for fun or for profit. For example, some people paint murals in public spaces or plant trees in parks in order to beautify a city or restore a native plant habitat. Others produce public goods for less altruistic reasons, including fame, fortune, or necessity. Members of a tribe might pool their labor in order to build a bridge or wage war against their neighbors. Of course, these goods might be described as less than fully public if those who don't contribute are excluded from using the goods, or from other social benefits. In this case people produce collective goods by creating exclusion mechanisms. This suggests that many goods that appear to be public can be transformed into private goods or impure public goods through the invention of subtle exclusion mechanisms. When this is true, there is no reason to assume government is necessary to produce public goods (whether state provision or private provision is more efficient is a separate empirical question). Another way public goods can be produced privately is that profit-seeking firms may be able to find people who are willing to contribute to a collective endeavor, but who lack the assurance that like-minded people will do their part. Firms can then charge a fee for helping people coordinate their efforts by creating a contract between willing cooperators. It is worth remembering that public goods create two separate problems: the free rider problem (people who want the good, but who try to avoid paying for it), and the assurance problem (people who want a good, and are willing to pay for it, but who fear that others will not contribute enough to produce it). For local public goods that aren't consumed by many people, conditionally binding assurance contracts can solve both Anomaly 119 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from problems reasonably well (Schmidtz, 1987). Conditionally binding contracts solve the assurance problem by charging people (in money or labor) for a public good only if enough others pledge to contribute to produce the public good. Since most public goods are not binary-they are not all or nothing17-we can imagine a range of such contracts producing different kinds and quantities of public goods. Firms that profit by underwriting such contracts have an incentive to pay careful attention to how much different people are willing to pay for public goods. However, as the number of people needed to produce a public good increases, strategic behavior is likely to emerge, and transaction costs may become prohibitive. This suggests that many large-scale public goods, especially global and inter-generational goods like the reduction of ozone-depleting chemicals, are unlikely to be produced through assurance contracts. Moreover, since contracts must be enforceable to be effective, governments will almost always play some role in the provision of public goods, even if their role is simply to establish the rules of contract and provide judicial arbitration for contract disputes. The crucial role of government in creating and enforcing the basic rules of the game suggests that the dichotomy between private and public production of public goods is a bit artificial. In addition to enforcing contracts and adjudicating disputes, governments can also facilitate the production of public goods by altering property rights or reducing transaction costs (Coase, 1960; Hampton, 1987). For example, by exempting private charities from taxation, government might facilitate the emergence of public goods without directly producing them (Cowen, 2006). Indeed, this may be preferable in cases where people with local knowledge are better able to determine which public goods would benefit those around them. Still, there is a useful conceptual distinction between government directly producing public goods, and providing them indirectly by creating a legal environment or incentive structure that makes it easier for individuals to do so. For example, to the extent that education creates the public good of skilled citizens and competent voters, governments might produce the good directly through government-run schools, or indirectly by funding a voucher program in which education is competitively produced by privately run schools. The distinction between direct and indirect provision is especially useful to make when thinking about the efficiency of markets and governments at producing public goods.18 As a rule of thumb, markets tend to under-produce public goods, while governments tend to over-produce them. This is true in part because politicians are imperfectly informed, and because they spend other people's money (Schmidtz, 1993; Tullock, 1971). They also have an incentive to deliver gifts to the most politically powerful of their constituents, and impose the costs on less powerful people. Before we conclude that governments should (directly or indirectly) produce public goods, we should keep in mind that state action can create new externalities and novel public goods problems. Primary and secondary public goods When governments produce public goods, they can simultaneously solve old problems and create new ones. For example, in the USA many state governments require citizens to purchase automobile insurance. In theory this is done to pool risk, and to protect people from damage others may impose on them but lack the ability to pay for.19 The idea seems to be 120 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from that there is a public good associated with bringing everyone into an insurance pool so that each can share the risks of driving and protect themselves against large losses imposed by those who are both uninsured and cannot afford to pay for the accidents they cause. But a predictable consequence of forced risk-sharing is that people have less incentive to take precautions to protect their own cars from minor accidents and theft. Insurance mandates transform time and money spent on protecting one's car into a public good since all members of the pool bear the cost of damaged property. The only way to encourage people to spend more resources protecting their car is to permit insurance companies to charge copayments, to change the insurance mandate, or to create another policy that encourages each person to take more precaution against theft and damage. Thus, new mandates can both solve and create public goods problems (or, more generally, externalities); they can also impose additional enforcement and compliance costs. When a public good is an artifact of public policy, it is an open question whether governments should supply it, or whether they should alter the policies that make the good public to begin with. Consider a more controversial example. Many argue that reducing obesity is a public good because it will save money for all people in an insurance pool (in states with private health insurance) or all taxpayers (in states with government-financed health care). Similar arguments are often applied to smokers. Public goods arguments are frequently invoked to justify taxing cigarettes, and regulating what kinds of food and drink people consume. One problem with these arguments is that some evidence indicates that, on average, adults who choose to smoke (or allow themselves to become obese) do not impose net medical costs on other people over their lifetimes, since they die younger but live long enough to contribute nearly as much money in taxes and insurance premiums as healthier people (Barendregt et al., 1997; van Ball et al., 2008). If so, the public goods argument evaporates. However, even if smokers and obese people do impose significant costs on other people, so that there's a public good associated with reducing smoking and obesity, these costs are largely a function of public policy (Anomaly, 2012). This is true partly because insurance companies and other firms are often not allowed to price discriminate by charging more for services rendered to people who engage in risky behavior, and because social welfare programs typically cover people's costs regardless of the choices they make. When public policy creates new kinds of public goods problems, we should think about whether further policies that attempt to provide the relevant public good should be passed, or whether those that create the problem should be repealed or altered. Paternalism and self-subversion The use of government coercion always raises deep moral questions.20 Since compulsion is sometimes the only way for governments to produce some public goods, we should be cautious about how much discretionary power we give to policy makers to decide which public goods should be produced. I argued above that not all desires are worth satisfying. If demand for public goods stems from poorly formed desires, people will not necessarily be made better off when their desires are satisfied. The converse is also true: people can be made better off when their desires are frustrated. Indeed, many public goods are supplied despite popular Anomaly 121 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from opposition, and benefit people in ways they fail to understand. Consider free trade agreements, which are mutually beneficial but often unpopular; or treaties that reduce pollution by restricting trade in certain chemicals, such as ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons. Few people have an incentive to take economics and environmental science courses, or to inform themselves about the details of international treaties. So it is not surprising that many people are poorly informed about policies that provide global public goods.21 When this is true, it may be legitimate for policy makers to provide public goods for which there would be widespread demand if desires were adequately informed. One of the practical problems with a theory that says some desires count more than others is that it seems to empower policy makers to pass repressive laws by invoking the counterfactual desires their constituents would have if they were more thoughtful or informed. David Schmidtz worries that one problem with using government power to supply public goods is that it is paternalistic: 'compelling us to contribute is paternalistic insofar as it does something for each of us that is good for us but that we cannot do for ourselves because we lack the collective will'. He goes on to say that '[t]his paternalism is benign in the sense that the end it helps us attain is not only good for us but is also an end we actually desire' (Schmidtz, 1991: 2). Although I agree that paternalism is a real worry, Schmidtz uses the term 'paternalism' in a way that I think we should reject. Gerald Dworkin suggests instead that for compulsion to count as paternalistic, it must override our judgment about purely self-regarding conduct (Dworkin, 1972). On Dworkin's influential account (in contrast to Schmidtz), if each of us recognizes an end as beneficial, but we lack the power to bring it about without the force of law, a law that compels us to do our part to achieve the end is not paternalistic since it does not override our judgment. Moreover, even when some people do not consider the coercive provision of a particular public good beneficial, if the reason for government provision is to prevent people from harming others, coercion is not paternalistic (whether any particular use of coercion is objectionable for other reasons is a separate question). For example, if the Center for Disease Control advocates a policy that requires most people to get vaccinated against smallpox, this is not paternalistic if the reason for requiring vaccination is to prevent people from spreading the smallpox virus to others.22 Paternalism aside, we might worry that if policy makers believe the theory that some public goods should be publicly provided because people would endorse their provision if they were adequately informed, they might be tempted to use this rationale to defend morally objectionable policies by appealing to the counterfactual desires of their constituents. While it is true that policy makers can misuse arguments, this does not show that the theory from which their arguments are drawn is false. For example, Henry Sidgwick famously argued that utilitarianism may be self-effacing (which implies that nobody should use it as a decision procedure) without being self-undermining (which implies that it is false). According to Sidgwick, a Utilitarian may reasonably desire, on Utilitarian principles, that some of his conclusions should be rejected by mankind generally; or even that the vulgar should keep aloof from his system as a whole, in so far as the inevitable indefiniteness and complexity of its calculations render it likely to lead to bad results in their hands (Sidgwick, 1874: 490). 122 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from The worry I want to raise is a natural extension of Sidgwick's. If policy makers tend to misuse arguments to justify policies that are not consistent with the arguments they appeal to, it may be desirable that they stop appealing to such arguments. While it is conceivable that we would be better off if the theory of public goods had never been invented, or never been propagated to policy makers, this seems overly pessimistic. It is always possible for policy makers to appeal to arguments and principles that are either self-serving or unintentionally harmful. But this gives us a reason to constrain their discretionary power and pay attention to political incentives, not a reason to change our view about the complex connection between desire satisfaction, welfare, and public goods. Conclusion I have argued that although public goods are sources of market failure, and that governments can sometimes intervene to improve the outcome, widespread demand for public goods is, at best, a necessary condition for government intervention. There is no automatic link between demand and welfare, and the link is especially tenuous in the case of public goods because people have less incentive to become informed about goods which they lack the power to unilaterally produce or consume. In markets, poorly formed preferences are punished because buyers bear the costs of bad choices. In the political realm, this is rarely true since individual citizens have little power to decide through consumption or voting which public goods will be provided. This suggests that before policy makers decide to address a public goods problem with the machinery of government, they should consider whether demand for public goods stems from wellformed desires, whether the costs of public provision exceed the benefits, and whether markets will, all things considered, produce a better or worse outcome than government action. Acknowledgements Thanks to Geoffrey Brennan, Jerry Gaus, and Michael Munger for comments and conversations about these ideas. Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Notes 1. Nonrivalry in consumption means that one person's consumption doesn't change the amount available for others to consume; nonexcludability means that nobody can be excluded from enjoying the good once its available. Many apparent public goods are easily provided by creating exclusion mechanisms (thus converting them into club goods) or by charging people as they use more of a good. 2. Head (1962) argues that the inability to separate public goods into discrete units with prices creates the main provision problem. Anomaly 123 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from 3. James Buchanan explains it as follows: The individual, as a member of a large group characterized by general interdependence among all of its members, will not expect to influence the behavior of other individuals through his own actions. He will not behave strategically; he will not bargain; he will not 'game.' Instead, he will simply adjust his own behavior to the behavior of others, taken as a composite unit . . . He accepts the totality of others' action as a parameter for his own decisions, as a part of the environment, a part of nature, so to speak . . . The small number case provides the individual with motivation both to initiate trade and to bargain over terms. The effective large number case . . . tends to eliminate both trading and bargaining behavior' (1999: 82). 4. Scholars who explore how public goods can be supplied through non-governmental means (Ostrom, 1990) usually focus on local public goods with some degree of rivalry or excludability. Indeed, when cultural norms emerge among a small community of people, and norm violators are penalized-usually in the form of social stigma (in mild cases) or expulsion (in serious cases)-members of the community can transform public goods into private goods by excluding rule breakers from a variety of social benefits to which rule followers have access. In these cases cultural norms essentially serve the same function as enforceable property rights in large, liberal societies. Although adhering to norms and punishing norm violators is itself a public goods problem in the absence of state institutions, natural selection seems to have partly solved the problem by equipping most of us with moral emotions like shame and indignation, along with a powerful desire to punish those who undermine mutually-beneficial social norms (Gintis and Bowles, 2008; Ostrom, 2000). 5. For this reason, it can be misleading to describe public goods in terms of benefits that are nonrival and non-excludable. Technically, a good can be public even if it benefits nobody at all. The essential feature of public goods is that they must be available to everyone (and in equal amounts) if they are available to anyone. Thus, some public goods-even pure public goods- may not be desired by anybody, and may be despised by nearly everybody. For example, a museum in Tel Aviv that glamorizes Nazism, but which doesn't charge admission fees, is a public good in the technical sense, but one for which there is little demand. 6. Mancur Olson's (1965) influential treatment of public goods problems as prisoners' dilemmas must be modified. First, since almost no public good is pure, we cannot represent all rational players as choosing a Pareto-dominated Nash equilibrium, as they would if the game were a true prisoner's dilemma. Second, while public goods are defined by generic features-nonrivalry and nonexcludability-prisoners' dilemmas, like all games, are defined by the preferences over outcomes of the particular people playing the game. If players are relatively altruistic, for example, the Pareto optimal action may be identical with the Nash equilibrium, in which case it's not a prisoner's dilemma. If the utilities in a game reflect everything the players care about, and some players care how an outcome is reached, or about the other people with whom they are playing, they may be modeled by a different game than other players in the same situation with different motivations. 7. Some take this to show that we should rely more on expert opinion than on citizens' sentiments on complex issues that require a high degree of scientific competence. Others take it to suggest skepticism about empowering experts who will also be subject to bias if not ignorance. 124 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from 8. For more on the scandal, see Paul Offit (2010). For more on the moral significance of the controversy, see Tom Sorrel (2007). 9. Other recent cases that are structurally similar include unfounded skepticism among many Americans about the connection between carbon emissions and climate change, and an unfounded belief among many Europeans that genetically modified foods cause various medical disorders. 10. Preferences differ from desires only in the sense that preferences are rankings over alternative bundles of goods or states of affairs, while desires can be aimed at a single good or state of affairs. 11. See especially Richard Brandt (1979), David Gauthier (1986: ch. 2), and Hausman and McPherson (2006: ch. 8) for attempts to distinguish which satisfied preferences should count as welfare-enhancing rather than welfare-diminishing. 12. See Parfit (1984: ch. 6). 13. This criterion is admittedly vague. But, as Aristotle reminds us, we shouldn't expect more precision than a subject matter admits of: We must be content in speaking of such subjects and with such premises to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premises of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits (350 BCE, Bk 1, Section 3). 14. Stiglitz (1999). 15. This is a clear case in which the dichotomy between market versus government or public versus private provision is artificially stark. Much basic science research is funded by state governments, but distributed to private, public, and non-profit institutions-including firms and universities-on a competitive basis. 16. Mill and Sidgwick also anticipated arguments that (what we now call) market failures should always be compared with governmental policies that might make the problem worse, given the incentive and information problems faced by bureaucrats. See Steven Medema (2007). 17. See Harold Demsetz (1993: 564). 18. Although I am tempted to distinguish between public production and public provision of public goods, since most authors who write about public goods equate 'provision' and 'production', I will stick with direct versus indirect provision, and use 'provision' and 'production' interchangeably. 19. Insurance mandates can also be a way for legislators to redistribute risk and wealth without the state getting directly involved in taxing and spending. More cynically, they are sometimes simply a legally-sanctioned transfer of wealth from citizens to insurance companies. I do not take a stand on whether insurance mandates are justified, or whether the argument from risk sharing or adverse selection is plausible. 20. Although some use 'coercion' to refer to the use or threat of force by one party against another in such a way that the coerced party's rights are violated, I use 'coercion' in a morally neutral way. 'Coercion' does imply that the coerced party's viable options are diminished (due in part to a fear of punishment), but it does not imply that his rights are violated or that his welfare is Anomaly 125 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from reduced. Indeed, Hobbes argues that coercively enforced laws can promote welfare by increasing trust, coordination, and exchange (Hobbes, 1651: ch. 15). 21. For example, most people have never heard of the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion, and among those who have, many believe that climate change and ozone depletion are the same problem. According to a recent survey on American attitudes about climate change, large majorities incorrectly think that the hole in the ozone layer and aerosol spray cans contribute to global warming, leading many to incorrectly believe that banning aerosol spray cans or stopping rockets from punching holes in the ozone layer are viable solutions (Leiserowitz et al., 2010: 4). 22. Public goods that are justified not as mechanisms to prevent people from harming others, but rather as a way of promoting a preference we would have if better informed would count as paternalistic on Dworkin's view, and potentially as justified paternalism. References Anomaly J (2012) Is obesity a public health problem? Public Health Ethics 5(3): 216–221. Aristotle (350 BCE) Nichomachean Ethics. Available at: http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.html (accessed 9 January 2013). Barendregt J, Bonneux L and van der Mass P (1997) The health care costs of smoking. New England Journal of Medicine 337: 1052–1057. Brandt R (1979) A Theory of the Good and the Right. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Buchanan J (1993) How can constitutions be designed so that politicians who seek to serve the public interest can survive and prosper? Constitutional Political Economy 4(1): 1–6. Buchanan J (1999) The demand and supply of public goods. In: The Collected Works of James M. Buchanan. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. First published 1968. Buchanan J and Brennan G (1999) The reason of rules: constitutional political economy. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund. First published 1985. Buchanan J and Tullock G (1962) The Calculus of Consent. 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The Journal of Political Economy 65(2): 135–160. Dworkin G (1972) Paternalism. The Monist 56: 64–84. 126 Politics, Philosophy & Economics 14(2) by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from Gaus G (2007) On Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth. Gauthier D (1986) Morals by Agreement. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Gintis H and Bowles S (2008) The evolutionary basis of collective action. In: The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hampton J (1986) Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hampton J (1987) Free rider problems in the production of collective goods. Economics and Philosophy 3: 245–273. Hausman D and McPherson M (2006) Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hayek F (1945) The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review 35(4): 519–530. Head JG (1962) Public goods and public policy. Public Finance 17(3): 197–219. Hobbes T (1651) Leviathan. Available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option1⁄4com_staticxt&static file1⁄4show.php%3Ftitle1⁄4869 (accessed 9 January 2013). Holcombe R (2000) Public goods theory and public policy. The Journal of Value Inquiry 34: 273–286. Huemer M (forthcoming) Why people are irrational about politics. Available at: http://home.spry net.com/*owl1/irrationality.htm (accessed 9 January 2013). Hume D (1739) A Treatise of Human Nature. Available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php? option1⁄4com_staticxt&staticfile1⁄4show.php%3Ftitle1⁄4342&Itemid1⁄427#toc_list (accessed 9 January 2013). Kavka G (1986) Hobbesian Moral and Political Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kelman S (1981) Cost–benefit analysis: An ethical critique. Regulation 5: 33–40. Leiserowitz A, Smith N and Marlon JR (2010) Americans' Knowledge of Climate Change. New Haven, CT: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. Available at: http://environment. yale.edu/climate/files/ClimateChangeKnowledge2010.pdf (accessed 9 January 2013). Medema S (2007) The hesitant hand: Mill, Sidgwick and the evolution of the theory of market failure. History of Political Economy 39(3): 331–358. Offit P (2010) Autism's False Prophets. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Olson M (1965) The Logic of Collective Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ostrom E (1990) Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom E (2000) Collective action and the evolution of social norms. Journal of Economic Perspectives 14(3): 137–158. Parfit D (1984) Reasons and Persons. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Pigou AC (1932) The Economics of Welfare, 4th ed. London, UK: Macmillan Press. Rawls J (1971) A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Samples K and Hollyer J (1990) Contingent Valuation of Wildlife Resources in the Presence of Substitutes and Complements. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Samuelson P (1954) The pure theory of public expenditure. The Review of Economics and Statistics 37(4): 350–356. Samuelson P (1972) Indeterminacy of government role in public-good theory. In: RC Merton (ed.) The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul A. Samuelson, volume 3. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Schmidtz D (1987) Contracts and public goods. Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 10: 475–503. Anomaly 127 by guest on April 14, 2015ppe.sagepub.comDownloaded from Schmidtz D (1991) The Limits of Government: An Essay on the Public Goods Argument. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Schmidtz D (1993) Market failure. Critical Review 7(4): 525–537. Schmidtz D (2001) A place for cost–benefit analysis. Philosophical Issues 35: 148–170. Sidgwick H (1981) The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. First published 1874. 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Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl Allison Merrick, Rochelle Green, Thomas V. Cunningham, Leah R. Eisenberg, and D. Micah Hester Author biographies Allison Merrick, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), Little Rock. She coaches the UALR Ethics Bowl team and is Treasurer of the Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy. Rochelle Green, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR), Little Rock. She coaches the UALR Ethics Bowl team and is Executive Secretary of the Eastern Society for Women in Philosophy. Thomas V. Cunningham, PhD, MA, MS, is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities and Internal Medicine at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Little Rock, and Clinical Ethicist at UAMS and Arkansas Children's Hospital. Leah R. Eisenberg, JD, MA, is Assistant Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Little Rock, and Clinical Ethicist at UAMS and Arkansas Children's Hospital. D. Micah Hester, PhD , is Professor of Medical Humanities and Pediatrics, and Chief of the Division of Medical Humanities at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Little Rock. He is also is co-course director of the Practice of Medicine course in which ethics education occurs during the first two years of medical school at UAMS, and Clinical Ethicist at UAMS and Arkansas Children's Hospital. CORRESPONDING AUTHOR: D. Micah Hester, PhD Division of Medical Humanities UAMS College of Medicine 4301 W. Markham St., #646 Little Rock, AR 72205 [email protected] 2 Abstract & Key Words Although ethics is an essential component of undergraduate medical education, research suggests current medical ethics curricula face considerable challenges in improving students' ethical reasoning. This paper discusses these challenges and introduces a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised, the Medical Ethics Bowl. Finally, we suggest pedagogical advantages to MEBs when compared to other ethics curricula. Key Words: ethics curriculum; medical ethics bowl; undergraduate medical education; ethical reasoning Introducing the Medical Ethics Bowl Ethics is an essential component of medical school curriculum.1 2 3 4 However, many question the efficacy of ethics curriculum in undergraduate medical education.5 Indeed, findings from a number of distinct studies are, at best, troubling.6 Research indicates some medical students exhibit minimal development in moral maturity during their four years of undergraduate medical education.7 Yet, other studies suggest students make gains in ethical reasoning during their first two years of school and then undergo a "detrimental ethical shift" during their third and fourth years of medical education. 8 9 10 11 12 13 Regardless of the ultimate reliability of such findings, they paint a bleak picture for undergraduate medical education in ethics, suggesting that current methods face considerable challenges in improving students' ethical reasoning. The aim here is to discuss these challenges and to introduce a promising new mode of graduate and professional ethics instruction for overcoming them. We begin by describing common ethics curricula, as discussed in contemporary medical education literature, focusing in particular on established problems with current approaches. Next, we describe a novel method of ethics education and assessment for medical students that we have devised, the Medical Ethics Bowl (or MEB), distinguishing it from the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl sponsored by the Association for Professional and Practical Ethics.14 Finally, we suggest pedagogical advantages to MEBs when compared to other ethics curricula. 3 Aims and Challenges of Medical School Ethics Education The rise of ethics education in healthcare and other professional education stems from an awareness of the need for greater ethical sensitivity and reasoning in professional practice.15 16 While ethics curricula must satisfy a number of objectives, at its base, all professional ethics education attempts to help students develop a greater awareness of ethical issues that arise for professionals as well as provide ways of dealing with them. There are no standard methods or curricula for teaching ethics in medical schools. Educators employ lectures, videos, discussion, team-based learning and other modalities. Perhaps the most common approach is to use case studies to educate and evaluate moral sensitivity and reasoning.17 For that reason, the small group discussion model focusing on cases, has been championed as the most effective way to deliver ethics education to medical students.18 This pedagogical strategy delivers content through lectures and readings, which then becomes the foundation for discussing primary themes during case analyses in small group settings. Advantages of this approach include the ability to fit the format into existing medical school curricula, and allow medical students to discuss and work through complex, realistic, ethical cases similar to those that they will confront as physicians. A number of studies support the success of this pedagogy.19 20 21 By the end of the preclinical years, medical students who participate in this type of training demonstrate the ability to identify the central ethical issues in a case and offer ways of adjudicating the issue.22 However, although small group, case-based ethics curricula are effective in teaching ethics to medical students early in their training, some studies suggest that gains in moral sensitivity in the preclinical years are rarely long-lasting . Studies of moral sensitivity and moral reasoning suggest basic challenges for undergraduate medical student education in ethics.23 Principally, they indicate that regardless of their baseline morality prior to beginning medical school, medical students experience a decline in their moral senses during-and perhaps as a consequence of-undergraduate medical education. This is consistent with other findings of similar reductions in medical student empathy during the same time frame24 and the marginalization of medical ethics content in the "hidden curriculum" of undergraduate medical education-the informal education students absorb through the culture of medical practice as opposed to the formal education they receive in medical knowledge and theory.25 As educators, we have observed additional challenges medical students face in their ethics education, which echo others' experiences.26 First, because of the prodigious amount of information medical students are presented during their first two years of training, they typically adopt a strategy of selectively reading assignments, attending large lectures, and participating in small group discussions. In this context, ethics appears to be deprioritized because, from the students' perspective, it is both more demanding and less rewarding than other subjects. Unlike other subjects, ethics requires students to reflect on their personal moral sensibilities in addition to understanding theory and becoming familiar with key topics and cases. Yet, also unlike other courses, poor marks in ethics rarely cause academic failure given the way performance in 4 medical school curriculum is typically evaluated. Thus, ethics is both more demanding because of the burdens of self-reflection and it is less rewarding because excellence in ethics does not contribute significantly to grades or test scores. Secondly, medical students face challenges in how they individually conceptualize the value of ethics in the medical context. While many indicate morality is important to them, they also suggest it is a subject matter that relates to their personal, as opposed to professional, actions. Instead, students often conflate the domains of institutional policy and health law (especially risk management and malpractice litigation) with medical ethics. While these domains are obviously also of essential concern for future physicians, they remain distinguishable from ethical issues likely to emerge in practice. Consequently, rigorous and effective ethics education within the medical school context faces the challenge of distinguishing ethics from other aspects of professionalism.. The task is to create avenues for students to explore and internalize the value of ethics in their education, and further, to conceptualize this education as providing a worthwhile set of skills and practices relevant for their future medical careers. Furthermore, this task is compounded by the intensity of medical student education and the competing demands for students' attention, even when students recognize the value of ethics education, as many studies and self reports indicate they do.27 28 29 30 The question that we must confront is "How to design medical ethics curriculum such that it meets these challenges?" Our response has been to develop the Medical Ethics Bowl. In order to appreciate fully the ways in which this new alternative helps to overcome such challenges, it is useful to distinguish it from the related Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl (ICEB) method that inspired our development of the MEB. Intercollegiate vs. Medical Ethics Bowls The ICEB was introduced by Robert Landenson of the Illinois Institute of Technology as a way of encouraging college students to engage in serious moral discourse. In his description, "The Ethics Bowl is an activity that combines a valuable and distinctive educational experience for students with the excitement and fun of a competitive team game." 31 32 The format and content are designed to apply to any number of contexts in which education in ethical sensitivity and reasoning is a goal. ICEB is an annual, regional and national competition of intercollegiate teams administered through the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics (APPE). Colleges around the country develop extracurricular teams of undergraduate students, and the APPE furnishes a series of cases for competition that cover a wide variety of ethical issues-e.g., voting rights, death penalty, gun control, Facebook invasion of privacy, sustainable growth and development, hiring practices, medical ethics, grade inflation, and plagiarism. Each team spends hours in preparation and practice prior to the competition, working through eight specific cases. During an ICEB competition, a moderator begins each match by posing a question to the four-student team presenting first based on one of the cases, chosen by the organizers on the day 5 of the event, The two teams from different schools attempt to lay bare the central ethical issues, present a reasoned argument for their team's position, and offer reasons why someone might oppose their viewpoint. ICEB presentations are judged by an independent panel of judges, composed of community members interested in ethics and moral reasoning, such as college professors, high school teachers, and local professionals. Teams are judged in terms of the clarity and intelligibility of the presentation in addition to the relevance of the argument and supporting evidence offered. Important educational features of the ICEB are the focus on developing sound argument, working as a team, pursuing careful research and reflection and acquiring skill in argument presentation. According to Landenson, the ICEB can serve the following educational aims: "(a) the development of ethical understanding in connection with complex, ambiguous, and difficult to resolve issues; and (b) the fostering of key virtues associated with democratic deliberation."33 Following the general form of its ICEB cousin, the MEB is designed as both a formative and evaluative modality for teaching aspects of ethics to medical students. It differs importantly from ICEB in its aims. While the ICEB is an educational forum, the "fun" of ICEB is in the competitive character, where regional and national champions are crowned. The MEB, on the other hand, while retaining a pseudo-competitive form, is primarily a curricular event, designed not to identify a champion but to stimulate learning and evaluate the extent of that learning. Given that MEBs are curricular, rather than extracurricular, modifications to the form and content of ICEB had to be made as we designed the MEB. For instance, because the medical student body is large (approximately 170 medical students in each class at the University of Arkansas Medical School), students are divided into teams of about 6 which remain constant throughout the academic year. Similar to ICEB, teams of students participate in presenting and responding to arguments with each other on topics raised through the use of pre-assigned cases. However, unlike ICEB, two cases are initially presented to all the students during a 1-hour class session, held 1-2 weeks before the MEB matches. During this preparatory period, students are encouraged to ask questions about the case or the MEB process, and time is allotted for them to join with their teams and start planning their approaches to the cases. Thereafter, they are expected to perform any necessary research to generate a cogent and thorough response to the ethically challenging cases and are scored in part based on how well they accomplish that task. Each MEB match consists of two teams of 6-7 students and two judges. An MEB match is timed at 60 minutes and consists of two 27-minute rounds. Each match is spaced 1 hour and 15 minutes apart to allow time for introductions, judges' scoring, and optional discussion with teams after the match concludes. The team presenting first is determined by a coin flip. The round begins when the team presents its 8-minute position on the assigned case (which includes ethical analysis, proposed ethical resolution, and substantive arguments for and against their own proposal). Next, the opposing team presents a 6-minute response; followed by the presenting team's 5-minute rebuttal. After formal presentations and responses are finished, a panel of judges questions the presenting team and listens to their 8-minute response. Judges ask questions with the intention of helping 6 students to think more deeply about a specific issue, to consider implications of their arguments they had not previously identified, or to examine more carefully a dimension of the ethical theme under consideration. After the round, the two teams switch roles, with the presenting team now being the responding team and the responding team taking the presenting role in the second case. Once the pattern repeats, the match concludes. The judges then have six minutes in which to discuss the event with the students and roughly 15 minutes to confer, write down their scores using a specific scoring sheet (available via email to the corresponding author), and take a break before the next match. The MEB curriculum is faculty-intensive because there are a minimum of 28 teams that participate in matches (which means every MEB involves fourteen matches). Judges are recruited from faculty with expertise in ethics and/or medicine.. To prepare faculty for judging, two of us with ICEB experience (AM and RG), designed a 3-hour training session. The session was repeated several times and video-recorded for absent faculty, so all faculty volunteers for MEB judging received training prior to judging. Faculty judges are paired so that each match has a judge whose expertise is in medicine and a judge whose expertise is in ethics, humanities, or social science. On ethics bowl days, students are assigned a 1 hour and 15 minute time slot and a room for their matches. Judges are also given rooms and times, enabling up to 5 ethics bowl sessions to be underway simultaneously, allowing each MEB at UAMS to accommodate 170 students in a 40 hour time block. Ten faculty volunteers judge 3 matches each during the afternoon The basic aim of the MEB curriculum is to help students learn how to produce and present an argument for an ethical position in response to a realistic clinical situation. As part of the MEB curriculum, students are given GRACE, an acronym for a mnemonic pedagogical tool, developed by one of us (DMH). GRACE, provides a conceptual structure for better identifying, appreciating, and understanding ethical issues that are often raised in medical cases. G: Get the whole story. Ask: What are the technical, personal, and social facts, values, and beliefs pertinent to the situation? R: Recognize obligations. Ask: What is expected of the professionals, patients, families, and others in the case as moral agents? A: Accept responsibilities / Avoid over-reaching. Ask: What is the scope of those roles in the situation? What falls outside those roles? C: Consider consequences. Ask: What are the possible outcomes of proposed actions under the circumstances. E: Evaluate character. Ask: How might the proposed actions be viewed by others within the community, institution, or profession? This structure also provides a basis by which judges can score the case presentations. A strong presentation should include academically acceptable researched materials that relate to cogent responses to the GRACE considerations. The best presentations will be well researched and answer a majority of the questions captured by GRACE. Accordingly, each case will require 7 that students meet together outside of class time and seek out the appropriate resources necessary to fully develop the complexities present in each of the cases. Pedagogical Benefits of the MEB When compared to traditional undergraduate medical ethics curriculum, our experiences has been that the MEB curriculum offers a number of pedagogical benefits, making it a promising method for overcoming challenges to undergraduate medical education in ethics. As a gauge to measure these benefits, we can consider the five objectives for medical ethics education enumerated by R. Eckles: 1. To enable physicians to examine and affirm their own personal and professional commitments. 2. To teach physicians to recognize the humanistic and ethical aspects of medical careers. 3. To equip physicians with a foundation of philosophical, social, and legal knowledge. 4. To enable physicians to employ this knowledge in clinical reasoning. 5. To equip physicians with the interactional skills needed to apply this insight, knowledge, and reasoning to human clinical care.34 Given these five objectives, we believe that the MEB can help students reach those goals in the following ways: 1. As part of building a cogent case for MEB, students are asked to identify ethical quandaries and the role played by conflicting values. Part of a successful MEB presentation involves students recognizing the values of the stake-holders described in the case, as well as reflect on their their own values and how values affect decision making. 2. During the MEB students are asked to produce and present an argument for an ethical position in response to a realistic clinical situation that inevitably involves the fears and vulnerabilities of patients and their families. As such, students can grow in recognizing the humanistic and ethical aspects essential in a medical career. 3. A cogent MEB presentation requires students to consider the medical, ethical, legal, and psychological facts, along with the philosophical underpinnings and relevant values and beliefs pertinent to the case, thus providing a foundation in these areas as well as developing awareness and understanding of the overlapping complexities of the issues involved. 4. MEB is a team-based process, requiring students to work together to develop good arguments. Insofar as the MEB cases represent realistic clinical situations, students can practice their ethical reasoning skills as a team-based effort, and experience the importance of this approach to problem solving in a clinical setting. 5. The final goal is to equip physicians with the communication and interactional skills needed to apply their moral reasoning skills, insights, and clinical knowledge to clinical 8 care. Students must not only formulate logical arguments for their positions and effectively communicate their findings with the opposing team; they are also asked to interpret charitably and respond professionally to the findings of the opposing team- again practicing and developing competencies in interpersonal communication. In addition to these five skills, MEB has the potential to develop both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Current research in education indicates the importance of distinguishing between these two types of motivation. At its most basic, extrinsic motivation involves "doing something because it leads to a separable outcome."35 When learning, a person is extrinsically motivated by factors like grades or the idea of rewards once a particular task or skill is completed and mastered. The MEB is likely to develop motivation of this order because of the competitive format. That is, students may find themselves motivated to construct the best case possible in order to score well in a match. If this is indeed the case, then a mode of extrinsic motivation is developed. By contrast, intrinsic motivation, or "doing something because it is inherently interesting or enjoyable," has been shown to be affected by positive feedback when a learning activity occurs.36 The key difference in this situation is that a person who is intrinsically motivated performs an action, not for some external reward, but because the action is seen as valuable initself. By contrast with other modes of instruction that offer delayed feedback (e.g. such as requiring students to submit essays and returning those essays at the next course meeting), medical ethics bowls-through both the questions posed by judges and the scores given during the match-provide students with immediate affirmative feedback. As a result the MEB may prove to be a valuable pedagogical tool in generating intrinsic motivation because it provides a means of translating qualitative assessments of argument, reasoning, and engagement with alternative viewpoints into quantitative measures using the judges rubric and score sheet. Finally, participating in MEBs may help students develop moral sensitivity and improve moral reasoning. In the educational context, "moral sensitivity" may be well and simply defined as the ability to recognize ethical dilemmas,37 while "moral reasoning" is demonstrated by a student's ability to respond cogently to a recognized ethical issue.38 Both moral sensitivity and moral reasoning may be assessed using case studies and vignettes.39 40 41 42 For example, in a Toronto study medical students were asked to list all of the ethical issues present in expertprepared vignettes, with points awarded for recognizing issues in three domains: autonomy, beneficence and justice.43 44 Moral sensitivity was measured in terms of recognition of issues in the three domains, which increased from first-year students to second year students, decreased from second-year students to third-year students, and decreased from third-year to fourth-year students. Others have explored the effect of ethics education on medical students' moral reasoning by employing Kohlberg's theory of three levels of moral development, so-called preconventional morality, conventional morality, and postconventional morality.45 In one study, students at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec, Canada completed a Moral Judgment Interview upon entry in their first year and again in their third year. Using this measure, students' moral reasoning declined significantly after three years of medical education.46 Participation in 9 MEBs has the possibility to improve students' moral sensitivity and moral reasoning as measured in studies such as these. Conclusion Though ours may be the first medical school to adopt the MEB format as a required curricular modality, both engineering and business schools have adopted similar modalities and have reported success.47 48 Yet, the only empirical study of this pedagogical strategy remains inconclusive.49 With the launch of this new MEB curriculum in our medical school, we have a unique opportunity to study the effects of this mode of ethics instruction, which we plan to accomplish in the future by performing mixed methods research. Presently, we have heard student feedback about the curriculum in two forms: individual discussions and class officer feedback to course directors. Individual discussions with students indicate that these students enjoy the MEB process-developing case presentations and interacting during the matches themselves. There is an energy in the room during matches that students can feel and seem to enjoy. However, class officers indicate that while the students like the format, they are concerned about the variability of judges scoring (a.k.a., inter-rater reliability or IRR). Of course, with multiple judges making subjective determinations (even when based on a common rubric), IRR is a challenge. To address issues of IRR, student team are being assigned different judges across the two year curriculum, so that they are unlikely to be evaluated by the same judge multiple times. Thus, in the event that one or more judge deviates significantly (positively or negatively) in his or her evaluation of MEB matches, the teams will not be exposed to that bias more than once. But even more concerning is that the students concerns may have the consequence of creating student apathy to the process because they believe that their efforts could go unrecognized and unrewarded depending on the judges they are assigned. We are addressing those concerns by changing our judges' evaluation materials to include more robust comments section. We hope that with increased comments, students will better understand how individual judges assessed the strengths and weaknesses of their presentations. As we learn more about the strengths and weaknesses of medical ethics bowls, we aim to codify our findings and disseminate them widely. We hope that the insights we developed will be of use to those involved in developing medical ethics curriculum now and in the future. 1 Branch W. Supporting the moral development of medical ethics students. Journal of General Internal Medicine 2000;15(7):503-508. 2 Bryan CS, Babelay, AM. Building character: A model for reflective practice. Academic Medicine, 2009;84(9):1283-1288. 3 Doukas D, McCullough L, Wear S. Project to rebalance and integrate medical education (PRIME) investigators. 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